Back when the world was their oyster, Hyannis Port and the briny coast of New England was the Kennedy family’s oyster bed.

Photos of their perpetually smiling faces playing football on the front lawn, sailing the Nantucket Sound, khaki shorts and rolled up sleeves. Freshly pressed summer dresses, windblown hair and bare feet have become as much a part of the American iconography as Marilyn Monroe standing on the subway grate.

Here’s an unstressed JFK looking picture perfect on top of his beloved sailboat. A group shot of all nine children on the beach looking toothy and goofy. There’s Jackie in a tailored A-line dress meeting her fiancé’s family for the first time. Then later, as First Lady while lounging on blue patio furniture her children John Jr. and Caroline and their bevvy of dogs. 

For almost a century, the rambling white clapboard mansion at 50 Marchant Avenue has served as a coastal playground for the Kennedy clan and later generations to laugh, play, and grieve away from the public eye. 

It’s where JFK plotted his political career from freshman congressman, to senator and President of the United States. It’s where John and Jacqueline Bouvier posed for Life Magazine as a newly engaged couple; and where the family gathered in full to watch the nail biting election returns that made John F. Kennedy the 35th President of the United States. 

Among the chintz sofas, hook rugs and matching drapes the legend of Camelot was born. 

It would also be a place that sustained them during more trying times, as the so-called ‘Kennedy curse’ struck the family with four of the children killed prematurely in the following years.

It’s where the family first learned that Joe Jr, a bomber pilot in WWII, was killed abroad in 1944. Kick Kennedy died four years later aged just 28 in a plane crash in the south of France.

It’s where the eldest sister, Rosemary, enjoyed her teenage years before a botched lobotomy left her institutionalized for the rest of her life. And where the family collectively grieved the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy in 1963, just two years after taking office; and Bobby Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968 after winning the California presidential primary.

Hyannis would be engulfed in almost unbearable sadness once again in 1999 when John F. Kennedy Jr. crashed his plane off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard on his way to a family wedding. And again in 2019, when Bobby Kennedy’s 22-year-old granddaughter, Saorsie, died of an accidental overdose. 

Through it all, the Kennedy Compound has been a safe haven for the dynasty to act themselves, to mourn, to celebrate, to enjoy and to dine during the darkest hours of their history. 

Now a new book titled ‘White House by the Sea,’ by Kate Storey spotlights the house that kicked off the myth of Camelot.

Joe Kennedy Sr. was the hard scrabble son of a Boston politician who made a fortune through stocks and real estate. 

After renting a few houses on the Cape for his brood of boisterous children, he finally decided to settle down in the sleepy village of Hyannis Port in 1928. 

He purchased a three acre property on a short dead-end street that opens directly onto the Nantucket Sound and immediately got to work expanding it to include twenty-one rooms, twelve bedrooms, a steam room and a 50 person theater in the basement.

It became known to the family and neighborhood kids as the ‘Big House.’ 

From day one, it was a hive of recreational activity.

When the yard wasn’t being used for cutthroat games of touch football, it was used as a baseball diamond, or a putting green. 

There was a swimming pool a well as the Nantucket Sound, which they enjoyed for sailing and waterskiing. 

The renovated property also included a new separate hut to serve as a private sanctuary for the family matriarch, Rose Kennedy. 

Unlike her children, she didn’t enjoy being out on the water. If she wasn’t attending Mass at the nearby Catholic church, her days were spent with her children and husband when he was home. 

‘It’s solitary confinement not splendor I need,’ she once said.

Rose and Joe Sr. had an unspoken agreement about his extramarital affairs, as long as he was discreet and didn’t embarrass the family. 

Albeit Joe Sr.’s romance with Hollywood star, Gloria Swanson set tongues wagging in Hyannis Port when she landed by sea plane in the summer of 1928.

By then, Joe was making waves in Hollywood with the purchase of Film Booking Offices of America and they had already been sleeping with each other for a year. 

Gawkers stood on the beach to catch a glimpse of the silver screen icon, whose glamour and glitz stood out among the barefoot beach crowd.

Joe was discreet at first, stashing her away in Californian villa. But he became so infatuated with Swanson that he started bringing her on family trips. This was the first time he invited her into his family’s inner sanctum.

Nonetheless, Rose kept her head high and treated Swanson like any other professional colleague of her husband’s, despite the fact that he openly showered her with attention. 

The private movie theatre was a popular attraction for the neighborhood kids, but young girls quickly learned to refuse Joe Sr.’s invitation to sit next to him.

‘Big Joe,’  as he was called, ‘liked to pinch’ the pretty girls he asked to sit up front next to him, recalled Nancy Tenney, a close pal of Kick’s, who grew up across the street.

‘My friend Sancy was cute and blonde, and he’d say, ‘Sancy, how nice to see you, come sit with me,’ and she’d roll her eyes,’ said Tenney. ‘He leans over this way so she has to lean this way. I never sat next to him—I was like one of the children,’ she added.

Competition was drilled into them from an early age  by Joe, who always expected excellence from his children.

‘Coming in second was just no good,’ said Eunice, his fifth child.

In a household devoted to sports, he supervised swimming lessons, stood on the sidelines of tennis matches, and puttered behind them in a motorboat as they went sailing.