‘wherever Kathleen went, sunshine followed’.13 She was rarely moody or temperamental, always sunny and full of jokes, always quick to laugh.
In May, Kick sent her mother another Spiritual Bouquet, for Mother’s Day with an affectionate card: ‘To the sweetest, youngest mother in the wide world … may this bouquet give you many graces. I love you.’14
At Whitsun, there was a raffle for ‘gifts and fruits of the Holy Ghost’, and Kick remarked pithily, ‘I got Wisdom which I need for these final exams and Patience, which I sure need too.’15 She was preparing herself for a one-day spiritual retreat ‘which I know you will not want me to miss’. But she longed to go home for the summer holidays. Her asthma was bad and she was continuing to have injections, and she told Rose that her doctor had ordered chest X-rays. ‘I go to Mass every morning,’ she added dutifully.16
In June 1934, as a reward for his involvement in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign for the presidency, Joe had been offered the position of Chairman of the newly formed Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). That summer, he befriended the prestigious New York Times political journalist Arthur Krock, who would become one of his most powerful supporters and allies. Joe was setting his sights on the White House, and he leased Marwood, a huge, faux-French mansion in Washington, as his political base. The family would continue to live in Bronxville. At his new base, Joe held spectacular parties and dinners, shipping in lobster from Maine and oysters and clams from Cape Cod, washed down with plenty of the best Scotch.17
Kick was relieved and delighted when she finally left the Convent for the long summer vacation at Hyannis: the coldness and the austerity would be temporarily forgotten with the promise of the sunshine of the Cape and reunion with the rest of the clan. Weeks and weeks of sailing, tennis, touch football, dancing and fun lay ahead. Kick was especially looking forward to spending time with Jack, who was bringing Lem for the vacation.
Kick and Lem stuck together, worried about Jack, but also determined to enjoy the summer as best they could. Lem found the relationship between the Kennedy parents extremely odd, and saw at first hand how Joe dominated Rose. He was also struck by Rose’s obsession with good manners and social form, table manners, punctuality, appearance: ‘Don’t wear white socks with dress suit. Wear dark shoes with blue or gray suit, not brown shoes.’ She forbade the children to address people with ‘hi’. Nobody could leave the dining table until Rose had left.18
Jack’s persistent and myriad illnesses were one of the reasons why he lived for the moment, and this was one explanation for why he loved sex and women. For Kick, it was another odd mixed message. She was a convent girl, expected to behave well at all times, to obey her mother’s commands and her insistence on etiquette and social form. Conversely, her brothers, to whom she was so close, were beginning to lead active sex lives. One friend reported that Joe Sr left carefully opened pornographic magazine centrefolds on Jack’s bed. ‘I think it’s Dad’s idea of a joke’ was Jack’s response.19
While Joe was encouraging his sons to sow their wild oats, Rose continued to impress upon her daughters the importance of a religious life. In notes she made entitled ‘Advantages of Catholic Education’, she wrote about the benefits of a convent:
If she is in a convent school, she is taught by women who have devoted their lives to the spiritual welfare of children. They themselves lead unselfish, exemplary lives, devoted to loving and worshipping of God. They give the girls the Catholic point of view about why they are in this world and their obligations to God, to themselves and their neighbor, and inspire them with the love of God … They teach the girls to be gentle, unselfish and charming in their manner and behavior, and it seems to me that I can tell a convent girl in any part of the world.20
‘Gentle, unselfish and charming’ with a devotion to God and the Catholic Church: that was Rose’s mantra for her girls. After a summer of sunshine, dancing and boys, Kick returned to Noroton: ‘Here I am back in this _____ I had better not say,’ she wrote to her mother. ‘Its lovely here now but its awful to be back.’21
7
She thinks you are quite the grandest fellow that ever lived and your letters furnish her most of her laughs in the Convent.
Joseph P. Kennedy to John F. Kennedy
Kick embraced her academic work at Noroton. She was an able scholar. Her school report for Christmas 1934 suggests that she was near the top of the class. Pass mark for examinations was 75 per cent and she attained high marks in all of her subjects, especially in Christian Doctrine (91 per cent) and History (90 per cent).1 She wrote to her mother to enquire about her school report: ‘I hope it wasn’t too bad.’2 She told Rose that she was studying hard, but longing for Christmas at Palm Beach. There was nowhere to shop at Noroton and she badly needed ‘a bath-robe, bathing suit, underwear, shoes etc’.3
She told Rose that she had received her ‘aspirantship to the Angels’ and that four of her friends had got their ‘Child of Mary’ medals in a ‘beautiful ceremony’. Unlike her mother, Kick had not achieved membership of that exalted and exclusive sodality. She also wrote to ‘Daddy Dearest’, thanking him for a trip to New York to see a show. She was taking sewing classes and otherwise cramming for exams: ‘I am sitting in the Study Hall waiting for my dear brother, Jack, to show up. I only hope he does.’4
Kick remained close to Jack. He knew that she was unhappy at the Convent and spent as much time as he could visiting and writing her amusing letters. Her relationship with Jack was based on jokes and banter. But she admitted to her father how much she adored and admired him. ‘She really thinks you are a great fellow,’ he told Jack. ‘She has a love and devotion to you that you should be very proud to have deserved. It probably does not become apparent to you, but it does to both Mother and me. She thinks you are quite the grandest fellow that ever lived and your letters furnish her most of her laughs in the Convent.’5
That February, Jack had got into serious trouble at Choate and was almost expelled. Kick had become involved in the story, incurring, for once, the wrath of her father. Jack had long clashed with his teacher and housemaster J. J. Maher. Maher disliked Jack, and believed that he was a bad influence on Lem, who slavishly followed every move he made and endorsed his every whim. Maher recommended that Jack and Lem be kept apart.6
The headmaster, George St John, had a derogatory term for boys who refused to follow the Choate line: they were called ‘Muckers’ (a thinly veiled insult for Irish labourers). Jack and his friends decided to form a renegade society rebelling against the school’s values and ethics: it was to be called ‘The Muckers Club’, to, in Jack’s own words, ‘put over festivities in our own little way and to buck the system more effectively’.7 There were thirteen members, and each member proudly
