STEPPING INTO GOLDEN AUTUMN SUNLIGHT, THE NEWLYWEDS beamed for the Boston Globe. Rose Fitzgerald was the “talented and charming” daughter of the mayor; Joe Kennedy, Harvard ’12, president of a local bank, was “prominent in social events among the younger Catholic people of the city.”1 On October 7, 1914, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy exited William Cardinal O’Connell’s Back Bay home, where he had performed the marriage ceremony in his private chapel. Instructing Honey Fitz not to send Rose to a secular college, O’Connell had thwarted Rose’s wish to enroll at Wellesley years ago. Now he solemnized her most profound desire to marry her true love.
Attended by a small wedding party, a few friends, and immediate family, the ceremony’s modesty evinced Honey Fitz’s lack of enthusiasm for the union. An equally subdued reception for seventy-five guests followed at the Fitzgeralds’ Dorchester home. What a contrast to Rose’s lavish 1911 debut! Facing whiffs of scandal, Mayor Fitzgerald was also a lame duck. As an octogenarian, Rose would remark that she wished her nuptials had occurred in a large church so that she and her husband could have passed by periodically and recalled their marital vows.2 Perhaps she had longed for a more concrete symbol of her marriage when rumors of Joe’s womanizing circulated.
Yet on their wedding day Joe and Rose were the picture of a striking young couple—she aglow in her white satin gown trimmed with lace, and a fashionable Normandy lace cap trailing a chapel-length veil; he jauntily sporting a black top hat, morning coat, and striped trousers. Their broad smiles radiated happiness and anticipation. Two decades later, after nine children, Rose speculated in her diary, “When I look back now, I wonder at the size of the job & I think that when we stood as a blushing radiant gay young bride & groom we were not able to look ahead & see nine little helpless infants with our responsibility to turn them into men & women who were mentally morally & physically perfect, how we would have felt—But as the pious old Irish nun in the Convent used to say—Pray to our dear Lord & that is what we did—as that is all we could do.”3
The couple embarked on a carefree honeymoon. For three weeks they traveled, first to New York, where they rode in a “machine,” the common name for early automobiles. After seeing a play starring Douglas Fairbanks, they left for Philadelphia to attend the 1914 World Series. An avid baseball fan, Joe brought his new bride to see their hometown team, Boston’s Braves, defeat the favored Philadelphia Athletics, 7 to 1 and 1 to 0. Then they journeyed by train to West Virginia’s White Sulphur Springs, where the posh Greenbrier Hotel had just opened in 1913. During their ten days there, the honeymooners rode horses every day and enjoyed playing tennis and golf, pastimes that they would pursue throughout their married life, though often separately. From the Greenbrier, where they dined on pheasant with high-society patrons, they traveled to kitschy Atlantic City. Then she and Joe returned to New York City for another play, followed by dining and dancing at the Biltmore. Returning home in late October, they moved into their new house at 83 Beals Street in Boston’s Brookline suburb.
Rose’s lifelong pursuit of excellence and recognition now coalesced with Joe’s innate desire for money and power. They immediately distinguished themselves from their relatives and peers by moving to a middle-class Protestant enclave. Most of their newly married friends were settling in apartments or received homes as wedding gifts. The young Kennedys purchased a three-story clapboard home for $6,500; Joe had borrowed a $2,000 down payment two months before his marriage. Rose particularly liked the neighborhood’s open feel, with empty lots on either side of her new home and across the street. How far removed in atmosphere, if not mileage, from her birthplace in the crowded North End, where young Honey Fitz had lived cheek-by-jowl in immigrant tenements. Beals Street carried little traffic, yet shops and a neighborhood Catholic church, St. Aidan’s, were only a few blocks away, within easy walking distance. Joe had a short commute to his East Boston office at Columbia Trust.4
Declining a wedding gift from her husband, Rose reasoned, “[T]here wasn’t anything I wanted especially, and I thought we should reserve our resources for the immediate problems, which were furnishing a house and getting settled.”5 From the beginning of her married life, however, Rose hired household staff. A friend sent her “a gay neat Irish girl” to cook and clean for $7 per week and board on the house’s third floor.6 Taking for granted that “most everyone has a decorator,” Rose supervised the furnishing and arrangement of her first marital abode. The room to the left of the center hall contained a dining set purchased by the couple and china hand-painted by Joe’s sister. For tea they used cups and saucers from Rose’s admirer, Sir Thomas Lipton, stamped with the Erin’s emblem, reminding Rose of her visit aboard the Irish yacht. Her large living room, with its cozy fireplace, accommodated a baby-grand piano, a gift from Rose’s uncles. The house’s second floor contained a master bedroom with twin beds for the couple, a guestroom for visiting family and friends, and a small bedroom on the back of the house. A tiny chamber that overlooked the roof of the front porch became Rose’s study, just big enough to hold a mahogany desk and a Martha Washington sewing cabinet.7 “I should love to … show you my new little house,” she wrote to an old friend in Concord.8
Joe and Rose settled easily into married life. Rose continued attending Ace of Clubs functions, and the newlyweds enjoyed socializing with friends, going to symphony concerts, and cheering the Harvard football team. The new bride soon discovered that she was expecting her first child, due in July. Joe rented a summer cottage in Hull, near Rose’s parents, who had acquired a Victorian mansion at the historic beach resort. Rose and Joe (on the weekends) spent the first summer of their marriage in the sun, sand, and surf, as they had as teenagers on Maine’s beaches. Ocean breezes refreshed Rose in her pregnancy’s last trimester. The Kennedys were happy to escape the stifling city, even more uncomfortable prior to modern air conditioning.
Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr. was born at Rose and Joe’s Hull cottage on July 25, 1915, exactly nine months and eighteen days after his parents’ wedding. “Honeymoon babies” were common before reliable, legal contraception. Since 1873’s Comstock Act, Congress had considered contraceptives obscene materials and banned their movement in interstate commerce. Victorian crusaders viewed birth control as an affront to Mother Nature and a means to promote promiscuity, asserting that the threat of pregnancy functioned as birth control. Just one year before Rose’s marriage, Margaret Sanger had published the Woman Rebel, a monthly newspaper advocating family planning, and coined the term “birth control.” Her devoutly Roman Catholic mother had succumbed to tuberculosis after producing eleven children. Federal authorities arrested Sanger for violating the Comstock Act, but she escaped to Europe. Returning to the United States after the government dropped charges, she opened a family-planning clinic in New York City’s slums. There she ran afoul of state bans on contraception and served a one-month prison sentence.9
After World War I, the alarming spread of venereal disease persuaded a New York court to legalize contraceptives if physicians prescribed them for preventing sexually transmitted diseases. Relaxation of sexual mores in the Roaring Twenties coincided with Sanger’s 1923 establishment of New York City and Chicago institutes to research women’s reproductive needs and to distribute family planning information.10 Yet Connecticut’s criminal statute proscribing the use of contraception, even by married couples, remained in force until 1965, when the US Supreme Court invalidated it as a violation of constitutional privacy rights.11
Even if civil law had sanctioned birth control, Catholic couples like Joe and Rose wouldn’t have practiced contraception, in order to comply with Church doctrine that declared it sinful. Catholicism viewed production of children as the primary duty of marriage. A spouse who refused to achieve this mandated goal, especially via artificial birth control, was guilty of an “unnatural and unchristian” act.12
Rose recalled how strict her father had been during her teenage years, not allowing her to “dance with boys at the age of sixteen,” when Joe invited her to a dance at the Boston Latin School. Victorian constraints of her youth forbade her from even kissing a beau until she became engaged to marry him.13 Yet her furtive, premarital rendezvous with young Joe, their soulful walks, slipping into the Christian Science Mother Church for privacy, and their dance-card ruses all illustrate Rose’s rebellious streak that might have raised eyebrows among Blumenthal’s nuns. Being a Child of Mary obviously didn’t preclude Rose’s pursuit of Joe, even if that meant circumventing her parents’ attempts to limit her access to him. Once married, she graduated from the “no kissing” rule to pregnancy in a matter of weeks.
As their firstborn, baby Joe immediately became his parents’ pride and joy. A youthful, athletic, rugged Joe Sr., clad in a bathing suit, proudly holds the smiling Joe Jr. in a 1916 photograph.14 The baby settled into his nursery, and his parents hired a $3-per-week trained nurse to care for him. Rose would now play the role of the ever-pregnant matriarch, presiding over a growing and boisterous Kennedy brood, the first five born in a mere six years, from 1915 to 1921. Her public life, so carefully practiced with Honey Fitz, came a distant second to maternal obligations. Yet Boston’s new mayor, Andrew J. Peters, named her to his wife’s reception committee for Mrs. Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 visit.15
Rose’s second child, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, named for her father, entered the world on May 29, 1917. She gave birth to the future president in her Beals Street bedroom. Always the practical New Englander, Rose situated her bed next to the window so the doctor had plenty of light to deliver the baby, who arrived at three o’clock in the afternoon.
Unlike robust Joe Jr., young “Jack,” as the family called him, was often scrawny and hollow-eyed. He caught nearly every childhood disease, including scarlet fever when he was only two-and-a-half. Caused by the same streptococcal bacteria that produces strep throat, potentially fatal scarlet fever provoked panic and fear before the 1940s advent of antibiotics. Doctors and the public dreaded its onset, marked by fever, sore throat, and characteristic red rash. Highly contagious through casual contact, it could also lead to complications like rheumatic fever. Typically, public-health officials quarantined patients in their homes.
Rose had just given birth to her fourth baby, Kathleen, on February 20, 1920, the day Jack developed his alarming symptoms. “If a baby had just been born [and] the [infected] child was in the house, [a] small house, they were afraid the new baby would get scarlet fever, I would get scarlet fever,” Rose recalled. Using Honey Fitz’s contacts, Joe managed to persuade Boston City Hospital to admit the desperately ill child for treatment (even though the Kennedys lived in Brookline) to protect Rose and the other children. Joe kept vigil at the toddler’s side, while Rose remained at home with her new baby. Even in religious matters, the Kennedy patriarch employed deal-making. He begged God to spare young Jack. If so, Joe promised the Almighty, he would donate half his “fortune” to charity. The little boy survived, and his grateful father contributed $3,700 to the St. Apollonia Guild for a bus to transport disadvantaged children to doctors.16 When Jack regained his strength a few weeks later, his parents sent him to a Poland Springs, Maine, sanitarium for two months, where he continued recuperating with a governess and visits from Boston relatives.17
Before inoculations limited the spread of potentially fatal childhood diseases, Rose fretted constantly about her children’s health. She insisted on fresh air for them. Pushing the youngest in a baby carriage and bringing the others in tow, Rose took daily morning walks. Often they would toddle to a nearby shopping center. The live-in maid grocery-shopped, laundered mounds of diapers, sterilized baby bottles, and prepared formula. “[Diapers] never concerned me,” Rose recalled.18
Only occasionally did she breast-feed her first several children, which made her more susceptible to pregnancy and them more prone to disease. Nursing mothers can usually prevent conception by having their babies suckle for all feedings during the first six to twelve months after birth. Yet Rose became pregnant with each of the four children after Joe Jr. on an average of every eight months. “If you got run down and you had to go away you stop[ped breast-feeding] at six months,” she explained. “Unfortunately when Eunice was born she didn’t get along very well because the bottle wasn’t very well organized, and I couldn’t nurse her at that time because I had breast abscess[es].… Baby is just as well on a bottle, maybe better, it’s more regular.” Moreover, Rose found it “a little confining to be home every three hours to nurse the baby.… [A] baby is usually fed at 10 or 10:30 [p.m.]. You’re at the theater, so what do you do?” Rushing home to nurse an infant didn’t suit her schedule.19
During one of her morning walks with the children, Rose purchased index cards and a small wooden file box. She began meticulously, some might say compulsively, to record all of the children’s religious milestones (baptism, First Communion, confirmation) and vital medical statistics—one card per child—much as parents now store such data on computers. In addition to maintaining a card catalog of childhood illnesses and medical treatments, Rose obsessively monitored her children’s weight for years, not just when they were infants. “I used to weigh them every week and keep track and then give them more nourishment if they were losing weight, give them an extra glass of milk or cream in their milk. Jack, who was always thin, used to get the extra juice from the steak when it was carved, or the roast beef juice, which was an idea I had to build up his health because we didn’t talk so much about vitamins then.”20
Several of her nine children, perhaps because of their mother’s constant worry over their being too thin, tended to add pounds, and then both Rose and Joe would chastise them for looking chubby. Rose’s own “nervous tummy” caused her to have an adversarial relationship with food, and she focused single-mindedly on remaining petite. Later in life she adored receiving compliments on her svelte figure—especially after producing nine offspring. Twenty-first-century doctors might diagnose her with an eating disorder. Perfectionist women who strive to achieve unhealthfully thin physiques may suffer from anorexia nervosa. Rose linked her concern for the children’s diet with creating perfect Kennedys: “I was usually home by lunchtime so as to see that the children ate properly. At suppertime I sat with them and then had my own dinner a little later. My great ambition was to have my children morally, physically, and mentally as perfect as possible.”21
Yet Rose’s third child was anything but perfect in her mother’s eyes or by early twentieth-century standards. Her first daughter, christened Rose Marie, but also known as Rosemary or Rosie to her family, arrived on September 13, 1918, between older brother, Jack, and younger sister, Kathleen, known as Kick. In the midst of the worldwide Spanish flu pandemic, Rose archived a newspaper clipping about the latest Kennedy baby in her scrapbook: “[A] dainty daughter was added to the nursery which previously sheltered two sturdy sons.…”22 Yet Rosemary’s cherubic face and sweet smile initially masked what Rose gradually began to comprehend—the shy little girl couldn’t keep up with her active, bright, and precocious older brothers and younger sister. Rose first noticed that Rosemary’s motor and verbal skills developed more slowly than Joe’s and Jack’s. She began walking and speaking at a slower pace. As she grew older and tried to participate in sports with her competitive siblings, Rosemary couldn’t steer her sled, ice skate, hit a tennis ball, or row a boat—all activities that the energetic Kennedy children performed as naturally as their athletic parents. More alarming to her mother, Rosemary scrawled her letters from the right side of the page to the left.
Joe Jr. and Jack began their formal education around the corner from Beals Street at the public Edward Devotion School. Joe Jr., Rose assumed, had the higher IQ of the two boys, but teachers reported that Jack scored above him. (Even years after his presidency, Rose continued to believe that Jack had a lower IQ than Joe Jr.)23 Devotion School teachers told Rose that Rosemary had a low IQ and recommended that she repeat kindergarten. “I was puzzled by what all this might mean,” Rose agonized. “I did not know where to send her to school or how to cope with the situation. I talked to our family doctor, to the head of the psychology department at Harvard, to a Catholic psychologist who was head of a school in Washington. Each of them told me she was retarded, but what to do about her, where to send her, how to help her seemed to be an unanswered question.… I had never heard of a retarded child.”24 Not knowing how to help Rosemary, Rose felt “very discouraged and really heartbroken.”25
She eventually concluded that Rosemary’s condition had resulted from a “genetic accident.” Some children suffered brain damage at birth, but Rose believed that was not the case here. In many families “someone is brilliant and someone [is] slow,” Rose reasoned.26 Her view of Rosemary’s intellect relative to the Kennedy family corresponds to the modern definition of mental retardation. It “describes how people with low intelligence function in society.”27
In fact, the Kennedys’ initial approach to Rosemary was quite enlightened. They engaged, at times, in what would now be called “mainstreaming.” In the early twentieth century, authorities considered children with IQs under seventy to be “mentally retarded.” Such “feebleminded” persons, as they were then labeled, faced years of horrific institutionalization, ridicule, and, during the eugenics movement, forced sterilization sanctioned by the government, including the US Supreme Court.28 One hundred years later, the same IQ categorization (below seventy) still applies to individuals currently said to have an “intellectual disability,” but intelligence tests are no longer viewed as infallible. The more commonly accepted paradigm of intellectual disability views it as a formula: “person x environment.”29 In other words, how do people with low IQs and social adaptability issues relate to others?
According to Rose, the Kennedy family wavered between two equally imperfect options then available. If they tutored Rosemary at home, she would have no schoolmates, as her popular siblings did. If they sent her away to a school for “slow” children, Joe and Rose worried that she would be forever behind her peers. Even if they had decided on the latter course, very few schools existed in the 1920s for children with special mental and physical needs. They refused to institutionalize her. Instead, with their financial resources, her parents decided to homeschool Rosemary with hired tutors. She ultimately learned how to write but never advanced beyond block letters. Rose eschewed cursive handwriting in order to communicate by mail with Rosemary and avoided speaking French to her children for fear of making their slower sister feel inferior. When asked in 1972 if Rosemary demonstrated “any particular aptitude or interest,” Rose starkly replied, “No. She was never capable, sometimes they [the mentally retarded] do, but she never showed any [aptitude].” On second thought, Rose added, “She swam well.”30
Always promoting an active lifestyle, Rose hired physical-education instructors to teach Rosemary how to play tennis, dance, and swim. “I gave her a great deal of attention, thinking that I could circumvent this affliction that she had, or I could have her so educated that it wouldn’t be noticed at all or she could still go on with the other children in a normal way. But it took a tremendous lot of time and thought and attention, and visits away from home to visit schools and to visit psychologists.”31 What did such pressure to fit in, albeit applied with loving intentions, impose on Rosemary and her siblings? Reminiscing about those demanding early days of motherhood, Rose wondered if she had neglected young Jack. In fact, she returned home one day from her travels to learn that he had accidentally sipped from an ammonia bottle. Fortunately, “he didn’t swallow it so he was okay,” Rose reported in her diary.32 Clearly, the Kennedy household didn’t always function perfectly.
Joe remained president of Columbia Trust until 1917, when he left to become assistant general manager of the Fore River Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation’s plant, south of Boston. His draft board declared him eligible for military induction in World War I, but Joe explained to draft officials that he had resigned his bank presidency and “enter[ed] the ship-building business … prompted by a desire to feel that I was doing something worth while.”33 The draft board refused his deferment requests until influential friends intervened.34
Joe worked sixty-five-hour weeks to ensure the production of naval vessels for the US war effort, earning a $4,000 annual salary, plus a bonus of 1 percent of the plant’s total profits. They were considerable, as Fore River produced thirty-six destroyers for the war. In addition to handsome bonuses, the war production’s frenetic pace also brought Joe a case of nervous exhaustion. He would be prone to such stress-related ailments, including peptic ulcers, throughout his career. His drive and entrepreneurship led him to sign a lucrative contract to run the Fore River cafeteria. In addition, he made his first contacts with the young assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt.35
When Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, ended the “Great War,” Joe looked for his next professional challenge. To unload the Fore River shipyard’s postbellum surplus, he attempted to negotiate a deal with Galen Stone, one of the founding partners in the brokerage firm Hayden, Stone. Though unsuccessful in that effort, Joe so impressed Stone that he hired Kennedy as a broker and manager of the firm’s Boston office in the summer of 1920. Joe now acquired an effective professional mentor, as well as an office in Boston’s downtown business district. His base salary ($10,000) represented more than twice what he had made annually at the shipyard. More important for his future career and financial status, he began to play the stock market systematically (with mixed success initially) in the precrash decade, before federal regulations. Joe’s Wall Street maneuvers required numerous trips to New York City. On September 16, 1920, he narrowly escaped injury when a bomb exploded in front of J. P. Morgan & Co. during one of Kennedy’s Wall Street visits. Authorities suspected anarchists of planting the lethal device, which killed forty and injured scores. Joe’s harrowing brush with terrorism prompted him to consider joining the Republican Party to support its law-and-order stance. Rose, however, convinced her husband to maintain the Kennedy-Fitzgerald families’ historic Democratic ties.36
As Joe increasingly turned his attention from home, Rose frequently had to perform her parental tasks alone. Once, while pregnant with Kathleen in 1920, she became so distraught that she moved back to her parents’ Dorchester home. How could she face the unremitting pressures of motherhood with her husband focused on business concerns, not to mention chorus girls and actresses?37 Later, Rose would remark that he had “an unusual [knack] for getting along with princes or paupers, chorus girls, society matrons, Catholic and Protestant, East Boston and Back Bay, businessmen or dilettantes.… He could talk to anybody.”38 Resigned to Joe’s gregarious nature, Rose eventually decided to accept it as a benefit to her sons’ future political careers.
Rose’s 1920 absence lasted only several weeks. Her father told her bluntly that she had to resume her responsibilities as a wife and mother. Honey Fitz and Josie’s prophecy, uttered when Rose begged them to let her attend Harvard’s 1911 prom with Joe, had come to pass. Married life had overtaken her opportunities to think of herself first. After attending a religious retreat, Rose returned to Beals Street with renewed determination to fulfill her spousal and maternal duties.39 Years later she scoffed at the suggestion that the Kennedys might have contemplated ending their marriage. “[Y]ou never heard a cross word, we always understood one another and trusted one another and that’s it,” Rose proclaimed with characteristic certainty. “All the world was wondering, watching and saying we were separated, one day; the next day we were going to have a baby. This was in our early married life. There’s no reason ever to change or have any reason to doubt.”40 Rose would not likely have contemplated divorce, because the Catholic Church strictly forbids it. In fact, those Catholics who do divorce are denied the sacraments and may not remarry in the Church unless their previous union is annulled. Recognizing that spouses face “great trials,” especially in rearing children, Catholicism preaches the need for self-sacrifice.41 At least Rose could take comfort in knowing that her marital sacrifices constituted a noble vocation.
She never publicly conceded her temporary separation from Joe in 1920 or her knowledge of his womanizing. In fact, she squelched all such references as “gossip.” Producing children confirmed a successful marriage in her worldview. Rose always insisted that she and Joe never quarreled during their fifty-five years as husband and wife because they had so much in common. That view of her marriage coincided perfectly with the Catholic Church’s ideal. Its doctrine of parents’ responsibility toward their spouses and children to maintain a “Christian family” became the sine qua non of Rose’s life.
She described Joe’s responsibilities primarily as being the breadwinner. Unlike her own mother, who told a newspaper reporter that Honey Fitz rarely spent time at home, Rose never chastised Joe publicly for his absences, even at the birth of their children.42 She enjoyed describing how the first five Kennedy offspring enthusiastically greeted their father at the train station, after his two-month stay in New York, with the exclamation, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, we’ve got another baby!” He, in turn, recalled the bemused look on his fellow travelers’ faces, as if to say, “What that fellow certainly does not need right now is another baby.”43
Contrasting her view of childbirth with that of her adult daughters in the 1970s, Rose observed, “I think the modern idea is to have them [husbands] go through this trivia with the wives so they’ll know, they will appreciate the child more, appreciate more what the wife does [in childbirth]. That wasn’t my idea, the idea was it was something the woman had to do and the less bother she gave to anybody else, including her husband, the better it was, and the easier it was.”44 Remarkably, she described labor as “trivia.” Of course, in that era, even when the majority of births occurred at home, not a hospital, most men didn’t assist their wives in childbirth, but would await the postnatal news beyond the birthing chamber.
Rose explained that she saw no need to disrupt Joe’s work if the baby wasn’t expected for six or seven hours. In fact, her husband was in Florida when Kathleen was born. “[T]here was no need in keeping Joe around in the winter … so he went to Palm Beach.” She conceded, however, that her acceptance of, indeed seeming preference for, her spouse’s absence from the Kennedy nativity scene “might be misinterpreted.”45
Clearly, Rose believed in a literal division of labor between husband and wife. The Catholic Church approved, and undoubtedly shaped, her view. “Being the provider of the family, and the superior of the wife both in physical strength and in those mental and moral qualities which are appropriate to the exercise of authority, the husband is naturally the family’s head, even ‘the head of the wife,’ in the language of Saint Paul,” proclaimed Catholicism’s patriarchy. Still, the Church maintained that wives were equal to their husbands, except “when disagreement arises in matters” of household governance, then “as a rule,” the woman was “to yield” to her spouse. Nevertheless, “care and management of the details of the household belong naturally to the wife, because she is better fitted for these tasks than the husband,” Catholic dogma explained.46
To Rose, “the more children you had, the better developed would be your life.… [O]f course, it was a very strong teaching in the Catholic Church.” In addition to having the satisfaction of conforming to her faith’s edicts, Rose always received jewelry from Joe, of increasing value as his fortunes rose, after giving birth. By the last few children, Joe would ask his jeweler to lend him several diamond bracelets or pins. Rose would then choose the reward for delivering yet another Kennedy child.47
She saw herself as the manager of hearth and home, while Joe toiled in the business world. “I ran the house. I ran the children,” Rose neatly summarized. “We were always busy in our department, and he [Joe] had his, a great deal to do, and I think that was the way [it was] most of our lives. I mean I didn’t interfere, and he didn’t interfere,… I would say I wanted all rubies and not all sapphires if he was buying jewelry.… [H]e loved to buy jewelry, and he wanted me to have everything everybody else had.”48
In the earliest years, Joe would take the children to his parents’ Winthrop home each Sunday in the Model T Ford he had purchased shortly after his marriage. Rose appreciated some quiet time, even if she had to care for the newest baby when the nurse took off every other Sunday. “Some people used to get substitute nurses to take care of their children when the regular nurse was away, but I always liked to take care of them myself because, if one does, one discovers little discrepancies or little leaks in the system.” Rose periodically checked on the cook to see that she offered the children enough variety in their meals. She reported that the hired help sometimes cut corners and fed the youngsters the same soup every night if Rose failed to supervise mealtimes closely. “If you take care of [the children] yourself, or at least you’re at home when they are eating, you would see that. Then you can make suggestions [that] the nursemaid doesn’t want to do … because she doesn’t want to get in wrong with the cook. So I think it’s a good idea to be around quite often so that you know what’s going on.”49
Rose took most seriously the role assigned her by the Catholic Church—teaching the faith to her children. On their daily walks they visited St. Aidan’s so that her offspring would associate praying in church with the other quotidian aspects of life, not just with attending Sunday Mass. By 1923 Joe Jr., at age seven, became an altar boy. Still, Rose’s piety sometimes ran counter to her two bumptious boys. Explaining to young Jack that attendance at Mass on the first Friday of each month for nine straight months ensured a “happy death,” she was alarmed that he would rather pray for “two dogs.” Joe Jr.’s attendance at Stations of the Cross while “all dirty” mortified his mother.50 No wonder that Rose wanted to send the boys to Catholic school to bolster their religious instruction. Joe countermanded her wish, however, contending that they would learn their religion at home, the way he and Rose had. Further, sending them to non-Catholic schools would prepare them to excel in a Protestant world.51
Four high-spirited children under one roof, with only three bedrooms and one bath, necessitated a move to larger quarters. In 1921 the Kennedys purchased a more commodious home a few blocks away. It featured three bathrooms, a large porch, and a private bedroom for Rose. Money “never was a big question,” she observed. “I always had maids, [Joe] was president of a bank, there was very little money in the bank, but he had other assets and naturally as time went on I realized we had more money, because we had bigger houses and I was able to have more maids and more expensive clothes and more expensive fur coats.”52
Joe and Rose’s fifth child, Eunice, named for her mother’s fatally ill sister, was born on July 10, 1921, shortly after the move from Beals Street. In addition to maids, cooks, and nurses for the new babies, Rose hired governesses to assist with the older children. “I always had a school teacher [to serve as governess] because I thought they spoke correctly, and they could interest the children in the proper books and proper reading.” As a little boy, Jack “used to ask the Canadian governess why she would prefer to be under the king of England instead of under the president of the United States.” His mother believed that Jack’s question proved that the little boy had politics “in his roots.”53
JOE’S MENTOR, GALEN STONE, retired in 1923, and Joe hung out his shingle as a solo banker and broker in Boston. He arranged for his assistant and confidante, Edward (Eddie) Moore, and his wife, Mary, to purchase the Beals Street house. Moore had served as Honey Fitz’s secretary before dedicating his life to Joe Kennedy. A childless couple, the Moores became surrogate parents to Joe and Rose’s brood. Edward was also Rosemary’s godfather and helped supervise her care.
The Moores’ complete devotion to the Kennedy family, and the presence of household staff, meant that Rose could travel, as she had while single. Sometimes she took the children. Just after Christmas 1922, Rose, Joe Jr., and Jack went to Poland Springs in Maine, where Jack had recuperated from scarlet fever. Mary Moore accompanied them, and the two women’s husbands joined them a few days later. The three youngest children remained behind with household staff. Rose reported in her 1923 diary, which she vowed to keep each day, despite her busy lifestyle, that the New Year’s crowd at Poland Springs consisted of numerous “college boys and girls.” Her youthful, carefree days had ended, however, and the diary that year consisted of numerous references to mundane maternal duties—nursing sick children, curtailing thumb-sucking for fear it would misalign their teeth, celebrating birthdays, supervising the children’s religious instruction. Joe Sr. and Eddie left Rose behind in Maine and returned to Boston. Rose, in turn, left Jack and Mary in Maine and went home with Joe Jr. This pattern of splitting the family among a host of locales would mark the Kennedys’ future, with the distances growing greater as the years progressed. On January 7, 1923, Rose’s frustration leaps from the page of her journal entry: “Took care of children. Miss Brooks, the governess, helped. Kathleen still has bronchitis and Joe sick in bed. Great life.”54 Still, Rose continued a surprisingly active social life, despite her family obligations. In 1923 she recorded attending an Ace of Clubs dance as president of the organization she had founded, spectating at the Harvard–Princeton hockey game, going to the theater, and hearing a lecture by Hilaire Belloc, the Anglo-French writer and historian. Her travels continued apace. Sometimes she rewarded herself by leaving the kids behind altogether. When her children were young, she would escape Boston’s bitter cold winters by returning to Palm Beach for a couple of weeks. “I did go to [California in 1923] with my sister because I thought we’d been [to] Palm Beach three or four years; we’d never been to California. [W]e could see new places and faces and California. So we had friends out there,… and had a glorious time.…” Jack, always a precocious little boy, chastised Rose as she left on the California trip: “Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children all alone.”55 Assuaging her guilt, Rose reported later that when she returned to the house to retrieve a forgotten item, the children were happily showing no signs of abandonment.56
Joe Kennedy, known as the deal-maker in the family, found his match in Rose when it came to arranging travel. She would allow Joe to vacation with his friends in Palm Beach during the winter if she could travel with companions. On the 1923 trip out west, she left her home, husband, and children for more than six weeks. Her sister Agnes accompanied her for their transcontinental adventure. Rose would have adapted perfectly to Facebook and Twitter, using her diary entries as daily postings. “I left for California at 10 A. M. from South Station.” “Arrived Chicago, 1 o’clock, shopped at Marshall Fields.” “Arrived Albuquerque. Visited Indian Museum.… [C]ountry more interesting, hilly, red sand and muddy rivers shallow. Indian clay houses—adobes—oil fields.” “At Grand Canyon.… I rode around rim.… Colors beautiful—purples, lavenders, and reds and blues.”57 Agnes ventured into the canyon for a close-up look. The difference in how they experienced nature’s wonder reflects Rose’s approach to life: she often confined herself to the edge of experience, preferring a more superficial view of even the most profound sites.
From home Joe sent news of the children. Using his nickname for her, “Rosa,” in cables, Joe assured her that he was the “greatest manager in the world” because the children were “fine.” “I hope you are having a real good time because you so richly deserve it. Please do not think too much about us and spoil your party. I am not lonesome because I find myself very happy in the thought that you are enjoying yourself. Lots of love from us all.”58 Refusing to worry her about an outbreak of measles among the children, he kept the health report mum.59 Likewise, she never reported bad news from home when he traveled because, as she put it, “There was little or nothing he could do to help the situation at a distance, so why worry him?”60
As Rose explored California, from the missions to the orange groves and Sunkist factory to Coronado Beach and La Jolla with a detour across the Mexican border to Tijuana, Joe encouraged her to write to him: “I like to know how you are.” Meanwhile, Joe met with teachers, took the children to parties, and treated them to Friday night suppers. Rose traveled north to Los Angeles, where she and Agnes stayed at the new Ambassador Hotel and dined at its famed Coconut Grove nightclub, a hot spot for new film celebrities such as Louis B. Mayer, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Howard Hughes, Clara Bow, Rudolph Valentino, and Gloria Swanson. In Hollywood she lunched at a restaurant frequented by actors and actresses and saw Gloria Swanson perform a film scene.61 The next day Rose explored Santa Monica, Venice, and San Pedro, and then sailed to Catalina Island, finding the boat trip “tiresome” when she nearly became seasick. But she enjoyed seeing the home of chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr., who developed the picturesque island. She loved her hotel in Santa Barbara, describing her room’s decor in detail. Taking an auto excursion to Miramar and Montecito over a “beautiful mountain road,” she caught a glimpse of Douglas Fairbanks’s property. The central California flora fascinated her, especially the eucalyptus trees, date palms, and cypress, as did the stunning topographical wonders of Yosemite. Moving north, she spent five days in San Francisco.
By now, Joe pined for her, writing, “I am looking forward to the nineteenth [of May, her return date] like I did for October seventh [their wedding day] some years ago. Everybody still fine but I think the help will welcome you back.”62 Rose returned by way of Salt Lake City, where she recorded Brigham Young’s family statistics: “19 wives, 28 daughters, 24 sons.” Colorado Springs and Denver were her last stops, and she marveled at the Rocky Mountains’ splendor.
A few weeks after her mid-May return, the family moved to the South Shore for the summer. In 1920 they had begun to rent a house at Cohasset, a Protestant bastion. Finding the local golf club inhospitable, Joe was angry but not too surprised when its members blackballed him. The Kennedys celebrated Rose’s thirty-third birthday with a trip to Hyannis on Cape Cod, where Joe presented his wife with a Cartier vanity case. While summering at the South Shore in 1923, Rose became pregnant with baby number six, Patricia. She sent Joe and Jack back to Boston to start school in September, while she stayed at the beach. The boys resided with the Moores in Brookline. Jack told Mary that “the cops are chasing me already,” after he had teased a playmate who then complained to the police. Rose would stay on the South Shore until early October. By the time she returned home, the boys were playing more childish pranks, including shoplifting Halloween paraphernalia. Yet six-year-old Jack could be a charming “elf,” as his mother described him. “Daddy has a sweet tooth, hasn’t he? I wonder which one it is?” she reported he queried her. Rose’s admonitions to buckle down at school met with his boyish response, “You know, I am getting on all right and if you study too much, you’re liable to go crazy.” Believing that both boys had too much time to conjure up mischief, she and Joe sent them to Dexter, a private, nonsectarian elementary school, with supervised play and sports in the afternoons.63 Joe Jr. and Jack could walk to the exclusive school, which attracted boys from Boston’s WASP elite. Joe Sr.’s plan to remove his sons from their socioeconomic roots was now under way.
Joe and Rose had more worries than the boys’ antics in 1923. The first of their family tragedies began to befall them. Just after Rose returned from her California trip, Joe’s mother, Mary Hickey Kennedy, died of stomach cancer at sixty-five. “It was just God’s will,” Joe wrote.64 In September Rose’s sister Eunice passed away at twenty-three from tuberculosis contracted while working for the Red Cross during World War I.
One bright spot for the Kennedys in the Roaring Twenties appeared in their improving financial position. By the middle of the decade, Joe’s net worth approached $2 million.65 Eventually Rose’s household staff included four maids, a cook, a waitress, a nurse, and a governess. Honey Fitz advised her to hire as many servants as necessary to ease her maternal burdens. Joe, too, indulged his materialistic desires. One day he brought home two Rolls-Royces. Rose remembered, “I thought then he was going a little crazy and that I should talk to him tactfully because they say if you run afoul with your husband … perhaps he’ll stop giving you presents.… I said, ‘Well, really two Rolls Royces cost [a lot], and I don’t think we need [them].’… [B]ut I never asked [Joe] how much money he had or where he was getting it or anything.… [H]e used to like my clothes. [But] [h]e didn’t want to see the bills.…”66
Cooks constituted more than a luxury in Rose Kennedy’s household. They represented an absolute necessity. She simply didn’t know how to prepare meals for any size family, much less an army of young Kennedys. “I tried to learn [to cook as a young girl],” Rose asserted, “but my mother always had a cook for years, and she wasn’t really very cooperative. She wanted to get the work done. She didn’t want to stop and teach me, but I thought I should know how to cook because I thought it would be an advantage. But I never had to cook much.”67
ATTEMPTING TO THWART a hostile investor pool engaged in driving down Yellow Cab stock to the detriment of a Honey Fitz crony, in 1924 Joe spent considerable time in New York. He and his associates manipulated the company’s stock prices to counter the attack. Rose knew that her husband “was running a [stock] pool,” although she admitted, “I don’t understand the stock market. But [Joe] had two or three different things going, selling and buying at the same time, mixing everybody up.”68 Though a financial naïf, she actually grasped the primary aim of Joe’s Wall Street machinations.
As Joe spent increasingly more time in New York, Rose considered moving the family there, but “I didn’t want to change the children’s schools.…”69 Honey Fitz had switched Rose’s school several times, including taking her from Concord to Boston for a few months during grammar school so that he could tell the electorate he lived in the city. She found the experience difficult and didn’t want to treat her children similarly. While away from the family, Joe kept in touch by telephone, an invention he quickly adopted for personal and professional use. Rose labeled her husband “a great telephoner. He used to telephone before we were married every night and afterward nearly every night, which was a wonderful habit, and one which the children inherited, which was rather expensive.… I suppose every family has their pet economies and their pet extravagances.”70
Perhaps Rose had another reason to stay in Boston and communicate with Joe by phone. During his many New York absences, she experienced the longest interval among her first seven children’s births: three years between Eunice (1921) and Patricia, born May 6, 1924.
Joe’s increasing wealth enabled him to indulge his passion for entertainment, especially live stage productions. Since his days at Hayden, Stone, he had dabbled in “moving pictures.” As early as 1919, he likened them to the invention of another of his favorite electronic instruments, the telephone. “[W]e must get into this [movie] business,” Joe declared to a friend. After trying unsuccessfully to do so throughout the first half of the 1920s, he finally completed a deal to purchase Film Booking Offices of America (FBOA) and became its president and chairman of the board in 1926.71
Working on the movie deal, Joe’s weekly commute to New York grew tiresome. He wrote lovingly to Rose from New York’s Harvard Club, just before sailing for Europe in the summer of 1925 to negotiate with English film moguls: “I just want you to know that going away on trips like this makes me realize just how little anything amounts to except you as years go on I just love you more than anything in the world and I always wonder whether I ever do half enough for you to show you how much I appreciate you. Well dear this is just a little love letter from a husband to wife married 11 years.”72
Joe’s letters to Rose from shipboard and Europe reflect warm affection for her and their family. Aboard Cunard’s Aquitania, he penned, “Rosa dear, Well here I am two days out and already wishing I was home.… You were certainly a peach to think of your letters and have the pictures of Jack… and the little girls. I am looking forward to opening the rest of them.” As the ship neared Cherbourg, Kennedy told Rose about his unrelenting homesickness and that he had received her photograph: “I was tickled to get it but you should have put it in the first envelope. You know that’s where you belong and always will.” From Paris he admitted, “I know it is terrible to tell you in every letter how homesick I am but it is terrible. I can’t seem to shake it off at all. I think of you and the children all the time and almost go silly.… I have received one letter from you but I suppose the others are in England. It was just bread from heaven.” Observing his First Friday duty, Joe “went to communion … and went to an English priest for confession. When I finished he asked me if I was a priest (how do you like that old darling[?]).… I can’t get along without you, Rosa. It may be nice to travel but only with you. The complete success of your system is acknowledged. I admit absolute defeat and beg for terms.… I am crazy about you.”73 In later years Joe continued to express his love for Rose in letters during his many and lengthy absences, but none ever achieved the ardor or tenderness of the 1925 billets-doux.
After the FBOA purchase, Rose relented on moving to New York. She had occasionally visited Joe while he worked there and “found it a very exciting city.” They would enjoy a “week of fun. We would go to theaters and see the life there. So I was very happy to go. Although some of my friends did not want to go to New York. Joe had two or three associates’ wives who did not want to go at that time. But … I always was interested and joyous and happy about seeking new adventures.”74
Joe’s explanation of the family’s 1927 move to Riverdale, in the Bronx, was less sentimental. Hoping to escape Boston’s provincialism, he set his children on a course to avoid the Brahmins’ religious and ethnic bigotry.75 Once in New York, the Kennedys acquired “a bigger house and more servants” for their seven children, which now included a third son, Robert, born on November 20, 1925. The family bestowed the diminutive “Bobby” on the little boy. Rose’s mother worried that he would become a “sissy” because he was surrounded by sisters and governesses.76 When asked in 1969 to share anecdotes of his childhood, Rose wrote that his sisters might have more stories to offer “as Bobby was [the] youngest of seven children of whom [the] eldest was only ten years old, and I do not remember many details—Children were all grouped together.…”77
The thirteen-room Riverdale estate had once belonged to Republican Charles Evans Hughes, who would become chief justice of the United States in 1930. Rose admitted to acute homesickness for Massachusetts.78 Maintaining their Bay State roots, Joe rented, and then in 1928 bought, a summer home at Hyannis Port that would become the nucleus of the family’s Cape Cod compound.
Kennedy and Fitzgerald family associations continued to shadow Joe and Rose during the 1920s. Although an abstemious drinker because of his sensitive stomach and a desire to avoid the stereotype of the drunken Irish, Joe had access to the stored sherry, port, and spirits from P. J. Kennedy’s days as a saloon owner. Joe sold his father’s wine, and supplied alcohol for his tenth Harvard reunion in 1922, despite Prohibition. Yet the terms “bootlegger” and “rumrunner,” often attached to Joseph Kennedy’s legend, exaggerate his deals. Amanda Smith, Joe’s granddaughter, found neither “confirmation nor denial” for the age-old rumor that he sometimes waited on Massachusetts’s North Shore for nighttime deliveries of illicit alcohol. Even the federal government never discovered any illegalities in Joe’s alcohol business prior to the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.79
Joe also assisted Honey Fitz’s ongoing political ambitions although Rose’s marriage and motherhood removed her from the campaign trail. In 1916, two years after he withdrew from the mayor’s race in disgrace, Fitzgerald had won the Democratic Party’s nomination for US Senate, but incumbent Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. defeated him in the Bay State’s first popular senatorial election. Vying for the US House of Representatives seat from the Tenth District two years later, Honey Fitz won and served seven months until a congressional investigation uncovered voter fraud. The House then voted to remove Fitzgerald. He never held public office again, though he tried unsuccessfully to win the governorship in 1922.80
Honey Fitz turned his attention to young Joe Jr. and Jack, delighting in taking them to parades, political rallies, Red Sox games, and Boston’s historic sites. Waiting in the car with his Grandma Fitzgerald while Honey Fitz shook voters’ hands at political rallies made Jack impatient. John Fitzgerald’s namesake would never relish pressing the flesh as much as his grandfather. It would be another of Rose’s sons whom Ted Sorensen would label the “reincarnation of Honey Fitz.”81