Free Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story by Barbara Leaming Page A

thinking, young Joe was the model boy, healthy, handsome, and strong. In this regard, frail Jack, with his ever-lengthening record of illnesses both grave and routine, could scarcely compete. If old Joe did not overtly encourage the bullying to which the smaller, weaker brother was routinely subjected, he surely countenanced it. But Joe Junior was not the only instigator of these brutal encounters, which often ended with the older boy smashing the younger one’s head against a wall. Despite the odds, Jack was known to incite countless fistfights with his brother. Jack longed to disrupt the pecking order by proving to their father that he too was the fierce, hardy kind of boy old Joe preferred. But in view of old Joe’s maxim, “We want winners, we don’t want losers around here,” Jack’s efforts were inevitably for naught. In these ludicrously ill-matched physical confrontations, he always seemed to get the worst of it. Yet, contrary to all reason, Jack, as stubborn as he was slight, kept rushing in for more.
    Jack despised being restricted to bed, as he often was during his boyhood and teenage years. In any case, he managed to extract an advantage from these mortifying but unavoidable interludes. He used the time to read. The legends of King Arthur and the Round Table appeared on the shelf beside his bed. Then came works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, and Thomas Babington Macaulay. And then, titles by Winston Churchill, John Buchan, David Cecil, Duff Cooper, Edmund Burke, and others. Already physically out of harmony with the Kennedy atmosphere, Jack by his reading widened the breach. He also steadily, stealthily confirmed his belief that he was superior to his brother. Recasting delicacy in the form of refinement, he established himself, as Jackie would perceive years afterward, as the more imaginative of the two boys.
    Still, it was regarded as “heresy” in the family to suggest that Joe Junior was in any way the lesser figure. Yet that was precisely what Kick, the sibling born in 1920 as Jack fell ill with scarlet fever, long and defiantly maintained. Kick’s status as, in Rose’s phrase, old Joe’s “favorite of all the children” prevented her from being swatted down for daring to challenge the accepted order of things. She was permitted to speak out, but that did not mean her father was required to listen. He persisted in touting young Joe as the best of the boys, the Kennedy son for whom preeminence had been foreordained. When by the time Jack was about fourteen years of age he had failed to persuade old Joe to alter his views, the second son finally seemed to give up the fight. As both Kick and Lem Billings, Jack’s prep school roommate at the time, understood, that did not mean Jack had abandoned his conviction that he was better than his brother. But, to all outward appearances, he did seem to put aside any hope of displacing him in old Joe’s eyes. If their father persisted in thinking Jack inferior, the teenager thenceforth would gamely play along. Onstage, he cast himself as the sluggard Kennedy brother, whose lack of discipline and ambition his father never ceased to complain of. Offstage, Jack burrowed the more deeply into his reading.
    Both tall, handsome brothers were in their early twenties when they appeared together in London at the time of old Joe’s ambassadorship. The English debutantes dubbed Joe Junior “the Big One,” by way of contrast with scrawny Jack. Known to speak often and openly of his confidence that Joe Junior would one day become America’s first Irish-Catholic president, the ambassador encouraged the eldest son to write up his impressions of contemporary Europe as a way of generating the “international publicity” that could be so helpful when at last he was ready to launch himself in public life. The adoring father pitched Joe Junior’s letters on travel and politics to leading periodicals. He urged him to find a way to stitch those letters together