II

In one essay that year, Jack pondered how a Christian God could allow evil in the world, and how true justice could be achieved when people were born into such widely varying circumstances. Does God in fact “render to everyone his just due,” Jack asked, given the vast disparities in the human condition?

A boy is born in a rich family, brought up in [a] clean environment with an excellent education and good companions, inherits a fool-proof business from his father, is married and then eventually dies a just and honest man. Take the other extreme. A boy is born in the slums, of a poor family, has evil companions, no education, becomes a loafer, as that is all there is to do, turns into a drunken bum, and dies, worthless. Was it because of the [rich] boys abylity that he landed in the lap of luxery, or was it the poor boys fault that he was born in squalor? The answer will often come back “The poor boy will get his reward in the life hereafter if he is good.” While that is a dubious prospect to many of us, yet [there is] something in it. But how much better chance has [the] boy born with a silver spoon in his mouth of being good than the boy who from birth is surrounded by rottenness and filth. This even to the most religious of us can hardly seem a “square deal.” Thus we see that justice is not always received from “The Most Just” so how can we poor mortals ever hope to attain it.

The young Kennedy, himself a son of privilege, was professing here that he saw little reason why the less fortunate should put much stock in the traditional Christian promise of a heavenly reward for a life well lived. Maybe such a reward would indeed be forthcoming, he allowed, but inequalities of condition and opportunity made the task of living a morally upright life much more daunting for those born into poverty and despair. In sum, injustice in the world remained a problem for which the Bible offered few answers.13

It was a core philosophical position, staked out at sixteen, in the midst of the Great Depression, from which the grown-up Jack Kennedy—congressman, senator, president—would never waver.

Kay Halle, a wealthy socialite friend of Joe Senior’s, got a sense of Jack’s precocity when, accompanied by the father, she visited him in a hospital room where he was laid up with one malady or another. It was her first encounter with him, and it made an impression. “Jack was lying in bed, very pale, which highlighted the freckles across his nose. He was so surrounded by books I could hardly see him. I was very impressed, because at that point this very young child was reading The World Crisis, by Winston Churchill.” Halle did not indicate whether Jack had all six volumes of this epic mega-history of World War I in the hospital room that day, and one wonders, too, what he made of Churchill’s interpretation of the war, so different from his father’s. Whereas the elder Kennedy still clung to his view that the Great War had been a colossal waste, sacrificing millions of young men for no good reason, Churchill, though critical of many aspects of British and Allied strategy, extolled leaders and fighting men who set duty and sacrifice before self-interest, who were driven by something bigger than themselves, and whose cause was entirely just: “Every man a volunteer, inspired not only by love of country but by a widespread conviction that human freedom was challenged by military and Imperial tyranny.”14

Author Barbara Leaming suggests that Jack’s reading of The World Crisis initiated his lifelong fascination with and admiration for Churchill (later in adolescence he read and loved the Englishman’s massive million-word biography of Marlborough, the great military commander, statesman, and Churchill ancestor) and also spurred a deep and lasting interest in the question of how wars begin—and how to prevent them.15 This seems right, and there can be no doubt that, given his growing interest in international affairs, Jack in this period followed current global politics as well—the climb to power in 1933, during his second year at Choate, of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party in depression-ravaged Germany; the deepening crisis of confidence in France and Britain; and the growing tensions in East Asia as a rising Japan flexed its muscles.

With respect to domestic affairs, on the other hand, including the widespread dislocation and deprivation caused by the Great Depression, one doesn’t see the same level of engagement from young Jack—notwithstanding his probing fifth-form paper on injustice. To a considerable extent, the cloistered Choate existence kept the students isolated from the outside world. Then again, from his daily New York Times Jack would have been aware of the devastating effects of the economic downturn on his fellow Americans. Given his superior recall, he might even have known some specifics: that between 1929 and 1933, the gross national product declined by half; that 100,000 businesses in that period shut their doors; that corporate profits fell from $10 billion to $1 billion; that by the time of the presidential election of 1932, a quarter of the nation’s workforce was unemployed, while millions more worked only part-time; and that there was no national safety net: no unemployment compensation, no welfare system, no social security.

On home visits, too, Jack would have observed up close his father’s deepening gloom over the state of the nation. This was something new, for over the previous dozen years Joe Kennedy had shown scant sustained concern about political developments—he’d been too busy making money and producing movies. Even the historic candidacy of fellow Catholic Alfred E. Smith, the Democrats’ choice for president in 1928, had failed to excite him. Although still a Democrat by party affiliation (if more from inheritance than conviction), Kennedy had profited handsomely from the “Coolidge prosperity” of mid-decade, and he had felt strongly that Herbert Hoover stood a better chance than Al Smith of keeping the good times going. (He may also have been embarrassed by the informality of Smith’s campaign style, adhering in core respects to the stereotype of the crude Irish pols of Joe’s Boston youth.)16

The stock market crash and subsequent Depression changed him. Though his vast fortune remained intact and indeed grew, thanks to his expertly timed withdrawal from the stock market prior to the crash and his adept short selling afterwards (in 1935 his wealth would be estimated at $180 million, or $3.6 billion today), he now saw the future in bleak, self-centered terms, fearing a radical upheaval that might bring down the social and economic order and scuttle everything he had built for his family. His political philosophy, such as it was, remained inchoate and cynical—basically, acquiring and maintaining power were all that really mattered—but he intuited that whereas in the twenties business had been supreme, the thirties would be the decade of government, with the reformers running the show, and that he needed to shift his attention accordingly. He saw the limits of his long-held belief that money brought power; real power, he now saw, rested in politics.17

Kennedy hitched his hopes to one man, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the governor of New York and Democratic candidate for president in 1932. The history between the two men reportedly went back to World War I, when, as manager of the Fore River shipyard, Kennedy negotiated testily with Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, over the fate of two Argentine dreadnoughts completed before the war but returned to the Fore River yard for premature repairs. (Kennedy, so the story goes, refused to deliver the vessels until payment was received; Roosevelt objected and, when Kennedy stood firm, dispatched Navy tugs to tow away the ships.)18 Now, a decade and a half later, Kennedy, having seen up close the flaws in the economic system that had made him rich, willed himself to believe that Roosevelt, more than the ineffectual Hoover, represented capitalism’s best hope against revolution from below. And there was cold opportunism, too: Kennedy speculated that FDR would win and that through him he might himself find an entrée into politics. Roosevelt, for his part, saw in Kennedy not only a means of building up his presidential war chest, but a rare and formidable ally in the world of finance.19

“Roosevelt was a man of action,” Kennedy told a journalist later. “He had the capacity to get things done….Long before the campaign, long before his name was even seriously considered, I went out to work for him. I think I was the first man with more than $12 in the bank who openly supported him. I did this because I had seen him in action. I knew what he could do and how he did it, and I felt that after a long period of inactivity we needed a leader who would lead.” To another reporter he said, “I wanted [Roosevelt] in the White House for my own security and for the security of our kids, and I was ready to do anything to elect him.”20

They were a fascinating pair, so similar in some ways, so contrasting in others. Both were intelligent and egotistical men, skilled in the art of concealing their true motives behind guileless masks. Both were impatient with intellectual debate over abstract ideas and theories. (At Harvard, where they were eight years apart, they had been content to scrape by in their classes and to prioritize the social dimensions of collegiate life.) Both were hearty and outgoing, adept at attracting talented and dedicated subordinates, yet were not known for maintaining deep friendships—or being true to their wives. The differences were equally telling. Where Kennedy was fervent and single-minded, Roosevelt was cool and urbane, content to operate on myriad levels at once. Kennedy viewed the human condition in dark, fatalistic terms, whereas Roosevelt usually saw reasons for optimism even in the most difficult circumstances; he had the greater faith in the power of democratic ideals. Kennedy’s intellect, though formidable, had a narrow character, and he was uncomfortable with doubt; Roosevelt, with his more capacious sensibility, liked to entertain differing points of view. Most striking of all, whereas for Kennedy his children were always supreme, Roosevelt seemed at times more responsive to his constituency—his “national family”—than to his own offspring.21

Thus began a marriage of convenience, one that was never free of mutual suspicion but that for a time, in the early and mid-1930s, also featured a degree of affection, or at least commonality based on a shared sense of humor and an appreciation of each other’s talents and achievements. Kennedy poured money and time into Roosevelt’s campaign in 1932, contributing ideas to the candidate’s speeches on the economy and calling wealthy Democrats to urge them to make donations. He also helped persuade newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to break the deadlock at the Democratic National Convention that threatened an early FDR win. Kennedy then accompanied the candidate on a whistle-stop train tour to the western states in September, voicing robust support as Roosevelt called for greater government involvement in combating the economic crisis through “a new deal for the American people.” On election night, Kennedy put on a lavish victory party that took up two floors of the Waldorf Astoria, in New York, with Roosevelt’s theme song “Happy Days Are Here Again” blaring through the night. In the weeks thereafter, he laid on the flattery: in one telegram he informed FDR that a nun at his daughter Rosemary’s convent school had declared the new administration to be “like another Resurrection.” (Roosevelt, perhaps recalling what had occurred immediately before the previous Resurrection, replied vaguely with a thank-you for the “awfully nice telegram.”)22

There had been signs during the campaign of what would become two pronounced features of Joe Kennedy’s public persona in the years to come: his cultivation of the press and an obsessive interest in image-building. The right sort of publicity, his Hollywood years had taught him, could endow a person with fame as well as prestige; consequently, he made friends among the reporters who covered Roosevelt and took every chance to chat them up. “He liked being with the press more than he liked being with the politicians,” said Ernest Lindley, a correspondent who two years earlier had penned the first Roosevelt biography. “He liked the repartee.”23

Kennedy hoped to be appointed secretary of the Treasury in the new administration, but, to his intense frustration, there would be no offer of any kind for more than a year after the inauguration, in large part because of opposition at the White House, especially from the gnarled, gnomish, chain-smoking chief secretary, Louis Howe, who loathed the idea of bringing on a man he considered an unscrupulous Wall Street denizen. His pride wounded, Kennedy turned privately critical of Roosevelt—in letters, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings, he unloaded on FDR for his ingratitude and callousness—only to fall under the spell of the president’s mesmerizing charm whenever they met and leave each encounter pledging his undying support. In 1934, after being passed over a second time for the Treasury slot and turning down an offer to become the U.S. representative to Ireland, he agreed to head up the Securities and Exchange Commission, a newly created entity designed to regulate stock exchanges, meaning that the notorious stock speculator would now be the cop on Wall Street’s corner.24 Presidential aides objected to the appointment for that reason, but Roosevelt held firm. Set a thief to catch a thief, he reasoned.25