Parenting & Family Quote by Joseph P. Kennedy

Affection, in Joseph P. Kennedy's mouth, lands with a chill: greatness is measured not by curiosity, generosity, or competence, but by the precision of a shared grudge. "He's a great kid" sets up the familiar patronizing cadence of an elder blessing a younger man. Then the second sentence snaps the sentiment into something transactional and tribal. Love becomes a political alignment. The compliment is really a recognition signal: you're one of mine because your enemies are my enemies.

Kennedy was a diplomat, but this is anti-diplomatic language - an intimate admission that what binds elites is often less an agenda than an animus. Hatred here isn't a regrettable excess; it's a style, a method, almost an inheritance. The phrase "the same way I do" suggests technique: not merely whom to hate, but how - with discipline, persistence, maybe even a kind of cultivated sophistication. It hints at mentorship in resentment, the grooming of a successor who can carry forward old feuds and old suspicions with the proper tone.

Placed in the Kennedy ecosystem of the mid-century - where family, ambition, and power were braided tightly - the line reads like a window into a worldview that prizes loyalty over principle. It's the dark mirror of statesmanship: instead of coalition-building through shared hopes, coalition-building through shared contempt. The wit of it isn't comedic; it's revealing. It strips away the civic costume and shows the machinery underneath: politics as kinship, kinship as vendetta, and "greatness" as the talent for hating correctly.