The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [384]
Jack was amused too as he sat smoking a small cigar, observing the proceeding as a spectacle staged for his special benefit. The only Kennedy who appeared out of sorts was the Kennedy who was in large part the creator of this evening. Joe sat quietly. He was not a man who complained, but he said that he had little taste in his mouth and felt “blah.” Rose thought for the first time that her seventy-three-year-old husband looked old.
Joe’s sons left as quickly as they had arrived, and the beach was soon cold and deserted. Joe flew down to Palm Beach, as he did each winter season. One day he was walking on the beach with Frank Waldrop, the former editor of the Washington Times-Herald. The two men’s friendship went back three decades. “It’s so incredible about Jack as president,” Waldrop enthused. “You must just feel so great.” The old editor had an endless curiosity about the human condition, and he was always probing people, but he was startled by Joe’s answer. “I get awfully blue sometimes,” Joe said, and the two men continued silently down the beach.
A conservative in style as well as politics, Joe liked things to stay as they had always been. Unlike many nouveaux riches, Joe and Rose did not feel the need to constantly redecorate. The Kennedy homes in Palm Beach and Hyannis Port had stayed much the way they were in the 1930s. Though some accused the family of being parsimonious, Joe and Rose viewed each sofa and chair as part of their lives.
Joe still played golf, teeing off at precisely eight o’clock every morning, not waiting even a minute for a late arrival. One day he went out to play golf with his daughter-in-law Ethel, taking along his oldest grandson, nine-year-old Joe II, as the caddy. He loved his grandchildren, but he wanted them to see that sports were not a respite from serious endeavors but a veritable graduate school of life. Joe still won at golf, and golf was the one sport he still played. Although as usual he beat the determinedly competitive Ethel, in the process he managed to lose two golf balls. Joe II could not find the balls, and for that the youth received one spectacular life lesson. “I had to stay outside for three hours after the game looking for the balls,” Joe II recalled. “When I came home Grandpa didn’t speak to me because I didn’t find one of his balls.”
The Kennedy patriarch treated Joe II’s little brother David more gently. Joe was watching over his six-year-old grandson, reading him stories and trying to find something suitable on television for him to watch. Joe was supposed to go to a dinner with the president, who was in town only for the day, but he stayed for a long time with the boy, trying to see that he was not feeling too much alone.
All his life people had waited for Joe and had seen him off on his grand adventures, but now he was the one who waited and saw others off. In the morning he got up and set off to the airport to wave good-bye to his son who would be leaving on Air Force One after a one-day visit to Palm Beach. “I’m going to the airport with your father,” Joe called out to four-year-old Caroline. “Would you like to come along?” Caroline hopped into the car and perched on her grandfather’s knee. Many adults were apprehensive around Joe, nervous that they might set him off somehow or that he would freeze them with his cold stare. His grandchildren, though, saw a different man, one who had endless time for their games. He wasn’t one for fawning baby talk but had a gentle concern for a child’s separate world.
After the plane took off, Joe returned to the estate and played with the grandchildren for a while. He had been a more emotional parent than Rose, and he was a more emotional grandparent as well, full of an abiding, self-indulgent love, a blessing to children who would soon learn the burden and expectations of the Kennedy name.
After romping with his grandchildren, Joe headed out to play golf with Ann Gargan, his niece. Ann had been training to become a nun when she developed what was diagnosed as multiple sclerosis and left the order.