The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [41]
Joe, however, had no use for what he considered the tedious malarkey of American democracy. He had received his education in American social mores at Harvard. He was not going to have his sons go through life bearing the stigma of public school. Rose argued with her husband, but this was not a debate that she had any business joining or the possibility of winning.
In the fall of 1929, fourteen-year-old Joe Jr. left his classmates at Riverdale to head off to Choate, one of the half-dozen or so top prep schools in America. “He is a rare youth and you will be most fortunate to have him,” Frank S. Hackett, the Riverdale headmaster, wrote in support of Joe Jr.’s admission. “I regret exceedingly that this family are contemplating any change.”
Jack stayed at home another year attending Riverdale before being sent to Canterbury Prep, a Catholic school in New Milford, Connecticut. Since his early years of sickness, he had been a healthy, vibrant boy in Bronxville. Away from home, thirteen-year-old Jack began to suffer from a myriad of minor maladies. He joined the football team, but being small and weak, he was knocked up and down the field. “My nose my leg and other parts of my anatomy have been risked around so much that it is beginning to be funny,” he wrote Bobby.
By now Jack was fluent in the emotional language of the Kennedys. He knew he could never complain too loudly that he missed his mother or his friends, or that he was full of wistful homesickness. He might allude to such things, but sickness was the only avenue of emotional release left to him. His frequent letters home were full, not of the joys and vicissitudes of a boy’s life, but of problems with his health. He wrote his father that at mass he “began to get sick dizzy and weak. I just about fainted and everything began to get black.” He said he was only saved from collapsing onto the floor by an alert proctor, who held him up.
Jack could not tolerate the suggestion that he might be weaker than his brother, and he pointedly reminded his parents: “Joe fainted twice in church so I guess I will live.” On another occasion he wrote about problems he was having with his eyes: “I see things blury [sic] even at a distance of ten feet,” he told his parents. “I can’t see much color through that eye either.” He wrote that he was losing weight and that he was “pretty tired.”
Such letters would have sent most parents hurrying to the school to succor their sickly son. Neither Joe nor Rose apparently ever visited Jack at the school. They wrote frequent letters. They kept in contact with the school administration. But they treated the school year as a sentence that Jack had to serve out on his own and whose life lessons would be diminished by their presence.
Jack was already imbued with the Kennedy attitude that individuals outside of the family were largely interchangeable. That winter of 1930/31, Jack wrote his mother complaining about the suit that she sent him and detailing problems with his eyes. Only then did he mention what another boy would have considered the most important news. Jack had been out sledding with some of the other youths. The hill was steep and slick with ice. Jack estimated that the sleds careened down the pathway at close to forty miles an hour. He was traveling so fast that he did not make a turn and sailed into a ditch. Jack set out again, and as he wrote his parents, “I smashed into a sled that was lying on the ground and I saw the other boy, Brooks, lying on the ground holding his stomach.” Jack went on in clinical detail describing the youth’s “grayish color” and speculated that the injured boy was probably operated upon. “He had internal injuries and I liked him a lot,” Jack concluded, describing the student as if he were deceased.
The friend had been carried off life’s