9781451635096

The critically acclaimed, New York Timesbestselling new biography of John F. Kennedy, by Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hardball. Chris Matthews, who has been following and studying the Kennedys most of his life, has interviewed President Kennedy's closest confidantsfamily, friends, and those who served with himto create a moving portrait of a man many loved but few really understood. Matthews evokes JFK's days at prep school, his heroism during World War II, his political career, and, always, his devotion to the Kennedy family. Jack Kennedy took surprising risks, struggled with chronic illness, and repeatedly confronted "the thin membrane between life and death." As Matthews describes it, Jack Kennedy was a rebel, an adventurer, and a great enjoyer of life precisely because he understood its fragility. By getting closer to the man than any book before has, Chris Matthews's Jack Kennedywill be a touchstone for those who wish to remember his heroism and his inspiration now and for years to come.

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Chris Matthews is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit, Jack Kennedy—Elusive Hero, Tip and the Gipper—When Politics Worked, Kennedy and Nixon, and Hardball. He is the former host of MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews.

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CHAPTER ONE
SECOND SON

History made him, this lonely, sick boy. His mother never loved him. History made Jack, this little boy reading history.

—Jacqueline Kennedy, November 29, 1963,
from notes scribbled by Theodore H. White

Certain things come with the territory. Jack Kennedy, born in 1917 in the spring of the next-to-last year of World War I, was the second son of nine children. That’s important to know. The first son is expected to be what the parents are looking for. Realizing that notion early, he becomes their ally. They want him to be like them—or, more accurately and better yet, what they long to be.

Joseph Kennedy, a titan of finance, whose murky early connections helped bring him riches and power but never the fullest respect, had married in 1914, after a seven-year courtship, Rose Fitzgerald. The pious daughter of the colorful Boston mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, she launched their substantial family when, nine months later, she presented her husband with his son and heir, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. For the proud couple, he would be their bridge to both joining and mastering the WASP society from which they, as Roman Catholics in early twentieth-century America, were barred.

Such stand-in status meant, for the young Joe, that he had to accept all the terms and rules put forth by those whose ranks he was expected to enter. The idea was to succeed in exactly the well-rounded manner of the New England Brahmin. Above all, that meant grades good enough to keep up at the right Protestant schools, and an ability to shine at sports as well. In this last instance, there was no doubt about the most desirable benchmark of achievement. The football field was not just where reputations were made and popularity earned, it was where campus legends were born.

Joseph Kennedy’s handsome eldest boy would prove himself equal to the task. Entering Choate, the boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut, where he was a student from the age of fourteen to eighteen, he quickly made his mark. A golden youth, he became the headmaster George St. John’s ideal exemplar. Transcending his origins—which meant getting past the prejudices St. John was said to hold for his kind, the social-climbing Irish—Joe Jr., with his perfect body and unquestioning, other-directed mind, seemed to embody the Choate ethos without breaking a sweat.

A second son such as Jack Kennedy, arriving as he did two years later, finds himself faced with that old familiar tough act to follow. And, of course, embedded in the soul of any second male child is this Hobson’s choice: to fail to match what’s gone before guarantees disappointment; to match it guarantees nothing.

You have to be original; it’s the only way to get any attention at all—any good attention, that is.

Jack Kennedy, almost as soon as he got to Choate, quite obviously put himself on notice not to be a carbon copy. He was neither a “junior,” nor would he be a junior edition. He would be nothing like the much-admired Joe, nothing like the Choate ideal. What he brought, instead, was a grace his brother—and Choate itself—lacked. Even as a child of the outrageously wealthy Joseph Kennedy and his lace-curtain wife, Jack soon showed himself well able to see the humor in life. The wit he displayed cut to the heart of situations and added to life an extra dimension. He was fun.

Here, then, is where we begin to catch a glimpse of the young man who would stride decisively up to that convention stage a quarter century later, leaving behind the indelible image. Even though he’s very much still a boy, he’s preternaturally aware of the way life demands roles and resistant to stepping into one preselected for him.

There’s the wonderful irony that comes with those surprises that second sons—Jack Kennedy included—are driven, and also inspired, to produce. Unlike his older brother, bound to a more conventional blueprint, Jack wasn’t under the same pressure. There was a lightness to him, a wry Irishness that blended with the WASP manner rather than aspiring to it. With that combination, he could enter where his father, mother, and brother could not.