The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [16]
Joe had thought that the baseball diamond was a sacred field of play, removed from all the sordid duplicities of the outside world. He had attempted to live in that world, but the coach had dismissed him from the A squad like a day laborer. The winds of a new age were blowing through Harvard Stadium, even if most of the alumni could not feel them.
The plaudits won on this field could be cashed in out there in the world, and those who did not know that were fools. Sexton was paid far more than any professor. He was paid to win, and win he had. McLaughlin, the hero of the team, was about to cash in too, by using the fame and honor that he had won on the field to help him get into the new movie business. A few days before this final game, Joe’s father’s friends had gone to the senior captain and told him that if he wanted those movie theater licenses in Boston, then Joe better get into that final game against Yale. And so Joe had won his letter, and he had not cared how.
To a previous generation, Joe’s Harvard H would have been a badge of shame, not of honor, but he did not see it that way in the world in which he was living. Rose did not see it that way either, wearing the rose-colored glasses that were part of a woman’s natural wardrobe. “My father and I saw him the day he won his ‘H,’ “she recalled, “when he made the winning play against Yale.”
Joe had his letter, and now he left the team for good. His excuse was that he had agreed to coach the freshman team, but Sexton probably had had quite enough of Joseph P. Kennedy. Although the first-string first baseman was graduating, the Harvard Crimson did not even mention Joe as a prospect to take over the position.
That fall, Joe was one of only 36 Harvard men among the 2,262 undergraduates who had the right and honor to wear the Crimson sweater with the black letter. He was chosen now for one of the lesser of the final clubs, Delta Kappa Epsilon, in part probably because of his Harvard H. He had achieved his great goal, but he had achieved it so late that he had little time to savor the pleasures of life as a clubman. He entered Delta Kappa Epsilon by the front door now with the men of the Gold Coast. He had achieved what was socially impossible for the Catholic son of an Irish-American politician, and by rights he should have savored his triumph. Yet he was angry that he had been snubbed and had not received all that was his due. He had no interest in sitting around in his club endlessly socializing. He had had whatever he thought he could wring out of his Harvard experience, and he petitioned to graduate at midyear. The university turned him down, presumably because of his academic record; during his four years at Harvard he received not a single A, four Bs, nineteen Cs, and ten Ds, including one in social ethics.
As he strolled through Harvard Yard, a stalwart senior and the very model of a Harvard man, who knew or cared how Joe Kennedy had won his letter or how he had made his final club? He had entered Harvard hoping to be like the men of the old Harvard world. He was leaving a man of the raw new century.
3
Manly Pursuits
Joe stood next to Rose in Cardinal O’Connell’s private chapel repeating his marital vows. This tender ceremony was a victory not only of love and devotion but also of power and cunning. Joe had wrested Rose from her father, Honey Fitz, in a struggle that had lasted most of a decade and was not yet over even on this radiant October day in 1914.
For Honey Fitz, as for Joe, life was a matter of battles between men. Joe could see through Honey Fitz as if he were a pane of glass. There was a hard nub of petty jealousy in the former mayor that exhibited itself to any man who might stand above him, even in the private kingdom of his own home. Joe was not a man to bow in deference to his new father-in-law; Joe was a threatening figure to Honey Fitz, especially since the mayor had left office and no