Kennedy: The Classic Biography Read Online Free PDF Page A

Massachusetts politician—aspired to that profession. (Perhaps young Jack foresaw the charge that he and his two younger brothers would later hear of “too many Kennedys.”) Early in our acquaintance he told me that he had considered careers as a lawyer, a journalist, a professor of history or political science, or an officer in the Foreign Service. (A brief try at Stanford Business School apparently persuaded him to seek more interesting fields.) But after Joe’s death, he entered the political arena— not to take Joe’s place, as is often alleged, not to compete subconsciously with him, but as an expression of his own ideals and interests in an arena thereby opened to him.
    His entry was neither involuntary nor illogical. “Everything seemed to point to it in 1946,” he said. Both his grandfathers had held elective office, and as a boy he had accompanied his Grandfather Fitzgerald to political rallies, heard him sing “Sweet Adeline,” and watched him, he once told me, waste too much time afterward with hangers-on while his grandmother waited patiently in the car. An old-time Boston chronicler, Clem Norton, believes young Jack’s first speech was to a group of Fitzgerald’s cronies at a Parker House Hotel gathering. After the boy had been waiting outside for an hour or so, he was brought in, and old John F. picked him up and placed him on a table with the words: “Here’s my grandson, here’s the finest grandson in the world.” To which young John F. responded, “My Grandpa is the finest grandpa in the world.” And the crowd cheered Jack Kennedy’s first public speech.
    But, as always, he was listening and learning more than speaking. He listened to his father discuss his own high appointive offices and Roosevelt and the New Deal at the dinner table. At Harvard, on an assignment from Professor Holcombe, he had spent a year reading every utterance of an obscure Republican Congressman. (“The thought,” he later wrote, “that some zealous and critical sophomore is now dissecting my own record in a similar class often causes me some concern.”) As a student and assistant to his father, he had met politicians in England, France and elsewhere.
    In the South Pacific he had debated politics with his companions amid the grim toll of international political disorder. In a brief fling at journalism he had observed power politics at Potsdam and the San Francisco UN Conference and covered the British elections.
    All this had sharpened his interest in public affairs and public service. “I never would have run for office if Joe had lived,” he said. But Joe had died, a seat was open, and Jack Kennedy knew he wanted to be a participant, not an observer. He was, in many ways, an old-fashioned patriot—not in the narrow nationalistic sense but in his deep devotion to the national interest. He had compared firsthand the political and economic systems of many countries on several continents, and he greatly preferred our own. He shared Buchan’s belief that “democracy…was primarily an attitude of mind, a spiritual testament” and that “politics is still the greatest and the most honorable adventure.”
    Although by the time we met in 1953 he had achieved considerable success as a politician, he had no grandiose picture of himself as a chosen savior of mankind from any specific evil. But he did recognize, with his customary objectivity that put both modesty and ego aside, that he possessed abilities, ideals and public appeal which could be combined to help the nation with whatever problems it faced. In all the years that followed, however the problems and his public image may have changed, that private vision of himself and his role never altered.
    DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES
    When I first began to work for him, it seemed we had nothing in common.
    He was worth an estimated ten million dollars, owing primarily to the vast trust funds his father had established many years earlier for each of the nine Kennedy