The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [150]
Jack had been brought up to think of such gambits as part of the colorful panoply of urban politics, fancied by such irascible players as his own grandfather, Honey Fitz. When the chuckles ended, though, the fact remained that his father had stolen candidate Russo’s votes as surely as if he had stood in the polling places tearing up ballots. If Jack did not know about it beforehand, he surely did when he learned that there would be two Russos on the primary ballot.
Jack was no innocent either in the way the campaign was exploiting his war career. He had never been comfortable when the newspapers called him a hero, and now his own people exaggerated even those exaggerations. “Naval hero of the South Pacific” he was called in one campaign news release, as if he had single-handedly defeated the Japanese.
Not only did Jack have his father masterminding the campaign, but the whole family, except for little Teddy, was out working the hustings. Rose was a Gold Star mother who could speak mother to mother about her beloved Jack. Eunice was a woman of fierce intelligence and energy who irritated Jack at times by standing on the platform soundlessly mouthing the very words he was speaking. Nonetheless, Eunice, Pat, and Jean were a formidable trio, setting up teas and meetings, working as hard as any of the volunteers, heading out each morning from their suite at the Ritz-Carleton. Jack’s beloved sister Kathleen was missing only because she was living in London.
In the last weeks of the campaign, Bobby showed up too, still dressed in navy blue. Jack deputized Red Fay to take his brother to a movie and show. Red was a talker, and he found the taciturn, morose Bobby a formidable burden, even for a few hours. Red had a risqué wit and a devilish interest in good times. His charge was a self-righteous Puritan, who wrinkled up his nose at an off-color joke as if he smelled something foul.
Jack had seen that part of Bobby shortly after Joe Jr. died. Over Labor Day, Bobby had come upon Jack and his old PT-boat buddies and their wives sitting drinking forbidden booze in the kitchen in Hyannis Port. His father rationed family and visitors to one drink before dinner. When Bobby, a scrawny little Savanarola, lectured them, Kathleen laced into the would-be snitch, telling him to get lost and tossing him out of the room like a mongrel pup.
Bobby was attempting to don the clothes worn by his father and big brothers. Upon graduating from Milton, Bobby had entered the navy’s V-12 officer training program. He headed off to Harvard while most young men his age were drafted. Bobby was hardly a shirker. Even after Joe Jr.’s death, he fancied himself a navy aviator; he would honor his big brother by following in his oversized shoes. But he didn’t seem to know what he was, or what he should be, what was authentic and what was not.
“I am not sure, between you and me, just how much I go for flying but I guess that’s the best thing to do,” he mused to Dave Hackett. “There are so many complications and decisions to make and I am so mixed up.” He had a politician’s self-consciousness about what the world might think of him, and he wanted it on his resume that he had been a navy pilot. “I know that there will be a great deal more risk in this, but I think that it will be a lot more exciting, stimulating, and will do more good when I get out,” he wrote his father.
His father pulled no special strings to help Bobby in that quest, and when he failed the flying aptitude test, that particular dream came to an end. The fact that his two older brothers had made their own heroic contributions to the war effort did not diminish Bobby’s desire to stand within sight of the flash of combat. Like Joe