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

visiting her parents in Boston the following February and was rushed to St. Elizabeth’s for her own emergency appendectomy. “Her doctor called me and said that she would not be operated on unless I was there!” Hennessey remembered. That evening, when Joe visited Rose in her room at St. Elizabeth’s, he asked Hennessey if she would accompany the Kennedys to London, to act as the family nurse and help with the children as they settled in over the first six weeks. She agreed, and would remain with the Kennedys not only for six weeks, nor just through their sojourn in England, but for years afterward.
    Sworn in as ambassador at the White House on February 18, 1938, Joe headed to England while Rose took two weeks to recuperate in Palm Beach before organizing the transport of the Kennedy troops. From Florida, she sent Hennessey a note. It read: Do you understand the art of packing?
    “I wondered why she did that,” Hennessey said. “But I certainly learned in London, when we went to the south of France, or went to Switzerland for winter sports; there would be forty-five and fifty trunks andboxes packed for eleven, twelve of us to move.” Rose confronted a logistical nightmare anytime she had to move the family en masse; her can-do temperament, along with a sizable household staff, made it possible.
    Joe’s media profile was at its zenith. By now a multimillionaire with a beautiful wife and nine photogenic children, and fresh from successful stints at both the SEC and US Maritime Commission, he was a press darling. Roosevelt, correctly sensing that Kennedy represented a potential rival should the president try for a third term in 1940, was all too happy to send him across the ocean. Roosevelt also took great delight in putting a plainspoken, even brusque, Irish Catholic into the role of ambassador to England, a spot previously reserved for Anglo Protestants. “Almost invariably they have been chosen for the Englishness of their background and manner,” reported the New York Times . Joe’s appointment was a move designed to create a stir, and it did. Newspapers and film crews covered his New York departure and his arrival in England.
    Rose’s role, as wife of the United States ambassador, was critical. Representing America at the Court of St. James would require tact, diplomacy, and impeccable manners. It would mean exquisite attention to detail in dress and comportment. It would require minute observance of obscure protocols and an almost archaic level of formality. And all of that under the watchful gaze of the papers and the newsreels. It was, in short, what Rose had been preparing for her entire life.
    In March of 1938, Rose crossed the ocean with Kick, Pat, Bobby, Jean, and Teddy; Luella Hennessey, governess Elizabeth Dunn, and all that luggage came, too. Expecting a media circus awaiting the family’s arrival, Rose had Eunice and Rosemary wait five weeks to make the trip in order to shield Rosemary from the media glare. Joe Jr. and Jack, both at Harvard, stayed behind for the time being, but they were to join the family that summer.

    The ambassador’s residence at 14 Prince’s Gate was a six-story, fifty-two-room mansion. Donated to the US government in 1920 by banker and philanthropist J. Pierpont Morgan, it was within walking distance of the embassy and just off of Hyde Park, where Joe went horseback ridingalmost every morning before work. It had its own elevator, which Bobby and Teddy used as their personal amusement-park ride until Rose put a stop to it. She redesigned the mansion to suit their needs. It would cost Joe a fortune to renovate the residence for a family of eleven; he was able to make peace with that more easily than with his office at the embassy. “I have a beautiful blue silk room and all I need to make it perfect as a Mother Hubbard dress and a wreath to make me Queen of the May,” he sneered in a letter to a friend. “If a fairy didn’t design this room, I never saw one in my