The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [108]
In the summer at Hyannis Port, Bobby spent more time with his younger brother than many boys would have spent. Nine-year-old Teddy’s closest friendship was not with fifteen-year-old Bobby, however, but with his ten-year-old cousin, Joseph “Joey” Gargan. Rose’s sister, Mary Agnes, had died four years before, leaving Joey and his two sisters motherless. Even with their own large family, Rose and Joe invited the young Gargans each summer to Hyannis Port. As generous as his uncle and aunt were to Joey, there was always a quid pro quo with the Kennedys. Although nothing was said formally, Joey was deputized to watch over little Teddy, to be his guardian and his mentor and his friend. Joey was loyal and vigilant, steering his little friend away from conduct that would have brought a firm rebuke from Teddy’s father. For both youths, summers in Hyannis Port resonated with all the glorious pleasures of boyhood and some of its dangers.
“Teddy went outside the harbor [in his sailboat] one day, and they got caught in the fog and they got very nervous and hysterical,” Rose recalled. “Some of them started to weep, and after that he understood how important it was not to go out of the harbor when there might be fog.”
For Teddy, these radiant times were the source of many of his ideals of family. Hyannis Port was the private preserve of family and home to which he would always return. Joe was no longer flying off to Washington or New York. He rarely left this house except for his early morning horseback ride.
Rose could no longer sail off to Europe on her shopping trips, and she too was omnipresent. “I saw a man and a woman in a relationship which was one of love and affection and respect for one another,” Joey recalled. “I never saw two people who spent that much time together. If I spent as much time with my wife as Joe spent with Rose, she’d be asking me to take a vacation.”
That was the vision of family love that Teddy carried within, never to be bleached out by the fierce sun of life. Hyannis Port was the home where he had been nestled in his mother’s arms and had sat boldly at the table beside his brothers and sisters. These grounds were hallowed, alive with memories. His grandfather’s songs carried on the wind, and Jack was out there sailing Victura, out there somewhere beyond the last horizon.
While his big brother learned about flying, Jack was off traveling around Latin America. It had not been the easiest of trips. Jack wrote his Harvard friend, Camman “Cam” Newberry: “I don’t know about the army, my back was snapped several times.”
The armed forces were not so bereft of fit young men that they would happily take an emaciated-looking recruit of such dubious health that he could not even get life insurance.
Jack had struggled to play football when he was a sickly wisp of a youth, and now he could not possibly stand on the sidelines as the leaders of his generation donned uniforms to enter the ultimate field of play. His whole conception of manhood was at stake, as well as everything his father had taught him about how he must live. Rightly, then, it was to his father that he went to seek help in getting into the navy, which would probably have rejected him as easily and quickly as it had accepted his brother.
Joe feared war for his country and himself, but mostly he feared it for his sons. He had ominous premonitions of what war would bring. Although he rarely mentioned his sons in his dark prophecies, he feared that their lives might be part of the terrible wreckage of war. He could have attempted to talk Jack out of his plans to enlist. Joe, however, had wanted sons who were what he considered true men, and now he had them—brave sons who would run toward the cannon’s bright fire.
Joe contacted