Kennedy Dynasty:The Kennedys were raised to believe that 'of those who have much, much is expected', writes KEVIN CULLENin Boston
IT ALL started in the dining room in London, because old Joe Kennedy believed that kids learned most of what they needed to know not in school but at the table, when the family shared food and ideas and even some good-natured slagging.
Imagine being a Kennedy kid and you’re sitting in the ambassador’s residence in London and your father starts grilling you on world events.
What do you think of Chamberlain? Why is Germany so aggressive? How did Mussolini rise so fast in Italy?
The kids were expected to know what they were talking about and, if they didn’t, someone, usually a sibling, sometimes the father, called them out. Being a Kennedy meant being in perpetual competition, at the dining-room table, at school, during an impromptu game of pick-up football.
Politics seemed easy after growing up a Kennedy.
There was never any question that Joe Kennedy was grooming his kids for big things, all to do with public service and public life. And not just Joe jnr, Jack, Bobby and Teddy. The girls – Kathleen, Eunice, Pat and Jean – were expected to be well-read and well-spoken and not just so they could marry and marry well.
Imagine being Teddy Kennedy. You’re still in short pants, you’re living in London, it’s 1939 and you’re holding the hand of your Irish governess, Luella Hennessey.
Teddy told Mrs Hennessey that an English boy was teasing him and punching him in the park and Teddy pointed at the English kid and asked Mrs Hennessy if it was okay if he hit the English boy back. And Luella Hennessey, speaking more as an Irishwoman than as a governess employed by the US ambassador to the Court of St James, told young master Kennedy to “go for it”. And so he did. So did they all. They all went for it. All except Rosemary, who suffered from some form of mental disability that was made permanently worse by a partial lobotomy.
But even Rosemary’s life became profound, touching millions of lives for the better when her sister Eunice became a champion for those with mental and developmental disabilities.
“I was young, but I remember those dinners,” Ted Kennedy told me two years ago, after I had gone through his mother’s collected papers at the library named for his brother, the assassinated president.
“My father was like a game-show host asking questions. I was lucky. I was the baby, so I was exempt. But, boy, oh boy, were they entertaining.”
Old Joe Kennedy made a ton of money in Hollywood and the Kennedy kids could have easily coasted into a private life of luxury. But old Joe Kennedy wouldn’t hear of it and, in the end, neither would any of them.
“We grew up in this atmosphere that, you know, ‘of those who have much, much is expected’,” Ted Kennedy said.
“When we were at that dinner table, there was no ideal higher than public service. The conversations were about history and current events and world leaders and this and that, but the whole point of the exercise was to talk about public service, about the importance of it.”
Joe jnr was the chosen one, but his navy plane exploded above the English Channel in 1944.
Kathleen, the most beautiful, gregarious and maybe the most intelligent of the Kennedys, could have been anything, even in that day and age. But, she, too, died in a plane crash, two years after her husband, an English aristocrat, died at the front within weeks of her brother Joe.
Death haunted the Kennedy kids and it often pressed those into service before they were ready or able. With Joe jnr dead, Jack became the family standard-bearer.
His election as president fulfilled old Joe Kennedy’s dream, the ultimate revenge of an Irish- American Catholic whose family had first arrived in a Boston when there was systemic discrimination against Irish Catholics.
But it also cast young Ted Kennedy, just 30, into a run for a US Senate seat when his resume consisted mainly of being a Kennedy.
His opponent, Massachusetts attorney general Edward McCormack, ridiculed Kennedy’s inexperience, saying during a debate: “If his name were Edward Moore, with his qualifications – with your qualifications, Teddy – if it was Edward Moore, your candidacy would be a joke.”
Leave aside for the moment that McCormack himself was the nephew of the US house speaker John McCormack, the fact of the matter was Ted Kennedy was a Kennedy.
Jack Kennedy’s election as the first Catholic president and his subsequent assassination, followed by Bobby’s political career and assassination, ensured that being a Kennedy was in itself a qualification.
It was poignant and not a little tragic that Ted Kennedy fell ill last year at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, the same spot where his father suffered a stroke 48 years ago. It was there also that Ted Kennedy died.
They are creatures of habit, these Kennedys, and like tourists they cross the Sagamore Bridge and return to Cape Cod when the weather turns good. They have always returned to Hyannisport, in good times and in bad.
Teddy’s father was 73 when he had a stroke, three years younger than Teddy was when the brain cancer was diagnosed.
Old Joe Kennedy lived another eight years in a wheelchair and it drove him mad with frustration. He was in the wheelchair when he found out that someone had shot his Jack and he was in the wheelchair when he found out that someone had shot his Bobby.
Ted Kennedy remained fairly robust in the 15 months he outlived the cancer. He lived long enough to see all his kids and grandkids and long enough to see a man, a black man, who reminded him of his brothers, be elected president.
Vicki, his wife, said they had more than a few good dinners in Hyannisport, with all the kids and all the grandkids gathered around the table.
And, sick as he was, Teddy was pumping them with questions.
Kevin Cullen is a columnist for the Boston Globe