The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Jack’s fragile health was also shameful, not only because it singled him out as a weak figure, but because of the sheer embarrassment of some of the diseases with which he was afflicted. When he returned from Palm Beach after the Christmas holiday, he came down with a terrible case of hives, covering his entire body, and was taken to the hospital in New Haven. “Well, you know, Jack, the doctors are simply delighted to have the trouble come out to the surface instead of staying inside,” Eddie Moore, his father’s associate, told him.

  “Gee!” Jack exclaimed. “The doctors must be having a happy day today!”

  When the hives began to disappear, Jack wished the doctors would stop poking at him and let him get back to his life. “If this had happened fifty years ago, they would just say, ‘Well, the boy has had a case of hives, but now he’s all over it,’ “he told Clara St. John, the headmaster’s wife. “Now they’ve got to take my blood count every little while and keep me here until they correspond to what the doctors think it ought to be.”

  Jack wanted to get out of the hospital, but he was still so mysteriously weak that the doctors continued their tests. By the summer Jack had more vague symptoms, and his father decided to send him to the famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for a battery of tests. It was a situation that cried out for his mother’s presence. Rose’s visit, however, would have been an omen of death or a sign of intolerable weakness. Instead, Eddie Moore, a surrogate parent, accompanied Jack.

  Jack was a fiercely intelligent young man who looked with wry bemusement at his life. Never was there a moment of self-pity in Jack. Never did he muse aloud about why the God his mother worshiped daily should have plagued him with these constant illnesses. Never did he ask the heavens why he couldn’t have a disease that he might defeat instead of these inexplicable conditions that the doctors never seemed able to diagnose or resolve.

  In a series of letters to his friend Lem, Jack sought to turn his weeks at the Mayo Clinic into a roguish adventure. His closest friend was staying at the Kennedy house in Hyannis Port, partaking of all the summer revelry that to Jack was the sweetest part of the year. Lem was living his life. Only occasionally did Jack even allude to the terrible uncertainty of his plight. “The reason I’m here is that they may have to cut out my stomach!!!” he scribbled on the side of one letter. He began another letter by exclaiming: “God what a beating I’m taking. I’ve lost 8 pounds and still going down.” He did not go on bemoaning his condition however, but wrote how he had gone to the movies and found himself sitting next to a couple. “You’ve never smelt anything so vile as that girl,” he wrote. “She stank. I mentioned to Ed to move over. He moved over and then I moved. Well the girl looked at me and then whispered something to the fellow. He took his arm down and stood up. I, nothing daunted, stared back. The girl grabbed his arm and he sat down. It was a lucky thing for him because he was only about 6’3” and I could have heaved him right into the aisle on his ass.”

  Jack was lying in a hospital bed at St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, where, as he wrote Lem, “I’ve got something wrong with my intestines—in other words I shit blood.” He thought he might have piles. He was obsessed with his adolescent plague of pimples. The doctors performed procedures that seemed like base assaults on his dignity. Jack turned the tables on his tormentors by employing the only weapon he had: a dark sense of humor,

  Yesterday I went through the most harassing experience of my life. First they gave me 5 enemas until I was white as snow inside. Then they put me on a thing like a barber chair. Instead of sitting in the chair I kneeled on something that resembles the foot rest with my head where the seat is. They took my pants down!! Then they tipped the chair over. Then surrounded by nurses the doctor first stuck his finger up my ass. I just blushed because you know how it is. He wiggled it suggestively and I rolled ‘em in the aisles by saying “You have a good motion.” He withdrew his finger. And then, the shit stuck an iron tube 12 inches long and 1 inch in diameter up my ass. They had a flashlight inside it and they looked around. Then they blew a lot of air in me to pump up my bowels. I was certainly feeling great as I know you would having a lot of strangers looking up my ass-hole. Of course when the pretty nurses did it I was given a cheap thrill.

  Jack’s bed symbolized not only sickness but also sex. He told Lem that he had managed to masturbate only twice, and his “penis looked as if it had been run through a wringer.” His pajamas were dirty and “stiff from sweat.” He “feels kind of horny,” especially after reading a dirty book. All day long nurses entered his room. They were “very tantalizing and I’m really the pet of the hospital … and let me tell you nurses are almost as dirty as you, you filthy minded shit.” He boasted to Lem that one of the nurses “wanted to know if I would give her a workout,” but the nurse did not return later to his room.

  The boastful boyish bravado and self-conscious obscenity are so overwhelming that it is easy to forget, as surely Jack wanted to forget, that he was a seventeen-year-old youth half a continent away from his family, lying in a hospital bed with doctors and nurses poking away at his body, seeking to understand the mysterious affliction that tortured him and held him back from the life he wanted so much to live. He was sick and he was hurting and he was full of pain that he could not even fully admit to himself, and never to Lem and the rest of the world.

  Jack was at the Mayo Clinic while his closest friend sat in his house, sailing and swimming, enjoying the marvelous days of summer. He wrote Lem about “dirty minded nurses” and confrontations in a movie theater as if, even in this worst of times, he was having daring experiences that Lem would never have. Jack had a wondrously inventive mind and, like most adolescents, was full of braggadocio about his supposed sexual encounters.

  Jack was probably inventing these stories, and doing so with detail, imagination, and nuance. He was affirming his own vitality, even if it was in the guise of a fictional creation. There was a heroic quality in the magnitude of Jack’s denial and the daring invention of this picaresque life. He could have given in to his illness and accepted an invalid’s pale life. Instead, Jack had learned a denial technique when dealing with the implacable realities of life, and it proved to be irresistible. He had made a mask that he could put on whenever he needed it, or if he chose to, he could put it on and never take it off again.

  As the perpetual observer of his own life, Jack lived in two worlds. It was this extraordinary duality that set him apart not simply from Joe Jr. and his other siblings but from everyone else as well. Young Jack was in a situation that would have filled most adults with fear, but there was none of that in him. Here in this hospital room his sense of irony grew hard and became the preeminent means by which he looked at the world.

  Jack left the hospital that summer with no firm diagnosis of his condition, and that fall he returned to Choate. In chapel the headmaster stood before the students and in his Olympian manner talked about the small minority of mindless troublemakers who were destroying the peace of his beloved Choate. St. John said that these miscreants represented no more than 5 percent of the student body, but that they were a slow poison. If he ever could determine their names, he would root them out quickly and send them home disgraced. They were muckers, nothing but muckers, mucking up Choate.

  As Jack and his friends listened, they were delighted at St. John’s coinage. Muckers! That was exactly what they were. Muckers! The boys decided to turn their casual fraternity into a small secret society. To formalize matters, they trooped into Wallingford and had special golden shovel emblems made for themselves at a jewelry shop.

  The thirteen members of the Muckers Club met every evening between dinner and chapel in Jack’s room. Theirs was the most benign of conspiracies, their worst crimes being such misdemeanors as stealing out for milk shakes and playing their radios after hours. They planned at Spring Festivities to bring shovels into the dance on which they would pull their dates. Then they would all go outside and be photographed with the shovels next to a manure pile.r />
  When St. John heard of this mysterious group and their nefarious scheme for Spring Festivities, he reacted with unrelieved fury. He was a man whom humor had bypassed. He simply could not abide such a challenge from the likes of Jack Kennedy. Mucker. The very name was a confrontation. Jack was Mucker Number One. He and his friends had created a little revolutionary nest within the sacred reaches of Choate, a nest that had to be eradicated. He called the boys into his office and raged at them, threatening to throw them out, ruining their academic records and their chances of attending an Ivy League college.

  The matter was so serious that the headmaster wired Joe at the SEC in Washington: “Will you please make every possible effort to come to Choate Saturday or Sunday for a conference with Jack and us which we think a necessity.”

  Joe arrived that Sunday afternoon and went immediately to the headmaster’s study, seating himself in a leather chair next to St. John’s desk. The headmaster saw this as an occasion to teach this Catholic upstart an unforgettable lesson by heaving his troublesome son out the front gates, even though other faculty members, including Harold Taylor, had implored St. John to let poor Jack finish out his term.

  Another father would have pleaded with the headmaster to allow his son to graduate. Joe did not do that. He was a brilliant businessman in part because he figured out his opponent’s motivation and tried to play to that. In this instance, St. John was angry because Jack and his friends dared to attack his authority by creating their own separate world. Joe flattered the headmaster by berating his own son as much as St. John himself ever did.

  While this was going on. Jack was back in his room prowling back and forth, dreading the reaction his father would have. He was finally shown into the office where his father and the headmaster sat. He had a look of doom on his youthful countenance. While St. John took a phone call, Joe turned to his son and half whispered: “My God, my son, you sure didn’t inherit your father’s directness or his reputation for using bad language. If that crazy Muckers Club had been mine, you can be sure it wouldn’t have started with an M!”

  That was enough to relax Jack, but as soon as St. John returned, Joe went back to berating his son, the two men punching verbally at Jack one after the other. “We reduced Jack’s conceit, if it was conceit, and childishness to considerable sorrow,” St. John remembered decades later. “And we said just what we thought, held nothing back, and Mr. Kennedy was supporting the school completely.” As the two Kennedys left, St. John felt richly vindicated, even though he had not thrown Jack or the other youths out of school.

  Joe had acted with magnificent panache. He had come up to Choate that weekend to see to it that Jack graduated. That way his son would go to a top college and have the kind of life his father intended him to have. He had whispered to Jack in St. John’s office, not because he was winking at the headmaster’s authority, but to put his son at ease.

  Joe was enraged at his son’s behavior. But nothing, no conduct, no crime, nothing, could diminish Joe’s aspirations for his son’s future or lessen his pride in family blood. Joe was always there for Jack. No matter what the crisis, what the time, what the cost, what the pain, Joe was there. For Jack, that was the lesson of his father’s weekend visit and of the Muckers’ revolt.

  In the aftermath the headmaster arranged for Jack to speak with Dr. Prescott Lecky, a Columbia University psychologist. The analyst could see that Jack was “definitely in a trap, psychologically speaking. He has established a reputation in the family for thoughtlessness, sloppiness, and inefficiency, and he feels entirely at home in the role.” Jack had his own deep insights into his psyche. He understood the psychological bounds that constricted him, but the truth did not set him free. “A good deal of his trouble is due to comparison with an older brother,” the psychologist noted. “He remarked, ‘My brother is the efficient one in the family. I am the boy that doesn’t get things done. If my brother were not so efficient, it would be easier for me to be efficient. He does it so much better than I do.’ Jack is apparently avoiding comparison and withdraws from the race, so to speak, in order to convince himself that he is not trying.”

  Rose, a woman of remorseless optimism, wrote in her memoirs that “this silly episode of the Muckers may well have been a turning point in his life.” He did pull up his grades a bit those last months, but for all four years of high school at Choate he did not receive one honor grade and finished 65th in a class of 110. His SAT scores for college entrance were respectable (verbal 627, math 467), but hardly the marks of a brilliant young man. Choate’s “General Estimate” of Jack for his Princeton application was both fair and devastating. “Jack has rather superior mental ability without the deep interest in his studies or the mature viewpoint that demands of him his best effort all the time. He can be relied upon to do enough to pass.”

  One of the first occasions in which the “new” Jack made his appearance was during the very Spring Festivities that the Muckers had planned to disrupt. Each year the evening began with a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan. It might have been expected that a much-chastened Jack would have been in the front row, applauding vigorously. But Jack and his friends could not abide sitting there. Instead, Jack and his date, Olive Cawley, and Lem and his date, Ruth “Pussy” Walker, drove off with Porter “Pete” Caesar, who had graduated the year before and was now back from Princeton, driving a spiffy roadster. Leaving Choate that evening would have been grounds for expulsion by itself, but the crime was dramatically escalated when they stopped at a roadhouse for some beer.

  On their drive back to campus, the group realized it was being followed by proctors whose mandate was to catch such miscreants as Lem and Jack. Caesar sped away, roaring out into the countryside, trying desperately to shake off their tormentors. He turned into a farmyard and cut off the headlights, while Jack, Lem, and Olive ran to secrete themselves in the barn. Jack and Lem in tails and Olive in a ball gown hunkered there among hay and animals. When the proctors arrived, they found Caesar and Lem’s date making out in the car. The proctors had seen more figures in the car than these supposed smoochers, and they sat in their car waiting. Caesar tore out of the farmyard and led the Choate teachers on a new chase, finally shaking them.

  “Finally, Pete Caesar came back and drove into the barnyard very fast; no other car was in sight,” Lem recalled. “Olive rushed out to the car and lay on the floor at Pussy’s feet with a coat thrown over her. I dashed to the back—Pete opened the trunk and I jumped in. He closed me in. We didn’t dare call for Jack—so we left him behind…. It was only a mile to the school…. He [Caesar] delivered Olive and myself to the dance and we danced into the crowd together despite the fact that Olive had lost one heel from her shoe and looked a pretty mess. About a half an hour later, I’m glad to report, Jack showed up.”

  Jack had one other parting gift for dear old Choate. As one of the last acts of the year, the seniors voted for yearbook honors in a number of categories. The highest honor of all was “Most Likely to Succeed,” given inevitably to a serious, studious young man who exemplified all the Choate ideals. Jack was as likely to win in that category as to be asked to give a sermon in chapel. Jack’s friends, however, waged a vigorous, whimsical campaign, and he not only won the signal honor but won it overwhelmingly. It was a final poke in the eye for Choate as he drove out the gates for the last time.

  7

  The Harvard Game

  While other Harvard freshmen lit up cigarettes, trying to look grown up, nineteen-year-old Joe Jr. smoked a cigar, puffing on it, as his friend said, “like an old man of the world.” Like his father before him, Joe Jr. arrived at Harvard a year older than most of his classmates, and he seemed even more mature. He was six feet tall and 175 pounds, a genial, expansive figure who strutted across Harvard Yard in the fall of 1934 as if he knew that he belonged in the steps that he trod. He may have been four generations from the wheat fields of County Wexford, but his blood was Irish and he had a handsome, full-blown Irish face, with wide cheeks and
perfect white teeth owing to his mother’s obsession with orthodontia.

  Joe Jr. was used to servants, helpmates, and advisers, and his father’s stipend of $125 a month was enough to enable him to live far better than most of his contemporaries. He was not one of those who thought the tutoring services of Harvard Square an unfair, cynical business that destroyed much of what a college education was supposed to be. He availed himself so much of the tutors that at least one of his contemporaries believed he used them for every one of his classes. He wasn’t about to clean up after himself either. He had his own valet, George Taylor, a black man who passed out business cards proudly announcing that he was a “gentleman’s gentleman.”

  Joe Jr. was the kind of Harvard man his father had aspired to be, but without his father’s overweening social calculation and youthful self-consciousness. Joe Jr. knew that the men of the Gold Coast looked down upon his kind, but it didn’t bother him as it had his father. If many of his friends were Catholics, it was simply that he enjoyed their company. He had met his closest friend, Timothy “Ted” Reardon, a fellow Catholic, one day after freshman football practice when Joe Jr. asked him to stay after and throw the ball around.

  Joe wanted sons of matchless physical courage, privileged sons whose money and education had not tempered their toughness. Joe Jr. was fearless, taking pure joy in the crunch of a hard tackle or a savage block, in either football or rugby. His picture was featured in Life in a story on a rugby game against Cambridge University; he stood on the sidelines, his head bandaged, a wounded gladiator ready to go back into the fray. He broke his arm playing football in the spring of 1935, but that accident hardly slowed him.

  Joe Jr. did not leave his intrepid spirit behind when he left the football field. One winter night he was walking near Harvard Square when he heard a woman’s anguished screams. When he turned and saw that a man was beating her, he could have called for the police or admonished the attacker to stop. Instead, Joe Jr. charged the man and started flailing away. The police arrived to find two men fighting in the street. Joe Jr. ended up spending the night in jail, a rare setting for a Harvard student.