The Last Patrician (3 page)

Later the family would acquire the neighboring houses: Bobby bought the adjacent property, and Jack bought the house next to that, a nondescript residence on Irving Avenue, some distance from the water.
8
Legend has exaggerated the glamour of the place; the very name the press gave the property—the Kennedy “compound,” with its air of institutional, of vaguely military, dullness—proclaimed its plainness. Not even the most fanciful commentator could call it an estate. For Joseph Kennedy to have bought—and retained—so modest a property was out of character. It is almost a rule: the successful American—Vanderbilt, Frick, Rockefeller, Hearst, Gates—builds himself a house commensurate with his fortune. And yet Kennedy, though he was no less vain than the constructors of our various American Xanadus, refused to build himself a monument to his plutocratic pluck. Some would doubtless argue that the reason for such unwonted modesty lay in the fact that the Kennedy fortune was never as great as has been supposed, that misapprehensions of the extent of the family's wealth began in 1957 when
Fortune
magazine estimated the family's net worth at $250 million, roughly double the actual figure.
9
But even allowing for exaggeration, Kennedy's wealth would surely have permitted him to buy a bigger house than the one he did. Not Kykuit, perhaps, the Rockefeller mansion in Pocantico Hills, or Matinecock Point, the Morgan estate on the north shore of Long Island, but something more impressive than the Malcolm cottage. Why, then, did he buy it? Why did he choose Hyannis Port? His business ventures were taking him farther and farther afield, to Hollywood, to Chicago, to London; wouldn't a summer place closer to New York, his base of operations, make more sense? Wasn't Southampton, or Oyster Bay, or Glen Cove a more natural choice? Hyannis wasn't even
friendly
to the Kennedys when they arrived—or later. Watching the neighbors wave after her brother's election to the presidency, Eunice Shriver commented sourly, “They never showed such interest.” The Kennedy “compound,” however unglamorous that formulation sounds, was actually an improvement on the original name. For years the Kennedy property was known simply as the “Irish house.”

He must initially have hoped for acceptance. He would not repeat the mistakes he had made in the Brahmin resort at Cohasset, where he and Rose had been blackballed at the country club.
10
By taking a modest house at Hyannis, Joseph Kennedy would impress his Protestant neighbors with his restraint, would convince them that he, too, despised vulgarity. Far from resembling the gaudy perfection of a Rockefeller residence, with Picassos and Mirós on the walls, Joseph Kennedy's houses tended toward a distinct shabbiness. Guests were surprised to discover that, despite the expense of their upkeep, the houses were never quite clean.
11
But the ingenious strategies failed; the modest houses, the modest sailboats, the modest cocktail hour (one drink before dinner) failed to convince the Yankees (and the Middle Western WASPs who were becoming increasingly prominent at Hyannis) that Joseph Kennedy was one of them.
12
“It was petty and cruel,” one WASP recalled.
13
The women “looked down on the daughter of ‘Honey Fitz'; and who was Joe Kennedy but the son of Pat, the barkeeper?”
14

His money did not impress them, and neither did his genuine successes. Rose Kennedy spoke hopefully of a day when the “nice people” of Boston would accept her husband, but the day never came.
15
When Kennedy did an admirable job as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the “nice people” spoke darkly of his knowledge of the crooked and indirect ways of Wall Street; only a very corrupt man, they said, could have made the stock market honest. When he proved (at first) to be a popular ambassador to the Court of St. James's, the descendants of the Four Hundred (FDR among them) laughed at the spectacle of “a red-haired Irishman” being taken into the camp of the English.
16
“Do you know a better way to meet people like the Saltonstalls?” the young Joseph Kennedy asked, naively, after he had been appointed to the board of directors of the Massachusetts Electric Company.
17
But the Saltonstalls remained aloof; so, too, did the Harvard classmates who booed and jeered him at his twenty-fifth reunion; so, too, did the clubbable people who continued to refuse his applications for membership in their clubs.

Why then did he stay? Why did he not retire from the scene of his disgrace, flee from the memory of his humiliation? It is true that he moved out of Boston and took houses in New York, in Riverdale and Bronxville (as well as in Palm Beach).
18
But he continued to maintain his principal residence at Hyannis, and he encouraged his children to think of Massachusetts as home.
19
His decision to stay was, to say the least, out of character. Joseph Kennedy's inclination, when confronted with the possibility of failure or rejection, was to cut his losses and get out: thus the ignominious retreats from Hollywood in the thirties and from England and national politics in the forties. Failure of any kind reduced him to almost pathological despair. Gloria Swanson recalled how Kennedy, when he realized the full magnitude of the
Queen Kelly
disaster, slumped in a chair and “held his head in his hands”: “Little, high-pitched sounds escaped from his rigid body, like those of a wounded animal whimpering in a trap.”
20
And yet, in spite of the proportions of his social failure in Massachusetts, Kennedy determined to stay. Stubbornness may have played a part in that decision, but it is not the whole explanation. There was an element of calculation as well, a hope of gratification generationally deferred. The establishment oligarchs may have determined that
he
was unable to live up to the standards of their civilization; it would be different with Bobby and his brothers. It was for their sakes that he refused to give up, refused to surrender his little toehold in New England, refused to become an expatriate and join rich Europeans in a life of polo and purchased titles. Massachusetts would be more than a political base for his boys; it would enable them to become something he himself could never hope to be. Joseph Kennedy could not have been elected to the Board of Overseers at Harvard, but his son Jack could—and ultimately did—obtain that high Brahmin honor. “If an Irish Catholic can get elected an Overseer at Harvard,” Joseph Kennedy said, “he can get elected to anything.”
21
The elder Kennedy knew what it was like to have the patent-leather jack-boot of class thrust in his face; but not Bobby and his brothers. They would escape his fate.

Mastering the Mores of the Establishment

I
T IS EASY
to parody the more naive attempts of critics to describe the vast and secret powers of what used to be called the Protestant establishment in America, that shadowy preserve of old boys and DAR matrons that, according to E. Digby Baltzell, amounted to an indigenous aristocratic caste. In 1962 Richard Rovere published an essay that was perhaps just such a parody—a parody of the mixed sensation of delight and despair the paranoid prole feels when he thinks he has proved beyond all shadow of a doubt the existence of an elaborate conspiracy superintended by men like David Rockefeller and John J. McCloy with the assistance of the Council on Foreign Relations, Skull and Bones, J. P. Morgan & Co., and the Racquet Club.
22
Joseph Alsop, for his part, stated for the record that “there is no such thing” as an “American aristocrat,” and that “anyone using that phrase” would have been “dismissed as ‘common'” by those uncommon people who, although they might have acted like aristocrats (by, among other things, dismissing their fellow citizens as “common”), really weren't.
23

Scoffers like Rovere might scoff, and covert snobs like Alsop might deny, but Joseph Kennedy never for a moment doubted the existence of an American aristocracy. He long remembered every snub, every rebuke, every cut he received from those who, he fancied, belonged to it. And how could he, the wunderkind of the Street, have forgotten the humiliation of sitting in the reception room at 23 Wall, waiting to see Mr. J. P. Morgan, Jr., and being informed that Mr. J. P. Morgan, Jr., was too busy to receive him?
24
Whether Kennedy ever admired the so-called “Protestant” or “Eastern” establishment will always be a question, but there can be no doubt that he had considerable respect for what he perceived to be its power. A mastery of its mores was, he was convinced, essential to anyone who wished to hold power in the republic beyond the next election or two. He had, in his own career, fatally misjudged the strength, the toughness, and the ruthlessness not only of such grandees as FDR and Averell Harriman but of their implacable capos, men like Hopkins, Frankfurter, and Ickes. His belief was not an unreasonable one: after the failure of his English embassy, the patricians turned on Kennedy savagely, turned on him in a way they never would have turned on one of their own.

His mistake might in other circumstances have seemed a venial one: he had, in an unguarded moment, offered a gloomy assessment of the future of democracy in England.
25
That was all, but that was enough. Kennedy had only to contrast the way the preppy oligarchs treated him with the way they treated Alger Hiss to see a genteel hypocrisy at work. Kennedy offered a gloomy prophecy of England's future; Hiss betrayed his country and engaged in treason. Hiss, however, was an insider, one who had distinguished himself at the Harvard Law School, clerked for Mr. Justice Holmes, and impressed Secretary Acheson. At the time of Hiss's indictment for perjury in 1948, David Rockefeller attempted to persuade his fellow trustees of the Carnegie Endowment to give the estimable but penurious young man a paid leave of absence (Hiss himself had offered to resign as president of the Endowment).
26
Adlai Stevenson and Felix Frankfurter testified to Hiss's good character at the trial, and so, too, did John W. Davis, the West Virginia lawyer whose service as Solicitor General, Ambassador to England, Democratic presidential candidate, founding member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and lawyer for the House of Morgan had made him into a pillar of the Eastern ascendancy.
27
The establishment that vilified Joseph Kennedy, and never forgave him, took pity on Alger Hiss and never forgave his accusers.

Seen from the perspective of his struggles with the grandees, Joseph Kennedy's choice of the unpretentious Malcolm cottage makes perfect sense. It is no wonder that he should have been anxious to ensure that Bobby and his brothers develop, through their experience of the Cape, New England manners, New England accents, a New England sensibility. It is no wonder that he should have desired them to attend not the Catholic prep schools (Canterbury, Portsmouth Priory) that Rose favored, but such quintessentially Protestant institutions as St. Paul's, Milton, and Choate.
28
Joseph Kennedy had himself been educated at the Boston Latin School, but although this venerable institution had once graduated the cream of the Brahmin crop, by the time Kennedy entered it in 1901, it had lost much of its social cachet. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the sons of Boston's Brahmin and New York's Four Hundred families were sent in greater numbers than ever before to be educated in the “English” fashion at boarding schools modeled on the great English public schools; it was to these schools that Kennedy sent his own sons to be educated.
29
There Bobby and his brothers would learn the secret language of the better sort of people, the code of the “nice people” of Boston, would learn about the things that the rest of the world didn't: “tennis, table manners, foreign and ancient languages, good pictures, fine music, French wines, the little harbors of Penobscot Bay” (so runs Nelson Aldrich's catalog of patrician esoterica in his book
Old Money
).
30
Their memories would be indistinguishable from those of their patrician peers, memories that together form a kind of collective unconscious of the preppy race: memories of “stumbling recitations of the
Anabasis,
the feel of grass tennis courts under bare feet, an embarrassing performance in the Tavern Club play, a coming-out party at Hammersmith Farm (
everybody
was there), the steamed mirrors at the Racquet Club…”
31

The sons would gain more than memories at these Etons
manqué;
they would learn to compete with a grace, a humor, a nonchalance, that quite eluded the father. Joseph Kennedy impressed upon his sons the importance of excelling not only at tennis, but also at sailing and (mindful of Dink Stover, the hero of Owen Johnson's
Stover at Yale
) football.
32
(Kennedy drew the line at polo; when Teddy expressed an interest in the sport, his father informed him that Kennedys did not play polo.) The waters of Nantucket Sound and the playing fields of Milton and Choate would work their Anglo-Saxon magic and transform Bobby and his brothers into something Joseph Kennedy himself had never been able to become—competitors who not only won races, but who also won
over
the very opponents they bested. Christopher Matthews, in his study of the two men, has shown that even Richard Nixon, Jack's great rival, could not help but love and admire his adversary: Nixon burst into tears when it appeared likely that Kennedy would die in 1954 following back surgery, and he became “euphoric” when he learned that Kennedy wanted to visit him in Florida a few days after his defeat in the 1960 election.
33
The Kennedy siblings, George Plimpton observed, played touch football stylishly, with good humor and a ready wit, in contrast to the plodding Secret Service agents who sometimes joined in their games. Nice people played football one way, Secret Service agents—and the rest of the world—another. When “touch” was played on the lawns in front of the Ambassador's house at Hyannis Port, Plimpton recalled, “you had
them
”—the Secret Service men—“along with the dogs and the children and the sisters and the house guests … quite a mob of people.” The numbers, however, were “cut down quite quickly,” mostly, it seemed to Plimpton, “because of the hard-nosed play of the Secret Service people.” “They'd been shut up in their sentry boxes or lurking about, whatever it is they do, and the touch football games gave them a chance to
star,
to perform.” The agents played the game in a manner Plimpton thought “brutal and humorless”: