Nine Little Helpless Infants
“They did come rather rapidly,” she later said, typically dry. “And there were a good many of them.”
Her first five children were born within six years. “When I look back now, I wonder at the size of the job,” she’d write much later. “And I think that when we stood as a blushing, radiant, gay young bride and groom, we were not able to look ahead and see nine little helpless infants with our responsibility to turn them into men and women who were mentally, morally and physically perfect.” Perfection is a tall order, but it never would have occurred to Rose to try for anything less.
By the time their first child, Joe Jr., was born, on July 25, 1915, Rose and Joe had settled into their Beals Street house. “It was a nice old wooden-frame house with clapboard siding,” she’d remember. “Seven rooms, plus two small ones in the converted attic . . . only about 25 minutes from the center of the city by trolley, the usual means of transportation in those days. There was a sense of openness in the neighborhood . . . fine big shade trees lining the sidewalks.”
Having grown up with a maid and a cook, it was important to Rose to hire help immediately, and they employed a housekeeper who cooked and cleaned and lived in the attic space. As soon as Joe was born, they hired a nurse to care for him. Rose only occasionally breast-fed; as a society woman out and about, she didn’t want to be home every three hours, and the immunological benefits of breast milk were not yet known.
The second child, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was born on May 29, 1917, and her first girl, Rosemary, on September 13, 1918. Both would challenge Rose’s ideas about the perfectibility of her children and her sense of control. Jack was sickly and underweight nearly from the beginning, and at the age of two and a half he nearly died from scarlet fever. (It would be the first of four times in his life that he would receive last rites.) Rosemary, it would gradually dawn on Rose and Joe, was developmentally disabled, or “retarded,” as it was called then. Efforts to create a normal life for Rosemary, to help her keep pace with her siblings and to make her feel included, would be one of the central focuses—and ultimately, heartbreaks—of Rose’s motherhood.
As the brood grew, Rose’s motherhood took on a managerial quality. With nurses and nannies, Rose employed a team approach. Decades later, when the Beals Street house was opened as a historic site in 1967, she remembered:
I conceived the idea of having a card catalog which I bought up the street here, and I put their names and the dates of their birth and their weight and the time they had a Schick inoculation for diphtheria or scarlet fever, whatever it was, when their tonsils were taken out . . . whether there were any complications. Anyone could look up and find out that Jack had his tonsils out in New Haven when he was at school there . . .
The data she kept on her notecards was exacting. “I used to weigh them every week,” she later said, “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.” When Joe became ambassador to the United Kingdom in the 1930s, she took the card catalog along with her. “When I got to England I showed it to some reporters, and they thought it was American efficiency,” she said. “But I just said it was Kennedy desperation because I couldn’t possibly keep track of all of them.”
While Rose toiled as coordinator and troubleshooter at the Kennedy home, Joe’s career and fortune evolved. He left the presidency of Columbia Trust in 1917 to become assistant general manager at the Fore River Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation’s plant; his position there, overseeing the production of naval vessels, kept him out of uniform in World War I. “Joseph P. Kennedy was not a shipbuilder,” wrote Nasaw. “But he was young, smart, ambitious, disciplined, and well connected; he knew how to negotiate a contract, read a balance sheet, and get things done in Boston.”
It was an enormous project, employing thousands of people and bringing in millions of dollars in government contracts. To cite one example of Kennedy’s get-rich ingenuity: One of his responsibilities as assistant manager was to award the contract for the plant cafeteria, which would serve the tens of thousands of plant employees. Kennedy quietly formed a privately held company, the Fore River Lunch Company, and awarded the lucrative contract to himself.
The sixty-five-hour workweeks that his ambitions required strained the young marriage. It wasn’t so much that Rose needed or expected his help with the children: “I ran the house. I ran the children,” she insisted. It seems that she simply missed her husband, resenting his long hours away, both at work and, she almost certainly knew, unwinding with the attentions of other women. In 1920, while pregnant with her fourth child, Kathleen, she even briefly moved back to her parents’ Dorchester home. The time away lasted only a few weeks. Honey Fitz, though certainly no fan of Joseph P. Kennedy, was a steadfast believer that a woman’s role in marriage was to put up with whatever the husband did; he’d certainly asked his own wife to put up with quite a bit. He convinced Rose to return to Beals Street to resume her responsibilities as wife and mother. She would never acknowledge their break publicly or, for that matter, that there was ever any friction in the marriage at all. Throughout her life, she would show an amazing ability to present her family as she wanted it seen. She did this with great confidence, even when asserting something that would strike the most casual observer as patently suspect. “You never heard a cross word,” she said of her marriage. “We always understood one another and trusted one another and that’s it.”
After the war, Joe went to work as a stockbroker and manager for the Boston office of Hayden, Stone, a Wall Street brokerage firm. It was here that he’d begin playing the stock market in earnest, using his considerable wits—and a great deal of inside knowledge—to grow his fortune. He also dealt in real estate on the side, buying theaters all across New England, and began his ventures into the film industry, enterprises that would gather force as the 1920s continued. It was around this time that he hired Edward Moore as his assistant. Moore would become his right-hand man, secretary, and confidante; in fact, in 1932, Rose and Joe would name their youngest child after him. His wife, Mary, similarly became Rose’s closest friend, and the childless couple became as familiar to the Kennedy children as their own parents.
After Kathleen was born on February 20, 1920, the Beals Street house became cramped. The Kennedys moved to a larger home, just a few blocks away, in 1921, and Eunice was born there on July 10. Their household also expanded with the addition of more manpower: “In addition to maids, cooks, and nurses for the new babies, Rose hired governesses to assist with the older children.” The Moores were also frequent helpers, allowing Rose to travel. She needed the time away, as Joe was rarely around.
It developed that the two usually vacationed separately. Joe almost always wanted to golf in Palm Beach in the winter, and Rose had other ideas. “I thought that was a terrible waste of money, to be always coming to the same place,” Rose later wrote, “but he used to say that he worked hard during the year and he wanted to come and rest someplace. He didn’t want to be coming to Europe where he’d have to wait around for customs and changing planes . . . ” In 1923, for example, Joe took his two-week Palm Beach vacation in January. In April, Rose and her sister Agnes took a two-month trip to California. When she was on her way out the door for this trip, an almost six-year-old Jack famously cracked, “Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children all alone.” It’s not clear whether young JFK ever castigated his father for his much more frequent absences.
Young Jack was puckish, a lanky instigator. Throughout his youth, he was a source of both frustration and amusement to Rose. “He was a very active, very lively little elf,” she would remember,
full of energy when he wasn’t ill and full of charm and imagination. And surprises—for he thought his own thoughts, did things his own way, and somehow just didn’t fit any pattern. Now and then, fairly often in fact, that distressed me, since I thought I knew what was best. But at the same time I was taken aback. I was enchanted and amused. He was a funny little boy, and he said things in such an original way.
“In looking over my old diary,” she wrote to Jack in 1962, “I found that you were urged on one occasion, when you were five years old, to wish for a happy death. But you turned down this suggestion and said that you would like to wish for two dogs instead.”
The family continued to grow, but 1923 would also be a year of loss. That summer, Rose became pregnant with her sixth child. The two eldest boys—Joe Jr. and Jack—were now in elementary school at Dexter, a private, nonsectarian school within walking distance of their new house. Rose had originally wanted to send her boys to Catholic schools, but Joe argued that they needed to expand beyond their Irish Catholic social circle if they ever hoped to surpass a certain level of political and financial success in the wider WASP world. In September of that year, Rose’s younger sister Eunice died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-three. Rose would grieve deeply, if very privately, this loss, while Joe’s work kept him in New York more and more of the time. He was trying to break into the film industry, and the wheeling and dealing leading up to his 1926 purchase of the Film Booking Offices of America (a deal six years in the making) meant that he was rarely at home.
That autumn, little Rosemary went to kindergarten with other children her age at the Edward Devotion School, only blocks from the Kennedy house. Though her teacher, Margaret McQuaid, was delighted by the little girl’s grace and manners, Rosemary simply could not keep up with the other children. “As time went on, I realized she was slow at school,” Rose later wrote. Even before that, Rose had noticed that Rosemary lacked the basic physical coordination of her siblings. She could not steer a sled, play tennis, row a boat, or roller skate. “I was puzzled by what this might mean, as I had never heard of a retarded child and I did not know where to send her to school or how to cope with the situation.” Rosemary would repeat kindergarten the next year, after which it would be clear that she would never be going on to the first grade.
While this was no doubt upsetting for a mother who believed her responsibility was to raise perfect children, it also brought out the tender side of the strong team culture she fostered within the family. The other Kennedy children “were told that she was a little slow and that they all should help her, which they did do and tried to encourage her.” The trouble that they often went to is touching. In 1934 Rose would write to the Choate School, where Jack was attending high school. “Would it be possible for Jack to go to a tea-dance in Providence on Friday, January 19th?” she wondered.
The reason I am making this seemingly absurd request is because the young lady who is inviting him is his sister, and she has an inferiority complex. I know it would help if he went with her. She is fifteen years old, and trying to adjust to herself. I am sure you understand my point of view. It is not tremendously important, but we do all we can to help her.
As we regard Rose’s euphemism today—she has an inferiority complex—it’s easy to read it as Rose being ashamed of having a child with a developmental disability. But that would be a facile reading, only partly true. Rosemary was born into an era when respected voices in the scientific community were claiming that “morons”—as those with IQs between sixty and seventy were newly designated—were a danger to society. It was expected that many of these “morons” would become thieves, drunkards, and prostitutes. Not only did their existence reflect poorly on the genes of their parents, but the females were being forcibly sterilized in many states. There’s little doubt that Rose and Joe wouldn’t have wanted the stigma that having sired a “moron” would have earned them. But it’s also true that they wanted to protect a vulnerable girl from a world that was openly hostile and bigoted toward her.
Sixth child Patricia was born on May 6, 1924, and Bobby the following year on November 11. By this time, Rose’s household staff could take over most of the basic feeding and care of the children. Underlining her approach to parenting as the management of an enterprise, she would later write of her firm belief that mothers should spend at least one day a week with their children,
to see what methods the nurse is using, what her routine is with them, whether the meals are adequate, or is she giving them the same kind of soup each day so she does not have to think of meal planning, is she putting them to bed too early just [to] be rid of them, etc. If a mother never takes care of her children, she really has no first-hand knowledge of what the nurse is doing.
A mother inculcated values, beliefs, and habits in a child, but much of the daily care could be outsourced, as it were, given the proper amount of quality assurance.