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C CENTURY 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Century 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA Century is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © James Patterson 2020 James Patterson has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Part Title photographs courtesy of the following: One – Bert Morgan/Premium Archive via Getty Images; Two – Imagno/Hulton Archive via Getty Images; Three – Bettmann/Bettmann via Getty Images (both images); Four – Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images; Five – Bill Eppridge/ The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images; Six – Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images; Seven – Everett Collection/Shutterstock; Eight – Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images First published in Great Britain by Century in 2020 www.penguin.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 9781529125092 ISBN 9781529125108 (trade paperback edition) Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This books is made from Forest Stewardship Council® paper. PROLOGUE he frail old man wakes screaming, tangled in an American flag—the same one that draped the coffin of his slainson, TPresident John Fitzgerald Kennedy, three days after his November 22, 1963, assassination. Joseph Kennedy Sr., the seventy-five-year-old patriarch of the Kennedy dynasty, who once could sway prime ministers and presidents with his Irish charm, is suffering the lingering effects of a stroke, unable to communicate beyond moaning the words “yaaa” and “nooo.” Trapped inside his nearly paralyzed body, he struggles to pull himself free from the flag. The flag had sheathed the president’s casket, borne by horse- drawn caisson to Arlington National Cemetery two days earlier. After the army bugler sounded taps, the military honor guard watching over the gravesite folded the flag thirteen times to form a triangle showing only a field of blue stars, as customary, then presented it to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, the president’s stoic widow. And Jackie wants her beloved father-in-law to have it. The v TheHouseofKennedy_HCtextF2 PROLOGUE 2020-01-15 18:22:38 v PROLOGUE man she calls “Grandpa” has been convalescing at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, too ill to attend the funeral. Before Jackie kisses Joe Sr. good-bye to return to her two small children, Caroline and John Jr., she leaves the flag near his bed—where, during the night, Joe’s niece Ann Gargan has innocently unfolded the flag and placed it over him. R Three days earlier, when the news of Jack’s death had first bro- ken and the world mourned the assassination of the dashing thirty-fifth president, private nurse Rita Dallas kept watch over his bedridden father. “He was a helpless man who had lost a son,” Dallas observed. “But even more he was a man yet to be comforted by his family, yet to be told anything except that his son had been murdered.” While Joe’s wife, Rose Kennedy, paced in her room across the hall from her husband’s, too distraught to talk, two of their chil- dren, Senator Ted Kennedy and his older sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, rushed to Joe’s bedside to perform the grim family duty. Eunice grabbed her father’s withered hand and kissed him. “Daddy, there’s been an accident,” she whispered. “Jack was in an accident, Daddy. Oh, Daddy. Jack’s dead. He’s dead. But he’s in Heaven,” she affirmed. “Jack’s okay, isn’t he, Daddy?” Ted, his face tearstained, told him the awful news: “Dad, Jack was shot.” The man who taught his children that crying is a sign of weakness closed his eyes, and two teardrops fell down his cheeks. “Nooo,” he howled. R vi TheHouseofKennedy_HCtextF2 PROLOGUE 2020-01-15 18:22:38 vi PROLOGUE Already, he has outlived his firstborn, Joe Jr., a World War II navy pilot killed while flying a secret combat mission, as well as his free-spirited daughter Kathleen, who died in a private plane crash. And his oldest daughter, Rosemary, who he subjected to a disastrous experimental lobotomy, is left permanently disabled. And now,his second-born son, Jack—killed, his gruesome death caught on film. Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s life’s ambition is to place a Kennedy in the White House, and he will see his two surviving sons pick up the baton and reach for the Oval Office. But Bobby is murdered before he can capture the Democratic presidential nomination, and Ted is caught in a scandal that leaves a woman dead, doom- ing his chances to attain the presidency. In July 1969, Ted Kennedy wonders aloud if a “curse actually did hang over all the Kennedys.” From Joe Sr.’s death in Novem- ber that same year to nearly three decades later in July 1999, when Jack’s son (and heir apparent to America’s version of a royal family), John F. Kennedy Jr., meets his own terrible fate, tragedies continue to haunt the House of Kennedy. “The Kennedy Curse” is an idea that endures. vii TheHouseofKennedy_HCtextF2 PROLOGUE 2020-01-15 18:22:38 vii TheHouseofKennedy_HCtextF2 2020-01-15 18:22:38 8 PART ONE The PatriarchPART ONE JOSEPH PATRICKThe Patriarch KENNEDY SR. JOSEPH PATRICK KENNEDY SR. HouseofKennedyPT_text4P.indd 1 1/13/20 11:00 AM TheHouseofKennedy_HCtext3P 2020-01-07 18:09:39 1 HouseofKennedyPT_text3P.indd 1 1/7/20 1:38 PM TheHouseofKennedy_HCtext3P 2020-01-07 18:09:39 1 TheHouseofKennedy_HCtextF2 PART ONE The Patriarch 2020-01-15 18:22:38 2 CHAPTER 1 hey are known as “coffin ships”: overcrowded, disease- riddled, barely seaworthy sailing vessels that transport mil- Tlions of impoverished Irish fleeing the mid-nineteenth- century Great Hunger, or potato famine, hoping to begin new lives in the US and Canada. Assuming they make it that far—some 30 percent of transatlantic passengers commonly die at sea during the treacherous three-thousand-mile crossings, which can take as long as four months. Given the conditions, many travelers mark their departure from Ireland with an “American wake,” evoking the finality of the voyage they are about to undertake. One such traveler is Patrick Joseph Kennedy, a twenty-seven-year-old cask and barrel maker from Dunganstown, County Wexford, and future great-grandfather of President John F. Kennedy. His name ap- pears on the 1849 manifest of the SS Washington Irving, a ship with fewer than five years under sail. Records of shipboard conditions indicate that they are uni- versally harrowing, and the monthlong crossing from Liverpool 3 TheHouseofKennedy_HCtextF2 Chapter 1 The Patriarch 2020-01-15 18:22:38 3 JAMES PATTERSON to Boston is no exception. Overcrowding and unsanitary quar- ters propagate deadly cases of cholera, smallpox, and measles; the ship’s crew toss scores of corpses to the sharks that inces- santly circle the three-masted ship. While Kennedy family lore tells of Patrick traveling in steer- age with his bride-to-be, Bridget Murphy (as well as her parents, who’d toiled their whole lives as tenant farmers of absentee British landlords), practical evidence of that can’t be found. Regardless, Patrick and Bridget did most likely meet in Ireland and plan to marry in America—which they’ll do in Sep- tember 1849, in Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross. The ship docks in Boston, a city of seventeen thousand, on April 21, 1849. Conditions on land are not always an improvement—the Boston Brahmins atop the city’s entrenched class system scorn the new immigrants as “shanty Irish” (after the Dickensian squalor of their vermin- and disease-infested tenement quar- ters), and fruitless searches for jobs that pay a decent wage are underscored by sternly worded want ads declaring, “No Irish Need Apply.” For a time, Patrick Kennedy and his bride are among the lucky ones. He and Bridget have five children in nine years, and he steadily works his trade. More than a hundred years later, on a state visit to Ireland in 1963, President Kennedy states: “When my great-grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things: a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty. I am glad to say that all of his great-grandchildren have valued that inheri- tance.” Unfortunately, at age thirty-five, Patrick succumbs to cholera. The year of his death is 1858. The date is November 22. Exactly 105 years later, that same date will forever loom as the day his great-grandson loses his life. 4 TheHouseofKennedy_HCtextF2 Chapter 1 The Patriarch 2020-01-15 18:22:38 4 THE KENNEDY CURSE With five children to support, widow Bridget can’t mourn for long. Though barely literate, she proves to be a savvy busi- nesswoman. She becomes a hairdresser at the upscale retailer Jordan Marsh, founded in 1851 as a dry-goods emporium. Then she buys a notions shop—and expands her wares to in- clude whiskey. The youngest of the five Kennedy children, Patrick Joseph Jr.—nicknamed P.J.—inherits his parents’ ambition. He is in his mid-teens when he’s hired on as a stevedore, loading and unloading ships’ cargo, and by the time he’s in his twenties, owns several saloons popular among the Irish Catholic working class. He marries Mary Augusta Hickey, daughter of another well-to-do Irish Catholic saloon keeper, in 1887.