The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [153]
It was a hot Boston day, and by the time Jack reached the reviewing stand he was staggering ahead, nearly collapsing. State Senator Robert Lee happened to live right there, and Jack was carried into the politician’s home. Lee called Joe, who told him to wait until a doctor arrived and his son could be moved. Lee stood and watched the twenty-nine-year-old candidate turn yellow and blue. “He appeared to me as a man who probably had a heart attack,” Lee remembered. “Later on I found out it was a condition, which he picked up, probably malaria or yellow fever. We took off his underwear, and we sponged him over, and he had some pills in his pocket that he took. That was one of the questions his father asked, did he have his pills with him.”
No news of Jack’s condition got out, and the whole Kennedy family was there the following evening in the headquarters on Tremont Street to hear the happy results. Jack had scored a formidable success in the primary, defeating the other nine candidates with 22,183 votes, 40.5 percent. His closest challenger, Michael J. Neville, the mayor of Cambridge, stood far behind with 11,341 votes. The authentic Joseph Russo received 5,661 votes, while another 799 votes went to the faux Russo.
Of all the people who were there that evening at headquarters, only Joe seemed strangely out of sorts. “I got the impression that night that Joe was disdainful of us all,” Dalton recalled. “I just couldn’t understand it. He wasn’t going around saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you for what you’ve done for my son.’ He wasn’t doing that at all.”
Joe may well have been haunted by his dream of what might have been. Joe Jr. would have walked along the route of the Bunker Day parade, firm of stride, strong of manner, shaking hands, and slapping backs. He would have needed no microphone this evening, no urgent hands to push him up to the platform, no sitz baths, no doctors to monitor his steps, no sad reticence.
13
A Kind of Peace
The Harvard College that Bobby returned to in the fall of 1946 was bursting its walls with veterans wanting an education. The university took over the Brunswick Hotel in downtown Boston to house 115 lucky married couples and mandated that any student who lived within a forty-five-minute commute would have to live at home.
Now with the largest student body in its history, many of the totems of civilized life at Harvard seemed like silly rituals, a waste of money and time. Men found themselves sleeping in beds stacked on top of each other. In the dining halls where waiters had always served Harvard men, students stood in line grasping metal trays. Some of the frosh hardly knew what to do, but to Bobby and the other veterans these double-decker bunks and newfangled cafeterias were standard issue.
There were 659 Harvard men who died in the war. Those who returned safely were several years older in age, and decades older in experience. They might listen to scholarly pretenders tell them how to think, but not what to think nor how to live or how to drink.
In classrooms, a man who had parachuted into Burma or flown a bomber over Germany listened with both a hunger for knowledge and a hardy reserve of skepticism. When one veteran who had lost a couple of fingers in the war got drunk, no proctors dared to point theirs at him in rebuke. Another student had had his ear burned off. When he came rolling in drunk at dawn, no one said anything.
Bobby was a veteran but he was far different from most of the former GIs matriculating at Harvard. He bore a name that was almost as honored at Harvard as it was elsewhere now, and he was voted into the Spee Club with an ease that Jack had not experienced.
Bobby could easily have passed his days in the world of clubs and class and privilege