Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [45]
Referring to the townhouse they shared on Thirty-first Street NW as akin to a “Hollywood Hotel,” Billy cherished the memories of all the gorgeous women coming and going. “Thinking about girls is what kept Jack alive,” he said.
Playing the field, rejecting any definite romantic attachments, gave him the freedom he craved. Refusing to give fealty to the Democratic leadership or to the liberal old guard gave him the independence he treasured. Being able to enter each world without the baggage from the other gave him the breezy, debonair life he wanted. Anywhere he went he could simply be Jack Kennedy, the guy he wanted to be, the one he’d made himself.
“He did have a lot of close associations,” Mary Davis recalled. But not “a lot of close personal friendships.” Charlie Bartlett recalls the detached way his friend regarded political colleagues, no matter their status. “He used to enjoy kidding about the personalities on the scene, and there used to be a lot of jokes about different personalities from Sam Rayburn down, and even some sort of gossiping about the foibles of some of the senior statesmen in Congress.” He liked to watch what they were up to, enjoyed charting their purposes and behavior—but at a distance.
George Smathers was the rare social friend Jack made in the House of Representatives. A marine in World War II, and son of a federal judge in Florida, he’d gotten to know Jack’s father at the Hialeah Park Race Track in Miami. Smathers, not to put too fine a point on it, was a hack, knew it, and enjoyed it—and this gave him, for Jack, a special aura of honesty. Confiding that he voted whatever way would keep him in office, this made him, in a world of hypocrites, special indeed.
Kennedy told Charlie Bartlett he liked Smathers “because he doesn’t give a damn.” If he judged Dick Nixon to be the “smartest” guy on the Hill in those days, his pal George was the most fun to hang out with.
Smathers knew his role: he was Falstaff. Jack was still playing Hal, a prince whose fears, in those days, were not—or not yet—of coming kingship but of mortality. Smathers remembers his pal being “deeply preoccupied by death,” talking endlessly on a Florida fishing trip about the best ways to die. He remembered Kennedy deciding it had to be drowning, “but only if you lost consciousness.”
“Quick”—that was the key. “The point is, you’ve got to live each day like it’s your last day on earth,” he recalled Jack telling him. “That’s what I’m doing.” Ted Reardon recalled a similar conversation on the way home from Capitol Hill one late afternoon in Jack’s convertible. “It was a bright, shining day. We had the top down. Out of the blue he said, ‘What do you think is the best way of dying?’ “ A new friend, the newspaper columnist and Georgetown mandarin Joseph Alsop, recalled Jack’s bluntness when it came to his short-range outlook. “Unless I’m very mistaken, he said that as a matter of fact, he had a kind of slow-acting—very slow-acting—leukemia and that he did not expect to live more than ten years or so, but there was no use thinking about it and he was going to do the best he could and enjoy himself as much as he could in the time that was given him.”
Alsop could clearly see there was cause for worry. “He used to turn green at intervals,” he recalled. “He was about the color of pea soup.”
As he had all his life, Jack found refuge from his health worries in the power of words and ideas. Reading remained his salvation, and not just of the newspapers that are the daily fare of most politicians. Billy Sutton recalls him staying up late at night with Arthur Schlesinger’s Age of Jackson. Mark Dalton, perhaps the most thoughtful of the people around him back then, recalled a visit to Hyannis Port one weekend when Kennedy called him and another friend up to his bedroom.
He wanted to read them a passage by Churchill, possibly one from his magnificent