The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [160]
“No,” McCormack replied, knowing full well what lay behind the question. “If you don’t want to sign it don’t sign it.”
Jack did not sign the petition, though he knew it was a bad thing to make enemies in politics, for enemies remember when friends forget. McCormack didn’t stand up publicly against Jack. He just held on to every scrap of the political patronage, and worst of all, he remembered.
As a freshman congressman, Jack carried with him the bitter memories of a wartime capital full of what he considered the self-serving and the self-seeking. He was hoping to find something else in Washington this time. In September, he traveled back to Choate for the school’s fiftieth anniversary and gave one of the most heartfelt speeches of his young life.
Until recently he had been at best ambivalent about the word “politician,” disdaining the title, particularly in a gathering like this one. This evening, though, he proudly wore that appellation so as to inspire some of these youths as well as other distinguished alumni not to retreat into private enclaves of privilege but to come forward and stand for election, as he had.
He pointed out that despite all the contributions of Choate men, there was “one field in which Choate and the other private schools of the country have not made a great contribution and that is the field of politics…. In America, politics are regarded with great contempt; and politicians themselves are looked down upon because of their free and easy compromises.”
The speech was reprinted in the alumni bulletin as “Jack Kennedy’s Challenge,” but it was a challenge that Jack himself met only partway. He could stand before the Choate youths and fill the room with inspiring rhetoric, but when he returned to Washington, he was like Gulliver in the land of Brobdingnag, so close to the realities that he smelled only the stench and saw only the endless compromise. “Everything you said is true—only more so,” Jack wrote Clare Boothe Luce, a woman of studied cynicism and disdain who had long since forgiven Joe for betraying her in the 1940 presidential campaign.
As the months went by, Jack became less and less a forceful advocate and more of an ironic, disinterested bystander. He brought the same emotional distance that he kept from everyone in his life to the world of politics. He was living in a small, disordered house in Georgetown with his sister Eunice. Thanks to their father’s intervention, twenty-six-year-old Eunice had an important position, the first executive secretary in juvenile delinquency at the Justice Department. Eunice did not have that common liberal malady of loving humankind more deeply in the abstract than the specific. She not only talked endlessly about the problems of troubled youth but also often brought groups of troubled girls home for Sunday dinner.
Although Jack tolerated his sister’s eccentricities, he much preferred spending his evenings in the company of an endless parade of women. In some of the newspaper photos of the time, his eyes appeared dark and hollow, his features seemingly twice their size in his thin face. Yet he had a sexual aura that made him nearly irresistible. The Associated Press named Jack one of the fifteen most eligible bachelors in America. Even if Jack ran well behind Cary Grant and Clark Gable, he was the only politician on the list alongside the biggest stars in Hollywood.
Jack enjoyed the company of another Democratic freshman, Congressman George Smathers of Florida. Smathers had already met Jack’s father in Florida, and he had more than an inkling of what the Kennedy men were all about. Joe had purchased a part ownership in Hialeah Racetrack and he generously invited Smathers, a young assistant U.S. attorney, to his box.
“Joe was using me to sit with these pretty girls,” Smathers recalled decades later, full of admiration for the sheer duplicity of the man. “Joe was married, and