Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. died on November 18, 1969, at the age of 81, in the house on Marchant Avenue in Hyannis Port, surrounded by family.
He had lived to see four of his nine children die, and he was unable to comment on any of it. Now, the final question, the one that actually builds the title of this video. If the records do not support hatred, and they do not, but rather something colder and more precise, a father who ranked his children and informed them of their ratings, then where did the story of the father who despised his son come from, and who was in a position to correct it?
For a long time, no one, because the family controlled the record. Rose published “Times to Remember” in 1974, the approved version. The warm father, the high standards, the dinner table, the competition that was really about excellence.
She wrote about Rosemary. She did not write about the lobotomy part, which she did not know about. That came out through other people and other records decades later.
The book was a bestseller and set the frame for a generation of writing about the family. The estate also controlled access to the papers. Joseph P.
Kennedy’s personal papers went to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, and most remained closed for decades. Scholars wrote around them.
What filled the vacuum was memoirs, recollections, and material the family chose to release, which is why so much of what everyone knows about Joe Kennedy comes from anecdotes rather than papers, including the bootlegging, the buying of copies of “Why England Slept,” and the multiple versions of the sentence in which he recruited his son. Then his granddaughter opened the files. Amanda Smith is the daughter of Jean Kennedy Smith.
In 2001, she published “Hostage to Fortune,” the letters of Joseph P. Kennedy, over 700 pages of the man’s actual correspondence, selected and annotated by a family member. It was a real editorial decision, and she took the harder path.
She included the letters about England. She included the material that made him look exactly as he was in 1938 and 1940. She included the letters to his children.
So the file that finally came out to answer the question of what Joe Kennedy actually felt about his second son is a file written by Joe Kennedy, released by a member of the Kennedy family, and it does not say what the legend says. What is there is worse in one way, and far better in another. It is unrelenting.
It corrects spelling. It corrects handwriting. It tells the boy his grades are not good enough and reminds him what the family expects.
It compares him, sometimes directly, to his brother. It writes to Jack about his health in the tone of a man reviewing an operational problem. Reading 300 pages of it straight through leaves one genuinely uncomfortable because the affection is constantly present but always conditional on performance.
He is also, undeniably, proud of him. He tells him the book will be valuable for years. He writes about him to other people, to Beaverbrook, to Krock, to friends, in terms he never used to Jack’s face.
He kept the letters. He kept all of them, including the ones where his son pushed back. That is the correction, the reveal the title was gesturing at without being able to say it.
The evidence that Joseph Kennedy despised his son is in Joseph Kennedy’s own hand, and it is not there. What is there is the thing the family never had a word for, because they never needed one. He was assessing the boy constantly, out loud, in ink, for 25 years.
The boy grew up knowing that love in that house was on a debt schedule, and he became the most politically gifted figure of his generation, in part because he had been trained from age eight to be useful to the man who paid for the house. Back to the golf course in Palm Beach on December 19, 1961. The first reading of that morning is the intuitive one, the one the obituaries reached for.
A hard man struck down at the top, punished by fate in the middle of his triumph. The beginning of what people were starting to call the Kennedy curse about 18 months later. Here is the second reading.
By December 1961, the transition was already complete. It had begun on August 12, 1944, off the coast of Suffolk, when the only son Joe Kennedy had ever fully backed disappeared, and the “spare” son inherited the position. It continued in Chicago in 1956, when the son took the biggest gamble of his career against his father’s direct instructions, and came out of that loss a national figure.
It ended in 1960, when his own campaign decided the most effective use of Joseph P. Kennedy was to keep him away from cameras and newspapers. A decision made by the son’s operation about the father’s value.
And it was the right decision. The stroke did not take away his influence. The stroke took away his ability to complain about the influence he no longer had.
He spent nearly eight more years in the house with the porch and the view of the harbor. He was wheeled onto the boat, and he watched his family on a television that sometimes worked. He had wanted to be president himself, and he ended that with 90 minutes of frank talk with a Boston reporter in 1940.
He wanted his eldest son to be president, and he buried him with full military honors in a closed casket in 1944. He got his second son, the one he had spent years telling to be better, for a thousand and thirty-six days. And the last thing he built for that son, the money, the press contacts, the Pulitzer, the reprints, the Boston paper, is not what remains to define either of them.
What remains is a pile of letters in a Boston library, written by a father to a boy he did not think was the one, released by that boy’s niece. He spent his whole life buying the narrative he wanted. In the end, the only narrative that survived was the one he wrote himself.