The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [53]
Joe Jr. was not simply observing Nazism as his father’s surrogate, or as an abstract student of politics, but as a young man searching for ideas that he might one day implement in America. Joe Jr. intended to be president, and he was already planning his cabinet, telling his friend Aubrey that he would name him to a newly created post of secretary of Public Education. “We were going to make that office much more important than a Secretary of Defense,” Whitelaw recalled in a letter to Jack, “in accordance with Plato’s admonition that a government should be judged not by its Secretary of War but by its Secretary of Education.”
Joe Jr. was an impressionable young man full of pretensions to political wisdom that he did not have. As proud as Joe Sr. was of his son’s observations, he gently cautioned Joe Jr. that Hitler might have gone “far beyond his necessary requirements in his attitude toward the Jews.” Joe Jr. returned later that summer to Hyannis Port bubbling not with quotations from Mein Kampf but with all the ideas he had learned from Laski and his colleagues.
“Joe came back about 3 days ago and is a communist,” Jack wrote Lem. “Some shit, eh.” Rose was appalled at the heretical ideas that Joe Jr. was spouting, ideas that he never would have learned if he had stayed in America. “Joe, if you feel like that why don’t you just give away your boat and live like all these other people,” she told him slyly.
“Oh, Mother, just giving away one boat would not make any difference,” he replied. Rose was even more appalled when Joe Jr. appeared to be making his first convert. “Joe seems to understand the situation better than Dad,” Jack told his mother. That was enough to send Rose hurrying off to her husband to warn of the incipient revolutionaries in their own house. Joe was not worried. “I don’t care what the hell they think about me,” he told Rose bluntly. “I will get along all right if they stick together.”
Joe Jr.’s departure from Choate did not change Jack’s behavior at all. He was still the merry prankster standing apart from the rules and rigors of the school and refusing to wear any harness of responsibility. Sloppy in dress and manner, he walked on the borderline of disdain, daring his masters to attempt to pull him back.
John J. Maher, the football coach and housemaster, had applied the switch of discipline to the backs of scores of recalcitrant scholars. Maher wrote the headmaster: “At first his [Jack’s] attitude was: ‘You’re the master and I’m a lively young fellow with a nimble brain and a bag full of tricks. You will spoil my fun if I let you, so here I go—catch me if you can.’ “After two years even Maher essentially gave up. “I’m afraid it would be almost foolishly optimistic to expect anything but the most mediocre from Jack,” he wrote St. John.
“There is actually very little except physical violence that I haven’t tried,” Jack’s French teacher reported. After a rare visit to the school, Joe left with a devastating sense that his second son was a spoiled, petulant young man, just the sort who might one day dishonor the Kennedy name. “I can’t tell you how unhappy I felt in seeing him and talking with him,” Joe wrote St. John in November 1933. “He seems to lack entirely a sense of responsibility. The happy-go-lucky manner with a degree of indifference does not portend well for his future development.”
Jack wasn’t concerned about St. John but about his father. Joe had taught him that no matter what he did, if he came to his father and told the truth, everything would be fine. Joe absolved all. He forgave all. He made what was bad good and what was broken whole. The curtains of his confessional were the boundaries of the family, and every word and every deed stayed within those precincts.
The truth can be as manipulative as a lie, and Jack learned to finesse his father with candor. “I thought I would write you right away as LeMoyne and I have been talking about how poorly we have done this