Kennedy: The Classic Biography Read Online Free PDF Page B

foreign affairs. Mine were domestic. He asked me one day in 1953—long before national politics was on our horizon—what Cabinet posts would interest me most, if I ever had a choice; and I replied, “Justice, Labor and Health-Education-Welfare.” “I wouldn’t have any interest in any of those,” he said emphatically, “only Secretary of State or Defense.”
    Yet all these differences made very little difference in his attitude. He was not simply a sum of all the elements in his background—a Catholic war veteran from a wealthy Boston family who had graduated from Harvard. His most important qualities he had acquired and developed on his own, and those who attempted to pigeonhole him according to the categories in his case history were sadly mistaken.
    Clearly he was proud of his military service, his Purple Heart and his Navy and Marine Corps Medal. As a constant reminder of that brush with death, he kept on his desk preserved in plastic the coconut shell on which he had scratched his message of rescue from that far-off Pacific island. As a young Congressman he had been a leader in the postwar efforts of the more progressive veterans’ organizations to secure passage of a Veterans’ Housing Bill. But he was neither a professional warrior nor a professional veteran. He never boasted or even reminisced about his wartime experiences. He never complained about his wounds. When a flippant high school youth asked him, as we walked down a street in Ashland, Wisconsin, in 1959, how he came to be a hero, he gaily replied, “It was easy—they sank my boat.”
    He was unawed by generals and admirals (even more so once he was President) and had grave doubts about military indoctrination. When still hospitalized by the Navy in 1944, he had written to a friend concerning the “super-human ability of the Navy to screw up everything they touch.”
Even the simple delivery of a letter frequently overburdens this heaving puffing war machine of ours. God save this country of ours from those patriots whose war cry is “what this country needs is to be run with military efficiency.”
    He had also achieved some notice in 1949 when he stated on the floor of the House that “the leadership of the American Legion has not had a constructive thought for the benefit of this country since 1918.” (Some insist that his original retort was somewhat more sweeping and bitter than this Congressional Record version.)
    He was proud of his academic training but did not believe that all wisdom resided in Harvard or other Eastern schools. (As President, upon receiving an honorary degree at Yale, he observed, “Now I have the best of both worlds—a Yale degree and a Harvard education.”) And he was proud to have been elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers, for few Catholics had ever been elected. His defeat for that post in 1955 was a new and disappointing experience for a man accustomed to winning. But he selected his Senate and White House aides without regard to the source of their education, and he recognized that his own Ivy League background was not always a political asset. When I included in the first draft of an article for his alumni magazine the statement:
A Harvard diploma is considered by most Massachusetts voters to be evidence of devotion to the public,
    the Senator changed it to read:
A Harvard diploma is considered by many Massachusetts voters, although not all I hasten to add ,to be evidence of some talent and ability.
    He did not believe that all virtue resided in the Catholic Church, nor did he believe that all non-Catholics would (or should) go to hell. He felt neither self-conscious nor superior about his religion but simply accepted it as part of his life. He resented the attempt of an earlier biographer to label him as “not deeply religious”; he faithfully attended Mass each Sunday, even in the midst of fatiguing out-of-state travels when no voter would know whether he attended services or not. But not once in