The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  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.”

  Joe 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 sc
hool 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.”

  Jack wasn’t concerned about St. John but about his father. Joe had taught him that no matter what he did, if he came to his father and told the truth, everything would be fine. Joe absolved all. He forgave all. He made what was bad good and what was broken whole. The curtains of his confessional were the boundaries of the family, and every word and every deed stayed within those precincts.

  The truth can be as manipulative as a lie, and Jack learned to finesse his father with candor. “I thought I would write you right away as LeMoyne and I have been talking about how poorly we have done this quarter,” he wrote Joe in early December 1934. “I really feel, now that I think it over, that I have been bluffing myself about how much real work I have been doing.” That was all true, but Jack’s was the calculated candor of a defense attorney who outlines his client’s worst crimes before the prosecuting attorney does it. Jack had confessed before the quarter was even over, and well before his father would see his son’s grades. No matter what punishment he faced from his father in Palm Beach, the letter would soften the blows.

  Jack had gauged his father perfectly. “I got a great satisfaction out of your letter,” Joe replied. Jack’s father was a busy man, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in America, yet he answered immediately. Joe was full of the most wearisome cynicism toward everything in life except for his sons. They were the repositories of his ideals and aspirations. He was doing whatever he could so that on the day when his sons’ wealth and privilege were weighed against their achievements, an honest assayer would say that the Kennedy men’s lives more than balanced the scales.

  This was not a rhetorical shield behind which he pushed his sons ahead on their crude accession. This was his profound belief, and at this point he pushed it with principle and tact and nuance. “I would be lacking even as a friend if I did not urge you to take advantage of the qualities you have,” he wrote Jack in early December 1934. “It is very difficult to make up fundamentals that you have neglected when you were very young and that is why I am always urging you to do the best you can. I am not expecting too much and I will not be disappointed if you don’t turn out to be a real genius, but I think you can be a really worthwhile citizen with good judgment and good understanding.”

  Jack did not heed his father’s heartfelt words. He read the New York Times every day and had a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of current events, but he sat daydreaming in class, responding listlessly to his teachers’ queries, barely getting by academically.

  As a father, Joe was facing one of the conundrums of great wealth. How did a rich man raise sons with purpose and a sense of destiny and responsibility? He thought he had been doing just that in part by sending Joe Jr. and Jack to Choate, but he saw in young Jack all the wages of his failure. Joe’s fear was that wealth and all the mindless ease that came with it had distorted his son’s values.

  Joe was proud that he had earned money as a boy and that he had adhered so tightly to adulthood’s harsh laws. It appalled him, as he wrote a Choate administrator, that he and Rose had “possibly contributed as much as anyone in spoiling him [Jack] by having secretaries and maids following him to see that he does what he should do, and he places too little confidence on his own reliance.”

  Jack was a young man of terrible carelessness. He was careless about his clothes, careless about appointments, and careless about money. Worse yet, he was intellectually careless. He was living through the Great Depression, with millions unemployed and the roads and rails full of hollow-eyed wanderers, and yet he knew and felt nothing of what his compatriots were suffering. “I have no memory of the Depression,” he told journalist Hugh Sidey years later. “We lived better than ever. We had bigger houses, more servants. We had more money, more flexibility, more power than ever before.” Jack was a rich young man who saw wealth not as something that had to be earned or maintained, or that others might try to wrest away, but as something that was simply his, as much a part of him as his feet and his fingers.

  Ralph “Rip” Horton, Jack’s friend and classmate, was just as scrawny and malnutritioned-looking as Jack, and just as rich. He had, moreover, certain perks of wealth that Jack didn’t have but aspired to, such as a card granting entry to the more elegant New York clubs and a casual familiarity with the cafe society of the metropolis. The youths dressed up in ersatz adulthood on their forays into the Manhattan nightlife, acting with the nonchalance of the regular habitués.

  Jack was getting over his shyness toward the opposite sex and slowly developing a lustful, cynical self-assurance. To Jack and many of his classmates, one of the major allures of attending Choate was the inspired presence of the wife of one of the masters. “Queenie,” as she was known by the boys, was a voluptuous young woman, and perfectly aware of the dry-mouthed attention she received when she strolled into the dining hall. The highest honor that several of the boys dreamed of was not the Choate Prize that Joe Jr. had just won but the bedding of Queenie, a fantasy so unthinkable, so daring, so impossibly sweet that it could scarcely be whispered about.

  One of Jack’s classmates, Larry Baker, has the distinct recollection that Jack bragged that he had that honor. That claim was doubtless one of Jack’s first forays into fiction, for what rankled him, as it did several others, was that often Queenie invited Maurice Shea, the Choate quarterback, to her house for tea. Jack was so irritated by the sheer unfairness of this that he turned to a song he had written:

  Maury Shea, Maury Shea

  Drinking tea every day

  Maury Shea, what’s your appeal?

  Queenie, we want a new deal.

  Queenie had never had a song written to her before, at least not by one of her husband’s students, and one day she asked Jack and his friends to sing it to her. “We damn near died,” Horton recalled. “Why we weren’t thrown out of school, I’ll never know.”

  During spring break of his junior year Jack and a group of students drove down to Palm Beach in three cars. The youths roared southward, the cars playing tag with each other, roaring along the macadam at seventy miles an hour. In North Carolina they were stopped for speeding. Jack pleaded poverty to the small-town judge, displaying his empty pockets. The magistrate cut their fines, and off they roared again. Jack and his friends did not suffer the mild discomfort of stopping at anonymous motels. They lived in their private world of privilege. They knew people all along the route, and they stopped at several estates.

  At Sea Island a tollbooth blocked their way. One of the boys picked up a fire ax that happened to be lying there, and they roared past, waving the ax at the tollbooth keeper. Later in the day the young men drove Larry Baker’s new Model A convertible into the ocean, a mild diversion that upset only the car’s owner. Larry already had one souvenir from his friendship with Jack—a dark front tooth that had been d
eadened when Jack shoved him against the stucco wall of their house at Choate.

  In Palm Beach, after a meal at the Kennedy home, Jack insisted that the group make a visit to the Cuban Tearoom, a brothel in West Palm Beach. Larry waited in the car while the others went inside. “They made fun of me,” Baker recalls. “The kids went deep-sea fishing the next day. They teased me because I hadn’t gone to the brothel, and decided to make me seasick.”

  Baker was far from the only detractor among Jack’s classmates. One of his former friends accused Jack of telling the dean that he, the friend, and another student had a motorbike hidden in the countryside, a motorbike that Jack had ridden. Others felt that Jack was nothing but a spoiled snob, tooling off to Miss Porter’s School to pick up his date in his father’s chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and limiting his friendships to those of social or athletic status.

  For Jack, the illnesses continued. Over Christmas 1933, he had another relapse. His condition was now so “interesting” that it merited a discussion before the American Medical Association. After his recovery, Joe wrote Joe Jr.: “It is only one of the few recoveries of a condition bordering on leuchemia [sic], and it was the general impression of the doctors that his chances were about five out of one hundred that he ever could have lived.” If the youth’s father wrote his eldest son such a terrifying letter, surely Jack knew his prognosis as well. He could hardly help knowing, for when it was thought that he had leukemia and would die, back at Choate the headmaster led a prayer for Jack in the chapel.