The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [54]
Jack had gauged his father perfectly. “I got a great satisfaction out of your letter,” Joe replied. Jack’s father was a busy man, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in America, yet he answered immediately. Joe was full of the most wearisome cynicism toward everything in life except for his sons. They were the repositories of his ideals and aspirations. He was doing whatever he could so that on the day when his sons’ wealth and privilege were weighed against their achievements, an honest assayer would say that the Kennedy men’s lives more than balanced the scales.
This was not a rhetorical shield behind which he pushed his sons ahead on their crude accession. This was his profound belief, and at this point he pushed it with principle and tact and nuance. “I would be lacking even as a friend if I did not urge you to take advantage of the qualities you have,” he wrote Jack in early December 1934. “It is very difficult to make up fundamentals that you have neglected when you were very young and that is why I am always urging you to do the best you can. I am not expecting too much and I will not be disappointed if you don’t turn out to be a real genius, but I think you can be a really worthwhile citizen with good judgment and good understanding.”
Jack did not heed his father’s heartfelt words. He read the New York Times every day and had a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of current events, but he sat daydreaming in class, responding listlessly to his teachers’ queries, barely getting by academically.
As a father, Joe was facing one of the conundrums of great wealth. How did a rich man raise sons with purpose and a sense of destiny and responsibility? He thought he had been doing just that in part by sending Joe Jr. and Jack to Choate, but he saw in young Jack all the wages of his failure. Joe’s fear was that wealth and all the mindless ease that came with it had distorted his son’s values.
Joe was proud that he had earned money as a boy and that he had adhered so tightly to adulthood’s harsh laws. It appalled him, as he wrote a Choate administrator, that he and Rose had “possibly contributed as much as anyone in spoiling him [Jack] by having secretaries and maids following him to see that he does what he should do, and he places too little confidence on his own reliance.”
Jack was a young man of terrible carelessness. He was careless about his clothes, careless about appointments, and careless about money. Worse yet, he was intellectually careless. He was living through the Great Depression, with millions unemployed and the roads and rails full of hollow-eyed wanderers, and yet he knew and felt nothing of what his compatriots were suffering. “I have no memory of the Depression,” he told journalist Hugh Sidey years later. “We lived better than ever. We had bigger houses, more servants. We had more money, more flexibility, more power than ever before.” Jack was a rich young man who saw wealth not as something that had to be earned or maintained, or that others might try to wrest away, but as something that was simply his, as much a part of him as his feet and his fingers.
Ralph “Rip” Horton, Jack’s friend and classmate, was just as scrawny and malnutritioned-looking as Jack, and just as rich. He had, moreover, certain perks of wealth that Jack didn’t have but aspired to, such as a card granting entry to the more elegant New York clubs and a casual familiarity with the cafe society of the metropolis. The youths dressed up in ersatz adulthood on their forays into the Manhattan nightlife, acting