The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (51 page)

After basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, Teddy transferred to Fort Holabird in Maryland, where he intended to enter Army Intelligence. He had scarcely started the program when he was abruptly terminated and sent to Camp Gordon in Georgia to be trained as an MP. From there he sailed to France on the
Langfit.

Teddy had a self-deprecating sense of humor and was perfectly willing to make himself the butt of his own jokes. On the long crossing he did not write of his female conquests back in Georgia, as Joe Jr. might have done, or of being here while his friends whooped it up in the exalted confines of Harvard and other young men died in Korea. He wrote instead of the minor misfortune of having been chosen for KP, a duty that had him supposedly contemplating going AWOL in Norfolk. “However, upon considering my welcome back in New York by my family … I concluded that to make the crossing now was the only thing left to do,” he wrote, his humor still intact. His major accomplishment, as he saw it, was that he lost fifteen pounds.

Teddy did not look toward Europe as his big brothers had as a place to test their manhood and their minds. The Continent was not the dangerously inviting place it had been before the war. But Europe was still full of young Americans whose wanderlust had brought them to the cafes of Paris and the steps of Rome in search of adventure and culture they felt they could not find at home. Teddy was not the kind of young man, however, who was deeply attracted to foreign accents. He served out his time as a member of the NATO honor guard outside Paris, a lackluster, ceremonial duty, and though he went bobsledding in Switzerland, the adventures he sought were back at Harvard.

N
ow that Teddy’s scandal was behind him and the matter had effectively been kept quiet, Joe had one major duty to perform before the family could go on as he wanted it to go on. He had been responsible for Rosemary’s lobotomy. So too was he responsible for her care. Joe had sent Rosemary to several psychiatric hospitals before he had settled upon Craig House in upstate New York. The private psychiatric hospital catered to the wealthy and famous, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, who spent nine weeks there in 1934. Rosemary was in all likelihood the only patient to spend years there, however, shut away behind the barred windows high above the Hudson River.

Joe had turned his eldest daughter into the unmentionable Kennedy, as exorcised from the family dialogue as if she had been condemned to a biblical shunning. Was it possible that this man who at times still cried when his eldest son’s name was mentioned cared so little for whatever was left of his eldest daughter? Did he dismiss her because she was a mere woman, bearing none of the noble manly traits and prospects of his sons? Could he simply walk away from his daughter’s life, never looking back? Or did he know too well what he had done and feel too much, finding it unbearable to mention her name? Could he not stand to see what damage the scalpel had done to a sweetly compliant young woman who had once made her debut before the king and queen of England? Was Rosemary his secret torment? That answer lay only within Joe, and there it would always reside. But it was a terrible truth that lay there, whatever it was. Joe was either a monster in his unconcern or a man keeping matters within his own heart that no one should have to keep hidden.

Joe had never expressed any interest in the problems of mental retardation, but his friend Archbishop Richard Cushing had told him about a well-regarded Catholic institution, St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children in Jefferson, Wisconsin. In 1949 Joe traveled there and arranged for the building of a small home alongside Alverno House, in which resided lifelong adult residents. In August, when the construction was finished, two nuns traveled to Craig House and brought Rosemary back to the modest house where she would spend the rest of her life watched over by several nuns. But Joe did not go to visit her or see her. Nor for years did anyone else, not her mother or any of her brothers and sisters. The first visit to Rosemary probably took place in 1958 when Jack made a secret trip to St. Coletta’s during a campaign swing.

J
ack did not like confrontation. He found the endless battles between Democrats and Republicans not a real war but a wearisome and tedious routine. He had one of the worst attendance records in the House of Representatives, missing over one-quarter of the roll-call votes during three terms. Only some of those absences could be attributed to his many illnesses.

He simply could not tolerate sitting through committee hearings and House debates, pretending to listen to the pious posturing and platitudes of so many of his colleagues. That said, he was no more interested in wandering through the streets of East Boston or Somerville listening to what most politicians called “the real people.” That to him was equally tedious.

Jack treated his district the way many British members of Parliament treated their borough, as little more than a convenient device that won them election and a place to return to primarily when they sought reelection. Reading Jack’s travel itinerary for the first half of 1949, the uninitiated might imagine that he was the congressman from the right side of Manhattan, not from the wrong side of Boston.

During those six months, Jack spent at least a dozen weekends in New York at the Waldorf or St. Regis, as often as not with one woman or another. There was good theater to be seen, good restaurants to frequent, good times to be had, and it was a damn sight better than hanging out at the American Legion in Brighton.

A year later, Jack suddenly started taking a deep interest in attending such homey events as the kickoff dinner for the Home of Aged Italians in East Boston, the Lexington Minute Men banquet, the Boston Jubilee baked bean supper, the South End Post Number 105 American Legion dinner, and the Army Day Dance, 2nd Brigade, 101st Infantry, at the Cambridge Armory. He had begun wooing Massachusetts like a forgotten lover—or more accurately, like a politician who had decided to run for either governor or senator in 1952.

When George Smathers learned that Jack was going to announce for Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.’s seat, the newly elected Florida senator walked across the Capitol to the House side to try to talk his friend out of the race. Smathers could have made a formidable argument that the race against Lodge would be political suicide.

The Republican senator, bearer of one of the most celebrated political names in America, was the perfect model of the old Brahmin ideal of stewardship. He was a man of prickly independence, with a quick, nervous irritability that his detractors chalked up to snobbishness. He had the kind of integrity that occasionally comes from generations of wealth. At six feet three inches tall and with lean, patriarchal good looks and public manners as impeccable as his dress, the fifty-year-old senator had a stunning public presence. Lodge had a handsome Italian-born wife, Francesca, and was most decidedly a family man.

Lodge and Jack had many parallels in their lives. As a senator in his early forties, Lodge had every reason not to serve in combat in World War II. He had done so, however, with valor and distinction, then returned to reclaim his Senate seat in the same election that sent Jack to Washington.

Lodge was a man of moderation and thoughtfulness when those virtues were not always common. He was an internationalist who on many of the issues of the day sat on the same side of the aisle as Jack. In what boded to be a Republican year, Lodge appeared impregnable.

Smathers was appalled at the way his friend was throwing away his political career. As a former House member, Smathers had floor privileges and he wandered around until he found Jack lying on a couch in the cloakroom. Jack was in such a state that he could not even stand up. Smathers reached down and pulled his legs down onto the floor. The two men walked onto the House floor and stood leaning on the bar at the back of the room. “My God, man, I don’t see how you can possibly think about running,” Smathers implored in a loud whisper, “when you can’t even get up and down.”

Smathers was not making a trivial point. A tough campaign is about as vigorous and sustained a period of physical activity as can be imagined, and running against a popular incumbent is the very definition of a tough campaign. There was a new nastiness to American politics as well. Smathers had won in 1950 by turning Senator Claude Pepper, a somewhat naive but decent reformist liberal, into a virtual traitor. (“Florida will not allow herself to become entangled in the spiraling spider web of the Red network. The people of our state will no longer tolerate advocates of treason.”) Jack’s friend and colleague Richard Nixon had done virtually the same thing to Helen Gahagan Douglas to win a Senate seat from California.

“I’m running,” Jack replied firmly.

“Why do you say that? You can’t even move. How can you run from a
hospital bed? I don’t understand. I don’t think you ought to try. I think Lodge is too strong at this point.”

“I’ve made up my mind,” Jack replied definitively. “I’m going to run.”

From everything he had experienced, Jack knew that he couldn’t expect to live to a sweetly blanketed old age. He saw his plague of maladies not as an omen telling him that he must prepare for death rather than life, but as a goad pushing him out into a world that he probably would not long inhabit. Even Smathers did not know how sick Jack truly was. The columnist Joseph Alsop recalled that in the late 1940s, Jack “turned a strong shade of green: this odd skin color combined with his hair—still decidedly reddish—to make the congressman look rather like a bad portrait by Van Gogh.”

When Alsop asked Jack why he exuded this strange color, he replied that he had “some kind of slow-motion leukemia. The disease, he explained, was a kind of blood cancer for which the doctors kept prescribing chemicals to cure. The latest chemical, he felt, had turned him green. He added in a flat tone, ‘They tell me the damn disease will get me in the end. But they also tell me I’ll last until forty-five, and that’s a long way away.’”

Years later, in reflecting on what Jack had told him, Alsop concluded that Jack was talking about Addison’s disease, not leukemia. The chemicals Jack was taking that had turned him “green,” however, would probably not have been for Addison’s disease but for some other illness. There was, moreover, another strong witness to his purported cancer. “He had leukemia at one point,” Rose told Robert Coughlin in an unpublished, tape-recorded interview for her autobiography. “I remember because there was one doctor who

could cure it, or who had specialized in it They don’t get over that

[leukemia] very often.”

Jack’s mother would not have invented an illness for a son so beleaguered by illnesses. His leukemia, or suspected leukemia, was yet another secret that had to be carefully contained. No record of this adult illness exists in any medical data that have yet been made public. However, if true, it adds even deeper poignancy to the life of a man plagued by disease and weakness, a man parading in the public arena as if he were the very totem of health and youth.

Jack had another medical problem as he traversed the state weekend after weekend for close to two years, traveling with Frank Morrissey, his father’s friend. He had once again begun to suffer from “intermittent slight burning on urination” from “a mild, chronic, non-specific prostatitis.” He slept in the back of the car wrapped in a blanket while the chauffeur sped five or six hundred miles a weekend, getting him up for events where Jack shook half a million hands in the two years of his extended candidacy. Morrissey’s task was not only to estimate handshakes but also to report back to Joe on everything his son did and did not do.

If Jack was going to run for the Senate against Lodge, he needed an imprimatur as an expert on foreign affairs. In January 1951, he set out on a five-week trip to Europe. He kept a daily diary of a journey that took him to England, France, Italy, West Germany, Yugoslavia, and Spain. Jack proceeded much like a diplomatic correspondent, interviewing American and foreign diplomats, world leaders, and American foreign correspondents. He was interested in Europeans in the aggregate, not in the star-crossed lives of individuals. He did not talk to workers, housewives, bureaucrats, businessmen, or students, noting their comments. On only one occasion in the 158-page diary did he write down a physical description of what he was seeing. That one instance suggests that he could indeed look on the world with a journalist’s vivid descriptive eye:

Yugoslavia—Belgrade—Stones cold and damp—no heating—windows bleach clothes of poor quality—the streets full of crowds—partly due to the fact that there are such few stores. The crowds seem young and energetic many soldiers among them. Tito guard with … machine guns over their shoulders—all with red stars in their vests. Though they look strong—they are not healthy—The disease rate particularly tuberculosis is the highest rate of any country in Europe.

Jack had come to Europe to learn, not to preach, and his diary is almost totally devoid of his own opinions. As he journeyed across this continent whose history had so defined him, he saw a world resonating with many of the themes he had observed in London before World War II. The great threat now was not Hitler but Stalin, and the European democracies faced Communist Russia with some of the same lassitude and uncertainty with which they had once faced Nazi Germany.

Jack’s anticommunism was tempered by the terrible realities of war in a nuclear age, as well as his own subtle, ever-growing awareness of the complexities of the modern world. The Italians should have been doing their part, but he learned that “the Italian economy is so precarious—so poor—with the necessity of paying for food 6% of which they must export, that they hate to give up economic recovery for rearmament.” He was told that “many Germans do not want their country to become Korea [and] are sick of war—feel that strength cannot be built up to stop R. [Russia] on the land.” As for the French, he learned that “because of over powering strength of R. [Russia]—many French feel everything is hopeless … lack confidence in themselves—doubt if French who are expected to provide the mass of land troops for the defense of Europe can do so.”