An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (26 page)

Of course, while Kennedy’s stand for an internationalist policy rested on the belief that Truman was right, it also sprang from a concern to separate himself from his father. Recently, Joe had publicly complained that the United States lacked the financial means to meet its obligations at home and send hundreds of millions of dollars abroad to combat communism. His solution was to let the communists take over Greece and Turkey and other nations, predicting that these communist regimes would collapse after proving to be unworkable. An isolationist, prosperous United States would then become a model for both industrial and emerging nations, in which we could comfortably invest. Joe’s shortsightedness was evident to foreign policy realists, who warned that allowing Soviet expansion to go unchecked would be a disaster for all the democracies, including the United States. Joe’s bad judgment irritated Jack, who understood that it was more the product of personal concerns about family losses than reasoned analysis of the national interest. But Joe’s misjudgments made Jack more confident about a public career: On foreign affairs, he correctly believed that he was much more realistic than his “old man.”

NO ONE IN
1947 would have described Jack as ready for a leading role in national affairs. His first term in the House was a kind of half-life in which he divided his time between the public and the private. He was never indifferent about the major issues besetting the country; housing, labor unions, education, and particularly the communist challenge to U.S. national security received close attention between 1947 and 1949. But he was a quick study, and as only one of 435 voices in the House—and a junior one in the minority party at that—he found himself with ample time to enjoy a social life, especially since his large, able office staff took care of constituent demands. An English friend who lived around the corner from him in Georgetown remembered Jack as “a mixture of gaiety and thought. . . . He seemed quite serious, and then suddenly, he’d break away from reading and start to make jokes, and sing a song. But I think he did appear to be quite a serious thinker and always probing into things—literature, politics, etc.”

Though having turned thirty in May 1947, his boyish good looks and demeanor bespoke not ambition and seriousness of purpose but casualness, ease, and enjoyment. Rumpled jackets, wrinkled shirts, spotted ties, khaki pants, loose-fitting sweaters, and sneakers were his clothes of choice; the expensive tailored suits he wore only out of deference to the customs of the House—and even then, perhaps not as often as he should have.

A rented three-story town house at 1528 Thirty-first Street in Georgetown, which Jack shared with Billy Sutton; his twenty-six-year-old sister Eunice, who worked at the Justice Department for a juvenile delinquency committee; and Margaret Ambrose, a family cook, had the feel of a noisy, busy fraternity that reflected casual living. Despite the presence of George Thomas, a black valet, who struggled to keep a rein on Jack’s sloppiness, clothes were draped over chairs and sofas, with remnants of half-eaten meals left in unlikely places. Billy Sutton recalled how people were always “coming and going, like a Hollywood hotel. The Ambassador, Rose, Lem Billings, Torby, anybody who came to Washington. You never knew who the hell was going to be there but you got used to it.”

Jack’s idea of a good time was an unplanned evening with a friend. One young woman, who resisted any romantic involvement, recalled how “he would come by, in typical fashion, honk his horn underneath my garage window and call out, ‘Can you go to the movies?’ or ‘Can you come down to dinner?’ He was not much for planning ahead. Sometimes I’d go down for dinner and he’d be having dinner on a tray in his bedroom and I’d have my dinner on a tray in his bedroom. He was resting, you see? The back brace and different things would be hanging around. Then he’d find out what was at the movies and he’d get dressed and we’d go to the movies. And I’d pay for it because he never had any money.” When he stayed home, he could be found sprawled in a chair, reading. Or as a reporter said, “Kennedy never sits in a chair; he bivouacs in it.”

Jack still took special pleasure in athletics, reportedly making a habit of pickup football, basketball, or softball games with local teenagers. An Associated Press reporter described Jack in full uniform at a high school football practice. The team’s star halfback, who thought Jack was a new recruit, gave him a workout, catching and throwing passes, running down punts, and tackling. “How’s the Congressman doing?” the coach asked the unsuspecting halfback. “Is that what they call him?” he replied. “He needs a lot of work, Coach.” (Given Jack’s health problems, was the A.P. story a puff piece?)

For all Jack’s devotion to his social life, he had few close friends. Not that he couldn’t have drawn other congressmen, journalists, and Washington celebrities into close ties. His charm, intelligence, and wit made him highly attractive to almost everyone he met. But he felt little need for what current parlance would describe as male bonding. His strong family connections and frenetic womanizing gave him all the companionship he seemed to need.

He quickly developed a reputation as quite a ladies’ man. “Jack liked girls,” recalled fellow congressman George Smathers. Smathers, thirty-three and the son of a prominent Miami attorney and judge, shared a privileged background and affinity for self-indulgence that made him one of Jack’s few good friends. “He came by it naturally. His daddy liked girls. He was a great chaser. Jack liked girls and girls liked him. He had just a great way with women. He was such a warm, lovable guy himself. He was a sweet fella, a really sweet fella.” A contemporary gossip columnist for a New York newspaper supported Smathers’s recollections. “Palm Beach’s cottage colony wants to give the son of Joseph P. Kennedy its annual Oscar for achievement in the field of romance. The committee says that young Mister Kennedy splashed through a sea of flaming early season divorcees to rescue its sinking faith in the romantic powers of Florida.” Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas remembered Jack as a “playboy,” and New Jersey congressman Frank Thompson Jr., another of Jack’s friends in the 1950s, said that “the girls just went crazy about him”; he had “a smorgasbord of women” to choose from.

Most of these women were one-night stands—airline stewardesses and secretaries. “He was not a cozy, touching sort of man,” one woman said. Another woman described Jack as “nice—considerate in his own way, witty and fun. But he gave off light instead of heat. Sex was something to
have done, not to be doing
. He wasn’t in it for the cuddling.”

He wanted no part of marriage at this time. His friend Rip Horton remembered going to his Georgetown house for dinner. “A lovely-looking blonde from West Palm Beach joined us to go to a movie. After the movie we went back to the house and I remember Jack saying something like ‘Well, I want to shake this one. She has ideas.’ Shortly thereafter, another girl walked in. Ted Reardon was there, so he went home and I went to bed figuring this was the girl for the night. The next morning a completely different girl came wandering down for breakfast. They were a dime a dozen.”

Several of Jack’s contemporaries and biographers have concluded that he was a neurotic womanizer fulfilling some unconscious need for unlimited conquests. Priscilla Johnson, an attractive young woman who worked on political and foreign issues for Jack in the fifties, concluded that “he was a very naughty boy.” (She rejected invitations from him to go to his hotel suite at the Waldorf-Astoria when they were in New York.) Kennedy family biographers Peter Collier and David Horowitz have described his affairs as “less a self-assertion than a search for self—an existential pinch on the arm to prove that he was there.” This is shorthand for the view that Jack was a narcissist whose sexual escapades combated feelings of emptiness bred by a cold, detached mother and a self-absorbed, largely absent father. They quote Johnson: “I was one of the few he could really talk to. Like Freud, he wanted to know what women really wanted, that sort of thing; but he also wanted to know the more mundane details—what gave a woman pleasure, what women hoped for in marriage, how they liked to be courted. During one of these conversations I once asked him why he was doing it—why he was acting like his father, why he was avoiding real relationships, why he was taking a chance on getting caught in a scandal at the same time he was trying to make his career take off. He took a while trying to formulate an answer. Finally he shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know really. I guess I just can’t help it.’ He had this sad expression on his face. He looked like a little boy about to cry.”

Johnson and others thought it was as much the chase as anything that excited Jack. “The whole thing with him was pursuit,” she said. “I think he was secretly disappointed when a woman gave in. It meant that the low esteem in which he held women was once again validated. It meant also that he’d have to start chasing someone else.” Like Johnson, Doris Kearns Goodwin sees more at work here than simply “a liking for women. So driven was the pace of his sex life, and so discardable his conquests, that they suggest a deep difficulty with intimacy.”

A sense of his mortality may also have continued to drive Jack’s incessant skirt-chasing. The discovery of his Addison’s disease, his adrenal insufficiency, in the fall of 1947 put a punctuation point on the medical problems that had afflicted him since childhood. Although the availability of DOCA made his problems treatable by the late 1940s, no one could be certain that the disease would not cut short Jack’s life. His English physician, who diagnosed the Addison’s disease during Jack’s 1947 trip to Ireland, told Pamela Churchill, “That young American friend of yours, he hasn’t got a year to live.” Jack was not told this, but his cumulative experience with doctors had made him skeptical about their ability to mend his ills. Moreover, when he came home from London in September 1947, he was so ill that a priest came aboard the
Queen Mary
to give him extreme unction (last rites) before he was carried off the ship on a stretcher. In the following year, when bad weather made a plane trip “iffy,” he told Ted Reardon, “It’s okay for someone with my life expectancy,” but he suggested that his sister Kathleen and Reardon go by train. “His continual, almost heroic sexual performance,” Garry Wills said, was a “cackling at the gods of bodily disability who plagued him.” Charles Spalding believed that Jack identified with Lord Byron, about whom Jack read everything he could find. Byron also had physical disabilities, saw himself dying young, and hungered for women. Jack loved—perhaps too much—Lady Caroline Lamb’s description of Byron as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

Events affecting Jack’s sister Kathleen deepened his feelings about the tenuousness of life. Jack and Kathleen, as their letters to each other testify, had a warm, affectionate relationship. Jack was closer to her than to any of his other siblings. They shared an attraction to rebelliousness or at least to departing from the confining rules of their Church and mother. Jack had supported Kick in a decision to marry Billy Hartington, outside of her faith. Billy’s death in the war had brought her closer than ever to Jack. Each had a mutual sense of life’s precariousness, which made them both a little cynical and resistant to social mores. And so in the summer of 1947, during his visit to Lismore Castle in Ireland, Jack was pleased to learn that Kathleen had fallen deeply in love with Peter Fitzwilliam, another wealthy English aristocrat and much-decorated war hero. A breeder of racehorses and a man of exceptional charm, with a reputation for womanizing despite being married to a beautiful English heiress, Fitzwilliam reminded some people of Joe Kennedy—“older, sophisticated, quite the rogue male.” Jack saw Kathleen’s determination to marry Fitzwilliam—who would have to divorce his current wife first—despite Rose’s warnings that she and Joe would disown her, as a demonstration of independence and risk taking that he admired. Before any final decision was reached, however, a tragic accident burdened the Kennedys with a far greater trauma. In May 1948, while on an ill-advised flight in stormy weather to the south of France, Kathleen and Fitzwilliam were killed when their private plane crashed into the side of a mountain in the Rhône Valley.

Jack found it impossible to make sense of Kathleen’s death. When it was confirmed by a phone call from Ted Reardon, Jack was at home listening to a recording of Ella Logan singing the lead song from
Finian’s Rainbow,
“How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” She has a sweet voice, Jack said to Billy Sutton. Then he turned away and began to cry. “How can there possibly be any purpose in her death?” Jack repeatedly asked Lem Billings. He later told campaign biographer James MacGregor Burns, “The thing about Kathleen and Joe was their tremendous vitality. Everything was moving in their direction—that’s what made it so unfortunate. If something happens to you or somebody in your family who is miserable anyway, whose health is bad, or who has a chronic disease or something, that’s one thing. But, for someone who is living at their peak, then to get cut off—that’s the shock.”

Kathleen’s death depressed Jack and made him more conscious than ever of his own mortality. He told the columnist Joseph Alsop that he did not expect to live more than another ten years, or beyond the age of forty-five, “but there was no use thinking about it . . . and he was going to do the best he could and enjoy himself as much as he could in the time that was given him.” He queried Ted Reardon and George Smathers about the best way to die: in war, freezing, drowning, getting shot, poisoning? (War and poisoning were his choices.) “The point is,” he said to Smathers, “that you’ve got to live every day like it’s your last day on earth. That’s what I’m doing.” Chuck Spalding remembered that “he always heard the footsteps. . . . Death was there. It had taken Joe and Kick and it was waiting for him. So, whenever he was in a situation, he tried to burn bright; he tried to wring as much out of things as he could. After a while he didn’t have to try. He had something nobody else did. It was just a heightened sense of being; there’s no other way to describe it.”