The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [151]
For the rest of his life, Bobby would sail with his brothers’ legacy. On the destroyer, the sailors did not know that the scrawny young seaman was the younger brother of the hero for whom their ship was named.
It was fitful, unsatisfying duty, sailing down the Atlantic coast to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. The best part of it, as far as Bobby was concerned, was that he was meeting the kind of fellows he hadn’t met at Harvard. They were mainly uneducated southerners who had a strength that his fancy friends rarely had. That didn’t make his duty any more palatable. After six weeks he was transferred, rising, as he wrote, “from the lowest grade of chippers, painters & scrubbers, the 2nd Division, up into one of the highest grades of chippers, painters, & scrubbers, the 1st Division.”
When Bobby arrived in Boston late in Jack’s campaign, he was sailing on another ship with his brother’s name on it. Jack was eight years older than Bobby, a man who had experienced a world that Bobby had scarcely visited. Nevertheless, Bobby was not going to swab the deck, ordered around by the likes of Lem Billings and Red Fay.
Bobby insisted on taking over three of the toughest wards in East Cambridge, the lair of Jack’s strongest opponent. He worked with the residents in a way that Jack and his highborn friends never could. He ate spaghetti with the adults and played football with the kids, and maybe Jack didn’t win the majority of the East Cambridge votes, but he did far better there than he would have without Bobby’s efforts. Bobby’s own little entourage included his sister Jean and her friend and fellow Manhattanville student, Ethel Skakel.
Joe Kane coined Jack’s campaign slogan—” A New Generation Offers a Leader”—and it was with the new generation of veterans that Jack was at his best. He may not have spoken in the firm, resonant cadences of a great speaker, but when he talked to his fellow veterans in the primary and later in the general election campaign, he spoke as truthfully and authentically as he ever did.
Jack could have offered himself up to the returning soldiers as “their” man, set to head down to Washington to unlock benefits that they deserved for their rich sacrifices. He did not do that. He saw these eighteen million Americans, 43 percent of the adult male population, as representing “mentally the most able, physically the best … in truth members of a citizens’ army.” These veterans were his natural constituents in a sense that no other group could ever be. He had shared with them what was for him, as for most of them, the most profound and the most formative experience of his life.
After World War I the authentic patriotism of the returning veterans had been transmuted in the American Legion into reactionary, jingoistic pseudo-patriotism, hostile to new ideas and immigrants. This time Jack thought it could be different if only the veterans looked beyond their own narrow interests to those of all Americans. “I have noticed among many friends I knew who have come home … one common reaction since their return—a letdown,” he said.
I have seen it in many of their faces, I have heard many of them mention it—the realization that home is not what it was cracked up to be…. In civilian life, many of them feel alone. In the last analysis they feel they have only themselves to depend on. What they do not always understand and what all of us in this country sometimes forget is that the interdependence is with us in civilian life just as it was in the war, although perhaps it is not as obvious…. In a larger sense, each one of us is dependent on all the people