The Patriarch (78 page)

“How terrifically pleased I am for you. Everyone says you were so good in the Election and that the outcome must have been a great source of satisfaction,” Kick wrote from England. “It’s nice to know you are as appreciated in the 11th district as you are among your brothers & sisters. Gee, aren’t you lucky.”
²¹

Jack took a few days off in Hyannis Port, then flew to Hollywood to enjoy a last fling. “I saw in Jack Lait’s column,” Kennedy wrote Houghton on July 30, 1946, “that my congressman son was paying attention to Peggy Cummins [the glamorous British actress] and another columnist had him seeing Inga Arvard, Hitler’s Nordic. Well, I suppose youth must be served! We haven’t heard anything from him. Do you know when he is coming back?”
²²

Jack returned to Boston to give a few speeches before the general election. In mid-August, he presented Archbishop of Boston Richard Cushing, a family friend, with a $600,000 check to build a convalescent home and hospital for poor children in Brighton, which just happened to be in the eleventh district in which he was running for Congress. The funds came from the newly organized Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation, of which John F. Kennedy was the first president. The day after the ceremonies, photographs of the candidate handing the check to Bishop Cushing, with his mother, the daughter of a former mayor, at his side, appeared in all the Boston papers.

The publicity given the grant led to several requests for funding addressed to John F. Kennedy in Boston. His form letter responses thanked the writers for their letters and explained that there were no funds available as “the work that the foundation is planning to do has already been mapped out for the next three years.” A “Kennedy for Congress” flyer was stuffed into every envelope.
²³

In November, to no one’s surprise, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected to Congress. What was startling was the size of his victory. He polled 69,093 votes to his Republican opponent’s 26,007. Statewide, the Democrats took a beating. Senator Walsh was defeated in a landslide victory by Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Governor Maurice Tobin and his running mate for lieutenant governor, Paul Dever, were beaten almost as badly.

With John Fitzgerald Kennedy now elected to a seat it would be nearly impossible for him to lose, his father could speak out with impunity. And he did.

—

I
n the year that had passed since Kennedy’s
Life
magazine article, the national debate over what would soon be known as the Cold War had intensified. Isolationist Republicans on the right, led by Senators Robert A. Taft and John Bricker of Ohio, and internationalists on the left, led by Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, argued, as Kennedy had, against government spending abroad to counter the so-called Communist threat. Within the White House, the debate was nearly over. A near consensus had been built around the “Long Telegram” written by George F. Kennan, counselor at the American embassy in Moscow. Kennan, asked to make sense of Stalin’s rhetoric and actions, had argued persuasively that Russia’s historic suspicion of the West and the Soviet Union’s ideological commitment to expansion and conquest posed a threat, though a containable one, to American interests in Europe. It was incumbent on the American government to “contain” that threat by the careful but persistent application of counterforce.

On March 12, 1947, President Truman went before a joint session of Congress to declare that, the British government having concluded it could no longer provide Greece and Turkey with political, economic, or military assistance to contain Soviet aggression, the American government had to step into the breach. “The very existence of the Greek state,” the president announced in his request for $400 million in aid, “is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists. . . . It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. . . . The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.”
²⁴

Kennedy was unalterably opposed to supplying military or financial assistance to Greece or Turkey. Instead of ratcheting up anti-Communist rhetoric and actions, he believed it advisable to try to negotiate with the Soviets. Anything was better than heightening tensions and pushing the world a step closer to another war.

In the late 1930s, the United States had, he had argued, no business going to war with Germany or assisting the British and the French in doing so, for the simple reason that Hitler posed no threat to American interests. The same was now true, a decade later, of the Soviet Union. Kennedy’s “consuming public concern” in the postwar period was, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., would later write in his biography of Robert Kennedy, “as it had been before the war: that the United States might be deluded into mounting a world crusade for democracy. He was perfectly consistent. He saw communism in the forties as he had seen Nazism in the thirties—as a detestable system but not as a mortal threat to American security.”
²⁵

Kennedy’s chief concern in the spring of 1947 was that he had no way of making his voice heard, no means of countering what was becoming a groundswell of bipartisan support for Truman’s foreign policy initiatives. Arthur Krock, who visited him in Palm Beach that spring, came to his rescue. Either because Krock was on retainer or believed Kennedy’s views still newsworthy or because, as a Jew who had been passed over for promotion, he sympathized with Kennedy’s struggle to cross over from outsider to insider, he made sure that his patron’s ideas got maximum coverage.

At Kennedy’s “instance,” Krock recalled in his
Memoirs,
the two “designed [an interview] for publication.” On March 12, 1947, the day of Truman’s speech to Congress calling for assistance to Greece and Turkey, Krock published his “interview” with Kennedy. He disguised the genesis of the column by claiming that while in Palm Beach on vacation, he had happened upon “an informal round table the other evening, the subject being our future economic foreign policy,” at which “the most emphatic view offered was that of Joseph P. Kennedy.” Ambassador Kennedy, he reported, was opposed to spending large sums of money overseas when the American economy was still in the doldrums. Given the task of reconverting the economy from wartime to peacetime and the need to keep taxes low to encourage investment, the United States could not “possibly finance resistance to other systems of government, to the extent and for the period proposed or required, without impoverishing this nation. . . . The wise policy is to keep the American way of life as strong as our resources can make it, and permit communism to have its trial outside the Soviet Union if that shall be the fate or will of certain peoples. In most of these countries a few years will demonstrate the inability of communism to achieve its promises.” The United States should, in other words, back off and “permit communism to have its trial.”
²⁶

Krock’s column thrust Kennedy into the center of the national debate. His recommendations were immediately and universally condemned in editorial pages across the country as “the new appeasement.” Ten days later, James Reston of the
New York Times
declared that while a small coalition of the Far Right and the Far Left was assembling to oppose financial assistance to Turkey and/or Greece, no one was “prepared to take the responsibility involved in adopting publicly the Joseph P. Kennedy thesis that we should take our chances with the spread of communism.” The only positive responses to Kennedy’s remarks were editorials in the Hearst papers and a letter to the editor of the
New York Times
from pacifist A. J. Muste of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
²⁷

On April 22, the Senate took up and approved Truman’s proposal for assistance to Greece and Turkey by a vote of almost three to one, with Republican senators Arthur Vandenberg and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts not only enthusiastically supporting the measure, but gathering a large number of their party’s votes in support of it. On May 8, the House followed with an overwhelming bipartisan endorsement of the president, approving his bill by a vote of 287 in favor, only 107 opposed. Recorded in favor of the bill was the young congressman from the eleventh district of Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy.

Joseph P. Kennedy had raised his boys to argue with him—and this was the result. It didn’t make him particularly happy, but he accepted that there was nothing he could do about it. Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, whom Kennedy had hired at the SEC, stayed close with, and promoted several times for national office, remembered a visit to Palm Beach in 1949. “I must be nuts,” Kennedy said to him. “The two men in public life that I love the most are Jack and you. And I disagree with you guys more than anyone else. What’s wrong with me?”
²⁸

—

Y
ears before, his son Jack had warned Kennedy to temper his language, to stay away from labels like “isolationist” and “appeaser.” And he had done so, for a time. Now, in 1947, with all hope gone of his returning to Washington—and with his son elected to a safe seat in Congress—there was no longer any incentive to hold his tongue or mind his manners. In late April, he spoke at length to Hearst
New York Journal American
columnist Frank Conniff on “the heavier problems which harass the world today” and declared he was ready “to admit from now on that the term ‘isolationist’ described my sentiments perfectly. We never gave ‘isolationism’ a chance. The ‘interventionists’ had their way and look what happened. I’m proud I warned against participation in a war which could only leave the world in a worse condition than before.” Communism would, he predicted, fall by itself. The people of Eastern Europe were fiercely patriotic. “You can’t tell me indifferent administrators like the Russians are going to have everything their way in such strongly nationalistic countries. It’s against the probabilities to expect it.”
²⁹

On May 18, the
New York Times
provided Kennedy with space, on the front page of the business section, in which he declared forcefully that Truman’s plan to spend millions on Greece and Turkey should be opposed on economic grounds alone. To pay for foreign assistance projects, the government was going to have to level exorbitant taxes at home, which would rob business of the capital it needed to expand, deprive Americans of well-paying jobs, and decrease the resources required to defend the homeland. “Personally, as I have said before, I believe our efforts to stem communism in Europe with dollars will eventually prove an overwhelming tax on our resources that will seriously affect the economic well-being of our country.”

He repeated himself the following week in an interview that was splashed across the front pages of the Hearst papers on May 25. “Approximately $10 billion is the staggering price we have already paid for the dubious privilege of taking up the ‘white man’s burden’ now that England has slipped from its prewar world stature.” And what would come of it? Neither peace nor prosperity nor any possibility that these dollars would buy reliable anti-Communist allies overseas. “I suggest that our statesmen read something of modern history before going all out for saving the world. . . . With nations as with individuals, the ALLY YOU HAVE TO BUY WILL NOT STAY BOUGHT.”

Again, the response to his broadsides was overwhelmingly negative. Again, Kennedy didn’t much care.

—

T
he depression that he feared would result from escalating military spending overseas did not come to pass in his lifetime. The American economy would be transformed, as he predicted, but money spent abroad, much of it on military projects, would not destroy “economic well-being,” but rather stimulate growth and increase per capita income at home. Only over the long term would it become apparent that this Cold War spending spree might have had other, perhaps less positive impacts on American “economic well-being” by diverting capital from infrastructure, nonmilitary industrial modernization, and social welfare projects.

Thirty-two

F
AMILY
M
ATTERS

I
have given up all my favorite sports—golf and kissing girls—and expect to devote my life to serious business,” he wrote Lucius Ordway, his millionaire friend from Palm Beach, in November 1950. He was joking, of course—about the golf and the girls and the serious business.

He played golf every day he could, which was every day of the week now that he’d retired from business. He had no trouble finding partners. His children all played golf, except for Rosemary, and visited Palm Beach during the holidays. When they weren’t around, he played with “the Commish,” Joe Timilty, who had virtually moved in after being denied reappointment as police commissioner; or with Arthur Houghton, who after his resignation from his position in Hollywood and the death of his wife was free to spend long periods with Kennedy in Palm Beach.

Nothing pleased Kennedy more than a day with his buddies golfing or at the baseball park or the racetrack (Hialeah in the winter and Saratoga in August). “That’s one thing about Houghton and me,” he joked with Lucius Ordway, “women have never had any effect on our lives—we’re men’s men!” And he meant it. As important as female companionship was to him, he had never let the women in his life, not Rose or Gloria Swanson or any of the others, take him away from his male friends.
¹

At age sixty, as at every stage of his life, his eye still wandered, though perhaps not the way it once had. Kick, in England, found it hysterically funny that her father had been identified in a
Sunday Pictorial
article about the Florida Gold Coast as “the playboy of Palm Beach. . . . I think it shows a lot of life left in that old man of ours if he can start being a playboy at his ripe old age!!! I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if they had named Grandpa, but I didn’t expect Daddy to have the title.” Even Rose, on occasion, made light of her husband’s flirtatious ways. From Hyannis Port on June 25, 1949, she wrote her daughters that Teddy had brought home with him “a girl called Nancy who was here last year, and she stayed here last night. She is really very pretty but looks about fifteen. Your Father made the startling announcement to her that when she was about eighteen he would be waiting for her. As she is already eighteen, she was really dumbfounded.”
²

—

I
n late 1946, Kennedy sold Somerset Importers. The liquor importing business had served the family well, but it was no longer the cash cow it had once been, and with Jack launched on a political career it had become a source of potential embarrassment. “In Jack’s campaign for Congress,” Kennedy wrote Sir James Calder after the primary victory in 1946, “they made the real issue my support of the British Loan and said the only reason for it was that I had a franchise from Haig & Haig. It occurs to me that from here in it is going to be necessary for me to take a great many positions for England as against Russia, and it is silly to have wrong interpretations put on my actions.” In the final analysis, it made no sense to remain in the liquor business now that Kennedy owned the Merchandise Mart, which generated more money than Somerset ever had, much of it tax-free.
³

Kennedy had minimized tax liabilities by placing ownership of the Merchandise Mart—and its annual income—in a partnership: 12.5 percent for him, another 12.5 percent for Rose, 50 percent for the family trusts, and the remaining 25 percent for the newly incorporated Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation. Because the property was owned by a “partnership” rather than a corporation or an individual, he and Rose paid lower rates on their shares; the family trusts paid lower rates still; and the foundation paid nearly nothing. The Mart would continue to generate income for the Kennedy family until 1998, when it was sold for $625 million, fifty times what Kennedy had paid for it.
⁴

—

O
n the second anniversary of Joe Jr.’s death, Kennedy established a foundation in his name and in his honor. Having put away more than enough money to provide for three generations of Kennedys and earning sufficient income to cover current expenses for all of them, he was prepared now to increase his charitable giving. He would have been a fool to do so without taking advantage of the tax benefits offered family foundations.

“Although the philanthropic impulse, like human nature, is immutable,”
Fortune
magazine declared in August 1947 in an article titled “How to Have Your Own Foundation,” that impulse reacted “to external influences. These influences today happen to be progressive surtaxes and fixed exemptions for charitable contributions.” With the top bracket in 1946–1947 fixed at 86.45 percent for taxable income over $200,000, estate taxes at 77 percent, and gift taxes at 58 percent, wealthy individuals had every incentive to make use of the charitable deductions afforded them by the tax code. The taxpayer who established a family foundation did not have to spend any of the money put into it to get a deduction. One hundred percent of the funds could sit, accumulating untaxed interest and dividends, until the directors chosen by the donor decided to spend it. Better yet, for individuals such as Kennedy with assets that appreciated over time—stocks, real estate, and, later, stakes in oil wells—the amount of the tax deduction was based not on the original cost of the asset, but on its present value. What this meant was that Kennedy could donate to the foundation a building he had bought for $100,000 that was now worth $1 million, deduct $1 million from his income taxes, and avoid whatever capital gains he would have had to pay if he cashed out.
⁵

The mission statement of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation read much like those of Progressive-era settlement houses: its “purposes . . . are for the relief, shelter, support, education, protection and maintenance of the indigent, sick or infirm; to prevent pauperism and to promote by all lawful means social and sanitary reforms, habits of thrift, as well as savings and self-dependence among the poorer classes, without discrimination owing to race, color, or creed.” The fact was that none of the Kennedys truly knew how best to commemorate Joe Jr.’s life. He had been a good Catholic, a good student, a good athlete, a man-about-town, and a very good brother. But he had not lived long enough to demonstrate any commitments to philanthropic purposes.
⁶

Kennedy had given money earlier to Catholic charities and institutions and expected to do the same with the foundation’s funds. He had asked nothing in return for his earlier gifts, but he wanted those given by the foundation to be named for and to serve as memorials to his son. Buildings were a poor substitute for a living body, but they would, he hoped, sustain the memory of his firstborn. There was less vanity here than a genuine and desperate desire of a father to keep his son’s name alive.

The foundation would serve other purposes as well, at least in its early years. It would solidify the family’s political base in Boston and Massachusetts and, by calling attention to Kennedy beneficence, subtly shift the conversation away from the source and size of his fortune to the uses he intended to make of it on behalf of the community. The first foundation gift had been the $600,000 check that Jack had presented to Archbishop Cushing just before election day in 1946. In his second year of giving and thereafter, Kennedy maximized the political impact of the donations by giving money not only to Irish Catholic institutions, but to Italian Catholic and Polish Catholic and a few Jewish and nonsectarian ones as well.
⁷

Kennedy appointed as foundation directors four of the men closest to him: Eddie Moore, Johnnie Ford, Paul Murphy, and James Fayne, whom Kennedy had worked with at Hayden, Stone, brought to the SEC, and would hire full-time to work in the New York office in 1949. Jack was the fifth director and the first president. (In 1947, Ford would be replaced on the board by Eunice; in 1953, after Jack’s election to the Senate, he would be replaced as president by Bobby.)

So as not to waste money on unnecessary infrastructure, the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation had no program officers, accountants, evaluators, or staff of any sort. It was run out of Kennedy’s New York office. As foundation president, Jack did little more than sign letters and appear at ceremonies.

—

K
ennedy had surrounded himself with an extraordinary group of business executives, accountants, researchers, tax men, and real estate experts who he had no doubt could run a foundation in addition to overseeing his investments. A large number of them had worked with him in Boston, New York, Washington, and London. Several, after leaving his employment, had returned. Paul Murphy was in operational control of the office; Johnnie Ford oversaw the New England concerns, including Kennedy’s theater business; John Reynolds ran the real estate operation; John Burns, the former Harvard Law School professor and superior court justice whom Kennedy had brought to the SEC as general counsel and who had remained a close friend and business associate ever since, was now in private practice. He continued to work on retainer for Kennedy, who insisted that his business concerns be given precedence over those of Burns’s other clients.

Sometime after the war, Burns, who had taken on several important clients, including Hearst and the New York Archdiocese, informed Kennedy that he needed more time for them. He was weary of being on constant call and of having to work on whatever Kennedy threw him, no matter how trivial it might be (“I didn’t go to Harvard Law School to spend my life disputing Rose’s bills at Bergdorf’s”). Kennedy threatened that if Burns left, he would tell everyone who mattered that he had been fired. Burns responded that he knew enough to sink Kennedy and that if Kennedy dared do anything to threaten his livelihood and interfere with his capacity to provide for his family, he would open doors that Kennedy needed closed and locked. Burns left Kennedy’s employment, but neither man ever said anything about the circumstances under which he departed. Remarkably, while their fathers remained estranged, the Burns and Kennedy children would remain closely connected for the rest of their lives.
⁸

James Landis, former Harvard Law School dean, chair of the SEC and the Civil Aeronautics Board, and as distinguished a jurist as Burns, stepped into the role that he had occupied. In December 1947, Tommy Corcoran called Kennedy in Palm Beach to say that he had learned that President Truman was not going to reappoint Landis as chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board. Kennedy contacted Landis to offer him a job. “Come on down to Palm Beach and just announce that ‘I’m associated with the Kennedy enterprises.’ . . . I’ll get hold of Arthur Krock and see to it that the
Times
carries that story, that you are leaving in order to take a job with the Kennedy enterprises.” When Landis asked what he would be doing in this job, Kennedy responded, “We’ll figure that out after you’re down here. You’ll need a rest for a while.” Kennedy’s intervention saved Landis “from a great deal of embarrassment,” financial and personal, at having been ousted from his Washington position.
⁹

Kennedy quickly found work for Landis, most of it far beneath his capacities. Landis drafted letters, wrote speeches, reviewed legal contracts, and when Clare Boothe Luce decided to run for Congress, undertook a “racial and religious makeup of Fairfield County” for her. He also served as Kennedy’s research assistant and coauthor for an article in
Life
magazine and a pamphlet,
The Surrender of King Leopold,
which refuted Churchill’s claim that because the Belgian king had not notified the Allies in advance, his surrender to the Germans in May 1940 had had dire effects on the course of the fighting in Europe and the evacuation of the British troops at Dunkirk.

Landis’s primary task, however, was trying to put Kennedy’s diplomatic memoirs into publishable order. Since returning from London ten years earlier, Kennedy had been working on the project with help from a variety of editors, researchers, and several of his children. With Elizabeth Walsh, who also worked full-time for Kennedy, and for a time Jean Kennedy, Landis did the historical research that was required to fill in the narrative, fact-checked the manuscript, contacted men cited in the document (such as Sumner Welles and Arthur Krock) to check their recollections, organized and redrafted and rewrote. Several drafts and many years later, a readable, rather accurate, but insensately ponderous history of the prewar years, with Kennedy at its center, was completed. The book was never published—not, as would later be charged, because Kennedy’s analysis of American diplomacy from 1938 to 1940 might cause difficulties for his boys’ political careers, but because it was too boring for a general audience and too light for a specialized academic readership. “As I look at the book,” Kennedy reluctantly concluded in a letter to publisher Paul Palmer in March 1955, “I am not dead sure that there are very many things that are of any great import.”
¹⁰

—

S
ix and a half years after his resignation as ambassador, in July 1947, Kennedy accepted another government appointment, this one unpaid and part-time, on the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, which, chaired by former president Herbert Hoover, would become known as the Hoover Commission. The legislation establishing the commission provided for a membership of twelve, half government officials, half private citizens, appointed in equal portions by the president; Joe Martin, the Republican Speaker of the House; and the Republican president pro tempore of the Senate, Arthur Vandenberg. Kennedy accepted appointment out of respect for Hoover and only after being assured that he would not have to attend any meetings. Instead, he met occasionally with Hoover at his Waldorf Towers suite. Though Dean Acheson and James Forrestal, representing the Truman administration, did their best to influence the course of the deliberations, Hoover controlled the proceedings, the staffing of task forces, and the flow of information to commission members. Kennedy had no difficulties with any of this, as he trusted and respected former president Hoover much more than he did President Truman or any of his advisers.