The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Rose wanted to be a perfect young mother, for perfection was the only passing grade. The experts warned her that her children’s failures were her failures. “Lack of precision in the mother is responsible for most of the failures we see,” wrote Mrs. Burton Chance in The Care of the Child. Experts tried to turn the nursery into a pristine conservatory where children were carefully nurtured and monitored like exotic flowers. If these flowers did not grow tall and splendid, the fault lay in the gardener, and a terrible fault it was, a shame visible to all.

  Rose had a strapping son in Joe Jr., an advertisement for her virtues as a mother. Alas, she had a sickly weak child in Jack. In her namesake Rosemary, she slowly realized, she had a child who was mentally retarded—a moron, in the scientific nomenclature of the time. It was a devastating realization to both her and Joe, and it forever changed the family.

  Rose had wanted to be the mother of mothers. By the merciless standards of science, she had probably created, through slovenliness, excess, or oversight, these two children who demonstrated her failures. Whatever guilt she may have felt was covered by an elaborate brocade of optimism. She had a relentlessly upbeat spirit and belief. She pushed her half-sick children out to play, denied her own pain and doubt, and smiled, if sometimes through clenched teeth.

  When Joe Jr. and Jack and their siblings needed a touch of unbridled love and a hug, they turned to their stout Irish nanny, Kikoo Convoy, a woman untutored in modern child-rearing techniques. As much as the children adored Kikoo, as they grew older they could see that in their world such unregulated emotion was a servant’s indulgence.

  Rose often dressed her two sons in identical sailor suits or other clothes that marked them as if they were twins. They needed no such costuming to mark them as brothers in blood and destiny. Joe Jr. had been an enormous baby, anointed not simply by his parents but by life itself. Teachers told Rose and Joe how brilliant their firstborn was and showed them Joe Jr.’s IQ tests that confirmed his high intelligence, so much so that he was chosen for a study of gifted children. Rose could not help but think that there was a direct linkage between intelligence and virtue, and it seemed unthinkable that her mischievous second son could be as smart, or even smarter, than his brother.

  “I didn’t think you could have two in one family,” she said later. His father had much the same opinion as his mother. “He told me once that he didn’t think Jack would get very far and he indicated he wasn’t very bright,” recalled Henry Luce, the publishing magnate, of a conversation a few years later.

  Jack was younger, smaller, weaker, and lesser in everything but spirit. He was second-born and bore all the markings of his diminished rank. “The mood of the second-born is comparable to the envy of the dispossessed with the prevailing feeling of having been slighted,” wrote Alfred Adler, the psychologist. “His goal may be placed so high that he will suffer from it for the rest of his life, and his inner harmony be destroyed in consequence. This was well expressed by a little boy of four, who cried out weeping, ‘I am so unhappy because I can never be as old as my brother.’ “

  The jealous competitiveness was a Darwinian struggle in which Jack never yielded but rarely won. Jack would admit decades later that Joe Jr. had been “rather heavy on me on occasions. Physically we used to have some fights that, of course, he always won…. I was somewhat brighter than he was, but I would say he was physically ahead of me.” It was a telling mark of their competitiveness that Jack would only grudgingly admit that Joe Jr., two years his senior, “was physically ahead.” Jack had few memories of his childhood, but one of them was a bicycle race between the two boys. “We ran a race against each other around the block and hit head-on,” Jack recalled. “You know, we started in the opposite direction, came round this way, and I really tore this all up and got, I guess, twenty-eight stitches and he emerged unscathed.”

  Here was poignant testimony to the drama of birth order. The Kennedys took this typical sibling struggle and ratcheted it up to create much of the essential psychological drama of the family. Joe and Rose made their eldest son a little father with authority over his brothers and sisters. They were not so foolish as ever to say that Joe Jr. was their favored son, but they did everything to show it. At the dinner table, when Joe quizzed his children on current events or history, he went always first to Joe Jr., who as often as not replied in words that could have been his father’s. Under the table the two boys kicked each other, careful not to be detected by their mother. Their father took the competition to higher and higher levels. “Remember that Jack is practicing at the piano each day an hour and studying from one-half to three-quarters of an hour on his books so that he is really spending more time than you,” Joe wrote Joe Jr. in July 1926.

  When Rose looked back on these years, she said that she had been so preoccupied with Rosemary’s difficulties that she felt guilty that she had neglected Jack. Rose recalled: “When his sister was born after him, it was such a shock, and I was frustrated and confused as to what I should do with her or where I could send her or where I could get advice about her, that I did spend a lot of time going to different places or having her tutored or having her physically examined or mentally examined, and I thought he might have felt neglected.” She did not worry that she may have neglected her other daughters, Kathleen and Eunice, born in July 1921, who presumably did not need the mothering that a son needed.

  Little Jack lay in his bed in a dressing gown reading books, each illness and each condition taking more days away from the rugged fields of play and the struggle for manhood. The specter of homosexuality—a moral disease, a betrayal of masculinity—was omnipresent. What could be more horrifying than if sickly little Jack ended up as one of them, as a “man of broad hips and mincing gait, who vocalizes like a lady and articulates like a chatterbox, who likes to sew and knit, to ornament his clothing and decorate his face”? Dr. Joseph Collins wrote in his best-selling The Doctor Looks at Life and Love that “they are the most to be pitied of all of nature’s misfits…. They are constantly between the devil and the deep sea; tormented by desires that will neither be subdued nor sublimated and unable to obtain even vicarious appeasement.”

  Rose was herself a carrier of the vice of femininity and did not want to make her sickly child into a mommy’s boy. Rose inspected Joe Jr. and Jack before they left to walk to Edward Devotion Elementary School, where they were as neat and proper as the outfits they wore. After school they changed into clothes that made them look, in Rose’s phrase, “like roughnecks.” Once clad in these coarse garments, they were like unfettered young beasts, so wild that at least one of the neighbors’ boys, Robert Bunshaft, was not allowed to play with them. They went traipsing down to the stores at Coolidge Corner. When they saw a sign outside a restaurant, NO DOGS ALLOWED IN THIS RESTAURANT, they scribbled in the word HOT before DOGS, then headed off after admiring their witticism. Two days later they returned to the shopping area and stole false mustaches from a store. On other occasions they walked into the public library in Brookline and disrupted the quiet, as if it were their right to carouse through the stacks, yelping and joking, while their nanny sat reading a book. Then they were out on the streets of adventure again, where Joe Jr. led his brother through the alleys and the back streets, a boy’s jungle, once getting caught up on a neighbor’s roof. “The boys have a new song about the Bed Bugs and the Cooties,” Rose noted in her diary in February 1923. “Also a club where they initiate new members by sticking pins into them.”

  For the sedate neighbors, it was bizarre, inexplicable, and unseemly. The Kennedys, after all, had moved into a new large house on the corner of Naples and Abbottsford Road, had a Rolls-Royce with an English chauffeur, and were the wealthiest family in this largely middle-class area. And yet their two sons, beatific altar boys at St. Aidan’s on Sunday, gentle scholars at school, became rude ruffians on the street.

  No one considered Joe responsible for the children’s problems. Joe was living at a time when even the word “Father” was suffering
what many considered a diminution into the words “Dad” or “Daddy,” terms that his own children used while, like most of their contemporaries, continuing to refer to Rose as “Mother.” In the twenties “Dad” was the butt of jokes and cartoons, the neutered “Pop” who had nothing more to offer his children than his wages. Poor Pop. He was not wanted in the nursery, and he was widely rumored to be inadequate in the bedroom.

  “It has often been said that American husbands are the best providers and the poorest lovers in the world,” wrote Dr. Joseph Collins in 1923. “They frankly admit the first charge and tacitly the second.” The image of the father was such that in 1924 the New York Times ran an article about the almost stillborn Father’s Day and its official flower, the dandelion, chosen “because the more it is trampled on the better it grows.”

  Many fathers wanted to get into the nursery and into the center of their children’s lives but feared that they would be emasculated. Some of them were willing even to help with housework if they could do so without being sissified. They sought a companionate relationship with their children, one in which, as Chester T. Crowell wrote in the American Mercury in October 1924, “once children are accepted as associates rather than duties, living with them becomes a lot of fun.”

  Joe was radically different from the diminished, companionate fathers of his time. He had his own ideas about fatherhood, and in carrying them out he became the most important political father of twentieth-century America. Rose referred to him once as “the architect of our family,” and an architect he truly was as he set in place the master plan.

  Joe had no knowledge of the nursery. He did not care much about fathering when his children were mere infants; he was preoccupied with his business pursuits. One winter day he was pulling two-year-old Joe Jr. on his sled while carrying on a conversation with Eddie Moore, a lifelong associate. The toddler fell off into the snow while his father continued walking, pulling the empty sled. As for his daughters, Joe loved them deeply, but he had no interest in raising them, whatever their ages. As he saw it, that was best left to his wife and to the nuns. If his daughters were properly protected, they would not struggle into womanhood but would largely assume it, taking on the natural and narrow virtues of their sex.

  For his sons, however, once they reached a certain age, he was ready to lead them on the arduous journey into true manhood on which he had been thwarted. His sons would not be prissy inheritors. He would give them the wealth that the Brahmins assumed was synonymous with virtue, and he would push them up that great road. He would develop his sons as a happy meld of gentleman and athlete, democrat and aristocrat.

  With his sons not only dressing like roughnecks after school but acting like ones, Joe saw that their rambunctious masculinity needed to be channeled into the proper venues. For the first time since Jack’s scarlet fever, Joe assumed dominance over his sons’ lives, a dominance that in a sense he never relinquished. His daughters could go to public and parochial schools, but his sons had to enter the elite Protestant social world where the progeny of their families entered. “The old man wanted them to mix with money,” recalled Tom Finneran, one of their classmates at Edward Devotion. “That’s why they went to private school.”

  Joe sent the two boys to the exclusive Noble and Greenough School to match wits and fists with the likes of Storrows, Bundys, Littles, and Coolidges. Generations of refinement had not honed the natural boyish viciousness out of the students, and they took exquisite pleasure in testing the mettle of the two Kennedy interlopers, probably the only two Catholics in the school. The upper-crust boys hurled the word “Irish” at the two new arrivals as if it were the crudest invective.

  Joe wanted his sons to compete manfully on the fields of sport. Jack was team captain in a baseball game played in May 1926. Joe would have been there, but he was in New York. So he cabled his “Good Luck” to eight-year-old “Captain Jack Kennedy.” Even without such encouragement, young Jack knew that on the baseball diamond and the football turf he and his brothers were to show their mettle and spirit as Kennedys.

  One of the biggest of the boys, John Clark Jones III, tormented Joe Jr. after school until young Kennedy ran scurrying down the street to take up sanctuary in St. Aidan’s. “This is a shrine!” Joe Jr. yelled. “You can’t touch me here.” A Catholic church was a dark mystery to the Brahmin boys. They would no more have chased Joe Jr. in there than risk bad luck by chasing him under a ladder. The Kennedy boys used their sacred preserve again and again. “When they’d shoot a snowball in our snowball fights, they’d duck over to the church and get inside the building there for protection,” recalled Holton Wood, a fellow student.

  As much as Joe Jr. and Jack fought each other, they stood together against this foreign world. On the playground Joe Jr. would challenge other boys to a fight, the bigger and older the better. Jack would stand by, betting on his big brother, with marbles as the currency. As the days went by, Jack’s little bag of marbles grew larger and larger. To boys like Augustus Soule Jr., Joe Jr. was the perfect archetype of the despicable Irish thug that he had been told about—” very pugnacious, very irritable, very combative.” Joe Jr. was a strange Irish bully, however, a fourth-generation American picking on boys who were bigger and older than he was.

  When the headmaster sold the school to a developer, Joe was one of seven members of a committee to found the new Dexter School. For the first time in his life, he was on an equal footing with the other private-school fathers. His sons had been the opening wedge, but he was an equal only because he had the money to contribute substantially to the building fund. The parents whispered about Joe and passed on rumors about the illegal ways in which he was making his fortune. But his dollars gave off no foul odor, and they rationalized that even though they took his money, the Kennedys would never grace their homes socially.

  Joe did not have to tell his sons that they were different, but he wanted that memory stamped on them indelibly. He was often gone from Brookline, but he pointedly took them out for football practice the first time in September 1926. To Joe, the football field was still the plain of honor where manhood was forged. He had recoiled at the struggles on that field himself and turned back toward more sedate sports, but he wanted his sons to prove their mettle, as he had not.

  “Well, coach, you’re going to have quite a problem, because here are two young ‘micks’ who need discipline,” Joe told Willard Rice, the new coach, a Harvard man. “Mrs. Kennedy and I will give you carte blanche for any disciplinary measures that you need to take to get them into line.” “Mick” was a term of derision. By using it, Joe was raising the stakes, which, on this field, were already high enough. The boys were the only two Catholics on a team that wore imitation Harvard uniforms. Their teammates did not need added incentive to tackle and block these papist encroachers until they ran whining off the field. The coach inspired laggards by kicking them in the behind, a practice that Joe and Rose considered “a wonderful idea.”

  The Dexter boys thought of football as their sport. They had every reason to believe that someday they would wear these same colors in Harvard Stadium, as did their big brothers and older cousins and friends. There they would compete against young men like themselves. What the youths discovered was something that many people would learn over the years: the Kennedys bore up to pain as if it were some paltry diversion that they refused to recognize.

  The Kennedy boys were tough beyond measure. As a back, Joe Jr.’s greatest attribute was his crushing aggressiveness. Pounding into his opponents, he preferred to run over them rather than to finesse his way around the defenders. Joe Jr. treated the football field as a testing ground where the crack of tackles and blocks was so vicious that all but the most heedless and fearless were driven to the sidelines. Jack, a wiry quarterback who led the Dexter eleven to victory, was made of more subtle stuff.

  Joe Jr. was even more his father’s son on the baseball diamond. He would argue with the umpire, an unthinkable affront to the sportsmanlike ideal of Dex
ter. He scurried after every fly ball within reach, shouting the other outfielders aside. When he pitched, he threw the ball with such force that he nearly knocked the catcher backward. Only Jack could catch his brother, although tears welled into his eyes as the ball burrowed into his glove and he sometimes dropped the ball, to the glowering disdain of Joe Jr.

  At Dexter, as for the rest of their lives, each brother had not simply friends but admirers who championed them and put down the other brother. Those who cared for Joe Jr. celebrated his exuberant extroversion, the way he grasped for every ball and fought every fight, seeing him as a model of boyhood. Those who cared for scrawny Jack considered him a deeper sort and thought that extroverts shouted their insensitivity to the world. But both boys played with intensity, not understanding those who sauntered after fly balls or blocked halfheartedly in football games.

  The boys would have found these afternoons on the playing fields of Dexter perfect if only their father had been there. He was gone sometimes for months, but when he returned, it was as if a firestorm of life had descended into the Kennedy living room. Joe purchased a controlling interest in FBO, a film company, and had gone to the West Coast to become a Hollywood magnate. “At that time he was the only Christian in the movie picture business,” Rose recalled. “And I believe the story was that the Jews would get this Irishman. But on the contrary, he had banking experience while the other people had not.”

  FBO made cheap films, its greatest asset being Tom Mix, a cowboy star beloved by boys across America. On one of his visits to Brookline, Joe returned with Tom Mix outfits, an awesome prize for Joe Jr. and Jack. When he arranged for films to be shown at Dexter School, it was a special occasion that none of the other fathers could provide.