The Patriarch (98 page)

Until the Kennedys arrived in Washington, America had for the most part kept its entertainment, political, and intellectual elites carefully compartmentalized. This would all change, and rather dramatically, in January 1961. The mixing and matching of elites was noticed first at a dinner that Jean and Steve Smith gave at their Georgetown home on January 17 for family members, friends, and some of the entertainers Frank Sinatra had brought with him for the pre-inaugural gala at the National Armory.

It was the father who had introduced the Kennedys to Hollywood and vice versa, but it was his children—Pat, who married Peter Lawford; Jack, who had wined and dined and dated his way through Hollywood as a young man; and the rest of them—who built the bridges between the entertainment and political worlds that would stand for the next fifty years and more. And it was Jack who added to this mixture the intellectuals: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Frost, and Norman Mailer.

The gala, the ostensible purpose of which was to raise enough money at $100 a ticket to retire the Democratic Party debt, was scheduled for nine
P.M.
, the night before the inauguration. The snow had started falling at noon, become a near blizzard by four
P.M.
, and paralyzed a city not known for its skill in handling poor weather. After a concert of classical music at Constitution Hall that started late, Kennedy and Rose, with Ted and Joan in their limousine, drove to the National Armory for the gala, which had been held up because neither entertainers nor audience could get there on time.

Never before (or since, perhaps) have the stars of Hollywood, Broadway, the London stage, television, and the recording industry come together for a night like this one. Joseph Kennedy, ever alert to the possibilities of combining entertainment and politics, had arranged for the gala to be filmed and for the rights to belong to him exclusively. Frank Sinatra was the star, but he had brought with him Harry Belafonte, Milton Berle, Leonard Bernstein, Nat King Cole, Tony Curtis, Bette Davis, Jimmy Durante, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson, Gene Kelly, Janet Leigh, Fredric March, Shirley MacLaine, Ethel Merman, Laurence Olivier, Sidney Poitier, Juliet Prowse, Anthony Quinn, and many others. The only one missing from the extended Sinatra entourage was Sammy Davis, Jr., who had been subject to the vilest whispers, jokes, and hate mail since he had announced his engagement to the beautiful blond Swedish actress May Britt. The decision to exclude him would wrongly be blamed on Joe Kennedy, but not by Davis Jr., who insisted in his autobiographies that it had been made by the president-elect.
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The gala began late and went on until after one thirty in the morning, when the president-elect concluded it with a short speech, thanking Sinatra and “the happy relationship between the arts and politics which has characterized our long history [and] reached culmination tonight.” Rose and Jackie had gone home long before and missed the dinner and party at Paul Young’s restaurant, planned and paid for by Joseph Kennedy and scheduled for midnight. The party did not begin until two
A.M.
or so when the guests arrived from the gala to dance to the music of Lester Lanin’s band and eat “a buffet of high-WASP food such as Lobster Newburg and Strawberries Romanoff.” Jack’s friend “Red” Fay, who had somehow ended up escorting Angie Dickinson, recalled in his memoirs being “greeted by Mr. Kennedy, who barked with no intent to bite, ‘Wait until I tell your wife how you are conducting yourself.’ Then, without missing a comma, he turned to Angie, ‘How are you, dear? You look lovely. Why are you wasting your time with a bum like this fellow?’ With a friendly wave he sent us into the room so as to greet the next guests.”

It had indeed been a glorious party. Even the president-elect was impressed. Early that morning, as the dinner was coming to an end, he motioned “Red” Fay to join him in the “pantry just off the kitchen. Out of earshot of the others, he said with emphasis, ‘Have you ever seen so many attractive people in one room? I’ll tell you Dad knows how to give a party.’” The
Washington Post
reported the next day that when the dinner finally broke up at about four
A.M.
, Joe Kennedy told his departing guests, ‘Just wait until you see the party we throw four years from now.’”
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The morning of the inauguration, it was so cold that the snow that had fallen the day before had hardened into ice. Rose woke early and went to Mass, where she saw her son but didn’t join him in his pew. The dignitaries who had been assigned seats on the Capitol steps were supposed to be in them by eleven
A.M.
Kennedy, Rose, Ted, his wife, Joan, and cousin Ann Gargan were dressed and ready to go early enough, but the snow- and ice-covered streets and sidewalks made getting anywhere near impossible. “As our driver tried to pull out of his parking place,” Ted recalled in his autobiography, “we heard nothing but the sound of the engine and the whirring of the tires as they spun around and around. . . . None of us was happy, but my father was furious. ‘Hurry up. We’re going to be late,’ he shouted. But we were stuck. Finally, my father decided to take things into his own hands. I can still see him getting out of the car in his full dress clothes, shouting and gesturing at the driver and directing him on how to turn the wheel, how to back up, move forward, while Dad finally just pushed the car, providing the necessary muscle to power the vehicle out of the parking spot. It was classic Joe Kennedy: take charge and do it right, even if it means having to do it yourself. We made it to the inauguration.”
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Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy were seated at the far end of the first row, which displeased Rose enormously, as they “were left out of everything except the panoramic pictures.” Cardinal Cushing began the ceremonies with an endless invocation, enlivened only when smoke caused by an electrical fire rose from the lectern. After Cushing was finished—and the fire extinguished—Marian Anderson sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Sam Rayburn administered the oath of office to Lyndon Johnson, Robert Frost stumbled through a poem, and Chief Justice Earl Warren administered the oath of office to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who, after shaking hands with Richard Nixon, delivered his inaugural address.

Joseph Kennedy had tried on a few occasions to get a peek at the address but had been politely refused. His chief worry was that his son, having given a magnificent farewell address to the Massachusetts State Legislature, could not possibly do as well in Washington. He was wrong. The speech was electrifying. Jack had had many collaborators, advisers, and editors—and solicited and reviewed drafts from Adlai Stevenson, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Ted Sorensen, among others. Still, the words he delivered from the Capitol steps on January 20 were his, including the one sentence that was most remarked upon at the time—and continues to be fifty years later: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” The thought was not a new one. It had been included in earlier speeches, including the acceptance speech in Los Angeles.

It would be fruitless indeed—though many have tried—to figure out exactly how this particular thought got put into these particular words. The resemblance is nonetheless striking between this idea as expressed in John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s inaugural address and his father’s lifelong insistence that his children enter public service and do something worthwhile, that they devote themselves not to making money—he had done that for them—but to the greater good of the larger community.

After the inauguration, while the new president and vice president and their wives were honored at a lunch given by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, Kennedy hosted a luncheon for about 150 family members and friends in a private room at the Mayflower Hotel. He and Rose were then driven to the White House, where they watched the inaugural parade from the front row of the reviewing stand.

As the lead-off car with the president approached the reviewing stand, Joseph P. Kennedy stood up and took off his hat in a gesture of deference to his son. “It was an extraordinary moment,” Eunice would later remark. “Father had never stood up for any of us before. He was always proud of us, but he was always the authority we stood up for. Then, just as Jack passed by and saw Dad on his feet, Jack too stood up and tipped his hat to Dad, the only person he honored that day.”
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That evening, his wife recalled, “Joe wore the white tie tails he had seldom worn since the ambassadorship, and had found to his satisfaction that they still fit quite well, nearly twenty years later.” He and Rose attended the largest of the five inaugural balls, then returned to their rented house on P Street. “We didn’t stop for a visit or farewells at the White House. . . . Joe was so determined to avoid any appearance of influencing Jack that he did not set foot in the White House except once during the rest of that year,” when Jackie invited him to visit his grandchildren in their new home.
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W
ith his two oldest boys settled in Washington—and his daughters, except for Rosemary, all married with children of their own—Kennedy’s attention was now turned to the baby in the family, Edward Moore Kennedy. Sometime after the inauguration, Ted visited Hyannis Port and went out on the
Marlin
with his father and Cardinal Cushing. After they had finished their fish stew lunch, Kennedy turned to his younger son, “Now that Jack and Bobby are where they should be, we have to find something for you.” At twenty-eight, Ted was too young to run for the Senate, but in two years, when the term of Jack’s Senate replacement, Benjamin A. Smith II, expired (an interim appointment in Massachusetts could be for only two years), he would be thirty, the minimum age to serve. Before even contemplating a run for elective office, Ted needed to get some seasoning in Washington or elsewhere. “When Jack became President and Bob Attorney General,” Joseph Kennedy wrote Richard Steele of the
Worcester Telegram
on February 20, “I urged Ted not to move out West, as he thought of doing, but to dig our roots even deeper in Massachusetts. I am glad to see that he is doing just that.” Ted took a house in Boston and a job as assistant district attorney for Suffolk County.
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Like Jack before him and with the family fortune at his disposal, Ted spent the two years running up to the election touring the state and lining up support. His father assigned Frank Morrissey to look after him and introduce him to everyone he should know. Kennedy went through his old lists of Massachusetts contacts compiled for Jack years ago and sent them on to his youngest son. “They are likely out-of-date now, but could be of some use.” Eunice, watching from the sidelines, was impressed with the way her father turned aside the rather vocal objections to Ted’s running for Jack’s seat. “He predicted unparalleled success for Teddy in politics and argued that Teddy’s success, and his differences in temperament and approach, would actually strengthen Jack and Bobby. . . . He was just as interested in Ted and his generation as he had been in the future of my older brother eighteen years before.”
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His children were grown up and doing quite well for themselves, but Joseph P. Kennedy was still head of the family—and lord of Hyannis Port. Jean Kennedy Smith remembers the afternoon just after her brother’s election when the president, the attorney general, and assorted family members and friends were playing touch football in the front yard. Lunch at Hyannis Port was served promptly at 1:15. At about 1:12, Joe Kennedy appeared on the porch and hollered at his children to come inside. “Come on, hurry up, food’s getting cold.” Jean and Jack were the farthest from the house and the last ones up the stairs. As they approached the house, Jack whispered to his sister, “Doesn’t he know I’m the President of the United States?”
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Ted recalled a similar scene. Caroline was crying over something and the president had picked her up to comfort her when an aide appeared to say there was an urgent call. The president put his daughter down and went into the next room to take the call. When he returned, his father told him sternly that he didn’t care what the emergency was, “never leave a crying child.”
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—

T
he older I get the less inclined I seem to want to write an autobiography,” Kennedy wrote Jess Stearn of
Newsweek
on February 6. “The real reason may be that after reporters have made an investigation of my past life and I read it, I can’t imagine adding enough to the reports to make a dent anywhere. Of course, a lot of the ‘facts’ have been repeated so often that they are considered true by most people. That applies to the bad as well as the good. As I sit in my office and try to dig out from all the correspondence that I have received, I am realizing how insignificant it is compared to the fact that I am now the father of the President of the United States. I will probably just let the history of my life stand as it stands, and I am quite sure that nobody will care a damn. I have never written this long about the subject before because I never had a son President of the United States, and I felt I was entitled to a better break than I was getting. But I think I am over it now.”
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He took up again—with new enjoyment—his old familiar role as family cheerleader. There was, in those first hundred days, much to cheer about. The president’s approval ratings were extraordinary through March and into April. And then, in the middle of the month, came the Bay of Pigs fiasco: the bombing raids organized by the CIA, the invasion of the fourteen hundred Cuban exiles, the death of one hundred of them, the capture of the others, and the administration’s embarrassment at getting caught in a series of lies and being so thoroughly and publicly humiliated by Fidel Castro. When Rose heard what had happened in Cuba, she put in a call to “Joe who said Jack had been on the phone with him much of the day, also Bobby. I asked him how he was feeling and he said ‘dying’—result of trying to bring up Jack’s morale after the Cuban debacle.” Like his sons, Joseph Kennedy was furious with the CIA for misleading the president. “I know that outfit and I wouldn’t pay them a hundred bucks a week. It’s a lucky thing they were found out early.”
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