Not for “Jack” himself of course. He grew up in a series of bubbles—the Hyannis Port compound; another in Palm Beach, Florida; the private schools (Choate, Princeton, Harvard); the U.S. ambassador’s residence overlooking Hyde Park in London. Each allowed him to glide past most of life’s regular inconveniences. He rarely carried cash, usually leaving friends or acquaintances to pick up the tab in restaurants and then having his factotum reimburse them. Hotels around the world always knew where to send the bill. In 1942, on turning 25, Kennedy gained access to the 1926 trust established for him by his father; in 1948, when he turned 31, he was permitted to spend the earned income (without touching the capital) from another bigger trust. Taken together, they made Jack a rich man, who, as the eldest living son, was also heir to the majority of his father’s fortune (a billionaire in today’s money).
Growing up, Jack had some idea that he might like to be a writer. “Kennedy seemed at times like a young professor,” the novelist Norman Mailer would say of him, “whose mind was off in some intricacy of the Ph.D. thesis he was writing.” And here again his father’s money and influence helped smooth the way. A plethora of researchers, editors, and public relations boosters were assembled to help turn a Harvard senior thesis into the national bestseller Why England Slept. At the end of World War II, his father’s friend, the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, gave him a job as a foreign correspondent and sent him to San Francisco to report on the founding United Nations Conference and to Potsdam in Germany for the “Big Three” conference at which Harry Truman told Joseph Stalin about the existence of the atomic bomb.
