The House of Kennedy(16)

Joe refuses to engage his onetime nemesis.

“You had a terrible time during the war; your losses were very great.” Churchill continues. “I felt so sad for you and hope you received my messages.”

“The world seems to be in a frightful condition,” Churchill laments, sipping whiskey and smoking a large cigar.

“Yes,” Joe at first agrees, then demands, “After all what did we accomplish by this war?”

“Well, at least, we have our lives,” Churchill answers.

Joe can no longer contain his fury. “Not all of us.”





PART FOUR





The President


John Fitzgerald Kennedy





Chapter 10



The little girl is staring at the man standing in her parents’ living room in Boston. She points at his backside and giggles, “Jack, Jack, your blue underwear is showing through the seat of your pants.”

Jack Kennedy looks over his shoulder and sees a blue strip of fabric through a split in the seam of his trousers. Jack and the little girl’s father—his and Joe Jr.’s Harvard buddy Tom Bilodeau—break out in laughter over her discovery. In a day of speeches around the city, no one else has dared confront the young Massachusetts politician about his sartorial mishap.

Their banter draws Bilodeau’s Irish mother-in-law into the room. Treating Jack like her own son, she says, “Jack, take your pants right off and I’ll fix them,” Bilodeau recalls in an interview for the JFK Presidential Library. “And right there in the living room, Jack took his pants off. My mother-in-law got out a needle and thread and sewed them and off he went to his next speaking engagement.”

When Jack is later elected president, he invites the Bilodeau family to attend the inauguration in January 1961. Jack definitely remembered the ripped pants incident, Bilodeau chuckles, since “an invitation to my mother-in-law [was] addressed to his ‘seamstress.’”

*



Jack Kennedy enters the Eightieth Congress as a Democratic Representative of the Eleventh District of Massachusetts in January 1947 at the age of twenty-nine, but is often mistaken for a staffer, given his youthful looks and informal, somewhat disheveled attire. “He wore the most godawful suits,” Mary Davis, his secretary during congressional years 1947–52, would say. “Horrible looking, hanging from his frame.”

As his mother, Rose, would so often lament, Jack cares nothing for his appearance. But he “had the best sense of humor of anybody I had ever met,” Kirk Le Moyne “Lem” Billings, who first befriended Jack at Choate School, says. “If we were at a show together, he’d somehow manage to sneak backstage to see the leading singer,” Lem recalls. “If we were eating out, he’d be so charming to the waitress that we’d end up with an extra dessert.”

That charisma may be part natural, part reactive. Joe Sr.’s assessment of his two eldest sons has always been unfavorable to Jack. “Joe never thought Jack would do anything,” Chuck Spalding, who also knew both brothers at Harvard, recalls Joe Sr. “didn’t realize that by all odds, Jack was the most gifted. He thought Joe Jr. was.”

Even after Joe Jr.’s death, Jack still futilely competes with his older brother. “I am now shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win,” Jack tells Lem.

Underscoring the strong correlation the Kennedys assumed between mental ability and physical health is Rose’s belief that Jack had a lower IQ than Joe Jr.—something she insists upon until after Jack’s presidency.

“Jack never wanted us to talk about this,” Lem Billings says in an oral history for the JFK Library in Boston, but “Jack Kennedy all during his life had few days when he wasn’t in pain or sick in some way.”

As Jack later tells his wife, Jackie, his was a childhood in confinement, “sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history…reading the Knights of the Round Table.”

And while Jack tests at a “superior” IQ of 116 (today’s assessments might rate it as high as 158) it takes three attempts—and a generous donation from Joe Sr., including two movie projectors—to get Jack through his entrance exams for the exclusive preparatory Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, where his older brother Joe Jr. is achieving academic and athletic success.

In Jack’s junior year, with Joe Jr. now enrolled at Harvard, Jack is the only Kennedy at Choate. He’s also the only student on campus to subscribe to the New York Times. Jack’s English teacher spots “a very definite flair for writing” and encourages him to pursue it professionally. But a bout of hepatitis and various mysterious ailments end Jack’s school term and his participation in athletics early.

While recuperating in New Haven Hospital, the indignant teenager writes his classmate Lem a humorously crass account of the invasive medical procedures he’s forced to undergo. “No one is able to figure out what’s wrong with me. They give me enemas until it comes out like drinking water which they all take a sip of. Then surrounded by nurses the doctor first stuck his finger up my ass. I just blushed because you know how it is. He wiggled suggestively and I rolled ’em in the aisles by saying ‘you have good motion’!”

When Jack returns to Choate in winter 1935, his mischievous streak erupts. “What makes the whole problem more difficult,” says the Choate housemaster Earl Leinbach, who has to contend with nuisances such as pillows bursting from dorm rooms, “is Jack’s winning smile and charming personality.” (Years later, in 1942, his eventual bride Jackie’s own gifts as a mimic also land her in trouble at the exclusive Holton-Arms School in Washington, DC, when she is caught mid-parody by the teacher she is mocking, though nothing on the level of mayhem that Jack and Lem wreak with “the Muckers,” their secret society of pranksters.)