The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [26]
Joe was no retail bootlegger with his stash of liquor, no matter what some of his classmates might have thought. He got his liquor through his father’s associate, charging his class $302 for twenty-six and a half gallons of liquor that he did not drink. Some of these Harvard graduates had ancestors who had arrived on the Mayflower, and Joe had the liquor delivered in a boat that landed in Plymouth where the Pilgrims had disembarked.
Joe caroused with his Harvard mates, dressed in a sparkling white shirt, a bow tie, and the inevitable crimson sweater. For Joe, this was a uniform for a summer’s weekend. For his old friends Bob Fisher and Tom Campbell, this was practically their daily wardrobe. Fisher had given up his career in merchandising to become the Harvard football coach. Campbell had joined his old football teammate as Harvard’s freshman coach and also served as assistant graduate treasurer of the Harvard Athletic Association.
Only his other old friend, Bob Potter, had the kind of life that Joe could fully admire. He was vice president of the National Shawmut Bank, lived in a townhouse in Back Bay, and lunched at the Somerset Club, within whose portals Joe was not welcome. Some of these fellow graduates were cutting a fancy picture, but they were coming to old Joe now to hit him up for loans at Columbia Trust. Even Potter, two years later, asked to borrow thirty-five hundred dollars. “It’s all right to give it to him if you can get collateral accepted in the savings department.” Joe wrote the bank officer with a dismissive tone. “Otherwise, just tell him that you have not got the money.”
Joe, for his part, had long since duly noted the hypocrisy of the Brahmin class. Were the good gentlemen who drank bootleg whiskey cut of a finer moral cloth than Joe, who sold it to them? With all their fine talk of law and honor, these Harvard men drank the liquor brought to them by a new class of criminals. He could stand and talk with these self-satisfied burghers, listening to their tales of business, banking, children, golf, and tennis. He was an amusing raconteur, enjoying the casual camaraderie. He appeared no different from his classmates, though he traveled on a stage wider than any that they traversed and dealt with men like Tommy McGinty and Owen Madden as well as with cardinals and magnates. He was making his way into the shadowy centers of power in America, places his Harvard friends and professors did not know and would never understand.
4
“Two Young ‘Micks’ Who Need Discipline”
Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children alone.” Jack may have been frail in body, but there was a daring quality to a five-year-old boy who would so confront his mother. It was April 1923, and Jack was upset that Rose was going off to California with her sister for an extended trip of four or five weeks, leaving him and his three siblings behind. It was a risky business to speak out, for if he displeased his mother, she might bring out her infamous wooden coat hanger. To Rose, a coat hanger was not a biblical “rod of correction” with which she beat goodness and wisdom into her offspring. Hers was a more scientific endeavor. The coat hanger was her little tuning fork that she judiciously applied until her children were singing the song she wanted them to sing. She never lost control, never struck them out of sheer anger, but hit them with what she considered the proper, healthy dosage of pain.
This time Rose did not bring out the coat hanger but she did note her son’s sarcastic outburst in her diary. The next day, as the children were playing on the porch, she said good-bye and drove down the elm-lined street. Realizing that she had forgotten something, she turned back and was relieved to see