Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [28]
Everyone has written that Jack Kennedy needed to be dragooned into running for Congress in 1946. Everyone, that is, except the people who really knew him. The solitary walk he took on the beach at Hyannis after getting the news about Joe Jr. must have involved, along with the grief, recognition of a coming swerve on his life’s path. The personal landscape he’d long taken for granted had rearranged itself around him, and so, too, had the expected demands. He was ready, it turned out, to welcome them.
Many aspects of the man were coming together. Jack had run for student office, majored in government. The reading interests that he’d maintained so steadily—memoirs and history, news stories and political currents, world affairs—had culminated in Why England Slept, his thesis-turned-best-seller. It had shown his skills as a firsthand observer of history. He’d been planning to go to law school, specializing in international law.
I should add that he liked poetry—Tennyson’s “Ulysses” was a favorite, as were the poems sent from the front in World War I by a fellow Harvard man, Alan Seeger, who died on a French battlefield. Yet Jack, despite his childhood built on books, resisted the artistic sensibility. Though he was comfortable with the arts, the poetry that drew him was about mission and dedication, courage and overcoming obstacles. A great example are these several lines from “Ulysses”—
I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known,—cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Even in the far-off Solomon Islands—where, like Ulysses, he’d “suffer’d greatly” on a “dim sea”—he’d kept up lively conversations with his messmates about all the subjects that most fascinated him: indeed, “cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments.”
When he returned stateside and was required to put in more hospital time, with everything else on hold, the idea of attending law school continued to be his operative plan right up through early 1945. “I’m returning to law school at Harvard in the fall,” he wrote Lem Billings, “and then if something good turns up while I am there I will run for it. I have my eye on something pretty good now if it comes through.” That “something good” may well have been the seat for the 11th Congressional District of Massachusetts, a district that included Cambridge.
In the pre–Civil War nineteenth century, that seat had been held by John Quincy Adams, also a Harvard man, and the country’s sixth president; it was the only time a president had served in the House after leaving the White House. At the moment, the seat was occupied by the old-style Irish pol James Michael Curley, now nearing the end of a legendary career that would, by its close, include not just four terms as Boston’s mayor but also two stints in prison.
Curley, now, was about to abandon his congressional post to run again for mayor. Jack knew this because Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., freshly involved in local political matters, was bankrolling the rascal. His son knew it but he kept it to himself, as he took one last try at another career possibility.
His father wrangled him a job stringing for the Chicago Herald-American, a Hearst paper. His assignment was to cover the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco. He’d be reporting the historic event “from the point of view of the ordinary GI.”
The city was hopping when he got there, with men and women on hand from all over the world. Fifty nations sent delegates to the conference, which began in late April 1945 and lasted two months. FDR had just died, leaving his vice president, Harry Truman, in the White House. Everyone knew World War II was nearing its close. Out in San