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

his admission. But reluctant once more to be directly in Joe Jr.’s shadow, he chose to go to Princeton with Lem Billings and other Choate friends. Joe Sr. accepted his son’s decision as a welcome demonstration of Jack’s independence—though he may have smiled when the son who so wanted to diverge from his elder brother’s path asked to follow Joe Jr. in spending a year in England under Harold Laski’s tutelage.
    In the conflict between self-indulgence and worldly interests, the former gave little ground to the latter in Jack’s eighteenth year. And in fact, in the summer and fall of 1935, when he traveled to Europe for the first time, Jack was less interested in studying with Laski at the London School of Economics than in making acquaintances and enjoying the social life in London. Rising European tensions over the Rhineland and Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia registered less on Jack as a significant moment in history than simply as reasons to go home.
    In October, when one of Jack’s bouts of illness added to concerns about keeping him abroad, he returned to America, where he quickly seemed to recover and petitioned for late admission to Princeton’s fall term. When the university denied it, Joe arranged through a prominent Princeton alumnus for Jack’s enrollment at the beginning of November. He lasted only until December, when illness again interrupted his studies and sent him to Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. Recuperating from his still-undiagnosed maladies in Palm Beach, Florida, Jack accepted his father’s suggestion that he go to Arizona for two months beginning in April. There, the warm climate and relaxed pace at a ranch seemed to restore Jack’s health. With time to reflect, Jack changed his mind about college. Princeton’s cloistered environment and spartan living quarters in South Reunion Hall had disappointed him, so he decided to renew his application to Harvard in July 1936, receiving admission to the fall term within three days of applying.
    During his first two years at Harvard, Jack largely continued the pattern he had established at Choate. His academic record was unimpressive: a B-minus in government the first year and a B in English the second were offset by grades of C and C-plus in French, history, and a second government course, his major interest. “Exam today,” he wrote Billings during his first finals period in January 1937, “so have to open my book & see what the fucking course is about.” When he got too far behind in his work, Jack occasionally relied on a tutoring service or an outside “cram school,” which charged a fee for bringing unprepared students up to speed for an exam. Jack’s freshman adviser predicted that he would probably do better in time, but in his sophomore year he had still not lived up to his talent or promise. “Though his mind is still undisciplined,” his tutor wrote, “and will probably never be very original, he has ability, I think, and gives promise of development.”
    Jack’s classmates and teachers remember a charming, irreverent young man with a fine sense of humor and a passion for sports and the good life. He certainly showed no overt interest in the campus activism provoked by the Depression, FDR’s New Deal, and the challenges to democracy and capitalism from fascism, Nazism, and communism. There is no indication that he read any of the popular progressive journals of the day, such as
The Nation,
the
New Republic,
or
New Masses,
or gave much, if any, heed to the parades and protest demonstrations organized by students eager to have a say in public affairs. He had little use for doctrinaire advocates who “espoused their causes with a certitude which he could never quite understand.” Indeed, after only two months at Harvard, he privately vented his irritation with the political clichés he had been hearing in a whimsical letter to Billings. “You are certainly a large-sized prick to keep my hat,” he complained to Lem,