His loyal friend K. LeMoyne Billings, who was a classmate at Choate, waited years before revealing how much Kennedy had suffered. “Jack never wanted us to talk about this,” Billings said in an oral history for the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, “but now that Bobby has gone and Jack is gone, I think it really should be told … Jack Kennedy all during his life had few days when he wasn’t in pain or sick in some way.” Billings added that he seldom heard Kennedy complain. Another old friend, Henry James, who met Jack at Stanford University in 1940, eventually came to understand, he told a biographer, that Kennedy was not merely reluctant to complain about pain and his health but was psychologically unable to do so. “He was heartily ashamed” of his illnesses, James said. “They were a mark of effeminacy, of weakness, which he wouldn’t acknowledge. I think all that macho stuff was compensation—all that chasing after women—compensation for something that he hadn’t got.” Kennedy was fanatic about maintaining a deep suntan—he would remain heavily tanned all of his adult life—and he once explained, James said, that “it gives me confidence.… It makes me feel strong, healthy, attractive.” A deep bronzing of the skin when exposed to sunlight was, in fact, one of the symptoms of Addison’s disease.
Kennedy had few options other than being strong and attractive; his father saw to that. Joseph Kennedy viewed his son’s illness as a rite of passage. “I see him on TV, in rain and cold, bareheaded,” Kennedy told the writer William Manchester in 1961, “and I don’t worry. I know nothing can happen to him. I tell you, something’s watching out for him. I’ve stood by his deathbed four times. Each time I said good-bye to him, and he always came back.… You can’t put your finger on it, but there’s that difference. When you’ve been through something like that back, and the Pacific, what can hurt you? Who’s going to scare you?”
Jack was always striving to be strong for his father; to finish first, to shape his life in ways that would please Joe. Jack’s elder brother, Joseph Jr., always in flourishing health, had been his father’s favorite, the son destined for a successful political career in Washington. With Joe Jr.’s death in 1944 as a naval aviator, Jack became the focus of Joe Kennedy’s aspirations. In Jack’s eyes, his father could do little wrong. Many of Jack’s friends thought otherwise, but learned to say nothing. “Jack was sick all the time,” Charles Spalding told me in 1997, “and the old man could be an asshole around his kids.” During a visit to the Kennedy home in Palm Beach, Florida, in the late 1940s, Spalding said, he and his wife, Betty, were preparing to go to a movie with Jack and his date, Charlotte MacDonald. Spalding went upstairs with Jack and Charlotte to say good night to Joe, who was shaving. The father turned to Charlotte and said scathingly, “Why don’t you get a live one?” Spalding was appalled by the gratuitous comment about his best friend’s chronic poor health and couldn’t resist making a disparaging remark about Joe Kennedy to Jack. The son’s defense of his father was instinctive: “Everybody wants to knock his jock off, but he made the whole thing possible.”
Charles Bartlett, another old friend, saw both Joe Kennedy’s toughness and his importance to his son. Bartlett, who became friends with Jack in Palm Beach after the war, declared that Joe Kennedy “was in it all the way. I don’t think there was ever a moment that he didn’t spend worrying how to push Jack’s cause,” especially as his son sought the presidency in 1960.
“He pushed them all,” Bartlett, who later became the Washington bureau chief of the Chattanooga Times, told me in an interview for this book. “He pushed Bobby into the Justice Department, and he made Jack do things that Jack would probably rather not have done. He was very strong; he’d done things for the kids and wanted them to do some things for him. He didn’t bend. Joe was tough.” And yet, Bartlett added, “I just found that, in so many things, his judgment down the road was really enormous. You had to admire him.”
Jewel Reed vividly recalled her first visit to a family gathering at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and the intense energy Joe Kennedy focused on his children. “The table was dynamic, and Mr. Kennedy was checking up on everybody about whether they had come in first or second or third in tennis or yachting or whatever,” she said in an interview for this book. “And he wanted them to be number one. That stuck with me a long time. I remembered how intensely he had focused on their winning.”
There was a high cost, Reed added. “His values that he imposed upon his children were difficult. His buying things. I hate to use the word bribery, but there was bribery in his agenda often.” During Jack Kennedy’s first Senate campaign, in 1952, Reed said, when he stunned the experts by defeating Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., “the billboards in Massachusetts came to about a quarter of a million dollars. That was a long, long time ago, and a quarter of a million was an awful lot of money.” Reed also said that Joe Kennedy purchased thousands of copies of Profiles in Courage, Jack’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, published in 1956, “to keep it on top of the bestseller list. I don’t know what he did with all those books. That was bribery in a way. He was pushing, and if it cost money, he paid it. I’m sure that the children couldn’t have felt comfortable about that.”
The point, Reed added, was that Joe Kennedy “loved his family. It was very evident, and I remember Teddy [Edward M. Kennedy, Joe’s youngest child] paying tribute to his father in saying that he was always there when they needed him. And that’s saying a lot.”
It was different with Rose Kennedy. As Jack’s friends knew, he was full of misgivings about his mother. Kennedy once said to his aide Kenny O’Donnell that he could not recall his mother ever telling him, “I love you.” Charles Spalding got a firsthand glimpse of a rare flash of Jack’s hostility toward his mother. “I remember being down in Palm Beach and she [Rose Kennedy] came by in the middle of lunch and said to Jack, ‘Oh, baby, I just hate the idea of your having to go back [to Washington].’ Jack just blurted out, ‘If you hadn’t pushed me to be a success, I could stay here.’”
In an interview in 1990 with British biographer Nigel Hamilton, author of JFK: Reckless Youth, a definitive account of Kennedy’s early years, Spalding speculated that Jack’s craving for women and his compulsive need to shower, as often as five times a day, were linked to a lack of mothering. Kennedy, Spalding said, “hated physical touching—people taking physical liberties with him—which I assume must go back to his mother and the fact that she was 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.”
“What is touch?” Spalding added. “It must come from some deeper maternal security—arms, warmth, kisses, hugs.… Maybe sex is the closest prize there is, that holds the whole thing together. I mean if you have sex with anybody you care about at all, you feel you’ve been touched.…”
In an extraordinary series of interviews, one of Jack Kennedy’s lovers has candidly described his strengths and weaknesses as she saw them during a bittersweet relationship that spanned four years during which he campaigned for and won the presidency. The woman, who subsequently married and had a successful career, agreed to share her insights only upon a promise of anonymity. She had met Kennedy, then a U.S. senator, at a fund-raising dinner in Boston in the late 1950s; she was nineteen years old, a student at Radcliffe, and he began flirting with her.
“It was glamorous,” she recalled. “It was supposed to be terrific. It was supposed to be just what anybody would want, what any woman would want. During that early time there would be looking at me. There would be nodding at me. There would be leaning