Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE
THE LAST OF THE KENNEDY BOYS
Notice was sent, not to the applicant, but to his father. “Your son has been admitted to Harvard College,” wrote the dean of freshmen, Delmar Leighton, to Joseph P. Kennedy in July 1950. He scribbled in a postscript, “Happy to be sending you another of these letters!”
Kennedy, a Harvard alumnus and benefactor, took the university’s admittance of his eighteen-old son, Edward, as his due. At one, the patriarch was extraordinarily wealthy, after a rollicking career as a Wall Street tycoon, diplomat, Hollywood studio chief, real estate mogul, purveyor of forbidden liquor, and adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt.
“I suppose it would almost be a sacrilege,” Kennedy wrote back, “not to have the last of the Kennedy boys attend the school where his father and brothers went.”
The corsair closed his letter with cajolery. Someday he might need Leighton’s help again. “It’s a rather difficult job today to be Dean of Freshmen at a college like Harvard, with all the problems that the youths of today have to face,” Kennedy wrote. “We are delighted that Teddy is in your hands.”
Unspoken, but known to both, was Harvard’s expansive criteria for accepting Edward Moore Kennedy to the Class of 1954. It wasn’t because his academic record showed flair. Like so much in his life, it had to do with family. The university was a place where clans like the Adamses, Roosevelts, and Lodges sent their sons—prodigies, rakes, and dolts alike—to be certified for rank and lives of privilege. Even in the 1950s, when the leveling effects of World War II were strong and programs for young veterans like the GI Bill democratized the yards of the Ivy League, Harvard preserved its traditional allotment of each year’s class for boys of wealth and stature. Ninety percent of the applicants from the better prep schools, and an equal proportion of the sons of Harvard alumni, were admitted in 1950.
College administrators called them “the gentlemen” or (with smiles they shared among themselves) “the paying guests.” Along the redbrick walks of Cambridge, on the gold coast of Mount Auburn Street, in clubs with names like Spee or Fly, the “gentleman’s C” was respectable. In some of the clubhouses or athletes’ suites, where eggheads and day students grinding for grades might find themselves the subject of mockery, academic indifference was a mark of honor. Yet there were always a few of the legacy sort who, for lack of effort or talent, or temperament, would come to ill‑ starred ends, face suspension, and place the school in an awkward position. Leighton sought, in his letter to Joseph Kennedy, to head this off. “While we believe that no students have been admitted to Harvard who do not have the capacity to do good college work, the transition to university conditions is not always easily made,” wrote the tactful dean. “We ask for your cooperation in notifying us if . . . you have reason to believe your son is having difficulty.”
“Write us about him, as fully as you are willing, with references to his individual qualities and needs,” the dean urged Kennedy, “in case he has deficiencies in his earlier education or weaknesses in character or health we ought to know about.”
In fact, there was reason for Joseph to believe that Edward Kennedy— Ted or Teddy, sometimes Eddie, to family and pals—might find the transition difficult. It’s not that Ted was not gifted. Far from it. The last of the Kennedy boys was tall and handsome, with a robust physique, arboreal quads, a million‑dollar grin and an exuberant sense of humor. His thick, wavy dark brown hair would last a lifetime and the mighty Irish jaw was assertive—if prone to be enveloped in times of plenty by the chipmunk cheeks of the Fitzgeralds, his maternal line. His eyes were expressive: not probing like his older brother John’s, but vulnerable, and eloquent in times of sorrow. He was a warm, playful human being who loved dogs, good times, song, and devilry. “To find Ted Kennedy, listen for the laughter,” a friend of his would say. He said his prayers and went to church; a Sermon on the Mount—not a Ten Commandments—Catholic.
He was more than intelligent, but no intellectual. His brother John called Ted a “gay illiterate.” When motivated—most notably by his father’s prodding—he’d invest the needed hours in the study halls and carrels. As the last of nine children, he had sometimes been coddled, but often neglected. He knew loneliness, having spent much of his childhood shuttled off to boarding schools. By the time he got to Harvard, he had attended ten different schools. (Or was it nine? Or eleven? His mother could sometimes not remember.) The experience left him unsure. He stumbled over words, a cognitive tell. He did better when rehearsed, and he knew it. Throughout his life, he would compensate via intense preparation and relentless effort. It made for an intricate, and complex character—that marvelous affability joined with drive and perseverance; insecurities addressed by toil, and anxiety salved by self‑indulgence. He would spend that life seeking “to catch up” to his siblings. “The disadvantage of my position is being constantly compared with . . . brothers of such superior ability,” he would say.
As a Kennedy, he had formidable advantages—and just as formidable expectations. His grandfathers were men of note in Boston. Each was the son of an Irish immigrant father who died young in the new land, leaving the boys to sustain their families; each found his way into politics. Tightlipped Patrick J. Kennedy, an East Boston barkeep, tavern owner, and liquor distributor, served in the state senate and on the Democratic Party’s “board of strategy,” which sought to arbitrate disputes among the town’s fractionate Democrats. There, he recurrently found an ally in garrulous John Fitzgerald, who would ascend from the North End to the U.S.
Congress and to City Hall, where he served two terms as Boston’s mayor. Their families gathered for picnics on Old Orchard Beach in Maine. And Patrick Kennedy’s son Joseph married John Fitzgerald’s daughter Rose.
Rose was a fine catch: Irish American royalty, “rocked to sleep to political lullabies,” she would say. Joseph was a lone wolf, with a lean and hungry look, who set out to build a fortune in finance. “Tenaciously independent,” a reporter wrote in his notes. “A cold‑blooded predilection to bet against the crowd,” wrote another. “When you get out on The Street, you have got to be a cold appraiser, or you die,” Joseph told the scribes.
Fine advice, not always followed. Joseph Kennedy was a temperamental sort—self‑made, gifted, sensitive and prickly, reliant on instinct, which sporadically failed him. He could rage, engage in torrid love affairs, crush rivals—and be overpowered by emotion when seeing the polio‑stricken children who shared the rehabilitative swimming pool with the disabled Roosevelt at Warm Springs, Georgia. While serving as the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain at the outset of World War II, Kennedy had scuttled his yen to be the first Roman Catholic president when he split with Roosevelt over the threat posed by Nazi Germany and got vilified as a herald of appeasement. His designs for a Kennedy presidency fell upon his sons.
Ted’s three older brothers—Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr. (Joe Jr. to the tribe), John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Jack), and Robert Francis Kennedy (Bobby)—had excelled at Harvard. The two oldest then left Cambridge for war, and memorable acts of heroism. Joe Jr. had been groomed to lead clan and country but died in a perilous mission in the skies over Europe.
John—renowned for his gutsy efforts to save the crew of his sunken torpedo boat in the South Pacific—took up the family’s drive for power.
Joseph and Rose Kennedy expected that the boys—that all their children—would excel. They were dispatched to elite schools—Harvard, Princeton, Stanford—taught to ride, sail, waltz, and ski, and shine at golf and tennis. Amid the Great Depression, they savored prime rib suppers on Sundays at Longchamps, had their teeth straightened by the best Manhattan orthodontists, and canoodled with film stars on the zebra‑patterned booths at El Morocco. Seated around the family dinner table, the boys faced intense interrogation from their father on current events, politics, and history. Visitors to the Kennedy estates in Palm Beach, Florida, and Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, found a gorgeous crowd of young folk, furiously engaged in sailing, touch football, waterskiing, and other athletic pursuits, teasing, laughing, and goading one another in play. “They were like carbonated water, and other families . . . flat,” John’s wife, Jacqueline, recalled. “They bring out the best then they all bounce off each other.” After surviving her introduction, and a broken ankle suffered in one of their football games (from which she thereafter abstained), she nonetheless found them “wonderful . . . gay . . . stimulating . . . [and] gallant.”
When Joseph was named as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in the months before the war, his wife and children had joined him in Great Britain. The handsome family beguiled the British and American press, which recorded their sojourns to London’s teas and dances, to kiss the Blarney Stone in Ireland, to Saint Moritz to ski and skate in winter, and to the cabanas of Cannes in summer. The Kennedys arrived in England in March 1938, when Ted was six, and Rose and her children stayed through the first weeks of the war, in September 1939. They settled at 14 Princes Gate, a thirty‑six‑room mansion near the Albert Memorial, bequeathed to the U.S. government by another famous American financier, J. P. Morgan, as a residence for its ambassador. It had an elevator, which Ted commandeered; a large garden where he and Robert, twelve, rode their bicycles; and a view of Hyde Park, where their father went horseback riding. Robert was old enough to wear trousers; Ted was consigned to knee socks and shorts. They attended a party at Windsor Castle and danced with the princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret. Ted wrenched a knee learning to ski in Switzerland, was goaded by his older brothers to leap into the Mediterranean from the high embankment at Eden Roc, and received his First Communion from the newly inaugurated Pope Pius XII, a family friend, in Rome. “I hope you will always be good and pious as you are today,” the pontiff told Ted.
“I wasn’t frightened at all,” the boy told the press. “The pope patted my head and told me I was a smart little fellow. He gave me the first rosary beads from the table before he gave my sister any.”
Atop the ladder, in those years before the war, were Joe Jr. and John and high‑spirited Kathleen, who was called Kick and would marry into the British aristocracy. “To us they were marvelous creatures, practically god‑like, and we yearned to please them and be acceptable,” said Eunice, a middle child. The youngest Kennedy, nurse Luella Hennessey would remember, was “bubbly and happy.” The ambassador reserved times to visit with each of his sons. He and Robert would have a sober discussion, and then after Robert left, “Teddy would come in and the atmosphere of the room would completely change,” said Hennessey. “Teddy was like the sunshine, lighting up everything in sight and keeping his father young. Through the corridors, you could hear them laughing.” He was the “complete antithesis” of the brooding, more reticent Robert, said their mother.
The outbreak of war sent Rose and the children home to the Kennedy mansion in Bronxville, New York. London was not safe during the Nazi air attacks. The family had been chastised by the air raid wardens after Ted ripped a blackout curtain.
“We are up in Bronxville now . . . we had a dead skunk in the pool,” Ted wrote his father, who remained in England. “We had a Halloween party lost week Afterwards Igot dressed up like a ghost and went all the way down the road I didn’t scare because you said not to scare anyone because they may have a weak heart,” Ted reported.
“It snowd on Friday,” Ted wrote. “I hope not many bombs have drop near you . . . my reading is beter in school, love, Teddy.” And, “Dear Daddy. We are down in cap‑card [Cape Cod] mother has gone to jacks graduain [graduation]. joe is here. The wether is very dad [bad]. Would you get me the kings autograh [autograph] for me.”
In September 1940, amid the Battle of Britain, Joseph took the time to write a long letter to his youngest son:
I don’t know whether you would have very much excitement during these raids. I am sure, of course, you wouldn’t be scared, but if you heard all these guns firing every night and the bombs bursting you might get a little fidgety.
I am sure you would have liked to be with me and seen the fires the German bombers started in London. It is really terrible to think about, and all those poor women and children and homeless people down in the East end of London all seeing their places destroyed. I hope when you grow old you will dedicate your life to trying to work out plans to make people happy instead of making them miserable, as war does today. . . .
Well, old boy, write me some letters and I want you to know that I miss seeing you a lot, for after all, you are my pal, aren’t you?
Love Dad
The summers of his youth took on an idyllic status for Ted: the family together on the Cape or the Riviera; those handsome, laughing brothers teaching him to swim, to sail, to ride a bicycle. The children looked to one another for closeness and camaraderie; the notion that age or marriage— much less death—would end it seemed absurd. “My family did not so much live in the world as comprise the world,” he remembered. “It was all here; all here.” This idealized family moment would be his lifelong touchstone—something he would desperately miss and, incessantly and incapably, seek to renew. “We were enormously happy together. Our best friends were our brothers and sisters,” he recalled. It was “our space and time.”
But with those breezy summers came that unabating expectation. “Our family was the perfect family,” Rose told her journal. “Boys brilliant, girls attractive and intelligent, money, prestige, a young father and mother of intelligence, devoted, exemplary habits and successful in the education of the children.” Joe Jr. and John were warriors. Robert was too young to serve in wartime combat, yet he—the shortest and scrawniest of the brothers—surpassed them on the football field, winning his Harvard letter by playing in the Yale game, on a fractured leg. There was “no crying” in his house, Joseph Kennedy famously decreed. “I would not have allowed the children to express grumpiness,” Rose said.
After Joe Jr. was killed in an aerial attack on a Nazi U‑boat base, their father’s calculations prevailed, and John moved to the head of the line.
Ted remembered how the family received news of the eldest son’s death— from priests who arrived on a summer day at the Cape—and how it shattered their father, and how John had stepped in as leader, to suggest that they go sailing, for “Joe wouldn’t want us sitting here crying.” John Kennedy entered “politics not because it was natural to him or that it was his desire,” Joseph wrote to Representative John McCormack a few years after the war. “As the next oldest, Jack took up a great many . . . obligations and desires of Joe’s.”
Singularity was discouraged. “If a member of the family has nothing to offer in a conversation, or has accomplished nothing, then the rest of the family rather ignores him,” Rose wrote. “If everyone campaigns for Jack and he has done nothing, then the other members do not want to talk with him. If he does not want to play tennis, golf, ski or ride then he sits by himself.” There was, Eunice would remember, “a lot of pressure, all the time.” Her father had a saying: “Not for chalk, money or marbles will we take second place.”
In this silken, Darwinian environment, Ted Kennedy craved a secure footing. He was awed by the achievements of his father and brothers and vexed by self‑doubt. His solicitations of affection had an urgency. He was avid, yet sometimes failed to show good judgment. He was wont to take risks that, in retrospect, were reckless. All his life, he would see himself as the “fuck‑up” in the clan. “Ted—he was the ninth child, after all—did not get the attention the others got. Always felt inadequate because of his brothers,” said his cousin Joseph Gargan.
“What is of interest to people who might study him,” said Patrick, his youngest son, “is this conflict in his life between this idea of who he was supposed to be . . . and who he was. And I think who he was, was just an amazing, authentic person who loved a good time, loved people, was very gregarious and social and yet, in a way, felt encumbered . . . [by] the sense of I have to be something else and be serious-minded if I’m to be successful, taken seriously.”
If nagged and pressed, he was also spoiled. As those who knew them well remarked, there were rules for Kennedys and rules for everyone else. When a child of his blundered, Joseph Kennedy might stomp and storm, but his clout ensured a bailout was at hand. To avoid Joseph’s hard glare and displeasure, the boys grew adept at dodging responsibility. After being reported for a road rage incident in which he repeatedly bumped the car in front of him, John asked his friend Kirk Lemoyne “Lem” Billings to lie to the police and take the blame. When Robert was caught in a cheating scandal at Portsmouth Priory, a Catholic prep school in Rhode Island, he was permitted to leave quietly and resume his schooling elsewhere. When Ted conducted a nighttime raid on a chemistry lab at Milton Academy— to rig the equipment so that an instructor’s planned experiment failed the next morning—there was agita but no expulsion.
Within Ted’s life of privilege, there was tension. When he was nine, his mentally handicapped sister Rosemary was given a lobotomy and vanished from their home. Ted wondered if he, too, might be disappeared.
“You can have a serious life or a non‑serious life, Teddy. I’ll still love you which ever choice you make. But if you decide to have a non‑serious life, I won’t have much time for you,” his father told him when he was a teenager. “You make up your mind.”
Over time, Ted chose sailing as his avocation—leaving the stringent standards of the crowded shore for the liberty of wind and water. Here he found solace in troubled times. His metaphor for life became a search for a “true compass”—a steady course, fixed by the unshakable stars, to guide him through tumult.
The sea was salve and getaway. As a man, he would display on his dresser a framed bit of dialogue from the playwright Eugene O’Neill, in which the dissolute Edmund Tyrone speaks of his escape to deep water:
I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim‑starred sky!
Ted had applied to Harvard from Milton, one of the country’s finer preparatory schools, which traced its history, in the countryside outside Boston, back to 1798. His work there was satisfactory, but his education overall was haphazard: Milton was the last of those ten primary or secondary schools he attended by the time he turned sixteen. His parents were rich, busy people whose relationship was characterized by the long stretches they spent apart—apart from each other, and from their nine children. Rose dealt with Joseph’s marital infidelities by spending his money on jewelry and clothes and traveling about the world.
“Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children all alone,” John scolded when he was five years old and Rose was leaving for a six‑week vacation. “His mother really didn’t love him,” Jacqueline told a writer from Life magazine in the days after John’s death. “She likes to go around talking about being the daughter of the Mayor of Boston or how she was an ambassador’s wife. She didn’t love him.” When a measles epidemic struck Boston and imperiled her brood, Rose left Joseph and the family nurse to deal with it. “My mother didn’t touch me—but you can’t give what you didn’t get,” Maria Shriver would say of her mother, Eunice, and Eunice’s relationship with Rose. “Ghastly family,” author Gore Vidal, a relative of Jacqueline, recalled. “What an awful woman [Rose] was. Never went to see [John] in the hospital—he was sick most of the time he was at school. She never showed up.”
The boys were delivered as boarders to chilly institutions like Choate or St. Paul’s, and the girls (like Rose before them) dispatched to convent schools. The older sons—Joe Jr. and John—left home as teenagers and had relatively stable educations. But by the time Ted, the youngest, came along, his mother, Rose, was weary of reading books, playing games, or devoting too much time to a child. “We tried to keep everything more or less equal, but you wonder if the mother and father aren’t quite tired when the ninth one comes along,” she would say. “It takes an effort to tell a bedtime story which has been told dozens [of] times,” she confided to her journal. “It is sort of a chore to go out on a frigid hill to watch a child’s ski lesson.”
Rose tried, unsuccessfully, to enroll Ted in kindergarten when he was four, and in first grade at five, and ultimately dispatched him to his first boarding school at the age of seven. More than once, when she wanted to get to Palm Beach for the season, Rose yanked her son out of his cold‑ weather school and placed him in a strange Florida classroom. It’s not certain that he ever finished third or fourth grade. “You spent your time just sort of finding how you get to your classroom, where your bed was,” he remembered.
So he bounced from school to school. He was deposited at seven in Portsmouth Priory where the rest of the students were five or more years older, and bullied him. They dug up the dead pet turtle he had buried and threw it in his bed with him one night, then played catch with it around the hall.
“I was in the wrong grade . . . you couldn’t have friends,” he remembered. “Suddenly this wonderful, nurturing family is . . . divided. Suddenly . . . there was real separation and sense of confusion. And wondering. You wondered were you going to ever see these people again.” It was “a rather lonely existence . . . very difficult . . . bleak.”
“At nine years old I went off to boarding school at Riverdale Country, and I got whooping cough and almost died,” he remembered. “The underpinnings . . . of the family and support and faith weren’t there.” He reached for a sailing analogy. “You’re losing your mooring.”
Much of the time, his native buoyancy prevailed. “Teddy is just the same,” Rose wrote her children in a letter from Palm Beach in 1941. “He went roller skating all by himself the other day and enjoyed it thoroughly.” A year later, she reported how Ted “goes confidently off without bothering anyone” when he wished to see a movie. “I remember him when he was seven or eight as being overweight, terribly good natured, laughing constantly and an incessant tease,” Eunice remembered.
Yet, as a schoolboy, Ted was given an assignment to write a short story. Many years later, he showed it—to illustrate his childhood—to James Young, a University of Virginia professor. “It was a story about a boy at school who was very sad and who didn’t like it at school,” Young recalled. “He was just so sad and . . . he got his little bag together and tried to run away. They caught him and all the things in his bag spilled off and rolled down the hill.”
By Kennedy’s account, it was not until he arrived at Milton, at the age of fourteen, that his anxiety eased. He learned to make a friend, met his first girlfriend—learned to learn—and the loneliness started to dissipate. He played football, and was a member of the school debating squad that gloriously defeated a team of Harvard freshmen.
But parental abandonment remained a running theme. “I’m sending these flowers to you even though you sent me to boarding‑school when I was 7,” Ted would write on Mother’s Day in 1973.
“Have sent flowers to New York and called Palm Beach and Boston,” wrote his sister Jean. “No wonder I am so insecure. Where are you Mommy?”
The boarding school regimes were strict, at times Dickensian. At the Riverdale Country School in the wealthy suburbs of New York, Ted and the other boys suffered degrees of sexual molestation at the hands of a dormitory master and his stooges. At the Fessenden School in Newton, Massachusetts, he was paddled thirteen times in four years. Some classmates found the spankings “absolutely horrendous,” he later recalled, but when the school asked for parents’ permission to employ corporal punishment, “My father was the first one to send it back, approved.”
His parents shrugged off danger signs. “Changing schools is always something of a handicap no matter how successfully the person is handled,” warned Julia Markham, the principal of his Bronxville, New York, elementary school. “Interruptions at this point in his progress are apt to prove difficult and will no doubt result in slowing up his advance,” wrote the heads of the nearby Lawrence Park West Country School, upon hearing that Ted would be leaving only months after arriving.
Ted’s namesake, Edward Moore—an adjutant for Joseph Kennedy—and Moore’s wife, Mary, were often called on as surrogate parents. His father’s office staff helped the youngster gather the correct gear, from the proper clothing stores, for the latest academy. He had problems focusing. When he was ten, his parents had him evaluated, and hired a tutor. “Ted is much more quiet and considerably deflated,” Rose reported to the family, then quipped, “which most of his brothers and sisters consider an improvement.” Friends of the family did what they could—taking Ted and his brother Robert in for Thanksgiving dinner or to the theater in Boston. Robert, who was similarly shipwrecked, kept in touch with Ted on the telephone and reported to his parents. “Sorry you didn’t get to Boston as expected but I expect you were busy with the welfare of all the other little children,” Robert wrote his father.
“I was struck by what a complicated role [Ted] played in that family,” said Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, a friend and adviser, years later. “Rose was merciless with him, joking in various ways, making fun of him After a few drinks he would say, ‘Mom, you always left me behind.’ It was really remarkable to watch the family tensions.”
Among “the biggest thrills” of his childhood, Ted would recall, was the time that Robert and he stole away to Hyannis Port on Easter weekend, camped out in the empty garage—the house was boarded up for winter—hiked the beach, cooked their own meals, and slept on cots.
Rose concluded that, for the most part, Ted just needed to apply himself. Her easygoing son could, she feared, cross the line to fat and lazy. His siblings called him “Biscuits and Muffins” and the family correspondence was chock‑full of gossip about his weight. “Teddy has to go on a diet. Miss Dunn has to get extra‑large suits for him,” his sister Jean tattled to their father. “Get that fat little brother of yours to write more frequently,” Joseph told her.
Rose knew what strings to tug. “Your diagnosis is undoubtedly correct, as you are on the scene,” she wrote the concerned staff of the Fessenden School. She urged them to ratchet up the pressure. “The constant re‑ minder to him that his three brothers all did excellent work in their schools (and that you know his father is placing great dependence on him) might help do the trick.”
Within the family, it was expected that “he was never going to amount to much,” his friend and aide David Burke would later recall. But then, what did it matter? Ted was the comic, the jester, the afterthought. It was crazy to think that the weight of the crown might ever rest on those blithe shoulders.
Among those who filled in as parental figures was Ted’s grandfather John Fitzgerald. “John F” or “Honey Fitz,” as the former mayor was known, would take Robert and Ted to lunch on Sundays and then walk with them through the city, discoursing at length on the sites and monuments. Fitzgerald whetted Ted’s interest in history and impressed him with the glad‑ handing way he greeted the common folk—the help they encountered in restaurant kitchens, the passersby and workmen on the Common and street corners.
The old man’s disquisitions stoked a sentiment that Ted and his broth‑ ers and sisters had inherited from their parents: a kinship with the little guy, despite the family’s elite status. Fitzgerald told his grandsons about the days when “No Irish Need Apply” signs welcomed job seekers, and the Protestant Yankee “Brahmins” and Irish Catholic immigrants squared off in ruthless enmity. In 1910, Henry Adams, a scion of the city’s other, esteemed presidential sept, had met the news of Fitzgerald’s election as mayor by writing to a friend, “Poor Boston has fairly run up against it in the form of its particular Irish maggot, rather lower than the Jew, but more or less the same in appetite for cheese.”
Rose told the children how she founded an “Ace of Clubs” society so that Irish American girls, snubbed by the proper Bostonians, could have their own social circle. And Joseph, though he publicly professed to have moved beyond such grievances, let his sons know that he moved to New York in the 1920s to escape Boston’s parochial gridlock. He had felt the sting of prejudice at Harvard, and his grand seaside home was in Hyannis Port, and not in Cohasset nearer to Boston, because the Protestants there had blackballed him when he tried to join their country club. Boston “was no place to bring up Irish Catholic children,” Joseph would recall. “I didn’t want them to go through what I had to go through I know so many Irish guys in Boston with real talent and ability that never got to first base only because of their race and religion.”
Thomas Fitzgerald, the children’s great‑grandfather, had fled the Great Famine and the oppression of British rule. He arrived in Boston in the 1850s, worked as a peddler, and raised his children in a three‑story tenement house on Ferry Street crammed with nine families. They slept on pallets of straw and shared a toilet with three dozen neighbors. Family traits made their appearance, among them fecundity (Thomas and his wife, Rosanna, had twelve children), enterprise (he found wealth in the liquor trade, after investing with his brother in a grocery and saloon), tragedy (a baby girl died of cholera), dependency (three of his children became slaves to drink), and ambition (John F. was accepted at Harvard Medical School and, with the backing of his clan, soon excelled in politics). Joseph Kennedy also had immigrant grandparents. His widowed grandmother, Bridget Murphy Kennedy, and her hardworking son— Patrick Joseph—had used a notions store and a saloon to secure their family foothold in East Boston.
Adams defined politics as “the systematic organization of hatreds,” and nowhere was this truer than in Boston at the turn to the twentieth century, as the native elite reacted from contempt and fear, and with resolve, to stop the Irish from taking power. It was a doomed endeavor, as the immigrants poured ashore in unrelenting number and Catholics gave birth at a rate surpassing the Brahmin gentry. But the competition dominated society, commerce, and politics for much of a century, and left a lasting scar on the newcomers. “It was symbolic. The business establishment, the clubs, the golf course . . . that was what I was told at a very young age,” Robert Kennedy would recall. “Both my parents felt very strongly about the discrimination.”
Joseph said he wanted to raise his children free from all that. “What the hell do I have to do to be an American?” he muttered. In 1927, he put his family on a private railroad car and set off for Wall Street. The youngest children, Jean and Ted, were born New Yorkers. Their childhood home was the mansion in Bronxville, in Westchester County, New York. The gabled white house in Hyannis Port—fourteen rooms on a seaside bluff that would grow into a six‑acre compound with sauna, swimming pool, tennis court, and private movie theater—was purchased in 1928, and an oceanfront villa in Palm Beach acquired in 1933.
Kennedy “moved in the intense, secretive circles of operators in the wildest stock market in history, with routine plots and pools, inside information and wild guesses,” said Fortune magazine in a 1937 profile. But he kept his Democratic affiliation, shifted his gaze from finance to politics,
and in 1934 Roosevelt named him to lead the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission, to regulate Wall Street. Who better than a fox to guard the chickens?
“I wanted power,” Kennedy would recall. “I thought money would give me power and so I made money, only to discover that it was politics—not money—that really gave a man power.” Where Rose had chosen to duplicate the Brahmin institutions, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote, Joseph resolved to infiltrate their core. His sons came away with the edge of outsiders. With a sympathy for rebels. With an empathy for the dispossessed. Joseph Kennedy’s boys were “well fed underdogs, with pretty good bite,” said Charles Daly, who worked with them all.
Ted arrived at Harvard after spending the summer of 1950 on a splendid jaunt through Europe. He and his cousin Joseph Gargan, who was two years older and studying at Notre Dame, left for Italy from New York after the week of festivities surrounding Robert’s wedding to Ethel Skakel in Greenwich, Connecticut. While in Europe, Ted and Gargan missed a storied moment when the high‑spirited Kennedys dunked Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, a friend of their father, in Nantucket Sound. “They gave him the boat treatment, i.e., throwing him out of the boat, and then Eunice, in her usual girlish glee pushed him under. To everybody’s concern and astonishment, the Senator came up with a ghastly look on his face, puffing and paddling. The wonder of it all was that he did not drown on the spot . . . coming from Wisconsin he had never learned how to swim,” Rose wrote Robert.
Kennedy and Gargan alighted in Rome, rented a Fiat convertible, and toured Naples and Sorrento before turning north and traveling through Austria and Germany to France. They visited Pompeii, went boating in the Blue Grotto of Capri, took a sliding, twisting trip over Mount Vesuvius, and had to be rescued after capsizing their canoe on Lake Como. They toured the World War II battlefield at Monte Cassino, and Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest” at Berchtesgaden, and were moved by the bombed‑out ruins of Aachen and Cologne. A survivor guided them through the bleak grounds, the huts and crematorium at the concentration camp in Dachau.
They were innocents: Catholic boys who on most mornings rose early to attend Mass, and alleged to be baffled by the bidets in the bathrooms. But they were eighteen and twenty, and so there was room on the itinerary for young ladies—a lovely Rose Marie who stole Gargan’s heart in Venice; eighteen‑year‑old Elizabeth Taylor, whose path they crossed as she honey‑ mooned poolside at the Hotel du Cap‑Eden‑Roc on the French Riviera (the young actress “really is the business,” Ted told his diary, somewhat embarrassed by the “maneuvering” he had performed to get her photograph and the cold eye he and Gargan had gotten from her husband, Conrad “Nicky” Hilton), and the American girls they met in Paris, who showed them its cultural attractions by day and joined them at the Moulin Rouge and other cabarets at night. No scene of them carousing, watching the bare‑breasted showgirls, was included in their letters home to Rose.
They may have done better, girl‑wise, had Ted not forgotten his swim‑ suit and been forced to purchase an ancient woolen bathing garment at the Lido as a substitute. “It takes Ted ten minutes to squeeze into it, because he isn’t getting any lighter eating this food,” Gargan wrote Joseph and Rose. The suit led to a run‑in with the law. After breaking into a private cabana to change, they were rousted by police and escaped by sprinting, arms full of clothes, through the thickets of beach chairs, blankets, and umbrellas on the strand. They sailed home on the luxurious ocean liner SS America. For Gargan it was “one laugh after another.” Ted wrote in his diary, “Sensational time. Best trip ever.”
In Cambridge, Ted was assigned to room in the Wigglesworth dormitories, on the south side of Harvard Yard. He came to Harvard in his mother’s blue coupe, but quickly switched to a sporty Pontiac convertible, with a horn that bleated like a cow. “I considered that fairly stylish and amusing,” he would remember. “I was still a kid in many ways.” His father, who kept close tabs on his children, heard of Ted’s noisy cruises through Harvard Square, and lectured his son about deportment. You might do this sort of thing as a prole, Joseph told Ted, but not as an epitome of Irish America. To be a Kennedy was to be different. “When you exercise any privilege that the ordinary fellow does not avail himself of, you immediately become a target,” Joseph wrote. “It’s alright to get ahead of the masses by good works, by good reputation and by hard work, but it certainly isn’t by doing things that [prompt others to say] ‘Who the hell does he think he is?’”
Harvard was all Ted hoped for. He was six feet two inches tall and weighed 210 pounds and made the freshman football team, where he won kudos for rambunctious play. His father was delighted, and paced the sidelines in coat and beret, shouting encouragement. Ted made lifelong friends among the Harvard athletes and—had he not already done so in Europe that summer—lost his chance at the $1,000 his parents promised the Kennedy boys if they made it to twenty‑one without drinking. “Making cleat marks and crashing into other solid bodies on the same field where my brothers had played—it didn’t seem that life could hold anything better than that,” he would recall.
There were shadows that fall. John Fitzgerald died—a sad landmark commemorated by impressive ceremonies, laments, and retrospectives in the Boston newspapers. There were tales of death from Korea as well, where, as Kennedy and Gargan frolicked in Europe, the communist regime of North Korea had launched a surprise attack on South Korea, seizing Seoul and corralling the beaten American and South Korean defenders in a corner of the peninsula. The U.S. troops were told to stand or die; there would be no miraculous evacuation, like Dunkirk.
The allied commander, General Douglas MacArthur, reversed the course of the war with a brash amphibious landing at the port of Inchon in mid‑September, flanking the North Koreans and driving them back deep into their homeland. But MacArthur’s success led to the third act of the conflict, as hundreds of thousands of Red Chinese troops crossed the border. With flares, screaming trumpets, and gongs, the Chinese troops attacked at night, sending the allies in a reeling retreat south. Casualties soared at the frozen Chosin Reservoir and amid the blood‑soaked rocks of Hoengsong. President Harry Truman, prompted by MacArthur, considered the use of nuclear weapons.
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