An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (8 page)

And perhaps if Joe Sr. saw in his eldest son what could be, he saw in Jack more who he was. When St. John interrupted a conversation between him, Jack, and Joe to take a phone call, Joe leaned over and whispered to Jack, “My God, my son, you sure didn’t inherit your father’s directness or his reputation for using bad language. If that crazy Mucker’s Club had been mine, you can be sure it wouldn’t have started with an M!” Joe’s irreverence was not lost on Jack, who inscribed a graduation photo to one of the other leading lights in the club, “To Boss Tweed from Honest Abe, may we room together at Sing Sing.”

When Joe Jr. graduated from Choate, his father sent him to study in England for a year with Harold Laski, a prominent socialist academic. Rose considered this “a little wild and even dangerous,” but Joe, convinced it would encourage greater independence and sharpen his son’s ability to argue the case for a more conservative outlook, ignored his wife’s concern. And when Joe Jr. returned after a summer trip to Russia with Laski and described the advantages of socialism over capitalism, Joe told Rose, “If I were their age I would probably believe what they believe, but I am of a different background and must voice my beliefs.” Joe made it clear that he cared much less about their different outlooks than that they had reached independent judgments.

St. John saw even more of this sort of constructed independence in Jack’s behavior. “Jack has a clever, individualist mind,” he told Joe. “It is a harder mind to put in harness than Joe [Jr.]’s. . . . When he learns the right place for humor and learns to use his individual way of looking at things as an asset instead of a handicap, his natural gift of an individual outlook and witty expression are going to help him. A more conventional mind and a more plodding and mature point of view would help him a lot more right now; but we have to allow, my dear Mr. Kennedy, with boys like Jack, for a period of adjustment . . . and growing up; and the final product is often more interesting and more effective than the boy with a more conventional mind who has been to us parents and teachers much less trouble.” The mature John Kennedy would fulfill St. John’s prediction.

DESPITE BEING SIXTY-FIFTH
in a class of 110, Jack was assured a place at Harvard. In 1935, as the son of so prominent an alumnus, with an elder brother in good standing at the university, and Harry Hopkins, FDR’s welfare administrator, and Herbert Bayard Swope, the prominent journalist/editor, listed as nonacademic references, Jack had few doubts about his admission. But reluctant once more to be directly in Joe Jr.’s shadow, he chose to go to Princeton with Lem Billings and other Choate friends. Joe Sr. accepted his son’s decision as a welcome demonstration of Jack’s independence—though he may have smiled when the son who so wanted to diverge from his elder brother’s path asked to follow Joe Jr. in spending a year in England under Harold Laski’s tutelage.

In the conflict between self-indulgence and worldly interests, the former gave little ground to the latter in Jack’s eighteenth year. And in fact, in the summer and fall of 1935, when he traveled to Europe for the first time, Jack was less interested in studying with Laski at the London School of Economics than in making acquaintances and enjoying the social life in London. Rising European tensions over the Rhineland and Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia registered less on Jack as a significant moment in history than simply as reasons to go home.

In October, when one of Jack’s bouts of illness added to concerns about keeping him abroad, he returned to America, where he quickly seemed to recover and petitioned for late admission to Princeton’s fall term. When the university denied it, Joe arranged through a prominent Princeton alumnus for Jack’s enrollment at the beginning of November. He lasted only until December, when illness again interrupted his studies and sent him to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. Recuperating from his still-undiagnosed maladies in Palm Beach, Florida, Jack accepted his father’s suggestion that he go to Arizona for two months beginning in April. There, the warm climate and relaxed pace at a ranch seemed to restore Jack’s health. With time to reflect, Jack changed his mind about college. Princeton’s cloistered environment and spartan living quarters in South Reunion Hall had disappointed him, so he decided to renew his application to Harvard in July 1936, receiving admission to the fall term within three days of applying.

During his first two years at Harvard, Jack largely continued the pattern he had established at Choate. His academic record was unimpressive: a B-minus in government the first year and a B in English the second were offset by grades of C and C-plus in French, history, and a second government course, his major interest. “Exam today,” he wrote Billings during his first finals period in January 1937, “so have to open my book & see what the fucking course is about.” When he got too far behind in his work, Jack occasionally relied on a tutoring service or an outside “cram school,” which charged a fee for bringing unprepared students up to speed for an exam. Jack’s freshman adviser predicted that he would probably do better in time, but in his sophomore year he had still not lived up to his talent or promise. “Though his mind is still undisciplined,” his tutor wrote, “and will probably never be very original, he has ability, I think, and gives promise of development.”

Jack’s classmates and teachers remember a charming, irreverent young man with a fine sense of humor and a passion for sports and the good life. He certainly showed no overt interest in the campus activism provoked by the Depression, FDR’s New Deal, and the challenges to democracy and capitalism from fascism, Nazism, and communism. There is no indication that he read any of the popular progressive journals of the day, such as
The Nation,
the
New Republic,
or
New Masses,
or gave much, if any, heed to the parades and protest demonstrations organized by students eager to have a say in public affairs. He had little use for doctrinaire advocates who “espoused their causes with a certitude which he could never quite understand.” Indeed, after only two months at Harvard, he privately vented his irritation with the political clichés he had been hearing in a whimsical letter to Billings. “You are certainly a large-sized prick to keep my hat,” he complained to Lem, “as I can’t find my other one and consequently am hatless. Please send it as I am sending yours. . . . Harvard has not made me grasping but you are getting a certain carefree communistic attitude + a share the wealth attitude that is rather worrying to we who are wealthy.”

His focus remained on the extracurricular and social activities he found more enjoyable, and stamped him as one of the many students at Harvard more interested in earning the social standing that attendance and graduation provided than in the book learning needed to advance a career. Although James Bryant Conant, Harvard’s president beginning in 1933, stressed the importance of “meritocracy,” a university focused more on the intellect and character of its students than on their social origins, social snobbery continued to dominate the undergraduate life of the university. Jack’s first two years on campus were a reflection of these mores. Football, swimming, and golf, and service on the Smoker and Annual Show committees occupied his freshman year, while junior varsity football, varsity swimming, the Spee and Yacht Clubs, and service on the business board of the Harvard
Crimson
filled his second year.

Jack put a premium on succeeding at these chosen activities. He was a fierce competitor. “He played for keeps,” the football coach recalled. “He did nothing half way.” Swim practice often occupied four hours a day sandwiched between classes. The athletic competitions gave him some gratifying moments: the freshman swim team went undefeated, and an intercollegiate championship in sailing for the boat he commanded sophomore year was a high point.

Yet, as at Choate, his brother continued to eclipse him. Joe Jr. was the best-known member of his class, and “Jack was bound to play second-fiddle,” a Harvard contemporary and later dean of admissions said. Whereas Joe was big enough and strong enough to play varsity football, Jack, at six feet and 150 pounds, was too slight to make more than the sophomore junior squad. Moreover, his fragile health undermined his success as a backstroke specialist, contributing to his failure to beat out a classmate for the starting assignment in the Yale swim meet.

His brother’s success in campus politics also reduced any hopes Jack may have had of making a mark in that area. Under an unstated family rule of primogeniture, the eldest son had first call on a political career. And Joe Jr. left no doubt that this was already his life’s ambition. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, one of Joe’s tutors, remembered him as keenly interested in politics and public affairs and quick to cite his father as the source of his beliefs. “When I become President, I will take you up to the White House with me,” he liked to tell people. Joe’s quick rise to prominence on campus gave resonance to his boasts. He won elections as chairman of the Winthrop House committee, as a class representative to the student council, as an usher for Class Day, and as business manager of the class album. He also enjoyed prominence as an outspoken anti-interventionist in the emerging troubles abroad.

Although very much in his brother’s shadow during his freshman and sophomore years, Jack also gave indications that he had more than a passing interest in public issues. A failed bid for a student council seat suggested that he was not content to leave politics entirely to his father and brother or that he was focused solely on high jinks. Moreover, his academic work began to demonstrate a substantial engagement with political leadership and how influential men changed the world. Economics, English, history, and government courses formed the core of his first two-year curriculum. In March 1937, his freshman adviser noted that Jack “is planning to do work in Gov. He has already spent time abroad studying it. His father is in that work.” He read several books on recent international and political history, and more revealing, he wrote papers on King Francis I of France and Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His essays focused on the uses of political and intellectual power to alter human relations, Francis I being notable to Jack as someone who had made himself the “undisputed and absolute” ruler of France and the architect of the French Renaissance, and Rousseau was the author of works that Jack saw as “the seeds of the revolution that took place in 1789.”

JACK’S GREATEST SUCCESS
in his first two years at Harvard was in winning friends and proving to be “a lady’s man.” He made a positive impression on almost everyone he met. “A gangling young man with a slightly snub nose and ‘a lot of flap in his reddish-brown hair,’” Jack etched himself in the memory of one classmate who saw him climbing the stairs of the
Crimson
building “with his long coltish stride.” One professor remembered “his bright young face which stood out in the class.” According to the master of John Winthrop House, who interviewed Jack and reviewed his request for a transfer there in 1937 from Weld Hall, he was a “good boy,” one of the “most popular at Weld,” and “one of [the] most popular men in his class.” John Kenneth Galbraith remembered Jack as “handsome . . . gregarious, given to various amusements, much devoted to social life and affectionately and diversely to women.”

“We are having one hell of a fine time,” Jack wrote Billings after arriving on campus and reconnecting with some Choate friends. “I am now known as ‘Play-boy,’” he wrote again in October. Jack was “very humorous, very bright, very unassuming,” said Torbert Macdonald, his closest Harvard friend, who became a star back on the football team. “Anytime you were with Jack Kennedy you would laugh,” another athlete friend recalled. Lem Billings agreed: “Jack was more fun than anyone I’ve ever known, and I think most people who knew him felt the same way about him.” His irreverence particularly endeared him to classmates, who shared a certain distaste for the social hierarchy of which they themselves were so much a part.

Jack’s discovery that girls liked him or that he had a talent for charming them gave him special satisfaction. As early as the summer of 1934, when he was seventeen, he had become aware that young women were attracted to him, reporting to Billings that the girl next door on the Cape had called from Cleveland to ask about his health. “I can’t help it,” he declared with evident self-pleasure. “It can’t be my good looks because I’m not much handsomer than anybody else. It must be my personality.”

His letters to Billings over the next few years, especially through his sophomore year at Harvard, contain numerous references to his sexual exploits. Some of this was adolescent bragging. “I had an enema given by a beautiful blonde,” he wrote Billings during a hospital stay in June 1934. “That, my sweet, is the height of cheap thrills.” “The nurses here are the dirtiest bunch of females I’ve ever seen,” he wrote a few days later. “One of them wanted to know if I would give her a work out last night. . . . I said yes but she was put off duty early.” During his first two years at Harvard, Jack had a series of conquests he graphically described to Billings. He worried that one of his weekend outings might mean “a bundle from heaven. Please keep all this under your skin and I wish now I had kept mine under my skin if you know what I mean. I would have less worries.” But it did not deter him. “I can now get my tail as often and as free as I want which is a step in the right direction,” he told Billings a few months later.

In rereading this correspondence years later, Billings categorized the letters as “dirty,” “very dirty,” or “not so dirty.” But he understood that there was more here than some adolescent rite of passage by a young man with a strong sexual appetite. “He was interested, very interested, in girls,” Billings remembered. But it was also “a form of being successful at something.” It was “important to him,” because it was an area in which he held an advantage over his brother and Billings and most of his other peers. At a wedding reception, Lem wrote Jack’s sister Kathleen, “brother John was right in his element as he found Dotty Burns & Missy Greer there—all anxious to hear about how Marlene Dietrich thinks he’s one of the most fascinating & attractive young men she’s ever met.”