Posted on 09/28/2006 6:38:19 PM PDT by Aussie Dasher
Rose Kennedy, for one brief shining moment the most powerful mother in America, went over John F. Kennedy's head in 1962 to write directly to Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev. For that, she got a playful scolding from her son.
She spunkily wrote a letter asking the Russian leader to autograph pictures of his meeting with her son, and Khrushchev complied.
"Would you be sure to let me know in the future any contacts you have with heads of state . . ." John Kennedy wrote to his mother on White House stationery on Nov. 3, 1962, just days after the Cuban missile crisis ended. "Requests of this nature are subject to interpretations and therefore I would like to have you clear them before they are sent."
Unfazed, Rose Kennedy wrote back: "Dear Jack: I am so glad you warned me about contacting heads of state as I was just about to write to Castro."
The exchange was contained in Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy's papers — 250 boxes of letters, photographs, notes — that became available to the public for the first time Thursday at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in Boston.
The collection sheds light on a woman best known as the daughter of a mayor, wife of an ambassador, and mother of sons who became president, attorney general and senator in a family that has known intense grief as well as enormous success.
"She's a hot ticket," said Megan Desnoyers, archivist for family collections at the library. "I don't think people know much about Rose Kennedy."
The eldest daughter of Boston Mayor John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, who also was a congressman, Rose Fitzgerald married Joseph Kennedy. Their 1914 Wedding Log, which is part of the collection, shows that they traveled to Philadelphia on their honeymoon to watch the Boston Braves play in a World Series game at Shibe Park.
Desnoyers describes Rose Kennedy as a "note taker and a keeper." She lived to be 104, dying in 1995.
As a teenager she became comfortable on the campaign trail with her father, said James Wagner, exhibits specialist at the library. That came in handy during her son's 1960 presidential campaign, when she visited more than a dozen states.
A six-page draft of a stump speech she gave in Wisconsin in 1960 includes her handwritten revisions.
"On the dais up until the last minute, she'd be revamping her speech," Wagner said. "She was a very comfortable public speaker. She would write her own speeches and edit them."
The papers were donated by the Kennedy family two years ago. Buried somewhere in the 250 boxes, but not yet pulled out for public display, is a letter she wrote to her son Edward in the early '60s, around the time he was either running for Senate, or after he was elected. It schools him on the proper pronunciation of "nuclear."
"She was always correcting their grammar. She definitely was a mother," Desnoyers said.
She was a disciplinarian as well.
"When the children needed to be spanked, I often used a ruler — and sometimes a coat hanger which was often more convenient because in any room there would be a closet and the hangers in them would be right at hand," she said in a letter dictated in 1972.
"Of course," it continued, "the children would sometimes anticipate what was coming and stuff their trousers with a pillow so I am not sure the spankings had much lingering effect."
Rose Kennedy's papers include solemn remembrances as well.
"My reaction to grief is a certain kind of nervous action," she wrote in her diaries shortly after the assassination of John Kennedy. "I just keep moving, walking, pulling away at things, praying to myself while I move, and making up my mind that it is not going to get me. I am not going to be licked by tragedy, as life is a challenge and we must carry on and work for the living as well as mourn for the dead."
She would have, but couldn't think of his name.
Just too bad she didn't have a better opportunity to abort a few of those leeches she bore.
Or what she thought of her law-breaking, womanizing, Nazi sympathizing husband.
And it didn't come close to working.
Interesting thing about liberals. They don't understand that results actually count for something.
Ah the Kennedys. Real class. Not.
Will we ever know the truth about poor Rosemary Kennedy, whom Mother Rose had lobotomized?
Not bloody likely, mate.
I guess we know where they got their love of socialism from.
I would have been fascinated to find out what would have happened had JFK never been assassinated. Would he have turned into another Jimmy Carter, or would he have led the democrats into the future with a pro-American, anti-Communist, anti-terrorist bent? Sad to say, but it would have been interesting to see an elderly JFK on CNN, berating his fellow party members about the WOT.
Look at the sheila in the left-hand bottom corner of the BJ/Lewinsky photo. Is that Sindy Shehen?
"Of course," it continued, "the children would sometimes anticipate what was coming and stuff their trousers with a pillow so I am not sure the spankings had much lingering effect."
I suspect Tedward was the one sticking pillows down his pants to lighten the consequences of his actions.
A world-class enigma, that woman... How interesting, the banal details of her disciplinary habits! /s
Memoirs of the idle rich are generally vacuous. As if Teresa.. er "Rose" had anything interesting to offer the general public.
My grandmother used to live around the corner from her when she lived on Moon Street in the north end of Boston. Said she was a clam...She actually used that term.
I was shocked.
"Or what she thought of her law-breaking, womanizing, Nazi sympathizing husband."
You forgot slumlording and pimping. The Kennedy fortune was accumulated by some disgusting behavior. And the one that's left, the one that stood on his girlfriend's shoulders to get out of the sinking car, the one who waited until he made an appointment to play tennis and consulted with his lawyers before calling for help, is continuing this long tradition.
He looks like he's had those pillows stuffed down his pants for decades!!!
Ok .. I laughed at that one *L*
It would be fascinating to know what would have happened if JFK's father had not succeeded in stealing the 1960 election, and Nixon had taken office. No Vietnam debacle, for one thing. Nixon would have followed Ike's advice (ignored by JFK) to bomb the Laotian trails that the North was using to infiltrate South Vietnam, and he would have refrained from committing a major US troop presence, something Ike warned against.
He was the last real Democrat, that's for sure.
Gosh, Rose Kennedy accomplished so much that we ought to make a great wonderful park over land formerly privately owned and taken by eminent domain from working people and name it after her.
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