Crosses Are to Bear

By Ruth Galvin

ROSE: A BIOGRAPHY OF ROSE FITZGERALD KENNEDY by Gail Cameron. 247 pages. Putnam. $6.95.

Rose Kennedy has been underestimated. It was her husband, everyone assumed, who lent fire to the love of country and fierce pursuit of power that have characterized their children. Yet, as each succeeding tragedy has struck her family, Rose has steadily emerged as the strongest character of the Kennedy clan. That is fitting enough for the mother of a President and the only woman in U.S. history to send three sons to the Senate.

Surprisingly, this is the first full-scale biography of Mrs. Kennedy, who is 80. In searching for the source of Rose Kennedy's strength, Gail Cameron, a former LIFE reporter, was somewhat handicapped because the subject always remains aloof on grounds that she is preparing her own autobiography. Accordingly, the author sometimes has had to fall back on familiar anecdotes and cinematic cliches like "amazing," and "extraordinary." Still, she offers much previously unpublished material, and the book exposes as adulative blather most previous exploitations of the Kennedy women. The absorbing personage presented comes on as half pluperfect politician, half solitary saint.

John the Bold. The source of what is now known as the Kennedy determination to "work harder than anyone else" was, as nearly everyone knows, the garrulous mayor of Boston. John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald prided himself on an ancestor named "Shawn a Boo" (John the Bold) and took as his slogan: "What I undertake, I do. What I want, I get." Honey Fitz proudly took Rose with him everywhere, and the girl never forgot that she was the mayor's daughter. She quoted her father so often that friends nicknamed her "Father says."

Dressed to the nines, Rose started making speeches as a teenager, often replacing her retiring mother as official hostess. Still, she managed to get all A's in high school and qualified for Wellesley at 15. Considering her too young for college, her father sent her instead to the Madames of the Sacred Heart. The experience transformed her from a dutiful Catholic into an intensely religious woman.

Like Honey Fitz, Rose appears to have got pretty much what she wanted. That included--against the mayor's better judgment--marriage to Joseph P. Kennedy, son of another Boston pol. As the youngest bank president in the U.S. (at 25), a multimillionaire by his 30s and ambassador to the Court of St. James's under Franklin Roosevelt, Joe Kennedy gave Rose greater glory than her father ever had--and she knew it. The two were bound together by the same determination. As this book makes clear, though, Rose's self-confidence outdistanced her husband's.

How these two encouraged, goaded and championed their children to high achievement is history. Rose was no stricter with her young than she was with herself. The secrets of her success were morning mass, diligent diet, a two-mile walk daily, frequent catnaps and "movement and action" as antidotes to despair. "How you cope is the important thing, not the events themselves," she says. Splendor aplenty had always accompanied her father's dockside determination, and Rose's fondness for French couture, parties and travel is also important: she sees herself as a Christian, not a martyr.

Impenetrable Privacy. She, not Teddy, may be the family's best politician. Her campaign charm with the public at teas and lectures is nothing compared with her mastery of the press, to whom she reveals precisely what she chooses, and then drifts deftly off, preserving an impenetrable privacy. Even her children have called her "remote" and, indeed, she seems to have spent much of the last 30 years alone: walking alone, golfing alone, traveling alone. And praying. Thus she has endured the deaths by violence of four of her nine children, the near death, twice, of a fifth, and the mental retardation of still another. Endured? Triumphed would be more accurate, for it is questions of life, not death, that concern her. Her answers have been both spiritual and worldly: "God never sends us a cross heavier than we can bear," she says. And to Teddy: "You can never afford to let down in a nonelection year."

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