JFK

by Fredrik Logevall

  Moreover, Jack’s extracurricular pursuits affected his athletic ambitions as much as they impaired his academics. When his coach learned of a weekend of debauchery at Hyannis Port involving Jack and some teammates and several girls, he promptly demoted the player he (rightly) deemed responsible, namely Jack. “The fucking football situation has now gotten out of hand,” Jack complained to Billings, “as the coaches found out about our little party and I am now known as ‘Play-boy’…I have been shoved down to the third team.”55

  He had greater success in swimming and golf, both minor sports at Harvard. He was strong in the backstroke, even besting the reigning Harvard champion in that discipline on one occasion in the team tryouts. The scrapbook of John Sterling Stillman, a classmate who would serve as an assistant secretary of commerce in the Kennedy administration, includes programs from freshman-team swim meets in Jack’s first year, when the team went undefeated and was deemed the strongest in the school’s history. His participation in the three-hundred-yard medley team was credited with helping Harvard defeat Dartmouth College on March 6, 1937. He hoped to be added to the varsity squad for the big contest against archrival Yale later in the month, but was laid up in the infirmary in the days before the meet, and not even Macdonald smuggling steaks and shakes into his room in an effort to keep his weight up was enough—Jack lost by three seconds in the team tryouts to Richard Tregaskis, later of World War II reportorial fame for his book Guadalcanal Diary. In golf as well, Kennedy made the freshman squad, while in his sophomore year he also won distinction in sailing—he and Joe Junior, as members of the Harvard Yacht Club, each sailed a boat to victory to win the McMillan Cup for Harvard.56

  “I had Jack Kennedy on my Harvard teams for three years,” swim coach Hal Ulen recalled, “and I remember him very vividly. He was a fine kid, frail and not too strong, but always giving it everything he had. He was more of a team man than an individualist and, in fact, was so modest that he used to hide when news photographers would come around to take pictures of the team.”57

  The university suited him, he determined. He took to the general atmosphere of the place, to the quiet grace of the Yard, to the Charles and its grassy banks, to the history, the traditions. As a dormitory Weld Hall was nothing special, but he liked its central location and got on well with his housemates. The university’s proximity to Boston and to various nearby women’s colleges were also pluses, and even Harvard Square had a respectable assortment of restaurants and bookstores, certainly as compared with Princeton.

  As at Choate, Jack operated in brother Joe’s shadow, but he did not seem to be unduly troubled by the fact. The two-year gulf between them, so wide in childhood and adolescence, now seemed to narrow. They got on well, and saw each other regularly. When the time came in April 1937 to select a residence for the following fall, Jack chose Winthrop House, partly because it was the house favored by Harvard athletes but also because his brother lived there. At the same time, Jack insisted on cutting his own path, a point noted by Joe’s tutor, the six-foot-eight Canadian transplant John Kenneth Galbraith, then a young lecturer in economics. Of Joe, Galbraith remarked that he was “slender and handsome, with a heavy shock of hair and a serious, slightly humorless manner. He was much interested in politics and public affairs,” and “would invariably introduce his thoughts with the words ‘Father says.’ ” (Rose at the same age had done the same with Honey Fitz.) Jack, on the other hand, was also “handsome but, unlike Joe, was gregarious, given to varied amusements, much devoted to social life and affectionately and diversely to women. One did not cultivate such students.”58

  That seems harsh—surely some such students, if they showed aptitude and latent promise, were worthy of cultivation. But it’s true that our gangly nineteen-year-old gave few hints in his first year of college of the accomplishments to come. He made no notable impression in the classroom and lost badly in his bid to become president of the freshman class. (He was eliminated on the first ballot.) His greatest distinction was gaining the honor to serve as chairman—and master of ceremonies—of the Freshman Smoker, a party for the freshman class held in Memorial Hall at the end of spring term. It was a big affair, with a guest list of more than a thousand; his brother had run the event two years before. Here Jack did prove his worth, arranging ample free food, tobacco, and ginger ale and putting together what some called the most impressive Smoker in Harvard’s history, with forty entertainers, including two jazz orchestras as well as the Dancing Rhythmettes, and appearances by baseball stars Dizzy Dean and Frankie Frisch.59

  The night’s headliner was Gertrude Niesen, a prominent torch singer and actress. It says something about Jack Kennedy that, although a mere college freshman, he was not shy about directing wisecracks at a high-profile entertainer many years his senior. It started during the rehearsal and went on throughout the day, Jack’s quips just cascading out of him and Niesen responding in kind. “She was giving it back and Kennedy was giving it to her in humor, and it was a very, very funny two hours, and it was a tremendous night,” one classmate remembered. “He didn’t take Gertrude Niesen seriously and she didn’t take him seriously. It just worked very well….And by eight or nine o’clock when the performance went on, I think we were all pretty well along in the evening, and Gertrude Niesen was just enjoying the hell out of it, and Jack Kennedy was joking with her the whole time.” To another classmate, the Smoker “was Jack’s first visible sign of being outstanding, the first time that people recognized him for being a little different from us.”60

  All the while, he put in the necessary work to get through his classes—if barely in some cases. (“Exam to-day so have to open my book to see what the fucking course is about,” he wrote Billings.61) Few papers survive, but his effort for his French F class, ten pages in length and written half in English and half in French, offers fascinating insight into his thought processes and the man he was becoming.62 For his topic, Jack selected Francis I, the French ruler of the first half of the sixteenth century. He chronicled Francis’s rise to the top, stressing the key role played by the young monarch’s cunning and ambitious mother in that ascent as well as his penchant for philandering from his early twenties on. “Ambitious, spoiled, possessed of an unbounded vitality and a physique capable of tremendous physical activity, he was the pride and personification of his age,” Jack wrote. “His lusty interest in life took many forms, the chase, war, and women.”

  Women were one of the dominating interests in his life and he had many affairs. Unlike his contemporary across the channel, Henry VIII, he did not marry for reasons of the heart or the fulfillment of passion, but married for reasons of state and thus missed going down in the history books [as a lover]. Francis’s marriages, definitely political, took up little of his time. He kept his first wife Claude, daughter of Louis XII, busy producing children, most of whom died while he continued his “amours guerreuses” with women like Le Foix. He knew women’s place, however, and except for his mother and his sister, they never assumed a position of great influence, at least until his later life.63

  Was there something of the young Jack Kennedy in this portrait? In all likelihood, yes. Moreover, Jack admired Francis’s bold political leadership and military ambition. “Hardly on the throne, he had reached in a short time the zenith of his fortunes,” he noted, though as it turned out his grip on power was tenuous, and in time would be overcome by the “methodical machine” of Charles V, resulting in Francis’s disastrous defeat at Pavia in 1525. Thereafter, the king more and more experienced a life of “distractions, living with his thousands of courtiers and living from one chateau to another.”

  I have tried to give a picture of Francis’s character and age. In studying his career it seems almost a pity that he could not have died at Pavia, as his career was an anticlimax [after that], although it had traces of glory. Francis was a man with an intense vitality for life: he was superficial but with some deep appreciations and a
s such was the perfect personification of the Renaissance….On France he had written his signature in chateaux. He understood the technique of the architect, as patron and as connoisseur. We find the true spirit of the reign of Francis, at least the best part of it, in the Chateau of Chambord. It was a living monument of all that was great in his reign. His life was not futile. It served its purpose, that of jolting France out of Medievalism.64

  The course instructor, Halfdan Gregersen, was underwhelmed. The French grammar was spotty at best, and for historical detail Jack relied too heavily on a few secondary sources. Gregersen gave the paper a D-plus.65 (Seven or eight decades later, in an era of less demanding grading, the paper would have merited a B− or a B.)

  V

  Undistinguished though Jack Kennedy’s freshman-year academic performance was, his father, himself an academic mediocrity during his Harvard days, was pleased with what he saw. “I am impressed with the almost complete turnaround you have made in yourself in the last year,” he wrote to his son in February 1937, brushing aside Rose’s concerns that the boy was spending too much time in nightclubs. “You know I always felt that you had great possibilities and I think you are now starting to avail yourself of them.” Kennedy encouraged his sons’ skirt chasing and gallivanting about town, and welcomed their determined pursuit of athletic success. Schoolwork had its place, too, he believed, but mostly as a means to an end—power and social status. Jack was taking full advantage of his extracurricular opportunities, as he should. Moreover, he was doing so at Harvard, where Joe Senior had always wanted him to be. “Got a letter from J.P. purring on my shoulder,” Jack wrote to Lem soon after. “He is really worshipping at my feet these days.”66

  At the same time, Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy urged their older children to broaden their horizons, to learn about the world. Over Christmas break in Palm Beach, Joe Senior expressed fears that a European war was coming and urged his second son to tour the Continent while he still could. “You ought to plan on seeing Europe before the shooting starts,” he told him.67 Jack, who had intended to spend the summer of 1937 racing his sailboat off Cape Cod, quickly warmed to the idea. At Harvard he had developed a particular interest in European history (during his four years he would take courses from prominent historians such as Roger Bigelow Merriman and William L. Langer), and he wanted to see the Continent up close. He would take his car, he determined, and would bring along a friend. Inevitably, the friend turned out to be Lem Billings. Joe Kennedy arranged with Mrs. Billings that he would pay Lem’s fare, on the understanding that Lem would pay back at least a portion of the amount after his graduation from Princeton.

  They set off from New York on June 30, 1937, aboard the SS Washington. Also making the trip was Jack’s Ford, a convertible with a fold-down top that he bought on installment (with help from his father) early in his freshman year. More important for posterity, Jack also packed a small leather-bound notebook given him by Kick and bearing the title “My Trip Abroad,” in which he jotted down notes as the mood struck him. His first entry was true to form: “Very smooth crossing. Looked pretty dull the first couple of days but investigation revealed some girls—chiefly Ann Reed. Had cock-tails with the Captain who knew Sir Thomas Lipton and thus grand-pa. The chief source of interest was General Hill and his rather mysterious daughter. He was a congressman, she might have been anything.”68

  The two friends stayed up all night to be sure to catch a passing glimpse of Jack’s ancestral Ireland, but decided it had not been worth it, Lem remembered, as “it necessitated sleeping the entire next day.” Upon docking at Le Havre, they took off in the Ford, bound first for Mont-Saint-Michel and then for Rouen, where the cathedral impressed them mightily. From there they motored on to Beauvais, some fifty miles north of Paris, bunking for the night in a spartan little inn called La Cotelette. Thus was established a pattern they would follow for much of the trip: days spent seeing architectural treasures and historic landmarks, followed by nights in modest hotels—Lem’s budget would allow no more. “This is another side of Jack’s character,” a grateful Billings recalled. “He was perfectly happy to live at places for forty cents a night, and we ate frightful food…but he did it [because] that was the only way I could go with him.”69

  Initially, Lem had the greater interest in the cathedrals and monuments, but Jack, too, was drawn in, albeit more by the historical dimensions than by the aesthetics. “Up at 12:00,” reads his diary entry for July 8. “Wrote letters had lunch got our money and the medicine for Billings ‘mal d’estomac’ after much trouble—Then to Soissons—saw the Chemin des Dames—one of the great scenes of fighting during the war. Also saw the cathedral that had been bombed—then to Rheims where we looked at the cathedral and to the Hotel Majesty (1.00 for room for 2)—My French improving a bit + Billings’ breath getting very French. Went to bed early—General feeling seems to be there will not be another war.”70

  The next day, after arriving in Paris:

  July 9—Rheims, Chateau-Thierry, and Paris. The general impression seems to be that Roosevelt—his type of government—would not succeed in a country like France, which seems to lack the ability of seeing a problem as a whole. They don’t like [Premier Léon] Blum as he takes away their money and gives it to someone else. That to a Frenchman is tres mauvais. The general impression also seems to be that there will not be a war in the near future and that France is much too well prepared for Germany. The permanence of the alliance of Germany and Italy is also questionable. From there [Rheims] we went to Chateau-Thierry picking up two French officers on the way. Arrived in Paris around eight. By mistake in French, invited one of the officers to dinner but succeeded in making him pay for it. Looked around and got a fairly cheap room for the night.71

  The readiness of the French to exploit American tourists got under the boys’ skin, and they took to parking the car around the corner from a prospective hotel in order to keep the proprietor from getting ideas and squeezing a higher rate out of them. When the car lights needed fixing, Jack felt certain the repair shop had fleeced him. “Got another screwing—these French will rob at every turn,” he noted sourly.72 Still, he and Lem loved the City of Light, and stayed out late at Moulin Rouge and other nightspots. At Catholic Mass at Notre-Dame on July 13, the eve of Bastille Day, Jack secured a seat near the front (thanks to an assist from the U.S. embassy, where his father had contacts), in the same row as the French president, while the Episcopalian Billings sat in the far back. The next day they took in the Paris Exposition, where the modern aircraft on display transfixed Jack—this was the future of warfare, he intuited, the future of geopolitical power.73

  All the while, Lem marveled at his ever inquisitive friend’s penchant for asking the locals for their views on Hitler and the German threat, on whether a war was coming and, if so, whether France could win. The responses varied, but a common theme was that the newly constructed Maginot Line (a string of concrete fortifications and weapon installations erected by the French government in the northeast in order to deter an invasion) would keep the country safe. Jack also picked up a copy of John Gunther’s book Inside Europe, which became his bedside reading as they pressed on southward, in the direction of the Spanish frontier.74

  “Walls very high but beautiful inside,” Jack wrote after visiting Blois. “Saw Wall of the Conspirators where 1500 were hung and also the place where Charles XIII bumped his head and died. Finally thrown off the walls and continued to Chenonceau, built on the water, which is also very impressive….Drove through to Angouleme, thru Tours to Poitiers, both deserted towns, and spent the night for 10 francs each.” Here they found a less tourist-friendly atmosphere than they had expected, and experienced difficulty getting traveler’s checks cashed. “Very impressed by the little farms we have been driving thru,” Jack wrote. “America does not realize how fortunate they are. These people are satisfied with very little and they have very little as it is really a very conservative country, at least
outside Paris.”75

  VI

  Even before leaving America’s shores, the two Ivy Leaguers had talked of visiting Spain, which was in the throes of a civil war between General Francisco Franco’s fascist rebels and a republican government in Madrid. It was a nonstarter, as they themselves knew—their passports were marked “Not good for travel in Spain.” Still, they made a vain attempt to cross the border just south of Saint-Jean-de-Luz; the police turned them back. They did get a glimpse of the border town of Irún, which had been bombed by the rebels, and in the ensuing days Jack took every chance to talk with refugees and take notes on what he heard. Their harrowing tales left their mark. In particular, he recoiled from a story of an imprisoned father, starving after being kept without food for a week, being brought a piece of meat and eating it, then being shown his son’s body with a piece of flesh cut out of it.76

  The tales of barbarism offered by the refugees took on added credence for Jack and Lem when they attended a bullfight in Biarritz. “Very interesting but very cruel,” Jack wrote, “especially when the bull gored the horse. Believe all the atrocity stories now as these southerners, such as these French and the Spanish, are happiest at scenes of cruelty. They thought funniest sight was when horse ran out of the ring with his guts trailing.” Billings in his trip diary echoed the point, but later acknowledged that perhaps he and his friend couldn’t appreciate the finer aspects of the sport: “Of course, we didn’t understand this temperament at all, and were disgusted by it.”77