On the morning of November 9, 1960, the Kennedy family gathered on the lawn of their compound in Hyannis Port for a photograph that would become one of the most enduring images in American political history. The newly elected president stood at the center. Jackie was there, pregnant. Bobby had just run the campaign.
Ted had lost most of the western states. The sisters stood in their places. Rose stood among them. And at the end of the line, finally allowed to appear, stood Joseph P.
Kennedy Sr. , seventy-two years old, dressed in a suit, looking like anyone’s grandfather. That last detail is the key to understanding everything else. Throughout the 1960 campaign, Joe Sr.
had been treated by his son’s staff as a liability to be kept out of sight. He had been an appeaser during his time as ambassador to Britain, was rumored to be a bootlegger, and Jack’s team knew that reminding Protestant voters in West Virginia of who was paying for the family’s airplane was the fastest way to lose an election. So he stayed home in Massachusetts. He stayed in Palm Beach.
He worked by telephone. He gave money. But he did not appear. On the morning after the votes were counted, he appeared.
That photograph was not a family reunion. It was a board of directors. Beneath the myth of Kennedy solidarity lay a corporation, designed by a man who had managed his children the way he managed his stock market deals. The rule that governed everyone in that house was repeated by half a dozen of them in nearly identical language over sixty years of interviews.
Second place meant nothing. If you came in second in a sailing race, a footrace, or in the classroom, you received no sympathy. Joe Sr. said he did not want losers around him.
The children repeated that phrase so often in their memoirs and oral histories that it became less an anecdote than a mission statement. Compare that with the second son. From the beginning, Jack Kennedy was designated by the family as the weak one. Scarlet fever at age two, so serious that his father reportedly promised God half his fortune if the boy lived.
Whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, and a childhood and adolescence of stomach troubles no one could name. Rose Kennedy kept index cards on her children—dates, illnesses, dental work, vaccinations, the administrative record of nine bodies. Jack’s stack was the thickest. In 1934, he was sent to the Mayo Clinic, where he spent weeks undergoing tests without a clear answer.
He wrote to his friend Lem Billings from the hospital with the tone he would use for the rest of his life when discussing his own body: dirty jokes, sarcastic exaggerations, and updates on how many people had examined him and from what angle. He told Billings he was ready to become the medical wonder of the age. He was fifteen years old, learning to make illness funny because the alternative, in that family, was to be a loser. The school reports are colder.
At Choate, the headmaster lectured boys on troublemakers, those who lacked discipline. Jack and twelve friends formed the Muckers Club in 1934. They ordered gold shovels on necklaces and came so close to expulsion that Joe Sr. was called to campus.
Jack graduated sixty-fourth out of 112 students. His classmates voted him most likely to succeed, a joke they evidently found hilarious. His older brother had passed through the same school as a shining star. Joe Jr.
was the heir, and not in any vague sense. He was bigger, healthier, more openly ambitious, and better at the things the father valued. In 1940, at age twenty-five, he sat as a Massachusetts delegate at the Democratic National Convention and refused to change his vote for Franklin Roosevelt, a young man publicly standing against a sitting president because his father’s grudge required it. Joe Sr.
told people openly that his eldest son would be president of the United States. Everyone in the family heard it, including the boy with the sick stomach. This system was funded. In 1926 and again in 1936, Joe Sr.
established trust funds for his children. With the second, each child had nearly a million dollars in his or her own name, at a time when a million dollars was a lifetime. He said he did it so his children could tell him to go to hell if they wanted. None of them ever did.
The money was more effective than a leash because it removed the ordinary reasons a young person eventually separates from their parents. None of them had to take a job. None had to marry for stability. None had to build anything that was not a family project.
They were free from everyone except him. And he was not a distant father. He was a manager. He read their report cards, corrected their letters, sent memos about their weights, assigned them topics for dinner-table debate, and tested them on it.
This arrangement wobbled in the summer of 1940, when Jack, twenty-three, a Harvard senior with a modest academic record, published a book. His thesis on British rearmament, heavily revised with help from Arthur Krock of the New York Times, was renamed Why England Slept, with a foreword by Henry Luce, whose magazines were the most powerful in America. It sold. Estimates suggest eighty thousand copies across the American and British editions.
Many biographers have concluded Joe Sr. bought copies in bulk to inflate the numbers, with reports of thousands later stored in the Hyannis courthouse. The precise figure was never established. What is beyond dispute is the result.
The second son had a bestseller at twenty-three and a public identity unrelated to his health. Joe Jr. wrote to their father about it. The letter survives in Joe Sr.
’s papers, and it is not dramatic. Joe Jr. conceded the manuscript had required a lot of work. He essentially told his father it did not prove much.
The heir, assessing the younger brother’s success for the man who set the rankings. He was not wrong in substance. But no one writes such a letter unless the balance of power has just shifted. That summer, Joe Jr.
was the heir at a watched convention. Jack was the invalid in a widely read article. Their father, who had just seen his political career end in London over appeasement, now owned an asset appreciating in value in a way he had not planned. Another thing happened in that house within the following year, and no one wrote any letter about it.
In the fall of 1941, while Joe Sr. arranged for the futures of his sons, he arranged something for his eldest daughter without discussing it with his wife beforehand, without telling the younger children for years, and covered it with a story about a teaching job in the Midwest that lasted publicly for more than two decades. Rosemary Kennedy was the third child, the first daughter, born in 1918 during the influenza pandemic. The family story of her birth, involving a nurse delaying her exit from the birth canal to wait for the doctor, did not surface until decades later and cannot be verified.
What can be documented is everything that followed her being slow to learn. She read and wrote at an elementary level even as an adult. She was also, by every photograph and testimony, the beauty of the family. In 1938, at the royal court in London, she curtsied to the king and queen of England while her father served as ambassador.
She was not a hidden child. She appeared in newspapers. During 1940 and 1941, at a convent school in Washington, according to the nuns and her family, she became moody, slipped out at night, grew physically difficult to control, and terrified a father whose entire project depended on the family name. In November 1941, Joe Sr.
consented to a lobotomy performed by Walter Freeman and James Watts at a Washington hospital. The procedure was experimental. Fewer than one hundred had been performed in the United States at that time. It failed.
She lost most of her ability to speak and much of her movement. She was twenty-three years old. Rose Kennedy said she was not informed in advance. Rosemary was eventually moved to St.
Coletta in Jefferson, Wisconsin, in 1949, and the family story for years was that she was teaching or working with children somewhere in the Midwest. Rose did not visit her for nearly twenty years. By that time, Jack was in the Navy, heading to the South Pacific after being rejected by two services for his back and stomach. On the night of August 2, 1943, a Japanese destroyer split PT-109 in half in the Blackett Strait.
Two of the thirteen men aboard died. Jack, whose back was already damaged, swam for hours towing a badly burned crewman by a belt held in his teeth, got the survivors to an island, and swam out to the channel on later nights trying to signal a passing boat. A message carved on a coconut shell reached an Australian coastwatcher. They were rescued after six days.
That was genuinely courageous and it happened. The question is what the family did with it. In June 1944, John Hersey published Survival in The New Yorker. Hersey was a friend of Jack’s, and the article was a model of deliberate understatement that made him look better than a boastful version would have.
Joe Sr. used his contacts to arrange a condensation in Reader’s Digest, which had millions of readers. Copies of that condensation were distributed across Massachusetts two years later during Jack’s first congressional campaign. Tens of thousands of them.
The invalid became a war hero. Joe Jr. was a Navy pilot in England and had already completed his required missions. He was qualified to return home.
In the summer of 1944, he volunteered for Operation Aphrodite, a program that filled worn-out B-24s with about ten tons of explosives. A two-man crew would take off, arm the payload, and parachute out while a mother ship guided the drone toward its target. On August 12, 1944, the aircraft exploded over Suffolk before Joe Jr. and his co-pilot could jump.
There was nothing left to bury. The son told since childhood he would be president, who had spent that spring watching his younger brother become nationally famous for survival, chose a test mission after his obligations ended. His father closed himself off. He went to his room in Hyannis Port, listened to music, and according to several accounts, did not speak of Joe Jr.
easily again for the rest of his life. Then the succession plan was reassigned. Jack later said in various forms that he was drafted, that if his brother had lived he would have gone into writing or teaching, and that his father wanted a Kennedy in politics, so he got the next in line. By 1946, Jack was in Boston running for Congress in a district he had never lived in, at twenty-nine years old, with his father buying the ads, his mother hosting the teas, and his sisters knocking on doors.
He won. There was another Kennedy who tested what happened to a child who deviated from the course. Kathleen, known as Kick, was the charming one, genuinely loved in London during the ambassadorship years. In 1944, she decided to marry William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, heir to the Duke of Devonshire.
The Cavendish family was not merely Protestant but historically, institutionally, and ethnically anti-Catholic. Children of the marriage would be raised Anglican. Rose Kennedy’s reaction was decisive. She threatened.
She pressured through the church. When the wedding took place in a Chelsea register office on May 6, 1944, Rose was in the hospital, and no Kennedy attended except Joe Jr. , who arrived in uniform and sent a telegram home claiming the Kennedys were united. Hartington was killed in Belgium four months later.
Kick was a widow at twenty-four. She stayed in England. She fell in love with Peter Fitzwilliam, an earl, a war hero, a Protestant, and, in the part that was unacceptable, a married man. In May 1948, she flew with him to Paris on the way to meet her father in Cannes to argue her case.
Their small plane crashed in a storm over the Ardeche. Joe Sr. was the only family member to attend the funeral. She was buried in Derbyshire on Cavendish land, among the in-laws her mother had fought.
Rose did not go. Two daughters. One removed by surgery and reclassified as a teacher. Another removed by a plane crash and reclassified as a tragedy.
The campaigns are where the family worked best, and it was not a myth. In 1952, Jack ran against Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. for the Massachusetts Senate seat. Bobby, twenty-six, took over managing the campaign after being pulled from his Justice Department job when it began to collapse.
He ran it the way he ran everything: he made people dislike him and he won. The sisters ran the tea parties, an idea professional politicians mocked until roughly seventy thousand Massachusetts women shook Kennedy hands in hotel ballrooms. Eisenhower carried the state by more than two hundred thousand votes. Jack beat Lodge by seventy thousand.
Eight years later, Bobby ran the presidential campaign. Ted was given the Rocky Mountain states and lost most of them. Eunice, Pat, and Jean worked the tea circuit nationally. Bobby’s reward for two campaigns was to be publicly viewed as the hatchet man.
And when the sisters were assigned tasks, they were assigned where they were useful, on a schedule set by someone else. Then came December 1960 and the battle no one in the family ever described the same way twice. Joe Sr. wanted Bobby to be attorney general.
Jack did not. Bobby did not either. He talked about teaching, writing, or running for governor of Massachusetts. He told friends he was tired of being an employee of his brother.
But the father overruled them both. Jack handled it the way he handled everything that embarrassed him: he joked. He told reporters he wanted to give Bobby a little legal experience before he went into the practice of law. The joke drew laughter and accomplished exactly what it was designed for, making nepotism look like a family joke rather than a father’s decision imposed on a president-elect.
In 1962, Ted, thirty, ran for Jack’s vacant Senate seat. Jack, according to several accounts within the administration, believed the timing was terrible, but he did it anyway. The seat was family property. There was a third brother available.
The sister who broke the pattern was Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Beginning in 1961, with her brother in the White House and her father’s foundation checkbook available, she took the family’s most carefully buried shame and turned it into federal policy. She pressed Jack to create the President’s Committee on Intellectual Disability, which he did in October 1961. Its recommendations led to the Maternal and Child Health and Mental Retardation Planning Amendments and the Community Mental Health Act, both signed in October 1963, the last major domestic legislation he signed before Dallas.
In September 1962, in the Saturday Evening Post, under her own name, Eunice published an article revealing that her sister Rosemary had an intellectual disability. She did not mention the lobotomy. That stayed buried until the 1980s. But Joe Sr.
had been silenced by a stroke in December 1961, twelve months before his daughter told the country what he had hidden. Eunice started Camp Shriver in her backyard in Maryland in 1962. By 1968, it was known as the Special Olympics. Bobby’s transformation was different.
The brother who had been the enforcer became, after November 1963, the widowed institution. He kept the office, the assistants, the language. In 1968 he ran for president using his brother’s coalition, his brother’s tone, his brother’s men. He was killed in June of that year in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel.
Ted, the youngest, the least respected, expelled from Harvard and given a Senate seat, became the last one left. He held that seat for forty-seven years. He passed more legislation than any of them, and he drove his car off a bridge at Chappaquiddick in 1969, left a young woman in the water, and was never fully held accountable. Both of those things are true.
Peter Lawford was the clearest example of what the family did with people who stopped being useful. He was the actor married to Pat, the Hollywood connection, the Sinatra liaison, which mattered in 1960. In early 1962, Jack was scheduled to stay at Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs, but Bobby, running the Justice Department and examining Sinatra’s mob connections, cancelled the visit. The president stayed at Bing Crosby’s house instead.
Sinatra reportedly smashed the helipad he had built with a sledgehammer. Lawford had lost his usefulness. Pat divorced him in 1966. He died in 1984, and no Kennedy attended his memorial service.
What was this family, then? It was a corporation with a founder, a succession plan, an internal ranking system, a public relations arm, and a policy for handling assets that stopped performing. The affection was real, which is what makes it difficult. Those people loved one another in a real, tangible, loud way.
They also lived inside a structure where love and status were one currency, and one man issued it. Those who lost—Joe Jr. , Rosemary, Kick—could not tell their own stories. Those who survived told theirs in order, with the right to decide what was included.
Rose published Times to Remember in 1974, warm, Catholic, controlled. The John F. Kennedy Library opened in 1979 with family cooperation, and for decades imposed meaningful restrictions on personal papers. Jacqueline Kennedy sat with Arthur Schlesinger in 1964 for eight and a half hours of interviews, then sealed them.
They were not released until 2011, after everyone mentioned in them was gone. On that lawn in Hyannis Port on November 9, 1960, the founder appeared in frame for the first time in a year because it was finally safe to photograph him. The man in the center existed there because his older brother had volunteered for a mission he did not have to take. Two women who should have stood in that row were missing, one of them still alive in Wisconsin.
The brother standing near the president would become attorney general within a month because the old man at the end insisted on it. They did not hate their father. That is too simple an explanation and the records do not support it. They were raised by a man who taught them that second place was worthless, and then somebody came in first by accident.
The invalid. The one they had all been quietly asked to expect to bury. He outlived them all by dying at the right moment to make a legend, and the scoreboard his father built kept working. Jack had won the only way that family recognized.
Permanently. With no one left to challenge the result.