Kennedy was a natural teacher. Indeed, she was probably a better teacher than a mother. Not coddling the children, or being overly affectionate, teaching them to be strong and independent, was part of her code. The children lived by a strict routine. Fresh air and exercise were high on the list. They were encouraged to take part in sports, especially swimming and tennis, to eat the right sorts of food, to read the right sorts of books, to contribute to the right sorts of discussions. Rose kept a close eye on their diets. She was obsessed with their weight, particularly the girls’. Every Saturday the children were weighed, and Rose scrupulously made a note of the latest figures on the index cards that contained all of their medical information. At the age of just seven, Kick wrote to her mother, ‘I gained a pound and a half. Eunice gained some too. Rose is as fat as ever.’17
Joe Kennedy wanted his family to be sleek and lean. He did not want his children to look like fat Irish peasants. The children were perfectly turned out, usually all of them dressed in the same clothes, as if their only identity was as a Kennedy – matching middy blouses and skirts for the girls and identical sailor suits for the boys.18
Rose hired an orthodontist to straighten out the children’s teeth, giving them the famous ‘flashing Kennedy smile’. For five years the children hopped into their father’s Rolls-Royce to be driven down to New York to a ‘superdentist’ to have their braces tightened. Rose closely monitored the intake of candy (only one piece allowed per day after dinner); tooth-brushing took place after every meal. With the thirteen-year age spread in the family, the dentist visits covered a span of two decades.
Rose admitted that she had all the domestic help she required, and that her role in the household was more like that of an ‘executive’. She recalled twenty years of ‘rows of diapers hanging up to dry on the back-yard clotheslines’.19 During the winter months, the diapers would freeze on the line, and would have to be thawed on the steam radiators.
Rose would think nothing of spanking the children with a ruler or a wooden coat hanger. She would never hit them in anger, but she believed in smacking, especially as she had such boisterous children. As she said, the mere mention of a spanking was enough to moderate a child’s bad behaviour. In later years, her grandchildren retrieved all the coat hangers from the closet and threw them down the garbage chute, just in case. Rose thought this was hilarious. Spanking was a very Roman Catholic punishment – immediate, direct, not inflicted in anger, and with the lesson learnt everyone could move on. Rose’s second method of discipline was to lock naughty children in the cupboard: ‘Well, I put them in the closet, but … they weren’t scared of the dark. It would just get one or two of them out of the way for a while.’20
Rose’s lack of emotional nourishment left its scars on her children. Jack, who was a sensitive boy, remembered: ‘My mother never really held me or hugged me. Never! Never!’21 The only time she touched them was to spank them. Kick, like Jack, was uncomfortable with physical demonstrativeness, which was another legacy of Rose’s emotional sterility. Later in life, Kick sought out several maternal substitutes, most notably Nancy Astor, with whom she developed deeply affectionate relationships. Older women were drawn to her, sensing that she lacked that special mother’s love.
Rose left the hugging and kissing to the children’s nanny, a working-class Irishwoman called Katherine Conboy, known to the family as ‘Kico’. Kick and her sisters adored her, and they would spend hours in the kitchen chatting to her. She in return adored the Kennedy children. Rose was perfectly happy with this arrangement. She simply did not see it as her role to kiss and hug for fear of ‘(s)mother love’. Respect was her by-word. The children always called her ‘Mother’, and they feared and loved her in equal measure.
Thus the Kennedy children were raised as upper-class British children were, by the nanny, and emotionally distant from their parents. It made them tough and independent, but it also left psychological wounds. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why Kick and Jack understood and sympathized with their English aristocratic friends. Rose’s strategy was to encourage the eldest son and daughter to take on the role of nurturing and shaping the other children. Joe Jr took to this role of little father with aplomb. Jack later said, ‘I think if the Kennedy children amount to anything now, or ever amount to anything, it will be due more to Joe’s behavior and his constant example than to any other factor.’22
The surrogate-mother role was more difficult for Kick because of Rosemary. Kick had to assume the role of eldest sister and was encouraged to take responsibility for all of her sisters, but, although she loved them, she was not naturally suited to the role. She was too wild, too free-spirited. Eunice, just one year younger, was much more temperamentally suited to that role, and she felt especially responsible for Rosemary. All of the girls mothered Teddy, the baby of the family, who was born in 1932. ‘It was like having an army of mothers around me,’ he recalled.23
Kick worshipped her father. He was a forceful presence in the lives of the children, despite the long absences caused by his work. He approached his duties as a father with great seriousness, and he loved children, but only his own. When he was away from home, every Sunday the children would line up in order of age and speak to him on the telephone.24
When he returned from business trips, it was a moment of high excitement for the children. ‘He would sweep them into his arms and hug them, and grin at them, and talk to them, and perhaps carry them around,’ Rose recalled. As each child became able to talk he would ‘want that child in bed with him for a little while each morning. And the two of them would be there propped up on the pillows, with perhaps the child’s head cuddling on his shoulder, and he would talk or read a story or they would have conversations.’25 Joe struggled with Rosemary’s mental incapacitation. He wanted his children to be perfect Americans, and that was one of the reasons he especially doted on Kick, who was so lively and smart. She later called him a ‘powerhouse, a force of nature’.26
He believed in treating the small children as young adults, refused to talk down to them and was plain-speaking and blunt, though loving. He was very tactile with the children, unlike Rose. They knew, however, not to overstep the mark, and if they did, one ‘Daddy’s Look’ was all it took: ‘ice-cold steel blue, piercing right into and through you and stripped you to the soul’.27 But if the children were ever in trouble, Joe insisted always on hearing the truth: ‘tell me the truth. Tell me everything about it, the whole truth. Then I’ll do everything I can to help. But if you don’t give me the truth, I’m licked.’28
Joe had his own inimitable way of speaking, which the children long remembered, with amusing phrases and aphorisms that became part of family lore: ‘applesauce’ (bullshit) was not tolerated, nor would he accept ‘monkey business’. ‘He doesn’t have the brains of a donkey’ or ‘He doesn’t have enough brains to find his way out of a telephone booth’ were Daddy expressions. ‘All my ducks are swans,’ he would say of the children, adding that Kick was ‘especially special’.29 ‘No crying in this house’ was another favourite, along with ‘You’d better believe it’, ‘Things don’t happen, they are made to happen’ and ‘I don’t want any sour pusses around here.’30 In later years, the children, now adults, would have cushions made with his aphorisms embroidered on them.31
Joe
