The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Teddy had gone through a couple of tough years, and it was a measure of Bobby’s love for his brother that he drove up from New York, where he was working on the Hoover Commission’s plan to reorganize government. Bobby was the least likely of spectators, however, and as soon as he got to New Haven he talked Teddy into finding another uniform so that he could join his brother on the field.

  The two brothers stood stalwartly together on the line, Bobby at end and Teddy at tackle, playing with a ferocity rare in such a modest competition. Bobby was on the verge of his twenty-eighth birthday and out of shape, but his opponents across the line would not have known. “Bobby … could play in that league like a tiger,” Teddy recalled. “I mean, he was very good, and it was great fun.” Was it any wonder, then, that to young Teddy, brotherly love was the highest love, and that he saw in his two big brothers the very models of what a man should be?

  Life was decidedly better now for Teddy. For the most part, the academic life of Harvard was just a dreary routine that he passed through on his way to good times. He was a drudge who managed to earn more Bs than Cs, doing far better in his grades than his father had done. He took one course with Professor Arthur Holcombe on the Constitutional Convention that excited him. Not only was Holcombe a brilliant professor teaching his last year, but he had also taught Teddy’s father and brothers. The legendary professor may have moved Teddy intellectually, but he was unimpressed by his student. “I think academic activities came out third [after athletic and social activities],” Holcombe reflected from retirement. “He did just what was necessary to remain in good standing.”

  Teddy was not much of a student, but he had willing helpers, including Bobby, who shipped some of his old term papers up to Harvard. Bobby admitted that one of them, an essay on the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, “seems a little technical, but perhaps you can water it down a little bit and still be able to use it.” Teddy had been thrown out of college for cheating, but neither brother seemed to understand that copying term papers was as serious an offense as cheating on an exam. They lived in their own moral universe and had a code singular unto themselves.

  At Harvard, for the first time in his life, Teddy had good friends, most of them his fellow football players. Several of these college buddies became lifetime friends whose identification with Teddy and his life was almost total. He brought them down to Hyannis Port, where they played spirited games of touch football and ate immense quantities of good food prepared by the Kennedys’ cook. Teddy didn’t brag about his famous family. During freshman year, it wasn’t until one of his new friends, Claude Hooton Jr., noticed a caricature in the Boston Globe that looked surprisingly like his classmate that he realized that Teddy was not an heir to the Kennedy Department Stores on the Cape but heir to something a bit larger. Teddy was by most measures a good and thoughtful friend whose graciousness sometimes even embarrassed Hooton. After a rugby match Hooton hurriedly showered and put on his tux for the big dance that evening. When Hooton picked up his friend, Teddy was carrying two corsages, one for his date and one for Hooton’s.

  Teddy could drink more beer than any of his buddies and still be up at dawn for a sail or a tennis game while his friends lay in bed, pillows over their heads, trying to quell their throbbing hangovers. He wasn’t the sort who went looking for a fight, but if a fight came looking for him, he didn’t duck down the alley. One summer sailing with David Hackett in Maine, he was rowing a dinghy to their boat when a smart aleck in a yacht made the mistake of shouting to Teddy that he should row faster, and then challenging him. Teddy and Hackett scampered up onto the yacht and, as the occupants hurried on deck, threw them, one after another, into the Atlantic.

  Anyone who knew Teddy would have laughed at the idea that the man was a pallid inheritor, the last and least of the Kennedys, feeding off the scraps of heritage. He was living an intrepid life, one summer going out west to work as a forest ranger, another year heading out to be a crewman on a race from California to Hawaii. He and Hooton went off one summer to teach water skiing in California. Driving back east they were nearly arrested when they attempted to sell their auto in New Orleans without title papers. Teddy called Jack’s office, where Bobby said he had never heard of his brother. Bobby called back later and they were freed.

  Teddy did not have Jack’s sophisticated charm or his subtle gamesmanship. He developed a rating system from A to F that he applied to every woman he met, including his own sisters. Even if a woman was an A, he was soon ready to move on, to go back with his buddies, before heading out another evening to score again.

  It bothered Bobby that Teddy had done all the penance he was going to do and back at Harvard was majoring in football and good times. Teddy’s self-indulgent conduct so rankled Bobby that on occasion he saw fit to lecture his kid brother. “I talked to Dad last night,” Bobby wrote Teddy in January 1955, “and he agreed with me that you really made a fool of yourself New Year’s Eve.” That may have been, but it was hardly brotherly to go running off to their father, all clucking commiseration, the contrast between upstanding Bobby and rascally Teddy all too stark.

  There was always an edge to Bobby’s humor, a sting to any balm he applied. Jack’s attitude toward his kid brother was far different. Jack was a man who, by Bobby’s estimate, was in physical pain half his life. To Jack, physical well-being took on a spiritual quality of which those who possessed it were rarely aware. Even in this transitory world of youth, where health was as common as the very air, Teddy seemed like the benchmark of health. As their mother observed her two sons, she thought that “Teddy had the strength and the vitality and Jack rather envied him his health and capacity to take part in all these sports.”

  Not just envy brought Jack up to Boston on those autumn weekends to watch Teddy playing end on the varsity. Earning a letter was something that he and his brother Joe had dreamed of. His father sat next to him celebrating whenever Teddy took the field. During his junior year, Teddy’s father and brothers spent some disappointing Saturdays watching him sit on the bench. When it came time for the final game against Yale in the 1954 season, he had played end for only fifty-six minutes, four minutes short of the hour necessary to win the coveted football letter that meant more to Teddy than any other Harvard honor. It was still the first half when Teddy got in the game for the first time, and it was almost certain that he would have his Crimson letter. As soon as Teddy took the field, however, a Yale back ran sixty-two yards around his end. It was not Teddy’s fault, but he was taken out and never got back in the game.

  “So I ended up at the end of the season with fifty-nine minutes, fifty-eight seconds,” Teddy recalled years later with a memory he has for few other things in his past. “And at the last minute Harvard scored to win the game. So the place was euphoric, and I had to be euphoric. And my father’s in the stands. I know I’ve disappointed him, disappointed my brothers who were up there. They’re trying to cheer me up, and I’m trying to be happy because the team wins, and I’m part of the team. These enormous emotions going through a person at that time.”

  The following year Teddy had played fifty-six minutes when it all came down to the final game against Yale in New Haven. Out there on that field, Teddy was living the life that both Jack and Joe Jr. had so much wanted to live. To the other Kennedy men, it hardly seemed to matter that, heading into its final game, this miserable Harvard team had won only twice, while losing six games.

  Teddy was inspired by the fact that his brothers and father were often up in the stands. “I think … [Jack’s] most profound influence was not so much when I was a teenager or a pre-teenager but was the later years when I was in high school and through college and the post-college years,” Teddy reflected. “I suppose the relationship with him was as much as a friend as a brother. There was a fourteen years’ difference—and he was remarkably interested in all the different kinds of things I was involved in. He came to the sports events when I was in school. He was interested in the subjects I took in college and the teachers
I had. I think he enjoyed vicariously a lot of the things I was doing—football in college…. He could look at the light side of situations which made things not look as grim.”

  The way the men of Cambridge saw things, a victory here in New Haven in November would mean a successful 1955 season. Jack and Bobby sat in the stands at the Yale Bowl. So did Joe, who had brought along two railroad cars full of friends, associates, his New York staff, even the family cook. More than fifty-five thousand spectators sat in the open stands on this blustery day as the young men fought their way up and down the icy turf, sliding into the piles of snow on the sidelines. Several times the referees had to stop fistfights between opposing players.

  As Joe watched Teddy running up and down the frozen field, the world below did not look that different from what it was four and a half decades earlier when Joe had first entered the gates of Harvard. Teddy had to prove his courage and his competitive zeal so that one day he would demonstrate those qualities on a larger field. Teddy may have shamed his family name by being caught cheating, but down on the field on this glorious afternoon he was the man Joe knew he must be.

  The stadium trembled with cheering, and for three hours nothing mattered more in life than that the Harvard men should prove not wanting. It all may have been diminished from what it was in Joe’s day, but none there that afternoon could have imagined that within a few years the crowds would dwindle, the bands would play mocking airs, and those students who still bothered to come would for the most part watch from an ironical distance.

  Joe had wanted few things in life as much as to see one of his sons on that field, not shuttled in for a play or two, but out there quarter after quarter. Even on the most splendidly exuberant of occasions, Joe’s thoughts were often haunted by memories of Joe Jr. On just such a day, Joe had watched as his oldest son sat on the bench, never getting into the Yale game for even a play to win the letter that he had struggled so to win.

  Blasts of cold wind coursed across the field. In the third quarter, as Yale led 14–0, Harvard pushed up the field to within striking distance of the end zone. Teddy stood on the end of the line, waiting for the ball to be hiked. He was notoriously slow of foot, hardly the material for a great end. But at six feet two and 210 pounds, he had a beautifully proportioned athlete’s body and was fearless in the way he leaped after a ball. He also was so wondrously resilient, and of such good cheer, that even when he was viciously blocked, he jumped up and patted his opponent on the behind before trotting back to the huddle.

  Teddy ran a few yards beyond the line of scrimmage, turned, caught a short pass, and ran into the end zone for Harvard’s first touchdown. The stadium erupted in applause, no one cheering louder than Teddy’s father and brothers. For all that the Kennedy men had tried for close to half a century, this was the first, last, and only great athletic moment in their history of playing football at Harvard. The Crimson scored no more, but when Joe, Bobby, and Jack entered the locker room after the game, they were not there to commiserate with a defeated team but to celebrate Teddy’s triumph. And when they shouted too loud and boasted too much, he shushed them as best he could, lest they bother his dispirited teammates. “My brothers and I were euphoric, and Harvard was depressed,” Teddy recalled. “It’s a great part of life, too … teaching you about the ups and downs and sort of coming back, and the irony of defeat and victory.”

  Joe didn’t have to hide his high spirits on the train ride back to New York City. He replayed the touchdown over and over again with his friends, but none of them could understand what a moment of vindication and sweet victory this was. So many years before, when little Jack had nearly died, Joe had made his bet with God that if his son lived he would contribute half of his worldly wealth to charity. And today, whether or not he had made another bet with God, he decided to give another tip of the hat to the Supreme Being. Joe turned to Janet Des Rosiers, his young secretary, who was seated beside him. “Janet,” he said, “remind me in the morning to tell Frank [Morrissey] that I’m going to give a million and a half dollars to that home for the elderly outside Boston.”

  Joe had met Des Rosiers back in the fall of 1948 in his suite at the Ritz-Carleton Hotel in Boston, where she interviewed to be his new secretary. By

  the time Des Rosiers walked into the living room, Joe had already talked to at least forty candidates. Twenty-four-year-old Des Rosiers had a sweet sensuality, a gentle demeanor, modest downcast eyes, brown hair, and a soft voice that one had to strain to hear. Joe told her later that as soon as he saw her he decided to forget the other candidates.

  For Des Rosiers, it was no small commitment to take on this job at a salary far from munificent. She was a single woman. Her father had died when she was only twelve, taking away most of her childhood with him. From then on, she had learned to live as an adult, helping to take care of her four younger brothers and sisters. She had worked at various secretarial jobs, but she had never had much time to date or hang out with a gang of young friends. Now she was expected to move down to a small apartment in Hyannis Port that Joe provided for her. In the winter she would have a cottage in West Palm Beach. It would be even harder to develop a life apart from her work.

  Each morning at precisely nine o’clock, Des Rosiers had to be at the Kennedy house in Hyannis Port when Joe had finished his horseback ride and breakfast. He walked into the living room wearing a stylish lounge suit, sat down in a large chintz chair, and began to answer letters, dictate, and talk for lengthy periods on the phone. Since Kathleen’s death, he had backed off from many of his business activities and was semiretired.

  Joe called his new secretary in the evenings and began to make gentle overtures. Des Rosiers did not think that there was anything crudely predatory in a sixty-year-old man propositioning an employee less than half his age. Joe was elegantly appointed, with manners as impeccable as his dress. He was strong and well built and youthful. He was not suggestive or vulgar. He was an astute student of human beings and all their vulnerabilities and he sang a gentle song of wooing.

  “He’d say, ‘Well, you know, we’ve got our house in West Palm Beach,’” Des Rosiers recalled. “Because I had the house that every other secretary rented. It was just a little cute cottage in West Palm Beach. And he started calling it ‘our house.’ Well, you’d have to be pretty stupid not to understand what he has in mind. Little innuendos like that went on the first two months. I didn’t see that much of him. And then I went to Florida in December, and that’s when it started. He was marvelous, you know. It would be very difficult for any woman to not succumb to his charm. He had a lot of charisma. But it was a shock to me because I was young and I didn’t take that job with this in mind. My God, you can imagine. It’s hard to fight off a man of his authority and experience and his ability, so I was gone right from the beginning.”

  Des Rosiers’s account of her first evening with Joe in West Palm Beach three months after meeting him has an eerie similarity to Gloria Swanson’s account of her initial sexual encounter with Joe. Gloria recalled that Joe had come rushing into her suite, practically tore her clothes off, and “kept insisting in a drawn-out moan, ‘No longer, no longer, now.’ He was like a roped horse, rough, arduous, racing to be free.” Des Rosiers recalled that Joe had come rushing into her little house one evening at eight o’clock and began undressing her. In Des Rosiers’s case, Joe discovered a bounty that Gloria did not possess. His new mistress was a virgin.

  Joe was possessive with his young mistress in a way he had never been about his wife. He wanted to know where she was and what she was doing and whom she was seeing. “One night I wasn’t home when he called,” Des Rosiers remembered. “And he said, ‘Where were you?’ And I said, ‘Well, I stopped off at the driving range to hit a few golf balls.’ He was mad. He didn’t like that at all. I think he was afraid maybe that I’d get attracted to somebody else or something, I don’t know. But he wanted me to work and go home, be there when he called me at night, and we’d speak for about an hour after being tog
ether all day.”

  Joe was a man of terrible vulnerabilities that he would never admit to another man. But Des Rosiers would never seek to barter his words for advantage. “He confided to me about how he wanted to end his life,” Des Rosiers said. “He told me practically in tears that he never wanted to end up dependent on people to have to take care of him. He just wanted to die very quickly and quietly and get it over with. He didn’t want to have a stroke or something like that. And he said, ‘I don’t want to linger and be dependent.’

  “Yet he wouldn’t give me any freedom. Once in Hyannis Port, Rose was not there, and I went to a party. And when I got back, I think it was maybe nine, ten o’clock, he was in bed and he was crying, and he said, ‘Why did you do that to me? Why did you do that to me?’ And he was so upset because I went to this party. He was dependent on me because he needed somebody around him. And in all my innocence and immaturity, I happened to fill the bill for him at the time. I was a very nice girl. And I wish I knew then what I know now in life.”

  Des Rosiers asked for nothing from Joe, not jewels or furs, not secret accounts or promises, not a raise or a bonus, nothing, and Joe gave her precisely what she asked for. She identified with Joe and maneuvered comfortably around Rose, whose gift of seeing only what she wanted to see had reached such rarefied heights that she appeared oblivious to the fact that Joe’s mistress was in her own house. “Have a long, happy holiday, dear Janet, and be assured always of our affection and our deep gratitude,” Rose wrote Des Rosiers in June 1956 as the secretary headed off on her vacation. Rose kept to herself, going off each morning to mass, keeping little notices pinned on to her blouse to remind her of what she had to do.