The Patriarch (32 page)

Franklin Roosevelt had one more favor to ask. Concerned that Father Coughlin, whose radio audience was growing larger by the day, was moving closer to an alliance with Huey Long in preparation for the 1936 elections, the president asked Kennedy to phone Coughlin and tell him the “boss” wanted to see him. Kennedy placed the call while he was with Roosevelt at Hyde Park. Coughlin agreed to come at once, boarded the overnight train from Detroit, and arrived in Albany about four the next morning. According to Coughlin, Kennedy picked him up at the station in his Rolls-Royce and drove him to Hyde Park. When the president awoke later that morning, he greeted both men warmly, then, with a smile, “told Joe to ‘go look at the pigs’—he didn’t have any pigs of course,” Coughlin later told a reporter. “It was just a little joke he used to make. Joe laughed and went out.” Coughlin then presented the president with evidence he said he had received from his bishop that officials in the Roosevelt administration were “helping the Communist cause overseas.”

Roosevelt listened intently but did not take the matter nearly as seriously as Coughlin had hoped. He didn’t have to. That morning, he had learned that Huey Long had died in a Louisiana hospital after being shot in the abdomen in the corridor of the Louisiana Capitol. As a Canadian and a priest, Coughlin could not run for president and was thus rendered infinitely less of a threat to the president with Long out of the picture.

At the end of their conversation, Roosevelt asked Father Coughlin and Kennedy “to stay for dinner,” but Coughlin replied that the two men had “already made plans to drive up to the home of a friend of ours in Great Barrington. On the way up I told Joe most of the story, and when we got there Kennedy asked the butler to bring him some writing paper . . . and wrote out his resignation as chairman of the SEC.”
⁶⁵

Most of the story rings true, though the letter of resignation Coughlin claims Kennedy wrote in Great Barrington had been delivered earlier. Coughlin may have misremembered the details. More probably, Kennedy had implied that he was so concerned with Roosevelt’s move to the left that he was resigning because of it.

Whatever he may have intimated to Coughlin or, later, to other Roosevelt critics, Kennedy was not resigning because of any policy differences, but because the thought of continuing in place, and gearing up to administer yet another congressional mandate, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, was more than he could stomach. Drew Pearson and Robert Allen, in their “Washington Merry-Go-Round”
column, insisted that in the end it was boredom as well as overwork that had forced his hand. He was resigning because the SEC was “functioning smoothly. ‘And,’ says Joe, ‘it is darn boring to sit around deciding whether a clerk receiving $3,200 should now get $3,600.’”
⁶⁶

The news of his resignation prompted an outpouring of praise for the man, his family, and the swell job he had done. In its July 22, 1935, cover story on Kennedy,
Time
magazine had already crowned the SEC with “the distinction of being the most ably administered New Deal agency in Washington.” Reporters and editorial writers from around the country agreed. “The financial community’s high esteem for Mr. Kennedy,” the
Literary Digest
opined on August 24, 1935, “is remarkable, perhaps unique. It involves a considerable measure of gratitude, since it is felt that his understanding attitude has made the rigors of SEC control not only bearable but, in many respects, acceptable.”
⁶⁷

“He was,” syndicated conservative columnist Frank Kent reported on September 25 in the
Wall Street Journal
and elsewhere, “more consistently and unanimously praised by the press than any public official of his time. . . . Mr. Kennedy happened to be in a class entirely alone” among Roosevelt appointees and supporters. “He stood out among these giddy New Dealers and carefree money-scatterers like a lighthouse in a fog. . . . Instinctively, Mr. Kennedy, fond as he was of Mr. Roosevelt personally, did not belong to the New Deal crowd, did not pretend to be one of them, did not believe in the New Deal hokum.”
⁶⁸

His greatest success, as the Kent article demonstrated, had been in maintaining and promoting, with the help of influential friends like Arthur Krock, his unique political persona as the plainspoken, always honest, nonideological, nonpartisan businessman who had come to Washington to do a job for the president and, having completed it, was leaving. Unlike other members of the administration team, he had refrained from commenting publicly for or against the programs and proposals that characterized Roosevelt’s turn to the left: the Wagner Act, the income tax proposals that had so angered Hearst, the massive deficit-spending work relief programs, or the “death sentence” provision of the public utility holding company legislation that he was rumored to oppose. If his conservative friends took his silence as disagreement with the administration, that was all to the good. It maintained his standing as their liaison to the White House, while keeping open the door to his return to Washington in some other role.

Thirteen

R
EELECTING
R
OOSEVELT

K
ennedy sailed for Europe on the
Normandie
on September 25, 1935, taking Jack, Kick, and Rose with him. Jack would remain in London to study with Harold Laski, as his brother had. Kick was on her way to a convent school at Neuilly, outside Paris. Rose had shopping to do.

Unwilling to abandon his role as an administration insider, Kennedy, on resigning his post at the SEC, had lobbied for a new and special assignment from the president. He intended to spend that fall negotiating with officials in the European capitals for the registration of foreign stocks and bonds on the New York Stock Exchange. Befitting his position as presidential emissary, he was preceded by letters to the American ambassadors in Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and France, asking them to arrange meetings with “one or two of the important people” in government and “also those in opposition.” Arthur Krock wrote the
New York Times
bureaus and reporters, asking them to assist Kennedy as well.
¹

Meetings were arranged with officials in charge of finance and banking in the Western European capitals, including, in London, Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain and former chancellor Winston Churchill. Bernard Baruch had cabled Churchill in advance, suggesting that he be sure to make an “appointment to see [Kennedy] as he is important and good relationship between you two might have far reaching results.”
²

After a visit to Chartwell, Churchill’s estate in Kent, and a week spent mostly in London, Kennedy crossed the English Channel for meetings in Switzerland, Holland, France, and Italy. His tour was cut short when Jack, whom he had left behind to register for classes at the London School of Economics, took ill and had to be hospitalized. Kennedy returned to London, cabled Jack’s doctors in the States, and was informed that Jack was probably suffering from a relapse of the “agranulocytosis” that had led to an earlier hospitalization. This time, as twice before, Jack miraculously recovered as quickly as he had taken ill. “I am once more baffling the doctors,” he wrote Lem Billings from London. “I am a ‘most amazing case.’”
³

While Jack put on the bravest of fronts, his father was frightened. He had witnessed too many unexplained illnesses, too many relapses, too many emergency hospitalizations. There was no telling when the illness would fell him again. If and when it happened, Kennedy wanted his son nearby, not in London, an ocean away. With a bit of help from Swope, the master fixer, strings were pulled and Jack was admitted, after the semester had begun, to Princeton, where Billings and his friends were in residence and where he could go to school without being compared with his older brother, Joe Jr., who was still at Harvard.

His improvement, so rapid at first, stalled when he got home. “Jack is far from being a well boy,” Kennedy wrote Ambassador Robert Bingham in London soon after his return, “and as a result I am afraid my time for the next six months will be devoted to trying to help him regain his health.” After consulting with Jack’s doctor at Princeton and the specialist who had been treating him at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Kennedy decided to let him stay at school through Thanksgiving. “Then, if no real improvement has been made,” he wrote Jack, “you and I will discuss whether or not it is best for you to lay off for a year and try and put yourself in condition. After all, the only consideration I have in the whole matter is your happiness, and I don’t want you to lose a year of your college life (which ordinarily brings great pleasure to [a] boy) by wrestling with a bad physical condition and a jam in your studies. A year is important, but it isn’t so important if it’s going to leave a mark for the rest of your life.”
⁴

A month later, Jack was back at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. In mid-December, he was officially withdrawn from Princeton. He spent the Christmas holidays in Palm Beach with friends from Princeton and would have preferred to recuperate there for the rest of the winter, but his father was determined to find out what ailed him and how to treat it. He sent Jack back to the hospital in Boston for two months of tests (with weekends off). In late February, the doctors released him to his father’s care in Palm Beach. They had failed to come up with any diagnosis or treatment plan. It was too late to return to Princeton—and Kennedy was not convinced his son was up to it. What the boy needed, he decided, was to build his strength to the point where he could fight off future infections.

Arthur Krock, who was visiting in Palm Beach, recommended a cattle ranch in Arizona. Jack reluctantly agreed, and after a bit more time in the sun in Palm Beach and a trip to New York, he went west to work on the ranch. He came home that spring, hale, hearty, and relatively healthy, to inform his delighted father that he had decided not to return to Princeton, but to join his brother at Harvard.
⁵

Kennedy wrote the Harvard dean of freshmen, with whom he had already been in correspondence, to push the boy’s application forward. He was so anxious to have Jack admitted that he preemptively identified, then apologized for, his son’s shortcomings: “Jack has a brilliant mind for the things in which he is interested, but is careless and lacks application in those in which he is not interested. This is, of course, a bad fault.” Still, he wanted the dean to know that Jack was so committed to returning to school and catching up on his year away that he intended to complete the work for his degree in three years, not four (thereby accomplishing something his older brother had never imagined attempting). Kennedy applauded his son’s ambition but requested that the dean’s assistant “confer with Jack on whether or not this three-year idea is to be encouraged.” He himself was on his way to Europe on business but would return in time for the opening of the school year. “I shall make it my business to go to Boston and talk with the teachers from whom Jack will receive instruction in his freshman year.”
⁶

—

I
n November 1935, after delivering his report to the president, Kennedy held an informal press conference to remind reporters of his existence, then in early December flew to Palm Beach for the rest of the winter. “Without me,” Rose recalled, “he was an unattached male,” that most coveted of dinner guests in Palm Beach. Still, he declined almost every invitation. Having his dinner anywhere but home, he risked getting “into an argument of some sort,” Rose told an interviewer in 1972. “He often sat next to some prying female who asked stupid inarticulate questions and why should he be thus bothered.” On those few occasions when he did go out, he was inevitably sorry the next morning, because he had gotten into “a fight about Roosevelt or he was asked advice about the Stock Market and was quoted or misquoted later.”
⁷

Rose visited Palm Beach occasionally, but she never stayed for long—and was seldom there alone with her husband. “I hope this letter reaches you in Florida,” Kick wrote her mother on February 8, “as you seem to jump around like a frog between N.Y. and Florida—One minute in New York the next in Florida.”
⁸

Rose did not particularly enjoy sharing the Palm Beach house with her husband’s golfing buddies, especially Arthur Houghton. When they were around—and they always were—she stuck out like a sore thumb. And then too there were the other women in Kennedy’s life. Though she would never articulate it as such, Rose had to have known in some way that her husband did not remain celibate during the three hundred or so days a year they remained apart.

As Joe Jr. and Jack grew older, and sexually active, they began to take notice of the beautiful young women their father kept company with. During his brief stay in London in the fall of 1935, Jack wrote Lem of his own interest in the “very good looking blonde whom Dad seems to know, about 24, who is a divorcee.” Joe Jr. wrote his father in Palm Beach the following February to say that the beautiful “Barbara Cushing [Barbara “Babe” Cushing, later Paley, was James Roosevelt’s sister-in-law at the time] & a friend who was out with you in N.Y. hearing Toscanini, Persian Room etc. till 3 o’clock were up here and gave me the low down on you. They said they nearly went South [to Palm Beach]. I think Mother ought to keep a better eye on you.” Kennedy responded lightheartedly that his son should not “worry too much about Barbara Cushing and her pal . . . 21 or 22 is still a little too young for me.”
⁹

From Palm Beach, Kennedy kept in touch with his children by letter. To Joe Jr., who was still more than a year away from graduation but had no real career plans, he suggested he consider the family business, politics. “Get yourself signed up and possibly make some speeches in the fall in the campaign throughout Massachusetts. It would be a very interesting experience and you could work up two or three subjects you wanted to discuss and go out through the State. Of course, the trouble is football may be on.” He suggested that Joe Jr. might also want to “drop in at the bank [Columbia Trust Company in East Boston] and see Mr. Porter [the president] and look around. There may be some points of interest there you would like to follow up.”
¹⁰

Rosemary was still living in Brookline with Miss Newton and appeared to be doing well. Looking at her, one would not guess that she was “slow.” Joe Jr. invited her to school dances and functions at Harvard, which she mightily enjoyed. She was also spending time with Rose’s sister Agnes and other members and friends of the Fitzgerald family. Her letters home were chatty but rambling and disorganized—in the manner of a five- or six-year-old. “I take my red pills, injections in my arm 3 times a week. My new white shoes are ready. I have a new necktie red and white the color. I am going to study Napoleon.”
¹¹

Kick had been homesick at first but had adjusted, as she always did, to her new circumstances at her convent school in France. Her father worried that she was a bit too eager to get away with her American friends for weekends and holidays in Paris, London, and Italy. Kennedy had no objection to her sightseeing, but he wanted her to make the most of her trips away from the convent. “Try to get all you can out of this trip, because it will be of great help to you in everything you do hereafter.”
¹²

Eunice, who never had to be prodded to focus on her schoolwork, had finished her “orals” and, her father supposed, was now “taking it nice and easy.” He suggested that she work on her penmanship, which was still pretty bad. “By this time I suppose Bobby has that bugle and the house is pretty nearly a mad house. However, maybe you could arrange to send him down near the railroad station and let him play when the trains come in.”
¹³

He asked Bobby, though only ten, to step up and begin taking a bit of responsibility at home in Bronxville. “Joe, Jack and I talked it over the other night and decided we really depended on you to do a good job in the house now that you are . . . the only man left in it.”
¹⁴

In late February, in his letter thanking Eunice, Patricia, and Jean for their valentines, Kennedy announced that the “golf professor” their mother and brother Jack had taken lessons from would be staying with them at Cape Cod for the summer. You all can take lessons every day and become good golfers—and that means Jeannie, too.” He wrote a separate thank-you note to Bobby and Ted. “I do not think you two boys would like to get a letter with the girls so am writing you one separately. . . . The girls will tell you about the golf lessons . . . I think Teddy would be a little too small, don’t you?”
¹⁵

—

A
s the world’s leading authority on procedures and requirements for registering new issues with the SEC, Joseph P. Kennedy, private citizen, was in great demand. In early 1936, David Sarnoff asked for his help in putting together a recapitalization plan for RCA, which would include the issuance of new SEC-registered securities. Kennedy, who had remained on good terms with Sarnoff since they had parted company seven years earlier, flew north to discuss his new assignment with him and the RCA board. On the way back to Palm Beach, he stopped off in Washington to meet separately with the president and with his former associates at the SEC. The announcement of his contract with RCA, followed two days later by his visit to the White House and the SEC offices, the
New York Times
reported, had “set brokers to speculating whether he is in business or in politics, or in both.” Colonel Robert McCormick, the publisher of the
Chicago Tribune
and at the time perhaps the New Deal’s most acerbic critic, published an editorial on January 18, 1936, attacking the president for having appointed Kennedy to the SEC and Kennedy for parlaying that appointment into a lucrative consulting contract with RCA.

Kennedy asked John Boettiger, Anna Roosevelt’s husband, who had worked for the
Chicago Tribune,
to help him draft a response. Though he did not say so to McCormick, he expected to return soon to Washington, and once he did so he would have to give up all moneymaking activities. Why not, then, while he was still a private citizen, make as much as he could?
¹⁶

He began work on the RCA project by assembling a team of accountants, several of whom had worked for him at the SEC. In April 1936, he flew to New York City to deliver his recommendations at a stockholders meeting. Following his presentation, he took questions. The first one was about his fee. Betraying not the slightest sign of embarrassment at the question—or the answer he was about to give—Kennedy began by explaining that “at the SEC we always demanded the truth and I guess some of you will get a shock. . . . My fee was $150,000 [equivalent to about $2.25 million today], from which I paid $30,000 to accountants.”

“The stockholders,”
Time
magazine reported on April 20, “were indeed shocked [by Kennedy’s disclosure], for a profound silence descended upon the rest of the meeting.” Moments later, however, they voted to approve his plan and his fee. The next day, the RCA stock price began an upward climb.