Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [11]
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