DEATH OF A MATRIARCH

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

To call her a matriarch is perhaps too easy, too simple a description of her place not only in her family but in this nation's history. Her values, by necessity, were a product of her time and place: she was a wife and mother first and, above all, protective of her nine children, fiercely ambitious for them. And she withstood the misfortunes of her life with fortitude. But to call her a matriarch and leave it at that shows how much we forget. It was Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy--more than her brash and dashing husband, more than the glamorous daughter-in-law she outlived, even more than her martyred sons--who forged the Kennedy character. It was Rose Kennedy, in reality, who played mythmaker to America's most mythic clan.

When she died on Jan. 22, after years of failing health but at the remarkable age of 104, she left behind five children, 28 grandchildren--and a motto as legacy to all who mourned her passing: ``I know not age, nor weariness, nor defeat.'' The boast is testament to her ability to craft legend out of the exigencies of real life. Of course, Rose Kennedy knew age and weariness and defeat. Many times over. She outlived four of her children and a husband who loved and humiliated her. She endured the haunting gossip and relentless scrutiny accorded all her family. With strictness, with humor, with a sense of style at once down-to-earth and every bit a match for her daughter-in-law Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Rose ruled and shaped the clan when sometimes it all must have been too much for her. Jackie once described Rose speaking of her life's sorrows: ``Her voice began to sort of break, and she had to stop. Then she took my hand and squeezed it and said, `Nobody's ever going to have to feel sorry for me. Nobody's ever going to feel sorry for me,' and she put her chin up. And I thought, God, what a thoroughbred.''

Her pedigree, like her father's before her and her children's after, was politics. The oldest child of Josephine Hannon and John Fitzgerald, she was born on July 22, 1890. Her father, Honey Fitz, who eventually became mayor of Boston in 1906, was the quintessential ward politician: he joined every club, attended every wedding, wept at every wake and kept Rose, his favorite child, close by his side. Though Rose had wanted to attend Wellesley, her parents dispatched her and her sister Agnes to a convent in the Netherlands. In the beginning, she was desperately lonely, but eventually she ``was able to find in myself the place that was meant for God,'' she later said. For the rest of her life, her faith sustained her, and she attended daily Mass for as long as her health permitted.

During a family vacation in Maine, Rose, then 16, met Joseph Patrick Kennedy, 17. Her father did not at first approve of Kennedy, son of another Irish ward boss, but Rose was in love with Joe, and the two married in 1914. The family grew and moved, following Joe Sr. as he became chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, then head of the Maritime Commission and, in 1937, the first Irish-Catholic American ambassador to Britain.

``None of my sons gives a damn about business, that's for sure,'' Old Joe told 's Hugh Sidey one night in the late '50s, standing in his Park Avenue apartment in his bathrobe, barking orders into a phone for his top hat and cutaway. ``But I raised them that way.'' He probably believed that. But the children certainly disputed who reared them. ``They talk a lot about Dad,'' said John Kennedy. ``But he was not around all that much. Mother deserves more credit than she gets. She is the one who was there. She is the one who read to us. She took us to Plymouth Rock and the other historic places. She gave me my interest in history.''

And she helped him and his brothers make history. She took to their campaigns with all the pride and energy she brought to rearing them. ``She was a master at knowing how to turn an ordinary event into a special occasion,'' said a friend. Rose had no false modesty about her powers. ``I was giving political speeches before women had the right to vote,'' she said on the eve of her 90th birthday. ``I have always loved politics.'' On the morning of J.F.K.'s Inauguration, she watched as he slipped into a Georgetown church. ``No one, including my son, knew I was there, as I sat in a side pew,'' she wrote to a journalist years later. ``I was infinitely pleased and thanked God for the grace which had prompted Jack to start his Administration with a prayer on his lips and in his heart.''

But every victory was matched by a sorrow: her oldest child lost to war, an estranged daughter to a plane crash, a retarded daughter relegated to an institution, an unfaithful husband, two sons assassinated. Rose was in Hyannis Port when she heard of J.F.K.'s murder, and firm in her belief that her ailing husband would handle the news better the next morning, she persuaded the household to behave as if all was well. She had the TVs unplugged, prayed and took a long walk on the beach. ``I can't stand it,'' she said. ``I've got to keep moving.''

Still, her children depended on her. Last week Ted said, ``She sustained us in the saddest times--by her faith in God and by the strength of her character, which was a combination of the sweetest gentleness and the most tempered steel.'' She leaves her family with a firm sense of what it means to be a Kennedy. She wrote in her autobiography, ``There are the living still to work for, while mourning for the dead.''