The Patriarch (88 page)

Jack checked into the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City on October 10. After three postponements, the operation was performed on October 21. Three days later, Jack Kennedy developed the infection that almost killed him. His temperature rose precipitously and he sank into a coma. A priest was called to administer the last rites. And then, as he had so many times before, Jack Kennedy rose from the near dead. He remained desperately but no longer mortally ill, with a wound eight inches long that would not heal.

Kennedy stayed in New York while Jack was in the hospital, answering questions about his health, responding to well-wishers and the hundreds of notes of encouragement that had been sent from all over the world. “Your cards came at a time when a little gayety was a much sought after thing,” Kennedy wrote to thank Carroll Rosenbloom in early November. “We have had quite a tough time with Jack and he has really suffered way beyond what anybody should be expected to endure and he has a long, long road still ahead.”
²⁹

On November 8, Congress reconvened with Jack still in the hospital, looking very much as if he would be absent for the entire session. The Democrats’ victory in the midterm elections in 1954 had won for the party a majority in the Senate and opened up new possibilities for committee assignments. Jack had served only one third of one term and would now be absent for much of the next year. He was in no position to ask any favors of the Democratic leadership, but his father, who had carefully spread his largesse among the party’s leaders in the form of generous campaign donations, was.

On the very first day of the session, Kennedy phoned Senator George Smathers of Florida to ask him to lobby Lyndon Johnson to put Jack on the Foreign Relations Committee. “After your call yesterday,” Smathers wrote Kennedy on November 9, “I went over and had another long talk with Lyndon about Jack. He is thoroughly sympathetic, but he certainly has his problems. . . . Lyndon has assured me he will do the best he can for Jack within the limitations imposed upon him by the seniority of these other fellows.” In the end, Johnson bypassed Kennedy, which made sense, as he was neither a Johnson loyalist nor a powerful Democrat whom the majority leader needed in his camp.
³⁰

On December 2, while Jack was still in the hospital, “most of the time in severe pain,” the Senate approved the McCarthy censure resolution by a vote of 67–22. Only one Democrat, John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, did not vote for censure, though he did not vote against it; his vote was marked as “unrecorded.” The senator might, had he chosen to, have instructed Ted Sorensen to pair him in favor of censure with an absent Republican who was opposed to it. He chose not to, either because he did not, at this moment in his life, want to go against his father’s wishes or because he believed that his constituents, like his father, did not believe that McCarthy had done anything to merit public censure.
³¹

The Kennedys, Bobby and his father in particular, would remain loyal to Joe McCarthy until the very end, which was not far off. Overcome by alcoholism, depression, and acute hepatitis, Senator McCarthy died in May 1957. Kennedy telegraphed his wife, Jean Kerr McCarthy, to say how “shocked and deeply grieved” he had been “to hear of Joe’s passing. His indomitable courage in adhering to the cause in which he believed evoked my warm admiration. His friendship was deeply appreciated and reciprocated.”
³²

While the Kennedys were all too ready to forgive the senator’s trespasses, they would for the rest of their lives nurture an abiding hatred for Roy Cohn, who they believed had brought him down. When, in the summer of 1955, Morton Downey invited Cohn to his home in Hyannis Port for a weekend, Rose wrote Kennedy in France that “Bob was livid . . . Bob is sure he would not do it, if you were around.” Kennedy, whose temper was no longer what it had once been—and certainly not as volatile as his second living son’s—wrote him in Hyannis Port to say that while Downey shouldn’t have invited Cohn, “in the last analysis, we can’t tell people whom they should invite to their home; nevertheless, I am annoyed.”
³³

—

O
n December 21, 1954, two months after his surgery, Jack was well enough to leave the hospital. He was transported by stretcher to a limousine that took him to the airport, then loaded him onto a private plane for the flight to Palm Beach. Covered from head to toe with a checked blanket, he managed a wan smile but looked more dead than alive. When his father saw the television footage, he worried that Jack might have reinjured his back on being carried into the airplane.
³⁴

Jack convalesced in Palm Beach in a makeshift hospital wing on the ground floor, cared for by a team of doctors and nurses and his wife and parents. The wound in his back opened up during the surgery did not heal; the pain did not subside. By February, Rose recalled to Doris Kearns Goodwin, “Joe came to the conclusion that something had to be done, so he flew to New York to see the doctors, and came back with a recommendation for a second operation. He recognized the high risk involved, but now he understood what Jack had meant in the beginning about not wanting to live unless he could really live.”
³⁵

Jack’s second operation, the chief purpose of which appeared to have been to remove the metal plate that had been inserted in his back during the first, was performed on February 15 and brought him a measure of relief. Early in March, he was able to walk without his crutches for the first time. “The Ambassador,” Dave Powers recalled, “said to me later when we were eating lunch, ‘God, Dave, he’s getting stronger all the time. Did you see the legs on him? He’s got the legs of a fighter or a swimming champion.’ Then the Ambassador said, and I often thought of it later, ‘I know nothing can happen to him now, because I’ve stood by his deathbed three times and each time I said good-bye to him, and each time he came back stronger.’”
³⁶

On May 27, 1955, seven months after his surgery and two days before his thirty-eighth birthday, Jack returned to the Senate, still in pain, but pain he could live with. “The results from the back operation,” Kennedy had written Galeazzi the month before, were “not what we had hoped for, but maybe time will correct it. [Jack] has gone through such a terrible ordeal.”
³⁷

Kennedy would continue to monitor Jack’s recovery and meet with his doctors. As heartbroken as he was about his son’s infirmities, he never let on—to Jack, especially—that he had any doubts that he would make a full recovery. “I am sorry you have been having trouble again with your physical condition,” he wrote from France in late July, “but I keep meeting people who have suffered a couple of years after operations and felt they would never be well and who are now playing 18 holes of golf every day and doing all the things that you want to do; but, as you say, let’s forget it as best as we can and see if being away from the scene of all your difficulties might not have a very good effect.”
³⁸

—

D
uring his long convalescence in Palm Beach, Jack had begun work on an article on political courage that was soon extended to a book-length manuscript. Like his father, who always sought research and editorial advice from his advisers, Jack asked Ted Sorensen, his chief aide in Washington, and to a lesser degree Arthur Krock, Jim Landis, and others, for assistance. By the summer of 1955, he and Sorensen had completed most of a first draft. Jack asked his mother, who was on her way to the South of France, to deliver the first and last chapters to his father. Jack showed up at the villa in early September with the rest of the book. “As usual,” Kennedy wrote his son Ted, sharing an insider Kennedy joke, “he arrived without his studs, with two different stockings and no underpants; so he walked off with a pair of brand new Sulka stockings of mine, a new pair of Sulka underpants of mine, and the last pair of evening studs I possessed. . . . He is back on crutches after having tried to open a screen in his hotel room, but if he hasn’t any more brains than to try that, maybe he should stay on crutches. His general attitude towards life seems to be quite gay. He is very intrigued with the constant rumors that he is being considered for the Vice Presidency, which idea I think is one of the silliest I have heard in a long time for Jack.”
³⁹

Although Kennedy made light of Jack’s possibilities as a vice-presidential candidate in 1956, he was in fact taking them seriously. His fear was that Adlai Stevenson, who looked to be the probable candidate at the top of the ticket, had little chance of winning and that Jack, if nominated, would go down to defeat with him. The only Democrat he thought strong enough to defeat Eisenhower in 1956 was Lyndon Baines Johnson. In October 1955, Kennedy called Johnson to tell him that he “and Jack wanted to support [him] for President in 1956” in return for Johnson’s putting Jack on the ticket as vice president. Johnson told Kennedy that he “was not interested” in running.
⁴⁰

—

W
ith the return of the Democrats to the Senate majority in the 1954 midterm elections, Senator John McClellan, one of the many recipients of Kennedy campaign contributions, had become chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and hired Bobby as chief counsel. Bobby was, Kennedy wrote Ethel in July 1955, “gradually earning a place in the sun that he so well deserves.” He was delighted, he told Ethel, that Bobby no longer gave “a damn whether McClellan likes him or not.” “He has arrived at a period in his education when he has awakened to the realization that if you have the real goods yourself, you don’t care a continental what the other fellow thinks, and that’s a very important milestone to pass. . . . Now if Mr. Eisenhower decides not to run [for reelection in 1956], I am sure the Democrats can win and he’ll have the opportunity to get a very topside job out of that sort of a setup.”
⁴¹

To broaden Bobby’s résumé, Kennedy had suggested that he travel that summer with Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas in Soviet Central Asia. “In 1955, when I finally got a visa,” Douglas recalled in his memoirs, “Joe Kennedy telephoned me and asked if I would take Bobby to Russia with me. He said, ‘I think Bobby ought to see how the other half lives.’ I told Joe that I would be happy to take his son. Joe was a crusty reactionary and a difficult man, but he was very fond of me and he cared a great deal about his boys. He had big plans for Bobby and probably thought that the Russian trip would be important in his education.”
⁴²

Kennedy stage-managed Bobby’s trip as he had those of his brothers. Before his son had even arrived in Russia, his father had hired a publicity agent for him. “I am quite sure you agree with me that Bobby has been doing an outstanding job as Counsel for the Senate Sub-committee,” he wrote Edward Dunn, who had worked for Jack’s Senate campaign, “and I imagine you agree with me that because of Jack’s position in Massachusetts politics it will be very difficult for Bobby to enter into politics. Nevertheless, I think that when he returns from this trip through Russia’s provinces he will have a background that will need some building up, and if this kind of a job is the province of your present day work, I would like you to give some consideration to it and I am enclosing my check for $1000 as a retainer.”
⁴³

“I think that the value of the trip,” he wrote Bobby, “besides adding stature to your background, is the articles and lectures you might give on it. . . . By all means I would extend the trip into Poland and any other places under Russian influence. That would give a new slant on your interview when you get to the States. In addition to all of this, if you are going to do any articles for ‘Life’ or the ‘Saturday Evening Post,’ I would do them jointly [with Douglas], if possible; at least as far as the one big article is concerned; after that each one on his own. Up to date the publicity has been fine for both of you, but as I have said a thousand times, things don’t happen, they are made to happen in the public relations field. As much as you and Ethel would love to be in Èze and take a seven-day trip home in a boat, I think it would be a mistake unless Douglas is going to stay somewhere out of America until you get back. From your point of view, the Americans must not think of this trip just in relationship to Justice Douglas. . . . These are just suggestions; there may be perfectly good reasons why they do not make sense. In any event, we would love to see you both if you can make it.”
⁴⁴

Bobby tried to do as his father had suggested, but he took ill in Siberia with a high fever and was not able to extend his tour into Poland. Jean and Ethel met him in Moscow, then traveled with him to Leningrad and to the Kennedys’ villa in the South of France. On his return to the United States, Bobby gave speeches and wrote articles about his observations for
U.S. News & World Report
and the
New York Times Magazine.
He had become a rather strident Cold Warrior, though with a particular Kennedy twist. He did not, according to his biographer Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., like “more obdurate Cold Warriors . . . see western empire as a bulwark against communism nor suppose that anti-colonialism in Asia and Africa was organized in Moscow.” He remained as much an anticolonialist as an anti-Communist. “If we are going to win the present conflict with the Soviet Union,” he declared in one of the speeches he gave on his return, sounding very much like his father, “we can no longer support the exploitation of native people by Western nations. We supported the French in Indochina far too long.”
⁴⁵

—

J
ack’s book, now titled
Profiles in Courage,
appeared officially on New Year’s Day 1956 to positive reviews and rather extraordinary sales. Kennedy had predicted as much in a letter to Sorensen he had written in August, after reading the draft and going over it with Jack. The following May, Kennedy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Arthur Krock would later claim credit for pushing the jurors in Kennedy’s direction, but he was probably overstating his importance. The book was lucidly written, had received terrific reviews, and was selling well: all ingredients that were taken into account by the jurors who gave it the prize.