The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [19]
Joe kept that same distance on May 29, 1917, when Rose gave birth to John Fitzgerald Kennedy upstairs in the bedroom of the Brookline home. Dr. Good arrived to deliver the Kennedys’ second son as he had the first, but this was not quite the event that Joe Jr.’s birth had been. Grandfather Fitzgerald did not stand below on Beals Street trumpeting to all who would hear that this son would one day become president of the United States, as he had done two years before on the beach at Hull when Joe Jr. was born.
As Joe saw it, there had never quite been a son like his firstborn, a rousing, exuberant child who charged on into life. He loved his second son too, but little Jack seemed a lesser sort in almost everything—smaller, slower, weaker, and greater only in his susceptibility to disease.
For most of the men of Joe’s generation, World War I was the defining event of their young lives. In the summer of 1915, after the German sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania, 1,200 American men, one-third of them Harvard graduates, had descended upon Plattsburg, New York, at their own expense for four weeks of military training under General Leonard Wood, a Harvard man. The following summer, with government money, about 16,000 men attended twelve camps similar to Plattsburg across America.
While these men prepared for war, Joe and three of his Harvard friends, Tom Campbell, Bob Fisher, and Bob Potter, gathered together on the Friday evening before the long pre—Fourth of July weekend at Joe’s parents’ waterfront home in Winthrop. As they reminisced, across the Atlantic the Battle of the Somme had begun. Of the 110,000 British troops who moved out of their trenches toward the German lines on an exquisite spring morning, 60,000 would fall, either killed or wounded.
On Saturday morning the Boston papers were full of details of the immense human slaughter juxtaposed against idealistic paeans to their sacrifices. Joe’s three Harvard friends read the accounts as true men, seeing the bloody field as the plain of honor where a man belonged and celebrating the nobility of these Englishmen and their selfless sacrifice. Joe sat silent.
Fisher and Potter were the models of the Harvard gentlemen in whose company Joe had sought to be included. The two men had been his mentors in learning the nuances of the Brahmin world, and they were mouthing the rhetoric of the true man’s credo that was so much a part of Harvard life. It was unthinkable for Joe to stand up to his friends. To do so was to stand up to the very world to which he had so long aspired. Joe nonetheless spoke out, deriding what he considered his friends’ mindless idealism. He told them, as Rose remembered, that their “whole attitude was strange and incomprehensible to him.” His friends, as Joe saw it, were not innocent in their mindless jingoism. He told them that “by accepting the idea of the grandeur of the struggle, they themselves were contributing to the momentum of a senseless war, certain to ruin the victors as well as the vanquished.”
Joe had monumental insight into the dark and senseless part of human nature. He had his father’s cunning sense of the political world and looked directly at all the twisted aspirations, avarice, and endless folly of humankind. He had his mother’s profound sense of social aspiration and her haughtiness toward most of humankind. He was a shrewd and subtle judge of humanity, knowing just who might be useful to him and how and why, and whom he could use before they used him.
Joe was a man of what he later called “natural cynicism,” which to him was a dysphemism for the highest realism. His natural cynicism was a philosophical stance that he believed he shared with a tiny elite of men who looked down on humankind with bemusement and disdain. As he saw it, most human beings