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A product of South Boston's melting pot ghetto, Cushing feels a Bostonian kinship to the Kennedys. The cardinal's father, after emigrating from County Cork in 1880, became a blacksmith for the old Boston Elevated. "We were ordinary people, but comfortable," Cushing recalls.
He attended public grammar schools, got his first taste of Catholic education when he entered the second-year class at the Jesuits' Boston College High School. "I was as rough as any of them, and they were pretty rough," the cardinal recalls. Actually, he seems to have been a devout and hard-working student; twice he thought of joining the Jesuits before he entered the archdiocesan seminary of St. John's after completing his sophomore year at Boston College.
"Originally, I wanted to be a politician," the cardinal says. "I used to make money speaking for politicians from the back of wagons. I spoke for Jim Curley. I spoke for the suffragettes and the anti-suffragettes—anyone who would pay me. This was all outdoors—that's how I developed this present style of talking indoors. Then the priest said, 'If you do any more speaking for politicians or any other cause, I'm never going to give you a letter to the seminary.' "
Taking Heaven by Storm. Ordained in 1921, Cushing spent his first eleven months as a parish priest. Then he had an interview with his archbishop, princely old William Cardinal O'Connell.* Brashly declaring that he wanted to "take heaven by storm," Cushing asked to be sent to the foreign missions. "Your foreign mission will be where I send you," the cardinal answered, and eventually named him chief local fundraiser for the Society for the Propagation of the Faith.
Cushing handled his job with such zeal that O'Connell made him an auxiliary bishop in 1939 to succeed Francis Spellman, who had been named Archbishop of New York. When O'Connell died in April 1944, Cushing was made temporary administrator of the archdiocese, and later that year he was formally installed as archbishop, thanks in large part to the intervention of Spellman. Friends then and now, Cushing and Spellman went through a long decade of cool relations. "The difference was to a large degree temperamental—the difference between a roughie [Cushing] and a smoothie," explains one veteran of church politics. "The smoothie thought he could tell the roughie what to do—and he couldn't." Opposition of New York's cardinal helped keep Cushing from winning his red hat until 1958.
Since 1944, his archdiocese has grown to 1,767,000 Catholics, and is the third largest in the country, after Chicago and New York. To serve this flock, Cushing has welcomed more than 60 different religious orders into Boston, and given so much help to the Jesuits that he has become one of their few benefactors known as "founders"; when he dies, every priest in the Jesuits' New England Province must offer three Masses for the repose of his soul.