Club).
The club planned pranks, one of which was to spread a pile of manure on the school dance floor and have their pictures taken shovelling the muck. The headmaster got wind of the plan and was furious, threatening to expel the boys involved. Jack, the ringleader, was in the most serious trouble. Joe Sr was called to the school for a meeting to discuss Jack’s future. In the meantime, Jack wrote to Kick telling her all about the incident. Kick immediately sent Jack and Lem a congratulatory telegram, which was intercepted by the school staff:
DEAR PUBLIC ENEMIES ONE AND TWO ALL OUR PRAYERS ARE UNITED WITH YOU AND THE OTHER ELEVEN MUCKS. WHEN THE OLD MEN ARRIVE SORRY WE WONT BE THERE FOR THE BURIAL
Kick’s telegram made everything worse. Joe was not pleased. He wrote to her: ‘I know you want to do all you can for Jack,’ he began, but then told her that there was a genuine chance that he could be expelled from school: ‘I want to urge you to stop all this talk [in] letters and telegrams to him and LeMoyne, so that we can dismiss the whole matter.’ He told her that, by sending the telegram, she had added ‘fuel to the fire’.8
It was Kick’s fifteenth birthday, she was far from home and clearly her father was angry. She wrote back, secretly: ‘I wanted to write you privately about the letter you wrote me. (in case you have not told Mother).’ She apologized for her part in the fiasco and confessed that Jack was angry with her. ‘I hope everything is OK now and I really want to help Jack.’9
She was deeply upset by her rift with Jack, especially as it was her birthday. Her parents sent her perfume and money and she wrote to them that she had had a ‘very happy birthday although I missed everyone too much. It was the first birthday from home and its quite hard.’10 She kept up the pretence with her mother that all was fine, telling her she had had a birthday cake, and a birthday lunch with her roommates at Maillard’s in New York City; she and her friends also went to Radio City and watched Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel. She told her parents that her birthday present from her eldest brother Joe was a visit to the Convent: ‘he is driving up here today on way to New York so am looking forward to seeing him’.
She asked her mother to prepare ‘Palm Beach for my arrival around March 20th’. She also asked if her parents could send a film for the ‘Shrove days before Lent. They are the last two days we are allowed to have candy, dancing etc.’ She and her friends wanted David Copperfield. It would be the last fun time before the austerity of Lent.
Kick and Jack made up. After the Muckers fiasco, Jack began to take his work seriously, urged on by the promise of a year in England in the footsteps of his brother Joe, who was studying under Professor Laski at the London School of Economics. Jack graduated from Choate, voted by his class as ‘most likely to succeed’. Kick was to take time away from Noroton, and plans were under way for her to spend time in Europe as well. Rose was determined that Kick should go to France, to improve her competence in the language and to undergo the experience of a French Sacred Heart convent.
Perhaps Rose hoped that her headstrong daughter would experience a similar religious epiphany to the one she had had in Blumenthal, which had so shaped the course of her life. Rose decided on the Sacred Heart Convent in St Maux, north-east France. Kick and Jack would sail for England with their parents in September.
As the children grew older, they insisted on bringing their friends to the Cape. The house was a hive of activity, with sports and picnics during the day and dances and movies at night. Several friends expressed their surprise at the disciplined way that Rose ran the household. Every lunchtime the family would head to Taggart’s Pier for swimming and diving.11 On the way to the dining room, Rose would pin a newspaper article or a theme to discuss on to her bulletin board and encourage the children to debate the issue of the day over dinner. History, geography and religion were at the top of her agenda. She later thought this contributed greatly to the prowess Jack showed in his televised debates with Richard Nixon in 1960. All of her children turned out to be brilliant public speakers.12
Rose recounted in her memoirs that she could be strict, but that she always tried to temper this with a sense of humour: ‘People told jokes, made wisecracks, hurled friendly insults, and hooted and hollered at silly mistakes. They joshed and kidded and made faces and fooled around (within limits) and talked about things that popped into their minds: things that happened at school, news of friends, opinions, likes and dislikes, a certain amount of chatter and gossip: the stuff of life, well spiced … there was no lack of laughter or fun.’13
One of Kick’s friends said that being at the Kennedy dinners at Cape Cod reminded her of being in a classroom. Everyone was expected to have an opinion. Kick was as ‘vociferous and opinionated as her brothers’.14 Over the dinner table, each child was expected to recount their day’s activities, and report on whether they had lost or won.
One of Jack’s schoolfriends, Paul Chase, remembered how important it was for the Kennedy children to be winners: ‘Mr K. really did preach that winning was everything.’15 Whether it was card games, Monopoly or physical sports like tennis and sailing, winning first place was what mattered. If any of the Kennedy children lost, the reasons were carefully and methodically analysed.16 The children teased their father over his favourite aphorisms: ‘We don’t want any losers around here. In this family we want winners.’ ‘Don’t come in second or third – that doesn’t count – but win.’17 But they believed in his vision wholeheartedly.
In the summer of 1935 the Kennedy children came away from the sailing competition at the Hyannis Port Yacht Club with fourteen first prizes, thirteen seconds and thirteen thirds in seventy-six starts.18 Eunice remembered racing fourteen times a week when she was only twelve years old.19 Rose and Joe ensured that the children had proper coaching for swimming and for tennis.
Joe was king at Hyannis. He would sit in the bullpen, usually on the telephone to the White House or to a business associate, but always with an eye on the children. He would watch them out in their sailing boats or on the beach. One of Kick’s friends recalled: ‘He ruled the roost. And, oh, God, did they love him. But they were scared to death of him, too.’20
The children’s friends were surprised by their competitiveness. ‘Which of us is the best looking?’, ‘Who has the best sense of humour?’ All agreed that Kick was the nicest Kennedy.21 Jack was the most intellectual and witty, Joe the most handsome and athletic, and so it went on. As the years went by, brain-damaged Rosemary became more lost and left behind, until the moment came when Joe began to believe that her presence was harming the rest of the children.
Even the liveliest guests were overawed and subdued by the ebullience of the Kennedys. Often it was hard for outsiders even to get a word in edgeways. Large families are entities unto themselves. They create a shorthand, private language, a code of behaviour, in-jokes, nicknames, family anecdotes, which bind them together, but also isolate those not in the know or in the fold. Years later when Jackie Bouvier met the family for the first time at Hyannis Port, she described them as ‘like carbonated water’ where ‘other families might be flat’. She was struck by their collective energy, enthusiasm and ‘interest in life … it was so stimulating’.22
