The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (6 page)

In partial repayment for Joe’s acuteness, the twenty-five-year-old was named president of Columbia Trust, supposedly becoming the youngest bank president in America. He was now a man of such position and promise that he could rightfully claim Rose Fitzgerald’s hand. For Rose, it was an exquisite dream finally realized. “I had read all these books about [how] your heart should rule your head,” she remembered decades later. “I was very romantic and there were no two ways about it.”

As the newlyweds walked out of the chapel into the bountiful sun of an Indian summer day, they waited on the steps while photographers took pictures. The reporters and photographers were not there for Joe. They would feature the couple on the front page of the next day’s Boston newspapers only because Joe Kennedy was marrying the former mayor’s daughter, the most eligible Catholic woman in Boston. Even in this moment Honey Fitz took his own pound of publicity, standing there with Rose while Joe huddled in the background.

The wedding party drove over to the Fitzgerald mansion in Dorchester for a wedding breakfast for seventy-five guests. When Rose had made her debut, her father postponed the city council meeting so that his colleagues might attend, and he also invited the governor-elect and other high officials, as well as hundreds of celebrants young and old. For his daughter’s wedding to Joe, he was putting on only the minimally acceptable celebration, a reception at his home primarily for family members.

It was just as well that so few outsiders were present, for in the midst of the party Joe and Honey Fitz began yelling at one another. Rose was so distraught that she took off her wedding ring and put it on the mantel. By the time the couple left for their honeymoon at the Greenbriar Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, however, her ring was back on her hand, and her smile was back on her face, and they departed as if it had been a perfect day.

When the newlyweds returned from their two-week-long honeymoon, Rose was probably pregnant. As flattering as that was to Joe’s sense of manhood, it also meant that if he followed accepted practice he could have no further sexual relationships with his bride until after the birth of their child. If sex outside of marriage was unthinkable and unspeakable, sex inside of marriage had to be carefully rationed. Some experts believed that there was an unfortunate tendency among frisky young married couples to indulge in sex gluttonously every night. Before long, warned Winfield Scott Hall, the leading sexual hygienist, the poor wife “is in a condition of neurasthenia, or nervous prostration, and the husband is consciously depleted in his powers,
and his business efficiency noticeably decreased.” Those who indulged too frequently, or in what was considered an unnatural manner, suffered, as Dr. A. T. Reinhold warned, “the most desperate cases of paralysis and epilepsy.”

Some experts believed that ideally sex should take place once a month, or among the passionate few, even twice a month. The reason for having sex only once a month had nothing to do with religious mandates that sex was for procreation, not pleasure, but with medical and psychological factors. Although the wife’s condition was duly and necessarily noted, the primary concern was the man. In this mechanistic concept of manhood, sperm was the precious elixir of life that, when unnecessarily spilled, dissipated the man, who thus abused himself and the future of his race.

Joe was a man of immense vitality who sought in his marriage to have an active sex life. Instead, almost from their wedding day, sex was a matter of tension between the couple. Rose was pregnant so often during the first decade of their marriage that if the couple followed the conservative regimen, he would have had sex with her hardly more than half a dozen times a year.

Joe, like his wife, was a man of profound discretion when discussing personal family matters, but Rose’s sexual reticence was so upsetting to him that he talked about it among friends. “Now listen, Rosie, this idea of yours that there is no romance outside of procreation is simply wrong,” he lectured Rose in front of their neighbors, the Greenes. “It was not part of our contract at the altar, the priest never said that, and the books don’t argue that. And if you don’t open your mind in this, I’m going to tell the priest on you.”

J
oe moved his bride to a new house in the suburb of Brookline. The town, one of the wealthiest communities in America, was home to many of the most affluent members of the Protestant elite, their mansions set in cul-de-sacs or shrouded in trees, far back from the vulgar streets. Joe had come out to Brookline in search not so much of fresh suburban air but of a good address signaling that he was an American success pure and simple, no rude immigrant, no hyphenated Irish-American. His neighbors on Beals Street were not old Yankees but for the most part people like himself whose forebears had arrived more recently in steerage.

Joe and Rose were at the beginning of a migration of middle-class Irish-Americans and largely German Jews to Brookline. He had headed out to the western suburb to get away from the taint of his immigrant past, but Brookline was a veritable colony of the Irish: at 11 percent, they made up the largest foreign-born element by far. For the most part these were not bankers and businessmen, though, but cooks, maids, firemen, cops, plumbers, and sanitation workers, a caste of workers and servants.

Joe’s new home, not far from the trolley into Boston, was a small three-story structure that the newlyweds filled with what they considered all the accoutrements of civility. Part of that was the maid and later the nurse who lived in tiny rooms on the third floor, where they shared the same bathroom and were so close to Joe and Rose that the couple always had an audience. Rose had the maid/cook wear a black uniform at dinner and serve her banker husband on fine china.

Each evening Joe returned home to what was in many respects a miniaturized upper-crust world, or more accurately, Joe and Rose’s imitation of what they thought that world was. There was the same self-conscious civility between the two of them as between their parents, no vulgar Irish excess, no loud arguments within hearing of the maid. They practiced the decorum that never faltered and wore the masks that never fell.

When Rose was about to give birth, Joe took his wife to a rented summerhouse on the ocean at Hull. To minister to her, he brought a special nurse, a maid, and two doctors, notably Dr. Frederick Good, who became the family’s pediatrician. There, on July 25, 1915, Rose gave birth to their first child, Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr., a squalling healthy son who weighed in at a formidable ten pounds.

Joe was proud of this son who bore his name, but he kept a distance from the tedious business of raising the baby, handing him off to nurses or his mother. Joe was acting no differently than most men of his generation, rendering unto women what was theirs. He went out into the world, leaving the home early each morning in his Model-T Ford, arriving home at night when the baby was asleep or resting and Rose was tired from her motherly exertions.

Joe kept that same distance on May 29, 1917, when Rose gave birth to John Fitzgerald Kennedy upstairs in the bedroom of the Brookline home. Dr. Good arrived to deliver the Kennedys’ second son as he had the first, but this was not quite the event that Joe Jr.’s birth had been. Grandfather Fitzgerald did not stand below on Beals Street trumpeting to all who would hear that this son would one day become president of the United States, as he had done two years before on the beach at Hull when Joe Jr. was born.

As Joe saw it, there had never quite been a son like his firstborn, a rousing, exuberant child who charged on into life. He loved his second son too, but little Jack seemed a lesser sort in almost everything—smaller, slower, weaker, and greater only in his susceptibility to disease.

F
or most of the men of Joe’s generation, World War I was the defining event of their young lives. In the summer of 1915, after the German sinking of the
passenger liner
Lusitania,
1,200 American men, one-third of them Harvard graduates, had descended upon Plattsburg, New York, at their own expense for four weeks of military training under General Leonard Wood, a Harvard man. The following summer, with government money, about 16,000 men attended twelve camps similar to Plattsburg across America.

While these men prepared for war, Joe and three of his Harvard friends, Tom Campbell, Bob Fisher, and Bob Potter, gathered together on the Friday evening before the long pre—Fourth of July weekend at Joe’s parents’ waterfront home in Winthrop. As they reminisced, across the Atlantic the Battle of the Somme had begun. Of the 110,000 British troops who moved out of their trenches toward the German lines on an exquisite spring morning, 60,000 would fall, either killed or wounded.

On Saturday morning the Boston papers were full of details of the immense human slaughter juxtaposed against idealistic paeans to their sacrifices. Joe’s three Harvard friends read the accounts as true men, seeing the bloody field as the plain of honor where a man belonged and celebrating the nobility of these Englishmen and their selfless sacrifice. Joe sat silent.

Fisher and Potter were the models of the Harvard gentlemen in whose company Joe had sought to be included. The two men had been his mentors in learning the nuances of the Brahmin world, and they were mouthing the rhetoric of the true man’s credo that was so much a part of Harvard life. It was unthinkable for Joe to stand up to his friends. To do so was to stand up to the very world to which he had so long aspired. Joe nonetheless spoke out, deriding what he considered his friends’ mindless idealism. He told them, as Rose remembered, that their “whole attitude was strange and incomprehensible to him.” His friends, as Joe saw it, were not innocent in their mindless jingoism. He told them that “by accepting the idea of the grandeur of the struggle, they themselves were contributing to the momentum of a senseless war, certain to ruin the victors as well as the vanquished.”

Joe had monumental insight into the dark and senseless part of human nature. He had his father’s cunning sense of the political world and looked directly at all the twisted aspirations, avarice, and endless folly of humankind. He had his mother’s profound sense of social aspiration and her haughtiness toward most of humankind. He was a shrewd and subtle judge of humanity, knowing just who might be useful to him and how and why, and whom he could use before they used him.

Joe was a man of what he later called “natural cynicism,” which to him was a dysphemism for the highest realism. His natural cynicism was a philosophical stance that he believed he shared with a tiny elite of men who looked down on humankind with bemusement and disdain. As he saw it, most human beings could never reach for long beyond their basest instincts.

Joe’s fellow Harvard men contributed as much as any group in America to what he considered “the momentum of a senseless war.” By the time war was declared the following April, America had the nucleus of a college-educated officer corps, in which Harvard men were disproportionately represented. If Joe’s friends were naive, they shared their naivete with millions of their compatriots. Joe’s three close friends all honored their ideals by serving in the war.

In all, 11,319 Harvard men served in World War I, and 371 died in the service of their country. Of Joe’s class alone, the majority of graduates either enlisted or were drafted, and 7 did not return. Some marched off to war because they were patriots; some marched off seeking fame in the cannon’s roar, and some marched off hardly knowing why. Those, like Joe’s three close friends, who set off as idealists returned as men to whom irony was often the highest political emotion. There had been several Harvards when Joe was there, but for many of the men of his generation there were now only two: those who served and those who did not.

Joe was not one of those who publicly opposed America’s entry into the war, a cause that might have subjected him to public rebuke and hurt his bank’s business. He was a man of natural cynicism after all, and it would have been futile to stand up to the folly of his fellowman. While some of Joe’s classmates had connived to get into battle, joining the French Foreign Legion or the Canadian forces, Joe connived to get out.

As soon as war was declared and his friends had donned their khakis, twenty-eight-year-old Joe wangled a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year position as the assistant manager of the Bethlehem Steel Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. In peacetime Joe would never have been considered for such a seat, but all across America executives and managers were exchanging their suits for officers’ uniforms. Joe was willing to help build warships to be used by men who might die in a war in which he did not believe.

When Joe arrived at his new office in October 1917, he knew nothing about administering a shipyard. One of the first things he learned was that the craft union had negotiated a new wage scale with his predecessor to go into effect with the next pay cycle. Instead of honoring the agreement or alerting the union that he wanted to renegotiate, he simply kept the old pay rate.

The workers, many of them immigrants, including a large number of English and Scottish skilled workers, were not that different from the kind of men who had nightly sat in his father’s home seeking advice and aid. If Joe had observed that scene with any acumen, he would have realized that you could push men like this, and you could push them some more, but if you broke their trust in you, dishonored your word, then they had a boundless fury.

When the workers got their pay envelopes and saw that they had been deceived, about five thousand of them went on strike. That was no trivial action on their part, for the District Exemption Board of Quincy immediately took away their draft exemptions. “The strikers, in refusing to work in the shipyard … become automatically eligible for the trenches,” one district board member said, the intimidation hardly veiled.

Within days of his arrival Joe had managed to create a crisis of potentially immense magnitude. The ships in the dry docks were crucial to the war effort, and if the strike spread, its costs would soon become incalculable. No one knew this as intimately as did Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. The aristocratic Roosevelt, a Harvard graduate, class of 1903, had never had workingmen sitting around in the evenings in the living room of his family estate in Hyde Park, New York. Yet Roosevelt had an instinctive awareness of how to deal with these workers. He sent a telegram in which he flattered the men by telling them that there was “probably no one plant in the country whose continuous operation is more important to the success of this country in the war, than that at Fore River.” He spoke to their devotion to country by appealing to their “patriotic duty.” Most important, Roosevelt agreed to honor the new pay scale.