In the fall of 1930, when he was thirteen and a half, Jack was more interested in current events and sports than in any of his studies. Football, basketball, hockey, squash, skating, and sledding were Jack’s first priorities, but feeling closed off in the cloistered world of a Catholic academy made him increasingly eager to keep up with the state of the world. He wrote Joe from Canterbury: “Please send me the Litary [sic] Digest, because I did not know about the Market Slump until a long time after, or a paper. Please send me some golf balls.” A missionary’s talk one morning at mass about India impressed Jack as “one of the most interesting talks that I ever heard.” It was all an early manifestation of what his later associate Theodore C. Sorensen described as “a desire to enjoy the world and a desire to improve it; and these two desires, particularly in the years preceding 1953, had sometimes been in conflict.”
In 1930, however, pleasure seeking clearly stood first. In 1960, when Time journalist Hugh Sidey asked Jack, “What do you remember about the Great Depression?” he replied, “I have no first-hand knowledge of the depression. My family had one of the great fortunes of the world and it was worth more than ever then. We had bigger houses, more servants, we traveled more. About the only thing that I saw directly was when my father hired some extra gardeners just to give them a job so they could eat. I really did not learn about the depression until I read about it at Harvard.”
He was insulated by money but also by nurture. Charles Spalding, one of Jack’s close childhood friends, who spent weekends and holidays with the family, noted, “You watched these people go through their lives and just had a feeling that they existed outside the usual laws of nature; that there was no other group so handsome, so engaged. There was endless action . . . endless talk . . . endless competition, people drawing each other out and pushing each other to greater lengths. It was as simple as this: the Kennedys had a feeling of being heightened and it rubbed off on the people who came in contact with them. They were a unit. I remember thinking to myself that there couldn’t be another group quite like this one.”
If Jack understood that he was part of an unusual family, it also bred a certain arrogance. Joe Sr. could be abrupt and unfriendly, even disdainful of anyone he considered unworthy of his attention, especially those who did not show him proper regard. He saw some of this as payback for the humiliating slights inflicted on him for being an Irish Catholic.
Most victims of Joe’s disdain were not ready to forgive and forget. They saw Joe and the family as pretentious and demanding. At Cape Cod, for example, where renovations had turned the original cottage on the Kennedy property into a house with fourteen bedrooms, nine baths, a basement theater wired to show talking pictures, and an outdoor tennis court, Joe had a reputation as “opinionated,” “hard as nails,” and “an impossible man to work for.” The family was notorious for its casualness about paying its bills or carrying cash to meet obligations in a timely fashion. Shopkeepers and gas station attendants lost patience with giving the family credit and having to dun servants for payment. “We’re Kennedys,” a carful of kids told a gas station owner who refused to accept a promise to pay later for a fill-up. A call to the Kennedy compound brought a chauffeur with a can of gasoline to get the car back to the estate.
Jack came to his maturity with an almost studied indifference to money. He never carried much, if any, cash. Why would someone so well-off need currency to pay for anything? Everyone knew or should have known that he was good for his debts, be it a restaurant check, a clothing bill, or a hotel tab. He was always asking friends to pick up the bill, not because he expected them to pay but because his handlers, his father’s moneymen, would square accounts later. And they usually did, though occasionally some of Jack’s creditors would have to make embarrassing requests for payment of loans or debts that he had overlooked.
The self-indulgence of the Kennedy children was often on public display. Stepping off one of the Kennedy boats onto the Hyannis Port pier, the children would shed articles of clothing as they marched along, expecting “that someone else would pick up after them.” Kennedy maids particularly complained about Jack’s slovenliness: “the wet towels in a heap on the floor, the tangle of ties in one corner, the bureau drawers turned over and emptied in the middle of the bed in a hurried search for some wanted item.”
The children also had little sense of being confined to a place and time. One of Jack’s childhood friends remembered them this way: “They really didn’t have a real home with their own rooms where they had pictures on the walls or memorabilia on the shelves but would rather come home for holidays from their boarding schools and find whatever room was available. . . . ‘Which room do I have this time?’” Jack would ask his mother. He did not feel he had to live by the ordinary rules governing everyone else. He was always arriving late for meals and classes, setting his own pace, taking the less-traveled path; he was his father’s son. With the Kennedys, Jack’s friend recalled, “life speeded up.”
There was also a remarkable sense of loyalty. Joe taught his children, particularly Jack and Joe Jr., to rely on family unity as a shield against competitors and opponents. On a crossing to Europe in 1935, Joe called Jack away from a game of deck tennis to meet Lawrence Fisher, one of the brothers who had gained fame and fortune designing autos for General Motors. “Jack, I sent for you because I want you to meet Mr. Lawrence Fisher, one of the famous Fisher Body family. I wanted you to see what success brothers have who stick together.” It was a lesson that none of the Kennedy children ever forgot. Once, when Joe Jr. and Jack argued with each other and one of Jack’s friends tried to take his side, Jack turned on him angrily, saying, “Mind your own business! Keep out of it! I’m talking to Joe, not you!”
AFTER A YEAR at Canterbury School, Jack was not keen to return, wishing instead to follow Joe Jr. to Choate. Joe acquiesced to his son’s request, and in September 1931 Jack joined his brother at the storied New England academy. Joe and Rose were less interested in the distinctive education the boys would receive than in the chance to expose them to the country’s power brokers, or at least the sons of America’s most influential families. Choate was not quite on a par with the older, more elite prep schools of Andover, Exeter, St. Mark’s, or St. Paul’s, but it was distinctive enough—part of a wave of boys’ boarding schools founded in the 1880s and 1890s. Association with the best and the brightest, Joe and Rose believed, would ultimately come at Harvard, but the prelude to admission there was an education at a school like Choate. As Jack would soon learn, membership in the world of privilege carried lifelong responsibilities that would both attract and repel him.
An IQ of 119 and strong scores on the English and algebra parts of Jack’s Choate entrance exams had helped ease his admission, though the desire to have Jack Kennedy at the school was decidedly mutual. Choate, which had a keen interest in the sons of a family so wealthy and, by 1930, publicly visible, had in fact courted first Joe’s and then Jack’s attendance. Jack had actually failed the Latin part of Choate’s entrance exam in the spring of 1931, but the school was more than happy to let him retake the test after some summer tutoring. And even if he did not measure up on his next Latin test, Choate intended to enroll him in the fall term; the only question was whether he would start “a straight Third Form schedule,” which he did when he met the Latin requirement in October.
The difficult transition from teenager to young adult characterized Jack’s four years at Choate. Not the least of his difficulties was a series of medical problems that baffled his doctors and tested his patience. From the time he was three, not a year passed without one physical affliction or another. Three months before his third birthday, he came down with a virulent case of scarlet fever. A highly contagious and life-threatening illness for so small a child, he had to be hospitalized for two months, followed by two weeks in a Maine sanatorium. To get Jack proper care at the Boston medical center best prepared to treat the disease, Joe had to exert all his influence, including that of his father-in-law. Wi
th 600 local children suffering from scarlet fever and only 125 beds available at Boston City Hospital, arranging Jack’s admission was no small feat. But when it came to medical attention for his children, Joe was as aggressive as in any of his business dealings: He not only got Jack into the hospital but also ensured that one of the country’s leading authorities on contagious diseases would care for him. During the 1920s, Jack’s many childhood maladies included chicken pox and ear infections. They compelled him to spend a considerable amount of time in bed or at least indoors, convalescing.
At Canterbury in the fall of 1930, at age thirteen, he began to suffer from an undiagnosed illness that restricted his activities. Between October and December he lost nearly six pounds, felt “pretty tired,” and did not grow appropriately. One doctor attributed it to a lack of milk in his diet, but the diagnosis failed to explain why during a chapel service he felt “sick dizzy and weak. I just about fainted, and everything began to get black so I went out and then I fell and Mr. Hume [the headmaster] caught me. I am O.K. now,” he declared bravely in a letter to his father. In April 1931, he collapsed with abdominal pains, and the surgeon who examined him concluded that it was appendicitis and that an operation was necessary at the nearby Danbury Hospital. Later notes on Jack’s school attendance describe him as “probably very homesick during his time at Canterbury. He wrote a great deal of letters home. In May, he left school with appendicitis and did not return.” But having completed his year’s work with the help of a tutor at home, he was able to move on to Choate in the fall.
There, his medical problems became more pronounced. Several confinements in the infirmary marked his first year at the school. In November, “a mild cold” cost him two nights in the hospital, and when he went home for Thanksgiving, Joe remarked on how thin he looked. In January, he was confined again for “a cold,” which did not clear up quickly, turned in to “quite a cough,” and kept him in the infirmary for more than a week. Although administered regular doses of cod liver oil and enrolled in a bodybuilding class, his weight remained at only 117 pounds—less than robust for a fourteen-and-a-half-year-old boy—and he continued to suffer fatigue. In April, he had to return to the infirmary because of another cold, swollen glands, and what was described as an abnormal urine sample.
More puzzling medical problems punctuated Jack’s second year at Choate. In January and February 1933, “flu-like symptoms” plagued him, as well as almost constant pain in his knees. “Jack’s winter term sounded like a hospital report,” a fiftieth-anniversary remembrance of his attendance at the school recounted, “with correspondence flying back and forth between Rose Kennedy and Clara St. John [the headmaster’s wife]. Again, eyes, ears, teeth, knees, arches, from the top of his head to the tip of his toes, Jack needed attention.” X rays showed no pathology in his knees, and so his doctor attributed his difficulties to growing pains and recommended exercises and “built-up” shoes.
Matters got worse the following year. Over the summer of 1933, after he had turned sixteen, he gained no weight. It precluded him from playing football, but more important, it stimulated fresh concerns about his health, which now went into a sharp decline in January and February 1934. “We are still puzzled as to the cause of Jack’s trouble,” Clara St. John wrote Rose early in February. “He didn’t look at all well when he came back after Christmas, but apparently had improved steadily since then.” But at the end of January he became very sick and had to be rushed by ambulance to New Haven Hospital for observation. Mrs. St. John told Jack: “I hope with all my heart that the doctors will find out in the shortest possible order what is making the trouble, and will clear it out of the way even quicker than that.” His symptoms were a bad case of hives and weight loss; but the doctors now feared that he had life-threatening leukemia and began taking regular blood counts. “It seems that I was much sicker than I thought I was,” Jack wrote classmate LeMoyne Billings after he got out of the hospital, “and am supposed to be dead, so I am developing a limp and a hollow cough.” He complained that his rectum was “plenty red after the hospital. Yours would be red too if you had shoved every thing from rubber tubes to iron pipes up it. When I crap I don’t even feel it because it’s so big.” By March, Jack’s symptoms had largely disappeared, but his doctors remained uncertain about the cause of his difficulties.
In addition to his illnesses, Jack now struggled with normal adolescent problems about identity and sexuality, as well as having to live in the shadow of a highly successful and favored elder brother. By the time Jack arrived at Choate, Joe Jr. had established himself as, in the words of the headmaster’s wife, “one of the ‘big boys’ of the school on whom we are going to depend.” Rose had already signaled George St. John, the headmaster, that Jack was not Joe Jr.—unlike Joe Jr., Jack did not acclimate easily to either academic or social regimens. Mindful of their concern, the headmaster told Joe, “Jack sits at a nearby table in the Dining Hall where I look him in the eye three times a day, and he is fine.”
But Joe Jr.’s success on the playing fields and in the classroom took its toll on Jack. A tall, skinny boy of fourteen, whom his classmates called Rat Face because of his thin, narrow visage, Jack was too slight to gain distinction in athletics, which he badly wanted. When his brother won the school’s coveted Harvard Trophy at his graduation in 1933, an award to the student who best combined scholarship and sportsmanship, it confirmed in Jack the feeling that he could never win the degree of approval his parents—and, it seemed, everyone else—lavished on his elder brother. Jack told Billings that he believed he was as intelligent as his brother, and probably even as good an athlete, but he had little confidence that his family would ever see him as surpassing Joe Jr.
In addition to feeling too much in his brother’s shadow, Jack wrestled with the strains of uncommonly high parental expectations, pressures to live up to “Kennedy standards,” to stand out not just from the crowd but from the best of the best. The overt message, especially from his father, was “second best will never do.” Whether in athletics, academics, or social standing, there was an insistent demand that the Kennedy children, especially the boys, reach the top rung. The lesson Jack now learned was that privilege had its advantages and pleasures, but it also had its demands and drawbacks. As one Kennedy family biographer said: “[Joe] stressed to his children the importance of winning at any cost and the pleasures of coming in first. As his own heroes were not poets or artists but men of action, he took it for granted that his children too wanted public success. . . . All too often, his understanding about their desires . . . were fruits of his experience and his dreams, not necessarily theirs.”
Joe Jr., with a robust constitution, a temperament much like his father’s, and a readiness to follow his lead, was Joe’s favorite. Yet despite this and whatever Jack’s antagonism toward Joe, an understanding that his father would do anything for him, that his overpowering dad was motivated by an intense desire to ensure his well-being, established surpassing lifelong ties of affection. Jack also identified with Joe’s iconoclasm, with his talent for seeing opportunities conventional businessmen missed, making independent judgments at variance with prevailing wisdom, and setting social standards that ignored accepted rules for married life.
For all the love and attention he lavished on his second son, Joe resented the many medical problems that plagued Jack’s early life. “Jack was sick all the time,” one of his friends recalled, “and the old man could be an asshole around his kids.” In the late 1940s, during a visit to the Kennedys’ Palm Beach, Florida, home, the friend, Jack, and a date bade Joe good night before going out to a movie. Joe snidely told Jack’s girlfriend: “Why don’t you get a live one?” Angered by the unkind reference to Jack’s poor health, afterward the friend made a disparaging remark about Joe. But Jack defended his father: “Everybody wants to knock his jock off,” he said, “but he made the whole thing possible.”
It was typical of Jack to see the best in people and outwardly not take umbrage at Joe’s occasio
nal hostility toward him for his physical limitations. But Joe’s hectoring did make Jack wonder whether the pressure was worth the many privileges his father’s wealth and status conferred on him. “We all have our fathers,” Jack said resignedly to a friend complaining about his parent. At a minimum, Joe’s allusion to Jack’s health problems struck a painful chord. Jack was self-conscious about his physical problems and worked hard to overcome and ignore them. One friend said, “[Jack’s] very frame as a light, thin person, his proneness to injury of all kinds, his back, his sickness, which he wouldn’t ever talk about . . . he was heartily ashamed of them, they were a mark of effeminacy, of weakness, which he wouldn’t acknowledge.” When this friend upbraided Jack for being too concerned about improving his appearance by getting a tan, Jack replied, “Well, . . . it’s not only that I want to look that way, but it makes me feel that way. It gives me confidence, it makes me feel healthy. It makes me feel strong, healthy, attractive.”
Within sharply delineated bounds, Jack rebelled against school and, indirectly, parental authority at Choate. His schoolwork continued to be uneven—strong in English and history, in which he had substantial interest, and mediocre at best in languages, which required the sort of routine discipline he found difficult to maintain. His low grades in Latin and French compelled him to attend summer session in 1932, at the end of his freshman year. Rose later remarked on how concerned they were about Jack’s health during his Choate years. But “what concerned us as much or more was his lack of diligence in his studies; or, let us say, lack of ‘fight’ in trying to do well in those subjects that didn’t happen to interest him. . . . Choate had a highly ‘structured’ set of rules, traditions, and expectations into which a boy was supposed to fit; and if he didn’t, there was little or no ‘permissiveness.’ Joe Jr. had no trouble at all operating within this system; it suited his temperament. But Jack couldn’t or wouldn’t conform. He did pretty much what he wanted, rather than what the school wanted of him.”
An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 Page 5