Jean Kennedy Smith Remembers Growing Up Kennedy

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/books/review/jean-kennedy-smith-nine-of-us.html

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THE NINE OF USGrowing Up KennedyBy Jean Kennedy SmithIllustrated. 262 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $29.99.

She was the eighth and penultimate child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, shyer than most of the others, a sidekick to her siblings. Now, as Jean Kennedy Smith notes in her wistful memoir, “The Nine of Us: Growing Up Kennedy,” she’s the only one left. That’s reason enough to dip into this graceful if gossamer book.

Her Irish-American grandfathers who rose to power in Boston politics get their due, but “The Nine of Us” really begins in Hyannis Port, the playground and testament to Joe Kennedy’s great success, first as a banker and stock picker, then as a Hollywood financier, and above all as an investor who knew when to get out: right about the time Jean was born in 1928.

Jean is too proper, of course, to address her parents’ marriage in any but the most reverent terms. The patriarch rarely at home in his striving days, romancing Gloria Swanson among so many others, is only the wise and devoted father here. Rose’s unconcern at their long times apart — their separate vacations, even — is no less a mystery than before. This is the sepia-tinted story of children who made their beds, did chores, came to dinner at exactly quarter past 7 and endured both parents’ endless interrogatories about global events of the day.

Jean’s brother Teddy, in his far weightier memoir “True Compass,” has already worked this ground, as have scores of biographers, but Jean has a few new stories of her own. Locked one day in a closet for stealing a cookie, she waited — and waited. Suddenly the door opened and in rolled Teddy, youngest of the nine, for some infraction of his own. Once again, the door was shut and locked. Her mother, Jean realized, had forgotten she was there.

To dry their tears, Jean started playing make-believe. “Teddy,” I said, “do you think we will ever get out of this closet? Or do you think we’ll be like Amelia Earhart, stuck here forever?” Teddy giggled, she reports, and off they sailed to the isle where Earhart awaited them. When their mother at last let Teddy out, she did a double-take at seeing Jean, too, but nothing more. “Mother,” she writes, “was not about to admit her mistake.”

It’s fun, too, to see statecraft through the eyes of an 8-year-old girl. By l935, Joe Kennedy had worn out his welcome with President Roosevelt, despite his brilliance in building the Securities and Exchange Commission: To Roosevelt, the Boston banker was a braggart. Still, Kennedy held some sway over the Irish Catholic vote; best to keep him in thrall. When Kennedy mentioned to the president his son Bobby’s stamp collection, Roosevelt knew just what to do.

“Roosevelt was himself an avid collector,” Jean explains, “and he found a moment . . . to dictate a note to Bobby.” Later, when Roosevelt invited all the Kennedys to the Oval Office, Bobby walked in clutching his album. “President Roosevelt was delighted,” Jean recalls. “The two of them moved to the large desk, where the leader of the free world brought out his stamp collection, too. There they lingered, the president and the boy, necks craned over their albums.”

For his good offices, Kennedy asked to be named ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Roosevelt reportedly laughed at the thought: No one was less diplomatic than Joe Kennedy. But fine, let him hang himself. And so, in l938, the Kennedys arrived in London to a roaring welcome. No one had ever seen such a large and dazzling brood.

The eldest son, Joe Jr., and Jack stayed back at Harvard, but the rest of the children became social stars there, including Jean, who at age 10 attended a boarding school outside London. (The choice seems stern, but Jean never complained: No whining was the family rule.) Even Rosemary, third of the nine, managed at age 20 to get through her social debut despite a mental handicap that left her ever further behind her siblings.

Jean, unsurprisingly, says nothing about the circumstances surrounding the end of her father’s ambassadorship — that his pleas for appeasement with Hitler had outlasted even Chamberlain’s. She does note that Rosemary stayed on with her father when Britain declared war on Germany and the rest of the family went home. “Dad felt he needed to stay in England, . . . and she was doing so well at a school there, better than she ever had before.”

Yet two years later, Papa Kennedy decided that Rosemary should have a new and promising but radical treatment: a frontal lobotomy. Jean omits any mention of it in her narrative. Only in an epilogue — could it have been at an editor’s insistence? — does she acknowledge that the operation went “tragically wrong,” leaving Rosemary with difficulties walking or communicating.

In the Kennedy clan, each older sibling was made guardian of a younger one. Jean’s guardian was Joe Jr., oldest and most promising of the lot. Vividly, she recalls the summer day in l944 when two priests came up the driveway with news that Joe, a Navy pilot, had been killed in action. Jean recalls riding her bike to church to cry and pray, then going to the local hospital where she worked as a volunteer. “What else could I do?”

Four years later, death took a second of the nine: Kathleen, or Kick, whose small plane went down over France. Kick’s lover, a dashing (and married) Brit, was with her, having pushed the pilot to brave an oncoming storm. Greater depths, for all these tragedies, simply go unplumbed. The Kennedys have never been ones for public expressions of grief.

Jean ends her memoir on the high note of Jack’s presidency, after introducing her college roommate Ethel Skakel to Bobby (“The rest is history”), marrying the businessman and political strategist Stephen Smith, and doing all she can with her siblings to get Jack elected. Left to the epilogue are the assassinations, along with Joe’s devastating stroke. Of later painful episodes — Chappaquiddick, her son William Kennedy Smith’s rape trial, Teddy’s brain cancer, her sister Patricia Lawford’s fight with cancer and more — there is no mention.

We can rue how much goes unsaid here, even about those Hyannis Port summers of the l930s and l940s. Or we can concede that the last Kennedy of her generation has the right to tell the story she wishes, and let it go at that. Slim as this volume is, it still makes for engaging reading — say, on a front porch by the sea, in that quiet time after lunch when the Kennedy children, at their parents’ insistence, read in their rooms every day, before the years when they lit up the sky.