Free An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek

end.” The following February, during a health crisis Jack weathered, St. John told Joe, “Jack is one of the best people that ever lived—one of the most able and interesting. I could go on about Jack!” He may not have liked Catholics, but he certainly liked this Catholic, a testament to Jack’s remarkable charm.
    In his limited rebellion at Choate, Jack was also playing out a trait Joe Sr. had consciously worked to instill in his children. Joe was not entirely blind to the fact that he was an overbearing, demanding, insistent character who dominated almost everyone and everything he touched. Because he sensed how destructive this could be to his offspring, especially the boys, he made a point of encouraging a measure of independence and even irreverence. Visitors to the Kennedy home who watched Joe’s interactions with Joe Jr. and Jack remembered how he would push them to argue their own point of view, make up their own minds, and never slavishly follow accepted wisdom. Lem Billings recalled that mealtime conversations at the Kennedys’ never consisted of small talk. Joe Sr. “never lectured. He would encourage them [the children] completely to disagree with him, and of course they did disagree with him. Mr. Kennedy is, I’d say, far right of his children, and yet he certainly didn’t try to influence them that way.”
    And perhaps if Joe Sr. saw in his eldest son what could be, he saw in Jack more who he was. When St. John interrupted a conversation between him, Jack, and Joe to take a phone call, Joe leaned over and whispered to Jack, “My God, my son, you sure didn’t inherit your father’s directness or his reputation for using bad language. If that crazy Mucker’s Club had been mine, you can be sure it wouldn’t have started with an M!” Joe’s irreverence was not lost on Jack, who inscribed a graduation photo to one of the other leading lights in the club, “To Boss Tweed from Honest Abe, may we room together at Sing Sing.”
    When Joe Jr. graduated from Choate, his father sent him to study in England for a year with Harold Laski, a prominent socialist academic. Rose considered this “a little wild and even dangerous,” but Joe, convinced it would encourage greater independence and sharpen his son’s ability to argue the case for a more conservative outlook, ignored his wife’s concern. And when Joe Jr. returned after a summer trip to Russia with Laski and described the advantages of socialism over capitalism, Joe told Rose, “If I were their age I would probably believe what they believe, but I am of a different background and must voice my beliefs.” Joe made it clear that he cared much less about their different outlooks than that they had reached independent judgments.
    St. John saw even more of this sort of constructed independence in Jack’s behavior. “Jack has a clever, individualist mind,” he told Joe. “It is a harder mind to put in harness than Joe [Jr.]’s. . . . When he learns the right place for humor and learns to use his individual way of looking at things as an asset instead of a handicap, his natural gift of an individual outlook and witty expression are going to help him. A more conventional mind and a more plodding and mature point of view would help him a lot more right now; but we have to allow, my dear Mr. Kennedy, with boys like Jack, for a period of adjustment . . . and growing up; and the final product is often more interesting and more effective than the boy with a more conventional mind who has been to us parents and teachers much less trouble.” The mature John Kennedy would fulfill St. John’s prediction.
    DESPITE BEING SIXTY-FIFTH in a class of 110, Jack was assured a place at Harvard. In 1935, as the son of so prominent an alumnus, with an elder brother in good standing at the university, and Harry Hopkins, FDR’s welfare administrator, and Herbert Bayard Swope, the prominent journalist/editor, listed as nonacademic references, Jack had few doubts about