Mike Wallace looks back at his long career

Joseph and Rose Kennedy moved to Brookline shortly after they were married in 1914, and began raising their large family just a block or so away from our home on Osborne Road. Jack Kennedy was one year older than I was, and we attended the same neighborhood school. More often than not, when I’ve told people that Kennedy and I went to the same elementary school and that its name was Edward Devotion, they’ve assumed it was a Catholic school, which reveals how little they know about Brookline’s glorious history.

Edward Devotion was an early hero in the American Revolution. On the night Paul Revere made his legendary ride through Boston and neighboring towns, his friend and fellow patriot Devotion mounted his horse and went on a similar gallop to sound the alarm that the British were coming. The course he followed took him through Brookline. I suppose the main reason why Devotion’s ride of warning has been so overshadowed is because many years later, when Longfellow sat down to write his famous ballad, Revere happened to be the horseman he chose to immortalize.

At a social function a few years ago, I was approached by Robert Kraft, the enterprising owner of the New England Patriots, the first team to win three Super Bowls in the twenty-first century. Since I hardly knew him, I wasn’t aware he was from Brookline and was surprised to hear him say that he, too, had grown up in my old neighborhood and was a pupil at Edward Devotion, although his time there came long after Kennedy’s and mine. He then asked if I’d been back there in recent years. I said I had not, and he told me it was worth a visit because the school had chosen to honor three of its most famous graduates — Kraft, Kennedy, and me — by putting our pictures on a wall near the main entrance.

“My picture is on top,” Kraft declared with some relish, “because of the three of us, I had the best grades. Then comes your picture, because you had the second-best. Then below you is Kennedy’s picture.”

I thanked him for sharing this bit of hometown lore, and proceeded to suggest that it was probably the only time in his life that John F. Kennedy finished third and last in anything.

Even though Jack Kennedy and I were about the same age and lived in the same neighborhood and attended the same elementary school, our paths seldom crossed during the years he lived in Brookline. I’m sure that in time, I would have gotten to know him better if he hadn’t moved away. After Joseph Kennedy made his fortune as an investment banker and in other enterprises, he began to set his sights on greener pastures, and in 1927, when Jack was ten and I was nine, the Kennedys relocated to Riverdale, then a posh and exclusive section of New York City.

From there, Jack Kennedy went on to his impressive achievements, which included heroism in the Pacific during World War II, then election to Congress in 1946 and to the Senate six years later. His political star then rose so rapidly that by 1957 he was on the short list of Democratic contenders for the White House. Which brings me back to my interview with Drew Pearson in December of that year. My reference to Kennedy as his party’s “glamour boy” led to a question about the senator and his controversial father.

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