Well, sure. But as Jack later “explained” in his autobiography, Fat Man in a Middle Seat, he went on TV for the money, all right, but the money was all for him. Working as an honest print journalist meant working 12-hour days for maybe $100,000 a year in 2013 money, barely enough to rub your nose against the well-toned ass of the upper-middle class. Working as a TV celebrity meant working 8-hour days for $250,000 a year, which is getting pretty close to “real money,” particularly if you’ve got a smart wife who can handle the books for free. Yeah, journalists, who get sooo mad when politicians lie, lie themselves, to preserve their journalistic integrity, which I guess is a bit of an oxymoron.
So, Jack may have played the curmudgeon card a bit too freely, but he still got off the best har-de-har-de-har-har-har line evah during the fracas over the Kennedy family’s “old fashioned family Easter” in Palm Beach, Fla., back in 1991, when ole’ Teddy and a couple of the boys paid a late night visit to the fabled Au Bar, which ended up with one of Teddy’s nephews being charged with rape (he got off, naturally). Not a big deal, really, by Kennedy standards, at least, but the McLaughlin Group went all apeshit on Uncle Ted, who, it seems, had woken the young lads up. “The kids were asleep!” they howled. “He woke them up! He woke them up! It was all his fault!”
Jack, for not the first time or the last, put things in perspective.
“You want him to drink alone?” he asked.
