An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (6 page)

The backdrop for all this was no longer Brookline. In September 1927, when Jack was ten, the family had moved to Riverdale, New York, a rural Bronx suburb of Manhattan. Joe had become a force in the film industry, and his ventures took him between New York and Los Angeles, so there were sensible business reasons for the relocation.

But Joe’s frustration with Boston’s social barriers had as much to do with the move to New York as convenience. Boston “was no place to bring up Irish Catholic children,” Joe later told a reporter. “I didn’t want them to go through what I had to go through when I was growing up there.” But unwilling to completely sever ties to the region that both he and Rose cherished, Joe bought the Hyannis Port estate they had been renting, ensuring that the family would continue to spend its summers on the Cape.

The move to New York was not without strain. Despite being transported in a private railway car and moving into a thirteen-room house previously owned by former Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes in a lovely wooded area overlooking the Hudson River, Rose remembered the change as “a blow in the stomach. For months I would wake up in our new house in New York and feel a terrible sense of loss.” Her distance from familiar surroundings, friends, and family made for a painful transition. The ancestors in the North End tenements would have puzzled over her hardship. A second move in 1929 into a mansion on six acres in the village community of Bronxville, a few miles north of Riverdale, where the average per capita income of its few thousand residents was among the highest in the country, was more to Rose’s liking.

Jack had quickly settled into the private Riverdale Country Day School, where he excelled in his studies in the fourth and fifth grades. In the sixth grade, however, when Joe Jr. went to the Choate boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut, Jack’s work suffered, falling to a “creditable” 75, a February 1930 report stated. Despite his undistinguished school record, or possibly because of it, Joe and Rose decided to send Jack to boarding school as well. But instead of Choate, Rose enrolled Jack in the Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut, an exclusive Catholic academy run by a Catholic priest and staffed by fourteen Catholic teachers for ninety-two students. Of the twenty-one students in the school’s 1930 graduating class going to college, seven went to Yale, seven to Princeton, and one to Harvard.

Although attending a boarding school marked Jack as a privileged child, he did not appreciate being sent so far away from home. (It would not be the last time Jack felt the burdens of privilege.) “It’s a pretty good place,” he wrote a relative, and “the swimming pool is great,” but he saw little else to recommend the school. He was “pretty homesick the first night” and at other times thereafter. The football team looked “pretty bad.” Worse, “you have a whole lot of religion and the studies are pretty hard. The only time you can get out of here is to see the Harvard-Yale and the Army-Yale [games]. This place is freezing at night and pretty cold in the daytime.” His attendance at chapel every morning and evening would make him “quite pius [sic] I guess when I get home,” he grudgingly told Rose. He also had his share of problems with his classes. English, math, and history were fine, but he struggled with science and especially Latin, which drove his average down to a 77. “In fact his average should be well in the 80’s,” the headmaster recorded. Jack admitted to his mother that he was “doing a little worrying about my studies because what he [the headmaster] said about me starting of[f] great and then going down sunk in.”

In the fall of 1930, when he was thirteen and a half, Jack was more interested in current events and sports than in any of his studies. Football, basketball, hockey, squash, skating, and sledding were Jack’s first priorities, but feeling closed off in the cloistered world of a Catholic academy made him increasingly eager to keep up with the state of the world. He wrote Joe from Canterbury: “Please send me the Litary [sic] Digest, because I did not know about the Market Slump until a long time after, or a paper. Please send me some golf balls.” A missionary’s talk one morning at mass about India impressed Jack as “one of the most interesting talks that I ever heard.” It was all an early manifestation of what his later associate Theodore C. Sorensen described as “a desire to enjoy the world and a desire to improve it; and these two desires, particularly in the years preceding 1953, had sometimes been in conflict.”

In 1930, however, pleasure seeking clearly stood first. In 1960, when
Time
journalist Hugh Sidey asked Jack, “What do you remember about the Great Depression?” he replied, “I have no first-hand knowledge of the depression. My family had one of the great fortunes of the world and it was worth more than ever then. We had bigger houses, more servants, we traveled more. About the only thing that I saw directly was when my father hired some extra gardeners just to give them a job so they could eat. I really did not learn about the depression until I read about it at Harvard.”

He was insulated by money but also by nurture. Charles Spalding, one of Jack’s close childhood friends, who spent weekends and holidays with the family, noted, “You watched these people go through their lives and just had a feeling that they existed outside the usual laws of nature; that there was no other group so handsome, so engaged. There was endless action . . . endless talk . . . endless competition, people drawing each other out and pushing each other to greater lengths. It was as simple as this: the Kennedys had a feeling of being heightened and it rubbed off on the people who came in contact with them. They were a unit. I remember thinking to myself that there couldn’t be another group quite like this one.”

If Jack understood that he was part of an unusual family, it also bred a certain arrogance. Joe Sr. could be abrupt and unfriendly, even disdainful of anyone he considered unworthy of his attention, especially those who did not show him proper regard. He saw some of this as payback for the humiliating slights inflicted on him for being an Irish Catholic.

Most victims of Joe’s disdain were not ready to forgive and forget. They saw Joe and the family as pretentious and demanding. At Cape Cod, for example, where renovations had turned the original cottage on the Kennedy property into a house with fourteen bedrooms, nine baths, a basement theater wired to show talking pictures, and an outdoor tennis court, Joe had a reputation as “opinionated,” “hard as nails,” and “an impossible man to work for.” The family was notorious for its casualness about paying its bills or carrying cash to meet obligations in a timely fashion. Shopkeepers and gas station attendants lost patience with giving the family credit and having to dun servants for payment. “We’re Kennedys,” a carful of kids told a gas station owner who refused to accept a promise to pay later for a fill-up. A call to the Kennedy compound brought a chauffeur with a can of gasoline to get the car back to the estate.

Jack came to his maturity with an almost studied indifference to money. He never carried much, if any, cash. Why would someone so well-off need currency to pay for anything? Everyone knew or should have known that he was good for his debts, be it a restaurant check, a clothing bill, or a hotel tab. He was always asking friends to pick up the bill, not because he expected them to pay but because his handlers, his father’s moneymen, would square accounts later. And they usually did, though occasionally some of Jack’s creditors would have to make embarrassing requests for payment of loans or debts that he had overlooked.

The self-indulgence of the Kennedy children was often on public display. Stepping off one of the Kennedy boats onto the Hyannis Port pier, the children would shed articles of clothing as they marched along, expecting “that someone else would pick up after them.” Kennedy maids particularly complained about Jack’s slovenliness: “the wet towels in a heap on the floor, the tangle of ties in one corner, the bureau drawers turned over and emptied in the middle of the bed in a hurried search for some wanted item.”

The children also had little sense of being confined to a place and time. One of Jack’s childhood friends remembered them this way: “They really didn’t have a real home with their own rooms where they had pictures on the walls or memorabilia on the shelves but would rather come home for holidays from their boarding schools and find whatever room was available. . . . ‘Which room do I have this time?’” Jack would ask his mother. He did not feel he had to live by the ordinary rules governing everyone else. He was always arriving late for meals and classes, setting his own pace, taking the less-traveled path; he was his father’s son. With the Kennedys, Jack’s friend recalled, “life speeded up.”

There was also a remarkable sense of loyalty. Joe taught his children, particularly Jack and Joe Jr., to rely on family unity as a shield against competitors and opponents. On a crossing to Europe in 1935, Joe called Jack away from a game of deck tennis to meet Lawrence Fisher, one of the brothers who had gained fame and fortune designing autos for General Motors. “Jack, I sent for you because I want you to meet Mr. Lawrence Fisher, one of the famous Fisher Body family. I wanted you to see what success brothers have who stick together.” It was a lesson that none of the Kennedy children ever forgot. Once, when Joe Jr. and Jack argued with each other and one of Jack’s friends tried to take his side, Jack turned on him angrily, saying, “Mind your own business! Keep out of it! I’m talking to Joe, not you!”

AFTER A YEAR
at Canterbury School, Jack was not keen to return, wishing instead to follow Joe Jr. to Choate. Joe acquiesced to his son’s request, and in September 1931 Jack joined his brother at the storied New England academy. Joe and Rose were less interested in the distinctive education the boys would receive than in the chance to expose them to the country’s power brokers, or at least the sons of America’s most influential families. Choate was not quite on a par with the older, more elite prep schools of Andover, Exeter, St. Mark’s, or St. Paul’s, but it was distinctive enough—part of a wave of boys’ boarding schools founded in the 1880s and 1890s. Association with the best and the brightest, Joe and Rose believed, would ultimately come at Harvard, but the prelude to admission there was an education at a school like Choate. As Jack would soon learn, membership in the world of privilege carried lifelong responsibilities that would both attract and repel him.

An IQ of 119 and strong scores on the English and algebra parts of Jack’s Choate entrance exams had helped ease his admission, though the desire to have Jack Kennedy at the school was decidedly mutual. Choate, which had a keen interest in the sons of a family so wealthy and, by 1930, publicly visible, had in fact courted first Joe’s and then Jack’s attendance. Jack had actually failed the Latin part of Choate’s entrance exam in the spring of 1931, but the school was more than happy to let him retake the test after some summer tutoring. And even if he did not measure up on his next Latin test, Choate intended to enroll him in the fall term; the only question was whether he would start “a straight Third Form schedule,” which he did when he met the Latin requirement in October.

The difficult transition from teenager to young adult characterized Jack’s four years at Choate. Not the least of his difficulties was a series of medical problems that baffled his doctors and tested his patience. From the time he was three, not a year passed without one physical affliction or another. Three months before his third birthday, he came down with a virulent case of scarlet fever. A highly contagious and life-threatening illness for so small a child, he had to be hospitalized for two months, followed by two weeks in a Maine sanatorium. To get Jack proper care at the Boston medical center best prepared to treat the disease, Joe had to exert all his influence, including that of his father-in-law. With 600 local children suffering from scarlet fever and only 125 beds available at Boston City Hospital, arranging Jack’s admission was no small feat. But when it came to medical attention for his children, Joe was as aggressive as in any of his business dealings: He not only got Jack into the hospital but also ensured that one of the country’s leading authorities on contagious diseases would care for him. During the 1920s, Jack’s many childhood maladies included chicken pox and ear infections. They compelled him to spend a considerable amount of time in bed or at least indoors, convalescing.

At Canterbury in the fall of 1930, at age thirteen, he began to suffer from an undiagnosed illness that restricted his activities. Between October and December he lost nearly six pounds, felt “pretty tired,” and did not grow appropriately. One doctor attributed it to a lack of milk in his diet, but the diagnosis failed to explain why during a chapel service he felt “sick dizzy and weak. I just about fainted, and everything began to get black so I went out and then I fell and Mr. Hume [the headmaster] caught me. I am O.K. now,” he declared bravely in a letter to his father. In April 1931, he collapsed with abdominal pains, and the surgeon who examined him concluded that it was appendicitis and that an operation was necessary at the nearby Danbury Hospital. Later notes on Jack’s school attendance describe him as “probably very homesick during his time at Canterbury. He wrote a great deal of letters home. In May, he left school with appendicitis and did not return.” But having completed his year’s work with the help of a tutor at home, he was able to move on to Choate in the fall.

There, his medical problems became more pronounced. Several confinements in the infirmary marked his first year at the school. In November, “a mild cold” cost him two nights in the hospital, and when he went home for Thanksgiving, Joe remarked on how thin he looked. In January, he was confined again for “a cold,” which did not clear up quickly, turned in to “quite a cough,” and kept him in the infirmary for more than a week. Although administered regular doses of cod liver oil and enrolled in a bodybuilding class, his weight remained at only 117 pounds—less than robust for a fourteen-and-a-half-year-old boy—and he continued to suffer fatigue. In April, he had to return to the infirmary because of another cold, swollen glands, and what was described as an abnormal urine sample.