I explained to the woman—the numbers had thinned once we had passed—that my friend had lost his key, and we were wondering if anyone had brought it in. “No, they haven’t,” she responded excitedly, “but don’t worry. We will find it.” She hopped onto the intercom, calling all the other attendants to the front desk. Within minutes, a handful of women were crawling around on their knees searching for the key while John and I continued our workout. After a few minutes, one popped up, shouting, “Found it!” She then rushed over to personally hand it to John, who thanked her before continuing with his set of curls.
John never met a mirror he did not like, and he enjoyed showing off his body, even in rather inappropriate ways. Our routine was to lift weights before engaging in intense games of racquetball. Afterward, we would put on our bathing suits and sit in the hot tub or take a steam. There was a sauna in the men’s locker room, but the “wet” area with the steam room and hot tub was coed. One day John forgot his bathing suit, so he put on his stretched white underwear and started walking out to go into the hot tub. “John,” I said, “you can’t go out there like that.” He responded, “Stevie, why are you so modest for me?” I wasn’t sure what he meant, but we went anyway. There were two older, gray-haired women sitting in the hot tub when John came out and plopped right next to them. They were so startled they practically ran into the women’s locker room. We would then take showers and enter the men’s sauna wearing only our towels. John would often strip away the towel, inspect his private parts in full view of other people in the room, or get down on the floor to do pushups. Remembering it now, all I can think is how lucky John was that he grew up in an age without cell phone cameras.
It was always curious to me that a guy who was so private would be such an exhibitionist. During touch football games, John would divide the teams into Skins and Shirts. John was always Skins. (Thankfully, he chose me for the Shirts.) It was not difficult to see the photographers with their long-distance lenses peering at him from afar. While he revealed little about himself to the press, he seemed to enjoy exposing his body to the world. It always seemed to me that his body was the one aspect of his life over which he felt some control. His good looks were genetic. His family name was a birthright. But he, and he alone, was responsible for transforming himself from an awkward, scrawny kid into an Adonis. He had spent long hours laboring at the gym, working with trainers, pushing himself to his limit to build muscle mass and burn fat. Years later, when he was living in New York and working on George, John would have memberships at more than a dozen gyms. He took great pride in his body and what it represented to him, and he wanted the world to see what he had accomplished without the help of his famous family.
By the time we finished in the evening, the cafeteria at Brown was closed, so John and I would get something to eat on the way back to Providence. A fancy new fast-food restaurant called Wendy’s had just opened up, and we probably ate there once a week. Of course, John never had money, so I usually had to spring for dinner.
It was during these many hours that we spent together that I bonded with John. He shared with me stories of his colorful life, and he asked me just as many questions about mine. John was fascinated by people raised under circumstances different from his own. And mine was very different.
When we were young, my dad worked two jobs and still managed to attend school three nights a week to earn an associate degree in engineering. My loving mom stayed home and took care of us—my older brother, Franny, and younger siblings, Mike and Karen. I had been an indifferent high school student, ranking in the bottom 20 percent of my high school graduation class and managing to fail three subjects during my senior year. I’m too embarrassed to mention my SAT scores. I received one honor at graduation: my classmates voted me class clown. (Apparently, the vote was unanimous.) For most of my youth, I dreamed of one day becoming a major-league pitcher, even though I only had a seventy-mile-per-hour fastball, and that was with hurricane-force winds at my back.
After graduating high school, I applied to a handful of local colleges and ended up attending Widener College, only a few miles from our family home. Widener bragged about its strong commitment to a liberal arts education, small classes, and dedicated faculty. But truthfully, I ended up at Widener because it was the only college that accepted me. I tried out for the baseball team and made varsity as a freshman. I thought I was well on my way to playing for my beloved Phillies, standing on the same pitching mound as Steve Carlton and Jim Bunning. But a remarkable thing happened along the way. In my sophomore year, I took a class in medieval history. It wasn’t that I had any real interest in medieval history; I did not even know what it was. To me, everything before World War II was medieval history.
As it turned out, however, that class changed my life. It was taught by Dr. Lawrence P. Buck—a young, dynamic professor who was genuinely interested in students and who clearly loved to teach. One day he opened the class for discussion. I remember sitting in the back of the room listening to my classmates and thinking, “Why can’t I talk like that? Why can’t I articulate my thoughts that way?” At that moment, I realized that I would never be a professional baseball player, and that if I was going to succeed, it would have to be with my untested brain and not my tired right arm.
At the end of class that day, I walked out of the room, went to the gym, and turned in my baseball uniform. I then took out a campus map, discovered that the big white building next to the football stadium was the library, and entered its doors for the first time. Over the next few years, I discovered both a love for history and a passion for learning. Although Widener had admitted me on academic probation, at graduation I managed to win the Faculty Prize, awarded to the undergraduate who earned the highest grade point average (GPA) in their junior and senior years. My next decision was partly influenced by Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, which I thought was the most brilliant book I had ever read. I saw that Wood taught at Brown, so I applied to its graduate program, hoping that he would accept me as his student. But though I went to Brown to study colonial American history, I quickly gravitated to modern America, which I found more accessible.
My love of learning was only one reason I ended up in graduate school. The other was my fear of dying if I chose the other alternative: doing manual labor. I spent my summers during college making toilet paper at Scott Paper Company in Chester, Pennsylvania. The work was tough. I was required to not only rotate shifts every week but also spend a long time around heavy machinery and sharp objects. My first time on night work, I was given a sharp blade and told to take a large roll of defective toilet paper (roughly five feet in diameter and eight feet long), slice through several layers at a time, and then toss the paper into a churning vat, where it would be turned into pulp and sent back to the mill. I made the first few slices just fine, but suddenly the blade lodged itself into my left thumb. Oddly enough, there was no blood, but I knew I had done serious damage. I casually walked to the nurse’s station, where a young woman with one arm in a sling started to examine me. I was playing tough guy until I looked down and saw that I had cut all the way to the bone. Suddenly all the blood rushed out of my body. The nurse struggled to keep me upright while I searched for a safe landing spot on her shiny linoleum floor. Fortunately, a few guys from my crew who were walking by helped lay me on a bed until a security guard took me to the hospital.
I returned with about six stitches and a large bandage wrapped around my thumb. Since it was now five in the morning, and the shift ended in two hours, I assumed the supervisor would either send me home or allow me to rest. I was wrong. He was furious because he now had to fill out a bunch of paperwork. “Gillon,” he growled, “I’m going to give you a job that not even you can fuck up.” Just to make sure I understood my new duty, he demonstrated it for me. It involved picking up small rolls of paper, about three feet in diameter with a solid cardboard core, and then placing them on a small metal pipe jutting from the fl
oor. Once the roll was securely resting on the device, I needed to press a pedal to shoot the pipe upward and knock out the core, which got tossed into a bin while the paper went back into the vat for reuse. Since I tend to be the curious type, I placed the first roll on the metal tube and, wanting to see how far up the pipe shot, leaned over the device and pressed the pedal. Turns out the pipe came up to my top front teeth, which were now scattered across the metal floor. I was stunned for a few seconds. When I looked up, I could still see my supervisor, who had stopped to talk to someone about thirty feet away. Fearing that I would lose my job, I continued working and kept my mouth closed so no one could see my jagged teeth. By the time the night finally ended, I had shattered my teeth and almost sliced off my thumb.
When people ask me why I chose to be a historian, I always tell the story about being inspired by a dynamic professor. While that is true, it is also only part of the story. I chose my career path because I was too clumsy to do anything else.
John loved hearing about my older brother, Franny, who was a former Philadelphia Golden Gloves champion, an all–Marine Corps titleholder, and, along with future heavyweight champion Leon Spinks, the interservice winner. “Are you sure you and your brother came from the same womb?” he used to tease me. He marveled over people who worked in factories and listened intently to my stories of summers spent making toilet paper. John had completed Outward Bound and had recently finished the Outdoor Leadership course in Kenya, but he had no experience with factory life. He was, however, relentlessly curious.
We also spent a great deal of time discussing politics, and John often expressed surprising views on current events. Although he voted for Jimmy Carter, John came to respect President Reagan out of admiration for presidents who, like his father, could galvanize the nation. He once said, and would repeat a few times later in life, that “politics was about giving people hope. It was about making people believe that the future would be better than the past.” He felt that Reagan’s eloquence and stature inspired confidence. Liberals snarked about Reagan’s lack of knowledge about policy, but John found that critique mistaken. Reagan, he argued, appealed to values, invoked themes, and identified myths that many Americans embraced. That storytelling ability was what made him such a great communicator. He did not agree with Reagan’s conservative agenda, but, for him, policy represented a secondary concern. The real purpose of politics was to motivate people, and he felt that Reagan, more than any president since his father, accomplished that goal.
John’s political views were difficult to discern, largely because he had yet to settle on an overarching philosophy. But his approach to politics was more like his father’s—practical, nonideological, and skeptical of both Left and Right orthodoxies—than those of his uncle Senator Edward Kennedy, who had emerged as the most outspoken leader of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. John loved his uncle Teddy, but he did not share Teddy’s unquestioned commitment to the liberal agenda. I recall a discussion in which John agreed with the concern of many conservatives that welfare provided a disincentive for people to go out and find jobs. His uncle was the leading critic of that viewpoint, claiming that structural problems in the economy—the lack of employment or effective training—represented the main source of poverty. Therefore, the federal government needed to spend more, not less, to help the poor. But while he may have disagreed with his uncle on specific policies, John did share a deep commitment to equality and an empathy for those less fortunate than him.
* * *
—
I witnessed almost every day how gracefully John handled the expectations placed upon him, and often with a healthy sense of humor. In 1983 John decided he wanted to watch a professional boxing match that would be broadcast over a new network called HBO. In those days, before widespread use of cable television, you needed to go to a bar to watch a fight. John had found a place in South Providence that was showing the event, so we drove there. As we walked into the bar, I saw two pictures on the wall: Jesus Christ and John’s dad. Both still had the palms that had been placed on top of the frame the previous Palm Sunday. I knew this night was going to be interesting. The bar was in a working-class, largely Puerto Rican neighborhood, not the usual place for Brown students, who literally lived atop a hill overlooking the city of Providence.
We were standing in the middle of a large crowd watching the fight when I noticed patrons parting in front of us. A little guy, who could have been Danny DeVito’s brother, gently pushed me aside and stood a few inches away from John. His arms dropped to his side as he stared upward. “You’re John,” he uttered in disbelief. “You’re John.” Understandably, such moments were often uncomfortable for John. He was accustomed to people coming up and shaking his hand or calling out to him on the street. “John-John” some would say, to which John would firmly respond, as usual, “One John is sufficient.” But this situation was different. This man was completely mesmerized. After a pause, John muttered, “Yes, I am.” The guy lifted his arms and hugged John without inhibition. “I loved your father,” he gushed. “I loved your father.” He then released his grip on John’s torso and started walking away, but not before announcing to the waitress, “Free drinks for my special friend.” (I soon discovered that I was not his special friend as well. John drank for free; I had to pay. Fortunately, I drank only soda back then.)
A few minutes later, I saw the crowd parting once again. I turned to John and warned him that he was about to have another visitor. Before he could respond, the Danny DeVito look-alike had returned, this time dragging his wife behind him. “Marilyn,” he proclaimed proudly, “I want you to meet my old friend, John Kennedy.”
“Old friend? Really?” I thought. They had just met about ten minutes earlier. But John did not miss a beat. “Hi, Marilyn,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m glad to finally have the chance to meet you.” Her face lit up immediately, and the two walked away, totally satisfied.
On the way home, I asked John what had just happened and why he pretended to know this random fan. He dissected the scene the way I used to dismember frogs in my high school biology class. The guy owned the bar and had probably told people he was friends with the Kennedy family, John said. He lived in the apartment upstairs; he simply left and brought back his wife. “What harm was done?” he asked. “I made two people very happy tonight.” I was oblivious to the dynamics taking place in front of me, but John had an instinctive ability to read a situation quickly and know exactly what to say. In that moment, I realized that John, despite his professed disinterest in public life, had politics embedded in his DNA.
* * *
—
We played our last game of racquetball while at Brown a few days before John’s commencement. It was a rather typical afternoon, except that John had to hurry back to campus to meet his mother. He dropped me off at the student union, where I sat on a deck overlooking the serene campus green. After several minutes, I caught a glimpse of a mob of reporters and cameramen moving slowly across the other side of the green. As I looked closer, I saw John in the middle of the scrum. For a second, I thought, “Why are all these people bothering John?” before realizing that he had transformed into John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr., strolling confidently across campus with his famous mother.
On Saturday, June 4, I joined seven hundred people in a packed auditorium to hear Senator Edward Kennedy speak at a forum on nuclear disarmament. “Instead of lavishing our treasure on first-strike weapons, let us spend it on first-class schools and first-class colleges for students,” he thundered. But the most memorable part of his speech came at the beginning when he spoke of John. “I know how much my brother Jack cherished John’s future, and how proud he would be to be here today,” Kennedy said, his voice faltering.
That evening, John and his roommates threw an all-night party. John’s roommate Rob Littell recalled that the party left them “exhausted and hung over” on graduation day. Still drinking beer at sev
en thirty in the morning, they quickly showered, changed into clean clothes, and then joined the procession beginning at eight thirty. Students lined up on the campus green before walking through the historic East Side district of Providence as parents, friends, and family watched. Photographers were on the lookout for John, although he was not easy to identify, since the cap covered his distinctive mop of curly brown hair. When they finally spotted him, they rushed toward him with their cameras clicking. Some photographers complained that his friends tried to shield him, but most of his friends were used to the prying eyes of cameras. More likely, the people around John hoped to squeeze into one of the pictures. Littell recalled how one classmate “glued himself unnaturally to John’s shoulder as the seniors marched up College Hill, obviously determined to be in the news photos.”
The general commencement consisted of all 1,400 graduates on the campus green, where they listened to speakers and witnessed the awarding of honorary degrees. The graduates then headed to their home departments, where they received their degrees. Before the general ceremony ended, a small plane buzzed overhead, skywriting the words, “Good Gluck John.” Many assumed that the misspelling was a silly mistake. The Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail viewed it as a sign of the problems plaguing the American education system. In fact, the message referred to a playful family joke about how John would not have graduated had he not received a passing grade in Mary Gluck’s class. The timing was off, however. The plane was not supposed to start writing until after the general ceremony had ended.
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