Members of the Spee Club in their distinctive blue and yellow English-style regimental ties, spring 1938. Kennedy is in the top row, fourth from right.
Ironically, some contemporaries were of the view that the glory days of the final clubs were over. To them, the old Harvard of stark social stratification, clubmen, and “gentleman’s C’s” was fading away, on account of the new house plan as well as President Conant’s emphasis on scholarly rather than social distinction. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., two years ahead of Jack in the class of 1938, predicted in The Harvard Advocate, the undergraduate literary magazine, that the house plan, together with the influx of midwestern students and public school graduates, would transform the social dimensions of the university and effectively kill the final clubs, or at least banish them to the margins of Harvard life. “With a wave of Harkness’s hand,” Schlesinger wrote, “their chief excuse for existence—the pleasant living they provided—vanished,” for the houses provided facilities that were superior in all respects: comfort, convenience, and overall magnitude. “The clubs will probably persist,” he went on, “vain and exclusive little organisms, sustained by sons who join the clubs of their fathers, looking from within like the distillations of the best in Harvard life but from without like fragile soda water bubbles; yet the day is in sight when they will stop being very important even to the five per cent who now turn to them for refuge.”26
Decades later, Schlesinger would ruefully admit that his prediction had left out one key element: “the power of snobbery.”27 The university was becoming less homogeneous, more democratic, but the clubs remained in place and kept their standing atop the social order. Jack Kennedy was a proud clubman, certainly, thrilled with his new status and seemingly content with a gentleman’s C average in his coursework. He did pull off a B in sophomore year in Professor Bruce Hopper’s government class, New Factors in International Relations: Asia, but managed only a C in Modern Government, co-taught by William Y. Elliott and Arthur Holcombe, and in Introduction to Art History, with Wilhelm Koehler. He declared government as his concentration, and his main reading showed a tilt toward politics, history, and economics, with a list that included, among other books, Guy Stanton Ford’s Dictatorship in the Modern World, Gilbert Seldes’s Sawdust Caesar, Calvin Hoover’s Germany Enters the Third Reich, Herman Finer’s Mussolini’s Italy, Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, Lenin’s State and Revolution, and Charles Beard’s The Economic Basis of Politics.28
In an English course on public speaking taught by Frederick Clifton Packard Jr., Jack earned a C. In a fascinating voice recording from that class uncovered by Harvard archivists in 2017, we hear the familiar voice and speech pattern, but with a more pronounced Boston accent, speaking in confident tones about Supreme Court justice Hugo Black and the recent revelation that Black had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan for almost two years in the 1920s. “Whether Mr. Black’s appointment to the Court was the correct one is hard to say,” the twenty-year-old declares early on. “It was evidently done in the heat of presidential anger at the conservative element who did not back Mr. Roosevelt’s court plan….He evidently had his reasons and he went forward as he saw them.”29
The grades don’t tell the full story, of course. They seldom do. Surely it reveals something about Jack Kennedy’s interests and aspirations that he chose for his topic in the class the Hugo Black controversy, whereas most of his classmates—at least those also captured on the recording—selected more mundane topics, such as sourdough bread, book collecting, and how to find a wife. Payson Wild, the acting master of Winthrop House and Jack’s instructor in Elements of International Law, remembered him as one who “really did have the ability to think deeply and in theoretical terms,” and to ponder big questions such as “Why do people obey?” In their one-on-one tutorials, Wild was impressed with the young man’s thoughtful and substantive analysis of the Aristotelian and Platonic political theories, and with how quickly he grasped the essentials of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau and the social contract theory of the state. Wild felt certain that Jack “had basically the deep interest, that there was in him a basis for all the pragmatic interests and concerns that he showed later on, which he had to show.”30
Wild also tutored Joe Junior, finding him less substantial intellectually than his brother. His mind was less creative. But Joe seemed already then to be the gregarious would-be politician: “He would call out under my window, ‘Hi, Dr. Wild. I’m coming.’ But Jack would never do that. He’d come up in a much quieter way.”31
Notwithstanding his growing interest in political matters, Jack steered mostly clear of the debates then roiling Harvard about the New Deal and Roosevelt’s activist government. Perhaps in part because the president was an unpopular man in the Yard—when he drove through Harvard Square during the 1936 campaign, FDR was booed lustily by students whose wealthy parents hated his liberal policies—Jack appears to have shunned altogether the Young Democrats and the Harvard Liberal Union, and there’s no evidence that he ever spoke out publicly in favor of Roosevelt’s reforms.32 The president, it seems, did not stir anything in him emotionally, either then or later. Still, Jack was proud of his father’s service in the administration, and he backed the comprehensive governmental effort to help the mass of Americans suffering extreme hardship in the Depression. He endorsed, one close friend recalled, “what the New Deal was trying to accomplish and that that was what government should do where it could.”33 This was Joe Senior’s view, too: unlike many Wall Street financiers, the elder Kennedy believed strongly in the state’s role in lifting up the downtrodden.
That autumn of 1937, the brothers were honored to host their father as the featured speaker in the Winthrop House Thursday evening lecture series. Late in arriving to the hall on account of sports practice, the two, according to head waitress Deedee de Pinto, hung back, not wanting to cause a stir. “Then the housemaster said, ‘Go on, boys, say hello to your father.’ They went up and both boys kissed him,” with no evident hesitation about showing such affection in public. John Kenneth Galbraith, then a Winthrop tutor, remembered “an absolutely wonderful talk, filled with anecdotes about [Kennedy’s] days in the unregulated stock market, telling what he personally knew of bucket shops, wire houses and pools,” and concluding with his role in “leading the raid as SEC policeman” that shored up the foundation of the capitalist system. Throughout, Galbraith was struck by the self-assurance, showmanship, and physical vitality that emanated from the lectern, and he concluded, “Kennedy was so ebullient and so successful in his presentation that even if his son had not become President, I would have remembered that night.”34
Jack’s health, meanwhile, continued to be better than it had been during his prep school years and his Princeton interlude but less good than it should have been. He went on suffering bouts of vague maladies. There were periodic trips to the infirmary and more than occasional missed classes. During fall football season, in which he suited up for the junior varsity team but saw little playing time, he suffered a debilitating back injury, though it did not prevent him from swimming that winter for Harvard against Penn, Columbia, Princeton, and Dartmouth.35 In February 1938, he paid a brief return visit to the Mayo Clinic, in Minnesota, to undergo tests relating to ongoing stomach and colon problems, and at the end of the month he found himself in the Harvard infirmary with a bad case of the flu. An intestinal infection followed in March that compelled a stay of several days in New England Baptist Hospital. His weight dropped through the spring, in spite of the ice cream machine his friends installed for him at the Spee Club.36
The Harvard swim team in 1938. Kennedy is standing, third from left.
All the while, the astonishing Kennedy energy and vitality kept him going. Torby Macdonald marveled at the ceaseless activity, not least when it came to women. They gravitated toward Jack more than ever, drawn in by his winning smile and wry sense of humor, and by a lighthearted, peppery flirtati
ousness that never seemed to cross the line into vulgarity or predatory encroachment. His relationship with Olive Cawley having sputtered to an end with his failed pursuit of her virginity, he now made up for lost time.37 Housemates would watch in wonderment as one or another Boston waitress came calling at Winthrop House. Or they’d see him zoom by on Memorial Drive or Garden Street in his Ford convertible, accompanied by a young woman from Radcliffe or Wellesley or Mount Holyoke or another of the women’s colleges in the area—seemingly a different girl each time.
His success with the opposite sex bemused him, at least in the early going. After all, he said to Billings, he wasn’t much better looking than other guys. The explanation, he went on, had to be in his personality. Billings, when asked by an interviewer long afterwards, saw a combination of factors: “Whenever he was home, there was always a girl around—usually it was a different girl each time. Almost, without exception, every girl he showed any interest in became very fond of him. I think the reason for this was that he was not only attractive but also he had tremendous interest in girls. They really liked him and he was very, very successful. This was important to him because he wanted to be successful in this area. He really enjoyed girls.”38 Like father, like son, in other words—and like older brother.
When Boston seemed too confining, Kennedy and Macdonald would drive to Smith or Vassar for double dates, taking turns behind the wheel. (Whenever Torby drove, Jack would snooze, astonishing his friend with his ability to fall asleep almost at will.) Or Jack would take a weekend jaunt to New York City, where he’d meet up with Lem Billings and Rip Horton and head to the fashionable Stork Club, on East Fifty-third Street. “In those days, that was the place to go,” Billings later said, “and the Stork Club was very anxious to attract young people. They particularly encouraged young models and pretty girls to come there, and they made things easier for the boys who brought pretty girls….There were presents for the girls and champagne. Of course we were very careful never to have more than one drink each while we were there—we couldn’t spend any more than that. Jack didn’t mind spending on the same basis as I did. Jack wasn’t much of a drinker, so it wasn’t any hardship to take one drink. He liked to dance very much.”39
“Jack certainly never made anyone conscious of his wealth,” Macdonald related. “In fact there were times when he had a disconcerting lack of consciousness about it himself. Once we double-dated a couple of girls and dined in a rather expensive Boston restaurant. When the bill came it amounted to something like $12. Jack dug into his pockets and came up with exactly nothing. I checked my wallet and found eight one-dollar bills. We had to borrow from the girls to get out of the place.”40
If not in his spending habits, Jack Kennedy’s sense of entitlement manifested itself in other ways. He was a notoriously reckless driver, with a fondness for putting the pedal to the floor and maneuvering quickly even in tight spaces. On one occasion in Allston, across the river from Cambridge, near the gray-arcaded horseshoe of Harvard Stadium, he got into a row with a woman after he backed into her car. Subsequently, he told Lem, the woman reported him to the police, “saying I had leered at her after bumping her four or five times, which story has some truth although I didn’t know I was leering.” Instead of taking the heat, Jack pretended he had loaned the car to Billings and urged him to agree. “Tell [the officer] you come from Florida if he asks for your license—also you’re sorry and you realize you should not have done it, etc….You write him a gracious letter and admit it,” he instructed. Lem, dutiful as always, went along.41
IV
Jack studied hard for his finals in the spring semester, hoping, he told friends, to finish with a flourish and make the dean’s list. He must have known it was a nonstarter—he simply had too much ground to make up in too many classes. He did find success outside the classroom, teaming up with brother Joe to carry Harvard to victory in the McMillan Cup sailing race, off Cape Cod, defeating nine other college teams in the process. Soon after that, the brothers joined their ambassador father, who had returned from London to attend Joe Junior’s graduation, on his voyage back to England. That summer, Joe Junior was to serve as secretary to his father while Jack would watch and learn and chip in as needed until the start of fall semester.42
The home visit had been a frustrating one for the ambassador. He had hoped to not only attend his firstborn’s graduation from Harvard but receive an honorary degree from the university. Friends had lobbied hard on his behalf but were turned down, on the grounds that an ambassadorship was an insufficient mark of distinction. The rejection stung all the more because two years prior, Kennedy had failed in his bid for a place on the Harvard Board of Overseers, running tenth among a dozen candidates. (Only the top five won a seat.) Associates tried in vain to console him by saying it was an honor merely to get on the ballot; he angrily insisted that only anti-Catholic bias could have caused the result. Now, with the refusal of an honorary degree, he felt doubly aggrieved, especially after The New York Times, quoting “authoritative sources,” indicated the bestowal would be forthcoming. To save face, Kennedy felt compelled to “refuse” what had not been offered to him and further announced he would miss Joe’s commencement in order to spend time in Hyannis Port with his ailing son Jack who, if he’d taken ill, certainly didn’t show it in the McMillan Cup. His petulance provoked mockery in the White House. “Can you imagine Joe Kennedy declining an honorary degree from Harvard?” Franklin Roosevelt chortled upon hearing the news.43
“It was a terrible blow to him,” Rose Kennedy later acknowledged. “After all those expectations had been built up, it was hard to accept that he wasn’t even in the running….Suddenly he felt as if he were once again standing in front of the Porcellian Club, knowing he’d never be admitted.”44
No wonder he looked forward to being back in Britain. There the press praised his every move, there the political leaders seemed more enamored of his performance than the Roosevelt administration at home was. From the start, Kennedy had won plaudits in London for his forthright and gregarious style and his close associations with Neville Chamberlain’s year-old Conservative government. Though Chamberlain held a low opinion of the United States and its president—he viewed FDR as an untrustworthy dilettante who was overly fearful of his own electorate—he and Kennedy (who had first met earlier in the decade) hit it off immediately, with the American giving full support to the prime minister’s efforts to head off a European war by whatever means necessary.45 Like Kennedy a self-made businessman who fancied himself a pragmatist, the prim, austere, silver-haired Chamberlain shared with the American a pessimistic worldview and a tendency to see the world in economic terms—Hitler, he believed, wanted primarily to have equal economic participation in Europe, and would cease his aggressive behavior once he had it. For both men, peace was a precondition for commerce and trade and thus for prosperity. For both, Communism represented a far greater danger than fascism. Kennedy soon became more than a mere ambassador: he became a trusted colleague to Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary Halifax, a man with whom they could confide freely and openly.46
An early letter to Arthur Krock bespoke Kennedy’s enthusiasm for the prime minister. “Chamberlain’s speech last Thursday was a masterpiece,” he enthused. “I sat spellbound in the diplomatic gallery and heard it all. It impressed me as a combination of high morals and politics such as I have never witnessed….All this means, as I size it up, that there will be no war if Chamberlain stays in power with strong public backing, which he seems to be acquiring by the day.”47
Kennedy also paid visits to Lord and Lady Astor at their palatial country estate at Cliveden, on the Thames in Buckinghamshire, which became known to critics as a favored meeting ground of Tory aristocrats determined to keep Britain out of war, through concessions to Germany if necessary. The “Cliveden Set,” left-wing journalist Claud Cockburn dubbed them, and though it would be too much to say that Kennedy was a dupe of the group—his ba
sic outlook on world affairs had been formed long before his first visit to Cliveden—the discussions around the Astors’ dining table were intoxicating and gave him additional fodder for his claims. The American-born Lady Astor, originally from Virginia and now in her early sixties, radiated charm and glamour and fierce intelligence, as well as a pugnacious insistence on defending Hitler’s Germany against criticism and on the need for a strong Germany to act as a counterweight to Stalin’s Russia. The first woman to sit in the House of Commons, she was also known as one of the leading hostesses in all of Britain, with a knack for befriending the leading lights of the moment, such as T. E. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, and Mahatma Gandhi. She took to Ambassador Kennedy immediately, and he to her. They were kindred spirits, ebullient and forthright, whose conservative views, it may be said, came naturally to them; after all, they had a lot to conserve.48
“The march of events in Austria made my first days here more exciting than they might otherwise have been, but I am unable to see that the Central European developments affect our country or my job,” Kennedy wrote to Krock, summarizing his noninterventionist stance. Economics, he went on, were determinative: “The more I talk with people…the more convinced I am in my own mind that the economic situation in Europe, and that includes Great Britain, is the key to the whole situation. All of the playing house they are doing on the political fronts is not putting people back to work and is not getting at the root of the situation. An unemployed man with a hungry family is the same fellow whether the swastika or some other flag floats above his head.”49
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