Joseph P. Kennedy Presents Read online

  Joe with his sisters, Loretta and Margaret, 1895

  Whereas P.J. found great personal satisfaction in aiding those who genuinely needed his help, his son looked at the same people and “all I could see was their predatory stare.” P.J. accrued business and political success as well as legions of friends, yet his eldest child saw him as suffering financially and emotionally by giving too much to his acquaintances and his community. Joe watched his father ride the wins and losses of elected officialdom, and it was as a young witness to those realities that he developed his own personality. “Joe decided early on,” says Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, “that he would build his life on his own foundation without depending on the loyalty of any place or institution.”

  Unlike his father, who had worked as a young man because he needed to, Joe worked because of his own ambition and his parents’ belief that it encouraged discipline. While his mother, in particular, set high expectations, no one pushed Joe harder than he pushed himself. He later told tales of hawking newspapers, clerking in a candy store, selling peanuts to tourists at the wharf, and making department store deliveries.

  P.J. occasionally eased the way for Joe's entry into various economic ventures, but it was his mother who provided the steady hand that ensured the damask cloths on the table, the lace curtains, and the “Irish hospitality” that made the children feel comfortable bringing their friends home. Mary was also an active supporter of “social welfare,” church charities, and suffrage for women. Her brother was a doctor who had graduated from Harvard Medical School, and her daughters went to college, but she wanted more for her only son.

  It was Mary who determined that Joe would attend Boston Latin, established by the colony's founders in 1635, with alumni such as Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Each morning Joe put a penny down to cross the harbor on the ferry. He played forward in basketball and first base on the school's baseball team, batting over .500 his senior year. Though it took him five years instead of the usual four to graduate, Joe was elected president of his senior class and chaired the debating society. Prophetically, his classmates predicted that Joe Kennedy “will make [his] mark on the world,” but “will earn his living in a very round about way.”

  Confident and almost cocky, Joe was accepted at Harvard University, ready to prove himself capable of cracking through the economic, religious, and social segregation that had for so long held Bostonians in its grip. He received a regular and “adequate allowance,” but he developed an eye for shortcuts and making money off the needs and wants of others. He enjoyed the scouting and the planning as much as the financial results, and partnered with his college friend Joe Donovan to purchase a sightseeing bus to ferry summer tourists around the monuments of Boston. The city controlled the routes, and the story goes that Joe went straight to the mayor to request they be allowed to take on passengers at the premium spot, the railroad station. The mayor assumed he was getting both Joe and his father in his debt by granting the request, but there is no record showing that P.J. knew anything about it, and Joe did not see it as a debt at all. From the start, he was not a politician looking for favors, he was an entrepreneur looking for profit. With Donovan behind the wheel and Kennedy polishing his verbal skills by recounting historical anecdotes, Joe boasted that in less than three years, he netted $5,000 on his $300 investment.

  Up front and in the middle, president of his graduating class of Boston Latin, 1908

  A witness to his early achievements was fellow Harvard student Hugh Nawn, two years Joe's senior and the son of a successful contractor. He remembered Joe's “wanted to be on his own” and was struck that “here was this sophomore in college already planning his life's work; always a long range thinker. Early in life, he had charted his course.”

  Academic success did not come easily, but Joe wasn't about to let schoolwork deter him from an active social life. His classmates included the future humorist Robert Benchley and Joe joined several associations, including Hasty Pudding. Harvard wasn't just overwhelmingly Protestant; one friend recalled that “Democrats were as scarce as orange trees in Labrador.” And Joe learned the hard way that even if a few Catholics and Jews were allowed to attend, they were barred from the most exclusive “final” clubs on campus. This highest echelon of social life was the equivalent of private gentlemen's clubs, where undergraduates gathered for meals, reading, and playing pool. Fewer than one tenth of the students were chosen. Most wouldn't even apply, but Joe did, and when he was rejected, the seeds of resentment were deeply planted. When he learned that the men he thought were his friends were to enter those hallowed halls and he was not, “he looked at himself in a different way.” Joe later told his wife “that he would perpetually be an outsider.”

  “A Harvard man knows who he is,” said Edmund Quincy, a descendant of one of the founding families of Boston. “If he isn't a Harvard man, who is he?” The Quincys personified the Protestent elite that Kennedy saw as scorning him but when, in 2002, John Quincy, Jr., current scion and eleventh generation of the family, was asked about Joe Kennedy, he heaved a sigh of noblesse oblige and said, “We tire of the Kennedys.” It was that impenetrable indifference that most infuriated Joe: he didn't matter. The outside world could see him as “a Harvard man,” yet while he had one foot in that domain, he knew he would never fully be accepted by those within; “these were not his people.”

  “Joe Kennedy saw early what made the power and gentility he wanted,” his friend Tom Corcoran explained. “Power came from money. Joe had a keen mind; it was honed against the great cynicism underlying rank and station in Brahmin Boston.” Joe himself put it more bluntly: “You can go to Harvard and it doesn't mean a damn thing. The only thing these people understand is money.”

  Another incident at Harvard bears recounting. When several of his classmates were interviewed in the late 1950 s, they volunteered the tale of Joe's making the varsity baseball team in his junior year but not playing until the final game against Yale. It was the biggest game of the season and if he saw action, he would win a coveted letter “H” for all the world to see. It wasn't until the final inning, with Harvard in the lead 4 to 1 and Yale down to one more out, that the team captain and pitcher, Charles McLaughlin, put Joe and two other players in to assure them their letter. The Yale batter hit a grounder that was fielded to Joe at first for the final out of the game. While his teammates surrounded the victorious pitcher, Kennedy put the game ball in his pocket and walked off the field. Confronted by McLaughlin with a request for the ball, Joe refused and kept walking. He could talk about being excluded, but the story was told as an example of how he brought exclusion on himself. As one of his former classmates summarized, “If he wanted something bad enough, [he] would get it and he didn't much care how he got it. He'd run right over anybody.”

  Joe saw it differently. He had tried to play by Brahmin rules and still it was not enough. He wasn't making that mistake again. And succeeding was no longer enough; he set out to best them.

  Outwardly, Kennedy was his “very outgoing, gregarious, vibrant” self and continued his studies and his moneymaking activities. He lived on campus to be a part of it all, returning home to visit his parents on weekends, occasionally bringing friends with him for Sunday dinner. The family had moved to a larger house with a wraparound veranda in Winthrop, the more prosperous neighborhood. The home was complete with luxuries such as a Steinway baby grand and P.J.'s sixty-foot pleasure boat. Joe went to church fairly regularly, didn't smoke or drink liquor or coffee, but he made time for a vigorous and bifurcated love life: pursuing chorus girls on one side and courting Rose Fitzgerald on the other.

  Rose (third from left) and Joe (second from right) among family and friends at the beach, Maine, 1907

  In retrospect, Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald and Joseph Patrick Kennedy appear destined for each other. As children of political, popular, and well-known fathers, Rose and the Kennedy boy first met at Old Orchard Beach in Maine, where the “sociable Irish”
summered, and the families of Boston powers like P. J. Kennedy and John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald played together on the beach.

  Their fathers had risen to the top tier of influence in Irish Catholic Boston. Fitzgerald is often painted as a boisterous, backslapping buffoon, but that was only one side of his personality. A graduate of Boston Latin, Fitzgerald left Harvard Medical School after his parents’ deaths to care for his six younger siblings. He was taken under the wing of the North End boss Matthew Keany, and within a few years Fitzgerald won a seat in the State Senate. At thirty-one, he was elected to Congress, but it was when he was inaugurated as mayor of Boston in January 1906 that Honey Fitz came into his own, with all the vices and virtues of a turn-of-the-century big-city politician.

  The Fitzgerald and Kennedy patriarchs had their disagreements and rapprochements, but they could not have been more different in style. Honey Fitz was effusive, short, and roundish, busy telling people what they wanted to hear. P.J., on the other hand, was much more reticent, tall with glasses and a distinguished handlebar mustache; “intelligent, shrewd and impeccably fair and honest.” Both were active in politics for decades, but while P.J. “kept himself free of taint,” the same cannot be said of Fitzgerald.

  Late in life, Rose said her father's determination to keep her apart from Joe Kennedy shaped her teenage years. Much has been written about Honey Fitz's disapproval of Joe as a suitor, yet many of those stories were promoted by Joe and Rose themselves, fueling Joe's tales of being a poor Irish kid who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and providing her with a solace that they had made it in spite of the world being against them.

  Two years younger than Joe, Rose was being publicly linked with him by the time he graduated from Boston Latin. After finishing at Dorchester High School at the age of sixteen, Rose wanted to go to Welles-ley, but her father insisted she attend Sacred Heart Convent College in Boston. Her consolation was that she was often at her father's side as he attended an average of “two dinners and three dances a night.” Her shy mother had turned reclusive, staying at home and growing bitter over her husband's long absences, so it was Rose, as the eldest of the six children, who took her mother's place, enjoying the public life that being the mayor's daughter opened for her.

  Any remaining hope of going to Wellesley was crushed when her father announced that Rose and her sister Agnes would spend a year at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Blumenthal in (then) Prussia. At the stark religious school, the girls wore long dark dresses with high white collars and were taught primarily by French nuns. Rose spoke French and German and had the opportunity to interact with other girls from all over Europe, but there is no record of her maintaining any friendships from that year. While she found a new satisfaction in the daily structure of prayer, meditation, and confession, her emotional life remained in Boston. She told a close friend that among the few possessions she brought with her was a picture of Joe Kennedy, and she continued writing him throughout the months she was abroad.

  Rose was nineteen when she returned home; her father was reelected mayor and her interest in Joe, now a junior at Harvard, was stronger than ever. Along with the governor and four hundred other guests, Joe attended her elaborate debut, but when he asked Rose to his junior prom, her father informed her she was accompanying him to Palm Beach instead. Her education continued the next fall at yet another convent school, Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, New York. She saw Joe whenever possible, often on the sly. Rose was frequently on the road with her father, accompanying him to Chicago, to the White House to meet President William Howard Taft, and to the Democratic National Convention. They took another grand tour of Europe together, when Mayor Fitzgerald headed a Chamber of Commerce delegation. Father and daughter returned home to pack again, this time for Panama. Rose thrived on these public outings and extensive travels, but the more challenging it was for her to see Joe, the more intriguing the relationship became.

  In the spring of 1912, as Joe was preparing to graduate from Harvard, President Taft and former president Theodore Roosevelt were battling over the White House, giving scant attention to the Democratic candidate, the former president of Princeton, Woodrow Wilson. Only twenty-five miles north of Boston, thousands of women were demonstrating in the streets of Lawrence, Massachusetts, demanding “bread and roses” in a strike that was shaking the textile industry. Yet Joe Kennedy's eyes were focused close to home and on his own immediate future. Sixty percent of America's personal wealth was in the hands of 2 percent of its population and he knew which side he wanted to be on. Since concluding “the only thing these people understand is money,” it was natural that Joe methodically decided to enter banking. “Sooner or later, [it is] the source of all business,” he told a reporter several years later. “I was careful to choose a ladder with more than one rung because I knew banking could lead a man anywhere.” Or as he more brusquely put it to a friend, “If you want to make money, go where the money is.”

  Banking, like just about everything else in Boston, was the jurisdiction of the Brahmins, but among the hundreds of financial institutions operating in the state were small single-branch banks such as Columbia Trust, serving local residents and small businesses. With only $100,000 plus in capital, its primary attraction for Joe was that P. J. Kennedy was a member of the board of directors and was currently serving as vice president.

  Joe began at the family bank as a clerk under the guidance of Columbia Trust's veteran treasurer, Alfred Wellington. Joe immediately set his sights on becoming a bank examiner and when he passed his civil service exam, he didn't leave anything to chance. Once again he went to see the mayor, this time armed with statistics showing that Massachusetts had never had an Irish Catholic bank examiner. Fitzgerald may have looked askance at Kennedy as a suitor for his beloved Rose, but he shared his resentment at being treated as less than a first-class citizen. With the influence of Fitzgerald and Wellington behind him, Kennedy was appointed a state bank examiner in September after working at Columbia Trust for only three months.

  There were over five hundred banks in Massachusetts and Joe criss-crossed the state, analyzing thousands of records. It was the equivalent of a crash course in financial structure, operations, and loan criteria, and it would serve him well the rest of his life. He disciplined himself to be impressed with nothing except the bottom line and claimed the most important lesson he learned was “we make a mistake when we call money hard cash. It's lively and fluid—the blood of business.”

  After working for less than a year, Joe took his own trip to Europe during the summer of 1913 with several college friends. He was a curious traveler, eager to see how others lived and carefully noting what the wealthier passengers wore and how they conducted themselves. One of his companions recalled how Joe befriended the ship's purser and arranged to take over one of the premier suites for a reduced rate. From then on, “there was nothing to do but travel to Europe like Kings.”

  Even if his continental travels fell short of the ease that Rose Fitzgerald was used to, Joe returned with a deeper sense of self-assurance and a determination to marry her. They were both ambitious, confident, and “born to conquer,” in some ways, Rose even more so than Joe. She was, however, content within her world as “the leader of the young Catholic set in Boston.” If she wasn't welcome in the highest echelon of women's clubs, Rose simply started her own. Yet she also had a sense of entitlement, such as her assumption that as the mayor's daughter, she shouldn't have to pay the fare when taking the streetcar. Joe never thought he deserved something for nothing: little was off-limits, but nothing was assumed.

  Rose saw in Joe someone very much like her father, a man who was the star of every room he walked into and, just as important, one who was proud to have her on his arm. Both men made a habit of being immaculately dressed; “dapper, debonair and bubbling with good cheer.”

  Honey Fitz must have seen himself in Joe too, but a different reflection than the one Rose perceived. He saw a man willing to pull strings and take short
cuts as well as a womanizer with a bifurcated life, one lived to the fullest in the outside world and one lived very separately, and only occasionally, at home. Joe may well have been dedicated in his courting of Rose, but he was also already known as a man about town and the mayor did not have to go far to find that out.

  Up to that point, both men had kept their extracurricular love lives out of the public arena, but that was about to change for the mayor. In the midst of Fitzgerald's reelection campaign, his opponent, the man he had once mentored, James Michael Curley, had a letter sent to the mayor's wife, detailing her husband's affair with a beautiful young “cigarette girl,” one Elizabeth “Toodles” Ryan. Curley threatened to go public with the information if Fitzgerald stayed in the race. To show he was serious about spreading the story, he announced a series of lectures including one entitled “Great Lovers of History: From Cleopatra to Toodles.”

  Even in her self-imposed isolation, Josie Fitzgerald must have heard stories about her husband and other women, but she had suffered in relative silence. This time, however, she confronted him over the potentially acute public embarrassment and the possible ruination of her daughters’ futures. Whatever Josie said to Honey Fitz, it worked. Reporters who had been writing that Fitzgerald had the race won in a landslide were shocked when Edward Moore, the mayor's secretary, announced that exhaustion from overwork was forcing Fitzgerald to withdraw “under the advice of my physician.”