Joseph Kennedy's legacy revised to show softer side

First published:
Tuesday 5 March 2013 1:32PM
Ann Arnold

Joseph Kennedy, father of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, is often remembered as an overbearing father. But a new biography argues that the bottom line, always, was that his nine children should have a bright future.

When the always thin and sickly baby John F. ‘Jack’ Kennedy was two years old, he was diagnosed with scarlet fever. In 1920 this was a dreaded, and often fatal, disease.

Jack’s mother, Rose Kennedy, had recently given birth to her fourth child, so with three other children under five at home, the highly contagious toddler—‘a very, very sick little boy,’ Rose recalled—had to be removed from the house. One of the best specialists was at Boston City Hospital, but the Kennedys did not live in the hospital’s catchment area. Joe Kennedy Sr, a young father already adept at working contacts and wielding influence, had the Democratic mayor of Boston, Andrew Peters, intervene and get Jack admitted to the hospital.

Rose was housebound, so Joe took responsibility for his dangerously ill son. For three months, Joe would start each morning with early mass, go to work at a brokerage firm, then spend the late afternoons and evenings by Jack’s bedside—first at the hospital, then in a resort hotel. He later wrote that he had ‘little realized what an effect such a happening could possibly have on me. During the darkest days I felt that nothing else mattered except his recovery.’

This devotion, shown to each of his nine children, and the determination to intervene on their behalf, would characterise his life as a father. While his reputation is that of an overbearing, manipulative father, the simultaneous tenderness, and genuine interest, in each child is revealed in letters and other correspondence. When Joe Jr, his eldest, is away at camp for the first time, at the age of 11, his father writes: ‘We’re all tickled to death with the way you seem to be getting along.’ He writes to daughter Kick, in 1935: ‘By this time I suppose Bobby has that bugle and the house is nearly a mad house. However, maybe you could arrange to send him down near the railroad station and let him play when the trains come in.’

The softer Joe Kennedy is revealed in The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy.  Biographer David Nasaw, whose earlier, award-winning books include Andrew Carnegie, and The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, had access to thousands of family documents and letters not previously made public.

With the benefit, also, of diplomatic cables and other secret official correspondence, Nasaw presents a more nuanced view of a man commonly cast as a womanising anti-Semite. Yes, says Nasaw, he was a womaniser. His lovers included the writer and Republican diplomat Clare Boothe Luce, and the Hollywood siren Gloria Swanson. He became Swanson’s business manager and lover after a request from an associate that ‘Gloria needs handling.' But these separate lives of married men were not uncommon at the time, Nasaw points out, and Joe deeply loved his wife.

He was not exactly anti-Semitic, in Nasaw’s view. He had longstanding, close friendships and business associations with Jewish people, but at times resented the influence Jews appeared to have in American policy and politics—and seemed prepared to let Jews pay the price of displacement from Europe if it meant avoiding American involvement in war.

Kennedy’s historical persona remains that of an appeaser who favoured negotiating with Hitler. He stridently opposed Britain being at war—even while he was the controversial US Ambassador in that country, being bombed during the Blitz. ‘When I hear these mental midgets talking about my desire for appeasement and being critical of it,’ he wrote to Jack after three nights of attacks on London, ‘my blood fairly boils. What is this war going to prove? And what is it going to do to civilization?’

He was an isolationist who opposed the USA getting involved in either world war. In WWI, he refused to enlist. He was the father of a fast-growing family, and he was on the make, becoming quickly wealthy through shrewd business deals, and progressing well in his bid as an Irish Catholic outsider to crack the cabals of conservative power in the US. How dare the war interrupt his path?

In 1917, he believed that fathers of young children should not have to fight a war which he opposed anyway on political grounds. As a second generation Irish American, he did not feel inclined to rush to Britain’s rescue. In the Second World War, Kennedy was convinced that Britain’s effort was doomed, and that all requests for the US to bail Churchill out should be rejected, because as well as the potential harm to America’s youth—his eldest children would be eligible to fight—there would be a disastrous effect on its economy.

The bottom line, always, was that his nine children should have a bright future.

Kennedy master-planned their lives. Before Joe Jr, and then Jack, went to Harvard, Joe sent each son to study with Harold Laski, the Jewish socialist at the London School of Economics. While Kennedy wore his capitalism as proudly as his Catholicism, he wanted his boys to understand their changing world.

Reams of letters were written over the years about Rosemary, the second child and eldest daughter. Although never clearly diagnosed, she was born with what the family eventually referred to as retardation. There was a constant search for the right school, the right approach. When she was 16 she lived with a private tutor, Miss Newton, who complained about her ‘bad disposition.’ Kennedy gently corrected the teacher. ‘It is something else... that must be blamed for her attitude. ... [It] is her inherent backwardness, rather than a bad disposition.’ He adored Rosemary, and exhorted her to continue to try as hard as she could.

There was a special bond with Jack, that began with the scarlet fever period and continued through Jack’s lifetime of chronic illness and pain, which Joe took charge of managing. There were many times when Jack’s parents thought they were losing him.

When Jack was well, Joe despaired in the way of any loving father. In 1933 he wrote to Jack’s headmaster that he was pleased Jack was doing well in history, his favourite subject. But ‘...the happy-go-lucky manner with a degree of indifference that he shows towards the things that he has no interest in does not portend well for his future developing.’ The headmaster politely and subtly suggested to this often intimidating man that his son had a ‘clever, individualistic mind’ and would benefit from a little less pressure.

When Joe was in his 70s, and inordinately proud of his son the president, a stroke left him immobilised and unable to speak. Jack was assassinated less than three years into his term. After Joe was told, he watched the television for three days, crying. There was a replay of this wheelchair-bound, wordless grief when Bobby, as Attorney-General, was also shot.

Rosemary, at the age of 23, had been subjected to a lobotomy, to control her moods. This was at Joe’s direction, on apparently good advice from the chair of the Department of Neurology at George Washington University Medical School. The lobotomy significantly reduced Rosemary’s capacities, and from then on Joe kept her at arm’s length from the family, cared for in a Catholic boarding school. There’s a photo of Joe with his attractive, laughing daughter in London, before the lobotomy, her arm linked through his. He didn’t see her for the last 25 years of his life.

Joe Jr, the golden-haired, athletic first born, never got to assume the leadership roles his father plotted for him. Joe Jr and Jack both fought in WW2, and Joe Jr was shot down in a plane off the coast of England. After he died, Joe Snr wrote to his cousin about how hard it was to ‘get in the mood to write letters about young Joe. You more than anyone else know how much I had tied my whole life up to his from here on. You know what great things I saw in the future for him, and now it’s all over.’

Listen to Philip Adams interview with biographer David Nasaw on Late Night Live.

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