The liquor business makes P.J. rich, but he has a thirst for politics. In a city where Protestants control commerce, industry, and education, P.J. finds another way to peddle influence. He starts giving out free drinks to those who can help him rise in the Democratic Party.
Among them is the future mayor of Boston, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. The two men forge what will become a powerful alliance. P.J. becomes a boss in East Boston’s Ward Two, where the booming Irish population now accounts for a third of Boston’s residents. As Irish Catholics swell the ranks of the police and fire departments, P.J.’s political clout soars. He is only twenty-seven when he’s elected to the first of what will be five consecutive terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, followed by two terms in the state senate.
Soon, P.J.’s formidable negotiation skills and political savvy steer him out of the barroom and into the world of finance. He purchases shares in a local bank, the Columbia Trust Company. The Kennedy fortunes rise exponentially. The family has finally shed the derisive moniker of penniless “shanty Irish” and joined the ranks of the respectable, moneyed “lace curtain Irish.”
On September 6, 1888, P.J. and Mary celebrate the arrival of their firstborn, a son. They don’t stretch their choices for a name. P.J. simply reverses his own initials. The newborn is christened Joseph Patrick.
Unlike their impoverished Irish immigrant grandparents, Joe and his three younger sisters grow up with all perks of wealth. They live in a three-story redbrick mansion on exclusive Jeffries Point, with a view of bustling Boston Harbor.
As an enterprising teenager, Joe works in a haberdashery, and on Fridays he lights the coal stoves for Orthodox Jews forbidden to work on their Sabbath.
He attends the exclusive public Boston Latin School. Joe stands out for being Catholic among the overwhelmingly Protestant student body—and for an academic record poor enough to necessitate repeating the eleventh grade. But Joe is socially astute, always working an angle. Tall and lean with piercing blue eyes, he joins the school’s baseball team, and the recognition helps get him elected class president.
Getting into WASPy Harvard in 1908 isn’t as easy, especially with his less-than-stellar grades. But Joe isn’t shy about using his father’s connections. And whenever his grades tank, Joe plies teachers with the family currency: a bottle of Haig & Haig Scotch.
But it’s P.J., a portly man with a handlebar mustache and years of service in Massachusetts state government, who teaches his son the biggest lesson of all: “Win at all costs.” One of young Joe’s earliest memories, biographer Edward Klein relates, is of two of P.J.’s campaign aides bragging, “We voted 128 times today.”
Joe graduates from Harvard in 1912 envisioning a future in banking, despite it being a field long dominated by Brahmins. His father, a director of the small Boston bank Columbia Trust Company, secures Joe a position as assistant state bank examiner, conducting the exacting work of audits and financial regulatory compliance.
“Banking could lead a man anywhere,” Joe boasts, then proves his claim by becoming the country’s youngest bank president at age twenty-five.
“Joe Kennedy saw early,” a friend observes, that “power came from money.” For Joe, learning the rules of finance is also an education in how to break them—undetected.
Business associates are keenly aware of Joe’s cutthroat—often amoral—tactics. As the Kennedy family interest in Columbia Trust comes under attack during a wave of hostile takeover attempts, Joe borrows heavily. His three sisters and their families endure heavy losses from risky stock investments Joe makes with their money. But despite being deeply in debt, Joe manages to turn his fortunes around, and in 1914 marries Mayor Honey Fitz’s convent-educated daughter Rose Fitzgerald. The pair will go on to create what the December 1969 Ladies’ Home Journal dubs “the century’s most historic family.”
Over the next seventeen years, Rose bears nine children: Joseph “Joe” Patrick Jr. in 1915, John “Jack” Fitzgerald in 1917, Rose “Rosemary” Marie in 1918, Kathleen “Kick” Agnes in 1920, Eunice Mary in 1921, Patricia “Pat” Helen in 1924, Robert “Bobby” Francis in 1925, Jean Ann in 1928, and Edward “Ted” Moore in 1932.
All of the Kennedy children grow up with their grandfather P.J.’s mantra—“win at all costs”—ringing in their ears. “The big thing we learned from Daddy,” Eunice says, “was win. Don’t come in second or third—that doesn’t count—but win, win, win.”
Even so, Rose and Joe make the children understand the imperative of devotion to public service. “To whom much is given, much is expected,” from the Gospel of St. Luke, is often repeated in the Kennedy household.
Youngest daughter Jean Kennedy Smith, who would go on to serve as ambassador to Ireland from 1993 to 1998, pinpoints her parents’ motivations: “They were very conscious of the tremendous oppression their ancestors had overcome and were extremely thankful to be Americans. They felt a duty to give back to the country that had embraced their family.”
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Joe and Rose Kennedy begin their early family life in a nine-room Colonial house at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts. Joe is employed at the Boston brokerage Hayden, Stone & Company, under the mentorship of Galen Stone, until he goes into business for himself as “Joseph P. Kennedy, Banker.” But by the late 1920s, Joe—by then a father of seven and already a multimillionaire—sours on the strictures of his hometown.
Boston is “no place to bring up children,” he decides, ordering up a private railcar to transport the family to Riverdale, New York, where in 1927 the family takes up residence in relatively close proximity to Wall Street. A 1963 Fortune magazine profile of Joe quotes the banker and Bostonian Ralph Lowell: “This city was a small, clear puddle. New York was a big, muddy one, and that’s what Joe wanted.” Joe enhances his career as an independent financier, achieving further astonishing success as a speculator.
Exactly how wealthy he becomes is a little murky, even to Joe. When Rose reads that Fortune has estimated his wealth in the mid-1920s as two million dollars (around twenty-five million in today’s dollars), she asks “if it was true, and if so, why he hadn’t told her they were rich,” biographer Ronald Kessler says. Joe’s evasive reply is “How could I tell you, when I didn’t know myself?”
Two years later, the family moves to Crownlands, a 1905 mansion situated on a multiacre property at 294 Pondfield Road in Bronxville. According to Patricia Kennedy Lawford, those were “very, very happy times particularly on weekends and holidays where Joe junior and John returned from school usually with houseguests.”
Ted Kennedy recalls his father’s adage “Home holds no fear for me.” But the meaning could cut two ways. “Complaining was strictly forbidden. We were not allowed to sit around moaning because we could not go to the movies or received a poor mark in our geometry class,” Jean Kennedy Smith says. “Dad’s voice would clamp down in our ears. ‘There’s no whining in this house!’”
“Dinner at Uncle Joe’s began promptly at 7:15 o’clock,” Kennedy cousin Joe Gargan recalls, “and no one was to be late.” Biographer Thomas Reeves further relates, “If one of the [children’s] guests was tardy, Joe would often fly into a rage and administer a tongue-lashing. One such victim [was] a pal of Jack’s who never returned” to the Kennedy table.