An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 Read online

  What vivid sense of family history there was began with Jack’s two grandfathers—Patrick Joseph Kennedy and John F. Fitzgerald, both impressively successful men who achieved local fame and gave their children the wherewithal to enjoy comfortable lives. Patrick Joseph Kennedy was born in 1858, the year his father died. In an era when no public support program came to the aid of a widow with four children, Bridget Murphy Kennedy, Patrick’s mother, supported the family as a saleswoman and shopkeeper. At age fourteen, P.J., as he was called, left school to work on the Boston docks as a stevedore to help support his mother and three older sisters. In the 1880s, with money he had saved from his modest earnings, he launched a business career by buying a saloon in Haymarket Square. In time, he bought a second establishment by the docks. To capitalize on the social drinking of upper-class Boston, P.J. purchased a third bar in an upscale hotel, the Maverick House.

  With his handlebar mustache, white apron, and red sleeve garters, the stocky, blue-eyed, red-haired P.J. cut a handsome figure behind the bar of his taverns. By all accounts, he was a good listener who gained the regard and even affection of his patrons. Before he was thirty, his growing prosperity allowed him to buy a whiskey-importing business, P. J. Kennedy and Company, that made him a leading figure in Boston’s liquor trade.

  Likable, always ready to help less fortunate fellow Irishmen with a little cash and some sensible advice, P.J. enjoyed the approval and respect of most folks in East Boston, a mixed Boston neighborhood of upscale Irish and Protestant elite. Beginning in 1884, he converted his popularity into five consecutive one-year terms in the Massachusetts Lower House, followed by three two-year terms in the state senate. Establishing himself as one of Boston’s principal Democratic leaders, he was invited to give one of the seconding speeches for Grover Cleveland at the party’s 1888 national convention in St. Louis.

  But campaigning, speech making, and legislative maneuvering were less appealing to him than the behind-the-scenes machinations that characterized so much of Boston politics in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. After leaving the senate in 1895, P.J. spent his political career in various appointive offices—elections commissioner and fire commissioner—as the backroom boss of Boston’s Ward Two, and as a member of his party’s unofficial Board of Strategy. At board meetings over sumptuous lunches in room eight of the Quincy House hotel near Scollay Square, P.J. and three other power brokers from Charlestown and the South and North Ends chose candidates for local and statewide offices and distributed patronage.

  There was time for family, too. In 1887 P.J. married Mary Augusta Hickey, a member of an affluent “lace curtain” Irish family from the upscale suburb of Brockton. The daughter of a successful businessman and the sister of a police lieutenant, a physician with a Harvard medical degree, and a funeral home director, Hickey had solidified Kennedy’s move into the newly emerging Irish middle class, or as legendary Boston mayor James Michael Curley mockingly called them, “cut glass” Irish or FIFs (“First Irish Families”). By the time he died in 1929, P.J. had indeed joined the ranks of the cut-glass set, holding an interest in a coal company and a substantial amount of stock in a bank, the Columbia Trust Company. His wealth afforded his family of one son, Joseph Patrick, and two daughters an attractive home on Jeffries Point in East Boston.

  John F. Fitzgerald was better known in Boston than P.J. and had a greater influence on Jack’s life. Born in 1863, John F. was the fourth of twelve children. As a boy and a young man, his father’s standing as a successful businessman and his innate talents gained him admission to Boston’s storied Latin School (training ground for the offspring of the city’s most important families, including the Adamses, John, John Quincy, and Henry), where he excelled at athletics and compiled a distinguished academic record, graduating with honors. Earning a degree at Boston College, the city’s Jesuit university, John F.—or Johnnie Fitz or Fitzie, as friends called him—entered Harvard Medical School in 1884. When his father died in the spring of 1885, he abandoned his medical education, which had been more his father’s idea than his own, to care for his six younger brothers. Taking a job in the city’s Customs House as a clerk, he simultaneously converted an affinity for people and politics into a job as a secretary to Matthew Keany, one of the Democratic party’s North End ward bosses.

  In 1891 Fitzie won election to a seat on Boston’s Common Council, where he overcame resistance from representatives of more affluent districts to spend $350,000 on a public park for his poor North End constituents. The following year, when Keany died, Fitzgerald’s seven-year apprenticeship in providing behind-the-scenes services to constituents and manipulating local power made him Keany’s logical successor.

  He was a natural politician—a charming, impish, affable lover of people who perfected the “Irish switch”: chatting amiably with one person while pumping another’s hand and gazing fondly at a third. His warmth of character earned him yet another nickname, “Honey Fitz,” and he gained a reputation as the only politician who could sing “Sweet Adeline” sober and get away with it. A pixielike character with florid face, bright eyes, and sandy hair, he was a showman who could have had a career in vaudeville.

  But politics, with all the brokering that went into arranging alliances and the hoopla that went into campaigning, was his calling. A verse of the day ran: “Honey Fitz can talk you blind / on any subject you can find / Fish and fishing, motor boats / Railroads, streetcars, getting votes.” His gift of gab became known as Fitzblarney, and his followers as “dearos,” a shortened version of his description of his district as “the dear old North End.”

  Fitzgerald’s amiability translated into electoral successes. In 1892 he overcame internal bickering among the ward bosses to win election to the state senate. Compiling a progressive voting record and a reputation as an astute legislator eager to meet the needs of every constituent, Fitzgerald put himself forward in 1894 for the only sure Democratic congressional seat in Massachusetts, Boston’s Ninth District. His candidacy pitted him against his fellow bosses on the Strategy Board, who backed incumbent congressman Joseph O’Neil. Running a brilliant campaign that effectively played on suffering caused by the panic of 1893 and the subsequent depression, Fitzgerald’s torchlight parades and promises of public programs produced an unprecedented turnout. Also helped by a division among the bosses, who responded to his candidacy by failing to unite against him, the thirty-one-year-old Fitzgerald won a decisive primary victory.

  During three terms in Congress, Fitzgerald voted consistently for measures serving local and statewide needs, for laws favoring progressive income taxes over higher protective tariffs, and for a continuation of unrestricted immigration. Massachusetts’ senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a tall slender Brahmin who, with his Vandyke beard and courtly manner, could not have been more of a contrast to Fitzgerald, once lectured the Irishman on the virtues of barring inferior peoples—indigestible aliens—from corrupting the United States. “You are an impudent young man,” Lodge began. “Do you think the Jews or the Italians have any right in this country?” Fitzgerald replied: “As much right as your father or mine. It was only a difference of a few ships.”

  At the end of three terms as one of only three Catholics in the House, Fitzgerald announced his decision not to run again. It was a prelude to gaining the post he wished above all, mayor of Boston. During the next five years, while he waited for a favorable moment to run, he prospered as the publisher of a local newspaper, The Republic. Demonstrating a keen business sense, Fitzgerald substantially increased department-store advertising in his pages by running stories of special interest to women.

  One of the city’s leading political power brokers as the boss of the North End’s Ward Six, despite having moved to Concord and then Dorchester, Fitzgerald was in a strong position to become mayor when the incumbent died in 1905. But another round of opposition from his fellow bosses, including P.J., put his election in doubt. In response, he devised a shrewd anti-boss campaign that appealed to current
progressive antagonism to undemocratic machine politics. Despite a bruising primary fight and another closely contested race against a formidable Republican, Fitzgerald gained the prize, chanting, “The people not the bosses must rule! Bigger, better, busier Boston.” Within hours of winning the election, he showed up at P. J. Kennedy’s East Boston office to say that there were no hard feelings about P.J.’s opposition to him. It was, two family biographers later said, “a first hurrah for the dynasty to come.”

  HONEY FITZ HAD COMPLEMENTED his political and business successes with marriage to his second cousin, Mary Josephine Hannon, or Josie, as intimates called her. They had met first in Acton at the Hannons’ farm in September 1878, when Fitzgerald was fifteen and Josie thirteen. As he remembered it, he immediately fell in love with the beautiful girl to whom he would be married for sixty-two years, but Fitzgerald had to wait eleven years before Josie’s family put aside their concerns about the consequences of having Josie marry a blood relative, however distant. The union produced six children, three sons and three daughters.

  The eldest of the Fitzgerald children, Rose Elizabeth, was Fitz’s favorite. Praying for a daughter who might fulfill his dreams of winning acceptance into polite society, Honey Fitz envisioned Rose’s life as a storybook tale of proper upbringing and social acclaim. As Rose later viewed it, her father succeeded: “There have been times when I felt I was one of the more fortunate people in the world, almost as if Providence, or Fate, or Destiny, as you like, had chosen me for special favors.”

  From her birth in the summer of 1890, she led a privileged life. When Rose was seven, Fitz and Josie moved the family to the Boston suburb of West Concord, where Rose remembers “a big, old rambling . . . wonderfully comfortable house” and the traditional pleasures and satisfactions of life in a small New England town: “serenity, order, family affection, horse-and-buggy rides to my grandparents’ nearby home, climbing apple trees, picking wild flowers.” There was the excitement of a father coming home on weekends from Washington, where, in Rose’s limited understanding, he was something called a “congressman” doing important things. Whatever her sadness at his frequent absences, she remembered “the absolute thrill” of driving to the Concord train station to meet him and his affectionate greeting, with “a wonderful present” always pulled from his bags. She also recalled a trip to the White House at age seven with her father, where President William McKinley warmly greeted them and gave her a carnation. “There was no one in the world like my father,” she said. “Wherever he was, there was magic in the air.” There were also the memories of the matched pair of beautiful black horses that pulled the family carriage and of her own rig that at twelve she began driving to the Concord library to borrow books.

  There were also the summers in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, where Boston’s prominent Irish families would seek the pleasure of one another’s company and relief from the heat. A beachfront crowded with hotels, cottages, and gregarious folks strolling, sunning themselves, swimming, fishing, shopping, playing cards, and eating together in the Brunswick Hotel’s huge dining room, Old Orchard was described as “the typical watering place for those who detest the name of solitude.” Rose remembered the joy of playing with other children and being surrounded by relatives and family friends who “visited back and forth constantly.”

  In 1904, having grown affluent on the returns from The Republic, the Fitzgeralds moved to suburban Dorchester, where their growing family of three girls and two boys lived in a sprawling fifteen-room house with a “scrollwork porch, mansard turret, and stained-glass insert in the front door portraying what Fitzie insisted was the family’s coat of arms.” Rose attended the Dorchester High School for Girls and, like her proper Bostonian Beacon Hill counterparts, rounded out her education with private lessons in French, dancing, piano, and voice.

  Dorchester’s remove from the center of Boston allowed Fitz to insulate Rose and the family from the rough-and-tumble politics of his 1905 mayoral campaign. Though now fifteen, Rose had only “a hazy idea of what was happening.” This was a good thing, for it was a contest with much name-calling and ugly innuendoes about her father’s private life and public dealings that would have offended any loving daughter, especially one as starry-eyed as Rose.

  Rose’s sheltered life extended into her twenties. At seventeen, as the mayor’s vivacious, intelligent daughter, Rose had become something of a Boston celebrity, in attendance at “all manner of political and social events.” Wellesley was an ideal college choice for so talented and prominent a young woman: It represented the chance to enter an exciting universe of intellectual and political discourse in the country’s finest women’s college. But believing her too young and impressionable, Fitz enrolled her in an elite Catholic school, Boston’s Convent of the Sacred Heart, where she received instruction in deportment and feminine virtues promising to make her a model wife and mother.

  At the close of Rose’s year in Sacred Heart, the Fitzgeralds took their two eldest daughters on a grand European tour. Ostensibly, it was to broaden the girls’ education. But Fitz, who had lost a reelection bid as mayor in 1907 and was under suspicion of lining his pockets during his two-year term, saw the summer trip as a chance to shield Rose and her sister Agnes from press coverage of his wrongdoing. To keep them away from the unpleasant public gossip and discourage a budding romance with Joseph Patrick Kennedy, P.J.’s son, the child of a family with less social standing, Fitz also decided to enroll Rose and Agnes for the 1908-09 academic year in a Sacred Heart convent school in Holland. Attended mainly by the daughters of French and German aristocrats and well-off merchant families, it was a more cosmopolitan version of its Boston counterpart.

  After coming home in the summer of 1909, Rose took refuge from the political wars with another year of schooling at the Sacred Heart Convent in Manhattanville, New York. At the close of that year, she returned to Boston ready to assume a large role in her father’s second term, which ran from 1910 to 1912. With two small children to care for and little patience for the duties of a political first lady, Josie left the part to Rose, who filled it with a style and grace reflecting her advantaged upbringing and education. She became Honey Fitz’s constant “hostess-companion-helper,” traveling with him to Chicago and Kansas on city business, to the Panama Canal to consider its effect on Boston’s future as an international trade center, to western Europe to advance Boston’s commerce with its principal cities, to meet President William Howard Taft at the White House, and to attend the 1912 Democratic National Convention in Baltimore that nominated New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson for president. As one biographer records: “Fitzgerald delighted in the good looks of his daughter, in her intelligence, her presence of mind and superb social skills. . . . She proved to be her father’s equal in conversation, curiosity, dancing, athletic ability and powers of endurance and even in the capacity for fascinating reporters,” who gave her front-page coverage in Boston’s newspapers.

  Nothing more clearly marked Rose as a local leading light than her coming-out party in January 1911. The state’s most prominent figures were counted among the 450 guests in attendance. Even the normal social barriers between Protestants and Catholics fell away for the occasion: Massachusetts’ governor-elect, two congressmen, Boston’s district attorney and city councilmen—who declared the day a holiday—rubbed shoulders with wealthy and fashionable bankers, businessmen, attorneys, physicians, and clergymen.

  By the conventions of the time, Rose’s debut at age twenty was a prelude to courtship and marriage. She certainly did not lack for suitors, but by accepted standards, they did not include Protestants. The “mistrust” and “resentment” between Boston’s Brahmins and its Irish Catholics caused them to have “as little as possible to do with each other.” And even though her father had fostered better relations by joining with Brahmin James Jackson Storrow to establish the Boston City Club, a place where both sides could meet in “a neutral and socially relaxed atmosphere,” Rose saw the divide as “one of those el
ementary facts of life not worth puzzling about.” Besides, there were enough eligible Catholic men who could measure up to her status, including, she believed, P.J.’s son, Joe, whom she had known almost her entire life and who impressed her—if not her own father—as a most desirable mate.

  DESPITE BOSTON’S CULTURAL DIVIDE, Joe, like Rose, had no sense of inhibition about reaching the highest rungs of the country’s economic and social ladders. His parents and their families had gained material comforts and social standing that had put them in the upper reaches of the American middle class. And like the business titans of the late-nineteenth century—Diamond Jim Brady, Andrew Carnegie, Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller—whose backgrounds and middle-class beginnings had acted as no bar to their acquisition of vast wealth and international fame, Joe Kennedy could entertain similar dreams.

  Born in 1888, Joe grew up in an era when America’s greatest heroes were daring entrepreneurs who not only enriched themselves but greatly expanded the national wealth by creating the infrastructure of an industrial society—steel, cheap energy, railroads, and financial instruments to grow the economy. Never mind that many were left behind in the rush to affluence: The social Darwinian code of the time, by which Joe was guided throughout his life, gave legitimacy to the view that the innately talented and virtuous succeeded while the less deserving made only modest gains or fell by the wayside. It was the natural order of things, and no sense of injustice need attach to wide gaps between the richest and poorest Americans. Of course, there was nothing against the fortunate sharing some of their largesse with needy Americans; indeed, the most well off were obliged to help the least advantaged. But to impute any inhibition on the accumulation of wealth from this obligation was never a part of Joe’s outlook or that of other contemporary self-made men. As a boy, Joe had an oak bookcase stacked with the works of Horatio Alger Jr., which one of his sisters said he read avidly. Although Alger’s stories were more attuned to the world of a rural pre-Civil War America, his rags-to-riches theme held a constant appeal to ambitious, up-and-about boys and young men like Joe Kennedy. Similarly, “mind power,” or a belief in self-manipulation or success through positive thinking, which began to have a strong hold on the popular imagination at the turn of the century, captivated Joe. As he made his way in the world, Joe never tired of reminding people that anyone with God-given talents could figure out how to succeed; it was largely a matter of will.