Harvard friends indeed noticed a more serious-minded and diligent Jack Kennedy that autumn as he upped his game in the classroom, despite a heavy course load (he took six classes), and raised his average to a B. In Government 9a, with A. Chester Hanford, Jack impressed with his active and discerning participation in class and his capacity for independent thought, though Hanford found it curious that the grandson of Honey Fitz Fitzgerald showed so little interest in state and local politics as compared with national affairs and foreign relations.

Arthur Holcombe, an erudite senior member of the faculty who had been around long enough to teach both Joe Senior and Joe Junior and now had Jack as well, came away impressed by the young man. “He stood out among the group he lived with,” Holcombe later said. All of them saw a college education as “much more than studying things. They were interested in life. But Jack was more interested in ideas than most men who have the means of doing whatever they wish when they’re in college. He had a genuine interest in ideas, there’s no question about that.” In Holcombe’s Government 7 class, which focused on Congress, each student had to produce a research paper on an individual member of the House of Representatives, studying that lawmaker’s methods and assessing accomplishments and failures as objectively as possible. Holcombe assigned Jack the upstate New York Republican Bertrand Snell, known chiefly for representing the electric power interests in his district. The result, Holcombe found, was a “masterpiece,” based on “a very superior job of investigating,” though admittedly the young man had certain advantages: during Christmas vacation, “he goes down to Washington, meets some of his father’s friends, gets a further line on his congressman and on Congress.”29

Jack’s rooming arrangement at Winthrop House, meanwhile, had changed: he and Torby moved into a larger quad unit together with two football players, Charlie Houghton and Benjamin Smith (who would later fill Jack’s seat in the U.S. Senate when he was elected president), who were dismayed by Jack’s astonishing untidiness but otherwise found him to be a congenial and engaging roommate. “Jack was a very stimulating person to live with,” Houghton recalled. “Very argumentative in a nice way. He questioned everything. I think the depth of his curiosity was shown in that he’d challenge anything you said. He had the best sense of humor of all the Kennedys.”30

Donald Thurber, a fellow government major, likewise saw in Kennedy someone who was not content with the pat answer, who was willing to challenge assumptions and to ask, “What makes you think so?” “You got the impression that here was a mind that was learning from other people, and that longed to learn from other people—he would regard them as sources of information and knowledge to fill out his own.” Nor could Kennedy be considered a mere lothario intent on having a good time, Thurber continued. “I knew plenty of playboys. I could spot a playboy on the other side of the room. Jack didn’t fit into that mold at all—he was someone who played hard when he played, but his motivation was a serious one—you got the idea that he’d already decided life was a pretty serious proposition, even though it wouldn’t have to be, with lots of money and so on. But it was going to be a serious proposition.”31

To be sure, the desire for extracurricular fun had not dissipated. Kennedy wrote to Billings that fall about parties and sexual conquests, and about Harvard’s superiority over Princeton in football. “Dear Billings: Yours of the 19th received and horseshit noted. Numerous Harvard varsity men have been quoted as saying, ‘Four tough games in a row—Thank God we’re playing Princeton.’ ” He instructed Billings to get a date for the Harvard-Yale game on November 19, “as we’re going to have a party in Bronxville.” With the rest of the Kennedys overseas, the three family homes could be—and not infrequently were—perfect settings for myriad undergrad debaucheries.32

In personal appearance he remained as casual as ever, often showing up to class with wrinkled pants and mismatched socks, his tie askew. And he gave few outward signs of personal wealth, despite the fact that he had become, on his twenty-first birthday the previous spring, a millionaire, gaining access to a trust fund established for him by his father a decade before. (He also received on his birthday two $1,000 checks from his father, for meeting a challenge to refrain from picking up smoking or drinking; even afterwards, indeed to the end of his life, Jack seldom touched tobacco or alcohol, apart from the occasional cigar or daiquiri.) Jack showed limited interest in luxury goods, or in material possessions generally; with respect to those belongings he did have he was, like many children of privilege, nonchalant, losing golf clubs and tennis rackets and suitcases with abandon, much to his mother’s annoyance.33

He also fell in love, in a way he never had before. Her name was Frances Ann Cannon, a ravishingly beautiful North Carolina textile heiress and former Sarah Lawrence student who turned the heads of all the men in Winthrop House. Charlie Houghton took her out first and then Kennedy moved in, entranced by her looks, her sense of humor, her southern drawl, and her inquisitive mind and interest in politics. Soon her name started popping up in Kennedy’s letters to Billings, and friends wondered if she might be the one, especially after he followed her to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. There, at the Comus Ball, Cannon’s friend Jane Suydam (née Gaither Eustis) laid eyes on Jack for the first time. “He was standing there in the call-out section, very tanned, wearing white tie and tails,” she remembered. “He was unbelievably handsome. He had this remarkable animal pull. The impact on me was overwhelming.” Jack’s friends had somewhat the same reaction upon meeting Frances Ann. Rip Horton, for one, thought her the most beautiful girl Jack had ever dated and recalled thinking after one double date, “My God, why doesn’t Jack marry this girl?”34

Later Kennedy would contemplate that very thought, even though he surely knew the chances of a union were slim—his Catholicism was unacceptable to Ann’s family, as was her Protestantism to his. For the moment, though, his priorities were directed elsewhere—namely, to getting himself back to Europe as soon as possible. His family was there, and so was the geopolitical action, notwithstanding the lull following the Munich agreement. The summer of motoring around the Continent with Lem had fired Jack’s imagination, had made him hungry for more, so he asked his Harvard dean for permission to take a semester’s leave in the spring of 1939 in order to spend it in Europe. He pledged to take along a stack of books on political philosophy and to do groundwork—in consultation with his Winthrop House tutor, Bruce Hopper—on a senior thesis dealing with some aspect of diplomatic history and international law. The dean, impressed by Jack’s apparent seriousness of purpose, approved the request.