The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [166]
Teddy seemed always to be getting in one sort of minor trouble or another, and it was always someone else’s fault. “This morning I served mass with a boy that said he knew how,” Teddy wrote his parents. “The boy kicked the bell over and stood and knelt at the wrong times. After mass we were practically chased out of the church, but even after I told the priest I didn’t even know the fellow, he mumbled … ‘that he would rather have no one serve than me.’ This was a definite blow to my pride.”
Another quality of Teddy’s was revealed in his letters to his parents. He didn’t try to impress but laid out his life as it was. Unlike many teenagers, including Jack, he didn’t have a need for a private life apart from his parents. He had been shuttled back and forth between so many schools that he could have been a complete emotional outcast, but that had not happened.
Teddy might not have Jack’s intelligence or Bobby’s intensity. Unlike Joe Jr., he did not boast to his peers of his intention to be president. Ambition was not his secret mistress. He left that to his brothers. But with all the pressures in the Kennedy family, it was no mean accomplishment to have the same dreams as other young men. He found joy in a dance at the celebrated Totem Pole, a large dance hall outside Boston. He took pleasure in buying a boat and paying for it with money he had earned, and delight in sitting around with his friends or family. Of all the siblings, he had the greatest prospect of a life full of what most people call happiness.
While Teddy struggled through Milton with few thoughts of the burden of the name that he bore, his father was attempting in a subtle, even brilliant way to institutionalize the Kennedy place in American life. During the war, Joe had gotten involved in real estate, becoming a major player in New York City and elsewhere. In 1945, he made what was probably the most successful business deal of his life. Without even one visit, he purchased the gigantic Merchandise Mart in Chicago, then second only to the Pentagon as the biggest building in the world, for $13 million. The building had been built in 1930 for $35 million, an indication in itself that he had struck a good deal. Beyond that, he knew that the government tenants of the four-million-square-foot building would be leaving after the war. Then he would be able to lease space at top commercial rates, generating several million dollars of profit a year.
Joe had no intention of having his money siphoned off to Washington in the unholy name of taxes. He considered laws, whether they dealt with the stock market, taxes, or political contributions, the instruments on which he played the tune that he wanted to play. And thus in 1946, he turned the Merchandise Mart into a device to help perpetuate his family and their legacy.
Joe gave one-quarter of the Merchandise Mart to a new family foundation named after his fallen son, the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation. This money would grow tax-free, and Joe would be able to spread his bounty around to whatever charity, or semi-charity, he saw fit, stamping every gift with the Kennedy imprimatur. He turned the other 75 percent into a partnership that paid lower taxes than a corporation, keeping one-quarter of the company for himself and Rose and putting the rest in trust for his children. In 1946, Joe divested himself of Somerset Importers, his liquor holding.
Joe set out to follow in the exalted footsteps of the old Boston elite, turning himself into a philanthropist. The original mandate for the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation was full of a nineteenth-century paternalism with its purpose of “relief, shelter, support, education, protection and maintenance of the indigent, sick or infirm; to prevent pauperism and to promote by all lawful means social and sanitary reforms, habits of thrift,