ROSE HAD THOUGHT THE MOVE TO RIVERDALE WOULD REUNITE the family while Joe pursued his movie business in New York City. She had barely settled in, however, when Joe began spending most of his time in Hollywood, as he would until 1930.1 At least Riverdale was a pleasant community. Prosperous nineteenth-century businessmen had built their mansions there to escape cramped urban life. The Kennedys’ home sat across from an estate once rented by Teddy Roosevelt, then by Mark Twain.
Maintaining a flock of seven, ranging in age from twelve-year-old Joe Jr. to two-year-old Bobby, presented Rose with numerous challenges. First came the search for new schools. Joe Jr. and Jack enrolled in Riverdale Country Day, which proved more than adequate for scholastic and extracurricular activities. Established in 1907, it was among the nation’s first country day schools. Wealthy parents had created these posh suburban enclaves so that their sons could have a prep-school experience without boarding away from home. RCD maintained high academic standards, fostered esprit de corps and character, and promoted sports, as well as other after-school activities.2 Rose knew her two animated oldest children needed such supervised afternoon play and studies.
Only once—in spring 1927—did Rose visit Joe in Hollywood. “I couldn’t travel a whole lot on account of having all these young children.… [T]he winters were quite severe in New England, and the children had colds, and I stayed pretty close to home. And Hollywood was three days away on the train, or four days and three nights. I went once, but a child could be dead and buried by the time you would get back from Hollywood.”3 As we have seen, Rose worried incessantly about her children’s health, perhaps with memories of Jack’s scarlet fever preying on her mind. Or maybe her method of handling Joe’s infidelity, knowing that she had cast her lot with him forever in 1920 (after a brief respite with her parents), was simply staying home and protecting her children. When she needed a break from single parenting, she could rely on Eddie and Mary Moore, as well as household staff, to provide child care.
Rose’s spring 1927 Los Angeles visit with Joe marked several turning points. Her older children could now compose coherent letters. Joe Jr. wrote, “Dearest Mother: I thank you and dad for the lovely telegram. The most important thing I have to tell you [is] that I was confirmed yesterday by Cardinal O’conell [sic].”4 Rose must have felt some guilt about missing her eldest son’s confirmation in the Catholic Church. He reported that he had served early Mass, received Communion, and returned to church later for the confirmation ceremony, attended by the ever-present Moores, Grandma and Grandpa Fitzgerald, sisters Eunice and Rosemary, and Aunt Agnes. He dutifully thanked Joe and Rose for the prayer book they had given him to mark his becoming a “Soldier of Christ,” and he reported that Grandma Fitzgerald and Aunt Agnes presented him with a rosary. He also observed that his sister Kathleen would make her First Communion the next week, another important religious milestone that Rose and Joe would miss. The governess, Miss MacSwain, assured Mrs. Kennedy that Kathleen would “look very sweet” for the holy occasion. Eunice, not quite six, scrawled, “Dear Mother, I love you and Daddy. We all are fine,” and the governess attached an update on all of the children. Rose had been gone so long that MacSwain commented, “When you come back, you will see quite a change in [Bobby].” “He says ever so many words now.”5
While her children braved a rainy, cool Boston spring, Rose experienced Hollywood’s sun-kissed life, including visits to movie stars’ opulent homes. Although Beverly Hills extravagances shocked Rose’s frugal New England sensibilities, she charmed her Los Angeles hosts. Meeting celebrities throughout her life had prepared her to hobnob with Joe’s hospitable colleagues.6 Asked years later, “Were you impressed by those people, kind of excited and thrilled.…” Rose responded, “Well, I was, [but] … I didn’t see them a lot.… I only went out there once.… [T]he people themselves, they were all very pleasant, I thought.”7 She took Joe’s ascent from minor East Coast movie entrepreneur to Hollywood mogul “in my stride and tried to learn the names of the moving picture companies, and the actresses and the actors.…”8
From her sole California visit with Joe, Rose returned pregnant with their eighth child. Although already settled in New York by the baby’s due date, Rose returned to Boston to be near her familiar obstetrician, Dr. Frederick Good. By 1928, medical protocols had changed, and Rose gave birth to Jean Ann Kennedy at a Dorchester hospital on February 20. Back in Riverdale, and attempting to keep meals orderly, Rose imposed a strict schedule on her octet of children: up to age six, they ate an hour earlier than the rest of the family. Rose sat with them and discussed simple topics of interest to toddlers and preschoolers. Then the older children dined together, and she would chat with them about more complicated subjects.9 Through their early school years, Rose encouraged Joe, Jack, and Kathleen, then Eunice, Pat, and Bobby, to read daily newspapers. She posted articles or documents on a bulletin board, expecting the older children to read them and discuss the content at dinner. Even during summer vacations, they continued supper seminars. Every July 4, she celebrated Independence Day at Hyannis Port by displaying the Declaration of Independence and discussing its historic signers.10 On Sundays and Holy Days she posed questions about the priest’s sermon and Catholic symbolism.
Looking back, she believed the children felt no pressure to perform at mealtime. “[N]othing was stressed or strained.… If they wanted to do it fine, but if they didn’t want to do it, they were more or less ignored. Not definitely, not deliberately, but, because they just were not interesting.… ”11 Visitors sometimes felt intimidated, especially when Joe was home and presided over the dining table. Rose’s friend Mary Sanford admitted years later:
It was an education to go to lunch with the whole family—it was a frightening experience. [Joe] would sit at the head of the table, and, if you didn’t know what was happening—if you weren’t au courant with all the politics of the day, you just felt like you were the most stupid person in the world. And each kid would get into the arguments and the conversation. It was very stimulating. And he was like a tyrant. I think they were always scared to death of him. You can see how interesting they are now [1972]—every one of them is interesting. Well, I think they’ve imbued them with this terrific drive and ambition—and certainly Rose has it.…12
Rose insisted on mealtime punctuality, even during the summer. “My husband was always on time. And I think it is rude to be late,” she asserted. She attributed her ability to accomplish so much in life to running the household by strict rules.13 Young Jack, however, chronically defied his mother. She would instruct the children to assemble at an appointed hour for their lunchtime trip home from the pool. Each day he missed the ride from the country club, found alternative transportation, and wandered in halfway through the noonday meal. Rose’s rule decreed that a tardy diner must start with whatever course the cooks were serving. But she let Jack sneak to the kitchen afterward and charm the staff into feeding him. Decades later she still bemoaned Jack’s recalcitrance. “[W]hat could you do if he was late everyday, and it was deliberate?” she wondered. “But he was so thin all the time that I couldn’t really adhere to the original [rules].”14
Jack had a sweet, endearing side, too. When Rose gave birth to her last child on February 22, 1932, in Boston, fourteen-year-old Jack asked if he could serve as the baby’s godfather. JFK waggishly wanted to name him “George Washington Kennedy,” in recognition of the infant’s historic birth date. Instead, his parents chose Edward Moore as the child’s name, to honor their dear friend, but they nicknamed the robust infant “Teddy.” Challenging two of her most cherished possessions—her girlish figure and devout faith—Rose’s friends criticized her for having yet another child. “[P]eople said, ‘Why do you want to have nine children? You have had eight. You are over forty-years-old, and you will be tired out, and you will lose your figure and looks. Why do you want to pay any attention to those priests?’” Obviously, her friends knew that Rose was following Catholic dictates. “I got rather indignant,” she responded, “and made up my mind that neither Teddy nor I [was] going to suffer and were going to be independent and make it in superior fashion. [I] [w]asn’t going to have any body feel sorry for us.”15 Rose declared, “[H]e was happy.… He would never get upset with anybody or anything.”16
Teddy remembered her lovingly: “Mother was … our Pied Piper into the world of ideas. She led us on educational outings to museums and to concerts, to Concord and Bunker Hill and the Old North Church, rattling out improvised math challenges to us along the way.… She was moderator of our topical dinner table conversation, the topics—geography one night, the front-page headlines the next—announced in advance on cards that she wrote out and pinned to a billboard near the dining room.”17
Admitting that “[Mother] was the disciplinarian of all our headstrong impulses, and was sometimes strict,” Teddy recalled that “spankings and whacks with a coat hanger were in her arsenal, as were banishments to the closet. On one such expedition, I stood in the darkness feeling sorry for myself, until I realized I was not alone: Jean was standing beside me, serving out her own time for some infraction of the rules. But Mother was also the tender index-card archivist of the small moments, the letters, notes, and remarks that were the lifeblood of our family.”18
Teddy earned a spanking and closet time for walking home alone from kindergarten. As Joe grew wealthier and more prominent, Rose worried that her children might be abducted for ransom.19 The 1932 kidnapping and murder of toddler Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. stunned her and fixated the nation. Rose frequently mentioned the tragedy and her fears about the children’s safety, especially Rosemary’s, agonizing that without constant supervision, the retarded youngster might wander off.
Rose later dismissed Victorian discipline’s potential ill effects on her children: “Well, I put them in the closet, but … they weren’t scared of the dark. It would just get one or two of them out of the way for awhile.…”20 Looking back, she admitted, “I spanked them with a ruler. Then I spanked them with a coat hanger as they grew older because there was always a closet near and there was always a coat hanger in the closet. And I couldn’t be bothered, you know,” throwing up her hands and smiling, “with nine children and all their friends in and making a lot of noise when you were telephoning or teasing one another.… I’d just give them a couple of [whacks].”21
Mary Sanford refused to criticize her friend’s parenting: “All the time that Joe was in California making money, and with all these deals and things, she was home looking after the children and bringing them up.”22 “Shopping for eight or nine children takes a tremendously lot of time,” Rose noted, though in truth she turned many duties over to the governess. After all, “I had a social life. I used to go to the opening of plays all the time. There were a lot of new openings then.”23 Daughter Pat recalled, “My room … was right next to my mother’s, and I remember often when she’d go out at night with Daddy (maybe it’s because she went out very infrequently). I remember her coming in to kiss me good-night. She was always so beautiful. My room was dark, and this vision just sort of came in, just smelling absolutely marvelous with her perfume.”24
Rose continued her religious observances too: “I went to the convent; the first Friday [of the month] was always a day of prayer.”25 During summers in Hyannis, Rose attended daily Mass at St. Francis Xavier. Each morning she drove her blue coupe to church, although she could barely see over the steering wheel. “Unlike the rest of us, my mother would have been dressed in a way befitting respectable society, in a tilted broad-brimmed straw hat and floral dress, her earrings and pearls in place, a small purse held tightly in her two gloved hands,” Teddy recalled. In the 1930s Rose “was named the best-dressed woman in public life by a poll of fashion designers.”26
AFTER TWO YEARS in Riverdale, from 1927 to 1929, the Kennedys bought an estate at 294 Pondfield Road in Bronxville, about fifteen miles north of midtown Manhattan. The $250,000 mansion sat on six acres. Joe Jr., Jack, and eventually Bobby rode a bus to Riverdale Country Day School, and the girls attended the Bronxville School, described by Rose as “a very good public school, a progressive school,” just down the street from the new house. “And then there was the golf course. We played golf.… We liked [Bronxville]. They were all happy at school.…” Rose invited the children’s teachers to lunch each new school year and visited their classrooms.27
Teddy retained vivid memories of the Bronxville home. “The colonnaded house … stood in the village’s leafy Sagamore Park neighborhood. Its three stories and twenty rooms occupied a crest of land, its red-tiled roof catching the sun above a thick scattering of tall old trees.” “A curving third-floor balcony rested on top of three Ionic columns,” Teddy remembered, “and a smaller balcony below it stretched above the front entrance. Inside, amid the master rooms, were such modern wonders as shower baths, an oil-burning hot water heater, and a number of enclosed porches. The basement held a billiard table, and the garage was big enough for five cars.… A driveway bordered by shrubbery arced downward along the terraced lawn until it reached the street.”28 In a mere dozen years, the Kennedys had moved from middle-class Brookline to Bronxville’s opulence.
Despite Joe’s many absences, Teddy insisted that his “father’s voice” was “paramount.”29 When at home, Joe lavished attention on the children, treating them to lunches and Radio City Music Hall movies. Eunice affirmed Joe’s central role in the Kennedy universe: “I can remember Sunday lunches. My father was [the] personality that dominated. He dominated things always, although my mother was more articulate with everything when he wasn’t there. But when he was home, she let him sort of take over.” Yet Eunice recounted that her father seemed to be away “always” during her childhood. To her, Rose played the role of “presiding parent” only in her father’s absence. “[A]s we got older, he made it possible for us to do things, but I think that the terrific drive and everything, to me, came much more from my mother, than my father,” Eunice asserted. Rose’s and Joe’s influence on their children depended on their gender and birth order. As the fifth child, exactly in the middle of her eight siblings, Eunice thought her parents struck a “balance” in child rearing. “He didn’t interfere with the girls as much as he did with the boys. He was more concerned about the boys’ future than the girls’. Then she had more to do where we went to school.”30
All children under Rose’s supervision, including nieces and nephews, agreed on her exacting persona. “She was, I think, quite stern,” Eunice remembered:
She knew there were certain ways to behave. We went to dancing lessons once a week, we had our teeth straightened. I remember going five years with my sisters, five or six of us in a car. We’d go all the way into New York. She’s a perfectionist. Instead of going to the local dentist, which I suppose we could have done, we had to hop into the car once every three weeks. We’d drive for an hour to New York. Go to the dentist and back we’d come. We’d wait our turn and then we’d go to the chair. Then we’d go to our dancing class, Arthur Murray’s. She bought the lessons, and then I would have to go with my sisters. We’d go once a week. We were really organized.… She was a great believer in opening up many opportunities for all of us. And though some of those things were difficult, she would compensate by saying you ought to try them. Encourage my father all the time to let us go. He’d say it was good, but she’d talk him into it all the time. Saying “they should go abroad, take the trips,” and it started out with my sister Rosemary when I was about sixteen. We went to Switzerland.… She [Rose] just believed it; they ought to be exposed [to new experiences].31
The dazzling Kennedy smiles resulted from another of Rose’s perfectionist obsessions: oral health. Before dental hygiene became an American craze after World War II, Rose set the standard by insisting that her children brush their teeth before going to school, play, and bed. She prided herself on asking if they had performed their ablutions and instructed the governess to supervise. Rose’s request for goodnight kisses led to her inevitable follow-up:
“Did you wash your teeth?” It’s just habits. If they start when they’re three years old, they go on.… I had nothing else to do, and I was interested. If the toothbrushes are right there in front of them, it’s not very much of an effort. And they all had beautiful teeth. When they were straightened, it cost a lot of nervous energy. Doctors every … week.… New York to Bronxville was [a] little bit of a trot. They couldn’t go alone all the way because they were too young sometimes. They were eight or ten years old. To get from the station to the dentist was another haul. I would bring them home if I were shopping, or somebody would have to put them on a train and telephone. Of course, we had all this help. It was mostly management [on Rose’s part].32
Her children did not simply possess healthy teeth. Their smiles radiated what became known in politics as “Kennedy charisma.” Even as young men, Joe and Jack impressed their peers and elders with their pearly whites. The son of JFK’s prep-school headmaster explained, “When [Jack] flashed his smile, he could charm a bird off a tree.” And Joe Jr.’s crusty British tutor described the young man’s grin as “pure magic.”33
IN 1929 JOE SR.’S career as a Hollywood producer neared its end. Combining two smaller movie businesses into RKO, he made more than $5 million (nearly $70 million in current dollars).34 Joe also romanced silent-movie goddess, Gloria Swanson, the epitome of his penchant for exotic women of stage and screen. Rose found herself in the awkward position of accompanying Joe, Swanson, and her spouse, Henri Marquis de la Failaise de la Coudraye, to the 1929 Paris and London premieres of Swanson’s first talking picture, The Trespasser. Swanson wondered how Rose could accept such humiliation: “Was she a fool, I asked myself …, or a saint? Or just a better actress than I was?”35 If Rose kept a travel diary for the trip, as she did on most of her other European excursions, it didn’t survive or isn’t among her papers.
Years later Rose recalled a tense moment at Swanson’s London premiere: “the people were disappointed when I got [out of the car] instead of Gloria. They could see me coming instead of Gloria. ‘Who are you? What are you doing? We want to see Gloria.’”36 How demeaning for Rose to accompany her husband’s paramour to a public event and hear spectators clamoring for the “other woman.” For a childhood friend from Concord, however, Rose put a positive spin on these matters: “I have had quite an interesting life. My husband was quite successful in the movies and we went out frequently with Gloria Swanson and other stars.”37
Although Gloria was nine years Rose’s junior, the two women looked strikingly similar in their flapper clothing, smiling broadly from under cloche hats. They were both petite and battled sensitive stomachs. Gloria followed a vegetarian diet and embraced macrobiotics. Rose ate birdlike portions of bland food. Their personalities and lifestyles, however, could not have been more divergent. Gloria’s half-dozen marriages, countless liaisons, and several abortions represent the very antithesis of Rose’s staunch Catholic mores. Indeed, her Victorian sensibilities starkly countered vampish Gloria, who, even in her seventies, reveled in double entendres when she appeared on talk shows wearing dramatic outfits—a contrast to Rose’s conservative wardrobe. Gloria spoke in low, sultry, sexy tones; Rose’s Boston accent, and somewhat brittle voice, occasionally grated.
Even more awkward for Rose were Swanson’s visits with the Kennedys in Bronxville and Hyannis. Mary Sanford assumed Rose knew about the affair: “When I met Joe—I’d talked to him on the phone—I don’t know if I should say this—he was stuck on Gloria Swanson—you remember that?” she queried Rose’s memoirist. “[Rose] knows about that—and she went for a trip … with them, didn’t she …? I’ve never discussed it with her. Anyway, [Joe] was smitten with Gloria Swanson.”38
Officially, Joe served as the actress’s financial adviser and producer of several films. Behind the scenes, he pursued her ardently. Swanson’s 1980 autobiography described a brief consummation of their affair in a Palm Beach hotel.39 How many other assignations occurred over their several-year association remains unknown, but most biographers report that the affair was “common knowledge” in Hollywood.40 Like numerous stars, Swanson believed in serial matrimony: she married six times and divorced all but the last spouse, who simply outlived her.41
Rose’s 1972 comments reveal her complicated history with the screen siren who captivated Joe Kennedy. “Gloria Swanson was with us a lot,” Rose observed. “And her daughter [Gloria]. My daughter [Pat] brought her to public school …, and nobody would believe that it was Gloria Swanson’s daughter, because everyone wondered why would Gloria Swanson’s daughter be in Bronxville, naturally. Because at that time we had just moved to Bronxville, and nobody knew us very well and the connections that we had with the movies or the connection that we had with Gloria.”42 Just prior to her ninth birthday in 1930, Kick wrote to her father, “Tell Gloria [Swanson’s daughter] that I sent her a letter and ask her if she got it. Would you please get me a picture of Miss Swanson with her name on it.”43 Two months later, Kick asked of Joe, “How is little Gloria[?] Will you please ask her to write me a letter [?]”44
Rose explained her family’s tie to the actress:
[Joe] managed Gloria Swanson because she had financial difficulties at the time.… So we traveled with her a good deal. And the stories circulate, because … they had their pictures taken and notice I wasn’t in the movie picture. See, on the ship [returning from England] I stepped aside, and afterwards the story got around that Joe and Gloria had gone on a trip to Europe together. A long story started, until they said the child [Gloria’s adopted son Joseph Patrick] was named after him. But she contradicted that, I saw a month or two ago. In fact, I cut it out. The [adopted] boy Joseph had been named after her father. But, of course, the story got around that he was Joe’s son.…45
Eunice Kennedy Shriver insisted that Rose heard no gossip about Joe and Gloria Swanson until the late 1960s and was not bothered by an alleged, twenty-year-old romance.
Like Jacqueline Kennedy’s attempt to mitigate scandalous stories about her husband by constructing the Camelot mythology, Rose created an idealistic image of her marriage. “In my relations with my husband, there was never any deceit.… He never said he was going out on business; he would say he was going to a show, and I would say, ‘Fine.’ Eddie Moore was usually always with him.… He told me that he kept Eddie around when he was signing contracts with some of these ‘dames,’ as he used to say,” Rose laughed. “And then he’d, you know, get framed and get into difficulties. Whatever business he was in, he always had Eddie Moore with him as his private secretary at this country and abroad.”46 But, she conceded, “[Joe] was meeting women all the time that were well dressed, too, and working for him, so I found no reason that I shouldn’t be [well dressed].”47 That resigned comment parallels Lady Bird Johnson’s attitude toward her husband’s adultery. She adopted a philosophical approach to LBJ’s infidelity, deciding to glean beauty and fashion tips from the women to whom he was attracted.
IN THE LATE 1920S, Rose’s daily responsibilities decreased, when Joe Jr. and Jack enrolled in boarding schools. “I wanted to send them to a school in New York State so we might see them more often.” Yet eventually she realized that when they were “in boarding school you don’t see your children very much.”48 Nevertheless, the boys remained close by in neighboring Connecticut. She won, temporarily, the debate with her husband over secular versus parochial education, enrolling thirteen-year-old Jack in Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut. Letters to his mother focused on what he knew mattered to her—health and weight: “I hope you and Dad and all the little girls including Bobby and lastly Buddy and Pal [the family dogs] are feeling O.K. I was weighed yesterday and I have lost one pound and have not grown at all.”49 The rail-thin adolescent followed a routine his mother had recorded so assiduously on her index cards. Rose reported on Jack’s file, “Oct., Nov., Dec. [1930] lost weight at Canterbury and went down to 95½ [pounds].… Examined by Dr. Schloss on Tuesday, Dec. 30. Found to be in good general condition. Loss of weight attributed to lack of milk in diet, tonic prescribed.”50
With Jack away, she couldn’t supply the extra cream or steak juice that she administered to him at home to add pounds. Trying to alleviate his mother’s worries, Jack reported, “I guess the only thing wrong with me is that I am pretty tired.” To his father, however, he described a worrisome fainting spell suffered at Mass.51 After expressing concern to Rose about his low grades, he included a postscript, “Am coming to Dentist I think on Wednesday.”52 At least his mother could take comfort in that! His weight began to tick upward that spring, exceeding 100 pounds for the first time, until an appendectomy felled him, causing the loss of several pounds.
While Jack suffered from illness and isolation at Canterbury, Joe Jr. excelled at Choate, and JFK asked to join his brother at the Wallingford, Connecticut, prep school the next year. “It was a good school and it was near Bronxville,” Rose explained, only about a two-hour car drive from home.53 It boasted the nation’s largest school infirmary, important for chronically ill Jack. The school’s formidable headmaster, Reverend George St. John, ruled the campus in stern English public-school tradition.
From Bronxville, Rose continued to track Jack’s health and attempted to impose her dietary rules on him. To the headmaster’s wife she wrote that Jack shouldn’t be eating “sweets” at the school’s “Tuck Shop.” “Jack has no discretion,” Rose criticized, “in fact, he has never eaten enough vegetables to satisfy me.” “I do not want to bother you, but will someone please investigate this matter a little?” she asked Mrs. St. John. Rose noted that “Mr. Kennedy will probably be up next week, but I have not been well enough to visit Jack, and I do want him to go along the right track.” Rose rarely admitted ill health, but she wrote this letter around Teddy’s birth, which perhaps accounts for her indisposition. She added a postscript about Jack: “How is his weight?” Then she noted that he had weighed 114½ in September and 115 in January “after supper.”54
In contrast to Rose’s critiques of Jack, she took great pride in Joe Jr. Graduating from Choate in 1933, he received the Harvard Prize for scholastic and athletic achievement, which his mother kept proudly for decades.55 Writing to Headmaster St. John, she thanked him “for your interest and patience in Jack. He has a very attractive personality, we think, but he is quite different from Joe for whom we feel you have done so much.” Jack “hates routine work but loves History and English—subjects that fire his imagination.”56
Even with Joe Jr. and Jack away, Rose’s maternal duties continued. “Her role was a little different,” Eunice explained. “She was there all the time. She organized our lives.… I guess the word is discipline. She had us out no matter what the weather was.… I can remember going ice skating in Bronxville. Mother would take us, and I remember her skating.” Rarely described as warm or demonstrative, Rose’s relationship with her children “wasn’t a great emotional thing,” offered Eunice. “She was more a teacher or an inspirer. She was more interested in whether you were reading or whether taking skating lessons. You just wouldn’t go skating off into the blue yonder. She’d say, ‘Use your right leg or use your left leg better.’”57
The same was true in academics. Rose wanted the children to do their best and never make excuses. “She’d say, ‘You just get along there; don’t be stupid about it,’” Eunice recalled. “Never, ‘Oh, you poor thing, you may not feel very well today. You can’t do Latin well. That’s too bad. You drop Latin and take another subject.’ No. [She would say] ‘You go in there and you learn Latin.’… So she would do homework with me, and, if I couldn’t do it, she’d get cross, [and] say, ‘You just learn this, and sit here and learn that verb.’ Instead of saying, ‘Why don’t you drop Latin.’ Never.” Rose sounded “sort of [like] an ogre,” Eunice conceded, “but you never felt that she was.… You felt that she felt you had more in you than you thought you did. She never assumed that you didn’t.”58
Eunice once ran afoul of Rose’s sense of propriety when the young girl tried to raise money for Catholic missions by selling apples on her Bronxville street. “[S]uddenly this low voice came up behind me and out popped my mother. She was absolutely enraged, told me to go right home. ‘How dare [you] sell those apples. Never do that again. Go right to [your] room. See that you go. Stay ’til morning.’ I thought it was one of the few times I saw her so angry. I guess she … [thought], living in Bronxville at that time, it was unseemly. I was about ten years old.”59
Why was Rose so outraged, especially since her daughter simply wanted to earn money for Catholic charity? Perhaps, as Eunice surmised, Rose thought it inappropriate to hawk apples in an upscale neighborhood. Or maybe she thought it reflected poorly on their wealthy family to have the children asking for money. Did Rose not want to draw attention to the Kennedys’ Catholicism in a WASP enclave? Maybe she believed Eunice evoked scenes of the unemployed, forced to sell apples on street corners during the Depression.
In 1933, while a quarter of the nation’s workforce battled unemployment and many families faced homelessness, Joe Kennedy took some of the money he had made in films and the stock market, which he abandoned before its 1929 crash, and purchased a third home. “The crash in the stock market left me untouched; I was more fortunate this time than usual,” Joe wrote to the attorney who handled his father’s estate.60 (P. J. Kennedy died of liver disease in 1929, just after his son had returned to California. Joe Jr. represented his father at the funeral.) With the collapse of the Florida real estate market, Joe negotiated a bargain price of $100,000 for a classic Mediterranean-style home designed by Addison Mizner. The white stucco, red-tile-roofed house, featuring seven bedrooms, a pool, decorative Spanish tile, and wrought iron, sat on two acres of prime oceanfront property.
Each winter Rose spent several weeks there with her family. When she returned to New York, Joe used the house as a refuge for himself and golfing buddies or business associates. Caring for children on the train to and from Florida presented logistical challenges. “Coming down in February, there were a lot of drafts in the trains, in the corners, and we would stuff [the openings] with towels and with papers.… And then we would have special milk for the baby, and we would have to feed the baby, and we would have to keep the milk hot, and we would have to keep something else cold, and we would have to have woolen nightgowns for the train, and books to read and games to play, and cough medicine and toothpaste and all those things.”61 Once more Rose had to manage the family “department” while Joe enjoyed another sunny venue.
The family continued summering at Cape Cod’s Hyannis Port. Evoking You Can’t Take It with You, the 1938 movie about a lively, eccentric family whose household is in constant motion and chaos, Teddy described the Kennedys in Hyannis: “[B]edlam would be pouring through the windows.… We would hear their raucous, contending voices and laughter, high-spirited insults and their tramping on the stairs, as telephones rang, dogs barked, radios blared, and some passing virtuoso banged out a few notes on the living room piano en route to somewhere else.”62
The tumult literally drove Rose from her home. She ordered a small prefabricated cottage for the beach. “I had my bathing suit and my books down there, and the telephone ringing and the children were playing up … [at the main house]. I would just go down there to get away from the confusion, where I would[n’t] hear any of that, and read my books or read my mail. And maybe put on my bathing suit and go in swimming, and take a rest afterwards.” The refuge had a little desk and porch, where Rose could sit and enjoy the ocean view. She loved and craved the solitude “[b]ecause all my life I have had a great many people around me. With the children and … the household staff. And we had these big storms, which came up and washed away the first [cottage]. And it washed away the second one. And there were only two as I remember. Then I started going to Europe, and I didn’t need it.…” Even the famed Kennedy touch-football games on the broad Hyannis lawn frazzled her nerves. She understood college football from attending Harvard games, but “whatever this game was, I didn’t [understand]. Except it was noisy, so I’d go to my little house and try to rest.”63
Explaining his mother’s more definitive escape, Teddy wrote, “She became a familiar figure in international ports of call: after seventeen years of birthing and nurturing her nine children, Rose Kennedy in her forties resumed her girlhood penchant for travel, making several trips to Europe and to her beloved Paris in particular. Dad would arrange to be at home with us when Mother was rekindling her love of European art, languages, and cities.”64 Rose reportedly took seventeen trips to Europe in the mid-1930s.65
Before fame or public imagery intruded, the children wrote frank letters to absent Rose revealing how much they missed her. Nine-year-old Kathleen told her that she had brought home “puppet Snowwhite for you to see,” but Rose had already left. Kick assured her that the puppet “was very cutely dressed. You will see her when you come home.”66 Perhaps because of her frail constitution, similar to Jack’s, Eunice was the most heartsick during Rose’s absences. At age seven Eunice printed, “I am sorry that you are away. I hope you will be home soon. I am getting along better at school. I am sorry that you will not be [here] to see the puppet show.”67 With Rose in Boston for Teddy’s birth, Eunice, then ten, wrote, “I miss you verry [sic] much and wish you were home. I am nearly all better now and know [sic] body else has been sick.” A few weeks later, she followed up woefully, “I miss you a[n] awful lot.…” “I love you lots and lots,” Eunice concluded, underlining “love you” four times.68 Eight-year-old Bobby seemed to take his mother’s absence in stride, reporting that “Daddy took us to lunch at the Plaza. Then we saw ‘Peck’s Bad Boy.’…” He closed with “[m]uch love and kisses” for his globe-trotting mother.69
Rose chose to spend her twentieth wedding anniversary away from Joe and the family, sailing for France one week before the date. She and Joe took contrasting approaches to their anniversary. From the Ritz, Rose cabled, “Thank you. Twenty years rare happiness. All my love always, Rosa.” Her economy of words may have reflected a worry about Western Union’s charges.70 Or maybe Joe’s nearly two decades of infidelity diluted her devotion. Joe’s felicitations to Rose were warmer and perhaps contained a veiled reference to the pain he had caused. “Darling: This is your twentieth anniversary. I cannot tell you how happy these years have been for me and what a marvelous person you have been through it all. The thing that makes this so true is proven by the fact that I love you more now than ever.… I wish I were with you in Paris today to celebrate our universary [sic?]. Love from all, Joe.” Was the last sentence’s final word a typo or a clever construction on Joe’s part to describe their union? The word “person” seems so bland a term to label his spouse of two decades. Hadn’t Rose been a “marvelous” wife or mother or soulmate? Like so much Kennedy correspondence, Joe’s telegram updated Rose on the children’s health. Thirteen-year-old Eunice, who often experienced stomach upsets, had gained 1½ pounds. Jack’s worrisome low blood count had returned to normal and his eyes had strengthened. Rosemary “raised Cain” the first week in her new surroundings in Boston, where Joe had sent her to study with a tutor, but she had calmed down considerably.71
Joe had assumed primary responsibility for Rosemary’s education and medical treatment, although he intended to discuss his findings with Rose when she returned from Europe. He began consulting endocrinologists about the possibility that a “gland situation” contributed to fourteen-year-old Rosemary’s “backwardness.” As we have seen, the Kennedys always urged their children to give maximum effort in studies and sports. Joe felt conflicted in trying to determine how much of Rosemary’s problem might result from “her inherent backwardness” and how much “from her attitude.” He visited her in Boston and “had a firm talk,” telling “her that something must be done.…”72 With her tutor’s help, the teenager wrote a poignant letter to him after their visit in clear but childlike block script. “I would do anything to make you so happy. I hate to Disapoint [sic] you in anyway. Come to see me very soon. I get very lonesome everyday.… lots of love kisses, Your loving Daughter, Rosemary.”73
As she traveled, Rose wrote tender letters to Rosemary. The determined mother, who had tried so hard to help her “slow” child achieve her potential, wrote in simple language: “We are here at a place called Cannes where people come in the summertime for bathing, and they also come here in the winter time like we go to Palm Beach.… We are leaving tomorrow and are going to Rome, where I expect to see the Pope. I shall ask him to pray for all of us. Much love from me my darling daughter, Mother.” Rose encircled her signature with little x’s to represent kisses to the daughter she struggled to make whole. Always the geography teacher, Rose added, “Find Rome on your map.”74
WITH BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES scarce during the Depression, Joe searched for new challenges. Deciding to support Democratic New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1932 presidential campaign, Kennedy raised nearly $300,000 in donations and loans. He contributed $25,000 and loaned an additional $50,000. His funding earned Joe a spot on FDR’s transcontinental campaign train. Kennedy attracted supporters from the movie industry, assisted with campaign speeches, and linked FDR’s camp to the press corps. When Roosevelt defeated incumbent President Herbert Hoover, Joe sponsored a celebration for the president-elect’s family and friends.75 He hoped that President Roosevelt would offer him a government position. Joe coveted the treasury secretary position, but FDR awarded it to two other candidates in succession. Joe bided his time. Now Rose “had to learn who the people were in Washington.”76
Meanwhile, having graduated from Choate, Joe Jr. set sail for England to study with London School of Economics professor Harold Laski, a noted British socialist, who invited him on a trip to the Soviet Union. Rose wanted Joe and Jack to attend Oxford or Cambridge for a year after their prep-school graduations. Her husband thought they should learn about socialism and communism so that they would understand the challenges to capitalism in an uncertain, depression-ravaged world. Yet why not attend “Oxbridge”? Joe consulted his friend, Harvard Law professor and New Deal advocate Felix Frankfurter, who had an Oxford visiting professorship. Perhaps the Kennedy boys didn’t make the grade for Oxford. In any case, Oxford and Cambridge didn’t accept Americans for one-year courses.
In spring 1934 President Roosevelt invited Rose and Joe to stay with him. Rose proudly wrote letters to her children on White House stationery. To Eunice, in Palm Beach with the Moores, she reported that FDR, Joe, and the president’s son Jimmy would attend the Gridiron Dinner that night, while she dined with Jimmy’s wife and sister. Rose vowed to ask the president for an autographed photo “for us to have at home.”77
Jack responded from Choate, “P.S. Got your White House letter. It must have been swell.” His note focused on his weight loss and exam grades, which were passing, if not with “flying colors.”78 Rose continued to worry about his health and, in particular, his fallen arches, which she believed were “inherited” but worsened by Jack’s choice of flimsy shoes. Writing again to Mrs. St. John, Rose alerted the headmaster’s wife to Jack’s foot condition and hoped that more supportive footwear would solve the problem.79 Rose Kennedy was a “helicopter parent” long before the twenty-first-century term came to describe hovering mothers. Her letters about Jack echo the theme: he possessed certain weaknesses—physical or intellectual—that he aggravated by his own lack of responsible behavior, always a serious offense in his mother’s ledger.
THREE MONTHS AFTER the Kennedys’ White House visit, FDR appointed Joe chairman of the new Securities and Exchange Commission. What better person to rein in Wall Street’s excesses than the very man who had skillfully maneuvered through them prior to the crash? The media launched the Kennedy family’s public image with an International News Photography Service picture that appeared in newspapers, including the New York American, on July 9, 1934. With Joe Jr. still abroad, eight of the Kennedy children lined up in birth order. Two-year-old Teddy, in his Buster Brown haircut, stood at one end, and seventeen-year-old Jack, in a white double-breasted blazer, posed at the other, next to his mother and father. In a stairstep row, the Kennedy children produced a compelling image over the photo caption, “A New Deal Family.” Three days later Hal Phyfe, photographer of stage and screen stars, sent the clipping to Rose, asking if he could photograph her family. He offered to construct bleachers, and even move to a roomier studio, to accommodate the large family in a pose “so that everybody’s best camera angle” could be achieved—an improvement on the newspaper’s less artistic lineup.80 Rose accepted his offer, hiring him to create a classic portrait of her and her family at Hyannis. With his eight fashion and makeup tips for women to be photographed, he was the perfect match for Rose to enter her new public life.
Joe left Bronxville for Washington, moving to a 125-acre Maryland estate. It included a luxurious mansion, with a hundred-seat movie theater and a huge pool, where Joe entertained FDR, his Brain Trusters, and the president’s secretaries/mistresses. Rose maintained that she didn’t move to DC in order to avoid uprooting the children from their schools, orthodontists, and doctors.81
Meanwhile, Jack, noted for his leadership of student shenanigans but named “most likely to succeed,” graduated from Choate in 1935. He hoped to copy Joe Jr.’s experience and study under Professor Laski at the London School of Economics. Rose and Joe Sr., who had resigned from the SEC after getting the commission under way, accompanied Jack and fifteen-year-old Kick abroad in late September. They dropped JFK in London and Kick at a Sacred Heart convent near Paris. (Rose worried that her attractive daughter was too interested in boys and initially sent her to a Sacred Heart girls boarding school in Connecticut.) Suffering once more from undiagnosed ailments, Jack returned home, after only a brief stay in London, and enrolled at Princeton for the fall term of 1935. There he joined his prep-school buddy Lem Billings and began to chart a different course from Joe Jr. at Harvard. But ill health again intervened and landed Jack in Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, forcing him to withdraw from Princeton midway through his first semester. He wrote his parents that his blood count was less than half of brother Joe’s. Yet he maintained his humor, noting that his hale and hearty older sibling, now on the Crimson football team, must be “twice as healthy.”82
After two months’ hospitalization, still with no definitive diagnosis, in the spring of 1936 Jack headed to Arizona for a dryer, warmer climate. In later years Rose was vague about this period of his life. She had cared so much about her young children’s health, but once they matured and, in Jack’s and Rosemary’s cases, problems became more serious, Rose relinquished matters to her husband, much as she washed her hands of his business and extramarital affairs.83 She simply let Joe coordinate Jack’s and Rosemary’s medical care and education. Although Rose’s domestic “department” was shrinking, she soon undertook another role. When she and Joe returned to the States in fall 1935, Rose visited Boston and began the next phase of her life. Delivering a lecture about England and France to the Ace of Clubs, she marked the start of her public-speaking career about her travels.
Rose spoke admiringly of Winston Churchill, whom she and Joe had visited at his country estate, Chartwell. Not realizing the public service that still lay ahead of him, she wrote of the future prime minister, “[He is] almost seventy—a pleasant, talkative, country gentleman, probably the most versatile whom I have ever met.”84 She delighted in telling the Ace of Clubs that Churchill, in addition to being a statesman, politician, and writer, “feels that every man should use his hands and so for a pastime has laid many of the bricks in the wall surrounding his estate. He also has a small studio filled with his paintings and that day was working on a bowl of flowers.”85
Keeping the lecture light, Rose added her impressions of Hollywood celebrities she encountered on the 1935 trip. She found Elsa Maxwell “vibrant,” Barbara Hutton “attractive,” and Merle Oberon “pleasant, unspoiled.” Charles Boyer didn’t fare so well: He “was a great disappointment in his looks and should never make personal appearances.” Rose’s characteristic discretion quickly returned, however, when she described his wife, Scottish actress Pat Paterson, as “very petite” and “perfectly adorable, as the debs would say.”86 Like many American travelers to Europe, Rose complained about England’s lack of central heat, France’s dearth of “excellent milk,” and the unreliability of foreign elevators. “And so, though it was immensely stimulating to visit foreign shores,” Rose concluded, “still I am tremendously thankful that my little family and I are living in the United States.”87
Yet she sailed again for Europe in April 1936 to rendezvous with Kathleen. While her sons gravitated toward Joe’s supervision, Rose continued monitoring the education and travels of Kathleen and the younger girls. The era, however, and Rose’s own conservative background limited her aspirations for them, at least in contrast to her hopes for the boys. “[W]hen my daughter [Kick] went abroad to school,… none of the girls whom she met had thought of going to college [or] had any associations with the girls who were in college. They expected to come out at the age of eighteen with a big party and travel, perhaps spend a year in France to familiarize themselves with the French language and then get married.”88
Rose, however, could expand her and her daughters’ horizons through travel beyond France. During Kick’s year abroad, Rose planned a trip to “the Soviet,” as she called the USSR. It was a courageous adventure for two refined Irish Catholic ladies. “Poor little Kathleen didn’t know why we wanted to go to the Soviet because everybody was so shocked that two women were going alone to the Soviet …, and she finally said to me, ‘But Mother, why are we going to Russia.’ I said, ‘We’ve been in Italy, been in Spain, now we are going to try [Russia].’” Joe Jr.’s trip to the USSR with Professor Laski the previous year had piqued Rose’s curiosity. She breezily termed it a “marvelous country” with a “new political philosophy.” Her husband thought traveling beyond the capital and Leningrad would be too difficult for women, but he knew US Ambassador William C. Bullitt in Moscow and made arrangements for Rose and Kick to stay at the comfortable US embassy.89
They visited art museums, attended the theater and ballet, viewed Lenin’s tomb, and saw the czars’ palace, where Rose noted the icons of Russian Orthodox saints. Her understanding of the Soviet regime lacked nuance. She inaccurately assumed that “[b]allet artists are left alone to follow their professions and are not molested by political ideologies.” Typical of her tendency to focus on fashion and propriety, she wrote about the Moscow ballet, “Of course, no one was suitably dressed for a ballet. The men were in shirts with no ties, and I was the only woman who wore a hat.”90
Rose demanded that her Soviet guide take her to a Catholic church. There she discovered that the priest said Mass on Sunday evening because the Sabbath was not a day of rest. All of the congregants were very old or very young. “If working people went to Mass, they were apt to be demoted in the factory or some of their privileges taken away,” she learned. Rose concluded that the Soviets had “great enthusiasm for the new regime as giving people opportunities never enjoyed under the Czars, but life provided far, far below the material comforts and luxuries and opportunities given in our country every day.…”91 Despite seeing Soviet spies trailing their every move, Rose recalled the trip as enjoyable and “a very enlightening experience, as future events proved.”92
Rose tried to keep up with headlines by, like her father, compulsively snipping newspaper articles. She meticulously preserved them in her “Black Book,” along with information about “men, music, art people,” as well as “quotations and definitions” she wanted to learn. For composing speeches, she consulted this vast archive of information. She always carried it with her while traveling so that she could refer to it while killing time. Self-improvement, discipline, responsibility: these were Rose’s guiding principles—along with her religion. Although like many of her coreligionists she rarely read the Bible, Rose frequently studied modern Catholic treatises to renew her faith.93
Teddy credited his mother with bestowing “the gift of faith as the foundation of my life. It is the core factor in my understanding of who I am. My own center of belief, as I matured and grew curious about these things, moved toward the great Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25 especially, in which he calls us to care for the least of these among us, and feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, visit the imprisoned.”94
His sister Eunice listed Boston and religion, in that order, as the two most potent influences on Rose’s character. “We’d all have to keep First Fridays, for example.… [W]hen [Jack] was president he would say his prayers morning and … night. Now that doesn’t mean he was terribly religious … but the point is that [Rose’s] influence on saying prayers and doing sort of religious rituals [was] so strong in her and she was successful in getting it in her children.… Jack was, he was always a little less convinced, but [Lem] Billings can tell you, on trips and everything he went to Cathedrals and used to go to mass on Sundays.… I lived with him a long time while he was a congressman in Washington, and he always hustled off to mass.… Bobby … was very really quite religious. He was at Communion Sundays all the time.”95
Rose conveyed her profound religiosity to her children by placing a rosary on each of their beds, hearing their prayers, and testing their knowledge of the Catholic catechism. When fourteen-year-old Pat suffered a severe post-appendectomy infection, Rose prayed over her, holding a crucifix and telling her sick daughter, “Remember how Christ suffered and died on the cross.”96 Rose intended to comfort her ill child, who had to endure a second abdominal surgery, by encouraging her to “offer up” her pain as a prayer for healing, a common practice among traditional Catholics.
To reinvigorate her faith, Rose also made annual religious retreats. “I do think they are a very good practice because they review your past actions and your past resolutions. They give them new life and new fervor.… And then if you have any questions, it’s a good time to resolve them because it’s a trained priest, philosopher there, [a] priest who is able to answer them,” she explained. “And if you are floundering, why you read these notes again. You read these observations, and then you gain new strength, new understanding, courage to go on.”97 With her staunch commitment to Catholicism and self-discipline, Rose rarely admitted to “floundering” about anything, least of all, her religious faith. But the many tragedies that befell her family provided numerous reasons to question God and his priestly representatives.
Her husband’s infidelity might have been an additional factor in Rose’s search for theological guidance. At a retreat or anonymously in the confessional, if she had spoken to clerics about her husband’s philandering, they would have preached that she must make her union with Joe successful, defined as having offspring and raising them to become devout Catholics. Though Rose thought she was old, almost forty-two, when Teddy was born, she was still a decade short of menopause. Her numerous trips to Europe, often without Joe, along with choosing to let him move to Maryland and take his vacations without her, could have been her method of contraception in the final years of her fertility. About this time, the Catholic Church began advocating the natural rhythm method of birth control, but even when used fastidiously, it has a failure rate of 25 percent.98 According to some authors, when at home, Rose insisted on abstinence.99
Eunice, however, asserted that her mother, unlike Eleanor Roosevelt, maintained both “a very independent personality” and a “marital relationship.”100 Nevertheless, Joe Kennedy resigned himself to the fact that he and Rose would have no more children. At Christmas 1937, he wrote to a former Kennedy nanny, “Teddy is growing big now and I am afraid that he has got out of the baby class and I will have to look forward to grand-children to fill the void.”101
BY 1936 BOTH Joe Jr. and Jack were attending their father’s alma mater, Harvard. (After his restorative stay in Arizona, Jack did not return to Princeton.) Every Sunday they lunched with Honey Fitz at the Bellevue Hotel, across the river from Cambridge. He regaled them with stories of Boston politics and history, as well as tales of his campaigns and Washington career. According to Rose, they would laugh at and with him, enjoying visits with their colorful grandfather.102 “I guess some of his stories were a little risqué—they told me since! But, of course, they wouldn’t tell me that then, nor would he—it would have shocked me,” she confessed.103
Rose’s Victorian, indeed puritanical, nature developed a scheme that she convinced Joe to apply to their children. She wanted them to abjure smoking and drinking until age twenty-one, when, if they had succeeded, their father would reward them with a thousand dollars. She borrowed the idea from the Rockefellers. According to Rose, she and Joe drank milk at home to set a wholesome example, and she tried to instill discipline in her older children so the younger ones would imitate them. “[S]ometimes they’d think I was old-fashioned,” Rose admitted. “I knew when I had problems what a great help my husband was as they grew older and as they had problems, which I couldn’t really cope with.… I think, of course, boys are probably more difficult than girls at a certain age—teenagers probably.”104 She told journalist Robert MacNeil that they weren’t always “angels.”105 In fact, she developed a protocol for dealing with unpleasant news from them. “[I]f the boys were going to tell their father anything that was difficult, I’d always say, ‘Well, wait until the morning.…’”106 She reasoned that nothing could be done at night about a “difficult” situation, and the news would only lead to unnecessary sleeplessness.
Just as Rose began to kick off the traces of motherhood in the mid-1930s, another family tragedy befell her, eventually bringing more responsibilities. Her sister, Agnes, Rose’s stalwart convent roommate and loyal travel companion, died suddenly in 1936, at age forty-three, from an embolism. She had married Joseph Gargan in 1929 and given birth to three children, all under age six when their mother passed away. Though disconsolate, Rose tried to be attentive to her two nieces and a nephew two years Teddy’s senior. She took on even more supervision of them and their education when their father died eight years later.
JOE SPENT CONSIDERABLE time, energy, and money working for FDR’s 1936 reelection. After the president’s landslide victory, Roosevelt hosted Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican’s secretary of state, at Hyde Park. Joe and Rose accompanied Pacelli by private railcar to the president’s Hudson River estate. Afterward, Pacelli stopped in Bronxville for tea at the Kennedy home. Glowing with pride, Rose watched four-year-old Teddy climb up on the prelate’s lap and examine his gold cross.107 She preserved the couch where they sat and placed a commemorative plaque on it when Pacelli became Pope Pius XII in 1939.108
Shortly after his second inauguration, attended by the Kennedy children, Roosevelt again asked Joe to join the administration, as head of another new regulatory body, the United States Maritime Commission. Kennedy’s experience managing the Fore River shipyard during World War I served him well. Rose was proud of Joe’s high-ranking position among Catholics in the administration, yet she knew that he coveted a more exalted job. She grew impatient with FDR’s hesitance to elevate Joe and hectored her husband about when the president might issue the desired offer. She pointed out that Joe had left his family numerous times to serve the chief executive and deserved a reward.109 As 1937 drew to a close, FDR finally issued a plum offer, the ambassadorship to the Court of St. James’s. Joe Kennedy would become the first Irish American to serve as the United States representative to Great Britain. And Rose, the Boston colleen and daughter of Honey Fitz, would soon launch her public career as the matriarch of a political dynasty.