Read Online The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 by Laurence Leamer - Free Book Online

call him up. He pointed out how indispensable he was to the war effort. When the board thought otherwise, Joe’s boss went all the way to Washington to see that his young associate did not have to serve.
    It was a good time to be an ambitious young man in America away from the stench of the trenches. While one million Americans served in the armed forces, the economy was roaring ahead, and a man could make it in a way he never could before. Joe had only a small office, but he was the turnstile through which all the goods had to pass, and he made the most of it. He had a fine salary, bonuses, the right to run the canteen for his own profit, important new contacts, and the knowledge that Bethlehem Steel was a stock that a smart man had better get into.
    To Joe, all the prissy rules and moral guidelines of Harvard did not apply to him and his life. In July 1919, he joined Hayden, Stone and Company as a stockbroker. His employer, Galen Stone, made much of his money, not by the tedious route of collecting customer commissions but by employing insider information to drive a stock up or down. The technique, while then technically legal, preyed on the avarice and ignorance of the average stock buyer, an approach that fit perfectly with Joe’s view of human beings. He became as adept at this game as his employer. “Tommy, it’s so easy to make money in the market we’d better get in before they pass a law against it,” he told one friend, Tom Campbell. On one stock alone, Pond Coal Company, in which Stone was chairman of the board, Joe made close to seven hundred thousand dollars on an investment of only twenty-four thousand dollars. It was a high-stakes game in which Joe had thrice lost everything, he told his friend Oscar Haussermann, but he had come back and was again on top of the game.
    Joe was a competitor in everything, and to some degree his home life was not measuring up. He could not complain that Rose was anything less than the woman he had married: profoundly religious, Catholic-educated, andsocially conservative. But she was not growing into the new age, a time when women could snap wisecracks as quickly as men, roll their stockings on the dance floor, smoke cigarettes, and vote.
    Joe might not have wanted such a woman for his wife, but Rose remained a Catholic provincial. She might talk of culture, but he was the one who truly loved classical music and looked forward to their nights at the symphony.
    Joe Jr. was his father’s namesake in every way, a healthy, vibrant four-year-old, but the other children were not quite measuring up. Jack was a scrawny, whining, sickly tyke, and the newest, Rose’s namesake Rose Marie, or Rosemary as she was called, born in September 1918, was painfully slow in every part of her life.
    In January 1920, Joe came home from his new office on Milk Street in downtown Boston and found that his pregnant wife had returned to her father’s home in Dorchester. It was unspeakable and unthinkable that Rose should leave him, an insult to his manhood, to his children, to his family, and a full measure of the silent pain his wife was suffering. Joe was a good provider and a good husband by all the measures that mattered in the world in which he lived. He could not fathom the idea of divorce, which would sever him and Rose forever from the sacraments of the Church, making him such an outcast from Catholic society that his economic future would be compromised. He had no choice, however, but to wait his wife out, and wait he did for three full weeks.
    In the end it was his father-in-law, a man Joe considered in part a mountebank, who told his daughter to return to her husband. In Honey Fitz’s world, appearances were reality. As mayor, he had orchestrated photos of himself as a devoted family man, the public image so different from the reality, in which Honey Fitz honored his love of home by rarely being there. So there would be, if necessary, a similar portrait of Rose and Joe and their family.