The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [181]
Joe had never expressed any interest in the problems of mental retardation, but his friend Archbishop Richard Cushing had told him about a well-regarded Catholic institution, St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children in Jefferson, Wisconsin. In 1949 Joe traveled there and arranged for the building of a small home alongside Alverno House, in which resided lifelong adult residents. In August, when the construction was finished, two nuns traveled to Craig House and brought Rosemary back to the modest house where she would spend the rest of her life watched over by several nuns. But Joe did not go to visit her or see her. Nor for years did anyone else, not her mother or any of her brothers and sisters. The first visit to Rosemary probably took place in 1958 when Jack made a secret trip to St. Coletta’s during a campaign swing.
Jack did not like confrontation. He found the endless battles between Democrats and Republicans not a real war but a wearisome and tedious routine. He had one of the worst attendance records in the House of Representatives, missing over one-quarter of the roll-call votes during three terms. Only some of those absences could be attributed to his many illnesses.
He simply could not tolerate sitting through committee hearings and House debates, pretending to listen to the pious posturing and platitudes of so many of his colleagues. That said, he was no more interested in wandering through the streets of East Boston or Somerville listening to what most politicians called “the real people.” That to him was equally tedious.
Jack treated his district the way many British members of Parliament treated their borough, as little more than a convenient device that won them election and a place to return to primarily when they sought reelection. Reading Jack’s travel itinerary for the first half of 1949, the uninitiated might imagine that he was the congressman from the right side of Manhattan, not from the wrong side of Boston.
During those six months, Jack spent at least a dozen weekends in New York at the Waldorf or St. Regis, as often as not with one woman or another. There was good theater to be seen, good restaurants to frequent, good times to be had, and it was a damn sight better than hanging out at the American Legion in Brighton.
A year later, Jack suddenly started taking a deep interest in attending such homey events as the kickoff dinner for the Home of Aged Italians in East Boston, the Lexington Minute Men banquet, the Boston Jubilee baked bean supper, the South End Post Number 105 American Legion dinner, and the Army Day Dance, 2nd Brigade, 101st Infantry, at the Cambridge Armory. He had begun wooing Massachusetts like a forgotten lover—or more accurately, like a politician who had decided to run for either governor or senator in 1952.
When George Smathers learned that Jack was going to announce for Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.’s seat, the newly elected Florida senator walked across the Capitol to the House side to try to talk his friend out of the race. Smathers could have made a formidable argument that the race against Lodge would be political suicide.
The Republican senator, bearer of one of the most celebrated political names in America, was the perfect model of the old Brahmin ideal of stewardship. He was a man of prickly independence, with a quick, nervous irritability that his detractors chalked up to snobbishness. He had the kind of integrity that occasionally comes from generations of wealth. At six feet three inches tall and with lean, patriarchal good looks and public manners as impeccable as his dress, the fifty-year-old senator had a stunning public presence. Lodge