DEATH OF THE FOUNDER

TEN years ago this weekend, they gathered before a fireplace in Hyannisport to rough out plans for J.F.K.'s run for the presidency. They all were there, handsome as Irish thoroughbreds, their eyes bright as dimes--Jack, Bobby, Teddy, Eunice, Jean, Pat, Ethel, Jackie, Joe and Rose. Together, attended by their Irish mafia, the Kennedys burst upon the decade to become its dominating political myth.

The family was the realization of Joe Kennedy's dreams of glory. "The measure of a man's success in life," said the founding father, "is not the money he's made. It's the kind of family he's raised." Joe Kennedy amassed a fortune of some $400 million (see box, p. 23), but he was also an astonishing success as a progenitor. Yet the patriarch's glory was brief. One day last week was the sixth anniversary of John Kennedy's assassination. Another would have been Robert Kennedy's 44th birthday. And on a third, the family gathered to bury Joseph Patrick Kennedy, who died of heart failure at 81.

It is possible that Ted Kennedy, the one surviving son, will eventually emerge from the penumbra of Chappaquiddick to run for the presidency. If he does so, he will be alone in a way that neither his brothers nor his father could ever have anticipated. For now, with a tragic theatrical economy--assassins on cue, the paterfamilias dying like Priam after seeing his sons slaughtered, the calendar neatly pinching off the decade--the myth of the Kennedys is at least temporarily ended.

Few fathers have ever set out so deliberately to found a political dynasty--although the Kennedys were too close together to be called dynastic. The denouement of his dream was especially bitter for a man whose tough pride in name and faith in success amounted almost to hubris. For most of the decade of his sons' triumphs, he was paralyzed and speechless following a stroke the year after Jack's inauguration.

All of the other decades of his life, Joe Kennedy was a remarkably shrewd, hearty and charming man. He had the serenity of a man totally devoted to his family and the detachment of a lucidly ruthless financier. He moved with an Irish swagger among Presidents, movie stars and corporation bosses, but bequeathed to his sons some of his East Boston toughness. He frequently concealed his taste for classical music lest it be thought effete. One night in the '30s he was listening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on a phonograph when a pair of his cronies requested some "hi-di-ho." Scowled Kennedy: "You dumb bastards don't appreciate culture."

Behind the Lines. Joe Kennedy had the fortune to be born in a Boston where, the Yankee hegemony notwithstanding, political and financial power was beginning to be possible for an Irishman. His grandfather had fled the potato famine in 1848; his father, Patrick J. Kennedy, became a saloon owner and Massachusetts state senator. Pat Kennedy had the money and savvy to send Joe to Boston Latin School and then across the river to Harvard, deep behind the Brahmin lines. Emerging from Harvard in 1912, Kennedy told friends that he would be a millionaire at 35--and he just made the deadline.

In 1914, Kennedy realized another ambition. He married Rose Fitzgerald, the lithe, convent-schooled daughter of Boston's ebullient Mayor John F. (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald. Borrowing $2,000 for a down payment, Kennedy bought a nine-room frame house in the Brookline section of Boston. The family needed the space. Joe Jr. arrived within a year; five of the nine Kennedy children were born within six years.

Kennedy's fortunes burgeoned almost as rapidly. He bought a chain of 31 small New England movie houses, and by 1928 his maneuverings in show business brought him control of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain. He went to Hollywood, spent 32 furious months investing in the movies, and came away about $5 million richer.

Kennedy manipulated stocks and securities with a shrewdness close to genius. He sensed disaster approaching in 1929 and well extricated himself from the stock market before the crash. He made at least $1,000,000 by selling short when the panic came. "Only a fool," he told a friend, "holds out for the top dollar." Foreseeing the end of Prohibition, he cornered the franchise for Gordon's gin and several Scotch whiskies, imported thousands of cases "for medicinal purposes." When repeal came, Kennedy warehouses were bulging and ready for business.

Into Politics. With his financial base secure, Kennedy began to harbor political ambitions. He poured $25,000 into Roosevelt's 1932 campaign, raised another $100,000 from friends. F.D.R. rewarded him with public office--the chairmanship of the new Securities and Exchange Commission, appointment to the Maritime Commission, and the post of U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's (at the time an especially intriguing position for an Irish Catholic Kennedy). Though he ever after cherished the title of "Ambassador," the post did not work out well. He became fast friends with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, endorsed appeasement and returned home stunned and embittered after Hitler marched into Poland.

During the war years, the first blows of what Ted Kennedy called "some awful curse" began falling. Joe Jr., whom the ambassador was quite consciously raising to be President, died when his plane exploded over England in 1944. At the same time, Jack lay in a Boston naval hospital recuperating from injuries suffered as a result of the sinking of PT109. A few weeks later, daughter Kathleen's husband, the Marquess of Hartington, died leading an infantry charge in Normandy. Kathleen was to be killed four years later in a plane crash in France. A continuing heartbreak for Rose and Joe was their oldest daughter Rosemary, who is retarded.

Joe Kennedy threw himself passionately into Jack's new political career. The founder spent some $50,000 for the young naval veteran's first congressional campaign. In 1952, when Jack was thinking of running for Governor of Massachusetts, Joe Kennedy persuaded him to try for Henry Cabot Lodge's Senate seat. "When you've beaten him," said Joe, "you've beaten the best. Why try for something less?" The Kennedy forces spent $500,000, dislodged the Senator by 70,000 votes.

As Jack became a presidential possibility after the 1956 convention, Joe was careful to recede more and more into the background. The idea that father and son almost never agreed on political issues was encouraged. "Dad is a financial genius, all right," John Kennedy once said, "but in politics he is something else."

The patriarch was virtually invisible during the 1960 campaign. But on Jan. 20, 1961, he sat reviewing the inaugural parade with translucent pride beside his son, the 35th President of the U.S. Then the brief realization of his dream began.

White Mass. Last week the clan that has grown so practiced at funerals over the decade gathered at St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis. At Rose's request, the requiem was a white Mass--celebrated in white vestments to emphasize the Resurrection. Ted Kennedy delivered a brief eulogy to his father, reading from The Fruitful Bough, a privately printed book of essays about the ambassador. Boston's craggy Richard Cardinal Gushing, who has married, baptized and buried the Kennedys for 24 years, delivered a twelve-minute "personal tribute to the character and genius of a longtime friend."

Eighteen of the ambassador's 28 grandchildren were there. Six of the remarkably handsome brood served as honorary pallbearers. John Kennedy Jr., sometimes straining to remember the words, recited the 23rd Psalm, and eight Kennedy girls made up the offertory procession that bore the hosts, wine, ciborium and chalice to the altar. After the Mass, the clan drove to Brookline and buried the founder in a family plot marked by a large granite slab reading simply KENNEDY.

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