The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [30]
No one considered Joe responsible for the children’s problems. Joe was living at a time when even the word “Father” was suffering what many considered a diminution into the words “Dad” or “Daddy,” terms that his own children used while, like most of their contemporaries, continuing to refer to Rose as “Mother.” In the twenties “Dad” was the butt of jokes and cartoons, the neutered “Pop” who had nothing more to offer his children than his wages. Poor Pop. He was not wanted in the nursery, and he was widely rumored to be inadequate in the bedroom.
“It has often been said that American husbands are the best providers and the poorest lovers in the world,” wrote Dr. Joseph Collins in 1923. “They frankly admit the first charge and tacitly the second.” The image of the father was such that in 1924 the New York Times ran an article about the almost stillborn Father’s Day and its official flower, the dandelion, chosen “because the more it is trampled on the better it grows.”
Many fathers wanted to get into the nursery and into the center of their children’s lives but feared that they would be emasculated. Some of them were willing even to help with housework if they could do so without being sissified. They sought a companionate relationship with their children, one in which, as Chester T. Crowell wrote in the American Mercury in October 1924, “once children are accepted as associates rather than duties, living with them becomes a lot of fun.”
Joe was radically different from the diminished, companionate fathers of his time. He had his own ideas about fatherhood, and in carrying them out he became the most important political father of twentieth-century America. Rose referred to him once as “the architect of our family,” and an architect he truly was as he set in place the master plan.
Joe had no knowledge of the nursery. He did not care much about fathering when his children were mere infants; he was preoccupied with his business pursuits. One winter day he was pulling two-year-old Joe Jr. on his sled while carrying on a conversation with Eddie Moore, a lifelong associate. The toddler fell off into the snow while his father continued walking, pulling the empty sled. As for his daughters, Joe loved them deeply, but he had no interest in raising them, whatever their ages. As he saw it, that was best left to his wife and to the nuns. If his daughters were properly protected, they would not struggle into womanhood but would largely assume it, taking on the natural and narrow virtues of their sex.
For his sons, however, once they reached a certain age, he was ready to lead them on the arduous journey into true manhood on which he had been thwarted. His sons would not be prissy inheritors. He would give them the wealth that the Brahmins assumed was synonymous with virtue, and he would push them up that great road. He would develop his sons as a happy meld of gentleman and athlete, democrat and aristocrat.
With his sons not only dressing like roughnecks after school but acting like ones, Joe saw that their rambunctious masculinity needed to be channeled into the proper venues. For the first time since Jack’s scarlet fever, Joe assumed dominance over his sons’ lives, a dominance that in a sense he never relinquished. His daughters could go to public and parochial schools, but his sons had to enter the elite Protestant social world where the progeny of their families entered. “The old man wanted them to mix with money,” recalled Tom Finneran, one of their classmates at Edward Devotion. “That’s why they went to private school.”
Joe sent the two boys to the exclusive Noble and Greenough School to match wits and fists with the likes of Storrows, Bundys, Littles, and Coolidges. Generations of