The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (65 page)

One of the reasons Jack did not like liberals was that many of them had an overweening sense of moral superiority and were under the misapprehension that a lecture was the same thing as a dialogue. By the summer of 1956, attacking McCarthy was no longer mortally dangerous to a political career. That Jack did not get in a few blows at the fallen McCarthy was one of the more inexplicable moves in his career. Instead of agreeing with Mrs. Roosevelt, Jack reached into his little bag of legalisms and spoke as if McCarthy had already died. “My point was that … because I had never really been particularly vigorous about McCarthy during his life, that it would really make me out to be a complete political whore, for me to be really chomping and jumping … vigorous[ly] in my denunciation of McCarthy when he was gone.”

Mrs. Roosevelt could not understand why the junior senator from Massachusetts
would not denounce the evils that even he could now see. Jack did nothing, and this moral albatross remained tightly wrapped around his neck. McCarthy’s status as a family friend may have had something to do with his reticence. Beyond that, what Jack’s detractors never considered was the possibility that this man, so obsessed with courage, may have realized that he had hidden when he should have stood up, and that he said nothing now was a mark not of dishonor but of its opposite.

Instead of choosing his own running mate, Stevenson took the dramatic step of throwing the choice open to the Democratic delegates. The Kennedy people had been prepared for all eventualities but this one, and they hustled the great floor seeking votes from delegates wavering primarily between Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and Jack.

Neither Joe nor Teddy was among the Kennedy people frantically working undecided delegates. Joe was on the Riviera, an ocean away from what he considered a futile effort destructive to Jack’s presidential chances four years later. Teddy was on a trip to Africa, preferring adventure to politics. To give his journey the veneer of seriousness, he had set himself up with press credentials as a stringer covering the French forces in Algeria, but unlike his big brothers, he never managed to file a series of published stories. His father had warned him about spending “too much time” among the more pleasurable fleshpots. It was an admonition that had some muscle; true to the family pattern, Teddy was not traveling alone but had Fred Holborn, a Harvard instructor, for a companion.

Jack had proved to be prescient in wanting Bobby to have delegate credentials so that he could be on the floor. Bobby employed the whole anthology of emotions in promoting Jack. He pled, argued, threatened, and cajoled as he moved from one delegation to the next. He saw that among some of these people even his most salient political arguments did no good. “So many people had come up to me and said they would like to vote for Jack but they were going to vote for Estes Kefauver because he had sent them a card or visited in their home,” he reflected afterward. “I said right there that as well as paying attention to the issues we should send Christmas cards next time.”

Jack came a tantalizing thirty-eight votes short of winning on the second ballot before Kefauver surged ahead. During the voting, Jackie had been surrounded by well-wishers, but as the voting began to go against her husband, the adoring sycophants began sidling away until she was left alone, looking to one observer “a forlorn figure.”

Jack may have lost that evening, but he was the largest victor of the week. He left the 1956 convention brilliantly positioned for a run at the presidential nomination in four years. The Boston papers celebrated their native son’s near-win, but Jack’s name was heard now in areas far distant from Massachusetts.
The
Clearwater Sun
in Florida called him “one of the ablest and most promising young men on the American political scene today … substantial feeling exists among Democrats and other observers that he may have advanced himself a very long stride toward a presidential nomination in the years ahead.”

J
ack flew out of Chicago exhausted after not having slept for three nights. Jackie was exhausted too, and when the plane landed in New York, she took an air taxi to Newport to rest at her mother’s home. The admirable John F. Kennedy the newspapers were celebrating would have been on that plane with his wife to spend the last days of summer awaiting the birth of their first child. Even the most cynical of politicians would have joined his wife; no matter how boring he may have found married life, if he wanted to be president, he would do best to play the loving husband and father-to-be.

Instead, announcing that he was going off on a two-week visit to Nice and the Middle East, Jack got on another plane to Paris. In fact, Jack was heading off on a Mediterranean yachting trip. Since March, when Jack already knew that his wife was pregnant, he had been actively negotiating for a yacht with the Mercury Travel Agency in Cannes. “I do not wish for personal reasons to have the direct responsibility or be in any way connected with the hiring of the boat,” he wrote H. W. Richardson at the travel agency in April. “I am sure you can appreciate my reasons.”

Jack arranged for a Washington railroad executive and lobbyist, William Thompson, to sign the contract and pay $1,750 for the eighty-five-foot
Vileshi
and its four-person crew for two weeks beginning August 21, 1956. Those who disliked the big, brawny Thompson judged him little better than a procurer, but Jack considered him a friend with whom he shared an insatiable appetite for nubile young women. Jack and Thompson were the horsemen of the night, riding out together in search of sexual adventure, be it in Florida, Cuba, or elsewhere. Beyond their mutual pleasure, Thompson doubtless understood how useful it was to have such a well-placed friend, and arranging cruises brought better access than buttonholing the senator outside the cloakroom.

For the senator from Massachusetts and potential presidential candidate, this excursion was unimaginably foolhardy. Jack was heading off on a yacht paid for by a lobbyist/executive, accompanied by several young women, and with a letter on file at the agency showing that he wanted his role kept secret.

When Jack arrived in southern France, he spent a few hours with his parents at their villa. There is no evidence that Rose, who exalted family above
all else, suggested to her son that it was inappropriate for him to be vacationing away from his twenty-seven-year-old pregnant wife who had already lost one baby. The talk was of the convention and the hack politicians who Jack thought had betrayed him.

Jack had hoped that Gunilla might be with him on the yacht, but she took her marital vows literally. Jack was accompanied instead by a group that included Teddy and a number of young women. Teddy, a student of his older brother’s life, had yet another opportunity to take studious notes on the man he took as his ideal.

For years, Jack had taken risks in the name of sexual amusement, but now there was a dangerous crescendo to his activities. Jack had nearly died after his operation in New York. There are those who rise out of a nearly fatal illness and its telling lesson of the transitory nature of human existence displaying a generosity of spirit that they had not exhibited before. Others leave their sickbeds believing that they must chase every bright flash of life, heedless of its costs to others or even themselves. Jack’s father had taught his sons that life must be sucked of its essence. Jack’s illnesses were more lessons on the same page. He sought everything now with an intensity that he had not showed before, not only political power but also pleasure, and pleasure to Jack meant sexual diversion.

Jack had just come through the most physically exhausting political week of his life. He wanted to relax, and he would have found no relaxation listening to the mindless social chitchat of his in-laws, and no solace walking the Newport beach hand in hand with his pregnant wife. He took what was best from everyone around him. When he wanted to be amused, Lem or Red appeared, all but wearing clown suits. When he wanted to discuss public policy, Sorensen sidled into the room, all solemnity. When it was his political future at stake, Bobby and his father appeared. And when he sought relaxation, he wanted sex. “Unique among them,” recalled one of the Mediterranean revelers, “was a stunning but not particularly intelligent blonde who didn’t seem to have a name but referred to herself in the third person as ‘Pooh.’ She fascinated Jack, who was wound very tight when he arrived in Europe and almost completely unwound a few days later.”

While Jack was basking in the sun, Jackie began hemorrhaging. The doctors performed a cesarean section, but the baby was stillborn. When Jackie woke up, it was not Jack who was sitting there by her bedside but Bobby. It was Bobby who was always there, but as much as he watched out for his sister-in-law, he was watching out even more for his absent brother.

A hospital official stated that the baby died owing to the mother’s “exhaustion and nervous tensions following the Democratic National Convention.” When Jack learned that the baby had died, he sailed on. It took a call from
George Smathers to convince Jack that he should go home to his grieving wife. “I told him, ‘You ought to come back,’ which he did,” Smathers recalled.

For Jackie, the fact that her husband had not returned was like a light so brilliant that even a blind woman would have seen its flashes. She had written a poem to a noble, star-crossed hero, but that was not the husband who returned to her.

B
obby was doing far more than advancing Jack’s political career and tidying up after his romantic sojourns. In his own right, Bobby was a man of extraordinary ambition, energy, and cunning. Bobby did almost nothing without explicitly mixed motives, and made no move without figuring out all that might go wrong.

Bobby attempted to ingratiate himself with J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI chief, seeing him twice early in 1954 on what were considered personal matters. He visited the FBI chief again the next year when he was planning to take a trip to the Soviet Union. Hoover suspected Bobby not as a cryptic liberal but as someone from an equally treacherous category, a publicity lover. “Kennedy was completely uncooperative until he had squeezed all the publicity out of the matter that he could,” Hoover noted about a subject before the subcommittee, Bobby having had the bad taste not to realize that Hoover was the one to do the squeezing.

In the summer of 1955, Joe arranged for Bobby to go on a six-week trip to the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Joe was forever pushing his sons to confront their truths in spirited debate with those of radically different positions. Douglas favored a less rigid, more accommodationist policy toward the Soviet Union, and the liberal jurist was the worthiest of choices to debate Bobby as they journeyed around regions of the Soviet Union where, since the revolution, few Westerners had gone.

Douglas was a proud humanist whose faith looked no higher than the peoples of the earth. He found it notable that, as they flew above routes that Marco Polo had once traversed, Bobby sat in the plane not boning up on the agriculture of Uzbekistan or literacy in Kazakhstan but reading his Bible. And wherever they went, Bobby grasped the Bible in his left hand to ward off the evil virus of communism and lectured to the Marxist true believers, trying to convert them.

In Omsk, near the end of the trip, Bobby fell sick and ran such a high fever that Douglas feared he might die. Bobby refused to see a doctor, saying, as Douglas recalled, “Russian doctors are Communists and he hated Communists.” The justice insisted, and a young, white-clad woman doctor
walked in to minister to a delirious Bobby. She stayed in the room for thirty-six hours straight until Bobby’s delirium ended, the fever broke, and he began to get well. He arrived in Moscow in decent shape but about twenty pounds lighter than when he had begun the trip.

“As a result of this rather extensive and arduous Russian journey, I began to see a transformation in Bobby,” Douglas recalled. “And in spite of his violent religious drive against Communism, he began to see, I think, the basic, important forces in Russia—the people, their daily aspirations, their humanistic strains, and their desire to live at peace with the world.”

Bobby may have seen all that, but he also had heard enough to reinforce his most rigid views of Marxist totalitarianism, from the loudspeakers spewing propaganda in the fields and factories (“It just drives you out of your mind”) to the absence of any voices of dissent, spirited or otherwise. He saw Russian colonialism at work in the segregated school system that separated the Asian and Russian populations. As he sat with his hosts eating such exotic fare as lamb’s brain, he saw too that there were few Communists in this Communist land. He saw a Soviet Union attacking the colonial powers of the West in Africa and Asia while running its own empire in Central Asia. He showed a perceptive awareness of one of the great ideological struggles of his time, not communism versus capitalism, but Russian imperialism versus the nationalistic instincts of subject peoples within the Soviet empire.

When Bobby returned home, he parlayed the journey into a bounty of publicity and goodwill. Douglas may have believed that Bobby’s experiences in Russia had begun to open him up to a world more divergent and complicated than any he had imagined. Yet Bobby successfully hid that awareness in the many interviews and speeches that he gave and the articles that he wrote.

Bobby had had an opportunity that no American official had ever had before—to meet with the largely forgotten peoples of Central Asia, whose nationalistic aspirations would explode into life three decades later. Yet Bobby remained as much an ideologue as the Communists he despised, and no more interested in the story of the individual human life than they were. Bobby had gone to the Soviet Union on a political mission, and he was not ready to display reportorial snapshots in lieu of ideas.

It is out of the specificity of human experience, however, that empathy grows. Nowhere did Bobby tell the tale of the woman doctor who saved his life, presumably because it would have given his audience the idea that a Communist could be a human being. Nowhere did he make Douglas’s essential point, that these were people, not ideological stick figures. Nowhere did he draw the obvious conclusion that as offensive as the ethnically segregated schools might be, Americans could hardly condemn them too loudly until they changed their own segregated system.