The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Jack’s grades were as sickly as his health, and his teachers knew him more as a patient than as a pupil. Joe finally caught on to the message Jack was sending him and allowed his son to come down to Palm Beach for a vacation. “I hope my marks go up because I guess that is the best way to say thanks for the trip,” Jack wrote his father, fully understanding that Joe considered life a matter of exchanges. Jack was not able to repay that debt, for as soon as he returned to Canterbury he was stricken with stomach pains. The surgeon who was flown down to attend him pronounced that Jack had appendicitis and needed an immediate operation. Jack never talked about the fear he surely must have felt clutching his stomach in terrible pain, then being carried off to Danbury, Connecticut, where he was operated upon, alone and isolated. He did not return to Canterbury that year but was taken to Bronxville, where Rose monitored his recovery, making him study so he would not lose his academic year.

  Jack and his siblings looked forward that summer, as they did every summer, to their sojourn at the Kennedys’ house in the hamlet of Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Joe had rented the white clapboard house for three years before purchasing it in 1928. The oceanfront house, set on two and a half acres of land, had plenty of room for tennis courts, a pool, and an expanse of grass for football games.

  Hyannis Port became as close to a spiritual home as the Kennedys would ever have. These Cape Cod summers were not vacations, filled with the natural lassitude of hot, humid days. Hyannis Port was the school in which more than anywhere else Joe and Rose created the emotional ethos of the young generation of Kennedy men.

  Joe believed that every moment of life had to be squeezed of its juices until only dry pulp remained. In the morning he was the first to get up and go for his hourlong horse ride. After breakfast he took his place on a deck outside his upstairs bedroom window, where he could survey his domain. He could not abide seeing his children sitting around, even for a moment. They moved from tennis to swimming to football to sailing, sometimes led by a full-time sports instructor. Joe had taken the playing fields of Harvard and brought them to Hyannis Port, out to the tennis court and out on Vineyard Sound, anywhere his sons might challenge each other and the lesser sons of other vacationing families.

  When the boys played touch football, their friends soon learned that “touch” meant something different to the Kennedys than it did to others. It was the Kennedys’ field and the Kennedys’ football, and they usually claimed quarterback as their natural due. They had their own rules, often changing the parameters of the field on each play. They threw every pass as if it were the last play of the game and they needed a touchdown to win.

  In the summer of 1937, Joe Jr. took Teddy out in his sailboat for his first race. Five-year-old Teddy was a natural sailor, and he and his big brother had the sails up just as the starting gun sounded. “Pull in the jib,” Joe Jr. shouted as the boat cruised ahead. “Pull in the jib.” Teddy looked around as if looking for some implement with “JIB” written on it in big letters. As the other boats drew farther ahead, Joe Jr. jumped up and grabbed the jib. Then he took Teddy by the pants and threw him into the sea. As Teddy felt the cold water and the stark fear of the moment, Joe Jr. grabbed him by the shirt, lifted him up, and dumped him on the deck like a fish. After the race, in which they came in second, Joe Jr. warned Teddy not to talk about the incident but to keep it eternally between them.

  Joe was the master of competitiveness, and he doubtless would have found his eldest son’s action only mildly excessive. Joe set the example in part by taking on his own sons in the sports in which he knew that he could beat them. He was a strong golfer and could easily defeat his sons. He was as much a strategist on the tennis court as in the boardroom, and he played a shrewd game with his sons, driving the ball back and forth, and then neatly dropping it away from their most desperate feint.

  Each time he played them, however, it got harder to win. Then finally, one summer day when he was in his early forties, he struggled harder than ever against Joe Jr. Joe came off the court that day a victor, but he never played his sons again, preferring to give up tennis rather than lose to them.

  Joe turned the luncheon and dinner table into another playing field, quizzing his sons about events in the world. He might ask a perfunctory question or two of one of their friends, or even squander a moment on one of his daughters, but his sons were his pedagogical target. When he was not there, Rose continued the questioning, often reading from a prepared list, relentlessly asking her queries in her tiny, grating voice.

  Some of the Kennedys’ friends dreaded sitting there, having to respond to questions they could sometimes hardly understand, much less answer. Harry Fowler, one of the friends, believed that for a boy summer was vacation time. “My lord, this is a nice summer afternoon,” he thought as he sat there with the family at lunch. “What in the hell is Mrs. Kennedy doing anyway?”

  Rose and Joe were attempting to imbue every aspect of their sons’ lives with a fever-pitched competitive intensity. Joe was proud of saying that second best was not good enough. Winning was everything. “Don’t come in second or third,” he admonished his children. “That doesn’t count—but win.”

  To Joe, life itself outside this pristine precinct was nothing more than an extension of it, an epic competition that went to the daring and the determined. “He always trusted experience as the greatest creator of character,” his daughter Eunice said.

  Joe offered his sons the opportunity to gain a fine education. He bought them status and entree to the heights of society. But for them to be the kind of men he wanted them to be, they needed to pass through a crucible of experience. He did not flinch when Joe Jr. and Jack took their boats out in the highest of seas. He understood that it was dangerous, but he wanted his sons one day to sail bravely out into the storms of life.

  Little Teddy, the last-born, was as much a part of this drama as Joe Jr., the firstborn, even if his big brothers treated him at times like a puppy that they could either ignore, coddle, or tease until it barked. Teddy was the last of nine children and the fourth of four sons, and in that one fact lay much of the drama of his life. “All children can be de-throned, but never the youngest,” wrote Alfred Adler.

  He has no followers but many pacemakers. He is always the baby of the family…. In every fairy tale the youngest child surpasses all his brothers and sisters…. And yet the second largest property of problem children comes from among the youngest, because all the family spoils them. A spoiled child can never be independent. Sometimes a youngest child will not admit to any single ambition, but this is because he wishes to excel in everything, be unlimited and unique. Sometimes a youngest child may suffer from extreme inferiority feelings; everyone in the environment is older, stronger, and more experienced.

  One of Teddy’s few early memories is of the day he walked home alone from kindergarten in Bronxville. “I wasn’t supposed to—and I remember getting spanked,” he recalled. “Someone was supposed to pick me up, and I walked home, so the person who was supposed to pick me up didn’t know where I was and it caused needless worry. I think she [Rose] used a hairbrush to spank me.”

  If his older brothers and sisters had walked home at the age of six, their conduct would probably have merited nothing more than a rebuke. But since the kidnapping and murder of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s baby within a few days of Teddy’s birth, Rose looked at the world beyond her walls with a new wariness. Up until then she had seen the Kennedys’ wealth, privilege, and celebrity as a perfect thing. What had Lindbergh’s fame been, however, but a beacon attracting tragedy?

  When Life featured the Kennedys and their wealth, Rose rebuked Henry Luce, the publisher, for needlessly pointing kidnappers toward her children. Teddy was brought up to mimic the intrepid lives of his big brothers as they moved out fearlessly into the world. Yet he was also taught to be suspicious of strangers, and what was the world he saw beyond family but an endless sea of strangers?

  Jack treated his past like a prosecutor�
�s brief, remembering every rebuke, every unfairness, but Teddy had a different kind of memory, selecting what was sweet and good from the remnants of the past. Teddy did not remember the mother who was gone for weeks at a time, but the mother who was there.

  “Probably three times a week she’d read us a Peter Rabbit or a Thornton Burgess story,” Teddy recalled. “Jean and I would go up to her room, and she’d read that. At the end of that I’d go down and go to bed, and in a few minutes she’d come down and kiss me goodnight.”

  With his impeccable business instincts, Joe had gotten out of the stock market before black Tuesday in October 1929. While some of his less prescient neighbors were relegated to living in mansions without electricity and pawning their family valuables, Joe did not suffer during the Great Depression. He profited from it as one of the leading bears, selling the market short from a desk at Halle and Stieglitz on Madison Avenue and Fifty-second Street.

  Despite the millions of dollars that Joe continued to earn, he feared that the malaise was so severe that it might drive the four million unemployed and the two million vagrants into the streets, fomenting a revolution or anarchy that would take away all that he had earned. He was the darkest of Cassandras, apprehensive that he might end up as penniless as the forlorn men peddling apples on the street corners. “I am not ashamed to record that in those days I felt and said I would be willing to part with half of what I had if I could be sure of keeping, under law and order, the other half,” Joe reflected years later. “Then it seemed that I should be able to hold nothing for the protection of my family.”

  Joe decided to back New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency in 1932. He did so largely out of what he considered self-interest, not out of concern for the commonweal. He did not care much that Roosevelt might have the compassion, ideas, and intelligence to stem the tide of hollow-eyed, desperate wanderers filling the migrant camps of California or to keep good farmers from being driven bankrupt off their family land. Joe cared that Roosevelt would help him maintain for his family what was his. “I wanted him [Roosevelt] in the White House for my own security and the security of our kids, and I was ready to do anything to help elect him.”

  Joe was honest in his proud avowal of expediency, refusing to cover it with the tinsel of idealism. Self-interest is a thin parchment on which to swear fidelity to a cause or a person. Almost from the day he signed on to the campaign he began to extract his pound of benefit. “I doubt that Joe Kennedy felt like tugging his forelock to anybody on God’s earth, and I don’t think he ever did,” said Frank Waldrop, the late editor of the Washington Times Herald and a friend of Joe. “But I also don’t think he was under any illusions as to what Roosevelt was up to when he was dealing with him.”

  Joe fancied himself a man of ideas, but he had seen at Harvard that no matter how people pretended otherwise, money was always part of the admission price. He not only contributed $50,000 himself to the Roosevelt campaign but solicited funds from other wealthy men. Joe borrowed a private plane from a speculator, William Danforth, and crisscrossed New England raising money. Joe knew how to fill the most coddled heart with fear, and he took money from Republicans as well as Democrats.

  Some of the Republicans insisted on anonymity, thinking it best to keep their beneficence quiet until after the election. Joe happily obliged, sending the checks in with his own name proudly displayed. Joe flew out to meet with the press magnate William Randolph Hearst and to attempt to woo him away from his candidate, Speaker of the House John Nance Garner.

  At the Democratic convention in Chicago Stadium in June 1932, FDR fell short of the two-thirds majority then necessary for nomination. Although he was the convention’s clear choice, FDR’s supporters knew that if they did not win soon, some delegates might start looking elsewhere for a candidate. At this point Joe made one of the crucial phone calls to Hearst, pushing him to ask his first choice, Garner, to release his delegates. Hearst did so, and on the fourth ballot FDR finally won the nomination.

  Afterward Roosevelt left for a leisurely cruise, fishing from a yawl along the coast of New England. Behind sailed a yacht full of advisers, would-be advisers, and putative advisers, meeting the candidate in port each evening for strategy sessions. Proximity is the first law of politics, and Joe made sure that he was there each evening, whispering his wisdom into the candidate’s ear. He had to whisper with special intensity, for many of FDR’s advisers despised Joe. They thought that in any true tribunal he would have been in the first ranks of the greedy speculators and manipulators blamed for helping to bring on the Great Depression.

  On one of those days when Joe’s competitors for Roosevelt’s ear were isolated out on the yacht, Joe flew into New York City for a meeting with Roy Howard, the Scripps-Howard publisher and a prominent backer of one of the defeated candidates, Newton Baker of Ohio. Here was an opportunity for Joe to promote FDR’s candidacy with one of the most powerful publishers in America, but if he did so, he chose a curious means.

  “He, himself, is quite frank in his lack of confidence in Roosevelt, as evidenced by his statement to me yesterday that he intends to keep constant contact with Roosevelt during the cruise on which the latter embarked yesterday,” Howard wrote Baker afterward. “Kennedy expects to fly to whatever port Roosevelt is in for the night, to be present at the evening conferences, because he knew if he were not present the other men—notably Louis Howe and Jim Farley—would ‘unmake’ Roosevelt’s mind on some of the points which Kennedy had made it up for Roosevelt.”

  The Scripps-Howard chain was a rival of the Hearst newspapers, and Howard worried that Hearst might have an unseemly influence on a new Democratic administration. Joe assured the publisher that “Roosevelt was under no obligation whatsoever to Hearst and had not communicated with him personally either by telephone, or letter…. He protested … that Roosevelt is under no obligation to Hearst because Hearst is motivated not by any desire to nominate Roosevelt.”

  Despite his passionate avowals, Joe afterward solicited Hearst for a $25,000 campaign contribution. He wrote the press magnate a thank-you note that could scarcely be misunderstood: “You may rest assured, and this I want to say in order to go on record, that whenever your interests in this administration are not served well, my interest has ceased.”

  Joe could not seem to understand that what he thought of as candor others took as duplicity. In the minds of important men like Baker and Howard, Joe was a man not to be trusted. To them, he appeared a mercenary of conscience, with his mind and ideas for sale to the highest bidder.

  Joe had a bigger game in mind than men like Baker and Howard could even imagine. This election and presidency was only a prologue. As Roosevelt’s cruise continued, Joe stayed onboard the yacht for a while, sharing a cabin with Eddie Dowling, an actor and producer. On Cape Cod, Joe left the boat for good, leaving his bed to Eddie Moore, his lifelong associate. Moore was in an especially expansive mood, in such proximity to the man who would probably be the next president of the United States. He confided in Dowling about his employer. “If we live long enough and he is spared, the first Irish Catholic in the White House will be one of this man’s sons,” Moore told the incredulous Dowling. Irishmen were always full of their reveries, and Dowling marked it off as just another “pipe dream.”

  When Joe acted in a generous manner, it often turned out to be simply a loan that was expected to be repaid with interest. One of those who learned this lesson was the president’s son, James “Jimmy” Roosevelt. Jimmy was something that none of Joe’s sons would ever be, a sad inheritor endlessly trading on his father’s name and power. Joe helped Jimmy win some of the Ford Motor Company’s business for Jimmy’s insurance company. Joe then invited Jimmy to go along with him to England in September 1933, where he hoped to acquire liquor distributorships before the end of Prohibition.

  Jimmy’s presence next to Joe at business meetings signaled to the British business leaders that if they wanted to please the new administration, here was a good
way to do it. Joe had no interest in risk, leaving that sad concept to entrepreneurs, plungers, and business school professors. He preferred certainty, and the exclusive Dewar’s Scotch, Gordon’s gin, Ron Rico rum, and Haig & Haig Scotch import licenses were the very definition of certainty. Once that was locked up for his new company, Somerset Importers, Joe finagled a “medical” license to bring in large shipments of Scotch to be sitting in warehouses on December 5, 1933, when liquor could be sold legally again in America.

  Joe expected a cabinet post for his contributions to FDR’s victory and in recognition of the acumen that he thought he would bring to the new administration. Instead, he was frozen out, the only trifle thrown his way being possible membership in the American delegation at the London Economic Conference, which would be writing a reciprocal trade agreement with Latin American nations. James Warburg, Roosevelt’s chief representative, scotched that possibility. “I didn’t want anything to do with a delegation selected to pay off political debts,” he recalled, “for one thing because I thought it would be by definition an incompetent delegation.” A few days later, on April 8, 1933, Warburg had lunch with Harrison Williams, a young administration official, who provided even more devastating insight into Joseph P. Kennedy. “Found out all about Kennedy from him,” Warburg noted in his diary, “a completely irresponsible speculator who has been spreading malicious stories about the President…. I think Kennedy was probably spreading these tales because he hadn’t got his payoff for his $50,000 campaign contribution.”

  In June 1934, Roosevelt made the “completely irresponsible speculator” chairman of the new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Joe’s critics scoffed at the idea that he would end the ruinous practices that he and his kind had for so long employed to such profit and harm.