The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [68]
Joe Jr. did not have to wait behind the velvet rope but was immediately shown to a good table. As he scanned the room, his eyes tended to focus on the most beautiful women in the club. There at a ringside table sat a gorgeous young woman, and next to her none other than John F. Kennedy. Joe Jr. thought of the Stork Club as his club, and he was hardly amused that his brother should have usurped what he considered rightfully his. Joe Jr. went immediately to a pay phone and paged Jack. As Jack threaded his way back through the tables to take the call, his brother hurried to ringside and, with a dialogue as original as it was duplicitous, talked the young woman into leaving with the two Harvard football players before Jack returned. Later that evening, when the two young men arrived at the Bronxville house after escorting the woman to her apartment, Jack was already there, angry enough to want to fight his big brother.
This was hardly the only time the two brothers came close to drawing blood. Joe Jr. was usually the instigator. He could couch even his best advice with such cavalier dismissal that Jack was bound to do just the opposite. On the football field in the fall of 1936, Joe Jr. jogged over from the varsity to where Jack was practicing with the other freshmen. As Torby listened in, Joe Jr. said: “Jack, if you want my opinion, you’d be better off forgetting about football. You just don’t weigh enough and you’re going to get hurt.”
Torby could see his friend’s face flash with anger at Joe Jr.’s arrogant dismissal of his athletic prospects. “Come off it, Joe,” Torby exclaimed, interjecting himself between the brothers. “Jack doesn’t need any looking after.” Instead of echoing his friend’s sentiments, Jack turned on Torby: “Mind your own business! Keep out of it! I’m talking to Joe, not you.”
Joe Jr. was right. Jack should not have been out on the football field. In a scrimmage the next year Jack would hurt a spinal disc so severely that not only would his third-rate football career be over, but he would suffer from back problems the rest of his life. That was Jack’s legacy from the Kennedys’ obsession with football—an often-debilitating pain that plagued him and at times nearly crippled him. Here on the field of play where he was supposed to have won the laurels of true manhood, he would hurt himself in such a deep and largely unperceivable way that much of his life became a struggle to pretend that he walked as other men did, and to prove that his spirit would never be crippled.
Torby was not the only friend to learn that as disputatious as the Kennedy brothers might seem, their father had taught them to stand arms linked against the world. Despite this commonality, both young Kennedys stood at a distance from everyone else around them, and apart from each other as well. “I suppose I knew Joe [Jr.] as well as anyone, and yet I sometimes wonder whether I ever really knew him,” Jack reflected a decade later. “He had always a slight detachment from things around him—a wall of reserve which few people ever succeeded in penetrating.” Jack could as easily have been speaking of himself as his big brother.
Joe Jr. and Jack were not like so many young men who defined their own manhood by thrusting off from their father’s vision of the world. Joe Jr. largely affirmed his father’s world as his own, while Jack steered warily around Joe’s mammoth presence in search of his own identity. Both sons, however, not only tolerated their father’s sexual mores but largely adopted them and were endlessly amused by them.
When Joe Jr. and Jack went to Hyannis Port, they were not surprised to find their father seated in