The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (3 page)

Joe befriended one of the best athletes at Boston Latin, Walter Elcock. Not only was Elcock captain of the football team, but he was sure to be chosen captain of the baseball team as well. Joe took his friend to steak dinners that he would not have been served at home and talked him into stepping aside so that Joe would be named captain. Thus two years in a row, Joe was captain in name and deed.

Joe learned of the profound dangers of sex, not of its pleasure. There was no purity in the world of sex, especially not in the Ireland from which Joe’s ancestors had emigrated. In the name of God, the peasant priests drove the sexes apart, patrolling the Irish countryside in search of couples so foolish as to seek out a dalliance. Men married late and reluctantly, seeking another farmworker as much as a wife. Then, and only then, did they partake in the short, brutish business that was sex and prove their manhood nightly by continuing to lift a few with friends at the village tavern.

In the Boston of Joe’s childhood, a gentleman did not talk about sex. As for children, when they talked of “the dirty place” or “the dirty parts,” it was clear of what and where they spoke. They might disguise the words, but they could not disguise the acts. Hall recalled that, growing up in the small town of Worthington, Massachusetts, youths experimented with “homosexuality, exhibitionism, fellatio, onanism, relations with animals, and almost every form of perversion.”

The list of sexual experiments in East Boston may have been smaller, but life for an adolescent was presumably not radically different. No one of any honor and decency spoke of such matters, and Joe most likely stayed clear of such behavior in word and deed. Joe’s own family displayed attitudes suggesting that they considered sex a matter largely peripheral to the serious business of life. As a young man, his father was too busy succeeding to squander his time in momentary flirtations. He had not married until he was nearly thirty, only then starting his family of four children. Joe’s own uncle, John Hickey, a doctor, and his aunt Catherine had never married, and indeed, they lived together—another fine example of how the bothersome business of sex could be exorcised.

Joe was six feet tall, far above the average height for his generation, and his height advertised his virtue and manhood. He was a hardy, athletic, outgoing youth. He had an interest in the opposite sex, but it appeared to be confined to the narrow parameters of civilized life. In the summer of 1907, Joe met a petite young woman in Orchard Beach, Maine, where his family spent part of each summer. He had met the vivacious sixteen-year-old a decade before on the same beach, but he did not remember her. Her name was Rose Fitzgerald, and she had all of the virtues that his mother had taught him to hold dear in a woman. She was a deeply religious Catholic. She was a cultivated woman who could play the piano. She was a far better student than Joe. And not least among her merits, she was the beloved favorite daughter of the mayor of Boston, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald.

Honey Fitz was everything Joe’s mother had taught her son to deplore: a professional Irish-American full of self-conscious blarney. This man sang “Sweet Adeline” at the hint of an invitation and cried Irish green tears on cue. He was the kind of Irish-American politician the Brahmins hated, a mountebank who, on a congressman’s salary, had built a mansion in Dorchester and jig-danced away from anyone who tried to investigate him. He was an embarrassment to those Irish-Americans who were attempting to brush the straw of Ireland off their clothes. He was nonetheless a man of such immense native sagacity that he had served three terms in Congress from Boston’s North End while living in Concord, a full sixteen miles from his district and the constituents whom he vowed he loved so much. Honey Fitz was deeply possessive about power, publicity, and his beloved daughter Rose. He would choose her suitors, and he was not about to see her wooed by Joseph P. Kennedy.

Joe began a romance with Rose that was both innocent and clandestine. The couple met in the Boston Public Library after Joe’s baseball games and wherever they could manage a few delicious moments together. For Joe, the risks were penny-ante, a momentary embarrassment. For Rose, however, this
mild dalliance was an adventure of high order. The religious guides were full of terrifying warnings of the fate in store for the young woman who did not protect her virginity as life itself (“He is shut out from the Kingdom of God. His portion will be the worm that never dieth, the fire that is never quenched. O Christian maiden, tremble before this awful sin!”).

Rose had wanted to attend secular Wellesley College. Instead, at the insistence of Bishop William O’Connell, Rose’s father enrolled his daughter at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Boston. Then a year later, in the spring of 1908, when his almost eighteen-year-old daughter expressed her intention of marrying Joe, he sent Rose and her younger sister, Agnes, off to Europe to the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Blumenthal, Holland. There she would be cloistered away from Joe and his pernicious influence.

The Joe from whom Rose was sailing away had become an ideal specimen of young manhood. At nineteen, he was half a foot taller than most of the men of his father’s generation, and his striking face was perfectly groomed, his reddish hair impeccably brushed, his eyes a brilliant blue. He had a proud military bearing. His manners were military too, given more to abruptness than graciousness, but among his peers at Boston Latin he was a popular student.

The fact that Joe had taken an extra year to graduate from Boston Latin hardly diminished his popularity. He was colonel of the Cadet Corps, president of his class, and a baseball player of legendary repute, just having won the city trophy for the best batter with the awesome average of .667. If there was one disconcerting note, it was the prediction in the 1908 Boston Latin School yearbook that Joe would earn his fortune “in a very roundabout way.”

2
Gentlemen and Cads

I
t would have taken a keen observer to realize that the arresting young man striding along with such confidence through Harvard Yard in September 1908 had no business being there. Joe’s academic record at Boston Latin School was so abysmal that he had repeated his last year and was a year older than most of the other freshman. On his first day at Harvard, twenty-year-old Joe was as much a child of special privilege as some of the denizens of the Boston elite who had little to recommend them to the Ivy League school but old money and old names.

Even if Joe had had a good academic record, the son of a leading Boston Catholic politician belonged at Boston College, the proud new Jesuit institution that sat on Chestnut Hill, where Bishop O’Connell intended that it would look down upon Harvard and its secular world. But for a young man who aspired to the pinnacle of American life, the most prestigious university in America beckoned irresistibly. No university has ever dominated the intellectual, social, and athletic life of an American city the way Harvard dominated Boston in the early years of the twentieth century. Joe was not walking this day along mere bricks and stone but on a noble path toward everything that he aspired to be: a civilized gentleman fulfilling his mother’s dreams, a celebrated athlete, a brave true man of Harvard.

On the same day that Joe matriculated alongside other public school graduates, the prep school youths arrived from their ghettos of privilege. Most of them set up housekeeping on the celebrated Gold Coast, the row of private dormitories on or near Mount Auburn Street. They brought their carriages, cars, and servants, and they greeted each other with casual familiarity. They fit into their college life as comfortably as they would have checked
into a first-class stateroom on a transatlantic crossing. They were now “Gold Coast men,” and so they would be known during their years at Harvard.

As these young men settled in, reminiscing about summers full of European travel, sailing, tennis, or western sojourns, Joe found more meager accommodations on campus. In doing so, he defined himself as a “Yard man.” Yard men were in steerage on a ship they did not know, among passengers they had never met, on a journey they had never taken. The dorms were frequently foul places, with underground toilets and so few showers that many men went unwashed. The filthy windows let in little light, and at night the students studied by flickering gas jets. “Compared to any respectable house or hotel they are all vile,” wrote one undergraduate critic in the
Harvard Advocate.

Joe did not want to be relegated to a tedious life among his dormmates but sought to stand among the privileged men of the Gold Coast. He imitated their dress, manners, and social attitudes. He had a rare gift of social mimicry and a constant wariness among his social betters never to betray his past.

Imitation is not always the sincerest form of flattery; sometimes it disguises its opposite. Joe was no unctuous wanna-be, but a young man whose pride matched that of the most arrogant of the Brahmins, a pride that he hid at times under a cloak of deference. Joe had a profound desire to be accepted in their world, but he could not openly admit to such a goal. Social ambition is the one human aspiration that dares not speak its name; to be caught at it is to fail.

Joe perfectly mimicked the attitude of the Gold Coast men toward their academic work. To many of them, it was little more than a tedious aside to the real business of college life—election to their private club. A club was the only proper place for a gentleman to eat and socialize. The winnowing process began in the sophomore year when upperclassmen chose members for the Institute of 1770.

“A hundred or so of the class are devoured by the Institute and carefully told that there are two kinds of men at Harvard—‘gentlemen’ and ‘cads,’ “wrote Paul Mariett in the
Harvard Illustrated
in May 1911. “The Institute contains the gentlemen.” The first seventy or so chosen became members of DKE, or the Dickey. They in turn joined “waiting clubs” out of which the new members of the final ten clubs would be chosen, the most prestigious being Porcellian, followed by AD and Fly.

Joe found it impossible to get to know many of the Gold Coast men. They kept to themselves and their clubs. Their motto was “Three Cs and a D, and keep out of the newspapers.” “Our friendships are made in our rooms, with men who appreciate a good cigar much more than a Greek
pun,” one of them wrote, dismissing the tedious world beyond Mount Auburn Street.

For a young man who aspired to great wealth, it was natural that Joe gravitated toward the Harvard upper crust. Everywhere Joe looked, he saw irrefutable evidence that money and class were the same. The names of over half the millionaires in Boston were listed in the Social Register. About two-thirds of the Bostonians who were officers and trustees of major American businesses came from the upper class. They sent their sons to a Harvard that those young men largely dominated.

By the time Joe entered Harvard, he was disgorging anything that might mark his Irish immigrant heritage. He did not drink, sidestepping one stereotype: the bulbous, blustering, belligerent Irish drunk. He had been born and brought up in an East Boston known as an immigrant enclave. During his Harvard years, the family moved to the prestigious seaside suburb of Winthrop.

Joe could change his accent, dress, and home address. He could not change the fact that his grandmother had been a servant, as had most of the Irish immigrant women of the famine generation, and that his ancestors had been peasants. His grandmother’s name, Bridget, had been so ubiquitous that the Brahmin ladies referred to female servants as “their Bridgets,” and the now-debased name had largely disappeared with the next generation.

For the most part Joe’s professors felt nothing but contempt for the immigrant onslaught that they believed had so besmirched the pristine reaches of their Boston. One of them, Barrett Wendell, reflected that almost everyone of his class had contemplated suicide because of the immigrants.

Joe was not one to query his teachers and challenge their ideas or expose his background by rubbing against the wrong kind of ideas or people. As at Boston Latin School, he was no student. Joe took no pleasure in the bounty of courses set before him. In his freshman year he barely managed a “gentleman’s C.” That was prime evidence that he had not been infected by the contagion of academe, losing his manhood by sitting too long in class and library. The very mediocrity of his grades suggested that the professors and their arid pedantries had not produced what Teddy Roosevelt called another “over-civilized man, who has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues.”

The Brahmin world that Joe wanted so desperately to enter was more than a charade of social rituals and endless disdain for the vulgar masses. Harvard gentlemen bravely shed their blood in their country’s wars. For Joe and the other students, the martyred dead were not simply names on monuments that they breezed by on their way to class. There were Harvard men still living who had fought in the Civil War and were the living testament to noble
acts. When the students entered Memorial Hall, dedicated to the memory of the Civil War dead, they doffed their hats; those who neglected this modest gesture of respect were greeted by the sound of hundreds of students drumming silverware on their water tumblers.

Harvard took itself seriously as an incubator of courage, considering its classrooms and playing fields as the highest training grounds for a true manhood that would have its final test on the fields of battle. Even William James, the celebrated Harvard psychology and philosophy professor, thought that war was the natural arena for young men to prove themselves. “Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us,” he wrote in a famous essay attempting to create some “moral equivalent to war.” “So far as the central essence of this feeling goes, no healthy minded person, it seems to me, can help to some degree partaking of it. Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals and of hardiness, and human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible.”