The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (46 page)

Jack had a bad back and wasn’t about to test it by swinging a golf club. He decided to go off to see whether he could find the old Kennedy homestead. It was a peculiar journey for a man who had once found it expedient to say that his father was born in the more fashionable Winthrop, not the largely immigrant community of East Boston, and who had managed to get into Harvard’s Spee Club only by latching onto friends whose forebears had not been born in humble Irish cottages.

One of the other houseguests, Pamela Churchill, the shrewd, socially astute wife of Churchill’s son, Randolph, did not play golf either, and she agreed to accompany him. Pamela was a connoisseur of upper-class men, and she found Jack rather disappointing in his immature boyish ways, a woefully less sophisticated man than his brother Joe. Pamela had a courtesan’s adeptness at casual conversation, and she carried on in full form on the hundred-mile drive through the Irish countryside. Whether or not Pamela expected to see a Kennedy castle rising out of the heather, she surely had not anticipated a thatched cottage outside of which stood a menagerie of pigs, goats, and chickens, and a sturdy outhouse, while inside resided an unaccountable brood of children and a modest couple who called themselves Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy.

“I spent about an hour there surrounded by chickens, pigs, etc., and left in a flow of nostalgia and sentiment,” Jack recalled a decade later. “That was not punctured by the English lady turning to me as we drove off and saying ‘That was just like Tobacco Road.’ “

Pamela might have wanted to hold a perfumed handkerchief over her nose, but for the first time in his life Jack had looked straight on at his heritage and admired it. It was disappointing to him that his sister did not feel the same way.

“When we got home, we were very late for supper, but Jack was very excited,” Pamela recalled. “He said, ‘We found the original Kennedys.’ I remember Kick saying, ‘Well, did they have a bathroom?’ And he said, ‘No,
they did not have a bathroom.’ And I think that she was interested but not in the same way that Jack was.”

Jack traveled to London before heading off on his congressional junket. He had hardly arrived when he collapsed in his hotel. A British doctor gave Jack the potentially devastating news that he had Addison’s disease, a condition marked by an insufficiency of the adrenal glands. These glands, the size and dimensions of a small strawberry, sit on top of the two kidneys. They play a crucial role in physical and psychological health, pumping steroids into the system. These hormones regulate metabolism, sexual characteristics, and the ability to handle stress and injury.

The disease has no distinctive signs itself and masquerades in many guises. Its victims often just seem vaguely tired. They sometimes have stomach troubles, diarrhea, or vomiting, symptoms they blame on bad food or nervousness. Jack had been ill so often, and had overcome so many maladies, that he tended to ignore complaints that would have sent anyone else to a doctor. He may well have already been suffering from Addison’s for a year, or perhaps considerably longer. The weakened victims of Addison’s often do not die of the disease itself but usually of something else, such as getting a tooth pulled or the flu. By the summer of 1947, the introduction of a new wonder drug, cortisone, had changed the prognosis of the disease from almost certain death to a manageable condition.

The press was told that young Jack had suffered a temporary relapse of the malaria that he picked up at the end of his service in the Pacific. It was a war hero suffering from his war injuries who was carried from a London hospital in pajamas to an ambulance and through the streets of London to the hospital on the
Queen Elizabeth,
where a private nurse ministered to him. It was a war hero who was carried by ambulance from the New York docks to a private plane to fly him to another ambulance that took him to a private room at the New England Baptist Hospital.

A
lthough the family attempted to minimize the seriousness of the matter, saying that Jack’s condition was only temporary and that he would spend only a few days in Boston for “observation,” the photos of Jack entering the hospital belied all this. He was dressed in a suit and tie, as if these clothes would mask the seriousness of his condition. But the man lying under a blanket on the stretcher wore a death mask, his face haunted and bony, his chin slumped against his chest.

Addison’s disease turns its victims into medical Dorian Grays. Jack often had gloriously tanned skin that seemed to exude a sailor’s health. He had thick brown hair that probably would never turn gray. This was all due to
Addison’s disease. The malady is so insidious that at first it seems not like a disease but like a slow draining of the spirit. Its victims lose weight, muscular strength, and their appetite, slowly declining toward death.

At the Lahey Clinic, Jack had a series of appointments with the prominent endocrinologist Dr. Elmer C. Bartels, who would treat him for the next thirteen years. By then Jack was already injecting himself with cortisone. “He had to take medicine,” Bartels said. “He’d forget to take it, or not take it with him on trips.”

Jack needed these injections to live. Patients were advised to increase the dose during periods of high stress, not as a medical crutch but as a physiological necessity, since in crises and danger healthy adrenal glands produce more of the essential steroids. Jack thus acquired the capability of manipulating his own health, or at least manipulating his psyche. If he took too high a cortisone dosage, however, he risked worsening such potential side effects of longtime use as muscular weakness, high blood pressure, and “agitation, euphoria, insomnia and, rarely, psychosis.” As it was, many of the illnesses and physical problems Jack had had over the years, from his back pain to his stomach troubles, may have been either caused by or exacerbated by his Addison’s disease.

Jack had been brought up to believe that a man was a vibrant physical being who had the strength to flick off adversity. A man’s whole sense of himself, and everything he did, felt, and thought, was based on good health. Women were not attracted to whiners or weakness. Neither were men.

Jack’s great creation, then, was not some piece of legislation but himself, a man of apparently endless vigor and health. He let no one stand close enough to his pain to betray his illusion. He let no one know what he felt when he jabbed the needle into his leg for the umpteenth time. On one occasion, though, Red Fay was standing there when Jack was injecting himself. Red was adept at playing the amiable buffoon, and Jack called him into his presence for moments of diversion.

“Jack, the way you take that jab, it looks like it doesn’t even hurt,” Red opined as he stood over his friend. Red’s insensitivity was usually one of his charms, but on this occasion Jack plunged the needle into Red’s leg. He yelled in pain. “It feels the same way to me,” Jack told his friend.

Jack easily could have affected a demeanor of such seriousness that it would have seemed natural for him to give up such silliness as touch football and adolescent roughhousing. But that was a part of him he was not willing to lose.

W
hen Bobby came down for a visit, they got a gang together and went out in the park for a game of touch. On a sunny weekend afternoon the mall and
parks in Georgetown were full of ad hoc games, the players sketching out their imaginary diamond or gridiron in the grassy expanses. The Kennedys had their own peculiar game of touch that gave them what they wanted, endless action, but took up a great deal of space. It was Kennedy football, passed on from brother to brother, and eventually from father to son. “They actually didn’t play the game as you normally play it,” reflected Dick Clasby, a Harvard football star who married Jack and Bobby’s cousin, Mary Jo Gargan. “They could throw the ball all over the field. You could throw it behind the line of scrimmage … and if you caught it you could throw it again.” The offensive team could keep passing the ball forward beyond the line of scrimmage until the player holding the ball was finally touched. Then, on the next play, as likely as not, one of the Kennedys would change the goal line.

Just down from Jack’s touch football game, a group of younger men played baseball. They thought that they had as much right to the grassy field as the football game, and on occasion a batter hit the ball into the midst of the football game. “You better stop that,” the young men were told.

The next time a baseball came flying over, one of the football players tossed the ball away. The young men came running over. Bobby squared off against one of the baseball players and they battled each other with bare fists. Other men joined in. Jack stood nearby, afterward rationalizing, “I was too dignified to fight.” Jack might pretend that he was a sturdy quarterback for an afternoon, but it would not have done for the congressman from Massachusetts to be arrested in a melee in the park.

Even a few years later, when Bobby was married and had children and a responsible position on a congressional committee, he still treated a football game as ritual war. On Sunday mornings, he often joined in the pickup touch football game at the Volta Street playgrounds near his Georgetown home. On one play, he came barreling in at the opposing quarterback from his blind side, decking the man before he had time to release the football.

“Excuse me. Do you know what game we’re playing?” asked the two-hundred-pound quarterback.

“What are you talking about?” Bobby sneered. “Can’t you take it?”

“Yeah, I can take it,” replied Bruce Sundlun, the hefty quarterback. “I just want to make sure you understood what game we were playing.”

A few plays later, Bobby came tearing in and again knocked Sundlun to the hard turf. This time Sundlun rushed toward Bobby and had to be pulled back. “Now wait a minute!” exclaimed Jim Rowe, a burly Washington lawyer. “Let’s stop this. This is touch football, and let’s just play touch football.”

“Yeah, and if you do this once more, sonny, you’re gonna get hurt,” Sundlun said, shaking himself off and knowing by the look in Bobby’s eyes that he would be coming again.

On the next play, Sundlun cocked his arm to pass and waited until his tormentor got within three feet of him, and then threw the ball with all his strength directly into Bobby’s face. Bobby’s head snapped back so forcefully that Sundlun thought he had broken his neck. Bobby lay there for a while, his nose and mouth bloody, and then jumped up to fight the quarterback. “Now wait a minute,” Rowe said, interjecting himself once again between the two men. “He told you if you did that once more, you were gonna get hurt. You did and you got hurt. Now stop this. If you can’t play according to the rules, then get the hell out of this game and go home.”

Bobby stood there thinking for a moment while wiping the blood off his nose. “Yeah, he did tell me, didn’t he? Okay, let’s go.”

“Years later when Bobby got to be attorney general, he used to use that story,” recalled Sundlun, who was governor of Rhode Island from 1991 to 1995. “If I was at a function and he was there and it suited his purpose, he’d send somebody over to say, ‘The attorney general wants to see you.’ So I’d go over and he’d throw his arm around me like I was his new best friend. ‘See this guy? He’s the only guy in Washington who’s got guts enough to knock me on my ass. The rest of you are a bunch of wimps.’ Or he’d insult them by some expression. But if it didn’t suit his purpose, hell, he’d walk by like he’d never seen me before in his life. But that was what Bobby was like. I’m sure he was very loyal to his brother. And to his family. But the rest of the world didn’t make much difference.”

W
hen the family got together at Hyannis Port, Teddy played with his big brothers and their friends. He was eager enough but so slow of foot that Bobby or even Jack could dance around him and run down the expanse of lawn for a touchdown. At Catholic Cranwell, a Jesuit school where he spent eighth grade, husky Teddy challenged a priest in robes to a foot race. The father left Teddy eating his dust. As sluggish as he might appear, Teddy was so strong and vigorous that he seemed the very definition of good health. Jack looked at his youngest brother with awe at the precious gift that Teddy had been given, a gift whose value the kid could not possibly understand as Jack did.

In the first two summers after the war, Teddy and his friend and overseer Joey Gargan worked on the Kennedy farmland on the Cape, clearing the bridle paths and cutting hay for Joe’s horses. The two boys earned thirty-five dollars a week for their endeavors, and as with everything else, Teddy’s father attempted to turn their sweaty labors into a series of life lessons. Teddy had a subtle memory that tossed out much of what passed as a childhood, but these summers he remembered.

Teddy had a rapport with his maternal grandfather unlike any of his
brothers, and it was on those long summer days that he first became close to Honey Fitz. The old man did not get along with his son-in-law, who had long ago tired of the ebullient Fitzgerald and his oft-told Irish tales. Honey Fitz found in little Teddy a worthy repository for his endless anecdotes. He was a vibrantly healthy octogenarian who fancied that he ingested immense quantities of iron and bromides by lying on the beach covered with seaweed.

Much of the time, though, Honey Fitz sat on the sunporch telling stories. “He was a marvelous storyteller,” Teddy recalled. “I heard my first off-color story from Grandpa. He was laughing so hard that I don’t think he ever did get to the punch line.”

In the fall of 1946, Teddy transferred to Milton Academy, where he spent all four of his high school years. He went out for football and made the team as the regular end for his junior and senior years. He did not have the speed to lope along the sidelines and stretch out his hands for a pass soaring thirty yards down the field. But he was big and tough, the choice for short five-yard passes, grasping the ball with certain hands and steeling himself for the tacklers who tried immediately to knock him to the ground.

Teddy was not only a poor student but a sloppy one, with little regard for such educational basics as grammar and spelling. He was a great talker, though, and made his mark on the Milton debate team. When he spoke, his arguments were perfectly organized, the way they were not in his term papers. No one checked his spelling, and he had such rich verbal gifts that his twisted syntax slid by on a burst of eloquence.