The Patriarch (28 page)

While New Dealers were distressed by the appointment, conservatives within and outside the Roosevelt camp were delighted. “He is all right,” journalist Mark Sullivan, one of the most influential and outspoken of the New Deal opponents, wrote Swope on August 1, 1934, after an interview with Kennedy. “He is an unusual combination of Irish temperament to an extreme degree, with an exactness of mind and a head of figures which the Irish don’t always have. . . . He can tell a long story carrying dramatic development hand in hand with logical development. I think he could have been a showman had he started out that way, but I suspect all that characteristic of him has been rather submerged by the traits of mind he developed in business. When he is tired he has a priest-like look that often comes to Irishmen of the intellectual type. That he will make friends goes without saying.” What was most encouraging to Sullivan, who had publicly excoriated members of Roosevelt’s brain trust for trying to turn America into Russia, was that Kennedy was a true conservative. “In the past the radicals have had it almost all their own way due largely to their greater energy and earnestness. . . . From now on, I imagine, Kennedy can be depended on as the conservative influence that will press on Roosevelt all the time. If Kennedy presses harder than the radicals, then Roosevelt will take the country reasonably to the right. . . . Kennedy is at once fighter enough and Irish enough and flexible and resourceful enough, to lick the radicals although the radicals may outclass him a little in steady persistence.”
¹³

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K
ennedy’s meeting with Sullivan had been part of the carefully orchestrated media campaign conducted by his friends Bernard Baruch and Herbert Swope, who also arranged a long, one-on-one interview for him with Arthur Krock, the Washington bureau chief and columnist for the
New York Times.
This was the start of the Krock-Kennedy alliance, one of the stranger partnerships in the history of American politics and journalism. Arthur Krock, a stately, somewhat pompous man of medium height and nondescript, certainly not handsome, features, had been born in Kentucky of a not particularly prosperous Jewish father and half-Jewish mother. He had spent a year at Princeton, then dropped out and gone to work for the
Louisville Herald.
He eventually moved to the
New York
World,
where he wrote editorials until Walter Lippmann, the editorial page editor, already upset with him for blatantly boosting Bernard Baruch, accused him of disclosing information about a future editorial to brokers from Dillon, Read, where he moonlighted.
¹⁴

Krock left the
World
for the
New York Times
in 1927. In January 1932, he was named Washington bureau chief and the following year was given an opinion column. The Washington bureau was his fiefdom; the reporters who worked there did as he told them. In his column as well, he had complete autonomy. By 1934, Arthur Krock was one of the most powerful men in Washington. A born and bred southern conservative, he opposed big government, big spending, northern liberals, Franklin Roosevelt, and many, if not most, of the New Deal programs that he slyly but not subtly critiqued in his columns.

He had met Kennedy on the campaign trail in 1932 and been readily “impressed with the fact that for vigor, intelligence, forcefulness, political sagacity, and charm, this tall, red-haired, red-faced, boy-eyed man was outstanding in the circle dedicated” to electing Roosevelt president. Still, he did not, in his words, “become really acquainted with him” until 1934, when Kennedy accepted the appointment as chair of the SEC. Within a year, Krock was “an intimate of the family.” For the next quarter century, while working as Washington bureau chief and as columnist, would serve as Kennedy’s unofficial, clandestine press agent, speechwriter, political adviser, informant, and all-purpose consultant. Whenever Kennedy had something to say, Krock helped him say it and gave him space in his column or in those of the reporters in his bureau.

In his memoirs, Krock insisted that Kennedy “was as scrupulous as I in excluding material considerations from this relationship,” but as we shall see, this may not have always been the case. In Kennedy’s letters, there are offers to pay Krock generous weekly salaries for his editorial assistance, but no letters from Krock refusing such salaries. On the whole, the correspondence reveals something quite disturbing, if not corrupt, about Krock’s willingness to do Kennedy’s bidding, to advise him or write a speech for him, then praise it in his column, to take money for ghostwriting Kennedy’s
I’m for Roosevelt
campaign book in 1936, to assist Jack in turning his college thesis into a book,
Why England Slept,
to allow Kennedy to pay for vacations in Palm Beach and travel to London, all without any acknowledgment to his superiors at the
Times
or his readers.
¹⁵

The first fruits of the Krock-Kennedy relationship or partnership were a pair of
New York Times
articles, by Krock and by S. J. Woolf, who published an extended profile on August 12, 1934.

“His manner is buoyant, his spirit exuberant and his clear blue eyes are merry,” Woolf reported. “As he discussed the future of the country’s financial activities he interrupted his remarks with tales of his nine children. It is evident that he regards them as the best dividends he had ever received. One senses that he is solicitous of the future for their sakes; that the improvements for which he is striving are improvements which they will enjoy.”

Kennedy pleasantly surprised Woolf, as he did Washington’s other reporters, by answering “good-naturedly questions about his former activities—questions which might never have been asked had he been less free and candid in his manner.” He claimed that he had “operated in stocks, but . . . with his own money.” This was not quite true. Much of the money he invested was borrowed, in the early days largely from his own East Boston bank. Kennedy insisted as well that he had never been in a “bear pool.” This too was untrue. He had taken part in almost every kind of investment scheme on Wall Street over the past two decades. As Kennedy proudly admitted at the end of his SEC tenure, “The President had appointed me as chairman of the SEC because he knew that I knew all the angles of trading, that I had studied pools and participated in them and was aware of all the intricacies and trickeries of market manipulation. . . . I had engaged in many a furious financial fight and knew the formulas—when to duck and when to hit.”
¹⁶

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A
fter being sworn in, Kennedy took a week off to get his affairs in order. He flew to Hyannis Port to kiss the children and Rose good-bye, then, in late July, returned to Washington with Eddie Moore, who would function as his personal secretary and chief of staff and whose salary he paid out of his own pocket.

Every step he took was now covered by reporters, columnists, and magazine writers who took great delight in reporting the comings and goings of the newest sensation on the Washington scene, a man who was not only highly accessible and quotable, but photogenic and the father of nine gorgeous children. He leased Marwood, the faux French Renaissance “near-palace,” as the papers described it, which had been built by Chicago millionaire Samuel Klump Martin III for his wife, Mary Jane, who among other achievements had danced in Eddie Cantor’s
Whoopee!
When Martin died, his widow sold Marwood to the Pulitzer family, who rented it to Kennedy. Everything about the mansion overlooking the Potomac was extraordinary. The “near-palace” was approached through “an arched gatehouse, which guards a mile-long roadway lined with trees.” There was a pool, where Kennedy would swim naked every morning, and several bathhouses. Inside the mansion was an “enormous hotel-like living room. . . . The dining room is the kind in which sat King James I of England. A large library, dressing rooms, lavatories, and a sound-proof office completes the ground-floor symphony.” Upstairs were fourteen master bedrooms and fourteen baths, each with gold fixtures, which delighted Rose. In the cellar was the game room. Below it, in the subcellar, was a “motion-picture theatre with lounges for 100 guests.”
¹⁷

The reporters explained that Kennedy needed so vast a mansion to house his nine children, but that was not quite true. None of the children were going to relocate to Washington. Neither was Rose, who that October accepted her husband’s twentieth anniversary gift of a European vacation—without him. Kennedy had rented a Washington mansion not for the family, but because, as Rose would put it, he would be more comfortable there than in “a suite in a hotel [because] in a house he could rest better, away from the noise; he could eat better and at his own convenience . . . and he would be happier.” He could also entertain whomever he wanted, whenever he chose.

Joseph Kennedy was not a particularly sociable man. His idea of the perfect evening was a dinner cooked by his chef for him, Eddie Moore, and a few of the guys, followed by an hour or so listening to classical music, reading a mystery novel, and going to bed on the early side. Unfortunately, men who went to bed early and did not socialize with their peers and betters did not succeed in business or politics.

To make a name for himself as a Washington insider, he had to entertain, and lavishly. Marwood was the perfect place to do so. “He got into the habit of ordering delicious live lobsters sent down from Maine or from Boston,” Rose recalled. “Then he would invite different Senators out for a stag dinner. In those days, fresh lobsters were a great delicacy in Washington. In fact, many of the Westerners did not know exactly how to eat a lobster until initiated into the delicious salty briny flavor by omniscient Eddie Moore. When oysters and clams were at their best at Cape Cod, they too were shipped down. There was always plenty of the best Scotch around—[Haig & Haig] Pinch Bottle, which was prize Scotch. There different Senators were entertained weekly and often the President would drive out for an hour’s relaxation and a heaping platter of seafood washed down with a choice beverage. Everyone was in a gay mood, a relaxed mood, and everybody enjoyed this form of Kennedy hospitality.”
¹⁸

The president enjoyed nothing more than a night with friends away from the White House, and he became a frequent visitor at Marwood, often with members of his inner circle and his son James. Arthur Krock reported on one such evening when Roosevelt and his party stayed late into the night, drinking mint juleps, enjoying a lavishly prepared and served dinner, watching a feature film in Kennedy’s screening room, then retiring upstairs to sing along with Corcoran’s accordion and tell jokes and stories, the president offering his own about college life and sailing adventures. “The party soon became very merry. The President’s laughter rang out over all, and was most frequent.”
¹⁹

Kennedy began life in Washington in the height of summer, when the un-air-conditioned city was virtually uninhabitable. With the federal government expanding almost exponentially week by week with new agencies and commissions squeezed into old, already overcrowded buildings, there was no space available for the SEC. The commission was slated to move into two floors of the old Interstate Commerce Commission building but could not do so until the ICC had moved out. For the time being, it was housed in a wooden building that had been hastily constructed during the Great War and was famous (according to the July 6
New York Times
) for being “one of the hottest spots in the capital.”

As always, Kennedy rose early, exercised, breakfasted, and was at his desk by eight thirty
A.M.
, where he would remain until after dark. As the chair of an entirely new commission with an extended mandate, he was in the enviable position—or so it appeared at first—of being able to hire dozens of lawyers, accountants, professors, and hungry young men eager to spend a tour in Washington.

Over the next few months everyone he had ever known, and several he did not, would petition him for jobs for themselves, their children, their friends, and their friends’ friends and children. He received personalized letters and tried to act positively on recommendations from, among others, Eleanor Roosevelt, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Mayor James Michael Curley of Boston, Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, and dozens of other elected and appointed officials. Mrs. Roosevelt was particularly indefatigable in sending Kennedy and Eddie Moore the names of friends or the children of friends who needed work either in Washington or in Hollywood, where she knew Kennedy still had contacts.
²⁰

Loyalty was not just important to Kennedy, it was critical. As a Washington outsider, he felt the need to construct a comfort zone of men he had worked with and trusted. He brought Eddie Moore with him to the SEC and then hired two other Irish Catholics from Boston, Joe Sheehan, a Boston Latin classmate, and James Fayne, a Harvard classmate, both of them efficient, hardworking businessmen whose primary loyalty would be to him. “After Frank Shea [another Harvard Law School graduate], no more Irish,” Milton Freeman, one of the lawyers on the staff, remembered Kennedy joking. “This place is beginning to look like the Irish Free State Embassy.”
²¹

Kennedy’s most important appointment was of a general counsel. Ben Cohen, the brilliant, quietly confident Frankfurter protégé who had been brought to Washington to draft the 1933 and 1934 securities and securities exchange bills, was on the top of every list. But Cohen, as everyone in Washington knew, was fiercely loyal to Frankfurter. Kennedy wanted his own man as his general counsel, preferably someone new to Washington, ideally an Irish Catholic. He chose Judge John Burns, a tough, smart Boston Irish Catholic who had worked his way through college and then Harvard Law School, had been named a full professor at age thirty, and a month later appointed to the Massachusetts Superior Court.

Kennedy wanted only the best and brightest working for him, and he was able to get just about anyone he wanted. His closest adviser was James Landis, the smallish, slim, humorless, intensely serious son of a missionary who, at Frankfurter’s urging, had come to Washington from Harvard Law School, where he had been a professor of legislation. Landis had been one of the principal drafters of the Securities Act of 1933 and was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which administered the law until the SEC was created. His background and familiarity with the establishing legislation made him a logical candidate for the position of SEC chairman, but when he was passed over, he agreed to serve under Kennedy.