The Patriarch (97 page)

Joseph P. Kennedy had finally, through his son, accomplished all he had hoped for. The Kennedy family had completed its four-generation journey from outsiders to insiders, but at a cost greater than Kennedy had ever imagined. The Catholic Church, its American hierarchy, and the Vatican, instead of supporting the family’s journey from East Boston to the White House, had stood in its way. And this the patriarch would not forget or forgive.

He did not broadcast his disaffection or speak openly of it to anyone, save Galeazzi and perhaps Cushing. Still, the signs that Spellman was out of favor with the Kennedys were not difficult to find. The cardinal was not invited to the inaugural: Cushing was asked to give a prayer instead. And the family foundation never followed up on the promise of $1 million for the Kennedy Child Study Center, sponsored and administered by the New York Archdiocese. Cardinal Spellman, in a draft of an April 1961 letter to Bobby that was never sent, expressed his sorrow “that your father cancelled the benefit for this providential enterprise which he encouraged me to start with a promise of one million dollars of which . . . we have received ____.” He left the final figure blank and asked his staff to find out exactly how much had indeed been received. They calculated the total as $580,109.33, including a “personal contribution of Ambassador Kennedy made payable to St. Vincent’s Hospital,” a bit more than half what had been promised. Hoping that Eunice, who had recently visited the center, would extract more from her father and the foundation, Spellman decided not to send the note he had drafted. There is no evidence that the remainder of the money promised was ever delivered.
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D
uring his son’s campaign for the presidency, Kennedy had let go much of his bearish pessimism about the future, but now, with Jack about to move into the White House and take on the problems of the nation and the world, his father was visited again by his old fears.

Three weeks after the election, he invited Dorothy Schiff, publisher of the
New York Post,
to dinner to thank her for her support of Jack’s candidacy. Schiff “found Joe quite changed. He looks his age,” she noted after their dinner, “although he has retained his figure. He seemed depressed and nervous. . . . Joe asked me if I would like a drink and I ordered my usual. He ordered tomato juice and didn’t drink a drop, which wasn’t much fun for me. I don’t know whether he never drinks or whether he was on guard. He ate sparingly and after dinner, instead of coffee, he had hot water with sliced lemon. . . . I realized that Joe is a worrier. I tried to get him to talk about his business interests. He said he didn’t care any more about making money or making women.” He had that afternoon, he told Schiff, been visited by the “top steel people [who] had expressed their concern [about] Jack’s changing the oil depletion allowance. . . . He said he told them that if they tried to destroy Jack in the next four years they would have nothing—the country would also be destroyed. He repeated this several times. He said the economic situation was terrible and if Jack didn’t receive cooperation, all would be lost. . . . He talked about the national debt and seemed very worried about it. . . . He talked about his concern about what would happen after January 20th—what if Mr. K. decided to recognize East Germany.”
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If, in the past, the father’s confidence had buoyed the children’s, the converse was now the case. His children’s full-throttled belief in their ability to control their futures restored his own faith. “Jack will be faced in the future with a horrible situation,” he wrote his friend Galeazzi two weeks after his dinner with Schiff. “The Laos problem is in an awful state. The Cuban situation couldn’t be any worse. There is an undercurrent of unrest among the Western Allies and Africa is in bad shape. In the United States business is bad and there are many, many problems to be faced. Jack himself recognizes all these problems and just seems to feel that something can be done about them all. . . . I am worried but hopeful.”
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To Hugh Sidey, a faithful family supporter to whom he granted an interview in December, Kennedy confessed the strange mixed emotions that were running through his mind as he awaited his son’s inauguration. “Just after his son was elected President,” Sidey reported, “Joseph P. Kennedy got a call from a friend asking how it felt. ‘Hell, I don’t know how it feels,’ he said. ‘Of course I’m proud, but I don’t feel any different. I don’t know how I feel.’ It was not until a few weeks later that the difference began to sink in. ‘Jack doesn’t belong anymore to just a family. . . . He belongs to the country. That’s probably the saddest thing about all this. The family can be there, but there is not much they can do for the President of the United States.’”
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J
oseph Kennedy could afford the luxury of nursing his grudges. His son could not. Kennedy urged him to reach out to his opponents and asked George Smathers to set up a meeting with Billy Graham in Palm Beach.

Graham, on arriving at the Palm Beach house in mid-January, was greeted by the president-elect. “My father’s out by the pool. He wants to talk to you.” At poolside, the two shook hands, then Kennedy, Graham recalled in his autobiography, “came straight to the point: ‘Do you know why you’re here?’” Kennedy told the evangelist (and Nixon supporter) that he and Father Cavanaugh had been in Stuttgart, Germany, when Graham lectured through an interpreter to an audience of sixty thousand. “‘When we visited the pope three days later, we told him about it. He said he wished he had a dozen such evangelists in our church. When Jack was elected, I told him that one of the first things he should do was to get acquainted with you. I told him you could be a great asset to the country, helping heal the division over the religious problem in the campaign.’”

That afternoon, after a round of golf with the president-elect, Graham was reluctantly corralled into an impromptu press conference and did just as Kennedy had hoped: he told the press that he didn’t “think that Mr. Kennedy’s being a Catholic should be held against him by any Protestant. . . . They should judge him on his ability and his character. We should trust and support our new President.”
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K
ennedy left Hyannis Port for Palm Beach immediately after election day. His son, who had decided to make the Palm Beach house his headquarters, followed soon afterward.

Rose had spent a lifetime complaining with a smile on her face about her children’s habit of bringing home flocks of friends who would track sand into the house. But never before had any of their many residences been as crowded and chaotic as the house on North Ocean Boulevard would be that holiday season. Jack brought with him his valet and secretary; Jackie, who arrived in early December after the birth of John Kennedy, Jr., brought a children’s nurse, a maid, a private secretary, and a press secretary. The beach house was overflowing with “cooks, maids, gardeners, pool men, chauffeurs, hairdressers, and barbers commuting or living in the servants’ wing,” Thurston Clarke has written. “Add to this cast of characters politicians and dignitaries flowing through the house at all hours, Secret Service agents patrolling the grounds, and reporters camped outside the gate, and you have the ingredients of a Preston Sturges or Kaufman and Hart screwball comedy, in which several generations of an eccentric family trip over one another in a creaky mansion where the phones never stop ringing, doors never cease slamming, typewriters clack around the clock, doorbells sound perpetually, and guests never stop arriving and departing.”
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Kennedy did not seem to mind at all. He had his own bedroom on the top floor, his own servants, chauffeurs, chefs, a gorgeous secretary, and an even more gorgeous masseuse. Despite the hubbub, he stuck to his regular routines: mornings in his bullpen, nude and smeared with coconut oil, swims in the ocean and the pool, a daily round of golf, sometimes with the president-elect. He did not sit in on any of the meetings his son held with staff, advisers, and potential cabinet appointees.

The only cabinet post he had any interest in was attorney general, which he insisted go to Bobby. The president-elect, Bobby later told Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., offered him the position “immediately after the election,” but he turned it down. “I said I didn’t want to be Attorney General,” he later confided in an oral history. “In the first place, I thought nepotism was a problem. Secondly, I had been chasing bad men for three years and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing that.” After Bobby said no, the position was offered to Connecticut governor Abe Ribicoff, one of Jack’s earliest supporters, who also declined. On Thanksgiving, after Bobby returned to Palm Beach from a brief Acapulco vacation, Jack asked him again and he again said no.

Joseph Kennedy refused to budge. His sons listened as he explained why Jack needed someone in the cabinet in whom he had complete and absolute trust. The Kennedys would always be outsiders, unable to fully trust anyone but family members. Jack needed all the protection he could get; only Bobby was going to put his welfare first.

The president-elect was uneasy about pressuring Bobby anymore and concerned, as Bobby was, about the nepotism issue. He decided to offer Bobby the number two position at the Defense Department and asked Clark Clifford, who was running his transition team, to go to New York to explain to Kennedy, who had flown there after visiting Jackie and his new grandson in the hospital, why Bobby should not be named attorney general. Clifford agreed, though he thought it rather odd that the president-elect had asked “a third party to try to talk to his father about his brother.” Clifford met Kennedy at Kennedy’s apartment and presented his carefully rehearsed case against the appointment. “I was pleased with my presentation; it was, I thought, persuasive. When I had finished, Kennedy said, ‘Thank you very much, Clark. I am so glad to have heard your views.’ Then, pausing a moment, he said, ‘I do want to leave you with one thought, however—one firm thought.’ He paused again, and looked me straight in the eye.
‘Bobby is going to be Attorney General.
All of us have worked our tails off for Jack, and now that we have succeeded I am going to see to it that Bobby gets the same chance that we gave to Jack.’ I would always,” Clifford recalled years later, “remember the intense but matter-of-fact tone with which he had spoken—there was no rancor, no anger, no challenge.” The father had spoken, and his sons, on this issue at least, were expected to obey.
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Jack was the first to come around. He did not want to disappoint his father, and just as important, past experiences had proven to him that more often than not Joseph P. Kennedy knew what he was talking about. The initial criticism of his choice of his brother as attorney general would be brutal, he knew, but it would subside. He had, he told Bobby, assembled a sterling cabinet, but most of them, including Robert McNamara as secretary of defense and Dean Rusk as secretary of state, were strangers. He repeated now to his brother—as his father had to him—that he needed someone in the cabinet whom he could trust to tell him the truth at all times.

Bobby might have been able to withstand pressure from his father or from his brother, but the two together were too much for him. In mid-December, he accepted the position of attorney general.

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T
hough Kennedy made only this one demand on his son, he encouraged his daughter Eunice to add one more. Eunice had spent much of November recuperating from an operation in a Boston hospital, for what, we do not know. While there, she read the annual report to Congress of the Mental Health Association and was dismayed to find no significant mention of “mental retardation.” She called Dr. Robert Cooke of Johns Hopkins, one of the Kennedy foundation’s key consultants, and suggested that the foundation take up the slack and sponsor its own national conference on mental retardation. Her next call was to her father, to whom she repeated her idea for a national conference, sponsored by the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation. “‘Just lie down and get well, for God’s sake,’ he replied, ‘and when you come to Florida, we’ll discuss it again and see what turns up.’” Eunice, persistent as ever, raised the subject again in Palm Beach. Her father listened carefully, then suggested that the two of them go upstairs and talk to Jack. “This movement needs the federal government behind it. The President can give it the prestige and momentum we can’t give it if we work for 100 years and had 100 times as much money to put into the field.”
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Kennedy suggested that his son follow the Hoover Commission model and establish a presidential commission on mental retardation. When the commission had delivered its recommendations, he could ask Congress for legislation and funding to implement them. Eunice and Dr. Cooke contacted ex-president Herbert Hoover to solicit his advice on “what sort of an organizational structure was needed to have a commission like this.”
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The president-elect supported the plan, asked Myer Feldman, who would become special deputy counsel in the White House, to work with Eunice, and suggested that she ask Dr. Howard Rusk to recommend a panel chairman. Nine months later, on October 11, 1961, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy announced that he was creating a presidential panel on mental retardation in a statement so strong that it landed on the front page of the
New York Times.
There were, the president declared, approximately five million mentally retarded persons in the country. Mental retardation “disables ten times as many as diabetes, twenty times as many as tuberculosis, twenty-five times as many as muscular dystrophy and 600 times as many as infantile paralysis. . . . Our goal should be to prevent retardation. . . . Failing this, we must provide for the retarded the same opportunity for full social development that is the birthright of every American child.”
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T
he inauguration of the thirty-fifth president—the youngest ever to be elected—was scheduled for January 20, 1961. Three days before, Joseph P. Kennedy took a commercial flight to Washington and moved into the house on P Street that he had rented for the week. On his arrival, he made it clear to his friends in the press and to Jack’s staff that he didn’t “want to have any calls from anybody.” Instead, he spent the next “three days in the Senator’s office in the Old Senate Office Building, doing the same kind of work I did when I was fifteen years old—sorting out letters and answering telephones.” Invited by several of his friends in the press to a dinner for his son, he procrastinated, then declined. “While it seems silly for me not to have it over and say I would love to come, I just still haven’t got used to going to dinners where my son is. Perhaps after another six months I will become calmer about it. But since I haven’t attended one in my life while he has been in public office, I find it hard now to start.”
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