She thinks you are quite the grandest fellow that ever lived and your letters furnish her most of her laughs in the Convent.
Joseph P. Kennedy to John F. Kennedy
Kick embraced her academic work at Noroton. She was an able scholar. Her school report for Christmas 1934 suggests that she was near the top of the class. Pass mark for examinations was 75 per cent and she attained high marks in all of her subjects, especially in Christian Doctrine (91 per cent) and History (90 per cent).1 She wrote to her mother to enquire about her school report: ‘I hope it wasn’t too bad.’2 She told Rose that she was studying hard, but longing for Christmas at Palm Beach. There was nowhere to shop at Noroton and she badly needed ‘a bath-robe, bathing suit, underwear, shoes etc’.3
She told Rose that she had received her ‘aspirantship to the Angels’ and that four of her friends had got their ‘Child of Mary’ medals in a ‘beautiful ceremony’. Unlike her mother, Kick had not achieved membership of that exalted and exclusive sodality. She also wrote to ‘Daddy Dearest’, thanking him for a trip to New York to see a show. She was taking sewing classes and otherwise cramming for exams: ‘I am sitting in the Study Hall waiting for my dear brother, Jack, to show up. I only hope he does.’4
Kick remained close to Jack. He knew that she was unhappy at the Convent and spent as much time as he could visiting and writing her amusing letters. Her relationship with Jack was based on jokes and banter. But she admitted to her father how much she adored and admired him. ‘She really thinks you are a great fellow,’ he told Jack. ‘She has a love and devotion to you that you should be very proud to have deserved. It probably does not become apparent to you, but it does to both Mother and me. She thinks you are quite the grandest fellow that ever lived and your letters furnish her most of her laughs in the Convent.’5
That February, Jack had got into serious trouble at Choate and was almost expelled. Kick had become involved in the story, incurring, for once, the wrath of her father. Jack had long clashed with his teacher and housemaster J. J. Maher. Maher disliked Jack, and believed that he was a bad influence on Lem, who slavishly followed every move he made and endorsed his every whim. Maher recommended that Jack and Lem be kept apart.6
The headmaster, George St John, had a derogatory term for boys who refused to follow the Choate line: they were called ‘Muckers’ (a thinly veiled insult for Irish labourers). Jack and his friends decided to form a renegade society rebelling against the school’s values and ethics: it was to be called ‘The Muckers Club’, to, in Jack’s own words, ‘put over festivities in our own little way and to buck the system more effectively’.7 There were thirteen members, and each member proudly wore a tiny gold pin in the shape of a shovel with their initials inscribed alongside the logo of CMC (Choate Muckers Club).
The club planned pranks, one of which was to spread a pile of manure on the school dance floor and have their pictures taken shovelling the muck. The headmaster got wind of the plan and was furious, threatening to expel the boys involved. Jack, the ringleader, was in the most serious trouble. Joe Sr was called to the school for a meeting to discuss Jack’s future. In the meantime, Jack wrote to Kick telling her all about the incident. Kick immediately sent Jack and Lem a congratulatory telegram, which was intercepted by the school staff:
DEAR PUBLIC ENEMIES ONE AND TWO ALL OUR PRAYERS ARE UNITED WITH YOU AND THE OTHER ELEVEN MUCKS. WHEN THE OLD MEN ARRIVE SORRY WE WONT BE THERE FOR THE BURIAL
Kick’s telegram made everything worse. Joe was not pleased. He wrote to her: ‘I know you want to do all you can for Jack,’ he began, but then told her that there was a genuine chance that he could be expelled from school: ‘I want to urge you to stop all this talk [in] letters and telegrams to him and LeMoyne, so that we can dismiss the whole matter.’ He told her that, by sending the telegram, she had added ‘fuel to the fire’.8
It was Kick’s fifteenth birthday, she was far from home and clearly her father was angry. She wrote back, secretly: ‘I wanted to write you privately about the letter you wrote me. (in case you have not told Mother).’ She apologized for her part in the fiasco and confessed that Jack was angry with her. ‘I hope everything is OK now and I really want to help Jack.’9
She was deeply upset by her rift with Jack, especially as it was her birthday. Her parents sent her perfume and money and she wrote to them that she had had a ‘very happy birthday although I missed everyone too much. It was the first birthday from home and its quite hard.’10 She kept up the pretence with her mother that all was fine, telling her she had had a birthday cake, and a birthday lunch with her roommates at Maillard’s in New York City; she and her friends also went to Radio City and watched Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel. She told her parents that her birthday present from her eldest brother Joe was a visit to the Convent: ‘he is driving up here today on way to New York so am looking forward to seeing him’.
She asked her mother to prepare ‘Palm Beach for my arrival around March 20th’. She also asked if her parents could send a film for the ‘Shrove days before Lent. They are the last two days we are allowed to have candy, dancing etc.’ She and her friends wanted David Copperfield. It would be the last fun time before the austerity of Lent.
Kick and Jack made up. After the Muckers fiasco, Jack began to take his work seriously, urged on by the promise of a year in England in the footsteps of his brother Joe, who was studying under Professor Laski at the London School of Economics. Jack graduated from Choate, voted by his class as ‘most likely to succeed’. Kick was to take time away from Noroton, and plans were under way for her to spend time in Europe as well. Rose was determined that Kick should go to France, to improve her competence in the language and to undergo the experience of a French Sacred Heart convent.
Perhaps Rose hoped that her headstrong daughter would experience a similar religious epiphany to the one she had had in Blumenthal, which had so shaped the course of her life. Rose decided on the Sacred Heart Convent in St Maux, north-east France. Kick and Jack would sail for England with their parents in September.
As the children grew older, they insisted on bringing their friends to the Cape. The house was a hive of activity, with sports and picnics during the day and dances and movies at night. Several friends expressed their surprise at the disciplined way that Rose ran the household. Every lunchtime the family would head to Taggart’s Pier for swimming and diving.11 On the way to the dining room, Rose would pin a newspaper article or a theme to discuss on to her bulletin board and encourage the children to debate the issue of the day over dinner. History, geography and religion were at the top of her agenda. She later thought this contributed greatly to the prowess Jack showed in his televised debates with Richard Nixon in 1960. All of her children turned out to be brilliant public speakers.12
Rose recounted in her memoirs that she could be strict, but that she always tried to temper this with a sense of humour: ‘People told jokes, made wisecracks, hurled friendly insults, and hooted and hollered at silly mistakes. They joshed and kidded and made faces and fooled around (within limits) and talked about things that popped into their minds: things that happened at school, news of friends, opinions, likes and dislikes, a certain amount of chatter and gossip: the stuff of life, well spiced … there was no lack of laughter or fun.’13
One of Kick’s friends said that being at the Kennedy dinners at Cape Cod reminded her of being in a classroom. Everyone was expected to have an opinion.