by Scott Farris
The number and breadth of Kennedy’s illnesses is extraordinary. Following his bout with scarlet fever, there were many typical childhood maladies, such as chicken pox and ear infections, but then at the age of thirteen, while attending Canterbury, his first boarding school, Kennedy developed a mysterious illness that caused him to lose weight and not grow properly. If that were not enough, he developed appendicitis and had to withdraw from school.
The following fall, he entered Choate and continued to suffer from fatigue and an inability to gain weight. At nearly fifteen, Kennedy weighed only 117 pounds, despite having entered a bodybuilding class. He was so skinny he earned the unfortunate nickname “Rat Face.” Doctors were mystified. Kennedy was mortified. Sometimes taunted by his own father for his health problems and slight physique, Jack saw his illnesses not as a heroic struggle but, as biographer Robert Dallek writes, “a mark of effeminacy, of weakness, which he wouldn’t acknowledge.”
Fortunately, Kennedy had made a friend at Choate, someone with whom he could confide and who would remain a confidant the rest of his life. LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, son of a prominent Pittsburgh physician, was a year older than Kennedy, but he repeated his senior year so that he and Kennedy could graduate together. They first met when each worked on the Choate yearbook, and then they roomed together for two years. When Billings made a gentle sexual overture toward Kennedy, Jack replied, “I’m not that kind of boy,” but he did not break off their friendship. Given the taboos around homosexuality in the 1930s, it was a remarkable expression of loyalty on Kennedy’s part. Billings later declined Kennedy’s several offers of appointment to public office when Kennedy became president.
It was in bawdy letters to Billings, ripe with adolescent humor, that Kennedy opened up and described the often appalling treatments he received as doctors struggled to diagnose his illness. Some of the worst occurred during the summer of 1934, when Jack was sent to the Mayo Clinic at the age of seventeen. “I’ll be dipped in shit,” Kennedy wrote Billings in one letter. “. . . My bowels have ceased to be of service and so the only way that I am able to unload is for them to blow me out from the top down or the bottom up.” In another letter he reported, “God, what a beating I’m taking. I’ve lost 8 lbs. And still going down . . . Nobody able to figure out what’s wrong with me. All they do is talk about what an interesting case.”
The embarrassment that some of the treatments must have caused an already self-conscious (and likely frightened) teenager must have been extraordinary, and no doubt this helped shape two of Kennedy’s later notable qualities: his insistence on keeping emotion out of deliberations and his mordant sense of humor, which he honed in his letters to Billings.
There is, for example, this vivid account of doctors examining his bowels and intestines: “I’ve had 18 enemas in 3 days!!!! I’m clean as a whistle. They give me enemas till it comes out like drinking water, which they all take a sip of. Yesterday, I went through the most harassing experience of my life. . . . They (a blonde) pulled my pants down!! Then they tipped the chair over. Then surrounded by nurses the doctor first stuck his finger up my ass. I just blushed because you know how it is. He wiggled it suggestively and I rolled them in aisles by saying ‘you have a good motion.’ He then withdrew his finger and then, the schmuck, stuck an iron tube 12 inches long and 1 inch in diameter up my ass. They had a flashlight inside it and they looked around. Then they blew a lot of air in me to pump up my bowels. I was certainly feeling great as I know you would having a lot of strangers looking up my asshole. Of course, when the pretty nurse did it I was given a cheap thrill. . . . My poor bedraggled rectum is looking at me very reproachfully these days.”
How this experience, and others like it that occurred earlier or later in his life, impacted Kennedy has been the subject of tens of thousands of biographers’ words. There is no single answer, of course. Kennedy became mentally and physically tough, for sure. His brother Robert was not exaggerating when he said Jack spent half his days on earth in terrible pain, yet publicly, Kennedy was fanatical in ensuring no one could see that pain.
It certainly would have made him aware of his mortality at a far younger age than most. Did this make him empathetic to others in pain? Did this make him a hedonist who wished to take as much pleasure as he could before he died? Did it make him a risk-taker who could not wait his turn because he feared he would die before his turn came? The answer is probably “yes” to each of these questions.
It is also likely that his health, along with his upbringing in a chaotic household, made Kennedy, like Reagan, always keep a part of himself hidden away. Yet, also like Reagan, it was, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote, this “avoidance of easy intimacy, which, in the strange alchemy of relationships, served only to increase his attraction to others.”
The Mayo Clinic concluded that Jack had both colitis and digestive problems, though, of course, these were only a handful of the medical problems that would plague Kennedy the rest of his life. The clinic reported some success treating Jack that summer and sent him back to Choate, where Kennedy exhibited an interesting combination of exceptional maturity and adolescent high jinks. Never much for authority, Kennedy formed a club he called the “Muckers”—the school headmaster’s word for students who defied school rules. The Muckers enjoyed practical jokes and throwing forbidden parties. The school, while acknowledging that Jack had an endearing personality, complained to his father, who worried that Jack’s “happy-go-lucky manner does not portend well for his future development.”
Jack, despite an IQ of 119, graduated sixty-fifth out of a class of one hundred, but it hardly mattered for his future. His father’s wealth ensured he would get into any university he chose, and he initially chose Princeton to be away from his brother, who was already at Harvard. But despite Joe Senior’s worry about Jack’s carefree ways, Kennedy impressed classmates by demonstrating remarkable maturity in some areas, particularly his interest in world affairs.
At Choate, Kennedy began his lifelong fascination with the writings of Winston Churchill, who was also a hero of Reagan’s, and he amazed friends by not only subscribing to the New York Times but also by reading it. “In those days, it wasn’t the ordinary boy who subscribed to the New York Times in prep school. But Jack did, and as far as I know, he was the only one who did,” recalled a classmate, who added that Kennedy knew more about world affairs at sixteen than most adult men he knew.
While Kennedy was a “Mucker” at Choate, Reagan was proving to be the “Model Boy” at Dixon High School, even becoming president of the student body at the Northside campus his senior year. Reagan did not become a “square” later in life; he seems to have been that way since childhood. In an essay written during his junior year at Dixon High titled “School Spirit,” he lamented the passing of the “old tradition” and worried that the concept of school loyalty had been “buried beneath a cloak of attempted sophistication that sneers at this show of feelings.” He then extolled the joy of making the school football team, for “the fellow who knows the smell of liniment, and the salty tang of sweat-soaked jerseys, has acquired something precious, which no one can steal . . . the love of school has become a religion with him.” This earnestness was too much even for his teacher who, while giving Dutch an “A” for the well-written paper, still wrote in the margin, “I wonder what changes will come in your standards or values 8 years from now?” Not many, as Reagan’s son Ron would note.
Reagan had become especially active in his church. Even before his baptism, he had performed before the congregation in the little morality plays his mother had authored. At eleven, Reagan joined his mother in entertaining residents at the Dixon State Hospital, which cared for epileptics and the developmentally disabled; Nelle played the banjo while Reagan gave “entertaining readings.” Reagan also cleaned the church and led its Easter sunrise service when he was only fifteen. He dated Margaret “Mugs” Cleaver, the daughter of the Disciples of Christ pastor, Ben Cleaver, who hi
mself became a second father figure to Reagan, teaching him how to drive and helping him gain admittance to Eureka College. Like Kennedy, Reagan as a child and teenager was unusually comfortable around adults, many of whom always seemed to want to do something for these boys who had unexplored potential.
Yet even as Reagan was beginning to come into his own, he and Kennedy shared one significant disappointment while still schoolboys: Neither became the great athletic hero they each dreamed about. While professional baseball may have been the national pastime, football, because of such heroes as Jim Thorpe, Red Grange, and Notre Dame’s “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” had become by the 1920s the premier interscholastic sport. For two undersized boys, the physicality of football must have been an especially desired means of proving their manliness.
“Football,” Reagan recalled, “was a matter of life and death.” He was therefore understandably devastated when, weighing only 125 pounds as a freshman in high school—only slightly heavier than “Rat Face” Kennedy—he failed to make even the junior varsity team. He would finally win regular playing time his senior year, but he was never a star. Kennedy’s light weight, too, precluded him from playing football at Choate and denied him the athletic distinction that he too “badly wanted.” In a home that valued only winning, not simply striving, this must have been a special blow to Kennedy.
Later, as adults, the Kennedys became known for their especially vigorous and often bloody games of touch football. As an adult, Kennedy still fantasized about being an athletic hero. “Football!” Kennedy’s congressional aide Billy Sutton said. “If you could figure that out, you’d have the real key to his character. . . . I honestly think he’d rather have been a pro football quarterback than president.”
The importance Reagan attached to schoolboy athletic success can be measured by his reaction to losing the Republican Party nomination for president in 1976 to Gerald Ford when he was sixty-five years old; the only disappointment he could compare it to was his failure to letter in football. And late in life, while suffering from Alzheimer’s, family members said Reagan would not reminisce about his time as president or as an actor, but would imagine he was back in school and needed for a football game.
Reagan would try again for athletic success when he went to Eureka College, just as Kennedy would when he went to Harvard. While they each achieved a modicum of athletic success in college, they fell far short of their dreams. But soon they began to find other outlets for their competitive natures.
CHAPTER 6
COLLEGE DAYS DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION
In the 1920s and 1930s, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy did something very unusual for the time; they each attended college. “In the 1920s,” as Reagan himself remembered, “fewer than 7 percent of the high school graduates in America went to college.” Given that Kennedy’s father was rich and an alumnus of Harvard, there had been no question that he would go to college. But that Reagan and his older brother, Neil, attended and graduated from college—in the midst of the Great Depression, no less—is remarkable. Neither Reagan boy was a particularly good student, and their ability to cover much of the cost of tuition challenges Reagan’s later memories of his family’s poverty.
The Disciples of Christ, the church Reagan and his mother belonged to, have long put great emphasis on learning. The church’s flagship universities are Drake and Texas Christian, but it also founded many smaller colleges across the country, including four just in Illinois. Among the Prairie State schools, only Reagan’s alma mater, Eureka College in the town of the same name, still survives. Even before graduating from Dixon High School, Reagan said he had made the decision to go to Eureka for two reasons, neither to do with academics. First, his longtime girlfriend Margaret Cleaver planned to attend, and second, Reagan believed Eureka provided the opportunity for one last chance at football glory. It would not, however—at least not on the field, although his experience on the gridiron unexpectedly led to Reagan’s entrance into the entertainment industry.
Neil had not immediately entered Eureka after graduating from high school but had instead gotten a job in a local cement plant, where he soon earned almost as much money as his father did. Dutch, however, was not much for manual labor. He had tried to supplement his income as a lifeguard with work as a caddy at the local country club, and one summer he worked for a local contractor who told Reagan’s father, “That kid of yours can get less dirt on a shovel than any human being I’ve ever known.”
Having but $400 saved from lifeguarding, and knowing Eureka’s tuition was $180 per year, Reagan worried that he, like Neil, might need to spend more time earning money before applying. But when he drove Margaret to Eureka to register in September 1928, he knew he needed to enroll then and there. While he had supposedly decided to attend Eureka already, this was, in fact, the first time he had seen the campus “and I was bowled over,” Reagan said. With its redbrick Georgian-style buildings trimmed in white and arranged in a semicircle around a great green lawn studded with lush trees, “It was even lovelier than I’d imagined it would be,” he said.
By cajoling school officials, including the football coach in a futile attempt to win an athletic scholarship, Reagan was offered—with the help of Margaret’s father, Pastor Cleaver—a needy student scholarship that reduced his tuition by half. His savings would pay for the remainder of his tuition, his books, and the $2.50 per week his room would cost. He found work washing dishes at two women’s dorms (Eureka was both coed and racially integrated) to pay for his meals.
Reagan’s problems financing his higher education were not unusual in that time of widespread economic distress (the author’s father negotiated a very similar arrangement at roughly the same time with Oklahoma A&M University), nor do they indicate the Reagans were particularly poor. Reagan’s former neighbors in Dixon would later take exception to Reagan “talking poor” while president. “They were not worse off than anybody else,” neighbor Leo Gorman said, and another noted that Jack and Nelle were “always well dressed.” Jack Reagan never amassed much in the way of savings and was never able to buy a home, but in tracing his family roots, Ron Reagan said most of the houses his grandparents rented “were reasonably spacious and comfortable.”
In 1930, after the Fashion Boot Shop that Jack managed had closed, he got a job with the Red Wing Shoe Company that paid a very good salary of $260 per month, but he was laid off right before Christmas 1932. It was the one time Reagan’s family was in a truly perilous financial position. Having graduated from Eureka the previous spring, Reagan had not yet found steady employment. He worked his final summer as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, and with a vague idea of getting into the entertainment industry so that he could become an actor, Reagan won the chance to help broadcast four University of Iowa football games for radio station WOC in Davenport, Iowa. The gig paid all of $10 per game. Neil, meanwhile, still had another year planned at Eureka before graduation, but he was certain he would have to drop out for lack of funds.
Their fears and desperation lasted only a couple of months. In February 1933, Reagan was hired as a full-time radio announcer, and in the summer of 1933, with Roosevelt now president, Jack was given a local management position in the new Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), perhaps in part to reward him for his long-standing loyalty to the Democratic Party.
Biographer Garry Wills has written that “the scale of the rescue brought to the Reagan family [by FERA and Roosevelt’s New Deal] has not been widely appreciated,” for in addition to Jack being employed by FERA, Neil was also hired by the agency to work as district representative of the Federal Reemployment Bureau after graduating from Eureka. FERA was later expanded into the Civil Works Administration, which under the leadership of Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins was designed to put four million people to work within two months.
The hiring of two men from the same family was highly unusual, as was the hiring of an unmarried man like Neil, for the poi
nt of FERA was to ensure that as many families as possible received at least some work and income to head off destitution and even starvation during what was the lowest depths of the Depression. Jack’s job was to help the agency’s regional office identify and certify local public works projects that were labor intensive but which did not require a large investment in materials or tools, and which could be completed in a short amount of time. One of the projects of which Jack was most proud, though he did not personally design it, was to use abandoned streetcar rails to build hangars at the local airport. Jack did well enough that he was eventually promoted to county program director.
“The New Deal had bailed the Reagans out,” Wills notes, and in gratitude Reagan remained a loyal Democrat through 1950, when he campaigned for fellow actor Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas in her U.S. Senate campaign against Republican Richard Nixon. But as he began his conversion to conservatism and the Republican Party, he found it difficult to explain his previous loyalty to Roosevelt and the New Deal.
Reagan would do his best in later years to remake Roosevelt into a conservative. He would note, correctly, that while a candidate for president in 1932, Roosevelt had pledged to balance the federal budget and cut federal spending, though Reagan failed to note that Roosevelt later regretted having made that promise and tried to disavow it. Reagan also said he believed, based on conversations he had with one of Roosevelt’s sons, that Roosevelt always intended FERA and the other measures of the New Deal to be only temporary.
Reagan also said the New Deal’s “alphabet soup of federal agencies” was not Roosevelt’s greatest contribution to ending the Depression; rather, it was his “strong, gentle, confident voice” heard on the radio that reassured Americans “that we could lick any problem.” This, of course, would be a type of leadership that Reagan would be proud of when he became president.
