Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [71]
Jack and Jackie were, both of them, like characters out of Fitzgerald, two people with old-world aspirations, but like most Americans, self-inventing. Lem Billings, I think, had it right when he said: “He saw her as a kindred spirit . . . he understood the two of them were alike. They had both taken circumstances that weren’t the best in the world when they were younger and . . . learned to make themselves up as they went along. Even the names, Jack and Jackie: two halves of a single whole. They were both actors, and I think they appreciated each other’s performances. It was unbelievable to watch them work a party. Both of them had the ability to make you feel that there was no place on earth you’d rather be than sitting there in intimate conversation with them.”
20
Dumbarton Oaks
21
McCarthy & Cohn
22
Ted Reardon
CHAPTER EIGHT
SURVIVAL
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
—Ernest Hemingway
Jack Kennedy had faced death often in his life. He’d spent much of his teenage years with doctors examining him, saying what an “interesting” case he presented. Leukemia, even, was mentioned. He never did manage to escape the knot he felt in his stomach, a chronic reminder of the frequent invalidism he’d lived with in youth and which now followed him into adulthood. When the Japanese destroyer cut through PT 109, barely missing him, the pounding he took said, This is what it feels like to die. Once home, the surgery performed on his back left him with a pain he was forced to live with. In London, there was the diagnosis of Addison’s.
In 1954, Jack had a choice to make. He could play it one way, living a diminished life that would lead, very likely, to worse. Or he could risk it all—just as he’d done when he left Plum Pudding Island and swam out into that channel in hope of rescue. He was thirty-seven years old and staring at a future that promised a different sort of torture than he might have suffered at the hands of the Japanese. His steadily worsening back promised a return to the sickbed he’d endured as a boy. This time, however, his dreamed-of future would no longer be looming before him, but, rather, drifting forever into the past.
He would, of course, throw everything he had on the table. Rather than accept a lessened existence, he chose to bet his life on the operating room.
The year began with him executing a masterstroke. As a freshman congressman, he’d shown his independence by withholding his signature from the sleazy Curley petition. Now, in his second year in the Senate, Kennedy made an even bolder move, separating himself from the ranks of his fellow New Englanders. He voted for the creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway, connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes. This meant backing a public works project that could mean the loss of Boston Harbor’s importance as a major shipping port.
That 1954 January vote made him an unpopular figure in Massachusetts. It wasn’t hard to understand why. The carving out of a direct route from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes could be seen in New England only in terms of its economic threat to the region. The Northeast was already in decline, and those factories engaged in shoemaking and in textiles, especially, were moving to the non-unionized, cheap-labor South. If ships could find their way to the Midwest without docking at Boston Harbor, huge numbers of jobs would be lost. The men and families who relied on those jobs—the townies of Charlestown and other harbor areas—wondered aloud why their young Irish representative in Washington wasn’t now safeguarding them.
“The story circulated around the state,” said Ken O’Donnell, who was friendly with many longshoremen, “that the Seaway was being built to take care of his