AFTER ROSE’S 1957 IOWA TRIP, SHE BEGAN SPEAKING IN STATES crucial to Jack’s presidential candidacy. The 1960 Democratic nomination contest featured only sixteen primaries, in contrast to 2008’s forty. Jack Kennedy decided to focus on New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Indiana, West Virginia, Nebraska, Maryland, and Oregon. He couldn’t secure the nomination by winning those states, but victories in most of them could demonstrate his electability.1 New Hampshire, traditionally the first presidential primary, warranted Rose’s attention in early 1958. She spoke to Catholic organizations in Concord (the capital), Manchester (the largest city), and Nashua (the second largest city). A letter, probably from Rose’s secretary, informed one of the New Hampshire organizers that Rose did “not want to make her appearance in New Hampshire a political issue. We believe, therefore, she would not want to say ‘hello’ to the Governor as she doesn’t want any publicity about it, other than what comes from the people to whom she is going to talk.”2 This arrangement suited Rose perfectly; she could fly under the political radar while raising money for charity and spreading the Kennedy name among potential voters.
Always fastidious, Rose asked for a quiet room, not a suite, at the back of hotels, and a second room for her maid or secretary.3 In Nashua, her first stop, she spoke to five hundred faculty, students, and their guests at Rivier College, a Catholic institution founded by the Sisters of the Presentation of Mary. Next came Concord where six hundred Catholic Daughters of America turned out, followed by a capacity crowd of two hundred and sixty at a meeting of the Manchester Diocesan Council of Catholic Women.4
Rose’s engagements, like her 1957 Iowa events, reflected Joe’s strategic imprint and Jack’s undoubted concurrence. She declined some Massachusetts charity functions, telling organizations that 1958 would be devoted to campaigning for Jack’s Senate reelection. In reality, he seemed so likely to maintain his seat that the family didn’t even have to call on Rose until late in the campaign.5 The family was obviously looking ahead to 1960 when Rose wrote to James Cardinal McIntyre, “Joe has told me that your Eminence has graciously offered to get in touch with various groups in Los Angeles and in other parts of California to whom I might speak. I have been doing this kind of work for some time in Massachusetts and I have found it very stimulating.” Her offered topics varied from the tried and true “An Ambassador’s Wife in London” to her newly crafted “My Trip to Japan.” She also reminded McIntyre that she accepted no honoraria; all proceeds would be donated to charities organizing her visit. Planning to see Pat in L.A. during April and May 1958, Rose could deliver her talks then or later.6
The cardinal arranged an invitation for her to speak at an Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women meeting. Contacting Reverend Mother Mulqueen at Manhattanville College, Rose asked her to facilitate a talk at Sacred Heart College in Los Angeles. “To be frank,” Rose confessed to Mulqueen, “we Kennedys want very much to spread our acquaintances in California which is very important during the [1960 Democratic] National Convention [in L.A.], since it has a large number of delegates.”7 A lecture to the nuns, students, parents, and friends at the college would be just the way to add new supporters to the Kennedy bandwagon.
While in Los Angeles Rose did an interview on “The Ten-Fifteen File,” with KTTV television talk-show personality Paul Coates. Such appearances would become a public-relations staple for her in the 1960s and ’70s, but this engagement must have been among her first television interviews. Remarkably, after an absence of nearly two decades, Rosemary now reentered her mother’s litany of the Kennedy children. In a gentle and rather deceptive reference, Rosemary was described as “working for [a] retarded children school.” Never mind that she was actually one of the patients at St. Coletta’s. Rose resurrected the family’s previous story that Rosemary was a teacher. Why lift the veil now? Perhaps the family’s redefinition of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation’s mission, to fund research on mental retardation, gave Rose courage to mention Rosemary again and move closer to the truth. Or perhaps Joe and Jack had looked ahead two years to the Wisconsin primary. Rosemary had lived there since 1949. It wouldn’t do to have that fact revealed in the midst of a presidential campaign. Paul Coates asked Rose, “You’ve often been called a matriarch. Does that mean you—rather than your husband—were the boss of your home?” “I’m called matriarch merely to distinguish me from the other well-known Mrs. Kennedys—the wives of my sons. I don’t think it would be correct to call me the boss,” Rose responded. Coates then cut to the heart of Rose’s visit to L.A.: “You’ve asked me not to ask you any questions about politics, and I think I have stuck by my bargain pretty well. But I can’t help wondering: How much have you and your husband thought about the idea that one of your children would someday become president?” “Naturally it entered our minds …,” Rose had to admit. So Coates pressed, “Your son, Senator John Kennedy, seems to be the most likely of the clan to make the White House. Now, I know it’s impossible for you to be impartial but try to be as objective as you can and tell me what kind of president you think John would make.” Describing him as “very conscientious, straightforward in his thinking, experienced, well-equipped in affairs of state,” Rose added, “because, as a very young man, when others were swimming or golfing in the summer, he used to be traveling in Europe studying there and so at a very young age, he had a knowledge of international events.…” As the ’60s approached, the times they were a-changin’, not only in Rose’s use of media but in the kinds of questions she fielded. Coates, a member of her children’s generation and a leader in investigative journalism, asked her why she had never gone into politics herself. “You’re not opposed to the idea of women holding public office, are you?” he challenged. “No. It’s simply that I’ve always been too busy raising nine children,” Rose demurred with her stock answer. But Coates pointed out that her children were now grown. Hadn’t she become more active in public life? “Yes, I lecture about my experiences as an ambassador’s wife, with proceeds to charity. And I work with the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation for retarded children. We have established about ten schools in different cities for this group.”8 The discussion of the topic went no further.
RESTING DURING THE summer before Jack’s reelection campaign, Rose wrote from the south of France, “Shall await the big putsch—1960.”9 Back in Massachusetts by midfall, she finally turned her attention to Jack’s Senate reelection campaign. “At Home with the Kennedys,” a live thirty-minute television program, aired a week prior to the November 4 election. Joining her around a cozy living room set were Jackie, Eunice, and Jean, who debuted her toddler Steve Jr. The elder Mrs. Kennedy led a discussion among the women that by today’s standards seems quite stilted. She quizzed Jackie about her role in Jack’s campaign, and the young wife talked about traveling throughout Massachusetts with him. Rose mentioned the many historic sites in the Bay State, encouraging parents to visit them so that their children would emulate American heroes. When Jackie ventured that her mother-in-law campaigned as a young child with Honey Fitz, Rose corrected her, saying that girls didn’t campaign in those days before women’s suffrage. Jackie handled the correction with aplomb and observed that Teddy was serving as Jack’s campaign manager when he could spare time from his final year at UVA’s law school. Rose then introduced and narrated a video featuring Eunice, Bobby, and Pat with their spouses and children. Senator Kennedy joined the midmorning show and asked women viewers for their vote. If they called in, his sisters and his wife would field questions and pass them along to him. Jack displayed a firm command of policy details and a ready wit. When a teenaged boy phoned, JFK teased, “Why aren’t you in school?” Then he thanked his sisters and his mother, particularly, for her support of Honey Fitz’s and Joe’s public service. As a warm denouement, Jack joined Jackie on the couch and introduced their one-year-old daughter Caroline.10 Here was a vintage Kennedy performance in a new medium that brought three generations of the famous family into voters’ living rooms. Just as Joe and Rose had captured print and newsreels to present their young brood, now television would launch Jack and Jackie as political celebrities.
One caller had remarked that JFK was a “shoo-in” for reelection. Why should voters even go to the polls? Jack responded that he had no votes prior to election day and that he would like to have as many as possible to show his Senate colleagues the strong support he garnered in Massachusetts.11 Left unstated was his desire to demonstrate overwhelming popularity as he prepared for a bold run at the Democratic presidential nomination two years later, when he would be just forty-two years old. No Roman Catholic had run for president since Al Smith’s 1928 shellacking by Herbert Hoover. Jack’s final poll results didn’t disappoint. He won 73.6 percent of the votes, the largest winning margin in Massachusetts history and the second-largest among all 1958 Senate candidates.12
As Jack crisscrossed the country, sometimes with Jackie, more often with alter ego Ted Sorensen, Rose continued to deliver speeches on her own. In October 1959 she received the Trinity Award, named for the Washington, DC, Catholic women’s college. Its citation read:
In recognition of one who has contributed in a marked manner to the spiritual and physical well-being of so many exceptional children, of a Catholic mother of charm and wisdom, whose everlasting influence is dramatically apparent in terms of front page news from New York to Moscow, of a woman whose influence has direct bearing on the destiny of America and perhaps of the world, Trinity College is pleased to present the Trinity Award … to a gracious lady who stands for the signal virtues of motherhood, womanhood and for the influence of women for GOOD—Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy.13
Clearly, Rose’s star was rising with Jack’s. Her motherhood now attracted attention and honors not simply for its numerical novelty, but because, as she began stating in the 1950s, a mother influences her child “not for one day, one month, one year, but for time and for eternity.”14
She also spoke with pride about Eunice’s childhood tendency to care for her siblings and now her outreach to “the mentally retarded and … delinquent children.” “Be with your children when they are young and this applies to fathers as well as mothers,” Rose proclaimed. She and Joe hadn’t always followed that edict consistently. Looking back, she may have wished otherwise. Somewhat wistful, Rose revealed that the “greatest privilege” a mother could experience would be seeing her son join the priesthood. As we have seen, Joe insisted that the Kennedy boys attend non-Catholic schools, an unlikely route to religious vocations.15
Rose still took her maternal responsibilities seriously. Jack was now forty-two and a US senator, but she wrote to Jackie, “Will you please remind Jack about his Easter duty; I am sure that he could go to confession some morning in Washington as the church is quite near.” The Catholic Church requires that all members receive Communion during the Easter season. Rose probably thought that meant receiving the sacrament of confession, too. Technically, it didn’t, but the Church forbids Communion for those who have committed grave sins and not confessed them to a priest. Rose also micromanaged his wardrobe, asking Jackie to find “some old socks for Jack—for him to wear playing golf or walking in the rain, as he did not have any the other day when he was down here [at Hyannis].”16
IN CAMPAIGNING, ROSE enjoyed sparring with the common man. Taxi drivers proved a fertile source of opinion, especially about Jack. On her way to LaGuardia Airport in mid-1959, she grilled the cabdriver about the upcoming presidential race, keeping her identity secret.
[H]e was a different ilk than usual. Born in Brooklyn of Jewish parents … he was strong for Stevenson—thought he was a great man—thought Kennedy too young and said his chances were nil because he was Catholic. I, of course, adopted my regular technique, saying I was from Mass[achusetts]—we all were ecstatic about him up here. His youth was an advantage as we wanted no more old men like Eisenhower–Dulles, and Kennedy was experienced and well versed in the rudiments of politics in spite of his youth—due to his exposure to it from his babyhood.17
Unlike current presidential campaigns that officially begin more than a year before election day, John Kennedy announced his candidacy in Washington on January 2, 1960. Rose, billed as “mother of the presidential candidate,” continued her charity speaking engagements. In Fort Lauderdale she spoke to raise money for the Leukemia Research Fund. The talk on prewar London now included color slides of the late King George VI, the Queen Mother, and the Kennedy girls in debutante gowns. The women’s section of the Fort Lauderdale News proclaimed that Mrs. Kennedy “looked the part of an ambassador’s wife down to the tip of her elegant Italian shoes.” She shared a comedic, and somewhat embellished, version of her conversation with the queen about whether Rose saw her children off to school each morning. Her poker-faced retort in Fort Lauderdale: “I did that for the first six … after that, I figured this would go on forever, so I quit!” Leaving behind a hint of her Chanel No. 5, Rose stepped into a chauffeured limousine. She was off to campaign for Jack. Her exit line—“With nine children, your job as a mother is never done.”18
Nothing could have drawn Rose away from balmy Palm Beach other than Jack’s first primary, in frigid New Hampshire. “She is still a top campaigner,” thought Joe, again watching from the sidelines.19 Rose now had a genuine campaign speech, not her England or Japan travelogues. Even if campaign staff supplied its gist, she added her thoughts and personal touches that made her son more human. Joined by daughter Jean Smith, Rose made a two-day swing through the Granite State, starting at Keene Teachers College with a speech to faculty and students. After lunch at the local Lion’s Club, it was on to Manchester for an afternoon tea with women Democrats, then an evening reception in Exeter. The exhausting daily schedule would have challenged a youthful campaigner. Rose was sixty-nine, yet her “Fitzgerald energy” came in bursts for such trips. Up before dawn the next day, the Kennedy ladies were off to Laconia for a midmorning coffee hour and reception, then a student-faculty luncheon and public reception at Plymouth State Teachers College. One more tea, in Manchester, then it was back to New York.20 Ultimately, Jack received 85 percent of the New Hampshire vote.
Wisconsin was next, and Rose spent a grueling week stumping for Jack there. JFK was battling regional favorite Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey. Except for enclaves of Catholic voters in a few large cities, Jack faced Protestant strongholds. A credible showing might weaken the religion argument against his candidacy. Flying to La Crosse, anthropologist Rose noted that the male passengers were “more stalwart looking” and the “women more hardy and robust looking, less refined looking than [in the] East.” Their “clothes [were] sensible, practical, bought for long use.” An announcement by the stewardess that the “mother of Senator Kennedy was aboard” elicited no reaction that Rose could discern. Clearly, she was no longer in Massachusetts. Jack’s old friend Lem Billings collected her at the airport, reporting that “the religious question was rampant.” He “seemed very nervous” to Rose, but she attributed that to his wanting to have a large turnout and successful visit for her. Rose had come to Wisconsin to repeat the successful Kennedy teas; women, she explained, were more likely to come to a tea than a political rally. She decided to call the gathering a “coffee klatch,” which sounded less formal in the Midwest than a tea. And the Wisconsin ladies, with German backgrounds, were more likely to drink coffee, as Rose remembered from her days at Blumenthal and her travels in Germanic countries.21
Whenever given the chance, Rose proudly elaborated on Jack’s war record, noting in her diary that “Humphrey had not gone to war on account of [a] hernia.” Questions of how Jack became interested in politics were right in her strike zone, and she offered the same stories about Honey Fitz that she included in her campaign speech. In addition, she invoked the New Deal and Jack’s opportunities to meet principals from FDR’s administration, as well as Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, and Neville Chamberlain.22
La Crosse’s Bishop John Treacy, a Massachusetts native whom Rose had met at Palm Beach, offered to help Jack, but he telephoned to say that “he was afraid to come to my tea on account of anti-Catholic literature which had been circulated. We secretly agreed it was better that way as people are saying Catholics will vote for Jack [anyway], and they [the Kennedy campaign] are trying to get Protestants [to vote for him].…”23
Rose collected materials about Catholicism and its impact on the election. An article by Boston’s Cardinal Cushing argued that “[f]rom the very beginning of the Republic Catholics have played active and significant roles.” Roger Taney and Edward White, for example, had served as chief justices of the US Supreme Court. “The presidential oath is similar to that taken by members of Congress and the federal judges. Is there something peculiarly distinct in the office and powers of an American president which seems to disqualify a Catholic?” Cushing asked.24 His answer, of course, was “no.”
Rose also kept an article from the Catholic magazine Jubilee containing disquieting news about Jack’s candidacy among her coreligionists. Ninety-seven percent of subscribers interviewed were concerned about anti-Catholicism in the United States and thought that Kennedy’s run for the presidency would increase it. Only one-third of those polled believed JFK could win, although 57 percent reported that they would vote for him. Sixty-seven percent, however, indicated that they would vote for a Catholic other than Kennedy.25
From La Crosse to Viroqua to Richland Center to Prairie du Chien to Superior to Eau Claire to Milwaukee to Madison—Rose visited three of Wisconsin’s ten congressional districts, including the tenth, which was “heavily Lutheran and [for] Humphrey.”26 In Milwaukee, the state’s largest city, with more than seven hundred thousand people and a sizable black population, Rose provided another TV interview and then attended a small coffee hour “in a colored woman’s apartment. She was an alderman—small neat flat.” “Afterwards drove to a horticulture show to be photographed with colored representative.” Rose seemed a bit peeved that the photographer was late, “so I had to sit in car with two other colored friends and wait for him and then take him to hall for photo.”27 Starting with FDR in 1932, Democrats could count on receiving at least two-thirds of the nation’s black vote in presidential elections. Energizing Milwaukee’s black residents for Kennedy over Humphrey would help Jack’s primary contest with his Minnesota rival. Yet Humphrey had compiled a much stronger record on civil rights than JFK. At least Rose had drawn more voters to her La Crosse event than Humphrey had to his appearance.
At any rate, Jack did win Wisconsin’s April 5, 1960, primary, carrying 56 percent of the votes and six out of ten congressional districts—no knockout punch to be sure, but a harbinger. For his part, Humphrey would fight on to the May 10 West Virginia primary.28 As the primary season progressed, Rose listed “recommendations” for Jack’s political team that she wanted “sent to all headquarters”:
1. Bobby and Jack’s books and photographs should be in all the headquarters; War pictures of Jack and Caroline on display in the windows.
2. Mrs. Kennedy and the girls should not cover the same groups, if at all possible.
3. There should be a few night meetings, because not every woman can come during the day, particularly if she has children.
4. There should be adequate distribution of material to the various campaign headquarters.
5. There should be advance publicity pictures to stimulate interest.29
Leaving the grand strategy to Joe, Jack, and Bobby, Rose focused, as usual, on tactics that reached the grass roots, especially women.
Between the Wisconsin and West Virginia primaries, the Kennedys gathered at Palm Beach for Easter. Jack decided not to campaign during Holy Week, which pleased his devout mother. Rose took the opportunity to write in her journal about Jackie’s response to a national campaign: “Jackie [is] in gay spirits, talks animatedly and gaily about campaign experiences.” She fretted that Jackie “is more inclined to show her hates and be rude to newspaper people than Jack, who, according to the press and to his father, maintains a pretty level, unruffled front, never deviating from role of natural, inbred courtesy.” Jackie “is constantly telling us what she would like to do or say to those people who have cast aspersions on Jack—Doris Fleeson, for instance, a columnist has constantly abused Jack.” Fleeson, the first woman syndicated columnist, based at the New York Daily News, wrote scathing critiques of politicians. She invited Joe and Rose to the Press Club, and Joe wanted to accept, in hopes that it would “mollify Fleeson’s resentments or criticisms, but Jackie bristled at the idea of Fleeson having satisfaction of producing me at Press Club. At any rate, I did not want to go and wrote her I was busy campaigning,” Rose recorded.30 Fleeson eventually defended Jackie against her critics, prompting Jack’s wife to write a thank-you note to the journalist.31
Rose reveled in the excitement centered on her Palm Beach home. She loved the lively discussions of editorials, opinions, and rumors, as well as the incoming calls from all over the country. How fortunate, she thought, to have her sons and sons-in-law united in a common cause to secure the nomination for Jack and then elect him president. She didn’t mention her daughters and daughters-in-law, though they worked as hard as maternal obligations allowed.32
Jack scored a major victory over Humphrey in West Virginia, proving that a Catholic could carry an overwhelmingly Protestant state. It also eliminated one of his key opponents for the nomination. Short on money and organization, Humphrey couldn’t mount a viable response to the Kennedy family machine. Meanwhile, Adlai Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson waited in the wings, refusing to participate in the primaries. Jack’s campaign now moved on to Maryland and Nebraska, where Rose joined the Kennedy team again. She did a three-day swing through Baltimore and nearby towns. Mayor J. Harold Grady presented her with the key to Maryland’s largest city before Rose arrived at Notre Dame of Maryland, the nation’s oldest Catholic women’s college. When she spoke to women, Rose observed that they didn’t have the right to vote when she was young. In fact, Rose was thirty before women earned the franchise with passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. She exhorted modern women to “get out and vote and urge our friends to vote and urge our mother and grandmothers—like me.” Rose added that she now had sixteen grandchildren: her progeny were still a point of emphasis and pride. But the days of simply chatting about her family’s London embassy experiences were over. Momentum was on Jack’s side, as she cited his victories in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and West Virginia. She called for a “tremendous vote as it will give Jack a tremendous boost in Los Angeles.… Thus we have a chance to help select the next President of the United States. Otherwise a few men in a smoke-filled room in Los Angeles will have that privilege.” Then she was off to two more receptions at local Democratic clubs, and she stopped by a Baltimore hotel to greet Jack’s campaign workers.33
While in Baltimore, Rose attended a tea given in her honor by the Colored Women’s Democratic Campaign Committee of Maryland and then toured Morgan State University, Maryland’s largest historically black college.34 As one women’s-column writer noted, “Wealthy beyond belief, she could have leisurely ordered breakfast in bed. Instead, she was out on the political stump by 8:30 a.m., delivering at least six campaign speeches a day before women’s clubs, college groups, and TV microphones.”35 Rose continued this whirlwind in Nebraska prior to its May 10 primary. In Lincoln she met with the state’s first lady and welcomed the American Association of University Women to the governor’s mansion. Rose offered a special greeting to Manhattanville College alums at the gathering.
By June, Rose could relax, knowing that Jack had won the Nebraska primary with 89 percent of the vote and Maryland’s contest with 70 percent. She had campaigned for him in four of the seven primaries he entered, and he had won them all. Her week-long marathon for Jack in Wisconsin might well have been the most crucial of her trips. He carried that contest with little room to spare. Had he lost, his momentum into the decisive West Virginia primary would have slowed. Even worse, his Catholicism would have received more—and very negative—attention.
Settling in at Hyannis Port for the summer, Rose was “confident that Jack will win because his father says so, and through the years I have seen his predictions and judgments vindicated, almost without exception.” Joe also predicted that Jack would defeat Vice President Richard Nixon for the presidency. She doubted that her husband would ever receive credit for the “overall strategy” and “unremitting labor day and night, which he had devoted to making his son president.” Then Rose turned to her usual concern: Jack’s eating habits. She watched him down lobster and corn on the cob, New England favorites. Instead of feeling relief that he had a robust appetite after years of weight loss, Rose recalled that Dr. Sara Jordan of the Lahey Clinic at Tufts University had warned that such foods “are the worse things for a tummy like I have and Jack has.”36
One of Rose’s most triumphant moments neared as the family headed to Los Angeles for the Democratic Convention. Jack had compiled seven primary victories across the country. Yet the nomination was not assured. Some delegates supported Adlai Stevenson, the unsuccessful nominee in 1952 and 1956, who had the backing of Eleanor Roosevelt, no admirer of Jack or his father. Texas senator Lyndon Johnson, who detested the thought of young Jack Kennedy coming out on top, was launching a last-minute effort to rally support. His camp spread the word about Jack’s Addison’s disease, which the Kennedys, of course, had not publicized.
Jackie, now four months pregnant, stayed behind in Hyannis with two-year-old Caroline. From L.A. Rose penned a humorous and sweet note to her daughter-in-law, though she never sent it. Rose’s feet hurt from so many appearances in high heels. While she soaked her “sore instep in hot water and Epsom salts,” she told Jackie, “I am thinking of you and missing you. The conqueror’s [Jack’s] first words to Eunice after he had been pushed and jostled through the exulting, cheering crowd were, ‘I wish I were back at the Cape.’… [I]t showed where his heart was.” Rose complimented Jackie’s “good judgment” for staying home “because the girls said the crowds were really almost rough in their enthusiasm and would have crushed you and worried everybody.”37
While Joe continued to shun the spotlight, Rose welcomed it. Holding a news conference for women writers, she answered dozens of questions. The New York Times described her as a “strikingly dressed … soft-spoken New England matron.” Most important, she announced that she would campaign for JFK that fall. “I’ll go wherever they want me to go, and do whatever they want me to do during the campaign. I love to travel and will enjoy campaigning with Jack.” Initially, she tried to duck the religious issue, not wanting to discuss its relation to politics. But she asserted that “religion is a wonderful thing regardless of what the faith. It gives a person stability and confidence which is so badly needed by us all. Our religion has certainly not been a handicap politically,” Rose concluded.38 Regarding JFK’s youth, she observed, “Jack, incidentally, is only four years younger that Nixon. Older men have had their chance at the White House. I feel that younger men have a great deal of the vigor, enthusiasm, and idealism, which we need now.” About Jack’s health, Rose admitted that it took her son “a long time to recover from his World War II injuries in the Pacific (when his PT boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer). Now I think he is in very good health and he has been for some time. His capacity for traveling and campaigning is the best evidence.” Only a seasoned campaigner could so nimbly mingle Jack’s war record with his robust health during the strenuous primary season. She even took one for the team, letting a reporter describe her as a “size 10,” when she had remained a perfect size-8 figure after nine pregnancies. When asked her age, Rose noted that the press claimed she was seventy, even though she would not be for six more weeks. “It wouldn’t look good for Jack if I were too young,” Rose quipped. Also using humor to deflect queries about Joe’s reported fortune, she joked, “When I first read in the papers that he had $100 million dollars, I went to him and asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you had that much money?”39 But, more seriously, she observed, “You all know that he’s been rather a controversial figure all his life. He thinks it’s easier for his sons if he does not appear.”40 The press was utterly charmed: “Today, Rose was the undisputed queen of the Kennedy campaign, handling press conference questions with the agility of a pro.”41
Before the balloting began, Rose, Joe, and their niece Ann Gargan watched Stevenson’s televised address to the delegates. The Kennedys were “furious with him as he will not say he is a candidate, but he does take delegates away from us, and California is strong for him.” Joe was uncharacteristically quiet, but he perked up immediately when Jack came by appearing nervous about the outcome. The Kennedy patriarch tried to put his son at ease, and Rose admired how he became a “haven” for Jack “to drop all his cares, his problems, his misgivings in [his] Dad’s lap.”42
Soon the day they had all worked so hard for arrived, and they all gathered around the TV to watch the nomination process, while a barber trimmed Jack’s shock of thick auburn hair. His mother was amused that he, apparently as vain as she, “held a large mirror in front of him and told the barber, ‘A little more here on this side, a little more there,’” as he watched the convention proceedings. Rose tried to reach Jackie at the Cape, only to be told by the family chauffeur that she wanted no phone calls. Her mother and step-father had traveled from Newport to be with her. Eventually everyone but Joe went to the arena to watch Jack defeat Johnson on the first ballot, 806 to 409. Rose felt “relieved, encouraged.”43 Jack would choose Johnson for the vice-presidential slot to secure Texas’s twenty-four electoral votes and remove Lyndon from his Senate power base.
When JFK decided to make an informal appearance before the cheering delegates, he summoned his mother and his sister Pat, a California delegate, to join him on the platform. “I suppose that it was one of the proudest moments of my life,” the new nominee’s mother reflected.44 An Associated Press photo of radiant Rose, bowing and waving to the throngs with Jack at her side, was captioned “Mother’s Day.”45 Once again, with Joe sequestered, it was Rose, the matriarch, who represented the Kennedy clan in public. The next evening she sat with Jack on stage at the Los Angeles Coliseum and cheered his “New Frontier” acceptance speech.
With Jack’s nomination secured, Rose and Joe flew to the Riviera for a late-summer holiday and, they hoped, a respite from press attention. But that was not to be. Throughout their vacation, the Kennedys were besieged for interviews and photographs. Rose agreed to grant an interview in Paris, en français. She planned to stay abroad until late September, looking forward to a stop in Vienna. As it turned out, she was needed at home: “Plans changed as Bob [Kennedy] says I am in great demand as a speaker—so home early.”46
Soon she was back on the campaign trail, spending nearly seven weeks in fourteen states for Jack and his running mate. Her appearances took on added value because Jackie’s pregnancy had curtailed her travel. Rose, however, was willing to go the proverbial extra mile. In Kentucky, for example, she attended a luncheon for the state’s Democratic Woman’s Club, held at Cumberland Falls State Park, in the state’s rural, southeastern region. “Everybody realized it was quite a sacrifice for you to come down to such a remote place,” wrote the club’s president. She pointed out that nearly half of the state’s 120 counties had been represented at the luncheon. “We were very much impressed with your informative speech, and you endeared yourself to us with your radiance and warmth. We are looking forward to your return trip to Kentucky. The women will carry this state for your son.”47
Soloing suited Rose, although she usually had a maid or secretary in tow for assistance. “I used to campaign a lot alone because I could do it. That’s why there are not a lot of photographs of Jack and me campaigning because I could carry a women’s audience myself and my daughters were apt to be with him.…” Her typical schedule included three days on the road, followed by two days of rest. After her Cumberland Falls visit, she flew over the mountains of West Virginia to The Homestead, in Hot Springs, Virginia, a stop coinciding with the first debate between her son and Vice President Nixon on September 28. Jack, she worried, lacked debate experience, whereas Nixon had captained his college debate team. Rose prayed “all day” for Jack to turn in a winning performance. She sympathized with Nixon’s mother, who must have been nervous, too. Rose was also concerned that almost everyone she encountered at the elite Hot Springs resort was Republican. Though it was the first televised presidential debate in US history, Rose inexplicably listened to the debate on the radio, and, like many listeners, thought “Nixon was smoother.” Inheriting her rapid speaking style, Jack spoke too fast, Rose believed. Yet she maintained that her son had “more new ideas, more initiative” on the debate’s topic: domestic policy.48 His platform promoted civil and economic rights, including aid to farmers and the unemployed, health care for seniors, housing for the poor, and aid to education. Rose would have loved Jack’s television persona—tanned, fit, and relaxed—in contrast to the haggard, jittery, and perspiring Nixon, with his infamous five-o’clock shadow. She needn’t have fretted. Television viewers judged Jack the winner; Rose’s prayers had been answered.
Occasionally the campaign paired Rose with Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird. Rose had initially been dubious about Mrs. Johnson’s campaign style. Lady Bird, for instance, used the southern expression “in tall cotton” when she appeared with Rose, which to Mrs. Kennedy meant “not quite up to me.” This interpretation was, of course, too literal. In the South, the higher the cotton, the better the crop, and Lady Bird merely meant that being with Rose was special. Rose thought Lady Bird’s gracious handling of campaign volunteers served her well, but “her speech is not so appealing because I can tell women so many simple incidents about Jack and family, which appeal to their hearts but [Lady Bird] does make the supreme effort.”49
Fortunately Rose liked Kentucky, for Jack’s team sent her back there, to Louisville and Lexington, just ahead of Jack’s visit there on October 5. Although the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, the state had been reliably Democratic in all but three presidential elections since the Civil War. With two Republican senators and a victory for Eisenhower in 1956, however, the Bluegrass State wouldn’t be an easy win for Kennedy. Yet it did have a Democratic governor and a sizable Catholic population in Louisville, which supported a Catholic Democrat for Congress. Those factors might help. Again, Rose and Lady Bird worked in tandem. Rose read that the Republicans were making a pitch for women voters, but she felt the Kennedy campaign machine had perfected such outreach.50
Rose’s female audiences usually ranged between five hundred and two thousand attendees. Marveling that they would often wait up to two hours just to see her, Rose wrote,
There was always the same cross current of people, the modestly dressed young mother perhaps with a little girl or boy in tow; the middle-class matron of forty, ample in proportion, well dressed; the conservative-looking, middle-aged woman, usually attired in grey or beige and wearing a fur piece to show her affluence, who shook hands politely and wished my son luck; the jubilant voter who stepped briskly and smiled broadly and who said, “I just know he will win”; the quiet-mannered woman who whispered as she went by, “I have been saying a novena [a special Catholic prayer] every day and I am sure he will be our next president”; the light-hearted teenager who said, “[Jack] is a doll and you are, too”; and the shy ones who would smile quietly and say, “I am keeping my fingers crossed.” Sometimes a Republican would step along … [and say], “I am one of those Republicans who is going to vote for your son this year.”51
Some women “seem to regard Jack almost like a new Lincoln, saying ‘Thank you for giving us someone like your son’ or … ‘I just know that he is going to save this country.’” Now Rose could thrill to the compliments of the masses as they thanked her for producing a Lincolnesque savior. Occasionally ethnic voters, Italian women particularly, Rose noted, expressed their gratitude to her with embraces and kisses. A reserved Yankee, Rose thought these voters “over-enthusiastic.” She took special pleasure when Protestants told her that they would vote for Jack.52
Perfecting her reception routine, Roe preferred to speak “when we first arrive, then have women form a line, instruct them to shake hands without any conversation and then move on. That is maximum of accomplishment with minimum effort. They can drink their coffee while we pass on to something else.” Lady Bird’s attempt to repeat each attendee’s name seemed too time-consuming and tiring, but Rose admired Mrs. Johnson’s knowledge of each state and how she made a personal connection with the people. In Kentucky, she mentioned her friendship with Bluegrass heroes, the late senator and vice president Alben Barkley and the late US Supreme Court chief justice Fred Vinson.53
On her forty-sixth wedding anniversary, Rose found herself stranded in Jacksonville by a Florida thunderstorm. The rain, tropical humidity, and television lights matted her hair, which, along with her “flat shoes and tweed coat,” she worried would look unattractive for photographs. She was so preoccupied with her appearance that she almost forgot to wish Joe “happy anniversary” when they talked by phone.54 In fact, Rose’s marriage to Joe, nearly five decades before, came a distant third to her appearance and Jack’s second debate, scheduled for that evening. Once again, she turned to prayer, asking the Almighty to grant Jack a successful performance. Watching on television, “praying through every sentence,” she thought that her son “looked much more assured than Nixon and looked better physically. Jack seemed to have all the initiative and again Jack rose to inspiring heights of oratory once or twice.…” His proud mother couldn’t help proclaiming, “Jack really looks, sounds, and acts like young Lincoln.”55
The 1960 election would be close, the narrowest contest in presidential electoral history until surpassed in 2000 by the razor-thin electoral college vote (won by George W. Bush, despite Al Gore’s more than half-million-ballot margin in the popular vote). For much of the night and well into the wee hours of the morning, the Kennedys and their team huddled around televisions at the Hyannis Port compound, which now included the main house and separate homes for Jack and Bobby. Rose and Joe spoke very little on that momentous night, as her husband checked the returns from around the country. At Jack’s house Rose visited with Jackie, who was expecting the baby in six weeks or so, to keep her company, while most of the work occurred at Bobby’s home. Finally, Rose went to bed, not knowing what the morning would bring.
As the sun rose over Hyannis Port, the Kennedy compound began to absorb the bracing news that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was now the president-elect. His margin of victory over Vice President Nixon was only a little more than 118,000 votes of the nearly 70 million cast, one-tenth of one percent. Yet Kennedy had won electoral-vote-rich states, amassing a 303–219 edge (34 more votes than the 269 needed for election in 1960).56 Eight of the fourteen states where Rose had campaigned for her son (New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Louisiana) fell into the Kennedy column, accounting for 172 of his electoral votes.57 Kentucky went Republican; so did Tennessee and Ohio, where Rose had visited ten cities. California, Nixon’s home, and Iowa, where Joe Kennedy had sent his wife to start campaigning as early as 1957, also went for the GOP, along with Florida.
Rose beamed as all of her surviving children (except Rosemary), their spouses, and her husband gathered around the hearth for a family photo marking the historic occasion. Jack rightfully took the most prominent spot. His mother, wearing a bright red dress, perched on an armchair in front, her legs demurely tucked at an angle. The Life photograph marked the first time since before the convention that Joe made a media appearance with Jack. The gold-framed mirror behind them emanated an exquisite glow surrounding the Kennedys that happy morning.58
They would soon adjourn to the Hyannis Armory for Jack’s brief acceptance speech. He guided Jackie to stand at his side; Rose assumed the spot next to her. Shuffling her feet, seeking just the right angle, Rose posed with her arms behind her. But this event was all about Jack. He would now take center stage. Rose made the cover of Life but couldn’t have been pleased—her eyelids had drooped, just as the photographer caught Jack looking straight at him, flashing a radiant smile.59
The arduous campaign behind them, Jack presented Rose a map marked with all forty-six of her campaign appearances, inscribed, “To Mother—With Thanks.” Now it was time for her to travel again, this time for relaxation and closer to home—New York City—for several weeks of theater, opera, and Christmas shopping.60 Then she was off to Palm Beach for Thanksgiving. Jack remained in Georgetown so Jackie wouldn’t have to travel so near her due date. But as JFK headed down to Palm Beach the day after Thanksgiving, his wife went into labor prematurely, and by the time his plane returned to Washington she had given birth by caesarean section to a baby boy they named John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.61 Rose’s late father, Honey Fitz, had another namesake.
Two weeks later, mother and baby left Georgetown Hospital and traveled to Palm Beach for Christmas. The president-elect continued to organize his administration from his parents’ ocean-side villa. Although the house swirled with “happy chaos,” which upset Rose’s routines, she enjoyed meeting the VIPs visiting Jack. Senator J. William Fulbright spent an entire day with him. The segregationist Arkansan had hoped to be secretary of state under Kennedy, according to Rose, “but was not chosen because colored people do not like him and now the colored, or non-whites, which I am told has a better connotation, are beginning to have a strong influence in the United Nations. And, if they side against us, and line themselves up with the USSR, then we are lost.” Even so, Rose found Fulbright “charming, relaxed, easy to talk to, and very interesting because he has studied at Oxford for three years [as a Rhodes Scholar].” She neglected to mention that his devotion to scholarly exchanges had led to his establishment of the Fulbright Fellowships in 1946.62
Rose also liked Mrs. Fulbright, who joined them for dinner. She was “pleasant, natural, and contributed to the conversation without intruding, which after all is the proper role for a wife, I believe.” Born in the nineteenth century, Rose was no feminist: “Men have had the experience and have the knowledge, and people want to know what they think, and not the opinion of their wives.” She disapproved of Mrs. Douglas Dillon, wife of Jack’s secretary of treasury, for angry outbursts “when her husband is criticized.” Of more interest to Rose was Douglas Dillon’s father, “a Jew who visited a Boston family when at school and fell in love with the sister of a classmate.… He changed his name, sent his son to Groton, Harvard, and severed all connections with the Jews.”63 Rose didn’t reveal her viewpoint on this anecdote, but it corresponded to her lifelong fascination with people outside her social and religious circle.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., a popular campaigner for Jack in West Virginia’s primary, visited the president-elect in Palm Beach, hoping to be appointed secretary of the Navy. FDR had been assistant secretary of the Navy for Woodrow Wilson. Rose observed that JFK’s incoming secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, nixed the idea. “Jack was a bit nonplused [about] exactly what to say [to FDR Jr.],” but Joe intervened and told Roosevelt to follow his father’s footsteps by becoming governor of New York, then president. In the interim, he should show the public “that he was a hard-working, serious young man.” JFK named him undersecretary of commerce and chair of the president’s Appalachian Regional Commission. In 1966 FDR Jr. did run for New York governor but lost to Nelson Rockefeller. His eventual five marriages likely diminished Franklin’s “serious” label among voters.64
Equally exciting for Rose was the arrival of a retinue to photograph Jack, Jackie, and their children. Harper’s Bazaar and Look sent renowned portraitist Richard Avedon to capture the new first family. Avedon posed the stunning Jackie, only thirty-one, wearing an Oleg Cassini gown in front of a white backdrop in Rose’s living room. Then Jackie slipped into a Hubert de Givenchy hostess gown for a portrait with her infant, John Jr. Rose worried about the premature baby, who had suffered from undeveloped lungs at birth but “looked infinitely adorable as he lay cuddled in his mother’s arms.” Grandma Kennedy’s health obsession caused her to fret: “As it was a rather cool day, I worried that he would get cold, because his head was exposed for a long time in the living room, which has no heat and which may be drafty, although the photographer’s big screen probably cut off a lot of the draft.” Jackie had chosen for Caroline “an adorable white organdy dress and a pink ribbon in her hair.” Good choices, thought Rose.65
After all of the photographic commotion, Rose heard Jack tell Lem Billings, “Well, that was certainly a morning wasted.”66 For others in this image-conscious family, it was anything but. Avedon’s portraits appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in February 1961, and Look ran more informal and candid shots as its cover story, “Our New First Family.” Several of Avedon’s photos became instant classics. The Washington Post published them, as did papers in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Orleans.67 Rose had produced another “perfect” family for the baby boom–centered America of the 1960s.
Having a son become president-elect utterly transformed Rose’s Palm Beach life. Outsiders were now in charge. Secret Service agents prowled the beach, police guarded the front entrance, and crowds of onlookers strained to catch a glimpse of Jack and his family. Sometimes she felt like a stranger in her own home, for as soon as she stepped outside, the front door would be locked behind her, and the back entrance was always locked. “I am a bit confused as to where I should enter or exit.” Trying to avoid the crowds, she once started out through the servants’ quarters in the back of the house. There she discovered a local hairdresser having lunch. “I was dumbfounded, and she was doubly so at seeing me” as Rose came through the maid’s quarters. The hairdresser just “threw up her hands and I gave a laugh and she gave a laugh and out I went.”68 Actually, Secret Service agents weren’t there needlessly. A would-be assassin planned to blow up the president-elect with a carful of dynamite but decided not to murder JFK in front of his wife and children.69
Without a doubt, Rose liked Jackie, but she thought her daughter-in-law was taking too long to recover from John Jr.’s birth. Rose never underwent a caesarean, so the need for more than six weeks of bed rest after childbirth was unfamiliar to her. She wrote in her journal about the weeks preceding the inauguration: “Jackie had the bedroom downstairs in the extreme corner of the house, which is Jack’s old room. She likes to be alone, read French, or books and articles on the arts or antiques or fashion. Often she does not come to meals, so I do not see her, alas … she does not make it a point to notify me when people are coming.” Ten years later, for Rose’s memoir, Jackie rewrote her mother-in-law’s passage to say, “Jack and Jackie have the bedroom downstairs.…” In reality Jack had bunked in the same room with his friend Lem, a fact which neither woman bothered to remove from Rose’s journal entry. Jackie deleted the remark that she read French and about antiques or fashion, as well as her mother-in-law’s comment that she didn’t inform her when guests were arriving. Instead, Jackie added that she ordered books about White House history from the Library of Congress and that she planned “the moving of her young family” to Washington.70 Clearly Jackie matched Rose’s image creation prowess. In the early 1970s, responding to Rose’s request to review her memoir materials, Jackie wanted the world to believe that she and Jack had shared a bedroom at Palm Beach in the weeks leading up to the inauguration. She thought that her interest in French, antiques, and fashion were too elitist; instead, she focused on the more popular accomplishments of her White House years—refurbishing the White House and maintaining her family.
Eventually the Palm Beach house calmed when Jack returned to Washington. Rose, Joe, and Ann Gargan prepared to leave for the inauguration. They rented a home in Georgetown for, in Rose’s view, an outrageous weekly charge of $1,000 ($7,500 in 2012 dollars). The cost-conscious Rose wrote, “It seemed very steep to me, but the hotels were demanding that people take rooms for that number of days; and with the hotel food and service so expensive I suppose we wouldn’t have saved much.” Joan and Teddy, who had managed his brother’s campaign in the western states, joined them.71
In some ways the inauguration of the thirty-fifth president of the United States seemed to go by in an exciting blur for Rose, but certain aspects remained distinct. The historic snowstorm that paralyzed the nation’s capital; sliding through the streets of Washington to attend the inaugural-eve gala that featured a galaxy of Hollywood stars; the man who rode with her and Joe and jumped out of the car periodically to dig them out of drifts and slush; Joe’s attempt to remove his overcoat, taking his formal cutaway along with it, in the inaugural ball’s presidential box, as everyone joined in the laughter: these random snapshots made their way into Rose’s memoir.
On inauguration day Rose trudged through the snow to Mass at Georgetown’s Holy Trinity Church. Once there, she realized that Jack, soon to be sworn in as president, would be arriving. “I was really very happy at the thought, because I had not mentioned the idea to him. I knew that Jackie was too weak to accompany him, so I realized that he had come from his own volition and without any outside influence.” Indeed, as the first Catholic president of the United States, who had faced religious discrimination in his run for the office, JFK might have had every reason to worship privately, if at all. Moreover, he had stayed out until 4 a.m., partying with his family and Hollywood friends, so even Rose might not have begrudged a decision to sleep late that morning. Much to her joy, Rose explained, Jack “wanted to start his four years in the presidency by offering his mind and heart, with all his hopes and fears, to Almighty God, and he wanted to ask for His blessing before beginning his awesome duties.” Not wanting to be photographed in her informal winter attire, Rose sat incognito on a side aisle.72 How sad that she couldn’t share her joy with Jack for fear of being photographed in her snow togs.
At the inauguration ceremony on the Capitol’s east side, Rose once more had to watch from the wings. She and Joe were in the front row, but at the far end, while the Eisenhowers, Jackie, Lady Bird Johnson, and Pat Nixon sat closer to the podium. “[S]ince the photographers were focusing on the middle, we were left out of everything except the panoramic pictures. I have never seen one in which I am recognizable; in fact, some friends asked me later where I had been during the ceremonies. I had always wished I had a picture of me with my son when he was being inaugurated president.”73 (Actually, Rose stands out in the wide-angle shot because she wore a white fur hat, sunglasses, and a fur cape to ward off the cold. And Life did capture her peering at John Fitzgerald Kennedy as he raised his right hand to swear the presidential oath.)74 “It was quite magnificent, an overwhelming feeling,” she recalled of seeing her son become president of the United States: “I was quite emotional about it because to be the one who was fortunate enough or blessed [with] … that great distinction, that great joy and responsibility.… That my son was chosen of all the men in the U.S., all the people in the world.… It’s something you never really expect.… Overwhelming in its importance and its magnificence and responsibility.… Everybody was so enthusiastic about Jack and Jacqueline,… who was beautiful, so talented, so perfect.”75 Watching her son deliver his stirring inaugural address, sans hat and overcoat, on such a bitterly cold day flashed her back to memories of how, as a youngster, he would forget his sweaters. Rose couldn’t help noticing how healthy her once sickly boy now looked. “He had lost that lean, Lincolnesque look that I liked,” she conceded, but she willingly accepted his new robust physique.76
On the inaugural parade reviewing stand, Rose’s bright head cover was as recognizable as Jackie’s famous beige pillbox hat. Yet the two ladies didn’t last long in the bitter cold. Rose, capitulating to age, and Jackie to her recent difficult childbirth, left the platform in front of the White House, where their husbands reveled in the triumphant moments of the Kennedy clan’s dream come true. That night, at one of the inaugural balls, Rose wore the same 1938-vintage gold and silver Molyneux gown that she had bought for presentation to King George VI at Buckingham Palace. She even brought her ostrich-feather fan. Recalling that she wore this classic dress, Rose was delighted at the press’s observation that her figure hadn’t shifted an inch from those days in London so long ago.77