The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [60]
7
The Harvard Game
While other Harvard freshmen lit up cigarettes, trying to look grown up, nineteen-year-old Joe Jr. smoked a cigar, puffing on it, as his friend said, “like an old man of the world.” Like his father before him, Joe Jr. arrived at Harvard a year older than most of his classmates, and he seemed even more mature. He was six feet tall and 175 pounds, a genial, expansive figure who strutted across Harvard Yard in the fall of 1934 as if he knew that he belonged in the steps that he trod. He may have been four generations from the wheat fields of County Wexford, but his blood was Irish and he had a handsome, full-blown Irish face, with wide cheeks and perfect white teeth owing to his mother’s obsession with orthodontia.
Joe Jr. was used to servants, helpmates, and advisers, and his father’s stipend of $125 a month was enough to enable him to live far better than most of his contemporaries. He was not one of those who thought the tutoring services of Harvard Square an unfair, cynical business that destroyed much of what a college education was supposed to be. He availed himself so much of the tutors that at least one of his contemporaries believed he used them for every one of his classes. He wasn’t about to clean up after himself either. He had his own valet, George Taylor, a black man who passed out business cards proudly announcing that he was a “gentleman’s gentleman.”
Joe Jr. was the kind of Harvard man his father had aspired to be, but without his father’s overweening social calculation and youthful self-consciousness. Joe Jr. knew that the men of the Gold Coast looked down upon his kind, but it didn’t bother him as it had his father. If many of his friends were Catholics, it was simply that he enjoyed their company. He had met his closest friend, Timothy “Ted” Reardon, a fellow Catholic, one day after freshman football practice when Joe Jr. asked him to stay after and throw the ball around.
Joe wanted sons of matchless physical courage, privileged sons whose money and education had not tempered their toughness. Joe Jr. was fearless, taking pure joy in the crunch of a hard tackle or a savage block, in either football or rugby. His picture was featured in Life in a story on a rugby game against Cambridge University; he stood on the sidelines, his head bandaged, a wounded gladiator ready to go back into the fray. He broke his arm playing football in the spring of 1935, but that accident hardly slowed him.
Joe Jr. did not leave his intrepid spirit behind when he left the football field. One winter night he was walking near Harvard Square when he heard a woman’s anguished screams. When he turned and saw that a man was beating her, he could have called for the police or admonished the attacker to stop. Instead, Joe Jr. charged the man and started flailing away. The police arrived to find two men fighting in the street. Joe Jr. ended up spending the night in jail, a rare setting for a Harvard student.
On another occasion, Joe Jr. told his friends how he had jumped into the Charles River to save a drowning man. To some of his friends, it seemed a boastful Irish yarn, and they started calling him “the Life-saver,” their words touched with more derision than admiration. But if Joe Jr. was one to garnish his stories with hyperbole, he was not known as a liar, and if he said he saved the man, he probably had.
Joe Jr. was quicker of temper than of mind, always ready to rush into a scrap or to charge into the toughest part of the line. His friends soon learned that he could turn on them in righteous anger as quickly as he could on some lowlife tough striking his girlfriend on a dark Cambridge street. Unlike his father, Joe Jr. brimmed with pride at his Irish-American heritage and took umbrage at those who dared to demean it. He clenched his fist at those who spoke with disdainful hauteur at the corruption of Irish politicians.
Reardon learned that he could