If the visitors begrudged the dismissive treatment, they also frequently remarked on Joseph Kennedy’s devotion to his children’s welfare and his commitment to parenting. More than most fathers of his generation, who tended to be remote figures in their households, Kennedy was deeply involved in child-rearing, especially after his return from Hollywood.8 In contrast to the more emotionally distant Rose, Joe was tactile and warm—Jean, number eight in the birth order, later referred to him as “cozy.” He almost never talked down to the kids, and was quick to forgive when they did wrong, quick to accept and move on when they failed to live up to his expectations. All the same, he didn’t spoil them. Even when he was away on business trips, the children sensed they were on his mind as he penned innumerable letters, encouraging them, guiding them, offering them tips on self-improvement, but seldom trying to force on them a particular career choice or life philosophy. Or at least not fully—because his own heroes were not artists or poets or philosophers but men of action, Kennedy took it for granted that his children would likewise gravitate in that direction. Above all, he preached that Kennedys always stood together, come what may—the family against the world. The kids, for their part, adored him and talked of him constantly. When he arrived home, they crowded around the door to greet him. When they had problems, they usually consulted him before their mother.9

“He was never abusive, never wounding toward any of his children, but he had a way of letting us know exactly what he expected of us,” wrote Edward (known to all as Teddy and later Ted), the youngest, in his affecting 2009 memoir True Compass. In one conversation, the father used phrasing “so concise and vivid” that his son could still recall the exact words sixty-five years later: “You can have a serious life or a nonserious life, Teddy. I’ll still love you whichever choice you make. But if you decide to have a nonserious life, I won’t have much time for you. You make up your own mind. There are too many children here who are doing things that are interesting for me to do much with you.” Never, Ted emphasized, was his father’s love for him in question: “We knew that we could always come home, that we could make mistakes, get defeated, but when all was said and done, we would be respected and appreciated at home.”10

Jack grasped that Joe Junior’s primogeniture gave him a stature within the brood that he himself could never attain. Yet he chafed against it just the same. He would have understood, if not entirely accepted with regard to his own case, psychologist Alfred Adler’s comment on the drama of birth order: “The mood of the second-born is comparable to the envy of the dispossessed with the prevailing feeling of having been slighted. His goal may be placed so high that he will suffer from it for the rest of his life, and his inner harmony be destroyed in consequence. This was well expressed by a little boy of four, who cried out, weeping, ‘I am so unhappy because I can never be as old as my brother.’ ” Henry James, whose age gap with his older brother, William, was similar to Jack’s vis-à-vis Joe, wrote that William “had gained such an advantage of me in his sixteen months’ experience of the world before mine began that I never for all the time of childhood and youth in the least caught up with him or overtook him.”11

Alone among the siblings, Jack tried to challenge Young Joe’s primacy. Though weaker and smaller, he was canny enough to constitute a threat in his brother’s eyes, even if he seldom got the upper hand in their physical encounters. There were fierce fights on the living room floor that left the younger kids cowering in terror or running upstairs. (Bobby would be especially distraught, crying, his hands over his ears.) Invariably, Jack ended up pinned and humiliated. They would go toe-to-toe on the athletic field, where Joe’s greater size and strength usually overcame Jack’s fortitude and physical coordination. Frequently outgunned, Jack would utilize the classic weapons of the weak: cunning and audacity. Years later, Rose recalled a typical incident in Hyannis Port in which Jack, having finished his dessert, swiped Joe’s from his plate and took off running, stuffing it in his mouth with his brother in hot pursuit, before he was finally forced to jump into the water to avoid being caught and pummeled, knowing what awaited him when he got out.12

When asked decades afterwards if anything had really troubled him in childhood, Jack could think of only one thing: his big brother. “He had a pugnacious personality,” he said of Joe. “Later on it smoothed out but it was a problem in my boyhood.”13

Far from working to ease the rivalry between his sons, Joe Senior stoked it. “Remember that Jack is practicing at the piano each day an hour and studying from one-half to three-quarters of an hour on his books so that he is really spending more time than you are,” he wrote the older boy in July 1926.14 When the two of them fought, he refused to intercede, viewing the competition, even when physical, as instilling toughness they would need in spades as they made their way in the world.