Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [177]
I also want to thank Phil Griffin, President of MSNBC; Hardball executive producer John Reiss; Nancy Nathan, executive producer of The Chris Matthews Show; and the committed production teams of both programs.
I want to express my strong gratitude to Jennifer Walsh of William Morris Endeavor for her tremendous professional talent in bringing this project to completion. At Simon & Schuster, I want to thank Nicholas Greene, Jonathan Evans, Nancy Singer, Alexis Welby, Emer Flounders, Rachelle Andujar, Jackie Seow, Elisa Rivlin and Richard Rhorer. Most vital of all, I want to express my esteem for Editor-in-chief Jonathan Karp as editor, friend, pathfinder.
For Jack Kennedy, like all the projects and hopes before, I thank Kathleen, to whom this book is dedicated, for forming the loving world in which this project was undertaken and completed.
NOTES
The sources for this book include my interviews for Kennedy & Nixon, published in 1996 (Simon & Schuster). In a number of cases—Charlie Bartlett, Ben Bradlee, Ted Sorensen—I returned to the same people for fresh interviews that centered on Jack Kennedy himself. With the passage of time, many of those I interviewed earlier—Billy Sutton, Dave Powers, Mark Dalton, Paul “Red” Fay, George Smathers, and the warmhearted Tip O’Neill—have died. I treasured the opportunity to know them and benefit from their generous accounts of life with Jack. I was able to add to their memories with new interviews with Jean Kennedy Smith, John Glenn, Rachel Mellon, and others.
An extremely powerful resource for this book is the extraordinary collection of taped interviews with Kenneth O’Donnell made available to me by his daughter Helen. I refer to his sourcing as KOD. He was Jack Kennedy’s political strategist from the first Senate race in 1952 to the end. He offers a colorful account that gives this book a spine and spring it would not have otherwise. His leads a long list of oral histories (abbreviated herein as “OH”), most of them archived at the John F. Kennedy Library, that cover the man’s life from his teenage years onward.
The key documents exhibited in this volume include a binder of chapel notes kept by George St. John, who was headmaster in the years Jack Kennedy attended Choate. Also vital to me are the scribbled and typed notes Theodore H. White kept of his historic interview with Jacqueline Kennedy on the night of November 29, 1963.
A far more expansive source for me is the collection of great books written about John F. Kennedy, works I have come to respect enormously. Each section of this book relies on these remarkable efforts that have come before. Together they provide a scaffold for the new material I have been able to assemble and develop. I want to give full credit to the part these earlier works, some of them truly majestic, played in building the story of Jack Kennedy’s rise from rich kid to national hero.
• • • •
CHAPTER ONE: SECOND SON
The greatest achievement in chronicling Jack’s younger years is JFK: Reckless Youth (New York: Random House, 1992) by Nigel Hamilton. It is a treasure trove of research up to and including his first political race. He did more than anyone to unearth the great story of Jack and his “Muckers Club” at Choate.
There were two other valued sources for this early chapter. The first is Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917– 1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), which reveals Jack Kennedy’s medical history. The second is David Pitts’s equally revealing Jack and Lem: John F. Kennedy and Lem Billings: The Untold Story of an Extraordinary Friendship (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2008), which tells the wondrous story of Kennedy’s friendship with LeMoyne Billings, his Choate roommate and lifelong companion. I have relied here as before on Herbert Parmet’s Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1980). Barbara Leaming alerted me in Jack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) to the power of Winston Churchill in young Jack’s imagination and ambition.