'The Best Year of Their Lives'

April 10, 2005

FIRST CHAPTER
'The Best Year of Their Lives'

By LANCE MORROW
n 1948, John Kennedy was a gauntly boyish freshman congressman from the Eleventh District of Massachusetts. He lived in Georgetown in a row house, along with his sister Eunice and his aide, Billy Sutton, and a cook and a butler sent down by his father to keep the place in some kind of order. Kennedy never had a strong sense of home-growing up, he and his brothers and sisters would return from boarding school or college and, instead of having rooms of their own at Hyannisport or Palm Beach, they would simply take whatever bedrooms were unoccupied. So the Georgetown house had that bivouac frat house air. Kennedy attended to his always fragile health, and to a variety of attractive women. He went to New York as often as he could to see the Broadway shows. The day-to-day business of his congressional office was tedious; he left it to his staff.

Sargent Shriver, a young Yale graduate, ran the Merchandise Mart in Chicago for Joe Kennedy. Shriver moved into a house nearby, on N Street. He told the Kennedy biographers Joan and Blair Clark: "[Eunice and Jack] had a lot of dinner parties. That's where I first met Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy ... both young veterans. Nixon was a freshman congressman, like Jack, and I saw him there several times. Joe McCarthy was a freshman senator from Wisconsin, a colorful, dynamic outspoken, frank, Irish-type fellow. It was natural for them-Jack and Mc- Carthy-to be friendly.... It was an intelligent group. Young. Optimistic."

Other freshmen congressmen, among them Henry M. ("Scoop") Jackson of Washington and George Smathers of Florida, came to dinner.

Joe McCarthy dated Eunice for a while, with Joe Kennedy's approval. (Joseph P. Kennedy took careful note of everything his children did, including whom they dated). Joe Kennedy liked McCarthy. So did Jack Kennedy. McCarthy played shortstop on the Kennedys' "Barefoot Boys" softball team at Hyannis, but was taken out of the game after he made four errors.

A few years later, after McCarthy had become notorious, a speaker at the one-hundredth anniversary of the Spee Club at Harvard remarked that he was glad the Spee had not produced a Joe McCarthy or an Alger Hiss. Kennedy was there that night and he demanded, with uncharacteristic anger, "How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor?" Kennedy stalked out of the room. In 1952, when Kennedy was running for the Senate against Henry Cabot Lodge, Mc- Carthy, then hunting Communists and at the height of his garish fame, campaigned for Republican candidates all over the country, but stayed out of Massachusetts partly because Joe Kennedy (who had contributed money to McCarthy's war chest) asked him to stay away, and partly because McCarthy had picked up rumors that Lodge and other moderate Republicans were plotting against him. When it came time for the Senate to vote on the censure of McCarthy in 1954, Kennedy (recovering from a back operation) stayed away and did not vote.

In those early days, before drink and his own recklessness ruined him, McCarthy set himself up as a sort of blue-collar Kennedy. He had a boorish charm. Like Jack, McCarthy dated many women. A bachelor living in an aide's spare bedroom in the Anacostia section of the city-where the postwar housing shortage remained acute-McCarthy, the former chicken farmer from Appleton, Wisconsin, had a remarkable appetite for Washington social life. When he arrived in the Senate in 1947, having defeated Robert LaFollette, he set out to accept every invitation he received. As one Wisconsin journalist wrote, "He is handsome in a dark, square-jawed way that has kept the Washington society columnists chirping excitedly ever since he alighted on the capital roost.... The scratching for the decorative McCarthy's presence at dinners and cocktail parties is particularly furious."

Jack Kennedy and Joe McCarthy shared a kind of juvenile indifference to their own appearance. McCarthy wore inexpensive dark blue, double-breasted suits, which he bought four at a time and wore until they were frayed and shiny. McCarthy's biographer, Thomas C. Reeves, reported: "Joe was extremely careless about clothing. Stockings and underwear were frequently scattered all over his room; he left a trail of hats wherever he went. When packing a suitcase, he would grab whatever was in sight. He borrowed spare clothes when necessary. His shirts were often rumpled and dirty.... His often garish ties were frequently askew and soiled."

Congressman Kennedy's secretary, Mary Davis, reported: "He ... left clothes all over the place. He was constantly replacing or trying to retrieve his coats."

Kennedy's favorite movie in 1948 was Red River. He went to see it several times with Billy Sutton. Howard Hawkes's epic Oedipal Western reflected, in a way almost too pat, John Kennedy's struggle that year to break away from his father's autocratic control and to assert an identity of his own.

In the movie, Matt (Montgomery Clift) even resembled Kennedy-at least, he was Kennedy's physical type: gaunt, youthfully handsome. Clift held himself in a wary, crouched posture, shoulders hunched, a tautness of abdominal muscles. The overall effect, in profile, made him look like a tense parenthesis. Kennedy held himself in the same gingerly posture because of his back trouble.

Both Matt and young John Kennedy had intelligent eyes that searched the father's face for instructions; but as the story proceeded, Matt's eyes reflected the young man's transition to a will of his own.

The part of Joe Kennedy in the movie was taken by John Wayne, who played the primal prairie tyrant, Tom Dunson, a self-made cattleman and archetype of ruthless American imperial energy-a law unto himself. All his business life, Joe Kennedy had operated roughly along the lines of Tom Dunson, making his own rules, creating, out of nothing, his own empire. John Kennedy, always acutely and lovingly and uncomfortably aware of his powerful and sometimes embarrassing father, responded to the movie.

In 1948, Franklin Roosevelt, the great god, was gone. Winston Churchill was out of office. The evil gods Hitler and Mussolini were dead and buried in their ignominy. Stalin had vanished behind his Iron Curtain. The race of giant-fathers was much diminished. The postwar years marked the beginning of the transition of power to a new generation-to men such as Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Jack Kennedy. Red River was an exact parable of the process: the story of a young man earning the right to take over the outfit, to inherit the cattle ranch, to supersede his foster father. To be The Man himself.

Joe Kennedy was by no means a broken man, but he had decided that his dreams would now be enacted and fulfilled not by him, but by his surviving children-starting with Jack. Joe Kennedy had botched his own chance at history, as he hard-headedly admitted; his mythmaking gifts could work magic for his family, but not for himself. Balzac said that every great fortune begins with a great crime; Kennedy's great fortune-some $400 million (about $3 billion in contemporary dollars)-had at the least been acquired by sharp dealing, by stock churning and bootlegging, and other maneuvers that were not always in line with Marquis of Queensberry's rules.

After his disastrous tenure as the U.S. ambassador in London at the start of the war, after saying things that had hurt him publicly (he was enraged at Harry Truman for accepting the nomination for vice president in 1944 and asked him angrily: "Harry, how can you go on a ticket with that crippled son of a bitch that killed my son?"), Joe Kennedy's reputation was irretrievable. He emerged from the war as a disgraced appeaser, a defeatist, and probably an anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism before the war had been a commonplace informal inclination of America's Christian ruling classes-a sort of snobbery, a reflex of class. After Auschwitz, anti-Semitism became sinister in a previously unthinkable way; the meaning of anti-Semitism passed from the realm of the comparative/ social to the absolute/moral. To be an anti-Semite was, by inference, to be an accomplice of Hitler, of evil itself. Public figures in America so tainted would be, for official purposes at least, beyond the pale. Joe Kennedy had become El Sordo in the cave-Hemingway's corrupted clan leader: shrewd, repudiated, past his prime.

So he receded. He sold his liquor interests to clear the stage morally for Jack's career; it was a way of laundering the Kennedy fortune. The old man would remain out of sight backstage for the duration, except for the memorable snowy day in January 1961 when he would sit in the viewing stand in front of the White House to watch Jack ride by as the new president-the son rising in his open car and tipping his silk top hat to his father in eloquent acknowledgement of all that had come before: acknowledgement that the cattle drive was over, and that it had been great success, and that, as the son had just announced at the Capitol, "the torch [had] passed to a new generation." Inauguration day of 1961 completed the transfer of power from Joe to Jack that had begun in 1948.

* * *

When Jack first came to Washington as a congressman in January 1947, he seemed lackadaisical. He took little interest in his congressional work; it was as if something lingered from adolescence and made him dig in his heels and resist performing the duties that his father had imposed upon him. His Washington secretary, Mary Davis, who had extensive experience on Capitol Hill, reported later that Jack "did not know the first thing about what he was doing." Davis worked for him for six years and would never see much improvement in that regard: "He never did involve himself in the workings of the office. He wasn't a methodical person. Everything that came into the office was handed to me." Kennedy was accustomed to having servants pick up after him.

Joe Kennedy exerted an astonishing degree of detailed personal control over all his children. He had agents who spied on them. He had his man Frank Morrissey take charge of Jack's Boston office. The office secretary kept a log of every visitor to the office and gave it to the father as a matter of course. In A Question of Character, Thomas C. Reeves reported that "Timothy ('Ted') Reardon, Joe Junior's ever-loyal Harvard roommate, was put in charge of the Washington office, and the ambassador offered him money to report on Jack's activities. There was even a maid in Jack's Georgetown home who reported to the ambassador."

Jack never carried money. Almost everyone who knew him (friends, members of his staff, dates) told stories about having to pick up the check in restaurants, or about his putting the touch on them for small loans, which were rarely repaid. Joe Kennedy covered most of Jack's expenses, whether for the office or for personal items. As a congressman, Jack earned $12,000 a year, but he had a rich child's innocence about money. The ambassador had succeeded almost too well in his desire to accumulate so much money that he could liberate his children from financial concerns and free them for pursuits of public service.

Jack seemed resigned to his father's overbearing control. He joked about it: "I guess Dad has decided that he's going to be the ventriloquist," he told his friend Lem Billings, "so I guess that leaves me the role of dummy."

Joe Kennedy's grip upon his tribe was something close to totalitarian. The sheltered, isolated dynamics of John Kennedy's upbringing produced an unusual young man who in certain ways remained dangerously innocent of elementary facts of American life-the everyday realities of money, for example, and how people acquire and spend it; or the realities of race. He could approach an issue such as the advisability of the Taft-Hartley Act-proposing to outlaw the closed union shop, a hot issue in 1948-with modulated good sense (he joined most Democrats in opposing the act but saw some useful provisions in it), but his views on such matters were almost totally divorced from anything in his personal experience.

In later years, almost all portraits of John Kennedy would speak of a coolness or a detachment in his character. The famous detachment, beloved of Kennedy's iconographers, originated, it may be, not in some Olympian dispassion of Kennedy's brain but rather in the fanatical exclusivity of the Kennedy tribe ("Take it from me," said Patsy Mulkern, one of the family retainers, "there's nobody close to them") and the consequent detachment from many of the dimensions of American life. Kennedy possessed a gift of friendship, a sharp and wry sense of humor, and a fund of human kindness that was unusual. His friend George Smathers remarked, "He loved people, not in the intimate sense, perhaps, but he loved their humanness. He loved conversation. The more personal and gossipy the more he loved it. Whenever you had inside, salacious stuff, he wanted to hear it." And yet Kennedy did not possess a second-nature instinct about people's lives that comes from having existed on quite the same plane on which others normally struggle.

Still, his numerous chronic physical frailties had given him an education in what it means to suffer. The pain of his ailments-and of his brother Joe's death and his sister Kathleen's death and his sister Rosemary's mental retardation and lobotomy-taught him, on the good side, something about grace and good humor; and on the reckless side, a Byronic comprehension of the evanescence of life and the advisability of taking sexual pleasures as you can and when you can and as often as possible. The admirably stoic detachment of his suffering, cheerfully borne, was balanced by the paradoxical detachment of debaucheries, recklessly and even cruelly pursued.

The debaucheries were cruel when he persisted in them after he was married; even before that, Jack displayed something of the ambassador's goatish narcissism.

The ambassador flirted with and pursued his son's girlfriends. Jack may have recognized the moment in Red River when John Wayne calls upon Matt's girlfriend (Joanne Dru). In an ugly scene, the old man looks her over as if she were breeding stock, offers to marry her, and give her a cut of his kingdom if she will bear his children. Droit du seigneur as incest. In something of the same spirit, Joe Kennedy apparently attempted to bed Inga Arvad, Jack's beautiful Danish girlfriend, with whom Jack had been, it seems, in love, even as the old man broke the couple up, forbidding Jack to see her again. Arvad's son said years later: "The Kennedy family was weird. The family was just an extension of the old man's schizophrenic condition. . . . She thought old Joe was awfully hard-a really mean man.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Best Year of Their Lives by LANCE MORROW Copyright © 2005 by Lance Morrow. Excerpted by permission.
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