The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (121 page)

O
ne of those who flew north to help with the campaign was Milton Gwirtzman, a speechwriter and attorney. “Teddy and his brothers considered a political campaign an athletic competition by another name,” Gwirtzman reflected. “Teddy wanted to get in as many campaign stops as possible, just as
he wanted to get in as many downhill ski runs, to get in that nineteenth run even though it was getting dark and sometimes dangerous…. Teddy got it down to an absolute minimum the time it took him to get up in the morning, showered, shaved, dressed, and ready to go out campaigning. He got it down to five minutes so he could be down on the wharf at six-thirty in the morning shaking hands with fishermen.”

Teddy’s Democratic opponent, Edward McCormack, bore another famous Massachusetts political name. His uncle, Congressman John McCormack, was speaker of the House. Unlike Teddy, thirty-eight-year-old Eddie McCormack had paid his dues the way they always must be paid, in small bills over time. He was a true “Southie,” brought up in the Irish-American enclave of South Boston. This son of Boston had gone to Annapolis, then returned and finished first in his class at a proud local institution, Boston University School of Law. He had entered politics close to the ground, serving on the Boston city council. From there, he had gone on to spend four well-regarded years as the state’s attorney general. It was a natural progression for McCormack to run for the Senate in 1962, in spite of the thunderous arrival of the youngest Kennedy.

McCormack was simply overwhelmed, not only by the Kennedy power and money but by Teddy himself. Teddy had mastered the lingo of Massachusetts liberal politics, professing his spirited opposition to poverty, racism, and inequality, while letting his slogan (“He Can Do More for Massachusetts”) woo the realists in his crowd. He had one quality that could not be purchased, an immense likability, and a natural charisma that made many take pleasure in the mere sight of him.

Sometimes when he stood on a makeshift platform in the North End or in the town square in Quincy or Maiden, the greatest public attributes of the Kennedy men came together in him. There was something of Honey Fitz in the way he stood there pointing his finger in condemnation of his opponent’s faults. There was his grandfather’s sheer exuberance, sweeping out across the crowds, embracing them in his enthusiasms. Like his brother Joe, Teddy was a rugged, handsome man who exuded health and happiness, a man whom other men liked for his masculine qualities. His baritone was the sheer perfection of the Kennedy voice, carrying out across the crowds, hardly needing a microphone. He may have gotten on the stage because of his name, but his name alone did not hold the crowds captive, nor did it push people forward to grasp his hand or to ask for an autograph.

Teddy won the party convention in Springfield by an overwhelming margin. The count was 691-360 when McCormack conceded. The vote was a devastating rebuke to McCormack, who was rejected by people who had
been his friends and colleagues. Instead of conceding, McCormack vowed to take his case to the people in the primary, and he moved onward, sharpening his rhetoric against an opponent he had grown to despise. McCormack had the scent of a loser, however, and no special interests were donating to his campaign with the idea of covering their bet against a sure thing.

McCormack’s last best chance was to lure Teddy into debates where, before the camera, he would expose the youngest Kennedy, leaving him stripped to what he considered his fraudulent essence. With McCormack’s taunts resonating in his ears, Teddy agreed to two debates, the first one at South Boston High School. This was McCormack’s spiritual home, the very lair of the old Irish Boston and its tribal ways, a place where loyalty was the highest virtue and familiarity never bred contempt.

McCormack had fueled his tank with vitriol when he walked on the stage before an audience weighted with his supporters. There was a devastating contrast between all that McCormack had done in his life and all that Teddy had been given, and the Massachusetts politician poured forth his bill of indictment, arguing that “it was wrong that that young man who really had not worked a day in his life, had never been in the trenches, should get off being a United States Senator.”

Teddy was a man of immense physicality, and his instinct was to give McCormack a verbal licking. In preparing in Hyannis Port for the debate, he had vowed: “Eddie will get twice as much back as he gives out!” The president had heard Teddy’s blustering threats and, as he stood there on his crutches, lectured him on how to proceed in the debate. “Now listen, Eddie,” Kennedy said, calling his brother by the name he usually used, “You forget any personal attack on Eddie McCormack. You’re going to need all the supporters that McCormack has right after the primary. Let McCormack attack you as much as he wants. You’re running for the United States Senate. Stay on the issues and leave the personal attacks out.” Teddy’s father almost never spoke, but he grunted a few words comprehensible only to his sons. “You do what Jack says,” the old man said, drawing the words out of some reserve of will and ambition that had seemed lost to him.

This debate was the first great moment of Teddy’s public career, and as much as he was provoked, he did not respond. He had learned well from Honey Fitz, who saw politics as a theatrical enterprise in which each day the sets were struck, the politicians wiped off their greasepaint, and the next day they strutted onto a new stage speaking new lines. On this stage Teddy showed a quality both generous and calculating, an immensely valuable attribute that he would employ for the rest of his years in public life.

McCormack seemed not to understand that this evening he was facing a
shrewd Gandhi of an enemy who would not strike back no matter how hard the blows. McCormack flailed away even harder. Before the debate he had talked to Trohan, and the
Chicago Tribune
reporter told him of the sexual swath that Teddy had cut across South America. McCormack ridiculed Teddy as a diplomatic “Mr. McGoo,” stumbling around the world’s trouble spots with his pants half down, leaving only disaster in his wake.

“In Israel he almost caused—he caused an international incident by straggling across the border,” McCormack said, mocking his opponent. “In East Germany, he caused embarrassment by giving recognition to the East German government. In London, he caused a taxi strike. In Panama, the ambassador said to one of the reporters, or reportedly to him, ‘It will take me six months to undo what you have done in six hours.’ “

Teddy’s advisers feared that his credibility had been shredded in the merciless attacks, though they were not so bold as to tell the candidate directly. After the debate Teddy and his closest aides drove over to his house on Charles River Square. Teddy called the president and talked to him while the others sat listening. Then the phone was handed to Gwirtzman to give his professional assessment of how Teddy had done. Gwirtzman had never briefed the president before, and he employed every iota of his lawyerly judiciousness. “Now, Mr. President, if they listened to the points McCormack was making, I think we might have been hurt some. But, of course, if they were sitting there …”

“Stop!” Kennedy interjected. “He’s the candidate. He’s the one who has to go out tomorrow and campaign. You tell him he did fantastic.” It was precisely how the president’s father had bolstered him during his own campaigns.

As the group sat around discussing the nuances of the debate, they turned on the radio to a talk show. “Now that McCormack,” an indignant woman said in an Irish accent, “what he did to that nice young man….” Teddy and the others stopped talking and listened to caller after caller berate McCormack for his nasty attack.

McCormack had gone too far, for in insulting Teddy he had insulted the electorate as well. These callers bristled at the idea of McCormack daring to suggest that Teddy was a man of such pathetic ineptitude that he should never dare stand for high office. They felt sympathy toward the handsome Kennedy scion who did not merit such rebuke. Teddy won the primary in a landslide of more than two to one. Then, in the general election, he defeated his Republican opponent, George Cabot Lodge, also in a near landslide.

Teddy had won, but his victory had not arrived duty-free. Even Joe McCarthy, as close to an official biographer as the family had, wrote in
Look
that “his candidacy has already done irreparable damage to the president’s prestige…. His presence in the Senate could be an embarrassment to the
president.” James Reston of the
New York Times,
a temperate voice of the Washington establishment, said that the candidacy was “widely regarded here as an affront and a presumption,” a perception that Teddy would not easily or quickly overcome.

T
he Senate that Teddy entered was the most traditional political institution in American political life, a place of subtle respect and reverence for the ideal of seniority: the longer a person stayed in office, the more power he deserved, and the more his voice should be heard. Teddy was wise not to come bursting into the Senate chambers with bold ideas, his arms full of proposed legislation. He showed a natural deference to his elders—a category that included everyone else in the Senate—and he was smart enough to act as though age and wisdom were the same.

Teddy did not arrive in the Senate to confront men whom most of his constituents abhorred, like the segregationist Senator James Eastland. Teddy came as he was, as a young politician with much to learn, and fifty-nine-year-old Eastland liked him and gave him a choice assignment on the immigration subcommittee. Eastland told him: “You want something, you come over and speak to me,” as he would never have said in similar circumstances to either of Teddy’s big brothers. In the Senate it was a high honor to be liked. It meant that your word could be trusted, that you played square and understood your colleagues’ problems as if they were your own. And without question, Teddy was liked.

The president looked on in awe at Teddy’s youthful vitality, energy, and health. At times, though, he took rich pleasure in knocking his brother off his newfound perch of principle. On one occasion at a White House patty the new senator noted that the army’s new rifle was putting hundreds out of work who had been working in Massachusetts factories building the earlier version. “Teddy, these are your problems now,” Kennedy told his kid brother with rich pleasure. “Tough shit.”

Teddy was an apt student in the school of politics, and he did not bore in obsessively on the president. He understood the efficacy of humor, bracketing his serious requests in ribaldry. When he called his brother in March 1963 to talk about the problem of wool imports, Teddy knew that this was a subject that mattered profoundly to Massachusetts clothing manufacturers and their workers. Instead of beseeching the president for help, he painted a savagely amusing picture of the patrician Republican Governor Christian Herter running around the Commonwealth in his German Mercedes Benz as he sought to keep out the nefarious imports. “Everyone turns around and takes a look,” Teddy said as Jack laughed audibly, “[as] he drove up to
that wool meeting … that really let the balloon air out of every balloon in there.”

“But, of course, it’s tough,” the president told his kid brother, as if he were talking about nothing so banal as wool but life itself. “I tell you, boy, we went through that yesterday for two hours …”

“Yeah,” Teddy interjected, as if he could feel what his brother had gone through. “… about what we would do on wool. You see, those guys don’t want to give up that market.”

T
he president’s problem with wool imports was just one of an endless list of difficulties he was facing. For Kennedy, the spring of 1963 arrived without blossoms. “The major wheels of Kennedy’s legislative program to get America moving again internally have yet to turn,”
Look
stated in an article titled “Why There’s Trouble in the New Frontier.” Kennedy remained an immensely popular president, but there were danger signs out there. “In the field of party politics, where he was expected to be strong, President Kennedy is in trouble,” wrote Doris Fleeson, a political columnist. Kennedy had not followed the fundamental axiom that the garden of politics must be tended from one end to the other. He had largely left it to his minions to work the politicians, and they had not done their job well. It was hard, though, to push a Congress that stood deeply divided on the social and moral issues of the day. Kennedy was having problems enough with the Democratic majority, who, as was their wont, were more concerned with their reelection than with his presidency. Some members of his own party were boldly criticizing Kennedy’s refusal to push forward on crucial issues. “In rough issues … the Executive must lead the way with heavy tanks and artillery,” said Senator Eugene McCarthy, taking unbridled pleasure in employing his wit against Kennedy. “What we sometimes get nowadays from the White House is just an encouraging word that goes like this: ‘You go out and make a speech, and if you come back alive we’ll be for you.

“
I
n foreign affairs Kennedy was having almost as many problems with those considered friends, such as President de Gaulle, as those deemed enemies. In South Vietnam, on June 11, a Buddhist priest immolated himself in protest against the repressive Diem regime. There were 15,600 American troops and advisers in Vietnam, and soon Kennedy would have to make some brutally difficult decisions about that growing crisis. As for Cuba, the Caribbean island remained a preeminent crisis in part because the Kennedy administration chose to make it one.

They’re not certain yet where the ship went from,” Bobby said to the president enthusiastically over the phone in March 1963, “but they got the ammunition here in Alexandria.”

“Virginia?” Kennedy asked, as he sat in the Oval Office talking to his brother about the operation that a Cuban exile group had just run against a Soviet ship.

“Yeah,” Bobby replied enthusiastically. “And then they got a small boat with two outboards on the back. Went fifty-five miles an hour.”