Kennedy (6 page)

In the early stages of his public career his foreign policy speeches had a militant ring. Defense, in his view, was the bulk of diplomacy and disarmament was only a dream. But with increased perspective and responsibility came a renewed commitment to peace. Nothing gave him greater satisfaction in the White House than signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

The Senator who in 1954 paid little attention to the historic Supreme Court desegregation decision became less than a decade later the first President in history to invoke all the executive, legislative and moral powers of his office on behalf of equal rights.

The young Congressman who voted for the McCarran Internal Security Act, and who was—by his own admission—insufficiently sensitive to the ruin of reputations by McCarthyism, became the President who awarded the Enrico Fermi prize to the much abused J. Robert Oppen-heimer, pardoned Communist leader Junius Scales, halted the postal interception of Communist propaganda, welcomed the controversial Linus Pauling into the White House, and appointed to his administration several of McCarthy’s favorite targets.

In 1953 he knew little and cared less about agriculture, conservation and natural resources. His views on basic economic, fiscal and monetary policies were either unformed or uninformed. He had seen comparatively little of his own country, its land and its inhabitants. He had never toured a mining town or viewed a cotton field or visited a national forest.
He had never, as he later admitted in a Farm Belt speech, “plowed a furrow, straight or crooked.”

But by 1961 it could be said that no President had ever seen so often and known so well the people and the problems of every part of the country. During the preconvention campaign days, after a rainy day inspection of a farm near Columbus, Nebraska, he told his luncheon audience that the town banker had informed him of the bank’s basic rule: Lend no money to a man who’s never had mud on his face and manure on his shoes. “Today,” said the Senator from Boston, “I can qualify for a loan.”

He was fully aware of his own growth and evolution. He was, in fact, disappointed that the Burns biography of 1959 had not emphasized “a far greater evolution than he suggests. He could contrast my indifferent record at school with my present intensity.” The Senator candidly compared his political development with his scholastic performance. “The fact of the matter is,” he told me, “that I fiddled around at Choate and really didn’t become interested until the end of my sophomore year at Harvard.”

Some might say that he fiddled around as a Congressman and really didn’t become interested until his sophomore year in the Senate. It seemed to me in 1953 that an inner struggle was being waged for the spirit of John Kennedy—a struggle between the political dilettante and the statesman, between the lure of luxury and lawmaking. His performance in the House of Representatives had been considered by most observers to be largely undistinguished—except for a record of absenteeism which had been heightened by indifference as well as ill health and by unofficial as well as official travels.

Having won a Senate seat and a satisfactory measure of glory, he had proved his worth in his chosen profession of politics. It was six years until re-election, and the responsibilities of a freshman Democratic Senator under a Republican Congress and administration were neither weighty nor exciting. Having borne more pain and gloom than he liked to remember, he enjoyed in his bachelor days carefree parties and companions on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. There was a natural temptation to spend the limited number of days in which he could count on enjoying full health in pursuit of pleasure as well as duty.

But gradually the statesman won out, as his convictions deepened, his concerns broadened and Washington and the world occupied more and more of his time. And as clear as the fact of John Kennedy’s extraordinary growth is the fact that many factors contributed to it: his reading, his traveling, and the widening scope of his associates, experiences and responsibilities.

In 1952 he was elected to the United States Senate, broadening his concerns as well as his constituency.

In 1953 he was married, ending the carefree life of the bachelor and establishing a home of his own.

In 1954 a spinal operation brought him close to death, and the long months of immobile recuperation were spent in sober reflection.

In 1955 he learned, as he researched and wrote a book, about the essence of democracy, the public office-holder’s relations with his public.

In 1956 he narrowly missed the Vice Presidential nomination of his party, emerging as a national figure in wide demand.

In 1957-1959 he crisscrossed the country constantly, campaigning in areas wholly unlike his own, observing as well as orating, learning as well as teaching.

In 1960 he was successively Presidential candidate, Presidential nominee and President-elect, and the increased horizons and responsibilities of each role increased the breadth and depth of his perception.

In 1961 the Presidency altered his outlook and insight even more.

Fortunately, however, the gaiety and laughter within him never subsided. As Senator and President, in his home or on a boat, in the pool or private quarters of the White House, and particularly at Cape Cod and Palm Beach, he was always able to relax as intensively as he worked, to catch up on his sleep or his sun or his golf, and to laugh at his children and the world and himself.

Nor did he, in his moments of utmost pride and solemnity, ever pretend to be free from human vices and imperfections; and he would not want me to so record him. Like Lincoln’s a hundred years earlier, his language and humor could be as coarse in private conversation as they were correct on the public platform. He followed Franklin’s advice of “early to bed, early to rise” only when he could not otherwise arrange his schedule.

He had no passion for cards, dice or professional gambling—he never played poker, tried bridge only briefly and grew bored with backgammon—but he would briefly try his luck on campaign stops at Las Vegas, liked to bet on his golf games and did consistently well in our office World Series betting pools. Attending a Boston Red Sox game with aide Dave Powers, a baseball statistician without peer, he asked Powers how often slugger Ted Williams hit a home run, and Powers immediately calculated “one out of every fifteen times at bat.” “All right,” said Kennedy, “I’ll bet you ten dollars to one he doesn’t hit one this time.” Powers accepted the bet—Williams hit a home run—and Kennedy, who would later defy all the odds in politics, was more careful thereafter not to challenge them in baseball against Powers.

In eleven years I did not see him smoke a total of eleven cigarettes, but with increasing frequency he enjoyed an expensive cigar after a
meal or during a conference. (His decision as President to exclude Cuban tobacco was clearly a “sacrifice” for him.)

Along with the vast quantities of milk he usually drank with his campaign plane meals, he sometimes liked a bottle of beer. He had, in fact, revealed the drinking of a bottle of beer or two when his father was about to present him with the thousand-dollar check given to all Kennedy boys who did not smoke or drink before the age of twenty-one. When relaxing, he enjoyed a daiquiri, a scotch and water or a vodka and tomato juice before dinner and a brandy stinger afterward. He rarely drank in any quantity, and it rarely had any detectable effect on him. But he once told me with some gusto of his rather flippant remarks to a pompous couple one night in the West Indies when too much sun and rum had dissolved his customary reserve.

He was not free from vanity about his appearance. He knew that good pictures were the lifeblood of politics, and he resented photographers who waited to snap him brushing perspiration from his brow during a speech. He would not pose in honorary Indian headdresses or marshal’s hats, and could avoid putting them on or take them off faster than most photographers could raise their cameras. As a Senator he often recoiled at the sight of the pale, gaunt, early Congressional pictures still in use by some Massachusetts newspapers, and he always ordered his Administrative Assistant Ted Reardon to make certain more timely portraits were submitted.

His only brushes with the law arose from his earlier tendencies as a driver to ignore both traffic signs and traffic. The only occasion he was stopped when I was with him was when he sped to a mere forty-five MPH in order to pass a car in a sparsely settled area of Washington. Unfortunately it was a thirty-five-mile zone, and the car was a police car. Inasmuch as the Senator was not recognized by the two officers, was without his wallet and driver’s license, could not find the auto’s registration and decided not to claim the privileges of his office, they were prepared to take him for booking to the nearest precinct station (with me driving) until I walked back to their car and gave his name and occupation. “Why didn’t he say so?” the officer demanded; and, after peering once again into the Kennedy station wagon window, proclaimed, “Yep, it’s him all right,” and waved us on our way.

Through all these years, as John Kennedy learned and grew, it was my unique privilege to learn from him and to grow with him. Our relationship grew as well. After I had worked with him a month he increased my pay. Three months later, when his other legislative assistant moved out, he increased my responsibilities. In the next few years, our working together on legislation, speeches, Massachusetts politics and
Profiles in Courage
brought us closer together.

Before his back flared up, we played touch football. We went to
the movies in Palm Beach, in Washington and in his father’s basement at Hyannis Port, the low quality of some of the films in no way diminishing his enjoyment. We swam in his pool at Palm Beach while discussing politics and personalities. In 1956 I attended my first National Convention with him. From that summer of 1956 through November, 1960, we traveled together constantly, and long hours of conversation and observation in airplanes, airports and hotels forged a bond of intimacy in which there were few secrets and no illusions.

Some say that in time I talked and gestured, as well as thought and wrote, like the Senator. I doubt that he ever thought so, but occasionally, for reasons of time more often than mischief, he would have me assume his identity on the telephone.

It took me a few years to address him as “Jack” instead of “Senator,” and we agreed in 1957 that the decorum befitting a national political aspirant required that I return to calling him “Senator” in the presence of others. But “Jack” was still the accepted salutation in private until January 20, 1961.

The most important people in his life, however, were the members of his family, and particularly his father, his brother Bob and his wife Jacqueline.

The roles of Bob and Jacqueline emerge throughout the pages that follow. The role of Joseph P. Kennedy in his son’s undertakings was neither so large as the father sometimes liked to claim nor so small as he sometimes preferred to pretend. The usual areas of parental influence were often exaggerated by the detractors of both father and son into a Svengali-puppet relationship. Those who knew Jack Kennedy as a strong and self-sufficient person, with drive and desire and independence since early manhood, agreed with the thoughts Jacqueline Kennedy expressed to a 1959 biographer who had overstated the influence of both Joe, Sr.’s wishes and Joe, Jr.’s death: “No matter how many older brothers and fathers my husband had had, he would have been what he is today—or the equivalent in another field.”

Even in campaigns the father concerned himself almost entirely with tactics, almost never with substance. He knew that Jack disagreed with him sharply on most matters of public policy, and that they spoke for two different generations. Although the Ambassador seldom refrained from pronouncing his own views, he rarely tried to change Jack’s, and never sought to influence his vote. Jack, in turn, never in my experience argued with his father. “I don’t attempt to convert him and he doesn’t attempt to convert me,” he said. Both agreed they could disagree agreeably.
“You couldn’t write speeches for me,” Joseph Kennedy said to me at our first meeting at Hyannis Port in the fall of 1953, in tones I later learned were friendly. “You’re too much of a liberal. But writing for Jack is different.”

Father and son could scarcely have been more different. The “very few” members of the National Association of Manufacturers who supported his election, the President smilingly remarked to their 1961 convention, must have been “under the impression that I was my father’s son.” Both had a natural charm—but the father, though very emotional underneath, was often dour and gruff while his son kept outwardly calm. Both had a winning Irish smile—but the father was capable of more angry outbursts than his infinitely patient son. Both had a tough inner core, capable of making hard decisions and sticking to them—but the father had a more aggressive exterior compared to his son’s consistently gentle composure. The father’s normal conversation was often filled with hyperbole—his son’s speech, in private as in public, was more often characterized by quiet understatement.

Both had a hatred of war, but the father leaned more to the concept of a Fortress America while his son felt our concern must be global. On domestic matters, while preferring the simpler machinery and lower taxes of an earlier era, the father emphasized personalities as much as issues. “Do you realize,” his son said to me in 1953, “that his first choice for the Presidency last year was Senator [Robert A.] Taft and his second was Justice [William O.] Douglas?”

Father and son also had much in common: a delightful sense of humor, a fierce family loyalty, a concern for the state of the nation, endless vitality and a constant air of confidence no matter how great the odds or the pressures. (“I still don’t know how I did,” the candidate said after getting the usual cheery word by telephone from his father after the second Nixon-Kennedy debate. “If I had slipped and fallen flat on the floor, he would have said, The graceful way you picked yourself up was terrific’”)

They also admired, with good reason, each other’s political judgment, and it was in this area that they most often collaborated. The senior Kennedy understood the inner workings of politics and politicians. He enjoyed talking to the older professionals, getting progress reports on his son and suggesting the right emphasis for campaign advertising and television. In the 1958 re-election campaign a slogan in which considerable funds had already been invested was discarded because he felt, with some justification, that “Be proud of your vote” might be misunderstood and resented by the opponent’s fellow Italian-Americans.