Still, Mr. Kennedy’s wishes drove the ultimate decision. “My father wanted me to see both sides of the street,” Jack later said.6
That fifteen-year-old Kick was along for the voyage was an added bonus for him. It had been decided that she would take time away from her studies at Sacred Heart Convent, a Catholic all-girls boarding academy in Noroton, Connecticut, to spend a year at an affiliated Sacred Heart Convent school in Neuilly-sur-Seine, an affluent suburb of Paris, thus repeating the kind of educational experience her mother had had as a girl. Rose had struggled in vain to harness Kick’s free-spirited ways, and she thought her daughter altogether too popular with boys, who were prone to distracting Kick from her schoolwork. The solution: ship her overseas for an extended period in a convent, where she might also absorb French language and culture.7
Kick adored her two older brothers, but she was especially fond of Jack. The two enjoyed a good-natured teasing relationship, with a penchant for clever repartee that greatly amused their friends. Jack, the family reader, would rib Kick for her ostensibly shallow interests; she would poke fun at his vanity and his skinny frame. But the bond was deep. “She really thinks you are a great fellow,” his father had informed Jack a few months before. “She has a love and devotion to you that you should be very proud to have deserved. It probably does not become apparent to you, but it does to both Mother and me. She thinks you are quite the grandest fellow that ever lived, and your letters furnish her most of her laughs at the Convent.”8 Jack, for his part, treasured Kick’s open, intelligent, irreverent personality, so similar to his own, and sought her approval of the girls he brought home. His own friends, meanwhile, invariably fell in love with Kick on first meeting—though not conventionally beautiful, she was cute and feminine, with rich auburn hair, and her effervescence and easy charm made her irresistible to a steady stream of suitors.
Jack and Kick shared a lively interest in people and what made them tick, and could talk endlessly about their shared social experiences. “After parties,” one friend remembered, “Kathleen liked nothing better than to sit up in her bathrobe with Jack, talking into the middle of the night about the personality of everyone who was there. They were so close at times I thought of them as twins.”9
The close connection between brother and sister was evident in their written correspondence, both then and later. During the Muckers affair at Choate, Jack had given Kick the highlights via letter, whereupon she promptly fired off a congratulatory telegram to him and Lem Billings: DEAR PUBLIC ENEMIES ONE AND TWO ALL OUR PRAYERS ARE UNITED WITH YOU AND THE OTHER ELEVEN MUCKS. WHEN THE OLD MEN ARRIVE SORRY WE WON’T BE THERE FOR THE BURIAL.10 The Choate staff had intercepted the telegram, adding to Jack’s troubles. Joe Senior scolded her and said she had added “fuel to the fire.” Jack, too, was upset with his sister, but only momentarily. It was the sort of missive, after all, in both tone and content, that he himself could have dashed off if the situation were reversed.11
That summer at Hyannis Port, the two siblings were again thick as thieves, taking off at a moment’s notice in a family car (Jack now had his license) to dance at the Yacht Club or see a movie at the Idle Hour Theatre, or to have ice cream at the Rexall Drugstore, where the family kept a tab. If they got home late, they would pull into the driveway quietly, headlights off, and sneak into the house on tiptoes, shoes in hand. In the morning, Kick would find a note next to her pillow from her mother: “Next time be sure to be in on time.”12
II
Now here they were, bound for Europe together. It was the first time for both. And what a means of transportation they had! The Normandie was the greatest of all ocean liners (arguably to this day), the largest and fastest passenger ship afloat. Her maiden voyage had taken place just a few months earlier, during which she set a transatlantic speed record, covering Le Havre to New York in just four days, three hours, and fourteen minutes, at an average speed of thirty knots. Her lavish interiors, finished entirely in the Art Deco style, featured spectacular entryways and staircases, as well as a 305-foot-long dining room with silver walls and twenty-four-foot gold ceilings, a room larger than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, able to seat seven hundred guests at 157 tables. Other amenities included indoor and outdoor pools, a theater, a chapel, a winter garden, and an open-air tennis court. The Kennedys were enthralled, as Rose made clear in her diary, though Jack’s devouring of the French delicacies caused grumbling from one quarter. “The food here is very pimp-laden,” he wrote Billings, “and my face is causing much comment from the old man, and it is getting damned embarrassing. He really rang the bell when after helping myself to a dessert that was oozing with potential pimps he said my face was getting to look like yours.”13
The Kennedys were to disembark at Plymouth, on England’s south coast, but bad weather compelled the captain to make straight for Le Havre, in Normandy. From nearby Dieppe the family then boarded a small craft for a rough crossing to Newhaven, in East Sussex. “Everyone ill except Joe, Jack, and Kick all of whom stayed on upper deck in rain freezing to death,” Rose wrote in her diary.14
Jack, Joe, Rose, and Kick aboard the SS Normandie, September 25, 1935.
Upon arrival in London they settled in at Claridge’s hotel, in Mayfair, just off Grosvenor Square and the shops of Bond Street. It was an eventful time to be in Europe. A British election was fast approaching, and there were rising tensions on the Continent. Earlier in the year, German leader Adolf Hitler had warned that rival powers should get used to dealing with Germany on an equal footing—in March he announced the existence of a German Luftwaffe (air force) and ordered the conscription of all able-bodied men aged nineteen or over. Both were violations of the Versailles Treaty—the most consequential of a series of treaties imposed by the Allies on the defeated powers at the end of World War I—and caused acute consternation in European chancelleries. The Soviet Union and France responded by signing a treaty of friendship and mutual support. In September, shortly before the Kennedys set sail from New York, Hitler imposed the Nuremberg Laws, in which Jews were denied the rights of German citizenship and marriage, and extramarital relations between Jews and “Aryans” were prohibited. The swastika became the official flag of Germany. On October 2–3, Benito Mussolini’s Italy invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia), a clear breach of the League of Nations’ sanctions against aggression.15
For informed observers at the time, and for legions of historians later, these were deeply ominous developments, proof positive that the fragile international order was foundering. Coming out of the Great War, the Allied leaders, led by Woodrow Wilson, had championed a new way of conducting world affairs, with the end of secret diplomacy and bilateral deals and the creation of the League of Nations to settle geopolitical crises and head off interstate violence. Disarmament efforts would make the world safer and contribute to the avoidance of another destructive general war. Much to Wilson’s dismay, the U.S. Senate had rejected American membership in the League—the centerpiece of his vision for the postwar world—but under the subsequent Republican administrations, U.S. officials nonetheless participated discreetly in League meetings on a range of issues.16 Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 scuttled the disarmament talks—he walked out of them in short order, rendering further efforts moot, and the World Disarmament Conference adjourned indefinitely. Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, meanwhile, brought sharp verbal condemnation from the world’s powers but little more. Italy swiftly resigned from the League and drew closer to Nazi Germany.17
How much Jack took note of these machinations is unclear. He read the daily newspapers and (following his mother’s example) clipped articles that interested him. But mostly he devoted his early efforts in London to penetrating the city’s social scene. The LSE intrigued him, but he did not take to Harold Laski, finding him humorless and self-important and his socialist ideas impractical and narrow.18 Suddenly the prospect of spending an academic year—or even a term—under this man se
emed like a nightmare. Seemingly on cue, another mystery ailment arrived, placing Jack in the hospital and leaving physicians confounded once again. He was jaundiced and had joint pain, and his blood count was off, but he was not fully symptomatic of anything. The doctors settled on hepatitis as the likely diagnosis, but without conviction. “They are doing a number of strange things to me,” he wrote Lem from his bed, “not the least of which is to shove a tremendous needle up my cheeks. Today was most embarrassing as one doctor came in just after I had woken up and was reclining with a semi [erection] on due to the cold weather. His plan was to stick his finger under my pickle and have me cough. His plan quickly changed however when he drew back the covers and there was ‘JJ Maher’ quivering with life.” (Jack had named his penis after his detested Choate housemaster.) The “very sexy” night nurse, meanwhile, “is continually trying to goose me so I always have to be on my guard.”19
In time, much would be made of Jack Kennedy’s exposure to the famous Laski’s teachings. Jack himself talked up the connection, presumably in order to enhance the impression of his academic credentials. References would be made by political operatives to the “term” he spent at the LSE. In fact, he lasted in London all of a month before returning to the United States, his parents feeling his health could be better monitored from there.*1 Tellingly, he informed Billings in a letter that “Dad says I can go home if I want to.” Not only that, but the elder Kennedy signed off on his son’s request to enroll late at Princeton. (The school granted his appeal.) On October 21, 1935, Billings received the good news via wire: ARRIVING PRINCETON THURSDAY AFTERNOON; HOPE YOU CAN ARRANGE ROOMING.20
Billings was thrilled. He wired back: NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY SOUND BETTER. SO HURRY HOME. And he did have accommodation for his friend, though admittedly it wasn’t much: a dumpy two-bedroom apartment that he shared with Rip Horton on the fourth floor of South Reunion Hall. The main bathroom was in the basement, seventy-two steps away, and the flat had long since seen its best days. It had but a single radiator and a lone cramped closet. But it was cheap, and it offered a splendid view of ivy-covered Nassau Hall, the oldest building on campus, dating to 1756, when the university was known as the College of New Jersey.21
If Jack felt let down by his new digs, he didn’t show it. Never one to live with the ostentation his family wealth afforded him, he entered college with the same casual, even sloppy, manner of dress and lifestyle he had followed at Choate. He happily bunked on a spare cot in Billings’s small bedroom. He was aware, moreover, that the spartan arrangement was made necessary by his friend’s financial constraints. Though he could belittle Lem in letters (in a way Lem never dared do to him), Jack was also deeply loyal. He worried about his friend’s money problems, and pledged to help him out. “Your financial worries have upset me,” he wrote from London, “as Princeton would not be awfully jolly without your sif [syphilis] covered face.” He offered Billings $500 and added, “I won’t need it. You can pay me after you get out of college. You then would not have to borrow from that old Prick Uncle Ike [Lem’s uncle]. Let me know about this, and wether [sic] you need it, because I won’t be needing it.”22
The reunion of the three ex-Muckers was a happy one, and soon they were enjoying weekends in New York City, ninety minutes away by train. About his studies, however, Jack remained as lackadaisical as ever, if not more so. He barely cracked open his books. Princeton as an institution disappointed him—it seemed dismayingly similar to Choate in his mind, a kind of overgrown boarding school more than a university, palpably insular and oppressively Protestant. “I think he was a little disenchanted with the country-club atmosphere of Princeton,” a friend recalled. Nor did it help that he soon fell ill again. He could drag himself to class, but barely, and the jaundice from London returned—his complexion, an observer noted, took on a yellowish-brown hue, “as though he’d been sunbathing.”23 Already on November 11, barely two weeks after Jack’s arrival, his father wrote him an affectionate letter, suggesting that they monitor his health until Thanksgiving and then make a determination about whether he could remain in school: “After all, the only consideration I have in the whole matter is your happiness, and I don’t want you to lose a year of your college life (which ordinarily brings great pleasure to a boy) by wrestling with a bad physical condition and a jam in your studies. A year is important, but it isn’t so important if it’s going to leave a mark for the rest of your life….You know I really think you are a pretty good guy and my only interest is in doing what is best for you.”24
III
Thanksgiving came and went and Jack did not improve. He was sent to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, in Boston, for tests and observation. (TELL US WHAT TIME TO ARRIVE FOR THE FUNERAL, Billings and Horton cabled him on December 10.) The doctors there were mystified, however, which prompted the university physician to write to the dean: “You are probably familiar with the interesting case of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, [class of] ’39. We have been in touch with his doctors ever since he came here and it now appears advisable for him to withdraw from the university for the purpose of having such examinations and treatment as his condition may require in the hope that he will improve sufficiently to return as a Freshman next fall.”25
A 1935 Christmas card from three Princeton roommates, with a greeting inspired by the lead song in the new Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers film, Top Hat: Rip [Ralph Horton], Leem [Lem Billings], and Ken [Jack].
And thus ended Jack Kennedy’s tenure as a Princeton man, six weeks after it began. He would not return. The prospect of being laid up in Boston seemed dreadful, but he couldn’t quibble with his father’s argument that it was imperative “to arrive at a definite conclusion regardless of how much time it takes because we must settle this matter once and for all on this occasion.” The physicians got to work. “They are doing quite a number of things,” the young patient wrote his parents from his hospital bed, “but I am rather a difficult subject.”26 A flood of letters to Billings followed—witty, obscene, uninhibited, gossipy, unflappable, and suffused with a striking vitality that his mother had noticed in his language ever since he was a small child.
January 18, 1936: “My blood count this morning was 3500. When I came it was 6,000. At 1500 you die. They call me ‘2,000 to go Kennedy.’ ”27
January [undated]: “[It is] the most harrowing experience of my storm-tossed career. They came in this morning with a gigantic rubber tube. Old stuff, I said, and I rolled over thinking it would be stuffed up my arse. I didn’t know whether they thought my face was my ass or what but anyway they shoved it up my nose and down into my stomach. Then they poured alcohol down the tube, me meanwhile going crazy as I couldn’t taste the stuff and you know what a good stiff drink does to me.”28
January 27: “They haven’t told me anything, except that I have leukemia, and agranalecencytosis [presumably he meant agranulocytosis, a rare blood disorder]. Took a peak [sic] at my chart yesterday and could see that they were mentally measuring me for a coffin. Eat, drink, and make Olive [Cawley], as tomorrow or next week we attend my funeral.”29
January 27: “Flash! Got the hottest neck ever out of Hanson Saturday night. She is pretty good so am looking forward to bigger and better ones. Also got a good one last night from J. so am doing you proud. Gave up Bunny Day, I must admit, as a failure.” (In an earlier letter he had boasted that he would soon “climb” her “frame.”)30
Though playful in these missives, Jack could be cruel toward Lem in a way that betrayed his sense of entitlement. “I don’t know why you and Rip are so unpopular with girls,” he scoffed in one, signing off with one of his nicknames: “You’re certainly not ugly looking exactly. I guess they’re [sic] is just something about you that makes girls dislike you on sight. I was figuring it out this morning….It certainly is too bad. I guess you are just not cut out to be a ladies man. Mr. Niehans even has a girl, and so has Ike England. Frankly, my son, I’m stumped. Well send me my b
elt you prick right away, Regards, Ken.”31
Yet there was a tenderness in the letters, too, a vulnerability that Jack hated to reveal but that Billings undoubtedly picked up on, however couched it was in Kennedy’s devil-may-care personal style. Still smitten with Olive Cawley, who had been named the first Peanut Festival Queen in Montclair, New Jersey, and was about to embark on a modeling career in New York, he asked Lem for help: “Am coming to you for advice on the Cawley situation—should I ask her after this deliberate slight?” (Olive had not replied to his most recent letter.) “It’s your roomie who is asking and he’s also asking you to leave my writing paper alone. That writing paper was a present from one of my feminine admirers, a woman who worships the very air I breathe,” he said of Mrs. Billings, “but who unfortunately has a son with bad breath.” The barb no doubt stung the easily wounded Billings, but he always sensed his friend’s underlying devotion to him. Rip Horton saw this side of Jack, too. “[He] was very light, very witty, a particularly loyal good friend who cherished old friendships very, very much,” Rip subsequently said. Sometimes, Horton added, Jack went to greater lengths to maintain the relationships than the friends did.32
Lem offered his own assessment: “I think it’s interesting,” he told an interviewer, “because I, frankly, haven’t had another friend whom I’ve known as long as Jack Kennedy….There must have been something about him that kept people wanting him to be their friend through all the years. Much more interesting is why Jack wanted to keep all these friends, since his mind and interests did grow, let’s face it, at a much faster clip than any of his contemporaries.”33
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