The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [130]
His older brothers were handsome men with an ease of manner that helped propel them through the world. Bobby was the least physically appealing of the Kennedy brothers. His teeth were too big, his ears extended out, his body was scrawny, his voice a girlish tenor, his wit savage. The smile that once had marked a boyish cuteness now seemed an embarrassed grimace, emblematic of his shyness.
At Milton, Bobby was as mediocre on the football field as in the classroom. But how he tried on the gridiron, in practice attacking the blocking dummies as if they were glowering opponents, waiting for his chance in a big game. “I played in the football game against St. Marks,” he wrote his father, “but I was quite nervous and did not do very well.”
When Joe answered his son, it was not to send him hustling back onto the field, bloodied or not, to tackle and charge with mad fury. Joe had such a profound impact on his sons because his was a love tempered with insight. To him, each son was a different kind of jewel, and if Joe Jr. and Jack shone brilliantly on their own, Bobby had to be polished until he glittered like his older brothers. He reminded Bobby that his brother Joe had only made the Harvard team his senior year, and that Jack hadn’t made it at all. Bobby was hopelessly behind his big brothers in his social development. That was what Joe sought to bring out, telling his son that the whole idea of football was “the opportunity to meet a lot of nice boys.” These “nice boys” would turn out to be powerful men, and Joe told his son that “the contacts you have made from boyhood on are the things that are important to you in your own life’s development.”
Bobby was far more self-aware than his brothers and fiercely honest. He was nervous about everything that mattered to him, football, studies, faith, and girls. Everything was complicated, endlessly analyzed, pondered over, criticized.
When Bobby arrived at Milton, there was one young man who everyone at the school would have wanted as a friend. His name was David Hackett, and he was the most celebrated football player and athlete at the school. There is no fame like youthful athletic fame, unsullied by compromise and uncomplicated by any motivation other than to play well and fairly. And of all the people who could have become his closest friend, Hackett chose Bobby, the most unlikely of all. Hackett, progeny of a poor family, thought of himself as a misfit as much as his new friend did, and that apparently drew them together.
David Hackett became to Bobby what Lem Billings was to Jack—a coconspirator in all the trials of growing up. When he wasn’t around his best friend, Bobby wrote him letters. Bobby’s writing had none of the grace, wit, and literate detail of his older brother’s frequent missives to Lem, or any of the sheer exuberance. Bobby was blunt, but rarely purposefully vulgar. He was emotionally honest in a way that Jack was not. Jack usually kept Lem at a self-conscious distance, treating even his closest friend as an audience. Bobby’s friendship was as much about the pain and difficulties the two adolescents experienced as any joyful kinship. Bobby was a demanding friend (“if this friend of mine was the Son of a Bitch he seemed to be the world would catch up with him eventually and he would have to live the rest of his life with himself”). For Bobby, everything was a struggle, from studying to making friends, to seeking some measure of control over his future. Whereas Jack led Lem into precocious, bawdy adventures, there was a shy innocence to Bobby’s approach to the opposite sex.