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John F. Kennedy in New England
John F. Kennedy in New England
John F. Kennedy in New England
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John F. Kennedy in New England

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On May 29, 1917, John F. Kennedy was born in the Kennedy home in Brookline, Massachusetts. As a toddler, he wandered the sands of Nantasket Beach in Hull. When he was a little boy, he swam in the Atlantic waters of Sandy Beach in Cohasset, and as a teenager, he learned to sail on Nantucket Sound off the Cape Cod hamlet of Hyannis Port. He was married on the lawn of the Auchincloss Estate in Newport on the shores of Rhode Island Sound, and as president, he sailed the waters off John's Island in Maine, while the Navy's Blue Angels flew over in a salute to their commander in chief. John Kennedy was marked and then defined by his time sailing the seas off New England's shores, and as his brother Ted once said, it was Hyannis Port where he enjoyed his "happiest times."
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 17, 2017
ISBN9781439660317
John F. Kennedy in New England
Author

Raymond P. Sinibaldi

Baseball historians Raymond Sinibaldi, Kerry Keene, and David Hickey collaborate once again to tell the riveting story of the Dodgers in the Hall of Fame. They also collaborated on Images of Baseball: Yankees in the Hall of Fame, Images of America: Fenway Park, and The Babe in Red Stockings.

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    John F. Kennedy in New England - Raymond P. Sinibaldi

    Schlesinger.

    INTRODUCTION

    John F. Kennedy’s heritage was rooted in the country of Ireland and in the city of Boston, Massachusetts. His eight great-grandparents, bearing the names of Kennedy, Murphy, Hickey, Field, Fitzgerald, Cox, and Hannon, emigrated from Ireland dating back into the 1840s. Each of them came to the city of Boston seeking the economic opportunity offered in America. His paternal grandfather Patrick Kennedy represented parts of the city of Boston in both houses of the Massachusetts State Legislature from 1884 through 1896. His maternal grandfather John Honey Fitz Fitzgerald served in the Massachusetts Senate, represented Boston’s ninth district in the US House of Representatives, and served as Boston’s 38th and 40th mayor.

    Born in the Boston suburb of Brookline, the second child of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald, JFK planted his roots in the city of his forbears and in the seaside community of Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Inspired by trips to the USS Constitution as a young boy, Kennedy was drawn to the sea. He once wrote, "I have been interested in the sea from my earliest boyhood . . . My earliest recollections of the United States Navy go back to the days when, as a small boy, I used to be taken to the USS Constitution in Charlestown, Massachusetts. The sight of the historic frigate, with its tail spars and black guns, stirred my imagination and brought American history alive for me. His older brother Joe was born in Hull, Massachusetts, a seaside community on Boston’s south shore. The little boy, whom they called Jack," spent times in Hull visiting his Grandpa Fitzgerald in his oceanfront home. It was in 1928 when he spent his first summer in Hyannis Port that his love affair with the sea was fostered, bloomed, and flourished. This love affair would mark him and then define him, and it would last a lifetime.

    He has become an icon, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as a person . . . worthy of great respect and reverence. He has been marbleized by the mind-numbing events of that dark weekend in November over a half century ago. For those of us who were the children of his New Frontier, the images remain sharp, vivid, and clear, crystalized through the prism of time.

    It is difficult to tell when one transitions from human to legend to hero to icon. In 25 years as a history teacher, I discovered a phenomenon I call the iconic streamline. This is simply the singular event for which said icon has come to be known. When students are asked what they know about a particular historical person, the responses are almost always the same: Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Rosa Parks wouldn’t give up her seat on the bus, and Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. Throughout my quarter century as a teacher, when I asked my students what they know about John F. Kennedy, the answer was virtually always the same: He got shot.

    Icons hover over our history. They are essential to passing on to future generations the foundations of who we are and from whence we came, each one providing a link in the chain of what Abraham Lincoln called our mystic chords of memory. However, in the creation of historical icons, their humanity is lost. The person gets buried, hidden from the picklocks of biographers. We forget that they were fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and mothers and daughters. We forget that they were imperfect people living in an imperfect world with the capacity for formidable accomplishments and wrought with the human foibles that plaque us all.

    This book’s nascence lay two generations before I was born and is a culmination of a half century of interest, study, and living. It is rooted in the journeys of John F. Kennedy’s maternal grandfather John F. Honey Fitz Fitzgerald and mine, William F. Billy Kelly.

    The Fitzgeralds and Kellys were neighbors in Boston’s North End, and as a result, the Kellys were ardent supporters of the political endeavors of Honey Fitz. Kelly was 14 years old when Honey Fitz became the 40th mayor of Boston in 1910, and the excitement of that campaign ignited a political fire that would burn in him throughout his life.

    Kelly and the future president first met at the Boston Athletic Association Clubhouse on Exeter Street in Boston. The meeting is chronicled in his oral history at the JFK Library. Kelly’s recollections are as follows: I first met Jack Kennedy with his brother Joe . . . on April 19, 1935. That was the year my cousin Johnny Kelley [different spelling] the older, won the marathon race for the first time. Jack and Joe were with their grandfather to see the finish of the race. The next time I met Jack was when he became a candidate for Congress in the Eleventh Congressional District . . . I sat in on a conference with all the men of the district and plans were formulated to start the campaign. Living in East Boston, I was requested to act as Secretary of the East Boston area. Kelly served in that capacity in Kennedy’s

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