The Patriarch (80 page)

On July 27, he wrote Lord Beaverbrook, apologizing for his uncharacteristic two-month delay in responding to his condolence message. “Reluctance to address my mind to a distressing subject is the excuse I offer for my tardiness in acknowledging your comforting expression of sympathy. . . . The sudden death of young Joe and Kathleen, within a period of three years, has left a mark with me that I find very difficult to erase.”
¹⁹

Only in September, three and a half months after his daughter’s death, was he finally able to write and thank the Duchess of Devonshire for her kindness. “I thought about you a great deal since I came back to America. I think that the only thing that helped me retain my sanity was your understanding manner in the whole sad affair. I would like to be able to tell you that I am very much better, but I just can’t. I can’t seem to get out of my mind that there is no possibility of seeing Kick next winter and that there are no more weeks and months to be made gay by her presence. I realize that people say, ‘You have so many other children, you can’t be too depressed by Kick’s death,’ and I think that, to all intents and purposes, no one knows that I am depressed. In fact, I have never acknowledged it even to Rose who, by the way, is ten thousand per-cent better than I am. Her terrifically strong faith has been a great help to her, along with her very strong will and determination not to give way.
²⁰

Jack, Bobby, the girls, and Rose would all visit and correspond with Billy’s family in the months and years to come. Kennedy could not. Everything and everyone associated with his daughter brought him too much pain, pain that would not lessen as the years passed.

“Even in his prime,” his friend Father John Cavanaugh would later write, “he could not speak of [Joe and Kathleen] without great emotional disturbance.” Cavanaugh recalled driving with Kennedy “along a highway in Southern France. He wanted me to know that off to the left towards the lower Alps was the spot where Kathleen had dropped. He simply gripped my arm and made me realize with a quick look in his eyes what he could not speak in words. For several minutes we rode along without saying anything.”
²¹

—

A
year after Kick’s death, in the summer of 1949, the family marked the fifth anniversary of Joe Jr.’s death by giving Archbishop Richard Cushing $125,000 more for the Brighton hospital for poor children and $100,000 for the St. Coletta school in Hanover, a residential facility for what were known at the time as “feeble-minded children,” which had been built in the summer of 1947 on 175 acres of waterfront land in Hanover, Massachusetts, about twenty-five miles from Boston. The Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi, the order that had established a similar school in Jefferson, Wisconsin, in 1904, had agreed to staff the new school, which was to be called St. Coletta’s by the Sea.
²²

The Brighton hospital, officially known as the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Memorial, opened in September 1949. Kennedy was so delighted with it that he asked Eunice to keep her eyes open for “a very good project that will measure up to the Memorial Hospital, not necessarily in bricks and mortar, but in ideals.” All the children had been invited to take part in the foundation work, but from the onset it had been Eunice who demonstrated the most interest. In the years to come, she would play a larger and larger role in the management of the foundation.
²³

Though the hospital had been named after his son, Kennedy was dismayed to discover that the publicity materials the nuns had prepared for the dedication referred to “a convalescent Home and Hospital for Underprivileged Children.” “I just don’t understand, and haven’t from the beginning, why there is any hesitancy or disinclination to have everything identified with this new home described as being the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Memorial Home,” he wrote Mother Marie Emile Ange on January 31, 1950. He was angry as well with the “description of the hospital” that Archbishop Cushing’s office had given to the press, which had identified the total cost of the building at $2 million and Kennedy’s contribution as $700,000. “I did not like that kind of publicity at all.” He had agreed to build the hospital, been told the cost, and written a check. If in the end the final costs of the project came to $2 million, that was because Cushing had added a “chapel and the convent, for which at no time had I assumed any responsibility.” He did not know who was at fault for making him look cheap, but it didn’t matter. “I am not at all happy,” he wrote Mother Ange, “and I want the Archbishop to know it, and I want him to have this letter after you have finished with it. As far as I am concerned, I do not propose to discuss it ever again, except to say that I am not at all pleased.”
²⁴

Joseph P. Kennedy was discovering, as Andrew Carnegie had a half century earlier, that it was not easy to give away one’s money. To leverage his gifts—as Carnegie had—Kennedy provided seed money for construction costs, not funds or an endowment for operational costs. Where Carnegie had held local governments accountable for maintaining, staffing, and buying books for the libraries he built, Kennedy expected the Catholic Church and its charities to provide the funds necessary to operate the institutions his foundation built. He was more than a little taken aback when in August 1951, less than two years after the hospital in Brighton had opened, Mother Ange wrote to say that she was having “difficulty making ends meet.” He replied that before giving his donation for the building, he had “asked you just how you proposed to operate this new home. I did so because my business experience over the past 40 years has proved to me conclusively that it is not the initial cost that is the substantial one but it is the continuing deficit in operating expenses. You assured me that was no problem.” He insisted he had made no commitment to cover the hospital’s operating expenses.
²⁵

He did not want to appear stingy or unfeeling, but neither was he going to make promises he was not certain he could keep. “The Foundation’s chief source of income at the present is from the Merchandise Mart,” he wrote Father John Wright, Archbishop Cushing’s secretary. “A fire, a bomb, an accident of serious nature, a move of the home furnishings business away from Chicago to New York would leave the Mart a liability instead of an asset.” The suggestion Cushing had made, that the Kennedys “make a commitment based on” their own funds, he regarded as “hazardous.” With tax rates rising to pay for the Cold War, he feared that personal incomes over $25,000 would soon be taxed out of existence. Kennedy was temperamentally a bear. No matter how well he was doing in the present, he could not help fearing for the future.
²⁶

Relations between Kennedy and Archbishop Cushing were further strained by the appearance of an article in the
Boston Post
that quoted the archbishop as saying that since their original contribution, the Kennedys had given nothing to the Brighton hospital and that if funds were not forthcoming, new arrangements, including putting the children in the hospital up for adoption, might have to be made. Cushing wrote Kennedy immediately to disown the words attributed to him. “Having read the article, I was shocked to put it mildly.” The hospital was “not in need of funds. Everything is going along very well.” Cushing assured Kennedy “that never again, either directly or indirectly, will publicity ever appear unless it is personally written by me.” And he kept that promise.
²⁷

Part of the underlying tension between the two men was that Cushing was not a businessman and had little interest in behaving like one. Deficits did not trouble him. When they got too big to handle, he relied on God’s beneficence or, more concretely, on his and the church’s fund-raising prowess to raise the money he needed. Kennedy, who had no such faith, preferred that the institutions he funded be operated in the black.

In the summer of 1952, he sent two of his ablest associates to Brighton to review the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Memorial hospital’s financial statements. He followed up with personal visits and extended interviews with the sisters. “The original plan of the institution has been entirely set aside,” he wrote Cushing in early August. “The idea of the care of convalescent children and the care of children from broken homes . . . has given way to the care of mentally deficient children.” Though the sisters were doing a remarkable job, they had no training in this area. “They must start hiring professional help, which will be expensive.”
²⁸

Cushing insisted that things were not nearly as bad as “Joe” imagined them. “The Kennedy Memorial is one of the greatest institutions, of its kind, in this country. It is now what it was always intended to be—a haven for physically and mentally handicapped children.” There was no financial emergency. “The Finger of God is on this place.” And so was Cushing’s. “I had as much to do with the planning of this project as anyone and I can tell you there isn’t any institution, under Catholic auspices, in this country, that has attracted more favorable comments. I also planned St. Coletta’s in Hanover. . . . This is an entirely different institution. Saint Coletta’s is a school for exceptional children of a certain grade of intelligence. It could never accept the poor tots who go to the Kennedy Memorial. In fact, the latter has taken a few of the hopeless cases from the former. Honestly, Joe, I cannot understand what the ‘shouting’ is all about. There are no immediate problems at Kennedy.”
²⁹

The ambassador, Cushing later recalled, was “very demanding of his friends. But we all like it. He wants things done well and you fulfill his requests or ‘you get off the team.’” Because he got things done—and done well—Archbishop (later Cardinal) Richard Cushing would become a lifelong member of the team, friend of the Kennedy family, and recipient of large foundation grants for the projects he sponsored.
³⁰

Kennedy would enter into a working relationship with Archbishop Francis Spellman in New York similar to the one he had forged with Cushing in Boston for the same reason. Spellman could be counted on to get things done. The two men who would become rivals for Kennedy foundation funding could not have been more different. Cushing was fun-loving, informal, and outgoing. He looked rather like a tough, handsome, Irish cop and behaved more like a ward politician than a high church cleric. Spellman, on the other hand, was small, round, bespectacled, humorless, distant. Unlike Cushing, he spoke Italian and had powerful friends not only in the Vatican, but in the upper reaches of national politics, business, and banking.

Kennedy and Spellman shared the same real estate adviser, John Reynolds, who may have been instrumental in arranging the family’s first gift to the New York Archdiocese: a valuable piece of land on Pelham Parkway. In August 1951, Spellman wrote Kennedy with a request: “I realize that for many reasons your charitable interests should be in Massachusetts but nevertheless I think that New York can offer you bigger and better bargains.” The particular “bargain” Spellman was writing about was a boys’ home and school at 1770 Stillwell Avenue in the Bronx, “available for immediate dedication and occupancy. There are no
maintenance charges
. Better terms may be had if desired.” Spellman’s unchurchmanly reference to “bargains” and “terms” was offered tongue-in-cheek, but the archbishop was deadly serious. He understood Kennedy’s reluctance to commit funds for operational costs and was more than willing to accommodate him. The boys’ home in the Bronx had formerly been run by the Edwin Gould Foundation (founded by railroad tycoon Jay Gould’s son Edwin), which had had to abandon it “because of the high cost of operation.” Spellman anticipated no such difficulties. “Since the Sisters work for nothing but their food and clothing, we shall be able to conduct this institution for two hundred and eighty children at an anticipated annual operating deficit of less than $50,000 which deficit can be met by annual appropriations from Catholic Charities.”
³¹

Kennedy agreed to provide Spellman with the funds he needed—with the proviso that whatever donation he made be spread over several years. On September 8, 1950, the archbishop invited reporters to the site of the new Bronx children’s home, which he announced “would be named the Lieut. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Home,” its name to be “placed in bronze letters over the entrance.” Six weeks later, the press was welcomed back for the official dedication of the facility. Spellman and no fewer than four auxiliary bishops blessed the buildings, following which Joe, Rose, Jack, Eunice, Patricia, and Bobby posed solemnly for a photograph in front of an oil painting of Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.
³²

—

I
n the fall of 1948, a year and a half after Kathleen’s death, Kennedy took up what he wrote Johnnie Ford was “the most important unfinished business I have.” He had come to the conclusion that he could no longer keep Rosemary at Craig House (perhaps after speaking with Mary Moore, Eddie’s wife, who had made several visits there, the last in October). The year before, in October 1947, St. Coletta’s by the Sea, the school for the “feeble-minded” founded by Archbishop Cushing, had opened its doors in Hanover. Sometime during the fall of 1948, Kennedy visited the school or sent Johnnie Ford to talk to the sisters about moving Rosemary there. “The Sisters confided in me the nature of their recent contacts with you and yours,” Archbishop Cushing wrote Kennedy on December 4. “From the beginning, I told them I was not enthusiastic because I was fearful of publicity.” While he regarded the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi as “the finest group of religious that I have ever met,” he recommended against placing Rosemary with them in Hanover. “Humanly speaking, it would be impossible to avoid public attention to any plans you had.” He suggested instead that Rosemary be sent a thousand miles away to the St. Coletta school in Jefferson, Wisconsin. “There, and not Hanover, will solve your personal problems. That’s the recommendation that I wish to make. . . . Once again, I hesitate to make this recommendation for I have no reason for entering the picture save my devotion to you and the family.”
³³