The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [21]
In all of this Roosevelt demonstrated the incipient awareness of a great politician who understood that the essence of democratic politics is empathy. A leader must first understand what the other person wants. Only then can he act. Joe, for his part, saw life as a brutal Darwinian struggle in which men of will and power imposed themselves on the mediocre, the passive, and the slow-witted.
The men went back to work, and Joe left his position after scarcely a month. By any measure but his own, Joe was disgraced, shuttled aside into a lesser post at the new Squantum yard, handling all the company stores. For another man, this defeat would have been a painful moment of self-awareness in which he would have taken stock of his own excesses and mistakes. Joe, however, apparently walked away from this defeat incapable of or unwilling to admit to his culpability, having learned little but that even in the business world he operated in a democracy where the weak majority could gain ascendancy over the strong few.
Joe could not turn to Rose to talk of this failure. Rose was only a woman, and as The Catholic Encyclopedia expressed it, “The female sex is in some respects inferior to the male sex, both as regards body and soul.” Women were seen as incapable of a man’s high seriousness, and for Joe to turn to his wife for counsel would have been both unmanly and unseemly.
Rose had no inkling of the emotional price her husband was paying. To her, Joe was a heroic figure who worked terribly long hours for the war effort and suffered from an ulcer for his relentless endeavors. He was nervous and high-strung, and Rose worried about his health. Rose did not think that the debacle in the shipyards would have been reason enough for a nervous ulcer; to think such thoughts would have broken the covenant between them. Joe, for his part, could not and would not see that Rose was probably often depressed, a word and an emotion that were simply not allowed. She was married to a prominent and honored Catholic gentleman. She was a formidable woman in Catholic society, president of the Ace of Clubs, a leading Catholic women’s club, with her own social life and prestige. Her children were looked after by nurses and maids. She had a life that most women would have thought close to perfection.
Despite his new position, Joe’s draft board had the audacity to try to call him up. He pointed out how indispensable he was to the war effort. When the board thought otherwise, Joe’s boss went all the way to Washington to see that his young associate did not have to serve.
It was a good time to be an ambitious young man in America away from the stench of the trenches. While one million Americans served in the armed forces, the economy was roaring ahead, and a man could make it in a way he never could before. Joe had only a small office, but he was the turnstile through which all the goods had to pass, and he made the most of it. He had a fine salary, bonuses, the right to run the canteen for his own profit, important new contacts, and the knowledge that Bethlehem Steel was a stock that a smart man had better get into.
To Joe, all the prissy rules and moral guidelines of Harvard did not apply to him and his life. In July 1919, he joined Hayden, Stone and Company as a stockbroker. His employer, Galen Stone, made much of his money, not by the tedious route of collecting customer commissions but by employing insider information to drive a stock up or down. The technique, while then technically legal, preyed on the avarice and ignorance of the average stock buyer, an approach that fit perfectly with Joe’s view of human beings. He became as adept at this game as his employer. “Tommy, it’s so easy to make money in the market we’d better get in before they pass a law against it,” he told one friend, Tom Campbell. On one stock alone, Pond Coal Company, in which Stone was chairman