The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [143]
Those who defended Joe’s attitudes pointed at Krock and Baruch and argued that a man with Jewish friends couldn’t be anti-Semitic. He had his Jewish friends and associates—journalists, lawyers, doctors, and political advisers—but only because he considered them smart and useful. He played golf at the Palm Beach Country Club, a Jewish club, not because he chose to make some kind of statement, but because it was close to his home.
His children listened to their father long and well, and Kathleen shared her father’s keen ability to spot a Jew. Six million European Jews had died in the Holocaust, but after the war, Kathleen found them to be ubiquitous in Paris. “The people one sees at the collection aren’t a bit chic and the shops complain the people who buy now are black market profiteers,” Kathleen wrote the family on September 15, 1946. “The Jews are in evidence in all the shops and restaurants.”
For Jack, the pain and illness never seemed to end. He had been back in the States for over a year now, shuttled between hospital beds, cut open and shot up with drugs, and he appeared no closer to good health than when he had arrived. The doctors tried procaine, and while that made his back and leg pain tolerable, he was still in pain. In addition, in November 1944, they diagnosed him as having “Colitis chronic.” The doctors had tried everything they knew to try, and in the end they let him go, telling him that his convalescence might last another year.
Writing in a hospital bed from which he had good reason to believe he would never rise to full health and well-being, he sent a letter to his friend from the Pacific, Paul “Red” Fay Jr. He did not tell Red of the despair that he surely must have felt but covered his emotions with joking bravado.
“Sometime in the next month I am going to be paying full price at the local Loews,” he wrote. “I will no longer [be] getting the forty-per-cent off for servicemen—for the simple reason that I’m going to be in mufti. This I learned yesterday—as they have given up on fixing me up O.K. From here I’m going to go home for Christmas, and then go to Arizona for about a year, and try to get back in shape again.”
Jack headed out to the mountains of Arizona to see whether the western air could do what scalpels and medicines had not done. In his old navy fatigue pants and shoes, he was hardly the East Coast dandy. To a new friend, J. Patrick Lannan, Jack looked “yellow as saffron and thin as a rail,” and he gently bemoaned the fact that he could not digest much food. He was not much of a horseman, but he galloped through the high desert as if he thought he could outrace his illness and his own uncertain future.
His beloved sister Kathleen had written him: “It just seems that the pattern of life for me has been destroyed. At the moment I don’t fit into a design.” He could have replied to her in much the same way.
Jack worked on a memorial book for Joe Jr., patterned in part on his favorite book, John Buchan’s Pilgrim’s Way. Since Jack’s work on the book primarily involved editing the reminiscences of others, he had plenty of time for other pursuits. He talked to his cottage mate, Pat Lannan, about world affairs. Jack told his new friend that he was thinking of running for Congress from Massachusetts. He probably knew that his father was attempting