The Kennedy Hidden Powerhouse
A correction in The New York Times on August 28, 2009, noted a number of errors in a photo caption that had accompanied the obituary of U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts the day before. The caption, the nation’s newspaper of record acknowledged, “misidentified two of his sisters and omitted a third in some editions. In some editions, Eunice’s name was omitted, and in some editions, Rosemary and Kathleen were reversed.”
Invisible or interchangeable. That was the lot of the daughters of Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, relegated to the role of decorative accessories to the outsize ambitions, first of their father and then their brothers. Charming London society when Joe was U.S. ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s in the late 1930s. Hosting ladies’ teas during Jack’s first congressional race a decade later. Accompanying one of their brothers during the continual campaign that defined the Kennedys’ lives for more than a half century. From Jack’s ascendancy as the first Catholic president, through Bobby’s ill-fated run for the White House, to Ted’s long career in the Senate, Eunice, Pat, and Jean — the three Kennedy sisters not lost young to tragedy — were a silent backdrop to the nation’s storied political dynasty.
In the case of Eunice, that image was wildly out of focus. There was nothing silent or ornamental about the fifth of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s nine children. Even as she hatched the idea for those tea parties, Eunice chafed at such a circumscribed role in what was fast becoming the family business. “Dear Daddy, I know you are very busy,” she wrote to her father at Hyannis Port, probably in the late ’50s. “I also know you are advising everyone else in that house on their careers, so why not me?”
The answer was simple: As much as Joe Kennedy loved all of his children, his sons, not his daughters, were his priority. Born in 1921, only a year after women in the United States secured the
