The Patriarch (83 page)

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A
pproaching his middle sixties, Joseph P. Kennedy lived a strangely bifurcated life, swinging back and forth between what Reston had referred to as his “melancholy” and a kind of manic exhilaration. When he was with his friends and family, he was a very different man from the one who delivered angry speeches and lectured President Truman in the White House and General Eisenhower in Paris.

Now that he was retired and had more free time, his need to surround himself with family and friends was stronger than ever. His buddies—old friends such as Arthur Houghton, Phil Reisman, Morton Downey, and Joe Timilty and new ones such as Lucius Ordway, the St. Paul businessman and founder of 3M who had retired to Palm Beach, Carroll Rosenbloom, Baltimore businessman and NFL team owner, and Father Cavanaugh of Notre Dame—took his mind off his cares, made him laugh, and gave him an outlet for the caustic, mocking, but usually good-natured teasing at which he excelled. His letters to Houghton and Ordway and Rosenbloom, written in his sixties, were (absent the anatomical references) very much like those his son Jack had written in his teens and early twenties to his college friends: sophomorically funny, cuttingly sarcastic, irreverent.

“You were very smart to go to Mayo,” he wrote Ordway from Hyannis Port in June 1951. “Of course I go to the Lahey Clinic twice a year; but then, I always do things twice as well as you. . . . Houghton and I are thoroughly convinced that there is something more than just slightly wrong with that. You crab in a golf game; you abuse the nice woman who is now your wife; you’re anti-social; you don’t spend any of that thirty million dollars you have; in fact, we think you’re pretty nearly hopeless regardless of your condition from your neck down. I can imagine we could get testimony that that isn’t so good either! However, we like you for some strange reason and we like your wife even better.”
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For those he counted as his friends, he would do anything. There were times when he almost begged them to let him help them, to accept his business advice, to visit his doctors at his expense, to accept his offers of loans or investment capital. When William O. Douglas suffered a dreadful mountain-climbing accident in 1949, Kennedy paid his hospital bills and invited him to recuperate in Palm Beach. He worried especially about friends such as Count Enrico Galeazzi, whose employment as a lay adviser to an aging, infirm pope did not afford him much financial security. In the summer of 1950, he offered to secure for Galeazzi and his son-in-law a Coca-Cola distributorship, but Galeazzi was not interested. Kennedy promised to keep looking. “I spend most of my life writing how grateful I am to you for all the favors you do for me and my family, and I just feel that I never have a chance to do anything for you.”
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Carroll Rosenbloom believed that Kennedy kept secret many of these acts of kindness because “he rather enjoyed being thought of as ‘tough’ rather than ‘soft.’ . . . In his personal relationships, he has always been the ‘softest touch’ I have ever known.” Friendship was, for him, a priceless commodity. “I remember his telling me once that a man was fortunate if he could count his real friends on the fingers of one hand. . . . Friendship has always meant a great deal to him—it is a deep, abiding thing. To him friendship could never be casual.”
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He had a gift for friendship, though he knew it did not always come easily, that one had to work at it, stay in touch, celebrate the good times, offer condolences in the bad. When Walter Howey lost his wife in the spring of 1954, Kennedy wrote him from Palm Beach, even though they had not spent time together in years. “I am not sure I will do well with this letter even though I want to write it,” he began, aware that Howey had suffered severe professional and financial setbacks. “I have known that you have been hurt and that you are having a terrible time. I also know that your dear wife died. I just couldn’t write you a letter because what could I say? . . . All I can say is what I feel deeply—that my best and dearest friend has suffered a great loss and that his sorrow is shared by me. I can’t do anything for you except pray for you and that I will do. If you want me for anything, just let me know.”
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The only thing that mattered more to him than his friends was his children. The Kennedy boys and girls, he was convinced, could do whatever they wanted once they made up their minds to do it. Each had his or her minor flaws—Jack was rarely punctual, was very messy, and had still not, his father complained, “learned the art of taking care of himself”; Bobby never quite knew what he wanted to do next; Teddy was too much of a playboy; Eunice didn’t take care of her health; Patricia couldn’t make up her mind; Jean never seemed to take anything seriously. Each of these shortcomings could and, he was sure, would be corrected as they grew up.
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The Kennedys were beginning to expand in size now. The first newcomer was Ethel Skakel, whom Bobby married in June 1950, at the end of his second year of law school in Virginia. Ethel Skakel was the daughter of a self-made Protestant millionaire father and an Irish Catholic mother. She had grown up in a mansion outside Greenwich and gone to Manhattanville with Jean, who had introduced her to Bobby. Wealthy, Catholic, athletic, pretty, with a grand sense of humor and six siblings of her own, she had no trouble fitting into the Kennedy clan and ended up adoring her father-in-law as much as he adored her. The same would happen with Robert Sargent Shriver, the next to join the family.

Eunice had met Sarge in Washington in 1946 when she was working at the State Department and sharing a town house with Jack. Shriver, whose father, once wealthy, had lost the family fortune during the Depression, had gone to Yale College and Yale Law School, seen action as a battleship gunner during the war, then returned to work at
Newsweek.
Soon after they met, Eunice introduced Shriver to Kennedy, who was looking for someone to edit Joe Jr.’s letters from Spain for publication. When Shriver reported that the letters were unpublishable, Kennedy, admiring his honesty and intelligence, recruited him to work in Chicago at the Merchandise Mart. After eight months there, his employer—and future father-in-law—called Shriver back to Washington to help Eunice in her new job, organizing a committee on juvenile delinquency in the office of the attorney general. In the summer of 1948, Shriver was sent back to Chicago as assistant general manager of the Merchandise Mart and chief representative of the Kennedy family’s political interests. Three years later, Eunice moved to Chicago to work with the House of the Good Shepherd and the Chicago Juvenile Court. They would marry two years after this, in May 1953.

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I
n 1950, Ted Kennedy followed his three brothers and father to Harvard. He played freshman ball in the fall and did quite well. “Dad made all my home games, where he helped out the coach by pacing the sidelines wearing a beret and shouting instructions.” When spring came, Ted threw himself into practice “to the extent that my grades suffered, my Spanish grade especially. I worried that if I flunked or made a D on the final exam, I wouldn’t be eligible to play football in the fall.” He might have studied harder or gotten tutoring, but he took what he thought was the simple way out and had a friend take his exam for him. The boys were caught, given a year’s suspension, and “told we could come back if we’d done something useful with that time.”

Ted’s first call on being suspended was to his brother Jack, who agreed to prepare their father for the news. He then left Cambridge for Hyannis Port. “My father met me in the sunroom,” Ted recalled in his memoirs. “He alternated between disappointment and anger for quite a while. . . . The more we talked, the quieter his voice would get. But then the phone would ring; one of my brothers expressing concern, offering advice. And when I came back into the room, he’d tee off on me again. ‘There are people who can mess up in life and not get caught,’ he advised me at one point, ‘but you’re not one of them, Teddy.’” The day after their first go-round, as his father began to understand the possible fallout from his son’s suspension for cheating, “he was absolutely wild and went up through the roof. For about five hours. From then on he was calm. It was just ‘How do we help you?’ And he never brought the thing up again.” Ted might have transferred and continued his schooling, but he didn’t want to. He and his father decided that he would enlist in the army and return to Harvard after two years of service.
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On June 25, Ted took his physical and was assigned to basic training at Fort Dix. He wanted to volunteer for duty in Korea but was talked out of it by his brothers during a lunch in New York. “Both were appalled, and strenuously argued against my volunteering. ‘Mother and Dad have suffered enough. . . . We can’t afford to have you go over and risk getting killed. You just can’t do this kind of thing. Go where the army assigns you.’”
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Kennedy, who knew nothing of Ted’s dreams of becoming a war hero like his two oldest brothers, arranged to get him an assignment with the CIC, the Counter Intelligence Corps. Ted trained with the CIC for two months, after which he was transferred to Camp Gordon in Georgia, ostensibly because he was too young for the CIC and never should have been there in the first place.

On learning that his son was now going to be a MP, Kennedy contacted Anthony Biddle with “a tremendous personal favor to ask you.” He wanted Biddle, who had joined the army from the diplomatic corps during the war and still had contacts there, to arrange to get Ted “an interesting assignment, Paris, for instance, where he could learn the language and learn something about the place. . . . Now you know I wouldn’t bother you with this if it did not mean a great deal to me. I hate to ask favors from my personal friends but since he is only a private and we are not asking for transfer from one sphere of his duty to another but rather an assignment in his own present branch of activity, I would appreciate it if you could arrange this for me.” Biddle did Kennedy the favor he asked and Ted was assigned to Paris, where he served out his time.
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Fortunately for everyone, the cheating incident was kept quiet. Ted had left Harvard, his father told his friend Sir James Calder, “because he got restless and enlisted in the regular army.” That he had been suspended for cheating would not become public knowledge until the spring of 1962, when Ted was running in a primary election for the U.S. Senate and got a call from brother Jack in the White House, warning him to “get that Harvard story out.” Whether the president had learned that the press already had the story, we do not know. Ted took his brother’s advice and had the story released to the
Boston Globe,
which ran it on the front page. He was castigated for his cheating, then praised for his candor in admitting to it.
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lthough Ted’s dismissal from Harvard was kept secret, the ninety West Point cadets who were expelled for cheating that same spring had no such luck. Their story was front-page news for weeks.

Editorials demanded that Army football coach Earl Blaik, whose team had been decimated by the scandal, resign or be fired; President Truman expressed his concern; the Senate launched an investigation; Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas demanded that the football programs at West Point and Annapolis be suspended, if not permanently ended. Cardinal Spellman, on the other hand, declared that “to err is human, to forgive is divine” and asked the presidents of three Catholic colleges in New York, Fordham, Iona, and Manhattan, to admit West Point students who applied for transfer.

Father Cavanaugh of Notre Dame recalled years later that he, Arthur Houghton, and Kennedy had discussed the scandal during an August cruise on the
Marlin,
Kennedy’s fifty-one-foot yacht. They had just finished their fish chowder luncheon and were looking at yet another story about the expelled cadets in the
New York Times
when, Cavanaugh recalled in his oral history, “Kennedy shot a question at me. ‘What would it cost to send all of these young fellows through Notre Dame?’” Cavanaugh, without knowing how many of the students were in their first, second, third, or fourth year, quickly calculated that it would “run almost to a half million dollars” (about $12.4 million in purchasing power today). Kennedy’s response was immediate: “I want every one of them to have an opportunity to go through Notre Dame, all expenses paid. Let us agree upon two conditions. My name will not be made known, and none of these young men should participate in intercollegiate athletics. . . . Otherwise, people will think that Notre Dame’s benefactor is trying to buy athletes for the university.”
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The offer was announced on August 21, 1951. Each of the ninety expelled West Point students was sent a Notre Dame application and an offer letter that explained that while the unnamed benefactor did “not condone the act of the cadets,” he realized “the limitations of means for the purpose of getting an education by which some of the cadets and their families are restricted. . . . The offer is made to athletes and non-athletes, to Catholics and non-Catholics.” The only requirement was that the students “meet the standards and academic requirements of Notre Dame.”
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Thirteen West Point students registered at Notre Dame that September, twelve received funds from Kennedy, and every one of them graduated. Upon graduation they were given the name of their benefactor. The story made it to the back pages of a few newspapers, but nobody took notice, as by then the scandal was very old news. Kennedy wanted it that way, not because he shied away from positive publicity, but because there were too many loose ends he didn’t want to unravel. Jack was getting ready to run for higher office and wouldn’t be helped by stories of how his father had rescued West Point cheaters. Worse yet, Kennedy feared the story might lead reporters from West Point to Harvard and Ted Kennedy. It was better to keep the matter quiet.

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I
t would not be entirely accurate to say that Joseph P. Kennedy was mellowing with age. But it would be foolish to believe that he had not been affected by the passage of time and the tragedies that had befallen three of his four eldest children. He was as opinionated, volatile, argumentative, driven, fearful of boredom, and anxious to be doing something significant and remain in the public eye as he had ever been. But now well into his second decade of retirement and knowing that he would never again return to Washington or take on a full-time position in private business, he was in the process of creating a new life for himself. Rather than push back against his status—as senior citizen, retired businessman and public servant, philanthropist, and grandfather-to-be—he took hold of it, spent more time with his friends, welcomed daughters- and sons-in-law, presided over the family foundation, and concentrated his considerable attention and talents on pushing his children wherever they wanted to go.