The Patriarch (6 page)

Despite P.J.’s lukewarm support of the mayor and his virtual exile in Winthrop, he and his family were invited to the event. “They were,” Rose later remembered, “around at a lot of the festive gatherings that the politicians had.” After the main reception, the older generation, including P.J. and his wife, Mary Augusta, returned to their homes, while Joe and his Harvard friends and roommates, Bob Fisher and Thomas Campbell, joined the younger set at a sit-down dinner and dance.
²³

That spring, Joe invited Rose to his junior prom at Harvard, “and to make it easier for me to get my parents’ permission . . . arranged for one of his college roommates to invite a girl who was one of my best friends.” Rose accepted, then had to decline when her father announced that he needed her to accompany him on a visit to Palm Beach. “I didn’t argue with my father . . . I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing so; but I was visibly upset, downcast, teary, and melancholy. . . . I sniffled a bit and submitted and boarded the train for a trip of some twelve hundred miles, each of which I heartily regretted.” Rose not only missed going to the junior prom with Joe but was separated from him that summer, after her father demanded that she accompany him on a European tour.
²⁴

Despite her semiofficial duties as the mayor’s daughter, Rose saw Joe regularly during his final two years at Harvard: at friends’ houses, in Harvard Yard, and “in clandestine meetings” at locations like the Christian Science church in Boston, where no one would ever imagine looking for them. They made sure to attend the same formal dances, and there were a number of them, sponsored by Irish Catholic social clubs and voluntary organizations, some at Harvard, some in Boston. Rose, sparkling, witty, pretty, and the mayor’s daughter, always enjoyed a full dance card, which she was obliged, as were all the girls, to show her parents after the event. To disguise the fact that she spent far too much time with one boy, Joe Kennedy, she and he conspired to “fix” her card, with Joe signing it with a variety of aliases. “He would put on ‘Sam Shaw’—that was a favorite—SS—Sam Shaw.”
²⁵

Honey Fitz didn’t argue directly against Joseph Kennedy as a current boyfriend or potential husband, but he did caution his very eligible young daughter not to close her eyes to other suitors. “He pointed out that I was fortunate enough to have unusual advantages and opportunities. Therefore, I shouldn’t say yes to the first man who fell in love with me and wanted to marry me. I should take my time and look around. This theme was often repeated and endorsed by my mother.”
²⁶

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J
oe spent his last summer before graduating trying to make some money for himself. In partnership with Joe Donovan, his friend from East Boston, Boston Latin, and Harvard, he bought a decrepit-looking bus for $600, to be paid on the installment plan, painted it cream and blue with
MAYFLOWER
written in bold black letters on the side, used his contacts at City Hall to get a license to pick up passengers at South Street station, and went into the sightseeing business. Donovan drove the bus, while Joe handled the megaphone. “Passengers didn’t take the ride just for fresh air or the thrill of motor driving. They were interested in history, and I let them have it. I made special studies of Paul Revere, dug up every record I could find in the Boston libraries.”
²⁷

He returned to Harvard in September 1911 with money in his bank account, but not nearly enough to propose to the mayor’s daughter. Having given up on Harvard baseball and with no real interest in his classes (he had passed all ten he took as a junior, with five Cs and four Ds), he was anxious to graduate as soon as he could and intended to double up on his coursework in the fall and exit a semester early. On September 30, 1911, a Mr. Cram from the Harvard dean’s office wrote P. J. Kennedy in Winthrop. Cram had no doubt that Joe could, if he chose, take six courses in the fall semester and pass them, “but educationally such a plan is, I believe, deplorable, if not injurious. . . . I have urged him strongly to stay for the whole year . . . I hope that you will approve of his doing this. I don’t think that he will waste the year here; he is not that type of fellow. Furthermore, for the sake of his College and class I should like to have him here. He is associated with men who are helping good causes, and I shall value his assistance much.”
²⁸

After successfully petitioning the dean’s office to reduce his senior workload because he was “engaged in business in Boston: building a garage and running a sightseeing car,” Kennedy remained at Harvard through the spring semester. He graduated in June 1912, having completed the equivalent of seventeen full courses, the minimum required. His final record was heavy with Cs and Ds, a sprinking of Bs, but not a single A. In the end it didn’t matter. He had his Harvard degree, several lifelong friends, and a number of “proper Bostonian” contacts he could call on in the future.”
²⁹

Three

S
TARTING
O
UT

W
hy Joe decided to go into banking and finance after Harvard was a bit of a mystery, even to Rose, who recalled in her autobiography how difficult a road he had set himself. “The financial institutions of Boston were controlled by ‘proper Bostonians.’ They sat on their fortunes like broody hens on fertile eggs, and intrusions into their henhouses were met with resentful cluckings. I remember my father telling of an encounter he had with one old-line Boston banker. ‘You have plenty of Irish depositors,’ he commented. ‘Why don’t you have some Irishmen on your board of directors?’ The banker replied, ‘Well, a couple of our tellers are Irish.’ ‘Yes,’ said my father . . . ‘and I suppose the charwomen are too.’”
¹

The only answer to Kennedy’s choice of vocation is that he had always aimed high and almost always succeeded. He was good with numbers, had a Harvard degree, and had made some contacts at Harvard with the “proper Bostonians” whose families controlled Boston’s financial institutions. “Banking ranked as high as any commercial profession,” he would explain to a reporter in 1928. “It was the basic business profession.” And it offered a career “ladder with more than one rung. . . . Banking could lead a man anywhere, as it played an important part in every business.”
²

Boston had never been much of an industrial center. It had no steel mills and no large factories; its shipbuilding and maritime industries had long before entered into a state of permanent decline. What it had was capital, which had for more than a century been profitably invested in trade, textiles, and railroads. Regrettably for Joseph P. Kennedy of East Boston, Boston’s banks and financial institutions were, in the early twentieth century (as they had been since the founding of the first bank in Boston in 1784), tightly controlled by the scions of old-established Brahmin families, none of which had any interest in offering a decent position to an Irish Catholic from East Boston. Thirty-five years after Joe Kennedy graduated from Harvard, John Gunther visited Boston while researching
Inside U.S.A.
and
found that not much had changed. “Only one small Boston bank is Irish-owned, and only four out of thirty directors of the Chamber of Commerce are of Irish descent. There are few dominating Irish figures in . . . finance.”
³

Joe’s classmate and friend Bob Potter had on graduation been offered a position at the National Shawmut Bank, a relatively new institution, but one controlled by the old Boston families. (In less than a decade, he would be promoted to vice president.) Kennedy received no such offer from any Boston firm. His Harvard diploma could not erase and did not compensate for the fact that he was an Irish Catholic from East Boston. With no entry-level position at hand, he decided to take a different route into the Boston banking establishment. He would sit for the civil service examination for assistant state bank examiner.

He spent his first summer after graduation studying for the examination under the tutelage of Alfred Wellington at the Columbia Trust Company, the tiny bank his father had helped found in East Boston. At the end of the summer, he took and passed the examination and secured an appointment, perhaps with some help from his father’s and/or his future father-in-law’s political friends. The job paid little—$1,500 annually (less than $35,000 in purchasing power today)—but offered an invaluable hands-on banking education from the inside and the opportunity for Kennedy to introduce himself to the trustees and directors of the state’s larger banks.

Kennedy traveled across the state, poring over the books and records of savings banks and trust companies, compiling reports on their liabilities and their assets, and learning about bonds and stocks, mortgages, demand loans, time loans with collateral, overdrafts, foreclosed real estate, and currency and specie. Dressed impeccably in his three-piece suit, starched white shirt, rounded collar, and shining shoes, with his red hair carefully slicked down, he already looked the part of the prosperous young banker. He had anticipated that after a short time as assistant examiner, he would be offered a position by one of the bank officers whom he had impressed with his newly acquired knowledge of the banking business. But no such offer was forthcoming.

Keeping his options open, he invested his profits from his tour bus company and whatever earnings he could put aside (he lived cheaply, in his parents’ house in Winthrop) in a real estate company, Old Colony Realty, with his friend Harry O’Meara. O’Meara ran the day-to-day business, Kennedy watched over the books. They had some successes and a few failures. Kennedy did not put much energy or time into the business. Real estate was not a profession worthy of his full-time attention.
⁴

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W
riting her autobiography, Rose tried to recall precisely when, where, and how Joe had asked for her hand. She could not. It had been taken for granted, without questions asked or answered, that they would marry as soon as he was able to support a family. At Harvard and after graduation, Joe remained faithful to Rose in the way that men of his generation and class remained faithful to their best girls. He did not court other marriageable women, but neither did he remain chaste awaiting his wedding day.

His Harvard classmate and good friend Arthur Goldsmith remembered young Joe as quite “a ladies’ man.” On one occasion, while they were still students, the two took a couple of chorus girls from
The Pink Lady,
which was playing at the Colonial Theatre, skating at a Boston roller rink, where they came upon Rose. According to Goldsmith, Joe, arm in arm with his “charmer,” was able to talk “himself out of that one.” How, we do not know.
⁵

The farther he got from Boston, the safer Joe was from such embarrassments. That may have been one of the reasons he visited Goldsmith, who graduated a year before him, in New York as often as he did. In April of his senior year, Kennedy had telegraphed Goldsmith from Baltimore, where he was probably at spring training with the freshman baseball team, which he was coaching: “Will arrive Wednesday in New York. . . . Notify Hazel if you can. . . . Leave for Boston on midnight Wednesday night. I’ve got to move quickly.”
⁶

Kennedy visited Goldsmith in New York City regularly after graduation. “I expect to go over on the five [o’clock train] Thursday. There’s a chap named John Riley, our city’s Real Estate Expert, [taking the train to New York] on Saturday. Do you think you could get Evelyn to get him a nice looking girl? He’s a damned good fellow and I know you’ll like him. Let me know however, how you’re fixed right away. I’m looking forward to a hell of a time. I’ll leave everything to you including my fair name.”
⁷

One of the perks of working for the bank commissioner’s office were vacations so frequent and lengthy, even the governor publicly complained about them. In the summer of 1913, Joe was able to take enough time off to sail to Europe with a few Harvard friends on the
Kaiserin Auguste Victoria,
a whale of a ship that, when launched by the Hamburg-American Line in 1906, had been the largest in the world. In a photograph taken as they boarded ship, Joe looks every bit the “proper Bostonian” aristocrat, dressed elegantly in white slacks, black waistcoat, long black jacket, and starched white shirt with high collar.
⁸

The
Kaiserin Auguste Victoria
—which on the way to New York from Hamburg and Southampton had brought with it a steerage-hold full of German and Eastern European immigrants—was returning to Hamburg with a complement of 652 passengers in first class, another 500 in second and third class, and 1,842 in steerage. The boys had saved enough to purchase first-class berths, but on their first day out, Joe realized they could do even better. He sought out and befriended the purser, who offered to move them into the imperial suite for an extra $50 apiece. When his friends balked—they had had a difficult enough time raising the money for the first-class passage—Joe stalked off angrily, then returned a few minutes later with a better deal: $100 total. According to his traveling companion Joe Merrill, Kennedy had been so insistent on the upgrade because he needed it to impress and “win the girl that he had set his heart on, the one that he wanted. . . . Your Dad’s girl,” he later wrote Ted Kennedy, who was collecting reminiscences about his father, “was Ruth Rea who was traveling with her father and mother. Her father was then President of the Pennsylvania Railroad.” Ruth, Merrill remembered, was “very much” like Rose Fitzgerald, “about the same size, very good looking with a wonderful complexion. She was the retiring sweet type.”
⁹

Later that fall, Joe invited Ruth—and her father—to be his guests at the Harvard-Princeton game. “Think I will take a girl from Phila to Princeton game,” he telegraphed Arthur Goldsmith in New York City. “Will give you particulars later.” “Mr. Rea,” Joe Merrill later recalled, “came up [from Philadelphia to Princeton] in his private car and Joe put on a great show for him.” Merrill claimed that Joe’s pursuit of Ruth was part of his larger strategy to convince Honey Fitz that he was a suitable husband. “If Joe Kennedy was good enough for the daughter of the Pennsylvania Railroad, he was good enough for his daughter.” Whatever his ultimate motives, Kennedy had no intention and no hope of marrying Ruth Rea, who was a practicing Presbyterian and out of bounds as a wife.
¹⁰

Rose was his girl, and it was Rose he was going to marry. The mayor had by now bowed to the inevitable. His acceptance of young Kennedy as a future son-in-law had probably been helped along by P.J.’s change of heart—and allegiance. In January 1913, P.J. returned from Winthrop to East Boston to greet the mayor, who was being honored—we don’t know why—at a bowling tournament sponsored by the East Boston Literary Association. P.J. captained one of the teams, then, when the frames were rolled, sat with Fitzie at the “head table” for a “Dutch supper.” In April, P.J. joined the mayor again for an event at the Somerset Hotel. In October, he appeared with Fitzie, his wife, and his daughters on the receiving stand for the Columbus Day parade.
¹¹

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I
n the first week of December 1913, Joseph Kennedy resigned his position as assistant bank examiner, but not because he had been offered a position at any of the major banks or investment houses in the city or state. He returned home, instead, to East Boston and the Columbia Trust Company, which his father had helped found decades earlier and which was now threatened with takeover by several large Boston banks.

His resignation coincided with his future father-in-law’s announcement that he was going to run for reelection. As the
Boston Daily Globe
reported on December 24, 1913, Patrick J. Kennedy’s son, mistakenly identified as “Patrick J. Kennedy, Jr. . . . a Harvard man,” had been selected as chairman of the newly formed “young man’s nonpartisan league,” which, while claiming it stood for “clean municipal government,” endorsed John Francis Fitzgerald for another term.

This time around, Honey Fitz was going to need all the help he could get. He had made the near fatal mistake of procrastinating too long about whether to run for reelection, thereby opening the door to James Michael Curley, who, after serving two undistinguished terms in Congress, was ready to return home. Like Honey Fitz, perhaps even more so, Curley was a dynamo of a campaigner, a fiery speaker, and unscrupulous in attacks on his opponents. Unlike the mayor, who seemed always to be smiling, there was a churlish edge, a bitterness, to Curley’s politicking. He wasn’t content with merely getting more votes than his opponents; one sensed he wanted to eat them alive. On the stump, his language was laced with sarcasm, invective, belligerence. He presented himself as the only man of the people; those who dared oppose him or question his tactics or his motives were either boss-controlled and corrupt, such as Honey Fitz, or Irish Catholic–hating Yankee Protestant bigots.

The campaign of 1914 was hard-fought but short-lived. Honey Fitz, who had entered the race only six weeks before the primary, campaigned vigorously for a few weeks, then withdrew after Curley threatened to expose his relationship with a cigarette girl named Toodles, who was his daughter’s age. Though the story would be kept out of the papers—for a while, at least—it reverberated throughout the Fitzgerald household. The revelation that Curley knew about Toodles, and was ready to let the whole world know, was followed by a second calamity when Honey Fitz injured himself inspecting a decrepit lodging house that had caught fire. Frightened at the prospect of being humiliated as a fifty-year-old who chased cigarette girls, unable to campaign as usual because of his injury, and recognizing the distinct possibility that he might be defeated in the primary, Honey Fitz announced his retirement. Miss Rose Fitzgerald, quoted the morning after her father’s withdrawal, expressed only delight in his decision: “O, we feel ever so happy now that he had made up his mind to retire from the campaign, for we will soon have him with us all the time.” Patrick J. Kennedy, also cited in the papers, agreed that the mayor had done right by leaving the race to protect his health. “Because of the constant strain and the fact that he worked so hard I have felt for some time that the Mayor was in need of a rest and, from my own viewpoint, I am glad to learn of his retirement. For several weeks past I have urged upon the Mayor’s friends to have him retire because of the condition of his health.”
¹²

On Christmas Eve, five days after Fitzgerald’s withdrawal, the Young Men’s Nonpartisan League of Boston threw its support to Thomas Kenny, now Curley’s chief rival. On January 4, Patrick J. Kennedy endorsed Kenny as well, but it was too late now to head off Curley. On January 14, James Michael Curley was elected mayor of Boston.

The disappointment experienced in the Kennedy household was quickly eclipsed by rather spectacular good news. On January 21, Joe Kennedy’s photograph appeared in the Boston papers over the caption “Youngest in the State. Joseph P. Kennedy Elected President of Columbia Trust Company at Age of 25.” This was the goal Kennedy had set for himself on resigning as assistant bank examiner.