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Lost Destiny
Joe Kennedy Jr. and the Doomed WWII Mission to Save London
By Alan Axelrod Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2015 Alan Axelrod
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7912-6
CHAPTER 1
Chosen Son
Place—position, domain—was always important to Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. When he took up his ambassadorship in London, he complained that the embassy at 1 Grosvenor Square was not only "badly laid out" but that the "beautiful blue silk room" he had for an office called for nothing more than the addition of "a Mother Hubbard dress and a wreath to make me Queen of the May." While his official residence at 14 Prince's Gate, donated to the U.S. government years earlier by financier J. Pierpont Morgan, was more to his liking, he nevertheless found its fifty-two rooms insufficient for his family of eleven and immediately set about extensively refurbishing it—on his own dime.
The ambassadorship, the embassy, and the residence were the fruits of three generations' distance from the poverty that had driven his paternal grandfather from Ireland to America. Patrick Kennedy went to East Boston from County Wexford at the height of the potato famine and English oppression in 1848 or 1849. Ireland, which would figure so prominently in the ancestral memory of all the Kennedy clan, was, in the mid-nineteenth century, a place to leave, and East Boston was a resolutely working-class but relatively prosperous community. And work Patrick did, at a cooperage, making barrels twelve hours a day, seventy-two hours a week, until, at the age of thirty-five, he dropped dead. The cause was cholera complicated by soul-killing labor, and he left his widow, Bridget, to support four children, among whom was a single male, Patrick Joseph "P. J." Kennedy. The widow labored as a house cleaner and moonlighted as a hairdresser, managing to squirrel away enough money to open up a small combination grocery-bakery-liquor store and to get P. J. educated at Sacred Heart School. He went on to earn a living as a stevedore and, later, a pipe fitter before buying into several local saloons during his mid-twenties. From these enterprises, P. J. branched out to local and state politics, retail liquor sales, banking, real estate, and coal.
By the time P. J.'s first son, Joseph Patrick, was born in 1888, it was into the fine house of a rather wealthy man. It was, that is, a fine house in Irish Catholic East Boston, separated from Brahmin Protestant Boston proper by both the Inner Harbor and class prejudice. Of the two, the harbor was far easier to cross, and, at the prompting of his wife, Mary, P. J. saw to it that Joe was sent across that harbor to Boston Latin School. Founded in 1635, the institution was widely regarded by 1901, when Joe enrolled, as the most elite public school in the nation. The academic quality of the education it offered mattered less to P. J. than Boston Latin's function as a door to admission into the socioeconomic realm reserved for "proper Bostonians."
Joe was far from a standout student—Ds and Cs abounded—but he was an outstanding baseball player and sufficiently charismatic to win election as class president. The mere fact of having graduated from Boston Latin secured him a place at Harvard, and so, after commencement in 1908, he crossed the Charles River to Cambridge. He graduated in 1912, his academic performance as undistinguished as it had been at Boston Latin—Ds, Cs, a handful of Bs, and a lone A to show for four years—but his record socially and as an athlete (again on the baseball team) was impressive if not stellar.
From Harvard, he went directly into banking—or at least as directly as his Irish Catholic heritage allowed in Brahmin Boston. In 1912, only one Boston-area bank had an Irish president, and the barriers to entry into finance were so formidable for men of his ethnic and religious pedigree that Rose Fitzgerald—the daughter of Mayor John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, who became his college sweetheart and whom he married in 1914—was always puzzled as to why he chose banking over all other possible professions. The reason, of course, was place. Banking was just the place for a young Bostonian on the outside looking to get on the inside. Unable to enter banking as an officer, Joe decided to become a bank examiner, a state civil servant. He served in this position only briefly when, thanks to his father's banking connections, the opportunity to acquire a controlling interest in the Columbia Trust Bank came his way in 1913. And so he became, at twenty- five, not only Boston's second Irish Catholic bank president but the nation's youngest bank president.
After marrying Rose, Joe left it to her to choose a house—not in East Boston, however, but in Brookline, across the Charles from Cambridge. It was unmistakably an upscale suburb, but it was not Brahmin. In contrast, say, to Beacon Hill, where only old money mattered, in Brookline, money, new or old, spoke equally loud and clear. Yet even the new house in the new place was not, Joe judged, quite the right place for his first son to come into the world. As Rose's first pregnancy ran its course, Joe rented an oceanside summerhouse on the fine gray sands of Hull on the Nantasket Peninsula in Plymouth County. It was an idyllic location, amid cool ocean breezes and salt air. For the impending birth, Joe arranged for not one but two prominent physicians to be on hand, along with an obstetrical nurse and a housemaid. He was determined to leave nothing to chance when it came to ushering his firstborn into the world. The event occurred on July 25, 1915, precisely nine months and eighteen days after he and Rose were wed. Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr. was born, if not effortlessly—he did weigh ten pounds—at least without complication. The Kennedys were fortunate indeed.
Having chosen the place, summoned the doctors, and made the preparations, Joe Kennedy Sr. did not linger to hover and dote. He had bought the best care money could buy and planned everything to the last detail; now he went about his business as usual, leaving the baby entirely to Rose, the nurse, and the maid.
* * *
It was the way the father would treat all nine of his children, especially the first two, Joe Jr. and Jack. He would prepare, he would purchase, he would pull strings and smooth the way. He would counsel, yet he would not hover. He was, in fact, often absent, especially when he got into the movie business beginning in the 1920s and started spending large blocks of time in Hollywood (either at his desk or in the arms of some star or starlet). Yet he never let go.
Mindful of a heritage of Irish famine, hard work, and early death, Joe Sr. also appreciated his more immediate heritage: a father who made a fortune as well as political connections that propelled him across the Inner Harbor from East Boston to Boston proper by way of Cambridge. He intended to raise his children as Catholics, Irish Catholics. He had not run from that, and he did not want any of them to run, either. But, clearly, he wanted to position them—especially his firstborn and namesake—to suffer fewer of the social and professional exclusions he had circumvented if not always overcome. Joe Jr. did move effortlessly through the first years of the childhood his father had prepared for him. He had come into the world as a ten-pound package of perfect health, and he only grew stronger. The birth of a second son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, on May 29, 1917, frail and sickly from the start, introduced into the family a rare discordant note of worry—yet, by sheer contrast, the ill health of the younger son also served to underscore the phenomenal vigor of the elder.
If Joe Sr. left child rearing almost exclusively to his wife, she, in turn, relied heavily on Kikoo Convoy, an Irish nanny from the old country, who lavished on the boys her very genuine love. Rose may have had to struggle to avoid showing Joe Jr. the favoritism that his looks—strappingly handsome even as a toddler, with piercing blue eyes—and his obviously high intelligence commanded. Perhaps as a way of leveling the field, she dressed Joe and Jack in identical sailor suits. But after the results of an IQ test administered by his first teachers revealed Joe Jr. as "gifted," neither Rose nor Joe Sr. could continue to view their sons as existing on the same plane. Rose later admitted, "I didn't think you could have two in one family." To publishing mogul Henry Luce, the senior Kennedy even coldly expressed the judgment that Jack, in contrast to Joe, would not "get very far" because "he wasn't very bright."
To say that Joe outshone Jack sounds like the cliché it would certainly be if it wasn't simply true. Seen together as young children, Joe was the far more brilliant presence, big, handsome, and radiating health, whereas Jack appeared at best his thin, frail echo. He would look up to Joe Jr., who surely loved him, and yet the two were fiercely competitive. Physically, Jack was rarely a match for Joe. As he later admitted, when they fought, which was frequently, Joe "of course ... always won."
Their parents seem to have done nothing to discourage the competition or even to referee, let alone stop, the fighting. If anything, consciously or not, they encouraged it. Joe was assigned the favored seat at the dinner table and was most often engaged by his father in conversation. More precisely, he was the go-to target of Joe Sr.'s questions, which were typically about business, politics, and current events. Visitors remarked that Joe Jr. spoke as if he were a copy of his father. Indeed, both the Kennedy parents recruited Joe Jr. as a kind of deputy father to their other children, and he would even stand as godfather to the eighth of the Kennedy children, Jean Ann (born 1928). Yet the actual father himself never let his eldest son become comfortable, let alone complacent, in his position of privilege. If Jack practiced the piano for an hour or studied for a half hour, Joe Sr. presented his namesake with a precise accounting worthy of the banker that he was. The implication was unmistakable. Jack practiced an hour. You owe me at least that much, if not more. In fact, Joe Jr. was always expected to make additional deposits to his account, lest his brother catch up to—or even overtake—him.
"Boys will be boys," the old saying goes, and it has usually been the excuse fathers make for the boisterous transgressions they themselves instigate in their sons. In the case of Joe and Jack, however, it was Rose more than her husband who encouraged their aggressive behavior. She dutifully inspected them both before sending them off each morning to Edward Devotion Elementary School—Joe started there in 1920 and Jack followed in 1922—ensuring that their outfits were neat, proper, and altogether befitting their station in life. Yet no sooner did the boys return home from school than Rose insisted they change into clothes that made them look (she later said) "like roughnecks." By no means did Joe Sr. discourage this cultivation of masculine aggression in the pair, but his role was more that of instructor. He was, in fact, less interested in how they comported themselves than in what they knew and what they said.
Whether or not it was the result of their father's incitement to competition combined with their mother's cultivation of a "roughneck" attitude, Joe and Jack were often exuberantly unruly, if not downright obnoxious. They loudly disrupted the silence of the local library, they played on a neighbor's rooftop, and (according to Rose's diary) they formed a "club where they initiate new members by sticking pins into them."
* * *
When Joseph Kennedy Sr. was not quizzing the boys or lecturing them, he seemed curiously oblivious of them. One snowy day, when Joe Jr. was just two, his father pulled him on a sled; however, instead of watching the boy—let alone enjoying him—he talked business all the while with an associate while absently dragging his cargo behind him. When young Joe tumbled off the sled, the senior Joe did not even take notice but continued pulling, leaving the toddler behind in a bank of snow.
And yet Joe Sr. was willing to remake the world—or at least that part of it immediately adjacent to him—when he saw his children's lives at stake. In February 1920, shortly after Rose had given birth to a second daughter, Kathleen, Jack came down with scarlet fever during a local epidemic. The frail child quickly became desperately ill, and Joe Sr. found himself in a crisis. Jack needed to be hospitalized—not only to increase his own chances for recovery but to isolate him from Rose, the newborn Kathleen, sister Rosemary, and Joe Jr. The Brookline Hospital lacked a contagion ward and so could not accept Jack. Boston Hospital had a special isolation ward for children, the South Department, and also boasted a staff that included a renowned scarlet fever authority, Dr. Edward Place. The problem was that Jack was not a Boston child, and the ward—overflowing to more than five times its capacity with scarlet fever cases—would not accept a patient from outside of the city. Joe could not buy his way into Boston Hospital. But he could lean on his father-in-law, Honey Fitz, the former Boston mayor, who still possessed sufficient influence to prevail on Mayor Andrew Peters to muscle Jack into the isolation ward—never mind that this meant that some Boston child, like Jack a victim of the epidemic, would be excluded.
After Jack was out of danger, he was sent, with a nurse, to a rented house in Maine to convalesce and was periodically visited by members of the family. While Jack was away, in March 1920, the senior Kennedy decided the time had once again come to move. He sold his house on Beals Street, choosing a larger corner residence at Abbotsford and Naples Roads in a wealthier Brookline neighborhood. When Jack was fully recovered and safely installed in the new house, Joe Sr. was once again content to turn the boys over to Rose—until, in 1924, he decided to alter their young lives by finding a new school for them. He took them out of Edward Devotion, the local public school, and enrolled them both in the Noble Lower School—the feeder school for the exclusive Noble and Greenough School, which had been established in 1866 as an alternative to Boston Latin for boys whose parents had Harvard aspirations.
Why would Joe Kennedy, an alumnus of Boston Latin, want to place his sons in its alternative? We can only assume that it was for the same reason that some other parents chose it. Boston Latin, some agreed, had admitted too many Jews, immigrants—and (for that matter) Irish Catholics. Noble Lower and Noble and Greenough were overwhelmingly Protestant and therefore "solidly American." At the time of their enrollment, the Kennedy boys may well have been the only Catholics in attendance at the lower school. They endured slurs and epithets—mostly directed against their Irish ethnicity rather than their Roman Catholicism. As Joe Sr. saw it, for boys like his—just as for the boy he himself had been—exclusive private Protestant schools provided an obligatory hazing of initiation into a WASP-dominated world of money and influence and power. It was the price of admission.
Joe Jr. paid part of that price to one John Clark Jones III, a boy older and bigger than he, who seems to have made it his personal mission to torture the Irish newcomer. Ultimately, Joe learned to use St. Aidan's Church, located nearby at Freeman and Pleasant Streets, as sanctuary. After outrunning Jones and his followers, he would stand in the doorway of the church and announce that it was a shrine. "You can't touch me here!" Like many Protestants, Joe's tormentors were awestruck by the Catholic mystery and did not dare approach him in the shadow of the "shrine."
In 1926, Noble Lower closed, and Joseph Kennedy Sr. joined a seven-man committee to establish in its place the Dexter School—chiefly to function as the new "lower school" for Noble and Greenough. Now the senior Kennedy not only had his two sons in this bastion of Brahmin Boston, he also had a founding stake in it—a stake financed by a considerable contribution to the building fund.
While Kennedy had bought his boys a secure berth in the institution, and although the other parents treated both him and his wife with respect, they never socialized with the couple. It was clear to the senior Kennedy that his boys would have to earn acceptance the way he had at Boston Latin: not by dint of parental money, or even by academic achievement (despite Joe Jr.'s lofty IQ numbers, he was never close to being a standout student at Dexter), but on the playing field.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lost Destiny by Alan Axelrod. Copyright © 2015 Alan Axelrod. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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