The House of Kennedy(2)
While Kennedy family lore tells of Patrick traveling in steerage with his bride-to-be, Bridget Murphy (as well as her parents, who’d toiled their whole lives as tenant farmers of absentee British landlords), practical evidence of that can’t be found. Regardless, Patrick and Bridget did most likely meet in Ireland and plan to marry in America—which they’ll do in September 1849, in Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross.
The ship docks in Boston, a city of seventeen thousand, on April 21, 1849.
Conditions on land are not always an improvement—the Boston Brahmins atop the city’s entrenched class system scorn the new immigrants as “shanty Irish” (after the Dickensian squalor of their vermin-and disease-infested tenement quarters), and fruitless searches for jobs that pay a decent wage are underscored by sternly worded want ads declaring, “No Irish Need Apply.”
For a time, Patrick Kennedy and his bride are among the lucky ones. He and Bridget have five children in nine years, and he steadily works his trade. More than a hundred years later, on a state visit to Ireland in 1963, President Kennedy states: “When my great-grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things: a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty. I am glad to say that all of his great-grandchildren have valued that inheritance.”
Unfortunately, at age thirty-five, Patrick succumbs to cholera. The year of his death is 1858. The date is November 22. Exactly 105 years later, that same date will forever loom as the day his great-grandson loses his life.
With five children to support, widow Bridget can’t mourn for long. Though barely literate, she proves to be a savvy businesswoman. She becomes a hairdresser at the upscale retailer Jordan Marsh, founded in 1851 as a dry-goods emporium. Then she buys a notions shop—and expands her wares to include whiskey.
The youngest of the five Kennedy children, Patrick Joseph Jr.—nicknamed P.J.—inherits his parents’ ambition. He is in his mid-teens when he’s hired on as a stevedore, loading and unloading ships’ cargo, and by the time he’s in his twenties, owns several saloons popular among the Irish Catholic working class. He marries Mary Augusta Hickey, daughter of another well-to-do Irish Catholic saloon keeper, in 1887.
The liquor business makes P.J. rich, but he has a thirst for politics. In a city where Protestants control commerce, industry, and education, P.J. finds another way to peddle influence. He starts giving out free drinks to those who can help him rise in the Democratic Party.
Among them is the future mayor of Boston, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. The two men forge what will become a powerful alliance. P.J. becomes a boss in East Boston’s Ward Two, where the booming Irish population now accounts for a third of Boston’s residents. As Irish Catholics swell the ranks of the police and fire departments, P.J.’s political clout soars. He is only twenty-seven when he’s elected to the first of what will be five consecutive terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, followed by two terms in the state senate.
Soon, P.J.’s formidable negotiation skills and political savvy steer him out of the barroom and into the world of finance. He purchases shares in a local bank, the Columbia Trust Company. The Kennedy fortunes rise exponentially. The family has finally shed the derisive moniker of penniless “shanty Irish” and joined the ranks of the respectable, moneyed “lace curtain Irish.”
On September 6, 1888, P.J. and Mary celebrate the arrival of their firstborn, a son. They don’t stretch their choices for a name. P.J. simply reverses his own initials. The newborn is christened Joseph Patrick.
Unlike their impoverished Irish immigrant grandparents, Joe and his three younger sisters grow up with all perks of wealth. They live in a three-story redbrick mansion on exclusive Jeffries Point, with a view of bustling Boston Harbor.
As an enterprising teenager, Joe works in a haberdashery, and on Fridays he lights the coal stoves for Orthodox Jews forbidden to work on their Sabbath.
He attends the exclusive public Boston Latin School. Joe stands out for being Catholic among the overwhelmingly Protestant student body—and for an academic record poor enough to necessitate repeating the eleventh grade. But Joe is socially astute, always working an angle. Tall and lean with piercing blue eyes, he joins the school’s baseball team, and the recognition helps get him elected class president.
Getting into WASPy Harvard in 1908 isn’t as easy, especially with his less-than-stellar grades. But Joe isn’t shy about using his father’s connections. And whenever his grades tank, Joe plies teachers with the family currency: a bottle of Haig & Haig Scotch.
But it’s P.J., a portly man with a handlebar mustache and years of service in Massachusetts state government, who teaches his son the biggest lesson of all: “Win at all costs.” One of young Joe’s earliest memories, biographer Edward Klein relates, is of two of P.J.’s campaign aides bragging, “We voted 128 times today.”
Joe graduates from Harvard in 1912 envisioning a future in banking, despite it being a field long dominated by Brahmins. His father, a director of the small Boston bank Columbia Trust Company, secures Joe a position as assistant state bank examiner, conducting the exacting work of audits and financial regulatory compliance.
“Banking could lead a man anywhere,” Joe boasts, then proves his claim by becoming the country’s youngest bank president at age twenty-five.
“Joe Kennedy saw early,” a friend observes, that “power came from money.” For Joe, learning the rules of finance is also an education in how to break them—undetected.