The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (12 page)

Joe Jr. and Jack both had an intense, nervous hunger for all the minutiae of a boy’s life, treating touch football games as epic contests and passionately competing for even something like a bus seat as if the struggle were for life itself. Their friends relished their time at the Kennedy house, for everything was intensified there.

When Rose was home, she was not like many of their mothers, who were interested in bridge games and garden clubs. Rose was a mother who directed her children’s every endeavor. She had ample time for her children in part because the ladies of Bronxville had largely ostracized her. She was blackballed from the Bronxville Women’s Club, an outcast not because of her faith but because of her husband’s infidelity. It was also unthinkable that the Kennedys would be admitted to the Bronxville Country Club.

Jack and Joe Jr. were among the most popular boys at Riverdale. Joe Jr. was the dominant brother, pushing his little brother into the background. “Perhaps Joe Jr. was kind of spoiled,” Angulo recalled, “but then again, that was because he was the apple of his father’s eye. I wouldn’t say that Jack was spoiled.”

Joe Jr. was ahead of his class in everything, including his interest in girls. Jack was so shy around girls that when it came time for him to go to dancing class he would hide in the bathroom. He was a handsome lad, but when girls started calling him on the phone, he could not even bring himself to speak.

Girls weren’t everything. One fall afternoon Jack was sitting in the upper field with his football-playing mates, waiting for his turn to take the field. “What are you going to do when you grow up?” one of the boys asked. “I want to be a doctor,” one boy said. “I want to be an engineer,” a second asserted. “I’m going to be president of the United States,” Jack said matter-of-factly.

L
ittle Bobby would never have expressed such bold dreams, or if he had, his words would have been lost in his big brothers’ boastful shouts. His own mother often scarcely paid attention to him. She ruefully admitted years later that by the time the seventh of her nine children was born, even she was dragged down by the relentless routine of mothering.

“As a mother, yes, I did get a bit tired after fifteen years of telling the same bedtime stories, celebrating the same holidays,” Rose confessed. She was traveling more now, including twice-yearly sojourns to Paris to be fitted for the latest styles, and much of the time she foisted Bobby off on governesses and nannies. She might have felt differently if Bobby had been a brilliant boy, but lost in the middle of the family, he seemed to have nothing singular about him.

His big brother Jack could not remember Bobby until he was three and a half. Jack’s first significant memory is perfectly emblematic of Bobby’s upbringing. There stood this tiny tyke on the deck of a yawl in Nantucket Sound, jumping again and again into the rough waters, teaching himself how to swim, while Joe Jr. watched from another boat. Joe Jr. might have stopped him, lecturing him on the dangers, but short of saving him from drowning, Joe Jr. let his little brother continue.

Bobby could dive into that sea a thousand times, but he would never be able to knife into the water with the ease and elegance of his big brothers. Bobby scrambled on in life, fearful that he would be dismissed as unworthy and that when he arrived at the table of life the food would be gone and the guests departed. Once, when he was only four years old, he came careening down to the dining room, terrified that he would be late, and ran into a glass door, severely cutting his face. Another day he was playing in the toolshed when he dropped a rusty radiator on his foot, breaking his second toe. The pain was excruciating. Most boys would have burst into tears, dragging their injured foot behind them as they stumbled toward the house. Bobby sat there grimacing in pain, not even removing his shoe. A half hour later he finally took off his shoe: his sock was soaked in blood, and he had to be taken to the hospital.

In the high stakes of inheritance, Bobby seemed to have drawn the worst card. Unlike his brothers, he wasn’t a handsome child whose presence could charm the uncharmable. Bobby was scrawny and small, always struggling to keep up, running along double time while his brothers forged ahead with long strides. As a boy, he had soft, gentle features that suggested he had best stay away from the tough playing fields of manhood. His mouth was often pursed in a wry expression, suggesting nothing if not bewilderment. Some called him shy, but it was a strange shyness, for he would suddenly burst out like a cuckoo clock on the hour, making a few loud noises, before shutting himself up again. He was not especially smart either. Not only was he not a top student, but he showed none of Jack’s flashes of brilliance that excused his otherwise mediocre school record. Joe Jr. was one of the top students in his class at Riverdale, while in sixth grade Jack won a commencement prize for best composition.

“Bobby looked on both [of his parents] as if they were saints,” reflected Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, Jack’s closest friend. “He could see no defects in either. They did not reciprocate. They did not return his love.” Joe and Rose surely loved their son, but he seemed at times an interloper, an observer to the dramatic comings and goings of his big brothers, half ignored as his parents doted over little Teddy. Bobby was the most emotionally vulnerable
of the boys. “Bobby got along better with his mother than with his father,” his younger sister Jean reflected. “Jack, the reverse. His father was often very rough on Bobby; his mother would console him, ‘You’re my favorite,’ half jokingly.” Rose may have told Bobby on occasion that he was her favorite, but she most likely did so because he was not.

Life for Bobby was a foreign language that he spoke only haltingly, stumbling over the syntax, his accent showing that this was not a tongue that came naturally to him. He struggled to stay up with the world his father taught him must be his. As a boy in Bronxville, he signed up for a paper route, an endeavor that Joe thought admirable training for a youth. Admirable training it was, but primarily for the Kennedys’ chauffeur, who delivered the papers each morning. “I put an end to that,” his mother recalled. “Bobby said he was so busy with his schoolwork.”

Bobby had the deepest faith of any of his brothers. He appeared so devout at St. Joseph’s Church in Bronxville that one of the nuns, Sister M. Ambrose, thought that he “might have a religious vocation.” “Bishop Bernard from the Bahama Islands used to be given permission by Father McCann to collect at the Masses at least once a year,” Sister Ambrose recalled in a letter to Bobby years later. “After an appeal at the nine o’clock mass, you went home, got your bank, and gave the contents to the Bishop.”

The Kennedy boys had set their roots in Bronxville far deeper than their parents ever would or could. Rose wanted her sons to go to an elite Catholic school or, if Joe spurned that idea, to public school, “where they’d meet the grocer’s son and the plumber’s son as well as the minister’s son and the banker’s son.” In Bronxville there were few plumber’s and grocer’s sons in the classrooms, but the progressive school system was among the best in America.

Joe, however, had no use for what he considered the tedious malarkey of American democracy. He had received his education in American social mores at Harvard. He was not going to have his sons go through life bearing the stigma of public school. Rose argued with her husband, but this was not a debate that she had any business joining or the possibility of winning.

In the fall of 1929, fourteen-year-old Joe Jr. left his classmates at Riverdale to head off to Choate, one of the half-dozen or so top prep schools in America. “He is a rare youth and you will be most fortunate to have him,” Frank S. Hackett, the Riverdale headmaster, wrote in support of Joe Jr.’s admission. “I regret exceedingly that this family are contemplating any change.”

Jack stayed at home another year attending Riverdale before being sent to Canterbury Prep, a Catholic school in New Milford, Connecticut. Since his early years of sickness, he had been a healthy, vibrant boy in Bronxville. Away from home, thirteen-year-old Jack began to suffer from a myriad of minor
maladies. He joined the football team, but being small and weak, he was knocked up and down the field. “My nose my leg and other parts of my anatomy have been risked around so much that it is beginning to be funny,” he wrote Bobby.

By now Jack was fluent in the emotional language of the Kennedys. He knew he could never complain too loudly that he missed his mother or his friends, or that he was full of wistful homesickness. He might allude to such things, but sickness was the only avenue of emotional release left to him. His frequent letters home were full, not of the joys and vicissitudes of a boy’s life, but of problems with his health. He wrote his father that at mass he “began to get sick dizzy and weak. I just about fainted and everything began to get black.” He said he was only saved from collapsing onto the floor by an alert proctor, who held him up.

Jack could not tolerate the suggestion that he might be weaker than his brother, and he pointedly reminded his parents: “Joe fainted twice in church so I guess I will live.” On another occasion he wrote about problems he was having with his eyes: “I see things blury
[sic]
even at a distance of ten feet,” he told his parents. “I can’t see much color through that eye either.” He wrote that he was losing weight and that he was “pretty tired.”

Such letters would have sent most parents hurrying to the school to succor their sickly son. Neither Joe nor Rose apparently ever visited Jack at the school. They wrote frequent letters. They kept in contact with the school administration. But they treated the school year as a sentence that Jack had to serve out on his own and whose life lessons would be diminished by their presence.

Jack was already imbued with the Kennedy attitude that individuals outside of the family were largely interchangeable. That winter of 1930/31, Jack wrote his mother complaining about the suit that she sent him and detailing problems with his eyes. Only then did he mention what another boy would have considered the most important news. Jack had been out sledding with some of the other youths. The hill was steep and slick with ice. Jack estimated that the sleds careened down the pathway at close to forty miles an hour. He was traveling so fast that he did not make a turn and sailed into a ditch. Jack set out again, and as he wrote his parents, “I smashed into a sled that was lying on the ground and I saw the other boy, Brooks, lying on the ground holding his stomach.” Jack went on in clinical detail describing the youth’s “grayish color” and speculated that the injured boy was probably operated upon. “He had internal injuries and I liked him a lot,” Jack concluded, describing the student as if he were deceased.

The friend had been carried off life’s playing field, and though he presumably recovered, Jack moved on. In her reply Rose might have tried to
teach her son that without a sense of responsibility for his own actions, he would never be a true adult. She did not even address the matter, however, or ask about the boy’s well-being. If she did, the letter has been lost.

J
ack’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.