◆ SpookStack

oo mee an Successful On His Merits ———- Joe Kennedy had to walk alone in His early days at Harvard wen the term “no Irish need apply” was stili an echo if not an actual phrase In the advertise- ments for hired help in New England and New York. He was so good-looking in his fifties when I began to know him that I belleve he must have been a very devil in Harvard. Kennedys were not welcome at ” Harvard then, but Joe was so successful on his merits that he could take pity on Arthur J. Goldsmith and introduce him and underwrite him to a quite sur- prising success among the upper orders of the time. Goldsmith later became the kapok dragon of the Waldorf Tower, with a sinister apparatus of letter- head political fronts which bulldozed candidates in the outback and elected or defeated senatorial can~- didates by the clever use of a few thousand New York dollars in West Virginia, Montana, and Vermont. a The story of the organized determination of the whole Lcnnedy tribe to elact first, Joe Jr., and after his death, Jack, to the presidency is a myth, Like, many familles these Kennedys had a fearsome rep- utation as-kids in Bronxville as a wild, noisy gang. The boys fought the girls and the girls fought back. They screamed and squalled and threw things. Who- ever got to the bathroom first in the morning had to defend it, and whoever wanted a certain tie or pair of socks had to prevail by conquest. But Jack can telephone Joe for the last word on politics and economics and whatever his enemies may say of Joe they can’t say he has anything against riches or capitalism or in faver of Moscow or the intellectuals of the British Foreign Office who often turn up in the lee of the Kremiin, Schlesinger? Murrow? Bowles? Galbraith? . Keynes? They will not prevail while the elder statesman,,. the old man of the clan, is as close as the phone at Jack's elbow. —P Copyright, 1961. King Features Syndicate. ina —_———