Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [10]
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.
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Princeton 1935 with Ralph “Rip” Horton and Lem Billings
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Jack, Bobby, Torbert Macdonald
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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