The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [85]
Jack’s eyes fell on one pretty Irish lass. Jack cut her away from the rest, but though she agreed to go out with him, she insisted that her friend Rachel come along. Rachel was enormous, at least 250 pounds, dressed in a sailor suit. Jack, always ready for amusement, said that he would arrange a date for Rachel. He then called his snobbish Princeton friend Sandy Osborn and told him that he had a date for him. “Well, we went to pick up the girl at the corner of such-and-such street, and Sandy was so eager and excited: and suddenly the lights hit her standing on the corner,” Lem recalled. “It was one of the funniest experiences I’ve ever had in my life!”
Jack was also careless in his vision of the world. In the summer of 1937, he traveled through Europe with Lem, keeping a diary of his experience. It was an exceptional time to be journeying from the border of Spain to Berlin, but for the most part he wrote like a snooty prep school boy criticizing nations as if they were bad restaurants.
To young Jack, ethnicity was more important than ideology. In Saint Jean de Luz, he talked to refugees driven out of Spain by Franco’s minions. He noted in his diary: “Story of father starved kept in prison without food for a week brought in piece of meat, ate it—then saw his son’s body with piece of meat cut out of it.”
Jack did not look for reasons in the politics of his time but in the Spanish national character. “In the afternoon went to a bull-fight,” he scribbled in his notebook. “Very interesting but very cruel, especially when the bull gored the horse. Believe all the atrocity stories now as these southerners, such as these French and Spanish, are happiest at scenes of cruelty.”
In Germany, although he did not express pro-Nazi sentiments, Jack was impressed with the quality of life. “All the towns are very attractive showing that the Nordic races certainly seem superior to the Latins.” Near the end of his journey, he concluded: “Fascism is the thing for Germany and Italy, Communism for Russia and democracy for America and England.”
On his trip to Europe in 1937 Jack had been sailing along when, in London at the end of the summer, he developed a bewildering case of hives that four different doctors looked at before the problem disappeared as mysteriously as it had begun. Jack’s health was a veritable dictionary of illnesses, and years later Lem joked to a friend that if he wrote Jack’s biography, he would title it “John F. Kennedy, A Medical History.”
With his weak stomach, Jack was fortunate that he could eat at the Spee and be served a special diet. The club even had an ice cream—making machine to produce the one food that he could easily digest and that might put some meat on his bones. He went out for the Harvard swim team, but in March 1938, he entered New England Baptist Hospital with an intestinal infection that knocked out any chance of a swimming letter. Once again he lay in a hospital bed, trying to rise out of his pain and get back into the world.
By the middle of June, Jack was back in the hospital, nagged by weight loss and continuing intestinal problems. In the fall, doctors wanted him back in the hospital for more tests. He wrote Lem, “I’ve been in rotten shape since I’ve got back and seem to be back-sliding.” The following spring he was so sick that he had to agree to go to the Mayo Clinic for tests. It was simply endless.
Jack made a point of lying out in the sun at Palm Beach or Hyannis Port getting a tan, making sure his face always had a robust sheen. He was not going to be pitied or excused. No one was going to push him aside from the races of youth. His few friends who knew the truth realized that Jack’s greatest creation was the illusion of health. If he talked about his condition, and that was rarely enough, he did so only to make a joke about it. “Jack didn’t discuss it,” Rousmanière recalled. “We never made it a part