Eunice

The Kennedy Who Changed the World

Eileen McNamara

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781451642278
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this "revelation" of a biography ( USA TODAY ), a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist examines the life and times of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, arguing she left behind the Kennedy family's most profound political legacy. While Joe Kennedy was grooming his sons for the White House and the Senate, his Stanford-educated daughter, Eunice, was hijacking her father's fortune and her brothers' political power to engineer one of the great civil rights movements of our time on behalf of millions of children and adults with intellectual disabilities. Her compassion was born of rage: at the medical establishment that had no answers for her sister Rosemary, at her revered but dismissive father, whose vision for his family did not extend beyond his sons, and at a government that failed to deliver on America's promise of equality. Now, in this "fascinating" (the Today show), "nuanced" ( The Boston Globe ) biography, "ace reporter and artful storyteller" (Pulitzer Prize–winning author Megan Marshall) Eileen McNamara finally brings Eunice Kennedy Shriver out from her brothers' shadow. Granted access to never-before-seen private papers, including the scrapbooks Eunice kept as a schoolgirl in prewar London, McNamara paints an extraordinary portrait of a woman both ahead of her time and out of step with it: the visionary founder of Special Olympics, a devout Catholic in a secular age, and an officious, cigar-smoking, indefatigable woman whose impact on American society was longer lasting than that of any of the Kennedy men.

PART ONE

IN HER PARENTS’ IMAGE

ONE

THE MIDDLE CHILD

If my new granddaughter is like her mother, she’s all right for me.

—JOHN “HONEY FITZ” FITZGERALD, JULY 10, 1921

ROSE FITZGERALD KENNEDY went to a dance the night before she gave birth to her fifth child in six years, on Sunday, July 10, 1921.

Her husband, the young financier Joseph P. Kennedy, had rented a summer cottage at Nantasket Beach, near the Victorian mansion owned by Rose’s parents, Mary Josephine “Josie” and John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the colorful ex-congressman and former mayor of Boston. On Saturday night, Rose enjoyed the orchestra at the Hotel Pemberton, the forty-year-old Queen Anne confection of turrets and gables at the tip of a sandy peninsula just south of Boston on Massachusetts Bay.

The fashionable hotel on Windmill Point, with its wide wraparound porches, echoed the style both of her childhood home in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester and the large white-trimmed wood-frame house in Brookline Joe had purchased for the then-extravagant price of $16,000 for his growing family the year before.

The dance in the elaborate ballroom and the fireworks that followed from the pier were a respite for the thirty-one-year-old expectant mother already managing a household of two schoolboys, two toddlers, and assorted cooks, maids, governesses, and a husband who was frequently away on business.

Joe had made an effort to be in town for the birth, declining an invitation to play golf in the White Mountains over the July 4th weekend. “Nothing I’d rather do than spend the three-day holiday on the 4th at Bretton Woods but on account of Mrs. Kennedy’s condition, I do not feel I would want to be away from home at this time,” he had written to Chris Dunphy, a friend who was then manager of the Mount Pleasant Hotel in the New Hampshire resort town. Rose insisted she would have understood had he gone: “The idea was [that childbirth] was something the woman had to do, and the less bother she gave to anybody else including her husband, the better it was, and the easier it was,” Rose told Robert Coughlin, the ghostwriter of her memoirs, in 1974.

Labor pains had roused her from sleep before dawn that Sunday. After the twenty-mile drive from the summer house to Brookline, she arrived home at about six in the morning. The Kennedys’ third daughter was born three hours later, in Rose’s private bedroom in the twelve room house at the corner of Naples and Abbottsford Roads. “Mrs. Kennedy is an ardent follower of the Roosevelt doctrines, and she is dead set against race suicide,” the Boston Daily Globe quipped in its account of the birth. “She is one of a family of six children, but Mrs. Kennedy is out to beat her mother’s record.”

Rose, who would eventually give birth to nine children, named this baby Eunice after her fragile youngest sister, living that summer in a sanitarium for patients with tuberculosis at Saranac Lake in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Eunice Fitzgerald had contracted the infectious respiratory disease while nursing veterans of World War I at a Red Cross station on Boston Common when she was nineteen. She would die of the disease at twenty-three, two years after her namesake’s birth.

The baby would inherit her aunt’s delicate constitution as well as her name. Eunice Mary Kennedy, the first of her children that Rose did not nurse, was colicky and slow to gain weight, an early sign of the medical problems that would plague her all her life. “Unfortunately when Eunice was born, she didn’t get along very well because the bottle was not very well organized, and I couldn’t nurse her at that time because I had breast abscess[es],” Rose recalled, conceding that she had never nursed the older children with much regularity either. It was “a little confining to be home every three hours to nurse the baby . . . [A] baby is usually fed at 10 or 10:30 [p.m.]. You’re at the theater, so what do you do?”

The theater played an important part in the Kennedys’ lives in 1921. Two years before, Joe had joined the Boston brokerage house of Hayden, Stone & Co. Among his clients were small and midsized film production and distribution companies. Negotiations to refinance or consolidate one overleveraged firm kept him shuttling between Boston and New York in the weeks before Eunice was born. During this period, he was also investing his own money in movie houses throughout New England and spending time in Boston’s theater district, cultivating producers he hoped would recognize the potential he saw in the motion picture industry.

Joe had begun his business career far less glamorously, as a state bank examiner, after graduating from Harvard College in 1912. A year spent poring over the books of banks across eastern Massachusetts proved valuable in 1913 when the small East Boston bank founded by his father, Patrick J. Kennedy, and other Irish Americans was threatened with a takeover by a bigger downtown bank. P. J., as he was known throughout the neighborhood he had served as saloon keeper, state lawmaker, and Democratic Party ward boss, rewarded Joe with the presidency of the Columbia Trust Company when his son succeeded in keeping the bank in neighborhood hands.

Now, just a few years later, Joe’s growing wealth from stock deals and burgeoning investments in the movie industry opened a new world to the Kennedys, one more exciting than Wall Street trades or the work he had done during World War I as assistant general manager of Bethlehem Steel’s Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts.

The Kennedys’ lives were changing in ways that reflected the social and political upheaval of the decade into which Eunice was born. The 1920s were not yet roaring in July 1921, but they soon would be, and fast. The nation’s wealth would double during the decade as Americans moved from farms to well-paying jobs in the cities. Disposable income, in turn, paid for admission to amusement parks, dance halls, and movie palaces, and for the radios, phonographs, and vacuum cleaners in popular demand because two-thirds of American households now had electricity, up from only 16 percent a decade earlier.

Prosperity was not universally distributed. Two in five American families survived on subsistence wages, forgoing electric washing machines for basic necessities or buying big-ticket items on credit. But by the middle of the decade, Joe Kennedy had made his first million. He swapped his Model T Ford for a Rolls-Royce, and Rose exchanged her ready-to-wear wardrobe for the haute couture she displayed on their frequent forays to Boston’s theater district.

“It was all a completely new and different environment, gay, exciting, and quite different and quite breathtaking to me, who was a convent-bred girl. I had heard that chorus girls were gay, but evil, and, worst of all, husband snatchers. But nothing shocking happened,” Rose said. “One characteristic of my life with Joe was that we trusted one another implicitly. If he had occasion to go out with the theatrical people, he told me where he was going and he went. There was never any deceit on his part, and there was never any doubt in my mind about his motives.”

Whether she was being discreet or disingenuous, Rose was certainly being less than candid. Her husband’s serial philandering had prompted her to move home with her parents for several weeks in 1920 when she was pregnant with Kathleen. Since divorce was not an option for Catholics, her father sent Rose back to the man she had chosen—against his wish that she not marry the first man to propose—and with whom she would have five more children and live companionably, but largely independently, for the rest of their lives. She omitted their separation from her memoirs fifty years later, well schooled by then in the role of selective memory in the making of Kennedy mythology.

American women were at the center of cultural change in the 1920s. Flappers with short hair and shorter skirts had a freer attitude toward cigarettes, sex, and the bootlegged alcohol available in the speakeasies that sprang up during Prohibition. The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote, had been ratified the year before Eunice was born. The year of her birth, Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, the precursor of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which would liberate women—including those with whom Joe Kennedy tarried—to have sex without fear of pregnancy.

Perhaps to compensate for how difficult it was to keep track of her husband, Rose kept meticulous track of her children’s development. Her note-card system recorded their height and weight and each child’s encounter with mumps, measles, or whooping cough. Eunice was worryingly thin, but Rose thought her precocious, noting in her diary that at eighteen months she was “walking alone and talking a lot. Best little talker of all. Also likes to take a bow and say, ‘Little Partner, dance with me.’ ”

Reading her entries decades later, Rose thought “those jottings foretold something about the girl she became. Wonderfully well coordinated and with quick reflexes, one of the best athletes in our active family, a ‘talker’ with a special way of expressing herself in a pithy and witty manner that made her one of the livelier participants in our family conversations. But she was also a good listener, and marvelously generous in her interest in others, especially her brothers and sisters, but including waifs, strays, and anybody who needed her.”

In her siblings, Eunice had a houseful of potential partners for dancing or conversation. When she was born, Joe Jr. was six; Jack was four; Rose Marie, whom the family called Rosemary or Rosie, was almost three; and Kathleen was a year and a half. Pat, Bobby, Jean, and Teddy were yet to come, born in 1924, 1925, 1928, and 1932, respectively.

Her detailed notes notwithstanding, Rose was neither a warm nor doting maternal presence. “I don’t think she was quite the same role as most mothers,” Eunice recalled. “Mother wasn’t a nursemaid mother. We had a governess . . . I don’t remember [Rose] sweeping the floor, quite frankly, or serving at table. I also don’t remember her cooking. Her role was a little different.” Still, a diary entry on January 7, 1923, hinted at how exhausting Rose found motherhood, even with a household staff to shoulder the routine tasks of diaper laundering and food preparation: “Took care of children. Miss Brooks, the governess, helped. Kathleen still has bronchitis and Joe sick in bed. Great life.”

Rose was the enforcer of rules, the cultivator of manners, and the incubator of good taste and religious faith. She was not averse to using a ruler or a coat hanger to discipline a child or imposing a Spartan or fat-laden diet if a child came up too thin or too heavy at her weekly weigh-ins. Rose made St. Aidan’s Church, a few blocks from home, a regular stop on neighborhood strolls with her children to teach them “that church isn’t just something for Sundays and special times on the calendar but should be part of daily life.”

No one absorbed those lessons more dutifully than Eunice, whom Rose described as “rather pale and of a nervous, highly conscientious demeanor.” She craved her mother’s attention but rarely got it because of Rose’s extended absences. The first five months of 1923, when Eunice was not yet two, were typical of the long separations that marked the Kennedy marriage, ensuring that the children would seldom see both parents under the same roof at the same time. “Joe Sr. left on 5 o’clock for Palm Beach with Eddie Moore and a couple of other friends who joined them in New York,” according to a January 14, 1923, entry in Rose’s diary. He would work from Florida through the winter, enjoying the sun and the golf, returning in time for Rose to set off in April on her own six-week sojourn with her sister Mary Agnes to California.

To keep her household functioning smoothly during her frequent trips, Rose relied on Mary and Eddie Moore, an older, childless couple who served as surrogate parents for the Kennedy children. Eddie, for whom Ted would be named, had been the personal assistant to Rose’s father when Honey Fitz was mayor of Boston. He now performed that role, and much more, for Joe. “Eddie Moore became his closest friend, someone he trusted implicitly in every way and in all circumstances,” recalled Rose, who asked Mary to be Eunice’s godmother because she had become “an equally great friend, confidante, and unfailing support for me.”

The Moores made the Kennedys’ lives work, especially after Joe led a group of investors in the purchase of the Film Booking Office of America, in 1926, and another deal, a year later, with Radio Corporation of America (RCA) that brought sound to what had been a silent picture studio. The acquisitions required him to spend more time in New York and Hollywood, leading to the decision in 1927 to move his family to Riverdale, a bucolic haven in the far reaches of the Bronx. The move, a practical response to his business ventures, was personal as well. Boston was a hidebound, parochial town, its Brahmin elites unreconciled to the growing influence of the Irish, even those, like Kennedy, who had graduated from Harvard and built a fortune that would soon eclipse their own. Joe’s money was as good as anyone’s on Wall Street, but in Boston, his bank statement could not gain him admission to the right clubs, to the inner circles of Protestant power and respectability.

Boston “is no place to bring up Irish Catholic children,” Joe told a reporter, citing his conviction that his offspring would be denied their rightful places in society because of the city’s intractable anti-Catholic and anti-Irish bigotry. Robert Francis was the last of the Kennedy children to be born at home in Brookline, in 1925. Two years later, Joe hired a private railway car to take Rose and their seven children, ranging in age from twelve-year-old Joe Jr. to two-year-old Bobby, to a rented three-story, twenty-room mansion on Independence Avenue at 252nd Street. Eunice spent the trip doubled over with stomach pains—whether from nerves or illness, the record does not make clear.

In Brookline, Eunice had attended the Edward Devotion neighborhood public school, but in September 1927, all of the Kennedys’ school-age children—Joe Jr., Jack, Rosemary, Kathleen, and Eunice—were enrolled in the private Riverdale Country School, with its crisp uniforms, sweeping lawns, manicured playing fields, and stately academic buildings. The oldest of the girls, nine-year-old Rosemary, entered second grade with her seven-year-old sister, Kathleen, whom the family called Kick. Rosemary had repeated kindergarten and first grade in Brookline, where her teachers told her parents what they already knew: Rosemary was “slow” and her development “delayed.”

Rosemary’s struggles in school were not the first indication that the prettiest of the Kennedy girls was also the slowest. “Physically she was very healthy, and there were no signs I recognized that anything might be wrong,” Rose recalled of her birth. “She crawled, stood, took her first steps, said her first words late, she had problems managing a baby spoon and porringer—and yet, as everyone knows, babies always have their own individual rates of growth and acquiring skills, so I was patient, concerned, beginning to be a little apprehensive, but not worried, partly, I suppose, because of wishful thinking.”

By the time Rosemary reached school age, there was no denying her developmental delays. Her teachers in Brookline told Joe and Rose that Rosemary had scored lower than normal on the intelligence tests, just coming into use in the 1920s. How low is not clear from available records, but the news would have been devastating for any parent.

Rose “was puzzled by what all this could mean. I had never heard of a retarded child, and I did not know where to send her to school or how to cope with the situation.” She consulted her family doctor, the head of the Psychology Department at Harvard, and a Catholic psychologist who ran a school in Washington. “Each of them told me she was retarded, but what to do about her, where to send her, how to help her seemed to be an unanswered question,” Rose said.

There were no good choices, in Rose’s view. If she had Rosemary tutored at home, her daughter would lack playmates. If she sent her to a school for retarded children, Rosemary might never overcome her deficits. In lieu of an alternative plan, Rose hoped that, with persistence and the extra help their financial resources could provide, Rosemary might be able to hold her own in a regular classroom.

Those hopes collapsed after a year at Riverdale. Rosemary could not write in a straight line. She would sometimes write from right to left. She could not steer a sled or row a boat. She could not keep up on the playing fields, despite the hours Rose spent hitting tennis balls with her to develop her coordination.

Kennedy family biographers have speculated about the cause and extent of Rosemary’s childhood disabilities, but available documents provide no definitive answers. Her letters to her family and examples of her schoolwork are open to researchers at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, but dozens of documents in the archives that could shed light on her condition—much of her parents’ correspondence with her doctors, teachers, and tutors, for instance—remain closed or heavily redacted at the insistence of the family.

Conjecture has filled the vacuum. Could a nurse’s decision to delay delivery until the doctor arrived have deprived Rosemary of oxygen in utero? Could the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 have affected Rose’s pregnancy? Could eighteen-month-old Rosemary’s exposure to Jack when he nearly died of highly contagious scarlet fever in 1920 have compromised her intellectual de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• Prologue
• Part One: In Her Parents’ Image
• Part Two: In Her Brothers’ Shadows
• Part Three: In Her Own Right
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright