Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [8]
Jack was willing to divulge to Lem, a doctor’s boy, descriptions of those periods he’d spent captive to medical procedures and tests—even at their most graphic. “God, what a beating I’m taking,” he wrote once to Lem from one hospital over a summer break. “Nobody able to figure what’s wrong with me. All they do is talk about what an interesting case. It would be funny . . . if there was nothing wrong with me. I’m commencing to stay awake nights on that.”
The thought that even the experts were stymied by his symptoms tore at him, and came to haunt him. However jaunty he might have tried to sound, it was the fears they’d planted of a shortened life that he really wanted to share with Lem.
Sidekick, confidant, and traveling companion, and, above all, a touchstone, Lem was always to be a cherished constant. When his friend became Mr. President to the rest of the world, it wasn’t long before Lem Billings had his own room at the White House. As Joseph Kennedy, Sr., wryly observed at the beginning, he “moved in one day with his tattered suitcase and never moved out.”
Lem’s loyalty changed Jack’s notion of himself. It taught him he could have followers, which he soon did.
Jack had entered Choate a vulnerable and often lonely boy, a seemingly negligible younger brother with no constituency. He would depart four years later a practiced ringleader. If his adventures before then had been vicarious ones, enjoyed among knights and princes in the pages of books, when Jack left, fealty had been sworn to him much as it would have been to Robin Hood or King Arthur.
His Merry Men were called the Muckers.
To begin with, there were just the two of them, Jack and Lem. Their chemistry was the center from which the circle grew around them. Next came Ralph “Rip” Horton, the son of a wealthy New York family. The rest followed, until there were thirteen in all. Credit, or blame, for the way the Muckers chose that impudent name must be laid directly at the door of the very authority figure to whom they were setting themselves up in opposition.
It was during one of his daily sermons in evening chapel that headmaster George St. John had gone on the attack against those students displaying what now would simply be called “bad attitude.” The background is this: It was Jack and Lem’s final year. Lem, a class ahead of his best friend, had elected to stay on in order to graduate with Jack, and they were uproariously, and very chaotically, rooming together. The instructor overseeing their dormitory wing was not amused by their shenanigans. Fed up not only with their mess but also with the noisy gang of disciples who gathered there each day to listen to Jack’s Victrola, he complained repeatedly to the headmaster.
St. John, when he went on the attack, was clearly directing his words at Jack and Lem’s little band, and it was one of those you-know-who-I’m-talking-to moments. What the headmaster couldn’t anticipate, though, was the way one expression, in particular, that he chose to use—to refer to the “bad apples” he pegged as a small percentage of the student body—soon would come back to haunt him.
Mucker, the label he hung on the Kennedy-Billings gang, has several meanings. A mucker can be someone who takes important matters too lightly, who mucks about to no particular purpose—in this case, the sort of boys unwilling to uphold the time-approved, gold-plated Choate standards of decency, cleanliness, sportsmanship, piety, politeness, and, above all, respect for the powers that be. In short, the kind exemplified by Jack’s and Lem’s older brothers.
Yet there is another, secondary definition of mucker that would have been well known to a Boston boy of Irish extraction. That meaning addresses itself directly to those who traffic in muck, which is to say, mud. And in Boston,