Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [17]
“He loved his youth,” Buchan wrote of Asquith. “And his youth has become eternal. Debonair and brilliant and brave, he is now part of that immortal England which knows not age or weariness or defeat.”
Jack loved courage, hated war. That conflict would define his view of history’s leaders. As we will see very soon, it will define how he viewed himself.
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Inga Marie Arvad
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Raymond Asquith
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Red Fay
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Chuck Spalding saluting
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PT 109
CHAPTER THREE
SKIPPER
He had never found a circle where he was so much at home and his popularity was immediate and complete. He was an excellent battalion officer.
—John Buchan on Raymond Asquith,
from Pilgrim’s Way
Up until he went to war, Jack Kennedy had the luxury of living two lives. There was the often bedridden young man, who, loving books and loving heroes, greatly admired Winston Churchill. Twinned with him was the popular bon vivant son of the wealthy Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. One lived in the quiet world where history looks back and looms forward, where tales of majesty mingle with dreams of glory. The other lived in the divine, fortunate present of Mayfair addresses and country estates, of titled hosts and society hostesses.
War, for a time, joined the two Jacks as one. Called upon in 1943 to be a leader of men, he shouldered willingly the burden that comes with taking others into harm’s way and then getting them back alive and whole. His experience in the waters of the South Pacific was to be the most searing event of his life, the one that transformed him into a figure like those who previously consumed his imagination.
It would make of him a hero like those he’d read about. There is nowhere to hide any part of yourself when you face death. What’s more, Jack Kennedy now would be what he’d never been before: a regular guy. He was about to enter a world where he’d be accepted for the man he was. It didn’t matter where he’d come from, or what he’d done before. Finally, for the first time in his life, he was moving on to a level playing field. He proved more than up to the challenge, and the confidence that came of it would stay with him.
Look back at Raymond Asquith. Comparing the pair at this moment—two men poised on the brink of different wars—offers clear parallels. Both had been born to privilege and attended the most elite of schools. Both were tall and handsome. Both seemed, effortlessly, to gain the loyalty and devotion of friends. Both volunteered at the outset of world war. Both were assigned cushy, safe postings in intelligence—and, in each case, in locations far from the front. Both, on their own, rejected that safety and sought aggressively to get to the action, wanting to be in the thick of things, in front-line combat units. And the fact that Jack identified with Asquith—who lost his life after being shot by a sniper at the Battle of the Somme, where the British casualties were 420,000 men—was never any secret from his friends.
Jack and Lem Billings were playing touch football on the Washington Mall the Sunday Pearl Harbor was attacked. It was December 7, 1941. They heard the news on the car radio as they were heading back to Jack’s apartment on Sixteenth Street. Jack had managed to join the navy earlier that fall after being rejected by the army for obvious health reasons.
In fact, the navy had turned him down, too, but he stubbornly went all out for five months, exercising to overcome the bad back problems that had caused him to flunk. Strengthened by the training regimen, he passed the physical on his second try, but he also benefited from the support of a naval captain who’d been attaché at the London embassy and was now the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the outfit to which Jack was immediately assigned in Washington. It was a no-sweat job that had him knocking out routine bulletins and briefing memos. While Jack considered the paper-pushing a waste of his time, it left him enough leisure to