The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

  That July, as the convention grew closer, still with no word from the Stevenson campaign as to whom they were going to consider for vice president, Kennedy wrote Jack from France. “If you make up your mind that you either don’t want it and that you are not going to get it . . . you should get out a statement to the effect that representing Mass. is one of the greatest jobs in the world and there is lots to be done for your state and her people, and while you are most grateful for the national support offered you for the Vice Presidency, your heart belongs to Massachusetts.” If, on the other hand, Jack decided to keep his name in the running and “ride the thing through to see whether you can get it, why couldn’t I give an interview here in France to either Joe Smith of the I.N.S. [the Hearst news service], or the New York TIMES reporter, arranged by Krock or Jimmy Reston . . . in which I might say something like this: ‘I stand prepared to back my son’s decision whatever it may be. My own impression, however, is that his choice is being swayed by his heart and his head. His devotion to Massachusetts and its people has made him most reluctant to accept any position until he has done everything he possibly can for that state. On the other hand, he has a loyalty to his friends in the leadership of the Democratic Party who feel that his record and his integrity and ability would be of great assistance to the Democratic ticket. . . . I stand ready to support him in whatever his decision may be, and if he is nominated by his party, I am dead sure he will give a fine account of himself.’ I think this statement should be got out by either you or me in some way or another the minute you make up your mind that you are not going to try the V.P. so that the full good effect will accrue to you. You or I might both add that being a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts is the finest position any young man could aim for.”32

  Senator Kennedy wisely made no statement of any kind, nor did he enlist his father to make one for him. It would have been the height of folly for him to preemptively withdraw his name from consideration. To do so would have made him sound as if he expected or deserved the nomination. Kennedy should have known this, but he so desperately wanted to be of help to his son that his better judgment deserted him.

  Jack Kennedy departed for the Chicago convention still having heard nothing from the Stevenson camp. He had, however, been selected by producer Dore Schary to narrate and introduce the opening-day film on the history of the party. When the lights came up after the film, he was escorted onto the platform and given a standing ovation. “Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a prospect for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination,” the New York Times reported on August 14, “came before the convention tonight as a movie star.” The next day, he was asked to give one of the nominating speeches for Stevenson, which he did, but only after discarding the text handed him and, with Sorensen, writing his own. He assumed now that he was out of the running for the vice-presidential nomination. The tradition was that those called on to give nominating speeches were not being considered as possible running mates. Half a world away, in their villa in France, Kennedy and Rose listened to his speech on the “short-wave radio and thought it extremely good.”33

  After being nominated for the presidency, Stevenson returned to his hotel suite, where he announced that he had decided to leave the choice of his running mate to the convention delegates. At midnight, the Kennedy clan, missing only the parents and Rosemary, gathered in Jack’s hotel room with his senior advisers. As Charles Bartlett, Washington insider, journalist, and Jack’s friend, later recalled, a challenge like the one Stevenson had laid before them was irresistible for the Kennedys. “I remember the whole family was milling around ready to go. . . . As soon as the competition arose, why . . . he really went for it. . . . I was really amazed because I hadn’t been that aware before that he really wanted it that much.”34

  Jack “turned to Bobby and said, ‘call Dad and tell him I’m going for it.’” Bobby, according to Ken O’Donnell, placed the call, “by no means an enviable assignment. Jack disappeared from the room, leaving me alone with Bobby when the call came through. The Ambassador’s blue language flashed all over the room. The connection was broken before he was finished denouncing Jack as an idiot who was ruining his political career. Bobby quickly hung up the telephone and made no effort to get his father back on the line. ‘Whew!’ Bobby said. ‘Is he mad!’”35

  For the senior Kennedy, the scenario that was developing was the worst one possible. Either Jack would lose the fight to Senator Estes Kefauver, his first political loss ever, or he would win the nomination and, when the ticket went down to defeat, be blamed for having put his own ambition ahead of the party and, as a Catholic, siphoning off enough votes to elect Eisenhower to a second term. He would be tagged as a loser either way.

  On the first ballot, Kefauver of Tennessee, who had been campaigning all year for the presidential nomination, received 483½ votes for vice president to Jack Kennedy’s 304. The thought of a Kefauver victory, which now seemed imminent, galvanized the anti-Kefauver faction, including southern conservatives, into coalescing around Kennedy. On the second ballot, Jack Kennedy rallied to within 39 votes of the needed majority; then, on the brink of a Kennedy victory, Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee rose to request that his name be withdrawn from nomination and all his votes be switched to Kefauver. In quick succession, the chairs of the Oklahoma, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Missouri delegations rose to announce that their delegations were shifting their votes to Kefauver. Senator Kennedy, recognizing that the fight was lost, left his room at the Stock Yard Inn and went directly to the convention hall, where he was recognized by convention chairman Sam Rayburn, mounted the rostrum, thanked the convention for its support, released his delegates, and moved that Kefauver be nominated by acclamation.

  Although he would later thank his lucky stars that he had not been part of the losing ticket, Jack did not take defeat easily. He asked Bobby to call their father in France. “In bad times,” Bobby would later recall, they had always turned to their father, who “more than anyone else . . . has seen the bright side. . . . The greater the disaster, the brighter he was, the more support he gave.” And so it was on this occasion. Kennedy, who had been following the nomination fight on shortwave radio, congratulated his boys on their valiant efforts and assured them that when the Stevenson-Kefauver team went down in defeat, which Kennedy believed all but assured, Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy would be left standing as the only viable candidate for the 1960 presidential nomination.36

  Exhausted and depressed after the convention, Jack left his pregnant wife behind in Newport with her mother and stepfather and flew to France to see his father and take a brief sailing vacation in the Mediterranean with his brother Ted and his friend Torb Macdonald.

  “Jack arrived here very tired,” Kennedy wrote Morton Downey on August 24, “but I think very happy because he came out of the convention so much better than anyone could have hoped. As far as I am concerned, you know how I feel—if you’re going to get licked, get licked trying for the best, not the second best. His time is surely coming!”37

  Thirty-seven

  THE CATHOLIC CANDIDATE

  The short item in the Boston Globe for September 18, 1956, reported only that Joseph Kennedy had had a prostate gland operation, followed by some sort of abdominal surgery. That is all we know aside from the fact that his recovery took longer than expected. “The reason you haven’t heard from me,” he wrote Lord Beaverbrook at the end of October, “is because since the 6th of September, beginning in the hospital in Paris until last Saturday, I have been in the hospital under the care of the doctors, having had four operations. I am recovering now and feel reasonably well but not well enough to do or write very much.”1

  While their father recuperated in Boston that fall, Bobby and Jack campaigned for Stevenson. Jack, according to Ted Sorensen, covered “more than thirty thousand miles in twenty-four states [making] over 150 speeches and appearances in the course of six weeks.” Bobby, who it was anticipated w
ould be Jack’s campaign manager when he ran for president, “was sent on the Stevenson train . . . to see what was being done and how. A boring experience for Bob,” his mother recalled, but a necessary one. Both sons learned an enormous amount about how and how not to run a presidential campaign. Jack broadened his exposure to voters outside Massachusetts.2

  In November, Eisenhower was elected—and by a larger margin than 1952. He carried forty-one states out of forty-eight and polled 57.4 percent of the vote, the largest margin since Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936. Kennedy, still recovering from his surgeries, was not displeased by the Republican victory. In 1960, after eight years of a Republican presidency and with the unpopular Nixon the heir apparent, the Democrats would, he believed, be well positioned to take back the White House. “It is not too much to expect that the Democratic Party could be successful in 1960,” Kennedy wrote Galeazzi on November 9, “and it may interest you to know that Jack is a most likely candidate.”3

  On Thanksgiving Day 1956, Kennedy and Rose hosted their children and grandchildren at Hyannis Port. Later that day, after long conversations with his father, Jack told Dave Powers that he had decided to run. “With only about four hours of work and a handful of supporters, I came within thirty-three and a half votes of winning the Vice-Presidential nomination. . . . If I work hard for four years, I ought to be able to pick up all the marbles.” There would be no official announcement. Before he could declare for the presidency, the senator had to run for reelection in 1958 and, if he wished to be considered a viable candidate, win in a landslide.4

  Bobby too made a decision about his future after election day. Still chief counsel to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he had flown to the West Coast in November 1956 to follow up on a tip he had received on labor racketeering. Finding much more than he had bargained for, he returned east with a new agenda for himself and the Senate subcommittee: they would take on labor racketeering and corruption, beginning with the Teamsters and their president, Dave Beck.

  The Kennedy family spent its Christmas in Hyannis Port, because Kennedy was not well enough to fly to Palm Beach. It was there that Bobby told his father of his plans to ask the Senate subcommittee to undertake a thorough investigation of labor corruption and the Teamsters. Kennedy was aghast at his son’s recklessness. If Bobby went ahead, he would succeed only in alienating organized labor and making it impossible for his brother to win the 1960 nomination—or election. When Bobby would not yield, Kennedy brought in family friend and Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas to argue with him. Bobby refused to back down. He returned to Washington and convinced the senators he worked with to open an investigation of labor racketeering. A new subcommittee, chaired by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, was impaneled to investigate labor corruption. As the second ranking Democrat on labor, Senator John Kennedy was offered a position on the new subcommittee. Senator Kennedy knew his father would be opposed to his accepting the position, but Bobby had asked for his help, and he could not refuse him. Besides, as a student of history, he knew how the reputations of Harry Truman and Estes Kefauver had been burnished by Senate investigations into corruption.5

  In January 1957, Lyndon Johnson agreed to give Senator Kennedy the committee assignment on foreign relations that he and his father had been lobbying for since he’d arrived in the Senate. Jack may have sealed the deal with a telegram to Johnson, sent on July 27, 1956, thanking the majority leader for the “first class job you did for us all this year” and declaring that it was a “pleasure to be a Johnson man.” Jack’s rival for the position was Estes Kefauver, who was certainly not a “Johnson man,” especially on civil rights, which was expected to be a major item before Congress in the next session. Jack had never taken much of a position on civil rights, either in his speeches in his district, where there were few African Americans, or in his campaign for the Senate. His silence on the issue had stood him well in the vice-presidential race, where he received the bulk of the southern delegate votes.6

  In July 1957, six months after being named to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Jack publicly criticized the French for refusing to negotiate with Algerian nationalists and suggested that the United States use its best efforts to effect a settlement that guaranteed eventual Algerian independence. President Eisenhower, Secretary of State Dulles, and former Democratic secretary of state Acheson rebuked the junior senator from Massachusetts for interfering in French internal affairs. When Jack confided to his father that he feared he had made a mistake by speaking out so forcefully, Kennedy assured him he would be okay. “I have to smile. For years, the political sharpshooters have raised hell with me because I wanted to keep the United States out of all countries except South America. Now they are raising hell with you because you want the United States in. I don’t think they hurt me, and I’m sure they won’t hurt you.”7

  On August 2, Jack voted with Lyndon Johnson on the amendment to the 1957 civil rights bill, which required a jury trial before any official could be convicted of voting rights violations. Senate liberals had argued that requiring jury trials would render the bill meaningless, but Jack had voted for the amendment, insisting, alternately, that without it southern senators would filibuster the bill to death and that the jury trial provision was necessary to protect basic constitutional rights. He was widely criticized by liberals for giving Johnson and the South everything they had asked for. His father assured him again that he had nothing to worry about, that he would soon “be out of the woods” on Algeria and civil rights.8

  —

  On September 7, 1957, the Saturday Evening Post published an embarrassingly effusive puff piece titled “The Amazing Kennedys,” focusing not just on Jack’s campaign for the presidency, but on the public service achievements of the other Kennedy children, including Rosemary, who it claimed was caring for and teaching “exceptional” children in a Catholic school near Milwaukee. The author summed up his unrelentingly cheery family history by declaring that “fervent admirers of the Kennedys profess to see in their rise to national prominence the flowering of another great political family, such as the Adamses, the Lodges and the La Follettes. They confidently look forward to the day when Jack will be in the White House, Bobby will serve in the Cabinet as Attorney General, and Teddy will be the senator from Massachusetts.” Although there is no evidence for it, this last prediction sounds very much as if it had come from Kennedy—or someone close to him.9

  On October 28, 1957, the same day that the New York Times (on page twenty) declared his father one of the nation’s fifteen wealthiest men, Jack Kennedy received his own headlines (on page nineteen) for a speech he had given at a Yeshiva University dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. In it, he refuted by clever analogy the charges that as a Catholic he might have conflicting loyalties: to the Vatican as well as the United States. Referring to the “Zionist activities of the large Jewish organizations” (which his father had been so critical of) and to “Americans of Irish, Hungarian, Italian, Greek and Latin American extraction,” Senator Kennedy insisted that the interest such Americans took in their “homelands” was not “incompatible with loyalty to America. . . . American freedom had its deepest traditions in the toleration of multiple group loyalties.”10

  On November 18, Time magazine referred to his presidential campaign as a “soaring satellite” but asked if “the Democratic whiz of 1957 [would] still be the whiz of 1960.” Jack Kennedy’s virtues were manifold, but so were the obstacles to his candidacy, the article declared. He was Catholic, young, and “in many aspects, a conservative” in a liberal party. “Nobody,” Senator Kennedy told the Time writers, “is going to hand me the nomination. If I were governor of a large state, Protestant and 55, I could sit back and let it come to me. But if I am going to get it, I’ll have to work for it—and damn hard.”

  Two weeks later, on December 2, 1957, Senator Kennedy appeared on the Time cover, with the story inside describing in great detail his nationwid
e campaign. The article was unstinting in its praise of Kennedy’s parents and grandparents, highlighting the political careers of grandfathers Patrick Kennedy and Honey Fitz and father Joe’s skills as a moneymaker. Jackie defended her father-in-law “against charges that he runs his children’s careers. ‘You’d think he was a mastermind playing chess,’ says Jackie, ‘when actually he’s a nice old gentleman we see at Thanksgiving and Christmas.’”

  “The nice old gentleman” was delighted by the coverage, though, he joked, not particularly by Jackie’s quote. “TIME did a great job for Jack,” Kennedy wrote Luce, “but that ‘nice old gentleman’ quote has resulted in Jackie’s being cut out of my will and I am having a talk with my lawyers about suing you for libel. The build-up in the FORTUNE article [which had listed Kennedy as one of the nation’s wealthiest men] was great but what good is all that money to a ‘nice old man.’”11

  Kennedy was lulled by the positive publicity into thinking that the path to his son’s nomination might not be as difficult as he had believed. “Strangely enough,” he wrote Count Galeazzi in September, “the religious issue isn’t nearly as bothersome at the minute as his age.” He and his son’s advisers had “decided now that Jack has addressed himself enough to the Catholic issue and unless pressed by a difficult question, will assume that from now on a Catholic can be elected. We’ll see how this works out.” To make sure the campaign was fully prepared, Kennedy enlisted Bishop John Wright, Cushing’s former secretary and now bishop of Worcester, Massachusetts, to help him get “a few articles written” for national magazines on the subject of how one could be a good Catholic and a good American at the same time.12