The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (56 page)

For Bobby, the election was a victory in many ways. His sister Jean observed that in those months, he had proved himself to his father “very quickly and definitely.” He was only twenty-six years old, but he had no problem leading people twice his age, often bossing them with dismissive arrogance. He moved people around as if they were furniture, shoving them into this space or that. For the first time in his life he was a man of authority, and he used it willfully. He was his brother’s man. That was Bobby’s proud identity, a moniker he would carry the rest of Jack’s life.

Bobby went down to the Cape a few weeks after the election for a weekend of football and sailing and good times with old friends. It was time to savor the victory, like football players reliving each play of a close victory. Joe would have none of that. Life always lay ahead. “What are you going to do now?” Bobby’s father asked. “Are you going to sit on your tail end and do nothing now for the rest of your life? You’d better go out and get
a job.”

I
n December, Bobby told a reporter from the
Cape Cod Times
that he was “aiming for the post of Massachusetts attorney general” in a few years, but that he would first work in Washington to gain some experience. He could have gained that expertise working for any of a number of Democratic senators or congressmen. Instead, his father decided that he would call upon his Republican friend, Senator Joe McCarthy, to place Bobby in what boded to be the most publicized, most controversial staff position in the Eighty-third Congress: chief counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations chaired by the Wisconsin senator.

Joe showed up in his limousine at McCarthy’s townhouse on Capitol Hill one winter evening. McCarthy was out in back grilling steaks, but he hurried inside, wearing his apron and holding a cooking fork. “How do you like your steak, Mr. Ambassador?” asked George Mason, one of the senator’s friends. “I have no time,” Joe said peremptorily and turned toward McCarthy. “Bobby will give me no peace,” Joe said. “He wants a job. He wants to come to Washington. You’ve got to give him a job. You’ve got to do something about Bobby.”

Joe asked for few favors, and when he did, they were usually wrapped in velvet, but there was an urgent, imploring quality to this request. Joe was McCarthy’s supporter, fellow Catholic, and friend. Moreover, McCarthy was enough of a politician to realize when he could not say no. “I’ll talk to [Senator John] McClellan [the ranking Democrat] in the morning, and see what we can arrange.” With that, Joe turned and walked out the door, never having even taken off his homburg.

McCarthy told Joe that he had already hired twenty-five-year-old Roy Cohn, another ambitious young lawyer, as chief counsel. Instead, the senator offered Bobby a slot as assistant counsel.

Jack found McCarthy’s rhetoric vulgar and overweening but he was not about to attack him for such faults. Nevertheless, he was upset that Bobby was going to work for McCarthy, even if he thought it was for “political, not ideological,” reasons.

Bobby had scarcely arrived in his new position before he made his presence felt in a variety of ways. One day Maurice Rosenblatt received word that Bobby wanted to see him. Rosenblatt was a leading anti-McCarthy activist and the anonymous author of a series of articles about Joe’s anti-Semitism and dubious business dealings in the
City Reporter,
a small liberal publication. He was not used to getting calls from the Kennedys. Rosenblatt walked over to the assistant counsel’s office in the Old Senate Office Building. “I walk in, and he gets up, walks around his desk, and puts out his hand, and I put out my hand,” Rosenblatt recalled with the most vivid and immediate of
memories. “He pulls my hand and twists it, and I’m off balance, and [he] throws me onto a leather coach. No words or anything else. I blink and say, ‘What is this about?’ He says, ‘We have our eye on you.’”

B
obby had a dogged, tenacious quality that he applied in full measure to his investigation of American allies trading with the Chinese. He discovered that three out of every four ships carrying goods into Chinese ports flew a Western flag. Many of these shippers also had contracts to carry allied defense goods to Western Europe. And all of this was happening when American boys were dying in Korea.

This devastating information seemed to verify American feelings that the world outside its borders was a duplicitous, dishonorable place. Bobby’s initial report was judicious and serious, the very model of the way the staff of a congressional committee should do its work. Bobby did not point to bureaucratic culprits in Washington to be grabbed by their disreputable necks and hauled before the justice of the McCarthy committee.

The report should have led to lengthy, spirited hearings in which a wide variety of viewpoints would be heard. It was, after all, a world of fearsome complexities. The Japanese appeared to be one of the worst violators. They were shipping only seaweed to China in exchange for iron ore, however, and that seaweed was hardly the stuff of which the Chinese could make bullets. As for the British, they had colonies in Asia and had been a trading nation for centuries; it was far more onerous for them to stop shipping to China than for the United States.

These points were made, but they were drowned out by the sheer force and fury of McCarthy’s rhetoric. What could a man say—a politician, that is—when McCarthy shouted on the floor of the Senate: “We should perhaps keep in mind the American boys and the few British boys, too, who had their hands wired behind their backs and their faces shot off with machine guns—Communist machine guns … supplied by those flag vessels of our allies…. Let us sink every accursed ship carrying materials to the enemy regardless of what flag those ships may fly.”

If McCarthy had been able to marry his rhetoric to Bobby’s research, he might have staved off his ignominious political end for a while longer. He was, however, a man rising to his worst instincts, and no one played to those instincts better than did Roy Cohn and his new associate, G. David Schine. While Bobby was working on his shipping report, these two dapper, diminutive inquisitors traveled around Europe pulling suspicious books off Voice of America library shelves, happily exporting fear and suspicion to American officials abroad.

Bobby had an immense dislike for Cohn, an emotion that Cohn fully reciprocated. When the two ambitious young men looked at each other, it was as if they were looking into a mirror that exaggerated their blemishes and faults. Cohn did Bobby one of the most valuable favors of his life. If Bobby had not abhorred Cohn so profoundly, he would probably have stayed with McCarthy, a man he personally admired, and would have borne the heavy burden of that livery for the rest of his political life.

The history of the Kennedys might have been different if Bobby had remained with McCarthy, or had taken the position of chief counsel. The family would have been so closely identified with McCarthy that Jack would have found it difficult to get the support of enough liberal and centrist Democrats to win the presidential nomination.

None of the Kennedy men grasped the terrible danger of McCarthy. Across the nation men and women spent sleepless nights pondering whether they would be condemned for an acquaintanceship they once had, a petition they once signed, a belief they once held, a cause they once supported. This fear reached into the higher reaches of academe, into the unions, and into the bureaucracies of Washington. It even entered into the Kennedys’ own family. The fact that the matter was kept so quiet shows that in those years, fear was no stranger even among the Kennedy men.

During the summer of 1954, the FBI learned that Jack Anderson, then a reporter for columnist Drew Pearson, had information that after completing army basic training in 1951, “Teddy had not been permitted to go to a school at Camp Holabird, Maryland, because of an adverse FBI report which linked him to a group of ‘pinkos.’” Here, then, was just the kind of silent, unsubstantiated allegation that destroyed people. It had apparently been responsible for Teddy’s abrupt departure from Camp Holabird, destroying his Army Intelligence career, and now it might destroy his public honor.

FBI agent L. B. Nichols wrote Clyde Tolson, the FBI deputy director, that Joe “stated that he sent word to Drew Pearson that if he so much as printed a word about this that he would sue him for libel in a manner such as Drew Pearson had never been sued before.” Nichols reported that he had told Joe that there had been no such FBI report and that it may have been the case of “somebody confusing the FBI with some other investigative agency.” There may have been no formal FBI investigation, but Nichols told Tolson that “apparently some of the information which Anderson had on his son’s Army activities was accurate and Kennedy stated the army was somewhat incensed over how the information got out.”

Teddy, then, was probably a victim, if a minor one, of the Red Scare. If not for Joe, Teddy might have found himself permanently tainted. He was left unscathed, but neither his father nor his brothers appear to have grasped that
if the finger of accusation could point at Teddy, then it could point at anyone. Men who exalted courage above all virtues surely should have known that when the name of your own son or brother is called out, then it is time to stand up and condemn those fingers pointing so wildly, often destroying lives with the flick of an allegation.

Joe did not quite see it that way. He shared many of McCarthy’s beliefs and reveled in his association with J. Edgar Hoover, who fancied himself the greatest of all Communist hunters. Joe’s friendship with Hoover may have saved Teddy’s reputation, and Joe took every occasion to flatter the FBI director.

The year before the threat against Teddy, J. J. Kelly, the special agent in charge of the Boston office, made one of his periodic visits to Joe in Hyannis Port. Joe told the agent that “if it were not for the FBI the country would go to Hell.” Then he referred to a series of newspaper columns regarding civil rights investigations. Although the name of the columnist has been blacked out in the FBI Freedom of Information documents, Joe was apparently referring to Drew Pearson. Joe told the agent that he believed that the columnist “was angling his columns at the Jews, Negroes and the Communist element behind the Civil Liberties outfit, as well as the NAACP.”

Joe’s endless devotions to the FBI director were the mark not of an unctuous poseur but of a shrewd man who understood his subject only too well. As much as Hoover loved power, he loved praise even more. And in the midst of the McCarthy era, the director received accolades and acclaim so extravagant that only a man of boundless egoism could have believed it. Even among this army of courtiers and sycophants, Joe’s fawning voice stood out as, in the words of the FBI special agent in Boston, “the most vocal and forceful admirer [of Hoover] that I have met.”

T
he Senate was as close to a natural aristocracy as could be found in American politics, and Jack fit into the clubby collegial atmosphere as he had not in the rowdier, more populist House. A patina of authority descended on Jack, as it did on all members of the Senate, even one as youthful and naturally irreverent as the junior senator from Massachusetts. “Knowing him from then on was not knowing him at all, because once you become a member of the club, everything about you changes,” reflected Dave Powers.

Even Jack’s old friend Charles Bartlett noticed that a change had come over him. Up until then, nothing gave Jack greater pleasure than employing his wicked wit on the buffoons, mediocrities, and pretenders with whom he felt he served in Congress. Charley was a man of courtly civility who would
no more have passed on Jack’s indiscretions than he would have written about them as a journalist. But now Jack was forgoing his usual playful put-downs. “Dad says don’t knock anybody,” Jack explained, although in closing down much of his wit he was shutting off part of himself.

Jack’s ambition came into focus. He was a man concerned only with what you would do for him tomorrow. Loyal Anthony Gallucio had traveled the state by bus, eating at cheap restaurants and treating his employer as if he were an impoverished candidate, not the son of one of the wealthiest men in America. He had given his all to the campaign, his formidable organizing skill, energy, wit, and integrity, and he assumed that he would be going to Washington in Jack’s enlarged office, a minimal reward for his two years of relentless effort. Jack called finally to give him the news. “I’ve got no money,” Gallucio recalls Jack telling him.

For six years, Mary Davis had not simply served as an excellent secretary to Jack but used her astute political sense to promote the congressman in a myriad of ways. For several years she had been working in the office six days a week, then finishing up her work Sunday at home. She lined up a number of new secretaries and clerical workers for his expanded staff, agreeing on salaries that could reasonably be paid out of Jack’s allotment.

“Well, I can’t pay any more than sixty dollars a week,” Jack replied.

“Sixty dollars a week!” Davis exclaimed. “You’ve got to be joking. Nobody I’ve lined up would be willing to accept a job at that salary. And I wouldn’t ask them.”

“Well, that’s the way it’s going to have to be.”

“Where are you going to get somebody competent for sixty dollars a week? You cannot do that.”

“Mary, you can get candy dippers in Charlestown for fifty dollars a week.”

“Yes, and you’d have candy dippers on your senatorial staff.”

Mary was being paid only ninety dollars a week. Salaries on the Senate side were higher, and she asked to be raised to the one hundred fifteen dollars a week being offered her by a freshman congressman. “Mary, you wouldn’t do this to me,” Jack replied incredulously, unwilling to go beyond a 10 percent raise.

It would have been nothing for this multimillionaire heir to pay this loyal woman an extra eight hundred dollars a year, less than he spent during his weekends in New York. Jack, like the rest of his family, considered it part of the livery of service to be poorly paid. Those who sought market value for their services were expressing their disloyalty and they deserved to be gone, and gone Mary Davis was.