Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit

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CONTENTS

EPIGRAPH

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE ALTAR BOY

CHAPTER TWO AMBASSADOR’S SON

CHAPTER THREE HONOR THY FATHER

CHAPTER FOUR RITES OF PASSAGE

CHAPTER FIVE COMMITMENT

CHAPTER SIX BROTHER

CHAPTER SEVEN THE KENNEDY PARTY

CHAPTER EIGHT CLAN

CHAPTER NINE HAIL MARY

CHAPTER TEN IRISH COP

CHAPTER ELEVEN ENFORCER

CHAPTER TWELVE THE ENEMY WITHIN

CHAPTER THIRTEEN VICTORY

CHAPTER FOURTEEN FREEDOM FIGHTER

CHAPTER FIFTEEN GENERAL

CHAPTER SIXTEEN TWO GREAT MEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CIVIL RIGHTS

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN RELIC

CHAPTER NINETEEN BRAVE HEART

CHAPTER TWENTY AFFIRMATION

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE THE MOVEMENT

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO VIGIL

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE DEFIANCE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR SACRIFICE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE SALUTE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

For Michael, Thomas, and Caroline, to learn from this man’s faith and share his lived compassion

Man is Spirit

—WINSTON CHURCHILL

I long ago came to realize that movies are always about the present. It doesn’t matter whether the wardrobe is Elizabethan or cowboy. The story is told by and for the living, those who’ll be there to see it.

The same is true of biography. Jack Kennedy said the reason we read about famous people’s lives is to answer the question: What was this person actually like? Can I imagine being in their presence? Can I make the personal connection? Are they a hero to root for?

This book is about the Bobby Kennedy we’d want to have today, the kind of leader we lack today.

The years of Bobby’s public life were my times, too—when the Kennedys first emerged in 1956; the excitement of that great presidential campaign of Kennedy vs. Nixon; the championing of equality for every American; and the campus unrest over Vietnam. All that youth and hope and sense of change: you couldn’t be alive and not feel it.

In 1968 I joined the Peace Corps, spending two unforgettable years in Africa. That adventure took me to a new and a larger world. This, of course, I owe to the Kennedys’ arrival in Washington and the ideas they brought with them. For me, as for everyone I knew, those years were a shift from looking backward to gazing ahead.

The books I’ve researched and written on Jack brought home to me again and again the essential role Bobby played in those historic moments. Those accounts appear here as a starting point for showing that the younger brother’s role was indispensable to history. Among them: getting his brother elected to the Senate and then the presidency; handling the Cuban Missile Crisis; and pushing the Civil Rights Act to the national forefront of the Kennedy agenda.

And then there was Dallas.

And then there was Los Angeles.

To honor his life in politics, to mark the half century of his loss and the hope that our country can find its way back to the patriotic unity he championed . . . for all Americans, this is my story of Robert F. Kennedy.

Those who loved him stand in salute of Bobby Kennedy’s funeral train.

PROLOGUE

On March 16, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy stood in the high-ceilinged, marble-walled Senate Caucus Room where, eight years earlier, his brother Jack had announced for president. Bobby now was doing the same. After months of agonizing and second-guessing, he’d decided to step up and make the commitment he’d been hanging back from, fearful the timing at this moment was wrong for his future political career.

Walking into the Caucus Room that Saturday morning was for something more than a simple announcement. It was, in fact, a declaration of all-out political war. It would see him doing battle for the Democratic presidential nomination not just on one front, but two.

The first enemy Bobby was facing down was Lyndon Johnson, the president who’d taken his oath of office in the shadow of Jack’s assassination. His aggressive prosecution of the U.S. war in Vietnam had generated a dire national conflict, especially on college campuses.

But besides LBJ, Bobby had a second adversary, Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy, who was now holding aloft the banner of the growing anti–Vietnam War movement. The Minnesota lawmaker, with his cool professorial manner, had just, four days earlier, simultaneously thrilled the young while frightening Lyndon Johnson with a strong showing against the sitting president in the pivotal New Hampshire primary.

Thus, two very different men now obstructed the path to a Kennedy nomination.

Nonetheless, standing there at the lectern, surrounded by family members along with loyalist veterans of his brother’s campaigns, the forty-two-year-old Robert Kennedy was about to take on both men. He began his statement by paying homage to his brother, a tribute clear to many listening. The opening words he’d chosen were the ones Jack had spoken in that very place: I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.

With the sentence that followed, Jack’s steadfast brother left the past behind and went straight to the heart of the troubled moment that was early 1968: I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done—and I feel that I’m obliged to do all that I can.

But it’s what he said next that held such power and still would today: I run to seek new policies—policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country and around the rest of the world. I run for the presidency because I want the Democratic Party and the United States of America to stand for hope instead of despair, for reconciliation of men instead of the growing risk of world war.

Watching intently from his hotel suite in Portland, Oregon—where he himself was campaigning—was Richard Nixon, the Republican Jack Kennedy had narrowly beaten in 1960. Now certain of gaining the Republican nomination and having expected to face Johnson, the two-term vice president turned off the TV set only to continue staring at the blank screen.

He felt a foreboding. We’ve just seen some terrible forces unleashed, he pronounced grimly. He knew the force of the Kennedy magic, its power to thrill but also its power to disturb. Something bad is going to come of this. God knows where this is going to lead.

For LBJ, witnessing this scene at the Senate Caucus Room, it was a nightmare taking life. Since being sworn in on the 22nd of November 1963, just two hours after the death of John F. Kennedy, he’d occupied the Oval Office in the shadow of Dallas. Now, the younger Kennedy, having served just three years as New York’s junior senator, was ready, in Johnson’s words, to claim the throne in the memory of his brother.

There were millions of other attentive witnesses. All across the country, young people were obsessed with the daily spectacle of a war—glimpsed in all its horrors on the nightly news—a conflict that their country could neither win nor end.

But the news of Kennedy’s decision to run struck many antiwar activists as both threat and insult to those already in the fight. I had this reaction myself. Despite having spoken out boldly against Johnson’s war, Bobby Kennedy had for months refused to match Gene McCarthy’s courage by committing himself as a candidate. That’s the way I saw it as a grad student in economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For me, along with others of my generation facing the draft, Gene McCarthy had become a hero.

Let me put this feeling of ours in the simplest, most human terms. McCarthy galvanized us and claimed our loyalty by being the lone grown-up with the courage to assert that the Vietnam War was ill-conceived and that he, Gene McCarthy, meant to stop it. In this escalating conflict between sons and fathers—Gene, a guy of my own dad’s era, was on our side. He told us we were right, and not just selfishly opposing a war because we were personally afraid to fight in it. We understood the patriotic call to duty our dads and uncles had answered in World War II, but Vietnam was different. They wouldn’t admit it. McCarthy had.

Starting that Saturday with Bobby Kennedy’s declaration, there began a fight within the antiwar ranks. Why, we wanted to know, was Bobby Kennedy, having hesitated to strike first at Johnson, now jumping in? Was it because that close call in New Hampshire had revealed LBJ as electorally mortal? And if so, hadn’t Gene now showed himself capable of being more than a symbol? Wasn’t he the one man to take down Johnson? Why was Bobby coming in to steal his thunder?

But whatever had held him back before, Bobby’s entry into the race was compelling. That he’d taken up the mantle of his slain brother was both its power and its pathos. The great achievements of JFK’s New Frontier—the robust economy, the Peace Corps, the space program, the historic commitment to civil rights, the superb leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis—remained cherished by his countrymen.

Five years after Dallas, Bobby’s popular appeal was also for the younger brother himself and what he’d come to represent. Beyond his vocal opposition to the war, he was seen as a champion of the underdog. He spoke out on behalf of the poor blacks of the Mississippi Delta, the youth of the inner city, the isolated whites of Appalachia, the California farmworkers, the forgotten Native Americans on reservations. He just seemed to care. When he saw people in trouble, he wanted to help. Only Bobby Kennedy said the conditions facing this other America were, to use his word, unacceptable. As a politician, he often seemed out there alone in his insistence that America, which he believed deeply to be great, needed also to be good.

Then, eighty days after announcing for the presidency, Robert Kennedy was killed by a bullet just as his brother had been.

•  •  •

There are two main characters in Bobby’s story. One was his father. When Joseph P. Kennedy, one of the country’s richest men—arrogant, outspoken, autocratic, widely disliked—came even himself to realize that he was politically unacceptable, his single-minded goal was to propel his firstborn all the way to the White House. He put all his ambitions into his oldest and namesake. Positioned from birth as the ultimate American winner, Joe Jr. became the vessel of every bit of glory his father could dream of, the one chosen to inherit the family claim on history.

Yet American involvement in World War II—a prospect Joe Sr. had opposed to the point of villainy—would take from him this oldest boy upon whose future he had set his heart.

Robert—seventh of his children, third among his sons, born between two world wars—found himself from an early age enmeshed in his own life’s struggle. In the eyes of his demanding dad, he simply lacked the qualities the father believed to be of any value.

From childhood on, Bobby showed a large heart and generous spirit, both traits believed by Joe Kennedy to count for nothing. As utterly chilling as it sounds, a close family friend—Lem Billings, Jack’s boarding school roommate—recalled, decades later, Joe’s response when he’d praised young Bobby as the most generous little boy. Replied the senior Kennedy dismissively, "I don’t know where he got that."

Bobby’s true nature was known to those up close, his mother, Rose, among them. It’s pretty easy to watch somebody compete fiercely and see the grimace on his face, Jack’s close friend Chuck Spalding observed of the younger brother he’d known since his boyhood. You see that and then you translate it into terms of ruthlessness. But what you don’t see is the softness, because it’s been disciplined not to show. Jack’s bride, Jacqueline, newer to the family, could discern nonetheless that Bobby, of all his children, was the least like the father.

Even when trying hardest not to show his different side—playing Harvard football, or serving in the navy—the younger Kennedy couldn’t help but reveal himself if circumstances evoked it. When he heard a popular Boston priest preaching the doctrine of no salvation outside the Church—he openly challenged him from the pews, later writing a letter of complaint to Boston’s Cardinal Richard Cushing. The devout Rose Kennedy worried that her boy had gone too far—until she saw the intolerant priest excommunicated.

But Rose Kennedy worried about her third son. She saw how open and vulnerable Bobby was, how his natural sweetness might work against him. With four sisters between him and his next-oldest brother, Jack, she feared his winding up puny, even girlish. The father’s judgment was harsher. It bordered on outright dismissal. Bobby could feel it. It didn’t take this young boy long to realize he needed to show his father—and show him repeatedly—how tough he was.

The other main character in Bobby’s life was Jack. Though their shared heritage was on both of their map-of-Ireland faces, the two brothers hardly made for a match. For obvious reasons of age as well as personality, they’d never been close when young. All this business about Jack and Bobby being blood brothers has been exaggerated, their sister Eunice once revealed. They didn’t really become close until 1952, and it was politics that brought them together.

Jack and Bobby simply were different, always. And by the scorecard of the day, the advantage went to the older. Jack was elegant, Bobby awkward. Jack was charming, confident socially, jaunty as Joe Jr. had been. Bobby was smaller and quieter, less naturally gifted at athletics than his brothers and sisters. He was moodier and more anxious. He liked being alone.

Jack, meanwhile, was one of this world’s sunny princes. His longtime close friend Chuck Spalding—they’d met in 1940, when in their early twenties—once offered to me a wonderfully vivid description of the effect Jack had on companions. He made you feel, Spalding said, as if you were at a fair or something.

Bobby Kennedy, for his part, came to reveal a definite aptitude, as his mother put it, "to make difficult decisions." That is to say, tough calls, favoring one person’s interest over another, saying no as well as yes; even cutting people out of the action altogether. This tendency wouldn’t, as time went on, win him friends.

In 1946, when Jack was just starting off in politics and running for Congress, he didn’t even like having his brother around. Black Robert he called him, viewing him as too serious, too earnest, too much the straight arrow. One strategy for keeping him out of the way back then had involved sending this twenty-year-old family member off to work in an East Cambridge Italian neighborhood where the campaign didn’t expect to get many votes. It worked out surprisingly well. Bobby ended up spending his time playing softball with the local kids and making a hit. Later, the campaign would credit Bobby’s own style of community outreach with cutting the rival candidate’s margin in those wards.

In the seventeen years they had left together, the brothers’ political partnership saw them linked and striving ever higher and achieving ever-greater success—from the House to the Senate to the White House.

The question has long been what the loss of Jack—which Bobby could only bring himself to call the events of November 1963—did to him. As a close family member once suggested to me, the effect on RFK in the public sphere amounted to a shift in emotional focus. Before Dallas, he’d focused on going after those he saw as villains. After Dallas, he threw himself into making a difference for those he recognized as life’s victims.

Today, a half century after his death, Robert Kennedy is remembered with an emotion very different from the afterglow enshrouding the memory of the brother he’d served. The endurance of the idea of Bobby is, I believe, because he stood for the desire to right wrongs that greatly mattered then and which continue to matter every bit as much in the twenty-first century. Let me state that more starkly—now more than ever.

When his body was carried south by that twenty-one-car train, leaving New York for Washington—his final destination where he’d join his brother at Arlington National Cemetery—it’s estimated that a million admirers lined the route to pay tribute. News footage recorded those mourners, and in my mind’s eye I still can see clearly the expressions on their faces—young, old, black, white, men and women, few well-off, all caught up in their shared devastation.

That outpouring along the New Jersey rail tracks captured what the idea of Bobby Kennedy would come to mean. He was, for so many, the one American leader of our lives who refused to turn his eyes from the people swept aside in our country’s rush for economic prosperity and global prominence.

Over my years in Washington, I’ve seen the rarity of hero worship. You’ll hear little of such talk in this capital city. In the newsrooms and after-hours watering holes of Washington—where veteran political writers are to be found and where sentiment is kept to oneself—few are recognized. Yet Robert Francis Kennedy is quietly revered as the genuine article. As difficult as he was to figure out, and even at many times to deal with, what thrilled his supporters and scared the hell out of his opponents was that, in matters of justice, they believed he’d do exactly what he said he would.

•  •  •

Following our country’s politics has been my passion since the early 1950s. I was a young boy when General Dwight D. Eisenhower—the World War II commander who had received the Nazi surrender in 1945—entered the White House as our thirty-fourth president.

Then in 1960, after Ike had served his two terms, I was riveted by the back-and-forth electoral combat between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon. What decided that turbulent campaign wasn’t the posthumously confected image of Camelot but rather the Democrat’s stirring call to get this country moving again.

Yet by 1967, with President Johnson in the Oval Office, the aura of the New Frontier was shrouded by the Vietnam body counts on the nightly news.

By the fall of that year, 100,000 Americans—I was one of them—convinced that Lyndon Johnson’s continuing war policy had locked their country onto a disastrous path, gathered in the nation’s capital to march from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon. Five months later Robert Francis Kennedy stood in the Senate Caucus Room to declare his candidacy for president.

My goal here is to come to grips with his story, who and what he was and what lay beneath the man we saw. Born twenty years before me, he was from a different East Coast city and an environment far more privileged than mine. Yet the familiarities of our Irish Catholic world rang ardently through our everyday lives. I’ve discovered that the Kennedy family and the Matthews family shared the same conversations, with the same enduring public friends and foes—and, with them, our common triumphs and resentments. As with the other Americans in the melting pot, we found ourselves in a country explained again and again in the language of such handed-down stories.

Having grown up in Philadelphia, in 1963 I went to college at Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. There, fifty miles west of Boston, on a campus known for years as wall-to-wall Irish, I learned about the ingrained social attitudes of New England Catholics and their historic friction with the Yankee elite. It was, in fact, a Holy Cross fellow who, back in 1910, had delivered this famous toast at an alumni dinner:

And this is good old Boston,

The home of the bean and the cod,

Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,

And the Cabots talk only to God.

Like so many Americans of my generation, I’ve kept up my fascination with the Kennedys. Try to think of the era without them and see if you can do it. It’s impossible, really. More than most countries, American politics has tended to the phenomenal, driven by the moment and the person. The national mood often seems to emanate from the White House. When Jack Kennedy was president in those upbeat years of the early 1960s, then again when Bobby ran for president, the special Kennedy atmosphere captured the day. There was a spring in the country’s step, an excitement that could also, to those threatened, mean trouble.

Bobby was never to get his moment as the country’s leader. There was no Robert Kennedy era. What there was—and what remains vibrant in his legacy—was spirit. I disagree with those who argue that the younger brother’s true soul showed itself only after Jack. I’ve found good early evidence of that compassion which was later to reveal itself so vividly.

Even when acting the role of his brother’s bare-knuckled enforcer, as Jack made his way from congressman to senator to president, he brought an intangible value to the partnership. Jack had the charm, Bobby the conscience.

•  •  •

The narrative running through these pages has been decades in the making. The portrait is that of the public figure I watched with a powerful interest. That said, the account comes from the list of witnesses I’ve come to trust. They include at the top his wife, Ethel, and oldest daughter, Kathleen, who answered my every question. I’ve relied, too, on the recorded accounts of his confidant Kenneth O’Donnell, which were made available to me by his daughter Helen.

Not all had known Bobby Kennedy up close. Some were caught up by his message. Among them were the other volunteers with whom I served for two years in the Peace Corps through 1970, those fifty of us who’d left together in late 1968 for Swaziland. Fading quickly behind us as we flew off was an America carrying on in the shadow of Los Angeles and the rioting at a Democratic convention Bobby never got to enter.

Spread out across the Southern African veld, we’d get together whenever we could and sometimes talk of life at home, especially politics. Looking back, I’ve decided, it was a good time to be away. The America we were missing for those couple of years was turning downcast and divided.

When I returned to the States in early 1971, I began my career in politics working on Capitol Hill for a liberal Democratic senator from Utah. The top aide who recruited me was a young Mormon, Wayne Owens, who had been Bobby’s campaign director in the Rocky Mountain states. Wayne held a steadfast reverence for the fallen candidate that could only be termed remarkable. That Bobby’s background was different from his own didn’t matter; only his principles did. I remember, too, the Capitol engineer who one day reminisced to me about a behavior he’d noted daily. He’d realized one way the senator from New York differed from many other of his fellow liberal Democrats. While they would enter the building, walking past the Capitol Police avoiding eye contact, it was Bobby, he said, who made a point, always, of saying hello.

You might call that a small detail, but it’s one that’s stuck with me.

•  •  •

I’ve spent the best part of five decades not just working and living in Washington but also, I believe, intently observing it. I’ve been fascinated, on occasion repelled, but rarely indifferent. If you ever were to ask me what America needs in its leaders, my answer will vary with the times. When I spot indecision at the top, I’ll say conviction. When I watch a leader muddling through, I want purpose. When I see hawkishness, I look for the peacemaker.

What is it that’s missing today? Here’s my straightforward answer. We’ve gotten so used to treating our politics as zero-sum that we’ve lost the faith that joint action by the people is capable of bringing joint success. Why can’t there be a patriotism that joins us together instead of dividing us?

It’s now the accepted wisdom, for example, that the interests of the discarded factory worker and the ignored inner-city youth cannot be met together, so why try? Don’t we need leaders eager to champion the future of both? The faces and salutes of those thousands of Americans, white and black, lining the route of Bobby’s funeral train make for moving testimony to the fact that this country once had a brave figure who they believed could.

I lived through the times of both Kennedy brothers and carry within me still the memory of those moments when we knew we had lost them. It’s often said that we all remember where we were when we heard each was gone. But where are we now? And where are we heading?

I’ve written two books about John F. Kennedy. My need to know more about Robert pushed me to write this one. He was there at his brother’s side, yet was always his own person, contributing and supporting but also taking charge and leading. No one who knew him was indifferent to him. No one who encountered him ever forgot him. In that, he was like his brother. His own path, however, led him elsewhere, into new places and new concerns that, most strikingly, became his heartfelt priority.

It was, after all, Bobby Kennedy of the two, who’d recognized the historic urgency of making civil rights a national priority, who saw how vital it was to elevate the struggle to a main goal of his brother’s presidency. It was he who’d argued that ending segregation was a matter of American conscience. Over the following years, up until his own death, one can see clearly how—after that signal beginning, when serving as his brother’s vigilant attorney general—he progressed further and further into the role of activist champion of the country’s disinherited.

Recognizing the stubborn, burning passion that lay within him, I find myself now wanting to look into his life and understand both the origins and the evolution of that deepening commitment to a greater justice.

Bobby, 12, with younger brother Teddy.

CHAPTER ONE

ALTAR BOY

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

The immense wealth and security of the Kennedy family in twentieth-century America must be measured against the horrid poverty of their immediate ancestors. For those who lived, worked, and died on the subsistence farms of mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, life itself hung on the annual harvest of a single crop—the potato, which was the basic food for much of the country. A family had to survive an entire year on those pulled up the previous fall. If a new crop failed, as it did in what’s known as the Great Famine, the people starved.

Over a period of years beginning in 1845, owing to a spreading blight, a million tenant farmers and their families, making up much of the country’s rural population, died of both hunger and disease. They were not Ireland’s only loss. More than a million others fled across the Atlantic, through what poet John Boyle O’Reilly would call the bowl of tears.

The English government—at its head Queen Victoria, who’d assumed the throne eight years before at the untested age of eighteen—gave little sympathy, less help. In February 1847, it was announced in the House of Commons that fifteen thousand people a day were dying in Ireland. The young monarch was so moved by the ongoing tragedy, as a sarcastic Robert Kennedy would remark more than a century later, that she offered five pounds to the society for Irish relief. All official assistance issuing from London came, in fact, with a terrible condition: any family accepting it must forfeit its land.

The occasion on which Bobby recalled that history was St. Patrick’s Day 1964, in the Hotel Casey’s ballroom in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The hundreds seated before Bobby, all wearing formal attire, were proud members of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick of Lackawanna County. It was a significant appearance, the first speech Bobby had agreed to give in the shocked, grieving months after the killing of his brother in Dallas. Many listening were soon weeping openly.

What Bobby wanted was for the crowd, so close to him in heritage, to hear him explain his and his lost brother’s commitment to ending another injustice. He wanted to engage them on an emotional level, connecting their shared past to that of another disadvantaged people: the African Americans. He reminded them how the Irish once had poured into America, escaping the heartlessness of their historic British rulers only to be confronted by the New World’s dismissal of their basic humanity.

In Boston, for example, there were NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs everywhere to greet those seeking jobs. Our forefathers, he pointed out, were subject to every discrimination found wherever discrimination is known. Now, with Congress engaged in landmark legislation aimed at ending segregation in its Southern strongholds, Bobby was raising the well-known specter of Irish servitude and English disregard to enlist support for it.

It was not the Kennedys’ only experience with victimhood. Throughout his life, a very different sort of Irish legacy—one he would never speak of yet would invoke in ways stronger than words—had been carried across the Atlantic by his forebears. This, too, had long been haunting the third son of Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. In much of Ireland, tradition had dictated that a farmer, facing retirement, would divide his land among his sons. In County Wexford, on Ireland’s southeast coast, where the economy was better off, such rural inheritance was handled differently. There, the father kept his farm intact, awarding it when the time came to the son born first. It was this rule of primogeniture, carried on by Joseph Kennedy—already two generations settled in America—in this country that would leave its invisible stain on the young Robert. He was the Irish son who would not get the land.

Bobby’s great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy, a third son himself, had arrived in Boston’s North End in 1848. In this city the Kennedys stayed and prospered until 1927 when Patrick’s grandson Joseph P. Kennedy moved his young family to New York. Again, the reasons had to do with rejection, though now upon a rarefied level.

Joe Kennedy was, by almost every measure, an American success story. A graduate of the prestigious Boston Latin School, he’d gone on to Harvard, class of 1912, where he majored in economics. At age twenty-five, having maneuvered his way to control of a bank, one of whose major shareholders was his father, it was his boast that he was the youngest bank president in the country. Socially, he advanced rapidly amid the Boston Irish elite, marrying the daughter of Boston’s mayor, a colorful pol known as John Honey Fitz Fitzgerald. From there, Joe proceeded to new heights, reaching past Boston, wheeling and dealing his way in Wall Street, Hollywood, and beyond. Yet there was a Gatsby quality to him—his rise so meteoric—that his success always carried in equal measure awe and suspicion.

What separated Joe Kennedy from the other Irish around him were the high ambitions deep inside him, ones that couldn’t be satisfied by the usual scoreboard. He saw his destiny as grander than a law degree allowing him to put Esq. after his name, with an income just enough to secure a cottage on the Cape. The castle or the outhouse, he declared, nothing in between. What drove him in those early climbing years was what he was prevented from achieving—namely, social acceptance by the gatekeepers of the old New England order.

The doors shut to the Kennedy family had to do with their very name—such an obvious giveaway—and the background it proclaimed. Joe’s children—smart, lively, prosperous, attractive, well-schooled—were no different in their own eyes from their Protestant neighbors. They suffered from the basic handicap of their birth. Even if the rejections they faced were not those of employment opportunities slammed in the face of Irish immigrants seeking jobs, the reason was the same. The social gates closed to them were