Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [27]
Jack fixed his sights on the 1946 U.S. congressional election. In this race, as in the British “khaki election” of 1900, civilians got the chance to reward the gallant service of the returning soldiers and sailors with their votes. The man who’d made his reputation saving men in wartime was about to test his mettle in a different theater—equally demanding but entirely different, one that would call on all the democratizing experience he’d gained in uniform.
The fun-loving Jack and the serious Jack would now find a mutual pursuit: politics.
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Billy Sutton
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Charlie Bartlett
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Bunker Hill Day, 1946, with Dave Powers
CHAPTER FOUR
WAR HERO
It has been a strange experience and I shall never forget the succession of great halls packed with excited people until there was no room for a single person more, speech after speech, meeting after meeting—three, even four in a night—intermittent flashes of heat and light and enthusiasm with cold air and the rattle of the carriage in between: a great experience. And I improve every time. I have hardly repeated myself at all.
—Winston Churchill, from a
letter to Pamela Plowden, 1899
The biographies of all heroes contain common elements. Becoming one is the most important. With the physical courage of which he’d shown himself to be capable, Jack Kennedy had turned his years of frailty and private suffering into a personal and public confidence that would take him forward. In mythic terms, he’d also challenged his father’s point of view on the war and bent it to his own. He’d experienced the loss not only of comrades in arms, but of the family’s prince, his brother. Now, ahead of him loomed new ways for him to demonstrate the man he was becoming—and the leader he would be.
If Jack Kennedy didn’t see at first the change he was undergoing when he was discharged from the navy in 1944 and then directly afterward, many around him certainly did. “It was written all over the sky that he was going to be something big,” recalled one of his fellow officers.
Yet, as he was starting to look to the future, he couldn’t let go of what he’d witnessed and what he’d learned. War marks you forever, and so there was one crucial idea he had grasped, which was that it was wrong. In conversations with other officers, he urged them to take the life of their country seriously when they got home, to prevent another war.
For his own part, he spoke as if he, himself, was on the brink of coming to grips with big decisions, of preparing to face them. His commanding officer, for one, commented on the changes in Lieutenant Kennedy that started to be evident at this point: “I think there was probably a serious side to Kennedy that started evolving at that time that had not existed before.”
Now came the fortuitous: his secret illnesses could now be worn as public honors. His chronic bad back would from this era on be attributed to his war injuries. When the noted writer John Hersey, who chronicled Jack’s South Pacific exploits for the New Yorker, made the assumption it was the result of the PT 109 collision and all those hours spent hauling a helpless man through the water, Kennedy let it pass.
All of the other old troubles continued to plague him, especially his serious stomach problems, but they were now morphing into part of his new biography, or new image, just as the bad back was. Scarily thin and still sallow of complexion, Jack met new people and made new acquaintances who immediately chalked up his strange appearance to the malaria and other lingering effects of the PT-boat ordeal. What had been