John Kennedy

by Burns, James MacGregor;

  The Choate campus was typically New England, with its spacious lawns, shaded walks, and lofty elms. Jack lived in an old frame house, in a large room next to the housemaster’s apartment. It was a bit trying to be under a master’s eye, but it seemed worthwhile on Sunday nights when the housemaster’s wife made her famous waffles. The housemaster served as football coach also and enforced discipline by chasing the boys with a paddle. Years later, Kennedy returned to Choate as its alumnus-of-the-year and reminded his old coach gleefully, “You never could catch me with that paddle, could you?”

  Occasionally Jack took part in rough-housing or throwing food out of windows, but he did not seem to resent authority. Both his teachers and fellows liked him. He sent home a barrage of request for clothes, victrola records, golf balls, and “choclate pie with whipt cream in the middle.” As at Canterbury, he went out for a half-dozen sports, but failed to make the varsity. Coaches found him an eager, scrappy player in intramural games yet reluctant to apply himself in practice. In his studies his Latin was still low, his French not much better, his English and history only fair. To some teachers he seemed content to coast along as a “gentleman C scholar.” He graduated sixty-fourth in a class of 112. But to his classmates, if not to his teachers, he must have shown some glimpse of his potential ability and later drive, for they voted him “the most likely to succeed.”

  As his father’s riches piled up in the 1920’s, Jack spent many winter vacations at the family’s new resort home at Palm Beach and summers at another home at Hyannisport, on Cape Cod. He especially loved Hyannisport, and still does. The big house there looked out over a long beach, a tennis court, and a well-tended lawn handy for softball and other family games. Jutting out from the beach was a breakwater shielding the yachts of the summer folk. Jack’s competitive instinct showed up early—he named his first sailboat “Victura,” which he explained was Latin “meaning something about winning.”

  But life was not always a victory. Wherever he was, at school or at home, Jack was conscious of his father’s incessant concern that he do better, especially in his studies. His letters home were full of defensive, self-belittling remarks about his grades and his athletic skill. He offered excuses for his poor showing, at the same time denying that these were alibis.

  “If it were not for Latin,” he wrote his mother, “I would probably lead the lower school but I am flunking that by ten points.” In a letter to his father his second spring at Choate, he listed the high points of a recent vacation and concluded: “I hope my marks go up because I guess that is the best way to say thanks for the trip.” “Maybe Dad thinks I am alibing but I am not,” he wrote on another occasion. “I have also been doing a little worrying about my studies because what he said about me starting of[f] great and then going down sunk in.” Clearly Jack realized that what his father wanted above all was that he excel in his studies, as a prelude to competition in later life.

  In his senior year at Choate, he wrote his father that he and LeMoyne Billings, his best friend, had been talking about their poor work, “and we have definitely decided to stop fooling around. I really do realize how important it is that I get a good job done this year, if I want to go to England. I really feel, now that I think it over, that I have been bluffing myself about how much real work I have been doing.” From Washington, where Kennedy, Sr. had just taken the SEC chairmanship, he wrote back with “great satisfaction” about this “forthrightness and directness that you are usually lacking,” also about his improved penmanship.

  “Now Jack, I don’t want to give the impression that I am a nagger, for goodness knows I think that is the worst thing any parent can be,” the father wrote. “After long experience in sizing up people I definitely know you have the goods and you can go a long way. Now aren’t you foolish not to get all there is out of what God has given you.… After all, I would be lacking even as a friend if I did not urge you to take advantage of the qualities you have. It is very difficult to make up fundamentals that you have neglected when you were very young and that is why I am always urging you to do the best you can. I am not expecting too much and I will not be disappointed if you don’t turn out to be a real genius, but I think you can be a really worthwhile citizen with good judgment and good understanding.…”

  If failure aroused parental frowns, achievement was recognized in a very material way. A sailboat, a pony, a trip to England were rewards for better grades. When Eddie Moore, his father’s aide and confidant and once secretary to Mayor Fitz, stopped in at school and found the boy underweight, he offered him money to gain weight, beginning at a dollar a pound. Jack had a checking account and a modest allowance at Choate, but like any other boy he often went through the money quickly and he depended on the extra help that approval could bring.

  For Jack, competition was not some abstract thing that his father wanted. It was right in the family and its name was “Joe.” In their father’s long absences, Jack’s big brother ruled the roost. Joe was bigger and heavier, more boisterous and outgoing than Jack. He demanded absolute obedience from the younger children in exchange for his brotherly help. Even today when asked whether anything really bothered him as a child, Kennedy can think only of his big brother: “He had a pugnacious personality. Later on it smoothed out but it was a problem in my boyhood.”

  Jack was the only rival to Joe’s throne; the next in line were girls and the other boys were too young to serve as more than nuisances. The two oldest boys often fought, and Jack always seemed to come off second. When the two boys raced around the block on their bicycles in opposite directions and collided head on, it was Jack who had to have twenty-eight stitches and Joe who emerged unscathed. Joe would throw a boy overboard for sloppy sailing in a race, and he would lie in wait to catch a rebellious brother—usually Jack—coming in off the breakwater. Bobby Kennedy to this day remembers cowering with his sisters upstairs while his older brothers fought furiously on the first floor.

  The boys’ father knew about the rivalry but it did not bother him, except when it got out of hand. He wanted competition in the family as long as the children stuck together in dealing with the world outside. He knew, too, that Joe Jr. made up for his bullying ways in generosity and kindness to his young brothers and sisters. Jack, too, for all his troubles at the hands of his older brother, feels today that Joe’s overbearing ways, when later smoothed out, were one reason for his own success in school and in the war.

  The family competition was not just physical. The father encouraged political argument at the dinner table, especially among himself and the older boys. He asserted his own views strongly, but, though Jack says today that his father was sometimes rather harsh, he did not force his views on Joe, Jr. or on Jack. The boys could not help being influenced, however, by their father’s opinions, for he was forceful, knowledgeable, and articulate. At this point in their lives, any influence he had on his sons of a political nature must have been in a liberal direction, using that term here to mean support for governmental restrictions on business excesses and more economic welfare and social security for the underprivileged, for by the mid-1930’s, when Jack was finishing Choate, Joseph Kennedy, Sr., was an outspoken New Dealer. In his 1936 book, I’m for Roosevelt, he wrote: “I have no political ambitions for myself or my children, and I put down these few thoughts about our President, conscious only of my concern as a father for the future of his family and my anxiety as a citizen that the facts about the President’s philosophy be not lost in a fog of unworthy emotions.”

  There is no evidence that Jack was especially interested in that campaign himself. Though he certainly favored Roosevelt over Alfred Landon, he showed no indication that the President was a hero in his eyes. He became an omnivorous reader during these school years, but history and stories of famous men, rather than current affairs, were his favorites.

  Less intellectual impulses evidently were stirring, too. “Jack was a very naughty boy when he was home,” Jean, the youngest sister, wrote indignantly to her father
at Palm Beach. “He kissed Betty Young under the mistletoe down in the front hall. He had a temperature of 102° one night, too, and Miss Cahill couldn’t make him mind.” Jean recommended a good spanking.

  Harvard

  At eighteen, when he graduated from Choate, Jack Kennedy was a tall, thin, wiry boy with a narrow face, an almost snub nose, and a mop of hair that he tried unsuccessfully to control with hair tonic. He was good-looking but not as husky or as handsome as Joe, who had a square, open face, radiating Irish charm. Joe had gone on to Harvard after winning athletic and scholarly honors at Choate that Jack could not equal. Partly because many of his classmates were going, partly perhaps because he wanted to get out from under Joe, Jack chose Princeton instead of his father’s and his brother’s alma mater.

  His father, determined that Jack should make good use of the summer before college, packed him off to the London School of Economics to study under the noted Socialist professor Harold J. Laski, whom he knew through Felix Frankfurter from the old Boston days. He wanted Jack to rub shoulders with the polyglot population of British Laborites, European refugees, radicals from the colonies, Indian civil servants, and others at the school. Joe, Jr. had already studied under Laski, who had come to love the eager, zestful boy even though, as Laski wrote later, “his mind was only just beginning to discover the enchantment of thought.” Laski said also that Joe, Jr. had been determined to be President. Jack had little contact with Laski, for he fell ill with jaundice in London, left the London School, but was not well enough to enter Princeton until several weeks after classes began. His career at Princeton was cut short at Christmas by a recurrence of jaundice, so he took the rest of the year off. Then he decided to go to Harvard rather than return to Princeton.

  In the fall of 1936, Jack came back to Boston, after almost ten years’ absence. Grandpa Kennedy had died in 1929, but Grandpa Fitz was still very much alive, still active in politics, and delighted that he now had Jack as well as Joe to swoop down on and take to a ball game. Jack’s first two years at Harvard were in some ways a duplicate of his life at Choate. Sports still excited him far more than studies. During his freshman year he tried out for football, swimming, and golf, and crowded in some softball, too. As he had at Choate, he played furiously but his drive was greater than his athletic skill. He was fearless and willing to fight until the game was over. He was plagued by illness, however, and he also injured his back at football, an injury that has followed him into adulthood.

  Swimming was his passion and his best sport. A classmate recalls one occasion when Jack was hospitalized with a bad case of grippe just before he was to try out for a spot on the swimming squad that was to face Yale. Jack feared that the infirmary diet would leave him too weak to do well, so he persuaded his roommate to smuggle in steaks and chocolate malted milks. He sneaked out of the infirmary, swam furiously—and lost.

  As a freshman, Jack took English, French, history, and economics, and got C’s in all except economics, where he earned a B. At the end of the year he was in the second lowest group of passing students. He did no better his sophomore year, receiving four C’s, one D, and one B, though he concentrated in history and government and still read a good deal on his own, especially American history and biography. To his teachers he was a pleasant, bright, easygoing student.

  What young Kennedy did not do at Harvard was more significant than what he did do. The Harvard campus, like other college campuses, was boiling with ideas, fads, stunts—a ferment of protest against parents, deans, and, more in the 1930’s than ever before, politics and the world situation. Students huddled around the radio listening to Roosevelt’s fireside chats or trying to interpret Hitler’s frenzied diatribes at Nürnberg; they read avidly the Nation and New Republic and New Masses; they picketed factories, tried to organize university janitors and cafeteria workers, burned Hitler and the other dictators in effigy, formed the Veterans of Future Wars, paraded to demonstrate their indignation with the state of things, and sometimes landed in jail for disturbing the peace. Little clubs of radicals, liberals, socialists, pacifists, and communists grew up everywhere, their members arguing passionately far into the night.

  But Jack Kennedy had no part of this. He was moderately active in extracurricular affairs; he joined Winthrop House, won a berth on the Harvard Crimson, belonged to St. Paul’s Catholic Club, was chosen a member of the Spee Club and Hasty Pudding, to which his father had belonged. But the Harvard Liberal Union, the Young Democrats, and the others left him cold. Stranger still, practical politics did not interest him very much, nor, evidently, did the New Deal. A Harvard government professor remembers that Kennedy, in doing an outside paper, became absorbed in the study of a politician, but the politician was no glamorous New Deal leader and not even a Democrat—it was Bertrand Snell, a conservative Republican from upper New York State who devoted much of his official life to a fight against public power.

  In his junior year, Kennedy began to come into his own. For one thing, Joe, Jr. graduated, bequeathing to Jack, incidentally, George Taylor, “gentleman’s gentleman”. Joe, Jr., more charming than ever, a born leader, gregarious, had played varsity football, won election to class offices, graduated with honors. True, he was now in Harvard Law School, but at least Jack was not completely in his shadow. Then, too, Jack particularly enjoyed rooming with Torbert Macdonald, a well-known Harvard football star.

  Perhaps the most decisive step was Kennedy’s trip with his friend Les Billings to France, Spain, and Italy in the summer of 1937. He had traveled a good deal, but never as observantly as now. He had an audience with the Pope, and with Cardinal Pacelli, who inquired cordially after his father (“He is quite a fellow.” Kennedy wrote home about the Cardinal); he saw a bullfight, climbed Vesuvius, and somehow talked his way into Monte Carlo with his bad French. “Played with my 5 fr. chips next to a woman who was playing $40.00 chips and she was quite upset by my winning 1.20 while she lost about $500.00,” he reported to his father triumphantly. He talked with hitchhikers, reporters, diplomats. He found himself an admirer of the fascist corporate system in Italy, “as everyone seemed to like it in Italy.” From Spain he wrote his father a dispassionate analysis of Britain’s strategic stake in a victory for the Loyalists.

  One thing that impressed him, his letter said, was “the almost complete ignorance 95% of the people in the U.S. have about situations as a whole here. For example, most people in the U.S. are for Franco, and while I felt that perhaps it would be far better for Spain if Franco should win—as he would strengthen and unite Spain—yet at the beginning the government was in the right morally speaking as its program was similar to the New Deal.… Their attitude towards the Church was just a reaction to the strength of the Jesuits who had become much too powerful—the affiliation between church and state being much to close.” In America, he added, everyone was too prejudiced to get an impartial opinion. “Peoples’ financial status seem to form their political opinions, and even the newspapermen, at least the foreign ones are all prejudiced, due to the peculiar position of the press as party instruments over here.”

  Jack wrote his father that it was not so much what he learned abroad but the incentive it gave him to study when he got back that was important. If this was true, the incentive took more than a year to show up in his work at Harvard. But his grades did improve in his junior year; he became much more involved in his studies, probably because they were now more directly related to the events he had seen in Europe. He was majoring in government, with emphasis on international relations. He read extensively in political theory—nationalism, fascism, and colonialism. He followed the newspapers closely; it was a time when political philosophers’ doubts about the goodness of man and the future of the race seemed confirmed in the morning papers.

  Solid, sound, earnest, but not brilliant—this is how his professors of government summed him up. “Kennedy is surprisingly able when he gets down to work,” one of them noted. “His preparation may be spotty, but his general ability should bol
ster him up. A commendable fellow.” He was affectionate, generous, and loyal to those who broke through his reserve, a reserve that was sometimes disguised as cockiness, sometimes as coolness.

  Alone at the Top

  At the end of 1937, when Jack was still in his sophomore year, President Roosevelt had suddenly appointed Joseph Kennedy ambassador to Britain. Many Boston aristocrats were aghast. Joe Kennedy, an Irishman and a Catholic, the envoy to the Court of St. James’s? The President must be mad. But, after all, they added bitterly, what could you expect of a man who had deserted his class? And in East Boston the Irish were wondering, too. Imagine Pat Kennedy’s boy all dressed up in satin knickers bowing before King George!

  The most prized of all the diplomatic posts, this ambassadorship put its occupant close to the top of the social world of two continents. For Joseph Patrick Kennedy it meant that after years of striving he had got about as far as he could hope to go. His position would also mean social preferment for his children. His older daughters, now in their teens and all of them tall, dark, lovely girls, were soon meeting and winning the attentions of young British gentry. Kathleen met the Marquess of Hartington, heir of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, and the two fell in love. They were married later, during the war.

  Moreover, Joseph Kennedy had reached a high station in his church. Father of a model Catholic family, husband of a deeply pious woman, he had contributed heavily to Catholic charities, hospitals, and other undertakings. He was on his way to being appointed a Knight of Malta and a Grand Knight of the Order of Pius IX. Yet there existed a dichotomy in his attitude toward the church. He had sent his daughters to Catholic schools, but not his sons. His daughters, he seemed to feel, should be trained in the values and shaped by the character of the church. But his sons should have secular education to prepare them for the competitive struggle.