(3 of 8)
All Out. "We tried to keep everything more or less equal," recalls Rose Kennedy, "but you wonder if the mother and father aren't quite tired when the ninth one comes along. You have to make more of an effort to tell bedtime stories and be interested in swimming matches. There were 17 years between my oldest and youngest child, and I had been telling bedtime stories for 20 years. When you have older brothers and sisters, they're the ones that seem to be more important in a family, and always get the best rooms and the first choice of boats and all those kinds of things, but Ted never seemed to resent it."
For years, the older Kennedy brothers and sisters have kidded Teddy by insisting that "the discipline was breaking down when you came along." Not likely. Like the older Kennedy children, Teddy got by on an allowance of 10¢ to a quarter a week, cut grass for extra cash, worked a paper route. There were, of course, privileges unknown to most children; for example, Teddy received his first Communion from Pope Pius XII. But he still got his spankings with a coat hanger. Anything less than an all-out effort, whether in geometry or golf, was bound to bring a reprimand from his father. Recalls Sister Jean, the wife of Stephen Smith, who helps manage the family fortune: "Daddy always said, 'Never take second best.' " Says Teddy with studied understatement: ''We felt our father's presence throughout our young lives."
Animal Energy. Under the family's rigorous current-events course. Teddy studied newspaper clippings posted on a bulletin board by his mother, answered her questions at lunch. He laboriously compiled a daily diary that was regularly checked by his parents ("You had to use words you could spell''), and he listened, from the distance of the separate table reserved for the family's small fry, as his big brothers and father staged their free-for-all arguments at dinner about national and world affairs. Nonetheless, Teddy made himself felt. Says Jean: "Even as a child, Ted had a terrific animal energy. People naturally gravitated to him. He was always a leader of the family on things such as whether we would play football or go sailing. You never had to push Ted—you always had to hold him back."
His family's travels took him through ten different schools. Although he was never a top scholar, Teddy managed to follow his three brothers to Harvard. As a freshman, he was struggling along with a C minus in Spanish when, on the spur of the moment, he asked a classmate to take an exam for him. The friend was caught, and they were both suspended. This year, to forestall the possibility that his expulsion might be used against him politically, Teddy made a public confession of the incident. During the campaign. Opponent McCormack never mentioned it.
Kennedy enlisted in the Army, spent nearly two years in Europe. Honing his competitive edge, he climbed the Matterhorn, entered and won a bobsled meet for novices in Switzerland—the first time he had ever ridden a sled. Discharged as a Pfc, Kennedy was readmitted to Harvard in 1953, banged around in a beat-up Pontiac, excelled in public speaking, earned honor grades in history and government in his senior year.