The Serpent's Tooth

He had everything; he had nothing. His wealth would outlast his grandchildren who would live to break the rules until the rules broke them. An adoring populace would fawn over his children, vicariously enjoying his successes and grieve with him over his tragedies.

Joseph P. Kennedy had everything. Joseph P. Kennedy had nothing. Ambassador to England with presidential aspirations, confidant to world class VIPs, he lived to see his son become President of the United States.

But down deep inside, inside the core of his being coursed pure poison, poison that caused him to be the man with everything, the man with nothing. In a revealing book, the granddaughter of Joseph P. Kennedy has now published his private poison-soaked letters. These letters reveal, not a bitter old man, but a bitter man in his prime and in his old age. Joseph P. Kennedy was always a bitter man.

The poison ate him alive. It traveled through his veins because of what people did and didn’t do. When the King and Queen of England didn’t send him a condolence card in the 1940’s, the poison oozed. When a columnist criticized him, the poison coiled itself and lashed out. Bitter at Harvard, his alma mater, bitter at FDR, bitter at his church, bitter at those, he said, "Who should have helped [his son become president], but didn’t."

He once wrote in a letter, "When I have a bad experience, I remember it forever." He said about the bitterness, "I seem to be getting worse, not better." He pre-planned the successes of his sons; they were his tools of vengeance to get even with his personal enemies.

He had nothing; he had everything. He pre-conceived the way things and people ought to be, and when they weren’t, the poison flooded his veins, the bitterness roiled.

How different the Christian! Through his veins flows the fruit of the Spirit, the living water that wells in him and becomes a refreshing spring to others. The Christian lives in a world he knows to be fallen. It’s no shock to him that Eden’s flora and fauna are lost for the time being. The Christian lives in a world where he gives others the right to be wrong, in a world of realistic expectations, not unrealistic ones in his existence east of Eden. If poison gets into his system, he cleanses it with the antidotes of the Word and the filling of the Holy Spirit.

Slights, real and imagined, will come in an imperfect world filled with its imperfect people. The poison can’t course far in the Christian’s system because "love covers a multitude of sins."

Joseph P. Kennedy’s son had been the President for less than one year when on December 19, 1961, he boarded Air Force One that would take him from the Palm Springs airport to D. C. His father watched him walk on the plane. He went to play a round of golf, never knowing his life was about to change forever. Later that day, he had such a massive stroke that his name and the word "invalid" would now be in the same sentence. He lived on and saw two of his sons murdered.

The father that once said to his children, "We don’t want any losers around here. In this family we want winners," lost a life-long war to bitterness. The serpent’s tooth had injected its humanly inextricable venom, venom that never met its antidote.

At the end of the day, Joseph P. Kennedy had everything; Joseph P. Kennedy had nothing.

Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor

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