The Kennedys: An American Drama

THE

KENNEDYS

AN AMERICAN DRAMA

Also by Peter Collier and David Horowitz

THE ROCKEFELLERS

An American Dynasty

THE FORDS

An American Epic

DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION

Second Thoughts about the Sixties

THE

KENNEDYS

AN AMERICAN DRAMA

PETER COLLIER

DAVID HOROWITZ

Copyright © 2021, 2002, 1984 by Peter Collier and David Horowitz

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First paperback edition published in 2002.

First paperback edition ISBN: 978-1-89355-431-3

Second paperback edition published in 2021.

Second paperback edition ISBN: 978-1-64177-193-1

Second paperback edition eISBN: 978-1-64177-194-8

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CONTENTS

Prologue

PART 1: Architect of Their Lives

PART 2: The Stand-In

PART 3: Brothers Within

PART 4: The Lost Boys

Epilogue

Afterword, 2001

Bibliographic Note

Reference Notes

Index

PROLOGUE: APRIL 1938

IT WAS A MOMENTARY PLATEAU in Europe’s long slide toward war. Hitler had absorbed Austria and was eying Czechoslovakia. Roosevelt, having abandoned any hope of convening a peace conference in Washington, was looking for a coherent policy. British Prime Minister Chamberlain had suffered setbacks in his appeasement strategy, but continued to believe that rational men will agree to go along if the deal offered them is sweet enough. Joseph P. Kennedy was on his way to Windsor Castle to visit the King and Queen.

It was less than a month since he had walked out of the embassy in top hat and cutaway, climbed into the ornate ceremonial coach, and ridden to Buckingham Palace to present his credentials as the new American Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. In the intervening weeks he and his family had taken England by storm. His brashness even more than his truculent isolationism had made him the talk of the diplomatic community. His wife, Rose, had been taken up by London society, sweet revenge for someone who’d often felt the sting of being excluded by the proper Bostonians back home. And the nine winsome Kennedy children had been photographed and written about as if they were some remarkable, very American experiment in genetics. In one breathtaking move the Kennedys had become America’s first family abroad. The invitation to spend a weekend with the King and Queen was final proof that they had indeed arrived.

As their limousine pulled into Windsor Park, Joe and Rose drank in the royal details like tourists. The park looked like a forest in some old English ballad; the castle itself had an intentional magnificence unmatched by anything they’d ever seen in all their travels. As they were shown inside, they saw vaulted ceilings, furniture upholstered in red damask, gold ornaments, and liveried servants moving with silent precision down the long hallways. Their suitcases were deposited in a suite they later learned had once been Queen Victoria’s private chambers. The peruked footman attending them looked like a relic from the British Museum.

Dinner itself was the kind of occasion Joe Kennedy liked—a banquet of anecdotes and impressions that could be passed on to his children like the handwritten notes of commendation he solicited from President Roosevelt and photographs of himself posed beside the famous. Prime Minister Chamberlain and his wife were there, along with the new Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax, and his wife, and the Queen’s relatives Lord and Lady Elphinstone. When someone mentioned the painting of Victoria wearing the Garter, the royal couple discussed the origins of the motto of the Order: Honi soit qui mal y pense. Later, Kennedy gossiped with the Queen about American movies while the King swapped insights with Rose about child rearing. Eventually the King began to give the Queen significant looks that an imposing floral centerpiece prevented her from catching, which forced him to make a joke of the royal nod that traditionally signaled that dinner was over. After the ladies withdrew to a sitting room, the gentlemen remained behind with brandy and cigars, allowing their talk to turn to war. Prime Minister Chamberlain still believed the conflict could be avoided and Kennedy agreed with him; the King hoped they were right.

Later on, after everyone else had retired, Rose Kennedy lay in the canopied bed so high off the floor that a stepstool was required to climb up into it. She listened as the Windsor tower clock tolled eleven and the guard changed in the courtyard below her window. Feeling like an American Cinderella, she tried to fix the details of the evening in her memory; yet the moment was so special, such a dramatic caesura in the rush of their lives, that she could hardly force herself to realize she was really there: I thought I must be dreaming that I, Rose Kennedy, a simple young matron, am really here at Windsor Castle, a guest of the Queen and two little Princesses. Although not given to sentimental backward looks at his life, Joe Kennedy too had experienced something like this sudden sense of perspective when they were dressing for dinner, although he expressed it with his usual directness: Well, Rose, this is a hell of a long way from East Boston.

Indeed, the distance the Kennedys had come in half a lifetime was almost incalculable. Their grandparents had fled Ireland for America in steerage; they returned to England in first class, official representatives of an even greater power. Their grandparents had arrived in the New World anonymous and poor; they returned to Europe wealthy and famous. Yet the distance they had come involved more than history or geography. Character was also important, character and ambition. That they had gotten anywhere at all, Rose would have been the first to acknowledge, was because of her husband, one of the most talked-about men in America.

Not yet fifty years old, Joe Kennedy had already gone through several careers, always moving forward, pushing toward the center of things, grasping for more. He had been an operator on Wall Street, a self-made man who accumulated one of the largest private fortunes of the twenties. He had gone to Hollywood and become one of the first tycoons, making movies and engineering some of the mergers that transformed the film world from a colony into an industry. He had entered politics and become one of the most controversial personalities of the New Deal, a power in the Democratic Party and a friend of the President. Rumors of numerous extramarital affairs, illicit business dealings, and even ties to crime only added a piquant touch of mystery to his reputation and made him seem all the more romantic, Gatsbyesque.

Contemplating this remarkable rise, Fortune magazine had written: The legends of Joe Kennedy make him at once the hero of a Frank Merriwell captain-of-the-nines adventure, a Horatio Alger success story, an E. Phillips Oppenheim tale of intrigue, and a John Dos Passos disillusioning report on the search for the big money. The truth makes him the central character of a picaresque novel of a sort not yet written.

Picaro: the hero of a picaresque novel; a rogue or adventurer who lives by his wits, working his way through various strata of society, worrying less about morality than mobility; part of everything but ultimately belonging nowhere. In many ways the definition fit. Joe Kennedy’s whole life had been one of restless movement, an attempt to transcend ethnic assumptions while striking out into terra incognita where no Irish Catholic had yet been. For some other East Boston boy, the Court of St. James’s might have been the culmination of ambition—minister to the nation that had oppressed his forefathers, occupant of America’s leading social and diplomatic position abroad. But even as he spent this foggy April weekend at Windsor, the picaresque tale was continuing to unfold as Kennedy intrigued to position himself as a candidate for the White House if Roosevelt decided against a third term.

Always on the lookout for opportunity, he was more than a ruthless opportunist, as some had called him during his rise to prominence; more than an Irish Sammy Glick, as he would be called later on, after he had returned from England with the career that had seemed limitless now in shambles. If anything, Joe Kennedy was a homegrown Faust, willing to venture whatever he had in exchange for a chance to move closer to the heart of the American dream. It was a pact that implicated not only himself but his family too. Not long after the visit to the King and Queen, Kennedy was asked once again how he would keep from confusing the interests of the United States with those of England, as previous United States ambassadors had done. It was easy, he replied; he had a special stake in the future of his country. After all—he flashed his famous grin—my wife and I have given nine hostages to fortune.

Hostages to fortune: the phrase would acquire a melancholy resonance in the years to come. When the saga he began had unraveled its skein, Joe Kennedy’s triumph was that fortune did smile on him, making the Kennedys the American story. His tragedy was that in the final accounting, the hostages he gave would be taken one by one, and even those who survived would never be free.

PART 1

ARCHITECT OF THEIR LIVES

What is character but the determination of incident?

What is incident but the illustration of character?

—Henry James

ONE

EXACTLY HOW MUCH A TALE his story was, how much a metaphor for the rise of the American Irish in general, Joe Kennedy himself would never acknowledge. In the middle of his life, when a Boston newspaper referred to him as an Irishman one time too many, he exploded: Goddamn it! I was born in this country! My children were born in this country! What the hell does someone have to do to become an American? He surrounded himself with tough-talking Boston Irish, yet he had little patience with the easy tears and fusty rhetoric of the stage Irishman who blamed all his woes on discrimination. A self-made, indeed, a self-created man, he was fiercely protective of the individual nature of his accomplishment and had to believe that it was due to temperament, to his own will and philosophy, to what he liked to call moxie, and not to the sharp and tragic rejection his people had experienced from the time they first set foot on American soil. Those who knew him best, however, saw Joe Kennedy as Irish to the core—a logical outcome of the undeclared war that went back at least two hundred years before his birth to the day when a woman named Goody Glover was hanged as a witch on Boston Common because she’d knelt in front of a statue of the Blessed Virgin while telling her beads in the devil’s tongue of Gaelic.

The saga of the Irish in America—a history Joe Kennedy rarely mentioned but never forgot—was part history and part parable. The first federal census, in 1790, had listed only 44,000 persons of Irish birth, most of them Ulstermen (Scotch-Irish, they called themselves) who, as skilled workers and small businessmen, had become outriders for the conquest of the American frontier. Over the next few decades immigration increased, but in 1845 the history of Ireland and America was altered forever when Irish farmers discovered a blight of unusual character during the early stages of the potato harvest. The crop had been unreliable for several years, but now freshly dug potatoes turned rotten in hours, decomposing into a gelatinous black ooze with a putrescent smell. Livestock fed on the potatoes died; people hungry enough to eat them became violently ill. As the blight spread, the Crown convened boards of inquiry whose learned men theorized that the disease was perhaps caused by steam emitted from the locomotives recently introduced into Ireland, by sea-gull droppings the farmers used as fertilizer, or even by mortiferous vapours rising up from blind volcanoes deep in the earth. But if the causes were mysterious (it would later be discovered that the blight had been transmitted by a fungus that traveled to Ireland from America), the effects were clear enough. Over the next ten years, the period of the Great Hunger, a million Irish died and another million left their homeland, most of them heading across the sea.

The only parallels for this exodus were the plagues and persecutions of the Old Testament. Packet ships following the example of the Cunard Lines offered fares as low as twelve dollars between Londonderry or Liverpool and New York or Boston; often the tickets were purchased by absentee English landlords anxious to be rid of their starving peasants. The Irish squeezed onto the coffin ships, floating pest houses of typhus and other diseases, and undertook a voyage as close as any white man ever came to experiencing the dread Middle Passage of the African slave trade. As much as 10 percent of a shipload were likely to die at sea. In 1847, the most disastrous year of all, an estimated 40,000, or 20 percent of those who set out from Ireland, perished on the trip. If crosses and tombs could be erected on water, wrote a U.S. commissioner for emigration, the whole route of the emigrant vessels from Europe to America would long since have assumed the appearance of a crowded cemetery.

Until 1840, Boston had been little more than a debarkation point for immigrants moving on to Canada and the interior of New England. In 1845, in fact, the city’s foremost demographer confidently asserted that there could be no further increase in the city’s population. But over the next ten years, a tidal wave of newcomers—Boston’s harbor master claimed to be able to identify another shipload of them as far away as Deer Island just by the smell—piled off their ships, swarmed into Boston, and stayed, a quarter of a million of them. Called famine Irish to distinguish them from their predecessors, they were too poor to pay the tolls and fares that would take them out of the waterlocked city; they packed into the reeking Paddyvilles and Mick Alleys, as many as thirty or forty crowding into one tiny cellar, prey to accident and disease that made their death rate as high as it had been in Ireland at the height of the hunger. By 1850 they comprised a third of the city’s population. Gravid with their sudden weight, Boston was about to give birth to the first American immigrant ghetto.

Construction companies from all over the country sent to Boston for Irish contract laborers, transporting them to new destinations in railway cars with sealed doors and curtains nailed across the windows. Those who stayed behind became coal heavers and longshoremen, muckers and blacklegs who dug canals and cleared marshes, remaking the face of the city and giving it an opportunity for unparallelled growth and expansion. (When tourists remarked on the beauty of the cobblestones on Beacon Hill some Irishman was sure to remark, Those aren’t cobblestones, those are Irish hearts.) Yet they remained a people apart, exempt from New England traditions of transcendental humanism and social uplift which pitied southern Negroes but not their own white slaves. By the 1850s, the infamous NINA—No Irish Need Apply—signs began to appear in Boston, as the antagonisms that culminated in the Know-Nothing Party and other nativist movements reached a dangerous simmer. Boston’s Brahmin elite retreated from the Irish as if from contagion, dividing the city into two cultures, separate and unequal. Mayor Theodore Lyman spoke for those who intended to keep it that way, labeling the Irish a race that will never be infused with our own, but on the contrary, will always remain distinct and hostile.

This was the atmosphere that twenty-six-year-old Patrick Kennedy found when he arrived in Boston in 1849. He was the third son of a prosperous farmer; the Kennedys of Dugganstown, New Ross, in County Wexford, had eighty acres on which they grew barley and raised beef, and their county was one of the areas least affected by the famine. Unlike the other immigrants, who were literally fleeing death, Patrick had undertaken the journey to improve his fortunes. He left his parents behind, a brother, James (the oldest son, John, had died in the battle of Vinegar Hill), and a sister, Mary. He would never see them again; they would never see America.

A handsome, muscular man of medium build, with reddish brown hair and bright blue eyes, Kennedy was not alone when he stepped off the Washington Irving at Noddle’s Island, a strip of land in Boston Harbor that eventually became East Boston after Irish labor had joined it to the mainland. On board he had met Bridget Murphy, also a refugee from County Wexford, and begun his courtship at once. They were married on September 26 of the year they arrived, in the Holy Redeemer Church, by Father John Williams, later to become Boston’s archbishop.

The Kennedys went no farther than East Boston, possibly because, like many of their compatriots, they couldn’t afford the two pennies it cost to take the ferry across the bay. Patrick sat with other Irishmen on the piers in the shadows of the Cunard liners hoping a short-handed stevedore could use him, and, along with other newcomers, walked the crooked streets winding up from the docks looking for work in the warren of small shops. After a while he was able to establish himself as a cooper, fashioning yokes and staves for the Conestoga wagons heading west in the great Gold Rush to California and making whiskey barrels destined for the waterfront saloons where the Irish met to exercise their natural sociability and drown their sorrows.

At a time when Americans were beginning to move to cities to escape the smothering traditions of farms and villages, the Irish reaffirmed the conservative values of their recent rural past in the new urban setting. The tenement apartment, like the Irish farm, was a place where the generations stayed together; the family was the primary unit of emotion and survival. As the New World yielded less to their efforts than they had expected, the Irish turned inward to their kin for support, accenting the clannishness the Brahmins found so primitive. Like other immigrants who had left one family behind, Patrick and Bridget Kennedy quickly started another—four children in rapid succession, Mary, Margaret, Johanna, and, on January 14, 1858, a son, Patrick Joseph.

Whatever the fanciful tales told back in the Old Country, there were few rags-to-riches stories for this first generation of Irish. The streets of East Boston were not paved with gold. Instead of a material legacy, they left a sweat equity in America for their children and grandchildren to capitalize on. On November 22, 1858, ten months after the birth of his son, Patrick died of cholera, leaving behind no portraits or documents, just a family. He had survived in Boston for nine years, only five less than the life expectancy for an Irishman in America at mid-century. The first Kennedy to arrive in the New World, he was the last to die in anonymity.

HER HUSBAND’S DEATH FORCED Bridget Kennedy to look for a paying job, and she clerked in a notions shop near the ferry building which, through hard saving, in time became hers and the main support for her family. In an era when Irish ambivalence about America was intense—some Irishmen would soon riot against the draft at the same time that others were serving with distinction in campaigns against the Confederacy—Bridget Kennedy had no doubts about her adopted home. Realizing that the boy Patrick Joseph (known in the neighborhood as Pat’s boy until they gave him the grownup nickname P. J.) was the key to the family’s future, Bridget and her daughters pampered him and tried to keep him out of trouble. For a while he went to a school run by the Sisters of Notre Dame and helped his mother in the shop. But by the time he was a teenager, he was working on the docks as a stevedore. Over the next few years, as his sisters married, P. J. saved his money, looking for a way to solidify his family’s tenuous hold on respectability. Not long after his twenty-second birthday, he heard of a run-down saloon for sale in a dilapidated section on Haymarket Square. With loans from his mother and sisters, he bought the place and went into business for himself.

P. J. Kennedy had the most important qualification of a saloonkeeper: he was a good listener. What he heard from the other side of the bar during the first years he was building his business had less to do with the tragic hopelessness of Ireland than with questions of power in Boston. When the Irish first arrived, the Brahmins, eloquent theorists about democracy, had tried to blunt their impact by statute—attempting to extend the residency requirement for voting from five to twenty-one years. When this maneuver and others like it failed, they had sought to keep the Irish quarantined in shanty towns. But it was this enforced closeness, combining with their Old World heritage of clandestine organization for self defense, that made the Boston Irish political in a way that was unrivaled by any other immigrant group.

Politics for them did not result from abstract theories about representative government or the perfection of human nature; it was a strategy of survival. By the 1870s they had begun to form barroom associations which took over and systematized the chaotic political behavior in the streets. Building on family friendships and neighborhood loyalties, going street by street and ward by ward, they began moving into the local Democratic Party structures, taking them over by sheer numbers and nerve—that moxie Joe Kennedy would prize so highly and turning them into something like a parallel government, a machine that had to be built because existing civic institutions did not serve their needs for jobs, for protection against unscrupulous landlords, employers, and other social predators. In New York the machine was Tammany; in Boston it was a network of political clubs spread throughout the city’s wards, each with a boss bound to his people by a web of mutual loyalty and self-interest, brokering power for himself and his constituents.

The first great boss in Boston was Martin Lomasney, a stubby, cigar-chewing man in a derby whose father had been a tailor in Ireland. Known as the Mahatma, Lomasney met immigrants at the wharves and herded them to his headquarters at the West End’s Henricks Club. The deal he offered showed the beautiful simplicity of the machine, a synchronicity of moving parts that made it the political equivalent of perpetual motion. In return for help getting them settled, Lomasney asked only that the newcomers register as Democrats and vote as he told them to. (And for those uncertain about the mechanics of the franchise he had electoral aids to help them, the most famous of which was a fine-tooth comb with the teeth cut out in a pattern that, when superimposed on a ballot, showed exactly how to vote.) With their votes he got patronage which he used to find them employment. He sold his services effectively: Is somebody out of a job? We do our best to place him and not necessarily on the public payroll. Does the family run in arrears with the landlord or the butcher? We lend a helping hand. Do the kids need clothing or the mother a doctor? We do what we can, and sure, as the world is run, such things must be done. We keep old friends and make new ones.

There was a perverse integrity in Lomasney and his system, as muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens discovered when he came to Boston to do a damning article on the Mahatma and found him far from defensive. Who do you think you’re kidding? Lomasney challenged him. You get paid for muckraking and I get paid for creating what you call the muck.… Look, you walk your side of the street and I’ll walk mine. The two men ultimately became friends and later on Steffens said that it was Lomasney, more than anyone else, who had made the Boston Irish players in the game.

For an ambitious young man like P. J. Kennedy, this game offered excitement as well as rewards. Although just into his twenties, he cut an imposing figure—a large man with a full face, thick red hair, and piercing blue eyes that almost seemed larger than the Teddy Roosevelt glasses. He had already established himself as trustworthy and responsible, old beyond his realistic years, as a customer said, and had been successful enough to buy a second tavern across the street from the East Boston Shipyards where he had once worked. Having seen the dangers of drink up close, he was that rarest of Irishmen, a teetotaler, relaxing his rule only on the most festive occasions, when he allowed himself a single shot glass of beer. As the saloons made money, he looked for other opportunities, buying into a partnership in a well-known Boston hotel called the Maverick House, and in 1885 opening his own liquor-importation business, P. J. Kennedy and Company, located at numbers 15 and 17 High Street. His major product was Haig and Haig scotch, which he supplied to some of Boston’s best hotels and restaurants.

Political by nature, he found that politics came naturally to him. In 1884 he had been elected to the Democratic Club of Ward Two. (He publicized both his careers at once, handing out to everybody wood-handled corkscrews inscribed Compliments of P. J. Kennedy and Co., Importers.) Because East Boston lacked a strong leader of Lomasney’s stature, he moved rapidly into the ward’s hierarchy. In 1886, the year that children of Irish immigrants first outnumbered those of the native born in Boston, P. J. and his allies took control of the Democratic Committee of Ward Two and he was elected to the State Senate.

At the same time he was choosing a political life, Kennedy began courting Mary Augusta Hickey (Mame he called her). A handsome, physically imposing woman (larger than P. J. himself), she was the daughter of James Hickey, a prosperous businessman. Mary Augusta later told her children how she had watched the young legislator passing the parlor window of the Hickey home at 144 Saratoga Street on his morning route, and set her cap for him. It was a good match for Kennedy because the Hickey family was more settled and more comfortable than his own. One son, John, had graduated from Harvard Medical School, among the first Irishmen to do so. Another son, James Jr., was moving up through the ranks of the Boston police force toward an eventual captaincy. A third, Charles, was a funeral-parlor owner in Brockton, where he also dabbled in politics on the way to becoming the city’s mayor. The Boston Irish community might have considered the Kennedys beneath the Hickeys, but P. J. himself did not. On Thanksgiving Eve, 1887, he and Mary Augusta were married at Sacred Heart Church.

The couple moved into a three-story house at 165 Webster Street. Set on the crest of a hill, its back lawn sloping towards Boston Harbor, its front yard facing the city skyline, No. 165 was one of the most modest dwellings on a block which was rapidly becoming known as the Beacon Street of the Irish community. The following year, P. J.’s mother, Bridget, died in her home at 25 Borden Street at the age of sixty-seven. She had lived long enough to see Pat’s boy establish himself in the new world where she had struggled to survive. She had also lived long enough to see his first child, Joseph, born into it on September 6, 1888.

That year was significant for P. J. in another way: the party organization chose him to go to the Democratic National Convention and give a seconding speech for Grover Cleveland. It was a year when Boston’s Irish elected their first mayor, Hugh O’Brien, and were climbing the greasy pole of political ambition with a vengeance. But while enjoying the official success of their assault, they had also gotten a feel for the severity of the struggle ahead. Evicted from City Hall, Boston’s Brahmins had retreated to their Back Bay brownstones, grasping the levers of economic power all the more tightly and drawing social lines with a sharper edge. The message was clear: the Irish could be policemen, civil servants, settlement-house workers, even mayors; they could have the thankless task of assimilating and controlling a new wave of Catholic immigrants from lands where English was a foreign language. But they could not expect acceptance or a partnership in the complex arrangements by which ultimate social power was exercised.

During three terms in the Massachusetts Senate, P. J. did not distinguish himself as a particularly innovative or energetic legislator. In the entire 1892 session, for instance, he introduced only two bills—one mandating the clerk to supply daily magazines to the legislators and the other to put two more men onto the payroll of the Boston Fire Department. For him, the East End had the only action worth being involved in. While at the State Capitol, he tightened his hold over Ward Two, emerging as its most powerful figure. It was a sign of how far he had come that in 1898 he was able to battle Martin Lomasney for control of the city’s Democratic nominating convention. Playing by the rules of the day, P. J. had his troops put up blockades around the convention site. They kept rivals out until the Mahatma disguised his delegates as a funeral procession and smuggled them through Kennedy’s lines in a hearse.

After his years in the Senate, P. J. spent his days holding forth in a private room in one of his two saloons. He had patronage positions like Elections Commissioner, Wire Commissioner, and for a time Acting Fire Commissioner, all the while tending the pastures of Ward Two—listening to supplicants, arranging job interviews, addressing recommendations. In a graybound volume, carefully numbered and indexed in an ink script, he saved blue and purple carbons of the typed originals.

Letter #44, March 14, 1904:

Dear Dick,

…I have a matter now that I would like to have you assist me in. I have a young man, a friend of mine, who is a graduate of our schools and also of Harvard College, and is taking an extra course to fit him for teaching; yet under the rules as they prevail at the present time in the School Committee of Boston he is obliged to go outside of Boston to get a place. I do not think that any other city in the Commonwealth has such a rule as that. You may see that under these conditions it is hard for one of our young men to get a start, as instead of Boston boys being in a position to benefit by having been born here, it seems as though that is the very thing that works against them. It is particularly hard on one of our kind (I mean by this the Catholic boy) because there are very few cities in the Commonwealth that I know of that will give one of our boys a position if they know that he is Catholic.… I thought if you folks did not happen to have any young man in your section, that was an applicant, possibly this young man might get an opportunity there.…

In 1907, P. J. had gotten enough distance from his origins to undertake a sentimental journey to Ireland, visiting the New Ross farm of his ancestors in County Wexford, collecting keepsakes from the surviving relatives with whom he had kept in touch, and making the pilgrimage to Vinegar Hill, where his grandfather had fought and his great-uncle had died. It was with a great deal of pleasure, he wrote to his Irish cousins after returning to Boston,

that I showed to my children and my sisters and the friends gathered around when I arrived home, the copy book my father used when he went to school. My children were particularly interested in it, and you know how pleased I was…the fact that I had never seen my father to remember him…so one of the pleasures of my whole trip was bringing that copy book back home.

He had had his motto engraved on a plaque which he hung above his desk, its sentiments capturing the Irish feel for the evanescence of life that he had inherited from his father, but also containing the core of a ward boss’s political wisdom: I shall pass through this world but once. Any kindness I can do, or goodness show, let me do it now—for I shall not pass this way again.

By the early 1900s P. J. had brokered his way up from being just another of twenty-five ward bosses to being one of the four members of the so-called Board of Strategy, which had outflanked Lomasney to become the center of power in Boston. Along with Kennedy, the weekly noontime meetings in Room 8 of the Quincy Hotel had a seat for Smiling Jim Donovan of the South End, Joseph Corbett of Charlestown, and the member of the quartet P. J. liked least, the North End’s John F. Fitzgerald.

Fitzie, as he was known (the nickname Honey Fitz would come later, in the sentimental afterglow of his active political career), was P. J.’s opposite—loud and pugnacious, something of a philanderer, a histrionic politician, reveling in a public display of his considerable gifts. He was short and slight, although an outstanding athlete; he was always smiling in his photographs but had a heavybrowed, brooding look when crossed, an expression he affected more often after someone said it made him look a little like Napoleon.

While P. J. Kennedy had plotted a steady and patient climb to power, working behind the scenes and calculating his opportunities carefully, John F. Fitzgerald was a gate crasher by nature, and his assault on Brahmin institutions had made him something of a legend in the North End while he was still a young man. As a boy he had insisted on going to Boston Latin School, a venerable Boston institution whose alumni included such figures as Cotton Mather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Adams. After graduation, he went on to Harvard Medical School for a year, but he had to leave to take care of his six brothers when his father died. He worked in the insurance business and took up the Brahmin game of polo, playing in matches throughout New England.

But it was always clear that Fitzgerald had the gift and that politics would be his life. He became active in neighborhood affairs and caught the eye of Lomasney himself. Soon he was apprentice to the sorcerer of Boston politics, attending every dance and caper, distributing turkeys at Christmas-time, keeping a card file of people who needed jobs, scanning the newspapers for obituaries each morning so he’d know what wakes to attend that night. His energy and high spirits had soon made him the dominant figure in the North End, which he so habitually evoked as the dear old North End that his followers became known as the dearos. It was said that Fitzie was the first and most accomplished practitioner of the Irish switch—shaking the hand of one person while talking to another. But his greatest gift was the gift of gab. His ability to talk nonstop for hours helped inspire a popular verse later on: Honey Fitz can talk you blind / on any subject you can find / fish and fishing, motor boats / Railroads, streetcars, getting votes… A word for it entered the lexicon of Boston politics: Fitzblarney.

He was elected to the State Senate in 1892, serving alongside P. J. Kennedy there and recognizing him as a probable future rival for power. He went on to a term in Congress, where his kinetic personality once prompted Ohio Representative Henry Grosvenor to yell from the House floor, You are like a monkey on an organ grinder’s rope, always jumping around and shouting! Concerned with power rather than issues, Fitzgerald did rise to the occasion once, when he led the opposition to a bill which would have required potential immigrants to be able to pass a test that included being able to read the Constitution. After President Cleveland had vetoed the legislation, Fitzgerald was cornered by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. You are an impudent young man, the imperious Yankee began. Do you think Jews or Italians have any right in this country? Fitzie didn’t miss a beat. As much right as your father or mine, he replied. After all, it’s only a difference of a few ships.

But for someone raised in the dear old North End, national office was like serving in a foreign embassy. The only place that mattered was Boston; the only office that counted was mayor, a sort of Irish presidency. Having become moderately wealthy after leaving Congress by publishing a Boston newspaper, the Republic (and using his political clout to insure large advertising revenues), Fitzgerald made his move in 1905, even though it meant running against the opposition of his old allies on the Strategy Board. He waged the kind of campaign which until then had not been seen in Boston, making up to thirty speeches a day and mobilizing his dearos into a force that snaked through the city chanting his slogan: The people not the bosses must rule! Bigger, Better, Busier Boston!

When Fitzgerald won, he became the first mayor whose parents had been born in Ireland. In his victory speech, he said that he wished only that his mother and father were present: It would have been a great delight to them, for they were natives of a country where democracy could not be exercised freely due to English dominion. On the night of his election he journeyed to the headquarters of Ward Two to make peace with Kennedy. While there he couldn’t resist plunging into that crowd too. As P. J. watched the little man pressing flesh, he shook his head in wonder: He knows them all. I don’t know half of them, even though they are in my district. Then the new Mayor came to him and said: Now that the fight is over, Pat, let’s get together. As the two of them shook hands, small and large, it was a historic moment in the immigrants’ rise and a first hurrah for the dynasty to come.

TWO

IF P. J. HAD BEEN ABLE TO have his way, Joe Kennedy would have been named Patrick Joseph Kennedy III. But at the last minute Mary Augusta decided he should be Joseph Patrick. The reason she gave to outsiders was that she wanted no ‘little P.J.s’ running around the house, but to the family she said that this version of the same name sounded less Irish, and they realized it was a way of indicating that she wasn’t keen on the boy’s following in his father’s footsteps.

Joe’s two younger sisters, Loretta and Margaret, treated their brother like an Irish prince. Margaret, the younger of the two and so attractive and lively that she was later called the Kennedys’ It Girl, said of him later on: I thought he was a god. I’d be thrilled even if he asked me to put something away for him—anything, just as long as he noticed me. Loretta was always struck by the authority he assumed in the family, even as a child. She later told a newspaperman eager for an anecdote how she’d undergone a crisis of belief one Christmas when she came downstairs and saw the exact doll house she’d wanted but realized that it was too large for Santa Claus to have brought it down the chimney. When she questioned P. J. he shrugged and looked away. Joe immediately jumped up and told her that Santa had a magic wand which he used to make objects larger or smaller at will, thus preserving her faith for another year.

It was Mary Augusta who dominated Joe’s youth. Calling him my Joe and possessively monopolizing his time, she quizzed him about his school work and reminded him that his Uncle John had been to Harvard. It was her stern stare of disapproval—the Hickey look as the rest of the family referred to it—that spurred him to do better. And it was she who established his ambivalent attitude toward his Irish past. She was proud of the status in the community that P. J.’s political activity brought, yet aware that for proper people—the Bostonians who’d moved away from the Irish as if fearing contagion—politics had become a faintly disreputable profession. She wanted Joe to be somebody in a way that her husband—whatever his place in the hierarchy of Irish Boston—was not. Responsive to her ambitions, he came running home from the local parish school every noon to have lunch with her. He missed me, Mary Augusta reminisced happily later on, after he had established himself as one of the leading young men of the city. He missed me and wanted to hurry home and see me again.

Yet however ambivalent Mary Augusta may have been, politics continued to be the central reality of the Kennedys’ lives and as much a part of Joe’s early experience as the air he breathed. His growing up was an endless round of musicales and marriages, wakes and ward meetings—those grounds where campaign and community met. There was a constant flow of supplicants to 165 Webster. Tell them we’re eating, Mary Augusta would say in the early days when knocks sounded on the door. But P. J. would shake his head and stand, carefully wiping his moustache: No, I’ll see them now. After he had gone to the door, there would be hushed talk in the hallway and then he would stick his head into the dining room again as he was putting on his coat and hat: You’ll have to go on without me. Later she would see to it that fresh clothes were laid out for him in case he had to go out for an evening appointment, and she would make sure the cook prepared a large bowl of clam chowder surrounded by crackers ready for him when he came home. Sometimes Joe went with his father on his rounds. For the rest of his life, he remembered one election day when they were walking down the street and a Kennedy lieutenant dashed up and proudly reported that he had already voted 128 times.

The bosses were like an Irish family—feuding and maneuvering for advantage and obsessed with each other’s doings and undoings, yet so close that they even vacationed together. One of the photographs Mary Augusta kept showed her husband, rotund with authority, on horseback next to little Fitzie, both of them incongruously attired in jodhpurs and hunting coats, ready to run the foxes during a junket to North Carolina. Another snapshot remained from one of the outings at Orchard Beach the Democratic Party of Boston staged every summer. It showed Joe as a light-haired, squinting boy, sitting a few feet from the Mayor’s skinny daughter Rose.

LATER ON, JOE KENNEDY TRIED to make his amazing accomplishment even greater than it was by implying that he had known poverty as a boy. In fact, his father’s intertwined businesses of liquor and politics had produced a comfortable life, and enough of a surplus for investments in a local coal company and in Boston’s only Irish-controlled bank, the Columbia Trust. P. J. was well enough off to have a staff of maids and cooks to help Mary Augusta, to winter in Palm Beach when he chose, and to purchase a sixty-foot yacht, the Eleanor—skippered by a retired admiral—which he used for pleasure cruises in Boston Harbor as well as summertime meetings of the Board of Strategy. When the time came for his daughters to marry, he was able to stage impressive weddings for them: Margaret and her husband exchanged vows before hundreds of friends in an immense tent erected in the back yard of the Webster Street house, and Loretta had an elegant reception at the Copley Plaza Hotel. Brahmins living on trusts from the great New England fortunes in shipping and textiles might fret over the moral obligations of wealth, but P. J. and his Irish-American friends found such problems difficult to imagine. Money was not associated with guilt; it was the highly combustible fuel for their rise upward.

If Joe Kennedy always had enough, however, he always wanted more. An almost excessively wholesome boy—he had freckles, red hair a shade or two lighter than his father’s, and P. J.’s shockingly blue eyes—he was what his era called a go-getter. It was Mary Augusta who started him on his career, deciding when he turned twelve that he should have a job and arranging one for him at a high-class millinery shop delivering hats to Brahmin ladies. No ordinary delivery boy, he carried his merchandise in a horse-drawn carriage with a liveried driver, taking the hats inside the grand houses and waiting to see if they fit. If you are asked your name, Mary Augusta instructed him, answer ‘Joseph.’ There was no need to emphasize his Irish heritage.

After his millinery job, Joe branched out on his own. He sold candy on the harbor excursion boat Excelsior. He hawked papers at the ferry building close to the spot where his grandfather had stepped off the Washington Irving half a century earlier. He worked as a Sabbath goy lighting stoves for Orthodox Jews on their days of worship. When he heard that the Larkin Soap Company was sponsoring a contest, he got his friends to canvass the neighborhoods of East Boston and he won first prize—an oak bookcase on which he stacked the works of Horatio Alger that his sister Loretta remembered him reading avidly.

Making money was a way of exercising one’s God-given talents, of using the world for a gymnastics of self. He grew up not only on the lookout for opportunities but also calculating their marginal returns. Mae Duanne, the rawboned Irish girl Mary Augusta hired to chaperone him around town, was struck by this aspect of his character. Once they went to Revere Beach in the middle of a Boston heat wave. Joe’s dilemma for the day was that he had enough money either to rent a bathing suit or to have a tintype picture taken, but not to do both. I think I’ll choose the tintype, Duanne remembered him saying after long consideration. When the day is over that’ll be the end of swimming and I’ll have nothing to show for it. The picture will last a long time.

When not wondering how to make money, Kennedy was exploring ways to shape his world. He directed plays in the back yard, assigning parts and collecting admission fees at the gate. (In one show he put on an Uncle Sam costume and read an essay he had written on What America Means to All of Us while Columbia the Gem of the Ocean was played in the background.) He organized a group of teenage friends into a military drill team to march in the Memorial Day parade. He became an accomplished athlete, recognizing sports as one of the few places ruled by an aristocracy of talent. Organizing a neighborhood baseball team called the Assumptions, he appointed himself first baseman, coach, and business manager, buying uniforms with money from his newspaper job, scheduling games with teams from other neighborhoods and then passing the hat to spectators who’d stopped to watch. Some of his teammates complained that they were functioning as second fiddles in a one-man band. Kennedy’s sister Margaret, to whom he tossed his glove to put away when he came home from a game, always remembered his response: If you can’t be captain, don’t play.

He had started off at a school run by the Christian Brothers, but Mary Augusta felt that while Catholic schools like those she and her husband had briefly attended might be theologically sound and socially safe, they also tended to isolate students from the larger world and stunt their ambitions. And so in 1901 she enrolled Joe in Boston Latin, the elite school that Mayor Fitzgerald had attended years earlier. He was aggressive and popular—president of his class; colonel on the drill team that won the city-wide competition; a good enough baseball player to win the Mayor’s Cup (presented by Fitzie himself) for having the highest batting average in the city his senior year. In a valedictory mood he later called Boston Latin a shrine that somehow seemed to make us all feel that if we could stick it out we were made of just a little bit better stuff than the fellows our age who were attending what we always thought were easier schools. It was the place where he first saw that he could not only compete with but outdo students who were otherwise regarded as more American than he.

The next step was Harvard. If the university had ceased to be the special preserve of the Cabots and Lowells and other families who talked only to each other and to God, it was still a purposefully intimidating experience for what were regarded as the lower social orders. Boston’s crusty Cardinal O’Connell tried to steer the young people in his flock to Boston University or Holy Cross, both run by the Jesuits; but some Irish Catholics persisted in choosing Harvard, traveling back and forth between Cambridge and their own neighborhood every day by trolley car knowing that behind their backs they were referred to as untouchables.*

Joe Kennedy insisted on living in Harvard Yard, but even he went home on weekends to the seaside home P. J. had bought at 97 Washington Street in Winthrop, next door to his austere brother-in-law, Dr. Hickey, who lived there with his spinster sister Kate. Joe would bring some of his college friends with him, and they would spend Sundays walking along the beach in their blue trousers and blazers and then go in to feast on his mother’s baked ham and baked beans. After dinner they would all go into the parlor. First there would be the ritual of trying to stump Mary Augusta at spelling. Joe would have prepared his schoolmates, challenging them earlier to find difficult words in the dictionary. Sometimes they would come up with scientific and technical terms that she didn’t understand, but she still managed to spell them. And then Joe would beam: No one can stump my mother! Afterward, with Loretta accompanying on the piano, Joe would lead the songs: Peg o’ My Heart, Danny Boy, and, of course, Fair Harvard.

As son of a saloonkeeper and, even worse, grandson of one of the famine Irish, Joe Kennedy should have found university life difficult. But he shrugged off slurs against his background: when one door was slammed in his face he immediately knocked on the next one. He looked for openings, putting the onus on others by making them show prejudice in rejecting him, rather than taking himself out of the running in advance to avoid being hurt.

Joe sucked up to ‘important’ people quite ingloriously and without scruple, says one classmate. He tried to get some reflected glory by selecting roommates who were All-American football players and the like. Although he failed to make one of the good final clubs like Porcellian or Fly, he was chosen for Hasty Pudding, a significant accomplishment for someone from his background.

One episode that summarizes his technique occurred on the baseball diamond. His fine line-drive hitting had earned Kennedy a starting position on the Harvard freshman team, but he had never developed his fielding or base running, and by his senior year he was riding the bench. He would not have won a letter except that team captain and pitcher Chick McLaughlin asked the coach to put him in the game against Yale in the ninth inning. On the last play of the game, McLaughlin fielded a grounder to the mound and tossed the ball to Joe for the put-out. Instead of giving the ball back to McLaughlin, who’d earned it as a trophy, Kennedy stuffed it in his pocket and left the field. McLaughlin later admitted that he’d asked for Kennedy to be put in the game for a reason. His ambition was to open a movie house after graduation, and shortly before the game he had been visited by some anonymous men who pointed out that given P. J. Kennedy’s influence at City Hall it would be much easier for McLaughlin to get the required business permits for his venture if Joe Kennedy got his letter.

On the whole, Kennedy’s Harvard balance sheet after four years was mixed. He was not a particularly good student. (I did so poorly in a course in banking and finance, he said after Fortune had estimated his wealth at $250 million and he could savor the irony, that I had to drop out of it after one semester.) Nor was he particularly successful with the matrons of Beacon Hill, whose deb balls, dances, and weekends destroyed the modest attempts of Harvard officials to encourage democracy among their students. But he was fairly well liked by those not bothered by his social climbing. And he did establish himself as prime suitor of Rose Fitzgerald, lace-curtain daughter of the Mayor.

At the time he graduated he was still very Irish—brash, feisty, determined to get into everything. Rather than educating these qualities out of him, Harvard had paradoxically shown their value. He still wanted everything that those who proposed themselves as his social betters had; but he also saw their hypocrisy, the emptiness of prerogatives that had little to do with talent or real achievement. Envious and scornful, he emerged thinking he was as good as anyone else in the Class of 1912, and he set out to complete the journey to America his grandfather had begun half a century earlier.

WHILE AT HARVARD, KENNEDY had worked part-time as a tour-bus operator, getting his father to persuade the Mayor to award him a choice route and going into partnership with a friend who did the driving while he delivered a spiel through a megaphone about the great Boston landmarks of American history. He had put $300 into the business and it had netted him $5000 during his college years; that was a considerable sum in those days, but upon graduation he was looking for far bigger money. He decided to go into banking because it was the basic profession on which all others depended.

Joe Kennedy did not begin his career as a teller or junior executive, like some of his classmates, who defined a career as patient upward movement to the top of an institution. He got himself appointed a state bank examiner, a job that allowed him to travel throughout the eastern part of Massachusetts looking at bank records and books, learning how the banks made their money and how they were connected to other businesses. In less than a year he saw the opportunity he wanted. The Columbia Trust was about to be taken over by a downtown bank, the First National. The merger was seen as a threat by the Irish community, whose exclusion from the banking fraternity—before the Columbia was founded—made the takeover a charged issue.¹ Joe decided that if anybody was to take over the Columbia, he should be the one. Joe borrowed to the hilt, lining up support and playing a game of bluff that finally forced First National to give up. When the merger was called off, the Columbia directors rewarded him with the top job. At twenty-five he had become the youngest bank president in the country. In the press attention that followed, a local newspaper reporter asked exactly what he wanted out of life. Kennedy’s reply came without hesitation: I want to be a millionaire by the age of thirty-five. At the same time he secured his position in banking, Joe was making his move in other areas too, notably with Rose Fitzgerald.

Her father had established the family in a large and expensive home in Dorchester, complete with scrollwork porch, mansard turret, and stainedglass insert in the front door portraying what Fitzie insisted was the family’s coat of arms. He had seen that his daughters were as well finished as any Beacon Hill heiress, with lessons in French, piano, and voice.

An Irish aristocrat at home (greenbloods, the Brahmins sneeringly called people with such pretenses), Fitzie was a showman in office, a gladhander and fancy man whose liaison with a shapely blond cigarette girl at the Ferncroft Inn named Toodles Ryan was one of the poorest-kept secrets in Boston. The city’s number-one uninvited guest, he would go to parties with spare collars wrapped in a handkerchief in his back pocket so that he could dance all night and still look fresh. He was indefatigable, celebrating his fiftieth birthday by sprinting a hundred yards at seven o’clock in the morning, running a quarter-mile at nine, wrestling at noon, and boxing at one.

His wife, Mary Hannon Fitzgerald, a small, trim, withdrawn woman with dark Irish good looks and a piety some regarded as excessive, was not interested in politics and begrudged the long stretches of time the Mayor was absent. (Once when he was at home organizing his six children for a group photograph to be used in a campaign, she told him, John, it does indeed seem refreshing to have you here. I’m not sorry you are to have photographs to mark the evening. I’m going to frame one and place a card over it on which I will write—‘Taken on his one evening at home.’) Because Mary Fitzgerald refused to get involved in politics, the role of hostess and greeter fell to Rose, Fitzie’s firstborn and favorite, who had grown up defending her father from charges of graft and explaining why his administration had developed such new civil service positions as Tea Warmer, Tree Climber, and Rubber Boot Repairman. When he campaigned, she was beside him. She played the piano for him when he broke into an Irish tenor, and introduced him to Sweet Adeline, which became his theme song.

Rose had hoped to go to Wellesley after graduating from Dorchester High. But the Mayor insisted she attend one of the Sacred Heart convent schools that had become the pinnacle of Catholic education for women. The nuns came from the wealthiest Catholic families, endowing the institutions with their inheritances. As part of their training, the girls learned the proper ways to address servants and deport themselves at dinner parties. French was emphasized as the second language of the well-bred. The religious instruction taught the child of the Sacred Heart the feminine virtues of tact, quiet courage, and the willingness to subordinate her will to another’s gracefully and even gaily, and to model herself on the ideal of womanhood found in the Mother of God.

In the summer of 1908, the Mayor sent Rose off to Europe for a grand tour. Once