The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [211]
David Cecil’s book may well have been what set him to musing, scribbling notes that he surely meant only for himself. He was an American senator, but he wrote that he preferred reading European history. It was “more interesting because of [the] leisure class.” American history was the “struggle to survive” and “except on Western frontier [was] not glamorous.” European women were interesting because they were “women of leisure.” As for American women, they were “either prostitutes or housewives … [and did] not play much of a role in culture or intellectual life of country.” The “Civil War [was] glamorous … but only in Virginia because of remarkable personality of leaders.”
The Civil War may have been momentarily glamorous to a gallant young officer riding a thoroughbred steed alongside General Robert E. Lee, but hardly so for a tattered, barefoot Irish peasant walking behind in the dust with his rusty musket on his shoulder and hardtack in his kit. And that is where Jack’s ancestor would surely have been if he had fought for the Confederacy.
“Jack did have aristocratic instincts,” reflected his old friend Charley Bartlett. Jack, however, was a self-conscious aristocrat, and a self-conscious aristocrat is no aristocrat at all. He knew—and this rankled enormously—that he still would not be welcome in such haunts of the Brahmin elite as Boston’s Somerset Club, as either a member or possibly even as a guest.
In these notes Jack pondered an essential contradiction in his own life and nature. If not for his father and the lessons of the war, he might have lived a life extreme only its pursuit of pleasure, as a snobbish dilettante, dipping into the arts, endlessly amusing himself. Even if Jack had wanted to live that sort of life, he realized that there was no stylish leísured society in America like the society he found so attractive in London.
Most of Jack’s contemporaries were fascinated by the lives of the most adventurous elements of the middle class or the working class. Jack, however, found that American history “tend[s] to lack romance and drama, except the romance and drama that can be found in the story of a people and a country expanding from a beachhead to the most powerful nation on earth.” For him, American political history was in part a dreary business, unlike European history, with its grand, gaudy aristocratic lives that from a distance appeared “bright with color and romance” against a gray background of the “squalor and quiet desperation” in which the masses existed.
Worldly upper-class women, especially Europeans, intrigued Jack. Even his own wife, as sophisticated as Jackie was, had a girlish, unformed quality and could not compare with the great ladies of the past. He could applaud the virtue and achievements of such exemplary American women as Jane Addams or Susan B. Anthony, but he would have preferred to have the Marquise de Pompadour or Catherine the Great as his dinner companion.
In private, Jack placed a higher value on wit than virtue, cleverness than sincerity. At times he could hardly tolerate the relentless industriousness of American life, a philosophy encapsulated for him in Longfellow’s words: “Life is real! Life is earnest!/And the grave is not its goal.” He much preferred the European view of Lord Byron, who, while willing to die for Greek freedom, would have wanted to do it in a properly cut coat. Jack could quote approvingly Lord Byron’s axiom: “Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,/Sermons and soda water the day after.”
Scribbling his notes in Palm Beach, Jack wrote that as bad as American women were, politicians were their equals, “rather pompous,” their “humor unsophisticated.” What was impressive about them was “the vituperation that surrounds them on the floor of Senate, in newspapers etc.”
Jack occasionally revealed his disdain for many of his colleagues