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Cable-Stitched. The Kennedy clan is as handsome and spirited as a meadow full of Irish thoroughbreds, as tough as a blackthorn shillelagh, as ruthless as Cuchulain, the mythical hero who cast up the hills of Ireland with his sword. The tribal laws permit extremes of individualism, though most Kennedys look alike when they smile. When they are together, the family foofaraws are noisy and the discussions continuous, but when they are apart, their need for constant communication strains the facilities of the telephone company and the U.S. postal service. No matter where they happen to be, the Kennedys are a cable-stitched clan. The sisters communicate by long distance at least once a week; Jack and his brothers hold daily strategy meetings by telephone or in person. Father Joe, whether in his Manhattan office, his summer home in Hyannisport, his winter palace in Palm Beach, or his between-seasons residence on the Riviera, gets the latest daily report from one of the boys, and when Mother Rose makes one of her frequent trips to the ateliers of Paris, she can count on weekly letters, with the latest intelligence from each of her children.
Though intramural competition is intense, the clan swarm like bees around a queen when one member makes a louder hum than the others. Thus, when Teddy was a brawny end at Harvard, every Kennedy became an expert football coach and traveled in T-formation to Cambridge on autumn Saturdays to watch him play. In Bobby's heyday as the grand inquisitor of the Senate McClellan committee, when he was making Jimmy Hoffa squirm, the clan became totally absorbed in the investigation, discussed it over every dinner table and every long-distance telephone call and beat a path to the white marble Senate Caucus Room. Even the in-laws are not immune to the sudden fevers: Bobby's wife Ethel, often accompanied by two or three of her older children, was a daily onlooker at the hearings last summer, well into the seventh month of her seventh pregnancy. When the Peter Lawfords encountered a new parlor game, Conversations,* it was only a matter of days before all the Kennedys were doing what comes naturally in all their parlors all over the U.S. And when Jack got into politics, the entire clan plunged in with him as quickly as they would join a family game of charades or touch football.
Belle of Boston. The clan came by its political instincts easily. The Kennedys and Mother Rose's family, the Fitzgeralds, came to Boston more than a century ago, in the great avalanche of immigration that followed the Irish potato famine. The families prospered, and both grandfathers, John F. ("Honey Fitz") Fitzgerald and Patrick J. Kennedy, went into Democratic politics—Pat as a backstage oligarch, Honey Fitz as a frock-coated ham who could weep at will at a stranger's wake, made Sweet Adeline his theme song, served three terms in Congress and was a memorable mayor of Boston.