The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (16 page)

Jack wasn’t concerned about St. John but about his father. Joe had taught him that no matter what he did, if he came to his father and told the truth, everything would be fine. Joe absolved all. He forgave all. He made what was bad good and what was broken whole. The curtains of his confessional were the boundaries of the family, and every word and every deed stayed within those precincts.

The truth can be as manipulative as a lie, and Jack learned to finesse his father with candor. “I thought I would write you right away as LeMoyne and I have been talking about how poorly we have done this quarter,” he wrote Joe in early December 1934. “I really feel, now that I think it over, that I have been bluffing myself about how much real work I have been doing.” That was all true, but Jack’s was the calculated candor of a defense attorney who outlines his client’s worst crimes before the prosecuting attorney does it. Jack had confessed before the quarter was even over, and well before his father would see his son’s grades. No matter what punishment he faced from his father in Palm Beach, the letter would soften the blows.

Jack had gauged his father perfectly. “I got a great satisfaction out of your letter,” Joe replied. Jack’s father was a busy man, one of the wealthiest, most
powerful men in America, yet he answered immediately. Joe was full of the most wearisome cynicism toward everything in life except for his sons. They were the repositories of his ideals and aspirations. He was doing whatever he could so that on the day when his sons’ wealth and privilege were weighed against their achievements, an honest assayer would say that the Kennedy men’s lives more than balanced the scales.

This was not a rhetorical shield behind which he pushed his sons ahead on their crude accession. This was his profound belief, and at this point he pushed it with principle and tact and nuance. “I would be lacking even as a friend if I did not urge you to take advantage of the qualities you have,” he wrote Jack in early December 1934. “It is very difficult to make up fundamentals that you have neglected when you were very young and that is why I am always urging you to do the best you can. I am not expecting too much and I will not be disappointed if you don’t turn out to be a real genius, but I think you can be a really worthwhile citizen with good judgment and good understanding.”

Jack did not heed his father’s heartfelt words. He read the
New York Times
every day and had a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of current events, but he sat daydreaming in class, responding listlessly to his teachers’ queries, barely getting by academically.

As a father, Joe was facing one of the conundrums of great wealth. How did a rich man raise sons with purpose and a sense of destiny and responsibility? He thought he had been doing just that in part by sending Joe Jr. and Jack to Choate, but he saw in young Jack all the wages of his failure. Joe’s fear was that wealth and all the mindless ease that came with it had distorted his son’s values.

Joe was proud that he had earned money as a boy and that he had adhered so tightly to adulthood’s harsh laws. It appalled him, as he wrote a Choate administrator, that he and Rose had “possibly contributed as much as anyone in spoiling him [Jack] by having secretaries and maids following him to see that he does what he should do, and he places too little confidence on his own reliance.”

Jack was a young man of terrible carelessness. He was careless about his clothes, careless about appointments, and careless about money. Worse yet, he was intellectually careless. He was living through the Great Depression, with millions unemployed and the roads and rails full of hollow-eyed wanderers, and yet he knew and felt nothing of what his compatriots were suffering. “I have no memory of the Depression,” he told journalist Hugh Sidey years later. “We lived better than ever. We had bigger houses, more servants. We had more money, more flexibility, more power than ever before.” Jack was a rich young man who saw wealth not as something that
had to be earned or maintained, or that others might try to wrest away, but as something that was simply his, as much a part of him as his feet and his fingers.

R
alph “Rip” Horton, Jack’s friend and classmate, was just as scrawny and malnutritioned-looking as Jack, and just as rich. He had, moreover, certain perks of wealth that Jack didn’t have but aspired to, such as a card granting entry to the more elegant New York clubs and a casual familiarity with the cafe society of the metropolis. The youths dressed up in ersatz adulthood on their forays into the Manhattan nightlife, acting with the nonchalance of the regular habitués.

Jack was getting over his shyness toward the opposite sex and slowly developing a lustful, cynical self-assurance. To Jack and many of his classmates, one of the major allures of attending Choate was the inspired presence of the wife of one of the masters. “Queenie,” as she was known by the boys, was a voluptuous young woman, and perfectly aware of the dry-mouthed attention she received when she strolled into the dining hall. The highest honor that several of the boys dreamed of was not the Choate Prize that Joe Jr. had just won but the bedding of Queenie, a fantasy so unthinkable, so daring, so impossibly sweet that it could scarcely be whispered about.

One of Jack’s classmates, Larry Baker, has the distinct recollection that Jack bragged that he had that honor. That claim was doubtless one of Jack’s first forays into fiction, for what rankled him, as it did several others, was that often Queenie invited Maurice Shea, the Choate quarterback, to her house for tea. Jack was so irritated by the sheer unfairness of this that he turned to a song he had written:

Maury Shea, Maury Shea
Drinking tea every day
Maury Shea, what’s your appeal?
Queenie, we want a new deal.

Queenie had never had a song written to her before, at least not by one of her husband’s students, and one day she asked Jack and his friends to sing it to her. “We damn near died,” Horton recalled. “Why we weren’t thrown out of school, I’ll never know.”

During spring break of his junior year Jack and a group of students drove down to Palm Beach in three cars. The youths roared southward, the cars playing tag with each other, roaring along the macadam at seventy miles an hour. In North Carolina they were stopped for speeding. Jack pleaded
poverty to the small-town judge, displaying his empty pockets. The magistrate cut their fines, and off they roared again. Jack and his friends did not suffer the mild discomfort of stopping at anonymous motels. They lived in their private world of privilege. They knew people all along the route, and they stopped at several estates.

At Sea Island a tollbooth blocked their way. One of the boys picked up a fire ax that happened to be lying there, and they roared past, waving the ax at the tollbooth keeper. Later in the day the young men drove Larry Baker’s new Model A convertible into the ocean, a mild diversion that upset only the car’s owner. Larry already had one souvenir from his friendship with Jack—a dark front tooth that had been deadened when Jack shoved him against the stucco wall of their house at Choate.

In Palm Beach, after a meal at the Kennedy home, Jack insisted that the group make a visit to the Cuban Tearoom, a brothel in West Palm Beach. Larry waited in the car while the others went inside. “They made fun of me,” Baker recalls. “The kids went deep-sea fishing the next day. They teased me because I hadn’t gone to the brothel, and decided to make me seasick.”

Baker was far from the only detractor among Jack’s classmates. One of his former friends accused Jack of telling the dean that he, the friend, and another student had a motorbike hidden in the countryside, a motorbike that Jack had ridden. Others felt that Jack was nothing but a spoiled snob, tooling off to Miss Porter’s School to pick up his date in his father’s chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and limiting his friendships to those of social or athletic status.

F
or Jack, the illnesses continued. Over Christmas 1933, he had another relapse. His condition was now so “interesting” that it merited a discussion before the American Medical Association. After his recovery, Joe wrote Joe Jr.: “It is only one of the few recoveries of a condition bordering on leuchemia
[sic],
and it was the general impression of the doctors that his chances were about five out of one hundred that he ever could have lived.” If the youth’s father wrote his eldest son such a terrifying letter, surely Jack knew his prognosis as well. He could hardly help knowing, for when it was thought that he had leukemia and would die, back at Choate the headmaster led a prayer for Jack in the chapel.

Jack’s fragile health was also shameful, not only because it singled him out as a weak figure, but because of the sheer embarrassment of some of the diseases with which he was afflicted. When he returned from Palm Beach after the Christmas holiday, he came down with a terrible case of hives, covering his entire body, and was taken to the hospital in New Haven. “Well,
you know, Jack, the doctors are simply delighted to have the trouble come out to the surface instead of staying inside,” Eddie Moore, his father’s associate, told him.

“Gee!” Jack exclaimed. “The doctors must be having a happy day today!”

When the hives began to disappear, Jack wished the doctors would stop poking at him and let him get back to his life. “If this had happened fifty years ago, they would just say, ‘Well, the boy has had a case of hives, but now he’s all over it,’ “he told Clara St. John, the headmaster’s wife. “Now they’ve got to take my blood count every little while and keep me here until they correspond to what the doctors think it ought to be.”

Jack wanted to get out of the hospital, but he was still so mysteriously weak that the doctors continued their tests. By the summer Jack had more vague symptoms, and his father decided to send him to the famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for a battery of tests. It was a situation that cried out for his mother’s presence. Rose’s visit, however, would have been an omen of death or a sign of intolerable weakness. Instead, Eddie Moore, a surrogate parent, accompanied Jack.

Jack was a fiercely intelligent young man who looked with wry bemusement at his life. Never was there a moment of self-pity in Jack. Never did he muse aloud about why the God his mother worshiped daily should have plagued him with these constant illnesses. Never did he ask the heavens why he couldn’t have a disease that he might defeat instead of these inexplicable conditions that the doctors never seemed able to diagnose or resolve.

In a series of letters to his friend Lem, Jack sought to turn his weeks at the Mayo Clinic into a roguish adventure. His closest friend was staying at the Kennedy house in Hyannis Port, partaking of all the summer revelry that to Jack was the sweetest part of the year. Lem was living
his
life. Only occasionally did Jack even allude to the terrible uncertainty of his plight. “The reason I’m here is that they may have to cut out my stomach!!!” he scribbled on the side of one letter. He began another letter by exclaiming: “God what a beating I’m taking. I’ve lost 8 pounds and still going down.” He did not go on bemoaning his condition however, but wrote how he had gone to the movies and found himself sitting next to a couple. “You’ve never smelt anything so vile as that girl,” he wrote. “She stank. I mentioned to Ed to move over. He moved over and then I moved. Well the girl looked at me and then whispered something to the fellow. He took his arm down and stood up. I, nothing daunted, stared back. The girl grabbed his arm and he sat down. It was a lucky thing for him because he was only about 6’3” and I could have heaved him right into the aisle on his ass.”

Jack was lying in a hospital bed at St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, where, as he wrote Lem, “I’ve got something wrong with my intestines—in
other words I shit blood.” He thought he might have piles. He was obsessed with his adolescent plague of pimples. The doctors performed procedures that seemed like base assaults on his dignity. Jack turned the tables on his tormentors by employing the only weapon he had: a dark sense of humor,

Yesterday I went through the most harassing experience of my life. First they gave me 5 enemas until I was white as snow inside. Then they put me on a thing like a barber chair. Instead of sitting in the chair I kneeled on something that resembles the foot rest with my head where the seat is. They took my pants down!! Then they tipped the chair over. Then surrounded by nurses the doctor first stuck his finger up my ass. I just blushed because you know how it is. He wiggled it suggestively and I rolled ‘em in the aisles by saying “You have a good motion.” He withdrew his finger. And then, the shit stuck an iron tube 12 inches long and 1 inch in diameter up my ass. They had a flashlight inside it and they looked around. Then they blew a lot of air in me to pump up my bowels. I was certainly feeling great as I know you would having a lot of strangers looking up my ass-hole. Of course when the pretty nurses did it I was given a cheap thrill.

Jack’s bed symbolized not only sickness but also sex. He told Lem that he had managed to masturbate only twice, and his “penis looked as if it had been run through a wringer.” His pajamas were dirty and “stiff from sweat.” He “feels kind of horny,” especially after reading a dirty book. All day long nurses entered his room. They were “very tantalizing and I’m really the pet of the hospital … and let me tell you nurses are almost as dirty as you, you filthy minded shit.” He boasted to Lem that one of the nurses “wanted to know if I would give her a workout,” but the nurse did not return later to his room.

The boastful boyish bravado and self-conscious obscenity are so overwhelming that it is easy to forget, as surely Jack wanted to forget, that he was a seventeen-year-old youth half a continent away from his family, lying in a hospital bed with doctors and nurses poking away at his body, seeking to understand the mysterious affliction that tortured him and held him back from the life he wanted so much to live. He was sick and he was hurting and he was full of pain that he could not even fully admit to himself, and never to Lem and the rest of the world.