TOWARD THE DAY OF DESTINY

JFK, HIS FATHER AND THE FAMILY DREAM

In late 1956 Joe Kennedy launched his son Jack on the final leg of a lifelong dream: putting a Kennedy in the White House. Last part of a four-part excerpt from "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga."

On Nov. 25, 1956, surrounded by his wife, six children, and a dozen grandchildren, Joseph Kennedy presided over the traditional Thanksgiving Day feast at Hyannis Port. It was a crisp autumn day on Cape Cod, a day that would long be remembered by the family as the day Jack decided to run for president.

"After dinner," Rose recalled, "Jack and his father went in to the little study off the living room to talk about the future. Their conversation started with Jack presenting all the arguments against his running in 1960, knowing that his father would break them down. I remember thinking it was like a minuet with each partner anticipating the steps of the other.

"To each argument Jack presented -- his youth, his lack of support from the party's established leaders, and his religion, Joe responded with a counterargument. 'Just remember,' Joe said, 'this country is not a private preserve for Protestants. There's a whole new generation out there and it's filled with the sons and daughters of immigrants from all over the world and those people are going to be mighty proud that one of their own is running for president. And that pride will be your spur, it will give your campaign an intensity we've never seen in public life. Mark my word, I know it's true.' "

With this, Rose recalled, Jack's face broke into a huge grin. "Well, Dad," he said, "I guess there's only one question left. When do we start?" In answer, Joe grinned back and threw his arms around Jack.

There were many who would see in Joe Kennedy's design for his sons a monstrous arrogance, just as years before the press had criticized the Fitzgeralds for their "imperial dynasty." And arrogance it was. Built on a grand scale, with ambition, passion and will attaining in them a terrifying yet wondrous force, both the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys seemed to live their lives with an uncommon intensity that drove them to seek out the heights of greatness. Striking against the existing order of things in pursuit of their ambitions and their passions, they achieved more than they had ever dreamed, lending a magic to their family story that no tale of ordinary life could possibly rival. But the very nature of their search was for success of such towering proportions that, as history records, a terrible price was paid.

For more than 100 years a thick Catholic Bible with a gold cross in the center of its brown leather cover had accompanied the Fitzgerald family on their varied journeys from the narrow streets and dark rooms of the North End to the open fields of Concord; from the stately mansion on Welles Avenue to the Bellevue Hotel. Then, with the death of Rose Kennedy's father, one-time Boston Mayor John Fitzgerald, the old Bible was brought to the dusty attic of the Dorchester home of Thomas Fitzgerald, the mayor's youngest surviving son. There it remained, its frayed pages standing witness to the lives of three generations, until the second week of January 1961, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy dispatched two Secret Service agents to bring it from Boston to Washington to be used in his swearing-in as the 35th President of the United States.

The day before the inauguration, a raging snowstorm brought the capital to a standstill, leaving cars and taxis stranded on the streets, forcing thousands of visitors to trudge on foot to their hotels, their luggage in their hands. All night the snow had continued as 300 workmen labored with plows to clear Pennsylvania Avenue for the inaugural parade. But then at dawn the snow began to stop and the sun, flooding down from a cloudless blue sky, lent radiance to the freshly scrubbed capital and to the colorful flags swirling in the wind.

Long before noon, the crowd began to gather. There came the sons and daughters of John Fitzgerald's brothers, many of whom had never before been to Washington, who had come from Boston by car for the great event. Then came the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, the first members of British nobility to attend an American president's inauguration. There was Marion Davies, mistress of the late William Randolph Hearst. There were the crew members of Kennedy's PT-109, along with the commander of the Japanese destroyer that sank the boat. There also was Mary Moore, the widow of Eddie Moore, John Fitzgerald's private secretary, as well as two widows of former presidents, Edith Wilson and Eleanor Roosevelt.

During the swearing-in, several people reported they saw tears glistening in Joe Kennedy's eyes. In so many ways, it was the father's triumph as well as the son's. He had not planned it this way, the second son having replaced the first, but it was surely an extraordinary end to a journey that had begun 111 years before when his grandfather left the stone quay at New Ross, Ireland, to sail across the ocean.

At nine minutes past 12, as President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon stepped onto the platform, the Marine Band struck up "Hail to the Chief" in the general's honor for the last time. A few minutes later, to the sounds of "Stars and Stripes Forever," John Kennedy walked onto the Capitol steps wearing a cutaway coat and silk top hat. When Eisenhower was inaugurated, he had elected to wear a business suit and a black homburg, but Kennedy believed the occasion called for something more elegant.

For Jack Kennedy, family friend Lem Billings later observed, "romantic sentiment mingled strangely with cool rationality." He understood the importance of pageantry in tying the nation together. "He recognized," Billings said, "that even as the people would reject a king, their hearts tugged for the symbols of royalty. For that reason, he deliberately decided to invest his inauguration with pomp and ceremony. He wanted to use the moment to appeal to the imagination, to raise the ceremony to a heightened level of feeling. Perhaps it was his Catholicism that created in him the appreciation for tradition and majesty, or perhaps it was just his instinctive understanding of the American people, but whatever it was, it worked."

As the President approached the stand, Eunice Kennedy Shriver saw her father stand up and take off his hat in a gesture of deference to his son. "It was an extraordinary moment," Eunice said later. "Father had never stood up for any of us before. He was always proud of us, but he was always the authority we stood up for. Then, just as Jack passed by and saw Dad on his feet, Jack too stood up and tipped his hat to Dad, the only person he honored that day."

In the days before the inaugural it had been rumored that Joe Kennedy was looking for a house near Washington, but now the patriarch realized that nothing would ever be the same. "We're not going to live in Washington or anywhere near it," he told reporter Bob Considine. "If Jack ever feels he has anything to ask me -- I've had lots of different experiences in life -- he knows where he can find me and I'll tell him what I think.

"You probably know," he continued with a trace of sadness in his voice, "that we are a very close-knit family. But we've got to resign ourselves to the fact that he has much greater things to look out for now."

After the inaugural, the family Bible was returned to the Fitzgeralds in Boston, where it was largely forgotten until the opening of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Dorchester.

From the book "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga" by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Copyright

1987, Doris Kearns Goodwin. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Simon and Schuster Inc., New York. All rights reserved. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.