The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Review)
It is surprising to me that for all of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s esteemed and well-known books that The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys is not among her most famous. Unlike most of her work, this book is not on Audible.com and it is surprisingly hard to find a hard copy. I suspect it’s because there were allegations of plagiarism that still hang on the book, but it is a remarkable book that gives great insight into the Kennedy family and how Jack Kennedy became President John F. Kennedy.
The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys is 932 pages of intrigue, despite knowing how the story ends. Goodwin charts the lives of both families, but essentially moves from John Fitzgerald to his daughter, Rose. Once Rose and Joseph Kennedy married and had children, the story followed each of their lives and gave a lovely picture of how the mystique grew to become the American Camelot.
I took pages of notes while reading The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, and it would be uninteresting to share each of my observations, but here are some of the interesting anecdotes that Kearns Goodwin shared in her book.
Agnes Fitzgerald—Rose Kennedy’s sister—was in Germany after a term at Blumenthal Boarding School in the Netherlands. After her year at the Catholic school, she saw the young Crown Prince Wilhelm in his full regalia while traveling with her family. She wrote to her brother, Fred, about hereditary power. Agnes noted democracy’s superiority while writing, “Never mind [about the little prince], you may be President of the USA someday, which is far better.”
Goodwin described how deeply it affected Joe Kennedy to be rejected for the Porcelain Club at Harvard. His wife, Rose Fitzgerald, later said that the exclusion shaped Kennedy in deep and meaningful ways—negative ways according to her assessment. Goodwin offered the following summary of Joe Kennedy and his time at college: “Harvard had hurt him more than anyone knew. It had ripped something out of him that night [when passed over for the club] never again would he experience loyalty to any institution, any place, or any organization. And in the place of that loyalty, resentment had crystallized out hard as a rock; whether he knew it or not, his siege against the world had already begun.”
Goodwin contrasted John Fitzgerald with Joe Kennedy in the following manner: “Unlike Fitzgerald, Kennedy did not honestly care for a single soul beyond the circle of his friends and his family. If he found it convenient, he could be as tactful and as dignified as the next man; yet, if it suited his purpose, he could be brutal, relentless, and cunning. In the world which he saw as a never-ending battleground, he could plot and make use of people without compunction. Whereas Fitzgerald was divided by the conflicting desires of pleasing thousands and winning approval of far distant crowds,” Joe Kennedy’s talents all served his ambition.
P.J. Kennedy, Joe’s father, served as district boss with a deep feeling of personal indebtedness. As the son of a widowed mother, the community had helped raise him, so he served generously. Above his study, P.J. had the following plaque: “I shall pass through this world but once. Any kindness I can do, or goodness show, let me do it now—for I shall not pass this way again.” I sense that few of today’s politicians follow a similar mindset. Relatedly, Goodwin contrasted P.J. and Joe Kennedy with a quote from Boston Cardinal Richard Cushing: “Unlike his father, [Joe] was never an open-handed Santa Claus. Toward his close friends, Joe was as soft as his father, but he never ran around with his heart on his sleeve.”
In The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Goodwin gives a vivid and touching account of Rose Kennedy’s early dissatisfaction in marriage. Joe was constantly gone and regularly flirtatious with other women. Rose’s life centered around children and little else. Throughout school, her education had insisted that wife and mother were her culminating value. Yet it was not what she experienced. She took a break from their marriage in 1920, which finally led to her father’s instruction: “You’ve made your commitment, Rosie, and you must honor it now. What is past is past. The old days are gone. Your children need you and your husband needs you. You can make things work out. I know you can. If you need more help in the household, then get it. If you need a bigger house, ask for it. If you need more private time for yourself, take it. There isn’t anything you can’t do once you set your mind on it. So go now, Rosie, go back where you belong.” Given John Fitzgerald’s deep devotion to Rose, these words must have been hard to say. Soon after Rose separated from Joe, Jack Kennedy contracted scarlet fever and nearly died. The combination caused a change in Joe that prompted more devotion and care for his family.
Amid all of Kennedy’s travels as a man of business, he wrote more than 200 letters to his children. Not one had instructions on morals. Instead, they offered guidance on manners and success—the joy of being first and being people of action. The closest Kennedy mustered on morals was instructing his children to respect their mother.
Goodwin made an interesting observation when describing each of the Kennedy children: “It has been said that aspirations are not inherited. When a man forces his way to the top, his most precious asset is his drive, his will, his indomitability. Yet that is the one asset he cannot easily pass on to his children. He can pass on his wealth, his knowledge, and his influence, but he cannot pass on the memory of hardships, the will to win, and the fierce determination born of struggle. Indeed, the easy conditions of his children’s lives, sitting at the top simply because they were born into the right family, do much to ensure that they will be less highly motivated than their parents.”
When you think about the endless stories—both historic and fiction— where individuals lost everything in the stock market, it makes Joe Kennedy‘s foresight all the more impressive. In the spring of 1929, Kennedy began “to liquidate his stock holdings and gradually get out of the market.” He stuck with the advice of his mentor, Galen Stone, and continued evaluating every stock on its own accord. He saw the wild inflation occurring with speculative stocks and decided to get out of the market before it collapsed. After October 29, 1929, Kennedy continued evaluating individual stocks and used short-selling to build his wealth to an even greater sum after Black Tuesday. Kennedy’s profiteering on this method lends insight into his ethics. While he was stumping for FDR, Kennedy promoted reforms to prevent stock speculation. But when FDR declined to appoint Kennedy to his administration, Kennedy had no qualms about short-selling and the effect that such activity had on the market.
In addition to his foresight on the stock-market crash, Joe Kennedy also made the following prediction as the economic recession turned into a depression: “In The next generation, the people who run the government will be the biggest in America.” As such, Kennedy moved himself from business to politics as an early FDR supporter. Kennedy raised significant sums for Roosevelt and the two grew close. Kearns Goodwin contrasted the two as follows: “For all those similarities, however, there were as many contrasts. FDR was gracious and indirect, whereas Joe Kennedy was blunt and painfully direct…For all his warmth and capacity to make friends instantly, FDR was a man without a deep commitment to anyone...In contrast, Joe Kennedy was a man so deeply committed to himself and his family that everything else took second place.”
During prohibition, there was a loophole in the law that allowed doctors to legally prescribe alcohol. Ten million doctors prescribed more than a million gallons of liquor each year to Americans.
After high-school graduation, Joe Jr. studied under famed professor Harold Laski in London. Laski once noted, “I am a socialist, though from time to time I shall prescribe other books as an antidote to my poison. If you disagree, come along to my study and tell me where I am wrong.” Such a tension of thought is ideal: to know what you believe and why, while also holding onto convictions with humility to learn anew and refine one’s thinking.
Goodwin fleshed out how pervasive antisemitism was as Hitler rose to power. Joe Jr. spent time in Germany in 1934 and expressed sympathy for why Hitler was oppressing German Jews. Similarly, both John Fitzgerald and Joe Kennedy Sr. have recorded occasions of bias against Jewish people. Interestingly, the charges against Jewish businessmen were very similar to those raised against Joe Sr: succeeding by cunning, wit, and existing in the role of “creditor, speculator, and middleman,” not making anything productive on his own. Further, Kennedy also faced discrimination as an ethnic minority. Yet instead of fighting alongside his Jewish peers, Kennedy responded similarly to how the Protestants stifled the Irish.
John once found himself on the verge of expulsion from Choate Boarding School after creating the Muckers Club, a group of boys who wanted to cause mischief. John entered the headmaster’s office and found his father sitting there. Before the lecture began, the headmaster had to take a phone call. Joe Kennedy leaned over to his son and winked: “You sure didn’t inherit your father’s directness or his reputation for using bad language. If that crazy Muckers Club had been mine, you can be sure it wouldn’t have started with an M.”
In a letter from Joseph Kennedy‘s friend, Boake Carter, he received advice that Kennedy should have perhaps considered more deeply. Carter complemented Kennedy for his numerous strengths and virtues, but he noted that being ambassador to England was not a job for amateurs. He suggested that Kennedy should consider whether it was the right fit. Carter’s advice proved prescient—both for Kennedy and the country.
One point I think has been minimized in my education is the way that England and France abandoned Czechoslovakia when Germany began conquering Europe. Despite the World War I agreement to come to each other’s defense, when Hitler demanded portions of Czechoslovakia, England capitulated under Neville Chamberlain. Czech Prime Minister, Jan Masaryk, spoke to Chamberlain and Lord Halifax—Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs—after being excluded from a conference that would decide Czechoslovakia’s fate. Masaryk presciently said, if you have sacrificed my nation to preserve the peace of the world, I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, gentlemen, God help your souls.” Eight months later, Hitler conquered non-Germanic Czechoslovakia. This sequence is a stark reminder on how much character matters. In its absence, villainy wins.
This period of appeasement also changed the narrative for Joe Kennedy. He was so married to Chamberlain and the effort to avoid war, that the moral implications of capitulation increasingly looked dishonorable to people on both sides of the Atlantic. Kennedy adhered to peace at all costs, even after Hitler reneged on Czechoslovakia and news spread of Kristallnacht and the Jewish suffering under Hitler.
The story of Rosemary’s lobotomy is both heartbreaking and paints Joe Sr. as somewhat a monster. To make a unilateral decision to sever Rosemary’s frontal lobe may have been a trendy operation for the mentally ill, but it’s hard to understand not discussing the decision with his wife.
Goodwin makes an interesting analysis on how Rose Kennedy and Joseph Kennedy differently affected the children’s outlooks: “From their mother they were told: be Irish, be Catholic, follow the rules, live by the limits.” Yet their father’s life gave an alternative focus: “Never let themselves be limited by anything, not by their Irish Catholic background, nor by convention, nor even by the rules of the game.” Maneuvering these approaches must have been daunting at times for the Kennedy children.
After Jack Kennedy nearly died at age 26 with the crew of his PT boat, he wrote in a letter that he had lost the feeling that he would survive whatever he faced. Yet Kennedy maintained satisfaction in a life well lived: “As a matter of fact, I don’t feel badly about it [losing his sense of indestructibility]. If anything happens to me, I have this knowledge that I if I lived to be 100, I could only improve the quantity of my life, not the quality.” I wonder to what degree such self-reflection exists among Americans today.
The public awareness of Jack Kennedy‘s sexual exploits is quite remarkable. It seems surprising that it was so accepted by colleagues, friends, and family. Goodwin summed up the section with this assessment: “So driven was the pace of his sex life, and so discardable his conquests, that they suggest deep difficulty with intimacy.” The interviews cited in the books support the intimacy argument.
Another interesting element of John Kennedy‘s life was his significant bouts of illness. Bobby Kennedy observed that “At least one half of the days he spent on the earth were days of intense physical pain.” The Kennedy family did not allow for self-pity, and it is interesting to think about how similar Kennedy was to Franklin Roosevelt in his unwillingness to see himself as sickly.
Kathleen Kennedy’s tombstone reads, “Joy she gave, Joy she has found.” After Joe Kennedy Jr.’s early death, Kathleen’s early death, and Rosemary’s failed lobotomy, it is hard to imagine how joyless the Kennedy parents must have felt, which speaks nothing to the pain they would later experience with Jack and Bobby’s assassinations.
While describing JFK’s and Joe, Sr.’s lothario ways, Goodwin contrasted the societal and individual views on marriage that Rose and Jackie Kennedy held. In 1913, Good Housekeeping included a column that argued, “A woman may not have married the right man, but if she is sensible, she will make the best of it, realizing that the welfare of the home for which she is responsible is of far more consequence than her personal emotions.” While Rose bore Joe’s infidelity, Jackie viewed marriage as far less permanent, and she had far less tolerance for Jack disappearing at parties with other women.
I don’t believe I ever knew about Jack Kennedy’s near-death experience after back surgery in 1954. He developed a secondary infection from the surgery and the priests arrived to give him his last rites. This ceremony did not include anointing the loins, which was more typical in non-English settings. After he recovered, JFK joked with his friend, Lem Billings, that anointing of the loins and the subsequent remission of his carnal sins would have made the illness worthwhile.
During JFK‘s pursuit of the Democratic nomination, Joe Kennedy stopped in Nevada “and placed a substantial amount of money on Kennedy for president to ensure that the gambling odds on the nomination would come out in favor of Jack.”
Goodwin made an interesting observation about the Kennedy family that seems relevant for modern America: “But with the emergence of John Kennedy as a public figure, the rituals of politics had replaced the rituals of the church as the dominant means by which they strengthened their collective bonds.” Within many religious institutions, this observation on politics over church seems accurate.
Reading The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys makes it clear why the Kennedy name still holds such mystique today. Doris Kearns Goodwin not only captures the essence of the family but the effect that they had on politics in America. It is a daunting task to write about so many interesting individuals in a cogent and accessible manner. Fortunately, Kearns Goodwin is as good as it gets when it comes to history, politics, and storytelling. As I mentioned above, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys is a lengthy book, but it moves as a fast pace because there are so many enjoyable and interesting stories built into the overarching story. I give Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book a full endorsement and hope anyone reading it enjoys it as much as I did.
