wow that'd be SOME steak

From what I hear, most people, when they go to war, think most about, or want most, to go home.  They talk with each other, in their relaxing-time, about what they're going to do when they get home, "when the war is over" -- see family, see their wife, see their girlfriend and get married, work in their dad's business, sing, dance, or farm....my father said one of the soldiers he served with, building the Burma Road, used to say when he got back home he was going to order a "steak as big as a toilet seat."

[from Robert Dallek's JFK biography, An Unfinished Life]:  What remained the same...was an intense interest in the political questions that would need attention as postwar challenges replaced military exigencies.  During his almost nine months in the war zone, while many of his fellow officers diverted themselves with card games, Jack, according to his commander in the Solomons, "spent most of his time looking for officers who weren't in any game, as he did with me. 

We'd sit in a corner and I'd recall all the political problems in New Jersey and Long Island where I come from.  He did that with everybody -- discussed politics."  One of Jack's navy friends in the Pacific recalled:  "Oh, yeah, he had politics in his blood. . . . We used to kid Jack all the time.  I'd say, after the war is over, Jack, I'm gonna work like hell and we're going to carry Louisiana for you." 

Another of Jack's pals, who remembered spending "a lot of time, every single day practically, with him" just before Jack returned to the States, said, "He made us all very conscious of the fact that we'd better . . . be concerned about why the hell we're out here, or else what's the purpose of having the conflict, if you're going to come out here and fight and let the people that got us here get us back into it again. . . . He made us all very aware of our obligations as citizens of the United States to do something, to be involved in the process."

In the winter of 1944 - 45, as he left the navy and settled outside of Phoenix to recuperate from back surgery, Jack wrote an article, "Let's Try an Experiment for Peace," which he hoped might contribute to postwar stability....

Although Jack saw his essay as innovative, editors at Life, Reader's Digest, and the Atlantic Monthly all rejected it.  Reader's Digest thought the piece too "exhortative."  The Atlantic editor dismissed the article as "an oversimplification of a very complicated subject.  Some profounder thinking is needed here and conclusions not based on cliches," he said....

------------ If Jack lacked originality in addressing postwar armament and peace, at least he was well informed about foreign affairs; the same was not true of domestic issues....During his stay in Arizona, he became friends with Pat Lannan....Lannan explained that "labor was going to be a very important force in the country." 

"Jack," Lannan told him, "you don't know the difference between an automatic screw machine and a lathe and a punch press and you ought to!"  Jack took Lannan's words as a challenge and asked his father to send him a crateful of books on labor and labor law.  Lannan remembered that Jack "sat up to one or two in the morning reading those books until he finished the whole crate."

------------------------
{An Unfinished Life.  John F. Kennedy.  1917 - 1963.
by Robert Dallek.  Copyright, 2003.  Little,
Brown & Comkpany.  Boston - New York -
London}
------------------------

A crate full of books.

1 or 2 in the morning

finished the whole crate

obligations as citizens

a steak -- that is rather large...

-30-