The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [256]
Although Joe never mentioned Rosemary’s name, it is inconceivable that he would have taken such a step without thinking of her life. Rosemary, then, would make her own tremendous contribution to the world, for out of the loathsome lobotomy, the savagery that had called itself science, would come research to change the lives of these often-forgotten Americans and of the unborn. Did Joe feel guilty? Was his support of research into mental retardation an attempt to balance the scale before he met God’s judgment? Or was guilt a strong enough word to describe Joe’s emotions?
Joe had hardly become a man of pure beneficence. At the age of seventy, he had begun to have an old man’s jealousies and was suspicious of those who might try to pry away the power that was so much the essence of his life. He had always been a vital, energetic man. He had never accepted life’s cards but had drawn from the bottom of the deck or slapped down an ace from up his sleeve. He had no cards to trump this hand. He had always looked ahead: for several years he had been planning a massive mausoleum where he and Rose would be buried in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts. Cushing had arranged for the Church to donate a prominent plot of the kind normally reserved for bishops, on which would sit a great marble structure.
Joe was beginning a decline about which he could only rage in sputtering disbelief. “I am really disgusted with the setback that I had last week,” he wrote Cushing in June. “I thought that I was in bang-up shape and I had just finished a physical checkup. I sometimes get as leery of doctors as I do of politicians.” Joe was suffering in his right arm from a painful neuritis, an inflammation of nerves. Six weeks later he wrote Beaverbrook: “I haven’t been fit company for man or beast for six months.”
Jack’s aides had learned to walk warily around the candidate’s father. Joe’s relationship with Des Rosiers had ended, and he assumed it was one of his manly prerogatives to hit on one of Jack’s campaign secretaries, a beautiful twenty-year-old woman who found his attentions unseemly and frightening.
This was one activity that the two Kennedys, father and son, had perfectly in common. Back in Boston during a campaign fund-raiser. Jack noticed a pretty young brunette looking up at him as he spoke. Afterward, he asked one of his staff members to get her name and phone number. Jack was a forty-one-year-old U.S. senator with aspirations to the presidency. The young woman was a twenty-year-old Radcliffe College student, but that difference did not prevent him from calling her. Nor did it prevent the young woman from replying and agreeing to meet the senator.
Jack had all the charismatic glamour of a movie star. He was aging the way Cary Grant did, with the years heightening his handsomeness, deepening his tanned, manly features. He was irresistible to an adventurous, sophisticated young woman bored by the narrow social rituals of her class and time. Jack was not one for elaborate rituals of seduction; from him there would be no roses, no flowery sentiment, no midnight phone calls, no impassioned vows. He asked the young woman her views of the issues of the day, and that proved seduction enough:
At the beginning, he would ask me my opinion about politics, about the speech he’d just made, about something he’d read. What can I say? I was twenty years old and it certainly worked on me. I happened to be a kind of bluestocking, and it