BOOK: Capturing the Kennedy clan at Hyannis Port

The house had many names.

Old-timers called it Malcolm Cottage. When the Kennedys bought it, they added neighboring properties, and it became the Big House.

Kate Storey’s book gives the compound yet another name: “White House by the Sea: A Century of the Kennedys at Hyannis Port.” Sure, the Camelot years loom large, but there are 100 years of family history here, starting with Joe Kennedy, a Wall Street titan, and Rose, his politically connected wife.

“Joseph P. Kennedy drove a Rolls Royce,” Storey writes. “Well, he was driven in it. He was tall with perfectly erect posture, handsome with square shoulders, and ginger-haired in the sunlight — and he was quick with a smile that crinkled his eyes… He was married to Rose Fitzgerald, the daughter of John F. Fitzgerald, the former mayor of Boston better known as ‘Honey Fitz.’”

The Massachusetts couple originally brought their growing family to Riverdale, close to Joe’s Manhattan office. Still, the parents dreamed of the sort of summer vacations they enjoyed growing up. For a while, they rented Malcolm Cottage in Cape Cod. In 1928, the Kennedys bought it for $25,000 and redid it, doubling the square footage.

They needed the extra room. When they settled there in 1929, they had eight children. Teddy arrived in 1932. Although they eventually bought a winter retreat in Palm Beach, Fla., the Cape Cod house remained the family’s fulcrum, where their eventually far-flung brood could return for reunions, mourning, and relaxation.

That is, if you could relax with all those Kennedys running around.

“Rose was on the phone talking to Archbishop Sullivan,” Storey writes, recounting a typical night. “Pat, in a sweatshirt and worn-in dungarees, told a story she’d just read in the news about a plane crashing near where their family had lived in London, and Joe Jr. explained something happening in the Soviet Union. Bobby tried unsuccessfully to get everybody to play charades. Jack was surrounded by piles of ‘Why England Slept,’ the book he’d written from his Harvard senior thesis.”

As Irish Catholics, the Kennedys weren’t immediately accepted in Hyannis Port. Nor did Rose work terribly hard to build bridges. After the Kennedys moved in, a neighbor rang the bell, eager to introduce herself. The housekeeper cooly suggested she first book an appointment through Mrs. Kennedy’s social secretary.

“The hell with that,” the woman said under her breath and left.

But with nine kids, the family didn’t need others. There was always someone to talk to or play with. The family’s brutal touch football games were legendary. Even during carefree summer days, competition and ambition were paramount. Winning was everything.

“We would sit in our house and look at that big Kennedy house,” a neighbor remembered, “and know that somebody in that big house was going to be president.”

No one was surer of that than Joe Kennedy, but when his eldest son and namesake died in a World War II plane crash, he refocused all his attention on Jack.

In 1946, JFK ran for Congress and won. In 1952, he moved on to the Senate. The press was already half in love with him. “A lean, sinewy figure with an untamed brush of brown hair overhanging his gray eyes, he has an appealingly youthful appearance,” gushed the New York Times. “The illusion is enhanced by a suggestion of shyness… and a smile which can only be described as boyish.”

The grin certainly captivated a 23-year-old photojournalist, Jackie Bouvier. Once they became serious, Jack brought her to Hyannis Port to meet the family. It went well. She wasn’t much for touch football but was pretty and polite and liked sailing. After, she sent a thank-you note.

“Very few people have been able to create what you have — a family built on love and loyalty and gaiety,” Jackie wrote Rose. “If I can even come close to building that with Jack I will be very happy.”

Yet once they wed, lasting happiness would prove impossible. Dallas shattered everything.

Again, Joe Kennedy refocused his aspirations on another son, this time, it was Robert. Although Bobby had been an edgily aggressive young man — some described him as “mean” — grief has matured him. In 1968, he quickly became a contender for the presidency.

“I’m going to win this one for you,” he told his father before leaving for the crucial California primary.

An assassin’s bullet cut him down, too. As we know, more tragedies followed.

The first was in the summer of ‘69, at a party Ted Kennedy was helping to throw for the late RFK’s young female campaign workers. What went on at the party was never fully reported. All that’s certain is that while driving 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, Ted crashed into a pond on nearby Chappaquiddick Island. He made it to shore. She didn’t.

Ted also didn’t report the accident to authorities until the next day.

Eventually, he received a two-month sentence, suspended, for leaving the scene of an accident. But a young woman was dead.

So, before the year’s end, was Joe Kennedy. His son wondered if it was because of the shame and grief he brought the family. “The pain of that burden was almost unbearable,” Ted wrote later.

After JFK’s death, Jackie returned to Hyannis Port. But eventually, she, John Jr., and Caroline would move to New York. There were too many memories on the Cape. And Jackie worried about the influence of the Kennedy cousins, particularly Bobby’s unruly brood who, Storey writes, “always seemed to be hanging out of windows or swinging from trees.”

And after Ari Onassis’ death, Jackie continued to spend time in her home there.

“Jackie’s house, like Rose’s and Ethel’s, was locked in time,” Storey writes. “It looked exactly as it had in the 1950s — the same furniture, the same artwork on the walls. Jack’s room, next to Jackie’s, sat untouched. His golf caps hung in the closet. His books stood next to each other just as they had in 1963, faded after years sitting by the window.”

More tragedy was ahead when John F. Kennedy Jr. crashed the plane he was piloting. He, his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister Lauren, en route to Hyannis Port, all perished when the plane went down in the ocean.

And while the family came together yet again to mourn, and went on, part of its myth seemed to die that day, too.

“Now, sixty years after the Kennedy presidency, there’s no longer a Kennedy in Congress, let alone the White House,” Storey writes, “These days, Kennedys run for elected office more often than they win.”

Although RFK Jr. recently announced his pursuit of the presidency, his odds are slim, and most of his family is unsupportive.

And yet Kennedys still summer in Hyannis Port. Tourists still arrive to sightsee and buy souvenirs. One of the biggest sellers is a porcelain plate with America’s First Family in those halcyon days of Camelot, with Jack, Jackie, Caroline, and John-John.

“I think the reason people like the plate is the same reason they come here,” says a local store owner. “Wanting to remember the way it was, or maybe the way we thought it was — rather than the way it’s all turned out.”