The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [382]
One summer Kennedy dove off the Honey Fitz, the presidential yacht, undaunted by the seven- or eight-foot distance from the water that would have discouraged even many younger men. On one windswept cold day he took Jackie and half a dozen others out on the bay for a sail in the Victura. The wind got so strong, gusting twenty-five to thirty knots, that he turned the tiller over to a visiting youth who knew little about sailboats but much about presidential wishes.
These summer days became the focal point of the greatest photographic story of the epoch. The Kennedys were a parade of exquisitely photogenic characters, from a maternal Jackie gently toweling off her naked young son on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal to handsome Jack on the cover of Look riding his golf cart surrounded by his laughing children, nephews, and nieces.
There were twenty Kennedy children, and most of them, at one time or another, clambered on for a ride on the president’s gold electric cart, weighing it down as the vehicle lumbered ahead. No captions were needed to shout the message that this was a family graced with power, simplicity, and elegance. Kennedy was a man, as Alfred Kazin wrote in The American Scholar, who had it all and then some. Not only was he the president of the United States and a multimillionaire, but he was a man with “the naturalness of a newspaperman and as much savvy as a Harvard professor.”
The president and his brothers all understood how much the bounty of their days depended on their family fortune. The Kennedys treated their wealth like an enduring miracle. There was no business enterprise that might easily have justified the immensity of their wealth, no morally edifying story of daring entrepreneurship, just a series of vague tales and anecdotes. Joe had brought back this wealth from an amoral, often brutal world, and it was best not to ask too many questions about it but to be richly appreciative that none of them would ever have to venture back to the world whence it came. On one occasion Kennedy asked Thomas J. Walsh, the accountant who helped manage the fortune, who was richer, he or young Teddy. Kennedy may have been president, but these were matters hidden from him, and Walsh told him he could not tell.
No one would have watched the president’s endeavors with greater pleasure during the summer of 1961 than his father, but Joe was not there. He had rented a villa in the south of France and was gone that summer. “My father and mother wanted the children to have that house [in Hyannis Port],” Teddy recalled. “They didn’t want to be constantly telling them, you know, ‘Be quiet,’… I always felt, all of us felt, that it was because they wanted us to be there. They wanted the children to be there. I always interpreted that as being generous. My father never liked traveling. He liked that house. It was a great house, and he had a boat, and a cook, and his children. He was a very simple person in those areas.”
When Joe returned to Hyannis Port in the fall, he assumed authority over the houses and the land. He was seventy-three years old, but there would be no gentle, sweet-tempered decline, no sitting in the sun-dappled afternoons on the porch telling oft-told tales to those who only half listened even the first time he told them. He put on his riding boots each morning and rode out as he always had, his back ramrod stiff, his clothes impeccable, and his grip firm. One day he fell off his horse, and another day he fell down in the house, but no one dared to comment, not to his face. He was not taking his heart pills the way he was supposed to either, but no one monitored Joe’s conduct.
Joe continued to watch out for the other Kennedys. Luella Hennessey, the family’s longtime nurse, came to him saying that she had been offered $50,000 to write a story of her life with the Kennedys.