An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 Read Online Free PDF Page A

council, organizing all major class events, and winning entrance into significant clubs such as the Institute of 1770, the Dickey, and Hasty Pudding, which conferred high status on their members. Yet admission to the innermost circle of student standing through membership in the most prestigious clubs, such as Porcellian and AD, was denied him. For such appointments, one’s pedigree still made all the difference.
    On the ball field Joe had his frustrations as well. After making the freshman baseball team, a number of injuries kept him from the varsity until his junior year, and then another injury consigned him to the bench through most of his senior year. Only when team captain and starting pitcher Charles McLaughlin asked the coach to put Joe in the final Yale game did he manage to earn a coveted varsity letter, and later stories that Joe’s father had arranged the substitution by threatening to withhold a license McLaughlin wanted to operate a movie theater in Boston diminished the accomplishment of having gained the prize. Other accounts describing Joe’s refusal to give McLaughlin the game ball, which Joe caught for the final out, further tarnished his standing with classmates.
    Only in the realm of business did Joe have an unmitigated sense of triumph while at Harvard. During the summers of his junior and senior years, he and a friend bought a tour bus from a failing business. Boldly approaching Mayor Fitzgerald for a license to operate from a bus stand at South Station, the city’s choice location for such an enterprise, Joe turned an unprofitable venture into a going concern. With Joe acting as tour guide and his partner driving, they converted a $600 investment into an amazing $10,000 gain over two years.
    After graduating in 1912, Joe decided on a career in banking, the “basic profession” on which all other businesses depended, as Joe put it. This was not the product of study in a Harvard economics or business course. (He later enjoyed describing how he had to drop a banking and finance course because he did so poorly in it.) Instead, Joe came to this conclusion through keenly observing contemporary American financial practices. That spring, congressional hearings had described how the “astounding” power and influence of bankers over the national economy gave anyone ambitious for wealth on a grand scale a model to imitate. And Joe Kennedy was nothing if not ambitious. Whereas progressives turned the power of the bankers into a justification for democratizing reform, Joe saw it as a competitive challenge. He wanted to be the first Irish American to penetrate a preserve of some of Boston’s wealthiest and most prominent old-school families.
    Harvard degree in hand, Joe became a clerk in his father’s Columbia Trust. There, during the summer of 1912, he worked as an apprentice under Alfred Wellington, the bank’s thirty-nine-year-old treasurer. Recognizing that his pupil had uncommon talent and ambition, Wellington urged him to become a state bank examiner as a way to learn the essentials of the industry. After he passed the civil service exam and was placed on a list of potential examiners, Joe persuaded Mayor Fitzgerald to lobby the governor by pointing out that the state had no Irish Catholic bank examiners. The political pressure combined with Joe’s merits to win him an appointment. For a year and a half he traveled around the state, learning the intricacies of the industry and impressing senior executives as a brilliant banker in the making.
    As a consequence, when a downtown Boston bank threatened a takeover of Columbia Trust, Joe knew what he had to do to sustain the autonomy of one of the city’s few Irish-owned financial institutions: He needed to raise enough money to outbid the rival bank, which had made an offer that a majority of stockholders wanted to accept. He also knew that appeals to local pride could strengthen his case. But money was key, and the president of the city’s mainline