The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (2 page)

When a servant answered the door, Joe politely stated his business and waited for the lady of the house to come to the door to try on her new hat. The elite ladies believed that they had nostrils of such refinement that they could catch the scent of an Irishman before they even saw him. They had as their guides not only their own servants but also half a century of magazine caricatures by Thomas Nast and others portraying Irish-Americans as quasiapes, as looming, salivating simian wretches.

Joe’s face at first glance showed nothing of what the ladies considered the crude excess of an Irishman’s features. The matrons could try on their hats with the pleasing knowledge that their bonnets had been touched not by a rough Irish hand but by the fine fingers of a young man who could have been their own son.

These ladies were “New England Brahmins,” a term coined by one of their kind, Oliver Wendell Holmes. The hereditary aristocracy of the region fancied itself much like the Hindu religious caste: a natural elite, sanctified by an all-knowing God and a just social order. The Brahmin was, as Holmes wrote, “simply an Americanized Englishman. As the Englishman is the physical bully of the world, so the Bostonian is the aesthetic and intellectual bully of America.” Bullies they were, protecting their sacred precincts from loathsome pretenders who dared to dress themselves in the language and lingo that was not theirs, attempting to pass as one of their betters. The Brahmins had an almost perfect self-confidence. Nothing, no momentary fall in their economic well-being, no peasant races disembarking on their land, could move them off their high ground.

The Boston upper class was largely without irony and had a blessed ability to forget what should best be forgotten. They tended not to focus on a past in which many of their ancestors had made fortunes in a three-sided trade that had slaves as one of its sides, or a present in which their coffers were enriched by the cheap labor of the immigrants they largely despised. They were proud that at their Somerset Club on Beacon Street no member would think of engaging in the disgusting practice of doing business in their
social bastion, blissfully forgetting that they were such a close-knit elite that they could easily do their dealing elsewhere.

These were a people of restraint who at times mistook manners for morals. The flowering of a distinctive, dominant New England literature and culture was largely over. The blossoms had fallen, leaving the thorns of reaction and regression in a people who had turned from history to genealogy, from literature to antiquarianism. The Brahmins were facing the melancholy mathematics of democracy: one foul Irish immigrant vote was worth as much as that of the most refined Brahmin gentleman. The Irish politicians would soon have the votes to take over the Brahmins’ city, and there was little the Protestant elite could do to prevent it.

The Protestant upper class, however, did not simply slink into the night, carrying away the burden of their culture and their past. They were astute businessmen. They sat atop vast wealth that they continued to amass, dominating the economic life of New England. In their leisure hours they asserted themselves where a man’s vote did not matter, over the cultural and philanthropic life of the city.

As diminished as this world might soon be, it was still the summit toward which Mary Augusta pointed her son. Joe went from one imposing home to the next, learning the lesson of this exercise: these Brahmins were a royalty to whose company he could dare aspire. There was nothing about him—not his name, not his features, not his manner—that marked him as someone apart from these rich ladies and their elegant homes. Nothing seemed to prevent him from living the life they led.

W
hen Joe arrived back in the house in East Boston, he was in his mother’s universe. Mary Augusta was the monarch with absolute sovereignty over her small kingdom. She was five feet seven inches tall, towering above most of the women of her era, with a posture so straight that it seemed to add even more inches to her height. Mary Augusta was her own greatest creation, having reinvented herself as an aristocratic lady. No one who saw her walking to church with stately grace would ever imagine that her father had been a laborer. Even when she was a young woman and her father had risen to the point where he listed his occupation as engineer, the Hickeys were still not well off enough to live in anything but a rented house.

Mary Augusta was twenty-nine years old in 1887, approaching spinsterhood, when she spied P. J. walking past her kitchen window and set her cap for him. She became a splendid wife, no less so because she was so aware of her virtues. A woman of deep faith, she had been educated by the nuns for her role as wife and mother.

Mary Augusta loved her two daughters, Mary Loretta and Margaret Louise, but Joe was the measure of all things. Joe, not his younger sisters, would go out into the world. Mary Augusta taught Joe that there was no horizon on which he could not set his eyes. His sisters could be coddled and spoiled, for if they married well and properly, they might spend their lifetimes coddled and spoiled. As for Joe, his mother did not so much give him love as the promise of love. She spooned out her affection to Joe like a tonic that had to be taken in only the smallest of doses.

Mary Augusta was so concerned with the impression Joe would make on the world that when he was born on September 6, 1888, she insisted that he be named Joseph Patrick, not Patrick, after his father and his grandfather. Patrick was the most common Irish name, and she would not have her only surviving son forever marked by his immigrant forebears. Mary Augusta was trying to bring Joe up as her little Catholic gentleman, all frills and fanciness, but her son had never fully gone along. For his first formal photographs, she had Joe photographed in a long dress with a bow around his neck. Even then Joe stared out at the camera with firm unyielding eyes and a clenched fist.

Mary Augusta’s regimen as a mother was to teach her first and only surviving son the merciless rituals of civility. For Joe’s mother, the relentless pursuit of civility was not a trivial matter. In the radical egalitarianism of America, people learned to mimic the manners of those whose company they sought. The most vulgar and ill bred could affect the manners of their betters for a time, but eventually the mask of civility would fall. These ersatz ladies and pseudo-gentlemen often exposed themselves at dinner by choosing the knife as their favored implement for eating rather than the fork. Eating with a fork became such a symbol of civility that its teaching was laid out in Joe’s parochial school curriculum (“shall eat with a fork, rather than a knife; shall take small mouthfuls of food and masticate quietly”).

Young Joe lived largely in a female world, and from that world he took many of his ideas of womanhood. He had his mother as his guide and goad, a constable of civility. He had his two younger sisters, who constantly deferred to him. The Irish servant girls treated the young master as a royal being. He was the center around whom all things revolved, a condition that he took as the natural order of things. Joe saw even the Catholic Church largely through the eyes of women, particularly the nuns who taught him at parochial school.

Joe listened to the moral axioms proffered by the nuns and followed his mother’s detailed course in manners, but he chafed at all the restrictions she put on him. Mary Augusta represented a secret danger to her only son. Her idea of civility, of culture, was a seductive call that risked closeting him away
so that he might never become a true man. Her house was a sanctuary of rectitude and security, but it was on the streets below, unprotected by his mother’s sheltering skirts, that Joe had to journey to become a man.

Joe was on two journeys: one toward civility along a pathway led by his mother, the other a struggle toward true manhood. President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt feared that an insipid, feminized culture was castrating men, robbing them of their vitality. Roosevelt saw each nation engaged in its own struggle for survival, a fight in which only a nation of true men might survive. “Any nation that cannot fight is not worth its salt, no matter how cultivated and refined it may be, and the very fact that it can fight often obviates the necessity of fighting,” Roosevelt asserted. “It is just so with a boy.”

G. Stanley Hall, the most prominent psychologist of the age, taught that boys replicate the evolutionary process of civilization, from savagery to barbarism to refinement. It is a process, he lectured, that each boy has to go through to become a true man. A teenage boy who was “a perfect gentleman has something the matter with him.

“An able-bodied young man, who can not fight physically, can hardly have a high and true sense of honor, and is generally a milk-sop, a lady-boy, or a sneak,” wrote Hall, a Harvard Ph.D. and the president of Clark University. “He lacks virility, his masculinity does not ring true, his honesty can not be sound to the core.” Risk was risk and danger was danger, and Hall did not shrink from the implications: “Better even an occasional nose dented by a fist, a broken bone, a rapier-scarred face, or even sometimes the sacrifice of the life of one of our best academic youth than stagnation, general cynicism and censoriousness, bodily and psychic cowardice, and moral corruption, if this indeed be, as it sometimes is, its real alternative.”

Out on the streets of East Boston, the games were sometimes rough. Boys had their noses bitten, ears half torn off, groins kicked, heads stomped on, and lips split. Boys yelped and screamed, exhorted and cursed. A boy asked no quarter and gave none. A boy who whined was a sissy, a dandified, effete mommy’s boy.

Danger was everywhere. Joe often hitched a ride on the back of one of the long coal pungs that moved laboriously from the docks to the ferry. These horse-drawn wagons were so long that the driver rarely could strike his unwanted passenger, as often happened when boys jumped on a carriage. Joe still might have fallen off and had his legs crushed by one of the wheels. There was danger even when he stayed home. Joe had been injured playing with a toy pistol; so had one of his friends, and the boy died of blood poisoning. The dead boy’s brother invited Joe to go sailing with him. It was the first of the month, the day on which young Joe always took confession, so he
said no, and the boy upset the boat and drowned. Danger might be omnipresent, but Joe stepped around it like a puddle of water in his path.

Life in the streets, though, was not all danger and risk. Young Joe loved the rituals of patriotism. He always attended the parades to watch the drum corps and the Civil War veterans and the bands marching proudly by. One Memorial Day he got together all his friends in uniforms, and they marched in the parade, falling out long before its end. Back at the house, he orchestrated a flag-raising ceremony with all the neighborhood children present, and his own sister Loretta swathed herself in a flag and wore a glorious “Columbia” crown.

Joe’s father and mother could easily have given their precious son an allowance large enough that he never would have had to bother getting a foul taste of the workaday world of America. They did not do so, however, and were proud that young Joe went out hustling jobs. He ran errands at P. J.’s bank. He hawked newspapers on the street corner. He lit stoves on the Sabbath for Orthodox Jews.

One summer Joe got together with a friend, Ronan Grady, to raise pigeons, which many in East Boston considered a delicacy. Ronan had the coop and the pigeons, but Joe didn’t fancy himself as a pigeon farmer, feeding the birds expensive food, cleaning the coops, and waiting months for them to fatten. Instead, he and Ronan regularly picked out two of the most likely pigeons, secreted them under their shirts, and took them to Boston Common. There they released the birds. By the time the boys got home, their pigeons had already returned, bringing amorous partners with them. The boys sold the birds and split the profits. Joe was beginning to learn that there was nothing worth more than a good idea and a better angle.

T
he nuns might educate his sisters, but for Mary Augusta’s son, only the finest secular education would do. Joe set out in September 1901 to take the ferry to attend seventh grade at Boston Latin School on the corner of Dartmouth Street and Warren Avenue. He was entering what was probably the finest public school in America. Alumni included Samuel Adams, one of the fathers of the American Revolution; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the author; Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard; and George Santayana, one of the university’s most distinguished professors.

The youths who surrounded Joe in the Boston Latin classrooms did not bear the great names of the old city. The upper-class Protestants thought of Boston Latin as
their
school, but they had largely given it up rather than have their sons’ sweet souls soured by sitting next to the likes of a Joseph P.
Kennedy. They had made their hegira to the undefiled premises of a group of new private prep schools scattered across New England, where their sons would sit only among their own kind. That left only a few of the poorer Brahmin brethren to sit in classrooms full of immigrant sons and grandsons.

The boys who dominated the academic life of the school were almost all Jews. Joe was not one of those thrusting his hand up, waving it for attention. He was not a good student. His grades were pathetic, including Cs in elementary and advanced Greek and his second year of elementary French; Ds in English, elementary history, elementary Latin, elementary algebra, and geometry; and Fs in his first year of elementary French, elementary physics, and advanced Latin.

These grades did not temper Joe’s ego. He looked disdainfully at the humorless, relentless, merciless struggles of grade grubbers. For him, the glory of these years lay elsewhere, especially on the athletic field. On the baseball diamond all of his natural aggressiveness played out. He slid with spikes up, argued with umpires whose casual ineptness appalled him, and batted each time as if the game depended on him stroking the ball over the fence. For Joe, there was purity in this world that he found nowhere else. Years later he would lovingly remember the details of each school game, reliving the glory of those long past days.