The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, also favors appeasement, and in September 1938 signs the Munich Agreement, which paves the way for Hitler to invade Czechoslovakia. “I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain optimistically declares.
But peace ends on September 3, 1939, when Hitler marches into Poland and England declares war on Germany.
When Joe calls FDR with the news, his voice is trembling. “It’s the end of the world. The end of everything,” he says, and asks to come back to Washington. Roosevelt forbids any such acknowledgment of American fear.
Nevertheless, Joe surreptitiously sends his family home immediately—taking precaution to book them on separate travel accommodations. Rose, Kick (age nineteen), Eunice (eighteen), and Bobby (thirteen), set out on September 12, 1939, aboard the SS Washington, crowded with nearly fifteen hundred Americans fleeing Europe. Patricia (fifteen), Jean (eleven), and Ted (seven), board a second vessel, and Joe Jr. (twenty-four), a third. Jack (twenty-two), crosses the Atlantic by plane. Only Rosemary, who turns twenty-one that September 13, stays “out of duty to remain behind with [her] father” at a convent school in rural Hertfordshire.
With the bombing of London still a year off, and America’s entrance into the war uncertain, Joe takes bold, even reckless, action. Without consulting the State Department, he arranges a meeting with Hitler to “bring about a better understanding between the United States and Germany.” The attempt fails, effectively ending his ambassadorship, and perhaps his political career.
Yet a letter to a friend reveals how quickly Joe is able to redirect his ambitions: “I find myself more interested in what young Joe is going to do than in what I am going to do with the rest of my life.”
On the eve of the 1940 presidential election, Joe returns home, his ties to FDR severely diminished. He leans away from the president in favor of the inexperienced Republican candidate Wendell Willkie, who’d been a Democrat until 1939. But Roosevelt, who is running for an extraordinary (then constitutional) third term, needs Joe to secure the Catholic vote.
With the election set for November 5, FDR extends Joe and Rose an invitation. “Come to the White House tonight for a little family dinner,” he offers, feeding Joe’s lust for presidential power, and the promises of future endorsements.
Joe falls in line, agreeing to appear on a national radio broadcast in support of Roosevelt’s candidacy. He writes the speech in secret, revealing his words to no one.
On October 29, 1940, Joe goes on the radio and speaks of America, of politics, and, finally, of his family. “After all, I have a great deal at stake in this country. My wife and I have given nine hostages to fortune. Our children and your children are more important than anything else in the world.”
His popular ideas turn out the vote. Roosevelt is elected for a third term. At age fifty-six, Joe will see the president win a fourth term, too.
Nine hostages to fortune. How darkly prophetic a father’s words would prove for his children.
PART TWO
The Two Roses
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and
Rose Marie “Rosemary” Kennedy
Chapter 5
Public life starts early for the woman who will become the matriarch of the Kennedy political dynasty.
With her long black hair, petite figure, and perfect posture, Rose Elizabeth is a familiar sight at campaign events for her father, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. Young Rose has lost count how many times she’s accompanied her gregarious father on the piano. At weddings, wakes, or before the first pitch at the new Fenway Park, “Honey Fitz” plays to the crowds with his signature song, “Sweet Adeline.” By the time he is elected the first Irish American mayor of Boston in 1906, the year after Rose graduates from Dorchester High School, he has already served three terms in the US Congress.
Though devoutly Catholic, Rose rejects the domesticity of her shy mother, Mary Josephine, or “Josie.” “I was crazy about traveling,” Rose recalls. (Her son Jack will grow to deeply resent her frequent absences, though his youthful anger—“Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children alone”—morphs into adult bitterness: “She was on her knees in churches all over the world.”)
As a girl, what Rose prays for most ardently is handsome, charismatic Joseph Patrick Kennedy. She first set eyes on him at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, where Boston’s wealthy “lace curtain Irish” spent their summers.
She was six and he was eight.
They start dating when she is sixteen, perhaps the happiest year of Rose’s life. “I wish I was sixteen” again, she declares on her one hundredth birthday.
But although Rose invites Joe to a graduation dance at Dorchester High, theirs is a forbidden courtship. Her father, Honey Fitz, detests the mediocre—in academics and athletics—member of the Harvard class of 1912, and he bans Joe from his house.
“My father didn’t think I should marry the first man who asked me, and still I was very much in love, and I still didn’t want to offend my parents—so we used to have these rendezvous,” Rose recalls in the BBC documentary Rose Kennedy Remembers.
Rose will have to part temporarily from Joe, however, and for an important reason. She’s been accepted by Wellesley College, the prestigious liberal arts school less than twenty miles from her home in the Boston suburb of Dorchester.
She’ll miss Joe of course, but this will be her first adventure all her own. She plans to learn French and German, get her degree in music, and become a teacher.
The evening before she’s set to leave for Wellesley, Honey Fitz sits his seventeen-year-old daughter down and tells her to unpack. She won’t be going. He and her mother, Josie, have decided that Rose is too young.
It’s a selfish lie.
The mayor wants to save his own political skin. In the midst of a challenging reelection campaign, the local bishop has warned Honey Fitz that his daughter’s attendance at a “modernist” secular college might cost him the Catholic vote.
Honey Fitz nevertheless loses the 1908 election and breaks his daughter’s trust in him.
“There was screaming and yelling and absolute madness,” Rose recalls to her niece, the writer Kerry McCarthy. “I was furious at my parents for years. I was angry at my church. As much as I loved my father, I never really forgave him for not letting me go.”
Instead she enrolls in the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Boston but refuses to stop seeing Joe.
Honey Fitz takes drastic measures. He sends Rose and her sister Agnes to a Sacred Heart convent in the Netherlands for the next school year.
But when the homesick sisters return to Boston, Rose secretly starts seeing Joe again.
When they go ice skating, she wears a veil to hide her face. She’ll allow other men to sign her dance card, but as soon as she is out of her mother’s chaperoning sight, Rose partners with Joe. When he invites Rose to his 1911 Harvard junior prom, the Fitzgerald family once again collapses into turmoil.
Honey Fitz may be serving his second term as mayor of Boston, but his daughter is a citizen lost. He reluctantly gives Rose permission to marry Joe.
On October 7, 1914, after seven years of clandestine courtship, Rose, then twenty-four, and Joe, twenty-six, have their wedding day in the private chapel adjoining the home of Cardinal O’Connell, who officiates the modest ceremony.