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By Root 1301 0

a mistake, but for Jack it was just another pratfall visited upon him by men in white. Finally, after almost two months, he left the hospital at the end of February 1936 knowing as little about his malady as when he arrived. At least he was free to sun himself in Palm Beach and then to spend a few weeks at the Jay Six Cattle Ranch in Benson, Arizona. While there he applied for admission as a transfer student to Harvard College. He gave his father’s birthplace as Winthrop, a more socially acceptable address than the déclassé East Boston where he was in fact born.

Jack preened in the sun and the desert air. His narcissism grew out of not only his immense vanity but also a natural obsession with his star-crossed health. “If you could see what a thing of beauty my body has become with the open air, riding horses and Mexicans, you would stuff such adjectives as unattractive when you are speaking of my body right where they belong,” he wrote Lem from Arizona. He seemed to be flirting with his friend, taunting him with his alluring physicality. And yet there was a hint of self-mockery in his narcissism, for as much as Jack bragged about his beautiful body, something always went wrong. “I woke with a hacking cough,” he noted in another letter. “It will be the fucking last straw if I come down with TB in addition to a good load of clap in this my health cure.” That latter disease was a decided possibility, for he claimed he had ventured south of the border in search of his favorite pleasure. “I ended up in this 2-bit hoar-house [sic] and they say that one guy in 5 years has gotten away without just the biggest juiciest load of claps … so boys your roomie is carrying on … upholding the motto of ‘always get your piece of arse in the most unhealthy place that can be found.’ “

In the fall of 1936, Jack joined Joe Jr. at Harvard, where his father had thought he belonged in the first place. That he was willing to transfer suggested that Jack was moving closer to accepting the family destiny that his father had laid out for him. Joe Jr. was a young man of rare popularity, a football player and an exemplary Harvard man, and at first Jack had to nestle into what was his brother’s world.

“Dr. Wild, I want you to know I’m not bright like my brother Joe,” he told Payson S. Wild, an assistant professor of government and the acting master of Winthrop House. Jack placed his feet in his brother’s large footsteps, even sleeping often on a couch in Joe Jr.’s suite at Winthrop House. If Jack had been too small, weak, and vulnerable for football at Choate, then he was too small, weak, and vulnerable for football at Harvard. He was a Kennedy, though, and he had to play football. He had gained weight, but even at 160 pounds on his tall, still-weakened frame, he remained a gnat that runners swatted away as they dashed down the field. He was quickly demoted to the freshman “B” team, which was beaten by the likes of a prep school such as Exeter.

Jack found a different and more familiar way to stand out among his football teammates. He invited five of them down to Hyannis Port, enticing them with the prospect of dates that his father’s aide, Eddie Moore, had set up for them. “Four of us had dates and one guy got fucked 3 times, another guy 3 times (the girl a virgin!) + myself twice,” Jack wrote Lem. The former virgin had the considerable audacity to write her date “a very sickening letter letting [him know] how much she loved him etc + as he didn’t use a safer he is very worried. One guy is up at the doctor’s seeing if he has a dose + and I feel none too secure myself. We are going down next week for a return performance, I think.”

Few Harvard freshmen could provide such splendid weekends for their classmates, and they doubtless spread tales of their wonderful new friend, a swordsman who understood the true meaning of hospitality. When the coaches heard about the famous weekend in Hyannis Port, Jack found himself not only berated but also demoted even further to the third team. He might not ever win his crimson “H,” but there were other kinds of honors.