Chapter 1
Grandpa
FROM MY YOUNGEST DAYS I ALWAYS HAD THE FEELING THAT WE WERE all involved in some great crusade, that the world was a battleground for good and evil, and that our lives would be consumed in that conflict. It would be my good fortune if I could play an important or heroic role. And from the very beginning this conviction was rooted in my familyâs fervent Catholicism, and deeply intertwined with the politics of the country.
There had been Irish politicians on both sides of my family for generations, so it was no surprise that we children talked politics from the day we could speak. Such passion came naturally to a people for whom the distinction between political and religious martyrdom had blurred during eight hundred years of British occupation. From their arrival in America, the Irish took to politics as the starving take to food, having been stifled for centuries by rules that forbade them from participating in the political destiny of their nation. As early as 1691, Irish law prohibited Catholics from voting, serving on juries, attending university, practicing law, working for government, or marrying a Protestant. In Dunganstown, near the port of Wexford, my Kennedy ancestors learned to read and write in an illegal âhedge schoolâ; the priest who taught them was found out and hanged for the offense.
My progenitors were still in Ireland during that black February of 1847, when the announcement in Englandâs House of Commons that fifteen thousand Irish were starving to death every day so moved Queen Victoria that she donated five pounds to the Society for Irish Relief. Britain produced, stored, and exported thousands of tons of grain and livestock from Ireland during the five-year famineâmore than enough to feed the populationâbut the Crown refused to divert these money crops, so Ireland lost a quarter of her people. Skeletal corpses littered the countryside, their mouths green from eating grass like cattle. A million sons and daughters of Eire, including my great-great-grandparents, boarded the coffin ships sailing west, and the Atlantic became, in James Joyceâs words, âa bowl of bitter tears.â
Even in America the Irish encountered the familiar barriers of prejudice. Anti-Catholic sentiment would eventually drive my fatherâs parents, Joe and Rose Kennedy, from their beloved Boston. Grandma would sometimes show us clippings from old Boston newspapers, where the acronym NINA (No Irish Need Apply) followed all the best employment listings. Still, wherever they landed, the Irish flourished. Fecund Irish mothers with little opportunity for personal fulfillment beyond childbearing produced an invading force that triumphed at law, politics, sports, literature, and business. No people were ever prouder than the prosperous Irish-Americans who returned to the Old World a generation later with heads high. During his triumphant tour of the British Isles in 1887, boxing champion John L. Sullivan, the apogee of New World cockiness, cordially greeted the Prince of Wales, âIf ever you come to Boston, be sure to look me up. Iâll see that youâre treated right.â My grandfather must have felt every bit as jubilant when he recrossed the Atlantic to attend the Court of St. Jamesâs as FDRâs newly appointed ambassador to England.
Grandpa was the dominant figure during my childhood summers on Cape Cod. He made his home âThe Big House,â purchased in 1920 in Hyannisport on the shores of Nantucket Sound, where our house, John Kennedyâs, and Jean Kennedy Smithâs formed a tight compound surrounding it, and the Shriversâ and Teddy Kennedyâs houses lay in a slightly more scattered orbit around the tiny seaside village. Grandpa bought the home when the Brahmins of brown-shoed Cohasset rejected his application to their golf club on account of his religion. Although the Protestant swamp Yankees who dominated Hyannisport were similarly bigoted, Grandpaâs fellow Irishman Larry Newman, who owned the golf course, welcomed him.
During the first eighteen years of their marriage, Grandpa and Grandma produced nine children. God gave their firstborn, my Uncle Joe Jr., every gift but gray hair. He was born in 1915 and died in a secret Navy mission while flying a âdroneâ Liberator bomber that exploded over the English Channel in 1944, at age twenty-nine. Jack was born in 1917, Rosemary in 1918, and Kick, who married into Britainâs greatest house, lost her husband in the warâand would herself perish in an airplane crash at age twenty-sixâwas born in 1920. Eunice was born in â21, Pat in â24, my father, Bobby, in â25, and the babies, Jean and Teddy, in â28 and â32. Our generation called them, collectively, âthe grown-ups.â We all spent each summer on Cape Cod at the family compound, where the twenty-nine cousins were raised communally and subjected to a daily regimen of athletic training supervised by a stout former Olympic diver, Sandy Eiler.
Three times a week we took riding lessons at my grandfatherâs farm in Osterville, or made long trots through the scrub pine forests and sandy marshlands with Grandpa astride his tall chestnut hunter, Shaleighleigh, whom he had imported from Ireland. Grandpa spoke soothingly to Shaleighleigh as he rode, calming the high-spirited gelding with his latest thoughts on politics and the economy, prompting the grown-ups to joke that this must be the smartest horse in the world. A posse of grandchildren followed behind him on horseback down the rough sandy trails across Barnstable County woodlands. Sometimes we children stopped to swim with our ponies in an expansive kettle pond on the northern fringe of Grandpaâs farm, holding their tails to drag us, while he watched atop Shaleighleigh from a towering knoll along the wooded banks.
Every day we spent time on the ocean. My mother and father took us on the Victura, a twenty-six-foot wooden day sailor, for a picnic lunch on one of the nearby islands, where we fished for sand sharks, scup, flounder, puffers, and sea robins, gathered hermit crabs, periwinkles, and scallops, or dug for tasty steamers that betrayed their location on the tidal flats by squirting. With Captain Frank at the helm, we also took lunch outings on Grandpaâs wooden cabin cruiser, the Marlin, crossing the Sound to Monomoy or Cuttyhunk to explore the Elizabeth Islands and gorge from picnic baskets of Grandpaâs favorite foodsâlobsters with hot butter and lemon, corn on the cob, strawberry shortcake, Boston cream pie, baked beans, and clam chowder. We children talked and caroused on the bow while Grandpa sat astern with the grown-upsâUncle Jack, my father, Teddy, my mother, Aunt Eunice and Sarge Shriver, Jean and Steve Smith, and Pat and Peter Lawford. One day while cruising in Nantucket Sound, Uncle Jack and his closest friend, LeMoyne âLemâ Billings, assembled us on the green canvas cushions in the stern of the Marlin, where they sang âHeart of My Heart.â Dave Powers and Jack sang âThe Wearing of the Greenâ and taught us to whistle âThe Boys of Wexford.â It was Jackâs favorite song and he knew all the words.
We are the boys of Wexford
Who fought with heart and hand
To burst in twain
The galling chain
And free our native land.
After returning from sailing, we played baseball on the field behind Uncle Jackâs house, or touch football on the broad expanse below Grandpaâs veranda. In the afternoons Grandpa sat in his chair on the great white porch, often holding hands with Grandma. They had fallen in love as teenagers, married seven years later, and remained hitched for half a century until his death in 1969. They were always open and demonstrative in their admiration and affection for each other. Typical of their tender expressions for each other is a letter from September 1960 just before Jackâs election. She wrote him from Paris:
Joe dearest,
How can I have all this and youâ
And still have Heaven, too!
Home for Christmas.
Love to all,
Rosa
Together they watched their children and grandchildren play on the sprawling green lawn bordered by sawgrass stretching into the sparkling sea.
Hyannisport was a magical paradise for me. I loved the endless palette of colorsâthe vivid blue of sea and sky, separated by rich green landscapes, peppered with ubiquitous roses, hydrangeas, and daffodils, each in their season, the gleaming white houses, and offshore a panoply of brightly hued spinnakers running downwind. The ocean was always changing, from blue to every shade of green, to gray and almost black, to match the moods of the wind and sky. Here, surrounded by my family, I could indulge my obsession with the natural world.
My cousin Bobby Shriver and I rode our bikes to the tidal inlets at Kalmus Beach to crab, or to the salt marshes at Squaw Island to catch fiddlers, killifish, and mummichogs in a wire trap. We went dip-netting for painted turtles and baby catfish from a dinghy on Andersonâs Pond, or beach seining for eels, shiners, skipjacks, and Atlantic needlefish that hid in the floating sargasso weed and in the meadows of eelgrass that bracketed the harbor. We snorkeled for scallops, confining them in an underwater cage anchored in the harbor until we had enough to feed the whole family, a formidable task despite those bivalvesâ abundance.
When I was eleven my father gave me a motorized aqualung, a two-horsepower compressor wedged in a Styrofoam ring that bobbed at the oceanâs surface, pumping air down a fifteen-foot umbilical hose into a mask, the perfect contraption for exploring the shallow waters off Hyannisport. I filled its tank with gasoline from the private gas pump adjacent to Grandpaâs garage, and, wearing this apparatus, I swam with my little spear gun into dark caverns in the wrinkled rocks below the mile-long Hyannisport jetty. Pushing my way gingerly past keen-edged barnacles, I stalked giant tautog, considered a delicacy by the Portuguese fishermen who flocked around the jetty lighthouse each weekend from New Bedford and Fall River to cast for scup and flounder. Their fishing rigs, baited with sea worms and squid and anchored with pyramid sinkers, could not tempt the tautog, who preferred barnacles and crabs. So I sold the Azore men fish for comic-book money.
During the years when the Kennedy family compound served as the summer White House, the faint sucking thwuck, thwuck, thwuck each Friday afternoon summoned everyone to assemble for the landing of my fatherâs and Uncle Jackâs green-and-white Marine Corps helicopters on the big lawn between Grandpaâs house and the ocean. Grandpaâs gardener, Wilbur, hoisted the presidential flag up the pole and we cheered and waved as my dad and my uncles Teddy, Steve Smith, and Sarge Shriver climbed off the choppers. Leaving his own helicopter last, Uncle Jack would go kiss Grandpa and Grandma on the front porch of the Big House, then all the cousins would pile onto the golf cart as Jack took the wheel for a spin. A waiting fleet of limousines would whisk away Jackâs special assistants, Kenny OâDonnell and Dave Powers, the âIrish Mafiaâ pols who hitched rides on Marine One for weekend visits with their own families. Police boats and a Coast Guard cutter bobbed just offshore, and fire engines stood poised among the flood of a hundred reporters at the end of the driveway, adding to the excitement.
On Saturday evenings my cousins and the older generations, their weekend guests, and the household staff gathered to watch movies in Grandpaâs basement theater. An ardent film buff, Grandpaâwho owned RKO Pictures, founded PathĂ© Studios, and presented and produced around a hundred featuresâcould get first-run films, and wanted everyone to enjoy them. Grandpa also loved sports, and excelled at baseball, swimming, riding, and golf. A six-handicap with a fiendish putt, he often played with Boston Red Sox pitcher Eddie Gallagher, boxing champ Gene Tunney, and with my mother, who also had an excellent game. Shortly after his appointment as ambassador to England, Grandpa delighted his golf-loving British hosts and made headlines across Europe when he scored a hole-in-one with a 120-yard drive at Stoke Poges Golf Club west of London. âWhere was Houghton when the ball got into the cup?â his sons Jack and Joe inquired mischievously in a congratulatory cableâArthur Houghton being Grandpaâs roguish protĂ©gĂ© and golfing companion who had accompanied him that day.
Grandpa was just over six feet tall, and I remember him always smiling. He had big, white, perfect teeth of which Grandma was immensely proud, and bright blue eyes. He was gentle and affectionate, and loved to tell stories and roar with laughter. He read Latin and Greek, and fancied classical music. He relished the company of children, and always took time to play or to take us to the kitchen to visit his beloved cook Nellie and sample her famous angel food cake.
Yet even with his grandchildren, Grandpa had no tolerance for self-pity. A whining child would get him to clapping his hands rhythmicallyââI donât want any sourpusses around here.â He wanted us to understand that we should be grateful for our good fortune; it was spoiled to mope or complain. Grandpa also led the Kennedy adult chorus in its constant demand for industry: we children were to fill all the interstitial spaces of our lives with some useful activity. If he busted us watching television other than the news, he turned the set off and sent us outside to play, rain or shine; he considered the TV a catastrophic waste of time.
When I was very little I would rest on Grandpaâs lap as he read stories to me in his library, or sit with him on the porch and look at the sea. On his birthdays we children dressed in costumes to perform little plays in his theater and sang ditties we composed for him. During the winter we visited him at Palm Beach, where he fielded phone calls while sunning himself in a poolside wooden bunker called the âbullpen.â He would swim with us in the waves and he took me for long walks, helping me corral crabs. He showed me how to pick up the Portuguese man-of-war without getting stung. On Grandpaâs boat, the Marlin, Captain Frank brought us out on the Atlantic, where, in southeast Florida waters, I caught my first glimpse of flying fish, as well as cormorants, which, along with egrets and ospreys, had been largely extirpated north of the Mason-Dixon line by DDT. During one visit we watched green turtles hatch on Grandpaâs beach.
Against Imperialism
Grandpa has been much maligned, as powerful men often are, accused of everything from being a German appeaser during World War II to a bootlegging confederate of Al Capone and Frank Costello during Prohibition. Urban legend has it that he conspired with those capos to fix the 1960 election by manipulating the Illinois vote to give Uncle Jack his electoral victory. None of these slanders is remotely true, yet those myths are riveted even more solidly to the American consciousness than the (equally untrue) Muslim affiliation and fabricated birth certificate of Barack Obama.
The topic of bootlegging follows Grandpa like a pilot fish. The notion is largely rooted in Grandpaâs purchaseâwith the help of the presidentâs son, Jimmy Rooseveltâof the British company that owned White Horse scotch and Dimple Pinch just as Prohibition was ending. According to historian David Nasaw, who researched the issue exhaustively for his definitive biography, The Patriarch, âKennedy neither imported nor sold any liquor during his years in Brookline or at any time during Prohibition.â The slander debuted in the mid-1960s as part of a partisan campaign to tarnish John Kennedyâs name, which had become a powerful steroid for progressive politics after his death. Incapacitated by a stroke, Grandpa was unable to defend himself. Of course, if there had been any truth to those rumors, Grandpaâs many enemies would have raised them to wound him in his four Senate confirmations for high-level posts, and Jackâs enemies would have wielded them against him during the 1960 campaign. They didnât. Nora Ephron, who spent several years of her life researching a book on the liquor industry, came to the same conclusion. âAll sorts of biographers and journalists casually insist that Kennedy was a partner of Frank Costello and Al Capone during Prohibition,â she said. âItâs so not true. And I happen to be an expert on the subject. No one seems to care about [the truth] but me. Frankly, Iâm not even sure his own family cares.â Well, actually we doâat least I wince every time I hear it. But when I was a child, the grown-ups taught us to ignore malicious gossip, and never to dignify it with a response.
I recall a time when there were so many malevolent libels circulating about our family that several of the cousins considered challenging this family practice. But who wants to waste a lifetime, or even spoil a moment, replying to an endless stream of fictions? As Teddy wrote in his memoir, True Compass, âWith exceedingly few exceptions, we have refused to complain against the speculation, gossip, and slander. Some have viewed our refusal as excessive reticence, even as tacit admission of the innuendo at hand. In my view, it is neither. At least for me, itâs the continuing assent to Joseph Kennedyâs dictum: âThere will be no crying in this house.ââ That said, I hope Grandpa will forgive me, in this case, for defending him.
The even more venomous Nazi accusation is equally without merit. Despite his Irish heritage, Grandpa was a shameless Anglophile who urged the strongest support for England against Hitler. He asked FDR to increase shipments of all aid to Britain short of war, breaking with Charles Lindbergh, William Randolph Hearst, and the America Firsters. He abhorred Nazism, which he called âthe new paganism.â He condemned the fascist persecution of the Jews as âthe most terrible thing I have ever heard of.â His outspoken support for a Jewish homeland led the Arab National League of Boston to brand him a âZionist Charlie McCarthy,â and he made tireless efforts to rescue Jewish refugees from the Nazis. After a speech I gave in Minneapolis, a young woman approached me, introducing herself as Lisa Brenner. âYour grandfather got my grandmother, Mary, out of Germany before World War II,â she told me. âI wouldnât be alive if it werenât for him.â I canât count the times Iâve heard similar stories. In his exhaustive biography of my grandfather, historian David Nasaw chronicles how Grandpaâs frantic efforts to find safe havens for German and Austrian Jews after Kristallnacht ruined his relationship with the British governmentâwhich lodged an official complaint against him to Secretary of State Cordell...