About the AuthorChris Matthews is anchor of MSNBC's Hardball as well as the NBC-syndicated The Chris Matthews Show. He is an author of American; Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think; and Kennedy and Nixon.
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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 indispensable to know. The basi 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 fetch 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 significant family when, nine months later, she staged 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 receive all the terms and rules put forth by those whose ranks he was expected to enter. The idea was to succeed in incisively the well-rounded manner of the New England Brahmin. Above all, that meant grades good sufficient to keep up at the right Protestant schools, and an capacity to shine at sports as well. In this last instance, there was no doubt in regards to 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 oldest boy would prove himself equivalent 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 idealisti 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 perfective 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 intimate 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 warrantees disappointment; to match it warrantees nothing.
You have to be original; it’s the only way to get any attention at all—any good attention, that is.
Jack Kennedy, closely as soon as he got to Choate, rather plainly put himself on detect not to be a carbon copy. He was neither a “junior,” nor would he be a junior edition. He would be not one thing like the much-admired Joe, not one thing 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 capable 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 commence 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 even though he’s very much still a boy, he’s preternaturally conscious of the way life demands roles and immune to stepping into one preselected for him.
There’s the fantasti sarcasm 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 traditionalisti blueprint, Jack wasn’t underneath 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, introductory of all, he had to find himself, and, to a daunting degree, merely survive. His brother Robert—the seventh Kennedy child, younger than JFK by eight years—later said of that amount of time that any mosquito unlucky sufficient to bite Jack would surely have paid the uttermost price. Jean, his youngest sister, told me it was his bedridden youth that made all the difference. “I do not forget him being sick. I do not forget that he read a outstanding deal, and why he was so smart was because for the duration of those formative years he was reading when every one else was playing baseball or football or something like that.”
So it was in the sickbed, it turns out, that he became a ardent 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 expended 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 future prospects or potentials that concerned his doctors, and Jack couldn’t refrain from 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 peculiar aroused interest to his mother. Rose Kennedy held 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 suitable to his brother’s nature than his own. Perhaps because he all of a sudden was more conscious of his Catholic identity in that setting, he in a faithful manner 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 severe were Jack’s fears with regards to his extreme medical prognosis, he held them to himself. There was no one yet in whom to confide his secrets. What he actually necessitated to figure out for himself was a way to be happy there. He understood, too, the requisite of putting forth his best crusade to prove himself at the sports at which he stood a prospect 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 outstanding 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 persons laugh.”
But even before he’d gotten to Choate, Jack was forming and fostering 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 undertake to recall each of it is main points.
There would come over his face an expression of closely childlike pleasure when he’d worked through something difficult and figured it out. We all do not forget those kids who knew things, and cared when it comes to them, that weren’t taught at school. Jack was one of them. And it wasn’t the noesis for it is own sake, it was the grander world he glimpsed through it. Such habits of mind as thinking with regards to 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 galore solitary hospital stays, lying in bed waiting for visitors—Jack had produced 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 suitable 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 primary person he felt he could genuinely trust, and this permitted the initial real crack to appear in his wall of solitude.
Boys in closed-off environments such as boarding schools are caught by the dilemma of necessitating one another while recognizing they will have to stay wary. The without apparent effort usual types and their followers don’t suffer; the quirkier, harder-to-classify ones are left to feel their way more carefull...
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JFK - American Hero
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