Free The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 by Laurence Leamer Page A

selling whiskey and Kennedy selling Irish whiskey to Capone. And they made a deal to exchange it on Lake Michigan off Mackinac Island. That’s where the Kennedy ships and the Capone ships were going to makethe exchange of the two whiskeys that they agreed to there at that spaghetti dinner.”
    An obscure dying man in a short aside in a lengthy oral history has little cause to invent such an extraordinary tale, and little time to create such details. Patty McGinty Gallagher and Zel Davis have no reason to invent a family history so profoundly different from their own lives. Benedict Fitzgerald has no reason to exaggerate his extravagant life. There remains a maddeningly anecdotal character to this evidence and the allegations that have been made in other books, but the sheer magnitude of the recollections is more important than the veracity of the individual stories.
    Joe’s grandson Christopher Kennedy suggests that it would have been impossible for his grandfather to have had such far-flung dealings, doubly so without leaving any record. “About ten years ago a Wharton MBA with a degree in accounting who had audited several of the East Coast’s wealthiest families conducted an audit of Joe Kennedy,” Christopher Kennedy says. “He transcribed to the dollar every source of income and use of cash, and every dollar is accounted for.”
    That result strongly suggests, however, that Joe understood one of the fundamental rules of illegal dealing. The dealer does not get caught holding the goods. Joe occupied the enviable end of the business, away from the police and the riffraff, away from the parceling up and the danger. It is probably testimony to the sheer acumen of Joe Kennedy that no one has come up with any hard physical evidence linking him to bootlegging, but the circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that Joe was a financier and supplier of illegal liquor.
    Joe agreed to supply the liquor for his tenth Harvard reunion in June 1922. During his college days he would no more have been associated with an illegal activity than he would have danced an Irish jig in Harvard Yard. Joe had wanted desperately to be associated with these Harvard gentlemen, but he now no longer thought that it was enough merely to pattern his life on theirs. He understood their quiet disdain for men like him, and yet he was willing to provide their whiskey, fulfilling every stereotype of the Irishman.
    Joe was no retail bootlegger with his stash of liquor, no matter what some of his classmates might have thought. He got his liquor through his father’s associate, charging his class $302 for twenty-six and a half gallons of liquor that he did not drink. Some of these Harvard graduates had ancestors who had arrived on the Mayflower, and Joe had the liquor delivered in a boat that landed in Plymouth where the Pilgrims had disembarked.
    Joe caroused with his Harvard mates, dressed in a sparkling white shirt, a bow tie, and the inevitable crimson sweater. For Joe, this was a uniform for a summer’s weekend. For his old friends Bob Fisher and Tom Campbell, this was practically their daily wardrobe. Fisher had given up his career in merchandisingto become the Harvard football coach. Campbell had joined his old football teammate as Harvard’s freshman coach and also served as assistant graduate treasurer of the Harvard Athletic Association.
    Only his other old friend, Bob Potter, had the kind of life that Joe could fully admire. He was vice president of the National Shawmut Bank, lived in a townhouse in Back Bay, and lunched at the Somerset Club, within whose portals Joe was not welcome. Some of these fellow graduates were cutting a fancy picture, but they were coming to old Joe now to hit him up for loans at Columbia Trust. Even Potter, two years later, asked to borrow thirty-five hundred dollars. “It’s all right to give it to him if you can get collateral accepted in the savings department.” Joe wrote the bank officer with a dismissive