CHAPTER FIVE
1950-1958
The Harvard I entered in the fall of 1950 was in many ways the timeless Harvard of my father's and brothers' eras: a grand old national treasure of tree-scattered greens and yards and ancient redbrick buildings. Legendary professors such as Samuel Eliot Morison and John Kenneth Galbraith hurried to classrooms filled with intense young "gentlemen scholars" in their Harris Tweed jackets, their pipes tucked into their breast pockets. There were the final clubs, and parties.
Harvard was familiar to me from my many autumnal visits with the family to watch Jack and Bobby play football. I'd even visited Joe Jr. there once when he was in law school, and was amazed by how messy his room was. I savored an unfamiliar feeling--adultness--as I unpacked my suitcases in Room C-31 of the low-slung Wigglesworth dormitories that stretch along the southern edge of Harvard Yard. But I was still a kid in many ways--still the kid in the family. I looked forward to a rosy, uncomplicated existence as a Harvard man: good fellowship with new friends, stimulating contact with great professors, and playing football. As it turned out, my existence at Harvard was much more complicated than I had hoped.
I started off lucky, with a great roommate: a slim, sandy-haired boy named Dudley Richards. I'd casually known Dudley from summers in Hyannis Port. He and his older brother Ross were good sailors. Ross had sailed against Bobby and given him all my brother could handle.
Dudley's passion was ice skating, and by his early teen years he was a top Olympic prospect. But at sixteen he'd seemingly shattered that dream: diving into water that was shallower than he realized, he'd suffered a broken neck. He recovered, but only after two years of intensive physical therapy, during which time he did not skate at all.
By the end of freshman year, Dudley's hard work had paid off and he'd gained the rank of number two amateur skater in the nation. Our friendship continued after Harvard, and I cheered him from afar as he went on to win some Olympic bronze and silver medals. In January 1961, Dudley shared a gold medal in the pairs at the U.S. Championships with the young skating star he intended to marry, Maribel Owen. Tragically, they both were killed, along with the entire U.S. skating team, in a plane crash on the way to the World Figure Skating Championships in Prague in February 1961.
I drove to Cambridge in my mother's old blue coupe in that fall of 1950. As soon as I was able to buy a snazzy Pontiac of my own, I got a special horn for it, a horn that sounded like a cow's anxious "MOOOOO!" I considered that fairly stylish and amusing; but as always seemed to happen, word of the horn made its way back to my father, and I received the following letter from him:
I heard in my roundabout way that you are using that bell [sic] of yours on that car. I don't want to be complaining about things you do but I want to point out to you that when you exercise any privilege that the ordinary fellow does not avail himself of, you immediately become the target for display and newspaper criticism.
It's all right to struggle to get ahead of the masses by good works, by good reputation and by hard work, but it certainly isn't by doing things that [could lead people to say], "Who the hell does he think he is?"
I got rid of the cow horn.
Pulling a Harvard jersey over my head and shoulder pads to play freshman football was one of the thrills of my young life. At six foot two and 210 pounds, I had the right size for a college player in those days. Making cleat marks and crashing into other solid bodies on the same field where my brothers had played--it didn't seem that life could hold anything better than that. Dad made all my home games, where he helped out the coach by pacing the sidelines wearing a beret and shouting instructions.
One dear figure's passing tempered my joy that fall. John Fitzgerald, my grandfather, succumbed to a long illness on October 2. He had been delighted in Jack's congressional victory four years earlier. Grampa's death not only marked the passing of an era; it also served as a bright line marker for the end of my childhood.
In due course, I would awaken to Harvard's intellectual bounties and find in them the building blocks for my lifelong education, in particular my grasp of national and international political thought. My fall semester, in fact, was respectable if not stellar in my coursework. But in the spring of 1951, my mind turned, or returned, to thoughts of football, and to staying in condition so that I could go for the varsity squad in the fall. There were other reasons for my gridiron passion. Most of the friendships I'd made at Harvard were through football--John Culver, Claude Hooton, Dick Clasby--and I loved being part of a team. I didn't want to lose that. In most other ways that first year, I don't remember Harvard as being a particularly hospitable place. Not for me, at any rate.
So I threw myself into the spring football drills, to the extent that my grades suffered, my Spanish grade especially. I worried that if I flunked or made a D on the final exam, I wouldn't be eligible to play football in the fall.
I expressed my concerns to a friend in the dorm, Warren O'Donnell. He jokingly suggested that I let another buddy, Bill Frate, take the exam for me. I laughed off the idea. But then Warren brought it up again, in Bill's presence. Bill laughed and said he might get a worse grade than me. But then, trying to be a friend in need, he checked the exam schedule and saw that he was free at the time of the Spanish test. I'd already dropped the idea, but when I ran into him at dinner that night, Bill told me that if I wanted him to do it, he was willing. To my lasting regret, I said, "Great." I didn't think it through. I made an immature, spontaneous, extremely poor and wrong decision.
Bill took the exam--under the eye of a proctor who happened to be his adviser, and who knew he'd already passed a Spanish test, which had exempted him from having to take the course. Harvard sentenced each of us to a year's suspension. We were told we could come back if we'd done something useful with that time.
I felt terrible. I knew I'd screwed up. I felt even worse about having to face my father. I called up Jack and told him what had happened. Jack agreed to give Dad a heads-up while I drove to the Cape to see him. It was the longest and worst drive I ever had to make. I recall thinking as I drove that there were so many "ifs" involved: If I'd not confided my worries about Spanish to Warren. If he hadn't suggested to Bill Frate that he might take my place. If Bill had not been free. If there had been another proctor.
But in the final analysis, the "ifs" didn't matter. I knew I was to blame because I had embraced the idea.
My father met me in the sunroom. He alternated between disappointment and anger for quite a while. Why didn't you get ahead of this? he asked me. Why didn't you act responsibly? See what happens when you do these things? The more we talked, the quieter his voice would get. But then the phone would ring; one of my brothers expressing concern, offering advice. And when I came back into the room, he'd tee off on me again. "There are people who can mess up in life and not get caught," he advised me at one point, "but you're not one of them, Teddy." Boy, was he ever right.
By the next day, he'd settled down and begun to think about what my options were. We thought about other schools, but I wanted to prove myself and return to Harvard. Serving in the military made the most sense.
I signed up for the army, at the old building that still stands along the docks in Boston. My father thought the military would do me good. He was tough and he was deeply disappointed in me. But he never gave up on me. He wanted me to learn from this experience.
Another thing I recall about Dad during this crisis was that he was concerned on behalf of Bill Frate. He recognized that Bill had been trying to help me, and wanted to be supportive of him. Bill, to his great credit, took responsibility for his own actions and said he wanted to stand on his own. He went to another school for a year, then came back and graduated from Harvard.
Vicki and I still see Bill Frate and his wife, Anne. Once a year, we find a weekend to get together with some of my old football buddies and their wives for a Harvard game. Often it's the Harvard-Yale Game and the company includes Bill and Anne, John Culver, destined to be a lifelong friend of mine and an outstanding Democrat--he represented Iowa both as a senator and a congressman--along with his wife, Mary Jane, as well as Dick Clasby, who was one of the greatest ever to play at Harvard. He was a three-sport man, football team captain, and in 1952 broke loose for a ninety-six-yard touchdown run from scrimmage in the game against Washington University of St. Louis. Dick married Joe Gargan's sister and my very dear friend and cousin Mary Jo. We're joined by my dear friend Paul Kirk, who played for the Crimson a few years later, and his wife, Gail, and Bill Cleary, the All-American hockey player for Harvard and Olympic gold medalist, and his wife, Jo. Until his death, my classmate Jeff Coolidge was also part of our annual gathering. And Claude Hooton has joined us. We have a big dinner at an Italian family-style restaurant. Then the next day we go to the stadium and have a great tailgate party. Then we see the game.
But of course all this was years into the future. At the time, I wondered whether I'd ever get back to Harvard in any capacity.
I did my basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. I was in the 39th Infantry of the 9th Infantry Division. I worked hard through sixteen weeks of summertime heat and didn't sleep much. KP duty saw to that. I received thorough training in washing dishes and emptying garbage cans.
I also found myself in combat. Hard fighting. Against my will, and with my fists. And not with the enemy.
Up until then I'd had very little contact with African Americans. I was now at close quarters with several in our platoon, including another enlisted man named Wharton. One day Wharton and I, along with a fellow named Fessia, got gigged for having dirty rifles. Our penalty was to take some brooms, go over, and clean out the Officer's Quarters.
I wanted to get it done early because Harvard was playing football and it was being televised, and I wanted to see it. When I realized that Wharton was missing from our three-man detail, I suggested to Fessia that he go and find him. Fessia went to Wharton's barracks and returned with the news that "Wharton says he may come, or he may not."
I snapped, "That's ridiculous!" Fessia suggested, a little too casually in retrospect, that perhaps I should go over and reason with him.
I did. On the second floor of the barracks, I found probably eight men rolling dice against a footlocker. I said, "Is Wharton around here?" This fellow stood up--he was African American, about six foot four and 185 pounds of muscle--and said, "I'm Wharton."
I said, "Wharton, you got gigged."
"Yeah, I got gigged."
I said, "You've got to come over and clean out the BOQ like the rest of us." He said, "Well, maybe I'm comin' and maybe I'm not." I said, "You're coming." He said, "You telling me something?" Then the "reasoning" began. We launched into a really bad fight.
It was the wrestling I'd learned from Louie Andrews at Milton, and my football conditioning, that saved me. As it was, I had my hands full with Wharton. Had the fight been outdoors, on an open field, the techniques I'd learned in wrestling would have made it nearly impossible for him to stay with me. If you can take an opponent down, roll him, get a leg lock on him, you've pretty well got him. But in a barracks, you're rolling, and you roll into a footlocker, and suddenly he's on top of you. And Wharton got on top of me, pounding away and grabbing at my face. I thought he was going to put my eyes out. I put up a hand, and he bit right through it. He bit harder than the zebra.
I think I got the better of him in the end. Wrestling is defensive, and I finally managed to immobilize him. Which was good enough for me. There was blood all over the barracks, some of it Wharton's, much of it mine.
A sergeant named Maguire came storming into the room, blew his whistle, and ordered us both to get back over to the BOQ and finish cleaning it. "And you fellows can continue your fight at six o'clock on the parade ground."
Continue the fight at six o'clock on the parade ground?! I couldn't believe it. That's the last thing in the world I wanted to do. But if I had to, I had to. So at six o'clock I was pacing around the flagpole on the parade ground. And at 6:05 I was outta there. Wharton hadn't showed up. Lucky for me. I heard that in his next fight, he knocked out every tooth in the other guy's head.
With about two weeks still to go in basic training, I started formulating another idea. I would volunteer to go to Korea. I believed that it was my duty; a necessary phase of my atonement. I knew the risks. The war had stalemated, peace talks had begun, but American and Chinese troops were still slaughtering one another on the misty slopes of Bloody Ridge and Heartbreak Ridge.
On a three-day pass, I met Bobby and Jack in New York. Over lunch, I told them about my idea. Both were appalled, and strenuously argued against my volunteering. "Mother and Dad have suffered enough," one of them said to me. "We can't afford to have you go over and risk getting killed. You just can't do this kind of thing. Go where the army assigns you, and do your part."
I thought about this. I realized that I was being selfish and was risking unspeakable grief for my parents. God, I don't want to do that, I told myself. I've been enough of a screwup already.
I accepted an assignment to the Counter-Intelligence Corps Center at Fort Holabird, Maryland. CIC agents had guarded the Manhattan Project against spies during the war, and as anticommunist fervor took hold in the 1950s, the potential for spy-versus-spy intrigue promised to increase. Unfortunately, my career as a spy was fleeting. After two months, I found myself transferred to Camp Gordon, Georgia, for training with the military police.
I couldn't figure out why. Jack later learned that someone reported me in the company of one or two people at Harvard who might have had "leftist leanings." Now, that was a joke. I was a lot less interested in the left end of politics than the right end of the football line. I later came to suspect that I'd been blackballed by Roy Cohn, the anticommunist zealot and future counsel for Joe McCarthy. Cohn was just then enjoying national fame for his role in the convictions of accused spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He was jealous of my brother Bobby's rise as a prosecutor, and may have been trying to intimidate or harass him through smearing me.
Whatever the case, my main achievement at Camp Gordon was to set a camp record for chin-ups, with more than forty repetitions. Then, in June 1952, I was finally assigned overseas, to the 520th Military Police Service Company at Camp des Loges, near Rocquencourt, in the Paris suburb of Versailles.
Before shipping out, I traveled to Hyannis Port to say goodbye to my parents. My mother, well-meaning to the last, asked, "Well, where are you going to be?" I told her I would be in France and Germany. She came alive with ideas for teachable moments--ideas I rather fancied: "Oh, that's marvelous, Teddy! Now, in France, they have wonderful wine, because that's where they make it. And in Germany, they have wonderful beer, because that's where they make beer. And Joe," she said, turning brightly toward my father, "I think Teddy ought to be able to drink the wine and the beer, even though he isn't twenty-one yet."
Dad's answer revealed that he was in a somewhat less teachable mood. "Rose," he said, spinning around to examine her, "are you out of your mind?"
That effectively took the wind out of the sails for my permission to drink wine and beer in Europe that year. I did anyway.
What my parents didn't know was that I'd begun drinking beer and wine at Harvard. Dad had made a deal with each of his sons: if we refrained from drinking and smoking until we were twenty-one, we'd receive a reward of $1,000. Later, when my twenty-first birthday came around, I confessed to Dad that I had taken liquor, but had not smoked. Dad was true to his end of the bargain: I got $500.
With the Korean War raging and the armed services on full alert, my company had orders to guard the newly built Supreme Allied Headquarters (SHAPE) near Rocquencourt, mostly by walking the perimeter of the compound. One night on leave, I decided to taste the delights of Paris. Since the city lay only about twenty kilometers from the base, I walked there. I don't remember much about the delights, but I do recall making my way back toward the barracks at about 3:30 in the morning. Upon reaching Rocquencourt, I realized I could not identify the road to the base in the darkness. I stopped in at one of the few coffee shops still open and asked directions. The proprietor was helpful, but three men sitting at a table eyed me coldly. Somehow, I realized they were communists. French communists disliked the American military even more than ordinary French people did.
I eased out of the coffee house and started down the unlit street. As I walked I began to hear a steady choom, choom, choom, choom, choom behind me. I was being followed. By men armed with something that went choom, choom, choom, choom, choom as they walked.
I began to run. Now the choom, choom changed to a cha ting ta ting ting, as if the choom, choom weapons were now in high gear. Sticks. Sticks, beating a pattern on the road as the three men increased their pace.
I was still in great shape from football, fighting Wharton, and all those chin-ups, so I ran at full speed until one of my pursuers lost his wind and dropped out. That still left two men in the darkness with sticks. And I had no idea where I was.
I heard the pursuers closing on me. I stopped, wheeled around, and faced them. The leader looked like a bully. The other fellow was smaller. I could see that their sticks were sharpened at the ends. Pig sticks, used for jabbing at pigs to encourage them toward the pen. Then I remembered that I was armed as well: wrapped around each leg of my MP pants, anchoring the fold where they bloused over my boots, was a bicycle chain. The chains were useful for making an MP's pants look snappy, and sometimes for encouraging drunken soldiers toward the base.
I reached down and unhooked the chains. I started whirling them over my head. They made a whirr--far more menacing than the choom, choom or even the cha ting ta ting ting.
With my help, the Frenchmen eventually came around to that same opinion. I concentrated on the smaller fellow first. He'd move, and I'd go at him. Whack, with a bicycle chain. Whack. He started running backwards, and then the larger guy would lunge at me. Whack. Soon the little guy ran out of gas, and it was just me against the real bully. I kept swinging the chains as hard as I could until he gave it up and the two faded into the darkness. Panting for breath, I found my way back to the base.
After the fistfight and the close call with the communists, there was only one event that could put a capstone on my military career: a visit from my mother.
Rose Kennedy loved Paris and she swirled into the city after I'd been there a few weeks, taking a suite at a favorite hotel, the Ritz. I arranged a three-day furlough and called for her in a rented limousine, glad to see her as always. I entered the suite in the midst of a crisis: Mother couldn't find her jewelry. She'd hidden it someplace, but she'd forgotten where. We spent two or three hours combing the hotel room for the precious stones. Finally she found them--pinned to the inside back of her purse, so that she wouldn't lose them.
We drove to the Hotel du Golf near Deauville and enjoyed an overnight visit, during which we ran into some good friends. I found myself in the midst of a black-tie party for the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas, featuring Maria Tallchief. (I think I borrowed a tuxedo from one of the friends.) It was a good break from military life.
Returning to the army base late on the final night, with my mother along for the ride, I asked the driver to let me off about a hundred yards from the entrance. I didn't want my buddies to see me getting out of a limo.
I almost made it. I'd walked through the gate and was headed for the barracks when I heard rapid, tiny footsteps and a familiar voice behind me calling, "Teddy, dear! Teddy, dear! Oh, Teddy, dear!"
Do I turn around or keep walking? There was only one choice, of course. I turned around.
"Teddy, dear!" Mother's bell-like voice was loud enough to wake the guards. "Teddy, dear! You forgot your dancing shoes!"
My dancing shoes?! I watched her hurrying toward me, her small hands clutching two shiny objects. She spent a minute or two catching her breath. "Here are your dancing shoes!" I looked at them. They weren't even my dancing shoes! I thanked Mother as politely as I could, bade her good night, and turned to face what seemed to be every man in the barracks, all of whom were engrossed in the conversation.
From that moment on, I was known around the base as "Teddy Dear." Every man had the same question for me: "Teddy Dear! Do you have your dancing shoes?"
While I was in the army in France, my siblings back home were making important strides in their lives--toward their futures, and toward one another.
In October 1951, Jack and Bobby, along with our sister Pat, set off on a tour of several Eastern and Middle Eastern countries, including Vietnam. Jack was planning a challenge to the senior Republican senator from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. He wanted to sharpen his awareness of Soviet colonial pressure in several nations as a centerpiece of his campaign. The seven-week expedition yielded an unexpected bonus: my two brothers, who had spent long stretches of time apart from one another virtually since childhood, reacquainted themselves with one another as men. (Jack was thirty-four then, Bobby just shy of twenty-six.)
Left behind during the tour was the beautiful young socialite, equestrienne, and Vogue "enquiring photographer" Jacqueline Bouvier, whom Jack met at a Georgetown dinner party in May of that year. The separation hardly interrupted Jack's courtship of Jackie. The two were married on September 12, 1953, in Newport, Rhode Island. Bobby served as best man and I was an usher.
Bobby resigned his job as an attorney in the Justice Department to manage Jack's Senate campaign, with organizational brilliance. He helped steer Jack to a narrow victory over Lodge, and afterward, instead of returning to Justice, he applied for a position on the senatorial staff of one of our father's Irish Catholic friends, Joseph McCarthy, who'd become chairman of the Senate Government Operations Committee.
McCarthy by then had made his name as a rabid anticommunist witch hunter; the Washington Post cartoonist Herblock had coined the phrase "McCarthyism" two years earlier. The peak of the infamous "Era" that bore his name, though, was still a few years in the future. He had in fact visited our family at the Kennedy house in Palm Beach, and dated Eunice for a while.
Bobby went to work on the subcommittee on investigations for McCarthy, who was just then absorbed in rooting out anti-American books in public libraries. My brother joined two other fresh appointees, chief counsel Roy Cohn and Cohn's chief consultant, David Schine. Bobby was not yet twenty-eight then, and the extent of McCarthy's vile exploitation of anticommunist hysteria had not yet fully registered with him or indeed the country.
Bobby developed an instant distrust of Cohn and Schine, perceiving their cynicism and willingness to twist the truth to fit their boss's agenda. He didn't like McCarthy's frequent collaborator and ideological soul mate, the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, either; he distrusted him from the start. Bobby might have been an anticommunist, but he was sickened by the way Hoover and his allies destroyed lives without remorse.
Dad had known J. Edgar Hoover in the early days, back when crime-fighting was his focus. Dad liked him then, and had a lot of correspondence with him. My own memory is that until the cold war came to obsess him with rooting out communists in America, Hoover wasn't so bad.
In later years, as my own political career took hold, I came to believe that Hoover had to go. He was out of control, a law unto himself. He kept power by threat and terror. And he held his power for too long. I cringe every time I see his name on that building on Pennsylvania Avenue. He did some good things, but warrantless wiretaps and blackmail by the director of the FBI have no place in this country.
Bobby resigned his place on McCarthy's staff just months later, when Democratic members walked off the committee in protest of the chairman's unsavory methods. Yet his personal regard for McCarthy remained another matter. Even after the Wisconsin senator had been stripped of his credibility in 1954, and his career and reputation ruined, Bobby showed friendly feelings for him. He was castigated repeatedly for this, but he probably could not have made himself behave otherwise. Loyalty was one of my brother's greatest virtues, and he would not toss over a friend just because he had fallen out of favor with the world.
The following year, with McCarthy gone, Bobby rejoined the subcommittee as chief counsel. In 1955, with Arkansas senator John McClellan at the head of a reorganized committee, Bobby broke into national prominence as a tough investigator of corruption within the Teamsters Union. This image, in time, evolved into a slur that was perhaps the most offensive, and least accurate, of the many that Bobby absorbed from his adversaries over the years. It was a slur so contrary to his true nature that its use became an ironic family joke.
The slur was "ruthless."
I don't recall making much use of those dancing shoes that my mother handed me, but the remainder of my army time in Europe passed pleasantly enough: weekdays of drudge work, followed by weekend furloughs. I used one of those weekends to win a one-man Swiss bobsled race. I'd never been on a bobsled before. In the fall of 1952, I rounded up absentee votes for Jack's Senate race among my fellow Massachusetts soldiers. In February 1953, Pat and Jean came over to help me celebrate my twenty-first birthday. We went skiing in Austria for a week.
In May, Eunice married Sargent Shriver. So Bobby was married. Eunice was married. Jack was headed for a September wedding with Jackie in Newport. Pat would marry Peter Lawford in April 1954, and Jean would be wed to Stephen Edward Smith in May 1956. It seemed incredible to me. I'd always had a curious, half-fanciful way of thinking about my siblings as regarded marriage--and myself as well.
I never expected any of us to get married. We would be brothers and sisters, unchanging, forever.
Later that spring, the army transferred me back to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, for my discharge as a private first class. I'd hardly shaken hands with Dad when I found myself on another tour of duty--one that I was pleased to accept. He asked me to travel to Chicago and Tulsa to inspect some of the family's business investments. When I returned from that assignment, I had some surprising news for my father and the family: I was considering a political career of my own.
I spent a few weeks volunteering as a basketball coach at the South Bay Union Settlement House in Boston, and then I enrolled in a pair of summer school government courses at Harvard. In the fall of 1953, I returned to Harvard as a full-time student, determined to work hard and put the past behind me. The class I concentrated on the most that semester was Spanish, where I proudly brought my grade up to an A-minus. From then on through graduation, I pursued a tough curriculum heavily weighted toward government, economics, history, and English. It was John Kenneth Galbraith who elevated my understanding of economics. In just a few years, he would be Jack's ambassador to India. Arthur N. Holcombe, another Harvard giant who had taught Dad and all three of my brothers, made the Constitutional Convention of 1787 come alive before my eyes. Political philosophy was Holcombe's specialty, and I opened myself to his stirring historical and moral insights.
I worked at public speaking with a wonderful speaking coach named Oscar Verlaine. Four times each fall, and four times each spring, Verlaine sent me and other students into such venues as South Bay Settlement and various local high schools to address civic matters, such as the Red Cross. Perhaps our topics weren't earth-shaking, but we learned how to develop bonds with our audiences via a sense of conviction, brevity, and humor, tailoring our remarks to their specific level of understanding. These engagements also reinforced in me the satisfactions of public service.
My residence now was Winthrop House, on the northern bank above the Charles River. Joe Jr. and Jack had lived there, and Jack's room is now reserved for guests at the university. Winthrop was a popular residence for athletes--and, incidentally, one of the first houses to open itself to Jewish and Catholic students. I was ineligible for varsity football when I returned to Harvard in 1953, but I played for Winthrop House. I have especially fond memories of a special game we played in the fall of that year. We traveled to New Haven to play the Eli's top residential club, Davenport, the day before the official Harvard-Yale Game. We beat the Davenport boys, 6-0, thanks partly to the pile-driving play of a certain stranger to my Winthrop teammates. It was Bobby. I'd invited him to come up from New York and watch the game, but Bobby preferred to play. He'd been wearing neckties and white shirts for ten years, writing for the Boston Post and working for Dad and the Justice Department. Perfect, I thought. Let's see what he has left. I found him a house uniform and set of pads; he changed into them en route. He played defensive end in that game, and for an old guy, he did pretty well. In fact, he was the star of the game. As he was coming off the field at the end, our elderly house master, Ronald M. Ferry, gave him a close look and said, "Bob, aren't you supposed to graduate fairly soon?"
In 1954, I finally realized my dream of trotting out onto the field for the Crimson varsity. It was not an easy path. I started off on the eighth squad at Harvard. That was the lowest, I think. But I hung in there; I knew I wasn't the best athlete on the team, not by a long shot, but I was determined to work hard and stay with it.
And sure enough, as the games went on, a lot of the better-ranked players started to drop off the team. They'd get hurt, or decide they didn't want to continue, or football conflicted with chemistry lab. I was lucky. Lucky and determined. I gradually rose up the depth chart. In the Bucknell game the coach finally sent me onto the field. I was so excited to be in the game that I didn't notice when I got a tooth knocked out.
I hardly even merited a sentence from the student paper's sportswriter, David Halberstam. I had a chance to earn my varsity "H" in that year's Yale classic--I needed just four minutes of playing time--but on the first play after I entered the game, an Eli ball carrier swept around my end of the line for a sixty-yard gain. Out I came, as Dad threw up his hands on the sideline and my brothers watched in disappointment from the stands. I didn't get back in and I didn't win my varsity letter, though we beat Yale and won the Big Three title. Everyone at Harvard was celebrating--almost everyone.
In my final season in the fall 1955 I not only started, but averaged fifty-six minutes a game. Those were the days when the entire line still played both defense and offense. The team itself struggled--we had a dismal 2-7 record for the season--but we never lost heart and we still gave our all. I caught a touchdown pass as we defeated Columbia on October 5, by a score of 21 to 7. My most exciting personal moment, though, came in the Harvard-Yale Game, when a pass went skidding off the hands of its intended receiver and I reached out and grabbed it and hung on to it as I rumbled into the end zone. I won my letter, but we lost the game, 21-7. This time almost everyone at Harvard was down in the dumps--but not everyone. Dad, who'd brought a couple dozen of his friends from New York and Boston by train, charged into the locker room with Jack and Bobby to noisily congratulate me. I knew they should tone it down, but with Dad and my brothers smiling so broadly over my TD catch and the earning of my letter, I can't say that I was sorry for their enthusiasm.
I graduated from Harvard in the spring of 1956, satisfied that I had proved myself both academically and on the playing field. My grades were more than respectable, and I even received a letter from the Green Bay Packers wanting to know whether I wanted to try out for the team. I declined Green Bay's kind offer, but, all in all, I was feeling pretty good.
That August at the Democratic convention, Jack made a surprising bid for the nomination as vice president under Adlai Stevenson. He'd electrified the delegates on opening night with his narration of a moving film about the history of the party, which garnered him a lot of positive attention. Jack jumped into the open nomination process. As much as Jack wanted it, Dad was not in favor of his move for the vice presidential nomination because he was sure that President Eisenhower would defeat Stevenson and Jack's political career would be over. In my mother's memoir, she writes of Jack being persuaded to run, despite my father's objections, by a Louisiana delegate who pleaded with him to stay in the race after their delegation had stuck their neck out for him. In an amazing twist of history and fate, that Louisiana delegate was my future father-in-law, Edmund Reggie, then a thirty-year-old judge, who had managed to swing the Louisiana delegation behind my brother when Governor Earl K. Long had gone to the horse races. At the end of the day, Jack didn't win the nomination, but his experience at the convention was a win all the way around: my father was relieved; Jack's eloquence and grace in concession won him enormous political capital, raising his prospects as a serious contender for the presidency in 1960; and though I could not have imagined the significance at the time, our family began a friendship with the Reggies of Louisiana that some thirty years in the future would transform my life.
Meanwhile, I was eager to see more of the world after graduating from Harvard. I asked Jack where he thought I should go, and he suggested North Africa. He was interested in the global anticolonial movements, and he wanted me to look at the African countries just emerging from European rule: Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, which was still engaged in a long and bitter war of independence with France. I traveled with Fred Holborn, the distinguished Harvard political scientist who'd been an instructor of mine--my brothers and father always believed in bringing a knowledgeable source along when traveling in unfamiliar countries, especially those of geopolitical importance: a live-in tutor, so to speak. Jack had arranged meetings for us with key people in certain places, and I had made arrangements with the International News Service as a freelance reporter, just as Jack had done a few years earlier.
We drove by car across Spain and took a ferry into Morocco, experiencing our first taste of the exotic early on, high up in the steep and jagged Atlas Mountains. There we were to meet with Sidi Muhammad ibn Yusuf, the popular nationalist sultan whose exile to Madagascar by the French in 1953 had sparked an uprising. The French, realizing their mistake, returned this eminence to the Moroccan throne in 1955. Just weeks before our visit, Muhammad had negotiated Morocco's independence at Paris.
Our visit with Muhammad was memorable for a number of reasons. One was that another guest scheduled to arrive at the same time was El Glohi, a powerful Moroccan militant and recent rival of the king's. El Glohi's visit was of interest to my editor because he had tried to kill Muhammad on two or three previous occasions. The editors assured me that this meeting would be somewhat more amiable. In fact, it was to be a reconciliation; El Glohi was heading up the mountains to pay his tribute and swear allegiance to the king.
Holborn and I missed this reunion. It was held inside Muhammad's huge tent, with no outsiders allowed. We were, however, invited to the dazzling ceremonial dinner that followed. The festivities consumed most of an afternoon. The king's harem, seventy women strong, was present. There was dancing and the cutting of a calf. Out on a plain visible from the tent, bareback riders raced along on powerful horses, with rifles tucked under their arms. They would grasp the rifles with an opposite hand and, while at full gallop, hurl them fifty or seventy-five feet into the air. Without looking, they would grab the guns as they descended and fire them into the air. Then they would bounce off and back onto the horses. It was an unbelievable show. That night, Fred and I were shown to our sleeping area: a corner of the tent about five feet from these horses.
This experience paled, however, beside our next destination--Algeria, where we traveled around with the Algerian army. We witnessed a prologue to the Battle of Algiers. The French, who were winning at this point, had trapped the city's leaders in the sewer system. We watched as an officer opened a manhole cover and lowered a birdcage with a dove inside--a guarantee of safety to anyone down below who saw it.
The French thought they were going to prevail, but you could get the sense that it wasn't going to happen. The French would never bring these outraged nationalists to heel. The insurrection was all around. The Algerians had experienced the most brutal kinds of torture from the colonial army, and this enhanced their hatred and bolstered the movement for independence. Nothing could stop it.
After Algeria, I made a rendezvous with Jack, as we'd planned. He joined me for a sail in the Mediterranean after the Chicago convention. I gave him a detailed report of what I had witnessed during my six weeks of travel. Jack was keenly interested; but our hiatus was cut short by an urgent message from America: the pregnant Jackie, who had suffered a miscarriage the previous year, had just suffered the second of her three such losses. My brother hurried home to be with his wife. Yet he did not forget our conversation. In a speech a little more than a year later, the new senator John F. Kennedy tacitly drew upon the views I'd shared with him to carefully advocate for a "tolerable peace" in the Algerian conflict, arguing that "the dangers of communism only become greater as settlement is postponed." This was essentially the same view my brother held regarding the still young Vietnam conflict at the time of his assassination in 1963.
With Jack in the Senate to inspire me, public service was all but inevitable now as my career of choice, and the law was its foundation stone. I was interested in the law school at Stanford University in California--my grades didn't quite qualify me for Harvard Law--but ultimately I decided to follow Bobby's path to the University of Virginia Law School at Charlottesville.
These were a rousing three years, filled with fun and learning and new friendships. My roommate was John Varick Tunney, the son of the former heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney. When I met Gene, I found him to be similar to Dad in his no-nonsense, rough-and-ready approach to life. John was destined to become a Democratic congressman and then senator from California, and among the very closest of my lifelong friends. John is the godfather to Teddy Jr., and I am godfather to John's son Teddy.
We lived in a converted stable a short distance from the campus, where we staged a couple of memorable parties and had a lot of fun. The open, empty country roads were a great escape for me, a place to feel the fresh air on my face and contemplate the good things in life. Unfortunately, from time to time I lost track of the speedometer on my drives, but there always seemed to be a state trooper around to remind me. Still, life was great. I had good friends. And for a while at least, I stopped worrying about "catching up" and savored the moment.
It was Tunney who taught me mountain climbing, more or less. Exposed me to mountain climbing is probably more accurate. He and I and another law student and good friend of ours, named John Goemans, spent four weeks at the International Law School at The Hague studying contract law with the great Hardy Dillard. This put us within range of the famous mountains among the Pennine Alps of Switzerland--the Mischabel group that includes the Matterhorn and the Rimpfischhorn.
Tunney, who'd climbed while at Yale, decided to let me cut my teeth on an easy one, the Rimpfischhorn, which is only four thousand meters high and comes to an absolute point at the top. We went up with two brothers from the Swiss ski team, Auguste and Heinz Julen. It was probably the most terrifying experience of my life.
All of us were tied together, with me in between Auguste Julen and Tunney. I managed all right until we got close to the top. Maybe twenty feet. I saw Auguste put his foot on a little ledge and another foot someplace near that, and grab a handhold somewhere else, and boost himself up to a larger ledge. He looked down at me and said, "Now it's your turn."
After all the climbing we'd done to get to that point, my legs and arms felt like leaden weights. But I had no choice but to keep going. I was almost there. I put my foot where Auguste's had been, and my hand where I thought his had been, and I moved my other leg toward the other foothold--which wasn't there. I had just time enough to yell, "Tension! Tension!" which you yell if you're about to fall, and then boom! Down I went. I fell about twenty feet. The rope that encircled my waist slipped up underneath my arms, and I was swinging out there in space about three thousand feet above the valley. I resisted the temptation to raise my arms and grab the rope. If I raised them, I would slip through the loop and go spiraling through space. And if Auguste couldn't hold the rope, it would be lights out for all of us.
Auguste wrapped the rope around a boulder to keep it from slipping away and then slowly lowered me, letting out more and more slack. But I was beneath an overhang, and I could not touch the mountainside. I looked around and saw Tunney, just about at my level. He reached out and pulled me toward the mountain. He got me back to a very small ledge that could barely fit both of us, but it did. I was absolutely exhausted. The wind was fierce. I called out, "I don't think I can go up any farther. I really don't think I can make it. I'm too tired!"
"Boys, you've got to climb," Auguste called back. "You've got to get up to the top of the mountain." Or perish, was the unspoken implication.
I owe my life to Tunney. He looked around and spotted another route--a couloir, a corridor formed by large rocks. John managed to wedge himself in between the rocks and move his shoulders upward, while keeping his knees braced against the sides. In this way he managed the fifteen or twenty feet to where Auguste waited. I studied his movements carefully and then emulated them, which is why I am not hanging out there to this day.
On the far side of the peak was a funicular. We took it back down, and I found myself wondering why we hadn't taken it up as well. I made my mind up that was one sport I would never, ever get into.
The next day we climbed the Matterhorn.
Back at the University of Virginia, in the classroom, I threw myself into the study of law as never before. In this pursuit, as in our travel and good times, John and I sparked one another. We teamed up for the classic law school exercise known as moot court. The competition in this extracurricular drill consisted of seventy-five teams, with debates structured as tennis tournament eliminations. The process spanned nearly the whole of my three years at UVA.
"Free Speech" was the issue at hand, and John and I took the more liberal position. We had to write briefs that were the product of enormous research. To prepare for our oral arguments, we practiced against a team that we would not meet in the pairings, but which held the opposing view. By the time we reached the semifinals, the quality of competition had skyrocketed. The finals were in May 1959, and Bobby--who'd been through early rounds of the competition when he was in law school--and my sister Pat came down from New York to watch.
We had worked hard to get to this point in the competition and every nerve was on end. The pressure was only heightened by the caliber of our judges: retired Supreme Court justice and former solicitor general of the United States Stanley Reed; the former solicitor general and attorney general who had famously cross-examined Hermann Goring at the Nuremberg trials, the lord chancellor of the United Kingdom David Maxwell Fyfe, the Earl of Kilmuir; and U.S. Court of Appeals judge for the Fourth Circuit Clement Haynsworth (ten years into the future, as a senator, I would vote against Judge Haynsworth's nomination by Richard Nixon to the Supreme Court). Our opposing team was led by Wayne Lustig, a silvertongued southerner who made what even John and I considered an A-plus argument. Yes, the pressure was definitely on.
In the most exciting and rewarding moment of my life to that time, and among those of all time, John and I were declared the winners of the moot court competition. We were overjoyed.
Another great tradition at Virginia Law School was the Student Legal Forum, and I was in charge of getting distinguished legal and political figures to come and speak to the students. I was successful at getting some real stars to visit the forum, because I had an ally in Jack. He helped us get Hubert Humphrey, who came down and was captivating. A thousand students showed up to hear him, which pleased Jack enormously when he heard it. We brought in Edward Bennett Williams, who was just then defending Jimmy Hoffa in court. We tried to sandbag Williams on whether Hoffa even had a tenable defense, but he blew us out of the water in about thirty seconds. We had the great union leader Walter Reuther, who was dynamic and spellbinding. We had Victor Riesel, the hard-nosed antiracketeering labor columnist, who just a few months earlier had been blinded by sulfuric acid thrown into his eyes by an assailant on a Manhattan sidewalk. Supreme Court justice William Brennan was another one of our incredible speakers.
I still wince a little when I recall the time we invited Prescott Bush, George Bush's father and George W.'s grandfather, a distinguished senator from Connecticut and an enormously gracious, dignified person. But not exactly a big marquee name at the University of Virginia Law School. As the date of his appearance drew near, we saw the reverse of what usually happened with ticket requests: instead of increasing, the demand grew less and less. We'd drawn a thousand spectators for Humphrey and eight hundred for Williams. But with Prescott Bush, as the reality of the numbers started to sink in, we realized we'd need only about four or five hundred seats. Then we thought we'd better get down to two hundred.
We ended up listening to Prescott Bush in a small room with seventy-five chairs. But he was incredibly pleasant. We had dinner afterward--and, like most speakers, he was much more interesting at the dinner.
Several weeks later, as I was driving Jack to some appointment or other in Boston, my brother reached over and honked the horn. He pointed to another car. "I know who that is," Jack exclaimed. "That's Pres Bush!" In the passenger seat was his son, George Herbert Walker Bush. Both cars stopped, and we all got out and yakked it up. The Bushes were headed up to Maine. George Bush mentioned to me that his father had told him about his visit to Virginia Law School and "the nice young Kennedy boy." I had privately disagreed with some of Prescott Bush's views, but I had a cordial personal relationship with him--just as I would have with the next two generations of Bushes.
After the family's traditional Thanksgiving dinner in Hyannis Port in November 1956, Jack and Joe Sr. left the table and repaired to the study near the living room for a private talk. When they emerged, grinning, arms around each other's shoulders, the rest of us learned that Jack had decided to run for president in 1960.
Their talk apparently had been a kind of moot court in reverse: Jack citing all the reasons why he should not run (he was Catholic, only thirtynine, none of the party's leaders had indicated any support for such a move), and our father countering each one. Jack would not announce his decision until early in the election year. But a charge of energy ran through our family at once. Getting Jack reelected to the Senate, and then helping him become president--this had become our mission.
In October 1957, I got "aced out," courtesy of Jack, of a chance to see a professional football game, and as a result ended up meeting my future wife. The occasion was a Sunday afternoon talk that Jack "suggested" I give at the dedication ceremony for the Kennedy Physical Education Building at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart. Our family had donated the building in memory of Kathleen. My mother, Eunice, and Jean had all attended Manhattanville College, as had the former Ethel Skakel.
I had spent Saturday night in Dad's New York apartment with Jack. Giving a talk at a women's college was the last thing on my mind. The Washington Redskins were in town to play the 3-1 Giants, and Dad and I had planned to go see the game on Sunday. It was Jack, not me, who'd originally agreed to give the talk. But when my brother showed up at the apartment and saw me there he said, "Oh! Dad, since Teddy's here, why don't we let him do it? I want to go to the football game."
I didn't think that was a terribly good idea. I'd looked forward to seeing that game. Jack held his ground: it was going to be a great game, and he wanted to see it. Our father said, "Fine. Why don't you two work it out?" We worked it out, and Jack went to the football game.
I went to the college with my sister Jean. I gave the speech. It was successful enough, I suppose. After my remarks that Sunday afternoon, Margo Murray, a friend of Jean's, took me by the hand and introduced me to an exquisitely beautiful young student named Joan Bennett, who had just turned twenty-one. Jean was with Margo for the introduction, but she had not met Joan before either. I learned later that Joan had done some modeling and was a gifted piano player, which earned her a lot of points with Mother.
I definitely wanted to see more of Joan. I thought fast, and talked Margo and Joan into driving me to the airport for my flight back to Virginia. Joan and I hit it off in the car. I took her out every time I came up to New York, and almost before we knew it we were on a fast track toward marriage. The family was thrilled. She was beautiful, she was fun, and she played piano duets with Mother. It was time for me to think about settling down and getting married, and Joan seemed like a perfect match.
As for that football game--Jack had the great pleasure of watching the Giants get buried by the Redskins, 31-14.