Kennedyesque
Sean Sullivan
In 1987, when I was starting my sophomore year of high school and knew almost nothing real about myself, my father seriously decided, and I did not disagree, that I could one day be president. Not president of my class— that was totally unrealistic—but President of the United States of America. It was becoming clear, as he had suspected all along, that I was destined for great things, and halfway into my high school career all his hunches about me were coming true: I was a good student, seriously minded, mature beyond my years. And despite the fact I had no friends at the time, we both sensed that deep down I had charisma and natural leadership qualities.
These ambitions seemed reasonable and plausible. All summer long I had been reading obsessively about the Kennedys: a multi-volume RFK biography, a glowing sepia-toned memoir about Jack, books devoted to outlandishly paranoid assassinations, glossy coffee table books on the elegance of the Camelot White House. When I say reading, I mean I usually just skimmed the text and fixated on the iconic images: tousled JFK sailing in his leather bomber jacket, Bobby campaigning in Watts and nearly getting torn to shreds like a rock star. But to me, he was even cooler than a rock star—he was going to help those poor people get jobs and rescue them from poverty and disenfranchisement.
And the more I considered it, the more similarities I could see between our families, or at least my father’s side: we were from the Boston area; “descended from kings of Ireland,” as my father liked to say; and had lots of cousins, many of whom played the same sports the Kennedys played, like football. I even had a cousin, Billy, who was retarded, like the Kennedys’ sister, Rosemary.
However, there were major differences that nagged at me. First of all, we weren’t rich enough, or rich at all, though my father assured me that would soon change. The economy in Massachusetts was booming, and after years of more or less sporadic employment, my father had just gotten an account executive position with a new company that made energy bars developed by MIT scientists. The salary was a little low, he admitted, but the potential commissions—especially if the brand went national—were enormous. So even though things were still a little tight, he assured me that we would be rolling in cash by the time I was ready to go to college. At that point, though, the only things we were rolling in were the energy bars themselves, cases of which he would bring home every week for us to enjoy, in five nutritious flavors.
I also wondered if I was tough enough to compete in the world like the Kennedys. My parents had been married just long enough to produce me, instead of creating a rambunctious clan of siblings who could kick my ass in touch football and teach me to be ruthless and competitive. My father wasn’t stern and patriarchal like Joseph Kennedy Sr., who, I read, toughened up his sons by telling them never to cry and that second place was still losing; in fact, Dad praised me constantly, sometimes for no reason. The only thing I could I think was that I was so naturally gifted and serious that I was already beyond the need for strict discipline.
So a political dynasty in the making we were not. My father had, in fact, just separated from his second wife, Sharon, with whom he’d had another son, my little half brother, Tyler. We had all lived together for two years in a rented split-level ranch, until their marital problems gave my father no choice but to return with me to the dingy upstairs apartment in my grandmother’s two-family Victorian, where we had lived for ten years after his divorce from my mother. The apartment had remained vacant since we had moved out; my Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark posters were still hanging on the walls of my old bedroom. My mother was living with her new boyfriend in a relatively nice home in the next town over; I had a standing invitation to live with them, but utterly refused out of loyalty to my father.
The subject of my candidacy first came up after yet another Sunday afternoon visit to the Kennedy Museum in Boston. By then we’d seen the exhibits and documentary films so many times that our visits were mainly excuses to hit the gift shop. That’s where I would buy more cheap reproduction Kennedy campaign memorabilia for my room: bumper stickers, posters, buttons, glossy photos. I even had a reproduction PT-109 tie clip like JFK used to hand out to friends and advisers.
I was in bed watching television when my father came in and messed up my hair. He was smiling, and there was kind of a dreamy wistful air about him. I thought for a moment he had been drinking, despite his regular attendance at A.A. meetings.
He asked if I wanted to be president. I said sure.
“Because I think I could easily get you elected. I would just use everything I know about marketing,” he said.
Before his period of unemployment and subsequent re-employment as an energy bar salesman, my father had won some kind of regional food and beverage industry marketing award, so at that moment I did not doubt his ability to sell and market things.
“Ok,” I said.
“We’ll talk about it again. I love you, you know.”
I knew.
The next day, I could barely focus on my classes at West High. I looked around at my classmates—what was up with them? Academically, most of them were high achievers, but I found their ambitions tiny and pathetic. Sure, they were smart and hardworking, and raised their hands in class much more than I did, but I knew that most had set their sights on becoming little more than doctors or engineers or computer programmers. They seemed destined to settle into boring, humdrum lives, and would never stare down the Soviet premier in some glamorous European capital, or appear on national television looking resolved and determined while addressing their fellow Americans on matters of grave national importance. And when they died, the nation would not shut down, nor would thousands of mourners clog the streets for their funeral.
I decided that it was their parents’ fault. It seemed like if a kid was told that all he was ever going to amount to was a teacher or biochemist or advertising executive, then he would never aspire to anything more. Maybe those parents were trying to protect their kids from failing in more visible, meaningful arenas, like politics. Or, worst of all, they were yuppies, obsessed with nothing but money and Scandinavian furniture and imported cars. But my father certainly wasn’t like them; he treated me as though I had virtually unlimited potential. I supposed he had gained this deep insight into my character from observing me my whole life, from the day I was born. Joseph Kennedy Sr. must have regarded all of his sons in the same way, although he obviously felt they needed more discipline to reach their potential.
I thought about all the things I had to get out of the way before I could run for president, so when I got home from school I sat at my desk and composed a list:
1. Get accepted to Ivy League school, pref. Harvard or Yale.
2. Earn medals in armed service.
3. Attend law school, take bar.
4. Get elected to Congress, Senate.
5. Cabinet appointment?
6. Begin candidacy for President (Dad/marketing ideas)
Obviously, the first thing I had to concentrate on was the getting into Harvard or Yale phase of the plan. I was leaning toward Harvard because of the JFK connection, and also because I could see myself hanging around Harvard Square debating politics over croissants and browsing the books at the Coop during my precious moments of spare time.
Because I had no family connections to Harvard, Yale, or any other real college, I needed a strategy to get in, so I bought a book claiming to reveal all the secrets of getting into the Ivies. I learned it wasn’t enough to have straight-A grades and perfect SAT scores. Everyone who applied to the Ivies had those. You had to prove you had Leadership Qualities and were a Well-Rounded Individual. The book used real-life examples from the applications of successful Ivy League applicants: one kid had spent his summer overseeing the reconstruction of a Honduran village leveled by a hurricane; another had had her first novel published at age fourteen and gone on to start her own publishing house. Those were the kinds of extra-curricular activities admissions committees were looking for, and applicants had to enumerate them in detail on their applications.
I spent the rest of the night reading and re-reading the book, making plans to achieve a state of perfect Well Roundedness. I skipped my homework and set aside the book only for a couple of hours to watch television. I had plans. I was going to the White House.
A semester later, my quest for the nation’s highest office was already badly foundering. Realizing the futility of running for school-wide office, I concentrated on getting elected to positions of leadership in the various clubs; running for French Club treasurer, History Club secretary. In every case, I received exactly one vote, and I knew exactly whose it was—mine. Students I considered friends would assure me of support, but their votes never materialized; the number of tally marks next to my name never changed. It was one, always one. I seriously began to doubt my own inner Leadership Qualities and the extent of my Well Roundedness.
Even worse, this was when my grades started heading south, never to recover. Participating in extra-curricular activities cut into my study hall time, which was when I usually did homework. Outside of school, I barely had time to study either: I worked part-time at Caldor, and spent a good two to three hours a night glued to the television. I couldn’t bring myself to cut down on my compulsive viewing habits, and quitting my job was out of the question, too. I needed spending cash, because a lot of my father’s money went toward supporting his soon-to-be ex and my little half brother, Tyler.
He was hardly ever around then either, my father. Even though he and Sharon supposedly were about to get divorced, he spent most of his time at her house helping with Tyler. My grandmother, in the apartment downstairs from us, didn’t cook much, so most nights I would eat the energy bar samples or cereal. The few nights he was home, my father was usually too tired and distracted to help with my homework or to discuss the latest Reagan travesty. I didn’t dare show him my mediocre midterm grades or report cards; instead, I forged his signature on the form I had to bring back proving I had shown my grades to a parent or guardian. I was convinced that if he ever saw my C-pluses and B-minuses, he would have seriously reconsidered whether I was presidential material. He might have started spending even more time with Tyler, toughening him up and developing his Leadership Qualities at a frighteningly young age.
The envelope arrived in early May, on one of those rare Saturday mornings when my father was home. It was an overcast but warm spring day, and fluorescent yellow pollen covered everything: cars, windows, and the black wet pavement. As soon as I opened the door, I started sneezing.
It was postmarked England, from a college at Oxford. As someone who had indicated a strong interest in politics and government on the PSAT student questionnaire, I was invited to participate in a summer program on the Oxford campus with dozens of other future leaders from North America and Europe. According to the very slick and colorful brochure, there would be classes counting toward college credit, lectures from visiting world leaders, field trips to London and the Houses of Parliament, plus many other “unforgettable experiences.”
I couldn’t believe how suddenly my fortune seemed to have changed. My string of electoral defeats was meaningless, wiped away by the hand of destiny. Studying at Oxford would also get me academically back on track. In one summer, I was expecting to become fully Well Rounded and return to West High bursting with Leadership Qualities. Maybe I’d even find time to write a book about my experiences in England, like JFK did when he was a mere ambassador’s son.
I showed the brochure to my father, who leafed through it with a quizzical half smile.
“Too bad it’s not at Trinity College in Dublin. Imagine learning politics from the Irish? They practically invented modern politics in that country,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say. What he said sounded true, and I knew he didn’t care much for the British because of that shit they had been pulling in Ireland for thousands of years. I felt guilty for a moment, but then remembered that those issues hadn’t stopped Joseph Kennedy Sr. from being ambassador to Britain. Besides, it wasn’t like England was Nazi Germany or the USSR. Something about my father’s lack of enthusiasm unnerved me, but I pressed on.
“Come on, Dad. It’s Oxford,” I said, and pushed the brochure across the table at him.
As he flipped through the pages, I looked at him and noticed how he’d changed over the past few months. His face was thinner, with lots of deep creases. His hair, though still abundant, was mostly white even though he wasn’t yet forty.
“No, actually, this is a great opportunity. I’ll miss you if you go, but I know you have a great future ahead of you,” he said.
We agreed to work on the application together. To my relief, there were no specific grade-point requirements for getting in: the only things required were a completed application form; three essays; and a “keen interest in government and political science,” which I had already indicated on the PSAT questionnaire. And of course, the $2000 program fee, which covered everything except airfare. My father assured me not to worry about the money, that we’d find a way.
Desperate to ensure that no other future leader would take my spot at Oxford, however, I decided to work my ass off on the essays for the rest of the weekend. The plan was that I would write them out in longhand, and my father would have one of the secretaries at work type them out. Then my father would drop in the $2000 money order and send the package certified mail to England.
I decided to call my mother and tell her about my Oxford plans, and also to let her know that I wouldn’t be able to make dinner at her house with her and her boyfriend. Her initial reaction was even scarier than my father’s.
“Your father said it’s okay for you to go overseas for six weeks without even consulting me?” she asked.
“Um, yeah, he thinks it’s a good idea,” I replied.
“That’s not the point. I’m your mother, and he needed to check with me,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. I felt like air was slowly escaping from me. My mother mentioned something about my father’s irresponsibility, then asked if I was going to Oxford on a scholarship.
“No. It costs $2000, plus airfare. Dad said not to worry,” I said.
At that, my mother launched into another tirade about doctors and dentists bills that she always got stuck paying because my father always claimed to be hard up. I’d been hearing it for years, since not long after they had been divorced. But by the end of the conversation, she seemed more resigned than angry, and made me promise to go to her house the next weekend.
Relieved that my mother had come around just a little, yet unsettled by her point about the money, I decided I needed some reassurance. I found my father in the kitchen having a cigarette, blowing the smoke out the window over the sink. For some reason which I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint until later, I was kind of nervous, but went ahead and asked if he really thought he had the money.
He crushed out his cigarette and said, “Why do you think I won’t have the money? Did your mother tell you that?”
“No,” I said. “But she was like, you say you don’t have money for stuff lots of times. And she said you didn’t consult her about saying I could go.”
My father’s nostrils flared slightly, as if he might have been exhaling the last of his cigarette, but I recognized it as a sign of anger.
“After all I’ve done for you—and her—over the years. That woman’s got a lot of fucking nerve. My whole life I’ve busted my ass for everyone—your Grandma after my father left us, you, your mother. And not once has anyone said so much as thank you,” he said.
I just stood there wondering if I he was expecting me to thank him, if that would help him get over things.
“We’ll get you the money,” he said.
I was feeling guilty and drained from listening to both of my parents’ harangues, but managed to pull myself together to start on the essays. I spent the rest of the weekend writing. In one essay, I outlined my vision for a new century of peaceful co-existence with the Soviets. I quoted liberally from the CliffsNotes on Plato, Locke, Hobbes, and all the other philosophers we had studied in the political science course I had nearly failed last term. I finished late that Sunday night and left the essays on the fold-up card table we used for dining, along with a pile of specially ruled thesis paper on which the essays were required to be typed. My right hand was cramped and tattooed with blue ink squiggles, and I hadn’t even touched the pile of homework I had to do, but in my mind, that homework was chickenshit next to Oxford. Feeling a great sense of accomplishment and optimism, I celebrated by eating a couple of energy bars. When I came home from Caldor the next night, the application and essays were gone, and I assumed my father had taken them to his office to get typed.
My sense of optimism and accomplishment didn’t last very long. I wasn’t totally reassured about the money and still disturbed by my father’s outburst. I kept thinking about what my mother had said about my father, especially about her getting stuck with the bills, even though I lived with my father.
In my father’s defensiveness I heard echoes of another conversation from a few years earlier. It didn’t involve my mother, but his friend Arthur, from Alcoholics Anonymous.
When my father had just quit drinking but was still unemployed, just as I was starting middle school, he met a guy at one of the meetings whose A.A. pseudonym was Arthur L. Ten years older than my father, Arthur had pulled himself up from rock bottom to start a successful business application software company and was, according to my father, a millionaire, although he still lived modestly in one of the nicer neighborhoods of our town. Married, with two teenage daughters, Arthur took an almost paternal interest in my father, counseling him over the phone and occasionally dropping by to take us both to a movie.
Soon after they met, my father was working at Arthur’s company, helping to bring in new business prospects. The very first week, he bought us a new Sony Trinitron to replace the enormous wood-paneled Magnavox we’d had since before I was born, along with six new Atari cartridges for me.
After only a few months, however, my father stopped going to Arthur’s office and once again started combing the help wanted ads for new sales positions. I had to start answering the phone every time it rang, and if it was Arthur, I was instructed to tell him that my father was at my uncle’s or visiting with another one of the guys from A.A. One day, Arthur somehow managed to get through; I could hear my father arguing on the phone in the living room. Overcome with curiosity, I picked up the extension in the kitchen and listened.
Arthur was talking: “…and I’ve hesitated up to this point about taking any legal action, because you have a son and I…”
I reflexively dropped the phone back on the cradle and tried to push what I’d just heard out of my mind.
Eventually, the phone calls stopped, and I never saw Arthur again. My father started going to A.A. meetings in another town, and at one of them he ended up meeting his second wife-to-be, Sharon. A few years later, I asked him for some reason if he ever heard from Arthur.
“Listen,” he said, “don’t ever mention him again. I thought he was my friend, but all he did was kick me when I was down.”
By the second week of June, I was beginning to worry. There was no word from Oxford—no acceptance package, not even a letter acknowledging my application had been received. I wasn’t yet in a complete panic, because I knew that it took a week or so for mail to arrive from England, sometimes longer. Still, the program started in three weeks and I hadn’t even made plane reservations. But I had no idea how to find out what was going on. Call England? That was unheard of. I imagined an outrageous bill for making a single transatlantic phone call.
I couldn’t bring myself to bother my father with my worries. He seemed more exhausted than ever from taking care of Tyler at night, and so far none of the fat sales commissions he had been anticipating had materialized. My mother, on the other hand, had become more receptive, even excited about me going to Oxford, and offered to contribute my airfare. So she was as anxious as I was to find out once and for all if I would be going.
The answer would come very early in the morning of the fourth Sunday in June, when, heading out for a jog, I searched for my Walkman among the empty coffee cups and Happy Meal boxes that littered the backseat of my father’s car, and came up with the envelope containing my application form, three handwritten essays, and blank, startling blank thesis paper.
At age fifteen, I wasn’t ready to join the ranks of my father’s persecutors. With sudden clarity, I could see exactly what would happen if I were to confront him: he would become defensive to the point of hostility and turn on me, like he did with my mother and Arthur and who knows how many others. So I knew I would say nothing to him or anyone else about the application. It was more of a certainty than a decision. I was also certain that both of us would act like nothing had ever happened, that the whole Oxford thing had never existed. For the first time, I was conscious of a distance opening between me and my father, which would only grow in the years to come. But the only thing I could do at that moment was stare at the blank thesis paper while the soft light of sunrise slowly turned in to the blinding glare of a new summer day.
Troubled from the start, my campaign for president pretty much ended that summer, though there was no official statement to the media. My extra-curricular interests shifted from politics and the Kennedys to punk and alternative music, and posters of bands like Joy Division and the Smiths replaced the reproduction campaign memorabilia on my bedroom walls. I wasn’t rejecting things I thought the Kennedys stood for; I was fifteen and just moving on to the next thing. Eventually, I made it through college, although with a frighteningly large student loan debt, and began my career as a freelance music journalist and occasional club deejay. This work to me is richly satisfying, but its sporadic nature quite often forces me to work in numbingly dull temp administrative positions.
On the rare occasions I see my father, usually at weddings or funerals, I fill him in on what I’ve been doing, and from the look in his eyes I can tell he’s thinking that I’ve sold myself short, that I could be something a million times more impressive. I just figure, fine, let him think that. I’ll settle for knowing who I am.
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