The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (7 page)

In all of this Roosevelt demonstrated the incipient awareness of a great politician who understood that the essence of democratic politics is empathy. A leader must first understand what the other person wants. Only then can he act. Joe, for his part, saw life as a brutal Darwinian struggle in which men of will and power imposed themselves on the mediocre, the passive, and the slow-witted.

The men went back to work, and Joe left his position after scarcely a month. By any measure but his own, Joe was disgraced, shuttled aside into a lesser post at the new Squantum yard, handling all the company stores. For another man, this defeat would have been a painful moment of self-awareness in which he would have taken stock of his own excesses and mistakes. Joe, however, apparently walked away from this defeat incapable of or unwilling to admit to his culpability, having learned little but that even in the business world he operated in a democracy where the weak majority could gain ascendancy over the strong few.

Joe could not turn to Rose to talk of this failure. Rose was only a woman, and as
The Catholic Encyclopedia
expressed it, “The female sex is in some respects inferior to the male sex, both as regards body and soul.” Women were seen as incapable of a man’s high seriousness, and for Joe to turn to his wife for counsel would have been both unmanly and unseemly.

Rose had no inkling of the emotional price her husband was paying. To her, Joe was a heroic figure who worked terribly long hours for the war effort
and suffered from an ulcer for his relentless endeavors. He was nervous and high-strung, and Rose worried about his health. Rose did not think that the debacle in the shipyards would have been reason enough for a nervous ulcer; to think such thoughts would have broken the covenant between them. Joe, for his part, could not and would not see that Rose was probably often depressed, a word and an emotion that were simply not allowed. She was married to a prominent and honored Catholic gentleman. She was a formidable woman in Catholic society, president of the Ace of Clubs, a leading Catholic women’s club, with her own social life and prestige. Her children were looked after by nurses and maids. She had a life that most women would have thought close to perfection.

Despite his new position, Joe’s draft board had the audacity to try to call him up. He pointed out how indispensable he was to the war effort. When the board thought otherwise, Joe’s boss went all the way to Washington to see that his young associate did not have to serve.

It was a good time to be an ambitious young man in America away from the stench of the trenches. While one million Americans served in the armed forces, the economy was roaring ahead, and a man could make it in a way he never could before. Joe had only a small office, but he was the turnstile through which all the goods had to pass, and he made the most of it. He had a fine salary, bonuses, the right to run the canteen for his own profit, important new contacts, and the knowledge that Bethlehem Steel was a stock that a smart man had better get into.

To Joe, all the prissy rules and moral guidelines of Harvard did not apply to him and his life. In July 1919, he joined Hayden, Stone and Company as a stockbroker. His employer, Galen Stone, made much of his money, not by the tedious route of collecting customer commissions but by employing insider information to drive a stock up or down. The technique, while then technically legal, preyed on the avarice and ignorance of the average stock buyer, an approach that fit perfectly with Joe’s view of human beings. He became as adept at this game as his employer. “Tommy, it’s so easy to make money in the market we’d better get in before they pass a law against it,” he told one friend, Tom Campbell. On one stock alone, Pond Coal Company, in which Stone was chairman of the board, Joe made close to seven hundred thousand dollars on an investment of only twenty-four thousand dollars. It was a high-stakes game in which Joe had thrice lost everything, he told his friend Oscar Haussermann, but he had come back and was again on top of the game.

Joe was a competitor in everything, and to some degree his home life was not measuring up. He could not complain that Rose was anything less than the woman he had married: profoundly religious, Catholic-educated, and
socially conservative. But she was not growing into the new age, a time when women could snap wisecracks as quickly as men, roll their stockings on the dance floor, smoke cigarettes, and vote.

Joe might not have wanted such a woman for his wife, but Rose remained a Catholic provincial. She might talk of culture, but he was the one who truly loved classical music and looked forward to their nights at the symphony.

Joe Jr. was his father’s namesake in every way, a healthy, vibrant four-year-old, but the other children were not quite measuring up. Jack was a scrawny, whining, sickly tyke, and the newest, Rose’s namesake Rose Marie, or Rosemary as she was called, born in September 1918, was painfully slow in every part of her life.

In January 1920, Joe came home from his new office on Milk Street in downtown Boston and found that his pregnant wife had returned to her father’s home in Dorchester. It was unspeakable and unthinkable that Rose should leave him, an insult to his manhood, to his children, to his family, and a full measure of the silent pain his wife was suffering. Joe was a good provider and a good husband by all the measures that mattered in the world in which he lived. He could not fathom the idea of divorce, which would sever him and Rose forever from the sacraments of the Church, making him such an outcast from Catholic society that his economic future would be compromised. He had no choice, however, but to wait his wife out, and wait he did for three full weeks.

In the end it was his father-in-law, a man Joe considered in part a mountebank, who told his daughter to return to her husband. In Honey Fitz’s world, appearances were reality. As mayor, he had orchestrated photos of himself as a devoted family man, the public image so different from the reality, in which Honey Fitz honored his love of home by rarely being there. So there would be, if necessary, a similar portrait of Rose and Joe and their family. Honey Fitz would have no divorces or separations to stain his family name, no disgrace brought on by his favorite daughter.

Rose’s father did not inveigle his son-in-law to share more of his life with his wife, to attempt to understand her despair, or even perhaps not to arrive home with the scent of chorus girls on his lapel. He saw Joe’s role first of all as a provider, and if there was any failure, it was that he had not provided well enough. “If you need more help in the household, then get it,” he told Rose. “If you need a bigger house, ask for it. If you need more private time for yourself, take it. There isn’t anything you can’t do once you set your mind on it. So go now, Rosie, go back where you belong.”

Joe was relieved that Rose was back, but he was as drawn as ever to women whose laughter rang freely in the night. He had a suggestively intimate style in his letters to young women. “I don’t know how close you will
be obliged to stick to your boss tonight,” he wrote Vera Murray, the executive secretary of a theatrical producer in August 1921. “I know how close you would have to be if I were your boss.”

A month later Joe wrote Arthur Houghton, a theatrical manager and friend: “I hope you have all the good-looking girls in your company looking forward, with anticipation, to meeting the high Irish of Boston, because I have a gang around me that must be fed on wild meat lately, as they are so bad. As for me, I have too many troubles around to both[er] with such things at the present time. Everything may be better however, when you arrive.”

R
ose returned to Joe having made a silent compact that she would build her life around her God, her children, and the acquisition of material goods. She was hardly back when little Jack came down with scarlet fever, his body covered with red spots. It was a fierce, highly contagious disease whose very mention made mothers shiver and lock their doors. Rose was of little help, for she had just given birth at Beals Street to their second daughter, Kathleen, in February 1920. Like her sister and brother, the baby risked being infected by the disease. For the first time in their marriage Joe was thrust into the center of his children’s lives.

Joe knew that to save Jack, and perhaps to save all his children, he had to find a hospital bed for his son. The Brookline Hospital had no contagion ward, and his son was not eligible to enter the special children’s ward at Boston Hospital. There were 125 beds in the ward, and more than 600 Boston children sick with scarlet fever. The illness fell equally on the poor and the rich, the children of the North End and the children of Back Bay. There was a terrible triage at work in the choice between those who would enter the hospital, and probably live, and those who would not and might well die or pass on the disease to their siblings.

Power and influence could mean life and death, and Joe saw that he had not enough of either to save his son. His father-in-law, though, still had the power to see to it that little Jack got a bed that should have gone to a child living in Boston.

Joe was a man who thought he could solve any problem, but he felt now a parent’s helplessness in the face of illness. Watching little Jack in his sterile white room at Boston Hospital touched Joe in places in the heart that he had not known he had. Jack was a likable lad, with his good humor and gentle warmth, and a son who did not cry at having been taken out of his home and placed among strangers. Joe went to church and prayed to God promising that if his son lived he would give half his wealth to the church. And when
Jack lived, his father wrote out a check for $3,700 to the Guild of St. Apollonia. It was a noble gesture, but given Joe’s earnings, it would seem that he was a calculating negotiator even when he was dealing with God.

J
oe believed in the saving grace of money, but he now had two more reasons to seek great wealth and power. His wife had returned to him after having been told that her marital salvation lay in more servants and a bigger house. And his son had lived only because of his father-in-law’s power.

Joe was already making hundreds of thousands of dollars, but now, with the enactment of Prohibition in January 1920, he saw an opportunity to make even more. His own father had made his way in life largely through the liquor business—first with his own tavern, later with a wholesale liquor business—and the political clout of the industry. An Irishman’s pub was his Somerset Club, and for every worker who tumbled out drunk, ten others had a drink or two and went home to their families.

When the good ladies of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union campaigned for the Eighteenth Amendment to enact Prohibition, men like Joe’s father saw it as a malicious attack on them and their ways. With Prohibition, it was the Italian winemakers of northern California who saw their vineyards turn to weed, the German beermakers of St. Louis whose breweries were shut down, and the Irish tavern keepers whose doors were shut forever.

An observer might even have viewed the Volstead Act instituting Prohibition as a regressive piece of legislation, targeted at the poor and the foreign. Since the law allowed citizens to stock up beforehand, the forward-looking men of New York’s Yale Club put away enough for nearly a decade and a half of good drinking. For the well-to-do, there was always a supply at their clubs and homes. But the saloons of the poor were shut and dry.

The promise of bootlegging beckoned to the quick and the daring, but not to Harvard men. Crime was often a poor man’s capital, the quickest and surest way out of the ghetto. Joe, however lived far from the cusp of poverty and was within reach of the refined upper-class world where he sought to live. But Joe saw an opportunity. That he saw it and acted upon it is one of the most extraordinary facts of Joe’s entire life. His father had for decades been a major wholesaler and importer of liquor, and it was probably through him that Joe had contacts in Canada and England. Testimony suggests that Joe had the best of it, for the most part delivering the merchandise offshore to bootleggers who brought the liquor into the United States. In 1926 the Canadian Customs Commission looked into liquor export taxes that were not being paid and found the name “Joseph Kennedy” on many documents. Although the commission never definitively linked the name to the young
Boston businessman, there is no other Joseph Kennedy whose name has been prominently linked to bootlegging.

Joe did not enter this illegal business as some desperate expedient. He took no more risks than he did with some of his early gambles on Wall Street. If anything, liquor was another part of his portfolio; he was a businessman spreading his risks. Joe kept such distance from the business that his name was never formally linked to bootlegging. Cartha DeLoach, the former deputy director of the FBI, recalls that “there was a great deal of suspicion concerning his being possibly involved in smuggling in the early days. But as it is in America, you overcome these things.”

Joe chose his partners as cannily as he chose his part of the business, one of them being Thomas McGinty, an Irish-American known as “the King of Ohio Bootleggers.” “Joe brought the liquor to the middle of Lake Erie, and the boys picked it up,” recalled McGinty’s daughter, Patty McGinty Gallagher.

McGinty had been a flyweight boxing champion, and he was a man armed with Irish blarney as well as a steel fist. He went on to become the leading Irish presence in the Jewish-run Cleveland syndicate. He founded the famous Mounds Club outside Cleveland, ran racetracks, managed the casino at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, and became a hidden owner of the mob-controlled Desert Inn in Las Vegas, all the time maintaining a relationship with the Kennedy family. His daughter Patty, in the bar in her home in Palm Beach, Florida, has a picture of her father and a smiling Jack Kennedy taken in Havana in the 1950s.

Another witness is Benedict Fitzgerald, an attorney who not only knew the Kennedys intimately but also represented Owen Madden, a gangster who controlled leading nightclubs in New York City. Fitzgerald says that Joe was involved in bootlegging deals with Madden, a view confirmed by Q. Byrum Hurst, another of Madden’s attorneys.