Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  I would get to know some of these men who’d been part of Jack’s story. Billy Sutton was one, the first guy hired, just off the train from the army. One day in the 1980s, I walked into a back room in Speaker Tip O’Neill’s suite of offices up in Boston. There was this little fellow sitting at a table. Moment by moment he would transform himself. One instant, he’d be Adlai Stevenson, gravely addressing the General Assembly. Next, he’d be Rose Kennedy, her voice high and churchy. It was as if she were standing there before me. No wonder Jack had called Billy his “firecracker.”

  Tip O’Neill, as you can tell from this book, was rich in stories, each shining with a love of the game that bonded him and Kennedy.

  Jack’s closest friends have helped me answer that question he himself gave for the reason people read biography. What was he like? Once, when I got Charlie Bartlett remembering his friend, he took his glasses off to dry his eyes as he thought back. Here’s what Charlie himself wrote in November 1963, upon first hearing the news:

  “We had a hero for a friend—and we mourn his loss. Anyone, and fortunately there were so many, who knew him briefly or over long periods, felt that a bright and quickening impulse had come into their life. He had uncommon courage, unfailing humor, a penetrating, ever-curious intelligence, and over all a matchless grace. He was our best. We will remember him always with love and sometimes, as the years pass and the story is retold, with a little wonder.”

  Chuck Spalding and Jack had been buddies since the year before the war. It was a matter of “chemistry,” Chuck said. When I asked him my question, “What was he like?” he said he’d answer by way of a story. It was back when he and his then-wife, Betty, were getting ready to go through divorce, not a good time for them. Still together, though, they were out on the dock one day when Jack joined them for a sail. Spotting their two faces, he said, “Ah, the agony and the ecstasy.” That’s what one of his closest lifetime pals said Jack Kennedy was like.

  I loved hearing Sally Fay, Red’s daughter, speak of the joy in her house each time the phone rang and it was Jack Kennedy. “The most charming man I ever knew,” George Smathers told me. His old Senate pal was thrilled when I told him how Jack explained liking him, saying the reason was because “he doesn’t give a damn.” Ben Bradlee, a good friend of mine as well, described Jack as having an “aura of royalty about him.”

  Robert Kennedy carried on, we know, never stopped trying to keep his brother’s spirit alive, until he, too, was stopped. Teddy surprised everyone. Jack had said his kid brother wanted to spend his life “chasing girls in the South of France.” But it didn’t happen that way. Jack was once asked to pick the greatest senators in history. Of course, he could only look backward. Had he been able to look forward, he might well have included his youngest brother.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served Kennedy as assistant secretary of labor, was the one who said, “There’s no point in being Irish if you don’t know the world’s going to someday break your heart.” He carried on Jack’s plan to make Pennsylvania Avenue, the presidential inaugural route, a corridor of grandeur. “Make it like Paris,” he’d said. Pat once remarked to me, in a very personal way, his feeling about the events of November 1963: “We’ve never gotten over it.” Then, looking at me with generous appreciation, he added, “You’ve never gotten over it.” I saw it as a kind of benediction, an acceptance into something warm and Irish and splendid, a knighthood of the soulful.

  In a 2009 national poll, people were asked to say which American president deserves to be added to Mount Rushmore. It’s a good question, because it really gets to heroic stature. Who should be there with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and, especially the old “Rough Rider” himself, Teddy Roosevelt? They chose John F. Kennedy.

  In July 1969, a fellow volunteer of mine sat on a hillside in Swaziland with a group of local villagers looking at the night sky. He wanted them to sit and watch with him. Finally it arrived overhead, what they were looking for: a small light moving in the distance. It was his countrymen heading to the moon. That Saturn rocket Jack so loved had done its job; so had his Peace Corps.

  Twenty years later, the Berlin Wall came down. I was there on a drizzly night that November with the beaten-down East Germans, waiting for the Brandenburg Gate to open. When I asked what “freedom” meant to him, a young man answered, “talking to you.” Jack Kennedy would like to have heard that, deserved to, I think. The Iron Curtain was being ripped aside. Communism was in its death throes. The Cold War was ending without the nuclear war we so feared. We had gotten through it alive, those of us who once hid under those little desks of ours.

  Thanks to him, I’d say. He’d come a long way from the kid who caused trouble at boarding school, from being Joe Kennedy’s son. In the time of our greatest peril, at the moment of ultimate judgment, an American president kept us from the brink, saved us really, kept the smile from being stricken from the planet.

  He did that. He, Jack Kennedy.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The person I owe most for this book’s completion is my son Michael Matthews. At a critical juncture, he transformed a mountain of historic material—chapter themes, interview transcripts, oral histories and citations from other sources—into coherent notes. He has a beautiful historic sense.

  I want to thank Michele Slung for an editing and literary craft that gave shape and life to my narrative.

  I owe my TV producer Tina Urbanski for her role at every stage of Jack Kennedy. Taking on this project amid the schedule of six television programs a week is a chore no one can accomplish alone.

  I want to thank Helen O’Donnell for providing me with the vast oral history recorded by her father with correspondent Sander Vanocur. Kenneth O’Donnell was at Jack Kennedy’s side from that first senate race in 1952 to the end. His sharp political mind is well on display here. It took a reporter of Vanocur’s moxie to ask him just the right questions, and ask them he did.

  I want to thank the inimitable Vincent Virga for the design and selection of the photographs that give this book its artistic completion. He is a visual choreographer. I want to thank U.S. Congressman Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Mark Johnson, a teacher of history, for reviewing my manuscript with sharpness and intelligence.

  In an important way, this book emerges from my decades of real-time interest in Jack Kennedy. It benefits, of course, from the foundation of research I did for Kennedy & Nixon. Two other books have provided sturdy scaffoldings: Nigel Hamilton’s JFK: Reckless Youth, the best-ever work on Kennedy’s early life, and Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life, which reveals for the first time his full medical history.

  I need to credit Jon Meacham, author of Franklin and Winston, for the inspiration on how to craft this biography from the perspectives of those around him.

  Jack Kennedy lived his life in a golden circle of friends and close associates. By bringing together their firsthand memories, I’ve sought to bring to life the man at their center. For the first-person accounts in this book I interviewed many witnesses to the life of Jack Kennedy: Letitia Baldridge, Charles Bartlett, Benjamin Bradlee, Mark Dalton, Fred and Nancy Dutton, Red Fay, Paul Ferber, John Glenn, Lester Hyman, Peter Kaplan, Patrick Lucey, Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., Dave Powers, Terri Robinson, Tazewell Shepard, George Smathers, Ted Sorensen, Chuck Spalding, Billy Sutton, Bill Wilson, Christopher Lawford, and, especially, Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith.

  For those I could not interview—Torbert Macdonald, James Reed, and Rip Horton—I depended on the oral histories archived at the John F. Kennedy Library. I owe the personal accounts of Lemoyne Billings to the excellent Jack and Lem: The Untold Story of an Extraordinary Friendship by David Pitts, as well as the wonderful chapter on the Jack-Lem relationship in Best of Friends by David Michaelis.

  I benefitted greatly from Thomas P. O’Neill’s Man of the House, Lawrence F. O’Brien’s No Final Victories, Red Fay’s The Pleasure of His Company, Ben Bradlee’s Conversations with Kennedy, Ted So
rensen’s Counselor, Deirdre Henderson’s Prelude to Leadership: The European Diary of John F. Kennedy: Summer 1945, and Arthur Schlesinger’s Journals.

  Other books on John F. Kennedy are essential to any understanding of him. Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy by Herbert Parmet, Kennedy by Theodore Sorensen, President Kennedy: Profile of Power by Richard Reeves, Mrs. Kennedy by Barbara Leaming, and A Thousand Days and Robert F. Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger.

  I need to thank Lorraine Connelly and Judy Donald of Choate Rosemary Hall for the great help in understanding Jack’s early years; David McKean, Tom Putnam, Laurie Austin and Maryrose Grossman of the John F. Kennedy Library and Christopher Peleo-Lazar who did the excellent research there for me.

  I also want to thank Phil Griffin, President of MSNBC; Hardball executive producer John Reiss; Nancy Nathan, executive producer of The Chris Matthews Show; and the committed production teams of both programs.

  I want to express my strong gratitude to Jennifer Walsh of William Morris Endeavor for her tremendous professional talent in bringing this project to completion. At Simon & Schuster, I want to thank Nicholas Greene, Jonathan Evans, Nancy Singer, Alexis Welby, Emer Flounders, Rachelle Andujar, Jackie Seow, Elisa Rivlin and Richard Rhorer. Most vital of all, I want to express my esteem for Editor-in-chief Jonathan Karp as editor, friend, pathfinder.

  For Jack Kennedy, like all the projects and hopes before, I thank Kathleen, to whom this book is dedicated, for forming the loving world in which this project was undertaken and completed.

  NOTES

  The sources for this book include my interviews for Kennedy & Nixon, published in 1996 (Simon & Schuster). In a number of cases—Charlie Bartlett, Ben Bradlee, Ted Sorensen—I returned to the same people for fresh interviews that centered on Jack Kennedy himself. With the passage of time, many of those I interviewed earlier—Billy Sutton, Dave Powers, Mark Dalton, Paul “Red” Fay, George Smathers, and the warmhearted Tip O’Neill—have died. I treasured the opportunity to know them and benefit from their generous accounts of life with Jack. I was able to add to their memories with new interviews with Jean Kennedy Smith, John Glenn, Rachel Mellon, and others.

  An extremely powerful resource for this book is the extraordinary collection of taped interviews with Kenneth O’Donnell made available to me by his daughter Helen. I refer to his sourcing as KOD. He was Jack Kennedy’s political strategist from the first Senate race in 1952 to the end. He offers a colorful account that gives this book a spine and spring it would not have otherwise. His leads a long list of oral histories (abbreviated herein as “OH”), most of them archived at the John F. Kennedy Library, that cover the man’s life from his teenage years onward.

  The key documents exhibited in this volume include a binder of chapel notes kept by George St. John, who was headmaster in the years Jack Kennedy attended Choate. Also vital to me are the scribbled and typed notes Theodore H. White kept of his historic interview with Jacqueline Kennedy on the night of November 29, 1963.

  A far more expansive source for me is the collection of great books written about John F. Kennedy, works I have come to respect enormously. Each section of this book relies on these remarkable efforts that have come before. Together they provide a scaffold for the new material I have been able to assemble and develop. I want to give full credit to the part these earlier works, some of them truly majestic, played in building the story of Jack Kennedy’s rise from rich kid to national hero.

  • • • •

  CHAPTER ONE: SECOND SON

  The greatest achievement in chronicling Jack’s younger years is JFK: Reckless Youth (New York: Random House, 1992) by Nigel Hamilton. It is a treasure trove of research up to and including his first political race. He did more than anyone to unearth the great story of Jack and his “Muckers Club” at Choate.

  There were two other valued sources for this early chapter. The first is Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917– 1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), which reveals Jack Kennedy’s medical history. The second is David Pitts’s equally revealing Jack and Lem: John F. Kennedy and Lem Billings: The Untold Story of an Extraordinary Friendship (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2008), which tells the wondrous story of Kennedy’s friendship with LeMoyne Billings, his Choate roommate and lifelong companion. I have relied here as before on Herbert Parmet’s Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1980). Barbara Leaming alerted me in Jack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) to the power of Winston Churchill in young Jack’s imagination and ambition.

  . . . .

  14 Joseph Kennedy’s handsome eldest boy: Parmet, p. 31.

  14 Jack Kennedy, almost as soon as he got to Choate: Examples of JFK’s early, wry sense of humor appear in Hamilton, pp. 83–84, 93.

  15 What happened to Jack when: Robert Kennedy’s recollection of his brother’s illnesses appears in his foreword to the 1964 edition of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage (New York: Harper, 1956), p. 8.

  15 So it was in the sickbed: Reading King Arthur and Sir Walter Scott, Leaming, p. 17.

  16 Leukemia was one of the grim possibilities: Dallek, An Unfinished Life, p. 77.

  16 “Ratface”: Joan Meyers, ed., John Fitzgerald Kennedy—As We Remember Him (New York: Atheneum, 1965), p. 15.

  16 “Gee, you’re a great mother”: Rose Kennedy, Times to Remember (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), p. 93. Francis Kellogg, a classmate of Jack’s, responded to a Choate class survey and wrote: “I remember clearly one thing which surprised me during my four years at Choate: to the best of my knowledge, I do not believe Jack was ever visited during those four years by either his mother or father.”

  16 Chilly and restrictive: Choate’s English influence, Parmet, p. 29.

  16 Perhaps because he suddenly: JFK’s going to church, Hamilton, p. 146.

  16 At night, he knelt next to his bed: David Michaelis, The Best of Friends: Profiles of Extraordinary Friendships (New York: Morrow, 1983), p. 137.

  16 He understood, too: Parmet, p. 33.

  17 While at the Catholic school: Leaming, p. 21.

  17 Soon he was getting: Ralph “Rip” Horton, John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program.

  17 There would come over his face: Maurice A. Shea, John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program.

  18 Lem was a big kid: Pitts, p. 8.

  18 With all the strength of: Kennedy and Billings meeting at the Brief, Michaelis, p. 132.

  18 He would confide in Lem: LeMoyne Billings, John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program.

  18 Jack was willing to divulge: Lem’s family background, Pitts, p. 9.

  18 “God, what a beating I’m taking”: Hamilton, p. 111.

  19 As Joseph Kennedy, Sr., wryly observed: “As Dad liked to say, with some exasperation, Lem Billings and his battered suitcase arrived that day and never really left . . .” This is taken from Edward Kennedy’s published eulogy, May 30, 1981.

  19 Next came Ralph: Parmet, p. 34.

  19 The rest followed: Shea OH. 20 Yet there is another: Story of the “Muckers Club,” Hamilton, pp. 122–32.

  20 Troublemaking by kids: Public Enemies Number One and Two, Michaelis, pp. 131–32.

  20 Strategically astute: Muckers as “wheels,” Class of 1935 survey conducted in 1985, courtesy of Choate Rosemary Hall Archives. Robert Beach, a classmate of Kennedy’s, recalled in a class survey that “the main thesis was that we were such ‘wheels’ your father couldn’t kick us out.”

  22 Jack, Lem, and one of the girls: The barn story, Michaelis, pp. 138–40.

  23 Jack wanted “Most Likely to Succeed”: Shea OH.

  23 In this long-ago microcosm: Tip O’Neill with William Novak, Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 76.

  Headmaster George St. John kept a number of loose-leaf binders over the years containing selected choral hymns and sermon notes. Choate archivist Judy Donald allowed me
to study and copy from an early page in the binder that contained the essay written by Dean LeBaron Russell Briggs of Harvard, who was St. John’s mentor and lifelong hero. It’s from this essay, marked “Dean Briggs Essay,” that St. John would recite the “Ask not” lines once or twice a year (more on this in Chapter Thirteen notes).

  Tom Hawks, a bank president, was a ’35 classmate of Jack’s. He wrote in a class survey taken in 1985 how angry he was at hearing those familiar words in Jack’s January 20, 1961, inaugural address. “What bugged me most was the way he plagiarized (the Head) in his inaugural address. I boil every time I hear the ‘ask not’ exhortation as being original with Jack. Time and again we all heard the Head say that to the whole Choate family. Jack did not even have the decency to give him credit—and now it is engraved in marble at his final resting place.”

  CHAPTER TWO: THE TWO JACKS

  27 The blood-count roulette: Kennedy’s health diminished at Princeton, Hamilton, pp. 144–45.

  27 Back he went to: JFK’s stay at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Pitts, p. 45.

  27 he spent the remainder: Parmet, p. 43.

  27 Interestingly, he followed: Ibid., p. 159.

  27 Jack’s new friend was: Jack and Torby as friends and roommates, Torbert Macdonald, John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program.