The House of Kennedy(3)
Business associates are keenly aware of Joe’s cutthroat—often amoral—tactics. As the Kennedy family interest in Columbia Trust comes under attack during a wave of hostile takeover attempts, Joe borrows heavily. His three sisters and their families endure heavy losses from risky stock investments Joe makes with their money. But despite being deeply in debt, Joe manages to turn his fortunes around, and in 1914 marries Mayor Honey Fitz’s convent-educated daughter Rose Fitzgerald. The pair will go on to create what the December 1969 Ladies’ Home Journal dubs “the century’s most historic family.”
Over the next seventeen years, Rose bears nine children: Joseph “Joe” Patrick Jr. in 1915, John “Jack” Fitzgerald in 1917, Rose “Rosemary” Marie in 1918, Kathleen “Kick” Agnes in 1920, Eunice Mary in 1921, Patricia “Pat” Helen in 1924, Robert “Bobby” Francis in 1925, Jean Ann in 1928, and Edward “Ted” Moore in 1932.
All of the Kennedy children grow up with their grandfather P.J.’s mantra—“win at all costs”—ringing in their ears. “The big thing we learned from Daddy,” Eunice says, “was win. Don’t come in second or third—that doesn’t count—but win, win, win.”
Even so, Rose and Joe make the children understand the imperative of devotion to public service. “To whom much is given, much is expected,” from the Gospel of St. Luke, is often repeated in the Kennedy household.
Youngest daughter Jean Kennedy Smith, who would go on to serve as ambassador to Ireland from 1993 to 1998, pinpoints her parents’ motivations: “They were very conscious of the tremendous oppression their ancestors had overcome and were extremely thankful to be Americans. They felt a duty to give back to the country that had embraced their family.”
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Joe and Rose Kennedy begin their early family life in a nine-room Colonial house at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts. Joe is employed at the Boston brokerage Hayden, Stone & Company, under the mentorship of Galen Stone, until he goes into business for himself as “Joseph P. Kennedy, Banker.” But by the late 1920s, Joe—by then a father of seven and already a multimillionaire—sours on the strictures of his hometown.
Boston is “no place to bring up children,” he decides, ordering up a private railcar to transport the family to Riverdale, New York, where in 1927 the family takes up residence in relatively close proximity to Wall Street. A 1963 Fortune magazine profile of Joe quotes the banker and Bostonian Ralph Lowell: “This city was a small, clear puddle. New York was a big, muddy one, and that’s what Joe wanted.” Joe enhances his career as an independent financier, achieving further astonishing success as a speculator.
Exactly how wealthy he becomes is a little murky, even to Joe. When Rose reads that Fortune has estimated his wealth in the mid-1920s as two million dollars (around twenty-five million in today’s dollars), she asks “if it was true, and if so, why he hadn’t told her they were rich,” biographer Ronald Kessler says. Joe’s evasive reply is “How could I tell you, when I didn’t know myself?”
Two years later, the family moves to Crownlands, a 1905 mansion situated on a multiacre property at 294 Pondfield Road in Bronxville. According to Patricia Kennedy Lawford, those were “very, very happy times particularly on weekends and holidays where Joe junior and John returned from school usually with houseguests.”
Ted Kennedy recalls his father’s adage “Home holds no fear for me.” But the meaning could cut two ways. “Complaining was strictly forbidden. We were not allowed to sit around moaning because we could not go to the movies or received a poor mark in our geometry class,” Jean Kennedy Smith says. “Dad’s voice would clamp down in our ears. ‘There’s no whining in this house!’”
“Dinner at Uncle Joe’s began promptly at 7:15 o’clock,” Kennedy cousin Joe Gargan recalls, “and no one was to be late.” Biographer Thomas Reeves further relates, “If one of the [children’s] guests was tardy, Joe would often fly into a rage and administer a tongue-lashing. One such victim [was] a pal of Jack’s who never returned” to the Kennedy table.
Meals are also a time for discussions of current events and politics, often kicked off with questions. “Where has Amelia Earhart gone?” Jean Kennedy Smith recalls being asked at age nine when the famous aviator went missing.
Inevitably, the talk turns to Joe Sr.’s aspiration to have his family run the country. Eunice Kennedy Shriver explains how Rose, the children’s “greatest teacher,” helped the young ones through. “She taught us to listen to Dad’s dinner table conversations about politics, which seemed too boring to a small child but later become the basis for our life’s work.”
And Rose herself, Jean recalls, would arrive at the breakfast table “with newspaper articles she found interesting pinned to her dress.”
For her part, Rose describes the household division of labor between her and Joe in business terms: “We were individuals with highly responsible roles in a partnership that yielded rewards which we shared. There was nothing that he could do to help me in bearing a child, just as there was nothing I could do directly in helping him bear the burdens of business.”
Any motherly frustrations are carefully confined, even in her journal: “Took care of children. Miss Brooks, the governess, helped. Kathleen still has bronchitis and Joe sick in bed. Great life.”