Word: joe
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Behind the Lines. Joe Kennedy had the fortune to be born in a Boston where, the Yankee hegemony notwithstanding, political and financial power was beginning to be possible for an Irishman. His grandfather had fled the potato famine in 1848; his father, Patrick J. Kennedy, became a saloon owner and Massachusetts state senator. Pat Kennedy had the money and savvy to send Joe to Boston Latin School and then across the river to Harvard, deep behind the Brahmin lines. Emerging from Harvard in 1912, Kennedy told friends that he would be a millionaire at 35-and he just made...
...Kennedy realized another ambition. He married Rose Fitzgerald, the lithe, convent-schooled daughter of Boston's ebullient Mayor John F. (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald. Borrowing $2,000 for a down payment, Kennedy bought a nine-room frame house in the Brookline section of Boston. The family needed the space. Joe Jr. arrived within a year; five of the nine Kennedy children were born within six years...
...Jack became a presidential possibility after the 1956 convention, Joe was careful to recede more and more into the background. The idea that father and son almost never agreed on political issues was encouraged. "Dad is a financial genius, all right," John Kennedy once said, "but in politics he is something else...
During the war years, the first blows of what Ted Kennedy called "some awful curse" began falling. Joe Jr., whom the ambassador was quite consciously raising to be President, died when his plane exploded over England in 1944. At the same time, Jack lay in a Boston naval hospital recuperating from injuries suffered as a result of the sinking of PT109. A few weeks later, daughter Kathleen's husband, the Marquess of Hartington, died leading an infantry charge in Normandy. Kathleen was to be killed four years later in a plane crash in France. A continuing heartbreak for Rose...
...Joe Kennedy threw himself passionately into Jack's new political career. The founder spent some $50,000 for the young naval veteran's first congressional campaign. In 1952, when Jack was thinking of running for Governor of Massachusetts, Joe Kennedy persuaded him to try for Henry Cabot Lodge's Senate seat. "When you've beaten him," said Joe, "you've beaten the best. Why try for something less?" The Kennedy forces spent $500,000, dislodged the Senator by 70,000 votes...