The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [161]
Smathers’s office was just down the hall from Jack’s in the House Office Building. The Florida legislator was a handsome man of elegant bearing who as often as not preferred pulchritude to politics. Smathers adhered to the southern tradition that a successful politician better dress like one, and he was a veritable dandy in fancy suits.
Jack, for his part, didn’t mind a wrinkled suit, scuffed shoes, or white socks. The two young politicians did share, however, a common interest in women. Like his friend, Jack did not believe that quality and quantity were mutually exclusive and he ran through any number of young women. On one occasion, Jack’s old friend Rip Horton went out with Jack and his date, a blonde from Florida. The woman was stunning enough to have kept most men occupied for at least several dates, but Jack got rid of her before the evening was over.
Rip was staying at Jack’s house, and soon afterward another woman showed up. Rip was amazed at the audacity of his friend, but even more so the next morning when Jack emerged from his bedroom with yet another woman, who apparently had arrived during the night.
Jack’s friends might have been impressed, but in America of the late 1940s, the boyish Catholic politician could not afford to be seen as overly happy with bachelorhood. “Guess I just haven’t found the right one yet,” he told one interviewer, in words that Jimmy Stewart could have spoken in a Frank Capra film.
“I really prefer the homebody type of girl. One who is quiet and would make a fellow a nice, understanding wife and mother for his children. The color of her hair or her height wouldn’t make much difference. Just as long as she’s a homebody is all that counts. When I find her, even politics will take a back seat then.” The interviewer never asked the wistful bachelor why he did not date women who came at all close to his supposed ideal.
Washington was full of tedious, somber men who prattled on with what passed as seriousness. Jack’s friend Smathers could play that game too, but when he came off the platform, and the reporters had put away their pencils, by all appearances the man didn’t give a damn. It was all a splendid joke, and at times he and Jack stood on the sidelines ridiculing much of the spectacle that took place before them. Politically Jack was virtually schizophrenic: at times he was seriously and passionately concerned about his country, and at other times he dismissed the whole business as a silly circus.
“He was a guy whose father had a lot of money and he wasn’t quite sure how Joe got it. It didn’t interest him too much where he got it,” Smathers recalled. “He just knew he had it, it was easy to come by, and he didn’t think about it. And people who worked around him were the ones who had to talk to him about poor people. But Jack was very sympathetic. He was a very sweet guy. Just a real sweet man.”
Early on the Florida congressman noticed that his compadre was not at all what most of the women he bedded took him to be. As freshman legislators, the two bachelors had been relegated to the distant reaches of the House Office Building. Smathers walked with such long easy strides that it was nothing more than an invigorating jaunt to the Capitol. For Jack, getting to the floor of the House was often a different matter.
“Jack was crippled, and he couldn’t walk well,” Smathers remembered. “So the bells would ring for a quorum call or a vote. And I would go over and say, ‘Come on, Jack.’ And he would lean on me, and we would trudge our way to the elevator, which was about seventy-five yards, and catch that and go down three floors to the basement, then have to walk again and get on a tramway car that would take us across underground from the old House Office Building to the Capitol. Then we would get off there and have to go up three