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By Root 1583 0

Smathers recalled. “And when we went in to see him, he had these two guns that he pulled out of the drawer, and laid them out on the desk so you could see them. And one of them was looking at Jack and one of them was looking at me. I was thinking, ‘You better say the right thing if you want to get out of here in one piece.’ And then he made us go with him out to a great big tent where it was the custom that any mother who had had a baby, they would bring them there and they’d line up, and they had a lot of the priests and bishops and Catholic hierarchy there. And Batista made Jack and me stand up there with him and they’d give us a baby and we’d pass the baby down the line. And everybody would kiss the baby. And about thirty-five babies, forty babies go by. And Jack would look at me like, ‘How many more do you see out there?’ So we sat there one whole afternoon kissing babies. That was fun. If you look back on it. Anyway, we had a lot of fun in Cuba.”

Jack was forever off on his pursuits of pleasure, but he always returned to live within the bounds of family. Joe and Rose had created in their children a family that was like a temple into which no outsider could ever enter and those standing outside looking in could not begin to understand the rituals that took place within its precincts. No wonder, then, that Jack’s sisters were no more interested in marrying young than he was. In the end, they did not so much marry into other families as bring their husbands in as members of the Kennedy clan. The first to marry was thirty-one-year-old Eunice. Her husband, thirty-eight-year-old R. Sargent “Sarge” Shriver, was already at work for Joe at the Merchandise Mart. Sarge came from a distinguished, though now threadbare, Maryland Catholic family. He had gone to Yale University, where he was a baseball star, and served as a navy officer in World War II. He was a man of deep religious and philosophical concerns who tried to live a good dutiful life as a steward of God’s earth. His depth was not always apparent, for he could be a man of tiresome garrulousness with a salesman’s upbeat pitch, who exhausted listeners with his sheer enthusiasm. Sarge liked fine things, silk suits, antique furniture, and first-class restaurants. He was devoted to Eunice, fortunately enough, for over their nearly seven-year courtship she at times treated him more like a hapless retainer than a worthy suitor.

Sarge and Eunice were profoundly religious, and their wedding took place in May 1953 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral with Cardinal Francis J. Spell-man officiating, along with three bishops, four monsignors, and nine priests. At the elegant reception Eunice told the guests, “I found a man who is as much like my father as possible.” This was not true, even if Eunice believed it, but in her mind it was the highest honor she could give a man. She adored her father and was perpetually bewildered when others held him in lesser esteem than she did. Whatever doubts Eunice may have had about her new husband, her marriage to Sarge would prove to be the most successful and deepest of any of the Kennedy marriages.

Pat was not so fortunate. She had always been fascinated by Hollywood. In California she met Peter Lawford, a British-born movie star to whom she became engaged after an acquaintance of scarcely two months. Joe investigated the men whom his daughters dated even casually, and it is one of the unanswerable questions why he did not condemn this marriage before it ever took place. Joe was close enough to Hoover that the FBI director surely could have told Peter’s potential father-in-law of his dossier, which included a 1946 investigation involving “White Slave activities in Los Angeles” and four years later, a call girl’s statement that Peter was “a frequent trick.” Peter was not Catholic, and so the wedding took place in April 1954 at the Church of St. Thomas More in New York City, before about three hundred guests.

Jean married a man more like her father than any of his sons. In Stephen “Steve” Smith’s heritage flowed a rich mixture of politics and business.