The Passage of Power (9 page)

Then, in Chicago in 1956, after Stevenson had startled the convention by throwing open the vice presidential nomination, suddenly Kennedy was running for it.
“ ‘Old
pal, you’ve got to do me a favor,’ ”
George Smathers said Kennedy told him, telephoning at 1 a.m. “ ‘You’ve got to nominate me for vice president.’ I said, ‘For vice president? You’re running for vice president? … You’ve got to be kidding.’ ” Kennedy explained that he wanted the nominating speech to be made by House Majority Leader John McCormack of Massachusetts, but that McCormack wasn’t answering his phone: thirty minutes had been allotted for the speeches of each nominee, Kennedy said, “and you may have to take all the thirty minutes.” Delivering the speech the next morning, Smathers was having difficulty filling the time—“I couldn’t really think of anything he had done except he was very strongly for education”—but as it turned out he didn’t have to fill it all. “All of a sudden I had this
very
sharp pain in my back,” he was to recall—and then another one, and another. “I thought, ‘I’m having a heart attack.’ ” But looking over his shoulder, he saw that the pain was being caused by the handle of the convention chairman’s large gavel, which was being jabbed vigorously into his spine. “McCormack is here! McCormack is here!” the chairman rasped. “Sam Rayburn [was] sticking me in the back … to get me to shut up … so that McCormack” could speak.

D
ESPITE HIS DEARTH
of accomplishment, Kennedy had two things going for him at the 1956 convention: his effective star turn as the on-screen narrator of a filmed tribute to the Democratic Party that had been shown at the convention’s
opening night; and the determination of party professionals to deny the vice presidential nomination to the other man trying for it: Tennessee senator
Estes Kefauver, anathema to the South because of his support for civil rights and to the party’s northern big-city bosses because of his sensational, nationally televised, investigations that had too often hinted at links between big-city machines and organized crime. (Johnson disliked him for a personal reason—Kefauver’s refusal to accord him the deference he demanded: after maneuvering secretly for years to deny Kefauver committee assignments to which he was entitled by seniority, in 1955 the Leader had told him openly that he wouldn’t put him on the Foreign Relations Committee because he had a “team,” of which he was captain, and Kefauver wasn’t on it; the price of Senate advancement, Johnson told him, was
“to
want
to be” on that team.) Although at one point on the second ballot Kennedy was just thirty-eight votes short of the nomination—Johnson had taken Texas into his camp—Kefauver had enough devoted rank-and-file supporters to win. (The nomination of course was meaningless, given the Eisenhower landslide.) And in 1956 and 1957, Kennedy’s record in the Senate was little better than before.
“In
the terms that mattered to Johnson—which senators got things done in the Senate—Kennedy didn’t measure up,” Kennedy’s aide Ted Sorensen was to say. “So Johnson underestimated him; he, who had done everything, felt that he didn’t have to take him seriously.”

When, in January, 1957, another vacancy opened on Foreign Relations, Joe Kennedy importuned Lyndon Johnson to fill it with his son instead of Kefauver,
“telling
me that if I did, he’d never forget the favor for the rest of his life,” and Johnson agreed. Later, he would say that he had done so because
“I
kept picturing old Joe Kennedy sitting there with all that power and wealth feeling indebted to me for the rest of his life, and I sure liked that picture.” But the real reason was 1960: although as it would turn out, Kefauver would not be able to make a serious bid for the 1960 Democratic nomination, in 1957 it seemed that he would be able to—he had, after all, won all those primaries in 1952 and had won some in 1956 before bowing out of the race in Stevenson’s favor—and at that time Johnson regarded him as a serious threat for the nomination. Lyndon Johnson did not regard John Kennedy as a threat; in fact, he felt he might be a useful asset: a southern presidential candidate—a candidate from Texas, for example—would need a running mate from the Northeast; it wouldn’t be a bad idea to build one up, particularly one who had a father as powerful as Jack Kennedy’s.

Before the 1957 session ended, Kennedy rose on the Senate floor to deliver a speech on foreign relations: on the
Algerian struggle for independence, criticizing not only the French refusal to allow it, but the American government’s support of the French policy. Although the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote that in Europe the speech identified Kennedy
“for
the first time as a fresh and independent voice of American foreign policy,” and the editorial page of the
New York Times
applauded it, it aroused anger in the foreign policy establishment;
“even
Democrats drew back.” And aside from that speech, his career in the Senate
continued on a course that, in Capitol Hill terms, was charted toward mediocrity. Anecdotes—possibly exaggerated but certainly striking—abounded about his absenteeism and his irresponsibility. When he was asked to chair a new Foreign Relations subcommittee on Africa, it was recounted, Kennedy replied, “Well, if I take it, will it ever have to meet?” and accepted only when he was assured it wouldn’t. (Actually, it seems to have met at least once.) The fact that, due to his father’s fame, his speeches attracted more attention than those of other senators did not lead to more respect for him among his colleagues, but to the opposite: senators liked to categorize their colleagues as either “work horses,” men who studied hearing transcripts and department reports, did the donkey work on committees behind closed doors, and really made the Senate work, and “show horses,” men in the Senate only for the publicity it could bring them. Kennedy was, in the opinion of the “Old Bulls” who ran the Senate, a prime example of the latter breed. Looking back on Jack Kennedy’s Senate career decades after it had ended, Smathers had the same opinion of it that he had had in 1956:
“not
in the top echelon at all.… While he did from time to time make some brilliant speech about something or other … he was not what you would call a really effective senator.… He had a couple of pretty good ideas that he talked about, but I don’t know that anything he ever really passed … was of great significance.”

As for Lyndon Johnson, his opinion was that the young senator from Massachusetts was a “playboy” and basically lazy.
“He’s
smart enough,” he told
Bobby Baker at the time,
“but
he doesn’t like the grunt work.”

“Kennedy was pathetic as a congressman and as a senator,” Johnson was to say. “He didn’t know how to address the Chair.” He was, he said on another occasion,
“a
young whippersnapper, malaria-ridden and yellow, sickly, sickly. He never said a word of importance in the Senate, and he never did a thing.” During his retirement, describing Kennedy as a senator, in phrases that he knew were being recorded for posterity, Johnson used similar adjectives—and added to them four final words that were, in the lexicon of Lyndon Johnson, the most damning words of all: as a senator, Lyndon Johnson said, Jack Kennedy was
“weak
and pallid—a scrawny man with a bad back, a weak and indecisive politician, a nice man, a gentle man, but not a man’s man.”

T
HERE WERE, HOWEVER, ASPECTS
of the life of Jack Kennedy of which Lyndon Johnson was unaware—and which, had he known about them, might have led him to a more nuanced reading. He might have read him differently had he known what Kennedy had gone through to get to Capitol Hill—and why he hadn’t accomplished more once he was there.

Behind that easy, charming, carefree smile on the face of the ambassador’s second son was a life filled with pain—and with refusal to give in to that pain, or even, except on very rare occasions (and never in public), to acknowledge its existence.

Born on May 29, 1917, Jack Kennedy, even as a boy, seemed always to be falling ill—and doctors were never able to determine what was wrong with him. At the age of fourteen, already strikingly thin, he began to lose weight and said he was
“pretty
tired” all the time, and one day he collapsed with abdominal pain. The undiagnosed illness forced him to withdraw from boarding school. At Choate, where he enrolled the next year, he was frequently in the infirmary with severe stomach cramps, high fever and vomiting, and then, in January, 1934, when he was sixteen, he had to be rushed by ambulance to a hospital in New Haven, where he was kept for almost two months of humiliating and painful tests.
“We
are still puzzled as to the cause of Jack’s trouble,” the wife of headmaster
George St. John wrote Jack’s mother, Rose. “I hope with all my heart that the doctors will find out … what is making the trouble.” But they didn’t. For a while, the diagnosis—an incorrect one—was leukemia; prayers were said for him in chapel; later the diagnosis was changed to hepatitis, also incorrect. In March, doctors released him without having been able to determine what he had suffered from; some of the symptoms had cleared up, but he still vomited frequently, and had periodic high fevers and severe cramping pain in his stomach, and almost constant fatigue, and no matter what he tried, he couldn’t gain weight.

In June, ill again, he was sent to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and then to a hospital there.
“The
Goddamnest hole I’ve ever seen,” he wrote his friend
Lem Billings.
“I
wish I was back at school.” The tests lasted for a month. “I now have a gut ache all the time.” “Shit!!” he wrote eight days later. “I’ve got something wrong with my intestines. In other words I shit blood.” There were constant tests. “I’ve had 18 enemas in three days!!! … Yesterday, I went through the most harassing experience of my life.… They put me in a thing like a barber’s chair. Instead of sitting in the chair I kneeled … with my head where the seat is.… The doctor first stuck his finger up my ass.… Then he withdrew his finger and then, the schmuck, stuck an iron tube 12 inches long and 1 inch in diameter up my ass.… Then they blew a lot of air in me to pump up my bowels. I was certainly feeling great.… I was a bit glad when they had their fill of that.… The reason I’m here is that they may have to cut out my stomach—the latest news.” For a while the tentative diagnosis was that he had chronic inflammation of the colon and small intestine, so severe that it could become life-threatening, but at the end of the tests, as Joseph Kennedy wrote Dr. St. John,
“they
were unable to find out what had caused Jack’s illness.” And because of the fears about the leukemia and hepatitis, he had to live with frequent blood counts:
“7,000
—Very Good,” he reported to a friend once. But when Mrs. St. John visited him in the hospital, he never stopped kidding with her—
“Jack’s
sense of humor hasn’t left him for a minute, even when he felt most miserable,” she wrote Rose. In the Mayo Clinic and the Rochester hospital, he charmed his nurses and doctors. And at Choate, when he wasn’t in the infirmary, he was the center of a circle of friends, some of whom, like the loyal Billings, he kept for life.
“I’ve
never known anyone in my life with such a wonderful humor—the ability to make one laugh and have a good time,” Billings was to recall.
“Jack
was always up to pranks and mischief,” says another friend. “Witty, unpredictable—you never knew what he was going to do.” And except for the occasional letter to Billings, “He wouldn’t ever talk about his sickness,” another friend says. “We used to joke about the fact that if I ever wrote a biography, I would call it ‘John F. Kennedy: A Medical History.’ [Yet] I seldom ever heard him complain.” And thin as he was, he never stopped trying to make the Choate football team.

During most of Jack’s senior year at Choate, he stayed out of hospitals; in 1935, at Princeton, however, “He was sick the entire year.… He just wasn’t well,” had to withdraw—and spent nearly two months at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. “The most harrowing experience of all my storm-tossed career,” the eighteen-year-old youth wrote Billings. “They came in this morning with a gigantic rubber tube. Old stuff, I said, and rolled over thinking naturally that it would [be] stuffed up my arse. Instead they grabbed me and shoved it up my nose and down into my stomach. Then they poured alcohol down the tube.… They had the thing up my nose for two hours.” The blood counts were very bad. “My … count this morning was 3500,” he wrote Billings. “When I came it was 6000. At 1500 you die. They call me ‘2000 to go Kennedy.’ ” A few days later, he wrote again. “They have not found anything as yet.… Took a peak [
sic
] at my chart yesterday and could see that they were mentally measuring me for a coffin.” But when the next year, during what a biographer calls a “brief Indian summer of good health,” he enrolled at Harvard, he tried out for end on the freshman football team. “He was pathetic because he was so skinny. You could certainly count his ribs,” one member of the team recalls. The captain,
Torbert Macdonald, who was to become another lifelong friend, counted something else, however. “As far as blocking and that sort of thing, where size mattered, he was under quite a handicap,” he was to write. But, he added, “Guts is the word. He had plenty of guts.” He made the freshman second team, until coaches found out about a party he organized at which a number of players, in his words, “got fucked,” after which he was demoted to the third team. Nonetheless, although he had barely made the team, he had made it.

By 1938, he was back in a hospital, “trying to get rid of an intestinal infection I’ve had for the last two weeks.” And for the next three years, he would be in and out of hospitals, with a pain in his stomach that he told Billings felt “like a hard knot,” and that never seemed to leave him, and with chronic vomiting and diarrhea and fever, and unending concern about his weight and his blood count. But when he wasn’t in the hospital, he was always organizing pranks and parties, and never talking, except, it seems, to Billings, about what was going on in the intervals. Many years later, Billings told an interviewer:
“Jack
Kennedy all during his life had few days when he wasn’t in pain or sick in some way. Jack never wanted us to talk about him, but now that Bobby has gone and Jack is gone, I think it really should be told.”