Like many close attachments, their friendship was complicated, and neither boy likely fully understood its nature or limitations at this time in their lives. Lem was clearly the more emotionally involved. He needed Jack and Jack knew it. But also it was apparent that Jack needed Lem, too. In the early years, they tested each other, as boys are prone to do, each seeking dominance.

- Jack and Lem by David Pitts, Chapter One: The Ties That Bind

I would think this quite a credible summary of Jack and Lem’s teenage relationship if it weren’t for the line slap bang in the middle: “Lem was clearly the more emotionally involved”. Clear from WHAT, David???

It feels like it directly contradicts the wider point he’s trying to make here. If you read this chapter it is full of strange contradictions like this. Pitts regularly states his opinions as fact and they get cited by other authors as evidence, which frustrates me. Chiefly, I don’t like how Lem constantly gets positioned as Jack Kennedy’s tragic gay best friend. Poor Lem, so invested in Jack. Isn’t it good of Jack to let Lem be his friend? (Just to caveat: I know Pitts is gay but that doesn’t make him exempt from perpetuating this viewpoint, unfortunately).

I also just really really need to stress: the Kennedys were proud Americans and all, but they were sooooo unbelievably Irish in how they expressed themselves, particularly their feelings. Symptoms include: being irreverent to a fault, a severe allergy to earnestness, and affection conveyed via insults and moderate to severe bullying only.

You have to infer how an Irish person feels by a) judging how much time we will make for you and what level of effort we will go to on your behalf, b) assuming we mean the exact opposite of what we say at all times and c) understanding that if we don’t like you, we just won’t bother engaging with you. We’re kind and generous people, but we’re not always particularly polite or nice.

If you try to take Jack literally, or give him a surface-level reading, he can sound like a dismissive prick who put Lem down when he wanted some sort of social dominance over him, and who used him for attention/affection because he enjoyed that Lem “needed” him. In actual fact, he was frequently very kind, generous and considerate to Lem when given the chance (whilst in the same breath deflecting it by saying the rudest thing he could think of):

“Your financial worries have upset me,” he wrote from London, “as Princeton would not be awfully jolly without your sif [syphilis] covered face.” He offered Billings $500 and added, “I won’t need it. You can pay me after you get out of college. You then would not have to borrow from that old Prick Uncle Ike [Lem’s uncle]. Let me know about this, and wether [sic] you need it, because I won’t be needing it.”

- JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century by Frederik Logevall, Chapter Five: Freshman Years

$500 is $12,000 in today’s money. According to Google, a year’s tuition at Princeton in 1935 (the year this letter was written) was $450. Not only is Jack offering to pay for Lem’s entire year’s fee, but even for someone as rich as Jack, this is not an insignificant amount of money to offhandedly offer out. Also, Jack wrote this whilst he was seriously ill in hospital in London. He was supposed to be having his own “big adventure” studying abroad and instead it was about to be cut short because his parents wanted him to go to the West Coast to recover. He had been very excited to go to London, and didn’t want to go to Princeton at all, even if Lem was there.

This is Jack saying: I don’t like that you’re having a hard time. It’ll be shit for me if you’re not at Princeton, but more importantly this is YOUR shot at college, so I will do what I can to make sure you can stay there. This is an issue I can actually solve, unlike anything else in my life right now (ie my health), so let me do it for you. You’re NOT to try pay me back before you have a way to support yourself. I won’t take it because I don’t want you to struggle for money like this. Take four years, take however long you need, in fact I’m only saying this because I suspect you’ll be weird if I just GIVE it to you. I also know how much your uncle fucking sucks so best of all, this way you won’t have to deal with him. See? I’ve thought of everything for you.

Probably also: I’m going to offer this as though it’s absolutely nothing to me or we’ll both be embarrassed. Even though I’m obscenely wealthy, my dad keeps me on quite a short financial leash and as you know I’m actually known for being quite stingy. But I’m not an idiot, I know what I’m offering here is kind of a big deal. Still, if you need it, it’s yours. Obviously I’m not going to make any of this remotely clear because I would rather spontaneously combust. Instead I’m going to make fun of your acne and hope you can infer the rest.

Once you understand all of this, you can see quite clearly that Jack calling Lem “LeMoan”, straight up addressing letters to him with “Dear Unattractive”, bitching at him, deliberately saying the worst things he could think of and even pushing him away sometimes was precisely because he felt an equal level of love and emotional involvement!

It has spiralled into a four THOUSAND word f-ing thesis without my permission, with quotes and sources, and it’s only part one of what was supposed to be two parts at most 😭 I am sort of impressed with myself but also sort of scared. I won’t even bother to accurately stress how little time I have to be doing shit like this, how it’s 3pm and I have done very little else today. I haven’t written an essay in roughly 8 years and I haven’t written a specific history-related essay in about 15 years 🫠 (this is not an accurate reflection of its quality, I am in fact incredibly smart and it is very good and interesting and insightful, just: I cannot believe I was driven to do this from absolutely nowhere. Am I possessed? Is this Lem trying to regain control the narrative with me as a mere conduit?)

A letter from Joe Snr to Jack while Jack was at school.

Far be it from me to be on the side of Joe Snr in anything and I love nothing more than hearing stories about how scatty and scruffy Jack was, but I just googled how much $10.80 is adjusted to today and it is $263 (!!!!)

Nearly $300 spent on having your suits ironed in ONE MONTH!!!! Jack be so fuckin fr. You’re in high school why do you even have a suit. Why do you even have $263 dollars.

I like collecting photographic evidence of Jack's red (“auburn”) hair purely for my own amusement, and this is a new favourite I hadn't seen before.

This is JFK with his friend Paul Fay. You probably know Paul better by his nickname, "Red" Fay, which he was called almost exclusively, thanks to his... you guessed it... red hair! You can see here that their hair colour was actually incredibly similar.

(Letter from the JFK Presidential Library)

This letter was written on 14th June 1934 by Jack to Lem whilst Jack was receiving treatment at the Mayo Clinic for his stomach woes, and Lem was in Cape Cod Hospital recovering from burns he sustained after an accident in the Kennedy's shower in Hyannis Port (more on that after).

(disclaimer: am not a transcriber. Also slight TW for er… teenage boy grossness?)

Dear Moynee, Here I am in the hottest place, except the Kennedy's shower, in the country. We had a great trip out only being kept awake the whole night by a squeak. The plane flight was OK, though I about tossed my cookies. The other passengers were looking at me very strangely. This place is great and I'll tell you about it when I see you. A fellow stuck his finger up my rectum today and I, much to my embarrassment, burst out laughing. That rather upset the dignity of the whole place. How are you feeling? I hope you're having a pleasant stay. They are going to fix my leak. They commence blasting the boogies out tomorrow and as I sit in my window with my arm around a Rochester babe all I can hear is the rumble of dynamite trucks as they come from near and far bearing the explosive which will will pave the way for the men to start drilling. People are flocking from hither and yon on horse and foot to be at the explosion. I ought to be out of here Monday and home Wednesday or Thursday. Write wire me your plans if you know them before Monday to the hotel. Miss Cahill has your money. They ask me the most personal questions and I am blushing terribly, especially when they ask me the color of my stool. They also gave my penis a tremendous jerk and I began to giggle coyly. I am stuffing my pockets full of trash ect. to hang in our room next year as souvenirs. Well, LeMoyne, will write you tomorrow. A stiff upper lip, my lad, and a clean neck as Hard-Tack, the sailor says are necessary for to achieve burning* success. As ever, For the last time, "Boogie" *rather clever

Hilariously, Lem called this letter "juvenile but not dirty" and if you've read any of their other letters, yep - not even the tip of the iceberg. This is tame - dare I say: mundane - for them.

Re. the shower incident:

(From Jack and Lem by David Pitts).

Jack’s response to this news was: “Tough about your burns but to get back to a much more interesting subject… my bowels have utterly ceased to be of service”. He then goes into some graphic detail about his "treatment" before saying "Burn this when you get finished and for God's sake don't leave it around because if you do I'll have all your letters wrapped up and sealed to be presented to your sister's un-born baby at the age of 21 so she can see what a dirty-minded shit his god-damn uncle was" (From JFK: Reckless Youth by Nigel Hamilton).

They both would say that their letters needed to be hidden or destroyed but tbh Jack's handwriting is lowkey doing enough.

JFK: They'll never know the real me if they can't read a word I say 😏

Some of my favourite cursed JFK portraits gifted to him during his presidency.

Would adore to know where all these cursed artworks ended up, and how Jack reacted to them in private.

Don’t ask me why I’ve avoided it up until now — basically just because it’s very telling when some of the more informed and balanced takes you can find on the Kennedys are all on tumblr dot com (don’t get me wrong, some of you lot have an agenda for sure lollllll, but at least you’re not claiming otherwise!)

When your mum sends you off to school with a fresh uniform and brand new stationery vs when you come home for summer with nothing but chewed up pens and a single sock that wasn’t yours to begin with

So, I was in Wexford last summer and on a walk in my tiny tiny village, population ~250. As I said, it’s in the opposite end of the county to Dunganstown and is not historically linked to the Boston Kennedys at all. There is nothing there apart from a big hill, a Spar (kind of like a convenience store with a deli counter, like an extremely rural bodega?) and a graveyard. Most Irish people would probably even struggle to tell you where it is. So on the big hill I was very surprised to find this:

There are tonnes of Kennedy memorials in Wexford, but mostly in the south near the homestead and New Ross. There is even the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Bridge, and the Fitzgeralds were from Limerick lmao. But Jean personally planted this tree on the site of a 1700s rebellion and she visited not just once but twice, choosing to give a speech there during the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

I knew very little about her before I found this tree, but she’s a significant and beloved figure in modern Irish history in her own right, and I was very pleased to discover this memorial to an often overlooked member of the Kennedy family in an overlooked part of the county. Wexford itself is also pretty overlooked by the rest of Ireland, but I won’t go into that now.