OUT ROSE KENNEDY TODDLED, LEANING ON A CANE, SLIGHTLY stooped but impossible to miss in her jewel-tone coat and white fur hat. Her smile reflected maternal pride. What could be more historic than standing in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, watching her youngest son announce his candidacy for president of the United States? She delighted in Teddy’s introduction of her. Only just recovered from abdominal surgery, she relished another moment in the spotlight at the cradle of American democracy in the center of her cherished hometown.
It was November 7, 1979, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy was entering the 1980 presidential race to challenge Democratic incumbent President Jimmy Carter. Beset by a dismal economy, an energy crisis, and challenges abroad, Carter faced stiff opposition from Kennedy’s left-wing insurgency. In 1971 Rose had reported that Teddy said she could campaign for him even at age ninety.1 Now she was closing in on that milestone. A few months shy of it, she made an impassioned plea for votes in Iowa, where caucuses were scheduled for January 21.
Senator Kennedy appeared less enthusiastic. He had already started his presidential run on the wrong foot with a halting and inarticulate response to CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd’s simple query: “Why do you want to be president?” Once in Iowa, Teddy faced tough questions about Chappaquiddick, the tenuous state of his and Joan’s marriage, and his chronic womanizing. Even worse, the Kennedys’ traditional strategy of wooing party leaders ignored the caucuses’ grassroots emphasis. Teddy experienced a decisive defeat, winning only 31 percent of precinct delegates to Carter’s 59 percent. Fearing he had disappointed his mother, Teddy instead found her upbeat: “Oh, that’s all right, Teddy dear. I’m sure you’ll work hard and it’ll get better.” Then she changed the subject to a $220 sweater she had given him for Christmas. Perhaps he would like to exchange it for a cheaper one.2 If Rose found it hard to keep her mind on the campaign, Teddy’s heart wasn’t in it either. Initially, he seemed to go through the motions in order to fulfill others’ expectations of restoring the Kennedy presidency that had been snatched from Jack and denied Bobby.
The Iowa loss slowed contributions to a trickle, forcing brother-in-law Steve Smith to urge Teddy’s withdrawal from the race. What if he lost the upcoming Massachusetts primary? The senator’s legislative career might then be in jeopardy. Reluctant to be the first Kennedy brother to drop out of a presidential campaign, however, Teddy persevered all the way to the Democrats’ August convention but won only a little more than one-third of the delegates to Carter’s more than half. (Kennedy did, however, win his home-state primary, a positive sign for his Senate career.) By staying in the race, Teddy earned a prime-time spot on the convention’s program. He made the most of it, concluding to thunderous applause, “For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”3
Two weeks before the convention, Rose had turned ninety and participated in a parade through the village of Hyannis, organized by the Special Olympics. Riding in an open convertible, she clutched a bouquet of red roses and waved and smiled to the crowds. From Gibson girl to Gracious Grandmother—how far she had traveled from the parades that Boston Mayor John Fitzgerald and she presided over seven decades ago. Yet for all her journeys, around the world and through life’s vagaries, she always returned to her New England roots.
Rose’s ramrod posture had deserted her, but she still managed to raise her chin, trying to defy gravity’s downward force. On November 12, 1981, she returned to the White House for the first time since Jack’s death. President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy welcomed her and Teddy to the Oval Office. Sitting serenely on a couch, next to the president, Rose watched as Teddy presented Reagan with a plaque commending him for placing “love of country” ahead of partisanship.4 Although he had split his own party by challenging Carter, assuring the president’s 1980 loss to Reagan, Teddy could be a bipartisan master in the Senate when legislative strategy called for it. Party divisions seemed narrower in the months after March 30, 1981, when Reagan had become the only president to be seriously wounded in an assassination attempt and survive. Returning to the Oval Office, Rose had come full circle. She had first visited the White House in 1897, with Honey Fitz and her sister Agnes, to meet President William McKinley.
In July 1982 Rose turned ninety-two, and the family threw a gala party at the Hyannis Port compound, turning the occasion into a rally for Teddy’s fourth Senate reelection campaign. The assembled throngs of Kennedys and their supporters serenaded Rose with an enthusiastic chorus of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” Wearing a white turtleneck, pearls, and a jaunty red hat, she appeared on the porch, wide-eyed at the sight of her multitiered birthday cake. Advanced age had diminished her inhibitions, and Rose blew kisses to the assembled crowd on her front lawn. When Teddy intoned somewhat too solemnly, “The poet says that the rainbow comes and goes, but the rose always remains,” she staged whispered, “I never heard that before.” Looking up at the senator, who now towered over his elfin mother, she smiled innocently as he ad-libbed, “It’s a younger poet, Mother!”5 Then, playfully, she held a long-stemmed rose up to his face, as if to say, “Don’t take yourself so seriously. Stop and smell the roses.” That Thanksgiving she urged her progeny to remember the distaff side of their family: “You are not just Kennedys. You are Fitzgeralds too.”6
For her next birthday the Kennedys made a $1 million gift to St. Coletta’s in Rose’s honor, establishing a model program for senior citizens with intellectual disabilities. Rosemary was now sixty-five and still living with nuns in a small cottage at the Wisconsin institution.7 That September of 1983 Rose made her last public appearance, enfeebled and barely ambulatory. Attending her granddaughter Sydney Lawford’s wedding near Hyannis, she held tight to Pat and Teddy while slowly climbing the church steps.
Easter Sunday—Catholicism’s holiest feast—was always a joyous occasion for Rose. Traditionally her family gathered around her at Palm Beach for Holy Week services and then festive meals at the Kennedy estate. But in 1984 Rose collapsed on Good Friday, and by Easter Sunday seemed near death, suffering from a severe stroke. She rallied but, like Joe after his cerebral hemorrhage, she was now confined to a wheelchair and rarely able to speak intelligibly. How she would have despised the photos taken of her when she could no longer control her facial expressions. Music and prayer continued to provide comfort, so her family brought a pianist in each week to play for her, as well as a priest to say Mass. Also like her husband, she would live nearly a decade as an invalid, cared for by nurses. Teddy’s weekend visits to Hyannis Port, where she spent the last nine years of her life, brightened Rose’s spirit. She had deeded him the main house at the Cape Cod compound, where he slept in his father’s room, next to hers. “Let’s say our prayers,” he would urge Rose, and they would recite the Rosary together, even though she rarely spoke otherwise.8
Despite Rose’s debilitation, the family celebrated her one hundredth birthday in July 1990. Her granddaughter, NBC correspondent Maria Shriver, produced a brief retrospective on the Kennedy matriarch, whose life had spanned nearly one-half of the American Republic’s history. Teddy, Eunice, Pat, and Jean provided technical assistance for “Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy: A Life to Remember,” a brief video tribute to their mother, narrated by her last surviving son. By resolution, Congress designated July 22, 1990, as Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Family Appreciation Day in honor of her maternal feats. For Rose’s 104th birthday, her children published a new edition of Times to Remember, with her sprightly ninetieth birthday photo on the dust jacket. They felt blessed by what they called their mother’s gift of politics, and they labeled her the best campaigner and politician in the celebrated Kennedy family.9
In 1971 Rose had written to Eunice about the Kennedy gravesite in Brookline, where one day she would join Joe Sr.: “My nephew Fred, who is in the funeral business, told me today that very often people mark their tombstones, and I said I thought it would be very appropriate to add ‘Father of the President’—or put my name on and say, ‘Father and Mother of the President,’ leaving an open date opposite my name. I thought perhaps that you would welcome this information.”10
After her death from pneumonia on January 22, 1995, Rose was laid to rest in a grave marked simply “Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy 1890–1995,” surrounded by rose bushes. She didn’t get her desired epitaph, but her twenty-first-century fans post laudatory online messages for her via social media.11
Her living memorial is the Rose Kennedy Greenway, linking the North End, where she was born, to downtown Boston through a series of parks, gardens, and urban green spaces created over the city’s new underground traffic arteries. Dedicated in July 2004, the 1.5-mile public space epitomizes Honey Fitz’s slogan “Bigger, Busier, Better Boston.”
Rose was survived by Rosemary, Eunice, Pat, Jean, Teddy, all but one of her twenty-nine grandchildren, and scores of great-grandchildren. Rosemary had made her last trip to visit her mother in the summer of 1994. Eleven years later, the least visible Kennedy, but the one who inspired a worldwide movement for the disabled, died from natural causes at age eighty-six in Wisconsin, surrounded by her siblings. As Rose had hoped, Pat never remarried after her 1966 divorce from Peter Lawford. She raised four children in New York and devoted the remainder of her life to fund-raising for the arts and substance-abuse treatment. Oral cancer entailed disfiguring surgery in Pat’s later years, and in 2006 she died, age eighty-two, of complications from pneumonia.12
Eunice and Teddy passed away only two weeks apart in August 2009: she at age eighty-eight from a series of strokes, he at seventy-nine from brain cancer. Lauded for her unparalleled work in mental retardation, Eunice left behind her Special Olympics legacy. Indeed, some observers suggested that her work on behalf of the mentally retarded was as consequential as her brothers’ policy records.13 She and Sarge were the first married couple to have received Presidential Medals of Freedom for their public service.
Teddy’s colleagues, even from the opposite party, praised him as a lion of the Senate whose legislative record and longevity rivaled those of the institution’s most distinguished members in its history. Expanding civil rights, lowering the voting age to eighteen, abolishing poll taxes, fighting for universal health care, ending the draft, supporting peace initiatives throughout the world, expanding education opportunities, establishing public-service projects, crafting immigration reform, and leading the charge against conservative judicial appointees were all part of his portfolio.14
His funeral paid homage to Rose. Traveling from Hyannis Port to Boston, the hearse bearing his remains drove through her “Dear Old North End,” passing near her birthplace and St. Stephen’s Church, site of Rose’s baptism and funeral Mass. After being flown to Washington, Teddy was laid to rest near Jack and Bobby on a verdant Arlington hillside overlooking the nation’s capital, which the three brothers had taken by storm a half century earlier. In addition to his legislative victories, Teddy’s permanent monument is the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, next to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Rose’s Dorchester neighborhood. The institute promotes civic education, particularly regarding the Senate’s legislative process. It will also oversee the Kennedys’ Hyannis Port mansion as a site for seminars and educational programs. Teddy had promised Rose that their home would be preserved for charitable use.15
When Teddy’s son, Congressman Patrick Kennedy, left the House of Representatives in 2011, it marked the first time that a Kennedy was not serving in elective office since Jack took his House seat in 1947. In fact, Rose’s grandson, Timothy Shriver, chairman of the Special Olympics, commented that his generation was more likely to use “soft power” in pursuing social change than formal political power.16 By 2012, however, the Kennedys had a new star on the electoral horizon: Joseph P. Kennedy III, grandson of Robert Kennedy, won a seat in Congress from Massachusetts’s Fourth District.17 With movie-star looks, a Harvard law degree, Peace Corps service in the Dominican Republic, and the Kennedy name, Rose and Joe’s great-grandson may lead his generation to political prominence.
Jean Kennedy Smith is the last of Rose’s children to survive. She remains active in VSA (formerly Very Special Arts), an international organization she founded to promote arts for the disabled, based at Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Appointed US ambassador to Ireland by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she served for five years. The only one of Rose’s daughter’s to hold public office, Ambassador Smith’s critical role in the successful Northern Ireland peace process has been widely recognized. In 2011 President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her VSA leadership and work for the disabled. Now dividing her time between homes in Manhattan and Long Island’s Bridgehampton, she proudly shows visitors to her New York apartment, a veritable shrine to her brothers, complete with their photos and letters. The largest depiction is of her brother and godfather, Joe Jr.; an oil portrait of him in his Navy uniform dominates her hallway. Slim and ramrod straight, like her mother, she guides an interested scholar to a framed verse sent to her by Ireland’s poet laureate Seamus Heaney. The former ambassador reads aloud its lilting stanzas and urges her visitor to join the recitation.18 Farther removed from her immigrant roots than Rose, yet proud of the Fitzgerald/Kennedy Hibernian heritage, in 2011 Smith was inducted into the Irish America Hall of Fame.
LIFE MAGAZINE EULOGIZED Rose as “part nun, part enchantress, part ward boss and all mother.”19 Indeed, she blended her faith, femininity, political DNA, and maternal instincts into a potent formula for creating a dazzling dynasty in the modern media age. Before focus groups, consultants, and makeovers existed, Rose performed all of those roles for her family with the unswerving commitment to perfection that governed her life. When her husband and children fell short of her Victorian standards, she simply strove harder to correct, or at least mask, their flaws while touting their genuine accomplishments. Rose Kennedy’s maternal ledger includes a president, three senators, a congressman, an attorney general, two World War II military heroes, an ambassador, and two Presidential Medal of Freedom winners. No wonder United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson introduced her at the 1962 Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation’s International Awards dinner as “the head of the most successful employment agency in America,” prompting a standing ovation from President John F. Kennedy. An unwavering model of Catholic motherhood in public, Rose’s private weaknesses only add dimension and depth to her persona. She emerges as even more courageous for absorbing the doubts and fears that tragedy and loss thrust upon her. Creating a template for contemporary political wives, she selected a cause—mental retardation—and made it the focus of her prodigious charitable work. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy embraced a “family values” agenda before Reagan conservatives spawned the label. She embraced so many roles that “Mother of the President” is an inadequate epitaph. Born in the Gay Nineties, Rose gave birth to the Kennedy image that shaped twentieth-century American politics and continued to do so even as the new millennium dawned.
Commenting on the family matriarch, Jean Kennedy Smith insists, “I think it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, in fact, to find anything negative about my mother.… She was and always will be a great inspiration to all of our family, and I know that we were very fortunate to have such a wonderful mother.”20 Rose would approve of her sole surviving child continuing to sustain her mother’s legend and that of the political colossus she helped to create.