To call her a matriarch is perhaps too easy, too simple a description of her place not only in her family but in this nation's history. Her values, by necessity, were a product of her time and place: she was a wife and mother first and, above all, protective of her nine children, fiercely ambitious for them. And she withstood the misfortunes of her life with fortitude. But to call her a matriarch and leave it at that shows how much we forget. It was Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy--more than her brash and dashing husband, more than the glamorous daughter-in-law she outlived, even more than her martyred sons--who forged the Kennedy character. It was Rose Kennedy, in reality, who played mythmaker to America's most mythic clan.
When she died on Jan. 22, after years of failing health but at the remarkable age of 104, she left behind five children, 28 grandchildren--and a motto as legacy to all who mourned her passing: ``I know not age, nor weariness, nor defeat.'' The boast is testament to her ability to craft legend out of the exigencies of real life. Of course, Rose Kennedy knew age and weariness and defeat. Many times over. She outlived four of her children and a husband who loved and humiliated her. She endured the haunting gossip and relentless scrutiny accorded all her family. With strictness, with humor, with a sense of style at once down-to-earth and every bit a match for her daughter-in-law Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Rose ruled and shaped the clan when sometimes it all must have been too much for her. Jackie once described Rose speaking of her life's sorrows: ``Her voice began to sort of break, and she had to stop. Then she took my hand and squeezed it and said, `Nobody's ever going to have to feel sorry for me. Nobody's ever going to feel sorry for me,' and she put her chin up. And I thought, God, what a thoroughbred.''
Her pedigree, like her father's before her and her children's after, was politics. The oldest child of Josephine Hannon and John Fitzgerald, she was born on July 22, 1890. Her father, Honey Fitz, who eventually became mayor of Boston in 1906, was the quintessential ward politician: he joined every club, attended every wedding, wept at every wake and kept Rose, his favorite child, close by his side. Though Rose had wanted to attend Wellesley, her parents dispatched her and her sister Agnes to a convent in the Netherlands. In the beginning, she was desperately lonely, but eventually she ``was able to find in myself the place that was meant for God,'' she later said. For the rest of her life, her faith sustained her, and she attended daily Mass for as long as her health permitted.
During a family vacation in Maine, Rose, then 16, met Joseph Patrick Kennedy, 17. Her father did not at first approve of Kennedy, son of another Irish ward boss, but Rose was in love with Joe, and the two married in 1914. The family grew and moved, following Joe Sr. as he became chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, then head of the Maritime Commission and, in 1937, the first Irish-Catholic American ambassador to Britain.