Figure 1.-

Teddy was the baby of the family. He was born in 1932 and doughted on by his parents. Because of the age difference he did not spend much time with his two oldest brothers, Joe and Jack. He was still relatively young when his father was appointed ambassador to Great Britain. While in England, Rose took the children to Rome for an audience with the pope. Kennedy was elected to the Senate in 1962 to fill the vacant seat left by his brother, John F. Kennedy, as he had been elected President of the United States in 1960. President Kennedy helped to get his younger brother elected to the Seate. He has since been repeately reelected to his Senate seat. He has proven an effective senator, although his reputation and chances for a presidential race was severely compromised when a young campaign assistant was killed in an car accident on Chappaquiddick Island July 18, 1969. Kennedy ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980, but despite some initial successes failed to win. Kennedy has since devoted his efforts to the U.S. Senate. He is known as one of the Senate's leading liberal members. He has taken a special interest in healthcare issues.

Image

This photograph of the entire Kennedy family (except for the oldest son, Joe Jr.) was taken at the Vatican in Rome on the occasion of the coronation of Pope Pius XII in 1939 just before World War II broke out. Joe senior, then U.S. Ambassador to the Court of Saint James in London, was representing the United States. The extreme formality of the event required everyone to be very formally and correctly dressed. Note that Joe Kennedy Sr. and his son Jack Kennedy (the future president, then only 22 years old) both wear white tie and tails even though it is daylight. Rose Kennedy, the future president's mother, wears a floor-length black gown with the mandatory black veil or mantilla since Catholic women at this time were expected to have their heads covered in church, especially in the presence of the Holy Father. Bobby Kennedy (14 years old in 1939) wears a dark three-piece suit with long trousers with a grown-up white shirt and long tie. Teddy (the youngest boy, only 7 years old at the time) is dressed in a dark short-pants suit with an Eton collar and a white four-in-tie. He wears low-cut Oxford black shoes with long black stockings, undoubtedly held up by hose supporters (see the Sears advertisement for boys' garter waists published the same year, 1939). Jean, the youngest daughter (11 years of age) wears a white dress and veil as though for her First Communion. points out that Teddy received Communion personally from His Holiness, "the first time that a Pope had ever done this in the last couple of hundred years" to quote the words of Teddy's older brother Jack, who was writing to a boyhood friend. "The Pope then gave the Sacrament to Joe, Jack, and his sister Eunice `at a private mass and all in all it was very impressive'." [Dallek, p. 56.] The Swiss Guards in their traditional uniforms (designed according to some reports by Michelangelo in the Renaissance) flank the family gathering. Long stockings imn 1939 were going out of style, but were still sometimes worn, as in this instance, for formal occassions.

Sources

Dallek, Robert. An Unfinished Life (Boston: Little Brown, 2003).