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``None of my sons gives a damn about business, that's for sure,'' Old Joe told 's Hugh Sidey one night in the late '50s, standing in his Park Avenue apartment in his bathrobe, barking orders into a phone for his top hat and cutaway. ``But I raised them that way.'' He probably believed that. But the children certainly disputed who reared them. ``They talk a lot about Dad,'' said John Kennedy. ``But he was not around all that much. Mother deserves more credit than she gets. She is the one who was there. She is the one who read to us. She took us to Plymouth Rock and the other historic places. She gave me my interest in history.''
And she helped him and his brothers make history. She took to their campaigns with all the pride and energy she brought to rearing them. ``She was a master at knowing how to turn an ordinary event into a special occasion,'' said a friend. Rose had no false modesty about her powers. ``I was giving political speeches before women had the right to vote,'' she said on the eve of her 90th birthday. ``I have always loved politics.'' On the morning of J.F.K.'s Inauguration, she watched as he slipped into a Georgetown church. ``No one, including my son, knew I was there, as I sat in a side pew,'' she wrote to a journalist years later. ``I was infinitely pleased and thanked God for the grace which had prompted Jack to start his Administration with a prayer on his lips and in his heart.''
But every victory was matched by a sorrow: her oldest child lost to war, an estranged daughter to a plane crash, a retarded daughter relegated to an institution, an unfaithful husband, two sons assassinated. Rose was in Hyannis Port when she heard of J.F.K.'s murder, and firm in her belief that her ailing husband would handle the news better the next morning, she persuaded the household to behave as if all was well. She had the TVs unplugged, prayed and took a long walk on the beach. ``I can't stand it,'' she said. ``I've got to keep moving.''
Still, her children depended on her. Last week Ted said, ``She sustained us in the saddest times--by her faith in God and by the strength of her character, which was a combination of the sweetest gentleness and the most tempered steel.'' She leaves her family with a firm sense of what it means to be a Kennedy. She wrote in her autobiography, ``There are the living still to work for, while mourning for the dead.''