The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [216]
Teddy did not have Jack’s sophisticated charm or his subtle gamesmanship. He developed a rating system from A to F that he applied to every woman he met, including his own sisters. Even if a woman was an A, he was soon ready to move on, to go back with his buddies, before heading out another evening to score again.
It bothered Bobby that Teddy had done all the penance he was going to do and back at Harvard was majoring in football and good times. Teddy’s self-indulgent conduct so rankled Bobby that on occasion he saw fit to lecture his kid brother. “I talked to Dad last night,” Bobby wrote Teddy in January 1955, “and he agreed with me that you really made a fool of yourself New Year’s Eve.” That may have been, but it was hardly brotherly to go running off to their father, all clucking commiseration, the contrast between upstanding Bobby and rascally Teddy all too stark.
There was always an edge to Bobby’s humor, a sting to any balm he applied. Jack’s attitude toward his kid brother was far different. Jack was a man who, by Bobby’s estimate, was in physical pain half his life. To Jack, physical well-being took on a spiritual quality of which those who possessed it were rarely aware. Even in this transitory world of youth, where health was as common as the very air, Teddy seemed like the benchmark of health. As their mother observed her two sons, she thought that “Teddy had the strength and the vitality and Jack rather envied him his health and capacity to take part in all these sports.”
Not just envy brought Jack up to Boston on those autumn weekends to watch Teddy playing end on the varsity. Earning a letter was something that he and his brother Joe had dreamed of. His father sat next to him celebrating whenever Teddy took the field. During his junior year, Teddy’s father and brothers spent some disappointing Saturdays watching him sit on the bench. When it came time for the final game against Yale in the 1954 season, he had played end for only fifty-six minutes, four minutes short of the hour necessary to win the coveted football letter that meant more to Teddy than any other Harvard honor. It was still the first half when Teddy got in the game for the first time, and it was almost certain that he would have his Crimson letter. As soon as Teddy took the field, however, a Yale back ran sixty-two yards around his end. It was not Teddy’s fault, but he was taken out and never got back in the game.
“So I ended up at the end of the season with fifty-nine minutes, fifty-eight seconds,” Teddy recalled years later with a memory he has for few other things in his past. “And at the last minute Harvard scored to win the game. So the place was euphoric, and I had to be euphoric. And my father’s in the stands. I know I’ve disappointed him, disappointed my brothers who were up there. They’re trying to cheer me up, and I’m trying to be happy because the team wins, and I’m part of the team. These enormous emotions going through a person at that time.”
The following year Teddy had played fifty-six minutes when it all came down to the final game against Yale in New Haven. Out there on that field, Teddy was living the life that both Jack and Joe Jr. had so much wanted to live. To the other Kennedy men, it hardly seemed to matter that, heading into its final game, this miserable Harvard team had won only twice, while losing six games.
Teddy was inspired by the fact that his brothers and father were often up in the stands. “I think … [Jack’s] most profound influence was not so much when I was a teenager or a pre-teenager but was the later years when I was in high school and through college and the post-college years,