"The young boy stands smiling, his grin undeniable: he is often with his siblings, sometimes with his arm slung around them, playing with them at the beach or at their home, and at other times, posing alone in a Halloween costume, suit, with the family dog Bobby or upright on skis.
Newly released photos offer a look into John F. Kennedy's privileged childhood and teen years, growing up with his eight siblings in Massachusetts and New York, and vacationing at the family homes in Hyannis Port and Palm Beach, Florida as well as abroad. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum recently made the Kennedy family photos available for viewing online after completing an 18-month project to catalog and digitize them.
Born on May 29, 2017 in Brookline, an area outside of Boston in Massachusetts, Jack, as he was called by his family and friends, was named after his maternal grandfather, John Francis Fitzgerald, a former Congressman and mayor of Boston, who was known as ‘Honey Fitz’ for his charm and charisma. From a young age, the future 35th president would follow in his namesake's footsteps: Jack was considered a ‘natural wit’ to the point his mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy wrote down things that he would say, according to Nigel Hamilton’s ‘JFK: Reckless Youth.’
Jack would parlay that charisma and wit all the way to the highest office in the land, and along the way attend elite preparatory schools where he would win friends and titles such as 'Most Likely to Succeed' but not always academic accolades despite an individualist mind that enjoyed to read. Jack battled being seriously ill off and on throughout his childhood and teens years, but remained amiable and was considered the family's joker. All of the Kennedy kids contended with their parents - Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. - contentious marriage as Kennedy Sr. had several affairs, including with actress Gloria Swanson, according to the book.
Rose Kennedy would have nine children – four boys and five girls – and began a ‘card-index filing system to keep track of the children’s medical histories and vital statistics’, and had a ‘daily inspection’ where she ‘looked for signs of fraying garments,’ according to the book. Jack, the second eldest after his older brother Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., ‘seemed unconcerned about dress,’ Hamilton wrote, and was at times disheveled with his shirt not tucked into his pants.
Rose would spend much time sewing and mending and darning, and Hamilton called Rose’s mothering style more like management ‘rather than maternal approach to child rearing,’ and she ‘never kissed or touched’ her children that she ‘rarely saw.’ The children had several governesses.
When Jack was two-years-old, he was struck by scarlet fever, and Rose, who had just given birth to Jack’s younger sister Kathleen, was in a ‘frantic terror,’ Hamilton wrote, not on behalf of Jack but for his siblings. Jack was close to death but recovered, and would face spells of sickness throughout his childhood and his teens, according to the book.
Jack and his older brother, Joe, who was named after their father, were rivals, and ‘when not engaged in fisticuffs with his older brother, Jack turned more and more to books,’ according to the book. Hamilton surmises that while being ill, Jack took up the habit of reading. By aged six, Jack was promoted to second grade, and the next year to third grade when he was seven - ‘a year if not two ahead of most children his age,’ according to the book.
Meanwhile his sister, Rosemary, who was a year younger than him, was a slow learner and was ‘unable to hold a knife and fork at first,’ according to the book, and Rose spent more time with her than Jack.
By October 22, 1994, while Jack is in third grade at the Edward Devotion School, he pulled out of that institution and sent, along with his older brother, Joe, then nine, to the $400 a year Noble and Greenough Lower School. The Kennedy boys were likely the only Irish Catholic family at the school where most were Protestant and Anglo-Saxon, and as new boys they were the ‘object of derision and taunts,’ according to the book.
They were driven to school by a chauffeur in a big black shiny car, and both Jack, with his ‘precocious intellect,’ and his older brother Joe liked the school despite all the ‘social and ethnic prejudice they suffered,’ Hamilton wrote. Joe and Jack were also ‘steadfastly loyal to the ex-mayor,’ their grandfather Honey Fitz, and would go campaigning with him.
Among Boston’s upper crust, a contemporary of the Kennedy boys, Augustus Soule, said in Hamilton’s book that they ‘were very down on the Irish’ and that his father would have nothing to do with Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who had made money ‘in ways that were known, in banking circles, to be unsavory.’
Kennedy Sr. was a wealthy businessman who manipulated share prices, according to the book, and at one time owned production companies and tried his hand as a Hollywood impresario. It was during this period that Kennedy Sr., who was considered a womanizer, had an affair with icon and actress Gloria Swanson, according to the book.
The family would then move to a 12-bedroom colonial in nearby Bronxville in Westchester, and ‘at last acquired a summer house at Hyannis Port, on the east coast of Cape Cod,’ according to the book. The Kennedys would vacation often - in Hyannis Port, at their sprawling property in Palm Beach, Florida, and abroad.
The ‘record of parental absenteeism shockingly high’ for the Kennedy kids, and the ‘general deterioration in the relationship between mother and father created an emotional wasteland,’ Hamilton wrote.
On October 29, 1929, the stock market crashes, billions are lost and the United States is plunged into the Great Depression that follows. Kennedy Sr., however, ‘had shrewdly moved most of his investments out of stocks,’ according to the book.
Joe is sent to the Choate School, the elite boarding school in Connecticut, while Jack attended a boarding school in New England called the Canterbury School. At 13, Jack has an appendectomy, and would leave Canterbury to follow his older brother at Choate, according to the book.
Unlike Joe, Jack had a hard time conforming to the rules and struggled academically at Choate, and Hamilton said Jack's four years at the boarding school were ‘grueling.' Jack was popular with his classmates and had a reputation for ‘wit and clownishness,' and ‘on one occasion Jack stole a life-size cardboard cutout of Mae West from the Wallingford cinema and slipped it into his bed to shock the cleaning woman the following morning,’ according to the book.
While at Choate, Jack would fall ill a few times, and in January 1934, months before turning 17, seriously so with a friend saying in the book that he was close to dying. ‘If Rose Kennedy was anxious in Palm Beach, she had a strange way of showing it. She had ventured abroad seventeen times in four years, but could not manage the journey to Connecticut, where Jack lay in the hospital further north,’ Hamilton wrote.
Jack would bounce back again, and once healthy, would form a group called ‘The Muckers Club’ at Choate, which wasn’t about smoking or drinking but rather about planning pranks. Jack and the other members were almost expelled for a proposed prank but the headmaster reconsidered the punishment, which would have dashed the boys' Ivy League ambitions, according to the book.
Kennedy Sr. pushed his children to be competitive with a winning is everything mentality, according to the book, and a school friend said that while at first the Kennedys appeared to be a ‘model family,’ over time, the 'storybook façade concealed an almost psychotic drama, with Mrs. Kennedy eclipsed by her ruthless, bullying husband and the tension of that unspoken interparental hostility pervading everything. The competitiveness Mr. Kennedy generate among his nine children was awesomely fascinating.’
Hamilton added: ‘Perhaps most damaging of all was the sexual example Joseph Kennedy set for his children. Jack came home from school to having his father cover his bed with pornographic magazines ‘all open to display the female anatomy at its most immodest.’
Jack would vie for ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ at Choate and win. By the summer of 1935, Jack found out that he got into Harvard and would be put on a path toward the presidency.
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