Accolades, Weddings, Births, Victories
After a decade of so much loss for Rose, the 1950s were a riot of weddings, births, and political victories. With the exception of Rosemary, all of her surviving children were married during the decade, and all of those matches had produced children by the end of 1960. She saw her eldest surviving son elected, and then reelected, to the United States Senate, and as the 1950s drew to a close, his presidential aspirations gaining steam.
In June 1950, Bobby married Ethel Skakel, a doe-eyed young woman from another large, wealthy, deeply Catholic clan. Ethel’s toothy, irreverent exuberance and frenetic, spring-loaded athleticism made her a perfect fit for Bobby and the rest of the Kennedys, and her integration into the family was effortless. Soon after their wedding, Ethel was pregnant, as she would be almost constantly for the next eighteen years.
The Kennedys next joined together for the only truly dark spot in Rose’s decade: In October her father, Honey Fitz, died at the age of eighty-seven. Upward of thirty-five hundred people attended his funeral in Boston, including John, Eunice, Pat, Jean, and Teddy. Two mourners were notably missing: Josie, Rose’s mother, did not feel well enough to attend the funeral; and Rose herself, shopping in Paris at the time of his death, was not able to make it back in time. Honey Fitz had been ill, and eighty-seven was then, as now, a ripe old age. “In spite of his age,” Rose admitted years later, “it was impossible to conceive of life without him.”
Though Honey Fitz was gone, Rose was able to engage the political skills she had received from him. Jack ran for the Senate in 1952, and Rose played a more active role in this contest than she had in any of his congressional elections. Jack was running against incumbent Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. It was not the first time the two families had contended against each other for political office: In 1916 it was Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. who had defeated Honey Fitz for the same seat. Further, the Lodges were Brahmins: As a moneyed Protestant family dating from the origins of the republic, they were very much a part of the Boston ruling class that Joe felt had excluded him as an Irish Catholic. The Kennedys participated across the board, campaigning tirelessly across the state. Joe Kennedy, as was his wont, stayed in the background, but his checks spoke loudly enough.
Rose, only the year before named a Papal Countess by Pope Pius XII, drew women by the hundreds, and then the thousands, to hear her speak. She took her impeccable fashion, old world manners, and trim figure (past the age of sixty, she still took obsessive pride in staying slender) all around Massachusetts to great acclaim. Starting with “coffee hours” at private homes, she had to upgrade to larger venues to accommodate the sheer numbers of women who wanted to hear her speak. (The fact that handsome JFK sometimes appeared at these added extra appeal.)
Similar events were anchored by Pat, Eunice, Ethel, and Jean. Rose didn’t discuss policy in any depth at these speeches and forums; instead, she told of her travels, prewar London, and the challenges of raising nine children. Only once did her reliable mask of civility slip away. The Korean War was on, and Rose began to speak—very generally—about it at a rally in Worcester, Massachusetts. “Certainly I can appreciate what is happening to the mothers of the boys in Korea,” she started. “I lost one son . . .” There was a pause, and then Rose left the stage in tears.
This uncharacteristic loss of composure aside, the “tea parties,” as they came to be known, were a huge hit. When Jack won the election by a mere 70,737 votes, Rose believed that the votes she garnered swayed the election. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. agreed—the reason for defeat, he said, was “those damn tea parties.” Both were to some extent correct. Jack’s campaign was one of the first to make special efforts to attract both ethnic and female voters; the teas were responsible for attracting as many as seventy thousand voters to the polls alone. “I felt rather like a man who has just been hit by a truck,” Lodge said of his defeat.
Though the new Senator Kennedy clearly loved life as a bachelor, he knew that if he hoped to fulfill presidential aspirations, he would need a wife. It was a great relief to Rose, then, for many reasons, when he brought slender, graceful Jacqueline Bouvier to the Cape in the summer of 1952. It was a particularly joy-filled 1953 season for Rose: In May, Eunice married longtime beau Sargent Shriver; in June, Manhattanville conferred on Rose an honorary degree; and Jack and Jackie married in September. (Somehow Rose also found the time that year to travel to Paris and Salzburg.)
The mid-fifties were a blur as more of her children paired off and settled down. After a courtship of only two months, Patricia became engaged to movie star Peter Lawford; they wed in April of 1954 and Pat gave birth to their first child in 1955, just nine and a half months after the wedding. The same year, Rose took the chance to travel around the world—from California to Hawaii to Japan to India and throughout western Europe with her niece, Mary Jo Gargan—before settling for two months on the Riviera with Joe.
Jean married businessman Stephen Smith in 1956. Smith’s father, like Joe, oversaw a largely self-made fortune, and the Smiths’ Irish Catholic bona fides qualified him, in Rose’s eyes, as a suitable mate for her youngest daughter. In 1958, Teddy married Joan Bennett, a blonde bombshell from Bronxville with a good Manhattanville education and musical chops to match. Though Rose was initially unimpressed by the Bennetts’ relative lack of wealth, Rose and Joan bonded by talking about music and playing duets on the piano. By the end of 1959, all of her surviving children, except for Rosemary, were married and had at least one child.
The fifties were also a time during which the charitable mission of the Kennedy family was coming into focus. Rose’s frequent speaking engagements at various Catholic charities and clubs were often to raise money, particularly for youth causes and the research and treatment of what was then openly called “mental retardation.” Though it would be the late 1950s before the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation would primarily aim its resources at the developmentally disabled, veiled references to Rosemary began appearing in Rose’s speeches earlier in the decade. Without context, the audiences had no way of knowing she was speaking about her own child, but it’s clear that her eldest daughter was always on her mind. “Sometimes a mother finds in her midst a handicapped child, one child who is abnormal mentally or physically,” she said in 1953 when accepting an award for her work with young people from a Catholic charity. “Then, a whole new set of baffling difficulties presents themselves, and then fervently she prays and how diligently she searches every avenue to find an answer to that child’s problems.”
Throughout the 1950s, the speeches and chats that Rose gave gradually morphed from campaign appearances for Jack to fund-raising appearances for charity and back to campaign appearances for Jack by the later part of the decade. As early as 1957, when she did a short speaking tour of Iowa, Rose started speaking in states that Jack would need to focus on in the 1960 presidential contest. It was typical of Kennedy political savvy that Rose’s good works on behalf of the developmentally disabled, while genuine, simultaneously furthered her son’s presidential ambitions.
Jack announced his campaign for the presidency in January of 1960. Rose campaigned for him in the lead up to the New Hampshire primary, traditionally the nation’s first. After ensuring his resounding victory—he received 85 percent of the vote—they headed to Wisconsin, which promised to be a much more difficult enterprise. Hubert Humphrey, senator of neighboring Minnesota, all but had the state locked up; he was often referred to as Wisconsin’s third senator. But the Kennedys, including Rose, fanned out across the state, using their sheer numbers to make the Kennedy name more recognizable in several places at once. Patrick Lucey, then the leader of the state’s Democratic Party, remembered that Kennedy’s campaign was “just an effective presentation of celebrity. . . . The family was an asset . . . genuinely glamorous as well as glamorized, so the people were anxious to meet them wherever they went.” However, Jackie would remember their reception in Wisconsin somewhat differently: “They just stared at us, like some sort of animals.”
Nevertheless, Humphrey felt outnumbered and outgunned by the Kennedy phalanx. The Kennedys are “all over the state,” he moaned. “And they look alike and sound alike. . . . I get reports that Jack is appearing in three or four different places at the same time.”
On April 5, Kennedy won Wisconsin with 56.5 percent of the vote, thanks in no small part to Rose’s help. She sat out the hard-fought West Virginia primary that followed but campaigned for Jack throughout the election, generally campaigning three days on and then four days off, and taking a rest in Hyannis Port in the summer months after Jack received the Democratic nomination. Despite the lighter schedule, it still must have been punishing for a woman who turned seventy during the campaign. By the time Jack was elected, she’d traveled more than thirty-five thousand miles on his behalf, a woman talking to women.
On November 8, 1960, Rose Kennedy’s eldest surviving son was narrowly elected president of the United States. The next morning the family gathered in the main house at Hyannis Port for a photo to celebrate the occasion. Seated in the front of the tableau, looking twenty years younger than she was, Rose beamed. Twenty years previous, the Kennedy name was in ruins. That morning she was the mother of the president-elect of the United States. Her eldest living child, whom she’d come so close to losing to illness and to war, was now one of the most powerful men in the world.