Word: jacks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Looking down the bumpy road toward 1960, Jack Kennedy has moments of discouragement. He takes from his wallet a cartoon showing a harassed office worker, standing on his chair, thumbing his nose at his desk, and crying "I quit!' Says Kennedy: "That's the way I feel sometimes." But in a more characteristic mood, even while maintaining his official if-I-decide-to-try line, he looks eagerly to the brawls ahead. Says he: "Nobody is going to hand me the nomination. If I were governor of a large state, Protestant and 55, I could sit back...
...worry about finances. In fact, Joe banned all discussion of money among members of his family. He charged his children with his own competitive energy, once ordered a couple of the boys from the table when he learned they had hacked around and lost a sailing race. Says Jack Kennedy: "Dad persuaded us to work hard at whatever we did. We soon learned that competition in the family was a kind of dry run for the world outside. At the same time, everything channeled into public service. There just wasn't any point in going into business...
Message to Father. Jack Kennedy prepped at Choate, went to London School of Economics for a few months under famed Socialist Harold Laski ("My father wanted me to see both sides of the street''), majored in international relations at Harvard. During his junior year Jack went to Europe under the auspices of Ambassador Joe Kennedy, and in Berlin one night in 1939, U.S. Chargé d'Affaires Alex Kirk gave him a message to take to his father: world war would erupt within a week...
...hospital when he learned that his older brother, Joe Kennedy Jr., had been killed on a bomber raid against German V-2 installations in Normandy (a sister, Kathleen-"Kick"-Kennedy, the Marchioness of Hartington, was killed in an air crash in France in 1948). Invalided out of the Navy, Jack Kennedy hooked up with International News Service, covered the San Francisco founding session of the United Nations and the Potsdam conference-and decided to run for the Massachusetts Eleventh District congressional seat being vacated by indestructible James Michael Curley, who had just been elected mayor of Boston again...
Inept at the Switch. Jack Kennedy, politician, was-and is-a long way from the likes of Pat Kennedy and Honey Fitz, a fact still resented by some of Boston's old Irish types. Says one: "Tell me, who'd he ever get a job for? When did he ever attend a wake? When did he ever get out and rustle food for a poor starving family? Or raise the money for an undertaker?" In fact, Kennedy is even inept at the "Irish Switch," a maneuver that consists of vigorously shaking one person's hand while talking...