The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (20 page)

This was hardly the only time the two brothers came close to drawing blood. Joe Jr. was usually the instigator. He could couch even his best advice with such cavalier dismissal that Jack was bound to do just the opposite. On the football field in the fall of 1936, Joe Jr. jogged over from the varsity to where Jack was practicing with the other freshmen. As Torby listened in, Joe Jr. said: “Jack, if you want my opinion, you’d be better off forgetting about football. You just don’t weigh enough and you’re going to get hurt.”

Torby could see his friend’s face flash with anger at Joe Jr.’s arrogant dismissal of his athletic prospects. “Come off it, Joe,” Torby exclaimed, interjecting himself between the brothers. “Jack doesn’t need any looking after.” Instead of echoing his friend’s sentiments, Jack turned on Torby: “Mind your own business! Keep out of it! I’m talking to Joe, not you.”

Joe Jr. was right. Jack should not have been out on the football field. In a scrimmage the next year Jack would hurt a spinal disc so severely that not only would his third-rate football career be over, but he would suffer from back problems the rest of his life. That was Jack’s legacy from the Kennedys’ obsession with football—an often-debilitating pain that plagued him and at times nearly crippled him. Here on the field of play where he was supposed to have won the laurels of true manhood, he would hurt himself in such a deep and largely unperceivable way that much of his life became a struggle to pretend that he walked as other men did, and to prove that his spirit would never be crippled.

Torby was not the only friend to learn that as disputatious as the Kennedy brothers might seem, their father had taught them to stand arms linked against the world. Despite this commonality, both young Kennedys stood at a distance from everyone else around them, and apart from each other as well. “I suppose I knew Joe [Jr.] as well as anyone, and yet I sometimes wonder whether I ever really knew him,” Jack reflected a decade later. “He had always a slight detachment from things around him—a wall of
reserve which few people ever succeeded in penetrating.” Jack could as easily have been speaking of himself as his big brother.

Joe Jr. and Jack were not like so many young men who defined their own manhood by thrusting off from their father’s vision of the world. Joe Jr. largely affirmed his father’s world as his own, while Jack steered warily around Joe’s mammoth presence in search of his own identity. Both sons, however, not only tolerated their father’s sexual mores but largely adopted them and were endlessly amused by them.

When Joe Jr. and Jack went to Hyannis Port, they were not surprised to find their father seated in the front row of the private movie theater next to his latest blonde “secretary” while their mother stood in the background, a shadowy, silent presence. They found it, if anything, droll that their father cast his lecherous eye on any young woman, even their own dates. Nor did they find it irregular that their parents had separate apartments in New York.

As the Kennedys saw it, they were not a jaded family in which appearance was the only reality and hypocrisy passed as a code of honor. Joe Jr., Jack, and all their brothers and sisters considered that they had a great, loyal, caring family. In their own minds, they could integrate all these contradictions where some outsiders saw only falsehood. They could see too that what passed as family among many of their peers was pallid kinship. That was why their friends loved being around them, for the Kennedys lived with passionate intensity and with reverential attention to all the formalities of family. Joe might parade his mistresses in front of his wife, but at the dinner table his sons stood up when their mother entered and left the room. Joe Jr. and Jack respected their mother, but their love for their father was deeper, more emotional, and full of complexity.

When Joe arrived at Winthrop House in the fall of 1937 to give a guest lecture, Joe Jr. and Jack entered the room just as their father was about to be introduced. They stood in the back waiting to greet their father after his talk was over. Joe, however, called his sons forward, and in front of their friends the two young Kennedys kissed their father.

Joe treated the students to a dramatic, intimate narrative of the life of power in Washington. By then he was justly celebrated as the man who in only fourteen months as SEC chairman had shored up the foundations of capitalism, paring away the mechanisms that had allowed men like himself to make fortunes that risked destroying the very system that had so richly benefited them. Joe had gone on in 1937 to a ten-month stint as chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission, where he had for the most part further distinguished himself.

As candid as he was, Joe did not let the Winthrop men in on what he
considered the inner secrets of power. Joe was a man who believed that life did not just happen, but that the inspired few created a world that the mediocre masses accepted as truth. Part of that creation was the image that Joe created for his family. He was hungry for praise for himself and for his sons. The Kennedy men lived in the glow of publicity in part because Joe importuned those who held the spotlight to shine it brightly on them and their achievements.

Joe received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, a prize that the unwary would have thought came to him unbidden. The reality was that in 1937, his friend Bernard Baruch, the financier, donated $62,500 to Oglethorpe, an institution that had a reputation largely as a diploma mill. A few weeks later Baruch received a letter from a school official saying that he would recommend Joe for an honorary degree. That same day Baruch wrote Joe asking him which honorary doctorate degree he preferred. “I never heard of any but Laws but you’re the chairman,” Joe wrote back.

Two years later Arthur Krock, the
New York Times
Washington bureau chief and columnist, attempted unsuccessfully to obtain another honorary degree for Joe from Krock’s alma mater, Princeton. Krock was one of the most powerful journalists in America, and yet he moonlighted as a hapless flack for the Kennedys, compromising his integrity. He wrote Joe’s 1936 campaign tract,
Why I’m for Roosevelt,
wrote glowing columns about the man and his sons, and was available for editorial services and shameless shilling for any family member.

Joe Jr.’s Harvard friend Charles Houghton was startled to see that any event, even a sailboat race, that involved Jack or Joe Jr. received enormous publicity, and he thought he had puzzled out one reason why. “The old man hired Arthur Krock for twenty-five thousand dollars to keep the Kennedy name in the papers,” Houghton said. “The old man had a blue print…. Arthur Krock was supposed to publicize any member of the Kennedy family to make them look good. It’s the first time I ever heard about PR. This was back in 1937–38 when twenty-five thousand dollars was a lot of money.” Krock denied that Joe ever paid for his services. Whether paid or not, he was one of the first of many journalists to put his craft to work advancing the Kennedys’ careers more than he advanced the truth about them.

Thanks to men like Krock, Joe had managed to become one of the most celebrated members of Roosevelt’s administration. He was also one of its most disloyal. Joe did most of his bellyaching not to Roosevelt but to conservative journalists such as Krock, who heard his complaints not as treacherous whining but as a principled assault on New Deal doctrines.

Roosevelt realized that in Joe he had a subordinate who approved of neither his fiscal nor social policies, a man who in less troubled times perhaps would have been sacked. The president, however, was holding together a disparate and troubled coalition. Joe was no more disloyal than many Democratic Catholics who listened on the radio to the vicious anti-New Deal jeremiads of Father Charles Coughlin as if they were Sunday sermons. Joe was friendly enough with the demagogic priest that he wrote Coughlin in August 1936 thanking him for calling Joe “a shining star among the dim ‘knights’ of the present administration’s activities.”

During the interlude between his two positions in Washington, Joe had hired himself out to various troubled corporations for princely sums. He was brilliant at ferreting out excess, fraud, and corporate squalor and singularly unsympathetic to the mediocre inheritors who often sat at the heads of America’s major corporations.

In a stint at troubled Paramount Studios, Joe prepared a harshly candid portrait of a company in which directors who were the architects of “dissension and division in management policies” still sat on the board. He condemned the “cumulative effects of a chain of incompetent, unbusinesslike and wasteful practices,” and he backed up his critique with figures as firm as his words.

Joe received $50,000 in return, plus another $24,000 for his assistants, but he apparently thought that Paramount itself would have been fairer compensation. “Roosevelt is worried about anti-Semitism in America and one of the causes is all the movie companies being owned by Jews,” he told the board of directors, including Edwin Weisl, a senior partner in the Wall Street firm of Simpson, Thatcher & Bartlett. Weisl recalled the incident to his son, Edwin Weisl Jr., who, like his father, was a leading Democratic operative.

“What are we supposed to do?” a board member replied, painfully aware of the wages of fear rising across the world.

“The company ought to be owned by a non-Jew, and Roosevelt says you should sell it to me.”

Weisl had excellent political connections, and before he advised the board to sell, he wanted to confirm everything with Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt’s closest aides. “Hey, Chief,” Hopkins asked Roosevelt as Weisl stood near by. “What’s this about Joe Kennedy and Paramount?”

“What’s Paramount?” the president queried.

“Have you heard enough?” Hopkins replied, and the two men left the president alone. Weisl went back to the board to tell them that they should not sell Paramount to Joe but pay him off with money and thanks and be rid of him.

J
oe returned to Cambridge in November 1937 for the Harvard-Yale game, in which Joe Jr. would have his last chance to win a letter. His son had had a sad, unfulfilling career on the Harvard team, condemned to perpetual life on the bench.

He had practiced as hard as any of the varsity players and was never known to shirk an exercise or cut practice. Joe Jr.’s tenure on the team, however, had been plagued by injuries. In his freshman year he had broken his arm. The next year he had suffered such a serious knee injury that in his junior year his leg was operated upon. His father, despite his quasi-religious belief in football, feared that his eldest son was going to end up with a gimpy leg or worse, an honor that he would wear longer than a Harvard “H.” “You should think very seriously whether it is worthwhile or not,” Joe wrote his son.

Joe Jr. took his admonitions from the book of life he had learned from his father in the summers at Hyannis Port. A man did not give up or give in. He had lost weight, and he was far down on the list of ends on the team. Yet he went out for his final year, another dispirited season largely spent watching his teammates from the sidelines.

For his sheer devotion to the team, Joe Jr. deserved to be shuttled in for at least one play to win his Harvard “H.” Joe Jr. had no doubt but that he would indeed see action, for it was the honorable Crimson tradition to let all the seniors in for at least one play during their final Yale game.

His father could have told his son that as far as he was concerned, that tradition had ended a quarter-century ago on the baseball diamond. Since then his father had come to believe that fate was another word for pathetic fatalism. On the Friday evening before the game, as the backfield coach, Al McCoy, sat in his office perusing the list of seniors who were likely to play, Coach Dick Harlow received a call from a person identifying himself as a friend of Joe Kennedy. “He wanted to know if Joe [Jr.] was going to get his letter tomorrow because he wanted to tell the father,” Harlow fumed as he hung up the phone. “Well, nobody’s going to high pressure me!” Later that evening a man who identified himself as Joe Kennedy attempted unsuccessfully to reach the coach to put in a further plug for his son.

Saturday afternoon several games were played before the fifty-seven thousand fans as the damp wind blew fiercely across the Charles River. For some, the least interesting of the games was the one played on the frigid field. There the Yale and Crimson elevens struggled up and down the turf until, in the last quarter, with six minutes remaining, Harvard broke the tie with a touchdown.

For the seniors, the game that truly mattered centered on the coach’s decision to let them play in their last competition and win their letter. With that final Harvard touchdown, they were sure their moment had arrived. Up until then only seven substitutes had seen play, and the sideline was full of restive, nervous athletes ready for their moment of glory. The new coach had been brought in from Western Maryland, where he had a stellar record. Harlow’s mandate was to win. It was one of the ironies of this day that of all men it should have been that champion of winning at all costs, Joseph P. Kennedy, who glowered down on the coach, wanting his own son to play, winning be damned.

Harlow looked up and called for a new end to enter the game. If power and history meant what Joe thought they did, the coach would have bypassed Green, Jameson, and Winter and called out “Kennedy.” Instead, Harlow barked out, “Jameson.” The coach had made his last substitution, and when the final gun went off, there was as much sadness as joy on the long Harvard bench.

While Joe Jr. was lost in the surging crowds, his father made his way to the center of the field, where he greeted Coach Harlow with words that did not make their way into Monday’s
Harvard Crimson.
The Harvard paper did mention the names of seven worthy seniors who did not play that day. To add a modicum more of indignity to Joe Jr.’s final game, his name was not even listed.

8
Mr. Ambassador

W
hen Joe was named the new ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, the announcement was greeted with wide approval. Joe was not what Americans perceived as the stereotypical diplomat, a pinstriped, lisping, top-hatted fop, but a straight-shooting, straight-talking American whom the British could not bamboozle. He was not going to be taken in by the highfalutin’ tomfoolery that had supposedly seduced previous ambassadors and turned them into hapless agents for the British establishment.