Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (2 page)

3

Nine Little Helpless Infants

“They did come rather rapidly,” she later said, typically dry.
“And there were a good many of them.”

Her first five children were born within six years. “When I look back now, I wonder at the size of the job,” she’d write much later. “And I think that when we stood as a blushing, radiant, gay young bride and groom, we were not able to look ahead and see nine little helpless infants with our responsibility to turn them into men and women who were mentally, morally and physically perfect.” Perfection is a tall order, but it never would have occurred to Rose to try for anything less.

By the time their first child, Joe Jr., was born, on July 25, 1915, Rose and Joe had settled into their Beals Street house. “It was a nice old wooden-frame house with clapboard siding,” she’d remember. “Seven rooms, plus two small ones in the converted attic . . . only about 25 minutes from the center of the city by trolley, the usual means of transportation in those days. There was a sense of openness in the neighborhood . . . fine big shade trees lining the sidewalks.”

Having grown up with a maid and a cook, it was important to Rose to hire help immediately, and they employed a housekeeper who cooked and cleaned and lived in the attic space. As soon as Joe was born, they hired a nurse to care for him. Rose only occasionally breast-fed; as a society woman out and about, she didn’t want to be home every three hours, and the immunological benefits of breast milk were not yet known.

The second child, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was born on May 29, 1917, and her first girl, Rosemary, on September 13, 1918. Both would challenge Rose’s ideas about the perfectibility of her children and her sense of control. Jack was sickly and underweight nearly from the beginning, and at the age of two and a half he nearly died from scarlet fever. (It would be the first of four times in his life that he would receive last rites.) Rosemary, it would gradually dawn on Rose and Joe, was developmentally disabled, or “retarded,” as it was called then. Efforts to create a normal life for Rosemary, to help her keep pace with her siblings and to make her feel included, would be one of the central focuses—and ultimately, heartbreaks­—of Rose’s motherhood.

As the brood grew, Rose’s motherhood took on a managerial quality. With nurses and nannies, Rose employed a team approach. Decades later, when the Beals Street house was opened as a historic site in 1967, she remembered:

I conceived the idea of having a card catalog which I bought up the street here, and I put their names and the dates of their birth and their weight and the time they had a Schick inoculation for diphtheria or scarlet fever, whatever it was, when their tonsils were taken out . . . whether there were any complications. Anyone could look up and find out that Jack had his tonsils out in New Haven when he was at school there . . .

The data she kept on her notecards was exacting. “I used to weigh them every week,” she later said, “and keep track and then give them more nourishment if they were losing weight, give them an extra glass of milk or cream in their milk.” When Joe became ambassador to the United Kingdom in the 1930s, she took the card catalog along with her. “When I got to England I showed it to some reporters, and they thought it was American efficiency,” she said. “But I just said it was Kennedy desperation because I couldn’t possibly keep track of all of them.”

While Rose toiled as coordinator and troubleshooter at the Kennedy home, Joe’s career and fortune evolved. He left the presidency of Columbia Trust in 1917 to become assistant general manager at the Fore River
Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation’s plant; his position there, overseeing the production of naval vessels, kept him out of uniform in World War I. “Joseph P. Kennedy was not a shipbuilder,” wrote Nasaw. “But he was young, smart, ambitious, disciplined, and well connected; he knew how to negotiate a contract, read a balance sheet, and get things done in Boston.”

It was an enormous project, employing thousands of people and bringing in millions of dollars in government contracts. To cite one example of Kennedy’s get-rich ingenuity: One of his responsibilities as assistant manager was to award the contract for the plant cafeteria, which would serve the tens of thousands of plant employees. Kennedy quietly formed a privately held company, the Fore River Lunch Company, and awarded the lucrative contract to himself.

The sixty-five-hour workweeks that his ambitions required strained the young marriage. It wasn’t so much that Rose needed or expected his help with the children: “I ran the house. I ran the children,” she insisted. It seems that she simply missed her husband, resenting his long hours away, both at work and, she almost certainly knew, unwinding with the attentions of other women. In 1920, while pregnant with her fourth child, Kathleen, she even briefly moved back to her parents’ Dorchester home. The time away lasted only a few weeks. Honey Fitz, though certainly no fan of Joseph P. Kennedy, was a steadfast believer that a woman’s role in marriage was to put up with whatever the husband did; he’d certainly asked his own wife to put up with quite a bit. He convinced Rose to return to Beals Street to resume her responsibilities as wife and mother. She would never acknowledge their break publicly or, for that matter, that there was ever any friction in the marriage at all. Throughout her life, she would show an amazing ability to present her family as she wanted it seen. She did this with great confidence, even when asserting something that would strike the most casual observer as patently suspect. “You never heard a cross word,” she said of her marriage. “We always understood one another and trusted one another and that’s it.”

After the war, Joe went to work as a stockbroker and manager for the Boston office of Hayden, Stone, a Wall Street brokerage firm. It was here that he’d begin playing the stock market in earnest, using his considerable
wits—and a great deal of inside knowledge—to grow his fortune. He also dealt in real estate on the side, buying theaters all across New England, and began his ventures into the film industry, enterprises that would gather force as the 1920s continued. It was around this time that he hired Edward Moore as his assistant. Moore would become his right-hand man, secretary, and confidante; in fact, in 1932, Rose and Joe would name their youngest child after him. His wife, Mary, similarly became Rose’s closest friend, and the childless couple became as familiar to the Kennedy children as their own parents.

After Kathleen was born on February 20, 1920, the Beals Street house became cramped. The Kennedys moved to a larger home, just a few blocks away, in 1921, and Eunice was born there on July 10. Their household also expanded with the addition of more manpower: “In addition to maids, cooks, and nurses for the new babies, Rose hired governesses to assist with the older children.” The Moores were also frequent helpers, allowing Rose to travel. She needed the time away, as Joe was rarely around.

It developed that the two usually vacationed separately. Joe almost always wanted to golf in Palm Beach in the winter, and Rose had other ideas. “I thought that was a terrible waste of money, to be always coming to the same place,” Rose later wrote, “but he used to say that he worked hard during the year and he wanted to come and rest someplace. He didn’t want to be coming to Europe where he’d have to wait around for customs and changing planes . . . ” In 1923, for example, Joe took his two-week Palm Beach vacation in January. In April, Rose and her sister Agnes took a two-month trip to California. When she was on her way out the door for this trip, an almost six-year-old Jack famously cracked, “Gee,
you’re
a great mother to go away and leave your children all alone.” It’s not clear whether young JFK ever castigated his father for his much more frequent absences.

Young Jack was puckish, a lanky instigator. Throughout his youth, he was a source of both frustration and amusement to Rose. “He was a very active, very lively little elf,” she would remember,

full of energy when he wasn’t ill and full of charm and imagination. And surprises—for he thought his own thoughts, did things his own
way, and somehow just didn’t fit any pattern. Now and then, fairly often in fact, that distressed me, since I thought I knew what was best. But at the same time I was taken aback. I was enchanted and amused. He was a funny little boy, and he said things in such an original way.

“In looking over my old diary,” she wrote to Jack in 1962, “I found that you were urged on one occasion, when you were five years old, to wish for a happy death. But you turned down this suggestion and said that you would like to wish for two dogs instead.”

The family continued to grow, but 1923 would also be a year of loss. That summer, Rose became pregnant with her sixth child. The two eldest boys—Joe Jr. and Jack—were now in elementary school at Dexter, a private, nonsectarian school within walking distance of their new house. Rose had originally wanted to send her boys to Catholic schools, but Joe argued that they needed to expand beyond their Irish Catholic social circle if they ever hoped to surpass a certain level of political and financial success in the wider WASP world. In September of that year, Rose’s younger sister Eunice died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-three. Rose would grieve deeply, if very privately, this loss, while Joe’s work kept him in New York more and more of the time. He was trying to break into the film industry, and the wheeling and dealing leading up to his 1926 purchase of the Film Booking Offices of America (a deal six years in the making) meant that he was rarely at home.

That autumn, little Rosemary went to kindergarten with other children her age at the Edward Devotion School, only blocks from the Kennedy house. Though her teacher, Margaret McQuaid, was delighted by the little girl’s grace and manners, Rosemary simply could not keep up with the other children. “As time went on, I realized she was slow at school,” Rose later wrote. Even before that, Rose had noticed that Rosemary lacked the basic physical coordination of her siblings. She could not steer a sled, play tennis, row a boat, or roller skate. “I was puzzled by what this might mean, as I had never heard of a retarded child and I did not know where to send her to school or how to cope with the situation.” Rosemary would repeat kindergarten the next year, after which it would be clear that she would never be going on to the first grade.

While this was no doubt upsetting for a mother who believed her responsibility was to raise perfect children, it also brought out the tender side of the strong team culture she fostered within the family. The other Kennedy children “were told that she was a little slow and that they all should help her, which they did do and tried to encourage her.” The trouble that they often went to is touching. In 1934 Rose would write to the Choate School, where Jack was attending high school. “Would it be possible for Jack to go to a tea-dance in Providence on Friday, January 19th?” she wondered.

The reason I am making this seemingly absurd request is because the young lady who is inviting him is his sister, and she has an inferiority complex. I know it would help if he went with her. She is fifteen years old, and trying to adjust to herself. I am sure you understand my point of view. It is not tremendously important, but we do all we can to help her.

As we regard Rose’s euphemism today—
she has an inferiority complex
—it’s easy to read it as Rose being ashamed of having a child with a developmental disability. But that would be a facile reading, only partly true. Rosemary was born into an era when respected voices in the scientific community were claiming that “morons”—as those with IQs between sixty and seventy were newly designated—were a danger to society. It was expected that many of these “morons” would become thieves, drunkards, and prostitutes. Not only did their existence reflect poorly on the genes of their parents, but the females were being forcibly sterilized in many states. There’s little doubt that Rose and Joe wouldn’t have wanted the stigma that having sired a “moron” would have earned them. But it’s also true that they wanted to protect a vulnerable girl from a world that was openly hostile and bigoted toward her.

Sixth child Patricia was born on May 6, 1924, and Bobby the following year on November 11. By this time, Rose’s household staff could take over most of the basic feeding and care of the children. Underlining her approach to parenting as the management of an enterprise, she would later write of her firm belief that mothers should spend
at least
one day a week with their children,

to see what methods the nurse is using, what her routine is with them, whether the meals are adequate, or is she giving them the same kind of soup each day so she does not have to think of meal planning, is she putting them to bed too early just [to] be rid of them, etc. If a mother never takes care of her children, she really has no first-hand knowledge of what the nurse is doing.

A mother inculcated values, beliefs, and habits in a child, but much of the daily care could be outsourced, as it were, given the proper amount of quality assurance.

4

Leaving Boston

As a parent, Rose had the unenviable job of being the task­master
, the disciplinarian, the one who most often said
no
.

Their mother “was the disciplinarian of all our headstrong impulses, and was sometimes strict,” Teddy would later write. “Spankings and whacks with a coat hanger were in her arsenal, as were banishments to the closet.”

Their father, on the other hand, got to return to a house that was always ecstatic to see him. “He would sweep them into his arms and hug them, and grin at them, and talk to them, and perhaps carry them around,” Rose later wrote. “Also, as each one became old enough to talk . . . he would want that child in bed with him for a little while each morning. And the two of them would be there propped up on pillows, with perhaps the child’s head cuddling on his shoulder, and he would talk or read a story or they would have conversations.” At least at home, Joe had the easier job: He was a cheerleader to the children, a booster, the parent whose job it was to say
yes
.

It was a contrast Rose only sharpened by withholding physical affection. “Rose touched her children when she spanked them,” wrote Laurence Leamer. “She touched them when she adjusted their collars or rubbed a spot of dirt off their cheek before they headed to school. But she did not touch them when she loved them. She did not grasp Joe or Jack, Rosemary or Kathleen or Eunice to her bosom, holding them and telling the child ‘I love you.’ ” In behaving this way toward her children, she was very much in line with Irish American mothers of that time. “These children were Rose’s masterwork, and to her mind it was too serious a
business to indulge in the excesses of affection.” The sole exception was Rosemary, who, because of her disability, got the majority of Rose’s physical affection.

Though not outlandish for its time, Rose’s parenting style did lead to a strangeness and distance in her relationships with most of her children that lasted throughout their lifetimes. Jack’s attitude toward her, generally one of irritation, would never change. Interviewed in 1972, Jack’s lifelong best friend, Lem Billings, said that Joe Kennedy’s “great warmth and outgoing affection” toward his children “led kids naturally to love as well as honor” their father. “They loved their mother too but in a rather detached way, as she did them.” In later life, Jack came to have a “good working relationship” with his mother, characterized by “filial love, but never devotion, and continued feelings of irritation. He really didn’t want her around much.” From an early age, Jack’s personality prickled at formality, reveled in the sloppy
yes-ness
of life, bridled at
no
. Often, his disposition naturally placed him at odds with Rose, who preached the virtue of restraint.

But despite her strictness—or, more accurately,
through
her strictness—she showed the children what they were capable of. “She was a great believer in opening up many opportunities for all of us,” Eunice would write. “And though some of those things were difficult, she would compensate by saying you ought to try them.”

Rose hoped to make Joe more of a constant presence in their lives by agreeing to move the family to New York. They rented a mansion in the neighborhood of Riverdale in the Bronx, where they lived for two years before buying an estate in Bronxville, in Westchester County, fifteen miles north of midtown Manhattan. Leaving Boston couldn’t have been an easy or happy choice for a woman so identified with her hometown, but Rose deemed it worth the trouble to be closer to Joe. Unfortunately, Joe’s escalating involvement in the film industry meant that, almost immediately upon his family’s arrival in Riverdale in 1927, he started spending most of his time in Hollywood, as he would until 1930.

Joe’s business dealings in Hollywood were typically diverse and complicated, but the focus of his work was running FBO, a film studio that he
bought in 1926 on behalf of a consortium of investors that he organized. Moving pictures were still in their youth, and there was money to be made. One of the ways Joe did this was to root out inefficiencies in the filmmaking process on both coasts. He centralized the accounting practices of FBO in New York and fired several overpaid studio execs in New York and Los Angeles.

Joe was not indulging previously latent artistic urges; he was muscling in on a new and rapidly expanding market. “He was interested not in making artful or even good pictures at FBO,” wrote David Nasaw, “but in making a profit by producing cut-rate ‘program pictures,’ low-budget westerns, stunt thrillers, and action melodramas and distributing them to independently owned and operated small-town theaters that could not afford to pay premium prices for expensive pictures.”

In Los Angeles, Joe avidly pursued his business interests and, just as passionately, pursued actress Gloria Swanson, becoming both her manager and lover. A huge star of the silent era, Swanson was struggling to make the transition to the talkies. Kennedy hoped to manage this transition, and he did so with only limited success. Their coproduction of the epic
Queen Kelly
would be a disaster—one of the most famous uncompleted films of all time—and Swanson’s career would subside to regular TV and theater work until 1950, when she would again rocket to fame (and become a camp icon) with her scenery-chewing turn as Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s
Sunset Boulevard
. Swanson became familiar to the entire Kennedy family during the late 1920s, visiting them in Hyannis Port and at their new home in Bronxville. Joe’s ardor for her was ultimately short-lived but flagrant; if Rose knew, her feelings about the affair, like her feelings about so much else, would never be available for public consumption. Rose visited Joe in Hollywood exactly once, in the late spring of 1927. She returned to Riverdale pregnant with Jean.

With Jean’s birth on February 20, 1928, Rose now had eight children, ranging from newborn to twelve years old. She instituted a new dining schedule. “Up to age six, [the children] ate an hour earlier than the rest of the family. Rose sat with them and discussed simple topics of interest to toddlers and preschoolers. Then the older children dined together, and she would chat with them about more complicated subjects.”

Rose and Joe would always see the family dinner table as a prime location for education and intellectual stimulation. They expected the older children to read the newspaper and have not only knowledge of, but opinions about, current events. Rose “posted articles or documents on a bulletin board, expecting older children to read them and discuss the content at dinner. . . . On Sundays and Holy Days she posed questions about the priest’s sermon and Catholic symbolism.” According to Rose, the Sunday dinner interrogations ensured that “if they didn’t pay attention one Sunday they’d pay attention the next.”

When Joe dined with the family, Rose took an auxiliary role. This happened more frequently after 1928, when Joe bought the vacation home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, that would, in later years, become the nucleus of the cluster of homes that came to be known as the Kennedy compound. “It was really quite a lot of fun to be at the dinner table with them,” remembered nurse Luella Hennessey, who would join the family in 1937 and serve the wider family off and on in some capacity for decades.

Mr. Kennedy was the chairman or moderator of the discussions . . .Mrs. Kennedy sort of led the discussion on feminine and cultural things. Both Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy wanted the children to have a well rounded education, and she often discussed fashion and music and literature, and left it to her husband to handle the diplomatic and government discussions.

Eunice, noting Rose’s deference when Joe was at home, put it succinctly: “My mother was more articulate with everything when he wasn’t there.”

Arriving in 1929, the Kennedys found Bronxville hospitable. Their mansion sat on six acres, walking distance from the Bronxville School the daughters attended; Joe Jr., Jack, and eventually Bobby could ride the bus to the Riverdale Country Day school. The nearby golf course was open to Catholics, and Joe and Rose both enjoyed playing. In the summertime, the family would decamp to Hyannis Port, as they would for much of the rest of the decade.

Joe Jr. and Jack both spent much of the 1930s away at school, and Rose did her best to monitor their health and grades from Bronxville. She was not a mother who hesitated to be in touch with principals and teachers. “The fact has come to my attention that some of the boys at Choate do not seem to know how to write a letter correctly or how to address it,” Rose wrote to one of Jack’s teachers in 1932. “It seems to me it would be a very practical idea and a very useful one if a short period could be given to demonstrating the different forms.”

On another occasion, the same teacher heard from Rose
,

I understood from Jack’s letter than he is much better and he also said something about eating in the Tuck Shop in order to get “built up.” I was a lot worried at that suggestion because the Tuck Shop usually means sweets to me, and Jack has no discretion, in fact he has never eaten enough vegetables to satisfy me. I do not want to bother you, but will someone please investigate this matter a little?

At the age of forty-one, Rose had her last child. Edward Moore Kennedy, nicknamed Teddy, was born on February 22, 1932. Of all the Kennedy men, he would come to most openly express his affection for and admiration of his mother. As the youngest child of the family, he would benefit from more one-on-one time with Rose than any of the older children: His returns home from boarding school would be to Rose the empty nester, rather than to a household bustling with children and household staff. He called Rose “our Pied Piper into the world of ideas,” citing her leadership of their dinner conversations: “geography one night, the front-page headlines the next.”

By the end of 1931, Joe Kennedy was out of the movie business and no longer trading stocks. He’d been perspicacious enough to recognize, as early as 1923, that the market was overvalued, and in the wake of the 1929 crash, he actually made money via short sales. As a result, the Great Depression was something the Kennedys read about in the newspapers, rather than experienced as much of a daily reality. In 1933, at the depth of the Depression, Joe even bought a third home, this time in Palm Beach. He bought the mansion, a white Spanish-style villa with red tile roof,
pool, tennis courts, and large stretch of private beach, for $100,000. Even in 1933 dollars, it was a steal.

Joe’s money was safe, but the pessimist in him suspected that the sun might be setting on capitalism. If financial power was about to lose its meaning, he figured, the future lay in political power, and those who wielded it. He became one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s biggest fund-raisers, hoping that by helping Roosevelt gain the presidency, he might secure for himself a post of some power and prestige. Kennedy had his eye on the Secretary of the Treasury, but he was passed over twice for the position. He fumed privately while waiting for Roosevelt’s call.

In 1934, that call finally came when Roosevelt asked Kennedy, despite great public and private opposition, to become the first chairman of the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Politicians and newspaper editors across the country argued that putting one of Wall Street’s most notorious manipulators in charge of reforming Wall Street was tantamount to having the fox guard the henhouse, but Roosevelt argued that it took a thief to catch a thief. It turns out that he was correct. By most estimations, Kennedy did an excellent job as the first head of the SEC. And he did it by systematically criminalizing many of the manipulations he had used to build his own fortune. When he resigned in September of the next year, the agency was up and running, having been called by
Time
magazine “the most ably administered New Deal agency in Washington.”

Even by Kennedy standards, the 1930s were a frenetic decade for the clan. Joe flew between New York, Hyannis, Palm Beach, and Washington, DC. Rose learned to transfer her entire household—nine kids and a large staff—between three houses while also traveling tirelessly herself. At Hyannis, Rose found a balance between packed, kinetic family life and her need for solitude and reflection. She ordered a prefab cottage, complete with front porch and outfitted with a writing table, and stuck it on the beach. In her little shack, she could read, write, and get some peace away from the bustling household. After one cottage was washed away by a storm, a second was ordered. After the second was wrecked, Rose said, “I started going to Europe, and I didn’t need it.”