Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (5 page)

Yet however wise he might prove to be in response to unexpected events, he never fully faced up to personal limits that threatened to jeopardize his presidency. He was a compulsive womanizer. In the context of the times—a privileged young man growing up in the thirties, forties, and fifties—sexual escapades were not uncommon, especially among social lions in the country’s great urban centers, and doubly so for someone as handsome and charming as Kennedy, who had enjoyed standing in Washington for years as perhaps the city’s most desirable bachelor. Moreover, he was mindful of his father’s reputation as a ladies’ man, despite Rose Kennedy’s strict religious belief in the sanctity of marriage vows. As Jack was about to marry Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953, his father told one of Jack’s closest friends, “I am a bit concerned that he may get restless about the prospect of getting married. Most people do and he is more likely to do so than others.”

Yet marrying Jackie, as she was called, was irresistible. From his first meeting with her in 1951, she impressed him as an ideal mate. She came from a Catholic
Social Register
family, and she was clearly beautiful, intelligent, delightfully charming, self-confident, and wonderfully poised. At twenty-two, she was thirteen years his junior and somewhat worshipful of the worldly-wise celebrity senator, who could fulfill whatever fantasies she may have had of a glamorous life with a Washington star. Their marriage in September 1953 at the Newport, Rhode Island, estate of Jackie’s stepfather was described in the press as the social event of the year.

More than love drew Jack to marriage, however. As an ambitious politician who had his eye on higher office, Kennedy believed that he had to marry, however much he enjoyed his bachelorhood and freedom to sleep around. Yet he did not see marriage as a deterrent to multiple partners. It had not ended his father’s womanizing.

As Joe foresaw, his son’s philandering did not subside. He remained as promiscuous as ever. Lem Billings, Jack’s closest friend, recalled the “humiliation” Jackie “would suffer when she found herself stranded at parties while Jack would suddenly disappear with some pretty young girl.” Priscilla Johnson, an attractive young woman who worked on Kennedy’s Senate staff in the fifties and resisted his overtures, described him as “a very naughty boy.” Her rejection of his advances made him more respectful of her, and moved him to speak openly to her about women in general and his reckless behavior in particular. “I once asked him,” she said, “why he was doing it—why he was acting like his father, why he was avoiding real relationships, why he was taking a chance on getting caught in a scandal at the same time he was trying to make his career take off. He took a while trying to formulate an answer. Finally, he shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know really. I guess I just can’t help it.’ He had this sad expression on his face. He looked like a little boy about to cry.”

Kennedy’s response speaks loudly about the sources of his actions. His frenetic need for conquests was not the behavior of a sexual athlete. It was not the sex act that seemed to drive his pursuit of so many women, but the constant need for reaffirmation, or a desire for affection and approval, however transitory, from his casual trysts. It is easy to imagine that Jack was principally responding to feelings of childhood emptiness stemming from a detached mother and an absent father. As the mother of nine children, including a disabled daughter who followed Jack’s birth by only a little more than a year, Rose struggled to attend to her two oldest sons. Busy building his fortune and compelled by business demands to travel widely, Joe was more a family patriarch than a hands-on father closely interacting with his children.

Kennedy’s affinity for womanizing found an extended outlet in an eighteen-month affair with a young White House intern beginning in the summer of 1962. The publication in 2012 of
Once Upon a Secret
, a recounting by Mimi Beardsley Alford of her relationship with Kennedy, when she was just nineteen and twenty, provides the most revealing details ever into his sexual escapades. A companion on summer trips with him and on occasional weekends at the White House when Jackie was away, Mimi offered him a reliable retreat from the demands of his duties.

His time with Mimi also appealed to his attraction to risk-taking. Unprotected sex once led to an unrealized scare of pregnancy. Not to mention that Mimi’s nights at the White House and presence on trips suddenly made her visible to White House insiders and journalists, which created risks that could have politically touched off a ruinous scandal. Given the assumptions of the time that the mainstream press would not write about a president’s sex life, Kennedy was confident that he could avoid any public attack on his character. But he could not be sure. And he was mindful that as president he could be more than embarrassed by accusations of philandering. He either knew or at least understood James Monroe’s observation that “national honor is the national property of the highest value” and that every president is the temporary custodian of that property.

Alford remembers Kennedy’s affair with her as “a reckless desire for sex.” But, according to her account, something else was at work: Their relationship wasn’t “romantic. It was sexual, it was intimate, it was passionate. But there was always a layer of reserve between us, which may explain why we never once kissed. . . . In fact I don’t remember the President
ever
kissing me—not hello, not goodbye, not even during sex.” Her function, as she recalls, was to provide “good company . . . because he hated to be alone but also because he found a change of pace in someone like me—young full of energy, willing to play along with whatever he wanted.”

And what he wanted occasionally was to give expression to “his demons and . . . his more sinister side.” During a visit with him to Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Springs, California, where a raucous Hollywood party was in full swing, Alford refused to try a “popper,” an amyl nitrate capsule that “purportedly enhanced sex.” Unwilling to take no for an answer, Kennedy “popped the capsule and held it under my nose.” She “panicked and ran crying from the room” when the drug caused her heart to race and hands to tremble. Sometime after, Kennedy was “guilty of an even more callous and unforgivable episode at the White House pool,” involving long-time aide Dave Powers: He challenged Mimi “to give Powers oral sex” while he watched. Although she was “deeply embarrassed afterward” and Kennedy apologized to both her and Powers, it did not stop him from asking her at a later date to do the same thing with his younger brother Ted Kennedy. She angrily rejected the suggestion. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she told him. “Absolutely not.”

What Alford didn’t quite understand was how dependent Kennedy had become on her and how these callous actions expressed the anger he fixed on her as the object of his dependence. In some unspecified way, she filled a vacuum in his need for mothering, affection, and attention as well as for a release from presidential obligations. “He always asked . . . about her social life.” When she told him that she had begun dating someone she thought was “really nice,” he said, “Ah Mimi, you’re not going to
leave
me, are you?” It was true words spoken in jest. At their last meeting in November 1963, Kennedy embraced her and said, “I wish you were coming with me to Texas,” which was ruled out by Jackie’s presence on the trip. “I’ll call you when I get back,” he added. Reminding him that she was getting married, Alford recalled him saying, “‘I know that,’ . . . and shrugged. ‘But I’ll call you anyway.’” He seemed to need her more than she needed him—however sad she was at ending their remarkable affair.

As he entered the presidency, Kennedy had to be mindful of the risks to his public reputation from revelations about his closely guarded health problems and his affinity for extramarital affairs. Attempting to hide these personal weaknesses became an additional challenge to the daunting problems that now awaited him in the Oval Office.

C
HAPTER
2

Robert Kennedy: Adviser-in-Chief

A
s Kennedy searched for the men who would become his closest White House associates, his campaigns and House and Senate service gave him some feel for what he could expect from interactions with advisers. His experience in the military and as a keen observer of public policy had made him more than a little cynical about so-called experts. He was conversant with Irish leader Charles Parnell’s counsel: “Get the advice of everybody whose advice is worth having—they are very few—and then do what you think best yourself.”

Kennedy saw decision-making and governing as a high-risk business and the advice of the experts as essential, but always to be viewed with measured skepticism. He never doubted that advisers were eager to help and had his best interests at heart, but he also understood that they were competitors for his attention and might be intent on ingratiating themselves with him. Only members of his family could be fully trusted to act in the unselfish interest of their son or brother. It was a caution his father had preached repeatedly to his sons and daughters: Only your closest relatives would put your needs and ambitions first or ahead of theirs.

When Jack first entered politics in 1946 to run for a House seat from Boston, his principal adviser was his father, who financed the campaign and presided over all the major decisions on Jack’s candidacy. As Jack put it to a friend at the start of his reach for a House seat, “There goes the old man! There he goes figuring out the next step. I’m in it now, you know. It’s my turn. I’ve got to perform.” Joe believed that if Jack were to get anywhere in politics, he needed his help. Joe saw the twenty-nine-year-old Jack as “rather shy, withdrawn and quiet.” Joe worried that he lacked his drive and that of Joe, Jr., who “used to talk about being President.” But Joe’s concerns were overdrawn: Winning and being the best were family watchwords that Jack had fully absorbed. He played competitive sports—football and yacht racing—with a fierce determination. He told a reporter in 1960, “The fascination about politics is that it is so competitive. There’s always that exciting challenge of competition.”

Yet at the start of his political journey, Jack had little confidence in his ability to attract voters. He had limited affinity for the false camaraderie common among Boston politicos. “Backslapping with the politicians,” he acknowledged, was not his idea of a good time. “I think I’d rather go somewhere with my familiars or sit alone somewhere and read a book.” Mingling with an audience after giving a speech was nothing he relished. And speechmaking was an ordeal. In 1946, his delivery was stiff and wooden, with no trace of humor to lighten his remarks. He read his speeches, reluctant to depart from the text for fear he would lose his place and embarrass himself by unconvincing off-the-cuff reflections. He was like a novice teacher reluctant to make eye contact with students whose boredom would be all too apparent in their looks.

But Joe believed that he could create the conditions that would allow Jack to overcome his natural limitations as a conventional politician. Just as he had succeeded in building a fortune for himself from small beginnings, so Joe assumed that he could turn Jack into a winning candidate for high office. But first he had to repair his own damaged public standing: His poor judgment on British dealings with Hitler, his affinity for American isolationism, and his alleged anti-Semitism were liabilities opponents would try to attach to his son. In 1945–46, he improved his reputation in Massachusetts by promoting well-publicized programs of economic expansion for Boston and the state.

At the same time, he worked quietly to launch Jack’s political career: He persuaded James Curley to give up his Eleventh Congressional District seat to return to his old job as Boston’s mayor by offering to finance the campaign and help him pay legal fees incurred fighting fraud charges. When one of Jack’s potential opponents for the Democratic Party’s congressional nomination in the district and his supporters offered to help Jack run for some undesignated office in the future if Joe would agree to keep him out of the race, Joe dismissed their demand as “crazy,” saying, “My son will be President in 1960.”

Whatever Jack’s limitations—and they included attacks on him as an interloper or carpetbagger who had only recently taken up residence in the congressional district—he had the advantage of being a war hero, which was a compelling asset only months after the end of the war. Polls Joe commissioned advised Jack to emphasize his wartime service. They also indicated that Jack’s identification with the storied Kennedys and Fitzgeralds would be valuable in the campaign. The importance of the family connection was not lost on Jack. “My biggest help . . . getting started,” he recalled in 1960, was “my father having been known. . . . That’s a far greater advantage to me, I think, than the financial. Coming from a politically active family was really the major advantage.”

Nonetheless, Joe’s investment of more money than normally went into a Boston congressional race gave Jack high visibility among voters. Joe paid for one hundred thousand reprints of a
Reader’s Digest
summary of a
New Yorker
article about Jack’s wartime heroism in rescuing the crew of his torpedo boat, which was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer. The spending on the offprint was a small part of the $250,000 to $300,000 Joe is supposed to have put into the campaign. It was an unprecedented sum for a congressional primary. “With what I’m spending I could elect my chauffeur,” Joe joked. Two political journalists compared the lavish flow of money to “an elephant squashing a peanut.”

A campaign aide and veteran of Boston politics compared the nomination fight to a war that required three things to win: “The first is money and the second is money and the third is money.” California Democratic Party boss Jesse Unruh later echoed the point in the sixties: “money is the mother’s milk of politics,” he said. Joe’s cash allowed the campaign to hire a public relations firm that saturated the district with billboard, newspaper, radio, and subway ads; flattering pictures of Jack, the war veteran prepared to fight for the needs of district voters, became a familiar sight to its residents. Jack threw himself into the campaign with dawn-to-dusk appearances punctuated by appeals to voter patriotism that warned about the growing communist threat, which a Navy veteran like Jack would know how to fight. The election outcome was all Joe could have hoped for: Jack beat his closest primary rival by a two-to-one margin and defeated his Republican opponent in November by nearly three to one.

Once in office, like many congressmen from safe districts, Jack seemed to have secured a lifetime job. But it wasn’t the job he wanted. From the first, he saw the work of a congressman as unrewarding. “We were just worms in the House—nobody paid much attention to us nationally,” he complained. He saw service there as a stepping-stone; when the time and circumstances seemed right, he would run for a Senate seat, which in turn would be a prelude to a race for the presidency.

As he reached for the higher rungs on the political ladder, Jack needed more help and someone he could rely on to discuss campaign plans and strategies. His father would supply the money and give him access to people who could promote his candidacy first in Massachusetts and then around the nation. But Joe, already sixty-four when Jack ran for the Senate in 1952, could not be constantly at his side, and he remained enough of a controversial figure that his help was best given behind the scenes.

The alternative was Jack’s younger brother, Bobby, who initially did not seem like an appropriate choice as campaign manager and confidant. Born in 1925, he was eight years younger than Jack, and the seventh Kennedy child. Four sisters had followed Joe, Jr. and Jack. Joe, Sr. was not very invested in Bobby, as the boy was called. Before Bobby could hypothetically run for president in 1964, Joe would be seventy-six. If one of his sons were to reach for the White House in his lifetime, Joe assumed that it would have to be Joe, Jr. or Jack, and Joe, Jr.’s death made Jack the focus of Joe, Sr.’s ambition.

Besides, Bobby was Rose’s son. His diminutive size alongside his more robust brothers stirred Rose’s maternal protectiveness, as it did with Rosemary, the first daughter and third child, who suffered from birth defects that compelled special attention to her needs. Unlike the somewhat rebellious Jack and Kathleen, the second sister, who married an English nobleman in 1944 outside the faith, Bobby was the obedient, observant child, most devoted to his mother’s insistence on fidelity to their Catholicism. He became an altar boy and shared his mother’s affinity for regular church attendance. He stammered as a child and seemed most in need of parental reassurance, which he reciprocated with attentiveness to his parents’ demands for putting family first. No one was more faithful to Joe’s dictates about family loyalty and winning every contest than Bobby. He became a crusader of sorts for the Kennedy reputation. Combative and intolerant of any criticism of his family or of opposition to his father’s and brother’s ambitions, Bobby became the principal and devoted manager of the family’s political campaigns.

In 1952, when Jack ran for the Senate, Bobby was not very close to his older brother. While Bobby was growing up, Jack was already off at Choate and then Harvard. During the war, as Jack served in the Pacific, Bobby attended prep school at Milton Academy. After graduation in 1944, he enlisted in the Navy, where he served until 1946. Bobby joined Jack’s congressional campaign that year, but he was not welcomed with open arms. “It’s damn nice of Bobby wanting to help,” Jack wrote a mutual friend, “but I can’t see that sober, silent face breathing new vigor into the ranks.” To the contrary, Jack worried that Bobby would do more to antagonize than attract voters. Bobby had a reputation as “kind of a nasty, brutal, humorless little fellow,” who was “tough on himself and tough on the people around him.” Jack assigned him to East Cambridge, an area unfriendly to Jack’s candidacy, where Bobby would be largely out of the way and couldn’t do much harm. But his campaign work impressed Jack and the professional party operatives Joe paid to secure Jack’s election: Though Jack lost the East Cambridge wards to his opponents, the vote was closer than anticipated, for which Bobby, who had disarmed some of the hostility to the Kennedys by playing softball with local teenagers in a park, got the credit.

While Jack served six years in the House, Bobby was at Harvard, mainly playing football and arguing about politics, the topic of most interest to him after athletics. After graduation in 1948, Bobby followed the Kennedy tradition of foreign travel, and in Jack’s footsteps as a correspondent for the
Boston Post
. Eager to go where history was being made, he traveled to the Middle East: Cairo, Jerusalem, and Lebanon. He wrote several dispatches about the emerging state of Israel, which birth he witnessed firsthand as the British prepared to leave Palestine and Arabs and Jews prepared for war. The grand tour took him to Italy and through Belgium, Holland, and Germany. During the trip, the death of his oldest sister, Kathleen, in a plane crash greatly distressed him, as did talk of a war with Russia, which seemed to be imminent, according to the diplomats and military men he spoke with in Vienna. He saw such a conflict, which could well include the use of atomic bombs, as too horrifying to contemplate. But at the end of the year, after he had returned to the States, the arrest and trial of Hungary’s Catholic prelate, Cardinal Mindszenty, moved Bobby to advocate “forceful action.”

In September 1948, Bobby entered the University of Virginia Law School, where he assembled a respectable record, graduating in June 1951 in the middle of his class. It was a major improvement over Harvard, where his poor academic record had made his Virginia application a near failure. In June 1950, while in law school, he married Ethel Skakel, the daughter of a Chicago coal industry millionaire, and in July 1951, the first of their eleven children was born.

In the fall, he joined his congressman brother on a seven-week trip to the Middle East and Asia. Joe had to talk Jack into inviting Bobby, whom Jack saw as “moody, taciturn, brusque, and combative,” and seemed likely to be “a pain in the ass.” But family ties trumped personal tensions; Jack felt obliged to put up with his younger brother’s irritating qualities. Still, Jack was never entirely happy about his father’s directives, whether about familial relations or politics. “I guess Dad has decided that he’s going to be the ventriloquist,” Jack told a friend about Joe’s pressure on him to cast a congressional vote, “so I guess that leaves me the role of dummy.” At the same time, Jack never lost sight of how Joe’s fame and money had been so instrumental in facilitating his rise in politics. As Jack said later about his career, Joe made it happen.

During the trip, Jack for the first time took a shine to his younger brother, who charmed him with his sense of humor and playfulness by teasing people. As important, they shared a sense of how the United States needed to deal with the emerging Asian countries they visited. They agreed on “the importance of associating ourselves with the people rather than just the governments, which might be transitional.” In Indochina, where the French were fighting to hang on to their colonies, Bobby and Jack saw it as a losing cause that ran counter to the will of the masses. They believed that Western nations, including the United States, were putting themselves at a disadvantage in competing with communism by not identifying themselves with the aspirations of the majority of Asians for freedom from colonial control. They took away from the trip a mutual affinity for rescuing emerging nations from the grip of communism. Bobby’s religious orthodoxy made him more doctrinaire than Jack, who was more skeptical about church teachings and a little cynical about all institutional affiliations. Nonetheless, they found enough in common to imagine working together on future political issues.

The moment came in 1952 when Jack ran for the Senate from Massachusetts. His candidacy was something of a long shot; he aimed to unseat the storied Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., whose family—father and son—had held the seat for forty-five of the last sixty years. Moreover, Jack had hardly distinguished himself as a congressman and was reaching for the Senate office when the Republicans seemed likely to win the 1952 presidential campaign. President Truman and the Democrats were in poor standing over the stalemated Korean War, and the Republican nominee, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, an architect of victory in World War II, enjoyed considerable popularity in the state, where supporters sported “I like Ike” buttons.