The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

  Everything seemed to be going well when, in December 1957, almost two years after Profiles in Courage was published, and seven months after it had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, Drew Pearson, interviewed on television by Mike Wallace, declared that he knew “for a fact” that Jack Kennedy had not written the book. The Kennedys got in touch at once with Washington insider and former White House counsel Clark Clifford, then in private practice. Clifford suggested that Jack Kennedy demand a retraction from ABC, the television station that had broadcast the Pearson interview. While the senator was in his office, Clifford recalled in his memoirs, “the telephone rang. It was Ambassador Kennedy. . . . I could hear the old man screaming at Jack. Very calmly, [Senator] Kennedy said, ‘I will let you talk to Clark, Father.’ . . . Before I could even say hello, Joe Kennedy said: ‘I want you to sue the bastards for fifty million dollars. Get it started right away. It’s dishonest and they know it. My boy wrote the book. This is a plot against us.’” Clifford explained that he and Jack had decided to ask instead for a retraction and that he was flying to New York at once to “sit down with the people at ABC. ‘Sit down with them, hell!’ he shouted into my ear. His son watched me with a faint air of amusement.” Kennedy demanded again that suits be filed at once against “ABC, Pearson, Wallace, and anyone else in sight.” This time, the decision on how to proceed was not his call, but his son’s, and Jack preferred to request a retraction. Clifford was able to persuade ABC officials that there was no basis for Pearson’s claim and a retraction was issued and read by a vice president at the beginning of the next Mike Wallace show. After the retraction, Kennedy indicated “that we had followed the right course—which was,” Clifford recalled, “as close as the old man ever came to an admission of error.”13

  —

  Kennedy had been much too optimistic in his belief that his son’s Catholicism was not going to be as big an issue as he had feared. In early January 1958, an organization known as POAU, Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, demanded that Catholic candidates for national office “take a definite stand for or against” on several issues, including state aid for parochial schools and the appointment of an American ambassador to the Vatican. Kennedy contacted Father John Cavanaugh, who suggested that Jack get in touch with three liberal Catholic theologians who, he believed, could help him answer questions such as those raised by the POAU.14

  Questions about Jack’s faith continued to be raised, even more so now that he appeared to be the front-runner for the nomination. In May 1958, Kennedy wrote Father Theodore Hesburgh, the Notre Dame president, about problems that were beginning “to arise” and requested that Father Cavanaugh, who was still attached to the university, be released from his responsibilities for “possibly a week or ten days in July and during the month of August [to] offer advice and suggestions on Jack’s campaign.” A master of the quid pro quo, he assured Hesburgh that it was “always possible, of course, that in these discussions with Father Cavanaugh, I might come up with some ideas that might be beneficial to Notre Dame and that would help pay my debt to you for the loan of his services.”15

  —

  Though the Catholic issue would be with him through nomination and election, Jack’s whirlwind campaigning was muting most other objections to his candidacy. Questions were still being raised, however, about the extent of his father’s influence over him, but these too appeared not to pose any major problem. In Boston, Palm Beach, New York, and Washington, he might be Joe Kennedy’s son; everywhere else he was Jack Kennedy, the young, dynamic, affable, and very handsome candidate from Massachusetts. To mute the criticism that he was in control of his son’s campaign, Kennedy stayed put that winter in Palm Beach and offered no interviews or comments on the activities of either of his sons. Still, he spent so much time on the phone with them that Rose felt obliged to warn Bobby “again to please not telephone to your father around 7:15 P.M., as we have dinner then and if he gets too excited before dinner, as he did the other night when he talked to you about the labor investigation, it is not very good for his little tummy. It is nothing to worry about, dearest Bobby. It is just a little help for the grandfather of eleven or maybe twelve.”16

  Despite the resurfacing questions about Jack’s faith, Kennedy was more than content with his son’s progress toward the nomination. “The lineup today,” Kennedy wrote Galeazzi in early February 1958, “is still Jack in front, with the runner-up at this time the Democratic leader of the Senate, Lyndon Johnson. He is from Texas and has had one coronary attack. Either, or both of these will probably be more hurtful than Jack’s being a Catholic.”17

  In February 1958, Kennedy began planning for Jack’s reelection campaign and asked Francis X. (“Frank”) Morrissey, his and Jack’s Boston assistant, to lease the apartment “which we had during the campaign in ’52. It was very handy and I would like to get into the same building again for two months, say for the day after Labor Day until the day after the election.” In April, already looking beyond November 1958, he inquired about buying a Convair airplane for Jack’s presidential campaign.18

  The money that Kennedy was spending on Jack’s campaigns—for reelection to the Senate in 1958 and the presidential nomination in 1960—did not go unnoticed. In March 1958, at the Gridiron dinner in Washington, an actor playing Jack Kennedy appeared onstage to sing “a tribute to his father”:

  I’ll have a ball and votes this fall

  Will crown this Bostonian lady

  Then I will run for the top-most gun—

  And I learned it all from Daddy

  Now some hob-nob with brother Bob

  The boy who drove old Dave Beck batty,

  But Bob will chime that it ain’t no crime

  For us to take our cue from daddy.

  Yes, I’ll do it just like daddy

  And I hope he will not be mad

  When I send the bill to daddy

  Da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da-dad!

  So don’t try to get this lady,

  Though your aim be perfectly swell

  For the bill belongs to daddy

  ’Cause my daddy, he pays it so well.

  Jack had learned early that the best way to parry such attacks was with humor, which was never in short supply among the Kennedys. When he took the stage to deliver his own remarks, he prefaced them by reading from a telegram he ostentatiously pulled from his pocket. It was, he said, from his father: “Dear Jack—Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary—I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”19

  The following year, after Jack’s victory in Massachusetts and another year of campaigning had set him further out front in the race for the Democratic nomination, the Gridiron dinner honored him again with a skit. He was introduced this time “as the first candidate to run for President on the ‘family plan.’” The plan was explained by a Joseph P. Kennedy impersonator to the tune of “All of Me.”

  All of us

  Why not take all of us

  Fabulous

  You can’t live without us

  My son Jack

  Heads the procession,

  Then comes Bob

  Groomed for succession. . . .

  I’ve got the dough

  You might as well know

  With one—

  You get all of us.20

  Jack Kennedy took the gibes about his father and his family with good nature, but when Eleanor Roosevelt in a December 1958 television interview criticized Joseph Kennedy by name for “spending oodles of money all over the country” and buying “a representative in every state by now” to advance his son’s presidential ambitions, Jack responded by letter, rebutting her charges and demanding that she provide evidence to back them up. Mrs. Roosevelt admitted that she had no such evidence but refused to issue any apology.21

  —

 
; Despite himself, Joseph P. Kennedy was, two and a half years before the election, already looking forward to the possibility that he might one day be the father of a United States president. As he wrote Galeazzi in April, he had met with Allen Dulles, who, he reported, “was very happy with [Christian Democrat leader Amintore] Fanfani and was doing something for him. . . . I think that if there is anything that you want me to do, you could let me know at once and I will contact him. He is very aware of the fact that Jack may be the next President and while he has always been very friendly to me, I think that he is more than ever anxious to please.”22

  Kennedy returned to Boston in the spring of 1958 to contribute what he could to Jack’s reelection campaign. Ted Kennedy and Steve Smith, Jean’s husband, were already in place. Steve, whom Jean had married two years earlier, was a Georgetown graduate and a talented businessman who had run his family’s transportation business in New York. He would quickly develop into a gifted political organizer. In 1958, he coordinated Jack’s schedule in Boston. Ted was nominally in charge of the office, but when problems or controversies arose that could not be settled within the campaign staff, he called “dad up from the Cape.” As in 1952, Kennedy concentrated his attention on Jack’s print, radio, and television ads. He relentlessly pushed John Dowd, the advertising man, to come up with a new campaign slogan. Dowd would “write out a slogan and hand it to Dad, and Dad would look at it and say, ‘No, that doesn’t work, Dowd. That’s not good. You can do better than that. That’s not good.’ And Dad went across the street to Bailey’s restaurant and had his lunch, a chocolate soda. That’s all he’d eat. He loved ice cream, but he didn’t want to gain weight, so he had just this one chocolate soda.” He returned after lunch and kept pushing at Dowd, no doubt in stronger language than Ted reported, until he got it right.23

  Kennedy’s greatest concern in 1958 was that Jack was going to campaign himself into an early grave. Even Lyndon Johnson, in his condescending way, had written Kennedy in late March that Jack was “working too hard. Make him take it easier.” When he was presented with the schedule that Larry O’Brien and Kenny O’Donnell had drawn up for Jack, Kennedy exploded. “It’s crazy. . . . You’re going to kill him. You don’t have to run him all over the state, just put him on television. . . . O’Brien, you’ll wind up with a dead candidate on your hands and you’ll be responsible. This schedule is ridiculous and I’m completely opposed to it.” Jack, with his father in the room, agreed that the schedule was “rugged” and asked that it be retooled to give him “some time off. Dad’s got a valid point about my health.” After his first full day of campaigning, as he, O’Donnell, and O’Brien prepared to meet with his father at his apartment in Boston, the senator cautioned them not to argue anymore about the schedule. “Just ride with it. Your point is valid, but just don’t make it.” A compromise was reached. Jack would tour the state, but time would be set aside “every day for a quiet and quite leisurely lunch, because Ambassador Kennedy insisted upon it. ‘You’ve got to see to it that he eats,’” he had warned O’Donnell and O’Brien. To make sure that his rules were being followed, Kennedy had Frank Morrissey, who ostensibly worked for the senator, call him daily with news of his son’s health.24

  As Hyannis Port, filled again with children, spouses, and grandchildren, was more chaotic than ever that spring, Kennedy altered his usual routine and spent the last weeks of June and July on the north shore of Lake Tahoe at the Cal-Neva Lodge, so named because it sat on the border straddling the two states. The principal owner of the lodge, at the time Kennedy stayed there, was “Wingy” (or “Wingie”), the nickname cruelly given Bert Grober, the shriveled-arm gambler and owner of the Park Avenue Steak House in Miami. The Cal-Neva, or “Wingy’s place,” as Kennedy would refer to it, was a first-class resort that had everything Kennedy required. It was on the water, as was every house Kennedy had lived in since he was a child in East Boston; the rooms were large and the dining superb; there were trails for horseback riding, a bay and pools for swimming, a fine golf course, a casino, which Kennedy did not patronize, and attractive, available women in no short supply. As an added bonus, Lake Tahoe was a short flight from Los Angeles, where Pat and her family now lived and where Kennedy was in negotiations over a new foundation project.25

  There was nothing very remarkable about Kennedy’s summers at the Cal-Neva—he would return the next year as well. Only in the middle 1970s, as journalists, historians, and conspiracy hunters looked high and low for clues to tie John F. Kennedy’s assassination to organized crime, would attention be paid to his father’s stays at Cal-Neva and the “gang” connections he supposedly made, renewed, and exploited there. Joe Kennedy did not go out of his way to avoid the presence of unsavory characters, nor did he stay away from the places they frequented: Cal-Neva, Hialeah, and nightclubs and restaurants in New York, Chicago, Miami, and Palm Beach. But neither did he seek their company.

  He had disposed of his liquor import business and his stake in Hialeah because he did not want his children to be tarnished with the stereotypes he had so scrupulously avoided all his life. He had lived his life and made and kept his millions by carefully evaluating risk/reward ratios and avoiding any and all unnecessary dangers, in business and politics. It would have been extraordinarily reckless—and he was not a reckless man—for him to do business with or consort with known mobsters, especially as they had nothing to offer him he could not obtain elsewhere. He had more than enough money to finance his son’s presidential campaign and ties with big-city Democratic bosses across the country, including Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago, whom Shriver had cultivated on behalf of the family.

  —

  Jack easily won reelection to the Senate in November 1958 with nearly three quarters of the votes cast in his favor. His oversize victory, on the heels of a successful two-year speaking campaign across the country, cemented his position as the front-runner for the presidential nomination. Time magazine devoted its November 24, 1958, cover story to the “Democratic hopefuls.” The cover illustration had Jack Kennedy seated comfortably in the center of the group, with Governors Robert Meyner of New Jersey and Pat Brown of California seated on either side, and Hubert Humphrey, Stuart Symington, and Lyndon Johnson standing behind him. “Jack Kennedy is the early-season Democratic favorite by general agreement. Says an aide to Michigan’s hopeful ‘Soapy’ Williams: ‘If the convention were held today, Kennedy would win on the first ballot, period.’” The remaining dangers to the Kennedy candidacy, the article reminded its readers, were the perception that his father was trying to buy the election and, more critically, his “Catholicism [which] could still be held against him when kingmakers are looking for winners at convention time.”

  Five weeks later, on January 1, 1959, James Reston took up this issue in his New York Times column, declaring that “the political implications of nominating a Roman Catholic for the Presidency are now coming increasingly to the fore in the Capital.” Reston predicted, rightly, that the “religious issue” would, as the campaign swung into higher gear, “be debated more and more. And in the process Kennedy is likely to become, not just another candidate, but a symbol and center of political and religious controversy.”

  The scenario that Joseph Kennedy had so feared was unfolding before him and there was no way to escape it. Here he was, in 1959, at seventy years of age, after a lifetime spent on the quintessential American journey from outsider to insiders, suddenly and unexpectedly thrust back in time. His son had gone to Choate and Harvard, nearly lost his life in military service, written two books, won a Pulitzer Prize, been elected to national office five times, served thirteen years in Washington, and emerged as the front-runner in the race for the Democratic nomination—yet he was now identified not as the best-qualified candidate, but as the “Catholic” candidate. And he would have to run his campaign as such.

  Father and son and Jack’s senior campaign advisers were agreed that they had no choice but to confront the “Cat
holic issue” and head it off eighteen months before the nominating convention convened. The senator sat for an interview with Fletcher Knebel for a Look magazine article, “Democratic Forecast: A Catholic in 1960,” and defended himself from charges that he was under the control of his church by reminding Knebel that he “had opposed a number of positions taken by Catholic organizations and members of the hierarchy . . . attended non-Catholic schools, from the elementary grades to Harvard,” and, contrary to the church leadership, “favored aid to Yugoslavia, aid to Communist satellite states and the naming of Dr. James B. Conant [an outspoken critic of parochial schools] as our first ambassador to West Germany.” He then answered the questions that the POAU had asked fifteen months earlier. “In a capsule,” Knebel concluded, “his theme is that religion is personal, politics are public, and the twain need never meet and conflict.”26

  Jack Kennedy’s attempt at candor and at redefining his religion as a private matter backfired badly. His explanations not only did not mollify Protestants who feared that, as a Catholic, he was less of an American, but they incurred the almost universal wrath of Catholic columnists and editorial writers. “I don’t think you can exaggerate the reaction to that Look article, in the Catholic press, particularly,” recalled John Cogley, a former editor of the Catholic magazine Commonweal, who would later became a campaign adviser, “because it was the first public reaction to Kennedy and it was a very negative and a very naïve reaction and, I thought a very politically unsophisticated reaction.”27