The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [215]
The two brothers stood stalwartly together on the line, Bobby at end and Teddy at tackle, playing with a ferocity rare in such a modest competition. Bobby was on the verge of his twenty-eighth birthday and out of shape, but his opponents across the line would not have known. “Bobby … could play in that league like a tiger,” Teddy recalled. “I mean, he was very good, and it was great fun.” Was it any wonder, then, that to young Teddy, brotherly love was the highest love, and that he saw in his two big brothers the very models of what a man should be?
Life was decidedly better now for Teddy. For the most part, the academic life of Harvard was just a dreary routine that he passed through on his way to good times. He was a drudge who managed to earn more Bs than Cs, doing far better in his grades than his father had done. He took one course with Professor Arthur Holcombe on the Constitutional Convention that excited him. Not only was Holcombe a brilliant professor teaching his last year, but he had also taught Teddy’s father and brothers. The legendary professor may have moved Teddy intellectually, but he was unimpressed by his student. “I think academic activities came out third [after athletic and social activities],” Holcombe reflected from retirement. “He did just what was necessary to remain in good standing.”
Teddy was not much of a student, but he had willing helpers, including Bobby, who shipped some of his old term papers up to Harvard. Bobby admitted that one of them, an essay on the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, “seems a little technical, but perhaps you can water it down a little bit and still be able to use it.” Teddy had been thrown out of college for cheating, but neither brother seemed to understand that copying term papers was as serious an offense as cheating on an exam. They lived in their own moral universe and had a code singular unto themselves.
At Harvard, for the first time in his life, Teddy had good friends, most of them his fellow football players. Several of these college buddies became lifetime friends whose identification with Teddy and his life was almost total. He brought them down to Hyannis Port, where they played spirited games of touch football and ate immense quantities of good food prepared by the Kennedys’ cook. Teddy didn’t brag about his famous family. During freshman year, it wasn’t until one of his new friends, Claude Hooton Jr., noticed a caricature in the Boston Globe that looked surprisingly like his classmate that he realized that Teddy was not an heir to the Kennedy Department Stores on the Cape but heir to something a bit larger. Teddy was by most measures a good and thoughtful friend whose graciousness sometimes even embarrassed Hooton. After a rugby match Hooton hurriedly showered and put on his tux for the big dance that evening. When Hooton picked up his friend, Teddy was carrying two corsages, one for his date and one for Hooton’s.
Teddy could drink more beer than any of his buddies and still be up at dawn for a sail or a tennis game while his friends lay in bed, pillows over their heads, trying to quell their throbbing hangovers. He wasn’t the sort who went looking for a fight, but if a fight came looking for him, he didn’t duck down the alley. One summer sailing with David Hackett in Maine, he was rowing a dinghy to their boat when a smart aleck in a yacht made the mistake of shouting to Teddy that he should row faster, and then challenging him. Teddy and Hackett scampered up onto the yacht and, as the occupants hurried on deck, threw them, one after another, into the Atlantic.
Anyone who knew Teddy would have laughed at the idea that the man was a pallid inheritor, the last and least of the Kennedys, feeding off the scraps of heritage. He was living an intrepid life, one summer going