Though the Kennedys were one of the richest families in America, guests encountered few signs of ostentatious wealth or conspicuous consumption. Quite the contrary: “We each had a napkin,” Teddy later related, “and that napkin was expected to last the entire week. If it suffered any stains—which of course is what napkins are designed to do—too bad.” The furniture in the house was comfortable but mostly ordinary; the bicycles and sporting equipment were often weathered and beaten, meant to be used until they fell apart. On birthdays the children could expect to receive no more than one or two gifts, none of them extravagant. Their weekly allowances were kept small.28
In subsequent years the suggestion would be made that the close-knit Kennedys practiced an insular solidarity and didn’t mix much with the other families of Hyannis Port, many of them Protestants from Pittsburgh. Lem Billings, for one, didn’t deny the claim, but he questioned whether anti-Catholic prejudice played much of a role. “The children were invited certainly to every party there was in Hyannis Port and there was no problem about the mixing of the Pittsburgh Protestant children and the Catholic Kennedy children,” Billings said. “I know that when I used to visit the Kennedys I knew a lot of the boys and girls in Hyannis Port better than they did, because I’d been raised with them in Pittsburgh, but this didn’t mean they weren’t invited to whatever went on. I don’t think they probably went as often as they could have, because it was a very self-sufficient family. They had everything they needed at home. They had their own movies; they had all their own athletic facilities.”29
Always, the culture of competition dominated among the children. “Which one of us is the best looking?” visitors would be asked. “Who is the funniest?” “Whose outfit do you prefer?” Seemingly friendly “touch” football games on the family lawn would turn into fierce, bruising affairs, much to the astonishment of unsuspecting guests. The gentle pleasure of skipping stones would become competitive, as would seeing whose seashell floated out the farthest into Nantucket Sound. If the family was waiting for a car and had a few minutes to kill, someone would come up with a game to play. Even board games and charades would be hotly contested. At the ages of twelve and ten, respectively, Joe Junior and Jack started winning local sailing races, and they did not let up. Eunice would soon do the same. Patricia, for her part, became an accomplished golfer. At times, Joe Senior got into the athletic act, taking on his sons in sports in which he knew he would prevail. An excellent low-handicap golfer who regularly shot in the low and mid-eighties, he would challenge Joe and Jack and beat them every time. In tennis, too, he always won comfortably, until one day when Joe Junior, then in his mid-teens, nearly bested him. That was the end of the father-son tennis matches—Kennedy preferred to hang up his racket rather than lose to one of his boys.30
Years later, one weary weekend visitor outlined the “Rules for Visiting the Kennedys”:
Anticipate that each Kennedy will ask what you think of another Kennedy’s (a) dress, (b) hairdo, (c) backhand, (d) latest public achievement. Be sure to answer “terrific.” This should get you through dinner. Now for the football field. It’s “touch,” but it’s murder. If you don’t want to play, don’t come. If you do come, play, or you’ll be fed in the kitchen and no one will speak to you. Don’t let the girls fool you. Even pregnant, they can make you look silly. Above all, don’t suggest any plays, even if you played quarterback at school. The Kennedys have the signal-calling department sewed up, and all of them have A-pluses in leadership….Run madly on every play, and make a lot of noise. Don’t appear to be having too much fun, though. They’ll accuse you of not taking the game seriously enough.31
As a philosophy of life, winning was of course problematic. On some level, Joe and Rose understood as much. Their eldest daughter, Rosemary, pretty and round-faced and sweet-natured, with a lovely smile that dimpled her cheeks, could never compete in the family’s do-or-die ethos. A mere sixteen months younger than Jack, she had been slow to crawl and then to walk. Reading and writing were difficult for her—for a long time, she scrawled her letters from the right side of the page to the left. Like Joe Junior and Jack, she had entered Edward Devotion School, but at the end of kindergarten her teachers determined that she would not be promoted to first grade but would instead repeat the year. This time she passed, with a C, but the struggles went on. She couldn’t balance herself on a bicycle or throw a ball or steer a sled like the others. At the dinner table, she struggled to manage a knife, so her meat was served precut. The intricacies of sailing eluded her; alone among her siblings, she did not have her own boat. Her parents consulted a stream of experts, including the head of the psychology department at Harvard and a specialist in Washington, D.C. “Each of them told me she was retarded,” Rose recalled, “but what to do about her, where to send her, how to help her seemed an unanswered question….I had never heard of a retarded child.”32
For a time the parents opted for what was then an enlightened approach, in the form of what today would be called “mainstreaming.” They determined Rosemary would be sent to regular school, not institutionalized in the draconian way common for the “feebleminded” (as they were then labeled) of the era. When conventional schooling proved unworkable—there were few schools in the United States then for children with special needs—they opted for homeschooling, with hired tutors and with Rose in the supervisory role. Progress was slow and fleeting. Rosemary learned to write but did not progress beyond block letters. Rose avoided using cursive in her letters to her daughter and refrained from sprinkling in French expressions when speaking to the other children, for fear of making Rosemary feel disaffected. At her insistence, Rosemary was included in most social activities, including dances at the Yacht Club, where Joe Junior and Jack, if they saw her sitting by herself, were to make sure she kept dancing, even if it cut into their own fun.33
Years afterwards, Rose would express guilt that her preoccupation with Rosemary may have made her neglectful of Jack, so close to his sister in age. “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 expressed no similar worry about Kathleen or Eunice, born after Rosemary, who evidently could make do with less mothering than a son could.34
In September 1929, not long before her eleventh birthday, Rosemary was sent away to the Devereux School, in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, which provided specialized instruction for intellectually challenged students. She struggled to adjust to being away from home, and it did not help that the school discouraged parental visits. In mid-November, her father received his first letter and replied right away. “I cannot tell you how excited and pleased I was to get your letter,” he enthused. “You were a darling to write me so soon.” He filled her in on family goings-on and told her that Gloria Swanson would soon send her a letter and a photo, then nudged her to work hard in her studies: “I was very glad to see a lot of improvement in the report card, and I am sure that within the next couple of months it will be even better.” It didn’t happen. Though Rosemary adapted somewhat to the social environment of the school, she plateaued academically—she lacked confidence, her teachers reported, and had difficulty concentrating on any but the simplest tasks. Even elementary concepts eluded her. The parents hoped for improved performance when she returned to Devereux for a second year in 1930, and then for a third in 1931; each time they were disappointed.35
III
As the 1920s ended and Young Joe and Jack entered their teenage years, their father assumed a key role in their educational development, while Rose remained in charge of the girls and Bobby. Rose had wanted her sons to attend Catholic schools, but Joe thought that if they were to compete in the political world, they needed to be with boys from
prominent—which meant Protestant—families. “There is nothing wrong with Catholic schools,” he later said. “They’re fine. But I figured the boys could get all the religion they needed in Church, and that it would be broadening for them to attend Protestant schools.” Only such a school, he felt, could make his sons the kind of men he wanted them to be—and, at the same time, pave their path to Harvard.36
But which school should it be? Kennedy consulted widely, including with Russell Ayers, a Harvard classmate who taught history and coached baseball at Choate and who encouraged him to send his boys there. Choate was a highly respected private boarding academy, one that sent many of its graduates to the Ivy League (especially Yale) and had students from forty states and several foreign countries, but it wasn’t the elite of the elite among New England prep schools.37 The scions of New York money went there—Paul Mellon, son of Gilded Age robber baron Andrew W. Mellon, was a graduate—while the true blue-blood families sent their sons to the older and more prestigious St. Mark’s, St. Paul’s, or Groton. Joe Kennedy’s wealth was too new, and his lineage too Irish, to be fully acceptable to these schools.38 At Choate, the Kennedy sons were more likely to be accepted, and it had the further advantage of being closer to Bronxville—sixty-five miles away, in Wallingford, Connecticut—than the other schools.
“My only hesitancy about doing it,” Kennedy wrote C. Wardell St. John, the Choate assistant headmaster (and double cousin of the headmaster), in late April 1929, “is I realize that when the boys go away now to school, they are practically gone forever, because it is three years there and then four years at college, and you realize how little you see of them after that. I may be selfish in wanting to hold on for another year at least….However I am talking the matter over with his mother and will try to come to a decision and make out the applications as you suggest.” A few days later, Kennedy wrote Ayers to say, “I have definitely made up my mind to send them to Choate, provided I can get them in.”39
That September, Joe Junior enrolled at Choate. After a rough start, he adjusted and became a model student, making up with hard work what he lacked in natural aptitude. (“Joe is better at facts than at imagination,” one teacher wrote of him.) Soon he was a standout on the athletic field as well, suiting up for football, wrestling, hockey, and crew. “He has been one of the most livable boys in the whole house,” his housemaster wrote at the conclusion of the spring 1930 term, “and he accepted discipline—not nearly as frequently necessary in the latter portion of the year—with more grace and manliness than any other boy.”40
Initially, Jack was set to follow his brother and enroll in 1931, in the third form (or freshman year); then it was determined he would start a year sooner, in September 1930.41 But then the plan changed again, likely on account of Rose’s advocacy—she suspected Choate of having a Protestant bias. That fall, Jack was dispatched instead to Canterbury, an all-boys Catholic boarding school in New Milford, Connecticut, that aspired to prepare students not just for Catholic colleges but for the Ivy League.42
He showed up, without a uniform, on September 24, 1930, one of thirty-two new students. For the first time in his life he was on his own, in an alien, forbidding place. The campus was bleak, with nondescript buildings scattered about and a stone church at its center. The Housatonic River ran nearby. Just how Jack felt upon being deposited here instead of with his brother down the road in Wallingford is unclear; perhaps a part of him wanted to strike out alone, or imagined so. “It’s a pretty good place but I was pretty homesick the first night,” he acknowledged in a letter to his grandfather Honey Fitz soon after arriving. “The swimming pool is great even though the football team looks pretty bad. You have a whole lot of religion and the studies are pretty hard. The only time you can get out of here is to see the Harvard-Yale and the Army-Yale [games]. This place is freezing at night and pretty cold in the daytime.” To encourage his mother, he noted in another letter, “We have chapel every morning and evening and I will be quite pius [sic] I guess when I get home.”43
Soon he began suffering one malady after another—hives, fevers, lightheadedness, upset stomach, pink eye. The school infirmary became a second home. One wonders if some of these ailments were exacerbated by—if not rooted in—the shock of being away from home, by the pressure to match his brother’s achievements, and by the need to live up to the Kennedy family credo, which decreed that you never gripe too much, never say you miss your parents or siblings. (“My knees are very red with white lumps of skin,” he wrote in a letter home, “but I guess I will pull through.”) Jack’s letters detail his problems with fatigue and with keeping his weight up—he hovered around 117 pounds, not exactly brawny in a thirteen-year-old boy—and the challenges his comparatively small stature presented on the athletic field: “Football practice is pretty hard and I am the lightest fellow about on the squad. My nose my leg and other parts of my anatomy have been pushed around so much that it is beginning to be funny.” Lest his parents think him weaker than his brother, he pointedly reminded them, after describing feeling dizzy and weak to the point of almost blacking out in chapel, that “Joe fainted twice in church so I guess I will live.”44
To his mother, Jack wrote, “I have hives, that is a sickness which everything begins to itch. My face had hands knees and feet. I also have a cold. Outside of that I am O.K. When ever I go out the Doc jumps one on me for not wearing enough all the other boys arent either.” Then again, Jack added, his spelling questionable at best, some classmates had it worse: “One fellow who cracked his head to pieces and broke his collor bone sledding was one of them. They patched up his arm and then let him out two days later. He was a little fellow in the first form two days later he was down with pnemonia. They should not have let him out because he was weak and white. The other boy went to the infirmary with a slight cold and then he got pnemonia.” About his eyesight, Jack added, “It has gotten worse and everything is a blur at over eight feet but if you do want me to wait till Easter I will if you think it best.”45
Rose Kennedy’s index cards from the fall of 1930 indicate that Jack lost weight steadily between October and early December. At her request, Nelson Hume, the headmaster at Canterbury, arranged for the boy to be seen by a local physician named Schloss, who prescribed a special drink for weight gain. “Jack tells me that he has about finished the tonic that Dr. Schloss gave him,” Hume informed Joe Kennedy in January 1931, adding that, as headmaster, he was taking a personal interest in Jack’s health: “I am going to take immediate charge of the question of increasing Jack’s weight myself.” Increased dairy consumption was deemed to be the key, and Hume informed Mr. Kennedy that Jack would be given milk to drink all throughout the day.46
If such protracted ailments would send most parents today racing to the school to provide succor to their child, the Kennedys were not such parents. The record suggests that Rose and Joe paid but one visit to Canterbury during their son’s time there. Few thought this all that unusual at the time (though we can note that the parents of Jack’s fellow student and future brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, who did not suffer similar health problems, came to see their son on numerous weekends in the first year). Joe and Rose did write frequently to Jack, and also communicated via mail with his teachers and with the school administration.47
Little by little, the young teenager acclimated to campus life. Academically, he did better in some subjects than others. In English, where the class read one of his favorite authors, Sir Walter Scott, he earned his best grade, a 95. In math he scored a 93, followed by 80 in history, 78 in science, and 68 in Latin. (Foreign languages would forever be a struggle for him.)48 One senses in his letters a restive momentum, a nascent intellectualism, and an ear for rhetoric. “We are reading Ivanhoe in English,” he wrote his father, “and though I may not be able to remember material things such as tickets, gloves and so on I can remember things like Ivanhoe and the last time we had an exam on it I got a ninety eight.” Then an e
legant wrap-up: “There goes the bell and that is not just a form of finish because it really did ring.” He wrote of hearing a visiting speaker give “one of the most interesting talks that I ever heard, about India,” and in another letter he implored his father, one year after the Wall Street crash, to sign him up for a subscription to “Litary Digest because I did not know about the Market Slump until a long time after.” He added, “Please send some golf balls.”49
Latin class presented a special problem: “Today we had a latin test. I handed in my paper the last one and I thought he had it because I gave it to him. He was also handing out some corrected papers so he must have handed out mine because I have not seen it around and I cant convince him that I gave it to him so he gave me a zero which pulls my mark down to about 40 and so I guess my average will be very very low this month. In all my other subject after the first weeks bad start I am doing pretty well but the first week counts ¹/₅ so my average will be around 69 or maybe higher. What a mess!”50
Like other thirteen-year-old boys, Jack puzzled over the alterations to his voice. At choir practice, he thought he sounded like the family dog: “My voice must be changing, because when I go up it sounds as if Buddy is howling. I go up another note and Buddy is choking. Another note and Buddy and me have gasped our last.”51
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