The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 Read Free

as wife and mother.
    Mary Augusta loved her two daughters, Mary Loretta and Margaret Louise, but Joe was the measure of all things. Joe, not his younger sisters, would go out into the world. Mary Augusta taught Joe that there was no horizon on which he could not set his eyes. His sisters could be coddled and spoiled, for if they married well and properly, they might spend their lifetimes coddled and spoiled. As for Joe, his mother did not so much give him love as the promise of love. She spooned out her affection to Joe like a tonic that had to be taken in only the smallest of doses.
    Mary Augusta was so concerned with the impression Joe would make on the world that when he was born on September 6, 1888, she insisted that he be named Joseph Patrick, not Patrick, after his father and his grandfather. Patrick was the most common Irish name, and she would not have her only surviving son forever marked by his immigrant forebears. Mary Augusta was trying to bring Joe up as her little Catholic gentleman, all frills and fanciness, but her son had never fully gone along. For his first formal photographs, she had Joe photographed in a long dress with a bow around his neck. Even then Joe stared out at the camera with firm unyielding eyes and a clenched fist.
    Mary Augusta’s regimen as a mother was to teach her first and only surviving son the merciless rituals of civility. For Joe’s mother, the relentless pursuit of civility was not a trivial matter. In the radical egalitarianism of America, people learned to mimic the manners of those whose company they sought. The most vulgar and ill bred could affect the manners of their betters for a time, but eventually the mask of civility would fall. These ersatz ladies and pseudo-gentlemen often exposed themselves at dinner by choosing the knife as their favored implement for eating rather than the fork. Eating with a fork became such a symbol of civility that its teaching was laid out in Joe’s parochial school curriculum (“shall eat with a fork, rather than a knife; shall take small mouthfuls of food and masticate quietly”).
    Young Joe lived largely in a female world, and from that world he took many of his ideas of womanhood. He had his mother as his guide and goad, a constable of civility. He had his two younger sisters, who constantly deferred to him. The Irish servant girls treated the young master as a royal being. He was the center around whom all things revolved, a condition that he took as the natural order of things. Joe saw even the Catholic Church largely through the eyes of women, particularly the nuns who taught him at parochial school.
    Joe listened to the moral axioms proffered by the nuns and followed his mother’s detailed course in manners, but he chafed at all the restrictions she put on him. Mary Augusta represented a secret danger to her only son. Her idea of civility, of culture, was a seductive call that risked closeting him awayso that he might never become a true man. Her house was a sanctuary of rectitude and security, but it was on the streets below, unprotected by his mother’s sheltering skirts, that Joe had to journey to become a man.
    Joe was on two journeys: one toward civility along a pathway led by his mother, the other a struggle toward true manhood. President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt feared that an insipid, feminized culture was castrating men, robbing them of their vitality. Roosevelt saw each nation engaged in its own struggle for survival, a fight in which only a nation of true men might survive. “Any nation that cannot fight is not worth its salt, no matter how cultivated and refined it may be, and the very fact that it can fight often obviates the necessity of fighting,” Roosevelt asserted. “It is just so with a boy.”
    G. Stanley Hall, the most prominent psychologist of the age, taught that boys replicate the evolutionary process of civilization, from savagery to barbarism to refinement. It is a process, he lectured, that each