An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 Read Online Free PDF Page B

seven-dollar-a-week maid who cooked, cleaned, laundered, and served meals was also considered appropriate to their lifestyle.
    The following summer their first child was born at Nantasket Beach in Hull, Massachusetts, where Joe rented a house next to his in-laws. Two doctors, a trained nurse, and a housemaid attended the birth of the nearly ten-pound boy. Though speculation was rife that the child would be named after his maternal grandfather, John Fitzgerald, Joe insisted that his firstborn son be christened Joseph Patrick Jr. Despite Honey Fitz’s disappointment at not having his first grandson named after him, he expected the boy to have an extraordinary future: “He
is
going to be President of the United States,” the ex-mayor told a reporter, “his mother and father have already decided that he is going to Harvard, where he will play on the football and baseball teams and incidentally take all the scholastic honors. Then he’s going to be a captain of industry until it’s time for him to be President for two or three terms. Further than that has not been decided. He may act as mayor of Boston and governor of Massachusetts for a while on his way to the presidential chair.” Fitzgerald’s tongue-in-cheek description was the true word said in jest: ambition and unlimited confidence were central features of the Fitzgerald and Kennedy outlook.
    Less than two years later, the birth of Rose and Joe’s second child was greeted with less fanfare. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a healthy boy named after his irrepressible grandfather, came into the world on the afternoon of May 29, 1917. Born in an upstairs bedroom in the Beals Street home with the same contingent of doctors and helpers as attended Joe Jr.’s birth, Jack, as the new baby was called, received his first notice in the press from a proud grandfather “wearing a pleased smile.” Against the backdrop of an America that had entered the First World War, in which so many young men seemed certain to die, predictions about Jack’s future were left unspoken.
    THE SAME DAY Jack was born, his father was elected to the board of the Massachusetts Electric Company, making him at twenty-eight one of the youngest trustees of a major corporation in America. It was the start of Joe’s meteoric climb in the business world, which, paradoxically, the war would serve. World War I, which millions of Americans saw as an idealistic crusade to end national conflicts and preserve democracy, elicited little enthusiasm from Joe. The idea of sacrificing his life or that of any of his generation seemed absurd. He was too cynical about human nature and Europe’s traditional strife to believe that anything particularly good could come out of the fighting. Though this put him at odds with most of his Harvard friends, many of whom volunteered for military service, Joe saw nothing to be gained personally or nationally by enlisting. The war, he said, was a senseless slaughter that would ruin victor and vanquished alike. Looking down at Joe Jr. in his crib after hearing the news that tens of thousands of British troops had died in the unsuccessful 1916 Somme offensive, Joe told Rose, “This is the only happiness that lasts.”
    Joe’s response to the First World War set a pattern that would repeat itself in other international crises faced by the United States. Whereas he was more often than not brilliantly insightful about domestic affairs, particularly the country’s economic prospects, Joe consistently misjudged external developments. He understood world problems not on moral or political grounds but rather on how he felt they might inhibit his entrepreneurial ventures and, worse, cut short his life or, later, that of his sons. These personal fears would make him a lifelong isolationist.
    Joe’s rapid accumulation of wealth began with his departure from the bank and appointment as assistant general manager of Bethlehem Steel’s Fore River shipbuilding plant in Quincy, Massachusetts. Though