The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [180]
For Joe, the matter may have been behind him, but for Teddy, yanked unceremoniously out of his happy Harvard life, it was not. Teddy’s father did not believe in penance, but Harvard did, viewing a term in the armed services as suitable punishment. “If I had a good record in the Army, this would resolve and satisfy them,” Teddy said. One day later in the spring of 1951, he went down to the U.S. Army recruiting office and signed up. When Teddy returned to the house, Joe discovered that his son had signed up for four years, not two. Teddy was no student, but he could certainly tell two years from four, and it was probably a mark of his anxiety that he had not even noticed.
“When I signed up for four years, it was just a matter of paper shuffling,” Teddy recalled. “They had three forms at the recruiting office and I had no idea. I went down with the idea to sign up for two years … it was just an administrative type of thing.” That may have been true, but it took the considerable efforts of his father to rectify the error.
After basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, Teddy transferred to Fort Holabird in Maryland, where he intended to enter Army Intelligence. He had scarcely started the program when he was abruptly terminated and sent to Camp Gordon in Georgia to be trained as an MP. From there he sailed to France on the Langfit.
Teddy had a self-deprecating sense of humor and was perfectly willing to make himself the butt of his own jokes. On the long crossing he did not write of his female conquests back in Georgia, as Joe Jr. might have done, or of being here while his friends whooped it up in the exalted confines of Harvard and other young men died in Korea. He wrote instead of the minor misfortune of having been chosen for KP, a duty that had him supposedly contemplating going AWOL in Norfolk. “However, upon considering my welcome back in New York by my family … I concluded that to make the crossing now was the only thing left to do,” he wrote, his humor still intact. His major accomplishment, as he saw it, was that he lost fifteen pounds.
Teddy did not look toward Europe as his big brothers had as a place to test their manhood and their minds. The Continent was not the dangerously inviting place it had been before the war. But Europe was still full of young Americans whose wanderlust had brought them to the cafes of Paris and the steps of Rome in search of adventure and culture they felt they could not find at home. Teddy was not the kind of young man, however, who was deeply attracted to foreign accents. He served out his time as a member of the NATO honor guard outside Paris, a lackluster, ceremonial duty, and though he went bobsledding in Switzerland, the adventures he sought were back at Harvard.
Now that Teddy’s scandal was behind him and the matter had effectively been kept quiet, Joe had one major duty to perform before the family could go on as he wanted it to go on. He had been responsible for Rosemary’s lobotomy. So too was he responsible for her care. Joe had sent Rosemary to several psychiatric hospitals before he had settled upon Craig House in upstate New York. The private psychiatric hospital catered to the wealthy and famous, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, who spent nine weeks there in 1934. Rosemary was in all likelihood the only patient to spend years there, however, shut away behind the barred windows high above the Hudson River.
Joe had turned his eldest daughter into the unmentionable Kennedy, as exorcised from the family dialogue as if she had been condemned to a biblical shunning. Was it possible that this man who at times still cried when his eldest son’s name was mentioned cared so little for whatever was left of his eldest daughter? Did he dismiss her because she was a mere woman, bearing none of the noble manly traits and prospects of his sons? Could he simply walk away from his daughter’s life, never looking back? Or did he know too well what he had done and feel too much, finding it unbearable to mention her name? Could he not stand to see what