The Last Patrician Page 3
In the huddle they’d talk about running “post patterns,” and they’d scrabble plays in the grass. The slightly hysterical and charming play of Jackie, say, which was full of little yells and darting, unpredictable runs in the wrong direction, wasn’t quite suitable. So, by and by, people would drift away from the game—ostensibly, to get ready for dinner or … meet Uncle Ted coming in from his afternoon yacht race … and finally, in the dusk, there’d be four or five adults left, furious and panting, rushing quickly across the lawn and most of them were Secret Service people.34
Joseph Kennedy would never have understood why Plimpton thought the behavior of the Secret Service agents (“whatever it is they do”) so lacking in charm, so lacking in grace—so appalling, in fact, that the nice people had to make up excuses to escape. When in the late forties Bobby and his Harvard friend Kenny O’Donnell “joked at dinner about finishing last in a sailing race,” Joseph Kennedy was outraged. “What kind of guys are you to think that’s funny?” the Ambassador demanded before quitting the table in disgust.35 Like the Secret Service agents who spoke of “post patterns” and scrabbled plays in the grass, like Richard Nixon himself, Joseph Kennedy had not been educated at Milton or Choate; he was quite as incapable as the most graceless of the agents, with their “brutal” and “humorless” approach to competition, of speaking a language with which George Plimpton could have sympathized, of emitting the numerous little “recognition signals” (Joseph Alsop’s phrase) that taken together indicate that one belongs, that one understands the rules, that one appreciates good form, that one knows how to dress for dinner or enjoy a postrace drink with Uncle Ted.36
Joseph Kennedy did not speak George Plimpton’s language, but the result of his efforts at assimilation was that his sons did speak it, and as fluently as Plimpton himself. He did not understand what his sons had become, but at some level he was glad they had become it. Joseph Kennedy was not what the preppies called a clubbable man. Bobby, Jack, and Teddy were. They were initiated into the rituals of the preppy elite, made friends with the George Plimptons, the Ben Bradlees, the Joe Alsops of the world, were invited to join all the clubs from which the father had been excluded. Kenny O’Donnell said that Bobby had been invited to join “almost all” the best clubs at Harvard.37 (In 1950, alas, not even a Kennedy could aspire to Porcellian.) The brothers became masters of the “New England manner,” in Arthur Schlesinger’s words, and so consummate was their mastery that some critics were incapable of distinguishing them from the genuine article.38 Teddy White’s evocations of the Kennedys read at times like an Emily Post text designed to instruct duller Americans in the fine points of patrician etiquette. White was amazed that Jack Kennedy, sipping a daiquiri on election night in 1960, should have had the presence of mind to talk about art, not politics, with his friend Bill Walton. This suitably highbrow topic was discussed, White tells us, in a “large white room furnished to Mrs. Kennedy’s taste in antiques” without any interruption from “radio, TV, or the communications center.” Jack’s ruminations on the nature of art ended only when, “promptly at eight,” dinner was announced and he and Walton went into the “elegantly different” dining room of Kennedy’s Hyannis Port house.39 Take note, America: when Jack Kennedy finally did settle down to watch the returns that would determine his fate, he watched them “on a small leather-covered TV set that his wife manipulated to bring into focus.”40 The smallness and scarcity of television sets in Kennedy residences are a favorite theme of Kennedy aficionados like White; television might have helped make Jack Kennedy President, but he himself, we are assured, watched the vulgar medium as little as possible.
The unrefined air of East Boston hung about Joseph Kennedy, an offense to Brahmin and Four Hundred sensibilities; Bobby and his brothers would grow up in a more suitable environment, would progress, as naturally and inevitably as the Stimsons and Achesons of the world, from sailboats and prep-school playing fields to the highest affairs of state. Jack Newfield was wrong to call Bobby a quintessential Boston Catholic.41 Bobby and his brothers may have gone to college in Cambridge, but they never went to Boston for any reason other than to solicit votes. By the time they reached manhood, they were closer to the world of the Social Register than they were to the world of Honey Fitz.
Toward the Vineyard
LIKE SO MANY of their triumphs, the Kennedys’ achievement in mastering the code of the Brahmins looks different in retrospect. Sailing off the Vineyard with Social Register swells appears a less enviable experience in the context of Chappaquiddick. Like the Harvard-Yale game or the first sail of the summer, the Edgartown Regatta was a Kennedy family tradition, one of those ritual events that mark the passing seasons. It offered the Kennedys a chance to catch up with old friends who summered on the island—the McNamaras, the Bundys, the Katzenbachs—and to burnish the family’s intellectual credentials by cultivating literary preppies like John Marquand, Bill Styron, and their protégés. (Bobby met the young Philip Roth on the Vineyard in the middle sixties.) But the regatta also offered the Kennedys a chance to let go, to find relatively anonymous release in a crowd of lawyers and stockbrokers dazed by sun and drink. In the thirties an “overly boisterous celebration” of a regatta victory in an Edgartown hotel resulted in Joe Junior and Jack spending a night in the Edgartown jail.42 The Kennedy regatta parties in 1966 and 1967 were memorable affairs—happy occasions, if a trifle wild; the Kennedy brothers were able to relax on the Vineyard in a way they couldn’t at Hyannis Port, where Mother and Dad frowned upon excess.43
Islands like Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are extraordinarily illuminating guides to the social history of Protestant New England. This history is nowhere more evident than in the evolution of the islands’ architecture; to go from the Vincent House in Edgartown to Captain Lawrence’s house or Dr. Fisher’s house there is to see how the harsh and unforgiving life of the early settlers gave way to the more opulent civilization of the great sea captains and rich merchants who succeeded them. More opulent, but hardly less severe. The old Federal houses of Edgartown and Nantucket, for all their elegance of design and splendor of proportion, retain still the memory of the austere God-fearing men who built them, men who in the midst of wealth deplored the corruption of their souls, and who in the apogee of prosperity looked into their Bibles to ponder the lesson of Job. In time, however, the gloomy introspection of old New England gave way to the masques and revels of its foppish descendants, and a once-formidable race of Brahmins degenerated into a supine tribe of mere preppies. The Kennedys had the misfortune to infiltrate the old Protestant aristocracy at the height of its decadence. They came too late, and mastered its customs too well.
Teddy himself competed in the 1969 Edgartown Regatta; he apparently enjoyed himself as he drank beer and sailed his boat, the Victura, in the sultry afternoon. The race itself was something of a disappointment: the Victura finished in ninth place.44 No matter: the Kennedys had won the real race. They now “owned” a Senate seat that the Brahmins had once considered almost as their personal property. Ted could look on with serene magnanimity as the preppies made off with a sailing trophy. After the customary drink (rum and Coke) with the other sailors on the victor’s boat, Ted was driven over to Chappaquiddick Island by his chauffeur for a party in honor of the “boiler room” girls who had worked for Bobby in his 1968 presidential campaign.45 Garry Wills has said that Ted’s presence at the party was itself an act of noblesse oblige, the honorable deed of a sad-eyed man who, haunted by his brothers’ ghosts, felt it his duty to comfort the peasants who had plowed his family’s fields. And yet it is difficult to believe that the party was simply a chore for Teddy; on the contrary, it seems to have been precisely the kind of preppy blowout he enjoyed. The guests at the Lawrence cottage drank deeply that night, but not, in the context of the moment, outrageously.46 Nor was Ted the only preppy on the Vineyard to have a good time on the Friday night of regatta weekend. When, after the accident, he attempted to construct an alibi, he did so by appearing in the lobb
y of his Edgartown hotel—at half past two in the morning—to complain about the noise other revelers were making.47 The alibi was never used; in 1969 not even the most fastidious old boy felt a need to put on a blazer to go into a deserted hotel lobby in the middle of the night. The sad attempt to construct an exculpatory chronology, if it did nothing to prove Ted’s innocence, does reveal something of the overheated atmosphere of Edgartown on regatta weekend. The behavior that led up to the accident at Chappaquiddick was not anomalous; it was indeed perfectly explicable in terms of the mores of a preppy watering hole in the middle of the twentieth century. “Oh my God, what has happened?” Teddy is said to have exclaimed several times as he was driven to the Vineyard’s airstrip the next day for the flight back to Hyannis Port. A short time earlier he had, at the Edgartown police station, given an account of the accident the night before in which he admitted that he had been the driver of the 1967 Oldsmobile that had careened off Dike Bridge and plunged into the dark waters below.48 What had happened? The Kennedys had at last fulfilled the patriarch’s dream; they had arrived, but had arrived only to discover that the promised land of the patricians was not an altogether happy one.
2
Joseph Kennedy moved Bobby away from the faith and traditions of the Old World, the world of Honey Fitz and his daughter Rose, the world of Sunday Mass and rosary beads, of lace curtains and St. Patrick’s Day parades. But he did not introduce Bobby to the New World in which he himself had flourished, a world where entrepreneurial energy and a fierce belief in the power of individual effort brought him astonishing success. Joseph Kennedy was an archetypical New World character, a loner in all his business activities, one who, operating with a small staff and few institutional connections, raided promising markets, took his profits, and got out—a Natty Bumppo of Wall Street, one who eschewed affiliation with the established firms, one who was unwilling to be tied down by the obligations of partnership and institutional allegiance. For Bobby and his brothers, however, Joseph Kennedy wanted a different life, a life lived not on the fringes of power, but at the center. Bobby and his brothers would become not entrepreneurial improvisers on the frontiers of markets and communities, but men who conformed to established codes and reverenced established institutions. Joseph Kennedy sent Bobby and his brothers back to the Old World—not the world of the Boston Irish, to be sure, but the world of what is sometimes called the Eastern establishment, that curious monument to the labors of a generation of patricians eager to preserve, in America, those aristocratical privileges that a rising tide of democratic entrepreneurialism threatened to destroy.1
Up from Individualism
JOSEPH KENNEDY’S EAGERNESS to connect Bobby and his brothers to a tradition of Eastern aristocracy stemmed in part from the extraordinary revival of patrician energy and talent that occurred in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. This risorgimento of the well-to-do not only reversed a hundred years of aristocratic decline, it profoundly influenced the careers of Bobby and his brothers. The mastery of the aristocratic gesture that they eventually attained might have moved even FDR to envy. The Kennedys came in time to embody the idea of aristocracy in America; in some ways they were its fulfillment. But this aristocratic destiny was not as inevitable as might be supposed. Had Joseph Kennedy come of age a quarter of a century earlier, before the renaissance of the ruling class, it is unlikely that he would have wanted his sons to emulate the patricians. If there is splendor in the grandees who stare out at us from the canvases of Sargent, that splendor is diminished by a certain vacuousness in their expressions, a certain emptiness in their eyes. Sargent captured, in oil, not merely the elegance of the fin-de-siècle American aristocracy, but its impotence as well. Aristocracy in late-nineteenth-century America meant weakness; it meant effeminacy; it meant Henry James. Like the effete male protagonists of Edith Wharton’s novels, the American aristocrats of the fin de siècle had surrendered to the charms of neurasthenic indolence; snobbery and tradition had insulated them from the larger life of the country. For the nation’s first families the years between 1870 and 1900 really were the “Brown Decades,” as Lewis Mumford called them, gloomy years of stagnation and (in spite of great wealth) decline. The patricians of the period counted Virginia dynasts, Hudson River patroons, pious New England clergymen, and rich New England merchants among their ancestors, but the ancient families were unable to exercise any real degree of political or economic power in the republic. They had ceased to be a governing class and were now merely a privileged one.2 In Boston the Brahmins surrendered political control to the Irish in 1885, when Hugh O’Brien became the city’s first Irish Catholic mayor.3 Bobby’s maternal grandfather, John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, was one of a long line of Irish political leaders who followed in O’Brien’s footsteps.4 The soft young aristocrats who came of age at the end of the century were no match for the likes even of Honey Fitz; against such a lean and hungry competitor as Joseph Kennedy they had no chance whatever. The patricians had to contend, Edmund Wilson wrote,
with a world that broke most of them.… They could no longer play the rôle … of a trained and public-spirited caste; the new society did not recognize them. The rate of failure and suicide in some of the college “classes” of the ’eighties shows an appalling demoralization.5
The patricians retired to the club or the sanitarium, read Walter Pater, and attempted—usually unsuccessfully—to cure themselves of their neurasthenic symptoms.6 Although they retained all the outward show of aristocracy—the high ideals, the heavy pride, the intense conviction of their own superiority—the substance of aristocracy was gone. The greater number of America’s snobbish hereditary organizations (Daughters of the American Revolution, Mayflower Descendants, etc.) were founded during this period, a sure sign, Richard Hofstadter observed, of patrician insecurity.7 (The first Social Registers appeared, in Boston and New York, around 1890.8) A man like Henry Adams would doubtless have despised such pathetic attempts to recapture lost grandeur, but in spending his own life lamenting the demise of the eighteenth-century republic his ancestors had ruled, Adams himself, though in a more sophisticated and literary way, did much the same thing. Had the patrician order continued, in the twentieth century, to produce men like Henry James and Henry Adams, had these men continued to embody the highest qualities of the breed, it is doubtful whether Joseph Kennedy would have wanted any part of it. He would never have coveted the Court of St. James’s, the most aristocratic of the diplomatic posts, in the shameless way he did.9 He would never have established a household at Hyannis Port. He would have kept Bobby and his brothers away from the Brahmins, lest the Brahmins corrupt their masculine virtue. Milton and Harvard were worse than useless, if in the end they produced T. S. Eliot.
But Joseph Kennedy did covet a place in the aristocratic firmament, for by the time he entered Harvard College in 1908, the character of the aristocracy had greatly changed. The origins of the change can be dated with some precision. The revolt of the blue-bloods against their consignment to an historical oblivion of poetry and country houses began on the day when the young Teddy Roosevelt, bullied “almost beyond endurance” by two boys whom he had neither the strength nor the skill to subdue, decided to take up boxing and learn how to fight back. Roosevelt’s struggle to overcome his own tendencies toward dandyism was by no means an easy one; when he first took his seat in the New York State Assembly, the newspapermen, amused by his foppish apparel and shrill aristocratic accent, cried, “Oscar Wilde!” and hailed the arrival of a disciple of Walter Pater in Albany.10 But Roosevelt persevered, and eventually purged the last remnant of sissiness from his character. It was the first indication of a new spirit at work in the descendants of America’s most respectable families. Roosevelt—who was to become one of Bobby Kennedy’s greatest heroes—was the embodiment of a patrician generation that could not be content with the passivity of its fathers.11 Where the previous generation had luxuriated in its pain, its “obscure hurt,” or transformed the pain
into art, the new generation turned away from its suffering; it lost itself in action. “Get action, do things; be sane,” Roosevelt once said, “don’t fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody: get action.”12 Roosevelt had injected a dose of testosterone into the feckless aristocracy, and the Four Hundred would never afterward be the same.
Roosevelt’s conception of an aristocracy of action and power was one with which Joseph Kennedy could sympathize. But there was irony in Kennedy’s adoration of the reinvigorated aristocracy, for Roosevelt and the preppy junta over which he presided despised men of Kennedy’s type. Like all classes of people who have been deprived of influence by revolutionary transformations in the organization of society, America’s patrician classes resented the economic changes that had, during the course of the nineteenth century, rendered their own position in society a so much more inferior one. Commerce had destroyed their claims to preeminence. The patricians lamented the economic “anarchy” of a free market that elevated such crude, raw-mannered men as Jim Fisk, Daniel Drew, Henry Clay Frick, and Joseph Kennedy himself to prominence.13 Richard Hofstadter observed that, while in the 1840s “there were not twenty millionaires” in the United States, by 1910 “there were probably more than twenty millionaires sitting in the United States Senate.”14 Henry Adams, that brilliant snob, looking out of the window of his club at the “turmoil of Fifth Avenue” in the nineties, felt himself at Rome, under Diocletian, a witness to civic anarchy, the triumph of barbarism:
The city [Adams wrote] had the air and movement of hysteria.… Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid. All New York was demanding new men, and all the new forces, condensed into corporations, were demanding a new type of man,—a man with ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type,—for whom they were willing to pay millions at sight.15