It was her husband, Joe, however, who was the engine of the family’s special distinction that facilitated Jack’s rise to power. Joe’s middle name should have been ambition—for wealth, for status, for power. He grew up reading and identifying with the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches stories. Like so many other highly successful businessmen in his time, Joe enjoyed privileged beginnings. His family’s economic and social standing gave him access to Boston Latin, the city’s most famous private school, attended by its wealthiest residents. Despite an undistinguished academic record, Joe’s athletic accomplishments on the baseball team, success as the captain of the drill team, and social skills that fostered his election as senior class president won him admission to Harvard College, where, again, he made a mark not as an outstanding student but as a budding politician and entrepreneur. He won election to student councils and the storied Hasty Pudding Club while also running a tour bus business that paid most of his college expenses and gave him a feel for moneymaking, which became his dominant focus after earning his B.A. in 1912.
Over the next twenty years, his talent for building successful businesses in banking, liquor, movies, stocks, and real estate made him one of the richest and most prominent men in America. Joe and his family, which had grown to nine children by 1932, enjoyed a standing that was the envy of the country’s most famous figures—whether in Hollywood, sports, or politics. The onset of the Great Depression in the thirties convinced Joe, as he told his four sons, that the next generation of big men in America would not be in business, as when he came of age, but in government. And this is where Joe began investing his energies, and he expected Joseph, Jr., John, Robert, and Edward to do the same.
In 1934, Joe’s financial contributions to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential campaign and reputation as a brilliant entrepreneur facilitated his appointment as chairman of the new Securities and Exchange Commission. Joe had been eager for a cabinet post, but public anger toward big business in the Depression precluded giving someone like Joe, who had a reputation for questionable financial dealings, a White House job. When asked why he had chosen a Wall Street insider to head the SEC, Roosevelt replied, “It would take a thief to catch a thief.” In 1937, the president appointed Joe to head the new Maritime Commission, where he could draw on his World War I experience in shipbuilding to spur the growth of an American merchant fleet that FDR believed essential to the country’s economic future and national defense in a likely European war.
Joe’s reach for high public office culminated in a 1938 appointment as ambassador to Great Britain. Kennedy having established a reputation as an effective and evenhanded administrator at both the SEC and Maritime Commission, Roosevelt suggested he consider becoming secretary of commerce. But Joe saw the Court of St. James’s, the most prestigious overseas diplomatic assignment, as better suited to his goals. He had thoughts of running for president, and a term as ambassador to Great Britain would school him in foreign affairs and supplement his credentials as a brilliantly successful businessman. White House insider Tommy Corcoran told Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who puzzled over Kennedy’s choice of London over an appointment to Roosevelt’s cabinet, that the ambassadorship would open all doors to him. It wasn’t just political ambition driving Kennedy’s decision, Corcoran believed, but the chance to become America’s first Irish Catholic ambassador to London. It gave him equal status with the country’s most prominent Protestants.
FDR hoped that Kennedy’s Irish roots would make him a critical observer of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s conservative government and, specifically, his appeasement policy toward Hitler’s Germany. As Kennedy was about to leave for London, Roosevelt privately described his selection of Kennedy as “a great joke, the greatest joke in the world,” meaning that the British government would not be able to co-opt the Irishman, whom Roosevelt expected to make U.S. antagonism to Adolf Hitler clear. But Kennedy disappointed FDR’s expectations. Wedded to American isolationist thinking and fearing a European war that could draw the United States into the fighting and risk the lives of his two oldest sons, Kennedy supported Chamberlain’s soft line toward the Nazis and lobbied FDR to do the same.
Roosevelt, however, wanted no part of the disastrous Chamberlain-Kennedy indulgence of German aggression, which he saw threatening democratic nations everywhere. He shared Winston Churchill’s observation that Chamberlain had a choice between dishonor and war. He chose dishonor and got war. “Who would have thought that the English could take into camp a red-headed Irishman?” Roosevelt said. The great majority of Americans shared FDR’s outlook, and Kennedy’s reputation as an appeaser and a closet anti-Semite partial to Hitler’s persecution of Germany’s Jews decisively ended his ambitions for high elective office.
The fall in public standing depressed Kennedy, and he began taking “solace . . . in his children’s accomplishments.” Kennedy shifted the focus of his political ambitions to his oldest son, Joe, Jr. And the young man was all too eager to meet his father’s expectations. Like Joe, Sr., junior distinguished himself in prep school at Choate and at Harvard as an athlete and a young man on the make. In 1940, he entered Harvard Law School and simultaneously won election to the Massachusetts delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where he favored party boss James Farley over FDR’s ambition for a third term. In May 1941, after completing his second year in law school, Joe, anticipating U.S. involvement in the European war, which had begun in September 1939, enlisted in the Navy, winning wings as a naval aviator in May 1942. His commitment to military service rested on genuine concern about the nation’s security but also on the conviction that a military record would be essential to anyone intent on a postwar political career.
Joe’s hopes for his oldest son, who, in his twenties, already seemed marked out for extraordinary achievements by his ambition, family connections, and widely acknowledged charm, like that of Honey Fitz, collapsed in August 1944. Stationed in England, Joe volunteered for a risky mission aimed at German launch sites for their V-1 rockets on the coast of Belgium. The unmanned “buzz bombs,” as they were called, were devastating London. Joe and one other Navy airman flew a PB4Y Liberator bomber armed with twenty-two thousand pounds of explosives, the largest concentration of dynamite on a plane prior to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Joe and his copilot were to bail out before crossing the English Channel, and the plane would continue to the target by remote control. But the plane, for unexplained reasons at the time, exploded while they were still aboard, killing both of them. In 2001, fifty-seven years after the accident, a World War II member of the British corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers explained that a failure to inform British authorities to turn off ground-based radars in the south of England “upset the delicate radio controls” on Joe’s plane and triggered the explosion.
Joe’s death devastated his father, who told a friend, “You know how much I had tied my whole life up to his and what great things I saw in the future for him.” To another friend, he said, “all my plans for my own future were all tied up with young Joe and that has gone to smash.” Losing a child is torment enough for anyone, but for Joe it also meant the suspension of his dreams for a Kennedy in the highest reaches of American political power.
But not for long: In 1946, John, the second son, became the reluctant heir to Joe’s political ambitions. Jack, as his family and friends called him, was less outgoing and more cerebral than his older brother. As a boy, his health problems compelled long stretches in bed or at least indoors: Three months before his third birthday, he had scarlet fever, a life-threatening disease in 1920 that hospitalized him for two months, followed by two weeks in a Maine sanatorium. He subsequently contracted all the illnesses—bronchitis, chicken pox, ear infections, German measles, measles, mumps, and whooping cough—that commonly afflicted school-age children and caused periods of isolation that he filled with reading adventure stories—everything from Sinbad the Sailor to King Arthur and the Round Table
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Other illnesses followed: At Choate, the exclusive Connecticut private school, which Jack began attending in 1931, when he was fourteen, he suffered from spastic colitis, an intestinal disorder that kept him from gaining weight and forced his hospitalization in 1933. He responded to his illness with a kind of wry humor that masked fears of a bleak future. He wrote his closest friend at Choate: “It seems that I was much sicker than I thought I was, and am supposed to be dead, so I am developing a limp and a hollow cough.”
In June 1934, when Jack was seventeen, Joe sent him to the Mayo Brothers’ clinic in Minnesota, where he spent a month while the doctors struggled to come up with a treatment for his intestinal malady. He wrote his schoolmate: “God what a beating I’m taking. I’ve lost 8 pounds and still going down. . . . Nobody able to figure what’s wrong with me. All they do is talk about what an interesting case.” They also subjected him to repeated rectal and intestinal exams: “I was a bit glad when they had their fill of that. My poor bedraggled rectum is looking at me very reproachfully these days. . . . The reason I’m here is that they may have to cut out my stomach—the latest news.” He worried that his illness might limit his freedom to play competitive sports and blight his relationships with peers, especially girls, in whom he had developed a normal teenage boy’s interest. “What will I say when someone asks me what I got?” he wondered.
His medical ordeal had just begun. In 1937, when Jack was twenty and a student at Harvard, his struggle with colitis led doctors to prescribe newly available corticosteroids, anti-inflammatory agents that were administered in the form of pellets implanted under the skin. Although the drugs reined in his colitis, they produced new health problems—stomach, back, and adrenal maladies that were apparently triggered by limited understanding of safe steroid dosages. Peptic ulcers, osteoporosis of the lumbar spine, or bone loss in the lower back, producing miserable backaches, and Addison’s disease would afflict him for the rest of his life.
Kennedy’s medical issues discouraged consideration of a political career—a vocation that involved exhausting campaigns that tested the endurance of the healthiest candidates. It was also a profession in which the appearance of any physical disability could be seen as disqualifying someone for high office. Franklin Roosevelt, mindful that his paralysis from polio could raise doubts about his capacity to perform effectively as president, discouraged public knowledge of his immobility, assuring that no photos of him in a wheelchair or on crutches ever became public during his twelve White House years. The Kennedys took every precaution to keep public disclosure of Jack’s health issues to a minimum, even though there was no thought of having him run for office, at least as long as Joe, Jr. was expected to fulfill family aspirations for a Kennedy in high office. The assumption that no good could come of revealing Jack’s medical problems made it something of a family secret. Even Ted, Jack’s youngest sibling, had limited knowledge of his brother’s medical history. He first learned of the extent of Jack’s problems from reading this author’s An Unfinished Life, published in 2003.
The physical limitations Jack seemed likely to face throughout his life encouraged him to think about a writing career—either of books or journalism. In 1940, he had published his Harvard senior honors thesis, Why England Slept, which commanded a popular audience interested in understanding how Britain had been so unprepared for the European war. In 1945, he had worked as a freelance journalist covering the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco. Moreover, his temperament seemed little suited to the glad-handing, backslapping, small talk, and favor-granting that Boston politicians used to keep constituents happy.
Having traveled extensively in Europe in the late thirties before the outbreak of the war, Jack had an affinity for international affairs that holding a local office or even a congressional seat would not satisfy. He was principally interested in why and how nations cooperated and opposed each other, and not in cozying up to residents of Boston worried about jobs, the cost of living, and educating their children. Unlike his brother Joe, he was not his grandfather’s grandson. Becoming a foreign correspondent describing the rise and fall of foreign governments and monitoring international crises that he believed would agitate the postwar world were much closer to his heart’s desire than any conceivable job as a politician—except maybe for president, and the odds of getting to the White House as a Catholic with serious health problems and a father who was something of a public liability seemed very long, if not insurmountable.
In 1945–46, however, Jack, under pressure from Joe, agreed to enter politics. “I never thought at school or college that I would ever run for office myself,” Jack said in 1960. “One politician was enough in the family, and my brother Joe was obviously going to be that politician. I hadn’t considered myself a political type, and he filled all the requirements for political success.” But Joe, Sr. insisted that Jack replace his brother. “I got Jack into politics,” Joe said in 1957. “I was the one. I told him Joe was dead and that it was therefore his responsibility to run for Congress.” As Jack remembered it, “it was like being drafted. My father wanted his eldest son in politics. ‘Wanted’ isn’t the right word. He demanded it. You know my father,” Jack told a reporter.
Once committed to running for national office—first as a congressman, serving from 1946 to 1952, then as a senator, from 1953 to 1960—Kennedy acted as if his life depended on it. Winning, being on top, and staying there were the family’s unspoken mottoes, and Jack was now the Kennedy standard-bearer. Yet winning elections to the House and the Senate did not necessarily translate into a satisfying career as a legislator. Jack despised being a congressman and took little more satisfaction from serving as a senator. His time in the Lower House persuaded him to endorse Mark Twain’s snide observation: “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” He viewed the congressional leadership, which ranged in age from sixty-eight to eighty-three, as gray, stodgy, conservative, predictable, and unimaginative: men who worshipped at the altar of party regularity and lived by Texan Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn’s adage—“to get along, go along.” Kennedy saw most of his colleagues as time-servers: men who held safe seats, enjoyed the perks of the job—a degree of social standing, and a decent salary—and believed or convinced themselves that they were serving the national well-being.
By contrast, Jack thought that he and most of his colleagues accomplished little, if anything, of importance as congressmen. He told his close school friend, Lem Billings, that “most of his fellow congressmen [were] boring, preoccupied as they all seemed to be with their narrow political concerns.” He hated “all the arcane rules and customs which prevented you from moving legislation quickly and forced you to jump a thousand hurdles before you could accomplish anything.” He remained interested in ideas and unconventional thinking that challenged accepted norms, especially in international affairs. The House as an institution was decidedly unsuited for someone who thought as he did.
The Senate was not much more appealing to him. In his 1956 Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Profiles in Courage, Jack cited Daniel Webster’s observation: “We have not fully recognized the difficulty facing a politician conscientiously desiring ‘to push [his] skiff from the shore alone’ into a hostile and turbulent sea.” In Kennedy’s view, as a group, senators were no more courageous or imaginative than their House counterparts. After a year in his seat, when asked, “What’s it like to be a United States senator?” he replied: “It’s the most corrupting job in the world.” He saw senators as more intent on preserving their jobs than on boldly working for the national interest or addressing broad matters of national security. He complained that they were all too quick to cut deals and please campaign contributors to ensure their political futures.
Despite his complaints, Kennedy was never an especially independent voice in the Senate. In a 1960 tape recording he made for posterity, he described the life of a legislator as much less satisfying than that of a chief exe
cutive. He thought that effective leadership largely came from the top and one of a hundred senators lacked the power and influence exerted by a president. “The President today is the seat of all power. . . . The presidency is the place to be . . . if you want to get anything done,” he said.
As a senator, he was as cautious as any of his colleagues in the service of his ambitions for the presidency. In 1954, when the Senate voted to condemn Joseph McCarthy for breaking Senate rules and abusing an Army general, Kennedy was the only Democrat not to cast a vote against him. True, Jack was in the hospital recovering from back surgery and said later that he was “in bad shape” and preoccupied with his health. Still, he acknowledged that he could have paired his vote with a senator favoring McCarthy to put himself on record in support of condemnation. Instead, he ducked the issue, mainly out of political expediency. He did not want to risk reelection to his Massachusetts seat, which he feared could result from a vote against McCarthy, who was popular with Massachusetts Catholics. In 1960, when Jack was running for president, Eleanor Roosevelt said about his abstention on the McCarthy vote, contrasting his action with his rhetoric and the argument in his 1956 book, “I wish he had shown more courage and less profile.”
Journalists and party leaders questioned Kennedy’s reach for the White House. His good looks and youth (after Eisenhower, who was leaving office at the age of seventy as the oldest man to have ever served as president) made Kennedy’s appearance and age—forty-three in 1960—a distinct asset. “But what has all this to do with statesmanship?” a New York Post columnist asked. James Reston of the New York Times saw Kennedy’s image of casualness and youthful energy as masterful in selling himself to the public, but all the emphasis “on how to win the presidency rather than how to run it” bothered him. Other journalists wondered whether someone so boyish-looking could possibly capture and then serve effectively in the White House. His campaign fashioned a song partly to counter the objection that he was too young to serve as president: