The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [69]
As the Kennedys saw it, they were not a jaded family in which appearance was the only reality and hypocrisy passed as a code of honor. Joe Jr., Jack, and all their brothers and sisters considered that they had a great, loyal, caring family. In their own minds, they could integrate all these contradictions where some outsiders saw only falsehood. They could see too that what passed as family among many of their peers was pallid kinship. That was why their friends loved being around them, for the Kennedys lived with passionate intensity and with reverential attention to all the formalities of family. Joe might parade his mistresses in front of his wife, but at the dinner table his sons stood up when their mother entered and left the room. Joe Jr. and Jack respected their mother, but their love for their father was deeper, more emotional, and full of complexity.
When Joe arrived at Winthrop House in the fall of 1937 to give a guest lecture, Joe Jr. and Jack entered the room just as their father was about to be introduced. They stood in the back waiting to greet their father after his talk was over. Joe, however, called his sons forward, and in front of their friends the two young Kennedys kissed their father.
Joe treated the students to a dramatic, intimate narrative of the life of power in Washington. By then he was justly celebrated as the man who in only fourteen months as SEC chairman had shored up the foundations of capitalism, paring away the mechanisms that had allowed men like himself to make fortunes that risked destroying the very system that had so richly benefited them. Joe had gone on in 1937 to a ten-month stint as chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission, where he had for the most part further distinguished himself.
As candid as he was, Joe did not let the Winthrop men in on what he considered the inner secrets of power. Joe was a man who believed that life did not just happen, but that the inspired few created a world that the mediocre masses accepted as truth. Part of that creation was the image that Joe created for his family. He was hungry for praise for himself and for his sons. The Kennedy men lived in the glow of publicity in part because Joe importuned those who held the spotlight to shine it brightly on them and their achievements.
Joe received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, a prize that the unwary would have thought came to him unbidden. The reality was that in 1937, his friend Bernard Baruch, the financier, donated $62,500 to Oglethorpe, an institution that had a reputation largely as a diploma mill. A few weeks later Baruch received a letter from a school official saying that he would recommend Joe for an honorary degree. That same day Baruch wrote Joe asking him which honorary doctorate degree he preferred. “I never heard of any but Laws but you’re the chairman,” Joe wrote back.
Two years later Arthur Krock, the New York Times Washington bureau chief and columnist, attempted unsuccessfully to obtain another honorary degree for Joe from Krock’s alma mater, Princeton. Krock was one of the most powerful journalists in America, and yet he moonlighted as a hapless flack for the Kennedys, compromising his integrity. He wrote Joe’s 1936 campaign tract, Why I’m for Roosevelt, wrote glowing columns about the man and his sons, and was available for editorial services and shameless shilling for any family member.
Joe Jr.’s Harvard friend Charles Houghton was startled to see that any event, even a sailboat race, that involved Jack or Joe Jr. received enormous publicity, and he thought he had puzzled out one reason why. “The old man hired Arthur Krock for twenty-five thousand dollars to keep the Kennedy