The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [62]
Galbraith had the disconcertingly dangerous idea that liberalism was not only an abstract philosophical position but a guide to daily life. He looked askance at the way Winthrop House chose its residents, attempting to replicate the narrowly snobbish club world that the new house system was supposedly trying to end. The housemaster, Ronald M. Ferry, presented Galbraith with a ruled sheet featuring the cryptic letters: St. G. Ex, E & A, O.P, H.S., and X. Thus was displayed the social order, exactly as it had been in Joe Kennedy’s days.
At the top stood St. Paul’s, St. Mark’s, Groton and Middlesex, Exeter, and Andover, other private schools, public high schools, and then the all too common Xs, the Jews. Galbraith wanted to choose an outstanding student, Theodore White, but he was told that the quota of Xs was already filled, and so the man who would become one of the seminal journalists of his age went elsewhere. If he had been accepted, White would have found himself living on a floor with all the other Xs. Joe Jr., as a Choate graduate, was not up to the level of St. G. Ex., but he was far above H.S. and X, and he was readily chosen.
Many rich men’s sons would have spent their days at Harvard primarily with the sons and daughters of wealth. Joe Jr. enjoyed few things as much as heading off to Suffolk Downs with Joe Timilty, the rotund Boston police commissioner, sitting there among touts and pols. One day he took the incomparable Ethel Merman to the track with him, shepherding her as if she were some postdeb from Wellesley, not one of the stars of the musical stage. On another occasion he wangled a date with the beautiful young star Katharine Hepburn, who arrived accompanied by her mother.
Back in Cambridge, Joe Jr. was a gregarious young man who traveled with an entourage of friends and burst into Winthrop House full of energy and exuberant greetings as if to announce that life itself had arrived. Despite his temper, Joe Jr. was a man of myriad courtesies. Josephine Fulton, one of the managers of the house, answered the phone for Joe Jr. and often took calls from his grandfather, Honey Fitz. Then she would get in her car and go fetch him, most likely from a coffee shop where he hung out with his friends. He thanked her with boxes of chocolates, a small courtesy with which most young men could scarcely be bothered. When he went to visit his beloved Grandpa Fitzgerald at the Bellevue Hotel where he resided, Joe Jr. always stopped to say hello to the elderly housemaid.
Joe expected that Jack would follow his big brother to Harvard, but Jack said that he intended to join his friends Lem Billings and Rip Horton at Princeton. “You didn’t go to school because your friends are going there,” Joe Kennedy recalled telling his son. “That’s not the real reason, is it, Jack?” His son had had two blessed years away from his brother and all the tedious, inevitable comparisons. Doubtless Jack was looking forward to building his own identity away from Joe Jr.’s transcendent presence.
If Joe sometimes treated his sons like marionettes, he held the strings so loosely in his hands that they could not always feel the pull on their backs. He did not push Jack to join his older brother at his alma mater. He insisted, however, that before he went off to college he follow further along Joe Jr.’s pathway and study under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics.
Another young man would have been ecstatic to be sailing off to Europe in September 1935 on the Normandie. In Jack’s letters to Lem, however, it is as if he had been marooned, cast off into someone else’s life. Jack’s letters read like the ribald mutterings of a precocious fourteen-year-old, not the Ivy League-bound eighteen-year-old son of Joseph P. Kennedy. He might have deferred to his father at the captain’s table, but with Lem Jack described his father as a humorless pain in the posterior who nagged his second son about feeding his pimples with rich desserts, monitoring his conduct like a German nanny. Jack was