Tall, trim, and physically graceful, Joe excelled on the sports field. He captained the tennis team, played basketball, and became proficient as well at military drill, a high-status activity at the school. When, as a colonel, he led the Boston Latin team to victory in a citywide drill competition, he became a heroic figure on campus. But it was on the baseball diamond that Joe really dazzled. A superb line-drive hitter, he maintained an astonishing .667 batting average as a senior, a feat that earned him the Mayor’s Cup for batting in the city high school league, and gave him a trophy in a ceremony presided over by his future father-in-law, Mayor John F. Fitzgerald. In subsequent years, Joe would recall individual games in perfect detail, and offer highlights to any listener who made the mistake of showing even a modicum of interest.43

Then as now in American high schools, athletes were accorded more than their share of respect. Add to this Joe’s self-assurance, indefatigable energy, and good looks—he had strikingly blue eyes, gleaming white teeth, and brownish-red hair to go with an athletic build—and it’s no surprise that he was popular with the faculty and with fellow students. In the span of a few glorious weeks in the fall of 1907, he was reelected manager of the football team (The Boston Globe had the story, along with a large photo), elected senior class president, and named captain of the baseball team. Many years later, he called Boston Latin “a shrine that somehow seemed to make us all feel that if we could stick it out we were made of just a little bit better stuff than the fellows our age who were attending what we always thought were easier schools.”44

Perhaps so, but to our modern sensibility, it still surprises that the boy with the awful grades, who had to repeat a year and who was Irish Catholic to boot, would be admitted into the Harvard College class of 1912. But so he was. Joe’s rousing success in extracurricular endeavors no doubt helped, as did the fact that Boston Latin was a feeder school, sending more students to Harvard—twenty-five, half of the graduating class—than did any other high school in the country, public or private. That Harvard took more public school graduates and more Catholics (and Jews) than did Yale or Princeton may have mattered as well.45 And the admissions office was surely aware that the boy with the spotty record happened to be the son of one of Boston’s leading political figures.

V

And so, on the first day of October 1908, Joseph Patrick Kennedy headed across the Charles River and onto the grounds of the most prestigious university in the country. Though physically outside the city, in neighboring Cambridge, Harvard at the start of the century was at the epicenter of “proper Boston”; as a calling card to the city’s privileged elite, the university was more important than either occupation or address. The nineteenth-century Yankee and alumnus Edmund Quincy, whose father had been president of the college, expressed the prevailing sentiment: “If a man’s in there,” he remarked, tapping his Harvard Triennial Catalogue, with its full list of graduates, “that’s who he is. If he’s not, who is he?”46

Joe understood the point, as did his mother, who had dreamed of this moment since the day he was born. He knew, she knew, her husband knew, that Joe’s grandmother had been a servant, her first name so common and obviously Irish that the patrician women called their female servants “our Bridgets.” Yet now here he was, however improbably, a Harvard man. If Joe felt nervous about what lay ahead, he didn’t show it. Academically, he saw no reason to worry, given that Boston Latin was widely known to be more demanding than anything Harvard could throw at him. The rigid curriculum of the former gave way now to an elective system in which there were no core requirements and no need even to select a major. With the barest of effort, one could avoid difficult subjects and choose a path of least resistance. Kennedy did. Though he had a good head for numbers, he took no math or science but instead concentrated in government and economics, with a smattering of humanities courses thrown in.

As at Boston Latin, academics at Harvard mattered less to Joe than did the goings-on outside the classroom. He rarely opened a book unless it was required for class. But this time he would have a much harder time scaling the social and sporting peaks of the school. Like the journalist Walter Lippmann, who was two years ahead of him in the class of 1910, he did not fully realize how many Harvards there were, and how little they overlapped.47 There was the Harvard of the privileged young men from proper families such as the Cabots, Bancrofts, Winthrops, Welds, Lodges, and Saltonstalls, with their “final clubs” such as the Porcellian, the A.D., and the Fly, who might or might not go to class and aimed only for a “gentleman’s C” average. There was the Harvard of athletes; the Harvard of intellectuals intent on an academic career; the Harvard of socialites focused mostly on having a good time and securing a gig on Wall Street; the Harvard of iconoclastic outsiders looking to find their way; and the Harvard of public school graduates, many of whom commuted from home every morning and returned home every night.48

Joe Kennedy was firmly in the last group, even though he lived in residence in Harvard Yard. It didn’t take him long to realize that, despite the fact that freshmen were thrown together in the dormitories and dining halls in the Yard, sharp class distinctions defined the social environment. Being accepted into the right organization was the coin of the realm for many students, and the Catholic Joe, like the Jewish Lippmann, would never be tapped for membership at the elite ones—or even come close.

It was not for lack of trying. Where another student with his profile might have avoided the pursuit for fear of being rejected, or simply seen it as a lost cause, Joe charged ahead. When one door closed in his face, he knocked on the next. It was his nature to be irrepressible, not to mention ultracompetitive; both attributes would serve him well in his business activities in the years ahead, but at Harvard they did not get him through the narrow gate to a top final club. He had the wrong surname, the wrong family background, the wrong religious denomination. Perhaps, too, the very aggressiveness of his pursuit hurt his cause; he simply tried too hard, and lacked the finesse to hide it. Joe did gain membership to other university groups, including the Hasty Pudding Club and, in his senior year, Delta Upsilon, a lesser club where even Jews and scholarship boys were welcome, but for the rest of his life it stung him that no emissaries from the “Porc” or the Fly ever showed up at his door, depriving him of the recognition he most craved. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, class of 1904, likewise never forgot being passed over by the Porcellian.) In the ultimate determination of in or out at Harvard, Joe Kennedy was out.49

On the athletic field, too, Kennedy experienced disappointment. Like many who had starred in high school, he had the sudden, unnerving realization in college that he was merely ordinary. Superior talents were all around him. Though he suited up for baseball his first three years, and remained a potent hitter, his fielding and baserunning were liabilities, and he never made the varsity squad until late in his junior year; although he earned a coveted letter, he played in only four games and had seven at-bats.50 He did not try out for the team as a senior.

All in all, then, Joe Kennedy’s Harvard experience was a mixed one. Continuing his lax approach to his studies, he did just well enough to squeak by, earning mostly C’s and not a single A.51 Sporting success eluded him. And despite all-consuming effort, he failed to grab hold of the college’s most desired status symbol, membership in a top final club, which left him envious and scornful. On the flip side, he had his degree and would always be a Harvard man. Gregarious and bright, he proved quite popular among those classmates who didn’t mind his social climbing. And he made some connections with elite Bostonians that would prove useful going forward.

Most notable of all, it was during his Harvard years that Joe positioned himself as the leading suitor of Rose Fitzgerald, the mayor’s daughter.

VI

They had first met many years before, as children, when the Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds vacationed at Old Orchard Beach, Maine. A newspaper photo from that year shows Joe, age seven, and Rose, age five, standing a few feet apart, but in later years neither could recall this initial encounter. And there might have been other fleeting meetings, since, after all, their fathers were prominent political figures who occasionally brought their firstborn to campaign events.

Then again, P. J. Kennedy and John F. Fitzgerald (“Fitzie” to many, or “Johnny Fitz,” or, somewhat later, “Honey Fitz”) were also rivals of sorts, so perhaps the opportunities for chance encounters were fewer than one might imagine. Like the Kennedys, the Fitzgeralds were now second-generation Irish Americans. But where P. J. was restrained and unflashy, even a little severe, Fitzgerald was merry and pugnacious and dashing, a dynamo who could pontificate on any subject at machine-gun speed, the words gushing forth at a rate that astonished first-time listeners.

In other ways too, the two men were polar opposites. Kennedy was systematic in his climb to power, pragmatic and calculating, working patiently behind the scenes and considering his every move carefully. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, was the prototypical gate-crasher, glad-handing and histrionic and bombastic, inclined to shoot first and ask questions later. Short of stature at five feet, five inches, with a large, round face, blue eyes, and sandy hair parted down the middle, he was a natty dresser who reveled in his Irishness and refused to follow the guidelines of any party strategy. A buffoon to some, he had street smarts in spades, and a keen political antenna, and he vowed always to “work harder than anyone else.” And so he did. Ever smiling in photographs, he took on a gloomy look when crossed, his brow furrowed, and didn’t mind in the slightest when told it made him look a bit like Napoleon.52

Born in the North End in 1863 to Thomas Fitzgerald, a grocer, and Rosanna Cox Fitzgerald, who hailed from County Wexford and County Cavan, respectively, young John excelled in his studies and attended Boston Latin, one of the first Irishmen (if not the first) to gain admission. Intending to become a doctor, he enrolled at Harvard Medical School but dropped out before the end of his first year when his widowed father died suddenly and he had to support his siblings. Soon Fitzgerald began his ascent up the greasy pole of politics, first as a member of the Boston Common Council, then as a state senator (where he served alongside P. J. Kennedy), then as a U.S. congressman representing the Ninth District for three terms, then, beginning with his election on December 12, 1905, as Boston’s mayor, under the slogan “Bigger, Better, Busier Boston.”53

That he had a gift for politics no one doubted. It was said that Honey Fitz was the first and most expert practitioner of the “Irish switch”—shaking the hand of one person while talking to another and smiling at a third. An oft-told story had it that he could talk with a person for fifteen minutes, at a rate of two hundred words a minute, barely letting the person get a word in, then pat the fellow on the back and say how much he’d loved the conversation. Night after night he was on the go, seemingly indefatigable, often taking in two, even three dinners in a single evening—one account estimated that in just his first two years as mayor Fitzgerald attended twelve hundred dinners, fifteen hundred dances, and two hundred picnics and delivered three thousand speeches.54 This seems implausible, but even if the estimate overshoots by half, one is left with an almost superhuman level of activity. Then again, this is a man who would go to parties with spare collars in his back pocket so that he could dance all night and still appear fresh. On his fiftieth birthday he celebrated by sprinting a hundred yards at 7:00 A.M., running a quarter mile at nine, wrestling at noon, and boxing at one.55

In 1889, Fitzgerald had married his second cousin Mary Josephine (“Josie”) Hannon, of Acton, Massachusetts, whose parents hailed from County Limerick. Slender and petite, with soft brown hair and an erect bearing she would keep into her tenth decade, Josie was bashful and retiring, the antithesis of her husband. A daughter, Rose Elizabeth, arrived in July 1890, and five more children followed. Rose was born in the North End, the center of her father’s political power, in the family’s first home, at 4 Garden Court Street. There followed a stint in a big, rambling house in West Concord, twenty-five miles northwest of Boston, but in 1904 Honey Fitz, wanting to be closer to the action, bought a fifteen-room Italianate home with mansard eaves on Welles Avenue in Dorchester, just south of Boston. Inspired by her father’s lessons and their frequent excursions to see the city’s many landmarks, Rose became deeply interested in history. She was a stellar student, blessed with a sharp intelligence and a prodigious memory. From her mother, meanwhile, she inherited a deep religious faith and a serene disposition.56