The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [48]
The headmaster had an admirable concern for the individual lives of the boys at the Episcopalian-founded school, treating each one as a work of art in the making. He was occupied with his charges with a depth and intimacy that some of their own parents did not show. He was generous in spirit and fair as long as his authority was not questioned and youths did not imagine that they might construct another world beyond his purview. “I can’t live in a school where the waters are troubled,” he admitted.
St. John fancied that he treated all the boys the same, but the headmaster showed a special benevolence toward those, like the Kennedy boys, whose parents were willing to further their advance with added contributions. There was a certain irony to this. One of the teachers, Harold Taylor, avows that the headmaster had a distaste for Catholic upstarts like Joe Kennedy who dared foul his beloved Protestant school with his papist sons. In seeking added assistance from Joe, St. John was not so foolish as to indulge in the same honesty and forthrightness that he taught his minions to make the basis of their own lives. Better a little disingenuousness. Soon after Jack arrived, the headmaster wrote a letter to the former Hollywood mogul asking that “some one send to me information which one so ignorant as I can rely on” concerning a new sound motion picture projector. That was a mite too subtle, and so the headmaster appended a postscript: “It may be some time before I can raise money enough, but at any rate I want to be ready to go when I find it possible.”
Joe did not miss the message, and he sent off an expensive sound system to the school, ingratiating himself with the headmaster and presumably helping to ingratiate young Jack and Joe Jr. with their schoolmates as well.
“We’ll try to show our appreciation, our sheer gratitude, in every way we know,” he wrote Joe. “I’m keeping close to Jack.” That was the headmaster’s intention, but Jack was hardly the kind of youth to accept the St. Johns’ invitation to “feel free to drop in at our house at any time—even without a special invitation.”
That first evening St. John talked to Jack admiringly of his big brother. St. John wrote Rose afterward that Joe Jr. was “one of the ‘big boys’ of the School, on whom we are going to depend.” Joe Jr. had already been at Choate for two years. Now Jack faced the prospect of living in a house in which his brother had spread his belongings from room to room, leaving little space for another Kennedy.
Joe Jr. was a paradigm of what St. John envisioned a Choate boy to be. His time at the school formed a perfect rising arc, from a modest, difficult beginning to a noble finish. He had arrived in the fall of 1929 and had suffered through the hazing of the sixth-formers. He had been so foolhardy as to arrive back on a Sunday evening three hours late from Thanksgiving vacation. That gave St. John ample opportunity for a character lesson: he ordered the boy to be kept at school an added period over Christmas.
In his class work Joe Jr. had been equally foolhardy. As the headmaster wrote his father, Joe Jr. was “too easily satisfied and does not go that second mile that would make him a real student. Joe is still somewhat superficially childish. We like Joe so much that we want his best and Joe himself really wants to give it to us.”
Joe Jr. stopped fighting against the yoke of discipline and brought his grades way up. At the beginning he had been no better an athlete than a student, just another second-string guard on the junior varsity. He began to run and to train on his own, and he worked his way up to a starting position on the Choate varsity.
Joe Jr. also became one of the most admired young