The Patriarch (86 page)

Working eighteen to twenty hours a day seven days a week, Bobby pulled the disparate pieces of the campaign staff together into a statewide organization whose allegiance was not to the Democratic Party, but to John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Along the way, he acquired the reputation as the “ruthless” Kennedy. Every adjective ever applied to his father was now visited upon the son: abrasive, driven, aggressive, and a screamer. But, like his father, he got things done—brilliantly.

With Bobby in control, someone in whom he had confidence, the ambassador could back away from day-to-day operations. It was Bobby and Jack’s campaign now—and they would make the decisions. When Paul Dever tried to get the Kennedy camp to join forces with it in a Kennedy-Dever campaign, “Ambassador Kennedy called Bobby and told him to let the Dever organization work with us.” Bobby and his senior aides disagreed. They feared that Dever would drag Jack down, and the greater the distance and distinction between the two campaigns, the better it would be. In this instance—as in several others—it was Bobby who prevailed and his father who conceded.
²²

Kennedy’s major contribution to the campaign in its final months was to brilliantly use television in a way few others had ever done to market John Fitzgerald Kennedy as a senatorial candidate. For more than two decades now, Kennedy had been a student of the arts and crafts of the newsreel. When the Roosevelt campaign arranged to film the candidate at Hyde Park in 1932, Kennedy oversaw the placement of the cameras and the editing of the film. Later, in Washington and in London, he perfected his own performance in front of the newsreel camera. He taught himself how and when to look serious, how to stride masterfully to the microphone, flash a full-toothed, eyes-twinkling, but never goofy smile, and look straight into the camera with a fearless gaze that betokened intelligence and honesty.

He raised his children to be as comfortable on camera as he had become. He bought 8 mm home movie cameras for their nurses and nannies, who filmed the Kennedy boys and girls at home, at play, on vacation. As the children grew older, they were given their own cameras to film one another and their friends.

Kennedy adapted what he had learned about the newsreel camera to the new medium of television. “Mr. Kennedy was a genius about how Jack should be handled on television,” Sargent Shriver recalled. “He was the guy who really understood the tube. How Jack should appear on it. . . . He figured that television was going to be the greatest thing in the history of politics and he set out studying it and how Jack could utilize it most effectively. . . . He knew how Jack should be dressed and how his hair should be.” On television, the congressman’s youthful glamour and experience as a man of the world could be combined into one persuasive image.

“I remember one night,” Shriver recalled in an oral history, “eight of us were in Mr. Kennedy’s apartment watching Jack make a TV speech. There was the guy that wrote the speech and the guy from the advertising agency and all the yes men sitting there with Mr. Kennedy smack in front of the tube. After it was all over, Kennedy asked what they thought of it. They gave these mealy-mouthed answers and all of a sudden Mr. Kennedy got ferocious, just
ferocious
. He told them it was the worst speech he’d ever heard and they were destroying Jack and he never wanted to see his son have to get up on TV and make such a fool of himself again. The guy who wrote the speech said he couldn’t talk to him like that and Mr. Kennedy got red and furious and told him if he didn’t like it to get out. He told them they would have a meeting in the morning and come up with a whole new concept because they were ruining this precious commodity they had. . . . Then Jack called and Mr. Kennedy said, ‘Boy, Jack, you were great.’”
²³

Kennedy exploited his standing as an administration opponent to reach out to Taft Republicans who could not forgive Senator Lodge, first for backing Truman’s foreign policy initiatives, then for throwing support behind President Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination. The leader of the Taft wing of the Republican Party in Massachusetts was Basil Brewer, the publisher of the New Bedford
Standard-Times.
“The 1952 campaign,” Charles J. Lewin, Brewer’s editor at the
Standard-Times
recalled, “began for us in 1951. Mr. Basil Brewer . . . and I worked closely with Mr. Kennedy. We had frequent communication with him.” Kennedy actively exploited this Taft-Lodge split by pointing out as often as he could that on foreign policy, his son was closer to Taft than to Lodge.
²⁴

While Kennedy worked on the Republicans, he delegated James Landis, who was on good terms with Massachusetts liberals, to get in touch with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a founder of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), and arrange for Jack to appear before the executive committee. Schlesinger, writing Landis in July after the candidate’s appearance, reported that he had been “favorably impressed by Jack’s presentation as I have in general been by his voting record and his performance in Congress. . . . My own view is that Jack is better than Cabot on most domestic issues, they are about the same on foreign policy, and where Jack is weak (from my viewpoint) Cabot is equally weak. So I am inclined at this point to favor endorsement.” Still, Schlesinger wanted Landis to know that there was, among the ADA leadership in Massachusetts, “some disappointment expressed about an occasional tendency to vote to reduce foreign aid appropriations . . . and Jack’s inclination to stay out of the civil liberties fight.”
²⁵

The ADA would have found it easier to endorse Jack Kennedy had he ever criticized Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, but the congressman, like every other elected Massachusetts Democrat, had kept quiet, fearful of McCarthy’s popularity in the state, especially among Irish Catholic voters.

Though his silence was dictated in large part by political considerations, Jack also refrained from criticizing Joe McCarthy because he had become a friend of the family—and of his father. He himself had spent time with McCarthy during his first years in Washington. The senator from Wisconsin was fun to be around and had dated first Eunice, then Pat, and visited the Kennedy family at Hyannis Port, where he had gotten along rather famously with Joe Kennedy. “He was always pleasant; he was never a crab,” Kennedy recalled in a 1960 interview, describing a Joe McCarthy very unlike the nasty, scowling politician the rest of the world had come to know. “He went out on my boat one day and he almost drowned swimming behind it, but he never complained. If somebody was against him, he never tried to cut his heart out. He never said that anybody was a stinker. He was a pleasant fellow.”
²⁶

Joe Kennedy not only enjoyed McCarthy’s company, he admired him for his big mouth, his outspoken confrontations with the government establishment (especially the State Department), his take-no-prisoners attacks on the Truman administration, and his contempt for diplomacy and decorum. When McCarthy ran for reelection to the Senate in 1952, Kennedy, to express his friendship, loyalty, and provide another reason for the Republican senator not to campaign against his son, contributed to his campaign.
²⁷

Kennedy the father was adamant, for political and personal reasons, that his son not be pushed into the position where he would have to say anything in public about the senator from Wisconsin. The CIO had, James MacGregor Burns wrote in his 1960 campaign biography, lent the Kennedy campaign the use of “Pat” Jackson, a staunch liberal who on his own prepared an anti-McCarthy statement for the candidate. When Jackson brought the statement to Jack’s apartment, a meeting was in progress with senior staff and Joseph Kennedy. Jackson was asked to read the statement aloud. “He had got through three sentences,” Burns wrote, “when Joseph Kennedy sprang to his feet with such force that he upset a small table in front of him. . . . ‘You and your friends are trying to ruin my son’s career!’ . . . Again and again he returned to the charge that liberals and union people were hurting his son. The Jews were against him, too.” When asked to explain his father’s tirade, Jack attributed it to “pride of family.”

No anti-McCarthy ad was ever run, not because the Kennedys felt any great need to protect McCarthy, but because they were convinced that any attack on a popular Irish Catholic was bad politics. When Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for president in 1952, called Sargent Shriver to ask how he could be of use to the Kennedy campaign during his swing through Massachusetts, Shriver requested only that he refrain from attacking McCarthy. Jack, he told Stevenson, was hoping to position himself as the candidate who was strongest “on communism and domestic subversives. . . . Up here,” Shriver wrote Stevenson, “this anti-communist business is a good thing to emphasize.”
²⁸

Up until the last minute, the campaign worried that McCarthy would succumb to party pressure, campaign for Lodge, and pull away a sizable number of Irish Catholic votes. We do not know whether, as has been claimed, Kennedy himself called McCarthy or had Westbrook Pegler call to ask him not to campaign for Lodge. In the end, Joseph McCarthy’s biographer David Oshinsky concluded, “The man most responsible for keeping McCarthy out of Massachusetts was not Joe Kennedy; it was Henry Cabot Lodge.” Lodge told Oshinsky that he had never asked McCarthy to campaign for him and only at the very last minute “asked him whether he would come into Massachusetts and campaign against Kennedy
without
mentioning me in any way. He told me that he couldn’t do this. He would endorse me but he would say nothing against the son of Joe Kennedy. I told McCarthy ‘thanks but no thanks.’ So he never did come into Massachusetts.”
²⁹

—

E
very member of the Kennedy family except Rosemary, who was in Wisconsin, and Ted, who was stationed in Europe, campaigned in 1952. “Jean is, as you know, the Office Manager of Headquarters and is working from 9 in the morning until 10:30 at night,” Kennedy wrote Ted in June. “Pat and Mary Jo [Gargan, Rose’s niece] are on the Women’s Committees throughout the state and were in Worcester this week and Springfield next. Eunice appeared at a luncheon that Mayor Hynes gave for Jack on Bunker Hill Day, June 17th, but Jack was unable to attend. After lunch she wandered through the streets of Charlestown looking at the parade and made her usual big hit. Bobby has taken over the management of the whole campaign and is doing a great job. He works fifteen hours a day and is showing remarkable good sense and judgment. . . . Houghton and I spend three days a week in Boston on the campaign and this week we are going to New York. We will probably see the [Sugar Ray] Robinson-[Joey] Maxim fight Monday night and then line up the television procedure for Jack’s campaign. As busy as everybody is, Mother is the busiest. Her door is constantly open and whether I go out at 6:30
A.M.
or get in at 12:30 at night she has three sheets of paper full of suggestions for me to get busy on. She is planning to fly on the 27th of July for Paris but I suggested to her she should leave tomorrow or I won’t be alive by the end of July.”
³⁰

As in 1946, Kennedy supplied the campaign with an almost unlimited budget for receptions and “ladies teas,” telephones, posters, flyers, billboards, radio and TV, and almost one million copies of the “tabloid” campaign booklet that were distributed by mail and by hand throughout the state. That much was public. But there were other expenditures that also bought votes.

Days before the election, the
Boston Post,
which had supported the Republican candidates for governor and senator, abruptly switched sides and endorsed Democrats Paul Dever and John Kennedy. Almost six years after the election, John Fox, the rabidly anti-Communist publisher of the newspaper, appearing before a congressional committee, claimed that the day before the
Boston Post
endorsed Congressman Kennedy, he had “talked to Joseph Patrick Kennedy . . . who agreed to lend” him $500,000. When the story surfaced in 1958, Kennedy’s New York office declared that the loan had not been discussed until after the election and was repaid in full within sixty days. Robert Kennedy, questioned years later, claimed that he had forgotten the details, but he did not deny that “there was a connection between the two events,” the loan and the endorsement.
³¹

Early on November 4, 1952, it became clear that it was going to be a Republican year in Massachusetts and almost everywhere else in the nation. Eisenhower carried Massachusetts by 208,800 votes, but John Kennedy defeated Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., by more than 70,000. His victory was made all the more remarkable by the defeat of the incumbent Democratic governor, Paul Dever. “God!” Kennedy half joked to Lucius Ordway in Palm Beach. “I suppose I’ll have you sucking around me all this winter trying to re-establish your social contacts by claiming that you know the former Ambassador and father of a United States Senator.”
³²

As delighted as he was at Jack’s victory, Kennedy was disturbed that his son was not getting the recognition he deserved for knocking off an “unbeatable,” powerful, articulate, and wealthy Republican incumbent. “Sometimes in reading the papers,” he wrote a friend in mid-November, “I wonder whether they are not all mad at Jack for having had the temerity to lick this fair-haired Goliath. It seems to me that if there was ever an attempt to play down a real worth-while victory this was it. In an effort to save Lodge, Eisenhower and Nixon came into the city the night before election and paraded through the city and pleaded over the radio and television for his re-election. In spite of the fact that Eisenhower won by 200,000 votes, Jack licked Lodge by 70,000. Don’t make any mistake, this was a real desire on the people’s part to lick the Democrats. Of course, we are all tickled to death and I am sure Jack will do a fine job in Washington.”
³³

Thirty-five

R
ETIREMENT

J
ack had been elected to the Senate, but there was work to be done.

From Palm Beach, Kennedy contacted James Rowe, a Lyndon Johnson supporter and adviser, and had Jim Landis write him as well, to request “a good” committee assignment for the newly elected junior senator from Massachusetts. Kennedy also phoned Joseph McCarthy, who, with the Republicans now in the majority, would take over as chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, to recommend that he appoint Bobby as his chief counsel. McCarthy agreed to take Bobby on, but not as chief counsel. That position was going to Roy Cohn, the lawyer from New York who had distinguished himself as an anti-Communist crusader by helping to convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg of espionage.
¹

Kennedy did not expect Bobby to remain long as assistant counsel on a Senate subcommittee. In managing his brother’s campaign, his third son had shown an aptitude for politics. Kennedy hoped he too would someday run for office. The question was where. “Confidentially, Bobby is considering taking up residence in Connecticut,” Kennedy wrote family friend and lawyer Bart Brickley in March. “It’s the same old story, he doesn’t want to interfere with Jack’s career by going into politics himself. We have looked into where the best place would be to establish residence in that state and have come to the conclusion that it probably is around Hartford. In that event, we will want to have him make a good legal connection and, if possible, buy some business that would keep him interested—a paper or television station, or something like that. Have you any ideas or connections in that part of the world?” A month later, the Connecticut idea having been discarded, Kennedy contacted Cornelius Fitzgerald in Boston for advice on Bobby’s running for office in Massachusetts. “After all, that is going to be his ambition, but the problem is whether Jack’s being in politics there would hurt him very much. He is giving very serious consideration to it and might move out of the state” if it wasn’t feasible to run for office there.
²

Bobby’s first assignment for McCarthy’s committee was to compile statistics on foreign commerce and prepare a report on the extent to which British and Greek shippers were trading with Communist China. Five months later, after completing the report, he resigned. His problem was not with McCarthy, whom he liked, or the anti-Communist crusade, which he supported, but with Roy Cohn, his nominal boss, who preferred grandstanding to research and, Bobby Kennedy was convinced, was going to get McCarthy and everyone who worked for him into trouble.

After leaving the committee, Bobby remained loyal to McCarthy, as did his father. McCarthy was vulgar, scanted on his research, relied on an unscrupulous twenty-five-year-old as his chief counsel, lied when he thought he needed to, employed demagogic language and tactics, and drank too much. But these were not sins unique to him. He was being singled out for criticism, Kennedy believed, because he was a Catholic who spoke his mind and angered leftists who were either Jews or allied with Jews.

In July 1953, the month Bobby resigned, J. B. Matthews, the anti-Communist crusader whom McCarthy had hired as research director, charged that “the largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant clergymen” and that “at least 7,000 Protestant clergymen had served ‘the Kremlin’s conspiracy.’” When three leaders of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, including Monsignor John A. O’Brien of Notre Dame, asked President Eisenhower to repudiate Matthews’s allegations, he did so, calling them “deplorable” and “unjustified.”

Furious that Notre Dame, a Catholic institution whose board of lay advisers he would soon join, had allowed one of its faculty members to publicly criticize McCarthy, Kennedy wrote Father Cavanaugh, the former president of Notre Dame, to complain. “I don’t think it does Notre Dame any good to have Father O’Brien signing petitions for the Christians and Jews with Notre Dame behind his name; in fact, I think it does it immeasurable harm. I always thought that organization was completely dominated by the Jews and they just use Catholic names for the impression it makes throughout the country. I was disgusted to see him sign a petition to fire Matthews and I know nothing about Matthews. I am not suggesting eliminating freedom of speech but I certainly am against using the name of Notre Dame for the benefit of that type of organization.”
³

The senator from Wisconsin, spiraling out of control into depression, alcoholism, and a frighteningly self-destructive sense of his own importance, fired Matthews, but instead of retreating, launched a new investigation of subversives in the U.S. Army. Early in 1954, six months after he had resigned as assistant counsel to the subcommittee’s Republican majority, Robert Kennedy was hired by the Democratic minority. On April 22, 1954, when the Army-McCarthy hearings were broadcast live on television to some twenty million Americans, Bobby Kennedy, twenty-nine years of age but looking much younger, could be glimpsed in the rear of the hearing room, behind Democratic senators John McClellan, Henry Jackson, and Stuart Symington.

The hearings ended in mid-June 1954, with McCarthy having lost the support of the millions who had watched as he growled, snarled, and bullied his way through the proceedings. His colleagues were now prepared to take action against him. On July 30, 1954, Republican senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont submitted a resolution of censure. Senator Kennedy, who had never had any use for McCarthy, asked his chief aide and speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, to prepare a speech explaining why, though he disagreed with Flanders’s broad condemnation, he intended to vote for censure. That speech was never given, as the Senate leadership, instead of calling for a vote, referred the Flanders resolution to special committee.

In Europe that summer, Joseph P. Kennedy continued to defend McCarthy. “I had dinner with Lord Beaverbrook a couple of times,” he wrote Bobby on August 15, 1954, “and the other night Lady Diana Cooper, the widow of Duff Cooper, asked me, ‘How much longer will McCarthy amount to anything in the United States?’ That, of course, rubbed me the wrong way because it was true pontification. I said he was the strongest man in the United States next to Eisenhower. Then I said to the small English group, ‘What have you got against McCarthy?’” Lord Beaverbrook objected to McCarthy’s “calling Marshall a traitor. He, Beaverbrook, had no objection to him saying he was a bad Secretary of State and that he had lost China for the world, but he said people just know he isn’t a traitor. I said I had never heard that he said he was a traitor by condemning him for being an incompetent; but my own feeling is that Joe went further than that. I then asked Lady Diana what she had against him. She said she thought people she talked with felt he ruled by fear and added, ‘You know we British don’t like anybody to do things like that.’ I said that was poppycock. . . . The only thing I regret is that they seem to be forgetting Cohn in the picture and concentrating on McCarthy.”
⁴

Four days later, still incensed at the beating McCarthy was taking, Kennedy wrote his son Jack on the same topic. “All this poppycock about McCarthy having any effect on America’s standing in Europe is the biggest lot of dribble I ever read. Unless you’re a newspaperman or a politician, the masses haven’t the slightest idea what McCarthy stands for, what he does or what’s wrong with him, and 99% never heard of him long enough to remember him.”
⁵

—

H
is defense of McCarthy that summer was all the more remarkable given the fact that only months before he had experienced firsthand the damage that reckless accusations posed to innocent young men. In May 1954, Kennedy learned that reporter Jack Anderson, who was then working for Drew Pearson, was pursuing a story that Ted Kennedy had been dismissed from the CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps) training school “because of an adverse report which linked him to a group of ‘pinkos.’” Kennedy was livid and “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.” He then placed a call to J. Edgar Hoover and, after being informed he was “in a travel status,” was connected to Assistant Director Louis Nichols. Knowing that Nichols “had the Director’s confidence,” Kennedy told him that he was “sick of the Washington situation; that the Army-Stevens Hearings [usually referred to as the Army-McCarthy hearings] were a disgrace and that he simply was not going to tolerate his son being victimized in any way, shape or form.” Nichols promised that the bureau “would check into this matter immediately.” He later called Kennedy “back and told him that I could find no record and that we certainly had not investigated his son. . . . I told Mr. Kennedy that he was authorized to state, if need be, that he checked with the FBI and the FBI had not investigated his son.”
⁶

This was the second time that the bureau had done Kennedy a big favor—the first was during Jack’s affair with Inga Arvad—and he was not about to forget it. In early July 1954, he invited Special Agent H. G. Foster to visit with him at Hyannis Port. As Foster wrote Hoover after the meeting, “He had met many many people who are great admirers of yours, but I believe that Mr. Kennedy is the most vocal and forceful admirer that I have met. I found him to be a forceful, outspoken gentleman who takes great pride in his friendship with you.”
⁷

Kennedy’s flattery of Hoover was effusive to the point of near parody. “I think I have become too cynical in my old age,” he wrote the director in October 1955, “but the only two men that I know in public life today for whose opinion I give one continental both happen to be named Hoover—one John Edgar and one Herbert—and I am proud to think that both of them hold me in some esteem. . . . I listened to Walter Winchell mention your name as a candidate for President. If that could come to pass, it would be the most wonderful thing for the United States, and whether you were on a Republican or Democratic ticket, I would guarantee you the largest contribution that you would ever get from anybody and the hardest work by either a Democrat or a Republican. I think the United States deserves you. I only hope it gets you.”
⁸

In December 1957, he reported to his local FBI contact in Hyannis Port that Teddy, who was at the University of Virginia Law School, had told him “that several people have talked to the students there and have more or less unfavorably slanted their talk against the FBI. . . . He stated,” the Hyannis Port agent continued, that “he has taught his children to respect the FBI, that it is provoking to them, as well as to himself, to hear anyone speak ill of the work of the FBI.” He suggested that the FBI send someone to the University of Virginia to “give our side of the picture as to loyalty and security investigations.”
⁹

—

I
am promising myself every year that I will take it easy. I haven’t done too well so far, but I am hoping I will make a real effort in ’53.” Or so he had promised himself. But when the Republicans, on taking over the reins of government in 1953, convened a second Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, enlisted Herbert Hoover to chair it, and asked Kennedy to serve as a member, he agreed. The chance to return to Washington, if only on a part-time basis, was too good to pass up. He hired Bobby, who had resigned from the McCarthy committee, as his assistant and went to work.
¹⁰

Herbert Hoover ruled the second commission, as he had the first, with an iron hand, which was fine with Kennedy, who supported him enthusiastically. He was “the least frequent dissenter” on the commission, “entering a public dissent on only one of the commissions’ 314 recommendations.” This time around, he attended commission meetings, ably chaired his subcommittees, participated in the writing of several of the reports, and introduced and pushed through proposals of his own. As he proudly wrote Rose in April 1955, he had gotten the commission “to recommend increased appropriations for basic medical research for cancer, mentally retarded patients and various others” and was “overwhelmed with thank-yous” from the directors of medical research clinics.
¹¹

He was delighted to be a Washington insider again, especially as it gave him the opportunity to leak classified information to J. Edgar Hoover as thanks for past favors and down payment for future ones. “President Eisenhower,” he told Agent Foster, who forwarded the information directly to the director, “had requested Hoover Commission to investigate CIA . He [Kennedy] advised that General Mark Clark would probably head up their investigative efforts. He also indicated he was leaving for Europe in just a little over a week and left the inference he expects to do some inquiring concerning CIA while he is abroad. He also advised it was his personal thought that President Eisenhower had asked the Hoover Commission to make this inquiry to forestall an investigation into CIA by Senator McCarthy.”
¹²

Kennedy had no business divulging confidential information about possible investigations of the CIA to J. Edgar Hoover, who considered the agency the bureau’s chief rival. But he owed Hoover something—and information such as this was worth its weight in gold to the director. A firm believer in the ethics of the quid pro quo, Kennedy would continue to leak “insider” information to the director, who in turn, he hoped, would protect his boys by guarding whatever “insider” information he had on them.

—

T
he Kennedy family had much to celebrate. In May 1953, Eunice married Sargent Shriver at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Cardinal Francis Spellman officiating. The reception dinner and dance was held at the Waldorf. The bride looked beautiful, the groom handsome, the bride’s parents glowed with delight.

The following month, Jack announced his engagement to Miss Jacqueline Bouvier, whom the
New York Times
identified as a “Newport society girl.” She was more than that, of course. She was the perfect Kennedy daughter-in-law: educated at Vassar, the Sorbonne, and George Washington University, from a good (if divorced) Catholic family, gorgeous, trim, with a quiet but rather wicked sense of humor, and unflappable. She was also genuinely interested in and admiring of her new father-in-law, and he of her.