Kennedy: The Classic Biography Read Online Free PDF

children, and he had been accustomed to the social circles of Palm Beach, New York and the French Riviera. My own background was typical of a middle-income family in a Middle Western city, Lincoln, Nebraska.
    I had never been out of the United States and rarely out of the Middle West. But the Senator, as a student, tourist, assistant to his Ambassador father (1938), naval officer (1941-1945), journalist (1941 and 1945) and Congressman (1947-1953), had traveled to every major continent and talked with the presidents and prime ministers, the shopkeepers and scholars, of some thirty-seven countries.
    I had been seventeen years old when the Second World War ended. He had been one of its genuine combat heroes. Having pulled strings to be accepted for active duty, when his back might have excused him from service altogether, he inspired and assisted his shipmates to safety when the torpedo boat he commanded, the PT-109, was rammed in two by an enemy destroyer during a night operation in the Solomons. An expert swimmer from his days at Cape Cod and on the Harvard swimming team, he had towed one injured sailor three dark and freezing miles, grasping the man’s life-belt strap in his teeth, although his own back and health had been shattered.
    He had attended the exclusive Choate Preparatory School for boys, graduated with honors from Harvard, and studied briefly at Princeton,[17] Stanford and the London School of Economics. My total tuition in six years at the University of Nebraska, from which I received my degree in law, could not have paid for a single year at Harvard.
    He was a Catholic—by heritage, habit and conviction—and a friend of Cardinals. I was a Unitarian, a denomination whose absence of dogma and ritual places it at the opposite end of the religious spectrum.
    He had never been to the prairie states; I had never been to the New England states. He was thirty-five (born May 29, 1917), and I was twenty-four—although I carefully kept my age a secret from him at the time, and he seemed more amused than astonished when he learned it two years later.
    His two grandfathers, the sons of Irish immigrants, had both been prominent and successful politicians in their native Boston; mine were poor immigrants from Denmark and Russia. (He once sent me a postcard from Copenhagen, admiring its beauty and wondering “why the Danes ever emigrated.”)
    His father had gained fame and power through skillful, sometimes cynical, operations in the worlds of finance and commerce; and Joseph Kennedy’s 1940 break with the administration of Franklin Roosevelt after holding a series of appointive offices in it had been followed by an increasingly outspoken conservatism, although he remained a registered Democrat. My father, on the other hand, had been a crusading lawyer and reformer—a student on Henry Ford’s “peace ship,” a pioneer for human rights and woman suffrage, the draftsman of Nebraska’s unique unicameral legislature, the founder of its all-public power system, an insurgent Republican Attorney General, an associate of the independent Senator George Norris and a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt—although remaining a registered Republican.
    As a Congressman and candidate for the Senate, Jack Kennedy had been privately scornful of what he called the “real liberals,” and he knew and cared comparatively little about the problems of civil rights and civil liberties. He never joined the Americans for Democratic Action and was skeptical of the liberal American Veterans Committee. I had helped organize a Lincoln chapter of the ADA and a local race relations organization, lobbied the Nebraska legislature for a fair employment practices bill and joined in a Supreme Court brief amicus curiae on the school desegregation cases.
    Although he came to know and understand from his constituents, as a Congressman and candidate, the problems of poor housing and unemployment he had never experienced as a Kennedy, his chief interests were in