The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [257]
And me. I was living a novel. Years of daydreaming about romance had prepared me excellently for his seduction. Part of me recognized that there was a lack of connection to this man, a lack of intimacy, but it looked so wonderful. In addition, I thought, “Oh, this is amazing. He’s handsome. He’s glamorous. He’s a senator. He’s president.” It seemed quite wonderful except that it didn’t feel good. I was naive. I was pseudo-sophisticated. Above all, I was emotionally isolated, a truly lethal combination. It was important that the phone would ring, that I would be picked up, that we would have dinner together after some event or party and hash it over as if we were really lovers, really companions. But the reality of the connection? Not memorable at all.
Jack saw no contradiction between giving a compelling, idealistic speech and an hour later bedding a coed. He could have it all, and he did. He cynically and compulsively exploited his power in his sexual conquests. He picked up his young mistress at her Radcliffe dorm in his car. When McGeorge Bundy, the Harvard dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, and a man in whom the blood of his Puritan ancestors still flowed true, learned of Jack’s audacity, he purportedly was outraged. He did not think it appropriate that Jack, a Harvard overseer, should be seducing young women under the dean’s sheltering tutelage.
There was the dangerous, reckless part of Jack, but to see him simply as a hapless roué would be to photograph his loins and call it a portrait. There was still the other Jack Kennedy whose words resonated out of a deep place in his spirit and his mind.
At the beginning of his senatorial campaign, Jack gave Memorial Day talks in Brookline and Dorchester. He did not turn to Sorensen for his words but scribbled some notes on a few sheets of his U.S. Senate letterhead stationery. The words were as structured as if he had gone through half a dozen drafts.
This was a sacred day to Jack, as it was to many in his audience. Memorial Day was not a holiday for shopping or socializing, not a day to be wrenched out of its proper setting and set down next to Saturday and Sunday to make a three-day weekend. It was an occasion to stop and to remember. Jack was a son of war, a philosopher of that experience, and he reiterated the themes of his spiritual life. He disdained politicians who trafficked in patriotism and sentiment, wearing the flag as their preferred costume. That was not what he was doing this morning. His was a noble speech—short, deeply felt, and reflecting the becoming modesty of a man who believed he was a lesser being than those he honored.
“These men … died for honorable and eternal things—for home and family—for comradeship—and for the indomitable questions of youth,” he told his audience. War was for Jack what it was for brothers—a natural training ground for youth, a field of heroes and heroisms, the plain of honor for every true man. He went on to repeat a theme that had entered his life with the war and Joe Jr.’s death. “Because their sacrifice is a constant stimulus to us on the long road forward, they didn’t die in vain…. But the world is poor without them for they were the flower of our race, the bravest and the truest.”
Jack ended his talk with a passage from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The classic book of spiritual journey might have seemed far removed from Jack’s life, but he apparently knew at least one passage by heart; he wrote the words verbatim and with almost perfect accuracy in his handwritten notes.
Then said he, I am