Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [175]
“We had a hero for a friend—and we mourn his loss. Anyone, and fortunately there were so many, who knew him briefly or over long periods, felt that a bright and quickening impulse had come into their life. He had uncommon courage, unfailing humor, a penetrating, ever-curious intelligence, and over all a matchless grace. He was our best. We will remember him always with love and sometimes, as the years pass and the story is retold, with a little wonder.”
Chuck Spalding and Jack had been buddies since the year before the war. It was a matter of “chemistry,” Chuck said. When I asked him my question, “What was he like?” he said he’d answer by way of a story. It was back when he and his then-wife, Betty, were getting ready to go through divorce, not a good time for them. Still together, though, they were out on the dock one day when Jack joined them for a sail. Spotting their two faces, he said, “Ah, the agony and the ecstasy.” That’s what one of his closest lifetime pals said Jack Kennedy was like.
I loved hearing Sally Fay, Red’s daughter, speak of the joy in her house each time the phone rang and it was Jack Kennedy. “The most charming man I ever knew,” George Smathers told me. His old Senate pal was thrilled when I told him how Jack explained liking him, saying the reason was because “he doesn’t give a damn.” Ben Bradlee, a good friend of mine as well, described Jack as having an “aura of royalty about him.”
Robert Kennedy carried on, we know, never stopped trying to keep his brother’s spirit alive, until he, too, was stopped. Teddy surprised everyone. Jack had said his kid brother wanted to spend his life “chasing girls in the South of France.” But it didn’t happen that way. Jack was once asked to pick the greatest senators in history. Of course, he could only look backward. Had he been able to look forward, he might well have included his youngest brother.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served Kennedy as assistant secretary of labor, was the one who said, “There’s no point in being Irish if you don’t know the world’s going to someday break your heart.” He carried on Jack’s plan to make Pennsylvania Avenue, the presidential inaugural route, a corridor of grandeur. “Make it like Paris,” he’d said. Pat once remarked to me, in a very personal way, his feeling about the events of November 1963: “We’ve never gotten over it.” Then, looking at me with generous appreciation, he added, “You’ve never gotten over it.” I saw it as a kind of benediction, an acceptance into something warm and Irish and splendid, a knighthood of the soulful.
In a 2009 national poll, people were asked to say which American president deserves to be added to Mount Rushmore. It’s a good question, because it really gets to heroic stature. Who should be there with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and, especially the old “Rough Rider” himself, Teddy Roosevelt? They chose John F. Kennedy.
In July 1969, a fellow volunteer of mine sat on a hillside in Swaziland with a group of local villagers looking at the night sky. He wanted them to sit and watch with him. Finally it arrived overhead, what they were looking for: a small light moving in the distance. It was his countrymen heading to the moon. That Saturn rocket Jack so loved had done its job; so had his Peace Corps.
Twenty years later, the Berlin Wall came down. I was there on a drizzly night that November with the beaten-down East Germans, waiting for the Brandenburg Gate to open. When I asked what “freedom” meant to him, a young man answered, “talking to you.” Jack Kennedy would like to have heard that, deserved to, I think. The Iron Curtain was being ripped aside. Communism was in its death throes. The Cold War was ending without the nuclear war we so feared. We had gotten through it alive, those of us who once hid under those little desks of ours.
Thanks to him, I’d say. He’d come a long way from the kid who caused trouble at boarding school, from being Joe Kennedy’s son. In the time of our greatest peril, at the moment