The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [152]
Would Americans divide themselves in interest groups by age, class, and race, or was there truly an interest common to all Americans? Jack believed that the veterans should ask what they could do for their country, because they would benefit that way more than from narrow special-interest bills. America was their special interest.
Jack thought the veterans should lead the nation, with concern for policies that would maintain the peace and build a strong and prosperous nation. In his most passionate speeches, he was saying little more than he had in his hurriedly written letters from the Pacific when he vowed that the men who had died would have given their lives for something more than maintaining the lives of easy compromise and moral squalor that had seemed to him so prevalent in political Washington.
Jack was pleading for America’s veterans not to retreat into private life, leaving the public arena to the predators, the self-interested, and the narrow parochial interests who shouted only their own names and their own causes. “If we turn our veterans organizations into mere weapons for obtaining special benefits for ourselves at the expense of society, we shall be sending ourselves down the rocky road to ruin.”
Jack was fighting not only to end up first in the primary but also to create the illusion of health. He admitted to no one how much he suffered. When he had to walk up three flights of stairs for the Massachusetts Catholic Order of Foresters Communion Breakfast, he was limping. “You don’t feel good?” asked Thomas Broderick, a friend, solicitously. “I feel great,” Jack said.
Whatever the pain, he always said he felt fine, but at night in his little suite at the Bellevue Hotel he sat soaking in the tub, hoping the hot water would ease his back pain. One afternoon, another of the old politicians, Clem Norton, found the exhausted candidate in his room at the Bellevue crying, bemoaning the fact that he had agreed to this race.
Jack may have felt half dead at times, but he was nonetheless able to project a magical aura of stardom. It wasn’t just the billboards and the pamphlets that did it, but that ineffable quality that had somehow attached itself to his wasted frame. When he talked to the students at East Boston High School, the girls rushed up to him afterward shouting “Sinatra! Sinatra!” comparing him to another emaciated-looking sex symbol.
A few days before the primary, fifteen hundred women showed up at the Hotel Commander in Cambridge for a tea party in Jack’s honor. They swooned over him, flashed their eyes, and smiled, and presumably thought of things other than the housing shortage and the unemployment rate.
Joe had brought in sophisticated outside pollsters, and the candidate knew that he was well ahead. For his birthday at the end of May, the family got together in Hyannis Port in a celebratory mood. They all were taking part in the campaign, a mini-armada of Kennedys. Only fourteen-year-old Teddy had nothing to do with the campaign and seemed a spectator to the compelling drama.
Joe looked down the long table and asked each of his children to proclaim a toast to the future congressman. In the family, this was the time for juvenile put-downs. Each Kennedy attempted to top the last in the outrageousness of their toasts and the rudeness of their words. Then, finally, it was Teddy’s turn.
“I would like to drink a toast to the brother who isn’t here,” Teddy said solemnly. They all stood then and toasted Joe Jr., and if they did not cry, it was only because they did not believe in shedding tears, not any longer. They remembered afterward that it was little Teddy who had made the toast, little Teddy who had his own sense of family.
By mid-June, Jack had to wear a back brace and arrange his schedule so that he could fit in half a dozen scalding hot baths a day and back rubs by