The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [178]
Bobby ranted at them, barely comprehensible, his words even less understandable as a Boston accent in a sea of southern drawls. In the end the students voted down the resolution that they would have had to sign, but the Student Legal Forum adopted it.
This was not the first time that the university, one of the most liberal institutions in the state, had been confronted with this problem. Up until then the school had liberally applied the grease of hypocrisy by prominently posting a notice stating that a hall was segregated and then allowing blacks and whites to sit wherever they chose.
Bobby would have none of that. The matter was of such seriousness, the dispute so rancorous, that it came before Colgate Darden, the president of the university. Darden declared that the lecture was not a public meeting at all but an educational meeting, and could go on unsegregated.
For the first time in his life Bobby had confronted the most terrible American conundrum of his age, the question of race. He was not a fledgling politician who saw himself as an arbiter between different interests and peoples, seeking a consensus that would push society ahead inch by inch. When he saw what he called truth, he went for it, and woe betide those who stood in his way waving what he considered a white flag of compromise and expediency.
The youngest Kennedy man entered Harvard in the fall of 1950. Teddy had none of the social ambitions of his father or, to a lesser extent, his brother Jack. Nor had he the disdain for the narrow social elites of Cambridge that marked Bobby’s college tenure.
As a boy, Teddy had been not the youngest in the family but often among the newest boys in many of the schools he attended. To get along he developed a genial, conciliatory manner. He was interested in good times more than in great ideas, and he surrounded himself with young men of similar instincts. Most of his friends were football players and other athletes, the amiable sort who would make a natural transition from the gridiron to the manly world of business.
Many of Teddy’s friends had been shuttled off to prep school during their parents’ unseemly divorces. They were largely trophy children paraded home on holidays. Some of them spoke disdainfully of their parents or dismissed them irreverently. Teddy’s friend Claude Hooton Jr. was startled to hear one of their companions calling his mother by her first name. That was unheard of back in the Texas that he called home.
Teddy took literally the biblical injunction to honor one’s parents. He always called Rose “Mother” and Joe “Dad.” Whatever Teddy’s friends thought of their own parents, when he took them down to Hyannis Port for the weekend, they sat a mite taller at the dinner table and watched their words more carefully than they ever would have in their own homes.
Teddy’s father had taught him that he had a special responsibility as a Kennedy man. But what was that admonition to an eighteen-year-old finally free of all the constraints of prep school life and of his father’s overwhelming presence? He didn’t like rules, be they silly speed limits or other regulations that sought to hold him back from the life he intended to live.
Bobby’s football teammate Wally Flynn recalled that Teddy asked Wally and Nancy, his wife, to chaperone a party at a Harvard club to which they no longer belonged.
“Teddy, am I going to get in trouble?” she asked, knowing full well that Teddy was up to something that was not quite right.
Teddy’s friends at Harvard had their own special moral code, and it was a code that played into the part of Teddy that was weak and intellectually slovenly. These athletes considered academic course work a tedious, largely unnecessary regimen that kept them from playing sports and having a good time. They helped one another with their studies, choosing the easiest courses,