The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [28]
Rose wanted to be a perfect young mother, for perfection was the only passing grade. The experts warned her that her children’s failures were her failures. “Lack of precision in the mother is responsible for most of the failures we see,” wrote Mrs. Burton Chance in The Care of the Child. Experts tried to turn the nursery into a pristine conservatory where children were carefully nurtured and monitored like exotic flowers. If these flowers did not grow tall and splendid, the fault lay in the gardener, and a terrible fault it was, a shame visible to all.
Rose had a strapping son in Joe Jr., an advertisement for her virtues as a mother. Alas, she had a sickly weak child in Jack. In her namesake Rosemary, she slowly realized, she had a child who was mentally retarded—a moron, in the scientific nomenclature of the time. It was a devastating realization to both her and Joe, and it forever changed the family.
Rose had wanted to be the mother of mothers. By the merciless standards of science, she had probably created, through slovenliness, excess, or oversight, these two children who demonstrated her failures. Whatever guilt she may have felt was covered by an elaborate brocade of optimism. She had a relentlessly upbeat spirit and belief. She pushed her half-sick children out to play, denied her own pain and doubt, and smiled, if sometimes through clenched teeth.
When Joe Jr. and Jack and their siblings needed a touch of unbridled love and a hug, they turned to their stout Irish nanny, Kikoo Convoy, a woman untutored in modern child-rearing techniques. As much as the children adored Kikoo, as they grew older they could see that in their world such unregulated emotion was a servant’s indulgence.
Rose often dressed her two sons in identical sailor suits or other clothes that marked them as if they were twins. They needed no such costuming to mark them as brothers in blood and destiny. Joe Jr. had been an enormous baby, anointed not simply by his parents but by life itself. Teachers told Rose and Joe how brilliant their firstborn was and showed them Joe Jr.’s IQ tests that confirmed his high intelligence, so much so that he was chosen for a study of gifted children. Rose could not help but think that there was a direct linkage between intelligence and virtue, and it seemed unthinkable that her mischievous second son could be as smart, or even smarter, than his brother.
“I didn’t think you could have two in one family,” she said later. His father had much the same opinion as his mother. “He told me once that he didn’t think Jack would get very far and he indicated he wasn’t very bright,” recalled Henry Luce, the publishing magnate, of a conversation a few years later.
Jack was younger, smaller, weaker, and lesser in everything but spirit. He was second-born and bore all the markings of his diminished rank. “The mood of the second-born is comparable to the envy of the dispossessed with the prevailing feeling of having been slighted,” wrote Alfred Adler, the psychologist. “His goal may be placed so high that he will suffer from it for the rest of his life, and his inner harmony be destroyed in consequence. This was well expressed by a little boy of four, who cried out weeping, ‘I am so unhappy because I can never be as old as my brother.’ “
The jealous competitiveness was a Darwinian struggle in which Jack never yielded but rarely won. Jack would admit decades later that Joe Jr. had been “rather heavy on me on occasions. Physically we used to have some fights that, of course, he always won…. I was somewhat brighter than he was, but I would say he was physically ahead of me.” It was a telling mark of their competitiveness that Jack would only grudgingly admit that Joe Jr., two years his senior, “was physically ahead.” Jack had few memories of his childhood, but one of them was a bicycle race between the two boys. “We ran a race against each other around the block and hit head-on,” Jack recalled. “You know, we started in the opposite direction, came round this way, and I really tore this