Rose Kennedy - Wikipedia

Thank you my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that July 22 is the anniversary of the birth of American philanthropist, socialite, and the matriarch of the Kennedy family
Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald Kenned who was deeply embedded in the "lace curtain" Irish Catholic community in Boston, where her father was mayor.

Rose Kennedy - Interview - 1974
Rose Kennedy reminisces about her life as a member of the Kennedy family, as the wife of the first Irish-American ambassador to the Court of St. James, and as .

Respected Journalist Mavis Nicholson chats to Mrs Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, American philanthropist and socialite but most famously known for being a part of .

Barbara Walters on interviewing Rose Kennedy. For more on this and over 600 interviews, please visit emmytvlegends.org.
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, the mother of the famous Kennedy family is interviewed in 1974. She is the mother of Joe, Jack, Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia.
The house was purchased by Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. in 1914, shortly after his marriage to Rose Fitzgerald; John and his sisters Rosemary and Kathleen

Images
1. Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald.
2. Kennedy family portrait 1921 John, Joe Jr; Joe Sr; Rose, Rosemary, Eunice, Kathleen.
3. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy with her in-laws Mrs Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald Kennedy and Mr. Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr
4. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1911

Biographies:
1. jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/rose-fitzgerald-kennedy
2.

1. Background from {[http://jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/rose-fitzgerald-kennedy]}
"Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, London, circa 1939. Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald was born in Boston’s North End on July 22, 1890, the eldest child of John F. (“Honey Fitz”) and Mary Josephine Hannon Fitzgerald.
She was first introduced to politics as a child. When she was 5, her father was a congressman. By the time she turned 15, Honey Fitz was one of the most popular and colorful mayors Boston had ever known. He once took Rose and her sister Agnes to visit President William McKinley in the White House, and the president at one point said to Agnes, "You're the prettiest girl who has entered the house." Rose remarked later, "I knew right then that I would have to work hard to do something about myself." Her graduation from Dorchester High School in June 1906 was front-page news in the Boston newspapers as Mayor Fitzgerald proudly gave his daughter her diploma.

Rose had been accepted at Wellesley College during her junior year in high school, but her father enrolled her in the Convent of the Sacred Heart, in Boston, at the suggestion of Archbishop William O'Connell. At the age of 90, in an interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin, Mrs. Kennedy said her "greatest regret is not having gone to Wellesley College. It is something I have felt a little sad about all my life." However, she eventually grew fond of the convent school, and she said the religious training she received there became the foundation for her life.

In her teens Rose became acquainted with Joseph P. Kennedy at Old Orchard Beach in Maine where their families were vacationing together. On October 7, 1914, they were married in a modest ceremony in a small chapel at the residence of Cardinal O'Connell, who officiated. The couple's first home was a three-story gray building on Beals Street in Brookline, now a national historic site.

At the time of their marriage, Joseph Kennedy was making $10,000 a year as a businessman. When the family left Brookline and moved to Riverdale, New York, about 10 years later, he was a multimillionaire, in part through his dealings as a lone wolf financier and investor.

In their first 18 years of marriage, the couple had nine children. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. was born in 1915, John in 1917, Rosemary in 1918, Kathleen in 1920, Eunice in 1921, Patricia in 1924, Robert in 1925, Jean in 1928 and Edward in 1932.

Mrs. Kennedy was considered by many to be a model parent. "Children," she said, "should be stimulated by their parents to see, touch, know, understand and appreciate." She made the family a self-sustaining unit, with members allowed to go their own way while maintaining interest in the lives of the others. A friend of Mrs. Kennedy, Mary Jo Clasby, once said, "When she would teach you something you would have to do it yourself. She would really want you to do it, so you could find out for yourself it was possible."

Mrs. Kennedy often retold stories from history books to her children -- about Bunker Hill, the Battle of Concord, and Plymouth Rock -- then took them on outings to see those sites. She also told them stories from the Bible. "I always told the children that if they were given faith when they were young, they should try to nurture it and guard it, because it's really a gift that older people value so much when sorrow comes," she once said.

One of Mrs. Kennedy's main problems was keeping tabs on her large family. She kept careful records of all her children on index cards, and had an extensive filing system that she said helped her remember each one's physical condition. She said the cards weren't the product of American efficiency, but "Kennedy desperation." They listed weights, shoe sizes, dental treatments, eye examinations and illnesses each child had.

As Mrs. Kennedy's younger sons grew older, they began to look toward the political scene, and she did little to discourage them. She had learned from her father how to be at ease in public and how to conduct political campaigns, skills she used in her sons' numerous battles. "If you're in politics, I suppose you always work to get to the top," she once said. When her son John ran in 1946 for the Massachusetts 11th Congressional District seat, the one previously held by Honey Fitzgerald, Rose was the first to spur him on. “She was the greatest pol we had in 1946," said Dave Powers, a longtime friend of the family.

She loved politics, especially the backroom strategies and behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing. "She knew all the nuts and bolts," Pierre Salinger once said, noting that she made prospective voters feel more important by preparing her remarks carefully and addressing them on intimate terms. Mrs. Kennedy's love of history often infused her political discussions. "My view is a historical one," she said. "I tend to take the long view, in the light of history, of events."

After John's victory in 1946, his next big battle was for the US Senate. During his 1952 campaign to unseat Henry Cabot Lodge, Rose Kennedy was the hostess at many "Kennedy teas" sponsored by the Democratic Party. Newspapers reported that at times the campaign resembled a family feud -- the Kennedys vs. the Lodges.

In her son's 1960 presidential campaign, Mrs. Kennedy again did her utmost. "For six weeks," Powers said, "every night I'd pick her up and we'd go to meetings. Maybe the first place would be an abandoned North End garage, and she'd put on a babushka and talk to the women about children. And the next stop might be West Roxbury, so in the car she'd change her shoes and maybe put on a mink jacket," he said.

But during Robert's fateful presidential campaign in 1968, she made perhaps her only political misstep. Just before the Indiana primary, she was questioned about the large sums her family was spending on his behalf. "It's our money and we're free to spend it any way we please," she said. "It's part of this campaign business. If you have money, you should spend it to win. The more you can afford, the more you'll spend." Her comments were carried by newspapers nationwide. Later that spring, during the Oregon primary race, she said: "I don't talk about high finance anymore. If I did, they'd send me home tonight."

Mrs. Kennedy rarely talked publicly about her personal grief. But once she remarked to a friend: "Wasn't there a book about Michelangelo called 'The Agony and the Ecstasy'? That's what my life has been."

During World War II, her eldest son, Joseph Jr., a Navy pilot, was killed in action on August 12, 1944, when the plane he was flying on a mission exploded over the English Channel. Her second-oldest daughter, Kathleen, wife of the Marquess of Hartington, who was also killed during World War II, died May 13, 1948, in a plane crash in France. Her second son, John, was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, during his first term as president. At the funeral in Washington, she turned to Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie and said: "It's wrong for parents to bury their children. It should be the other way around."

Her third son, Robert, who was US Attorney General under his brother and later a Democratic senator from New York, was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, while campaigning for president. Her eldest daughter, Rosemary, spent most of her adult life in a home for intellectually disabled people. Mrs. Kennedy's husband suffered a stroke in 1961, and it left him an invalid until his death eight years later.

"Willpower, just willpower and doing what's necessary is what keeps me going," Mrs. Kennedy once said. And despite all the tragedies she lived to see, she wrote in her 1974 autobiography: "There have been times when I felt I was one of the most fortunate people in the world, almost as if Providence, or Fate, or Destiny, as you like, had chosen me for special favors."

When asked what were the greatest thrills of her life, one of the first Mrs. Kennedy mentioned was being at her son John's inauguration in January 1961 as President Eisenhower's successor. But she recalled other highlights few people might remember. In the late 1930s, her husband was named US ambassador to Britain. While living overseas, the Kennedy family was invited to attend the coronation of Pius XII in March 1939. They enjoyed a private audience with the new Pope. In 1951, she had the rare title of papal countess conferred on her by the Vatican in recognition of her "exemplary motherhood and many charitable works." She was only the sixth woman from the United States to have the title bestowed upon her by the Roman Catholic Church.

Aside from the most important aspects of Rose Kennedy's life -- family, religion and politics -- she was also interested and active in many other areas. Much of her time in later years was devoted to securing public support for the campaign to enlighten the public about mental retardation and its causes. The Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation has donated millions of dollars since 1946 to hospitals, institutions, and day-care and research centers throughout the United States.

Mrs. Kennedy spoke several languages fluently and was an accomplished pianist. Petite and slim, she dressed stylishly. During the '30s she was named the best-dressed woman in public life by a poll of fashion designers.

For relaxation, she played golf or swam off the beach at the family compound on Cape Cod. She could often be seen, well past her middle-age years, carrying her own clubs on the difficult Hyannis Port Country Club golf course, playing nine holes alone against the biting gusts of sea air. During the 1970s, Mrs. Kennedy loved to walk village streets alone, unrecognized by most passersby. But a stroke in 1984 left her in a wheelchair.

Perhaps the most fitting tributes to Mrs. Kennedy's life are those given by her children and grandchildren. In 1987, celebrating his grandmother's 97th birthday, Rep. Joseph Kennedy II spoke of her as "the magnet that always pulled all of us together as a family, ever since I was a little boy. We could look to her when things were going very well, and she'd give us a smile and encouragement. When things were not going so well, we'd get the same thing. Grandma's so strong and just a tremendous inspiration to all of us."
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy died in her Hyannis Port home on Jan. 22, 1995. She was 104.
[This biography is excerpted from an obituary in The Boston Globe , January 23, 1995.]"

2. Background from {[https://www.wbur.org/artery/2013/07/08/rose-kennedy-camelot-matriarch]}
"Rose Kennedy: The 'Courageous' Mother Of Camelot
July 08, 2013
• Bob Oakes
• Kathleen McNerney
This article is more than 6 years old.
The matriarch of one of America's most political families — certainly the most famous political family in Massachusetts — is Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.
"We've had great ecstatic moments, and we've had these tragedies, but the ecstasies or the triumphs are greater than the tragedy," Rose Kennedy said on the Merv Griffin Show in 1969, describing how she had weathered the losses of three sons, John and Bobby Kennedy to assassination and Joe Kennedy, the oldest son, to World War II.
The new book "Rose Kennedy: The Life And Times Of A Political Matriarch," out July 15, uses newly released documents and letters from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library to tell the story of the Kennedy matriarch.

The book's author, Barbara Perry, joined Morning Edition to discuss how researching the book changed her view of Rose Kennedy.
Barbara Perry: Spending five years with her, going through her massive amounts of personal papers that had been released by the Kennedy library in Boston in 2006, I just have a much, I think, more multifaceted view of her, her strengths and her weaknesses. She wasn't always courageous in the sense that she had her doubts and her fears, but she found ways to overcome those. And so, in that sense, I think she came out — in my mind

Bob Oakes: You write that in many ways she was responsible for shaping the Kennedy political dynasty. And it really all started with her work on campaigns with her father "Honey Fitz," John Fitzgerald, who served as mayor of Boston. She was out campaigning with him, essentially taking over the role traditionally held by wives. Explain how that shaped her early on.
Her mother, Josie Fitzgerald, was quite introverted and also had five other children. Rose was the oldest of six. So while her mother was at home taking care of the other five children and as Rose grew into teenagehood and loved the spotlight and, very much like her father, craved the spotlight, and she was so good on the stump, that he was perfectly happy to take her out and put her in the spotlight with him.
As you say, we know that she was a terrific campaigner. Jack's congressional campaign, the campaigns for Senate, the presidential campaign, Teddy's campaigns. Her sons and their campaign workers all thought she was a bit of a secret weapon. What made her so good at it?
She had this amazing ability to combine having such a fascinating life lived at a very high level, much higher level in terms of money and fame and fortune, but also to have the common touch and be able to relate to people.
You write that, in many ways, Rose was a Victorian, a Republican mother raising her sons to serve the government, but she also seemed indifferent to female issues on the campaign. So was she both typical and out of place?
Even there were women of her age and of her background who were participating, for example, in the suffragette movement, that was something that Rose was not drawn to, so we couldn't say that she was a feminist. But what I say she did was take the roles that she was handed, in sometimes secondary realms, and then she perfected those somewhat stereotypical female roles, and she used them to great advantage and power within this patriarchal family and society and religion.

Do you think that in a different day and age that Rose Kennedy might have actually been a candidate for office herself?
Oh, I do. And she would've been a great one because she was a tremendous surrogate for her sons. But we have to remember: She was born in 1890 into a very Victorian society, one in which women couldn't even vote, much less stand for office. I think that she would've been brilliant at that. She had the campaign skills; she had the intellect. She would've been as good or maybe even better than her sons.
We also should remember that her deal goal — and this is something that I found a reference to in one of these private letters that I came upon — was that she thought she was going to Wellesley. The story is that the Archbishop of Boston said to Honey Fitz, "You're the Irish Catholic mayor of Boston. You can't send your daughter to a non-Catholic institution." That's when he ended up sending her to the Prussian convent — also to remove her from her romance with Joe Kenendy.
She was disappointed in that.
She was. And she tended not to be a regretful person, but that was one thing she looked back on with regret. If she had had the opportunity to do a four-year degree at Wellesley, think how that would have broadened her mind in a way that going to this Prussian convent could not.

What about the dynamics of the household? She ran a very tight ship — strict schedules for the nine kids, but robust conversations about news and issues around the dinner table. How was she the one who drove that conversation and then spurred the kids to go on and do bigger and better things?
There's a bit of a tug of war, I think, with people who have written about her and about her husband and about her husband and about her family. Some people say, "Oh, it was Joe Kennedy who was always in charge and he was the one who really started that conversation at the family table." But he was away so much with his business work and, particularly as the children were coming on and growing up, she would — and her father did this as well for her — they would cut out articles from the newspaper and they would hand them around or they would put them on a bulletin board. And so she was constantly stressing that they must learn current events.

Did the kids have trouble living up to those pretty high expectations?
Yes, in a word. And she would point that out to them in great detail. These 250 boxes of her archives are just replete with letters — sometimes very critical — to the children, even when they are in the White House. She is writing to Jack about the clothes that he's wearing or how he looks or something that he might have said.
She was also the backbone of the family through its many tragedies. The first son, Joe Jr., killed in World War II. The second son, President Kennedy, assassinated. The seventh child, Sen. Robert Kennedy, also assassinated. Talk about how important she was to the family and the public in those times.
She was so staunch in her faith, and I think the rest of the family turned to her because she was the one who could always remain strong even when they were in the depths of sadness. But she said about her own life it was a combination of the agony and the ecstasy, but she preferred — at least in public — to focus on the ecstasy, the glory, the happy days.

You write that after JFK's assassination, she struggled and occasionally had to take medication to sleep through the night. How did the assassinations of Jack and then Bobby change her?
I think the way they would affect anyone. A mother, to lose these two sons within five years to political violence and assassination — again, after losing her firstborn in the war. And she would say sometimes in magazine interviews, "I raised these children to be good, strong individuals, to have a sense of their religion and their public duties. And they were all doing so well, and then--" and literally the sentence would trail off. She could almost not bring herself to say what happened to them.
Do you think that the Kennedy image would be what it is today if it weren't for the tireless work of this mother and this campaigner?
I do not. And that's what I think is the importance of this book; it really shows that it was Rose Kennedy who was the mother of Camelot and the crucial creator of that legend."


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Maj Marty Hogan Amazing woman who lead an amazing family.

Thanks, Maj Marty Hogan, if there ever was a woman of steel, it surely was Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Per the New York Times, there "...were the twilight years of a life she once described as a series of agonies and ecstasies, a life born into fortune and politics, wed to ambition, graced by the exhilaration of a son in the White House and others on Capitol Hill, but touched by violent death, illness, scandal and other adversities.

Tragedy Intrudes On a Privileged Life

Raised in Boston, the daughter of John (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, a Boston mayor and Massachusetts Congressman, the young Rose Fitzgerald knew a life most only dream of -- private schools, debutante balls, summers on Cape Cod, winters in Palm Beach, trips to Europe and Asia, and hosts of suitors entranced by her young Irish charm and directness.

She was married at 24 to Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., the son of a saloon keeper, and a dynamo who amassed holdings in banking, real estate, liquor, films and Wall Street that grew to an estimated $500 million. Despite controversy over his wealth and isolationist views, he was posted to the Court of St. James's as Ambassador to Britain from 1938 to 1941.

There were meetings with kings, presidents and popes, and the satisfaction of children on the national stage, in Congress and in the White House. Although hers was a supporting role, her erect bearing, careful grooming and tireless work in her sons' campaigns, made her a figure of public interest in her own right.

She was not a powerful public speaker, but family members called her expert at gauging her audiences. On a single evening, they said, she could don a head scarf and mingle with workmen's wives at a stop in a blue-collar neighborhood, then rush off to campaign at a country club, changing in the back seat of a car into a mink coat and stylish shoes. It was a whirl that led to many successes.

But sorrow intruded time and again. Four of her nine children died in their prime. President Kennedy was slain by an assassin in Dallas in 1963. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot by another assassin in Los Angeles during the 1968 Presidential campaign. Her eldest son, Joseph Jr., a Navy pilot, was killed when his plane exploded over the English Channel on a mission in World War II. And a daughter, Kathleen, died in a plane crash in 1948..."