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In the fall semester, Teddy took a course in natural science, a subject in which he and his friends had not an iota of interest. One of the fellows had taken a lot of physics in prep school. That led to the obvious solution. During the final exam the amenable friend sat up front in the amphitheater of the Allston Burr Science Building, writing in big letters in his blue book while Teddy and his buddies sat behind copying the answers.

For Teddy, it was a morning of little moment, but it set him apart from his brothers’ lives. Joe Jr. might have had a tutor priming him beforehand, or even handing him the previous year’s exam, but he would not have done what Teddy was doing. Nor would Jack. Bobby would perhaps have struggled mightily with the dilemma, and if he had gone along, it would have been only to get a good grade. But Bobby’s friends at Harvard were too proud and too morally straight to attempt such a thing. And so, probably, was Bobby.

In the spring Teddy took Spanish I. He had no natural instinct for languages, and he was appalled at the idea of having to study what he considered a useless subject for yet another semester. Somehow if he could get an A, he would be relieved of his language requirement.

Teddy and Warren O’Donnell, Kenny’s younger brother, went for a walk the night before the final exam.

“How are you doing?” Warren asked.

“This is a tough one,” Teddy recalled saying as the two men walked through Harvard Yard. “I’ve got to get that C minus or I can’t play football in the fall.”

Teddy and Warren decided to see another friend who was a crackerjack Spanish student. The young man was a scholarship student and he was open to suggestion. “Fine, hell, I’ll be glad to take that thing,” he said, agreeing to pose as Teddy the next morning and ace the Spanish exam.

For the rest of his life, Teddy would be surrounded by overly solicitous people who called themselves his friends and were ready to do what they had to do to get him what they thought he wanted. In this instance, Teddy stood by saying little while his friends pushed this young man, even waking him up the morning of the exam, prodding him to get dressed and fill in for Teddy.

There appeared to be a calculated passivity in Teddy, as if he thought himself less morally culpable if he had given no command. Others might have considered Teddy’s conduct doubly dishonorable: if he was going to cheat, then he should at least have had the gumption to do it himself without bringing in a gullible innocent. That was a subtlety lost on the Harvard dean, who, when the cheating was discovered, treated each young man equally and expelled them both for at least a year.

For Teddy, as for his brothers, the overwhelming fear was not what he did but what their father would think of what he did. Joe was a man of limitless ambitions for his family, yet he did not rage at his youngest son for betraying the Kennedys while Jack was thinking of running for the Senate or governor. As tough and merciless as Joe could be, he cared now more about his son’s life than his family’s future.

“Initially, my father just thought about what the impact was going to be on my life, etc., so he was initially very very calm,” Teddy recalled. Joe did his own inventory of what it would mean, learning that after a year his son could be reinstated. “And then after he got a feel for that sort of thing, he went through the roof (that was about twenty-four hours later) for about five hours and then he was all fine and never brought it up again.”

For Joe, the mystery was not that Teddy had cheated, but that he had cheated for so little. “The father was terribly disappointed in Ted’s doing something as foolish as that when there was so little at stake,” recalled the other young man, who after being thrown out of Harvard got to know Teddy’s father. Joe made a grand symbolic gesture to suggest that he believed young men should have a second chance. When members of Army’s football team were thrown out of West Point in a cheating scandal, he paid their