The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 Read Online Free PDF Page B

prospective customers arrived at South Station, and another company had the right to park there.
    Joe was not one to nibble around the edges of this new business. He went to see Mayor Fitzgerald. As much as the politician disliked his daughter’sboyfriend, Fitzgerald could at least appreciate Joe’s initiative. Within a few days the man at South Station learned that his buses could no longer park there, and the new possessor of the coveted space maneuvered the Mayflower into the vacated spot. For a short while Joe worked as the guide, wearing a black and white cap and shouting through the megaphone. Such plebeian endeavors, however, were not for him, especially when he could cheaply hire others. For three summers, Joe and his friend ran the service, netting more than five thousand dollars, an enormous sum for summer labors. Joe had seen again that initiative alone was a fool’s parlay and fairness a loser’s gambit. No matter how good your idea, it was equally who you knew and how you used them that mattered.
    O n the baseball diamond Joe had defined himself as one of the better-known members of his class, a student athlete who had every prospect of becoming one of the stars of the Harvard team. In the classroom he had established himself as proudly mediocre, displaying contempt for scholarly endeavor worthy of the elite. His friendships with Fisher and Potter had elevated him into the company of the most revered men of Harvard. He had not let matters rest there but had gotten his name on various committees, further advertisements for himself.
    Joe had done everything to ensure his election to one of the esteemed private clubs. The selection process for the ten final clubs was arbitrary in its means, and final in its judgments. The members of the Institute of 1770, the first step in the process, were chosen ten at a time, a social plebiscite brutal in its finality. Joe’s confidence and shrewd social maneuvering paid off. In the fall of his sophomore year, Joe and his three friends were chosen together by the inner club, the Dickey. For Joe his selection may have appeared inevitable, but it was a measure of the gauntlet he had passed that in a typical year, out of the 116 men chosen for the Institute of 1770, 112 were Gold Coast men, and only 4 roomed elsewhere, including 2 Harvard lettermen.
    If Joe had been brashly overconfident in assuming that his election to the Institute of 1770 was a foregone conclusion, he had every right to think he would now be chosen as a member of one of the ten final clubs. After all, he was a Dickey, already in an honored special circle. It was not a question of whether Joe would make a club, but which club would choose him. That was a matter of ample debate among his friends as the day finally arrived. Would it be Porcellian? Or perhaps the gentlemen from AD would cherish his company? Then again, what of Fly or Spee, or, God forbid, one of the lesser clubs—Phoenix, DU, or Iroquois?
    On a gray day in the late winter, Joe and Fisher were waiting in theirroom at Holyoke for the expected knock. As they paced anxiously, the clubmen spread out across the campus with the cherished invitations in their hands, knocking at the doors along the Gold Coast, though occasionally entering the dormitories in Harvard Yard. After handing out the precious letter, they took their newest member with them and moved on to the next person on their list. As the afternoon wore on, the groups grew larger—three, then five, and finally ten new members, along with the older clubmen, off in their world, beyond and above the public universe of Harvard. It was a moment of euphoria, leading finally to the clubhouse and inevitably to an evening of dinner, drinks, cigars, and manly conversation.
    The tap on Joe’s door came, as he knew it would. It was the gentlemen of Digammas, but they were coming for Fisher, not for Joe. And so he sat in the room and waited while outside the singing and the shouts grew louder. And he