The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [44]
When Life featured the Kennedys and their wealth, Rose rebuked Henry Luce, the publisher, for needlessly pointing kidnappers toward her children. Teddy was brought up to mimic the intrepid lives of his big brothers as they moved out fearlessly into the world. Yet he was also taught to be suspicious of strangers, and what was the world he saw beyond family but an endless sea of strangers?
Jack treated his past like a prosecutor’s brief, remembering every rebuke, every unfairness, but Teddy had a different kind of memory, selecting what was sweet and good from the remnants of the past. Teddy did not remember the mother who was gone for weeks at a time, but the mother who was there.
“Probably three times a week she’d read us a Peter Rabbit or a Thornton Burgess story,” Teddy recalled. “Jean and I would go up to her room, and she’d read that. At the end of that I’d go down and go to bed, and in a few minutes she’d come down and kiss me goodnight.”
With his impeccable business instincts, Joe had gotten out of the stock market before black Tuesday in October 1929. While some of his less prescient neighbors were relegated to living in mansions without electricity and pawning their family valuables, Joe did not suffer during the Great Depression. He profited from it as one of the leading bears, selling the market short from a desk at Halle and Stieglitz on Madison Avenue and Fifty-second Street.
Despite the millions of dollars that Joe continued to earn, he feared that the malaise was so severe that it might drive the four million unemployed and the two million vagrants into the streets, fomenting a revolution or anarchy that would take away all that he had earned. He was the darkest of Cassandras, apprehensive that he might end up as penniless as the forlorn men peddling apples on the street corners. “I am not ashamed to record that in those days I felt and said I would be willing to part with half of what I had if I could be sure of keeping, under law and order, the other half,” Joe reflected years later. “Then it seemed that I should be able to hold nothing for the protection of my family.”
Joe decided to back New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency in 1932. He did so largely out of what he considered self-interest, not out of concern for the commonweal. He did not care much that Roosevelt might have the compassion, ideas, and intelligence to stem the tide of hollow-eyed, desperate wanderers filling the migrant camps of California or to keep good farmers from being driven bankrupt off their family land. Joe cared that Roosevelt would help him maintain for his family what was his. “I wanted him [Roosevelt] in the White House for my own security and the security of our kids, and I was ready to do anything to help elect him.”
Joe was honest in his proud avowal of expediency, refusing to cover it with the tinsel of idealism. Self-interest is a thin parchment on which to swear fidelity to a cause or a person. Almost from the day he signed on to the campaign he began to extract his pound of benefit. “I doubt that Joe Kennedy felt like tugging his forelock to anybody on God’s earth, and I don’t think he ever did,” said Frank Waldrop, the late editor of the Washington Times Herald and a friend of Joe. “But I also don’t think he was under any illusions as to what Roosevelt was up to when he was dealing with him.”
Joe fancied himself a man of ideas, but he had seen at Harvard that no matter how people pretended otherwise, money was always part of the admission price. He not only contributed $50,000 himself to the Roosevelt campaign but solicited funds from other wealthy men. Joe borrowed a private plane from a speculator, William Danforth, and crisscrossed New England raising money. Joe knew how to fill the most coddled heart with fear, and he took