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By Root 1486 0

Steve’s grandfather, William Cleary, had worked alongside his Irish compatriots building the Erie Canal. Cleary saved enough to buy a tugboat and start Cleary Brothers, the family company that employed Steve. Cleary went on to serve three terms in Congress. Twenty-eight-year-old Steve was brash, tough, and rudely charming, an elegant dresser with an eye for women, and he was accepted by Joe and his sons as one of them in a way that the seemingly prissy, morally sensitive Sarge would never be. The couple was married in May 1956 at the same St. Patrick’s Cathedral where Eunice and Sarge had wed, but twenty-eight-year-old Jean settled for a more modest wedding and a far larger wedding gift, an enormous diamond pin.

They were truly a clan now, and Bobby’s, Jack’s, Sarge’s, and Steve’s families built their own homes nearby in Hyannis Port. There they lived together in the summer beneath the overwhelming shadow of Joe, who dominated his sons-in-law almost as much as he did his sons. The Kennedys were grandiose in their ambitions, and there were jealousies, pettinesses, and spats large and small, but Joe had taught them all that the world outside must know nothing of the internal workings of the family. Thanks to Joe, they were all wealthy, with scarcely a worry about the mundane details of living that preoccupied most Americans. Fortune estimated the family wealth at $350 million in 1957. Even if the fortune was only $100 million, as Forbes considered a possibility, it was still “one of the great American fortunes.” The Kennedys spent exuberant, exquisite days together in the summer on the Cape and in the winter in Palm Beach, each holiday together only reinforcing their feelings for each other and their sense of how different they were from the world beyond.

In the spring of 1956, the graduating Catholic students at Harvard held a celebratory get-together. Archbishop Cushing stood greeting the students beside Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey. Cushing knew none of these students and was delighted when Teddy appeared in line. “What are you going to do next year?” the bishop asked.

“I am going to try to go to Harvard Law,” Teddy answered.

“I think they will take you all right,” Pusey said. If the Harvard president was saying that in public, then Teddy was an apparent shoo-in, and Cushing sent Joe a letter of congratulations. It did not matter that Teddy had a mediocre grade point average and a cheating scandal against him. He was a Kennedy, and that outweighed everything else.

Teddy was not, however, accepted at Harvard Law School. Joe did not

let matters stand there but asked Cushing to intercede with Pusey. “I didn’t get anywhere in my intervention,” Cushing wrote Joe. “He [Pusey], himself, was just as much surprised as I was that Teddy didn’t get over the ‘hurdle’ of the aptitude test. If there is anything else I can do for the boy let me know. Like yourself, I think he has an abundance of latent abilities and a fascinating personality.”

If the Kennedys had been a poor family and Teddy had been asked to wear his brothers’ clothes, he would have been unable to pour his outsized frame into Jack’s or Bobby’s pants or shirts. It was his brothers’ lives that he was being asked to don, and he was having a difficult time even walking in the costuming of their lives.

Teddy headed down to the University of Virginia in the fall of 1956 to pursue a law degree. Wherever he went, he was an echo of his brothers who had gone before him. This time it was Bobby who had left footprints that his younger brother was trying to fill. Teddy simply did not have the quickness of his big brothers, and he had to make up for this with sheer diligence. He pored over the legal texts so many times that he risked wearing the words off the page. When he finished his long hours of study, he was not interested in changing his little piece of the world but in having a rousing good time.

Teddy had enough money in his trust fund to live more like a country gentleman than a law student. He and his friend Varick John Tunney, the son of the former heavyweight