In time, much would be made of Jack Kennedy’s exposure to the famous Laski’s teachings. Jack himself talked up the connection, presumably in order to enhance the impression of his academic credentials. References would be made by political operatives to the “term” he spent at the LSE. In fact, he lasted in London all of a month before returning to the United States, his parents feeling his health could be better monitored from there.^*1 Tellingly, he informed Billings in a letter that “Dad says I can go home if I want to.” Not only that, but the elder Kennedy signed off on his son’s request to enroll late at Princeton. (The school granted his appeal.) On October 21, 1935, Billings received the good news via wire: ARRIVING PRINCETON THURSDAY AFTERNOON; HOPE YOU CAN ARRANGE ROOMING.20

Billings was thrilled. He wired back: NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY SOUND BETTER. SO HURRY HOME. And he did have accommodation for his friend, though admittedly it wasn’t much: a dumpy two-bedroom apartment that he shared with Rip Horton on the fourth floor of South Reunion Hall. The main bathroom was in the basement, seventy-two steps away, and the flat had long since seen its best days. It had but a single radiator and a lone cramped closet. But it was cheap, and it offered a splendid view of ivy-covered Nassau Hall, the oldest building on campus, dating to 1756, when the university was known as the College of New Jersey.21

If Jack felt let down by his new digs, he didn’t show it. Never one to live with the ostentation his family wealth afforded him, he entered college with the same casual, even sloppy, manner of dress and lifestyle he had followed at Choate. He happily bunked on a spare cot in Billings’s small bedroom. He was aware, moreover, that the spartan arrangement was made necessary by his friend’s financial constraints. Though he could belittle Lem in letters (in a way Lem never dared do to him), Jack was also deeply loyal. He worried about his friend’s money problems, and pledged to help him out. “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.”22

The reunion of the three ex-Muckers was a happy one, and soon they were enjoying weekends in New York City, ninety minutes away by train. About his studies, however, Jack remained as lackadaisical as ever, if not more so. He barely cracked open his books. Princeton as an institution disappointed him—it seemed dismayingly similar to Choate in his mind, a kind of overgrown boarding school more than a university, palpably insular and oppressively Protestant. “I think he was a little disenchanted with the country-club atmosphere of Princeton,” a friend recalled. Nor did it help that he soon fell ill again. He could drag himself to class, but barely, and the jaundice from London returned—his complexion, an observer noted, took on a yellowish-brown hue, “as though he’d been sunbathing.”23 Already on November 11, barely two weeks after Jack’s arrival, his father wrote him an affectionate letter, suggesting that they monitor his health until Thanksgiving and then make a determination about whether he could remain in school: “After all, the only consideration I have in the whole matter is your happiness, and I don’t want you to lose a year of your college life (which ordinarily brings great pleasure to a boy) by wrestling with a bad physical condition and a jam in your studies. A year is important, but it isn’t so important if it’s going to leave a mark for the rest of your life….You know I really think you are a pretty good guy and my only interest is in doing what is best for you.”24