The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [115]
Inga saw the depth of Jack’s ambition. He was not his brother’s pale shadow, but a man who weighed the cost of aspiration with an appraiser’s cautious eye. Inga spied two pathways before Jack. She called one direction “the West,” though it was not a direction but many directions, not a mere road but endless space.
Out this way a man lived as he wanted to live. Here there was room for a woman like Inga, whose past disappeared in the openness, room for babies, laughter, and adventures that had no beginning and no end. Then there was that tortured road to power, twisting through the salons of Georgetown and the corridors of influence, a narrow, lonely road that ended at the White House.
Inga believed that her Jack could journey up both roads, and she implored him to keep both dreams alive. “You are going away,” she wrote him. “And more important than returning with your handsome body intact … come back with the wish both to be a White-House-man and wanting the ranch—somewhere out west.”
As much as Jack might want to journey up both roads, Inga knew that most successful men chose only one road. “Put a match to the smoldering ambition, and you will go like wild fire,” she implored him. “It is all against the ranch out west, but it is the unequalled highway to the White House. And if you can find something you really believe in, then my dear you caught the biggest fish in the ocean. You can pull it aboard, but don’t rush in, there is still time. Nonsense? Maybe badly expressed, but it is right, perfect and powerful like Young Kennedy in person.” She saw that if he could only reach out and find the ideals that gleamed out there on the horizon, then he might indeed have both power and principle, great accomplishment and noble ends.
Inga was daring Jack to break out of his prison of intellect, forgoing his dependence solely on calculation and rationality. “Maybe your gravest mistake, handsome … is that you admire brains more than heart,” she wrote him, “but then that is necessary to arrive in the end so that Jack could prove that he was indeed ‘a man of the future.’”
When Jack and Inga met or talked on the telephone, he savagely rebuked the world in which he found himself. He wrote Inga condemning the excesses of “stinking New Dealism.” His stint in Washington had convinced him that the city was a political brothel. He despaired at the boastful headline screaming victory above a story that “stinks of defeat.”
Jack believed, like his father, that the war “may call for us to be regimented to the point that make the Nazis look like starry-eyed individualists.” He had a Puritan’s rage at the triviality of politics and the pathetic self-interest of people chasing pensions, not Nazis. He despaired even at himself and people like him who were thinking gloomy thoughts and “writing gloomy letters” instead of fighting the war that had to be fought.
One of the persistent themes of Jack’s life was the natural lethargy of democracy. He believed that most citizens, if they had heard Paul Revere’s clarion call in the night, would merely have turned over and gone back to sleep. It took fires in the night lapping against the very foundation of their homes to wake up the citizens of a democracy and send them out into the street to attack the forces that would destroy them.
Jack had seen it in England, and now he saw the same thing again in Washington and Charleston. In the nation’s capital, the politicians and bureaucrats and reporters trafficked in the trivial while, as he wrote Lem, “all around us are examples of inefficiency that may lick us—Nero had better move over as there are a lot of fiddlers to join him.”
As he sat in Charleston perusing the newspapers, he felt that “Washington is begginning [sic] to look more and more like the Cuban Tea Room on a Saturday night with the Madame out.” Jack, like