The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (43 page)

J
oe Kane coined Jack’s campaign slogan—” A New Generation Offers a Leader”—and it was with the new generation of veterans that Jack was at his best. He may not have spoken in the firm, resonant cadences of a great speaker, but when he talked to his fellow veterans in the primary and later in the general election campaign, he spoke as truthfully and authentically as he ever did.

Jack could have offered himself up to the returning soldiers as “their” man, set to head down to Washington to unlock benefits that they deserved for their rich sacrifices. He did not do that. He saw these eighteen million Americans, 43 percent of the adult male population, as representing “mentally the most able, physically the best … in truth members of a citizens’ army.” These veterans were his natural constituents in a sense that no other
group could ever be. He had shared with them what was for him, as for most of them, the most profound and the most formative experience of his life.

After World War I the authentic patriotism of the returning veterans had been transmuted in the American Legion into reactionary, jingoistic pseudo-patriotism, hostile to new ideas and immigrants. This time Jack thought it could be different if only the veterans looked beyond their own narrow interests to those of all Americans. “I have noticed among many friends I knew who have come home … one common reaction since their return—a letdown,” he said.

I have seen it in many of their faces, I have heard many of them mention it—the realization that home is not what it was cracked up to be…. In civilian life, many of them feel alone. In the last analysis they feel they have only themselves to depend on. What they do not always understand and what all of us in this country sometimes forget is that the interdependence is with us in civilian life just as it was in the war, although perhaps it is not as obvious…. In a larger sense, each one of us is dependent on all the people of this country, on their obedience to our laws, for their rejection of the siren calls of ambitious demagogues. In fact, if we only recognized it, we are in time of peace as interdependent as soldiers were in time of war.

Would Americans divide themselves in interest groups by age, class, and race, or was there truly an interest common to all Americans? Jack believed that the veterans should ask what they could do for their country, because they would benefit that way more than from narrow special-interest bills. America was their special interest.

Jack thought the veterans should lead the nation, with concern for policies that would maintain the peace and build a strong and prosperous nation. In his most passionate speeches, he was saying little more than he had in his hurriedly written letters from the Pacific when he vowed that the men who had died would have given their lives for something more than maintaining the lives of easy compromise and moral squalor that had seemed to him so prevalent in political Washington.

Jack was pleading for America’s veterans not to retreat into private life, leaving the public arena to the predators, the self-interested, and the narrow parochial interests who shouted only their own names and their own causes. “If we turn our veterans organizations into mere weapons for obtaining special benefits for ourselves at the expense of society, we shall be sending ourselves down the rocky road to ruin.”

Jack was fighting not only to end up first in the primary but also to create the illusion of health. He admitted to no one how much he suffered. When he had to walk up three flights of stairs for the Massachusetts Catholic Order of Foresters Communion Breakfast, he was limping. “You don’t feel good?” asked Thomas Broderick, a friend, solicitously. “I feel great,” Jack said.

Whatever the pain, he always said he felt fine, but at night in his little suite at the Bellevue Hotel he sat soaking in the tub, hoping the hot water would ease his back pain. One afternoon, another of the old politicians, Clem Norton, found the exhausted candidate in his room at the Bellevue crying, bemoaning the fact that he had agreed to this race.

Jack may have felt half dead at times, but he was nonetheless able to project a magical aura of stardom. It wasn’t just the billboards and the pamphlets that did it, but that ineffable quality that had somehow attached itself to his wasted frame. When he talked to the students at East Boston High School, the girls rushed up to him afterward shouting “Sinatra! Sinatra!” comparing him to another emaciated-looking sex symbol.

A few days before the primary, fifteen hundred women showed up at the Hotel Commander in Cambridge for a tea party in Jack’s honor. They swooned over him, flashed their eyes, and smiled, and presumably thought of things other than the housing shortage and the unemployment rate.

Joe had brought in sophisticated outside pollsters, and the candidate knew that he was well ahead. For his birthday at the end of May, the family got together in Hyannis Port in a celebratory mood. They all were taking part in the campaign, a mini-armada of Kennedys. Only fourteen-year-old Teddy had nothing to do with the campaign and seemed a spectator to the compelling drama.

Joe looked down the long table and asked each of his children to proclaim a toast to the future congressman. In the family, this was the time for juvenile put-downs. Each Kennedy attempted to top the last in the outrageousness of their toasts and the rudeness of their words. Then, finally, it was Teddy’s turn.

“I would like to drink a toast to the brother who isn’t here,” Teddy said solemnly. They all stood then and toasted Joe Jr., and if they did not cry, it was only because they did not believe in shedding tears, not any longer. They remembered afterward that it was little Teddy who had made the toast, little Teddy who had his own sense of family.

B
y mid-June, Jack had to wear a back brace and arrange his schedule so that he could fit in half a dozen scalding hot baths a day and back rubs by “Cooky” McFarland, a boxing trainer. By rights he should not have even
considered marching in the annual Bunker Day parade through Charlestown the day before the June 1946 primary. But the other candidates would be there, and he could hardly advertise his health problems that until now he had hidden so convincingly.

It was a hot Boston day, and by the time Jack reached the reviewing stand he was staggering ahead, nearly collapsing. State Senator Robert Lee happened to live right there, and Jack was carried into the politician’s home. Lee called Joe, who told him to wait until a doctor arrived and his son could be moved. Lee stood and watched the twenty-nine-year-old candidate turn yellow and blue. “He appeared to me as a man who probably had a heart attack,” Lee remembered. “Later on I found out it was a condition, which he picked up, probably malaria or yellow fever. We took off his underwear, and we sponged him over, and he had some pills in his pocket that he took. That was one of the questions his father asked, did he have his pills with him.”

No news of Jack’s condition got out, and the whole Kennedy family was there the following evening in the headquarters on Tremont Street to hear the happy results. Jack had scored a formidable success in the primary, defeating the other nine candidates with 22,183 votes, 40.5 percent. His closest challenger, Michael J. Neville, the mayor of Cambridge, stood far behind with 11,341 votes. The authentic Joseph Russo received 5,661 votes, while another 799 votes went to the faux Russo.

Of all the people who were there that evening at headquarters, only Joe seemed strangely out of sorts. “I got the impression that night that Joe was disdainful of us all,” Dalton recalled. “I just couldn’t understand it. He wasn’t going around saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you for what you’ve done for my son.’ He wasn’t doing that at all.”

Joe may well have been haunted by his dream of what might have been. Joe Jr. would have walked along the route of the Bunker Day parade, firm of stride, strong of manner, shaking hands, and slapping backs. He would have needed no microphone this evening, no urgent hands to push him up to the platform, no sitz baths, no doctors to monitor his steps, no sad reticence.

13
A Kind of Peace

T
he Harvard College that Bobby returned to in the fall of 1946 was bursting its walls with veterans wanting an education. The university took over the Brunswick Hotel in downtown Boston to house 115 lucky married couples and mandated that any student who lived within a forty-five-minute commute would have to live at home.

Now with the largest student body in its history, many of the totems of civilized life at Harvard seemed like silly rituals, a waste of money and time. Men found themselves sleeping in beds stacked on top of each other. In the dining halls where waiters had always served Harvard men, students stood in line grasping metal trays. Some of the frosh hardly knew what to do, but to Bobby and the other veterans these double-decker bunks and newfangled cafeterias were standard issue.

There were 659 Harvard men who died in the war. Those who returned safely were several years older in age, and decades older in experience. They might listen to scholarly pretenders tell them how to think, but not what to think nor how to live or how to drink.

In classrooms, a man who had parachuted into Burma or flown a bomber over Germany listened with both a hunger for knowledge and a hardy reserve of skepticism. When one veteran who had lost a couple of fingers in the war got drunk, no proctors dared to point theirs at him in rebuke. Another student had had his ear burned off. When he came rolling in drunk at dawn, no one said anything.

Bobby was a veteran but he was far different from most of the former GIs matriculating at Harvard. He bore a name that was almost as honored at Harvard as it was elsewhere now, and he was voted into the Spee Club with an ease that Jack had not experienced.

Bobby could easily have passed his days in the world of clubs and class and privilege within its gilded enclave. But he was not comfortable sitting among heirs who thought that what their families had done in the past was more important than what they might do in the future. He was bored with the endless social palaver, and he spent little time at Spee. One of his friends, a Catholic, had been rejected and Bobby took that as an assault on his very faith.

Bobby went out for football and on the playing field met many of his closest lifelong friends. He was no more a natural athlete than he had been at Milton, but he had awesome quantities of determination and mindless physical courage. As a 165-pound end, he shared the honor with two backs of being the lightest players on the team. In scrimmage, he kept blocking Vince “Vinnie” Moravec, the 200-pound first-string fullback, a task that was akin to running into a slab of granite.

“For Christ’s sake, would you tell that little bastard to stop hitting me so hard!” Vinnie yelled at Wally Flynn, an end. “He’s gonna get kicked!”

Wally looked up the field at Bobby, hustling back to the line. “Vinnie, he’s gotta prove himself to his family, to those kids at Milton, to just about everybody. You gotta tell him. I’m not tellin’ him.”

As hard as Bobby hit in practice, and as much as he threw the ball around in the evenings with his buddy Kenneth “Kenny” O’Donnell, he was far down in the rankings of Harvard ends. In the first game of the 1947 season against Western Maryland, Bobby finally got his chance when the two starting ends were so sick that they couldn’t even make it to the bench. The game was a 52–0 rout, and Kenny, the quarterback, threw a touchdown pass to Bobby.

If Bobby had played forcefully before in practice, the next day out he was even more of a human missile, blocking with abandon, tackling with fierce resolve. The first-string ends were scheduled to come back, but with one word, Coach Harlow, sitting high above the play in his elevated chair, could change all that. Like his father, Bobby had a perfect memory when it came to slights, and he remembered that Harlow had refused to let his brother Joe win a letter by playing in the Yale game.

Harlow was now an aging, unhealthy man who looked out on the squad as if they were a bunch of malleable preppies. He shuttled players in and out for little reason except personal whim and indulged in pep talks that motivated no one but himself. Harlow was still the man, however, who would decide whether or not Bobby played. Bobby ran down the side of the field and crashed against an equipment car, crushing his leg. The accident would have been enough to end any other man’s practice, but Bobby got up and with a slight limp came back onto the field.

Three days later Wally stood across the line from Bobby in scrimmage. As Wally waited for the play to start, he saw an impossible sight. Bobby seemed to be crying. Wally stopped the game and hurried over to his friend. “Hey, wait a minute, Bobby?” Wally implored. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“I think my leg’s broken,” Bobby replied, embarrassed to be holding up the game.

Wally didn’t know a thing about medicine, but when he took a look at Bobby’s leg, he shook his head authoritatively: “Yeah, Bobby, it’s broken.”

The rest of the year Bobby had a cast on his leg, but despite that he managed to play in the Harvard-Yale game and win his letter.

T
he math was simple. Harvard tuition was four hundred dollars a year, and the GI bill paid a stipend of seventy-five dollars a month. A man could earn a thousand dollars in the summer and during the school year work a few hours for his room and board. And so the veterans came, and they changed Harvard forever.

Bobby spent his free time with his friends at the Varsity Club, a rambling old two-story brick house with a pool table, a television set, and knockabout furniture. They rarely talked of the war, but when they did they told heroes’ tales. “Oh, those guys were tough cookies,” Flynn recalled. “Vinnie Moravec got torpedoed in the Atlantic and spent all night saving the lives of about ten kids, getting ‘em on board. Oh, Jesus! The navy wanted to give him a medal, but he wouldn’t take it. Said, ‘I didn’t do anything.’ Leo Flynn jumped out of a burning B-17. So did Kenny O’Donnell. And I could go on and on. It was the finest group I ever met in my life.”