The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (47 page)

Teddy already had the makings of a politician, with an inordinate interest in getting his smiling picture in the Milton yearbook as many times as possible. Both Jack and Bobby had had a special close friend, but Teddy was like many politicians in that he had many acquaintances and no close friends.

At Milton, Teddy borrowed one of Commissioner Timilty’s cars so that he could drive into Boston for his dental appointment. Teddy was in a hurry. He was always in a hurry. And the confounded car kept stalling on him. “Finally it stalled for the last time at Mattapan,” Teddy wrote his father. “And so I left it there. Commish still thinks it’s my driving most likely, but it really was the car.”

Teddy seemed always to be getting in one sort of minor trouble or another, and it was always someone else’s fault. “This morning I served mass with a boy that said he knew how,” Teddy wrote his parents. “The boy kicked the bell over and stood and knelt at the wrong times. After mass we were practically chased out of the church, but even after I told the priest I didn’t even know the fellow, he mumbled … ‘that he would rather have no one serve than me.’ This was a definite blow to my pride.”

Another quality of Teddy’s was revealed in his letters to his parents. He
didn’t try to impress but laid out his life as it was. Unlike many teenagers, including Jack, he didn’t have a need for a private life apart from his parents. He had been shuttled back and forth between so many schools that he could have been a complete emotional outcast, but that had not happened.

Teddy might not have Jack’s intelligence or Bobby’s intensity. Unlike Joe Jr., he did not boast to his peers of his intention to be president. Ambition was not his secret mistress. He left that to his brothers. But with all the pressures in the Kennedy family, it was no mean accomplishment to have the same dreams as other young men. He found joy in a dance at the celebrated Totem Pole, a large dance hall outside Boston. He took pleasure in buying a boat and paying for it with money he had earned, and delight in sitting around with his friends or family. Of all the siblings, he had the greatest prospect of a life full of what most people call happiness.

W
hile Teddy struggled through Milton with few thoughts of the burden of the name that he bore, his father was attempting in a subtle, even brilliant way to institutionalize the Kennedy place in American life. During the war, Joe had gotten involved in real estate, becoming a major player in New York City and elsewhere. In 1945, he made what was probably the most successful business deal of his life. Without even one visit, he purchased the gigantic Merchandise Mart in Chicago, then second only to the Pentagon as the biggest building in the world, for $13 million. The building had been built in 1930 for $35 million, an indication in itself that he had struck a good deal. Beyond that, he knew that the government tenants of the four-million-square-foot building would be leaving after the war. Then he would be able to lease space at top commercial rates, generating several million dollars of profit a year.

Joe had no intention of having
his
money siphoned off to Washington in the unholy name of taxes. He considered laws, whether they dealt with the stock market, taxes, or political contributions, the instruments on which he played the tune that he wanted to play. And thus in 1946, he turned the Merchandise Mart into a device to help perpetuate his family and their legacy.

Joe gave one-quarter of the Merchandise Mart to a new family foundation named after his fallen son, the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation. This money would grow tax-free, and Joe would be able to spread his bounty around to whatever charity, or semi-charity, he saw fit, stamping every gift with the Kennedy imprimatur. He turned the other 75 percent into a partnership that paid lower taxes than a corporation, keeping one-quarter of the company for himself and Rose and putting the rest in trust for his children. In 1946, Joe divested himself of Somerset Importers, his liquor holding.

Joe set out to follow in the exalted footsteps of the old Boston elite, turning himself into a philanthropist. The original mandate for the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation was full of a nineteenth-century paternalism with its purpose of “relief, shelter, support, education, protection and maintenance of the indigent, sick or infirm; to prevent pauperism and to promote by all lawful means social and sanitary reforms, habits of thrift, as well as savings and self-dependence among the poorer classes.”

Joe did not use the foundation merely as a cynical device to foster goodwill for his family. If he had wanted to do only that, he would surely have begun by handing out grants during Jack’s primary campaign. Instead, he waited to announce the first major grant until two months later, in August 1946. Jack was there to hand out a $600,000 check to the Franciscan Sisters of Mary to construct a convalescent home for children of the poor named after Joe Jr.

Joe heard applause for his largess, but wherever he looked he saw outstretched palms. Some were desperate, heartfelt pleas, others the most cynical of gambits. There was a letter about an impoverished blind and deaf brother and sister. An Alabama woman was desperate for a place to live. A bishop in India wanted money to build a leper asylum. The priest at the Most Holy Redeemer Church in East Boston, the old family parish, asked for an ad in the commemorative program book for the church renovation, no more than forty dollars. Joe was discovering that in his attempt to memorialize his beloved son, he was saying no a dozen times or more for every yes, and to those he turned down, he hardly appeared the great man of endless largess.

Joe used this engine of beneficence to lift the Kennedys high above Catholic society to a place where saints and angels trod. The Kennedys were the most celebrated Catholic family in America, and Joe and his minions made sure that message was shouted to all within hearing. Whenever the Kennedys gave a gift, there was sure to be a picture of Jack, Bobby, or Ted, or perhaps all three, handing a check to a beaming priest. And every time Joe gave a major gift he insisted that the children’s home or the hospital wing be named after his martyred son. Life is made of mixed motives, and although Joe demanded his full quota of publicity, he gave his money with care and precision, attempting to create not only goodwill but also good.

In 1956, when the Kennedys’ gifts to Catholic charities in the archdiocese had reached $2,609,000, Archbishop Richard Cushing devoted an entire section of the weekly
Pilot
to celebrating the family’s exemplary Christian charity in a spread approved by Joe. On one page was a portrait of Joe Jr. in his naval officer’s uniform, with his hands outstretched above a list of all the gifts, the picture similar to one often seen of Christ. “They [the gifts] are made possible by an extraordinary man of God, a great American and his
charming wife and children,” the bishop wrote in an article reprinted in the
Congressional Record.
Cushing did not wish his less generous parishioners to miss the point that Joe was buying his way into God’s good graces. “When each charity, from faithful hearts, carries with it the seal of Christ’s Church, who can begin to estimate its heavenly reward?”

In most aspects of his life Joe was proudly, passionately cynical, yet he understood that his wealth, at least part of it, could be an engine of social goodness. “I have always thought that people who for some reason or another are not willing to risk giving away money while they are alive lose one of the greatest joys of their whole life,” Joe wrote Cushing in February 1956. “If one has been fortunate enough, with God’s help, to amass a fortune, one comes to a sense of realization that God must have meant him to give so that he could make it possible, in a measure, for his noble workers, like yourself, to carry on His charity.”

I
n the spring of 1948, Joe traveled to Europe for only his second trip since leaving the Court of St. James’s. In Paris, he stayed at the Hotel George V, where he talked to Bill Cunningham, a reporter for the
Boston Herald.
The man talking this day was not the Joseph P. Kennedy that history remembers, a man great only in his cynicism, a malevolent, grasping patriarch who pushed his sons mercilessly onto the stage of history. This was a man who had at least one noble idea, an idea that in some measure had cost one of his sons’ lives and cast his second son, with his broken body, into the fray. It was an idea that Joe continued to profess.

Joe believed, as he told the reporter, that in America the sons of wealth had a special obligation to serve their country. Even as he said it he knew his words might sound sentimental, or worse yet, that he might seem to be promoting his own brood.

“But it’s not just my children,” he insisted.

I think it should apply to all children of parents who can afford it. What we need now is selfless, informed, sincere representation and service at home and abroad…. Please don’t try to make any heroics out of this, but you asked me an honest question and I’ve given you an honest answer. That has been our family plan for our children from the first. If it doesn’t work out with them, it could work out with some others. I’m naturally tremendously proud of John. I think Joe, if the Lord had seen fit to spare him, would have been a fine man, and would have taken his place somewhere. Robert has yet to prove himself, but he’s bright, conscientious, and he seems to be tremendously interested.

Joe mentioned Eunice’s work in Washington, but he didn’t mention Kathleen. If she had been his son, he would doubtless have considered her life self-indulgent, a trivial pursuit of pleasure. Kathleen had made herself a part of the upper-class British world that shunned him. Kathleen had an endless supply of wit and a wondrous self-possession that never left her. At the age of twenty-seven, she had fallen in love again, this time with thirty-seven-year-old Earl Fitzwilliam, who suffered the dual disabilities of being both Protestant and married.

Fitzwilliam was a perfect exemplar of the parasitic life of wealth and privilege that Joe abhorred for his own sons. Kathleen and her beau were scheduled to meet Joe in Paris to discuss their future. If Kathleen could convince her father that Fitzwilliam offered her happiness, he would have to decide whether he would stand with her against all the onslaughts of Rose and the Church.

Joe did not sit idly in Paris waiting for his daughter and her lover to arrive. He had taught his children that time was the rarest commodity in life. Some men squeezed a half-dozen lives into their given time. Others diddled through their days in what was scarcely half a life. “Time is man’s dominant foe,” he said. “All man has on earth is the present moment…. To make proper use of your time is life—to waste it is merely to exist.”

Was it any wonder, then, that Kathleen lived her life like a Fourth of July sparkler, flashing brilliantly in the night? Kathleen and Fitzwilliam had decided to fly down in a private plane from London to southern France for one day. Then they planned to fly back to Paris for a Saturday luncheon at the Ritz with Joe.

On their way to the Riviera, the couple stopped in Paris for
dejeuner.
Their meal ran late, and when they returned to the airport, the weather had turned so threatening that all commercial aviation was grounded. Despite the late hour and the menacing reports, Fitzwilliam insisted that the pilot take off. Kathleen agreed with her lover and they flew toward the dark storm, considering it nothing but a momentary diversion, holding them back for a few nervous moments from the sun and warmth of the Cote d’Azur.

Early the next morning, Joe received a call in his suite from a
Boston Globe
reporter who told him that the plane had crashed. Kathleen and the other passengers were dead. There are as many ways to grieve as there are to die, and Joe turned immediately to what he considered the task at hand: to see that the truth was buried even before his daughter. No one was to dare to suggest that Kathleen had died a merry widow blithely flying off for a weekend
with her adulterous lover. Joe told the reporters that his beloved Kathleen, who had stayed in England to be near her husband’s grave, had hitched a ride with Lord Fitzwilliam, a mere acquaintance.

Jack was usually out somewhere for dinner, but this evening he was sitting at home listening to a recording of the Broadway musical
Finian’s Rainbow,
with its haunting, nostalgic “How Are Things in Glocca Morra.” Eunice took the phone call and told her brother that Kathleen had died. Jack was a man who did not cry, but this evening he cried and ran off to be alone in his bedroom. The next morning, when a family friend arrived at the house in Georgetown, Jack and his siblings had reverted to the stoic family mood. “As far as I remember, Eunice, Pat, and Jack were there,” Mrs. Christopher Bridge recalled, “and there was a grim, tragic restlessness about the atmosphere, with the gramophone playing, and a closing-in of the ranks of family and friends, but no emotional collapse.”

The next day Jack and Eunice traveled up to Hyannis Port to be with the rest of the family. Teddy was already there. He had left Milton Academy when he heard the terrible news and had taken the next train to the Cape. Jack was outraged that the masters at Milton had let his distraught little brother leave by himself. But there was a profound homing instinct in Teddy that in moments of grief, uncertainty, and doubt brought him to the restless seas of the Cape and the solace of a family and a house that resonated with memories of good times.

Kathleen was buried in the small cemetery in the Cavendish burial grounds at Edensor. She had been a well-loved woman and two hundred of her friends came to bury her. Of the Kennedys, only Joe was there that day. Rose had not felt right about the way her daughter was living her life, and Jack seems to have been so stunned that he could not bring himself to fly to London.

Joe stood at a distance from all those who had known and loved Kathleen, greeting no one and saying nothing. “He stood alone, unloved and despised,” recalled Alastair Forbes. And he left that day as silently as he arrived, not even stopping to pay the priest.