The House of Kennedy

They are known as “coffin ships”: overcrowded, disease-riddled, barely seaworthy sailing vessels that transport millions of impoverished Irish fleeing the mid-nineteenth-century Great Hunger, or potato famine, hoping to begin new lives in the US and Canada. Assuming they make it that far—some 30 percent of transatlantic passengers commonly die at sea during the treacherous three-thousand-mile crossings, which can take as long as four months.

Given the conditions, many travelers mark their departure from Ireland with an “American wake,” evoking the finality of the voyage they are about to undertake. One such traveler is Patrick Joseph Kennedy, a twenty-seven-year-old cask and barrel maker from Dunganstown, County Wexford, and future great-grandfather of President John F. Kennedy. His name appears on the 1849 manifest of the SS Washington Irving, a ship with fewer than five years under sail.

Records of shipboard conditions indicate that they are universally harrowing, and the monthlong crossing from Liverpool to Boston is no exception. Overcrowding and unsanitary quarters propagate deadly cases of cholera, smallpox, and measles; the ship’s crew toss scores of corpses to the sharks that incessantly circle the three-masted ship.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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 virulent anti-Semitism, a discordant echo of the discrimination his own Irish Catholic ancestors suffered at the hands of Boston Protestants. He tells friends of his intention to wipe out the Jewish movie producers he calls “pants pressers.”

 “Joe Kennedy operated just like Joe Stalin,” associates remark, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons dubs Joe “the Napoleon of the movies.” He is the only studio head in Hollywood history to run three of them simultaneously. He slashes jobs, turning each property into a streamlined model of fiscal austerity, a blueprint for future studio management and mergers. He’s also instrumental in bringing talkies to the silver screen despite critics who are still convinced the new technology is a fad.

When his father, P.J. Kennedy, passes away, Joe is too busy to return to Boston for the funeral.

He’s rarely too busy for a pretty girl, however. Indeed, Joe’s appetite for bedding young women is known to be insatiable. He asks a New York theater manager to arrange introductions to “all the good-looking girls in your company,” any aspiring actresses with Hollywood dreams. “I have a gang around me that must be fed on wild meat,” he writes.

But unknown ingenues won’t further Joe’s business interests. For that, he needs movie stars. He tries and fails to convince Babe Ruth to appear in his movies. Then, in November 1927, he meets Gloria Swanson at a New York City luncheon in the hotel dining room at the Barclay, where she is a frequent guest. An instant attraction sparks between the six-foot, bespectacled, thirty-eight-year-old studio head and the twenty-eight-year-old screen siren who stands less than five feet tall.

At the table, Joe hands Swanson, whom the renowned director Cecil B. DeMille called “the movie star of all movie stars,” a book he edited, The Story of Films. The gift marks the beginning of a three-year romance.

Though Swanson earns millions, her lavish lifestyle drains her coffers. In 1924, Photoplay magazine breathlessly reports on her extravagant expenditures—ten thousand dollars a year on lingerie and five hundred a month for perfume—in an era when the average American individual income is fifty-five hundred dollars annually.

The debonair Boston banker turned Hollywood producer promises to get her out of debt. He convinces her to let him manage her finances, filing a charter in Delaware for a new company, Gloria Productions, Inc., and instituting a complex system in which he’ll write “a letter to the files saying one thing and then order the exact reverse on the phone.” Though Swanson is grateful to Joe, who has “taken the business load off” of her, her finances show little sign of improvement, thanks in part to his underhanded habit of charging his own pricey personal expenses to her account. At least one newspaper cites Joe’s transcontinental calls to Swanson as “the largest private telephone bill in the nation during the year 1929.”

Joe is smitten with the blue-eyed screen goddess. Their intimate affair begins one afternoon at the Hotel Poinciana in Palm Beach. He slyly arranges to have his friend and business associate Edward Moore take Swanson’s third husband, the French marquis Henri de Bailly de La Falaise, on a deep-sea fishing trip while Joe makes a surprise visit to Swanson’s room.

“He moved so quickly that his mouth was on mine before either of us could speak,” she recounts in her memoir, Swanson on Swanson.

“With one hand he held the back of my head, with the other he stroked my body and pulled at my kimono. He kept insisting in a drawn-out moan, ‘No longer, no longer. Now.’ He was like a roped horse, rough, arduous, racing to be free. After a hasty climax he lay beside me, stroking my hair. Apart from his guilty, passionate mutterings, he had still said nothing cogent.”

The affair escalates in intensity, with the married Joe proclaiming his “fidelity” to the married Swanson. As she writes in her memoir, “He stunned me by telling me proudly that there had been no Kennedy baby that year”—though his wife, Rose, had been already five months pregnant with their eighth child, Jean Ann (born February 20, 1928), when Joe and Swanson met in November 1927. “What he wanted more than anything, he continued, was for us to have a child,” Swanson writes. Swanson is not interested in this career-threatening idea, and flatly refuses.

Except when it comes to the children, Rose and Joe deliberately lead separate lives: “If he was in Europe, she would be here [in the States], and if she was in New York, he would be in Palm Beach. If he was in Palm Beach, she would be in New York,” a family friend remembers.