The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (15 page)

The school treated Jack like a fragile seedling that had to be sheltered lest he be torn away in the storm of life. They were about to let him return to his room when the weather turned cold, wet, and unpleasant. So he was kept a bit longer in the infirmary. Whether owing to the mysteriously regenerative benefits of cod liver oil or simply the “glorious sunshine” that had finally graced the Connecticut winter, Jack was allowed to return to his room and to the dining hall, where the masters attempted to fill their 117-pound charge with salads and vegetables and in the afternoons to get him to down glasses of eggnog.

Rose telephoned Mrs. St. John asking that Jack be pushed to “finish well this term so that he will not have to do any summer work.” Jack was back in the infirmary in April with a mysterious “swelling” and urine that “was not entirely normal.” Despite Rose’s entreaties, Jack had to return in August for the summer session.

The following academic year Jack was plagued with a whole new range of illnesses. He had problems with weak knees. He had bad arches that required special built-up shoes, a condition that alone merited ten letters from Rose to the administration. He was in the infirmary with possible “pink eye” and on another occasion with a high temperature and “a little grippy cold.”

Scrawny, frail Jack was not the sort of youth who went out for football, not at Choate, and not anywhere else. But as a Kennedy son, Jack had to go out for the team on which his brother starred. Earl Leinbach, one of the junior coaches, was a severe disciplinarian who egged his charges on by chasing after them with a paddle and striking them full force on the buttocks. Jack’s most distinguished contribution to the team was managing to avoid the coach’s paddle as he swerved away from the strokes. In the end Jack was so unhealthy that he had to leave the dream and the honor that he had sought on the football field.

Jack had gone out for football and for two years fought with tenacity, but he was simply too small and weak. In the end, as he wrote his father, the closest he could get to the Choate football team was to be a cheerleader.

Golf was scarcely a worthy alternative to the struggles of the gridiron, but even here Jack feared that he was not up to the mark. “The golf is going good,” he wrote his father, “and I have a slight chance for the team because it is rather bad this year.”

J
ack needed to find a separate sphere where he could stand tall and apart, not always in the shadow of his brother, whose light blocked out the younger Kennedy’s accomplishments. He found those spheres largely in collaboration with Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, the classmate who became his closest friend and conspirator in the games of youth. Lem was a six-foot, 175-pound, gawky, bespectacled son of a socially prominent Pittsburgh physician, with a sense of humor almost as darkly ironic as Jack’s. What linked the two youths most profoundly were their older brothers. Jack and Lem both had brothers who carried the family name to heights the two younger boys could hardly hope to attain.

Frederic Tremaine Billings Jr., like Joe Jr., bore his father’s name, and he too carried his father’s values into the world. At Choate his brother was, as Lem only grudgingly admitted years later, “rather outstanding.” He was president of his class, editor in chief of the yearbook, chairman of the student council, and, like Joe Jr., winner of the Choate Prize, the highest honor.

At Princeton, Frederic was chairman of the student council, Phi Beta Kappa, captain of the football team, an ail-American honorable mention for football, and winner of the Pyne Prize, the highest of honors. Then he went on to England as a Rhodes scholar and became, like his father, a doctor.

Lem’s father had set forth the rules and expected both sons to run onto the same field of play. “My father did try very hard to have me line up as well as my brother in every area and was very disappointed that I didn’t,” Lem reflected. “I tried very hard.”

The friendship between Lem and Jack was unlike anything either one had experienced in the past. Like most adolescent friendships, theirs was based on a commonality of experience that they took to be life itself. They spoke in their own shorthand.

They both had pimples and were struggling with their sexuality. They built their own lives away from the prying eyes of others, including most of the other students. “I think that people who knew him [Jack] liked him very much,” Billings recalled. “I think others possibly didn’t because he had a
sharp tongue and could make fun of people very easily if he didn’t think they lived up to what he felt they should. I wouldn’t say he was overly popular.”

Jack and Lem were constantly together at Choate and elsewhere, and apart they corresponded regularly. In his scores of letters Jack never even mentioned Rose and hardly named Joe Jr. As for his father, he was the “old man,” a figure who was there primarily to berate his son when he got close enough, an austere, prickly presence who had to be gotten around.

Teenage boys often belittle each other in boisterous, rancorous put-downs, the only kind of display of manly affection with which they feel comfortable. Jack was merciless in his attacks on Lem, beating him down with a constant stream of criticisms. “Dear Unattractive,” he began one letter, a salutation he could have used every time he wrote his friend. Lem was the foil for all Jack’s insecurities, and whatever weight these attacks took off Jack’s own self-doubt, they surely added to Lem’s.

Jack was capable of generous acts of solicitude for his closest friends, but he inevitably tossed the gesture out with caustic disdain. As Jack saw it, Lem was forever the second best, and second only because there were just two of them.

Joe Jr. graduated from Choate in the spring of 1933, but his shadow remained, hovering over Jack. Joe Jr. had won the Choate Prize as the student who best combined scholarship and athletics, the exemplar of what a Choate graduate should be and what his father envisioned. His name was engraved on the bronze Harvard Football trophy, and he was celebrated in the
Boston Globe
as “a very popular hero.”

Joe Jr. might have headed off to Harvard in the fall, but his father had a different idea in mind for his firstborn son. Joe decided to send Joe Jr. to England to study. He could have sent him to Oxford or Cambridge, where he would have settled in among the kind of privileged young men whom Joe considered the Kennedys’ natural company. Instead, he enrolled Joe at the London School of Economics, a fervidly intellectual atmosphere full of Socialists and others who fancied themselves on the cutting edge of economic and political theory.

Joe had carefully evaluated the school and what Joe Jr. might learn there. He wanted his son to be able to cope with ideas about socialism and communism, all the supposedly most advanced thinking. Beyond that, he wanted his son to learn about the workings of capital and wealth. He told Rose: “These boys, when they get a little older and have a little money, I [want] them to know the whatnots of keeping that.”

Joe Jr. was not an intellectual, and his wit, while genuine, was narrow. To some, Joe Jr. seemed narrowly and ignorantly conservative. At the London
School of Economics he was dim-witted compared to some of the other students, notably three brilliant Jewish Socialists from London’s East End. In one third-year seminar that he sat in on, the three students and Professor Harold Laski batted ideas back and forth so quickly that poor Joe Jr. could not even follow.

Afterward, instead of leaving sheepishly with his head down, or arrogantly dismissing the discussions as pedantic foolishness, Joe Jr. showed up at Laski’s office and asked the professor to explain to him what he had not understood. It would have seemed preordained that Laski, an acerbic, deeply opinionated man of the Left, would see in young Joe Kennedy prima facie evidence for why capitalism was doomed. Laski realized, however, that Joe Jr. had the stuff in him to realize that his classmates knew much that he did not know and were worthy men with whom one day he hoped he might be able to argue on a more equal level.

Laski saw that young Joe had character and an incomparable zest for life, qualities that were not a matter of right or left, brilliance or dullness. “He had set his heart on a political career,” Laski recalled. “He has often sat in my study and submitted with that smile that was pure magic to relentless teasing about his determination to be nothing less than President of the United States.”

Following his year in London, Joe Jr. set off that summer with his friend Aubrey Whitelaw for a trip around Europe. Joe Jr. had a blessed quality of joyful self-assurance that drew people to him. Before they left England, Joe Jr. purchased auto insurance in London even though he was too young. Not every youth on his first European sojourn wandered the Continent behind the wheel of a Chrysler convertible. Joe Jr. was a young man that summer who, as Whitelaw recalled, laughed with detached amusement at a dubious Italian guide who had stolen his wristwatch, made caustic remarks at each sighting of Mussolini’s public portraits, and came close to fisticuffs in Munich with a Nazi who wanted Joe Jr. and Aubrey to “Heil Hitler.”

Although Joe Jr. might not have wanted to salute Hitler himself, he was impressed by aspects of Nazism. After all, he had been brought up to believe in power, order, and discipline, and to Joe Jr.’s way of thinking, Hitler was carrying out those principles on a national scale. In a letter to his father, he expressed what he clearly intended as a sophisticated, detached view of the situation, but in fact his observations were primitive, passionately engaged, and dangerously naive. He thought that the Germans had good reasons to dislike the Jews. He accepted the Nazi propaganda that the Jews dominated the Weimar Republic as “the heads of all big business, in law, etc. It is all to their credit for them to get so far, but their methods had been quite unscrupulous.” Joe Jr. felt sorry that “noted professors, scientists, artists, etc.
so should have to suffer,” but he was sympathetic to the Nazis’ dilemma. He concluded that it was impossible to sort the good Jews from the bad, and that the only reasonable answer was to throw them all out of Germany. He did not favor excessive private violence, but as he lectured his approving father, “in every revolution you have to expect some bloodshed.”

Once the blood had been washed from the streets, Hitler could begin wholeheartedly with such progressive measures as his eugenics campaign, carrying out his new law that would sterilize those so richly deserving of the measure. “I don’t know how the Church feels about it,” Joe Jr. wrote, though he surely could have guessed, “but it will do away with many of the disgusting specimens of men who inhabit this earth.” If Joe Jr. had thought a bit more about the matter, he might well have realized that one of those disgusting specimens would presumably be his own mildly retarded sister, Rosemary.

Joe Jr. was not simply observing Nazism as his father’s surrogate, or as an abstract student of politics, but as a young man searching for ideas that he might one day implement in America. Joe Jr. intended to be president, and he was already planning his cabinet, telling his friend Aubrey that he would name him to a newly created post of secretary of Public Education. “We were going to make that office much more important than a Secretary of Defense,” Whitelaw recalled in a letter to Jack, “in accordance with Plato’s admonition that a government should be judged not by its Secretary of War but by its Secretary of Education.”

Joe Jr. was an impressionable young man full of pretensions to political wisdom that he did not have. As proud as Joe Sr. was of his son’s observations, he gently cautioned Joe Jr. that Hitler might have gone “far beyond his necessary requirements in his attitude toward the Jews.” Joe Jr. returned later that summer to Hyannis Port bubbling not with quotations from
Mein Kampf
but with all the ideas he had learned from Laski and his colleagues.

“Joe came back about 3 days ago and is a communist,” Jack wrote Lem. “Some shit, eh.” Rose was appalled at the heretical ideas that Joe Jr. was spouting, ideas that he never would have learned if he had stayed in America. “Joe, if you feel like that why don’t you just give away your boat and live like all these other people,” she told him slyly.

“Oh, Mother, just giving away one boat would not make any difference,” he replied. Rose was even more appalled when Joe Jr. appeared to be making his first convert. “Joe seems to understand the situation better than Dad,” Jack told his mother. That was enough to send Rose hurrying off to her husband to warn of the incipient revolutionaries in their own house. Joe was not worried. “I don’t care what the hell they think about me,” he told Rose bluntly. “I will get along all right if they stick together.”

J
oe Jr.’s departure from Choate did not change Jack’s behavior at all. He was still the merry prankster standing apart from the rules and rigors of the school and refusing to wear any harness of responsibility. Sloppy in dress and manner, he walked on the borderline of disdain, daring his masters to attempt to pull him back.

John J. Maher, the football coach and housemaster, had applied the switch of discipline to the backs of scores of recalcitrant scholars. Maher wrote the headmaster: “At first his [Jack’s] attitude was: ‘You’re the master and I’m a lively young fellow with a nimble brain and a bag full of tricks. You will spoil my fun if I let you, so here I go—catch me if you can.’ “After two years even Maher essentially gave up. “I’m afraid it would be almost foolishly optimistic to expect anything but the most mediocre from Jack,” he wrote St. John.

“There is actually very little except physical violence that I haven’t tried,” Jack’s French teacher reported. After a rare visit to the school, Joe left with a devastating sense that his second son was a spoiled, petulant young man, just the sort who might one day dishonor the Kennedy name. “I can’t tell you how unhappy I felt in seeing him and talking with him,” Joe wrote St. John in November 1933. “He seems to lack entirely a sense of responsibility. The happy-go-lucky manner with a degree of indifference does not portend well for his future development.”