It was the wrestling I'd learned from Louie Andrews at Milton, and my football conditioning, that saved me. As it was, I had my hands full with Wharton. Had the fight been outdoors, on an open field, the techniques I'd learned in wrestling would have made it nearly impossible for him to stay with me. If you can take an opponent down, roll him, get a leg lock on him, you've pretty well got him. But in a barracks, you're rolling, and you roll into a footlocker, and suddenly he's on top of you. And Wharton got on top of me, pounding away and grabbing at my face. I thought he was going to put my eyes out. I put up a hand, and he bit right through it. He bit harder than the zebra.
I think I got the better of him in the end. Wrestling is defensive, and I finally managed to immobilize him. Which was good enough for me. There was blood all over the barracks, some of it Wharton's, much of it mine.
A sergeant named Maguire came storming into the room, blew his whistle, and ordered us both to get back over to the BOQ and finish cleaning it. "And you fellows can continue your fight at six o'clock on the parade ground."
Continue the fight at six o'clock on the parade ground?! I couldn't believe it. That's the last thing in the world I wanted to do. But if I had to, I had to. So at six o'clock I was pacing around the flagpole on the parade ground. And at 6:05 I was outta there. Wharton hadn't showed up. Lucky for me. I heard that in his next fight, he knocked out every tooth in the other guy's head.
With about two weeks still to go in basic training, I started formulating another idea. I would volunteer to go to Korea. I believed that it was my duty; a necessary phase of my atonement. I knew the risks. The war had stalemated, peace talks had begun, but American and Chinese troops were still slaughtering one another on the misty slopes of Bloody Ridge and Heartbreak Ridge.
On a three-day pass, I met Bobby and Jack in New York. Over lunch, I told them about my idea. Both were appalled, and strenuously argued against my volunteering. "Mother and Dad have suffered enough," one of them said to me. "We can't afford to have you go over and risk getting killed. You just can't do this kind of thing. Go where the army assigns you, and do your part."
I thought about this. I realized that I was being selfish and was risking unspeakable grief for my parents. God, I don't want to do that, I told myself. I've been enough of a screwup already.
I accepted an assignment to the Counter-Intelligence Corps Center at Fort Holabird, Maryland. CIC agents had guarded the Manhattan Project against spies during the war, and as anticommunist fervor took hold in the 1950s, the potential for spy-versus-spy intrigue promised to increase. Unfortunately, my career as a spy was fleeting. After two months, I found myself transferred to Camp Gordon, Georgia, for training with the military police.
I couldn't figure out why. Jack later learned that someone reported me in the company of one or two people at Harvard who might have had "leftist leanings." Now, that was a joke. I was a lot less interested in the left end of politics than the right end of the football line. I later came to suspect that I'd been blackballed by Roy Cohn, the anticommunist zealot and future counsel for Joe McCarthy. Cohn was just then enjoying national fame for his role in the convictions of accused spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He was jealous of my brother Bobby's rise as a prosecutor, and may have been trying to intimidate or harass him through smearing me.
Whatever the case, my main achievement at Camp Gordon was to set a camp record for chin-ups, with more than forty repetitions. Then, in June 1952, I was finally assigned overseas, to the 520th Military Police Service Company at Camp des Loges, near Rocquencourt, in the Paris suburb of Versailles.
Before shipping out, I traveled to Hyannis Port to say goodbye to my parents. My mother, well-meaning to the last, asked, "Well, where are you going to be?" I told her I would be in France and Germany. She came alive with ideas for teachable moments--ideas I rather fancied: "Oh, that's marvelous, Teddy! Now, in France, they have wonderful wine, because that's where they make it. And in Germany, they have wonderful beer, because that's where they make beer. And Joe," she said, turning brightly toward my father, "I think Teddy ought to be able to drink the wine and the beer, even though he isn't twenty-one yet."
Dad's answer revealed that he was in a somewhat less teachable mood. "Rose," he said, spinning around to examine her, "are you out of your mind?"
That effectively took the wind out of the sails for my permission to drink wine and beer in Europe that year. I did anyway.
What my parents didn't know was that I'd begun drinking beer and wine at Harvard. Dad had made a deal with each of his sons: if we refrained from drinking and smoking until we were twenty-one, we'd receive a reward of $1,000. Later, when my twenty-first birthday came around, I confessed to Dad that I had taken liquor, but had not smoked. Dad was true to his end of the bargain: I got $500.
With the Korean War raging and the armed services on full alert, my company had orders to guard the newly built Supreme Allied Headquarters (SHAPE) near Rocquencourt, mostly by walking the perimeter of the compound. One night on leave, I decided to taste the delights of Paris. Since the city lay only about twenty kilometers from the base, I walked there. I don't remember much about the delights, but I do recall making my way back toward the barracks at about 3:30 in the morning. Upon reaching Rocquencourt, I realized I could not identify the road to the base in the darkness. I stopped in at one of the few coffee shops still open and asked directions. The proprietor was helpful, but three men sitting at a table eyed me coldly. Somehow, I realized they were communists. French communists disliked the American military even more than ordinary French people did.
I eased out of the coffee house and started down the unlit street. As I walked I began to hear a steady choom, choom, choom, choom, choom behind me. I was being followed. By men armed with something that went choom, choom, choom, choom, choom as they walked.
I began to run. Now the choom, choom changed to a cha ting ta ting ting, as if the choom, choom weapons were now in high gear. Sticks. Sticks, beating a pattern on the road as the three men increased their pace.
I was still in great shape from football, fighting Wharton, and all those chin-ups, so I ran at full speed until one of my pursuers lost his wind and dropped out. That still left two men in the darkness with sticks. And I had no idea where I was.
I heard the pursuers closing on me. I stopped, wheeled around, and faced them. The leader looked like a bully. The other fellow was smaller. I could see that their sticks were sharpened at the ends. Pig sticks, used for jabbing at pigs to encourage them toward the pen. Then I remembered that I was armed as well: wrapped around each leg of my MP pants, anchoring the fold where they bloused over my boots, was a bicycle chain. The chains were useful for making an MP's pants look snappy, and sometimes for encouraging drunken soldiers toward the base.
I reached down and unhooked the chains. I started whirling them over my head. They made a whirr--far more menacing than the choom, choom or even the cha ting ta ting ting.
With my help, the Frenchmen eventually came around to that same opinion. I concentrated on the smaller fellow first. He'd move, and I'd go at him. Whack, with a bicycle chain. Whack. He started running backwards, and then the larger guy would lunge at me. Whack. Soon the little guy ran out of gas, and it was just me against the real bully. I kept swinging the chains as hard as I could until he gave it up and the two faded into the darkness. Panting for breath, I found my way back to the base.
After the fistfight and the close call with the communists, there was only one event that could put a capstone on my military career: a visit from my mother.
Rose Kennedy loved Paris and she swirled into the city after I'd been there a few weeks, taking a suite at a favorite hotel, the Ritz. I arranged a three-day furlough and called for her in a rented limousine, glad to see her as always. I entered the suite in the midst of a crisis: Mother couldn't find her jewelry. She'd hidden it someplace, but she'd forgotten where. We spent two or three hours combing the hotel room for the precious stones. Finally she foun
d them--pinned to the inside back of her purse, so that she wouldn't lose them.
We drove to the Hotel du Golf near Deauville and enjoyed an overnight visit, during which we ran into some good friends. I found myself in the midst of a black-tie party for the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas, featuring Maria Tallchief. (I think I borrowed a tuxedo from one of the friends.) It was a good break from military life.
Returning to the army base late on the final night, with my mother along for the ride, I asked the driver to let me off about a hundred yards from the entrance. I didn't want my buddies to see me getting out of a limo.
I almost made it. I'd walked through the gate and was headed for the barracks when I heard rapid, tiny footsteps and a familiar voice behind me calling, "Teddy, dear! Teddy, dear! Oh, Teddy, dear!"
Do I turn around or keep walking? There was only one choice, of course. I turned around.
"Teddy, dear!" Mother's bell-like voice was loud enough to wake the guards. "Teddy, dear! You forgot your dancing shoes!"
My dancing shoes?! I watched her hurrying toward me, her small hands clutching two shiny objects. She spent a minute or two catching her breath. "Here are your dancing shoes!" I looked at them. They weren't even my dancing shoes! I thanked Mother as politely as I could, bade her good night, and turned to face what seemed to be every man in the barracks, all of whom were engrossed in the conversation.
From that moment on, I was known around the base as "Teddy Dear." Every man had the same question for me: "Teddy Dear! Do you have your dancing shoes?"
While I was in the army in France, my siblings back home were making important strides in their lives--toward their futures, and toward one another.
In October 1951, Jack and Bobby, along with our sister Pat, set off on a tour of several Eastern and Middle Eastern countries, including Vietnam. Jack was planning a challenge to the senior Republican senator from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. He wanted to sharpen his awareness of Soviet colonial pressure in several nations as a centerpiece of his campaign. The seven-week expedition yielded an unexpected bonus: my two brothers, who had spent long stretches of time apart from one another virtually since childhood, reacquainted themselves with one another as men. (Jack was thirty-four then, Bobby just shy of twenty-six.)
Left behind during the tour was the beautiful young socialite, equestrienne, and Vogue "enquiring photographer" Jacqueline Bouvier, whom Jack met at a Georgetown dinner party in May of that year. The separation hardly interrupted Jack's courtship of Jackie. The two were married on September 12, 1953, in Newport, Rhode Island. Bobby served as best man and I was an usher.
Bobby resigned his job as an attorney in the Justice Department to manage Jack's Senate campaign, with organizational brilliance. He helped steer Jack to a narrow victory over Lodge, and afterward, instead of returning to Justice, he applied for a position on the senatorial staff of one of our father's Irish Catholic friends, Joseph McCarthy, who'd become chairman of the Senate Government Operations Committee.
McCarthy by then had made his name as a rabid anticommunist witch hunter; the Washington Post cartoonist Herblock had coined the phrase "McCarthyism" two years earlier. The peak of the infamous "Era" that bore his name, though, was still a few years in the future. He had in fact visited our family at the Kennedy house in Palm Beach, and dated Eunice for a while.
Bobby went to work on the subcommittee on investigations for McCarthy, who was just then absorbed in rooting out anti-American books in public libraries. My brother joined two other fresh appointees, chief counsel Roy Cohn and Cohn's chief consultant, David Schine. Bobby was not yet twenty-eight then, and the extent of McCarthy's vile exploitation of anticommunist hysteria had not yet fully registered with him or indeed the country.
Bobby developed an instant distrust of Cohn and Schine, perceiving their cynicism and willingness to twist the truth to fit their boss's agenda. He didn't like McCarthy's frequent collaborator and ideological soul mate, the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, either; he distrusted him from the start. Bobby might have been an anticommunist, but he was sickened by the way Hoover and his allies destroyed lives without remorse.
Dad had known J. Edgar Hoover in the early days, back when crime-fighting was his focus. Dad liked him then, and had a lot of correspondence with him. My own memory is that until the cold war came to obsess him with rooting out communists in America, Hoover wasn't so bad.
In later years, as my own political career took hold, I came to believe that Hoover had to go. He was out of control, a law unto himself. He kept power by threat and terror. And he held his power for too long. I cringe every time I see his name on that building on Pennsylvania Avenue. He did some good things, but warrantless wiretaps and blackmail by the director of the FBI have no place in this country.
Bobby resigned his place on McCarthy's staff just months later, when Democratic members walked off the committee in protest of the chairman's unsavory methods. Yet his personal regard for McCarthy remained another matter. Even after the Wisconsin senator had been stripped of his credibility in 1954, and his career and reputation ruined, Bobby showed friendly feelings for him. He was castigated repeatedly for this, but he probably could not have made himself behave otherwise. Loyalty was one of my brother's greatest virtues, and he would not toss over a friend just because he had fallen out of favor with the world.
The following year, with McCarthy gone, Bobby rejoined the subcommittee as chief counsel. In 1955, with Arkansas senator John McClellan at the head of a reorganized committee, Bobby broke into national prominence as a tough investigator of corruption within the Teamsters Union. This image, in time, evolved into a slur that was perhaps the most offensive, and least accurate, of the many that Bobby absorbed from his adversaries over the years. It was a slur so contrary to his true nature that its use became an ironic family joke.
The slur was "ruthless."
I don't recall making much use of those dancing shoes that my mother handed me, but the remainder of my army time in Europe passed pleasantly enough: weekdays of drudge work, followed by weekend furloughs. I used one of those weekends to win a one-man Swiss bobsled race. I'd never been on a bobsled before. In the fall of 1952, I rounded up absentee votes for Jack's Senate race among my fellow Massachusetts soldiers. In February 1953, Pat and Jean came over to help me celebrate my twenty-first birthday. We went skiing in Austria for a week.
In May, Eunice married Sargent Shriver. So Bobby was married. Eunice was married. Jack was headed for a September wedding with Jackie in Newport. Pat would marry Peter Lawford in April 1954, and Jean would be wed to Stephen Edward Smith in May 1956. It seemed incredible to me. I'd always had a curious, half-fanciful way of thinking about my siblings as regarded marriage--and myself as well.
I never expected any of us to get married. We would be brothers and sisters, unchanging, forever.
Later that spring, the army transferred me back to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, for my discharge as a private first class. I'd hardly shaken hands with Dad when I found myself on another tour of duty--one that I was pleased to accept. He asked me to travel to Chicago and Tulsa to inspect some of the family's business investments. When I returned from that assignment, I had some surprising news for my father and the family: I was considering a political career of my own.
I spent a few weeks volunteering as a basketball coach at the South Bay Union Settlement House in Boston, and then I enrolled in a pair of summer school government courses at Harvard. In the fall of 1953, I returned to Harvard as a full-time student, determined to work hard and put the past behind me. The class I concentrated on the most that semester was Spanish, where I proudly brought my grade up to an A-minus. From then on through graduation, I pursued a tough curriculum heavily weighted toward government, economics, history, and English. It was John Kenneth Galbraith who elevated my understanding of economics. In just a few years, he would be Jack's ambassador to India. Arthur N. Holcombe, another Harvard giant who had taught Dad and all three of my brothers, ma
de the Constitutional Convention of 1787 come alive before my eyes. Political philosophy was Holcombe's specialty, and I opened myself to his stirring historical and moral insights.
I worked at public speaking with a wonderful speaking coach named Oscar Verlaine. Four times each fall, and four times each spring, Verlaine sent me and other students into such venues as South Bay Settlement and various local high schools to address civic matters, such as the Red Cross. Perhaps our topics weren't earth-shaking, but we learned how to develop bonds with our audiences via a sense of conviction, brevity, and humor, tailoring our remarks to their specific level of understanding. These engagements also reinforced in me the satisfactions of public service.
My residence now was Winthrop House, on the northern bank above the Charles River. Joe Jr. and Jack had lived there, and Jack's room is now reserved for guests at the university. Winthrop was a popular residence for athletes--and, incidentally, one of the first houses to open itself to Jewish and Catholic students. I was ineligible for varsity football when I returned to Harvard in 1953, but I played for Winthrop House. I have especially fond memories of a special game we played in the fall of that year. We traveled to New Haven to play the Eli's top residential club, Davenport, the day before the official Harvard-Yale Game. We beat the Davenport boys, 6-0, thanks partly to the pile-driving play of a certain stranger to my Winthrop teammates. It was Bobby. I'd invited him to come up from New York and watch the game, but Bobby preferred to play. He'd been wearing neckties and white shirts for ten years, writing for the Boston Post and working for Dad and the Justice Department. Perfect, I thought. Let's see what he has left. I found him a house uniform and set of pads; he changed into them en route. He played defensive end in that game, and for an old guy, he did pretty well. In fact, he was the star of the game. As he was coming off the field at the end, our elderly house master, Ronald M. Ferry, gave him a close look and said, "Bob, aren't you supposed to graduate fairly soon?"
True Compass: A Memoir Page 11
