Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (5 page)

As Europe rebuilt from the devastation, Rose went to visit Kathleen, who was now well ensconced in London society. Staying with Kick in 1947 at Linsmore Castle, the Cavendish family estate in Ireland, Rose wrote to Joe: “It is beautiful here beyond words, quiet, peaceful, secluded . . . I feel
perfect
.”

Back in Massachusetts, Jack had been elected, at only age twenty-nine, to the US House of Representatives in the same district his grandfather Honey Fitz had been elected in the previous century. Though Rose did help with the campaigning in the 1946 election, she participated less than the rest of the family, and certainly not to the extent she would in coming years. The second half of the 1940s seemed to be a reflective period in Rose’s life.

That decade, already so tragic, held one final profound heartbreak for her. In 1948 Kathleen returned to the United States for a two-month visit. At the end of it, she announced to Joe and Rose that she intended to marry Peter Fitzwilliam. She’d been seeing Fitzwilliam, a married English aristocrat—and yes, Protestant—ten years her senior, since 1946; now that his divorce was set to become final, the two were ready to wed.

Rose was furious, threatening to disown Kick if she again broke with Catholic doctrine by marrying a divorced man. Joe offered no support either, but was at least open, a month later, to meeting Peter. In France for business, Joe agreed to meet the two in Paris. Kathleen and Fitzwilliam relaxed for two weeks on the Riviera before flying back to Paris in Fitzwilliam’s private plane, ignoring warnings that the weather was too treacherous to make the trip.

At his Paris hotel the next morning, May 14, 1948, Joe received a telegram informing him that Kathleen’s was one of four bodies recovered from the site of a plane crash on the side of a mountain in the Rhone Valley. She was buried in the Cavendish family plot in Edensor, near the Cavendish ancestral home. Joe was the only Kennedy who attended her burial.

Though Rose spoke little of her feelings after Kathleen’s death, she did remember her in a diary entry, dated June 24, 1962. It was fourteen years later, and Rose was on one of her religious retreats at Convent of the Sacred Heart in Noroton, Connecticut. “I heard the grandfather clock
chime in the hall,” she wrote, “the clock which we had given to Msr. Cushing when we moved to Bronxville . . .” Her handwriting is nearly illegible, and the connection difficult to discern, but the sound called to mind Kathleen, and the “many problems” life threw her way. The entry is in fragments: “Falling in love with Billy. Both young people knew it would be difficult if not impossible to marry—both were young—deeply in love—admirably suited to one another . . .” Fourteen years later, she was turning over the events in her head, wistfully trying to make sense of Kathleen’s short life. Rose, though publicly stoic, had room in her life for sorrow, and room for grief. But it was in a mysterious, private part of her, never available for anyone but God to see.

8

Accolades, Weddings, Births, Victories

After a decade of so much loss for Rose, the 1950s were a riot
of weddings, births, and political victories. With the exception of Rosemary, all of her surviving children were married during the decade, and all of those matches had produced children by the end of 1960. She saw her eldest surviving son elected, and then reelected, to the United States Senate, and as the 1950s drew to a close, his presidential aspirations gaining steam.

In June 1950, Bobby married Ethel Skakel, a doe-eyed young woman from another large, wealthy, deeply Catholic clan. Ethel’s toothy, irreverent exuberance and frenetic, spring-loaded athleticism made her a perfect fit for Bobby and the rest of the Kennedys, and her integration into the family was effortless. Soon after their wedding, Ethel was pregnant, as she would be almost constantly for the next eighteen years.

The Kennedys next joined together for the only truly dark spot in Rose’s decade: In October her father, Honey Fitz, died at the age of eighty-seven. Upward of thirty-five hundred people attended his funeral in Boston, including John, Eunice, Pat, Jean, and Teddy. Two mourners were notably missing: Josie, Rose’s mother, did not feel well enough to attend the funeral; and Rose herself, shopping in Paris at the time of his death, was not able to make it back in time. Honey Fitz had been ill, and eighty-seven was then, as now, a ripe old age. “In spite of his age,” Rose admitted years later, “it was impossible to conceive of life without him.”

Though Honey Fitz was gone, Rose was able to engage the political skills she had received from him. Jack ran for the Senate in 1952, and Rose played a more active role in this contest than she had in any of his congressional elections. Jack was running against incumbent Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. It was not the first time the two families had contended against each other for political office: In 1916 it was Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. who had defeated Honey Fitz for the same seat. Further, the Lodges were Brahmins: As a moneyed Protestant family dating from the origins of the republic, they were very much a part of the Boston ruling class that Joe felt had excluded him as an Irish Catholic. The Kennedys participated across the board, campaigning tirelessly across the state. Joe Kennedy, as was his wont, stayed in the background, but his checks spoke loudly enough.

Rose, only the year before named a Papal Countess by Pope Pius XII, drew women by the hundreds, and then the thousands, to hear her speak. She took her impeccable fashion, old world manners, and trim figure (past the age of sixty, she still took obsessive pride in staying slender) all around Massachusetts to great acclaim. Starting with “coffee hours” at private homes, she had to upgrade to larger venues to accommodate the sheer numbers of women who wanted to hear her speak. (The fact that handsome JFK sometimes appeared at these added extra appeal.)

Similar events were anchored by Pat, Eunice, Ethel, and Jean. Rose didn’t discuss policy in any depth at these speeches and forums; instead, she told of her travels, prewar London, and the challenges of raising nine children. Only once did her reliable mask of civility slip away. The Korean War was on, and Rose began to speak—very generally—about it at a rally in Worcester, Massachusetts. “Certainly I can appreciate what is happening to the mothers of the boys in Korea,” she started. “I lost one son . . .” There was a pause, and then Rose left the stage in tears.

This uncharacteristic loss of composure aside, the “tea parties,” as they came to be known, were a huge hit. When Jack won the election by a mere 70,737 votes, Rose believed that the votes she garnered swayed the election. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. agreed—the reason for defeat, he said, was “those damn tea parties.” Both were to some extent correct. Jack’s campaign was one of the first to make special efforts to attract both ethnic
and female voters; the teas were responsible for attracting as many as seventy thousand voters to the polls alone. “I felt rather like a man who has just been hit by a truck,” Lodge said of his defeat.

Though the new Senator Kennedy clearly loved life as a bachelor, he knew that if he hoped to fulfill presidential aspirations, he would need a wife. It was a great relief to Rose, then, for many reasons, when he brought slender, graceful Jacqueline Bouvier to the Cape in the summer of 1952. It was a particularly joy-filled 1953 season for Rose: In May, Eunice married longtime beau Sargent Shriver; in June, Manhattanville conferred on Rose an honorary degree; and Jack and Jackie married in September. (Somehow Rose also found the time that year to travel to Paris and Salzburg.)

The mid-fifties were a blur as more of her children paired off and settled down. After a courtship of only two months, Patricia became engaged to movie star Peter Lawford; they wed in April of 1954 and Pat gave birth to their first child in 1955, just nine and a half months after the wedding. The same year, Rose took the chance to travel around the world—from California to Hawaii to Japan to India and throughout western Europe with her niece, Mary Jo Gargan—before settling for two months on the Riviera with Joe.

Jean married businessman Stephen Smith in 1956. Smith’s father, like Joe, oversaw a largely self-made fortune, and the Smiths’ Irish Catholic bona fides qualified him, in Rose’s eyes, as a suitable mate for her youngest daughter. In 1958, Teddy married Joan Bennett, a blonde bombshell from Bronxville with a good Manhattanville education and musical chops to match. Though Rose was initially unimpressed by the Bennetts’ relative lack of wealth, Rose and Joan bonded by talking about music and playing duets on the piano. By the end of 1959, all of her surviving children, except for Rosemary, were married and had at least one child.

The fifties were also a time during which the charitable mission of the Kennedy family was coming into focus. Rose’s frequent speaking engagements at various Catholic charities and clubs were often to raise money, particularly for youth causes and the research and treatment of what
was then openly called “mental retardation.” Though it would be the late 1950s before the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation would primarily aim its resources at the developmentally disabled, veiled references to Rosemary began appearing in Rose’s speeches earlier in the decade. Without context, the audiences had no way of knowing she was speaking about her own child, but it’s clear that her eldest daughter was always on her mind. “Sometimes a mother finds in her midst a handicapped child, one child who is abnormal mentally or physically,” she said in 1953 when accepting an award for her work with young people from a Catholic charity. “Then, a whole new set of baffling difficulties presents themselves, and then fervently she prays and how diligently she searches every avenue to find an answer to that child’s problems.”

Throughout the 1950s, the speeches and chats that Rose gave gradually morphed from campaign appearances for Jack to fund-raising appearances for charity and back to campaign appearances for Jack by the later part of the decade. As early as 1957, when she did a short speaking tour of Iowa, Rose started speaking in states that Jack would need to focus on in the 1960 presidential contest. It was typical of Kennedy political savvy that Rose’s good works on behalf of the developmentally disabled, while genuine, simultaneously furthered her son’s presidential ambitions.

Jack announced his campaign for the presidency in January of 1960. Rose campaigned for him in the lead up to the New Hampshire primary, traditionally the nation’s first. After ensuring his resounding victory—he received 85 percent of the vote—they headed to Wisconsin, which promised to be a much more difficult enterprise. Hubert Humphrey, senator of neighboring Minnesota, all but had the state locked up; he was often referred to as Wisconsin’s third senator. But the Kennedys, including Rose, fanned out across the state, using their sheer numbers to make the Kennedy name more recognizable in several places at once. Patrick Lucey, then the leader of the state’s Democratic Party, remembered that Kennedy’s campaign was “just an effective presentation of celebrity. . . . The family was an asset . . . genuinely glamorous as well as glamorized, so the people were anxious to meet them wherever they went.” However, Jackie would remember their reception in Wisconsin somewhat differently: “They just
stared
at us, like some sort of
animals
.”

Nevertheless, Humphrey felt outnumbered and outgunned by the Kennedy phalanx. The Kennedys are “all over the state,” he moaned. “And they look alike and sound alike. . . . I get reports that Jack is appearing in three or four different places at the same time.”

On April 5, Kennedy won Wisconsin with 56.5 percent of the vote, thanks in no small part to Rose’s help. She sat out the hard-fought West Virginia primary that followed but campaigned for Jack throughout the election, generally campaigning three days on and then four days off, and taking a rest in Hyannis Port in the summer months after Jack received the Democratic nomination. Despite the lighter schedule, it still must have been punishing for a woman who turned seventy during the campaign. By the time Jack was elected, she’d traveled more than thirty-five thousand miles on his behalf, a woman talking to women.

On November 8, 1960, Rose Kennedy’s eldest surviving son was narrowly elected president of the United States. The next morning the family gathered in the main house at Hyannis Port for a photo to celebrate the occasion. Seated in the front of the tableau, looking twenty years younger than she was, Rose beamed. Twenty years previous, the Kennedy name was in ruins. That morning she was the mother of the president-elect of the United States. Her eldest living child, whom she’d come so close to losing to illness and to war, was now one of the most powerful men in the world.

9

The First Mother

Jack presented his mother with a map. There were forty-six pins
in it, one for every spot where she’d campaigned, and an inscription: “To Mother—With Thanks.” In Palm Beach, as the president-elect prepared for his term and Jackie recovered from the Caesarean delivery of her second child, John Jr., Rose adjusted grudgingly to the constant presence of Secret Service, press, and, anytime she went beyond the perimeter of the estate, gawking tourists and well-wishers.

On January 5, photographer Richard Avedon arrived to capture the next first family. Rose’s diary entry captures how disorienting and irritating the interregnum must have been for her, and how, in the midst of it, she coped by attending to details:

After my hair had been set and combed out I had to walk back through the living room in my long blue bathrobe. I nodded to one of photographer’s assistants and warned her about the loose neckline on Jackie’s half-finished velvet dress. I looked out the window to the front lawn and saw someone swinging Caroline, of which I disapproved, as I thought she would be too tired for the photographers. Then I took a quick look at John F. Jr., wrapped in blankets and awaiting his turn to be photographed. And I caught a glimpse of the Secret Service men on the beach outside on the oceanfront.

The security left Rose baffled about where to enter and exit her own home. Sneaking through the servants’ quarters the previous night, she’d surprised a hungry hairdresser apparently helping herself to a salad left on
the maids’ dining table. “She just threw up her hands and I gave a laugh and she gave a laugh and out I went.”

In the days before the inauguration, Washington, DC, disappeared beneath eight inches of snow. Early on the morning of the inauguration, Rose bundled up and walked from the Georgetown home she was renting with Joe, Ann Gargan, Ted, and Joan, to attend mass at Holy Trinity Church. She was delighted to see that Jack, independent of her plans, was attending the service as well. Jack, she thought, “wanted to start his four years in the presidency by offering his mind and heart, with all his hopes and fears, to Almighty God.” She didn’t approach Jack, staying anonymous and out of sight in the pews. Ever image conscious, she didn’t want to risk being photographed in her informal winter bundling.

She and Joe attended the inauguration ceremony, where they were seated in the front row, but at the far end; as a result, “we were left out of everything except the panoramic pictures. . . . Some friends asked me later where I had been during the ceremonies.” Still, she was moved by his inaugural address, the weight of the occasion, this culmination of her and Joe’s hard work.

That night, for the inaugural balls, she appeared in the same Molyneux gown she’d worn for her presentation at the Court of St. James in 1938. More than twenty years later, she was proud she could easily fit into it, proud her taste was so timeless.

“I was overwhelmed with the joy, the wonder, the glory of it all,” she’d say that fall in a speech to the Guild of the Infant Saviour, a Catholic social services organization. “The climax of my life as I approached my 71st birthday.”

Rose enjoyed her position as America’s Queen Mother, even sleeping in the Queens’ Bedroom when visiting the White House. Still, Jack generally found her presence stressful. She joined Jack and Jackie when they visited France at the end of May en route to JFK’s disappointing summit with a belligerent, chest-beating Khrushchev in Vienna, but only after she invited herself. “He really didn’t want her around much,” remembered Lem Billings. “In particular, he didn’t want her around on the trip he and
Jackie took to Paris and Vienna, but she asked to go and he let her.”

Whether Jack wanted her there or not, she was treated as royalty when they arrived in Paris. She chatted with Mme. de Gaulle about their children, though neither mentioned that both had developmentally disabled daughters. The state dinner welcoming the Kennedys was held at Versailles; the pageantry and protocol must have reminded Rose of the salad days of 1938, when she and Joe were fresh to London and spending weekends with royalty. And Vienna, so rattling an experience for her son, nevertheless also reminded her of her 1911 visit. “I wonder to myself,” she wrote in her diary, “if the young man with whom I danced has ever come back and if he too remembered the night in 1911 when, young and gay and carefree, we danced the hours away.”
*

The president and first lady departed Vienna, and Rose went on to Florence before visiting Pope John Paul XXIII—successor to her friend Pope Pius XII—in Rome. Afterward, she joined Joe for two months at a resort on the Riviera.

The Kennedys gathered for their traditional Hyannis Port Thanksgiving, with dinner for thirty-three. It was a merry scene. “Jack gets a great kick out of seeing Ted dance,” Rose wrote, “as Ted has [a] great sense of rhythm, but he is so big and has such a big derriere it is funny to see him throw himself around.” Joan played the piano, and Jackie demonstrated the Twist for the assembled mothers, fathers, children, and grandchildren. Rose was happy, despite Joe’s insistence on serving squash and sweet potatoes at the meal. (She objected to there being two vegetables of the same color.) Joe carved the turkey, held court, and played with the grandchildren.

The loveliness of the holiday would take on a bittersweet quality in retrospect. Ten days prior to Thanksgiving, Joe had suffered “an attack,” as Rose would put it in her diary. He “is not at all himself but quiet, complains about a lack of taste in his mouth and feels blah, he says. For the first time—I have noticed he has grown old.” Others at the Thanksgiving dinner noticed he was not quite himself, but Joe, whether out of denial or Kennedy grit, insisted that there was nothing wrong.

The family gathered again in Palm Beach the next month for Christmas. Presidential business called Jack back to Washington on December 19, though, and Joe took Caroline and saw him off at the airport, where father and son chatted briefly before Jack boarded Air Force One. After dropping Caroline at home, he and niece Ann Gargan went to play nine holes at the Palm Beach Country Club. While on the course, Joe felt faint and disoriented; seeing that his balance was compromised, Ann took him home. He reported feeling better and went upstairs under his own power, where he fell asleep.

Waking just five minutes later, he was unable to speak or move on his right side. He had suffered a massive stroke.

Jackie and Ann rushed with him to the hospital. By the time other Kennedy children started arriving later in the day, he had developed pneumonia, sunk into a coma, and received last rites. Rose could only pace his room and pray. Against the odds, though, Joe survived. He woke the next day and seemed to recognize Rose and the children. By Christmas Eve the doctors declared him out of danger, and by December 29 he was able to sit up. Though he’d never regain movement on his right side or the ability to communicate in words, he was otherwise healthy: His vital signs were good and his heart was strong. After several weeks, he returned to Palm Beach, where niece Gargan, the reenlisted Luella Hennessey, and nurse Rita Dallas would see to his daily care.

Rose resumed her speaking engagements, raising money and helping with Teddy’s senatorial bid throughout the state in 1962. The following spring she was with Joe when, entire Kennedy retinue in tow, he was flown north to begin further treatment at the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in New York. She stayed with him at Horizon House, a bungalow on the hospital grounds, specially fitted for wheelchair-bound patients. Every evening, they quietly ate dinner and then watched television together.

Joe’s case was overseen by Dr. Henry Betts, who was impressed with the closeness of the Kennedy family, their relentless positivity, and the complete absence of any pity toward their father. He saw a great warmth between Rose and Joe. “My impression was that she adored him,” he’d later say. It seemed to him that Joe “was very content” in her presence. Luella
Hennessey saw the devotion, but not the warmth: “She was awfully good to him when he had his stroke,” she said. “It wasn’t what one would call a normal relationship between a husband and wife. . . . Rose took care of him but there was very little feeling left. It had gone so many years ago.”

Months of rehab did little to improve Joe; he could feed himself, and his caregivers became more adept at interpreting his attempts at communication, but he never regained his speech or mobility. Rose’s response was complicated. On one hand, she seemed freed by her husband’s descent into infantilism—she was able to travel on behalf of Teddy’s campaign at her own discretion and was in charge of her own life to a greater extent. On the other, his difficulties upset and depressed her. Letters from that time, though they don’t address Joe directly, generally became more irritated, nitpicky, and exasperated.

Frustrated at the tendency of cars to disappear at Hyannis Port, Rose sent a long description of who was allowed to use which car and when. “This is the way [the cars] are to be used,” she concluded. “I do not want to be bothered this way at my age, and I do not think it is fair. Please give this to Ethel to read, so every one will understand.” In another letter, Rose advised Ethel and Jackie to close the blinds in their homes to avoid the sun fading the furniture. She was both compelled to write such niggling letters, and, simultaneously, exhausted by her compulsion. “I am trying to rest my brain,” she wrote wearily.

Later in the summer of 1962, Joe was brought back to Hyannis for what was to be a few weeks of vacation before returning to Horizon House. He never did. Thereafter he was shuttled back and forth between Hyannis and Palm Beach, always in the care of niece Ann Gargan and the staff of nurses. Rose came and went as she saw fit. “Mrs. Kennedy changed a great deal after her husband left Horizon House,” remembered nurse Rita Dallas. “Perhaps because a decision had been reached that not only relieved her, but also left her conscience intact.” Joe was home, and cared for. Rose was free to live her life.

As an image-maker, she became more involved in Jack, Bobby, and Teddy’s political lives than she had been prior to Joe’s stroke. Her
hectoring letters, throughout 1963, became less about Hyannis household rules and more about how the young men—and their wives—presented themselves to the media and the public at large. “I do not think it is necessary to emphasize the fact that you are both tone deaf or that cultural things do not play such a large part in your life,” she wrote to Bobby in April 1963. She also discouraged their publicizing the raucous life of their large family at Hickory Hill, or relying too much on the Kennedys’ touch-football games as an anecdotal crutch.

She also stepped into the role of White House hostess on a couple of occasions. The last would be at the state dinner for Ethiopian king Haile Selassie in late August 1963. Earlier in the month, Jackie had given birth to Patrick Bouvier Kennedy five weeks prematurely. The boy had lived only three days, and both parents were devastated. Finally Jack decided that a trip abroad might lift Jackie out of her depression, and he sent her with her sister for a vacation in Greece. Jackie left the day of Selassie’s arrival, and Rose happily took over.