The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [8]
2
Gentlemen and Cads
It would have taken a keen observer to realize that the arresting young man striding along with such confidence through Harvard Yard in September 1908 had no business being there. Joe’s academic record at Boston Latin School was so abysmal that he had repeated his last year and was a year older than most of the other freshman. On his first day at Harvard, twenty-year-old Joe was as much a child of special privilege as some of the denizens of the Boston elite who had little to recommend them to the Ivy League school but old money and old names.
Even if Joe had had a good academic record, the son of a leading Boston Catholic politician belonged at Boston College, the proud new Jesuit institution that sat on Chestnut Hill, where Bishop O’Connell intended that it would look down upon Harvard and its secular world. But for a young man who aspired to the pinnacle of American life, the most prestigious university in America beckoned irresistibly. No university has ever dominated the intellectual, social, and athletic life of an American city the way Harvard dominated Boston in the early years of the twentieth century. Joe was not walking this day along mere bricks and stone but on a noble path toward everything that he aspired to be: a civilized gentleman fulfilling his mother’s dreams, a celebrated athlete, a brave true man of Harvard.
On the same day that Joe matriculated alongside other public school graduates, the prep school youths arrived from their ghettos of privilege. Most of them set up housekeeping on the celebrated Gold Coast, the row of private dormitories on or near Mount Auburn Street. They brought their carriages, cars, and servants, and they greeted each other with casual familiarity. They fit into their college life as comfortably as they would have checked into a first-class stateroom on a transatlantic crossing. They were now “Gold Coast men,” and so they would be known during their years at Harvard.
As these young men settled in, reminiscing about summers full of European travel, sailing, tennis, or western sojourns, Joe found more meager accommodations on campus. In doing so, he defined himself as a “Yard man.” Yard men were in steerage on a ship they did not know, among passengers they had never met, on a journey they had never taken. The dorms were frequently foul places, with underground toilets and so few showers that many men went unwashed. The filthy windows let in little light, and at night the students studied by flickering gas jets. “Compared to any respectable house or hotel they are all vile,” wrote one undergraduate critic in the Harvard Advocate.
Joe did not want to be relegated to a tedious life among his dormmates but sought to stand among the privileged men of the Gold Coast. He imitated their dress, manners, and social attitudes. He had a rare gift of social mimicry and a constant wariness among his social betters never to betray his past.
Imitation is not always the sincerest form of flattery; sometimes it disguises its opposite. Joe was no unctuous wanna-be, but a young man whose pride matched that of the most arrogant of the Brahmins, a pride that he hid at times under a cloak of deference. Joe had a profound desire to be accepted in their world, but he could not openly admit to such a goal. Social ambition is the one human aspiration that dares not speak its name; to be caught at it is to fail.
Joe perfectly mimicked the attitude of the Gold Coast men toward their academic work. To many of them, it was little more than a tedious aside to the real business of college life—election to their private club. A club was the