The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [84]
Joe Jr. raged against Roosevelt’s hypocrisy, egging Britain on from a safe distance. He was not, however, the cocksure, often arrogant young man of two years before. He was even willing to consider a policy unthinkable to the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Joe Jr. concluded one dispatch: “I had always thought that we should stay out of war and that being a rich nation we can live by ourselves … but if we can’t … then I think we should have a real policy in Europe entirely fitting for the greatest power in the world rather than a half-hearted, namby pamby policy skipping one way then to the other so no one knows what will happen if their [sic] is a war.”
While Joe Jr. spent much of his time journeying around Europe, Jack was back at Harvard. Exemplifying what can be the terrible carelessness of wealth, he believed that there was always someone else to pick up for him. In his suite at Winthrop House, he had the disconcerting habit of dropping his clothes in the middle of the floor. One evening as he hurriedly dressed to go out, he threw his pants and shirt into a pile in the middle of the room. His roommate, Torby Macdonald, looked at the heap and declared their room had the distinct appearance of a rummage sale. “Don’t get sanctimonious,” Jack snapped back. “Whose stuff do you think I’m throwing mine on top of?” That may have been true, but before long George Taylor, Jack’s black, self-styled “gentleman’s gentleman,” would be dropping by to hang and press Gentleman Jack’s clothes while Torby’s would stay where they fell.
At times Jack treated the law like a petty hindrance that should not bother someone who carried the name Kennedy. Jack wrote Lem that he had a “rather unpleasant contact with a woman in a car who was such a shit that I gave her a lot of shit.” Euphemism is often a liar’s cloak, and Jack admitted to his friend that the woman had written the Registry of Motor Vehicles complaining that “I had leered at her after bumping her four or five times, which story has some truth although I didn’t know I was leering…. Anyways they got me in and are sore at me.”
Jack had apparently become so angry that he had rammed into this woman’s car a number of times. When he was called to account for his deplorable act, he lied, telling the officers that he’d “loaned my car out that night to some students.” Jack had given the police the name of one of these students—none other than his friend Lem. Now Lem was supposed to take the blame, saying “you’re sorry and realize you should not have done it.” Confession was good for the soul, even if it was a lie masquerading as honesty, as long as Jack did not have to take responsibility.
It remained a wondrous time to be rich, as long as you kept your eyes high, away from the unseemly sight of the poor and the hungry. Jack was a Spee Club man, and his friends were either rich and wellborn or stellar athletes. He did not sit at dinner at his club or around Winthrop House bemoaning the fate of the poor. Not once in any of his letters did he ever mention the dreadful consequences of the Great Depression.
Jack traveled from one watering hole of the wealthy to the next. At the wedding of his classmate Ben Smith in Lake Forest, Illinois, Jack left a faucet on all night in the home where he was staying. By morning the plaster had fallen down from the ceilings, and the newly decorated home was a shambles. Jack admitted his culpability with such self-deprecating charm that the hosts couldn’t possibly dislike him, and so they turned their wrath on a friend whose only crime was being there.
Women were one of his primary divertissements, if they were pretty. If they were not pretty, he simply ignored them, or occasionally ridiculed them. During Easter 1938 Jack and Lem were down in Florida, where they heard that the Oxford Meat Market was having a picnic