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Here was poignant testimony to the drama of birth order. The Kennedys took this typical sibling struggle and ratcheted it up to create much of the essential psychological drama of the family. Joe and Rose made their eldest son a little father with authority over his brothers and sisters. They were not so foolish as ever to say that Joe Jr. was their favored son, but they did everything to show it. At the dinner table, when Joe quizzed his children on current events or history, he went always first to Joe Jr., who as often as not replied in words that could have been his father’s. Under the table the two boys kicked each other, careful not to be detected by their mother. Their father took the competition to higher and higher levels. “Remember that Jack is practicing at the piano each day an hour and studying from one-half to three-quarters of an hour on his books so that he is really spending more time than you,” Joe wrote Joe Jr. in July 1926.

When Rose looked back on these years, she said that she had been so preoccupied with Rosemary’s difficulties that she felt guilty that she had neglected Jack. Rose recalled: “When his sister was born after him, it was such a shock, and I was frustrated and confused as to what I should do with her or where I could send her or where I could get advice about her, that I did spend a lot of time going to different places or having her tutored or having her physically examined or mentally examined, and I thought he might have felt neglected.” She did not worry that she may have neglected her other daughters, Kathleen and Eunice, born in July 1921, who presumably did not need the mothering that a son needed.

Little Jack lay in his bed in a dressing gown reading books, each illness and each condition taking more days away from the rugged fields of play and the struggle for manhood. The specter of homosexuality—a moral disease, a betrayal of masculinity—was omnipresent. What could be more horrifying than if sickly little Jack ended up as one of them, as a “man of broad hips and mincing gait, who vocalizes like a lady and articulates like a chatterbox, who likes to sew and knit, to ornament his clothing and decorate his face”? Dr. Joseph Collins wrote in his best-selling The Doctor Looks at Life and Love that “they are the most to be pitied of all of nature’s misfits…. They are constantly between the devil and the deep sea; tormented by desires that will neither be subdued nor sublimated and unable to obtain even vicarious appeasement.”

Rose was herself a carrier of the vice of femininity and did not want to make her sickly child into a mommy’s boy. Rose inspected Joe Jr. and Jack before they left to walk to Edward Devotion Elementary School, where they were as neat and proper as the outfits they wore. After school they changed into clothes that made them look, in Rose’s phrase, “like roughnecks.” Once clad in these coarse garments, they were like unfettered young beasts, so wild that at least one of the neighbors’ boys, Robert Bunshaft, was not allowed to play with them. They went traipsing down to the stores at Coolidge Corner. When they saw a sign outside a restaurant, NO DOGS ALLOWED IN THIS RESTAURANT, they scribbled in the word HOT before DOGS, then headed off after admiring their witticism. Two days later they returned to the shopping area and stole false mustaches from a store. On other occasions they walked into the public library in Brookline and disrupted the quiet, as if it were their right to carouse through the stacks, yelping and joking, while their nanny sat reading a book. Then they were out on the streets of adventure again, where Joe Jr. led his brother through the alleys and the back streets, a boy’s jungle, once getting caught up on a neighbor’s roof. “The boys have a new song about the Bed Bugs and the Cooties,” Rose noted in her diary in February 1923. “Also a club where they initiate new members by sticking pins into them.”

For the sedate neighbors, it was bizarre, inexplicable, and unseemly.