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

tone. “Otherwise, just tell him that you have not got the money.”
    Joe, for his part, had long since duly noted the hypocrisy of the Brahmin class. Were the good gentlemen who drank bootleg whiskey cut of a finer moral cloth than Joe, who sold it to them? With all their fine talk of law and honor, these Harvard men drank the liquor brought to them by a new class of criminals. He could stand and talk with these self-satisfied burghers, listening to their tales of business, banking, children, golf, and tennis. He was an amusing raconteur, enjoying the casual camaraderie. He appeared no different from his classmates, though he traveled on a stage wider than any that they traversed and dealt with men like Tommy McGinty and Owen Madden as well as with cardinals and magnates. He was making his way into the shadowy centers of power in America, places his Harvard friends and professors did not know and would never understand.

4
“Two Young ‘Micks’ Who Need Discipline”
    G ee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children alone.” Jack may have been frail in body, but there was a daring quality to a five-year-old boy who would so confront his mother. It was April 1923, and Jack was upset that Rose was going off to California with her sister for an extended trip of four or five weeks, leaving him and his three siblings behind. It was a risky business to speak out, for if he displeased his mother, she might bring out her infamous wooden coat hanger. To Rose, a coat hanger was not a biblical “rod of correction” with which she beat goodness and wisdom into her offspring. Hers was a more scientific endeavor. The coat hanger was her little tuning fork that she judiciously applied until her children were singing the song she wanted them to sing. She never lost control, never struck them out of sheer anger, but hit them with what she considered the proper, healthy dosage of pain.
    This time Rose did not bring out the coat hanger but she did note her son’s sarcastic outburst in her diary. The next day, as the children were playing on the porch, she said good-bye and drove down the elm-lined street. Realizing that she had forgotten something, she turned back and was relieved to see that little Jack and his siblings were playing, mindless of the fact that their mother had gone.
    Rose may have set off on her trip in guiltless bliss, but Jack had struck at an unpalatable truth. As a youth, he would tell his closest friend, that he had cried every time his mother left on one of her endless trips, until he realized that his tears not only did no good but irritated Rose and caused her to pull away emotionally even more from her second son. He realized that he had “better take it in stride.” The terrible threat was that if he did not buck up, Rose would return physically to the home in Brookline, but she might notreturn emotionally. As an adult, Jack reflected that his father was “a more distant figure” than his mother. Rose, however, although more often physically present, was “still a little removed which I think is the only way to survive when you have nine children.”
    Jack rationalized the psychological distance that Rose kept from him and his brothers and sisters. It was in part the same distance that Rose’s mother and Joe’s mother had kept from their children, a distance common in Irish-American homes. Love was a sweet cake given out only on special occasions, and then only in modest nibbles.
    Rose took her children to see Bunker Hill and Plymouth Rock. She did not allow Jack and Joe Jr. to romp over the sites but insisted that they stand there while she inundated them with details and anecdotes worthy of a tour guide. Upon returning to the house in Brookline, she quizzed them over lunch, pushing them to remember and recite. When she took her children to Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo, the boys and their sisters did not simply stand and watch the lions prowling back and forth. Rose stepped forward and