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

  As a teenager, Joe had already made clear that he was determined to rise above the ordinary. There were the usual things boys did then to make a little money: sell newspapers on the docks and candy and peanuts to tourists on a harbor excursion boat, light gas lamps and stoves in the homes of Orthodox Jews on holy days, deliver hats for a haberdasher, work as an office boy in his father’s bank. But Joe had an urge to make money in a more inventive way. At the age of fifteen, he organized a neighborhood baseball team, the Assumptions. As the team’s business manager, coach, and first baseman, he bought uniforms, rented a ball field, scheduled the games, and collected enough money from spectators to make a profit. When some of his teammates complained that he was too domineering and that they had no say about anything, Joe made it clear he didn’t care. There could be only one boss, and he would settle for nothing less. Summing up his personal philosophy, Joe told his sister: “If you can’t be captain, don’t play.”

  Because she believed that Joe was special, his mother decided to use the family’s social standing and affluence to move her son from East Boston’s Catholic Xaverian School to Boston Latin. It was not unheard-of for aspiring Catholic families to seek and win admission for a son to Boston Latin; Rose’s father had of course been a student there in the 1870s. But when Joe attended the school in September 1901, the redheaded, freckled-faced, muscular thirteen-year-old Irish kid from across the harbor was in a distinct minority among the scions of Beacon Hill and Back Bay families.

  It did not stop Joe from making a special mark at the school. Although he never stamped himself out as an especially good student, he excelled in extracurricular activities and athletics, becoming the colonel on a drill team that won a citywide competition, captain of the baseball team, and in his senior year, the player with the city’s highest high school batting average, for which he won the Mayor’s Cup, presented by His Honor John F. Fitzgerald. Admired by his fellow students for his accomplishments on the diamond and for his warm personality and loyalty to his friends, Joe was also elected president of his senior class.

  Reflecting the drive and self-help outlook that dominated his thinking, Joe later said that Boston Latin “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.” Joe’s self-assurance rested not simply on the cultural milieu in which he grew to manhood but also on the special affection that his parents had showered on him as their only son and that his two sisters gave him as an adored elder brother.

  After Boston Latin, in 1908 Joe moved on to Harvard, which, in response to nationwide pressure for more institutional and political democracy and less concentration of wealth and power, was ostensibly committed to diversifying its student body. Yet old habits of social stratification remained as intense as they had been in the nineteenth century. Despite coming from Boston Latin, Joe had no claim on social status at Harvard, where the “golden boys” from the elite private schools such as Groton, St. Mark’s, and St. Paul’s, many of them the sons of millionaires, arrived at the college with servants and lived in luxurious residence halls with private baths, central heating, swimming pools, and squash courts. Joe joined the less affluent majority in drab, poorly heated dormitories with primitive plumbing. Characteristically, he had no sense of fixed inferiority from the sharp divisions he met at the university. Instead, he built a congenial social world on friendships with former Boston Latin classmates and ties to athletes, including some who came from the elite circle closed to someone of Joe’s background. Within limits, Joe gained a measure of acceptability that spoke volumes about his potential for reaching heights not yet scaled by Boston’s Irish. In his sophomore year he and his closest friends became class leaders, serving on the student council, organizing all major class events, and winning entrance into significant clubs such as the Institute of 1770, the Dickey, and Hasty Pudding, which conferred high status on their members. Yet admission to the innermost circle of student standing through membership in the most prestigious clubs, such as Porcellian and AD, was denied him. For such appointments, one’s pedigree still made all the difference.

  On the ball field Joe had his frustrations as well. After making the freshman baseball team, a number of injuries kept him from the varsity until his junior year, and then another injury consigned him to the bench through most of his senior year. Only when team captain and starting pitcher Charles McLaughlin asked the coach to put Joe in the final Yale game did he manage to earn a coveted varsity letter, and later stories that Joe’s father had arranged the substitution by threatening to withhold a license McLaughlin wanted to operate a movie theater in Boston diminished the accomplishment of having gained the prize. Other accounts describing Joe’s refusal to give McLaughlin the game ball, which Joe caught for the final out, further tarnished his standing with classmates.

  Only in the realm of business did Joe have an unmitigated sense of triumph while at Harvard. During the summers of his junior and senior years, he and a friend bought a tour bus from a failing business. Boldly approaching Mayor Fitzgerald for a license to operate from a bus stand at South Station, the city’s choice location for such an enterprise, Joe turned an unprofitable venture into a going concern. With Joe acting as tour guide and his partner driving, they converted a $600 investment into an amazing $10,000 gain over two years.

  After graduating in 1912, Joe decided on a career in banking, the “basic profession” on which all other businesses depended, as Joe put it. This was not the product of study in a Harvard economics or business course. (He later enjoyed describing how he had to drop a banking and finance course because he did so poorly in it.) Instead, Joe came to this conclusion through keenly observing contemporary American financial practices. That spring, congressional hearings had described how the “astounding” power and influence of bankers over the national economy gave anyone ambitious for wealth on a grand scale a model to imitate. And Joe Kennedy was nothing if not ambitious. Whereas progressives turned the power of the bankers into a justification for democratizing reform, Joe saw it as a competitive challenge. He wanted to be the first Irish American to penetrate a preserve of some of Boston’s wealthiest and most prominent old-school families.

  Harvard degree in hand, Joe became a clerk in his father’s Columbia Trust. There, during the summer of 1912, he worked as an apprentice under Alfred Wellington, the bank’s thirty-nine-year-old treasurer. Recognizing that his pupil had uncommon talent and ambition, Wellington urged him to become a state bank examiner as a way to learn the essentials of the industry. After he passed the civil service exam and was placed on a list of potential examiners, Joe persuaded Mayor Fitzgerald to lobby the governor by pointing out that the state had no Irish Catholic bank examiners. The political pressure combined with Joe’s merits to win him an appointment. For a year and a half he traveled around the state, learning the intricacies of the industry and impressing senior executives as a brilliant banker in the making.

  As a consequence, when a downtown Boston bank threatened a takeover of Columbia Trust, Joe knew what he had to do to sustain the autonomy of one of the city’s few Irish-owned financial institutions: He needed to raise enough money to outbid the rival bank, which had made an offer that a majority of stockholders wanted to accept. He also knew that appeals to local pride could strengthen his case. But money was key, and the president of the city’s mainline Merchants National Bank, who saw a Columbia Trust run by Joe as a good risk, provided it.

  Joe’s success on fending off the takeover won him, at age twenty-five, the presidency of Columbia and taught him the advantages of good publicity. Joe’s victory and appointment to Columbia’s top job became the subject of local and national newspaper accounts that grew in the telling. Encouraging—or at least not discouraging—exaggeration with each reporter who came calling, Joe Kennedy went from being the youngest bank president in Boston to the youngest in the country to the youngest in the world,
and the small neighborhood Columbia magically became not a local depository but a mainstay of the national banking industry. All the positive accounts nearly doubled Columbia’s deposits and increased loans by more than 50 percent during the three years Joe served as president. He planned to be a millionaire by the age of thirty-five, he told a reporter. At this rate, it seemed possible.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1906, when Joe was eighteen and Rose sixteen, the two fell in love. Except for Rose, who saw Joe as a complement in every way to her life’s ambitions, the Fitzgeralds considered the young man and his family a step down. And between 1906 and 1914 Honey Fitz had done all he could to discourage the courtship. He forbade Rose from accompanying Joe to a Boston Latin dance or the Harvard junior prom, and would not even allow Joe in the Fitzgerald house. And, of course, Rose’s years in Holland and New York were partly aimed at keeping Joe and Rose apart.

  But the attraction between Rose and Joe endured. They were smitten with each other. “I was never seriously interested in anyone else,” Joe later said. Rose was more effusive: She remembered the young Joe Kennedy as “tall, thin, wiry, freckled,” with blue eyes and red hair, “not dark red, orange red, or gold red, as some Irish have, but sandy blond with a lot of red lights in it.” His “open and expressive” face conveyed a “youthful dignity,” which bespoke self-reliance and self-respect. He was serious, “but he had a quick wit and a responsive sense of humor.” His “big, spontaneous, and infectious grin . . . made everybody in sight want to smile, too.” They arranged to meet at friends’ homes, always with “a responsible adult on the premises.” And in 1914 the romance blossomed into promises of marriage that Honey Fitz could no longer resist. Forced to abandon another run for the mayor’s office by rumors of his affair with “Toodles” Ryan, a beautiful cigarette girl, Fitzgerald had lost enough public standing to make Joe, the successful young banker, a worthy—or at least tolerable—addition to the Fitzgerald family. After a four-month engagement lasting from June to October 1914, Rose and Joe were married in a relatively subdued ceremony in William Cardinal O’Connell’s private chapel, followed by a wedding breakfast for seventy-five guests at the Fitzgerald house. Fitz’s diminished stature and a lingering reluctance about establishing ties with the Kennedys made Rose’s matrimony a less celebrated event than her coming-out.

  In November the young couple, Joe twenty-six and Rose twenty-four, moved into a comfortable two-and-a-half-story house on a quiet tree-lined street in Brookline, a Boston Protestant enclave made up of second- and third-generation lower-middle-class laborers and middle-class professionals. The seven-room Kennedy house on Beals Street, a gray wooden structure with clapboard siding, a large porch, sloping roof, and dormer windows, put Joe $6,500 in debt. The $2,000 personal loan and $4,500 mortgage was a heavy financial burden, but Joe could not imagine a bank president living in a rented apartment. Moreover, he had every confidence that he was on an ascending financial trajectory that would allow him to pay off his loans and entitled him and Rose to drive a new Model T Ford, which he also bought with borrowed funds. A seven-dollar-a-week maid who cooked, cleaned, laundered, and served meals was also considered appropriate to their lifestyle.

  The following summer their first child was born at Nantasket Beach in Hull, Massachusetts, where Joe rented a house next to his in-laws. Two doctors, a trained nurse, and a housemaid attended the birth of the nearly ten-pound boy. Though speculation was rife that the child would be named after his maternal grandfather, John Fitzgerald, Joe insisted that his firstborn son be christened Joseph Patrick Jr. Despite Honey Fitz’s disappointment at not having his first grandson named after him, he expected the boy to have an extraordinary future: “He is going to be President of the United States,” the ex-mayor told a reporter, “his mother and father have already decided that he is going to Harvard, where he will play on the football and baseball teams and incidentally take all the scholastic honors. Then he’s going to be a captain of industry until it’s time for him to be President for two or three terms. Further than that has not been decided. He may act as mayor of Boston and governor of Massachusetts for a while on his way to the presidential chair.” Fitzgerald’s tongue-in-cheek description was the true word said in jest: ambition and unlimited confidence were central features of the Fitzgerald and Kennedy outlook.

  Less than two years later, the birth of Rose and Joe’s second child was greeted with less fanfare. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a healthy boy named after his irrepressible grandfather, came into the world on the afternoon of May 29, 1917. Born in an upstairs bedroom in the Beals Street home with the same contingent of doctors and helpers as attended Joe Jr.’s birth, Jack, as the new baby was called, received his first notice in the press from a proud grandfather “wearing a pleased smile.” Against the backdrop of an America that had entered the First World War, in which so many young men seemed certain to die, predictions about Jack’s future were left unspoken.

  THE SAME DAY Jack was born, his father was elected to the board of the Massachusetts Electric Company, making him at twenty-eight one of the youngest trustees of a major corporation in America. It was the start of Joe’s meteoric climb in the business world, which, paradoxically, the war would serve. World War I, which millions of Americans saw as an idealistic crusade to end national conflicts and preserve democracy, elicited little enthusiasm from Joe. The idea of sacrificing his life or that of any of his generation seemed absurd. He was too cynical about human nature and Europe’s traditional strife to believe that anything particularly good could come out of the fighting. Though this put him at odds with most of his Harvard friends, many of whom volunteered for military service, Joe saw nothing to be gained personally or nationally by enlisting. The war, he said, was a senseless slaughter that would ruin victor and vanquished alike. Looking down at Joe Jr. in his crib after hearing the news that tens of thousands of British troops had died in the unsuccessful 1916 Somme offensive, Joe told Rose, “This is the only happiness that lasts.”

  Joe’s response to the First World War set a pattern that would repeat itself in other international crises faced by the United States. Whereas he was more often than not brilliantly insightful about domestic affairs, particularly the country’s economic prospects, Joe consistently misjudged external developments. He understood world problems not on moral or political grounds but rather on how he felt they might inhibit his entrepreneurial ventures and, worse, cut short his life or, later, that of his sons. These personal fears would make him a lifelong isolationist.

  Joe’s rapid accumulation of wealth began with his departure from the bank and appointment as assistant general manager of Bethlehem Steel’s Fore River shipbuilding plant in Quincy, Massachusetts. Though a salary of $15,000 a year was not enough to make Joe a wealthy man, his defense work assuaged his conscience about avoiding military service. More important, the experience, business contacts, and, most of all, the chance to demonstrate his effectiveness in managing a multimillion-dollar enterprise were invaluable in opening the way to bigger opportunities. During his eighteen months at Fore River, beginning in September 1917, Joe worked constantly, sometimes sleeping in his office for only one or two hours a night. Others worked as hard as Joe, but they lacked the inventiveness for efficiency and effectiveness he brought to every task. When he left Bethlehem in the summer of 1919, he received a bonus check “for services rendered at a time when no one else could have done what you did.”

  Joe converted his wartime success as a manager at Bethlehem into a job as a stockbroker with the prestigious Boston firm of Hayden, Stone and Company. Believing that the greatest possibility to accumulate wealth in the coming decade would be in the stock market, Joe used his $10,000-a-year job to turn “inside” information into disciplined speculation that netted him nearly two million dollars over the next six years. Joe had made good on his promise to make his first million before he turned thirty-five, and after leaving Hayden, Stone in 1923 to open his own office, he made millions more trading stocks and in the movie industry
, by buying first movie theaters in Massachusetts and then an English-owned Hollywood production company. After selling all his movie holdings in 1930, he made another fortune in the liquor trade when Prohibition ended in 1933.

  Joe’s growing wealth allowed him and Rose to have several more children. In 1918 Rosemary, a tragically retarded child, was the first of four successive daughters: Kathleen, born in 1920; Eunice, in 1921; and Patricia, in 1924. Three more children—Robert Francis, born in 1925; Jean Ann, in 1928; and Edward Moore, in 1932—would make Joe and Rose the parents of nine children over a seventeen-year span. Joe and Rose took great joy in their large contingent; it distinguished them in an era when most upwardly mobile families had abandoned the tradition of having many children. Joe enjoyed telling the story of how he had missed Patricia’s birth because of nonstop business negotiations in New York. On his return home, the five elder children, ranging in age from two to nine, greeted him at the train station with shouts: “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! We’ve got another baby! We’ve got another baby!” Joe remembered other passengers on the platform probably thinking: “What that fellow there certainly doesn’t need right now is another baby.”