"Our parents gave us love, support and encouragement throughout their lives. Contrary to the malicious portrayal in this book, they were devoted and caring parents who lavished affection and attention on all of us."

"The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys," by Doris Kearns (Simon & Schuster, 1987), also said that Rose and Joseph Kennedy were less than ideal parents, that Mrs. Kennedy eventually became the more remote and even withdrew from her husband into the isolated comfort of her religion, because of "the complicatedly intense relationship she had experienced with her father so many years before."

In her autobiography, "Times to Remember" (Doubleday, 1974), Mrs. Kennedy said that she had devoted herself to her children and that there had been many satisfactions in her role. "What greater aspiration and challenge are there for a mother than the hope of raising a great son or daughter?" she wrote, and called motherhood "a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession." Early Introduction To Political Life

Rose Fitzgerald was born in Boston on July 22, 1890, the oldest of six children of an exuberant politician and his wife, the former Josephine Mary Hannon. After serving in the Massachusetts Legislature and the United States House of Representatives, her father became Mayor of Boston in 1906.

Her mother was a quiet woman who disliked the limelight, and Rose tasted politics early, parading through the streets with her father and attending public gatherings where the beer and the blarney flowed like the lilt of brogue. He introduced her to Presidents Grover Cleveland and William McKinley, and to his wealthy, influential friends.

She graduated with honors from Dorchester High School at 15, and wanted to enter Wellesley College, but her parents thought she was too young and enrolled her at the Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in Purchase, N.Y. She was also sent to Blumenthal Academy, a finishing school run by German nuns, in the Netherlands, where girls majored in French and German.

The Irish were still being snubbed by the Boston Brahmins in those days, and despite her stylish education and attractive, self-assured manner, she was blackballed from the Junior League. She shrugged off the slight and formed her own group, the Ace of Clubs.