The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [86]
Joe had taught his sons that nothing was more valuable in life than time, for life itself was no more than a blink of an eye. To be sickly was to live half a life, and half a life was not life enough. Jack willed himself to live his life as something he was not and never would be—a healthy man.
Jack kept his poor health secret all his life. If sometimes denial is another name for a lie, at other times it is the mask of courage, and friends such as Lem and Rousmanière believed that was the mask their friend was wearing. Later in his life, Jack would lie about his health for political reasons, but now he pretended that he was something he was not so that he could live as he thought a man must live.
During his last two years at Harvard, Jack had become the student that his father and older brother never were. Jack burrowed into books not to avoid the world but to enter it more fully. There was a dramatic immediacy to many of the classes, especially in government and modern history. The professors themselves often stood on different sides of the issues of war and peace. Education was no longer an abstraction. Education, at least part of it, was about life and death, a struggle in which these young men might soon be involved.
In the spring of his junior year, Jack received a leave of absence to go to Europe and prepare his senior honors’ thesis on England’s failure to prepare for war. During these seven months in 1939, Jack traveled throughout Europe and Palestine, sending his father a series of detailed accounts of his journey, most of which have been lost. He wrote Lem as well without having to play the diplomat.
In these letters to Lem there is a curious dichotomy between the fledgling public man and the spoiled, petulant, narcissistic youth. To that latter Jack Kennedy, life was a dress parade. Jack wrote Lem how he “went to court in my knee breeches and made my gracious bow before the king and queen and was really quite a figure,” while he was not “sporting around in my morning coat, my ‘Anthony Eden’ black homburg and white gardenia.” He was, as always, deeply sensitive to anything that smelled of the effete. He read in the Choate News that a lone bat had terrified students, zooming around Mem House, hiding until an intrepid housemaid attacked the animal with a mop. “My God, they all sound like fairies, both faculty and student body,” he wrote Lem.
To Jack, sex remained the preferred avenue of manly adventure, his sexual safaris taking him from the brothels of West Palm Beach to the refined enclaves of the demimonde, where at times the behavior did not differ that much from that of the whores of South Florida, only the price.
No small part of the adventure was the imminent possibility of carrying home an unwanted souvenir. In London he saw a woman who had lived with the Duke of Kent and had among her baubles of romance “terrific diamond bracelets” from the duke, a “big ruby” given to her by a Nepalese prince, and a cigarette case “engraved with Snow White lying down with spread legs, and the seven dwarfs cocks in hands waiting to screw her—very charming.” Jack wrote Lem: “I don’t know what she thinks she is going to get out of me but we’ll see. Meanwhile very interesting as am seeing life.”
Jack was seeing life too on what he called “the serious side.” His father got him introductions to ambassadors and other high officials. But it was his self-confident manner and astuteness that led them to spend time with him that they probably would not have granted to a less politically sophisticated young man. “The whole thing is damn interesting,” he wrote Lem, “and if this letter wasn’t going on a German boat and if they weren’t opening mail—could tell you some interesting stuff.”
Some politicians, even in their youth, live their lives as if they are biographies, measuring each word for posterity, writing letters with their ideas and feelings self-censored, all sanitized. Jack, however, wrote in an emotive stream, going in a few sentences