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By Root 1291 0

football coach. As the clubmen saw it, Jack was a hard sell too, with his ethnic background, his dubious faith, his questionable father, and the fact that not all playboys were gentlemen. In his favor were his wit and charm. He was a devotee of New York clubs and the high life, and undeniably wealthy. In sum, he was a plausible candidate, but just barely. Rousmanière and two of his eminently acceptable friends, Peter E. Pratt and William C. Coleman Jr., agreed that they would go together with Jack as a package. “It was obvious that only a couple of clubs were going to accept Jack Kennedy,” Rousmanière recalled. “And we, the three of us, said okay, we’ll play it out. In the end the Spee Club became the one place that seemed to be acceptable. So that’s what happened.”

Jack was a clubman of the first order, spending most of his free time at the handsome ivy-covered building at 76 Mount Auburn Street and taking most of his meals there. There was no one-way mirror at Spee, as there was at the Porcellian, from which the clubmen could stare unwatched at the outside world, but Jack and his friends looked on from afar at much of the Harvard world. The intellectual climate of Harvard in the thirties had been immensely broadened since Joe’s days, both by the greater diversity of the students and faculty and by the dangerous world that lay outside the open gates of the college. Of course, there were still such undergraduate endeavors goldfish gulping, reported on the front page of the Harvard Crimson, or a kissing contest, but these activities were nothing but the spring silliness of any college generation. The students were at times confronted with a diversity of ideas as wide as that in the outer world. The faculty included Granville Hicks, a 1923 graduate and a Communist, as well as Earnest A. Hooton, an anthropology professor and eugenicist who believed that robbers could be discerned by such distinctive marks as “attached ear lobes, heavy beards, and diffused pigment in the iris.” New Dealers shuttled down to Washington, trading in their professional gowns for the mantles of power. In Cambridge, students and faculty alike debated Roosevelt’s reforms. A few Communist undergraduates met regularly, while on the right-wing extreme a group calling itself Yankee-American Action held discussions at the university.

At Winthrop House, Galbraith was intensely interested in the debates of his time and surrounded himself with students of like mind. The young professor made a quick judgment that Jack was not serious, but an amusing dilettante, whose main elective was the opposite sex. Though it might have been pleasurable being around Jack, pleasure was a dangerous business for an ambitious young scholar, hardly a commodity of value in his academic world. “One did not cultivate such students,” Galbraith reflected.

Even some of Jack’s fellow students kept a wary distance from him, lest they too suffer some dreary consequence. One of them, Blair Clark, watched in appalled fascination as Jack hustled waitresses from Dorchester in and out of Winthrop House. Clark was convinced that sooner or later Jack would find himself expelled.

“Jack devoted himself to personal enjoyment, social matters, but Joe Jr. sought out members of the faculty, sought me out, particularly perhaps, and was enormously interested in world affairs, much more so than Jack,” Galbraith recalled. “Jack had a social agenda to pursue. Joe Jr. had a much stronger scholarly bent.”

Joe Jr. may have impressed his professors with his high seriousness, but he was hardly the kind of student to bury himself in the bowels of Widener Library. Even Jack was impressed with his brother, the swordsman. “Did you see about Joe in Winchell’s column—Quote—‘Boston Romance—J. P. Kennedy Jr., The Wall Street’s lad, and Helen Buck of the Boston Back-Bay bunch, are keeping warm,’” Jack wrote Lem. “Fucking gold-fish is the way I would describe it.”

For Joe Jr., a football weekend was exactly that, and after the Harvard-Princeton game he and his friend Tom Bilodeau jumped the team train in New York