In 1954, I finally realized my dream of trotting out onto the field for the Crimson varsity. It was not an easy path. I started off on the eighth squad at Harvard. That was the lowest, I think. But I hung in there; I knew I wasn't the best athlete on the team, not by a long shot, but I was determined to work hard and stay with it.
And sure enough, as the games went on, a lot of the better-ranked players started to drop off the team. They'd get hurt, or decide they didn't want to continue, or football conflicted with chemistry lab. I was lucky. Lucky and determined. I gradually rose up the depth chart. In the Bucknell game the coach finally sent me onto the field. I was so excited to be in the game that I didn't notice when I got a tooth knocked out.
I hardly even merited a sentence from the student paper's sportswriter, David Halberstam. I had a chance to earn my varsity "H" in that year's Yale classic--I needed just four minutes of playing time--but on the first play after I entered the game, an Eli ball carrier swept around my end of the line for a sixty-yard gain. Out I came, as Dad threw up his hands on the sideline and my brothers watched in disappointment from the stands. I didn't get back in and I didn't win my varsity letter, though we beat Yale and won the Big Three title. Everyone at Harvard was celebrating--almost everyone.
In my final season in the fall 1955 I not only started, but averaged fifty-six minutes a game. Those were the days when the entire line still played both defense and offense. The team itself struggled--we had a dismal 2-7 record for the season--but we never lost heart and we still gave our all. I caught a touchdown pass as we defeated Columbia on October 5, by a score of 21 to 7. My most exciting personal moment, though, came in the Harvard-Yale Game, when a pass went skidding off the hands of its intended receiver and I reached out and grabbed it and hung on to it as I rumbled into the end zone. I won my letter, but we lost the game, 21-7. This time almost everyone at Harvard was down in the dumps--but not everyone. Dad, who'd brought a couple dozen of his friends from New York and Boston by train, charged into the locker room with Jack and Bobby to noisily congratulate me. I knew they should tone it down, but with Dad and my brothers smiling so broadly over my TD catch and the earning of my letter, I can't say that I was sorry for their enthusiasm.
I graduated from Harvard in the spring of 1956, satisfied that I had proved myself both academically and on the playing field. My grades were more than respectable, and I even received a letter from the Green Bay Packers wanting to know whether I wanted to try out for the team. I declined Green Bay's kind offer, but, all in all, I was feeling pretty good.
That August at the Democratic convention, Jack made a surprising bid for the nomination as vice president under Adlai Stevenson. He'd electrified the delegates on opening night with his narration of a moving film about the history of the party, which garnered him a lot of positive attention. Jack jumped into the open nomination process. As much as Jack wanted it, Dad was not in favor of his move for the vice presidential nomination because he was sure that President Eisenhower would defeat Stevenson and Jack's political career would be over. In my mother's memoir, she writes of Jack being persuaded to run, despite my father's objections, by a Louisiana delegate who pleaded with him to stay in the race after their delegation had stuck their neck out for him. In an amazing twist of history and fate, that Louisiana delegate was my future father-in-law, Edmund Reggie, then a thirty-year-old judge, who had managed to swing the Louisiana delegation behind my brother when Governor Earl K. Long had gone to the horse races. At the end of the day, Jack didn't win the nomination, but his experience at the convention was a win all the way around: my father was relieved; Jack's eloquence and grace in concession won him enormous political capital, raising his prospects as a serious contender for the presidency in 1960; and though I could not have imagined the significance at the time, our family began a friendship with the Reggies of Louisiana that some thirty years in the future would transform my life.
Meanwhile, I was eager to see more of the world after graduating from Harvard. I asked Jack where he thought I should go, and he suggested North Africa. He was interested in the global anticolonial movements, and he wanted me to look at the African countries just emerging from European rule: Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, which was still engaged in a long and bitter war of independence with France. I traveled with Fred Holborn, the distinguished Harvard political scientist who'd been an instructor of mine--my brothers and father always believed in bringing a knowledgeable source along when traveling in unfamiliar countries, especially those of geopolitical importance: a live-in tutor, so to speak. Jack had arranged meetings for us with key people in certain places, and I had made arrangements with the International News Service as a freelance reporter, just as Jack had done a few years earlier.
We drove by car across Spain and took a ferry into Morocco, experiencing our first taste of the exotic early on, high up in the steep and jagged Atlas Mountains. There we were to meet with Sidi Muhammad ibn Yusuf, the popular nationalist sultan whose exile to Madagascar by the French in 1953 had sparked an uprising. The French, realizing their mistake, returned this eminence to the Moroccan throne in 1955. Just weeks before our visit, Muhammad had negotiated Morocco's independence at Paris.
Our visit with Muhammad was memorable for a number of reasons. One was that another guest scheduled to arrive at the same time was El Glohi, a powerful Moroccan militant and recent rival of the king's. El Glohi's visit was of interest to my editor because he had tried to kill Muhammad on two or three previous occasions. The editors assured me that this meeting would be somewhat more amiable. In fact, it was to be a reconciliation; El Glohi was heading up the mountains to pay his tribute and swear allegiance to the king.
Holborn and I missed this reunion. It was held inside Muhammad's huge tent, with no outsiders allowed. We were, however, invited to the dazzling ceremonial dinner that followed. The festivities consumed most of an afternoon. The king's harem, seventy women strong, was present. There was dancing and the cutting of a calf. Out on a plain visible from the tent, bareback riders raced along on powerful horses, with rifles tucked under their arms. They would grasp the rifles with an opposite hand and, while at full gallop, hurl them fifty or seventy-five feet into the air. Without looking, they would grab the guns as they descended and fire them into the air. Then they would bounce off and back onto the horses. It was an unbelievable show. That night, Fred and I were shown to our sleeping area: a corner of the tent about five feet from these horses.
This experience paled, however, beside our next destination--Algeria, where we traveled around with the Algerian army. We witnessed a prologue to the Battle of Algiers. The French, who were winning at this point, had trapped the city's leaders in the sewer system. We watched as an officer opened a manhole cover and lowered a birdcage with a dove inside--a guarantee of safety to anyone down below who saw it.
The French thought they were going to prevail, but you could get the sense that it wasn't going to happen. The French would never bring these outraged nationalists to heel. The insurrection was all around. The Algerians had experienced the most brutal kinds of torture from the colonial army, and this enhanced their hatred and bolstered the movement for independence. Nothing could stop it.
After Algeria, I made a rendezvous with Jack, as we'd planned. He joined me for a sail in the Mediterranean after the Chicago convention. I gave him a detailed report of what I had witnessed during my six weeks of travel. Jack was keenly interested; but our hiatus was cut short by an urgent message from America: the pregnant Jackie, who had suffered a miscarriage the previous year, had just suffered the second of her three such losses. My brother hurried home to be with his wife. Yet he did not forget our conversation. In a speech a little more than a year later, the new senator John F. Kennedy tacitly drew upon the views I'd shared with him to carefully advocate for a "tolerable peace" in the Algerian conflict, arguing that "the dangers of communism only become greater as settlement is postponed." This was essentially the same view my brother held rega
rding the still young Vietnam conflict at the time of his assassination in 1963.
With Jack in the Senate to inspire me, public service was all but inevitable now as my career of choice, and the law was its foundation stone. I was interested in the law school at Stanford University in California--my grades didn't quite qualify me for Harvard Law--but ultimately I decided to follow Bobby's path to the University of Virginia Law School at Charlottesville.
These were a rousing three years, filled with fun and learning and new friendships. My roommate was John Varick Tunney, the son of the former heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney. When I met Gene, I found him to be similar to Dad in his no-nonsense, rough-and-ready approach to life. John was destined to become a Democratic congressman and then senator from California, and among the very closest of my lifelong friends. John is the godfather to Teddy Jr., and I am godfather to John's son Teddy.
We lived in a converted stable a short distance from the campus, where we staged a couple of memorable parties and had a lot of fun. The open, empty country roads were a great escape for me, a place to feel the fresh air on my face and contemplate the good things in life. Unfortunately, from time to time I lost track of the speedometer on my drives, but there always seemed to be a state trooper around to remind me. Still, life was great. I had good friends. And for a while at least, I stopped worrying about "catching up" and savored the moment.
It was Tunney who taught me mountain climbing, more or less. Exposed me to mountain climbing is probably more accurate. He and I and another law student and good friend of ours, named John Goemans, spent four weeks at the International Law School at The Hague studying contract law with the great Hardy Dillard. This put us within range of the famous mountains among the Pennine Alps of Switzerland--the Mischabel group that includes the Matterhorn and the Rimpfischhorn.
Tunney, who'd climbed while at Yale, decided to let me cut my teeth on an easy one, the Rimpfischhorn, which is only four thousand meters high and comes to an absolute point at the top. We went up with two brothers from the Swiss ski team, Auguste and Heinz Julen. It was probably the most terrifying experience of my life.
All of us were tied together, with me in between Auguste Julen and Tunney. I managed all right until we got close to the top. Maybe twenty feet. I saw Auguste put his foot on a little ledge and another foot someplace near that, and grab a handhold somewhere else, and boost himself up to a larger ledge. He looked down at me and said, "Now it's your turn."
After all the climbing we'd done to get to that point, my legs and arms felt like leaden weights. But I had no choice but to keep going. I was almost there. I put my foot where Auguste's had been, and my hand where I thought his had been, and I moved my other leg toward the other foothold--which wasn't there. I had just time enough to yell, "Tension! Tension!" which you yell if you're about to fall, and then boom! Down I went. I fell about twenty feet. The rope that encircled my waist slipped up underneath my arms, and I was swinging out there in space about three thousand feet above the valley. I resisted the temptation to raise my arms and grab the rope. If I raised them, I would slip through the loop and go spiraling through space. And if Auguste couldn't hold the rope, it would be lights out for all of us.
Auguste wrapped the rope around a boulder to keep it from slipping away and then slowly lowered me, letting out more and more slack. But I was beneath an overhang, and I could not touch the mountainside. I looked around and saw Tunney, just about at my level. He reached out and pulled me toward the mountain. He got me back to a very small ledge that could barely fit both of us, but it did. I was absolutely exhausted. The wind was fierce. I called out, "I don't think I can go up any farther. I really don't think I can make it. I'm too tired!"
"Boys, you've got to climb," Auguste called back. "You've got to get up to the top of the mountain." Or perish, was the unspoken implication.
I owe my life to Tunney. He looked around and spotted another route--a couloir, a corridor formed by large rocks. John managed to wedge himself in between the rocks and move his shoulders upward, while keeping his knees braced against the sides. In this way he managed the fifteen or twenty feet to where Auguste waited. I studied his movements carefully and then emulated them, which is why I am not hanging out there to this day.
On the far side of the peak was a funicular. We took it back down, and I found myself wondering why we hadn't taken it up as well. I made my mind up that was one sport I would never, ever get into.
The next day we climbed the Matterhorn.
Back at the University of Virginia, in the classroom, I threw myself into the study of law as never before. In this pursuit, as in our travel and good times, John and I sparked one another. We teamed up for the classic law school exercise known as moot court. The competition in this extracurricular drill consisted of seventy-five teams, with debates structured as tennis tournament eliminations. The process spanned nearly the whole of my three years at UVA.
"Free Speech" was the issue at hand, and John and I took the more liberal position. We had to write briefs that were the product of enormous research. To prepare for our oral arguments, we practiced against a team that we would not meet in the pairings, but which held the opposing view. By the time we reached the semifinals, the quality of competition had skyrocketed. The finals were in May 1959, and Bobby--who'd been through early rounds of the competition when he was in law school--and my sister Pat came down from New York to watch.
We had worked hard to get to this point in the competition and every nerve was on end. The pressure was only heightened by the caliber of our judges: retired Supreme Court justice and former solicitor general of the United States Stanley Reed; the former solicitor general and attorney general who had famously cross-examined Hermann Goring at the Nuremberg trials, the lord chancellor of the United Kingdom David Maxwell Fyfe, the Earl of Kilmuir; and U.S. Court of Appeals judge for the Fourth Circuit Clement Haynsworth (ten years into the future, as a senator, I would vote against Judge Haynsworth's nomination by Richard Nixon to the Supreme Court). Our opposing team was led by Wayne Lustig, a silvertongued southerner who made what even John and I considered an A-plus argument. Yes, the pressure was definitely on.
In the most exciting and rewarding moment of my life to that time, and among those of all time, John and I were declared the winners of the moot court competition. We were overjoyed.
Another great tradition at Virginia Law School was the Student Legal Forum, and I was in charge of getting distinguished legal and political figures to come and speak to the students. I was successful at getting some real stars to visit the forum, because I had an ally in Jack. He helped us get Hubert Humphrey, who came down and was captivating. A thousand students showed up to hear him, which pleased Jack enormously when he heard it. We brought in Edward Bennett Williams, who was just then defending Jimmy Hoffa in court. We tried to sandbag Williams on whether Hoffa even had a tenable defense, but he blew us out of the water in about thirty seconds. We had the great union leader Walter Reuther, who was dynamic and spellbinding. We had Victor Riesel, the hard-nosed antiracketeering labor columnist, who just a few months earlier had been blinded by sulfuric acid thrown into his eyes by an assailant on a Manhattan sidewalk. Supreme Court justice William Brennan was another one of our incredible speakers.
I still wince a little when I recall the time we invited Prescott Bush, George Bush's father and George W.'s grandfather, a distinguished senator from Connecticut and an enormously gracious, dignified person. But not exactly a big marquee name at the University of Virginia Law School. As the date of his appearance drew near, we saw the reverse of what usually happened with ticket requests: instead of increasing, the demand grew less and less. We'd drawn a thousand spectators for Humphrey and eight hundred for Williams. But with Prescott Bush, as the reality of the numbers started to sink in, we realized we'd need only about four or five hundred seats. Then we thought we'd better get down to two hundred.
We ended up listening to Prescott Bush in a small room
with seventy-five chairs. But he was incredibly pleasant. We had dinner afterward--and, like most speakers, he was much more interesting at the dinner.
Several weeks later, as I was driving Jack to some appointment or other in Boston, my brother reached over and honked the horn. He pointed to another car. "I know who that is," Jack exclaimed. "That's Pres Bush!" In the passenger seat was his son, George Herbert Walker Bush. Both cars stopped, and we all got out and yakked it up. The Bushes were headed up to Maine. George Bush mentioned to me that his father had told him about his visit to Virginia Law School and "the nice young Kennedy boy." I had privately disagreed with some of Prescott Bush's views, but I had a cordial personal relationship with him--just as I would have with the next two generations of Bushes.
After the family's traditional Thanksgiving dinner in Hyannis Port in November 1956, Jack and Joe Sr. left the table and repaired to the study near the living room for a private talk. When they emerged, grinning, arms around each other's shoulders, the rest of us learned that Jack had decided to run for president in 1960.
Their talk apparently had been a kind of moot court in reverse: Jack citing all the reasons why he should not run (he was Catholic, only thirtynine, none of the party's leaders had indicated any support for such a move), and our father countering each one. Jack would not announce his decision until early in the election year. But a charge of energy ran through our family at once. Getting Jack reelected to the Senate, and then helping him become president--this had become our mission.
In October 1957, I got "aced out," courtesy of Jack, of a chance to see a professional football game, and as a result ended up meeting my future wife. The occasion was a Sunday afternoon talk that Jack "suggested" I give at the dedication ceremony for the Kennedy Physical Education Building at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart. Our family had donated the building in memory of Kathleen. My mother, Eunice, and Jean had all attended Manhattanville College, as had the former Ethel Skakel.
True Compass: A Memoir Page 12
