“What’s the moral of the story?” Kennedy’s former lover rhetorically asked during one interview. “That this grand man, this man of energy and intelligence and glamour and power, was to a certain extent dehumanized by the privileges that made him who and what he was. He allowed us to think that there are people who have it all. And that’s a very dangerous illusion, because at some point they know they don’t. Mythologizing this man did not help him and did not help us, because it allowed us to not take responsibility for our participation in the public life. We say, ‘Oh well, let this wonderful leader do it.’ But that is not inviting us to think.”
The Kennedys’ belief that they were extraordinary people who could make their own rules began long before Jack was born. It started with his grandfather.
* No outsider can fully comprehend the dynamics of another family’s life, but outsiders were often shocked by what they encountered in the Kennedy household. In 1957 Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader, was asked to make a speech in Palm Beach. It seemed only natural when Rose Kennedy telephoned and invited him to come to the family’s beachfront home for lunch. Johnson, recovering from a serious heart attack, was accompanied on the trip by Lady Bird, his wife; Bobby Baker, his aide and confidant; and Senator George Smathers, of Florida. “So we went over for lunch,” Baker recalled in an interview for this book. Rose Kennedy, gracious and charming, was alone. Suddenly, Baker said, “Old Man Joe comes in with a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl. Doesn’t say boo. Walks right in and goes upstairs” and engages in what, clearly and noisily, is sexual intercourse. “Here you have the majority leader of the Senate and he and Jack had a great relationship,” Baker told me. “I thought it was the rudest thing I’ve ever seen.” The lunch went on as if nothing had happened. Baker learned later, he said, that the young woman was Joe Kennedy’s caddy from the French Riviera, where the Kennedys maintained a vacation home.
History has been kind to John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, Jack Kennedy’s maternal grandfather, who is invariably portrayed as an amiable longtime Boston pol famed for his energetic campaigning and singing “Sweet Adeline” at political events. The athletic, handsome Fitzgerald was said to be the first politician to campaign by automobile: dramatically speeding across Boston, he preached his antiboss, reformer message at twenty-eight rallies on the last night of his successful 1905 campaign for mayor. No one, it was said, shook more hands, danced more dances, talked more rapidly, or generated larger and more enthusiastic crowds than Honey Fitz.
It is that historical legacy that survives—and not the reality. Fitzgerald’s contentious two terms as mayor of Boston, marked by sworn testimony of payoffs and cronyism, have been muted over the years into just another example of big-city political business as usual. His political alliance with his four brothers, who were provided with city jobs and other largesse, including valuable liquor licenses, was the beginning of the brother-to-brother family loyalty that would be repeated again and again in the next generation. And Fitzgerald’s political humiliation in 1919, when he was investigated in the House of Representatives for eight months before being unseated for vote fraud, is written off in a sentence or two in most Kennedy family histories.
The incomplete historical record is partially the result of the Kennedys’ purging of unsavory events from the family lore and the ability of family members to lie when necessary. The facts surrounding Fitzgerald’s ouster from Congress were protected by the congressional rule dating back to 1880 that sealed all unpublished investigative materials for fifty years. More than three thousand pages of House Elections Committee depositions and files dealing with the challenge to the 1918 election were not available to the public until 1969, and were then left unexamined and unpublished until research began for this book.
Fitzgerald won the House seat on November 5, 1918, by defeating the incumbent, fellow Democrat Peter F. Tague, by 238 votes out of the 15,293 cast in Massachusetts’s Tenth District. (Tague had been defeated by Fitzgerald in the Democratic primary election, amid charges of vote fraud, and ran again, as a write-in candidate, in the general election.) The newly examined elections committee files show that the Fitzgerald forces, who included his young son-in-law Joseph P. Kennedy, recruited immigrant Italians, then entering the United States in huge numbers, and sent them into election precincts with instructions to use threats and physical violence to prevent Tague supporters from casting their special ballots. A few professional boxers were also hired. The House investigators determined that at least one-third of the votes in three precincts in Boston’s teeming Fifth Ward were fraudulent, so-called mattress votes cast by men who were falsely registered as living in the district in order to vote on election day. Other Fitzgerald votes were determined to have been cast by men who had been killed in combat or were still stationed overseas in World War I. Most of the illegal votes came from a strip of notorious bars and houses of prostitution in the Fifth Ward, and it was these votes, so the committee concluded, that enabled Fitzgerald to steal the election.
Fitzgerald offered little defense during the months of congressional inquiry, other than to insist that he had been “framed” and to deny that any fraud was involved in his election. The elections committee’s report was debated for more than four hours on October 24, 1919. The House voted overwhelmingly to unseat Fitzgerald and swear in his opponent on the spot.
Fitzgerald’s comment to newsmen outside the Capitol was almost jaunty: “Well, McKinley was unseated by the Congress and became a candidate and was elected president. See what’s ahead of me?” In her bestselling biography The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, published in 1987, Doris Kearns Goodwin took brief note of the election of 1918 and its aftermath and observed that Fitzgerald, after being ousted from office, “remained as exuberant as ever, emerging once again from disgrace like a duck from water, and the local newspapers still considered him the leading citizen of Boston.”
Why was Fitzgerald so exuberant?
One answer may be that he was successfully practicing what is known today as political spin control—putting on an act for the public and the press in an attempt to minimize the importance of the disaster that had befallen him.
Another possible answer revolves around Fitzgerald’s lifelong ability to ignore the consequences of his actions. He had run for mayor of Boston in 1905 as a reformer but, once elected, presided over a regime that became infamous for patronage and graft. “From his earliest days in politics,” Goodwin wrote, “Fitzgerald had been able to compartmentalize his actions so that he could hold on to an image of himself as a ‘good’ man and a ‘reformist politician’”—even as he joined fully in the corruption of his administration. Fitzgerald’s instinct for compartmentalization and tolerance for political dirty tricks would be passed along to his son-in-law Joe Kennedy and to Kennedy’s second son, John.
Further, Fitzgerald might have understood how much more the House Elections Committee could have made public but did not. The unpublished hearings records of the committee depict Fitzgerald as a political leader who, like other corrupt big-city politicians of his time, relied heavily on alcohol, prostitution, and violence for financial and voter support.
The same files also demonstrate that Joe Kennedy was directly involved in many aspects of his father-in-law’s public life, an involvement that has been generally overlooked by historians. Fitzgerald family patronage of Kennedy is revealed in documents such as long-forgotten 1918 campaign leaflets in which Tague released letters showing that Fitzgerald had urged him to recommend Kennedy as a director of the federal Farm Loan Board (a position Kennedy did not get). Other depositions and documents show that the elections committee suspected Kennedy of playing a major organizational role on election day in November 1918, when the Fitzgerald forces used fraud and intimidation to win Tague’s seat. Some of the mattress voters from the shadiest hotels