The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [167]
Joe did not use the foundation merely as a cynical device to foster goodwill for his family. If he had wanted to do only that, he would surely have begun by handing out grants during Jack’s primary campaign. Instead, he waited to announce the first major grant until two months later, in August 1946. Jack was there to hand out a $600,000 check to the Franciscan Sisters of Mary to construct a convalescent home for children of the poor named after Joe Jr.
Joe heard applause for his largess, but wherever he looked he saw outstretched palms. Some were desperate, heartfelt pleas, others the most cynical of gambits. There was a letter about an impoverished blind and deaf brother and sister. An Alabama woman was desperate for a place to live. A bishop in India wanted money to build a leper asylum. The priest at the Most Holy Redeemer Church in East Boston, the old family parish, asked for an ad in the commemorative program book for the church renovation, no more than forty dollars. Joe was discovering that in his attempt to memorialize his beloved son, he was saying no a dozen times or more for every yes, and to those he turned down, he hardly appeared the great man of endless largess.
Joe used this engine of beneficence to lift the Kennedys high above Catholic society to a place where saints and angels trod. The Kennedys were the most celebrated Catholic family in America, and Joe and his minions made sure that message was shouted to all within hearing. Whenever the Kennedys gave a gift, there was sure to be a picture of Jack, Bobby, or Ted, or perhaps all three, handing a check to a beaming priest. And every time Joe gave a major gift he insisted that the children’s home or the hospital wing be named after his martyred son. Life is made of mixed motives, and although Joe demanded his full quota of publicity, he gave his money with care and precision, attempting to create not only goodwill but also good.
In 1956, when the Kennedys’ gifts to Catholic charities in the archdiocese had reached $2,609,000, Archbishop Richard Cushing devoted an entire section of the weekly Pilot to celebrating the family’s exemplary Christian charity in a spread approved by Joe. On one page was a portrait of Joe Jr. in his naval officer’s uniform, with his hands outstretched above a list of all the gifts, the picture similar to one often seen of Christ. “They [the gifts] are made possible by an extraordinary man of God, a great American and his charming wife and children,” the bishop wrote in an article reprinted in the Congressional Record. Cushing did not wish his less generous parishioners to miss the point that Joe was buying his way into God’s good graces. “When each charity, from faithful hearts, carries with it the seal of Christ’s Church, who can begin to estimate its heavenly reward?”
In most aspects of his life Joe was proudly, passionately cynical, yet he understood that his wealth, at least part of it, could be an engine of social goodness. “I have always thought that people who for some reason or another are not willing to risk giving away money while they are alive lose one of the greatest joys of their whole life,” Joe wrote Cushing in February 1956. “If one has been fortunate enough, with God’s help, to amass a fortune, one comes to a sense of realization that God must have meant him to give so that he could make it possible, in a measure, for his noble workers, like yourself, to carry on His charity.”
In the spring of 1948, Joe traveled to Europe for only his second trip since leaving the Court of St. James’s. In Paris, he stayed at the Hotel George V, where he talked to Bill Cunningham, a reporter for the Boston Herald. The man talking this day was not the Joseph P. Kennedy that history remembers, a man great only in his cynicism, a malevolent, grasping patriarch who pushed his sons mercilessly onto the stage of history. This was a man who had at least one noble idea, an idea that in some measure had cost one of his sons’ lives and cast his second son, with his