The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [156]
These men around Bobby were not like Jack and Joe Jr., who thought that it was a man’s natural calling to score with as many women as he could. They had been out in the world, however, and among them Bobby seemed haplessly naive. On one occasion, Bobby somehow managed to set up a date with Shirley Flower, who bore the exalted title of Miss Lynn, Massachusetts. Bobby was terrified by the prospect.
“What am I gonna do with this girl?” he asked a group that included Nick, Kenny, and Chuck. “Well, she lives in Lynn,” Chuck told her. “Take her out there, give her a couple of drinks, buy her a sandwich, and see what happens. And report to us.”
“Well, what’d you do, Bobby?” Chuck asked the next day at the Varsity Club. “We went to a movie and had a soda.” “Then what happened?” “Well, geez, I kissed her and she opened her mouth.” “Oh, heavens, Bobby, that’s terrible.”
Bobby drove his friends down to Hyannis Port, racing his old Chrysler with its bare tires down the narrow roads, frightening men who had jumped out of burning airplanes. His parents were used to having their sons bring college friends to the Cape, but for the most part, Joe Jr. and Jack had brought young gentlemen.
But now hordes of roughnecks descended on the pristine precincts, men who in Eunice’s eyes were “tough and rough … all big and bulky and very unsophisticated,” wearing army fatigues and wrinkled shirts, so unlike her exquisitely dressed father. Rose and Joe learned the background of men such as Nick Rodis, whose father was in the produce business and never made more than thirty-five dollars a week in his life. Then there was Paul Lazzaro, whose dad worked in a factory.
Joe hardly spoke to Bobby’s friends, not even nodding hello to Wally when he sat next to him in the private theater watching Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. When Joe did speak, as often as not it was to push the pedagogical imperative of the family. One weekend Kenny O’Donnell and Bobby sat over dinner joking about how they had come in last in a sailing race at Harvard. Joe blustered and fumed, getting more and more infuriated at the young men.
“What kind of guys are you to think that’s funny!” he exclaimed as he got up from the table, unwilling to sit any longer and listen to such blasphemy.
As for Rose, her face was a mask that rarely displayed its displeasure, but she could not contain herself. She and Joe had not sent their son to Harvard to have him socialize with working-class ruffians. If they belonged at Hyannis Port, it was in the kitchen with the cook and the chauffeur. Bobby’s friends were so bemused by his mother that they gave her a nickname, “Billie Burke,” after a Hollywood actress known in part for her high-strung, scatterbrained roles.
One weekend, Rose lectured her son on his woeful excuse for friends. “Bobby and his mother were having this conversation,” Flynn recalled. “She wanted to know why he didn’t have some other friends from other places. And one of our guys was standing there where she couldn’t see him. He could hear her. And it was too bad.”
Rose and Joe may have blamed Bobby’s friends in part for their son’s abysmal academic record, which landed him on probation in 1947. In his postwar tenure at Harvard, Bobby received thirteen Cs, two Ds, and not a single B or A. When he graduated in March 1948, nothing in his record suggested that he was anything but a shadow of Joe Jr. and Jack.
Jack wasn’t taking his role as the newly elected congressman from the eleventh district with ponderous seriousness. On the morning of his swearing-in, Jack sat at a drugstore counter and ordered two soft-boiled eggs and tea. As he waited for his order, Billy Sutton, his driver and general factotum, paced nervously. “We’ve got to get up there! Mr. McCormack is anxious that you get there.” The most powerful Democrat in Massachusetts was sitting