A Kennedy education, the schools that shaped America’s most famous family. One Kennedy was expelled from Harvard for cheating. Another challenge segregation at the University of Virginia Law School. JFK arrived at Chot thin, sickly, and underestimated. Then became the leader of a group of boys known as the Muckers.
Before the Kennedys became presidents, senators, ambassadors, journalists, and symbols of American glamour, they were students moving through some of the most powerful schools in America. Their education exposes a side of the family that glamour often hides. Illness, ambition, Catholic identity, class pressure, rebellion, and the punishing expectations placed on every generation. The same schools appear again and again.
Boston Latin, Sacred Heart, Chot, Harvard, Milton, Miss Porters, Radcliffe, Georgetown, Virginia Law, Brown, and Andover, turning the family’s education into its own kind of inheritance. The story begins one generation before Jack, Bobby, and Ted with two grandfathers who understood how much a school could change the future of a family. Patrick J.
Kennedy, 1858 to 1929. Patrick J. Kennedy was born in East Boston in 1858, the son of Irish famine immigrants. His father died during a chalera epidemic before PJ was even a year old. He received a modest Catholic education, worked on the docks, built businesses, and became one of the most important democratic political figures in East Boston. John F. Honey Fitz Fitzgerald, 1863 to 1950.
On Rose Kennedy’s side was John F. Fitzgerald, better known as Honey Fitz. He was born in Boston’s North End in 1863. attended Elliott Grammar, then Boston Latin, and briefly studied at Harvard Medical School before leaving after his father’s death. PJ Kennedy and Honey Fitz never earned college degrees, but they understood what schooling could do.
By the time their own children came of age, education had become one of the family’s main tools for entering institutions that earlier generations of Irish Catholics had rarely been allowed to touch. Joseph P. Kennedy, Senior, 1888 to 1969. Joseph P. Kennedy, Senior, understood that world better than anyone. Joe Kennedy began in parish schools.
first Assumption and then Zeian before his father sent him across the river to Boston Latin. Founded in 1635, Boston Latin is the oldest public school in America, older than Harvard and older than the United States itself. For PJ Kennedy sending his Irish Catholic son, there was a statement. Joe was being trained to move among Boston’s old elite. He was a middling student, but he was popular, athletic, and ambitious.
He was elected class president, became colonel of the cadet regiment, and played baseball. In 1908, he entered Harvard. At Harvard, Joe wanted more than a degree. He joined Hasty Pudding, played baseball, and tried to enter the Porcelian Club. the exclusive final club associated with Boston’s oldest families. He was rejected. The slight stayed with him for decades.
Joe Kennedy would eventually become one of the richest men in America. He made money in banking, Hollywood, Wall Street, and business. In 1934, Franklin Roosevelt named him the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 1938, he became ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, the post he had wanted for years. Still, he never forgot the doors that had remained closed to him.
When his own children came along, he made sure they carried credentials no one could easily dismiss. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1890 to 1995. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy brought a different kind of education into the family. She wanted to attend Welssley, but her father refused. Rose later described that lost opportunity as one of the great disappointments of her youth.
Instead, she studied within the Sacred Heart System, first in Boston, then in Europe. In 1908, she sailed with her father and sister to Europe and was left at the Blumenthal Academy of the Sacred Heart in Veils in the Netherlands near the German border. The school was housed in a former medieval castle and run with the strict formality of the Sacred Heart tradition.
She later attended Manhattanville and studied piano at the New England Conservatory of Music. When she married Joe Kennedy in 1914, she brought that sacred heart formation into the Kennedy home. She tracked her children’s progress carefully, recording their health, exams, schools, and milestones on index cards. For Joe and Rose Kennedy, childhood was organized, measured, and watched. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.
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1915 to 1944. Their first son was Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. From the beginning, Joe Jr. was treated as the future of the family. When he was born in 1915, Honeyfitz reportedly predicted that the child would become the first Catholic president of the United States. From that point on, the family seemed to treat the prediction almost like an assignment. Joe Jr.
attended Edward Devotion in Brooklyn, Noble and Greenos Lower School, Dexter, and Riverdale Country School. After the family moved to New York in 1929, he went to Chot. At CHO, he fit the image his parents wanted. He played football, worked on the yearbook, and graduated in 1933 with the reputation of a strong all-around student and athlete. Then came the London School of Economics, Harvard, and Harvard Law.
When he reached Harvard Law, his education had become preparation for public life. Then came the war. Joe Jr. left law school to fly Navy bombers. He had already flown enough combat missions to come home when he volunteered for Operation Aphrodite, a dangerous secret mission involving explosiveladen aircraft. On August 12th, 1944, his plane exploded over eastern England. He was 29.
The son raised for the presidency was gone. The family’s political hopes shifted toward the second son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. John F. Kennedy, 1917 to 1963. Jack Kennedy never looked like the obvious heir. He was thin, frequently ill, and spent so much time in school infirmaries that classmates sometimes wondered whether he would ever be healthy enough for a demanding career.
He began at Edward Devotion in Brooklyn in 1922, then moved to Noble and Greeno’s lower school, then Dexter, then Riverdale Country School. After the family relocated to Bronxville in 1930, Rose sent him to Canterbury, a Catholic boarding school in Connecticut. Appendicitis brought him home before the year was over. The next fall, he followed Joe Jr. to Chot. At Chot, Jack lived in his brother’s shadow.
Joe Jr. was stronger, healthier, and more naturally suited to the role their father had imagined. Jack was often sick, often underweight, and often in trouble. Classmates called him Rat Face. His closest friend was Lem Billings, who would remain one of the most important people in his life.
Together, they became part of the Chotmuckers Club, a group of boys who took their name from a chapel sermon by headmaster George St. John. St. John had warned against the muckers, the troublesome boys who disrupted school life. Jack and his friends adopted the insult as a badge of honor and had gold shovel pins made with CMC engraved on them. The Mucker’s Club became one of the defining stories of Jack’s school years.
He was sickly, mischievous, funny, socially magnetic, and already skilled at turning trouble into charm. One of the most famous Mucker stories involved a firecracker and a toilet seat in one of the dormatory bathrooms. The prank could have ended with expulsion. Instead, it became part of the legend around Jack Kennedy’s school boy rebellion. He graduated from CHOT in 1935, ranked 64th out of 112, and was voted most likely to succeed.
His college years began with false starts. He went to the London School of Economics and became ill within weeks. He tried Princeton and withdrew before Christmas. Finally, in 1936, he entered Harvard. At Harvard, Jack completed what illness had repeatedly interrupted. He wrote a senior thesis on British appeasement that with help from his father and journalist Arthur Croc became the bestselling book Why England Slept. The royalties helped him buy a Buick convertible.
The boy teased at Chot and doubted because of his health had become a published author before he was 23. Rosemary Kennedy 1918 to 2005. Rosemary Kennedy’s education tells a much sadder story. Born in 1918, Rosemary developed more slowly than her siblings after a difficult birth. The Kennedy household was built around competition, achievement, and public success.
Rosemary needed patience, specialized attention, and protection. She attended Edward Devotion, then the neighborhood school in the Bronx, then Mry Mount Convent in Terry Town, where the nuns worked with her on reading and arithmetic into her late teens. In 1938, she went to London with her parents. There at a monastery school, she experienced what her family later remembered as one of the happiest periods of her life.
The structure and method seemed to help her. Then the family returned to America. By 1941, Joe Kennedy had become increasingly concerned about Rosemary’s future and behavior. That November, he authorized a prefrontal labbotomy. Rosemary was 23. The operation left her unable to speak in full sentences and unable to walk without assistance. In 1949, she was moved to St.
Kleta’s in Jefferson, Wisconsin, where she lived for the rest of her life in a private cottage on the grounds. Her sister Ununice never forgot her. Rosemary’s life became one of the deepest influences behind Ununice’s later work with children and adults with intellectual disabilities, including the movement that became the Special Olympics. Kathleen Kick Kennedy 1920 to 1948.
Kathleen Kennedy, known as Kick, had the gift of charm. She began at Riverdale country then attended the convent of the sacred heart at Noraton Connecticut. After that came holy child in New Cersen outside Paris and Finch College in New York. Then her father became ambassador to Britain and Kick entered London society. She dazzled people almost immediately. The London press named her debutant of the year.
She fell in love with England with aristocratic life and eventually with William Cavendish, Marquis of Hardington, heir to the Duke of Devincshire. He was Protestant. Rose Kennedy was horrified. Kick married him in a civil ceremony in London in May 1944. Rose refused to attend. Four months later, Hardington was killed by a sniper in Belgium. Kick was a widow at 24.
In 1948, she died in a plane crash in France at 28. She was buried in the Caendish family churchyard at Edenser near Chhatzsworth, far from the Kennedy family plots and the world that had raised her. Ununice Kennedy Shrivever 1921 to 2009. Ununice Kennedy’s education helped shape one of the most consequential public lives in the family.
She attended the neighborhood school in the Bronx, the convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattan and Sacred Heart at Roampton in London. She entered Manhattanville in 1939, transferred to Stanford in 1941, and graduated in 1943 with a degree in sociology. Ununice had the Kennedy competitiveness, but she directed it toward social reform.
She worked with the Justice Department’s juvenile delinquency office and at the House of the Good Shepherd in Chicago. Then she began redirecting the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation toward intellectual disability. In the summer of 1962, she opened Camp Shrivever on the lawn of her Maryland home, Timberlawn. About 35 children attended. Local teenagers served as counselors. That small summer camp became the beginning of the Special Olympics.
Patricia Kennedy Laughford 1924 to 2006. Patricia Kennedy followed the Sacred Heart path as well. She attended Sacred Heart in New York, Roampton in London, and Rosemont College outside Philadelphia. In 1954, she married British actor Peter Lofford.
Lofford became part of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack and the Lofford Beach House in Santa Monica became the Kennedy family’s west coast gathering place. JFK stayed there during the 1960 campaign. Marilyn Monroe spent time there near the end of her life. Pat later divorced Lford and lived much of her later life away from the family’s political center. Robert F. Kennedy 1925 to 1968. Robert F.
Kennedy’s schooling was scattered, but the most revealing part of his education came at Virginia Law. Before that, Bobby had attended Riverdale Country, Gibbs School in London, St. Paul’s in New Hampshire, Portsmith Priaryy in Rhode Island, and Milton Academy outside Boston. At St. halls. Rose withdrew him after only a short time because the school’s Episcopal chapel made her uncomfortable. Portsouth Priaryy was more Catholic.
Milton was less so, but Joe Kennedy considered it more academically serious. Bobby graduated from Milton in 1944, served in the Naval Reserve, returned to Harvard in 1946, and graduated in 1948. Then came the University of Virginia Law School. While studying there, Bobby became president of the Student Legal Forum. In 1951, he invited Ralph Bunch to speak.
Bunch was a United Nations diplomat and in 1950 had become the first Africanamean to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Bunch agreed to come on one condition. The audience had to be integrated. Virginia’s rules did not allow that. Bobby fought the issue all the way up to the university president and won. On March 26th, 1951, Ralph Bunch spoke in an integrated Cabell Hall.
2 months after the Bunch event, Bobby married Ethel Skakel in Greenwich, Connecticut. They would have 11 children. Jean Kennedy Smith 1928 to 2020. Jean Kennedy, the youngest daughter, moved through three Sacred Heart schools, Maplehurst in the Bronx, Torresale outside Philadelphia, and Norin in Connecticut. She finished at Manhattanville in 1949.
In 1956, she married Steven Smith, who would manage the Kennedy family’s business affairs for decades. Long after her brothers were gone, Jean entered public life in her own right. In 1993, she became United States ambassador to Ireland, where she became connected to the peace process that led toward the Good Friday Agreement. Edward Ted Kennedy 1932 to 2009. Then came Ted Kennedy, the youngest of Joe and Rose’s nine children.
Among Joe and Rose Kennedy’s children, Ted became the one expelled from Harvard. During his freshman year, he arranged for another student to take his Spanish examination in his place. Both students were caught. Both were expelled. For a family that treated education as a matter of destiny, the scandal was humiliating. Ted’s early schooling had already been unusually disrupted.
He attended Gibbs in London, Lawrence Park in Bronxville, Portsouth Priaryy, Riverdale Country, Graham X in Florida, Fessendon in Massachusetts, and Cranwell in Lennox. In 1946, he entered Milton Academy where Bobby had gone. After his expulsion from Harvard, Ted served in the army in Europe. He returned to Harvard in 1953, graduated in 1956, and went on to the University of Virginia Law School, finishing in 1959.
3 years later at 30 he won his brother Jack’s old Senate seat from Massachusetts. He held it for 47 years, Jaclyn Bouvier Kennedy, 1929 to 1994. Then came the woman whose education would help shape the image of the Kennedy White House more than almost anyone expected. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy entered the family by marriage, but her schooling is one of the most revealing in the Kennedy world.
Long before she became first lady, Jackie Bouvier had already developed a reputation for intelligence, wit, independence, and occasional stubbornness. She began at Miss Chapen School on East End Avenue in Manhattan. She stayed there for 7 years. At one point, she received a D in conduct after behavior in geography class became so disruptive that the head mistress said she had to be removed from the room.
Jackie was spirited, observant, and difficult to place inside the narrow expectations of a young society girl. After her mother married Hugh D. Aenclauss. Jackie attended Holton Arms in Washington from 1942 to 1944. Then she chose Miss Porters in Farmington, Connecticut, partly because it prepared girls seriously for college. At Miss Porter, Jackie’s gifts became clearer. She graduated in 1947 with the Maria McKini Memorial Award for Excellence in Literature.
Her yearbook praised her wit, her horsemanship, and her reluctance to become a conventional housewife. She wanted to attend Sarah Lawrence. Her parents sent her to Vasser. She spent two unhappy years there, often taking the train to Manhattan on weekends. Then she persuaded her family to let her spend her junior year in France through a Smith College program.
She studied first at the University of Grenobyl, then at the Sorbon in Paris. She lived with the Duranti family at 76th Avenue Mozart in the 16th Arondism. Jackie later wrote that she loved that year more than any year of her life. France awakened in her a hunger for knowledge she had previously tried to hide. She did not return to Vasser.
Instead, she finished her degree at George Washington University, graduating in 1951 with a BA in French literature. That same year, she won Vogue’s Predepare, a prestigious editorial fellowship that would have placed her at the magazine for a year divided between Paris and New York. Her stepfather urged her to turn it down. So Jackie stayed in Washington and became the inquiring camera girl for the Washington Times Herald, stopping strangers on the street and asking them questions for the newspaper.
In May 1952, at a dinner party in Georgetown, she met Congressman John F. Kennedy. The next generation inherited famous schools, public expectations, and a surname that made ordinary childhood almost impossible. Caroline Kennedy, born 1957. Caroline Kennedy began at the Convent of the Sacred Heart on East 91st Street in New York, the same school tradition that had shaped her grandmother and several of her aunts.
She later attended the Breley School, then Conquered Academy in Massachusetts, graduating in 1975. After conquered, she spent a year in London at Sabe’s Institute of Art, then entered Radcliffe, where she studied fine arts and graduated in 1980. She later attended Colombia Law School, edited books and poetry collections, and served as ambassador to Japan and ambassador to Australia.
John F. Kennedy Jr. 1960 to 1999. Few Kennedy children grew up under greater public attention than John F. Kennedy Jr. The image of him as a three-year-old saluting his father’s coffin became one of the most famous photographs of the 20th century. From that moment on, his life unfolded under national fascination. John attended St.
David’s, the Catholic boy’s school on East 89th Street. then the collegiate school on West 77th Street. He later transferred to Phillips Academy in Andover, graduating in 1979. At Brown, he finally had something closer to ordinary college life. He majored in American history, joined FCAPasai, played rugby, and acted in student productions, including The Playboy of the Western World, The Tempest, and Short Eyes.
He lived first in a dorm, then in the Fappa Sai fraternity house. By junior year, he had moved into a house on Benefit Street with four roommates who at different points included Christian Amur long before she became one of the most recognizable correspondents in the world. His interest in acting gave his college years another dimension.
After one student production, a classmate later remembered being invited to a closing night cast party at John’s Benefit Street apartment. The place was unexpectedly polished with matching tasteful furnishings, a small detail that set him apart from the usual image of a careless college boy. Even at Brown, where he could blend in more easily than almost anywhere else, John Kennedy Jr. still carried a kind of inherited elegance.
Then came NYU Law where he finished in 1989. After law school, John faced a public embarrassment most young lawyers would have endured privately. He failed the New York bar exam twice. The tabloids treated each failure as proof that the Golden Boy was less golden than he looked. John kept taking it and in July 1990 he passed on his third attempt.
By then the public’s attention had become almost impossible to separate from his actual life. People magazine named him sexiest man alive in 1988. He worked as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan under Robert Morganthaw, handling ordinary cases where his last name could get attention. But the courtroom still demanded real work. In 1995, John founded George Magazine with Michael Berman. The idea was bold.
Politics presented with the glamour, photography, and celebrity energy of a glossy magazine. At the launch, he joked that he had not seen so many reporters gathered since he failed his first bar exam. The first issue made the concept impossible to miss. Cindy Crawford dressed as George Washington. In 1996, he married Carolyn bet on Cumberland Island, Georgia.
Three years later, on July 16th, 1999, John, Carolyn, and Carolyn’s sister, Lauren, died in a plane crash off Martha’s vineyard. By the third generation, the Kennedy school pattern had spread across nearly every branch of the family. Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s children began at Our Lady of Victory in Mlan, Virginia, the Catholic parish school that became their childhood anchor.
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, born 1951. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend went on to the Putney School, Radcliffe, and the University of New Mexico School of Law before becoming Maryland’s first female lieutenant governor in 1994. Joseph P. Kennedy II, born 1952. Joseph P. Kennedy II moved through Sidwell, Friends, Boarding Schools, and UMass Boston before founding Citizens Energy Corporation and later serving six terms in Congress from the Massachusetts District once held by his uncle Jack. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
born 1954. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. passed through Georgetown Prep, the Milbrook School in Duchess County, Harvard, the London School of Economics, UVA Law, and Pace. Milbrook had a working zoo on campus, the Trevor Zoo, which suited his early interest in animals and the outdoors. Patrick J. Kennedy, born 1967. Patrick J.
Kennedy went from Phillips Academy in Andover to Providence College, then to the Rhode Island Legislature at 21 and Congress at 27. Maria Shrivever, born 1955. Maria Shrivever carried Sacred Heart into Stone Ridge, then Georgetown and television journalism. Timothy Shrivever, born 1959. Timothy Shrivever went from St. Albins’s to Yale and eventually led the Special Olympics. Christopher Kennedy Lofford 1955 to 2018.
Christopher Kennedy Lofford moved through Middle Sex, Tufts, Georgetown, and Boston College Law before becoming an actor and recovery advocate. The schools kept repeating. Catholic schools, elite prep schools, Harvard, Georgetown, Virginia Law, Brown, Radcliffe, and the pattern kept expanding and so did the pressure. In the end, the Kennedy story can be traced through its schools almost as clearly as through its elections, weddings, scandals, and funerals. Boston Latin opened the door to old Boston.
Sacred Heart carried Rose’s Catholic formation into her daughters and granddaughters. Chot gave Jack Kennedy the Mucker Club, Lem Billings, and a reputation for charm under pressure. Harvard remained the credential Joe Kennedy wanted for his sons, even after it rejected him socially and humiliated Ted academically.
Some became presidents, senators, ambassadors, journalists, lawyers, and activists. Some died before they reached the futures planned for them. Others spent their lives trying to live beyond the pressure of the Kennedy name. For the Kennedys, schools were gateways, tests, battlegrounds, and warnings. Before the White House, the Senate campaigns, and Hyannis Port, there were classrooms, failed exams, school scandals, dormatory friendships, and young people trying to survive a name that demanded almost everything.
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