The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [51]
Frederic Tremaine Billings Jr., like Joe Jr., bore his father’s name, and he too carried his father’s values into the world. At Choate his brother was, as Lem only grudgingly admitted years later, “rather outstanding.” He was president of his class, editor in chief of the yearbook, chairman of the student council, and, like Joe Jr., winner of the Choate Prize, the highest honor.
At Princeton, Frederic was chairman of the student council, Phi Beta Kappa, captain of the football team, an ail-American honorable mention for football, and winner of the Pyne Prize, the highest of honors. Then he went on to England as a Rhodes scholar and became, like his father, a doctor.
Lem’s father had set forth the rules and expected both sons to run onto the same field of play. “My father did try very hard to have me line up as well as my brother in every area and was very disappointed that I didn’t,” Lem reflected. “I tried very hard.”
The friendship between Lem and Jack was unlike anything either one had experienced in the past. Like most adolescent friendships, theirs was based on a commonality of experience that they took to be life itself. They spoke in their own shorthand.
They both had pimples and were struggling with their sexuality. They built their own lives away from the prying eyes of others, including most of the other students. “I think that people who knew him [Jack] liked him very much,” Billings recalled. “I think others possibly didn’t because he had a sharp tongue and could make fun of people very easily if he didn’t think they lived up to what he felt they should. I wouldn’t say he was overly popular.”
Jack and Lem were constantly together at Choate and elsewhere, and apart they corresponded regularly. In his scores of letters Jack never even mentioned Rose and hardly named Joe Jr. As for his father, he was the “old man,” a figure who was there primarily to berate his son when he got close enough, an austere, prickly presence who had to be gotten around.
Teenage boys often belittle each other in boisterous, rancorous put-downs, the only kind of display of manly affection with which they feel comfortable. Jack was merciless in his attacks on Lem, beating him down with a constant stream of criticisms. “Dear Unattractive,” he began one letter, a salutation he could have used every time he wrote his friend. Lem was the foil for all Jack’s insecurities, and whatever weight these attacks took off Jack’s own self-doubt, they surely added to Lem’s.
Jack was capable of generous acts of solicitude for his closest friends, but he inevitably tossed the gesture out with caustic disdain. As Jack saw it, Lem was forever the second best, and second only because there were just two of them.
Joe Jr. graduated from Choate in the spring of 1933, but his shadow remained, hovering over Jack. Joe Jr. had won the Choate Prize as the student who best combined scholarship and athletics, the exemplar of what a Choate graduate should be and what his father envisioned. His name was engraved on the bronze Harvard Football trophy, and he was celebrated in the Boston Globe as “a very popular hero.”
Joe Jr. might have headed off to Harvard in the fall, but his father had a different idea in mind for his firstborn son. Joe decided to send Joe Jr. to England to study. He could have sent him to Oxford or Cambridge, where he would have settled in among the kind of privileged young men whom Joe considered the Kennedys’ natural company. Instead, he enrolled Joe at the London School of Economics, a fervidly intellectual atmosphere full of Socialists and others who fancied themselves on the cutting edge of economic and political theory.
Joe had carefully evaluated the school and what Joe Jr. might learn there. He wanted his son to be able to cope with ideas about socialism and communism, all the supposedly most advanced thinking. Beyond that, he wanted