Bobby’s identification with McCarthy added to an already negative picture of Joe and Rose’s third son as a carbon copy of his father—difficult and arrogant. And truth be told, he was a “very cross, unhappy, angry young man.” Often during evening social engagements at someone’s dinner table, he would provoke quarrels with anyone who disagreed with him. Ted Sorensen remembered him as “militant, aggressive, intolerant, opinionated, and somewhat shallow in his convictions . . . more like his father than his brother.”
Perhaps Bobby’s most distinguishing feature was his indifference to negative opinion about him. In April 1954, when McCarthy began attacking the Department of the Army as infiltrated by communists and his Senate subcommittee investigated the charges, Bobby signed on as the lead counsel for the Democratic minority. It provoked sharp criticism from McCarthy’s allies that Bobby was a tool of those who wished to smear the country’s best defender against internal subversion. During the hearings, after a heated argument and near fistfight with Roy Cohn, the Republican majority’s chief counsel, Bobby wrote the subcommittee’s minority report, which roundly condemned McCarthy’s accusations and tactics. A Senate censure vote of McCarthy in December 1954 vindicated Bobby and the Democrats who had recommended the reprimand. It signaled the collapse of McCarthy’s influence and won Bobby praise for his integrity. With the Democrats having gained control of the Senate in the November elections, Bobby was rewarded with an appointment as the chief counsel of the Investigations Subcommittee.
The McCarthy episode included a striking bit of irony. Democratic senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, who would become a principal antagonist of Bobby in the late fifties and sixties, was an unacknowledged ally of Bobby’s in battling McCarthy. As Senate minority leader in 1953–54, Johnson had been under considerable pressure to strike at McCarthy. But he shrewdly cautioned Senate liberals to wait until McCarthy began attacking conservatives and their favored institutions. Consequently, when McCarthy and his top aides hit out at Protestant clergymen and the Army, Johnson moved against them, arranging to have the Army-McCarthy hearings televised in the expectation that they would reveal McCarthy’s sinister character and unsavory methods and would undermine his public standing. Moreover, when it came time to appoint a Senate committee to consider McCarthy’s censure, Johnson persuaded conservative Democrats and Republicans to serve. It was an effective strategy that made Senate and national audiences receptive to Bobby’s report.
Although Jack and Bobby both worked in the Senate, and saw each other on a regular basis—socially, if not professionally—they operated in separate spheres: Bobby focused on domestic corruption as the subcommittee’s chief counsel and Jack increasingly concerned himself with foreign affairs. Because Bobby had not spent time abroad, except for his 1948 and 1951 excursions, Joe insisted that he travel to the Soviet Union with associate Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, who was a compulsive traveler to remote lands. Bobby spent much of the 1955 trip arguing with his Russian hosts until Douglas told him, “You can never argue with these fellows, so why don’t we just forget about it,” and not spend evenings “trying to convert some guy who will never be converted.” By the end of the trip in September, Bobby had become sympathetic to the Soviet masses, especially the various ethnic groups in Central Asia he viewed as victims of communist exploitation that was the equal of anything European nations had done to Asian and Middle Eastern peoples under colonial rule. His sympathy for Soviet citizens, however, did not reduce his distrust of the Kremlin: On his return, he publicly warned against being fooled into concessions to Moscow without reciprocal commitments.
In 1956, he and Jack came together again on trying to make Jack a potential presidential candidate. It was a considerable reach: A first-term thirty-nine-year-old senator with no visible credentials as a national political leader, Kennedy needed to expand his public profile as an attractive personality with whom millions of people could identify and as someone capable of dealing with the communist threat abroad and the racial divide at home.
Jack and Bobby saw the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nomination as a giant step toward the Oval Office. Traditionally, the vice presidency had been a burying ground of political ambitions. Vice presidents had come and gone without much public notice of who they were or what they had accomplished. By contrast, Vice Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman had performed admirably after succeeding to the presidency on the deaths of William McKinley in 1901 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, respectively, and winning elections in their own rights, in 1904 and 1948. They had significantly increased public regard for vice presidents and how service in the office could prepare someone for the presidency. Moreover, Richard Nixon’s three years as an active vice president under Eisenhower from 1953 to 1956 had added to the view that the office counted for something, especially since Nixon seemed likely to run for the higher office in 1960 at the end of a second Eisenhower term or if Ike lost his bid for reelection.
When Jack and Bobby told Joe, who was out of the country, that Jack was about to try for the vice presidential nomination at the Democratic convention, Joe exploded in anger. Initially, he had been ambivalent about the idea. In October 1955, when Eisenhower was recovering from a heart attack and speculation abounded that he would not run again, Democrats believed that they might recapture the White House the following year. In these circumstances, Joe agreed that the vice presidential nomination was worth fighting for. At least, he believed it worthwhile to have Tommy Corcoran, a prominent Washington fixer and friend, approach Lyndon Johnson about making Jack the VP candidate. It was accepted wisdom that Johnson, the Senate majority leader, was running for president, and that he had a better chance than Adlai Stevenson, who had lost to Ike in 1952, to win the White House. Joe told Johnson that if he would publicly announce his candidacy and privately commit to taking Jack as his running mate, Joe would finance his campaign.
But Johnson was reluctant to make a commitment before he was certain that Ike was not running. In addition, he believed it a mistake to get out front and become the object of a stop-Lyndon campaign. No southerner had won the presidency since before the Civil War and Johnson’s identification as a Texas segregationist would make it difficult enough for him to get his party’s nomination and win the White House without the additional burden of having the first Catholic running mate. Memories of Catholic governor Al Smith’s losing 1928 campaign suggested that any Catholic on the ticket could be toxic.
Johnson’s rejection of Joe’s proposal infuriated Bobby. “He believed it was unforgivably discourteous to turn down his father’s generous offer,” Corcoran recalled. Johnson’s response was perfectly understandable. He saw Joe’s suggestion as more helpful to Jack’s ambitions than his own and he had no interest in being a stalking horse for Joe’s wish to put a son in the White House. Bobby was so focused on the family’s ambitions that he could not see Johnson’s side of the issue. It also did not help that Johnson would acknowledge Bobby when they passed in the corridors of the Senate Office Building with a patronizing “Hi, sonny!” Jack was less frustrated by Johnson’s decision, accepting it as nothing more than self-serving politics.
By the time Jack decided to get in the race for vice president anyway, it was clear that Ike was running and likely to win a second term and Stevenson was the most likely Democratic nominee. Joe opposed Jack’s decision because he thought that Stevenson would be badly beaten and that the defeat would partly be blamed on Jack’s Catholicism, which would then damage his chances for a future presidential nomination.
But Jack and Bobby believed that a vice presidential nomination would give Jack the sort of national visibility that would propel him into the presidential nomination in 1960. Stevenson, however, was not sold on Jack as a running mate; he thought he needed a southerner or a border-state senator. To avoid alienating the Kennedys, who could be an important source of campaign financing, Stevenson refused to pick a vice president. Instead, he told the convention to decide for him. It pr
oduced a sharp contest in which Jack ran second to Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver on the first ballot. Conservative southerners, including Johnson’s Texas delegation, backed Kennedy against Kefauver, who had antagonized them with his support of civil rights. Kennedy took a second ballot lead over Kefauver, 648 to 551½, just 38 short of nomination. Liberals, however, irritated by Jack’s failure to vote for McCarthy’s censure, fearful that Jack’s Catholicism would hurt the ticket, and appreciative of a border-state senator’s backing of civil rights, rallied behind Kefauver, who won the nomination on the third ballot.
Commentators agreed that Jack had done himself nothing but good as a national political figure by his performance at the convention, where his attributes as a young war hero and attractive personality impressed many of the delegates. The defeat, however, frustrated Jack and Bobby. Jack was depressed, saying, “This morning all of you were telling me to get into this thing. And now you’re telling me I should feel happy because I lost it.” At first Bobby was inconsolable, complaining, “They should have won and somebody had pulled something fishy.” He lamented their ignorance of convention procedures that could have made a difference, but he filed away the lessons for the future. Moreover, he took solace from the belief that Jack was now “better off,” and Stevenson was “not going to win and you’re going to be the candidate next time,” he told Jack.
Despite his assessment of Stevenson’s chances, Bobby accepted an invitation to travel with the candidate and work in the campaign. For Stevenson, it was a way to mend fences with the Kennedys, who resented Stevenson’s failure to take Jack as his running mate. From the start, Bobby thought the whole operation was a disaster. Arthur Schlesinger remembered him in the campaign as “an alien presence, sullen and rather ominous, saying little, looking grim and exuding an atmosphere of bleak disapproval.” For Bobby, it was a chance to learn how to run a national campaign or, more to the point, how not to run a campaign. Bobby thought Stevenson’s style of speaking was terrible, always reading speeches when he should have been speaking extemporaneously. He came across as insincere or too cerebral, too focused on obscure issues instead of people and more devoted to words than actions.
Meanwhile, Jack had also signed on to the campaign, but less out of an interest in advancing Stevenson’s candidacy than in becoming better known around the country. Instead of confining himself to Massachusetts and a few of the big swing states, as Stevenson’s advisers asked, Jack went into twenty-four states, where he gave more than 150 speeches and charmed everyone with his wit and good looks. He endeared himself to audiences with the observation on his lost fight for the vice presidential nomination: “Socrates once said that it was the duty of a man of real principle to avoid high national office, and evidently the delegates at Chicago recognized my principles even before I did.”
Both brothers were becoming nationally recognized figures. In 1957, mass-market magazines featured them in articles: Look published a photographic spread about “The Rise of the Brothers Kennedy,” and the Saturday Evening Post led its September issue with “The Amazing Kennedys.” The Post saw “the flowering of another great political family” like “the Adamses, the Lodges and the La Follettes.” Amazingly, the article predicted that Jack would become president, Bobby the U.S. attorney general, and the youngest brother, Ted, a senator from Massachusetts.
The 1956 ventures were schooling for Jack’s and Bobby’s 1960 reach for the White House. The campaign began as soon as Stevenson lost to Eisenhower in November 1956, leaving the Democratic nomination for 1960 wide open. Jack broached the subject with Joe on Thanksgiving Day, raising questions about the viability of his candidacy. Joe, ever confident that his son could become president, brushed aside Jack’s doubts with assurances that millions of second-generation Americans were waiting for the chance to put one of their own in the White House. Jack didn’t need much persuading; he was eager to run and said, “Well, Dad, I guess there’s only one question left. When do we start?” He began courting all the party’s leaders and all its factions, while denying that he was a candidate, for fear he would stimulate a “stop-Kennedy” counter-campaign.
With no formal organization operating on Jack’s behalf, Bobby returned to his job as counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In September 1959, after more than two and a half years investigating labor corruption, Bobby resigned as counsel to the subcommittee to write a book on the subject, The Enemy Within (1960).
By October 1959, however, he was caught up in Jack’s campaign. Bobby, Ted Sorensen said, was Jack’s first and only choice for campaign manager. He trusted Bobby to “say ‘no’ more emphatically and speak for the candidate more authoritatively than any professional politician.” Bobby at once made clear that he would be a driving force in the operation. He convened a meeting of seventeen principals who were close to Jack and would be at the center of the nominating and national campaigns. At his Cape Cod home, on a beautiful fall day, he pressed everyone to say what was being done to ensure Jack’s success. When no one could provide decisive answers, Bobby chided Jack: “How do you expect to run a successful campaign if you don’t get started. . . . It’s ridiculous that more work hasn’t been done already!” Appreciating Bobby’s tough-minded realism and signaling the group to prepare themselves to be pushed hard by Bobby, Jack joked: “How would you like looking forward to that voice blasting in your ear for the next six months?” To reassure Bobby and the rest of the gathering that he had been busy laying the groundwork for the campaign, Jack spent the next three hours describing in detail the political challenges they faced in every part of the country to his securing the nomination and winning the election.
Bobby’s initial field assignment in November was to sound out Lyndon Johnson on his intentions. Although Johnson denied his interest in running, telling fellow senators that a southerner couldn’t get the nomination or be elected, few Washington insiders believed him. Adlai Stevenson, who was angling for a third nomination and refused to acknowledge his own ambition, assumed Johnson was in the chase and Jack thought he was “running very hard.” Bobby went to Johnson’s ranch in the Texas Hill Country—a show of deference by the thirty-four-year-old Bobby for the fifty-one-year-old majority leader, who saw Jack’s candidacy as a premature attempt to bypass senior, more accomplished, and more deserving members of the Senate and party. Johnson began reminding party bosses that the young man had little to show for his thirteen years in the House and Senate. “That kid,” as Johnson derisively called him, “needs a little gray in his hair.”
During Bobby’s visit to his ranch, Johnson denied that he was running and refused to endorse Jack or anyone else, but he did say he opposed a third Stevenson nomination. Eager to put Bobby and his brother in their place, Johnson insisted that Bobby join him in a deer hunt. Johnson correctly assumed that Bobby would be out of his element and forced to take instruction from him. Bobby was, indeed, a reluctant participant. He was knocked to the ground and suffered a cut above the brow from the recoil of a shotgun Johnson had insisted he use. With thinly disguised disdain, Johnson said, as he helped Bobby to his feet, “Son, you got to learn to handle a gun like a man.” Bobby understandably took Johnson’s remark as a slap in the face—not only to himself but also to his brother, who was daring to oppose what Johnson saw as his greater claim on the presidency. Johnson’s behavior reminded Bobby of his earlier refusal to take up his father’s “generous offer” and gave birth to a feud that would color all future relations between Johnson and the Kennedys, but especially Bobby.
Johnson’s response convinced Bobby and Jack that Johnson was in the hunt and strengthened their determination, as was typical whenever they faced opposition, to pull out all stops in the nomination fight. Bobby, like his father, took any defeat as not only a personal insult but also a demonstration of inadequacy. Any loss was proof of incompetence, of the larger society’s view of Irish Catholic inferiority. In 1960, an Irish Catholic running for president was a challenge to the unacknowledg
ed hierarchy of white Protestant America. Many in the country saw the Irish as only one cut above African Americans, whose inferiority was written into law across the South.
But as Johnson understood, in 1960, southern whites, like Catholics, were also unwelcome participants in the reach for the White House. True, Harry Truman, with his border-state twang and indelible middle American qualities—the bow tie, hair parted in the middle, and blue serge suits—had diminished some of the prejudices about who deserved to hold the highest office. But Johnson’s candidacy, like Kennedy’s, was a call to reshuffle the accepted standards for access to the Oval Office. They were implicit allies in trying to break down old barriers. But until they sorted out who would take the lead in redefining the country’s political standards, they were bitter rivals.
And for Bobby Kennedy, with Jack’s tacit approval, so was anyone who stood in the way of his brother’s White House campaign. The first demonstration of their hardball approach to winning the nomination came in Wisconsin, where they competed with Minnesota senator Hubert H. Humphrey in the Democratic primary. Primaries in 1960 were no surefire route to the party’s nomination. There were too few of the state contests to ensure anyone the prize. But for Jack, they were an essential demonstration to party bosses and convention delegates that he could win sufficient Protestant votes to become a viable national candidate.
Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House Page 6
