The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [232]
Instead, announcing that he was going off on a two-week visit to Nice and the Middle East, Jack got on another plane to Paris. In fact, Jack was heading off on a Mediterranean yachting trip. Since March, when Jack already knew that his wife was pregnant, he had been actively negotiating for a yacht with the Mercury Travel Agency in Cannes. “I do not wish for personal reasons to have the direct responsibility or be in any way connected with the hiring of the boat,” he wrote H. W. Richardson at the travel agency in April. “I am sure you can appreciate my reasons.”
Jack arranged for a Washington railroad executive and lobbyist, William Thompson, to sign the contract and pay $1,750 for the eighty-five-foot Vileshi and its four-person crew for two weeks beginning August 21, 1956. Those who disliked the big, brawny Thompson judged him little better than a procurer, but Jack considered him a friend with whom he shared an insatiable appetite for nubile young women. Jack and Thompson were the horsemen of the night, riding out together in search of sexual adventure, be it in Florida, Cuba, or elsewhere. Beyond their mutual pleasure, Thompson doubtless understood how useful it was to have such a well-placed friend, and arranging cruises brought better access than buttonholing the senator outside the cloakroom.
For the senator from Massachusetts and potential presidential candidate, this excursion was unimaginably foolhardy. Jack was heading off on a yacht paid for by a lobbyist/executive, accompanied by several young women, and with a letter on file at the agency showing that he wanted his role kept secret.
When Jack arrived in southern France, he spent a few hours with his parents at their villa. There is no evidence that Rose, who exalted family above all else, suggested to her son that it was inappropriate for him to be vacationing away from his twenty-seven-year-old pregnant wife who had already lost one baby. The talk was of the convention and the hack politicians who Jack thought had betrayed him.
Jack had hoped that Gunilla might be with him on the yacht, but she took her marital vows literally. Jack was accompanied instead by a group that included Teddy and a number of young women. Teddy, a student of his older brother’s life, had yet another opportunity to take studious notes on the man he took as his ideal.
For years, Jack had taken risks in the name of sexual amusement, but now there was a dangerous crescendo to his activities. Jack had nearly died after his operation in New York. There are those who rise out of a nearly fatal illness and its telling lesson of the transitory nature of human existence displaying a generosity of spirit that they had not exhibited before. Others leave their sickbeds believing that they must chase every bright flash of life, heedless of its costs to others or even themselves. Jack’s father had taught his sons that life must be sucked of its essence. Jack’s illnesses were more lessons on the same page. He sought everything now with an intensity that he had not showed before, not only political power but also pleasure, and pleasure to Jack meant sexual diversion.
Jack had just come through the most physically exhausting political week of his life. He wanted to relax, and he would have found no relaxation listening to the mindless social chitchat of his in-laws, and no solace walking the Newport beach hand in hand with his pregnant wife. He took what was best from everyone around him. When he wanted to be amused, Lem or Red appeared, all