Before Kennedy could move up to the varsity team with his classmates came freshman year final exams.

Kennedy had been struggling in Spanish A and was not confident about the final exam in spring 1951. William A. Frate ’54 agreed to take the exam under Kennedy’s name, but was caught by the proctor. Frate and Kennedy were both asked to take a year off, and Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy ’12, went berserk.

Kennedy biographer Adam Clymer writes that his brother John later said, “If it hadn’t been for [my father’s outburst], UUsdfjsdUnivTeddy might be just a playboy today. But my father cracked down on him at a crucial time in his life.”

With time to kill, Kennedy joined the Army in the middle of the Korean War and was stationed in Europe.

When Kennedy returned to Harvard, he became known for his impressive catches on the football field and his hard work in both athletics and academics.

Coolidge recalls Kennedy as quiet, but a “guy who could make spectacular catches.”

“We would reenact some of those catches,” Clasby says. “But I can’t throw it as far and he can’t jump as high any more.”

Paul F. Beatty ’56, who was Kennedy’s Winthrop House roommate during their junior and senior years, says that Kennedy was a dedicated student.

“He was a quick study,” Beatty says. “I don’t think he had to work as hard as some of the rest of us did.”

Nevertheless, he says, Kennedy “wasn’t a goof-off.”

According to a Crimson article from March 1956, Kennedy, Beatty and William E. Crosby ’56 defeated Eliot House in an inter-House debate league, arguing effectively against a proposition that Kennedy has supported throughout his Senate career—school integration.

Though Kennedy’s dedication to football landed him in 1955 an offer of a tryout with the Green Bay Packers, the future politician ultimately decided, as his website recounts, to “go into another contact sport, politics.” His football friendships, however, have continued.

“We meet still every year at the north end, either at the Dartmouth or the Yale game the night before,” Clasby says. “I really attribute it to playing together as freshmen.”

THE HARVARD CONNECTION

After graduating from the University of Virginia Law School in 1959 and serving as an assistant district attorney from 1961-62, Kennedy was first elected to the Senate in 1962 to fill the two years remaining in his brother John’s term after John was elected president.