The Patriarch (8 page)

Joe Kennedy was learning how to skate along the edges without falling in. As president of Columbia Trust, he had immediate access to capital and credit, which he used not only to finance his mortgage and real estate dealings, but to purchase stocks. As the economy righted and then boomed in early 1915, his fortunes soared. His former Harvard classmate and friend Tom Campbell remembered Joe telling him that every stock he “bought zoomed. It was such an easy way to make money that I wondered why more people did not know about it. I was afraid the market would close before I had all I wanted.”

Then came May 7, 1915, the German torpedoing of the
Lusitania
and the deaths of more than a hundred American civilians. In the war scare that followed, the spectacular four-month stock market rise was halted, then reversed, “wiping out all [his] profits” and, according to Tom Campbell, knocking his “dreams of easy money . . . into a cocked hat.” Fortunately for the nation and the Kennedys, fears that the
Lusitania
tragedy would lead to war were unfounded. The Germans pledged that there would be no more attacks on passenger liners, no more American civilian deaths. And with that, the economic boom generated by the Allies’ need for American foodstuffs, commodities, and credit to pay for them shifted into higher gear. The stock market pushed forward again, climbing in almost a straight line from a low of 65 in June 1915 to 110 in November 1916. Joseph P. Kennedy jumped back in, wiser now, a bit more cautious, but convinced that having made a killing once, he could do it again.
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On November 2, 1915, short of capital to invest, he borrowed $55,000 from National Shawmut, where Bob Potter was now an officer. It was a short-term six-month loan, backed by some stock certificates, life insurance policies, and real estate. In the months and years to come, there would be other sizable loans from National Shawmut, Merchants Bank of Boston, and State Street Trust, some of them secured by notes backed by real estate, a few by Columbia Trust stock. He never borrowed more than he thought he could repay, and only at preferential rates; and he never defaulted, though occasionally he was forced to take out a new loan to pay off an older one.

His ability to juggle numbers and accounts was remarkable. So too his capacity to profit from a booming market. Later in life, Kennedy would confess to being a bear in all things, including the market, and take great pride in the money he had made betting on stocks to go down. But that was certainly not the case in his twenties, when he was convinced that no matter how violent the short-term swings, the American economy was strong and would only grow stronger.
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Joseph P. Kennedy, still in his middle twenties, was well on his way to becoming a wealthy man, but only on the way. Rose remembered her thrill “the day my husband drove home in our very own brand-new, gleaming black Model T Ford.” It was not the most expensive automobile on the market and much less grand than the ones her father owned, but it was new and it was theirs. “Immediately after supper, in the summer twilight, off we went heading towards a neighborhood shopping center.” Preoccupied with steering his new automobile, the first he had owned or, perhaps, driven, Joe Kennedy didn’t notice the kerosene lanterns on the road or the excavation they marked. Rose “shouted a warning, [but] it was too late and into the ditch we went. . . . Neither of us was hurt except for a few black-and-blue bruises. And our beautiful car was relatively undamaged. They made tougher springs in those days.” Joe gunned the car out of the ditch, with “no loss of nerve.”
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Four

W
AR

J
oe Kennedy had to have wondered whether the Harvard Class of ’12 reunion committee was congratulating or ridiculing him when they included in the schedule of events for their third reunion a mock “Bank-Presidents Verein [German for association or society]: Meet in J. P. Kennedy’s room at 7:30. . . . The Federal Reserve Board will sing and the Controller of the Currency will read a paper on ‘Our Boy President, or Risen from the Bank.’”
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Still, whether or not his classmates considered Columbia Trust of East Boston a fitting landing place for a Harvard graduate, he was a bank president and rather proud of it.

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H
e rose early seven days a week, did calisthenic exercises with his Indian clubs, ate breakfast, and set off for work or, on Sundays, for Mass at St. Aidan’s. On those nights he came home after work, he and Rose had a formal dinner in the dining room (with their fine china and silverware), after which he retired to his big red lounge chair in the parlor to read the
Boston Transcript,
then his detective novel, and listen to classical music on the Victrola. On those nights he did not come home, Rose did not question where he had been—or why. “Joe’s time was his own,” Rose recalled in her memoirs, “as it had been and always would be.”
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In marrying Rose Fitzgerald, Joe Kennedy had pledged to faithfully love and support her—and the children they might have together; to keep them safe and secure and well sheltered; and to do everything in his power, to work day and night, six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year if necessary, to provide for them. What he did not intend to do was give up being a “ladies’ man.” And we do not know if Rose expected him to. Her father had most certainly been with other women during his marriage. So had, and would, a large number of Joe’s friends. Like them, he successfully demarcated his life into two parts, one of which he shared with his wife, the other spent apart from her, because he wanted to avoid situations that might cause her embarrassment or force her to confront the fact that he enjoyed the company of other women, hundreds of them over his lifetime: actresses, waitresses, secretaries, stenographers, caddies, models, stewardesses, and others.

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T
he Kennedys were outsiders in Brookline and preferred it that way. They did most of their shopping and socializing in Boston and spent their summers at the seashore in a rented house on C Street in the Waveland section of Hull on the Nantasket Peninsula, about twenty-five miles away. It was there, in Hull, that their first child, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., was born on Sunday, July 25, 1915, nine months, two weeks, and four days after his parents’ wedding. Rose, as was the custom, gave birth at home, with a squadron of doctors, attendants, and her housemaid. Joe waited in the next room; Honey Fitz was outside on the beach. When the doctors announced that it was a boy, a blue-eyed, big, healthy one, Honey Fitz rushed inside, greeted his grandson, daughter, and son-in-law, then contacted his friends in the Boston press to report how happy he was to be young (fifty-two), healthy, and a grandfather. Though Joseph P. Kennedy was not mentioned in the newspaper reports, the baby was named after him, not his famous father-in-law or father.

The Joseph P. Kennedys, now numbering three, returned to Brookline that fall. Columbia Trust continued to do well, riding the waves of prosperity set in motion as Great Britain and France, now entering their second full year of war, increased their purchases of American food and manufactured goods, much of it funded by credit from American financial institutions. Joe Kennedy was entering a new stage in his banking career, no longer a novelty, but on his way to becoming a respected, if decidedly minor, member of the business community. In May 1916, Eugene Thayer, president of the Merchants Bank of Boston, appointed him to the board of directors of a recently established “credit union” for workingmen. Serving with Kennedy on the board were a number of distinguished Boston businessmen and bankers.

By early 1917, Kennedy was making enough money to hire a full-time trained nurse to stay with Rose through her second pregnancy. The boudoir was turned into a nursery. Though the house had only one staircase—for the use of family and servants alike—it was large enough to accommodate three full-time servants on the third floor: nurse, nursemaid, and maid. The laundress who came in twice a week to do the family’s wash, supplemented now by diapers, worked in the basement.

That spring of 1917, the tidy little world Joe Kennedy had created for himself in Brookline and in East Boston was threatened by forces beyond his control. On April 2, President Woodrow Wilson had gone before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war. On April 4, the Senate approved Wilson’s declaration. On April 6, the House concurred and Secretary of War Newton Baker submitted legislation authorizing the drafting of a “National Army” of half a million men.

Kennedy was determined, from the moment war was declared, to do everything he could to remain out of uniform and stateside. As an Irish Catholic, he had no great love for the English and no desire to risk his life to protect the British Empire. As a young father, whose second son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had been born on May 29, 1917, he believed his first responsibility was to his family. As an ambitious young banker, he did not want to interrupt his career to spend time in the trenches. Kennedy did not advertise these views. His decision not to enlist or allow himself to be drafted was a private one, based on practical, not moral, choices. He was not opposed to all wars, just to Americans getting involved in this one. He resisted entirely the claims of the British propagandists and their American allies that the fight against the Huns was a fight for civilization.

Years later in a conversation with Doris Kearns Goodwin, Rose recalled how upset her husband got when, at a weekend gathering, his Harvard classmates applauded the daring and deadly British offensive at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. “As Rose remembered the conversation at the house, at first Joe just listened to the enthusiasm of his friends and didn’t say much. ‘He merely shook his head with sadness.’ And then, he counter-attacked. ‘He warned his friends [that] by accepting the idea of the grandeur of the struggle, they themselves were contributing to the momentum of a senseless war, certain to ruin the victors as well as the vanquished.’”
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P
resident Woodrow Wilson would have preferred to fight the war with an all-volunteer army, but resisted doing so in large part because of the British experience. The problem with a volunteer army, the British had learned, was that the wrong men volunteered for the battlefield, leaving the home front—which would have to supply the soldiers with armaments—bereft of skilled workers. The United States would prevent that from happening by organizing a “selective service” system to scientifically distribute the nation’s young men, as needed, to the various branches of the war effort. Millions would be sent to the battlefield; others would be directed into munitions factories and the shipyards, where they too would fight the war against the Hun. To forestall the divisions, chaos, and occasional riots that marked the conscription process during the Civil War, the Selective Service Act of 1917 mandated that there were to be no substitutions, commutations, or abbreviated terms of service, no way, in other words, for wealthy businessmen such as Joseph Kennedy to buy their way out of the draft.
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On June 5, 1917, Joseph P. Kennedy reported as directed to his local polling place and filled out his registration card. The Brookline registrar certified that he was tall and stout, with blue eyes, brown (really brownish red) hair, and no lost limbs or disabilities. Line 9 affirmed that he had a “wife and 2 children” who were “solely dependent on [him] for support.”
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That was not going to be enough, however, to get him the exemption he wanted. In the second week of August, the provost marshal general’s office in Washington and the state director of military enrollment in Massachusetts issued what the
Boston Daily Globe
referred to as “sweeping orders” to reduce “exceptions of married men.”

Honey Fitz, never one to sit out a battle, especially one as clear-cut as this, jumped into the controversy, his mouth wide open, demanding that the Republican governor of Massachusetts and the Republicans on local draft boards petition Congress to spare married citizens and draft aliens in their place. Though he may have had the best interests of his daughter and son-in-law in mind, he did them no favors by intimating that Republican draft board members, including the three in Brookline who would hear Joe’s case, were less interested than he was in keeping American families intact.
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In late October, the provost marshal general declared unequivocally that “married men who have independent incomes . . . where the support of the dependents in their absence was assured” would be denied exemptions. Each case would be heard on an individual basis. To secure his “dependency” exemption, Kennedy would have to prove—which he could not—that his three dependents were fully “dependent” on him for support, that no one else, not even his rich father-in-law, would be able to provide for them.

Fortunately, there were other categories of deferment. At the same time that he moved to restrict “dependency” exemptions, the provost marshal general, in response to a petition from a committee of shipbuilders, authorized large numbers of “industrial” exemptions for “shipworkers of military age” with specialized skills. A number of those exemptions went to employees of the Fore River Shipbuilding Company of Quincy, Massachusetts, just ten miles from downtown Boston, which in 1913 had been acquired by Bethlehem Steel. Bethlehem had been contracted by the government to build forty-five destroyers at Fore River and been given $9 million of government money to construct a ten-bay shipyard at Squantum in Dorchester Bay.
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Joseph P. Kennedy was not a shipbuilder; in fact, as he admitted in a letter to his draft board, he had “absolutely no technical knowledge of shipbuilding.” 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. He was, it appeared, a perfect candidate for a management position at Fore River—and the “industrial exemption” that would come with it.

In mid-October, three high-level executives of Fore River—J. W. Powell, the general manager, who had been promoted and was about to be transferred to Bethlehem headquarters in Pennsylvania; Samuel Wakeman, whom Powell had chosen to succeed him; and Guy Currier, the company’s lawyer and chief lobbyist—met with Joseph Kennedy at Young’s Hotel in Boston and offered him the newly created position of assistant general manager.
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For Kennedy, this was a golden opportunity. The pay was decent: $4,000 a year, equivalent to about $68,000 in purchasing power today, with a bonus based on total manufacturing profits at the plant. He would get an “industrial exemption” from the draft and the opportunity to associate himself with Bethlehem Steel, one of the nation’s most dynamic corporations, led by two of its most respected businessmen: Eugene Grace, president, and Charles M. Schwab, chairman of the board.

The Fore River project was going to be huge. Thousands of new jobs were going to be created, bridges and roadways built, docks extended, and tons of building materials transported to Quincy and Squantum to construct an industrial city populated by tens of thousands. Every state and city politician, businessman, contractor, manufacturer, real estate promoter, and banker would want a piece of the multimillion-dollar project that Kennedy would now have a hand in managing.

On the morning of October 15, 1917, Joseph Kennedy got into his Ford, said good-bye to Rose, two-year-old Joe Jr., and five-month-old John, and drove the fourteen miles from Beals Street in Brookline to the Fore River plant.

Kennedy’s first assignment was to help design and oversee the company’s employee insurance programs. He was also asked to manage construction of the transportation infrastructure required to get twenty-six thousand workers to, from, and between Boston, Quincy, Fore River, and Squantum. He secured from the state the right to build and operate a privately owned Bethlehem shipyard railroad to connect the Fore River and Squantum shipyards. To get workers to Fore River, he negotiated with public and private authorities to rebuild the Neponset Bridge from Dorchester to Quincy and have the streetcar rails double-tracked and extended from downtown Boston to Quincy Square and on to Fore River. All this required endless meetings with the Boston Elevated Railway, Edison Electric, the Bay State Street Railway, the navy, the Emergency Fleet Corporation, the United States Housing Corporation, and state and government officials as to who would pay for what and when.
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As the new shipbuilding facilities went on line, the number of workers commuting to the shipyards increased to the point where the Bay State Street Railway, which was owned by Massachusetts Electric, was asked to add new trains for the morning commute. The railroad requested that the company instead stagger the hours for its morning shifts to relieve overcrowding. Kennedy had been named a trustee of Massachusetts Electric in May, but that didn’t stop him from supporting the railroad’s request. He persuaded the plant managers to agree to change their work shifts, thereby saving the Bay State Street Railway and Massachusetts Electric the cost of paying additional crews to run additional trains to and from the plant. Union representatives pointed out the obvious conflict of interest, but Kennedy did not back down. Still, he had learned his lesson. When, in the fall of 1918, he was offered a directorship of the Citizens’ Gas-Light Company of Quincy, he turned it down. “My short experience . . . has taught me that the attitude of labor to-day towards management in charge of enterprises is not improved much by having labor think that there is too close a connection between the employers and those that sell them the commodity that they use.”
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