Why Massachusetts Loves the Kennedys

Another summer comes to Cape Cod; the herring have long finished their run, the shad-bush has lost its whiteness and the lilacs are by. On Hyannis Port’s high hill above the Kennedy compound they have taken down the wooden shutters from the little mock-gothic Episcopal church, St. Mary’s-bythe-Sea. Surrounded by a tangle of broom, dominated by its square fieldstone tower with four eroded gargoyles, St. Mary’s at first glance looks realgothic. Like the church, most of Hyannis Port hibernates, but it is a classy somnolence unlike the uneasy dormancy of honky-tonk Hyannis two miles or so away. Almost as many hippies converge on Hyannis as on Provincetown, to the disgust of the tourists many of whom have American flag decals on their windshields. The latter throw coins into the reflecting pool of the John F. Kennedy Memorial, and twice a day a man in rubber hip boots gathers up the take with a squeegee. The money goes to charity. “I wish I made as much a year as I rake up,’ he remarked morosely the last time I was there.

Looking down the hill on a July morning, I can just make out the widow’s walk and the sprouting television mast of Father Joe’s house in the Kennedy compound. The other houses are hidden by the interlacing greenery. But this year the compound no longer seems a focal point. Father Joe is gone. Jackie’s house is empty, so is Bobby’s and even Ted’s— or so they seem to be, except for the occasional week-end when the local police block the road to St. Mary’s. Rose, the matriarch, may or may not be there. All except one of the sentry boxes that surrounded the compound when Jack was President have now been removed. It is not really a very private place, but Father Joe was still emergent when he forsook the Irish summer enclave of Hull for Cape Cod. Directly below St. Mary’s is a spit of land running to an isolated peninsula with three or four large houses on it. If he had been more sophisticated at the time he would have bought the peninsula rather than the piecemeal section that the tourists now flock to see. Ted would not have had to get his second and more secluded house across the bay at Squaw Island. But I suppose one had to start somewhere.

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Francis Russell

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Another summer comes to Cape Cod; the herring have long finished their run, the shad-bush has lost its whiteness and the lilacs are by. On Hyannis Port’s high hill above the Kennedy compound they have taken down the wooden shutters from the little mock-gothic Episcopal church, St. Mary’s-bythe-Sea. Surrounded by a tangle of broom, dominated by its square fieldstone tower with four eroded gargoyles, St. Mary’s at first glance looks realgothic. Like the church, most of Hyannis Port hibernates, but it is a classy somnolence unlike the uneasy dormancy of honky-tonk Hyannis two miles or so away. Almost as many hippies converge on Hyannis as on Provincetown, to the disgust of the tourists many of whom have American flag decals on their windshields. The latter throw coins into the reflecting pool of the John F. Kennedy Memorial, and twice a day a man in rubber hip boots gathers up the take with a squeegee. The money goes to charity. “I wish I made as much a year as I rake up,’ he remarked morosely the last time I was there.

Looking down the hill on a July morning, I can just make out the widow’s walk and the sprouting television mast of Father Joe’s house in the Kennedy compound. The other houses are hidden by the interlacing greenery. But this year the compound no longer seems a focal point. Father Joe is gone. Jackie’s house is empty, so is Bobby’s and even Ted’s— or so they seem to be, except for the occasional week-end when the local police block the road to St. Mary’s. Rose, the matriarch, may or may not be there. All except one of the sentry boxes that surrounded the compound when Jack was President have now been removed. It is not really a very private place, but Father Joe was still emergent when he forsook the Irish summer enclave of Hull for Cape Cod. Directly below St. Mary’s is a spit of land running to an isolated peninsula with three or four large houses on it. If he had been more sophisticated at the time he would have bought the peninsula rather than the piecemeal section that the tourists now flock to see. Ted would not have had to get his second and more secluded house across the bay at Squaw Island. But I suppose one had to start somewhere.