The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  In the fall of 1936, Jack joined Joe Jr. at Harvard, where his father had thought he belonged in the first place. That he was willing to transfer suggested that Jack was moving closer to accepting the family destiny that his father had laid out for him. Joe Jr. was a young man of rare popularity, a football player and an exemplary Harvard man, and at first Jack had to nestle into what was his brother’s world.

  “Dr. Wild, I want you to know I’m not bright like my brother Joe,” he told Payson S. Wild, an assistant professor of government and the acting master of Winthrop House. Jack placed his feet in his brother’s large footsteps, even sleeping often on a couch in Joe Jr.’s suite at Winthrop House. If Jack had been too small, weak, and vulnerable for football at Choate, then he was too small, weak, and vulnerable for football at Harvard. He was a Kennedy, though, and he had to play football. He had gained weight, but even at 160 pounds on his tall, still-weakened frame, he remained a gnat that runners swatted away as they dashed down the field. He was quickly demoted to the freshman “B” team, which was beaten by the likes of a prep school such as Exeter.

  Jack found a different and more familiar way to stand out among his football teammates. He invited five of them down to Hyannis Port, enticing them with the prospect of dates that his father’s aide, Eddie Moore, had set up for them. “Four of us had dates and one guy got fucked 3 times, another guy 3 times (the girl a virgin!) + myself twice,” Jack wrote Lem. The former virgin had the considerable audacity to write her date “a very sickening letter letting [him know] how much she loved him etc + as he didn’t use a safer he is very worried. One guy is up at the doctor’s seeing if he has a dose + and I feel none too secure myself. We are going down next week for a return performance, I think.”

  Few Harvard freshmen could provide such splendid weekends for their classmates, and they doubtless spread tales of their wonderful new friend, a swordsman who understood the true meaning of hospitality. When the coaches heard about the famous weekend in Hyannis Port, Jack found himself not only berated but also demoted even further to the third team. He might not ever win his crimson “H,” but there were other kinds of honors. “I am now known as ‘Play-boy,’ “he wrote Lem. It was a label that would stick with him the rest of his life.

  “I swear I don’t think he ever made love to a girl, told her how wonderful she was, how sweet she was,” reflected Rip Horton. “I just don’t think he ever did that. I don’t know but I don’t think so. I don’t think he was sentimental. I don’t think he was ever dependent on the companionship of a girl. He always felt they were a useful thing to have when you wanted them, but when you didn’t want them, put them back.”

  Jack further enhanced his reputation as “Play-boy” Kennedy by chairing the Freshman Smoker Committee. Jack not only snared Gertrude Niesen, a stunning singing star, but also had the considerable audacity to think that the singer might put on two performances that evening in Cambridge, one before his classmates, and a second for him alone. He wanted to fly down to New York to escort her back to Boston but lost the coin toss to his classmate Hunt Hamill. Jack was there, however, at the airport to greet Niesen and, with his friends, spent several hours with her before the performance.

  Joe Jr. had made a triumph of his own freshman smoker, and he considered Niesen his droit du seigneur. “Get lost, Baby Brother,” he told Jack abruptly. “I’ll take over.” That was a phrase that Jack had heard more than once, but after all, it was Miss Niesen’s choice. “I was very young,” she recalled decades later. “And it was very exciting, very flattering, very wonderful. Joe was a terribly good-looking guy. He was much better looking than Jack at that particular time. If I’d been a little older and really understood what was going on—”

  Jack had a wondrously wry sense of humor. With women he could be playfully piquant and flirtatious but rarely crossed over the border into rudeness or vulgarity. His wit cascaded out of him. Niesen matched him rejoinder for rejoinder. Her performance that evening was a triumph for the singer herself, but equally so for Jack. “Gertrude Niesen was just enjoying the hell out of it, and Jack Kennedy was joking with her the whole time,” Rousmanière recalled. “Suffice it to say that Jack was not there at the end. Hunt Hamill was there at the end with Gertrude Niesen. But it was the culminating social event of the year, and Kennedy was the chairman of the committee. That was his first political success.”

  In his sophomore year, Jack moved into a Winthrop House in which his brother was one of the leading figures. Like his father before him, Jack’s overwhelming concern that year was not his class work but his admission to a proper club. The clubs had stayed as they were since his father’s day, places where a gentleman ate and drank and socialized. Those with social aspirations still roundly desired membership. The clubmen were invited to all the fancy debutante events in Boston—dances at the Somerset, the Ritz, the Women’s Republican Club, and the Brookline Country Club.

  Despite the unchanging rituals of the final clubs, life outside of them was moving away from the purview of the good gentlemen of the clubs. Jack’s profound identification with the club world, and his calculated and diligent quest for membership, set him far apart from an emerging new Harvard that sought to break down not only the walls within Harvard but also the walls that enclosed it.

  Jack’s approach was not that much different from his father’s. He surrounded himself with a mix of the socially prominent leavened with star athletes. The blue-blooded Rousmanière was one of his close friends in Winthrop House. Jack had also befriended Torbert “Torby” Macdonald, a football star, who became his roommate their sophomore year. When the ten clubs started sending out their invitations to their socials, where the clubmen had an opportunity to assess possible new members, Jack and Torby were rarely asked. Half a century later Rousmanière could say simply: “I guess he [Macdonald] wanted to be part of it, but Torby would have been a hard sell,” leaving the implications unsaid.

  Not only was Torby a Catholic, but his father was a high school football coach. As the clubmen saw it, Jack was a hard sell too, with his ethnic background, his dubious faith, his questionable father, and the fact that not all playboys were gentlemen. In his favor were his wit and charm. He was a devotee of New York clubs and the high life, and undeniably wealthy. In sum, he was a plausible candidate, but just barely. Rousmanière and two of his eminently acceptable friends, Peter E. Pratt and William C. Coleman Jr., agreed that they would go together with Jack as a package. “It was obvious that only a couple of clubs were going to accept Jack Kennedy,” Rousmanière recalled. “And we, the three of us, said okay, we’ll play it out. In the end the Spee Club became the one place that seemed to be acceptable. So that’s what happened.”

  Jack was a clubman of the first order, spending most of his free time at the handsome ivy-covered building at 76 Mount Auburn Street and taking most of his meals there. There was no one-way mirror at Spee, as there was at the Porcellian, from which the clubmen could stare unwatched at the outside world, but Jack and his friends looked on from afar at much of the Harvard world. The intellectual climate of Harvard in the thirties had been immensely broadened since Joe’s days, both by the greater diversity of the students and faculty and by the dangerous world that lay outside the open gates of the college. Of course, there were still such undergraduate endeavors goldfish gulping, reported on the front page of the Harvard Crimson, or a kissing contest, but these activities were nothing but the spring silliness of any college generation. The students were at times confronted with a diversity of ideas as wide as that in the outer world. The faculty included Granville Hicks, a 1923 graduate and a Communist, as well as Earnest A. Hooton, an anthropology professor and eugenicist who believed that robbers could be discerned by such distinctive marks as “attached ear lobes, heavy beards, and diffused pigment in the iris.” New Dealers shuttled down to Washington, trading in their professional gowns for the mantles of power. In Cambridge, students and faculty alike debated Roosevelt’s reforms. A few Communist undergraduates
met regularly, while on the right-wing extreme a group calling itself Yankee-American Action held discussions at the university.

  At Winthrop House, Galbraith was intensely interested in the debates of his time and surrounded himself with students of like mind. The young professor made a quick judgment that Jack was not serious, but an amusing dilettante, whose main elective was the opposite sex. Though it might have been pleasurable being around Jack, pleasure was a dangerous business for an ambitious young scholar, hardly a commodity of value in his academic world. “One did not cultivate such students,” Galbraith reflected.

  Even some of Jack’s fellow students kept a wary distance from him, lest they too suffer some dreary consequence. One of them, Blair Clark, watched in appalled fascination as Jack hustled waitresses from Dorchester in and out of Winthrop House. Clark was convinced that sooner or later Jack would find himself expelled.

  “Jack devoted himself to personal enjoyment, social matters, but Joe Jr. sought out members of the faculty, sought me out, particularly perhaps, and was enormously interested in world affairs, much more so than Jack,” Galbraith recalled. “Jack had a social agenda to pursue. Joe Jr. had a much stronger scholarly bent.”

  Joe Jr. may have impressed his professors with his high seriousness, but he was hardly the kind of student to bury himself in the bowels of Widener Library. Even Jack was impressed with his brother, the swordsman. “Did you see about Joe in Winchell’s column—Quote—‘Boston Romance—J. P. Kennedy Jr., The Wall Street’s lad, and Helen Buck of the Boston Back-Bay bunch, are keeping warm,’” Jack wrote Lem. “Fucking gold-fish is the way I would describe it.”

  For Joe Jr., a football weekend was exactly that, and after the Harvard-Princeton game he and his friend Tom Bilodeau jumped the team train in New York and headed out for an evening in the most elegant boîte of the city. Sherman Billingsley, the owner of the Stork Club, practically invented cafe society, that spirited mix of the wealthy amiables of both sexes, stunning young women, stars, politicians, and the transitory celebrities of the gossip columns. To gauge one’s place in this new society, all a person had to do was show up at the Stork Club without a reservation.

  Joe Jr. did not have to wait behind the velvet rope but was immediately shown to a good table. As he scanned the room, his eyes tended to focus on the most beautiful women in the club. There at a ringside table sat a gorgeous young woman, and next to her none other than John F. Kennedy. Joe Jr. thought of the Stork Club as his club, and he was hardly amused that his brother should have usurped what he considered rightfully his. Joe Jr. went immediately to a pay phone and paged Jack. As Jack threaded his way back through the tables to take the call, his brother hurried to ringside and, with a dialogue as original as it was duplicitous, talked the young woman into leaving with the two Harvard football players before Jack returned. Later that evening, when the two young men arrived at the Bronxville house after escorting the woman to her apartment, Jack was already there, angry enough to want to fight his big brother.

  This was hardly the only time the two brothers came close to drawing blood. Joe Jr. was usually the instigator. He could couch even his best advice with such cavalier dismissal that Jack was bound to do just the opposite. On the football field in the fall of 1936, Joe Jr. jogged over from the varsity to where Jack was practicing with the other freshmen. As Torby listened in, Joe Jr. said: “Jack, if you want my opinion, you’d be better off forgetting about football. You just don’t weigh enough and you’re going to get hurt.”

  Torby could see his friend’s face flash with anger at Joe Jr.’s arrogant dismissal of his athletic prospects. “Come off it, Joe,” Torby exclaimed, interjecting himself between the brothers. “Jack doesn’t need any looking after.” Instead of echoing his friend’s sentiments, Jack turned on Torby: “Mind your own business! Keep out of it! I’m talking to Joe, not you.”

  Joe Jr. was right. Jack should not have been out on the football field. In a scrimmage the next year Jack would hurt a spinal disc so severely that not only would his third-rate football career be over, but he would suffer from back problems the rest of his life. That was Jack’s legacy from the Kennedys’ obsession with football—an often-debilitating pain that plagued him and at times nearly crippled him. Here on the field of play where he was supposed to have won the laurels of true manhood, he would hurt himself in such a deep and largely unperceivable way that much of his life became a struggle to pretend that he walked as other men did, and to prove that his spirit would never be crippled.

  Torby was not the only friend to learn that as disputatious as the Kennedy brothers might seem, their father had taught them to stand arms linked against the world. Despite this commonality, both young Kennedys stood at a distance from everyone else around them, and apart from each other as well. “I suppose I knew Joe [Jr.] as well as anyone, and yet I sometimes wonder whether I ever really knew him,” Jack reflected a decade later. “He had always a slight detachment from things around him—a wall of reserve which few people ever succeeded in penetrating.” Jack could as easily have been speaking of himself as his big brother.

  Joe Jr. and Jack were not like so many young men who defined their own manhood by thrusting off from their father’s vision of the world. Joe Jr. largely affirmed his father’s world as his own, while Jack steered warily around Joe’s mammoth presence in search of his own identity. Both sons, however, not only tolerated their father’s sexual mores but largely adopted them and were endlessly amused by them.

  When Joe Jr. and Jack went to Hyannis Port, they were not surprised to find their father seated in the front row of the private movie theater next to his latest blonde “secretary” while their mother stood in the background, a shadowy, silent presence. They found it, if anything, droll that their father cast his lecherous eye on any young woman, even their own dates. Nor did they find it irregular that their parents had separate apartments in New York.

  As the Kennedys saw it, they were not a jaded family in which appearance was the only reality and hypocrisy passed as a code of honor. Joe Jr., Jack, and all their brothers and sisters considered that they had a great, loyal, caring family. In their own minds, they could integrate all these contradictions where some outsiders saw only falsehood. They could see too that what passed as family among many of their peers was pallid kinship. That was why their friends loved being around them, for the Kennedys lived with passionate intensity and with reverential attention to all the formalities of family. Joe might parade his mistresses in front of his wife, but at the dinner table his sons stood up when their mother entered and left the room. Joe Jr. and Jack respected their mother, but their love for their father was deeper, more emotional, and full of complexity.

  When Joe arrived at Winthrop House in the fall of 1937 to give a guest lecture, Joe Jr. and Jack entered the room just as their father was about to be introduced. They stood in the back waiting to greet their father after his talk was over. Joe, however, called his sons forward, and in front of their friends the two young Kennedys kissed their father.

  Joe treated the students to a dramatic, intimate narrative of the life of power in Washington. By then he was justly celebrated as the man who in only fourteen months as SEC chairman had shored up the foundations of capitalism, paring away the mechanisms that had allowed men like himself to make fortunes that risked destroying the very system that had so richly benefited them. Joe had gone on in 1937 to a ten-month stint as chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission, where he had for the most part further distinguished himself.

  As candid as he was, Joe did not let the Winthrop men in on what he considered the inner secrets of power. Joe was a man who believed that life did not just happen, but that the inspired few created a world that the mediocre masses accepted as truth. Part of that creation was the image that Joe created for his family. He was hungry for praise for himself and for his sons. The Kennedy men lived in the glow of publicity in part because Joe importuned those who held the spotlight to shine it brightly on them and
their achievements.

  Joe received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, a prize that the unwary would have thought came to him unbidden. The reality was that in 1937, his friend Bernard Baruch, the financier, donated $62,500 to Oglethorpe, an institution that had a reputation largely as a diploma mill. A few weeks later Baruch received a letter from a school official saying that he would recommend Joe for an honorary degree. That same day Baruch wrote Joe asking him which honorary doctorate degree he preferred. “I never heard of any but Laws but you’re the chairman,” Joe wrote back.

  Two years later Arthur Krock, the New York Times Washington bureau chief and columnist, attempted unsuccessfully to obtain another honorary degree for Joe from Krock’s alma mater, Princeton. Krock was one of the most powerful journalists in America, and yet he moonlighted as a hapless flack for the Kennedys, compromising his integrity. He wrote Joe’s 1936 campaign tract, Why I’m for Roosevelt, wrote glowing columns about the man and his sons, and was available for editorial services and shameless shilling for any family member.

  Joe Jr.’s Harvard friend Charles Houghton was startled to see that any event, even a sailboat race, that involved Jack or Joe Jr. received enormous publicity, and he thought he had puzzled out one reason why. “The old man hired Arthur Krock for twenty-five thousand dollars to keep the Kennedy name in the papers,” Houghton said. “The old man had a blue print…. Arthur Krock was supposed to publicize any member of the Kennedy family to make them look good. It’s the first time I ever heard about PR. This was back in 1937–38 when twenty-five thousand dollars was a lot of money.” Krock denied that Joe ever paid for his services. Whether paid or not, he was one of the first of many journalists to put his craft to work advancing the Kennedys’ careers more than he advanced the truth about them.