The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (10 page)

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 Dexter. 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.

T
he 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.

In Hollywood Joe learned one of the profound lessons of his life. He had always believed in family as a manifestation of his will. He saw in Hollywood how the Jews were able to maintain control of this important new industry.
As much as they competed with and berated their competitors, they stood together against the Gentile world. That was their strongest weapon.

Joe would build his family to stand together too, against all who might challenge them. “As long as they stick together that is the important thing,” Rose recalled as the essence of her husband’s thinking. “That is what he believed and expected.”

W
hen Joe was home, he always accompanied Rose to St. Aidan’s for mass on Sunday. The Kennedys cut fine figures as they entered the Tudor church. Joe had taken away from Harvard a sense that clothes were the way a man advertised himself, telling the world about his class, his aspirations, and his confidence. He was an impeccable dresser—as concerned about his clothes as was his wife about hers—and he walked with a sprightly, self-confident step. His fellow parishioners could easily see that Joe Kennedy was a man of the world, with a pretty, youthful wife and a handsome family. The Kennedys did not mix much with their Brookline neighbors, barely nodding a greeting before sitting down.

As they kneeled in their pew, the Kennedys were worshiping at different churches. Rose went to mass practically every day. With a faith both deep and true, she was making obeisance to a God who gave her solace and peace. Joe sat with much the same reverential cast to his face, the very picture of the perfect Catholic layman. Yet he slept with actresses and chorus girls, manipulated stocks so as to exploit widows, pensioners, and other less shrewd manipulators, and set up bootlegging deals with mobsters from Cleveland to Palm Beach.

Joe did not rustle nervously in the pew, worrying that a just God might smite him down for using the Church as a shield for his sins. He had ample reason to believe that there were two churches: the one ministered to by simple parish priests like Father John T. Creagh, here this Sunday, and the sophisticated, worldly church of power and substance, led in Boston by Cardinal William O’Connell. The cardinal was as much a player in the world of power as Mayor James Michael Curley or Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Cardinal O’Connell had officiated at Joe and Rose’s wedding and blessed their lives. His nephew, Monsignor James O’Connell, may have been present that day too, for he then lived with his uncle in the official residence.

Monsignor O’Connell had a certain disability for a priest—a wife in New York City. So did Father David J. Toomey, editor of the
Pilot,
the publication read by good Catholics in Boston. When Father Toomey was secretly excommunicated, he claimed that the cardinal’s nephew had bought his uncle’s silence by threatening to expose the cardinal himself for embezzling
from the archdiocese as well as his “sexual affection for
men.”
By apparently lying to Pope Benedict XV about his nephew, the cardinal defused the controversy and returned to Boston to inveigh against immoral movies and sin in general. The cardinal was not one to look too deeply into the cellars of Joe Kennedy’s life, for he might find his own skeletons hidden away there in the darkness. Beyond that, Joe was not only a generous contributor to his church but, in
Photoplay
magazine’s authoritative words, “the screen’s … leading family man.”

For Joe, the Catholic Church was like the Democratic Party—an institution that he was born into and that he used as he saw fit—but he had no more deep faith in one than the other. A great family, as Joe defined the term, was a wealthy family, and he was now a millionaire several times over. Wealth, however, could be either the rich sustenance out of which accomplishment grew for generations or an overrich banquet that left those who feasted on it satiated and weak. Joe had seen both aspects of wealth.

Joe’s father-in-law, Honey Fitz, had feared that his sons might outdo him. If anything, Joe feared the opposite. He had an astute understanding of the psychology of money. One key to the success of the great families lay in institutionalizing money in irrevocable trust funds. Thus, no one generation could squander the family’s assets, and each member could know that he would go into life spared the tedious necessity of scrambling for a basic living.

Early in 1926, Joe institutionalized his belief in family when he established the first of a series of trust funds. The trust agreement was an artful document, for it created a family wealth that could go on for generations. Until they were thirty-five years old, the trustees had discretion over the percentage of the income they would give the Kennedy offspring. The Kennedy daughters received the same share as their brothers, but with his low opinion of their financial acumen and assumption that women were naturally profligate, Joe added a typical “spendthrift clause for female beneficiaries.”

Joe told the financier Bernard Baruch, who shared his cynicism about human nature, that the trust fund would allow his children to “spit in his eye.” It was not that at all. Joe’s belief in family was in some ways an immortality wish, a way of living on through his sons and his sons’ sons. A trust fund was as much a part of that vision for his sons’ lives as private school education and athletic competition, as well as a part of his vision of what he thought a true man should be and have and do.

5
Moving On

I
n September 1927, the Kennedy chauffeur drove the family from Brookline to South Station to take a train to their new home in New York. Joe had a gift for mythic self-creation that was as American as the curveball. He could not admit that he was moving to New York largely because it was a more convenient place for him. He had to create a moral drama. He was fond of saying later that he had left so that his children would not have to suffer from the anti-Catholic, anti-Irish ambience of Boston.

“I felt it was no place to bring up Irish Catholic children,” Joe said. “I didn’t want them to go through what I had to go through when I was growing up.” His sons knew that among their schoolmates the term “Irish” was not a term of honor, but they surely would have been bewildered if they had been told they were leaving their friends and their neighborhood to save them from the horrors of prejudice.

The Kennedys were leaving a Boston in which the Protestant upper class dominated banking and the law, but the city itself, by the mid-1920s, was largely run by Irish-Americans like James Michael Curley, who was mayor during most of this period. Joe, moreover, was moving to a suburb of New York that was even more an enclave of the Protestant elite than Brookline.

On one occasion two decades later he did admit why he had left Boston, though he made it seem as if he had been a poor man driven out of the city because he could not get a job. “It is not a pleasant thing for a young man born and reared and educated in Boston to have to pull up his stakes and seek opportunity elsewhere,” he said. “I know, for I had to do it.”

Joe fancied not only that he had fought against outrageous prejudice and was driven in hunger out of Boston but that he had struggled upward from
the pits of poverty. That too was a common American belief: if you were not born rich, then the next best thing was to have been born poor and to have pulled your way up with nary a helping hand. As the train pulled out of South Station, however, Joe was leaving behind not poverty but most of the inconvenient witnesses to his past.

Those most irritated at his attempt to wrap his past in the sackcloth of poverty were his maternal aunts and uncles. They were proud of their family’s achievements and thought that Joe was diminishing them and their lives. His Aunt Catherine had so much believed in young Joe that she had lent him much of her life savings, when he was trying to save Columbia Trust Company from a takeover bid, without so much as asking for a promissory note.

It was not a woman’s place to know much about banking and finance. When, several years later her check bounced at the Columbia Trust Company, she had gotten dressed and gone down to the bank to find out why it had made such an embarrassing mistake. Joe had never replenished her account, and indeed he would never do so. Nor did he return money to his other relatives. Catherine and her brother and the other Hickey relatives were nothing more than reminders of a past he wanted to forget. As he left Boston that day, he was leaving unpaid debts. He was a sagacious judge of character, as ready to take advantage of the nobility of a relative as the ignobility of a stranger. He knew that these debts would never be called, that his actions would never be known beyond his uncles and aunts, who would bear a silent shame.

Joe was used to traveling endlessly. Rose’s roots were far deeper, and she would never grow them as deeply again, away from her family, from her identity, from her own separate status as the mayor’s daughter. She now had seven children, including her third daughter, Eunice, born July 10, 1921, her fourth daughter, Patricia, born May 6, 1924, and her third son, Robert Francis, born November 20, 1925. She was pregnant now with her eighth child, and as the train rolled onward she was traveling each mile farther away from the security of Dr. Good, who had delivered her babies and in whose care she planned to return to give birth to her newest child. Rose, even on this day, kept studious notes of her children’s lives. She wrote that six-year-old Eunice was suffering from stomach problems. Another mother might have scribbled down that perhaps her sensitive daughter was upset by the move. That was a guilty suggestion that Rose would never consciously admit, or her daughter dare to speak.

Rose was proud that her children were so wonderfully resilient, and the seven young Kennedys soon settled into life in the gracious thirteen-room house that Joe had rented in Riverdale, just outside of New York City, overlooking the expansive Hudson River. Rose was heavy with child and alone in a new community in which she knew no one, but she understood that this
was all women’s business, something with which Joe must not be distracted. Joe left his family there and headed off into his other life.

J
oe considered life a banquet at which he could feast on whatever and whomever he pleased. He had taken a liking to the sun and sociability of Palm Beach when Rose introduced him to the Florida resort a few years before. Now, in January 1928, instead of spending time in the frigid North with his pregnant wife, he was down in Palm Beach, setting off on a daring new romantic adventure.

Joe’s choice for his newest dalliance was twenty-eight-year-old Gloria Swanson, a celebrated Hollywood star. Greta Garbo was more classically beautiful, Mae West was more voluptuous, but no other contemporary actress had Gloria’s mysterious, exotic aura. She was a thrice-married egotist, now saddled to a fawning gentleman whose most notable feature was his name, the Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye. Gloria fancied herself a woman of her time, not a silly flapper but a spirited, independent, passionate woman who thought that eroticism was her natural due. While Rose perused her Catholic missives, Gloria read such up-to-the-minute works as
Sex and the Love Light
and
The Art of Love.