The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (24 page)

Joe thought that his sons were never too young to learn to be the public men he wanted them to be. Joe’s sons felt the need not simply to emulate their father but to defend him. Even young Bobby got into the fray. In November 1938, Walter Lippmann wrote a thoughtful column rightfully criticizing Joe as one of those “amateur and temporary diplomats [who] take their speeches very seriously. Ambassadors of this type soon tend to become each a little state department with a little foreign policy of their own.” Twelve-year-old Bobby wrote a tedious rebuttal that was little more than a regurgitation of some of his father’s more extreme views. There was a slovenly quality to the letter, with myriad typos, including a misspelling of Lippmann’s name.

Although Bobby would presumably have found it offensive if others had suggested that his father believed as he did simply because he was an Irish-American Catholic, he was perfectly willing to condemn Lippmann’s writing as the rationalizations of a Jew seeking to protect “his” people, and not his nation. Bobby dismissed Lippmann’s thoughtful, reasoned critique as nothing more than “the natural Jewish reaction.”

For one so young, Bobby had a deeply offensive arrogance, much like his father’s. He lectured Jews that they had better accept the realities of making accommodations with Hitler. “I know this is extremely hard for the Jewish community in the US to sto mach,
[sic],”
he wrote with all the wisdom of his years, “nbut
[sic]
they should see by now that the fcourse
[sic]
which they have followed the last few years has brought them nothing but additional hard ship
[sic].”

In April 1939, thirteen-year-old Bobby was invited to be one of a group
of children laying a stone at the Clubland Temple of Youth in Camberwell. Joe, the subtle mastermind of his sons’ journeys into manhood, had the event scripted with all the detail of a major diplomatic meeting. As ambassador, Joe had been asked to preside, but this was his son’s first important public appearance, and he wanted the spotlight to shine unabashedly only on Bobby.

The press attaché notified news organizations that the ambassador’s son would be making a short speech. James Seymour, the ambassador’s aide, prepared elaborate notes for the event, including Bobby’s little speech (“All the temples I’ve read about in history books are very old … but this ‘Temple of Youth’ is awfully young”). On the appointed evening, Bobby pulled a crumpled, penciled note out of his pocket and read what appears to have been his own remarks, not Seymour’s version of what a boy scarcely a teenager should say (“Many years from now, when we are very old, this Temple of Youth will still be standing to bring happiness to many English children”).

Young Bobby already understood that part of his role in life was to take the work of others and by his own subtle infusions make it his own. He was a boyish mixture of shyness and confidence. When the seventeen-year-old Japanese representative found herself next to the eleven-year-old daughter of the Chinese ambassador, there was deadly quiet, and the event risked becoming not a celebration of the commonality of children but a minor diplomatic incident between children of the two warring Asian nations. “I wonder shall we all be here to see Her Majesty perform the opening on May 20?” Bobby asked, his innocent query giving the two young women a neutral matter to discuss.

Even six-year-old Teddy realized that he was not just a boy. His parents told him that wherever he went he had to remember that he was the son of the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. That was a burden his older brothers had not had. The little boy was living two lives, his own and his father’s glorified idea of him. He came home from school one day and asked his mother for permission to punch a classmate. “Why?” Rose asked, believing that in the pantheon of virtues, civility stood below only godliness. “Well, he’s been hitting me every day, and you tell me I can’t get into fights because Dad is the ambassador.” After a family discussion, Ted was told that this once he could strike back at his tormentor.

I
n what would prove to be the last summer of peace, Joe Jr. headed out once again across Europe, a footloose, privileged witness to his times. He was frequently an insightful, prophetic observer. In Germany he saw that the people were largely united behind Hitler and that “there is only one thing that the
Germans understand and that is force. All attempts at conciliation are taken as signs of weakness, and furthermore are used as propaganda by the Germans to convince the smaller countries that the English won’t fight.”

Joe Jr. may have been his father’s son, but in these dispatches he did not simply parrot his father’s isolationist views. He had a young man’s rage at the hypocrisies of the world, and he pointed them out in passionate detail. Europe was full of ethnic loathing. Hitler was the primary architect of malevolence, but there were others building their bonfires of hate across the ancient landscape. This world might suck America into all its malice and complexities.

Joe Jr. raged against Roosevelt’s hypocrisy, egging Britain on from a safe distance. He was not, however, the cocksure, often arrogant young man of two years before. He was even willing to consider a policy unthinkable to the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Joe Jr. concluded one dispatch: “I had always thought that we should stay out of war and that being a rich nation we can live by ourselves … but if we can’t … then I think we should have a real policy in Europe entirely fitting for the greatest power in the world rather than a half-hearted, namby pamby policy skipping one way then to the other so no one knows what will happen if their
[sic]
is a war.”

W
hile Joe Jr. spent much of his time journeying around Europe, Jack was back at Harvard. Exemplifying what can be the terrible carelessness of wealth, he believed that there was always someone else to pick up for him. In his suite at Winthrop House, he had the disconcerting habit of dropping his clothes in the middle of the floor. One evening as he hurriedly dressed to go out, he threw his pants and shirt into a pile in the middle of the room. His roommate, Torby Macdonald, looked at the heap and declared their room had the distinct appearance of a rummage sale. “Don’t get sanctimonious,” Jack snapped back. “Whose stuff do you think I’m throwing mine
on top of?”
That may have been true, but before long George Taylor, Jack’s black, self-styled “gentleman’s gentleman,” would be dropping by to hang and press Gentleman Jack’s clothes while Torby’s would stay where they fell.

At times Jack treated the law like a petty hindrance that should not bother someone who carried the name Kennedy. Jack wrote Lem that he had a “rather unpleasant contact with a woman in a car who was such a shit that I gave her a lot of shit.” Euphemism is often a liar’s cloak, and Jack admitted to his friend that the woman had written the Registry of Motor Vehicles complaining that “I had leered at her after bumping her four or five times, which story has some truth although I didn’t know I was leering…. Anyways they got me in and are sore at me.”

Jack had apparently become so angry that he had rammed into this
woman’s car a number of times. When he was called to account for his deplorable act, he lied, telling the officers that he’d “loaned my car out that night to some students.” Jack had given the police the name of one of these students—none other than his friend Lem. Now Lem was supposed to take the blame, saying “you’re sorry and realize you should not have done it.” Confession was good for the soul, even if it was a lie masquerading as honesty, as long as Jack did not have to take responsibility.

It remained a wondrous time to be rich, as long as you kept your eyes high, away from the unseemly sight of the poor and the hungry. Jack was a Spee Club man, and his friends were either rich and wellborn or stellar athletes. He did not sit at dinner at his club or around Winthrop House bemoaning the fate of the poor. Not once in any of his letters did he ever mention the dreadful consequences of the Great Depression.

Jack traveled from one watering hole of the wealthy to the next. At the wedding of his classmate Ben Smith in Lake Forest, Illinois, Jack left a faucet on all night in the home where he was staying. By morning the plaster had fallen down from the ceilings, and the newly decorated home was a shambles. Jack admitted his culpability with such self-deprecating charm that the hosts couldn’t possibly dislike him, and so they turned their wrath on a friend whose only crime was being there.

Women were one of his primary divertissements, if they were pretty. If they were not pretty, he simply ignored them, or occasionally ridiculed them. During Easter 1938 Jack and Lem were down in Florida, where they heard that the Oxford Meat Market was having a picnic for the servants in Palm Beach. The two young men thought that it might be good pickings there, that pretty working-class girls would be happy to spend an evening with young gentlemen.

Jack’s eyes fell on one pretty Irish lass. Jack cut her away from the rest, but though she agreed to go out with him, she insisted that her friend Rachel come along. Rachel was enormous, at least 250 pounds, dressed in a sailor suit. Jack, always ready for amusement, said that he would arrange a date for Rachel. He then called his snobbish Princeton friend Sandy Osborn and told him that he had a date for him. “Well, we went to pick up the girl at the corner of such-and-such street, and Sandy was so eager and excited: and suddenly the lights hit her standing on the corner,” Lem recalled. “It was one of the funniest experiences I’ve ever had in my life!”

Jack was also careless in his vision of the world. In the summer of 1937, he traveled through Europe with Lem, keeping a diary of his experience. It was an exceptional time to be journeying from the border of Spain to Berlin, but for the most part he wrote like a snooty prep school boy criticizing nations as if they were bad restaurants.

To young Jack, ethnicity was more important than ideology. In Saint Jean de Luz, he talked to refugees driven out of Spain by Franco’s minions. He noted in his diary: “Story of father starved kept in prison without food for a week brought in piece of meat, ate it—then saw his son’s body with piece of meat cut out of it.”

Jack did not look for reasons in the politics of his time but in the Spanish national character. “In the afternoon went to a bull-fight,” he scribbled in his notebook. “Very interesting but very cruel, especially when the bull gored the horse. Believe all the atrocity stories now as these southerners, such as these French and Spanish, are happiest at scenes of cruelty.”

In Germany, although he did not express pro-Nazi sentiments, Jack was impressed with the quality of life. “All the towns are very attractive showing that the Nordic races certainly seem superior to the Latins.” Near the end of his journey, he concluded: “Fascism is the thing for Germany and Italy, Communism for Russia and democracy for America and England.”

O
n his trip to Europe in 1937 Jack had been sailing along when, in London at the end of the summer, he developed a bewildering case of hives that four different doctors looked at before the problem disappeared as mysteriously as it had begun. Jack’s health was a veritable dictionary of illnesses, and years later Lem joked to a friend that if he wrote Jack’s biography, he would title it “John F. Kennedy, A Medical History.”

With his weak stomach, Jack was fortunate that he could eat at the Spee and be served a special diet. The club even had an ice cream—making machine to produce the one food that he could easily digest and that might put some meat on his bones. He went out for the Harvard swim team, but in March 1938, he entered New England Baptist Hospital with an intestinal infection that knocked out any chance of a swimming letter. Once again he lay in a hospital bed, trying to rise out of his pain and get back into the world.

By the middle of June, Jack was back in the hospital, nagged by weight loss and continuing intestinal problems. In the fall, doctors wanted him back in the hospital for more tests. He wrote Lem, “I’ve been in rotten shape since I’ve got back and seem to be back-sliding.” The following spring he was so sick that he had to agree to go to the Mayo Clinic for tests. It was simply endless.

Jack made a point of lying out in the sun at Palm Beach or Hyannis Port getting a tan, making sure his face always had a robust sheen. He was not going to be pitied or excused. No one was going to push him aside from the races of youth. His few friends who knew the truth realized that Jack’s greatest
creation was the illusion of health. If he talked about his condition, and that was rarely enough, he did so only to make a joke about it. “Jack didn’t discuss it,” Rousmanière recalled. “We never made it a part of our lives what his health was. He was deceptive and his health was never an issue.”

Joe had taught his sons that nothing was more valuable in life than time, for life itself was no more than a blink of an eye. To be sickly was to live half a life, and half a life was not life enough. Jack willed himself to live his life as something he was not and never would be—a healthy man.

Jack kept his poor health secret all his life. If sometimes denial is another name for a lie, at other times it is the mask of courage, and friends such as Lem and Rousmanière believed that was the mask their friend was wearing. Later in his life, Jack would lie about his health for political reasons, but now he pretended that he was something he was not so that he could live as he thought a man must live.

D
uring his last two years at Harvard, Jack had become the student that his father and older brother never were. Jack burrowed into books not to avoid the world but to enter it more fully. There was a dramatic immediacy to many of the classes, especially in government and modern history. The professors themselves often stood on different sides of the issues of war and peace. Education was no longer an abstraction. Education, at least part of it, was about life and death, a struggle in which these young men might soon be involved.

In the spring of his junior year, Jack received a leave of absence to go to Europe and prepare his senior honors’ thesis on England’s failure to prepare for war. During these seven months in 1939, Jack traveled throughout Europe and Palestine, sending his father a series of detailed accounts of his journey, most of which have been lost. He wrote Lem as well without having to play the diplomat.