The Kennedys

by Thomas Maier

  When he got the call for help, Bobby wasn’t pleased. He’d been working on his first big investigation for the Justice Department and didn’t want to be pulled away.

  “I don’t know anything about Massachusetts politics,” Bobby argued. “I don’t know any of the players, and I’ll screw it up.”

  O’Donnell urged him to help out or his brother might lose. After a week, Bobby relented and joined the campaign. His decision helped cement a close, almost symbiotic, working relationship between the brothers that would last for the rest of Jack’s life. Bobby threw himself, heart and soul, into working for his brother’s success. He toiled endless hours in tasks ranging from late-night strategy sessions to going door-to-door with leaflets extolling Jack’s virtues. To his family’s delight, Bobby proved himself to be a natural in politics.

  ROBERT FRANCIS KENNEDY’S sense of family and faith were deeply engrained from youth, with a fidelity befitting his status as a former altar boy. Under the spiritual tutelage of his mother, Bobby attended Mass as much as three times a week and became Rose Kennedy’s most devout son. A shy, awkward and diminutive boy growing up, Bobby understood Catholicism in his bones, beyond the mere recitation of psalms and vespers, beyond the cultural appreciation of religion adhered to by his father and older brothers. At St. Joseph’s Church in Bronxville, a parish nun, Sister M. Ambrose, suggested to his parents that Bobby “might have a religious vocation.” Many years later, the same nun wrote a letter to Bobby in which she recalled how, after being moved by a sermon about the poor given by a Caribbean bishop, he marched home, broke his piggy bank and donated its contents to the charity mission. In a household of many children, Bobby gained recognition and approval, particularly from his mother, for his earnest faith. “He worked hard at it,” recalled his sister, Pat. “I used to go into his room to hear his Latin. Then mother would come in, too, so he could show her how much he learned.” After attending a succession of schools, including a disappointing time spent at the Portsmouth Priory School run by the Benedictine monks (where neither the educational nor spiritual standards met his parents’ approval), Bobby found himself among a handful of Irish Catholic adolescents at the Milton Academy, a private school in Connecticut with a student populace distinctly destined for the upper crust of American life.“My first impression of him was that we were both, in a way, misfits,” recalled David Hackett, who became a lifelong friend from Milton. “I think that was because his name was Kennedy and he was an Irish Catholic and Milton Academy was basically a WASP school.” Interestingly, several biographers later repeated Hackett’s “misfit” description as a psychological condition without relating it to Kennedy’s ethnic and religious background.

  Unlike his brother Jack, Bobby could never smooth out the rough edges of his ethnicity, nor did he seem willing to downplay his religion to gain approval. Rather than find a comfortable place in a parochial school for affluent Catholics, where Bobby would be likely treated deferentially because of his family’s prominence, his parents instead had placed him in a setting where his snoot would be rubbed raw by not-so-subtle bigotry. In this higher social strata, Bobby, the runt of the Kennedy family, tried to find his way. Like other Kennedys at various times, the idea of proselytizing— convincing others to Catholicism, hoping others would become like him, rather than being assimilated himself into the dominant Protestant culture— was cited in letters sent home. While at the private academy, Bobby wrote to his mother:“Am now leading an underground movement to convert the school, and am taking a lot of the boys to church on Sunday.” In such an Anglophile atmosphere as Milton, “Bobby Kennedy liked to play the tough Irish ‘mick,’ especially around Brahmins,”wrote biographer Evan Thomas. “The elder boys had been by and large accepted into the Protestant elite. But Bobby, defiantly Irish, had his father’s outsiderness, the drive that comes from resentment.” This tough outer shell, the sense of estrangement, didn’t limit his ability to feel empathy and compassion, and perhaps enhanced it. When Bobby heard the bad news about another Milton friend, Sam Adams, whose father was killed in a car crash two weeks before Christmas break in 1942, he went to Adams’s room to comfort him. “We sat on the bed and talked about faith,”Adams recalled. “I said to him, ‘I wish I had your acceptance, your conviction. I wish I could believe that it’s not all over when you die, and that I would see my father again.’ Bobby was very sure. He believed that very surely.”

  During their quiet conversation, as Adams packed to return home, Bobby discussed how faith might overcome such a personal tragedy. Adams wasn’t Catholic, and under different circumstances might have been offended by such suggestions after losing a parent. But Kennedy’s words were so sincere that Adams, through his own grief, still remembered them many years afterward. “He told me that faith would get me over this great burden,” Adams told biographers Lester and Irene David. “Not his faith, but mine. Even though I had no particular religious belief, and he knew it, he said that I can find faith, and that I could find comfort in it.”

  BOBBY’S DEEP religious faith manifested itself in a social conscience that showed signs of personal growth and independence as well as a penchant for fervid moral righteousness. At Harvard, where the student body became increasingly diverse after World War II, he’d been invited to join the Spee Club—the same fraternity that had rejected his father and Joe Jr., and barely admitted Jack. Jack was delighted to be in their presence, but Bobby quit when he concluded that an Irish Catholic had been blackballed because of his heritage. In lieu of the Spee Club, Bobby hung around with his friends on the football team, several of whom, such as Kenny O’Donnell, were Catholics. Perhaps the most remarkable act of moral independence, however, came with Bobby’s reaction to Father Leonard Feeney, a notorious Jesuit eventually excommunicated by the church.

  Father Feeney, a poet, writer and talented orator, served as chaplain for a storefront ministry near the Harvard campus. He seemed to be an unlikely radical, but toward the mid-1940s, he became increasingly conservative and anti-Semitic. He appealed to a segment of Catholicism that had agreed with Father Coughlin’s diatribes a decade earlier. Feeney pushed his central message— extra ecclesiam nulla salus, “outside the Church there is no salvation”— well past church doctrine into an absolute declaration that only Catholics could enter the gates of heaven. Protestants and Jews need not apply. From the St. Benedict Center in Cambridge, Feeney preached his reactionary doctrine to Harvard students who wandered into the former bookstore looking for spiritual enlightenment. A sampling of Father Fenney’s rants, according to those who witnessed them, included his claims that “the Jews have taken over this city” and “I would rather be a bad Catholic than any Jew in existence.”At a time of increasing incidents of anti-Semitic violence by Catholics in Boston, Feeney’s sermons proved incendiary. Some who enlisted in his cause withdrew from Harvard, Boston College and other schools to work for Feeney; others were appalled and alerted church authorities about his outrageous statements. Evelyn Waugh, the British writer who was a convert to Catholicism, walked away from a meeting repulsed by this “stark, raving mad” priest.

  Each Thursday evening, Father Feeney presided over an audience at St. Benedict or gave a Sunday sermon to even larger crowds on the Boston Common. During one lecture, Bobby Kennedy, a Harvard undergraduate, confronted the priest in a boisterous argument, glowering with contempt for such a hateful screed. He argued that church’s doctrine taught just the opposite, and that his Catholic teachers had never preached such exclusionary lessons. The confrontation was remarkable for several reasons. More than any of her sons, Rose Kennedy’s seventh child revered authority figures, never acted up in school, and remained particularly deferential to clergy wearing the Roman collar. To engage a priest in such a hostile challenge must have taken an extraordinary act of will by the former altar boy now in his early twenties. The confrontation with Feeney marked a subtle rite of passage for young Kennedy. Though still a conservative by nature, his action departed from the old, reactionary �
��Coughlin” world and showed a willingness to draw his own moral conclusions. A half century later, his cousin Joseph Gargan marveled at Bobby’s gall and strength of conviction in confronting the renegade priest. As a harbinger of things to come, it demonstrated his willingness to stand up against powerful figures when he felt them wrong.

  By 1949, Archbishop Richard Cushing came to the same conclusion and officially silenced Feeney, directing Catholics to steer clear of the St. Benedict Center. Feeney responded by calling the archbishop a heretic. Nevertheless, Rose Kennedy was horrified to learn that her devout son had displayed such disrespect to a priest. Good Catholics, in her mind, just didn’t do such things. Only when the Pope decided to excommunicate Feeney in 1953 did her mind ease on this matter.“Bobby was right,” Rose admitted to a friend. “When the Vatican excommunicated Father Feeney, I knew Bobby had been right.”

  ONCE DIPPED into the political waters of Boston, Bobby Kennedy immersed himself completely. During the 1952 campaign, his wife, Ethel, pregnant with their second child, also knocked on doors, passed out leaflets and socialized at the teas as if she had been born a Kennedy. Her devotion to religion and family matched her husband’s. Before agreeing to marry, she had considered becoming a nun.“How can I fight God?” Bobby wondered.

  Ethel Skakel Kennedy grew up in a wealthy Connecticut family. In the heat of the 1952 battle against Lodge, her father was asked to contribute and line up a quick $100,000—like some political dowry—for the Kennedy campaign.“Anytime now you could get us twenty individuals or a smaller amount if that is not possible, we could use it in the campaign,” Joe Kennedy urged his son’s new father-in-law. “As an individual cannot give a total of more than $5,000 and cannot give more than $1,000 to a committee, I am enclosing herewith a list of five committees to whom checks could be made payable.” George Skakel, of the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation in Manhattan, signed a check for $5,000 before leaving for a hunting trip and promised he’d line up the rest when he got back.

  Though he remained out of the public eye, Joe Kennedy’s fingerprints were all over the levers of his son’s juggernaut. The old man’s political instincts, however, were far from impeachable. He assumed the Republican presidential candidacy of war hero, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, would fizzle with no impact on his son’s Senate bid. “I think his campaign will break in seams in the next six weeks,” he predicted confidentially in early February 1952. When he heard the rumor of former FDR aide and Postmaster General James A. Farley making a bid for the White House, Joe Kennedy quickly dismissed it.“Very few, if any,would believe that the time has arrived for a Catholic to be that candidate,” he wrote, “and therefore, I doubt very much if, as worthy as Jim Farley is, he would receive any serious consideration.”

  Joe Kennedy’s political handicaps extended beyond his poor prognostications. In Brookline and other Boston neighborhoods with sizeable Jewish populations, he was viewed as a German appeaser during World War II and a long-time anti-Semite—a generally accurate assessment that posed a considerable obstacle for his son’s chances. To beat Lodge, Jack Kennedy needed the overwhelming support not only of Irish Catholics but of voters from all immigrant groups and minorities, including Jews, Italians and blacks. In a campaign appearance for his fellow Republican, Jacob Javits, a prominent New York politician who was Jewish, gave a speech that strongly suggested Jack Kennedy was anti-Semitic like his father, pointing to his amendment on the House floor to cut appropriations for the fledgling state of Israel. In one of the more interesting twists of the campaign, John McCormack, whose congressional district encompassed many Jewish neighborhoods in Boston, came to Jack Kennedy’s defense. McCormack’s own brother, Ed “Knocko” McCormack, was a longtime Curley crony. He was still peeved with Kennedy for not signing the petition to spring His Honor from jail. But soon after Javits’s visit, McCormack gave an impassioned speech at a Kennedy rally held on Blue Hill Avenue in the heart of a Jewish neighborhood. Earnestly, McCormack explained to the crowd how Jack Kennedy had offered the amendment, at his suggestion, only to stop efforts by Israel’s detractors in Congress to eliminate funding entirely.“It will cut the budget some, but we will save the remainder of the money for Israel,” McCormack said, recounting his conversation with Kennedy before his hometown constituents. His virtuoso defense of Kennedy was utterly convincing. The reputation of McCormack—whom some Irish called “Rabbi” because they felt he was too deferential—counteracted Javits’s visit and became conventional wisdom within the Jewish community.

  None of McCormack’s account was true. His story of a supposedly secret deal concocted with Kennedy to keep Israel from its enemies was created out of whole cloth simply for the benefit of Jewish voters. “Of course, it was a figment of McCormack’s imagination; it never happened that way whatsoever,” attested Tip O’Neill, who recalled how Kennedy told him the truth later on. Jack seemed to admire McCormack’s fidelity to another Democrat from the same Irish political machine.“When the chips were down, because I was a Democrat, he was up in the fire lines for me,” Kennedy admitted to O’Neill.“He did something for me that I never could have done for him.”

  Politics increasingly became a family affair with the Kennedys, especially between the two brothers. Winning was a crusade that took on its own moral imperative. Together, they worked as a team, adding ballast to their father’s heavy-handed advice with their own growing, self-assured political judgment. Sometimes they agreed with the old man; other times they quietly but effectively dismissed his judgments.“He doesn’t require it,” Bobby said about his father’s approval, when an aide, Ed Guthman, once asked. The troika of Kennedy men, forged in the 1952 race, would work diligently, almost single-mindedly, for one goal during the next decade. Among the threesome, as Guthman observed, “there was a great deal of love and respect.” As a campaigner, Jack learned to keep his own distance from his ever-aggressive and relentless brother. Bobby sometimes bumped against too many heads, including then Governor Paul Dever, who was in his own fading quest for reelection. “I know you’re an important man around here and all,” Dever warned the ambassador over the telephone,“but I’m telling you this and I mean it: keep that fresh kid of yours out of sight from here on in.” Stung more than once by the Kennedys, it was Dever, the product of a working–class Irish Catholic family, who later called Jack “the first Irish Brahmin” and saddled Bobby with the moniker “the last Irish Puritan.” There was more than a little truth in both sobriquets.

  ELECTION NIGHT brought sweet vindication. The upstart Kennedy beat Senator Lodge by more than 70,000 votes. With a record 90 percent turnout, the Republicans prevailed throughout the state and country, and Eisenhower won the first of what would become two terms in the White House. The GOP swept races against Dever and other Massachusetts Democrats. But Lodge never recovered from his slow start, not enough to overcome Kennedy’s lead.

  Campaign headquarters of the two candidates were located across the street from each other. As election night dragged on, Bobby and Jack stayed with only a handful of the faithful. Patsy Mulkern, ever the blunt assessor of political odds,went across the street, stood outside the window of Lodge headquarters and yelled,“You’re dead! You’re finished! Give up! Give up!” But the senator didn’t concede until seven the next morning. Bobby knew it was over when a glum-looking Lodge left his headquarters and “walked across the street, right in front of our window.”

  The Irish wards in Boston voted heavily for Kennedy, the margins five and six to one. The historical ironies and a bit of a grudge match were evidenced by the family’s reaction in victory. Jack sang a few bars of “Sweet Adeline,” as a tribute to Honey Fitz’s memory. John F. Fitzgerald had died two years earlier, but had lived long enough to see his namesake enter Congress and envision the potential for even higher office. The same tensions between the Irish and Brahmins that toppled Honey Fitz in his 1916 race against the old Senator Lodge were still present in the 1952 campaign, though this time with different results. “At last, the
Kennedys have evened the score!” Rose rejoiced, only half joking. Joe Kennedy, triumphant at last, thought of another lost family member and how things might have been different. “This is probably one of the jobs that I thought Joe would have filled, but we are more than fortunate to have Jack come along with the same hopes and ideals,” the senior Kennedy wrote to a friend.“His victory was, next to Eisenhower’s, the most sensational in the United States because he defeated a Republican that has never been defeated for anything in Massachusetts before.”Young Joe’s old friend, Father Maurice Sheehy, sent a note of congratulations with a similar reference.“How proud his brother Joe would have been of him!” the priest wrote to their father.“Jack is destined to do great things for his country and his Church.”

  The old resentments eased for only a few moments. In assessing Kennedy’s impressive victory, the press weighed in uniformly with a lament for the fallen Senator Lodge, a politician who had valiantly tried to steer the national party of Lincoln away from right-wing extremists and pave the way for the steady and trustworthy Eisenhower, yet was knocked off at home by what seemed a political lightweight. Implicit in these accounts was the subtle impression that Lodge was worthier, more fundamentally American than this scion of Irish immigrants. No journalist recognized this victory for what it was historically: the end of the Brahmin era in Massachusetts and the rise of a new wave of politicians, mostly Democrats, whose forebears had come on boats from Ireland or Italy or places other than the Back Bay. With his own ethnic sensitivities always in gear, Joe Kennedy still could perceive a slight in such wonderful news as his son’s election to the United States Senate. “After reading the Boston papers and most of the papers in the country,” old Joe wrote to a friend,“I have almost come to the conclusion that as far as they are concerned Jack has committed the unpardonable social error of beating Lodge.”