Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  Yet there is another, secondary definition of mucker that would have been well known to a Boston boy of Irish extraction. That meaning addresses itself directly to those who traffic in muck, which is to say, mud. And in Boston, this sense of mucker had evolved from being a derisive term applied to Irish-Americans put to work shoveling up horse manure from the city streets during the era of carriages, to becoming an all-purpose epithet for their immigrant countrymen.

  Without realizing it, then, George St. John had thrown down a gauntlet. Sitting in front of him was Honey Fitz’s grandson, whose own Irish ancestry was a source of pride to him and for whom the insult hit home. But the headmaster’s choice of words also, Jack realized, provided an opportunity for a memorable stunt, perhaps the cap to his career at Choate.

  Troublemaking by kids at school escalates. They compete to come up with outrageous schemes, each trying to top the other. Strategically astute, Jack and Lem—already known as Public Enemies Number One and Two on the Choate campus—had recruited their followers, the ones who now were the regulars in their room, from among the “wheels.” That is to say, their pals were the sons of rich fathers upon whose deep pockets the school’s endowment and building programs depended. That night, after chapel, back at Jack and Lem’s room, they agreed to be henceforth known, as dubbed by Jack, the Muckers.

  It was a thumb in the eye to old St. John.

  Then Jack was clever enough—when further inspiration struck—to conjure up a reality out of the metaphor. Here was the plan: The dining hall had been decorated for an important school dance. Just imagine, he proposed, the faces of their classmates if a large quantity of manure, imported from a nearby field, suddenly got dumped in front of them and their dates. Cue the Muckers, shovels in hand, to scoop it all up and save the day.

  Glorious a prank as it was, it didn’t happen. What kept it stillborn was the killjoy who’d caught a whiff of what was going on and ratted them out to St. John. All thirteen would-be culprits were instantly called from their classrooms and onto the carpet of the headmaster’s office, where they were reminded the punishment for forming an illegal club was expulsion. They were told they could count themselves as Choate students no longer; they would have to pack their bags and arrange for transportation home.

  Almost as quickly, Joseph Kennedy, Sr., was also summoned from his office in Washington, where he was chairing Franklin Roosevelt’s new Securities and Exchange Commission. Jack’s fifteen-year-old sister, Kick, alarmed at hearing the news from Lem—he adored her and stayed in close touch—telegrammed her support: DEAR PUBLIC ENEMIES ONE AND TWO ALL OUR PRAYERS ARE UNITED WITH YOU AND THE ELEVEN OTHER MUCKS WHEN THE OLD MEN ARRIVE SORRY WE WON’T BE THERE FOR THE BURIAL.

  However, Jack’s father, a ruthless rule-breaker in his own right, seemed far more impressed than angry once he heard the story. Pretending to share the headmaster’s anger, he waited until he had his son alone to tell him that if he’d founded the club, its name would not have begun with an M.

  For the first time, I imagine, Joe Kennedy was forced to take a good look at his second son. He’d devoted a great deal of his attention to imbuing Joe Jr. with the style he wanted, but now, I think, he saw in Jack essential qualities that he recognized only too well. Just as he, Joe Sr., had been a corsair defiantly mapping his own way, now Jack was revealed to be similarly audacious.

  When the furor died down and, somehow, they weren’t expelled after all, the failed stunt only left Jack and Lem with a zest for defiance. On the night of a different dance, they and their dates drove off campus, chauffeured in a convertible by a friend who’d already graduated. Such behavior was strictly forbidden: no students were to leave the grounds, ever, during a Saturday-night dance.

  Off they went—Jack and Lem in white tie and tails, the girls in long formal gowns, the Connecticut country lanes opening invitingly before them. But to their shock, just as they confidently assumed they were getting away with it, they glimpsed a car following them. Panicky, and sure it was campus security, they swerved into a farmhouse driveway, leaped out, and scattered. Jack, Lem, and one of the girls sought cover in a barn. Lem’s date stayed in the car and pretended to neck with the driver. When the coast seemed clear, Jack suddenly was nowhere to be found, so the others headed back to campus without him.

  A half hour later he turned up at the dance. In the end, it was all a false alarm: no one from Choate had been after them, and they were never found out. The tale is a fine example of the sort of risk Jack Kennedy enjoyed taking—dangerous on the downside, with very little on the up, except for the tremendous sensation it gave, short-lived but long-savored. It offered the promise of deliverance. It was his way of coming alive, and it would never change.

  As Jack’s time at Choate was drawing to an end, he and the Muckers changed course. Legitimate concerns now occupied them: directed by Jack, they began to invest their wit and energy in securing for themselves the “Most” tags featured in the senior yearbook. Jack wanted “Most Likely to Succeed” for himself, while Lem would get “Most Likeable.” The rest would divide the allotted spoils. However they managed it—and the historical record persists as a bit murky about whatever vote-swapping went on—Jack’s budding skill as a strategist-with-defined-set-of-goals successfully came into play.

  This exercise may have involved only prep school popularity, forgotten in the crumbling album of time—except for the identity of the intelligence masterminding it all. In this long-ago microcosm, Jack, the leader, created the first of what Tip O’Neill later dubbed the “Kennedy Party,” a political faction united by a personality. Their success sharing the yearbook spoils, as JFK might later say, had a hundred fathers.

  Speeches do, too.

  Perhaps the most significant legacy from Choate was his likely memory of a familiar refrain of George St. John. As with all the other well-loved mottoes, maxims, and homilies the headmaster delivered into the ears of his youthful charges during evening chapel, he expected this one to sink in. It’s a portion of an essay by his beloved mentor, Harvard dean LeBaron Russell Briggs. “In and out of college the man with ideals helps, so far as in him lies, his college and his country. It is hard for a boy to understand that in life, whatever he does, he helps to make or mar the name of his college. As has often been said, the youth who loves his alma mater will always ask not ‘What can she do for me?’ but ‘What can I do for her?’ “

  Though Jack Kennedy had rebelled against that call to higher duty in his youth, it would come to define him.

  5

  Princeton 1935 with Ralph “Rip” Horton and Lem Billings

  6

  Jack, Bobby, Torbert Macdonald

  7

  Harvard swim team

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE TWO JACKS

  Adversity is the first path to truth.

  —Lord Byron

  The self-made rich man forever remains the poor kid he once was. The short boy, no matter how tall he grows, never stops measuring himself. Jack Kennedy, for all his apparent vitality as an adult, projected the shining image we remember mostly by an extraordinary force of will. We now understand that he was beset by lifelong pain in his stomach and back. What’s also clear, if you listen to those who knew him best, is that this deeper Jack, who spent so much time as the vulnerable youngster struggling toward sound health, endured over the decades.

  It’s this bedridden child behind the man who transcended it all to become a war hero, congressman, senator, and president.

  The burden of that effort gives us insight into John F. Kennedy. From an early age, there were two Jacks. He’d had to learn, from necessity, to separate his life into compartments, ones that eventually grew greater in number and more intricate in their interrelatedness as time passed and the number of his relationships increased.

  At Choate he seemed to most of his classmates a sunny boy, full of good humor, always ready for fun. That was the picture he chose to present. But there were also, at school, the first signs of seriousness,
and with it ambition. The young Jack revealed what would later be known as his “charisma,” and also, along with his risk-taking inclination, his leadership instincts and his innate political talent. When he reached Harvard in the fall of 1936, this Jack comes into sharper focus.

  The standard take on Jack Kennedy is that he never intended a political career for himself until his brother’s death in World War II changed everything. But Jack was always ambitious. He was headed, one way or another, into public life. Even his father was starting to take notice of him as a leader, a kid exhibiting his own defiant spunk.

  When summoned by the Choate headmaster, Joe Kennedy hadn’t quashed Jack’s Mucker spirit so much as honored it. You don’t get to be a tycoon, one of the richest men in the country, by saying “please” and “thank you” and sticking to the script.

  Despite the fact that his dad had been a Harvard man, as was Joe Jr., Jack planned to spend his first year after Choate at the London School of Economics. While the LSE was known to favor a socialist point of view, Joseph Kennedy was a capitalist who liked being ahead of the market. He wanted his sons to have an edge on what he saw coming in the world.

  But as fate would have it, Jack’s chronic stomach problems sent him reeling back to America after hardly more than a month there. Rather than return to London when he recovered, he chose to break a second time with Kennedy family tradition and, still shunning Harvard, entered Princeton. There were several good reasons for this decision, the main one being that his closest friend, Lem Billings, and another Choate pal, Rip Horton, were already there. It’s easy to see what such friendship meant to him, and how he was learning to have—to make, to keep—the kind of friends Lem and Rip represented.

  Quickly moving in with them, he began attending classes. Then, once more, illness overtook him; standing six feet tall, Jack now weighed a puny 135 pounds. The blood-count roulette he was forced to play started up again, and, as his complexion went sallow, he resembled nothing so much as a scarecrow.

  Back he went to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston for two months, and then, suffering also from asthma, he spent the remainder of the school year trying to recover under the dry desert sun of Arizona. Finally, facing the inevitable, he arrived in Cambridge that September to take his room in Weld Hall. He was a Harvard man.

  Scrawny as he was, he quickly went out for freshman football. Whatever illnesses dogged him, he was doing his best not to let them define him. You couldn’t be the “sick kid” and still be popular the way he wanted to be. Interestingly, he followed his older brother’s lead in making a football star his best pal; three years ahead of him, Joe Jr. quickly had bonded with the quarterback, Timothy “Ted” Reardon. Jack’s new friend was Torbert Macdonald, his own class’s football hero, and Torby, like Lem before him, would come to know both Jacks. By sophomore year they were roommates.

  One thing had changed. At Choate, he’d operated outside the system. Now at Harvard, his father’s and brother’s school, he seemed to be looking to succeed from within it. He ran for student office in both his freshman and sophomore years, falling short of success both times. Yet he continued to emphasize his quest for campus leadership over academic excellence.

  “Exam today,” he wrote Lem at the end of his first semester, “so have to open my book & see what the fucking course is about.” But then he chalked up a social victory when he managed to get named chairman of the freshman “Smoker,” just as Joe earlier had been. Traditionally the class’s most elaborate party, the Smoker was considered a hot ticket, and expectations for it ran high.

  Taking his responsibilities to heart, Jack didn’t disappoint, producing not one but two jazz bands for the occasion. “No matter who you were or what you did as a freshman . . . everybody went to the Smoker,” one of his classmates recalled. “It was a leadership activity at Harvard . . . a big deal. It was his first political success. So by this, Jack Kennedy had made his mark.”

  Still, he had yet to outdo his brother. When he did, it would be a matter of beating Joe at his own game. During his sophomore year he was asked to join Spee, one of Harvard’s top final clubs. With that coveted invitation, the second son now possessed entrance into circles closed to both Joes. Demonstrating what we might call his “crossover appeal,” Jack, with his easy charm, had moved beyond the self-circumscribed orbit of the equally ambitious but unimaginative Joe Jr., who seemed unwilling to stride beyond the local Irish comfort zone. According to Joe’s tutor, John Kenneth Galbraith, the older brother was “slightly humorless, and . . . introduced all his thoughts with the words ‘Father says.’ “

  Quickly becoming both well known and popular, Jack didn’t give off the impression that he was trying too hard, and he made good use of what his older brother never seemed to have, namely a light touch. And more than that, his conversation, friends said, ranged more widely than that of anyone else their age.

  As Jack started to make a name for himself on campus, his energies at first were directed to such pursuits as arranging to meet Lem at the Stork Club in New York. Only in his “Gov,” or political science courses, in which he would eventually major, was the unexpectedly serious side to him glimpsed. Before an injury sidelined him—his congenital back troubles made worse by one leg’s being shorter than the other—Torby patiently threw passes for hours to help improve Jack’s skills as a receiver. Undaunted, Jack, who’d competed in backstroke at Choate, transferred his hopes for varsity success to the Harvard swim team.

  Just as Lem would always be, Torby turned into a Kennedy constant, there when his friend needed support. Lem and Torby were the first recruits of what would one day grow to be an unofficial reserve corps of steadfast compadres always game for the next adventure. What Jack required from any of his new best sidekicks was one thing above all else, and that was rescue: from being alone, from being bored, from being stuck.

  After spending Jack’s freshman year apart, in the summer of 1937 he and Lem crossed the Atlantic to embark on a traditional grand tour. Such an exciting trip was a way to try to erase the memories of Jack’s hospital stays that February and March. Sickness continued to be one specter he couldn’t charm his way past.

  For two months they hit the road, having fun but also making sure they saw the best cathedrals and historic buildings. Jack showed himself willing to stay in the cheapest pensions to help keep down expenses for his friend. Being two high-spirited young Americans, they couldn’t help having a terrific time. It was nonetheless a moment when Europe’s dark political realities were visible even to the most fun-loving of tourists.

  In France, where they stopped first, Jack wrote in his diary: “The general impression also seems to be that there will not be a war in the future and that France is much too well prepared for Germany.” Later, Lem would recall that his friend “was beginning to show more interest and more of a desire to think out the problems of the world. . . . He insisted, for instance, that we pick up every German hitchhiker. This worked out very well because a high percentage of them were students and could speak English. In that way, we learned a great deal about Germany.” Jack and Lem couldn’t resist making fun of the Nazis they saw: “Hi yah, Hitler!” they’d cheerfully call out.

  The threat of war, in fact, was now less rumor than fact. The Third Reich had been rapidly rearming, and possessed an army and air corps that couldn’t help but cast a pall over Europe. When Hitler first showed his true colors and remilitarized the Rhineland, in total violation of the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended World War I, neither Britain nor France rose up to challenge him. Thoughts of war, to most Europeans, too vividly brought back the devastation wrought by World War I, when masses of young soldiers were thrown against one another in a conflict that left the continent in carnage.

  Returning to Cambridge for his sophomore year, Jack soon faced an array of familiar, disturbing physical setbacks. As always, he fought against them in his own way. To remain on the swim team—as freshmen, they’d gained glory by being undefeated—was one of his
goals. Thus, when he found himself in Stillman Infirmary, he relied on Torby, who brought him steaks and ice cream to tempt his appetite and build up his strength. His friend even snuck Jack out to the indoor swimming pool to get the practice time he needed. Swimming for Harvard was serious business, after all, and team members were expected to sandwich in four hours a day between classes.

  Then, just before the year drew to a close, Franklin Roosevelt, now in the first year of his second White House term, threw a joker into the U.S. international diplomacy game: he named Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., ambassador to Great Britain. It’s impossible to figure out exactly what mix of motives inspired this maladroit appointment. Certainly domestic politics played a major role, for Irish-American voters made up a huge faction of the Democratic constituency. Also, given his background and connections, Joe Kennedy’s presence in London might help resolve the tricky situation between Ireland and Britain. However, if Roosevelt imagined that his new envoy would act as his surrogate in trying to stiffen the spine of the British when it came to facing down Nazi aggression, he was, sadly, wrong.

  The choice of Kennedy, who’d been an early, generous FDR supporter, for this ultimate plum offered the wily Roosevelt the satisfaction of making him into a retainer—a well-rewarded one, but a retainer nevertheless. Both men were well aware the job had to be entrusted to someone able to foot the extravagant costs its social traditions demanded. Ever the bold striver, Joe wanted badly to go there and was ready to spend whatever it took. Until the consequences of sending him to London would prove too large, FDR, too, was ready to weather them.