Kennedy (7 page)

During that same campaign, perhaps stepping over the fine line between tactics and substance, the Ambassador, as he was known, talked
to me at length about the gist of a proposed television speech, in effect delivering such a talk to me by telephone. Finally he subsided with the comment: “At least that’s what I would like to hear.” And I, more in daring than in disagreement, said, “But, Mr. Kennedy, maybe you don’t reflect what the typical voter would like to hear.” “Hell,” the man whose fortune ran to hundreds of millions exploded, with more feeling than logic, “I’m the only typical man around here!”

He could be, I observed, exceedingly warm and gentle, despite the legends which emphasized only a fierce temper, a curt manner and a cynical outlook. Yet Mr. Kennedy often contributed to his own legend with elaborate claims about himself and his children. Even his son Jack did on occasion. When a newspaper story on Eunice Kennedy’s wedding stated that a Kennedy business associate had smilingly acknowledged that its cost would run into six figures, the Senator exclaimed, “Now I know that story is a phony—no one in my father’s office smiles.”

But leaving the legend aside, the Ambassador at home was a likable man. I saw him only at his home, for he almost never came to his son’s office, though they talked frequently by telephone. I had no difficulty in getting along well with him. I admired the spirit of public service he had helped implant in his sons, after his own service as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Chairman of the Maritime Commission and Ambassador to Great Britain.
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I also admired his devotion to his children, to their education, happiness and success. However domineering his manner may have seemed, he had instilled in them a will to win without ever breaking their spirits. “I grew up in a very strict house,” said the Senator, “where there were no free riders.” His father had sent his sons to secular public and private, not parochial, schools and taught them to learn from Harold Laski as well as Herbert Hoover. He permitted each child to choose his own career, companions and political philosophy, however they may have differed from his own. He never discussed business or money at the dinner table, but he did talk about politics and personalities. He took pride in his children’s educational and literary achievements (“Although,” the Senator told me of this successful, well-informed man, “I’ve almost never seen him read a serious book”).

To assist his son’s fight to the top, he was willing to do anything—even stay out of the fight. He was not “banished,” as rumored in the fall of 1960, but took the same summer trip to Europe he had taken for
many years. “He is not going to participate actively in the campaign,” the Senator said, “but he never has. But I will be talking with him frequently…. His interest is constant.”

The Ambassador knew that he was a controversial figure and that in his son’s Presidential campaign his own opinions were better left unsaid and his participation unseen. He knew he had endowed his sons with enemies as well as friends. Much of the liberal suspicion of the Ambassador was in fact unfounded. While it is true that his conversation at times reflected the ethnic antagonisms and epithets that had long characterized East Boston and Massachusetts, this hardly made him an anti-Semite; and when he took a group of us to lunch at his country club in Palm Beach, he boasted that he was the only Gentile member.

His son Jack, who was singularly immune to prejudices of any kind (although he, too, would refer in private political discussions to “the Italians” or “the Jews” or “the Irish” in the same way he talked about “the farmers” or “the veterans”), resented the manner in which his father’s views on race and religion were both overstated in the press and attributed to his sons. More than one group of voters had to be reassured in 1960 that Jack Kennedy was independent of his father’s policies and positions. Harris Wofford, who worked on race relations in the 1960 campaign, tells of Kennedy’s reaction to the news that Negro leader Martin Luther King’s father had announced his support—after the Senator’s phone call to Mrs. King—stating he had previously planned to vote against Kennedy on religious grounds. “That was a hell of an intolerant statement, wasn’t it?” said Kennedy. “Imagine Martin Luther King having a father like that.” Then a pause, a grin and a final word: “Well, we all have our fathers, don’t we?”

But Jack Kennedy knew that his father was no bigot, whatever his enemies might say; and far from regarding him as a handicap or embarrassment, he had strong filial feelings of loyalty and love. Once, lunching with a noted radical’s son who was involved in a complicated altercation with the senior Kennedy, he asked, “Do you always agree with your father? No? But you love him?” Smiling with pleasure at his companion’s affirmative answer, he leaned back and said simply, “Same here.” At times he was annoyed by exaggerated statements in the press about his father’s forcing him into politics or masterminding his campaign (particularly when it was the Ambassador himself who was both directly and correctly quoted). But he never disowned, disclaimed or apologized for his father or his father’s money. He was grateful that Joseph Kennedy’s many successes—in such diverse industries as banking, shipbuilding, investments, movies, liquor, real estate and oil—had made possible for his sons the financial independence which assists political success. At our first strategy meeting on the Presidential campaign
in 1959, the Ambassador made clear that the family’s full financial resources were available, if needed. (“Not all of them, Dad,” said Bob in mock horror. “Don’t forget Teddy and me.”)

Until his stroke in December, 1961, Joseph P. Kennedy was the vibrant center of Kennedy family life—a constant source of praise and criticism, advice and commands, laughter and wrath. With each successive tragedy that befell the family, he showed the others how to close ranks and march ahead—though some say he never got over the loss of his oldest son Joe.

Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. had been a young man of many qualities—handsome, husky, gregarious, talented, aggressive, and adored by his eight younger brothers and sisters as well as by his parents. He talked openly of someday reaching the Presidency. Jack, the next oldest, often fought with him but also sought to be his intimate and, for a time, his imitator. They attended the same schools, traveled together in Europe, participated in similar sports. Both enlisted in the Navy before Pearl Harbor and both preferred hazardous duty.

Rejecting the rotation home that two tours of combat duty and some fifty missions over European waters had earned him, Joe volunteered for an experimental mission—flying a Liberator bomber loaded with explosives from which he would bail out once a control plane had directed it on target. With an earth-shaking blast that was never explained, his plane disintegrated in the air while still over England.

In a private book of tributes which he edited, Jack wrote:

And to a friend he wrote:

It never was, but in some ways brother Bob came closest to filling it for both Jack and his father. Bob, nine years younger than Jack, was not so close to him in their youth. “The first time I remember meeting Bobby,” his older brother said, “was when he was three and a half, one summer on the Cape.” The first time I remember meeting Bob, in 1953, he had not yet developed the degree of patience and perspective which would later make him so valuable a member of the Cabinet. At the invitation of his friend, Staff Director Francis Flanagan, he had accepted a position on the staff of the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, then about to run rampant under the fanatical chairmanship of
Senator Joseph McCarthy. Senator Kennedy told me he opposed his brother’s acceptance but would not stand in his way. It was not long before Bob left McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who, he said, paid scant attention to the facts.

In those days Bob, when crossed, could be as rough and rugged as his physique (and as his brother Joe had apparently been before him). He also tended then toward the more militant views that endeared him to his father. But his absolute loyalty and hardheaded judgment made him a valuable confidant of his less argumentative older brother. In Jack’s 1952 race for the Senate, as in the 1960 race for the Presidency, Bobby was the logical choice for campaign manager. He could be trusted more implicitly, say “no” more emphatically and speak for the candidate more authoritatively than any professional politician. “Just as I went into politics when Joe died,” said the Senator to an interviewer, “if anything happened to me tomorrow my brother Bobby would run for my seat.” Bob’s unique role is implicit in nearly every chapter that follows.

Another brother, Teddy, showed increasing signs of possessing Jack’s warmhearted popular appeal and natural political instincts. In September, 1957, a
Saturday Evening Post
article concluded:

But even fervent admirers thought that day, if it ever came, was still far away.

Jack had replaced brother Joe as leader of the Kennedy offspring, a source of advice and assistance and an object of their affection. He, in turn, cared more deeply about the approval of his parents and siblings than that of anyone except his wife. He took a genuine interest in their travels, their spouses, their schooling, their careers, their appearance, antics and ideas, even taking time out in the White House, for example, to talk with sister Pat’s husband Peter Lawford about his acting career and unknown to Peter making some efforts on his behalf.

Family gatherings at Hyannis Port or Palm Beach—to which I was an infrequent visitor—were occasions of great merriment, athletic and intellectual competition, exchanges of banter and bouquets, and relaxation in sailing, swimming, softball, football, tennis, golf, reading and the nightly movie. One afternoon, playing softball despite a sore back, the Senator hit safely in each appearance at bat, but sent his cousin Ann Gargan to run for him. On another occasion Mrs. John F. Kennedy and Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy were induced by the others to put on a fashion show of their latest Paris purchases.

Despite many similarities, each of the Kennedys differed from the Senator and from each other. But they were bound by ties of genuine filial and fraternal affection, ties that were strengthened by family tragedy and pride. They were all intensely competitive and at home vied with each other. But when it came to competing with the rest of the world, the warmth of their solidarity strengthened Jack and awed his adversaries.

Most of their wealthy neighbors in Republican Hyannis Port—for Nixon three to two in 1960—had little to do with the Kennedys. (“They never showed such interest,” Eunice observed to me sardonically the day after the 1960 election as we watched the friendly waves of one family that lived nearby.) But the Kennedys were content with their own company. Outside companionship, when desired, was imported from among their own circle of friends. Jack’s friends and those of the family were largely indistinguishable to an outsider—some had known one first and some another. Others had known Joe, Jr. or Kathleen.

For the most part the Senator’s “social” friends had little to do with the serious side of his life, and his working associates and staff were not involved in his social life. He liked the companionship of such men as K. Lemoyne “Lem” Billings, Charles F. “Chuck” Spalding and Paul B. “Red” Fay, Jr., not because of their success in the world of business, but because they were amusing, easygoing companions. His college roommates Torby Macdonald and Ben Smith, newsmen Charlie Bartlett and Ben Bradlee, writer-artist Bill Walton and Congressional chum George Smathers could all discuss politics with the Senator from their own experiences, but they were rarely invited on a trip or a holiday for that purpose. Even as President, while boating with his old friend the British Ambassador, Kennedy was more likely to discuss raising children than NATO.

His closest friends differed from him and from each other in background and interests—and not all of them liked each other. But they were all normal, healthy, intelligent and affable men, and they were all loyal to Jack Kennedy. He in turn was loyal to them—one expressed surprise to me after the Presidential election that “Jack still has time to bother with me.” But the President said later at a news conference, “The Presidency is not a very good place to make new friends. I’m going to keep my old friends.”

Both friends and family volunteered (or were drafted) for Jack’s political campaigns. Sisters Eunice, Pat and Jean helped organize the famous 1952 tea parties. But at those gatherings the star attraction, next to the candidate, was the articulate, intelligent and elegant Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., always looking amazingly younger than her years.

Although her father, Mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, had
been a more ebullient and colorful politician than Patrick J. Kennedy, her husband’s father, Rose Kennedy was more quietly devout and less outwardly combative than her husband and sons. From her the latter inherited much of their shy but appealing warmth and spiritual depth. But the mother was no less proud of their success and no less determined to help. Often after she had watched her son on television she would telephone me with a suggestion about some word he had misused or mispronounced. “She’s a natural politician,” the President remarked to me in 1957 with mingled pride and astonishment, after a long-distance call from his mother. “She wanted to know the political situation and nationalities in each of the states she’s visiting this fall.”

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, on the other hand, was not a natural politician—but, exquisitely beautiful, highly intelligent and irresistibly charming, she was a natural political asset. She had been an apolitical newspaper girl when they met at the home of their friends, the Charles Bartletts, “who had been shamelessly matchmaking for a year,” she said. On her first visit to the Senator’s office (as his fiancée) in the summer of 1953 she seemed awestruck by the complexities of his work. After their marriage in Newport on September 12 of that year, she interested him slightly in art and he interested her slightly in politics.