An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (2 page)

Nevertheless, he offended almost no one. Although he conveyed a certain coolness or self-control, his radiant smile and genuine openness made him immediately likable. “The effect he has on women voters was almost naughty,”
New York Times
columnist James Reston later wrote. “Every woman either wants to mother him or marry him.” Another columnist saw something in his appearance that suggested “to the suggestible that he is lost, stolen or strayed—a prince in exile, perhaps, or a very wealthy orphan.”

A visit to New Ross, a market town on the banks of the Barrow River fifty miles east of Lismore, filled some of Jack’s time in Ireland. Kathleen, who spent the day playing golf with her guests, did not join him. Instead, Pamela Churchill, whom Jack asked “rather quietly, rather apologetically,” went along. They drove for five hours in Kathleen’s huge American station wagon over rutted roads along Ireland’s scenic southeastern coast before reaching the outskirts of the town.

New Ross was not casually chosen. As they approached, with only a letter from his aunt Loretta, his father’s sister, to guide him, Jack stopped to ask directions to the Kennedy house. (“Which Kennedys will it be that you’ll be wanting?” the man replied.) Jack tried a little white farmhouse on the edge of the village with a front yard full of chickens and geese. A lady surrounded by six kids, “looking just like all the Kennedys,” greeted him with suspicion. After sending for her husband, who was in the fields, the family invited Jack and Pamela for tea in their thatched-roof cottage with a dirt floor. Though Pamela was impressed with the family’s simple dignity, she compared the visit to a scene from Erskine Caldwell’s
Tobacco Road
.

Jack believed that he had discovered his third cousins and seemed to enjoy himself thoroughly. Asking if he could do anything for them, the cousins proposed that he “drive the children around the village in the station wagon,” which he did to their pleasure and his. For her part, Pamela clearly did not understand “the magic of the afternoon.” Neither did Kathleen, who was angry when Jack returned late for dinner. “Did they have a bathroom?” she asked snidely.

The successful striving of her great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents—the unceasing ambition of the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys—had catapulted the family into another realm, an ocean and a century apart from the relatives left behind in Ireland. In America anything was possible—the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys were living proof. For most of the family, these Kennedys of New Ross were something foreign, something best ignored or forgotten. But not for Jack.

JACK HAD ONLY RUDIMENTARY KNOWLEDGE
about his distant ancestors. He knew that his great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy had come to East Boston during the great potato famines of the late 1840s, worked as a cooper making wagon staves and whiskey barrels, married Bridget Murphy, and fathered three daughters and a son before he died of cholera in 1858 when only thirty-five.

Jack also knew that his great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Thomas Fitzgerald, had clung to his farm in Ireland until 1854, when the famine drove him to America as well. Initially settling in Acton, twenty-five miles west of Boston, his impoverishment as a farmer forced him to take up life in Boston’s North End Irish ghetto, a crowded slum of wooden tenements. One contemporary described it as a “dreary, dismal” desolate world in which all was “mean, nasty, inefficient [and] forbidding,” except for the Catholic Church, which provided spiritual comfort and physical beauty.

In 1857 Thomas married Rosanna Cox, with whom he had twelve children—nine of whom reached maturity, an amazing survival rate in a time when infant mortality was a common event. Thomas, who lived until 1885, surviving Rosanna by six years, prospered first as a street peddler of household wares and then in a grocery business, which doubled as a North End tavern in the evenings. Income from tenements he bought and rented to Irish laborers made his family comfortable and opened the way to greater success for his offspring.

The limits of Jack’s knowledge about his Irish relatives was partly the result of his parents’ upward mobility and their eagerness to replace their “Irishness” with an American identity. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jack’s mother, took pains to instill American values in the children, ignoring their Irish roots and taking them to the storied landmarks of the country’s Revolutionary past around Boston. This attitude differed little from that of other ethnic groups, who tried to meet the demands of being an American by forgetting about their Old World past, but in stratified Boston it took on special meaning. Rose and Joe were understandably eager to insulate the family from the continual snubs that Irish Americans suffered at the hands of local Brahmins, well-off Protestant Americans whose roots went back to the earliest years of the Republic. Although Rose and Joe enjoyed privileged lives, their tangible sense of being outsiders in their native land remained a social reality they struggled to overcome.

The Boston in which Joe and Rose grew up was self-consciously “American.” It was the breeding ground for the values and spirit that had given birth to the nation and the center of America’s most famous university where so many of the country’s most influential leaders had been educated. Snobbery or class consciousness was as much a part of the city’s landscape as Boston Common. Coming from the wrong side of the tracks in most American cities was no fixed impediment to individual success. But in Boston, where “the Lowells speak only to the Cabots and the Cabots speak only to God,” rising above one’s station was an enterprise for only the most ambitious.

What vivid sense of family history there was began with Jack’s two grandfathers—Patrick Joseph Kennedy and John F. Fitzgerald, both impressively successful men who achieved local fame and gave their children the wherewithal to enjoy comfortable lives. Patrick Joseph Kennedy was born in 1858, the year his father died. In an era when no public support program came to the aid of a widow with four children, Bridget Murphy Kennedy, Patrick’s mother, supported the family as a saleswoman and shopkeeper. At age fourteen, P.J., as he was called, left school to work on the Boston docks as a stevedore to help support his mother and three older sisters. In the 1880s, with money he had saved from his modest earnings, he launched a business career by buying a saloon in Haymarket Square. In time, he bought a second establishment by the docks. To capitalize on the social drinking of upper-class Boston, P.J. purchased a third bar in an upscale hotel, the Maverick House.

With his handlebar mustache, white apron, and red sleeve garters, the stocky, blue-eyed, red-haired P.J. cut a handsome figure behind the bar of his taverns. By all accounts, he was a good listener who gained the regard and even affection of his patrons. Before he was thirty, his growing prosperity allowed him to buy a whiskey-importing business, P. J. Kennedy and Company, that made him a leading figure in Boston’s liquor trade.

Likable, always ready to help less fortunate fellow Irishmen with a little cash and some sensible advice, P.J. enjoyed the approval and respect of most folks in East Boston, a mixed Boston neighborhood of upscale Irish and Protestant elite. Beginning in 1884, he converted his popularity into five consecutive one-year terms in the Massachusetts Lower House, followed by three two-year terms in the state senate. Establishing himself as one of Boston’s principal Democratic leaders, he was invited to give one of the seconding speeches for Grover Cleveland at the party’s 1888 national convention in St. Louis.

But campaigning, speech making, and legislative maneuvering were less appealing to him than the behind-the-scenes machinations that characterized so much of Boston politics in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. After leaving the senate in 1895, P.J. spent his political career in various appointive offices—elections commissioner and fire commissioner—as the backroom boss of Boston’s Ward Two, and as a member of his party’s unofficial Board of Strategy. At board meetings over sumptuous lunches in room eight of the Quincy House hotel near Scollay Square, P.J. and three other power brokers from Charlestown and the South and North Ends chose candidates for local and statewide offices and distributed patronage.

There was time for family, too. In 1887 P.J. married Mary Augusta Hickey, a member of an affluent “lace curtain” Irish family from the upscale suburb of Brockton. The daughter of a successful businessman and the sister of a police lieutenant, a physician with a Harvard medical degree, and a funeral home director, Hickey had solidified Kennedy’s move into the newly emerging Irish middle class, or as legendary Boston mayor James Michael Curley mockingly called them, “cut glass” Irish or FIFs (“First Irish Families”). By the time he died in 1929, P.J. had indeed joined the ranks of the cut-glass set, holding an interest in a coal company and a substantial amount of stock in a bank, the Columbia Trust Company. His wealth afforded his family of one son, Joseph Patrick, and two daughters an attractive home on Jeffries Point in East Boston.

John F. Fitzgerald was better known in Boston than P.J. and had a greater influence on Jack’s life. Born in 1863, John F. was the fourth of twelve children. As a boy and a young man, his father’s standing as a successful businessman and his innate talents gained him admission to Boston’s storied Latin School (training ground for the offspring of the city’s most important families, including the Adamses, John, John Quincy, and Henry), where he excelled at athletics and compiled a distinguished academic record, graduating with honors. Earning a degree at Boston College, the city’s Jesuit university, John F.—or Johnnie Fitz or Fitzie, as friends called him—entered Harvard Medical School in 1884. When his father died in the spring of 1885, he abandoned his medical education, which had been more his father’s idea than his own, to care for his six younger brothers. Taking a job in the city’s Customs House as a clerk, he simultaneously converted an affinity for people and politics into a job as a secretary to Matthew Keany, one of the Democratic party’s North End ward bosses.

In 1891 Fitzie won election to a seat on Boston’s Common Council, where he overcame resistance from representatives of more affluent districts to spend $350,000 on a public park for his poor North End constituents. The following year, when Keany died, Fitzgerald’s seven-year apprenticeship in providing behind-the-scenes services to constituents and manipulating local power made him Keany’s logical successor.

He was a natural politician—a charming, impish, affable lover of people who perfected the “Irish switch”: chatting amiably with one person while pumping another’s hand and gazing fondly at a third. His warmth of character earned him yet another nickname, “Honey Fitz,” and he gained a reputation as the only politician who could sing “Sweet Adeline” sober and get away with it. A pixielike character with florid face, bright eyes, and sandy hair, he was a showman who could have had a career in vaudeville.

But politics, with all the brokering that went into arranging alliances and the hoopla that went into campaigning, was his calling. A verse of the day ran: “Honey Fitz can talk you blind / on any subject you can find / Fish and fishing, motor boats / Railroads, streetcars, getting votes.” His gift of gab became known as Fitzblarney, and his followers as “dearos,” a shortened version of his description of his district as “the dear old North End.”

Fitzgerald’s amiability translated into electoral successes. In 1892 he overcame internal bickering among the ward bosses to win election to the state senate. Compiling a progressive voting record and a reputation as an astute legislator eager to meet the needs of every constituent, Fitzgerald put himself forward in 1894 for the only sure Democratic congressional seat in Massachusetts, Boston’s Ninth District. His candidacy pitted him against his fellow bosses on the Strategy Board, who backed incumbent congressman Joseph O’Neil. Running a brilliant campaign that effectively played on suffering caused by the panic of 1893 and the subsequent depression, Fitzgerald’s torchlight parades and promises of public programs produced an unprecedented turnout. Also helped by a division among the bosses, who responded to his candidacy by failing to unite against him, the thirty-one-year-old Fitzgerald won a decisive primary victory.

During three terms in Congress, Fitzgerald voted consistently for measures serving local and statewide needs, for laws favoring progressive income taxes over higher protective tariffs, and for a continuation of unrestricted immigration. Massachusetts’ senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a tall slender Brahmin who, with his Vandyke beard and courtly manner, could not have been more of a contrast to Fitzgerald, once lectured the Irishman on the virtues of barring inferior peoples—indigestible aliens—from corrupting the United States. “You are an impudent young man,” Lodge began. “Do you think the Jews or the Italians have any right in this country?” Fitzgerald replied: “As much right as your father or mine. It was only a difference of a few ships.”

At the end of three terms as one of only three Catholics in the House, Fitzgerald announced his decision not to run again. It was a prelude to gaining the post he wished above all, mayor of Boston. During the next five years, while he waited for a favorable moment to run, he prospered as the publisher of a local newspaper,
The Republic
. Demonstrating a keen business sense, Fitzgerald substantially increased department-store advertising in his pages by running stories of special interest to women.

One of the city’s leading political power brokers as the boss of the North End’s Ward Six, despite having moved to Concord and then Dorchester, Fitzgerald was in a strong position to become mayor when the incumbent died in 1905. But another round of opposition from his fellow bosses, including P.J., put his election in doubt. In response, he devised a shrewd anti-boss campaign that appealed to current progressive antagonism to undemocratic machine politics. Despite a bruising primary fight and another closely contested race against a formidable Republican, Fitzgerald gained the prize, chanting, “The people not the bosses must rule! Bigger, better, busier Boston.” Within hours of winning the election, he showed up at P. J. Kennedy’s East Boston office to say that there were no hard feelings about P.J.’s opposition to him. It was, two family biographers later said, “a first hurrah for the dynasty to come.”