Child
All my ducks are swans … but Kick was especially special.
Joseph Kennedy
Kick was born, like her brother Jack and sister Rosemary, in the twin bed nearest the window in the upstairs master bedroom at 83 Beals Street in Brookline. From the start, Kathleen was a special baby. One of nine children, she would take on the status of eldest daughter, as a result of Rosemary’s special needs which made her forever a child.
Rose doted on her baby, but on the day that she was born, Jack, just two and a half, developed a serious case of scarlet fever and was hospitalized. In those days, as Rose recalled, it was a ‘dreaded disease, fairly often fatal, quite crippling in aftereffects’.1 Joe proved himself to be an exemplary father, praying for his son and spending hours in the Boston City Hospital. He had ‘never experienced any serious sickness in the family previous to this case of Jack’s’ and he had ‘little realized what an effect such a happening could possibly have’ on him.2
Jack of course did recover, and became particularly close to Kick. He returned home just before his third birthday, and he was shown his new baby sister. On the medical index cards that Rose kept for all of the children, she wrote that Jack seemed ‘very happy’ to see his sister.3 Physically Kick resembled him the most, with thick golden-brown hair and blue-grey eyes. She would not grow up to be conventionally beautiful. She had her mother’s strong jawline and short neck along with a somewhat square face that was unlike Rosemary’s (which was heart-shaped), but she was a striking girl with lovely ivory skin. Kick’s beauty was all within, and she would grow up to have the greatest sexual charisma of all the girls. Men would be utterly captivated by her.
She was a fearless toddler, always wanting to keep up with her two elder brothers in sports and physical activities. Rose noted in her journal that at the age of two and a half she went out in the snow by herself in her little sleigh.4 She was already exhibiting signs of the independent spirit that would define her life. In a diary fragment, Rose wrote that her three-year-old daughter was ‘a beautiful and enchanting child’, with the soft, high colouring and beautiful skin of her Kennedy grandmother: ‘Although we delighted in her, I don’t think we could have spoiled her if we had tried.’5
Rose Kennedy has sometimes been presented as a somewhat cold and uncaring mother. Nothing could be further from the truth. She was a strict disciplinarian (one had to be with nine lively children), but her journals show a different picture to the one that is sometimes perceived. She had a keen sense of humour, and she clearly took great pride and delight in her brood. Like many a Catholic mother, she especially adored her boys. She noted down all the amusing things that Joe and Jack did: ‘Joe Jr. and Jack have a new song about the Bed Bugs and the Cooties. Also a club where they initiate new members by sticking pins into them.’6 Another entry recorded: ‘Boys went to store and saw “No dogs allowed in this Restaurant” and they put in front of it “Hot”.’7
Kick was also naturally funny. When she was a toddler, her mother tried to discourage her from sucking her thumb in the night by binding it with a plaster. Rose noticed the next morning that it had been removed and when she asked where it was Kick replied innocently, ‘A little mouse took it.’8 Her first surviving letter was written to Santa Claus when she was six: ‘Dear Santa Claus i want a doll and a doll carriage tea set and paper doll little book and little blck board your little friend Kathleen.’9 Throughout her life, she adored writing letters, always scribbling at high speed, with frequent slips of the pen, regular spelling mistakes and occasional bad grammar (as far as possible, I reproduce her exact words in all quotations, only correcting where there is ambiguity of sense).
With so many children in the house, Christmas was a special time. Rose recalled that it was always ‘the greatest event in our house’.10 The children all helped to select the Christmas tree, ‘as big as our living room would allow’. Rose remembered them choosing presents carefully for one another, ‘a story-book with large colorful pictures’ for Jack, or a ‘wind-up toy’ or ‘for the baby of the moment, a rattle, or teething ring, or jingle bells’. Then the children would excitedly wrap them and hide everything away in secret places until Christmas Day.
Rose would tell them the Christmas Nativity story and the children would sing ‘Away in a Manger’, then on Christmas morning they would look to see what Santa had brought. The house looked like a Fifth Avenue toy-shop.11 She would also tell them the story about how her father had started the idea of public Christmas trees for those people who couldn’t afford to buy their own. Honey put up a Christmas tree in the middle of Boston Common, ‘and the idea spread, until thousands and thousands of cities and towns and villages all over the country have public Christmas trees every year’.12
Rose claimed that she was particularly close to her first four children. ‘I spent more time with them. I knew their every thought and each personality fascinated me,’ she declared in her memoirs.13 In an entry in her journal for 1923, she seems less enamoured: ‘Took care of children. Miss Brooks, the governess, helped. Kathleen still has bronchitis and Joe sick in bed. Great Life.’14
Rose, having made her decision to stick by Joe, was more content than she had been before, and she had all the trappings of wealth to reconcile her to the realities of her marriage. She took solace in her money and status. She was back, but it was to be on her own terms.
Joe had almost made his first million by the time Kick arrived. A few weeks after she was born, the Kennedy family moved into a large, newly built Colonial-revival house, at 131 Naples Road, which had all mod cons, including a washing machine and ice-box. Rose brought her cherished grand piano and her Sir Thomas Lipton crockery embellished with the Irish shamrock.
She had servants and a chauffeur. All the children had their own bedrooms, and so did she and so did her husband. This was an important symbol of Rose and Joe’s increasingly separate lives. They also began vacationing apart, sometimes for months at a time. When they went to New York City, they always stayed at separate hotels.
The house had a wraparound porch, a key to Rose’s management of her ever-increasing brood: ‘the front porch is one of the greatest arrangements ever imagined for the benefit of mother and child’. She divided the porch into sections with folding gates, so that the children could play together but also be safe, and she could keep a close eye on them.15 The children were entertained by the ‘full panorama of neighborhood life … cars passing by, people walking along (many of them acquaintances who waved), the letter carrier, the milkman with his wire basket loaded full as he came to our house and empty as he left, the policeman passing by on his patrol, the grocery boy, tradesmen, visitors, and friends of all degrees and kinds – everybody with a smile and cheerful greeting for the children’.16
Kick’s first school was the Edward Devotion School, a five-minute walk from her family home. Joe, Jack, Rosemary and Kick all attended the school, though Rosemary was kept back from first grade and stayed in a class with younger
