The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [93]
No one watched Jack’s progress with more interest than Joe Jr., who was now studying at Harvard Law School. “Jack rushed madly around the last week with his thesis and finally with the aid of five stenographers the last day got it [in] under the wire,” Joe Jr. wrote his father.
The 151-page essay was the most sustained intellectual effort of Jack’s life. As he saw it, the fault for Britain’s belated rearmament lay largely not in its leaders but in the nature of democracy. The naturally self-indulgent British democracy could not be awakened by a few shouts but only by the thunderous barrage of cannon fire. Jack shared his father’s profound pessimism about democracy, believing that only a totalitarian state could defeat a totalitarian foe.
“The [British] nation had failed to realize that if it hoped to successfully compete with a dictatorship on an even plane [sic], it would have to renounce temporarily its democratic privileges,” Jack wrote. “It meant actual totalitarianism, because after all, the essence of a totalitarian state is that the national purpose will not permit group interest to interfere with its fulfillment.”
Jack had some diversions from his academic work that left him with another health problem that would plague him the rest of his life. That college year he suffered from a condition described as “nonspecific urethritis,” which was treated at the Lahey Clinic with “local urethral treatment and sulfonamides.” The disease was a swelling and inflammation of the urethra, the duct that drains the bladder. “Nonspecific” is the medical way of saying that the exact cause may not be known, though the condition was usually the result of unprotected sexual intercourse.
The doctors most likely would have made a different notation in Jack’s medical record if the condition had derived from something other than sex. It was, after all, an age of sexual euphemism. Harvard’s course on general hygiene, mandatory until 1935 and known by the cognoscenti as “Smut I,” covered the hygiene primarily of what many called “the dirty parts.” Men who ventured downtown to indulge with prostitutes were “resort[ing] to less polite alternatives.”
Jack had good reason to cover up his disease. It was widely rumored—inaccurately, it turned out—that anyone so daring as to apply for a Wassermann syphilis test was abruptly segregated from the rest of his college mates. The Harvard Hygiene Department estimated that far less than 1 percent of the student body was infected with venereal disease each year, suggesting that, in his sexual conduct, Jack was an aberration.
Jack’s illness did not prevent him from finishing his senior thesis. His essay had all the markings of a student term paper, from its twisted syntax to its pages peppered with typos, but it was a provocative analysis, and it won him a cum laude citation, the lowest of the three honor grades. When Arthur Krock read the manuscript, he pronounced that it could be published as a book and offered to help. Jack’s father not only concurred but sent his son a thoughtful seven-page letter suggesting that he might have “gone too far in absolving the leaders of the National Government [Chamberlain and his cabinet] from responsibility for the state in which England found herself at Munich.”
Although Joe did not say it so directly, if Jack criticized Chamberlain he would in effect be criticizing his own father. Joe didn’t care. It was a mark of Joe’s love for Jack that he wanted his son to have his own ideas even if they conflicted with his father’s, as long as those ideas would lead him to a powerful, privileged position in American life. As it stood, however, Jack was hardly suggesting that Chamberlain and men like him had helped create a mentality in which the British people were comatose from fear or apprehension at the awesome power of the Nazi war machine.
Jack had the kind of help in preparing his book manuscript that few authors receive.