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~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: courtship

The Kennedy Courtship

11 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Comments Off on The Kennedy Courtship

Tags

American History, An Unfinished Life, Charlie Bartlett, Chuck Spalding, courtship, Jackie Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier, John F. Kennedy, Joseph Kennedy, Kennedy family, Lem Billings, politics, relationship, Robert Dallek

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“Private concerns preoccupied Kennedy during the debate on condemning McCarthy’s behavior. In 1953, he had reluctantly decided to marry. Up till that time, he had seemed perfectly content to be the ‘Gay Young Bachelor,’ as a Saturday Evening Post article then described him: a handsome, casual millionaire who dashed about Washington in ‘his long convertible, hatless, with the car’s top down,’ and had the pick of the most beautiful, glamorous women in and out of town. But Jacqueline Bouvier, a beautiful twenty-two-year-old socialite, had entered his life, and political necessities dictated that he end his career as the ‘Senate’s Confirmed Bachelor.’ One close Kennedy friend doubted that Jack would have married if he had lost the senate race in 1952, but a wife was essential for a young senator intent on higher office.

This is not to suggest that he was marrying strictly for reasons of political expediency; he had, in fact, fallen in love with Jackie. In 1951, after they met at a dinner party given by their journalist friend Charlie Bartlett, they began a two-year courtship. From the first, Jackie seemed like an ideal mate, or as close to it as Jack was likely to find: physically attractive, bright and thoughtful, shy but charming, and from a prominent Catholic Social Register family. Jackie also added to Jack’s public aura, which partly satisfied the political side of the marriage. She helped legitimize Jack’s standing as an American Brahmin — a royal marrying another member of the country’s aristocracy.

Jack and Jackie 3.png

They shared backgrounds of personal suffering. Jackie’s parents, John Vernou Bouvier III, a New York Stock Exchange member, and Janet Lee Bouvier, had divorced when Jackie was nine. Tensions with her mother and an absent father, whose drinking and womanizing further separated him from his family, had made Jackie distrustful of people and something of a loner. By contrast, Jack had countered his anguish about his health and parental strains by constant engagement with friends. Though outwardly opposites in their detachment from and affinity for people, beneath the skin they were not so different…

But there were also frictions that threatened the potential union. Joe Kennedy worried that Jack might not want to give up his freedom. ‘I am a bit concerned that he may get restless about the prospect of getting married,’ Joe wrote Jack’s friend Torb Macdonald six weeks before the wedding. ‘Most people do and he is more likely to do so than others.’

Jack and Jackie 5

Jack’s reluctance expressed itself in a ‘spasmodic courtship’ that bothered Jackie. She was in Europe for a while after they began dating, and when she returned, Jack’s campaign for the Senate took priority over the courtship. After that, Jack was often in Massachusetts, where he would call her ‘from some oyster bar… with a great clinking of coins, to ask me out to the movies the following Wednesday in Washington.’ Possibly more threatening to the relationship were rumors of Jack’s womanizing. But this, in fact, actually seemed to make him more attractive to Jackie. Chuck Spalding believed that ‘she wasn’t sexually attracted to men unless they were dangerous like old Black Jack [Bouvier],’ her father, whose philandering had destroyed his marriage to Jackie’s mother. ‘It was one of those terribly obvious Freudian situations,’ Spalding said. ‘We all talked about it — even Jack, who didn’t particularly go for Freud, but said that Jackie had a “father crush.” What was so surprising was that Jackie, who was so intelligent in other things, didn’t seem to have a clue about this one.’

They married at Jackie’s stepfather’s estate in Newport, Rhode Island, on September 12, 1953. It was a celebrity affair attended by the rich and famous and numerous members of the press, who described it as the social event of the year — the marriage of ‘Queen Deb’ to America’s most eligible bachelor. ‘At last I know the true meaning of rapture,’ Jack wired his parents during his honeymoon in Acapulco. ‘Jackie is enshrined forever in my heart. Thanks mom and dad for making me worthy of her.'”

Jack and Jackie 9__________

Excerpted from Robert Dallek’s definitive biography An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963.

Go on:

  • How dark was the shadow cast by Joe Kennedy?
  • Robert Kennedy and the process of grief (Part II, III, IV)
  • What Alexander Hamilton wanted in a girl

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Alexander Hamilton the Bachelor

19 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Alexander Hamilton, American History, courtship, Elizabeth Schuyler, founding, John Laurens, jokes, letter, Love, marriage, Michelangelo, sex, Shakespeare, Sistine Chapel

Alexander Hamilton

In December of 1779, a twenty-four year-old Alexander Hamilton wrote to his friend John Laurens, asking Laurens to find for him a wife in South Carolina:

“She must be young, handsome (I lay most stress upon a good shape), sensible (a little learning will do), well bred, chaste and tender (I am an enthusiast in my notions of fidelity and fondness); of some good nature, a great deal of generosity (she must neither love money nor scolding, for I dislike equally a termagant and an economist). In politics, I am indifferent what side she may be of. I think I have arguments that will safely convert her to mine. As to religion a moderate stock will satisfy me: she must believe in God and hate a saint. But as to fortune, the larger stock of that the better…”

__________

From a December 1779 letter from Alexander Hamilton to John Laurens. You can find more of Hamilton’s words, from adolescence to adulthood, in the definitive Alexander Hamilton: Writings.

In December 14th of the following year, Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler of Albany. Schuyler, whose mother Catherine Van Rensselaer was from one of New York’s most powerful and privileged families, and whose father, Philip Schuyler, was a decorated general of the Revolutionary War, eventually bore eight children before Alexander was killed in a duel in 1804.

Elizabeth, or Betsy as she was known, survived a half century after her husband’s untimely death, during which time she dedicated herself to helping dispossessed widows and founded New York’s first private orphanage, the New York Orphan Asylum Society. She is pictured below.

Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton

P.S. In closing this same letter, Hamilton wrote:

You will be pleased to recollect in your negotiations that I have no invincible antipathy to the maidenly beauties, and that I am willing to take the trouble of them upon myself.

If you should not readily meet with a lady that you think answers my description, you can only advertise in the public papers, and doubtless you will hear of many competitors for most of the qualifications required, who will be glad to become candidates for such a prize as I am. To excite their emulations it will be necessary for you to give an account of the lover—his size, make, qualities of mind and body, achievements, expectations, fortune, etc. In drawing my picture you will no doubt be civil to your friend, mind you do justice to the length of my nose, and don’t forget that I——

After reviewing what I have written, I am ready to ask myself what could have put it into my head to hazard this jeu de folie. Do I want a wife? No. I have plagues enough without desiring to add to the number that greatest of all; and if I were silly enough to do it I should take care how I employed a proxy. Did I mean to show my wit? If I did, I am sure I have missed my aim. 

I believe I can pick up most of the innuendo in this. Maidenly is a euphemism for virgin, while size and nose are substitutes for… well, you get the point. And at that, one’s tempted to just shrug boys will be boys, and put away the Hamilton letter for another day; that is, until the recognition hits you that it’s the author of Federalist No. 84 who’s making the lurid emails sent amongst your college buds look tame.

Yet there’s something warmly reassuring to these words. They’re a reminder that history is both linear and cyclical, that lives pass but that the pressures and preoccupations (and in this case the puerile sex jokes) repeat in each generation. Shakespeare’s horn and lance gags and even the snake imagery of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling betray the fact even our greatest geniuses were thinking and laughing about the same stuff you and I do.

To read a condensed but daunting biography of Hamilton, and see how his story contrasts with that of his political rival Thomas Jefferson, click below:

Alexander Hamilton

Jefferson, Hamilton, and the Art of Power

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