Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family Read Online Free PDF Page A

future lay in political power, and those who wielded it. He became one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s biggest fund-raisers, hoping that by helping Roosevelt gain the presidency, he might secure for himself a post of some power and prestige. Kennedy had his eye on the Secretary of the Treasury, but he was passed over twice for the position. He fumed privately while waiting for Roosevelt’s call.
    In 1934, that call finally came when Roosevelt asked Kennedy, despite great public and private opposition, to become the first chairman of the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Politicians and newspaper editors across the country argued that putting one of Wall Street’s most notorious manipulators in charge of reforming Wall Street was tantamount to having the fox guard the henhouse, but Roosevelt argued that it took a thief to catch a thief. It turns out that he was correct. By most estimations, Kennedy did an excellent job as the first head of the SEC. And he did it by systematically criminalizing many of the manipulations he had used to build his own fortune. When he resigned in September of the next year, the agency was up and running, having been called by Time magazine “the most ably administered New Deal agency in Washington.”

    Even by Kennedy standards, the 1930s were a frenetic decade for the clan. Joe flew between New York, Hyannis, Palm Beach, and Washington, DC. Rose learned to transfer her entire household—nine kids and a large staff—between three houses while also traveling tirelessly herself. At Hyannis, Rose found a balance between packed, kinetic family life and her need for solitude and reflection. She ordered a prefab cottage, complete with front porch and outfitted with a writing table, and stuck it on the beach. In her little shack, she could read, write, and get some peace away from the bustling household. After one cottage was washed away by a storm, a second was ordered. After the second was wrecked, Rose said, “I started going to Europe, and I didn’t need it.”
    She went to Europe at least seventeen times during the decade, often by herself; this included the trip that Joe gave her in the fall of 1934 for their twentieth anniversary, which tellingly she went on without him. At other times, though, she traveled in the company of the older children, who were learning to travel in the Kennedy fashion: often and lavishly.
    It wasn’t all shopping and beaches, though. In 1936 Rose and Kathleen (nicknamed “Kick” by the family) went to Russia, or “The Soviet,” as Rose referred to it. In Moscow, they visited Lenin’s tomb and the czars’ palace; they sampled Russian ballet and theater and toured its art museums. Joe Jr. had visited the previous year, and his descriptions had fired her curiosity.
    After FDR’s 1936 reelection, the president convinced Joe to tackle another administration role, this time as the head of the United States Maritime Commission. After performing the job ably, Joe felt he was in line for something more exalted. The call came late in 1937: Roosevelt appointed Joe as the United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James, the official title for the integral role of US ambassador to the United Kingdom. It was time, after almost twenty-five years of marriage, to move the whole family to London.

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    In July 1937, thirteen-year-old Patricia was rushed to St. ­Elizabeth’s Hospital in Boston for an emergency appendectomy. She was cared for by a nurse named Luella Hennessey; the Kennedys liked Hennessey so much, they asked her to care for Pat in Hyannis for the rest of the summer. There, Rose thought she fit in nicely: Aside from taking care of Pat, Luella was adaptable enough to pick up a tennis racket, go swimming with the kids, even act as crew in the family sailboat races. She stayed with the Kennedys until September, when she returned to her post in Boston.
    In an odd coincidence, Rose had her own attack of appendicitis while