Jack Kennedy Read online

  How’d he do it? What personal capability did he have? What had he learned? What combination of nature and training enabled him to see through the noise and emotions of the Cuban Missile Crisis and allowed him to grasp the root of the matter, to understand what he was up against, and what Nikita Khrushchev, his opposite number, was thinking? How did he know to overrule the experts, the angry generals and the professional Cold Warriors, whose every instinct dictated “Bombs away!”?

  It goes without saying that Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy were beautiful. But don’t look at the pictures; they’re a distraction. Jack understood that better than anyone, using them to divert us from his own far more complex reality.

  Yet look at them we did. And it’s hard, now, to grasp just how brief that moment was: only seven years from 1956, when we caught the first glimpse, to 1963, when the moment was extinguished.

  Whether you’re politically conservative, liberal, or moderate, whatever age you are, you probably have your own responses to and your own questions about Jack Kennedy, still today. And that includes all those questions about his personal life, the ones that linger and disturb.

  I began this book wanting to discover how he became that leader who, at a moment of national fear and anger, when emotions were running high, could cut so coldly and clearly to the truth, grasping the nature of the catastrophe to be averted.

  Not only has that decisive vision continued to hold me and stir my admiration, it has also fed my fascination with him. So what was it about him? What brought him into the world’s hearts and hopes so vividly, inspiring such fascination, leaving it, mine included, so alive behind him?

  Jack himself, also an avid reader of history and the lives of history-makers, once remarked to Ben Bradlee that the chief reason anyone reads biography is to answer the simple question, “What’s he like?”

  Having thought about it for so long, I believe I’ve come to recognize, and even unearth, key clues that help explain the greatness and the enigma of Jack Kennedy. They don’t come easily, however. Those glamorous images deflect us from the answers. But if you want to get Jack, you need to look for what they hide.

  Among them: He was a dreamer who found his dreams as he read voraciously throughout his boyhood, all alone in one infirmary and hospital bed after another. He was a rebel who showed early the grit that would repeatedly motivate him, launching him against every obstacle in his life, not the least of which was the one presented by his own all-powerful father. He was a dead-serious student of history. In young adulthood, while finishing college, he wrote Why England Slept, and never was able to forget the critical lesson he took away from it—that nations die or thrive on the ability and judgment of their leaders to stir them at perilous times.

  Then there was the extraordinary rite of passage made in the waters of the South Pacific during World War II, when he gained the confidence that he, always the frail boy, could meet as a man the twin tests of stamina and courage. At the age of twenty-eight, he determined to master the unforgiving art of politics and did so, with his love of that rough-and-tumble more and more an essential part of him. Finally, there was the deep revulsion he felt at the possibility of nuclear war.

  Before Jack Kennedy could make himself president, he first had to make himself Jack Kennedy. We’ve been led to take him as, essentially, a handsome young swell, born to privilege and accepting his father’s purpose along with his wealth.

  What I discovered, however, was an inner-directed self-creation, an adult stirred and confected in the dreams and loneliness of his youth. I found a serious man who was teaching himself the hard discipline of politics up until the last minute of his life.

  What’s hardest to see clearly, though, is often what hides in plain sight. So much of this man is what he did. His life is marked by events and achievements that speak for themselves. In searching for Jack Kennedy, I found a fighting prince never free from pain, never far from trouble, never accepting the world he found, never wanting to be his father’s son. He was a far greater hero than he ever wished us to know.

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  Lem Billings

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  CHAPTER ONE

  SECOND SON

  History made him, this lonely, sick boy. His mother never loved him. History made Jack, this little boy reading history.

  —Jacqueline Kennedy, November 29, 1963,

  from notes scribbled by Theodore H. White

  Certain things come with the territory. Jack Kennedy, born in 1917 in the spring of the next-to-last year of World War I, was the second son of nine children. That’s important to know. The first son is expected to be what the parents are looking for. Realizing that notion early, he becomes their ally. They want him to be like them—or, more accurately and better yet, what they long to be.

  Joseph Kennedy, a titan of finance, whose murky early connections helped bring him riches and power but never the fullest respect, had married in 1914, after a seven-year courtship, Rose Fitzgerald. The pious daughter of the colorful Boston mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, she launched their substantial family when, nine months later, she presented her husband with his son and heir, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. For the proud couple, he would be their bridge to both joining and mastering the WASP society from which they, as Roman Catholics in early twentieth-century America, were barred.

  Such stand-in status meant, for the young Joe, that he had to accept all the terms and rules put forth by those whose ranks he was expected to enter. The idea was to succeed in exactly the well-rounded manner of the New England Brahmin. Above all, that meant grades good enough to keep up at the right Protestant schools, and an ability to shine at sports as well. In this last instance, there was no doubt about the most desirable benchmark of achievement. The football field was not just where reputations were made and popularity earned, it was where campus legends were born.

  Joseph Kennedy’s handsome eldest boy would prove himself equal to the task. Entering Choate, the boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut, where he was a student from the age of fourteen to eighteen, he quickly made his mark. A golden youth, he became the headmaster George St. John’s ideal exemplar. Transcending his origins—which meant getting past the prejudices St. John was said to hold for his kind, the social-climbing Irish—Joe Jr., with his perfect body and unquestioning, other-directed mind, seemed to embody the Choate ethos without breaking a sweat.

  A second son such as Jack Kennedy, arriving as he did two years later, finds himself faced with that old familiar tough act to follow. And, of course, embedded in the soul of any second male child is this Hobson’s choice: to fail to match what’s gone before guarantees disappointment; to match it guarantees nothing.

  You have to be original; it’s the only way to get any attention at all—any good attention, that is.

  Jack Kennedy, almost as soon as he got to Choate, quite obviously put himself on notice not to be a carbon copy. He was neither a “junior,” nor would he be a junior edition. He would be nothing like the much-admired Joe, nothing like the Choate ideal. What he brought, instead, was a grace his brother—and Choate itself—lacked. Even as a child of the outrageously wealthy Joseph Kennedy and his lace-curtain wife, Jack soon showed himself well able to see the humor in life. The wit he displayed cut to the heart of situations and added to life an extra dimension. He was fun.

  Here, then, is where we begin to catch a glimpse of the young man who would stride decisively up to that convention stage a quarter century later, leaving behind the indelible image. Even though he’s very much still a boy, he’s preternaturally aware of the way life demands roles and resistant to stepping into one preselected for him.

  There’s the wonderful irony that comes with those surprises that second sons—Jack Kennedy included—are driven, and also inspired, to produce. Unlike his older brother, bound to a more conventional blueprint, Jack wasn’t under the same pressure. There was a lightness to him, a wry Irishness that blended with the WASP manner rather than aspiring
to it. With that combination, he could enter where his father, mother, and brother could not.

  What happened to Jack when he got to Choate in the fall of 1931, by then already a victim of persistent ill health, was that, first of all, he had to find himself, and, to a daunting degree, simply survive. His brother Robert—the seventh Kennedy child, younger than JFK by eight years—later said of that period that any mosquito unlucky enough to bite Jack would surely have paid the ultimate price. Jean, his youngest sister, told me it was his bedridden youth that made all the difference. “I remember him being sick. I remember that he read a great deal, and why he was so smart was because during those formative years he was reading when everyone else was playing baseball or football or something like that.”

  So it was in the sickbed, it turns out, that he became a passionate reader, thrilling to the bold heroes of Sir Walter Scott and the tales of King Arthur. At Choate, he may have wound up the holder of a title he never trumpeted: the record for most days spent in the school’s Archbold Infirmary.

  The appalling reality is that no one—no doctor, nor any of the top-drawer specialists to which his father sent Jack—could tell the Kennedy family or the young patient why he suffered so. He’d had scarlet fever, and his appendix removed, but what continued to plague him was a knot in his stomach that never went away. Frighteningly, too, his blood count was always being tested. Leukemia was one of the grim possibilities that concerned his doctors, and Jack couldn’t avoid hearing the whispers.

  What seems clear to me is that, both at home and away, this fourteen-year-old—a big-eared, skinny kid nicknamed “Ratface”—wasn’t marked for anything in particular, as far as his father was concerned. The succession was taken care of. There was only one dukedom.

  For Joseph Kennedy, his determination that his kids not be losers counted as a one-rule-fits-all. Nor did Jack seem to be of any particular emotional interest to his mother. Rose Kennedy kept her distance geographically as well as emotionally. Hard as it is to believe, she never once visited Jack at Choate, not even when he was ill and confined to the infirmary. “Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children alone,” he once told her at age six, as she was preparing for a long trip to California.

  Sent away to school, Jack Kennedy was a spirit marooned. Choate, from the first, caused him to feel trapped. Chilly and restrictive, overly organized and tiresomely gung-ho, it was a typical Protestant boarding school based on the classic British model, and as such, more suited to his brother’s nature than his own. Perhaps because he suddenly was more aware of his Catholic identity in that setting, he faithfully went into Wallingford to church on Sunday mornings. At night, he knelt next to his bed to say his Hail Marys and Our Fathers.

  However serious were Jack’s fears about his ultimate medical prognosis, he kept them to himself. There was no one yet in whom to confide his secrets. What he really needed to figure out for himself was a way to be happy there. He understood, too, the necessity of putting forth his best effort to prove himself at the sports at which he stood a chance of excelling—swimming and golf were his choices—while doing his best in the rougher ones, football and basketball. With that covered, he was free to make his name in more inventive ways.

  His great success was to find ways to have fun. Jack Kennedy knew how to have—and share—good times. Watching The Sound of Music decades later, a classmate was reminded of him. Like the trouble-prone Maria, he “made people laugh.”

  But even before he’d gotten to Choate, Jack was forming and nurturing an interior self. He had survived, even thrived in his way, as a bookish boy who soon would tolerate no interruptions when reading. While at the Catholic school where he’d boarded before coming to Choate, Jack had devoured Churchill’s account of the Great War, The World Crisis 1911–1918. Soon he was getting the New York Times each day. After finishing an article, it was his habit, as he once told a friend, to close his eyes in an attempt to recall each of its main points.

  There would come over his face an expression of almost childlike pleasure when he’d worked through something difficult and figured it out. We all remember those kids who knew things, and cared about them, that weren’t taught at school. Jack was one of them. And it wasn’t the knowledge for its own sake, it was the grander world he glimpsed through it. Such habits of mind as thinking about Churchillian views of history were the glimmerings of the man he was shaping himself to become.

  Yet, early on—and this habit, too, sprang from the many solitary hospital stays, lying in bed waiting for visitors—Jack had developed a craving for company. Left to himself so often for periods of his young life, as he grew older he never wanted to be alone. Even the companionship of any single person for too long never suited him. New people, and new people’s attentions, energized him, bringing out the seductive best in him—all his quickness, wit, and charm.

  It was close to the end of his sophomore year at Choate that he met the first person he felt he could truly trust, and this allowed the first real crack to appear in his wall of solitude.

  Boys in closed-off environments such as boarding schools are caught by the dilemma of needing one another while recognizing they must stay wary. The easily popular types and their followers don’t suffer; the quirkier, harder-to-classify ones are left to feel their way more carefully into friendships. Kirk LeMoyne Billings, a year ahead of Jack, would become, to the bewilderment of many, the absolute enduring stalwart of Jack’s life. Their relationship was a natural affinity that could never have been described until it happened.

  Also a second son—his older brother, Fred, had, like Joe Kennedy, been a Choate superstar—Lem was a big kid, a 175-pounder. His father was a Pittsburgh physician. With all the strength of his instantly faithful devotion, Lem Billings quickly began to tend to the needs of his new pal, whom he’d met in the offices of the Choate yearbook, the Brief. Looking at the support this friendship quickly began to provide for Jack, one could even see it as counterbalancing the neglect by his mother. He would confide in Lem that he cried whenever his mother sent word that she was heading off on yet another extended trip. He would be equally open with Lem about his health situation.

  Jack was willing to divulge to Lem, a doctor’s boy, descriptions of those periods he’d spent captive to medical procedures and tests—even at their most graphic. “God, what a beating I’m taking,” he wrote once to Lem from one hospital over a summer break. “Nobody able to figure what’s wrong with me. All they do is talk about what an interesting case. It would be funny . . . if there was nothing wrong with me. I’m commencing to stay awake nights on that.”

  The thought that even the experts were stymied by his symptoms tore at him, and came to haunt him. However jaunty he might have tried to sound, it was the fears they’d planted of a shortened life that he really wanted to share with Lem.

  Sidekick, confidant, and traveling companion, and, above all, a touchstone, Lem was always to be a cherished constant. When his friend became Mr. President to the rest of the world, it wasn’t long before Lem Billings had his own room at the White House. As Joseph Kennedy, Sr., wryly observed at the beginning, he “moved in one day with his tattered suitcase and never moved out.”

  Lem’s loyalty changed Jack’s notion of himself. It taught him he could have followers, which he soon did.

  Jack had entered Choate a vulnerable and often lonely boy, a seemingly negligible younger brother with no constituency. He would depart four years later a practiced ringleader. If his adventures before then had been vicarious ones, enjoyed among knights and princes in the pages of books, when Jack left, fealty had been sworn to him much as it would have been to Robin Hood or King Arthur.

  His Merry Men were called the Muckers.

  To begin with, there were just the two of them, Jack and Lem. Their chemistry was the center from which the circle grew around them. Next came Ralph “Rip” Horton, the son of a wealthy New York family. The rest followed, until there were thirteen in all. Credit, or blame, for the wa
y the Muckers chose that impudent name must be laid directly at the door of the very authority figure to whom they were setting themselves up in opposition.

  It was during one of his daily sermons in evening chapel that headmaster George St. John had gone on the attack against those students displaying what now would simply be called “bad attitude.” The background is this: It was Jack and Lem’s final year. Lem, a class ahead of his best friend, had elected to stay on in order to graduate with Jack, and they were uproariously, and very chaotically, rooming together. The instructor overseeing their dormitory wing was not amused by their shenanigans. Fed up not only with their mess but also with the noisy gang of disciples who gathered there each day to listen to Jack’s Victrola, he complained repeatedly to the headmaster.

  St. John, when he went on the attack, was clearly directing his words at Jack and Lem’s little band, and it was one of those you-know-who-I’m-talking-to moments. What the headmaster couldn’t anticipate, though, was the way one expression, in particular, that he chose to use—to refer to the “bad apples” he pegged as a small percentage of the student body—soon would come back to haunt him.

  Mucker, the label he hung on the Kennedy-Billings gang, has several meanings. A mucker can be someone who takes important matters too lightly, who mucks about to no particular purpose—in this case, the sort of boys unwilling to uphold the time-approved, gold-plated Choate standards of decency, cleanliness, sportsmanship, piety, politeness, and, above all, respect for the powers that be. In short, the kind exemplified by Jack’s and Lem’s older brothers.