The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Joe knew that he had to make the sort of authentic reforms that would satisfy his critics among the New Dealers. Yet he could not so overregulate the securities industry that the golden god of greed would never return to Wall Street. Joe was a decisive man, and in hardly more than a year he did magnificent service, creating many of the laws and rules that have formed the underpinnings of Wall Street ever since his time and helped to keep the American economy on an ever-rising trajectory.

  Joe had the confidence—and this became an essential part of the way the Kennedys worked—to bring in the smartest, most ambitious people he could find and let them work unfettered. In this instance, he brought in such brilliant minds as two Yale law professors, William O. Douglas and Thurman Arnold, both of whom would make a firm mark on history.

  Joe was not one to accept all the humbug of the New Deal by living in a narrow townhouse in Georgetown. Instead, he rented Marwood, a magnificent twenty-five-room estate in Maryland. He happened to be in town on the final Sunday in June 1935, a time by which most of his critics had been stilled. In the middle of the afternoon, Roosevelt telephoned to ask if he could come out to Marwood for dinner that evening. At seven the president and his small group arrived, including Missy Le Hand, his assistant, and the irrepressible Tommy Corcoran, carrying his accordion.

  Joe had no use for the inane dinners and endless cocktail parties that clogged up life in Washington and that he usually managed to avoid. He preferred to stay at home and have people come to him for what he considered a truly good time. That did not mean liveried butlers and four kinds of forks, but sheer fun. That was what Joe liked, and that was what the president liked as well. The evening progressed with ample supplies of mint juleps and the freshest political gossip, a hearty dinner, and a new Hollywood movie, Ginger, shown on a screen set up on the lawn.

  Then Corcoran took out his accordion, and it was time for song mixed liberally with joshing. The president was a man who could set aside the burdens of office with a song and a joke, that deep melodic laughter like a benediction. Joe felt comfortable enough with Roosevelt to trade him quip for quip, joke for joke.

  The president was full of a sailor’s yarns, tales of Northeast fishermen told in dialect, and of the ineptness of Roosevelt’s own sailing companions at Harvard. Joe was not a sailor himself and had never been part of that world, but his sons were, and he matched the president story for story.

  Each year Roosevelt went off on the Astors’ yacht, another outing to which Joe, even now, would not have been invited. “Your taste in dumb cruise mates doesn’t seem to have changed very much,” Joe told the president.

  Roosevelt laughed loudly and asked Corcoran to play “Tim Toolan,” a favorite Irish ballad about a boy who makes good in the Irish business of politics. Roosevelt knew the words, and when it came to the refrain, he sang out loud and pure:

  The majority was more

  Than it h’d ever been b’fore

  And our hero h’d carried the day!

  It had been a wondrous evening, and Joe’s guests did not leave until well after midnight. By the way Washington looked at things, Joe, given full imprimatur as a friend and counselor to the most powerful man in America, had arrived.

  6

  “Most Likely to Succeed”

  In the fall of 1930, thirteen-year-old Jack went off to Choate with his big brother. Rose did not accompany her sickly son that day. Nor did Jack’s mother ever visit the school in Jack’s five years there. She nonetheless inundated the headmaster and his wife with letters. She had all kinds of advice and suggestions, but always from a distance. She did not let her son know how much she loved him, how conversant she was with every last detail of his education, how great a concern she had over the myriad of illnesses that he faced.

  Joe also wrote often to the headmaster about both his sons but rarely came up to Connecticut to see them. For years he had been off in New York or Washington or Los Angeles, seeing his children primarily during vacations and on weekends. He nonetheless dominated his sons as assuredly as if he had been present from morning until night.

  Joe’s sons were extensions of him, young men bearing his name who would go out into the world to capture cities that he had seen only from the outer walls, to climb mountains that he had only gazed upon. Choate was a splendid crucible on which to forge the kind of men his sons were to be. There were few Jewish students, who had so dominated Boston Latin when Joe had gone there; the Choate application asked specifically whether the youth was “in any part Hebraic,” a question that helped to keep that particular contagion to a minimum. Nor would his sons’ unformed minds be contaminated by foul radicalism. A perfect indication of Choate sentiments was that the students voted each year for the “most conservative” student but not for the “most liberal.” That shameful category stayed largely where it belonged: outside the gated precincts of the school.

  That first evening at Choate, Jack was invited down to the home of the headmaster, George St. John, and his wife, for an evening of ice cream, singing, and what Mrs. St. John called “friendliness,” as if it were another category of dessert. St. John was an austere, pointedly serious gentleman who ruled over the Georgian-style buildings and playing fields of the Connecticut campus with autocratic zeal.

  The headmaster had an admirable concern for the individual lives of the boys at the Episcopalian-founded school, treating each one as a work of art in the making. He was occupied with his charges with a depth and intimacy that some of their own parents did not show. He was generous in spirit and fair as long as his authority was not questioned and youths did not imagine that they might construct another world beyond his purview. “I can’t live in a school where the waters are troubled,” he admitted.

  St. John fancied that he treated all the boys the same, but the headmaster showed a special benevolence toward those, like the Kennedy boys, whose parents were willing to further their advance with added contributions. There was a certain irony to this. One of the teachers, Harold Taylor, avows that the headmaster had a distaste for Catholic upstarts like Joe Kennedy who dared foul his beloved Protestant school with his papist sons. In seeking added assistance from Joe, St. John was not so foolish as to indulge in the same honesty and forthrightness that he taught his minions to make the basis of their own lives. Better a little disingenuousness. Soon after Jack arrived, the headmaster wrote a letter to the former Hollywood mogul asking that “some one send to me information which one so ignorant as I can rely on” concerning a new sound motion picture projector. That was a mite too subtle, and so the headmaster appended a postscript: “It may be some time before I can raise money enough, but at any rate I want to be ready to go when I find it possible.”

  Joe did not miss the message, and he sent off an expensive sound system to the school, ingratiating himself with the headmaster and presumably helping to ingratiate young Jack and Joe Jr. with their schoolmates as well.

  “We’ll try to show our appreciation, our sheer gratitude, in every way we know,” he wrote Joe. “I’m keeping close to Jack.” That was the headmaster’s intention, but Jack was hardly the kind of youth to accept the St. Johns’ invitation to “feel free to drop in at our house at any time—even without a special invitation.”

  That first evening St. John talked to Jack admiringly of his big brother. St. John wrote Rose afterward that Joe Jr. was “one of the ‘big boys’ of the School, on whom we are going to depend.” Joe Jr. had already been at Choate for two years. Now Jack faced the prospect of living in a house in which his brother had spread his belongings from room to room, leaving little space for another Kennedy.

  Joe Jr. was a paradigm of what St. John envisioned a Choate boy to be. His time at the school formed a perfect rising arc, from a modest, difficult beginning to a noble finish. He had arrived in the fall of 1929 and had suffered through the hazing of the sixth-formers. He had been so foolhardy as to arrive back on a Sunday evening three hours late from Thanksgiving vacation. That gave St. John ample opport
unity for a character lesson: he ordered the boy to be kept at school an added period over Christmas.

  In his class work Joe Jr. had been equally foolhardy. As the headmaster wrote his father, Joe Jr. was “too easily satisfied and does not go that second mile that would make him a real student. Joe is still somewhat superficially childish. We like Joe so much that we want his best and Joe himself really wants to give it to us.”

  Joe Jr. stopped fighting against the yoke of discipline and brought his grades way up. At the beginning he had been no better an athlete than a student, just another second-string guard on the junior varsity. He began to run and to train on his own, and he worked his way up to a starting position on the Choate varsity.

  Joe Jr. also became one of the most admired young men at the school, not just by the headmaster and the teachers but also by his own peers, and especially by the younger boys of Jack’s age. He was a model to which they aspired, an exuberant, masculine straight shooter who had a smile and a word even for the newest of the boys.

  Joe Jr. would have no part of hazing underclassmen but indulged in a full share of innocent wickedness. He delighted in filling his housemaster’s shoes with sand, short-sheeting his bed, and then shaking his head mournfully as he commiserated with the teacher about whoever would do such a dastardly prank.

  Optimistic. Conservative. Ambitious. Athletic. Friendly. Loyal. Intelligent. Exuberant. Joe Jr. was everything Joe wanted in a son. In comparison to Jack, it seemed at times as if Joe had passed on to his firstborn son everything of value. Joe Jr. was that most rare of spirits, a natural extrovert. The center of the room was Joe Jr.’s natural resting place, and he strode into any setting with that energetic manner.

  Jack had the most tortured, complex feelings toward his big brother. That admixture of love, jealousy, anger, and competitiveness had jelled into the seminal relationship in young Jack’s life. Jack, for all his sensitivity, could not see that Joe Jr. probably felt threatened by his brother and saw Jack’s potential far better than Jack saw it himself.

  Joe wanted his sons to be loyal as brothers, and much of the time they acted with deep affection toward each other. Yet there remained an undercurrent of rivalry and endless competitiveness. Though Joe was sure that Joe Jr. would win, he watched like a promoter who owned both boxers. He created a family climate in which Joe Jr. could berate his little brother and Jack could fight back with words as much as he did with his clenched fists.

  “When Joe came home he was telling me how strong he was and how tough,” Jack wrote his father in Palm Beach while he was still at Canterbury. “The first thing he did was to show me how tough he was to get sick so that he could not have any thanksgiving [sic] dinner. Manly youth.” Jack was the brother for whom the infirmary was a second home, and the sight of his sick brother was sweet vengeance. “He was then going to show me how to Indian wrestle. I then through [sic] him over on his neck.”

  As Jack saw it, Joe Jr. had nothing to teach him, and he had colleagues in his campaign against his big brother. “Did the sixth-formers lick him? Oh Man he was all blisters, they almost paddled the life out of him. He was roughhousing in the hall a sixth-former caught him he led him in and all the sixth formers had a swat or two. What I wouldn’t have given to be a sixth former.”

  At Choate, Jack was for the most part too sly, too ferretlike, to be caught and bullied by the upperclassmen, but what a ransom he would have paid to have been there among those beating “the life out of” his brother.

  Jack appeared shy, but his was not that sort of shyness that plagues a person in public places, taking immense energy to accomplish what for others is nothing but the routine of daily social life. Jack was not so much shy as reserved, keeping a distance from everyone and everything. Part of this manner was his way of building his own niche apart from his brother.

  And partly it was the result of his illnesses, of lying in bed watching adults scurry around him trying to hide their knowledge of his maladies. Although the Kennedys projected an image of a family of radiant good health, only young Joe Jr. seemed immune to disease. Rosemary was slow. Eunice was plagued with illnesses. Kathleen had asthma. None of them, however, suffered from the scourge of afflictions that affected Jack.

  Jack had scarcely settled into his routine at the prep school before he was in the infirmary. Mrs. St. John wrote Rose that Jack had what “seemed to have been the beginnings of a little cold.” Rose might have surmised that Jack’s condition was potentially more serious or the infirmary would have been overflowing with sniffling students, but the two women spoke in a genteel code language, always minimizing, always downplaying. Life would be just fine if everyone would simply say it was fine.

  In early January, Jack was back in the familiar confines of the infirmary with “a mild cold in his head.” Mrs. St. John wrote Rose that Jack had arrived with “a lavender bathrobe and lavender and green pajamas” and appeared to be “settling in for a pleasant stay,” as if he were setting off on a Caribbean cruise.

  Rose was consumed with her son’s condition. Yet even after he had been in bed for two weeks, it was unthinkable that she would drive the sixty-five miles to Wallingford to see her sick son. Instead, she wrote letters telling the school that three years before Jack had had “mumps, and the doctor thought it was probably a cold.” She suggested that he be given a teaspoon of Kepler’s Malt and Cod Liver Oil after every meal. Jack’s mother was assured that not only would he be forced to take a daily dosage in the infirmary, but that the tonic would continue back in his dormitory room. It was hardly a routine to please a boy who would have to be paraded in front of his peers after each meal to receive his medicine, a regimen that would continue until Jack was “full of pop.”

  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.”<
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  Jack 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.”