A Treasury of Great American Scandals (5 page)

Kennedy's daughters-in-law had him to thank for the influence he had on their philandering husbands. He was himself an inveterate adulterer who, in his later years, practically had his sons pimping for him when he wanted a date. One of the most famous of all his paramours was the actress Gloria Swanson, whom he had met in 1927 during his stint as a Hollywood mogul. Kennedy made little effort to hide the affair. Swanson was, after all, a major sex symbol, and bedding her certainly stroked his vanity. He never hesitated to bring Gloria home to meet his children, and once even cruised across the Atlantic with her
and
his wife. “If [Rose Kennedy] suspected me of having relations not quite proper with her husband, or resented me for it, she never gave any indication of it,” Swanson wrote. “In fact, at those times during the voyage when Joe Kennedy behaved in an alarmingly possessive or oversolicitous fashion toward me, Rose joined right in and supported him.” The arrangement was odd enough for Swanson to wonder: “Was she a fool . . . or a saint? Or just a better actress than I was?”

Joe Kennedy dishonored his wife with his chronic womanizing, but Rose seems to have tolerated the situation well enough to simply ignore it. Perhaps a far greater disservice was his complete disregard for her feelings about the welfare of their mentally retarded daughter, Rosemary. He made a profound, and ultimately devastating, decision about the young woman's very existence without ever bothering to consult with his wife: He had her lobotomized when her behavior started to become uncontrollable as she reached adult-hood. “He thought it would help her,” Rose Kennedy told Doris Kearns Goodwin with some bitterness, “but it made her go all the way back. It erased all those years of effort I had put into her. All along I continued to believe that she could have lived her life as a Kennedy girl, just a little slower. But then it was all gone in a matter of minutes.”

What Joe Kennedy taught his children, and showed them by example, was how to be just like Joe Kennedy. He passed down to them not only his low opinion of women, including their mother, but all his other biases and prejudices as well. Eldest son Joe Jr., for example, nicely reflected his father's fierce anti-Semitism in a 1934 letter he wrote home while traveling through Hitler's Germany. The increasing oppression of Germany's Jews, young Joe concluded, was justified by their own behavior. “[The Jews] were at the heads of all big business, in law, etc.,” he wrote. “It is all to their credit for them to get so far, but their methods have been quite unscrupulous. . . . As far as the brutality is concerned, it must have been necessary to use some, to secure the whole-hearted support of the people, which was necessary to put through this present program. . . . As you know, [Hitler] has passed the sterilization law which I think is a good thing. I don't know how the Church feels about it but it will do away with many of the disgusting specimens of men who inhabit this earth.” Sentiments sure to make Pops proud.

After making his fortune in banking, stock manipulation, and, as has been alleged, bootlegging, Joe Kennedy entered the political arena as a means of enhancing his power and prestige. His public career ended disastrously, however. As U.S. ambassador to Great Britain on the eve of World War II, Kennedy became an outspoken defeatist, going as far as to declare that democracy was dead in England. With his inglorious departure from center stage, the ambassador—as he insisted he be called for the rest of his life—foisted his ambitions onto his sons.

“I got Jack into politics,” the ambassador later boasted; “I was the one. I told him [elder brother] Joe was dead and that it was therefore his responsibility to run for Congress. He didn't want to. He felt he didn't have the ability. . . . But I told him he had to.” Jack Kennedy wasn't pushed into the political arena because of the great services his father felt he could offer the nation. The motive was far more cynical than that: It was to enhance the Kennedy brand name. “We're going to sell Jack like soap flakes,” the ambassador once said, underscoring just how inconsequential true political ideals were when it came to winning.

Utilizing all his substantial resources, Joe Kennedy ultimately propelled one son to the White House, another to the attorney general's office, and a third to the U.S. Senate. It didn't matter much that Ted Kennedy, barely old enough to qualify for the Senate, had never held elected office before. It was all for the greater glory of Joe Kennedy. However, the ambassador, having reached the pinnacle of success through his sons, did not have long to savor his victories. He suffered a massive stroke at the end of 1961 and for the next eight years watched in helpless silence as his dreams collapsed with the assassinations of two sons and the crowning blow to the Kennedy dynasty, Chappaquiddick. He died in 1969, yet his legacy lives on, without a hint of irony, at the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Institute of
Ethics
(emphasis, of course, added) at Georgetown University.

Oh, Brother!

 

 

 

Presidential siblings have always provided a steady source of embarrassment for their more prominent brothers. Thomas Jefferson was forever chagrined by the inanities of his younger brother, Randolph. There are indications that Randy was rather dimwitted and something of a buffoon. Tom had to keep an eagle eye on Randolph's financial affairs lest he bankrupt himself through sheer stupidity. The greatest indictment of Randolph Jefferson comes from the gently self-effacing recollections of a Monticello slave named Issac: “[Randolph] was one mighty simple man—used to come out among the black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night; hadn't much more sense than Issac.”

Ulysses S. Grant's administration was nearly done in by the shenanigans of the president's younger brother, Orvil, a thief and scoundrel of the first order. Orvil and Grant's secretary of war, William Belknap, lined their pockets with kickbacks from the sale of lucrative trading post franchises on the Western frontier. Since army regulations required soldiers to patronize the posts, a franchise was a valuable commodity with a guaranteed clientele. Annual payments to Grant and Belknap, however, forced traders to charge outrageously high prices for goods; even General George Armstrong Custer felt the pinch. Custer caused a huge sensation when he testified against Belknap and implicated Orvil Grant during a Senate investigation that clinched Grant's as the most corrupt administration to that date.

Lyndon Johnson did his darnedest to avoid being shamed by his unpredictable brother, Sam Houston Johnson, but his efforts ultimately backfired. Like many siblings of the successful, Sam Houston lived in his brother's shadow. LBJ even had him living at the White House during his administration so he could keep an eye on him and control the fallout from his famous fondness for drink. Sam came to refer to the president's home as “the penitentiary”: While being driven up the driveway he would hold his wrists together as if cuffed and shout, “Back to my cell.” For a time LBJ was successful in reining in his brother, keeping his profile so low with busywork that people started calling him “Silent Sam.” The silence, however, was soon to be shattered. Lyndon Johnson was said to have been deeply embarrassed by Sam's book,
My Brother, Lyndon,
which was released soon after the president's inglorious departure from the White House in 1969. Sam's portrait of his brother was hardly flattering. “I've always said that anyone who worked for my brother for at least a month deserved the Purple Heart,” he wrote. The estrangement between the brothers lasted until LBJ's death in 1973.

If uncouth behavior really is an unconscious form of sibling rivalry, Billy Carter—the mother of all embarrassing brothers—had to have been waging war. This hillbilly cartoon of a character, however, never failed to entertain. Whether holding court in front of his Plains, Georgia, gas station, or making one of his numerous, and well-paid, public appearances—like judging and participating in a world championship belly flop competition—he was ever dependable as a goofy foil. Like when he was seen urinating in public while waiting at the airport for a delegation of Libyans he was hosting. Indeed the Libyan relationship was Billy Carter's crowning glory, especially when he accepted a $220,000 loan for representing the outlaw nation's interests, and got a federal investigation aimed at him just in time for Jimmy's reelection campaign. The president always said he was loath to interfere in his brother's business, possibly because Billy had already announced what he'd do if big brother ever did: “I'd tell him to kiss my ass.”

Cold Wars

 

Hatfield vs. McCoy may be the most famous American feud, but it was by no means an aberration. We the people have made bickering among ourselves a treasured pastime, especially the most prominent among us. The winding path of U.S. history is strewn with great spats—some lethal, others just plain old nasty.

Feuding Founding Fathers

 

 

 

 

Busy as they were building a new nation, the Founding Fathers always managed to squeeze in enough time to tear one another apart. In this mode, they came off looking more like squabbling fish-wives—hurling insults and nursing petty resentments—than a brotherhood united in the quest for freedom. John Adams, “the crankiest Founding Father,” as historian Jack D. Warren calls him, was involved in many of these sometimes vicious quarrels. He seems to have had a gripe with just about all of his esteemed colleagues, including George Washington, under whom he served as the nation's first vice president.
³

“The rushing and dashing and roaring of the word Washington, Washington, Washington,” Adams wrote resentfully, “like the waters at Passaic or the tremendous cataract of Niagara, deafens stuns astonishes and bedizzards, all who are within hearing.”

It wasn't that Adams disliked Washington—he actually admired him in some ways—but all the laudatory attention he received, especially after his death in 1799, drove Adams nuts. “The feasts and funerals in honor of Washington,” he complained, “is as corrupt a system as that by which saints were canonized and cardinals, popes, and whole hierarchical systems created.” That his fellow Federalists idolized Washington galled Adams, who declared that they “have done themselves and their country invaluable injury by making Washington their military, political, religious and even moral Pope, and ascribing everything to him.”

The roots of Adams's resentment of “the superstitious veneration that is sometimes paid to Genl Washington” lay in part with his own diminishing reputation. After his defeat in the presidential election of 1800, he was obsessed by what historian Joseph Ellis calls “a frantic and uncontrollable craving for personal vindication, a lust for fame,” and “an acute awareness that history would not do him justice.” To Adams, it just wasn't fair that Washington was getting all the credit for fathering the new nation. Many leaders, including himself, played key roles in the revolution, he insisted, complaining that it “offended against eternal justice to give to one, as the People do, the Merits of so many.” Besides, Washington wasn't so great to begin with. In a letter to Benjamin Rush, Adams listed the “talents” to which Washington owed “his immense elevation above his fellows,” noting sardonically that none of these talents involved “reading, thinking, or writing”:

 

 

If Adams was jealous of George Washington, he absolutely despised Benjamin Franklin, no slouch himself when it came to cultivating enemies—including his own son.
⁴
Adams called Franklin “the old Conjurer,” dismissing him as a phony who managed to fool people with trite philosophies and contrived charm. Franklin didn't think much of Adams, either: “He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”