The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [260]
“When Ted told Jack about the ‘bug,’ Jack was really embarrassed,” Joan said. “Jack blushed scarlet when he found out.” Jack had been doubly careless, careless in the words he had spoken, and careless in the way he had left them lying around as he did his clothes, leaving them there for somebody else to pick up.
After their short honeymoon, the newlyweds moved to the house in Charlottesville where Teddy would be finishing up his last year in law school. Teddy was a wealthy young man, but he figured that being married might save him some money. “I do remember that when I moved into the house. Ted dismissed the maid!” Joan recalled. “I had to clean, cook, do the laundry, and I really learned a lot. It was fun—for a while!!”
Teddy’s parents were correct in thinking that marriage would bring a new discipline to their youngest son. “Cadillac Eddie” could not go roaring through life any longer. He ended up building his own house on Squaw Island near the family compound in Hyannis Port so that he and Joan could join the rest of the family there. In Virginia, Teddy settled down to a more sedate life as a married student, and he and Joan developed a loving relationship. He poured himself into preparing for the school’s prestigious moot court contest in which he and Tunney argued a mock case in front of a distinguished panel of jurists that included Stanley Reed, a Supreme Court justice, and Lord Kilmuir, lord chancellor of England. There were forty-nine other teams of ambitious attorneys-to-be, but as most of the Kennedy family sat in the hall, Teddy’s voice soared above the words and logic of all the others, and he and Tunney won the competition.
Upon graduation in June 1959, Joan thought that her husband would now have time for his wife. But Teddy secreted himself away in Jack’s old Boston apartment on Bowdoin Street to cram for the law boards.
When that hurdle was passed, Teddy was off again to work in the most important endeavor of his life—helping Jack win the Democratic presidential nomination.
19
“A Sin Against God”
On the first day of April 1959, Jack sat outside on the veranda of the Kennedy home in Palm Beach outlining a plan to win the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. Around him were most of the closest associates who would carry out his strategy. First of all, there was thirty-three-year-old Bobby, who, wherever he alighted or however much he paced back and forth, sat always at his brother’s right hand. Jack’s father was there as well, and though seventy-year-old Joe appeared at times to have reached an old man’s slippered years, he could still rise up and speak with a force and perception that guided everyone, including his eldest surviving son.
Jack was forty-one-years old, on track to become the youngest elected president in American history, and all of his associates resonated with youth as well. Thirty-one-year-old Steve Smith was the other family member there that afternoon. Steve may only have been a brother-in-law, but unlike Peter Lawford and Sarge Shriver, he was so much accepted within the inner sanctum that he had nearly become another Kennedy brother. Steve had a charm and wit that rarely left him, and these qualities were valued by Jack and Bobby as much as his political savvy.
Thirty-year-old Sorensen had been anticipating this moment since the day he arrived in Jack’s senatorial office. He was a crucial presence too, affecting a courtier’s subtle airs, dropping his words into the dialogue with perfect acumen. Thirty-five-year-old Kenny O’Donnell was also present, as brash and caustic as ever, with his flitting, penetrating Irish-American eyes. There was yet another pair of shrewd Irish-American political eyes there that day; they belonged to Larry O’Brien,