An Unfinished Life Part 2

Holcombe a.s.signed Jack to study Bertram Snell, an upstate New York Republican whose princ.i.p.al distinction was his representation of the electric power interests in his region. Holcombe said that Jack "did a very superior job of investigating, and his final report was a masterpiece." Of course, Jack had some advantages. As Holcombe noted, "When Christmas vacation came, he goes down to Washington, meets some of his father's friends, gets a further line on his congressman and on Congress."

When he finished the fall term, Jack made plans to sail for Europe at the end of February. First, however, he flew to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, where he was met at the airport by a girl he was dating and a Princeton friend, who was impressed that Jack had come by plane: "Not many people flew in those days," the friend recalled. But Jack did, and then flew back to New York before boarding a luxury liner for Europe.

Although his father's public image had taken a downturn in the fall of 1938, when he publicly expressed favor for Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeas.e.m.e.nt of n.a.z.i Germany at Munich, Jack felt no discomfort with his father's political p.r.o.nouncements or his family ident.i.ty. Although his father's pro-Chamberlain speech "seemed to be unpopular with the Jews, etc.," he wrote his parents, "[it] was considered to be very good by everyone who wasn't bitterly anti-Fascist." A new play, which he saw in New York and included several references to the Kennedys, greatly amused Jack. "It's pretty funny," he reported in the same letter, "and jokes about us get the biggest laughs whatever that signifies."

As soon as he arrived in London, Jack resumed "having a great time," he wrote Billings. He was working every day and "feeling very important as I go to work in my new cutaway." He met the king "at a Court Levee. It takes place in the morning and you wear tails. The King stands & you go up and bow. Met Queen Mary and was at tea with the Princess Elizabeth with whom I made a great deal of time. Thursday night-am going to Court in my new silk breeches, which are cut to my crotch tightly and in which I look mighty attractive. Friday I leave for Rome as J.P. has been appointed to represent Roosevelt at the Pope's coronation."

When he returned from Rome in late March, Jack reported to Billings that they had had "a great time." His youngest brother, Teddy, had received Communion from the new pope, Pius XII, "the first time that a Pope has ever done this in the last couple of hundred years." The pope then gave the Sacrament to Joe, Jack, and his sister Eunice "at a private ma.s.s and all in all it was very impressive." For all the sense of importance Jack gained from his father's prominence and influence, he kept an irreverent sense of perspective that allowed him to see the comical side of his family's social climbing. He wrote Billings: "They want to give Dad the t.i.tle of Duke which will be hereditary and go to all of his family which will make me Duke John of Bronxville and perhaps if you suck around sufficiently I might knight you." (In fact, Joe had a sense of limits about what an American public official could do and had no intention of asking the required permission of Congress to accept a t.i.tle of n.o.bility.) Jack's letters to Billings over the next several months describe a young man enjoying his privileged life. On the way back from Rome, he had stopped at the Paris emba.s.sy, where he had lunch with Carmel Offie, Amba.s.sador William Bullitt's princ.i.p.al aide, and was invited by them to stay at Bullitt's residence. He "graciously declined," as he wanted to get back to London for the Grand National steeplechase before returning to Paris for a month and then traveling to "Poland, Russia, etc." As of this writing in March, he was not doing "much work but have been sporting around in my morning coat, my 'Anthony Eden' black Homburg and white gardenia."

Two weeks later, he told Billings that he was "living like a king" at the Paris emba.s.sy, where Offie and he had become "the greatest of pals" and Bullitt had been very nice to him. He had lunch at the emba.s.sy with the famed aviator and isolationist Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, "the most attractive couple I've ever seen." He was "going skiing for a week in Switzerland which should be d.a.m.n good fun." Apparently, it was: "Plenty of action here, both on and off the skis," he told Billings in a postcard. "Things have been humming since I got back from skiing," he next wrote Lem. "Met a gal who used to live with the Duke of Kent and who is as she says 'a member of the British Royal family by injections.' She has terrific diamond bracelet that he gave her and a big ruby that the Marajah [sic] of Nepal gave her. I don't know what she thinks she is going to get out of me but will see. Meanwhile very interesting as am seeing life." And he was still living "like a king" at the emba.s.sy, where Bullitt "really fixes me up," and Offie and he were served by "about 30 lackies." Bullitt, Jack wrote, was always "trying, unsuccessfully, to pour champagne down my gullett [sic]."

But however welcoming Bullitt and Offie were, Jack did not like feeling dependent on their hospitality. He must have also sensed some hostility from Offie, who remembered "Jack sitting in my office and listening to telegrams being read or even reading various things which actually were none of his business but since he was who he was we didn't throw him out." Jack privately reciprocated the irritation: "Offie has just rung for me," he wrote Lem, "so I guess I have to get the old paper ready and go in and wipe his a.r.s.e."

For all the fun, Jack had a keen sense of responsibility about using his uncommon opportunity to gather information for a senior thesis. Besides, the highly charged European political atmosphere, which many predicted would soon erupt in another war, fascinated him. However much he kept Lem Billings posted on his social triumphs, his letters to Lem and to his father in London were filled with details about German intentions toward Poland and the likely reactions of Britain, France, Russia, Romania, and Turkey. "The whole thing is d.a.m.n interesting," he told Billings. He found himself in the eye of the storm, traveling to Danzig and Warsaw in May, where he spoke to n.a.z.i and Polish officials, and then on to Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Bucharest, Turkey, Jerusalem, Beirut, Damascus, and Athens. He received VIP treatment from the U.S. diplomatic missions everywhere he went, staying at a number of emba.s.sies along the way and talking with senior diplomats, including Amba.s.sador Anthony Biddle in Warsaw and Charles E. Bohlen, the second secretary in Moscow.

Jack spent August traveling among England, France, Germany, and Italy in pursuit of more information for his senior thesis. He and Torbert MacDonald, his Harvard roommate who had come to England for a track meet, met fierce hostility in Munich from storm troopers who spotted the English license plates on their car. Against the advice of the U.S. emba.s.sy in Prague, Joe Kennedy arranged a visit by Jack to Czechoslovakia. The diplomat George F. Kennan, who was serving as a secretary of the legation, remembered how "furious" members of the emba.s.sy were at the demand. Joe Kennedy's "son had no official status and was, in our eyes, obviously an upstart and an ignoramus. The idea that there was anything he could learn or report about conditions in Europe which we ... had not already reported seemed ... wholly absurd. That busy people should have their time taken up arranging his tour struck us as outrageous." Jack saw matters differently, believing a firsthand look at Prague, now under n.a.z.i control, would be invaluable, and his sense of ent.i.tlement left him indifferent to the complaints of the emba.s.sy.

In keeping with the peculiar way in which he moved between the serious and the frivolous at this time of his life, Jack spent part of August on the French Riviera, where his family had again rented a villa for the summer at Antibes. There he socialized with the famous movie actress Marlene Dietrich and her family, swimming with her daughter during the day and dancing with Marlene herself at night.

But the good times came to an abrupt end in September when Hitler invaded Poland and the British and the French declared war. Jack joined his parents and his brother Joe and sister Kathleen in the visitor's gallery to watch Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and members of Parliament, including Winston Churchill, explain Britain's decision to fight. Churchill's speech, giving evidence of the powerful oratory that would later inspire the nation in the darkest hours of the war, left an indelible impression on Jack. To Joe, the onset of war was an unprecedented disaster. He became tearful when Chamberlain declared that "everything that I have believed in during my public life has crashed in ruins." In a telephone call to FDR, the inconsolable Joe Kennedy moaned, "It's the end of the world ... the end of everything."

Jack now also got his first experience of hands-on diplomacy. His father sent him to Glasgow to attend to more than two hundred American citizens rescued by a British destroyer after their British liner carrying 1,400 pa.s.sengers from Liverpool to New York had been sunk by a German submarine. More than a hundred people had lost their lives, including twenty-eight U.S. citizens. The surviving Americans were terrified at the suggestion that they board a U.S. ship without a military escort to ensure their safety, and Jack's a.s.surances that President Roosevelt and the emba.s.sy were confident that Germany would not attack a U.S. ship did not convince them. Although Jack recommended to his father that he try to meet the pa.s.sengers' demand, Joe believed it superfluous, and an unescorted U.S. freighter returned the citizens to the United States. Meanwhile, Jack flew on a Pan Am Clipper to Boston in time for his senior fall term.

More than anything, Jack's travels encouraged an intellectual's skepticism about the limits of human understanding and beliefs. When he returned to America in September, he asked a Catholic priest: "I saw the rock where our Lord ascended into Heaven in a cloud, and [in] the same area, I saw the place where Mohammed was carried up to Heaven on a white horse, and Mohammed has a big following and Christ has a big following, and why do you think we should believe Christ any more than Mohammed?" The priest urged Joe to get Jack some "instruction immediately, or else he would turn into a[n] ... atheist if he didn't get some of his problems straightened out." When a friend at Harvard who thought Jack less than pious about his religion asked why he was going to church on a holy day, Jack "got this odd, hard look on his face" and replied, "This is one of the things I do for my father. The rest I do for myself."

It was all part of Jack's affinity for skepticism, which Payson S. Wild, one of his instructors in the fall of 1939, helped foster in a tutorial on political theory. Wild urged him to consider the question of why, given that there are a few people at the top and ma.s.ses below, the ma.s.ses obey. "He seemed really intrigued by that," Wild recalled.

Jack gave expression to his independence-to his developing impulse to question prevailing wisdom-in an October 1939 editorial in the Harvard Crimson Crimson. Responding to the impression that "everyone here is ready to fight to the last Englishman," Jack published a counterargument in the campus newspaper that essentially reflected the case his father was then making privately to President Roosevelt and the State Department. As much an expression of loyalty to Joe as of pleasure in running against majority opinion and presenting himself as someone with special understanding of international conditions, Jack urged a quick, negotiated end to the fighting through the good offices of President Roosevelt. Because it would require a third party to mediate a settlement, Jack thought that the "President is almost under an obligation to exert every office he possesses to bring about such a peace."

Jack believed that both Germany and England were eager for an agreement. And though such a settlement would mean sacrificing Poland, it would likely save Britain and France from probable defeat. But it would have to be a "peace based on solid reality," Jack a.s.serted, which meant giving Germany a "free economic hand" in eastern Europe and a share of overseas colonies. Hitler would have to disarm in return for these conditions, but Jack did not think this was out of reach.

Jack's misplaced hopes seem to have been more a case of taking issue with current a.s.sumptions than an expression of realism about European affairs developed in his recent travels. Nevertheless, his interest in exploring political questions-in honing his skills as a student of government-is striking. "He seemed to blossom once Joe was gone [to law school] and to feel more secure himself and to be more confident as his grades improved," Wild said. As another token of Jack's interest and vocational aspirations in 1939, he tried to become a member of the Crimson Crimson's editorial board; but it already had a full complement of editors and he had to settle for a spot on the paper's business board. He also occasionally wrote for the paper. An editorial in the Crimson Crimson and a speech before the YMCA and YWCA on how to restore peace made him feel like "quite a seer around here." He also joked with his father that being an amba.s.sador's son who had spent time in Europe with prominent officials gave him added cachet with the girls. "I seem to be doing better with the girls so I guess you are doing your duty over there," he wrote his father, "so before resigning give my social career a bit of consideration." and a speech before the YMCA and YWCA on how to restore peace made him feel like "quite a seer around here." He also joked with his father that being an amba.s.sador's son who had spent time in Europe with prominent officials gave him added cachet with the girls. "I seem to be doing better with the girls so I guess you are doing your duty over there," he wrote his father, "so before resigning give my social career a bit of consideration."

In the fall of 1939, Jack's interest in public affairs reflected itself in his course work. In four government cla.s.ses, he focused on contemporary international politics. "The war clinched my thinking on international relations," he said later. "The world had to get along together." In addition to a course with Wild on elements of international law, he took Modern Imperialism, Principles of Politics, and Comparative Politics: Bureaucracy, Const.i.tutional Government, and Dictatorship. Some papers Jack wrote for Wild's course on neutral rights in wartime on the high seas made Wild think that Jack might become an attorney, but Jack displayed a greater interest in questions about power and the comparative workings and appeal of fascism, n.a.z.ism, capitalism, communism, and democracy. The challenge of distinguishing between rhetoric and realism in world affairs, between the ideals of international law and the hard actualities of why nations acted as they did, particularly engaged him.

THE PRINc.i.p.aL OUTCOME of Jack's travels and course work was a senior honor's thesis on the origins of Britain's appeas.e.m.e.nt policy. The history of how Jack wrote and published the thesis provides a microcosm of his privileged world. During Christmas vacation 1939 at Palm Beach, he spoke with British amba.s.sador Lord Lothian, a guest at his father's Florida home. In January, Jack stopped at the British emba.s.sy in Washington for a conversation with Lothian that, as Jack later wrote him, "started me out on the job." Taking advantage of his father's continued presence in London, Jack received invaluable help from James Seymour, the U.S. emba.s.sy press secretary, who sent him printed political pamphlets and other Conservative, Labour, and Liberal publications Jack could not obtain in the United States. His financial means also allowed him to use typists and stenographers to meet university deadlines. of Jack's travels and course work was a senior honor's thesis on the origins of Britain's appeas.e.m.e.nt policy. The history of how Jack wrote and published the thesis provides a microcosm of his privileged world. During Christmas vacation 1939 at Palm Beach, he spoke with British amba.s.sador Lord Lothian, a guest at his father's Florida home. In January, Jack stopped at the British emba.s.sy in Washington for a conversation with Lothian that, as Jack later wrote him, "started me out on the job." Taking advantage of his father's continued presence in London, Jack received invaluable help from James Seymour, the U.S. emba.s.sy press secretary, who sent him printed political pamphlets and other Conservative, Labour, and Liberal publications Jack could not obtain in the United States. His financial means also allowed him to use typists and stenographers to meet university deadlines.

Although the papers Jack wrote for his senior-year courses show an impressive capacity for academic study and a.n.a.lysis, it was the contemporary scene that above all interested him-in particular, the puzzle of how a power like Great Britain found itself in another potentially devastating war only twenty years after escaping from the most destructive conflict in history. Was it something peculiar to a democracy that accounted for this failure, or were forces at work here beyond any government's control?

With only three months to complete the project, Jack committed himself with the same determination he had shown in fighting for a place on the Harvard football and swimming teams. Some of his Harvard friends remembered how he haunted the library of the Spee Club, where he worked on the thesis. They teased him about his "book," poking fun at his seriousness and pretension at trying to write a groundbreaking work. "We used to tease him about it all the time," one of them said, "because it was sort of his King Charles head that he was carrying around all the time: his famous thesis. We got so sick of hearing about it that I think he finally shut up."

Seymour proved a fastidious research a.s.sistant who not only persuaded the English political parties to provide the publications Jack requested but also chased down books and articles on the subject at Chatham House, the Oxford University Press, and the British Museum Reading Room. Seymour's efforts initially produced six large packages sent by diplomatic pouch to the State Department and then to Joe's New York office. But Jack was not content with Seymour's initial offering and pressed him for more: "Rush pacifist literature Oxford Cambridge Union report, etc.," he cabled Seymour on February 9, "all parties business trade reports bearing on foreign policy[,] anything else." "Dear Jack, your cables get tougher," Seymour replied, but by the end of the month Jack had an additional twenty-two volumes of pamphlets and books.

The thesis of 148 pages, t.i.tled "Appeas.e.m.e.nt at Munich" and c.u.mbersomely subt.i.tled ("The Inevitable Result of the Slowness of Conversion of the British Democracy to Change from a Disarmament Policy to a Rearmament Policy"), was written in about two months with predictable writing and organizational problems and an inconsistent focus. The thesis was read by four faculty members. Although Professor Henry A. Yeomans saw it as "badly written," he also described it as "a laborious, interesting and intelligent discussion of a difficult question" and rated it magna c.u.m laude, the second-highest possible grade. Professor Carl J. Friedrich was more critical. He complained: "Fundamental premise never a.n.a.lyzed. Much too long, wordy, repet.i.tious. Bibliography showy, but spotty. t.i.tle should be British armament policy up to Munich. Reasoning re: Munich inconclusive... . Many typographical errors. English diction defective." On a more positive note, Friedrich said, "Yet, thesis shows real interest and reasonable amount of work, though labor of condensation would have helped." He scored the work a cut below Yeomans as c.u.m laude plus.

Bruce C. Hopper and Payson Wild, Jack's thesis advisers, were more enthusiastic about the quality of his work. In retrospective a.s.sessments, Wild remembered Jack as "a deep thinker and a genuine intellectual" whose thesis had "normal problems" but not "great" ones; Hopper recalled Jack's "imagination and diligence in preparedness as outstanding as of that time." On rereading the thesis twenty-four years later, Hopper was "again elated by the maturity of judgment, beyond his years in 1939/1940, by his felicity of phrase, and graceful presentation."

Yeomans and Friedrich were closer to the mark in their a.s.sessments. So was political scientist James MacGregor Burns, whose campaign biography of JFK in 1960 described the thesis as "a typical undergraduate effort-solemn and pedantic in tone, bristling with statistics and footnotes, a little weak in spelling and sentence structure." Yet it was an impressive effort for so young a man who had never written anything more than a term paper.

Had John Kennedy never become a prominent world figure, his thesis would be little remembered. But because it gives clues to the development of his interest and understanding of foreign affairs, it has become a much discussed text. Two things seem most striking about the work: First, Jack's unsuccessful effort at a scientific or objective history, and second, his attempt to draw a contemporary lesson for America from Britain's failure to keep pace with German military might.

His objective, he states throughout the thesis, was to neither condemn nor excuse Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, but rather to get beyond a.s.sertions of blame and defense in order to understand what had happened. Yet Jack's reach for objectivity is too facile. Though his thesis is indeed an interesting a.n.a.lysis of what caused Britain to act as it did at Munich, it is also quite clearly a defense of Baldwin, Chamberlain, and the appeasers. Jack argues that Britain's failure to arm itself in the thirties forced it into the appeas.e.m.e.nt policy at Munich but that this failure was princ.i.p.ally the consequence not of weak leadership on the part of the two prime ministers but of popular resistance led by the pacifists, advocates of collective security through the League of Nations, opponents of greater government spending, and shortsighted domestic politicians stressing narrow self-interest over larger national needs. No one who knew anything about Joe Kennedy's pro-Chamberlain, pro-Munich views could miss the fact that the thesis could be read partly as a defense of Joe's controversial position. Carl Friedrich privately said that the thesis should have been t.i.tled "While Daddy Slept."

Yet dismissing the thesis as simply an answer to Joe's critics is to miss Jack's compelling central argument-one originally made by Alexis de Tocqueville over a hundred years before: Popular rule does not readily lend itself to the making of effective foreign policy. Democracies, Jack a.s.serts, have a more difficult time than dictatorships in mobilizing resources for their defense. Only when a pervasive fear of losing national survival takes hold can a democracy like Britain or the United States persuade its citizens "to give up their personal interests, for the greater purpose. In other words, every group [in Britain] wanted rearmament but no group felt that there was any need for it to sacrifice its privileged position. This feeling in 1936 was to have a fatal influence in 1938" at Munich.

Jack saw his thesis as a cautionary message to Americans, who needed to learn from Britain's mistakes. "In this calm acceptance of the theory that the democratic way is the best ... lies the danger," Jack wrote. "Why, exactly, is the democratic system better? ... It is better because it allows for the full development of man as an individual. But ... this only indicates that democracy is a 'pleasanter' form of government-not that it is the best form of government for meeting the present world problem. It may be a great system of government to live in internally but it's [sic] weaknesses are great. We wish to preserve it here. If we are to do so, we must look at situations much more realistically than we do now."

What seems most important now about Kennedy's thesis is the extent to which he emphasizes the need for unsentimental realism about world affairs. Making judgments about international dangers by ignoring them or wishing them away is as dangerous as unthinking hostility to foreign rivals who may be useful temporary allies. Personal, self-serving convictions are as unconstructive as outdated ideologies in deciding what best serves a nation's interests. Although he would not always be faithful to these propositions, they became mainstays of most of his later responses to foreign challenges.

The exploding world crisis encouraged Jack to turn his thesis into a book. It was not common for a Harvard undergraduate to instantly convert his honor's paper into a major publication. As Harold Laski told Joe, "While it is the book of a lad with brains, it is very immature, it has no structure, and dwells almost wholly on the surface of things. In a good university, half a hundred seniors do books like this as part of their normal work in their final year. But they don't publish them for the good reason that their importance lies solely in what they get out of doing them and not out of what they have to say. I don't honestly think any publisher would have looked at that book of Jack's if he had not been your son, and if you had not been amba.s.sador. And those are not the right grounds for publication."

However accurate Laski's a.s.sessment of the thesis, he missed something others in America saw-namely, that international developments made Jack's a.n.a.lysis a timely appeal to millions of Americans eager to consider a wise response to the European war. The collapse of France had made Americans feel more vulnerable to external attacks than at any time since the Franco-British abuse of neutral rights during the Napoleonic Wars.

New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, to whom Jack showed the thesis, thought "it was amateurish in many respects but not, certainly not, as much so as most writings in that category are." "I told him," Krock said, "I thought it would make a very welcome and very useful book." And so Krock helped Jack with stylistic revisions and suggested a t.i.tle, columnist Arthur Krock, to whom Jack showed the thesis, thought "it was amateurish in many respects but not, certainly not, as much so as most writings in that category are." "I told him," Krock said, "I thought it would make a very welcome and very useful book." And so Krock helped Jack with stylistic revisions and suggested a t.i.tle, Why England Slept, Why England Slept, mirroring Churchill's mirroring Churchill's While England Slept While England Slept. Krock also gave Jack the name of an agent, who arranged a contract with Wilfred Funk, a small publishing house, after Harper & Brothers and Harcourt Brace both turned it down. Harpers thought the ma.n.u.script already eclipsed by current events, and Harcourt thought "sales possibilities too dim" and "things moving too fast" for a book on the British failure at Munich to command much interest in the United States.

They were wrong, but partly because Jack made revisions to the ma.n.u.script that gave it more balance and greater timeliness than the original. In deciding to try for publication, Jack understood that he needed to do it "as soon as possible, as I should get it out before ... the issue becomes too dead." He also accepted the recommendation of several English readers that he not place so much more blame on the public than on Baldwin and Chamberlain for Munich. Most important, he saw the need to say less about the shortcomings of democracy and more about its defense in present circ.u.mstances. Hitler's victories in Europe and the feeling that Britain might succ.u.mb to n.a.z.i aggression made it more appealing for Jack to emphasize not democracy's weakness in meeting a foreign crisis but what America could do to ensure its national security in a dangerous world.

The book, which received almost uniformly glowing reviews and substantial sales in the United States and Britain, demonstrated that Jack had the wherewithal for a public career. No one, including Jack, was then thinking in terms of any run for office. But his success suggested that he was an astute observer of public mood and problems, especially as they related to international affairs. Neither Jack nor Joe foresaw the precise direction Jack's life would now take, but Joe saw the book as a valuable first step for a young man reaching for public influence. "I read Jack's book through and I think it is a swell job," he wrote Rose. "There is no question that regardless of whether he makes any money out of it or not, he will have built himself a foundation for his reputation that will be of lasting value to him." And to Jack he wrote: "The book will do you an amazing amount of good... . You would be surprised how a book that really makes the grade with high-cla.s.s people stands you in good stead for years to come."

For his part, Jack had few, if any, illusions about the book. He understood that circ.u.mstances more than his skill as a writer and a.n.a.lyst had given the book its resonance. But he also understood that seizing the main chance when it presented itself was not to be despised; he was more than happy, then, to devote his summer to publicizing and selling Why England Slept Why England Slept.

Kennedy friend Charles Spalding remembers visiting Jack at the Cape shortly after the book had appeared. "Jack was downstairs with a whole pile of these books... . It was just a wonderful disarray of papers, letters from Prime Ministers and congressmen and people you've heard about, some under wet bathing suits and some under the bed." When Spalding asked how the book was selling, "[Jack's] eyes lit up and he said, 'Oh, very well. I'm seeing to that.' He was seeing that the books were handed out and he was really moving the books... . It was just a sort of amusing pragmatism that he hadn't just written the book and then he was going to just disappear. He was going to see that it got sold. He was just laughing at his own success... . He was doing everything he could to promote it. And he was good at that... . The interviews, radio programs, answering letters, autographing copies, sending them out, checking bookstores."

IN THE SUMMER OF 1940, aside from promoting his book, Jack was at loss for what to do next. He had thoughts of attending Yale Law School, but health problems persuaded him to temporarily abandon such plans. In addition, he had doubts about a law career. It would mean not only competing with brother Joe, who was enrolled at Harvard, but also abandoning what Lem Billings called his intellectual interests. "I don't think there was any question but that he was thinking he would go into journalism and teaching." But like millions of other young Americans in 1940, the state of world affairs made private decisions hostage to public developments. "There was an awful vacuum there in 1940," Lem remembered, "a very uncomfortable period for a guy who was graduating from school. I mean, what to do? We were so d.a.m.n close to going to war... . You didn't know what you were going to do[,] so what was the point of getting into any lifelong thing?" Everybody "was just sort of marking time." The pa.s.sage of a bill in September 1940 authorizing the first peacetime draft had put the country's young men on notice that military service might take precedence over personal plans. 1940, aside from promoting his book, Jack was at loss for what to do next. He had thoughts of attending Yale Law School, but health problems persuaded him to temporarily abandon such plans. In addition, he had doubts about a law career. It would mean not only competing with brother Joe, who was enrolled at Harvard, but also abandoning what Lem Billings called his intellectual interests. "I don't think there was any question but that he was thinking he would go into journalism and teaching." But like millions of other young Americans in 1940, the state of world affairs made private decisions hostage to public developments. "There was an awful vacuum there in 1940," Lem remembered, "a very uncomfortable period for a guy who was graduating from school. I mean, what to do? We were so d.a.m.n close to going to war... . You didn't know what you were going to do[,] so what was the point of getting into any lifelong thing?" Everybody "was just sort of marking time." The pa.s.sage of a bill in September 1940 authorizing the first peacetime draft had put the country's young men on notice that military service might take precedence over personal plans.

And so Jack went to Stanford in September to nurse himself back to health in the warm California sun. His graduate work, which lasted only one quarter, to December 1940, was supposed to focus on business studies, but his courses and interests remained in political science and international relations. A young woman he dated while in California remembered his attentiveness to contemporary events. "He was fascinated with the news. He always turned it on in the car, on the radio... . He was intrigued by what was going on in the world." Another Stanford contemporary recalled Jack's conversations with Stanford's student body president about the nature of effective government leadership-he pointed to FDR as a model of how to make big changes without overturning traditional inst.i.tutions. This student also remembered Jack's telling him and other "remote westerners ... that there was a war on, that it had been on for a year, and that we were going to get into it." In December, he attended an Inst.i.tute of World Affairs conference in Riverside, California, on current international problems, where he acted as a "rapporteur" for four of the sessions: "War and the Future World Economy," "The Americas: Problems of Hemispheric Defense & Security," "War and the Preservation of European Civilization," and "Proposed Plans for Peace."

His interest in overseas affairs was more than academic. When Joe resigned his amba.s.sadorship in December 1940, Jack counseled him on what to say to insulate him from charges of appeas.e.m.e.nt and identification with Chamberlain's failed policies. More important, he now convinced his father not to take issue with the Lend- Lease bill FDR proposed as a means to help Britain defeat Germany. If we failed to give this aid now and Britain were defeated, Jack argued, it would cost the United States much more later and might force us into a war with Hitler, which Joe, above all, wished to avoid. Under pressure from Roosevelt as well, Joe publicly accepted his son's reasoning.

Jack's term at Stanford was an interlude of no lasting consequence. His unresolved health difficulties drew him back to the East Coast at the start of 1941, where he busied himself for the first three months of the year with finding a ghostwriter for his father's memoirs and thinking about renewing his application to Yale Law School. But when his mother and sister Eunice went to Latin America in the spring, Jack decided to join them and then travel on his own. He visited Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, with brief stops in Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama.

Although the trip was valuable, upon his return the direction of Jack's life still remained unclear. There was, however, little question that it would sooner or later take a serious turn. However self-indulgent, Jack had no intention of becoming a career playboy trading on his father's fame and influence. And Joe and Rose believed it inconceivable for any of their children to settle for a sybaritic life. The material benefits of their wealth were all too obvious, from the opulent houses to the cars, clothing, jewelry, foreign travel, lavish vacations, and parties at home and abroad with all the social lions of their time. But a life without ambition, without some larger purpose than one's own needs and satisfaction, was never part of the Kennedy ethos. It is one of the great ironies of this family's saga that however frivolous any of its members might be at one time or another, it was impermissible to make frivolity a way of life.

At the age of twenty-three, Jack understood that he needed a lifework; just as important, he had considerable confidence that he would succeed. His background and experience had created a belief in himself as someone special, as standing apart from the many other talented, promising young men he had met at home and abroad. His privileged life had opened the way for his success, but it was hardly the full measure of what would make for an uncommon life.

CHAPTER 3

The Terrors of Life

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

DESPITE THE FAMILY'S WEALTH and palatial houses, Jack had never seemed to feel as if he had a home, or at least a special place in one of the houses that was exclusively his. A young woman who went with Jack to Hyannis Port when the rest of the family was in Palm Beach "was surprised to see him go through the empty house like an intruder, peeking into his father's room and looking in his dresser draw[er]s, and picking up objects on all the surfaces as if he hadn't seen them before." and palatial houses, Jack had never seemed to feel as if he had a home, or at least a special place in one of the houses that was exclusively his. A young woman who went with Jack to Hyannis Port when the rest of the family was in Palm Beach "was surprised to see him go through the empty house like an intruder, peeking into his father's room and looking in his dresser draw[er]s, and picking up objects on all the surfaces as if he hadn't seen them before."

Part of the reason had to do with his mother. Rose's absences had always made Jack unhappy. In 1923, when he was almost six and Rose was about to depart on a six-week trip to California, Jack exclaimed, "Gee, you're a great mother to go away and leave your children all alone." Jack, who had been apart from his parents earlier for an extended hospital stay, saw any separation as a return of that unhappy experience. And while he seemed able to tolerate his father's business trips, with his mother it was different. He told LeMoyne Billings that whenever Rose announced another trip, he openly cried, which greatly irritated her and made her more distant than ever from her anxious son. Jack learned, as he told Billings, to act stoically in the face of her departures. "Better to take it in stride," he said.

That said, her presence wasn't necessarily an improvement. Rose's insistence on rigid rules of behavior upset and angered Jack. One commentator has said: "[She] organized and supervised the large family with the inst.i.tutional efficiency she had learned from the Ursuline nuns of Sacred Heart Academy. She insisted on strict adherence to domestic routines and an idealistic dedication to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church." Lem Billings remembered her as "a tough, constant, minute disciplinarian with a fetish for neatness and order and decorum." She discouraged any excessive emotional display. Touching, personal warmth, sensuality of any kind, was frowned on. "She was terribly religious. She was a little removed," Jack said as an adult. In private, he complained that Rose never told him that she loved him. Jack's friend Charles Spalding, who saw the family up close, described Rose as "so cold, so distant from the whole thing ... I doubt if she ever rumpled the kid's hair in his whole life... . It just didn't exist: the business of letting your son know you're close, that she's there. She wasn't." Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy told the journalist Theodore White that "history made him [Jack] what he was ... this lonely sick boy. His mother really didn't love him... . She likes to go around talking about being the daughter of the Mayor of Boston, or how she was an amba.s.sador's wife... . She didn't love him... . History made him what he was."

In response, Jack staged minor rebellions. He refused to toe the line on her religious concerns or follow her household rules. Once when she instructed the children on a Good Friday to wish for a happy death, Jack said he wanted to wish for two dogs. He occasionally interrupted Rose's recitations of Bible stories with impious questions. What happened to the donkey Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem on the way to his crucifixion? Jack asked. Who attended to the donkey after Jesus was gone? Jack also expressed his antagonism to Rose by keeping a messy room, dressing sloppily, and arriving to meals tardy.

His annoyance with her compulsive demands poked through a letter he wrote in response to a round-robin note she sent to all the children in 1941, when he was twenty-four. "I enjoy your round robin letters," he answered. "I'm saving them to publish-that style of yours will net us millions. With all this talk of inflation and where is our money going-when I think of your potential earning power ... it's enough to make a man get down on his knees and thank G.o.d for the Dorchester High Latin School [sic] which gave you that very sound grammatical basis which shines through every slightly mixed metaphor and each somewhat split infinitive."

If Jack and the other children had their tensions with Rose, they were not the product of the child-rearing habits of a thoughtless, selfish mother. On the contrary, Rose saw her maternal duties as a high calling requiring considered and devoted action. "I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty," she said, "but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world, and one that demanded the best I could bring to it." There was in fact a professionalism to Rose's organization of her large family that rested on the conventional wisdom of the day: Dr. L. Emmett Holt's widely read book, The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children's Nurses The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children's Nurses (1934). Holt was the Dr. Benjamin Spock of the first half of the twentieth century, and Rose closely followed his rules, which included the need for a daily bath, regular outdoor activity, strict discipline-"spare the rod and spoil the child"-and limited displays of affection. As Holt recommended, Rose kept file cards on her children's illnesses and made neatness and order a high priority, though to little avail in Jack's case. (1934). Holt was the Dr. Benjamin Spock of the first half of the twentieth century, and Rose closely followed his rules, which included the need for a daily bath, regular outdoor activity, strict discipline-"spare the rod and spoil the child"-and limited displays of affection. As Holt recommended, Rose kept file cards on her children's illnesses and made neatness and order a high priority, though to little avail in Jack's case.

It is also essential to remember that she was burdened with a r.e.t.a.r.ded daughter who consumed a large part of her energy and reduced her freedom to attend to and practice a more joyful give-and-take with her other children. Rosemary, the third child, had been born in the midst of the flu epidemic of 1918. Whether the contagion or some genetic quirk or brain damage from inexpertly used forceps during her delivery was the cause of her disability is impossible to know. By the time she was five, however, it was clear that her physical and mental development was dramatically abnormal. She could not feed or dress herself, had limited verbal skills, and could not keep up with the physical activities of her siblings or her cla.s.smates at school. Determined not to send her to an inst.i.tution, as was accepted practice at the time for "feebleminded" children, Joe and Rose committed themselves to keeping her at home under Rose's supervision, helped by a special governess and several tutors.

Rose gave the child unqualified love and attention. Eunice remembered the many hours Rose spent playing tennis with Rosemary, even though she never played with the other children. Moreover, Rose and Joe required everyone in the family to treat Rosemary as an equal as much as possible. The other children responded with an attentiveness and kindness that speaks well of all their characters and the strength of shared family purpose. To Rose, Rosemary's disability was a kind of gift from G.o.d, reminding the most fortunate that they must give as well as receive. She also believed that Rosemary's difficulties sensitized her other children to the meaning of daily hardship and suffering, which was the lot not just of the poor and underprivileged.

Certainly for Jack, Rosemary's r.e.t.a.r.dation gave him an uncommon compa.s.sion for human failings. One friend recalled that he had "a marvelous capacity for projecting himself into other people's shoes. That was one of the great keys to his whole personality. He could become a little old lady who was being embarra.s.sed by her husband's conduct. I saw it happen so many times." The friend recounted an episode in a New York restaurant when a drunk at a nearby table began verbally a.s.saulting Jack, who was by then a well-known public figure. The friend suggested that they leave, but Jack, who sat stoically through the abuse, said, "Would you look at that guy's wife and what she's going through?" The woman looked as if she were "about to die. She was purple with embarra.s.sment... . Eventually the wife did take over and get him out of there. And," Jack's friend said, "I thought that was so humane. There were loads of things like that."

Jack himself was as generous toward his sister as any of the children and undoubtedly felt as much remorse as others at her deterioration in 1939-41 when she reached physical maturity. After years of effort that had produced small gains in her ability to deal with adult matters, Rosemary turned violent at the age of twenty-one, throwing tantrums and raging at caretakers who tried to control her. In response, Joe, without Rose's knowledge, arranged for Rosemary to have a prefrontal lobotomy, which contemporary medical understanding recommended as the best means for alleviating her agitation and promising a more placid life. The surgery, however, proved to be a disaster, and Joe felt compelled to inst.i.tutionalize Rosemary in a Wisconsin nunnery, where she would spend the rest of her life.

Part of the family's impulse in dealing with Rosemary as they did was to hide the truth about her condition. In the twenties and thirties, mental disabilities were seen as a mark of inferiority and an embarra.s.sment best left undisclosed. Rosemary's difficulties were especially hard to bear for a family as preoccupied with its glowing image as the Kennedys. It was one thing for them to acknowledge limitations among themselves, but to give outsiders access to such information or put personal weaknesses on display was to open the family to possible ridicule or attack from people all too eager to knock down Kennedy claims to superiority. Hiding family problems, particularly medical concerns, later became a defense against jeopardizing election to public office.

Yet there was a benefit to keeping quiet about family suffering that served Jack in particular. The corollary to not speaking openly about family problems was bearing individual suffering stoically. The Kennedys believed that people as fortunate as they were should be uncomplaining about adversity. A visitor to the Hyannis Port home remembered how one Kennedy child, seeking sympathy for an injury suffered while playing, fell to the floor in front of Rose and began to whine. "'On your feet,' Rose ordered. The child promptly rose and practically stood at attention. 'Now you know how to behave,' she added. 'Go out there and behave as you know you should.'" The premium placed on strength and courage as answers to personal burdens would serve Jack well through a lifetime of medical problems and physical suffering.

BACK IN JUNE 1934, as Jack's junior year at Choate ended and he began feeling ill again, Joe had sent him to the famous Mayo brothers' clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He spent a miserable month there. "The G.o.dd.a.m.nest hole I've ever seen. I wish I was back at school," he wrote Lem Billings. By himself at the Mayo and then nearby St. Mary's Hospital, where he was transferred after two weeks, he kept his sanity and his hopes for a return to friends and family through a series of letters to Lem. We can only imagine how endless, painful, intrusive, and embarra.s.sing the tests he was subjected to by strangers must have seemed to a seventeen-year-old wrestling with normal adolescent concerns about s.e.x and his body. But having learned from his parents, Jack was stoic and uncomplaining about his difficulties. Lem Billings later told an interviewer, "We used to joke about the fact that if I ever wrote a biography, I would call it 'John F. Kennedy: A Medical History.' [Yet] I seldom ever heard him complain." Trying to be optimistic that the doctors would figure out his problem and restore him to health, Jack told Billings that during a telephone conversation with his father, "he was trying to find out what was wrong with me and for 20 minutes we were trying to hedge around the fact that we didn't know." 1934, as Jack's junior year at Choate ended and he began feeling ill again, Joe had sent him to the famous Mayo brothers' clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He spent a miserable month there. "The G.o.dd.a.m.nest hole I've ever seen. I wish I was back at school," he wrote Lem Billings. By himself at the Mayo and then nearby St. Mary's Hospital, where he was transferred after two weeks, he kept his sanity and his hopes for a return to friends and family through a series of letters to Lem. We can only imagine how endless, painful, intrusive, and embarra.s.sing the tests he was subjected to by strangers must have seemed to a seventeen-year-old wrestling with normal adolescent concerns about s.e.x and his body. But having learned from his parents, Jack was stoic and uncomplaining about his difficulties. Lem Billings later told an interviewer, "We used to joke about the fact that if I ever wrote a biography, I would call it 'John F. Kennedy: A Medical History.' [Yet] I seldom ever heard him complain." Trying to be optimistic that the doctors would figure out his problem and restore him to health, Jack told Billings that during a telephone conversation with his father, "he was trying to find out what was wrong with me and for 20 minutes we were trying to hedge around the fact that we didn't know."

Judging from his letters describing the medical tests administered to him and later medical records, Jack had "spastic colitis," which the doctors initially thought might be peptic ulcer disease. They began by prescribing a diet of rice and potatoes preparatory to tests Jack hoped would be over in a few days. But the exams lasted much longer than he had antic.i.p.ated. "I am suffering terribly out here," he wrote Billings on June 19. "I now have a gut ache all the time. I'm still eating peas and corn for my food and I had an enema." He expected to be there for at least another twelve days. By then, "I'll be dipped in s.h.i.t... . My bowels have utterly ceased to be of service and so the only way that I am able to unload is for them to blow me out from the top down or from the bottom up."

Two days later he told Billings: "G.o.d what a beating I'm taking. I've lost 8 lbs. And still going down... . I'm showing them a thing or two. n.o.body able to figure what's wrong with me. All they do is talk about what an interesting case. It would be funny," he declared wishfully, "if there was nothing wrong with me. I'm commencing to stay awake nights on that. Still don't know when I'll get home. My last eight meals have been peas, corn, prunes. Pul l l lently [sic] appetizing."

Six days later he gave another graphic description of his ordeal. He had heard that he might have to stay in the hospital until July 4. "s.h.i.t!! I've got something wrong with my intestines. In other words I s.h.i.t blood." He feared he might be dying: "My virility is being sapped. I'm just a sh.e.l.l of the former man and my p.e.n.i.s looks as if it has been through a wringer." The doctors were still trying to determine the cause of his illness: "I've had 18 enemas in 3 days!!!! I'm clean as a whistle. They give me enemas till it comes out like drinking water which," he said in an expression of rage toward his caretakers, "they all take a sip of. Yesterday I went through the most hara.s.sing experience of my life. First, they gave me 5 enemas until I was white as snow inside. Then they put me in a thing like a barber's chair. Instead of sitting in the chair I kneeled ... with my head where the seat is. They (a blonde) took my pants down!! Then they tipped the chair over. Then surrounded by nurses the doctor first stuck his finger up my a.s.s. I just blushed because you know how it is. He wiggled it suggestively and I rolled them in the aisles by saying 'you have a good motion.' He then withdrew his finger and then, the shmuck, stuck an iron tube 12 inches long and 1 inch in diameter up my a.s.s. They had a flashlight inside it and they looked around. Then they blew a lot of air in me to pump up my bowels. I was certainly feeling great as I know you would having a lot of strangers looking up my a.s.shole. Of course, when the pretty nurses did it I was given a cheap thrill. I was a bit glad when they had their fill of that. My poor bedraggled r.e.c.t.u.m is looking at me very reproachfully these days... . The reason I'm here is that they may have to cut out my stomach-the latest news."

On June 30, he was "still in this G.o.d-d.a.m.ned furnace and it looks like a week more." He had become "the pet of the hospital." It was testimony to his extraordinary stoicism and good humor that he had managed to charm the staff despite his ongoing ordeal. "I only had two enemas today so I feel kind of full," he told Billings. "They have found something wrong with me at last. I don't know what but it's probably something revolting like piles or a disease of my vital organ. What will I say when someone asks me what I got?" His question was not posed hypothetically. As with Rosemary, Jack and the family were determined to hide the seriousness of his medical problems. Nothing good could come from revealing that Jack might have some debilitating long-term illness that could play havoc with his future.

All the gastrointestinal tests indicated that Jack had colitis and digestive problems, which made it difficult for him to gain weight and threatened worse consequences if the colon became ulcerated or bled. In July 1944, Dr. Sara Jordan, a gastroenterologist at Boston's Lahey Clinic, would note that Jack's diagnosis at the Mayo Clinic and then at Lahey was "diffuse duodenitis and severe spastic colitis," intestinal and colonic inflammations that could become life-threatening diseases. The premium was not only on finding a better diet for him but also on relieving emotional stress, which in those days was a.s.sumed to be a major contributor to ulcers and colitis.

Judging from accounts of colitis therapy published in the January 1934 and December 1936 Mayo Clinic journal, Proceedings, Proceedings, the treatment given to Jack was a combination of restricted diet and injection or subcutaneous implant of a serum obtained from horses. Although the clinic claimed a measure of success with this treatment, it was clearly no cure-all. Indeed, in November 1935, the the treatment given to Jack was a combination of restricted diet and injection or subcutaneous implant of a serum obtained from horses. Although the clinic claimed a measure of success with this treatment, it was clearly no cure-all. Indeed, in November 1935, the American Journal of Medical Sciences American Journal of Medical Sciences recommended a "calcium and parathyroid" therapy. The use of parathyroid extract (parathormone) paralleled the development of adrenal-hormone extracts, which the Mayo Clinic, along with other research centers, was then testing. These extracts held promise in the treatment of a variety of illnesses, including chronic spastic and ulcerated colitis. Obtaining these extracts was then very costly. "We always had adrenal extract for those who could afford it," Dr. George Thorn, an expert at Harvard and Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, said in 1991. There seems no doubt that Joe was able to pay for the medication. recommended a "calcium and parathyroid" therapy. The use of parathyroid extract (parathormone) paralleled the development of adrenal-hormone extracts, which the Mayo Clinic, along with other research centers, was then testing. These extracts held promise in the treatment of a variety of illnesses, including chronic spastic and ulcerated colitis. Obtaining these extracts was then very costly. "We always had adrenal extract for those who could afford it," Dr. George Thorn, an expert at Harvard and Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, said in 1991. There seems no doubt that Joe was able to pay for the medication.

There are intriguing questions about Jack's medical history that remain difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. In 1937, the first clinical use of adrenal extracts-corticosteroids, or anti-inflammatory agents-became possible with the preparation of DOCA (desoxycorticosterone acetate). This drug was administered in the form of pellets implanted under the skin. It is now well known that Jack was treated with DOCA in 1947 after his "official" diagnosis of Addison's disease (a disease of the adrenal glands characterized by a deficiency of the hormones needed to regulate blood sugar, sodium and pota.s.sium, and the response to stress; it is named after the nineteenth-century English physician Thomas Addison). But there are earlier references to Jack implanting pellets. Early in 1937, in a handwritten note to Joe, Jack worried about getting his prescription-probably the parathyroid extract, or DOCA-filled in Cambridge. "Ordering stuff here very [illegible word]," he wrote his father. "I would be sure you get the prescription. Some of that stuff as it is very potent and he [Jack's doctor] seems to be keeping it pretty quiet." Nine years later, in 1946, Paul Fay, one of Jack's friends, watched him implant a pellet in his leg. He remembers Jack using "a little knife ... [to] just barely cut the surface of the skin, try not to get blood, and then get underneath and put this tablet underneath the skin, and then put a bandage over it. And then hopefully this tablet would dissolve by the heat of the body and be absorbed by the bloodstream." Thus, before the diagnosis of Addison's, Jack may have been on steroids-still in an experimental stage, with great uncertainty as to dosage-which may have been successfully treating his colitis, but at the possible price of stomach, back, and adrenal problems.

Physicians in the 1930s and 1940s did not realize what today is common medical knowledge: namely, that adrenal extracts are effective in treating acute ulcerative colitis but can have deleterious long-term chronic effects, including osteoporosis with vertebral column deterioration and peptic ulcers. In addition, chronic use of corticosteroids can lead to the suppression of normal adrenal function and may have caused or contributed to Jack's Addison's disease.

It is also possible that the DOCA had little impact on Jack's back or adrenal ailments. Unlike synthetic corticosteroids, which did not become available until 1949, the initial DOCA compounds did not have the sort of noxious side effects a.s.sociated with the later compounds. Nevertheless, by 1942, twenty-eight varieties of DOCA or adrenal extracts had become available, and since no one can say which of these Jack may have been using or exactly what was in them, it remains conceivable that the medicine was doing him more harm than good.

Jack could also have been suffering from celiac sprue, an immune disease common to people of Irish ancestry and characterized by "intolerance to gluten, a complex mixture of nutritionally important proteins found in common ... food grains such as wheat, rye, and barley." Although Jack would manifest several symptoms a.s.sociated with the disease-chronic diarrhea, osteoporosis, and Addison's-other indications of celiac sprue-stunted growth in children, iron deficiency anemia, and family history-were absent. The presence of persistent, severe spastic colitis (now described as irritable bowel syndrome) and the possibility that he had Crohn's disease (an illness marked by intestinal inflammation and bleeding as well as back and adrenal problems) also diminish, though do not eliminate, the likelihood that Jack had celiac sprue, a disease of the small intestine, not the colon. Moreover, despite many hospitalizations at some of the country's leading medical centers after 1950, when celiac sprue was first identified, none of his doctors suggested such a diagnosis. However, the fact that physicians in the fifties and sixties did not readily recognize the disease in adults leaves such a diagnosis as a possibility.

From September 1934 to June 1935, Jack's senior year, the Choate infirmary had kept close watch on Jack's blood count. In turn, Joe pa.s.sed the results on to the Mayo doctors. At that time, there was also concern that Jack might be suffering from leukemia, a fatal disease resulting from uncontrolled proliferation of the white blood cells. With the benefit of current knowledge, it seems likely that the changes in Jack's blood counts were a reaction to the drugs he was taking. When he fell ill the following year, Dr. William Murphy of Harvard advised that Jack had agranulocytosis, a drug-induced decrease of granular white blood corpuscles, which made him more susceptible to infections.

Some of Jack's hospitalizations were brief. Except for his short stay in the infirmary in April 1935, he enjoyed good health during his final year at Choate. While in London in October for his post-Choate courses at the London School of Economics, he had to be hospitalized, but a quick recovery allowed his enrollment at Princeton for the fall term. Jack's relapse probably resulted from an inconsistent use of the medicines or a reduction of dosage when his health showed improvement.

But sometimes Jack's visits were lengthy. When he had to withdraw from Princeton to enter Peter Bent Brigham in Boston, he spent most of the next two months there. Uncertain as to whether they were dealing strictly with colitis or a combination of colitis and ulcers and worried that his medicines were playing havoc with his white blood cell count, his doctors performed additional tests. Jack told Billings it was "the most harrowing experience of all my storm-tossed career. They came in this morning with a gigantic rubber tube. Old stuff I said, and rolled over thinking naturally that it would [be] stuffed up my a.r.s.e. Instead they grabbed me and shoved it up my nose and down into my stomach. They then poured alchohol [sic] down the tube... . They were doing this to test my acidosis... . They had the thing up my nose for 2 hours." The test measured Jack's acid levels to see if he was p.r.o.ne to stomach ulcers. The doctors were concerned anew about his blood count. According to what Jack wrote Billings, it was 6,000 when he entered the hospital and three weeks later it was down to 3,500. "At 1500 you die," Jack joked. "They call me '2000 to go Kennedy.'"

By the end of January, he was more worried than ever about his health, though he continued with more biting humor to defend himself against thoughts of dying. "Took a peak [sic] at my chart yesterday and could see that they were mentally measuring me for a coffin. Eat drink & make Olive [his current girlfriend], as tomorrow or next week we attend my funeral. I think the Rockefeller Inst.i.tute may take my case... . Flash-they are going to stick that tube up my a.s.s again as they did at Mayo." His frustration with and anger at medical experts who seemed better able to inflict painful and humiliating tests on him than explain and cure what he had was evident when he wrote Billings: "All I can say is it's bully of them or more power to my smelly farts."

And yet behind the jokes was Jack's fear that he was slated for an early demise, making him almost manic about packing as much pleasure into his life as he could in the possibly short time remaining to him. His letters to Billings are full of frenetic talk about partying and having s.e.x. He was frustrated at having to stay in Boston, even though he left the hospital on weekends to social