Out of Greenwich

[continued from here]

Shooting his mouth off.

That was the truly the one unforgivable sin. It was truly the only rule of the entire game, the only one that had to be obeyed by all players. All the other rules were simply guidelines foisted upon each man by nature. The strong are victorious. The weak perish.  All rules of behavior beyond that derive from this brutal self-correcting principle.

The man in the back of the car thought about these things as he driver took him south on the main highway from Connecticut into New York, and then the Bronx.

He should be glad that Kennedy has destroyed himself this way, so precipitously. Certainly he will glad about that, he thought to himself, in reference to another person. He will not take as any kind of setback. He never does.

Instead the anger he cultivated during his commute was more personal. It went close to the center of his own struggle, of the things he himself had been forced to learn along the way, through bitter experience, and what had been taught to him.

Keeping your mouth shut was not just part of the code.  It was the essence of the code. 

To violate it in such open way, most especially in the press, as Kennedy has done, was to make everyone stop in their tracks and pay attention to you. It was the height of awkwardness. The band stops playing.

No real damage is usually done. Nothing changes, except that  never again can you be taken into trust.

Worst of all---and this is what made the man in the car especially angry---you have destroyed your family. The ambitions of your wife---for she is the one who will hold your ambitions as a banker holds a promissory note---have been destroyed in an instance.

Your sons will also inherit this distrust, before they have even had a chance to become men. The man who kills his career by speaking out in the wrong way is thus the despicable of men, an egotist of the greatest scale, who accomplishes but destruction.

Now he could hear his own fathers words to him, when he was much younger. He thought about them, and how he would express them himself, to his own sons, if he could start from scratch.

It may be unfair, but that is how it works. Society is a family enterprise. Individual persons act within in societ, as they do in sport, but as in sport it is always as part a team, and in society the basis of each team is a family. Either it is your own family, if you are powerful, wealthy and long-established, or as part another family, with whom you wish to ally.

"Mr. Bush,"

He was interrupted by driver, as they had arrived at the front of 63 Wall Street.