Parents' Bedroom

Rose Kennedy stands next to the birth bed in her former bedroom at the site's dedication in 1969.

NPS / Cecil Stoughton

Quick Facts

Location:

83 Beals Street, Brookline, MA

Significance:

Room where President Kennedy was born

The bedroom of Joseph and Rose Kennedy is the largest of the five bedrooms in the house. In her tour recorded after the refurnishings of the house in the 1960s, Rose Kennedy recalled:

The president was born in the twin bed, near the window, on May 29th, 1917, at three o'clock in the afternoon.

Children were often born at home in the early 1900s. Rose Kennedy gave birth to John's younger sisters Rosemary and Kathleen in this house in 1918 and 1920.

Mrs. Kennedy was very religious and she often attended church every day, bringing the children with her. Despite this, you see very few religious items in the home. However, above the beds you see two religious paintings. Mrs. Kennedy said that she felt that church was a place to worship and home was a place for family, and so she didn’t want a lot of religious items in the house. In the early 1900s in Boston, many Irish Catholics faced discrimination. Years later, when JFK ran for president in 1960, the issue of his Catholic faith was his greatest challenge. He addressed voter concerns early on, identified the need for separation of church and state, and successfully became the nation’s first Irish Catholic president.

Similar to his wife’s belief that home was a place for family, Joe Kennedy preferred not to work from home. In this room, you see a telephone between the two beds; there is another telephone downstairs in the front hallway. It was unusual for families to have two phones. However, when Mr. Kennedy was co-managing the Fore River Shipyard, it was a facility that ran 24 hours a day and seven days a week during the war, and so, Mr. Kennedy wanted easy access to communication, if work required his attention. He would later say that he worked harder at the Fore River Shipyard than ever before in his life.