The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [258]
It was the Jack Kennedy who spoke words like these who inspired the sons and daughters of Massachusetts. This was the man for whom the people of Massachusetts voted in unprecedented numbers in November 1958, giving him 874,608 votes, or 73.6 percent of the total. They knew nothing of the Jack Kennedy who holed up in a hotel with a young woman. Nor did they know of the pain he so often suffered and the silvery needle that he injected into his body, deadening his pain. There were several Jack Kennedys, or at least several disparate parts of Jack Kennedy, and as he set out in earnest to win the presidential nomination, both the best and the worst were alive within him.
Teddy and Joan’s wedding was scheduled to take place three weeks after Jack’s landslide reelection. No one expected Teddy’s wedding to be as magnificent as those of his big brothers. Teddy was only a law student, not a senator, and though the Bennetts were well off, they were not immensely wealthy like Bobby’s in-laws or Jack’s mother-in-law. But it would be a major wedding, with 475 guests filling St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Bronxville.
Teddy was like a spectator at his own wedding, taking a walk-on part in an important familay ritual. Teddy wanted Father John Cavanaugh, the president of Notre Dame University, to officiate at the wedding. The wry, urbane churchman was a dear friend of his father and the family. Shortly before the ceremony Teddy came to the priest and said that he had changed his mind, though it was clearly his father’s decision. Teddy’s was a dynastic wedding, and he had to be married by Cardinal Spellman, the most celebrated Catholic leader in America.
Teddy’s bride was a virgin, and that aspect of the marriage had its natural appeal, but even their honeymoon was tied up in family ambitions. “We almost had to go to Lord Beaverbrook’s house in Nassau,” Joan recalled. “Joe said to Ted and me that this good friend of mine has this lovely house in Nassau. And you should go down.” As the youngest child, Teddy was a natural courtier, a genial supplicant to his siblings and his elders, a young man with a perfectly honed sense of who mattered and who did not. Teddy wrote the press magnate a letter that could have been a model for Emily Post. “I remember at the closing days of Jack’s campaign that you were kind enough to extend to Joan and myself an invitation to visit you on our honeymoon from November 29th to December 3rd,” he began in his handwritten letter. It was a perfect beginning, reminding Beaverbrook of the invitation, and listing the intended dates. “I couldn’t help but think that my brother Bob did trap you into extending this invitation, but I am much to [sic] ungentle-manly and entirely too excited about this prospect even to let this opportunity go by.”
As the wedding day approached, Teddy’s feelings of dread mounted. This was not the nervous stomach expected of a bridegroom, but a deep sense of disquiet. Joan was full of immense unease as well. Neither of them, however, felt comfortable enough with the other to voice any of their doubts.
Teddy sensed that what he was going to do was not right, not right for him, and not right for Joan. He was getting married because he was supposed to get married. He was being led up to the altar by his parents’ firm hands to say vows he was not ready to say. He waited for the day like someone about to have an accident who knows that in the final instant there is nothing he can do, that he can neither veer away nor even brace himself, but must simply wait and see what damage is wrought.
Jack had been filled with his own sense