The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [226]
When Jack called Gunilla from Poland, he was no longer playing the ardent, impassioned young lover but the heart-sickened man struck down by all the demands of the world. He told Gunilla, as she remembered it, that he had talked to his father about divorcing Jackie and marrying her. Joe had yelled, “You’re out of your mind.” Jack’s father, like Torby and Lem and almost everyone else, was a convenient foil. His father, if he did talk to him, was only telling Jack what he surely must have known already.
There often comes a point in a romance when the participants evaluate each other as objectively as if they are weighing semiprecious stones. Gunilla would have made a fine wife but a better mistress, and Jack suggested that she move to New York where, if she lost some weight, he would make her a “top model.” Jack’s friend Billings, who had never met the Swedish woman, wrote her that he would certify that she would not become a public charge, since “Jack has called me to do this and I shall be glad to.”
Gunilla’s parents were willing to have their daughter involved in an adulterous affair as long as marriage was at least possibly in the offing. They would not, however, have Gunilla the lesser half of a mere arrangement. They talked to Jack on the telephone, ending the romance that had so consumed their daughter and had been such a perilous adventure to Jack.
Jack was not so willing to give up, even after he learned that Gunilla was engaged. He continued to write her a few more times, but he no longer penned his letters in bold, expansive strokes but in a smaller, cramped and nervous style. “I had a wonderful time last summer with you,” he wrote her. “It is a bright memory of my life—you are wonderful and I miss you.”
Gunilla married a few months after Jack left, but he still hoped to meet her in Sweden the following summer, replicating the exquisite time he had had with her the previous August. Jack was not a man who sought to repeat sweet moments in his life, and he rarely looked back at past pleasures. But there was a certain melancholy in him now. “There must be a beach in Sweden,” he wrote her, knowing full well the sensuous warmth of the Scandinavian summer. He dreamed of returning. He was always careful not to pen words of overt romance that might come back to haunt him. But there was a poignant quality in Jack’s letter this time. He mentioned a friend of Gunilla whom he was hoping to meet. He ended his letter: “I am looking forward to asking her if she knows a beautiful Swedish girl with a quiet smile who lives on top of a mountain in the Cote d’Azur in August 1953.”
When Jack was recuperating in Palm Beach, he spent much of his time working on a book project. Since his college days, Jack was used to having the sort of help on his literary efforts that few of his peers received. Now, as a convalescing senator, he engaged a team to foster his efforts. The book, eight studies of courageous senators bracketed by two thematic essays, lent itself to a largely collaborative effort. Jack solicited advice and suggestions from a group of academicians. Sorensen, a government employee, worked almost full-time drafting four of the profiles. Landis wrote the draft of another chapter and gave other help, including the overall theme. Jules David, a professor at Georgetown, also helped with the conception while writing drafts of four profiles and the closing essay. Jack and his associates did make dramatic changes; the final version of the essay on John Quincy Adams is a dramatic, novelistic rendering of Adams’s career, unlike the more scholarly tone of the first draft.
“When