Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [6]
A second son such as Jack Kennedy, arriving as he did two years later, finds himself faced with that old familiar tough act to follow. And, of course, embedded in the soul of any second male child is this Hobson’s choice: to fail to match what’s gone before guarantees disappointment; to match it guarantees nothing.
You have to be original; it’s the only way to get any attention at all—any good attention, that is.
Jack Kennedy, almost as soon as he got to Choate, quite obviously put himself on notice not to be a carbon copy. He was neither a “junior,” nor would he be a junior edition. He would be nothing like the much-admired Joe, nothing like the Choate ideal. What he brought, instead, was a grace his brother—and Choate itself—lacked. Even as a child of the outrageously wealthy Joseph Kennedy and his lace-curtain wife, Jack soon showed himself well able to see the humor in life. The wit he displayed cut to the heart of situations and added to life an extra dimension. He was fun.
Here, then, is where we begin to catch a glimpse of the young man who would stride decisively up to that convention stage a quarter century later, leaving behind the indelible image. Even though he’s very much still a boy, he’s preternaturally aware of the way life demands roles and resistant to stepping into one preselected for him.
There’s the wonderful irony that comes with those surprises that second sons—Jack Kennedy included—are driven, and also inspired, to produce. Unlike his older brother, bound to a more conventional blueprint, Jack wasn’t under the same pressure. There was a lightness to him, a wry Irishness that blended with the WASP manner rather than aspiring to it. With that combination, he could enter where his father, mother, and brother could not.
What happened to Jack when he got to Choate in the fall of 1931, by then already a victim of persistent ill health, was that, first of all, he had to find himself, and, to a daunting degree, simply survive. His brother Robert—the seventh Kennedy child, younger than JFK by eight years—later said of that period that any mosquito unlucky enough to bite Jack would surely have paid the ultimate price. Jean, his youngest sister, told me it was his bedridden youth that made all the difference. “I remember him being sick. I remember that he read a great deal, and why he was so smart was because during those formative years he was reading when everyone else was playing baseball or football or something like that.”
So it was in the sickbed, it turns out, that he became a passionate reader, thrilling to the bold heroes of Sir Walter Scott and the tales of King Arthur. At Choate, he may have wound up the holder of a title he never trumpeted: the record for most days spent in the school’s Archbold Infirmary.
The appalling reality is that no one—no doctor, nor any of the top-drawer specialists to which his father sent Jack—could tell the Kennedy family or the young patient why he suffered so. He’d had scarlet fever, and his appendix removed, but what continued to plague him was a knot in his stomach that never went away. Frighteningly, too, his blood count was always being tested. Leukemia was one of the grim possibilities that concerned his doctors, and Jack couldn’t avoid hearing the whispers.
What seems clear to me is that, both at home and away, this fourteen-year-old—a big-eared, skinny kid nicknamed “Ratface”—wasn’t marked for anything in particular, as far as his father was concerned. The succession was taken care of. There was only one dukedom.
For Joseph Kennedy, his determination that his kids not be losers counted as a one-rule-fits-all. Nor did Jack seem to be of any particular emotional interest to his mother. Rose Kennedy kept her distance geographically as well as emotionally. Hard as it is to believe, she never once visited Jack at Choate, not even when he was ill and confined