The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  While Joe Jr. spent much of his time journeying around Europe, Jack was back at Harvard. Exemplifying what can be the terrible carelessness of wealth, he believed that there was always someone else to pick up for him. In his suite at Winthrop House, he had the disconcerting habit of dropping his clothes in the middle of the floor. One evening as he hurriedly dressed to go out, he threw his pants and shirt into a pile in the middle of the room. His roommate, Torby Macdonald, looked at the heap and declared their room had the distinct appearance of a rummage sale. “Don’t get sanctimonious,” Jack snapped back. “Whose stuff do you think I’m throwing mine on top of?” That may have been true, but before long George Taylor, Jack’s black, self-styled “gentleman’s gentleman,” would be dropping by to hang and press Gentleman Jack’s clothes while Torby’s would stay where they fell.

  At times Jack treated the law like a petty hindrance that should not bother someone who carried the name Kennedy. Jack wrote Lem that he had a “rather unpleasant contact with a woman in a car who was such a shit that I gave her a lot of shit.” Euphemism is often a liar’s cloak, and Jack admitted to his friend that the woman had written the Registry of Motor Vehicles complaining that “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…. Anyways they got me in and are sore at me.”

  Jack had apparently become so angry that he had rammed into this woman’s car a number of times. When he was called to account for his deplorable act, he lied, telling the officers that he’d “loaned my car out that night to some students.” Jack had given the police the name of one of these students—none other than his friend Lem. Now Lem was supposed to take the blame, saying “you’re sorry and realize you should not have done it.” Confession was good for the soul, even if it was a lie masquerading as honesty, as long as Jack did not have to take responsibility.

  It remained a wondrous time to be rich, as long as you kept your eyes high, away from the unseemly sight of the poor and the hungry. Jack was a Spee Club man, and his friends were either rich and wellborn or stellar athletes. He did not sit at dinner at his club or around Winthrop House bemoaning the fate of the poor. Not once in any of his letters did he ever mention the dreadful consequences of the Great Depression.

  Jack traveled from one watering hole of the wealthy to the next. At the wedding of his classmate Ben Smith in Lake Forest, Illinois, Jack left a faucet on all night in the home where he was staying. By morning the plaster had fallen down from the ceilings, and the newly decorated home was a shambles. Jack admitted his culpability with such self-deprecating charm that the hosts couldn’t possibly dislike him, and so they turned their wrath on a friend whose only crime was being there.

  Women were one of his primary divertissements, if they were pretty. If they were not pretty, he simply ignored them, or occasionally ridiculed them. During Easter 1938 Jack and Lem were down in Florida, where they heard that the Oxford Meat Market was having a picnic for the servants in Palm Beach. The two young men thought that it might be good pickings there, that pretty working-class girls would be happy to spend an evening with young gentlemen.

  Jack’s eyes fell on one pretty Irish lass. Jack cut her away from the rest, but though she agreed to go out with him, she insisted that her friend Rachel come along. Rachel was enormous, at least 250 pounds, dressed in a sailor suit. Jack, always ready for amusement, said that he would arrange a date for Rachel. He then called his snobbish Princeton friend Sandy Osborn and told him that he had a date for him. “Well, we went to pick up the girl at the corner of such-and-such street, and Sandy was so eager and excited: and suddenly the lights hit her standing on the corner,” Lem recalled. “It was one of the funniest experiences I’ve ever had in my life!”

  Jack was also careless in his vision of the world. In the summer of 1937, he traveled through Europe with Lem, keeping a diary of his experience. It was an exceptional time to be journeying from the border of Spain to Berlin, but for the most part he wrote like a snooty prep school boy criticizing nations as if they were bad restaurants.

  To young Jack, ethnicity was more important than ideology. In Saint Jean de Luz, he talked to refugees driven out of Spain by Franco’s minions. He noted in his diary: “Story of father starved kept in prison without food for a week brought in piece of meat, ate it—then saw his son’s body with piece of meat cut out of it.”

  Jack did not look for reasons in the politics of his time but in the Spanish national character. “In the afternoon went to a bull-fight,” he scribbled in his notebook. “Very interesting but very cruel, especially when the bull gored the horse. Believe all the atrocity stories now as these southerners, such as these French and Spanish, are happiest at scenes of cruelty.”

  In Germany, although he did not express pro-Nazi sentiments, Jack was impressed with the quality of life. “All the towns are very attractive showing that the Nordic races certainly seem superior to the Latins.” Near the end of his journey, he concluded: “Fascism is the thing for Germany and Italy, Communism for Russia and democracy for America and England.”

  On his trip to Europe in 1937 Jack had been sailing along when, in London at the end of the summer, he developed a bewildering case of hives that four different doctors looked at before the problem disappeared as mysteriously as it had begun. Jack’s health was a veritable dictionary of illnesses, and years later Lem joked to a friend that if he wrote Jack’s biography, he would title it “John F. Kennedy, A Medical History.”

  With his weak stomach, Jack was fortunate that he could eat at the Spee and be served a special diet. The club even had an ice cream—making machine to produce the one food that he could easily digest and that might put some meat on his bones. He went out for the Harvard swim team, but in March 1938, he entered New England Baptist Hospital with an intestinal infection that knocked out any chance of a swimming letter. Once again he lay in a hospital bed, trying to rise out of his pain and get back into the world.

  By the middle of June, Jack was back in the hospital, nagged by weight loss and continuing intestinal problems. In the fall, doctors wanted him back in the hospital for more tests. He wrote Lem, “I’ve been in rotten shape since I’ve got back and seem to be back-sliding.” The following spring he was so sick that he had to agree to go to the Mayo Clinic for tests. It was simply endless.

  Jack made a point of lying out in the sun at Palm Beach or Hyannis Port getting a tan, making sure his face always had a robust sheen. He was not going to be pitied or excused. No one was going to push him aside from the races of youth. His few friends who knew the truth realized that Jack’s greatest creation was the illusion of health. If he talked about his condition, and that was rarely enough, he did so only to make a joke about it. “Jack didn’t discuss it,” Rousmanière recalled. “We never made it a part of our lives what his health was. He was deceptive and his health was never an issue.”

  Joe had taught his sons that nothing was more valuable in life than time, for life itself was no more than a blink of an eye. To be sickly was to live half a life, and half a life was not life enough. Jack willed himself to live his life as something he was not and never would be—a healthy man.

  Jack kept his poor health secret all his life. If sometimes denial is another name for a lie, at other times it is the mask of courage, and friends such as Lem and Rousmanière believed that was the mask their friend was wearing. Later in his life, Jack would lie about his health for political reasons, but now he pretended that he was something he was not so that he could live as he thought a man must live.

  During his last two years at Harvard, Jack had become the student that his father and older brother never were. Jack burrowed into books not to avoid the world but to enter it more fully. There was a dramatic immediacy to many of the classes, especially in government and modern history. The professors themselves often stood on different sides of the issues of war and peace. Education was no longer an abstraction. Education, at least part of it, was about life
and death, a struggle in which these young men might soon be involved.

  In the spring of his junior year, Jack received a leave of absence to go to Europe and prepare his senior honors’ thesis on England’s failure to prepare for war. During these seven months in 1939, Jack traveled throughout Europe and Palestine, sending his father a series of detailed accounts of his journey, most of which have been lost. He wrote Lem as well without having to play the diplomat.

  In these letters to Lem there is a curious dichotomy between the fledgling public man and the spoiled, petulant, narcissistic youth. To that latter Jack Kennedy, life was a dress parade. Jack wrote Lem how he “went to court in my knee breeches and made my gracious bow before the king and queen and was really quite a figure,” while he was not “sporting around in my morning coat, my ‘Anthony Eden’ black homburg and white gardenia.” He was, as always, deeply sensitive to anything that smelled of the effete. He read in the Choate News that a lone bat had terrified students, zooming around Mem House, hiding until an intrepid housemaid attacked the animal with a mop. “My God, they all sound like fairies, both faculty and student body,” he wrote Lem.

  To Jack, sex remained the preferred avenue of manly adventure, his sexual safaris taking him from the brothels of West Palm Beach to the refined enclaves of the demimonde, where at times the behavior did not differ that much from that of the whores of South Florida, only the price.

  No small part of the adventure was the imminent possibility of carrying home an unwanted souvenir. In London he saw a woman who had lived with the Duke of Kent and had among her baubles of romance “terrific diamond bracelets” from the duke, a “big ruby” given to her by a Nepalese prince, and a cigarette case “engraved with Snow White lying down with spread legs, and the seven dwarfs cocks in hands waiting to screw her—very charming.” Jack wrote Lem: “I don’t know what she thinks she is going to get out of me but we’ll see. Meanwhile very interesting as am seeing life.”

  Jack was seeing life too on what he called “the serious side.” His father got him introductions to ambassadors and other high officials. But it was his self-confident manner and astuteness that led them to spend time with him that they probably would not have granted to a less politically sophisticated young man. “The whole thing is damn interesting,” he wrote Lem, “and if this letter wasn’t going on a German boat and if they weren’t opening mail—could tell you some interesting stuff.”

  Some politicians, even in their youth, live their lives as if they are biographies, measuring each word for posterity, writing letters with their ideas and feelings self-censored, all sanitized. Jack, however, wrote in an emotive stream, going in a few sentences from a rude put-down of his contemporaries to a telling insight into the world in which he lived, and then back to more gossip.

  Again and again Jack told Lem that it was all “very interesting,” and so it was. He traveled to the open city of Danzig, where swastikas were in full array and he “talked with the Nazi heads and all the counsels up there.” He realized that Poland would never give up Danzig to Hitler. Nor was Germany about to back off. “What Germany will do if she decides to go to war,” he wrote Lem on May 1, 1939, “will try and put Poland in the position of being aggressor—and then go to work.”

  Jack’s diplomatic reportage was perfectly prescient, but he had no interest in talking to the unwashed, the unlearned, and the unstylish. “All of the young people own estates of around 1,000,000 acres with 10,000 or so peasants,” he wrote Lem, as if young peasants were some degraded form of humankind unworthy of being called “young people.” If Lem came to visit, he promised that they would visit an estate rented by the Biddies “with around 12,000 on it who tip their hats with one hand and push forward their daughter with the other.”

  While twenty-year-old Jack was in London, he read The Young Melbourne, a new book by David Cecil. Jack was at an age when a young man of a literate bent reads books not as abstract fodder but as a guide to conduct. Young men of Jack’s generation were reading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and learning of love and courage, or John Steinbeck’s despairing Of Mice and Men. Their favorite book would never have been a literary biography of a Whig aristocrat who at a young age “envince[d] that capacity for compromising genially with circumstances,” a capacity that the young rarely consider a virtue.

  In this Whig world that Jack so admired, daring was for the battlefield, not for the art that hung on one’s walls, the literature that one admired, or the politics that one espoused. It was a life of appreciation, not creation, and perfunctory religiosity, not deep spirituality. It was above all a man’s world of conventional excess—drinking and gambling and wenching. “The ideal was the Renaissance ideal of the whole man, whose aspiration it is to make the most of every advantage, intellectual and sensual, that life has to offer,” the author wrote in what could have been an adage for Jack’s own life.

  Jack was a young man of intellectual precociousness. Many of the ideas in the book resonated within him and passed as wisdom. Young Melbourne was “a skeptic in thought, in practice a hedonist,” a description that fit Jack’s own vision of himself. This Whig hedonism was not vulgar sexual indulgence, but a life in which pleasures, sensual and otherwise, were aesthetic treats. Passion was in the pursuit. Loyalty was for friends, not for spouses or lovers. Moral perfection was left where it belonged, in heaven.

  “Nature had meant for him that rare phenomenon, a philosophical observer of mankind,” Cecil wrote. That sentence too would surely have resonated with Jack. He was in ways a spectator to his own life. There seemed nothing, no romance deep enough, no danger intense enough, no thought profound enough, to pull him fully outside the circle of himself.

  There was the conundrum, not only for young Melbourne but also for young Jack Kennedy. Is a man who sees the world as it is—with all its compromises, dishonesty, self-interest, and impediments to change—less able to make a deep mark than another man who is blithely unaware of his own limitations and those of the world? Was it the lot of a man who understood the sheer futility of most human effort—the illusions and vanity that drove men to seek fame and power—to stand on the sidelines, his head tilted ironically, merely observing the life that ran before him?

  9

  “It’s the End of the World, the End of Everything”

  Joe believed that England would lose in a war with Germany. Everything he did and said followed from that conviction. If he was correct, he was not a treacherous defeatist whose sentiments prolonged the period before America would begin to support its greatest ally with its immense military arsenal.

  No, he was a daring prophet and patriot who, once war seemed imminent, sought to extract whatever he could from the dying island empire, holding the British up to repatriate hard currency for Hollywood films, hanging tough in barter deals with the British, and promoting those British leaders who sought peace at almost any price. He had gone into politics to save his own fortune, or a good part of it. If his liquor business benefited from the diminished tariffs he was now helping to negotiate, that was only a fitting compensation for his many contributions as a public servant.

  As for the Jews, it pained Joe that they mocked him so when he considered himself practically their best friend in government. He believed that he shared with Chamberlain the attitude that if the world exploded in war, the troublesome Jews would share a good deal of the blame. In his thinking, he had nonetheless worked on several fronts to get some of them out of Germany and accepted in one of the many countries that shunned them. One of the new ambassador’s first tasks was to deal with the Evian conference in France. It was called a “refugee” conference, but that was a euphemism that hid the fact that 90 percent of the refugees were Jewish. The delegates focused on what to do with German “refugees,” but the problem was far broader. The Poles and the Romanians wanted to be rid of their “refugees” too. The British feared that too liberal a solution in Germany would inspire several other European nations to deport their “refugees.�
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  Joe tried to work out a solution to allow Jews to buy their way out of Germany and into other countries. Joe’s proposal pleased his eldest son. “The baby is tossed right into the laps of the people themselves for the real concern now is money,” Joe Jr. wrote in his diary on November 21, 1938. “If the Jews come through and especially the other people this problem can be cleared up. Dad doesn’t think they will put up the necessary money, but he thinks he has done his part, and the rest is up to the others.”

  London was full of rumors that Joe was making a new fortune selling out the British by trading on inside information. There is no evidence of such dealings in the British Foreign Office’s extensive files, and Joe may well not have been taking advantage of his position. But he was a man of such monumental cynicism, who glorified the rudest reaches of self-interest, that those around him often thought the worst of him.

  Joe was not cynical, however, about his children. No father cared more for the future of his sons than he did, and when he spoke out of that feeling, he touched what was deep and true. In May 1939, he traveled to Liverpool University to receive an honorary degree. There, as young British faces looked up at him, he spoke of his own children and their futures. “I have a couple of boys, and two or three daughters, who think that they know what’s wrong with the world,” he told his British audience. “They are quite outspoken in their opinion of the way we old folks have been doing things. I shouldn’t want them to know it but I must admit, just between us, that I can’t blame them…. The important thing to remember is that the majority of our difficulties are man-made…. They are the result of human carelessness, human short-sightedness, human greed.”