For Kennedy, as for most of us, his teens and twenties were the years when his personality and worldview took shape.
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these hardships deepened his determination to follow his parents’ exhortation, issued regularly to their kids, to contribute to society, to believe in something greater than themselves and to act accordingly.
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“gentleman’s C” average.
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Over the previous half century, since the end of the Civil War, the U.S. economy had grown faster than any economy had ever grown before—by an astronomical margin—fueled in good part by the arrival of millions of enterprising immigrants who, uneducated and poor though they might be, had ambition, energy, and intelligence in abundance.6
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“Never in the lifetime of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly.”18
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“At Harvard and after graduation, Joe remained faithful to Rose in the way that men of his generation and class remained faithful to their best girls.
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The boys loved his sense of fun, his infectious love of learning, his sheer delight at being in their presence.
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Joe fighting and getting all bloody, and Jack going around, betting marbles very quietly. To my mind that illustrates how completely different the two brothers were!51
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You see, the film industry was actually the cover, allowing men to take their mistresses to dinners or even to parties, providing a form of legalized whoring.69
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Joe exuded a sense of responsibility that made him seem older than his years.
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I often had the feeling his mind was only half occupied with the subject at hand, such as doing his arithmetic homework or picking his clothes up off the floor, and the rest of his thoughts were far away weaving daydreams….I
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he viewed with bemused detachment the vaunted Choate values and Choate ways that Joe Junior worked so hard to embody.
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young Jack Kennedy continued to grapple with his core dilemma: how to be true to his own sensibility and make his own way in the world while remaining a Kennedy, with all that that implied.
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would rather come home for holidays from their boarding schools and find whatever room was available.” Upon arrival Lem would hear Jack say to his mother, “Which room do I have this time?”
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“I was three years old before it dawned on me that Lem wasn’t one more older brother,” Teddy said, adding that Lem kept more clothes in the Hyannis Port home on a continual basis than Jack did.32
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timeworn maxim of the Harvard gentleman: “Three C’s and a D, and keep out of the newspapers.” The gray men were the products of public schools, “sturdy sons of the middle class.” They played football and baseball and hockey, edited the Crimson and the Lampoon, and ran for student government.
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Jack’s first visible sign of being outstanding, the first time that people recognized him for being a little different from us.”60
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(Churchill’s ideas, it bears noting, sometimes look better in hindsight than they did in their time.)
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He met with the king and took tea with the twelve-year-old Princess Elizabeth.
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It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man….We
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He had received communion from the pope and taken tea with Princess Elizabeth; had read high-level diplomatic dispatches in London and Paris; had been accosted by Nazi toughs in Munich; had flipped his car south of Paris and survived; had paid visits to Poland and Russia; had darted south to Turkey, North Africa, and the Middle East; had traveled behind German lines in occupied Czechoslovakia and crisscrossed Germany in the immediate lead-up to war, before carrying a top-secret message back to London; had been present in the House of Commons for the historic session on September 3; and, to top it off, had made his debut as a public figure in response to the sinking of an ocean liner on the first day of Britain’s war.
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When Kennedy on one occasion pointedly remarked that he had sworn off drinking and smoking for the duration of the war, Churchill muttered, “My God, you make me feel as if I should go around in sack cloth and ashes,” and poured himself another brandy.25
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(First Arthur Krock of The New York Times had assisted with revisions and now the legendary head of Time Inc. contributed an introductory essay: Jack did not lack for high-powered help.)11
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“There’s a lot of people in America who use political influence to keep out of combat,” he told a later interviewer, “but Jack Kennedy used it to get into combat!”65
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His usual approach in his young life—letting events come to him, being the detached if often perspicacious observer—would not suffice here, he realized. He had to seize control, had to bend destiny to his will. It was a brave idea, and a long shot.
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to see that by dying at Munda you are helping to insure peace in our time takes a larger imagination than most men possess.”
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“His worldly success was so assured and inevitable that his death seems to have cut into the natural order of things.”58
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them—for a modest fee of $750, they got sixteen informative and lucid articles from a war hero who had written a respected book on international affairs and had important family connections to senior U.S. and British officials.
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No one knew it, but present in Potsdam at the same time that summer was not only the thirty-third president of the United States, but the thirty-fourth and the thirty-fifth as well.
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And what about his world of prep schools, Harvard, international travel, and debutante parties—might it not seem off-putting to the working-class residents he’d be wooing, many of them living in squalid conditions in crowded tenements?
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He was shy, and that sometimes made him appear aloof. But it was a shyness born of an instinct that guarded privacy and concealed emotions. I understood these qualities because I shared them.”24
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the Kennedys scrambled to store away supplies of it in safe-deposit boxes around the country so that Jack would never go without.62
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Democrats were outraged and called on GOP leaders to condemn the speech, but McCarthy’s colleagues mostly stayed silent, while the right-wing press heaped praise on his assessment.
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In Lodge, moreover, Jack faced an incumbent respected far and wide for his probity and independence, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who spoke fluent French, stood six foot three, and bore one of the most iconic political names in America.
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“Rarely in American politics have hunter and quarry so resembled each other.”12
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When Boston mayor John B. Hynes appeared with Jack at a rally in Copley Square in June, he was surprised to see not one but two teleprompters set up and ready to go. He wondered why—until one broke down and campaign aides switched smoothly to the second. Hynes understood he was in the presence of perfectionists.26
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A later estimate suggested that Kennedy shook five hands for every one that Lodge shook.
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“The Kennedy campaign in 1952 was the most nearly perfect political campaign I’ve ever seen,”
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“What is there about Kennedy that makes every Catholic girl in Boston between eighteen and twenty-eight think it’s a holy crusade to get him elected?”82
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He was fascinated by her intelligence; they read together, painted together, enjoyed good conversation together and walks together.”
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From the start, he found the clubby, collegial atmosphere of the Senate preferable to the rowdier, more plebeian spirit of the House of Representatives.
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“If I had said just now, ‘Mrs. Lincoln, I have cut off Jackie’s head, would you please send over a box?’ she still would have replied, ‘That’s wonderful. I’ll send it right away. Did you get your nap?’ ”41
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As for Jack, the difference between a chic home and an unstylish one was mostly lost on him, as was the contrast between a bespoke suit and an off-the-rack model. He had little appreciation of good food or good wine, being perfectly content with a steak or a cheeseburger and some ice cream. Until, that is, his wife entered the picture.
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On his desk, among the letters and telegrams celebrating his return, was a giant fruit basket bearing a note that read “Welcome home,” signed “Dick Nixon.”71
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No longer could anyone consider John Kennedy just another freshman senator; now he was dubbed the unofficial historian of the upper chamber, and a respected champion of political integrity.
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“No delegate could buy his own drink and no elderly lady could cross a Chicago street without help from an eager vice-presidential candidate,”
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