The House of Kennedy(17)
But when Jack goes too far and sets off contraband firecrackers in the bathroom, destroying a toilet seat, he faces expulsion. Headmaster George St. John fumes, “I couldn’t see how two boys from the same family as were Joe and Jack could be so different.”
Joe Sr. is called to St. John’s office, saving Jack from expulsion, but not from judgment. “Don’t let me lose confidence in you again,” he writes in a letter following the incident, “because it will be a nearly impossible task to restore it.”
Jack graduates sixty-fifth in a class of 110. And he pulls off one last prank, persuading classmates to trade votes so that he’s named “Most Likely to Succeed”—in a rigged election.
Chapter 11
In 1934, Jack Kennedy and Lem Billings, both seventeen years old, dress in formalwear for a night in Harlem, New York City. They tell their cabdriver to bypass the famous Cotton Club where the great Cab Calloway performs. On this night, the boys have in mind only one experience they want to enjoy: losing their virginity.
Ralph Horton, another school friend, escorts them to a brothel. First, they watch a pornographic movie for a pricey three dollars. Then Jack accompanies a prostitute into a room, where the deed is quickly done.
“They were frightened to death they’d get VD,” says Horton. “So, I went with them to the hospital…where they got these salves and creams and a thing to shove up their penis to clean it out.”
Sex is always on Jack’s mind. Throughout his life, Jack will follow the Kennedy male tradition of coming on to any attractive woman—and succeeding. “Every woman either wants to mother him or marry him,” the New York Times columnist James Reston would write of Jack as a presidential candidate.
Attendance at Harvard is another rite of passage for Kennedy men. Joe Sr. is class of 1912; Joe Jr. graduates cum laude in the class of 1938, and Jack joins the class of 1940. Younger brothers Bobby and Ted will follow.
In college, Jack earns the same middling grades as he did at Choate. “He could do what he wanted,” the Harvard Crimson reports one of his professors as saying, “but he did not waste time on what did not interest him.”
Instead, he pursues athletics, excelling at swimming, tennis, and football. Even though the six-footer is underweight at 156 pounds, he’s a standout end for the freshman and junior varsity football teams, playing through the pain of a serious spinal injury he sustains in a game during his sophomore season.
Jack is a junior when FDR names his father ambassador to Great Britain in 1938. Though he remains at Harvard, he visits his expat family often during school breaks—he’s even there in Britain when they declare war on Germany on September 3, 1939.
That same day, the German submarine U-30 commits a war crime—torpedoing the SS Athenia, an unarmed transatlantic passenger liner bound for Canada, killing more than a hundred of the nearly fourteen hundred on board, including twenty-eight Americans.
Jack travels to Scotland as an impromptu junior ambassador to visit with American survivors of the sunken ship.
“Young John Kennedy came up from London and assured us that we were all the nearest things to the [American] nation’s heart and would be looked after,” Mildred Finley, a teacher who boarded a lifeboat and then a British destroyer on her way to safety in Glasgow, tells Scotland’s Daily Record.
“I, and several other of the most battered-looking survivors and children had pictures taken with him.”
Some Americans demand an immediate escort home, telling “young Kennedy that [if] the whole American Navy had gone after Amelia Earhart, why couldn’t a destroyer or two come for us. He smiled patiently and said he would tell his father. The group, of course, was somewhat hysterical: most of us were thankful for one ship.”
A report in the London Evening News lauds his efforts, “Mr. Kennedy displayed a wisdom and sympathy of a man twice his age.”
Citing to school officials the same “lack of transportation” that the Athenia survivors experience, Jack is late returning to Harvard to join his senior class. But the experience abroad cements a thesis he goes on to write called “Appeasement at Munich,” a firsthand critique of England’s inaction against Hitler and those (like Joe Sr.) who felt remaining neutral was an option. It goes on to be published in the United States in 1940, as the bestselling—due in part to Joe Sr. buying copies in bulk—Why England Slept, an allusion to Churchill’s own 1938 book, While England Slept.
Kennedy graduates cum laude from Harvard in the spring of 1940 with a BA in government and international affairs. That fall he’s back on campus—in California—auditing classes at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
In 1941, after Joe Jr. enlists as one of “Roosevelt’s Millions,” Jack changes course.
At a dock in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard, he tours a navy display of a PT—torpedo patrol—and becomes transfixed by the vessel. As America inches closer to war, he decides to follow his older brother’s example and enlist.
But his dubious medical history disqualifies him for service. He is rejected, twice, by both the army and the navy.
Eventually, Joe Sr.’s powerful connections override Jack’s poor health records, and he’s given a place as an ensign in the Naval Reserve, writing weekly reports for the Office of Naval Intelligence out of Washington, DC.