The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Jack, not Joe Jr., had written Why England Slept, winning the first major laurels of adult life. Yet he did not have the imposing dignity and presence that Joe Jr. could don like evening clothes and shuck just as easily. Jack was twenty-three years old, though he looked far younger. He had the same sloppy nonchalance about his wardrobe that he had about the world. His boyish insouciance may have been irresistible to women but hardly marked him as a future leader.

  At times Jack talked about becoming a journalist. He could have parlayed his book and its stellar reviews into a position that would have been the envy of his friends at the Harvard Crimson. He thought about law, but that was a tedious regimen at best, and he could not face the prospect, especially with his star-crossed health. Instead, after graduating from Harvard, he decided in the fall to go out to northern California to study at Stanford University. He would be a nondegree student, able to pick his way through whatever courses took his fancy.

  In late September 1940, Jack took a small apartment at The Cottage, a modest complex popular among graduate students. “Still can’t get used to the Co-eds,” he wrote Lem, “but am … taking it very slow as do not want to be known as the beast of the East.” That aspect of Stanford had its unique appeal to the handsome heir. It was a tonic watching the book-toting, chattering coeds hurry across the quad in their obligatory silk stockings.

  Jack may have been unformed in other parts of his life, but he had established his adult sex life. His bad back required him to sleep on a bed board. That was an ideal excuse to have women do what he wanted them to do.

  “Because of his back he preferred making love with the girl on top,” recalled Susan Imhoff, one of the first coeds to make a visit to Jack’s room at The Cottage. “He found it more stimulating to have the girl do all the work. I remember he didn’t enjoy cuddling after making love, but he did like to talk and had a wonderful sense of humor—he loved to laugh.”

  Jack had a taste for gloriously attractive, smart women, but as eagerly as they entered into their affairs with him, they usually left with a sense of disquiet. They may have had other affairs that did not end well, but there was something deeply unsettling about Jack. He swept down on women, wooing them with his charm and wit, and then flew off again, never having been touched, leaving only a whiff of emotion.

  Jack was no crude predator who lured women to his room, but a sly, sophisticated gamesman who seduced by seeming not to seduce. Once a woman succumbed, he quickly and efficiently disposed of the matter. As much as he might pretend otherwise, the fact that a woman slept with him showed that she was no better than all the others. “I’m not interested—once I get a woman,” he told his Stanford friend Henry James. “I like the conquest. That’s the challenge. I like the contest between male and female—that’s what I like. It’s the chase I like—not the kill!”

  Jack pursued one coed, Harriet “Flip” Price, more than any of the others. Harriet was beautiful, intelligent, wellborn, and athletic. For all his desire to score yet another conquest, Jack was not the sort to promise eternal fidelity or to vow that when he looked into Harriet’s eyes he heard wedding bells. They laughed and joked together and had sweet good times riding around in Jack’s new Buick convertible.

  As much as Jack wooed her, and as much as she felt herself “wildly in love,” Harriet would not sleep with him. Virginity was part of her capital. She was not going to exchange it for anything less than marriage. Beneath it all, they shared the belief that marriage was too serious a business to leave solely to the whims of romance. “I think Jack knew what he was doing all the time,” Harriet recalled. “And I think he knew exactly what kind of woman he wanted to marry, and did exactly what he set out to do.” And so, indeed, did Harriet.

  Jack hid from Harriet how troubled he was about his health, though he could hardly disguise the fact that after an hour of driving his back hurt so much that he had to stop for a while. Jack was chosen high in the draft in October 1940. He was fully aware of the irony of what a war it would be if it were fought with the likes of him. “This draft has caused me a lot of concern,” he wrote Lem in November. “They will never take me into the army, and yet if I don’t it will look quite bad. I may be able to work out some sort of thing.” He understood that his very manhood was at stake, and he could not sit on the curb waving a flag while other young men paraded off to war.

  Jack often did not show up for class and rarely participated in discussions, and by that measure he appeared little more than a silly dilettante and playboy. Harriet saw that beneath the veneer of frivolity and merciless wit Jack was deeply concerned with the world around him. He struggled to forge his own ideas, and in doing so he struggled for an identity apart from and beyond his father.

  Joe was a fierce and powerful force who gave no quarter. “When I hear these mental midgets [in the United States] talking about my desire for appeasement and being critical of it, my blood fairly boils,” Joe wrote Jack in September, as if to say that if his son veered from Joe’s truth he too would shrink to nothing in his father’s estimation. “What is this war going to prove?”

  Jack was at an age when most men have resolved their feelings about their parents, but he talked to Harriet endlessly about Joe. “He talked about his father’s infidelities,” she recalled. “I think his father was a tremendous influence. I don’t think there’s any question about that, but not all to the good! It seemed to me that his father’s obvious rather low opinion of his wife and the way he treated her, that some of that rubbed off on Jack. He wasn’t mean or anything about his mother, but I think that denigration, that came from the father rubbed off on the son. And that’s where all the womanizing and everything came from!”

  Jack’s relationship with his father was changing, evolving into a far more complicated bond than what Joe had with his other sons. Jack no longer simply mimicked his father’s behavior and ideas. After Joe’s selfdestructive

  candor with the Boston Globe, Jack began work on a document suggesting how his father should reply to his critics. Joe pressured him as he would any subordinate. WHEN WILL OUTLINE ON THAT APPEASEMENT ARTICLE BE READY REGARDS JOSEPH KENNEDY, he cabled Jack from Palm Beach early in December.

  The nine-page, single-spaced letter was the first truly political document Jack ever wrote. His father considered the British a weak, shuffling, defeatist people who would be stomped into the earth by the Nazi jackboots. Jack wanted Joe to say: “I have seen the English stand with their backs to the wall and not whimper. I have seen the grim determination.”

  Jack told his father that he would have to temper his candor and camouflage his bitter truth. “I don’t mean that you should change your ideas or be all things to all men,” he told Joe, “but I do mean that you should express your views in such a way that it will be difficult to indict you as an appeaser unless they indict themselves as war mongers.”

  For the first time Joe treated Jack as an intellectual equal, and his son responded with an astutely calculated defense of the ambassador’s tenure. In Jack’s memo there is nothing of deference; the document simply reflects two men dealing with a problem. Jack had some sound ideas for his father, but truth was no more than an occasional visitor to these pages, welcome only when it would burnish Joe’s image. Jack had articulately presented his father’s case, but in the end Joe decided not to defend himself in such a dramatic manner.

  When Jack flew out of San Francisco after his semester at Stanford, he sat in the United Airlines plane to Los Angeles writing a note to his father, further elucidating his views. A good politician learns to treat policies the way a good doctor prescribes medicine, always aware that its side effects may outweigh its benefits. Jack was opposed to American entry into the war, though he sensed that it would come. He feared that the isolationist movement had led to the diminution of the aid America was giving to a beleaguered Britain. “The danger of our not giving Britain enough aid, of not getting Congress and the country stirred up sufficiently to give England the aid she needs now—
is to me just as great as the danger of our getting into war now—as it is much more likely.”

  Jack sensed what might happen if Germany defeated Britain. He envisioned America “alone in a strained and hostile world,” spending “enormous sums for defense yearly” with the electorate asking “why we were so stupid as not to have given Britain all possible aid.”

  As Jack flew away, Harriet missed her beau enormously. Who else among her acquaintances could change in the space of a few minutes from a cheerful, witty young man whose greatest attribute was his charm to an adult pondering the dark question of his time, and then back again to his gay, seemingly carefree self? He seemed to express so much less than he felt, and to feel so much less than he thought.

  To Jack, being emotionally vulnerable was like being bound in silk so fine that it was hardly noticeable until he sought to pull away. He could not abide the idea that he might have exposed himself to Harriet by something he said or felt or wrote. “As I remember some of your most interesting mornings would be the mornings you spent reading your letters from your beaus in the East to a squad which you gathered down at the restaurant,” he wrote her on October 9, 1941. “Do me a favor and don’t read this.”

  The couple exchanged letters for a number of months as the romance faded away like the images in old photographs. In one note Harriet told Jack that she was almost killed in an automobile accident; thrown out of her car after hitting a tree, she was miraculously unhurt. “But as you say ‘That’s the way it goes,’ “she wrote.

  That was one of Jack’s favorite phrases. His father believed that life was something that a man could create in his own image. Jack believed that fate was the god to whom one showed obeisance, not by prayers, but by shrugs.

  Shortly after reading Jack’s ardent missive about the dangers of simple-minded isolationism, Joe decided to testify before Congress in favor of aid to Britain. Joe agreed with Jack now that the best way to keep out of war was to build up the American defense and send ships full of armaments to England from what Roosevelt called “the arsenal of democracy.”

  As for Joe Jr., he had taken the isolationist torch from his father. He was now one of the most vocal leaders of the Harvard movement. While his father was presenting a very different message before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Joe Jr. was back in Boston at the Foreign Policy Association fervently arguing that the United States should not send convoys of food and weapons or it would find itself standing next to Britain in the front lines.

  Joe Jr. made one unusual point for a man so passionate in his isolationist beliefs. He said that if most Americans decided they wanted to go to war, he was willing to go too. Joe Jr. hoped to be president. He could feel the winds of war blowing in across the Atlantic.

  If Joe Jr. held his position too long and too firmly, he risked seeing his political future swept away, a minor casualty in all the carnage of war. He saw himself as a proud patriot, not as a pacifist or an ironic bystander like his younger brother. “I think in that Jack is not doing anything,” Joe Jr. wrote his father early in 1941, “and with your stand on the war, that people will wonder what the devil I am doing back at school with everyone else working for national defense.”

  In June 1941, months before many student internationalists who despised Joe Jr.’s views even thought of military service, Joe Jr. enlisted in the Naval Aviation Cadet Program. His physical examination at the Chelsea Naval Hospital showed him to be in splendid condition, standing five-feet-eleven, weighing in at 175 pounds, and bearing not a single glitch on his health. Joe had greased things as best he could for his namesake, writing his son that he had set up the navy physical on “a personal favor basis” and then arranging for him to see Admiral Chester Nimitz in Washington.

  Not every cadet arrived at Squantum Naval Air Facility that summer escorted by such a notable as Joe Timilty, the Boston police commissioner, driving his official car. Nor had most cadets taken private flying lessons, as Joe Jr. had done thanks to a family friend, Benedict Fitzgerald. He nonetheless underwent the same rigors as the other cadets, facing a gauntlet that washed out half the would-be pilots. He ran double-time between classes and studied the arcane minutiae of navigation. He sat in a double cockpit with instructors who liked nothing better than to wash out another incompetent wretch who, if not for their good judgment, would one day have lost a good plane, killing himself in the bargain.

  For the Fourth of July weekend, Joe Jr. returned to Hyannis Port. The Kennedys were a family of special occasions, and no holiday was so brilliantly memorialized as the nation’s birthday. “Year after year, they were the highlights of our summers on Cape Cod,” Teddy recalled nearly four decades later. “Even today, I can see the gaily decorated porch, the long wooden table piled high with boiled potatoes and green peas and its centerpiece of fresh salmon, which Dad had brought in from New Hampshire or Maine, or even Newfoundland if he’d heard that the best salmon were running there.”

  The table was as heavily laden with food as ever, and the laughter as deep, but over the gathering hung Joe’s terrible fear that if war came there would never be a family gathering like this again. Joe Jr. and Jack, along with their father, dominated the conversations. Kathleen, Eunice, Pat, and Jean adored their brothers. They were honored enough just being there without injecting themselves often into the manly conversation. Rosemary sat there too, slightly reticent, a gentle presence, never entering into the quick-witted repartee. Bobby and Teddy were observers of their big brothers and the great world about which they reported like scouts back from reconnaissance.

  The major event of the weekend was the Fourth of July sailboat race. As they always did, the whole family went down to the pier, where they piled into a motor launch to watch Jack or Joe Jr. lead the pack of sailboats to victory.

  For the most part Jack and Joe Jr. ignored their baby brother, but this afternoon Jack motioned to little Teddy to join him in his beloved sloop, Victura, to serve as his crew. As splendid a moment as it was for Teddy, he must surely have dreaded that Jack might do what Joe Jr. had done four years before, dumping him in the water in frustrated competitive zeal.

  If victory had been what mattered today, Teddy might have found himself tossed into the drink like unwanted ballast. But on this day, unlike so many others, something else mattered more than coming in first. “We lost, but I admired Jack all the more, because he should have blamed me and didn’t,” Teddy recalled. “Winning was important, he said, but loving sailing was even more important.”

  Jack and Joe Jr. left after the weekend, but Bobby and Teddy stayed at Hyannis Port for the summer. They were only boys, but even they could sense how much their world was changing. Their father was selling their house in Bronxville, the only home they had ever known. From now on they would live itinerant, if privileged, childhoods, shuttled between vacation homes and boarding schools.

  Bobby had started out at St. Paul’s, but Rose decided that the Episcopalian school was more interested in proselytizing an untrue faith than educating her seventh child. She transferred him to Portsmouth Priory, where she believed the Benedictines would educate him in true Catholic principles. Rose’s letters to her son were as preachy as anything Bobby heard in chapel (“Remember, too, that it is a reflection on my brains as the boys in the family are supposed to get their intellect from their mother, and certainly I do not expect my own little pet to let me down”). He tried to make his name an emblem of success, working hard to get decent grades and make the football team. He was as mediocre at one as the other and ended up as the manager of the hockey team.

  Bobby was always struggling to keep up and to achieve the honors that his brothers won with such grace and ease. Bobby wanted to swim as fast as Joe Jr. and Jack, to throw the football as far, and to stand as high in his class, but he had neither the brawn of his biggest brother nor the brains of either one. He had another weakness for a boy who sought to compete in his brothers’ manly world—a passionate religious faith that tempered everything he sought to do
.

  One day at Portsmouth, Bobby was studying for his final Latin exam when his closest friend, Pierce Kearney, came rushing into the room. In his hand he held a smudged mimeographed paper that had been plucked out of the housemaster’s wastebasket. “Look, Bob, what we’ve got,” Pierce said, pushing the document toward him. “It’s tomorrow’s exam!”

  Bobby began to tremble, in Kearney’s recollection, “shaking like a leaf.” In the end Bobby scribbled some desultory notes and passed the paper back to his friend. For Bobby, quivering as he nervously perused the questions, this moment was a precursor to the great moral dilemmas of his life.

  Bobby wanted to be what he thought his brothers were and what his father told him he must be, but he did not have what he considered their great and noble gifts. He struggled harder than they ever did, but even that wasn’t enough to lead him to the head of the crowd. Everywhere he looked along the marathon of his life he saw moral shortcuts, hidden routes that might lead him to the front of the pack.

  This was tempting, but Bobby was not simply moral, but moralistic. He had to be able to justify his actions in the name of goodness. On this occasion Bobby didn’t take down all the questions. He could probably rationalize that he was doing something different from the boys who cribbed every answer, that his actions were a cut above those of the cheats and the dissemblers.

  Rose sent Teddy to join his brother at Portsmouth in May 1941. He arrived in short pants, a pudgy, freckled-faced Little Lord Fauntleroy led up the driveway by his impeccably attired father. Teddy was at a double disadvantage: he was several years younger than the other boys, and he had been unceremoniously placed at the school most of the way through the year. That was the story of Teddy’s childhood, shuttled from school to school, ten in all, adhering to his parents’ schedules, rarely staying long enough to make real friends. “That was hard to take,” Teddy reflected. “I can’t remember all those schools. I mean, at that age, you just go with the punches. Finally I got through schools where I spent some time learning and trying to find out where the dormitory is and the gym.”