The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [155]
Despite all the cliches about jocks as mindless semi-illiterates who read nothing but the sports page, these men had a fierce concern for the world in which they lived. Many evenings they debated the political future of their country. Despite its image in certain quarters, Harvard had a predominantly conservative, Republican student body. The Varsity Club was different. Sam Adams, Bobby’s friend from Milton, was the one Republican bobbing up and down in a sea of Democrats. The others took special delight in pillorying poor Sam as the relic of a dying class.
“We’re going to take the country away from you, Sam,” opined Kenny, the son of a football coach. “You guys have had it long enough.”
Bobby had not jumped out of a burning plane over Belgium or lost his fingers in the Pacific, and he knew far less of life than most of his teammates. He might have been a subject of mild derision among his mates, little Bobby painting his sailboat while others fought the war. It said much about Bobby and the caliber of these men that he was no more a figure of amusement at the Varsity Club than anyone else. Half a century later, when the men who had been there those many evenings were asked what had been Bobby’s special role, they all said the same thing. “He was one of us.” There were no leaders. There were no followers. “He was one of us.”
Even among this group, however, the man was a controversialist. Bobby enjoyed nothing more than slithering into a genteel conversation, increasing the intensity of the argument to a level only slightly below physical combat, and then slithering away again as his friends went at it, red-faced and blustering.
“Nick, I think he does that on purpose,” Wally told Nick Rodis one day. “He’s a little son of a bitch.”
Bobby was more conservative than most of his friends, often mouthing the self-serving homilies that he had learned at his father’s knee. There are few signposts on the road between righteousness and self-righteousness, and Bobby marched briskly ahead, heedless of where he might be headed. What made Bobby something more than a rich boy who took his good fortune as proof that all was right with the world was his sense of justice. He didn’t like unfairness. He didn’t like bullies. And he wasn’t afraid.
Bob had many Catholics among his friends. Unlike the prep school Harvard football team of his father’s day, public school men, most of them Catholics, dominated the postwar team. When the team played Holy Cross, there were more Catholics on the field for Harvard than among the Catholic college’s eleven.
Father Leonard Feeney, a charismatic Jesuit priest, headed the St. Benedict Center, just down the street from Harvard Yard. Feeney was a man of fierce faith who converted scores of Harvard students, turning philosophy majors into Catholics, and newly born Catholics into priests and nuns. He walked with the banner of faith into the very citadel of secular rationalism. He was the kind of man Bobby might have been expected to follow. But Bobby was not a man to accept received wisdom, whether it came from the dons of Harvard or a popular priest.
Bobby listened to Feeney and he did not like what he heard. The priest took literally Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam that “it is wholly necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” Feeney was a Catholic Billy Sunday, excoriating the infidels and prophesying spiritual death for all those who stood outside the Catholic faith.
Bobby’s football teammate Chuck Glynn recalls how Bobby confronted Father Feeney and then went straight to Archbishop Richard Cushing to complain about the priest. Bobby was only one of many voices that in the end condemned Father Feeney. Shortly before he was excommunicated, Father Feeney and his followers stood in Boston Common on Sunday afternoons. There