He walked along the beachfront, feeling the coolness of the salt-laden air on his face and the still warm sand between his toes. He had been with his father. It was unsettling. The old man could not speak, or walk; he was imprisoned in a body that no longer worked. Even that iron will could not make it work. He shivered. Better if they had let him slip away, when they had the chance. The man who had been so huge, who had been able to bluff or buy or bully his way into whatever he wanted, should not have been brought so low.
He looked out at the sea, which had always called to him, mysterious, restless, unforgiving. He thought of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” one of his favorites.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done.
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
That should be left him, that one more noble thing.
He had never imagined his father could be powerless, because he had always been able to do everything, fix everything. There were threads of love and fear, gratitude and resentment between them. As the second son, he had been shielded from the driving glare of his father’s ambition by his older brother’s perfection, allowed, to some degree, to think, to read, to explore, to fail, free from those relentless dreams.
If he had been given to introspection, and he was not — in a family where children jostled for position like racehorses at the rail, too much self-examination was regarded with suspicion — he might have been candid about the facts of his own creation. It was in part his father’s doing. The father’s ambition was born of an ache so great and deep that only a son’s uncontested triumph could assuage it. One night, the father had waited, alone in his room at Harvard, a popular young man, friendly with everyone, confident that the knock on the door would come, and he would be told of his selection to the most prestigious eating club in the Yard. All around him he heard the footsteps and the laughter and the sound of celebration. He waited, as the minutes ticked into hours. Joseph P. Kennedy, American, with none of the muck of Wexford on his shoes, waited for the knock on the door that would never come.
The older son was sent hurtling into the world, a missile that would at last, finally, heal the wound, but he died in a reckless bid for heroism, frozen forever in first place in his father’s heart.
“I’m shadow boxing in a match the shadow is always going to sin,” the second son told a friend. But he picked up the fallen standard, dutifully, and walked into adulthood shaped by his father’s dreams and his own formidable will. It was, after all, particularly American for men and women to invent themselves. They inherited a land hacked out of the wilderness, where there were no edges and no rules. A young man from the tenements of New York had become the Western outlaw Billy the Kid, and another sickly young man turned himself into a Rough Rider, and the son of an East Boston barkeep became the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.
He learned from his father. He learned to use money brutally, to create a juggernaut of cash and influence that rolled over men his seniors in age and experience. He learned to use women like limousines, as he had seen his father use them. He liked power. He liked being president. His saving grace was that he still believed those stories that he had read so many years ago beside this restless sea, of knights and wizards and dragons and noble quests. For the father, getting there was all. The son wanted, with Tennyson, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
But he was a Tory at heart, naturally cautious, seeking compromise, possibility, the surer thing. His natural caution warred with the hidden romantic inside him. In the corridors of power, the careful man often trod lightly. In his words, the dreamer came alive. Which was he, really! Perhaps even he did not know. But a generation heard the words, and their lives were forever changed. They believed they could move the sun and stars.
He walked to the edge of the jetty at the end of the green swath of lawn and stared, again, at the sea. He was his own man, at last. He had been a passable congressman, an indifferent senator, but at last he was growing into the job he was meant for. He was smart and he could listen and he could learn. He was growing surer and bolder with every passing day. Greatness hung, like the evening mist over the sea, almost within his grasp.
All he had to do was reach out and take it.