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.”
Frustrations aside, Rose harbors great nostalgia for precious childhood memorabilia, and keeps meticulous family records. “There’s a memory of mine, and of all of us, growing up,” Pat Kennedy later says, “that Mother was in the attic, putting things away.”
“Mother kept all our vital statistics on index cards that became an absolute necessity as our numbers began to grow,” recounts Jean. The international press, Rose remarks, lauded her card file as a “symbol of ‘American efficiency.’ Actually, it had just been a matter of ‘Kennedy desperation.’”
Young Jack’s poor health was a constant worry for Rose. “Jack had what Mother called an ‘elfin quality,’” Jean explains of her elder brother, “because he was so sickly for most of his childhood. Whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, and the dreaded scarlet fever all found Jack and sent him to bed.”
Yet Joe draws on a father’s supreme confidence in the strength of his son Jack, a feeling that would endure throughout the Kennedy presidency. “I see him on TV,” he tells presidential biographer William Manchester many years later, “in rain and cold, bareheaded, and I don’t worry. I know nothing can happen to him. I tell you, something’s watching out for him. I’ve stood by his deathbed four times. Each time I said good-bye to him, and he always came back.…When you’ve been through something like that and back, and the Pacific, what can hurt you? Who’s going to scare you.”
Joe dares to believe that nothing else bad could happen to Jack.
He is a Kennedy, after all.
Chapter 2
In 1926, before moving his growing brood from Boston to New York, a restless Joe Kennedy leaves his family on the East Coast to follow a twentieth-century California gold rush: Hollywood. There’s money to be made and women to be had.
To maximize potential profit, Joe targets small film studios. He partners to buy the fledgling FBO, Film Booking Office of America, for one million dollars. It’s the predecessor of Radio-Keith-Orpheum, RKO, later famous for greenlighting then-unknown director Orson Welles to make Citizen Kane. As studio head, Joe’s aim is to make “American films for Americans.” But it’s much more profitable to make cheap pictures like The Gorilla Hunt, the kind of film that he “couldn’t for the life of him understand why it made money, but it did,” notes actress Gloria Swanson.
In clubby Hollywood, an outsider attracts outsize attention. Who is Joe Kennedy? What interest does an East Coast banker have in the movie business? rival studio heads want to know. The mutual distrust is inflamed by Joe’s