The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

  Three weeks after the election, he invited Dorothy Schiff, publisher of the New York Post, to dinner to thank her for her support of Jack’s candidacy. Schiff “found Joe quite changed. He looks his age,” she noted after their dinner, “although he has retained his figure. He seemed depressed and nervous. . . . Joe asked me if I would like a drink and I ordered my usual. He ordered tomato juice and didn’t drink a drop, which wasn’t much fun for me. I don’t know whether he never drinks or whether he was on guard. He ate sparingly and after dinner, instead of coffee, he had hot water with sliced lemon. . . . I realized that Joe is a worrier. I tried to get him to talk about his business interests. He said he didn’t care any more about making money or making women.” He had that afternoon, he told Schiff, been visited by the “top steel people [who] had expressed their concern [about] Jack’s changing the oil depletion allowance. . . . He said he told them that if they tried to destroy Jack in the next four years they would have nothing—the country would also be destroyed. He repeated this several times. He said the economic situation was terrible and if Jack didn’t receive cooperation, all would be lost. . . . He talked about the national debt and seemed very worried about it. . . . He talked about his concern about what would happen after January 20th—what if Mr. K. decided to recognize East Germany.”17

  If, in the past, the father’s confidence had buoyed the children’s, the converse was now the case. His children’s full-throttled belief in their ability to control their futures restored his own faith. “Jack will be faced in the future with a horrible situation,” he wrote his friend Galeazzi two weeks after his dinner with Schiff. “The Laos problem is in an awful state. The Cuban situation couldn’t be any worse. There is an undercurrent of unrest among the Western Allies and Africa is in bad shape. In the United States business is bad and there are many, many problems to be faced. Jack himself recognizes all these problems and just seems to feel that something can be done about them all. . . . I am worried but hopeful.”18

  To Hugh Sidey, a faithful family supporter to whom he granted an interview in December, Kennedy confessed the strange mixed emotions that were running through his mind as he awaited his son’s inauguration. “Just after his son was elected President,” Sidey reported, “Joseph P. Kennedy got a call from a friend asking how it felt. ‘Hell, I don’t know how it feels,’ he said. ‘Of course I’m proud, but I don’t feel any different. I don’t know how I feel.’ It was not until a few weeks later that the difference began to sink in. ‘Jack doesn’t belong anymore to just a family. . . . He belongs to the country. That’s probably the saddest thing about all this. The family can be there, but there is not much they can do for the President of the United States.’”19

  —

  Joseph Kennedy could afford the luxury of nursing his grudges. His son could not. Kennedy urged him to reach out to his opponents and asked George Smathers to set up a meeting with Billy Graham in Palm Beach.

  Graham, on arriving at the Palm Beach house in mid-January, was greeted by the president-elect. “My father’s out by the pool. He wants to talk to you.” At poolside, the two shook hands, then Kennedy, Graham recalled in his autobiography, “came straight to the point: ‘Do you know why you’re here?’” Kennedy told the evangelist (and Nixon supporter) that he and Father Cavanaugh had been in Stuttgart, Germany, when Graham lectured through an interpreter to an audience of sixty thousand. “‘When we visited the pope three days later, we told him about it. He said he wished he had a dozen such evangelists in our church. When Jack was elected, I told him that one of the first things he should do was to get acquainted with you. I told him you could be a great asset to the country, helping heal the division over the religious problem in the campaign.’”

  That afternoon, after a round of golf with the president-elect, Graham was reluctantly corralled into an impromptu press conference and did just as Kennedy had hoped: he told the press that he didn’t “think that Mr. Kennedy’s being a Catholic should be held against him by any Protestant. . . . They should judge him on his ability and his character. We should trust and support our new President.”20

  —

  Kennedy left Hyannis Port for Palm Beach immediately after election day. His son, who had decided to make the Palm Beach house his headquarters, followed soon afterward.

  Rose had spent a lifetime complaining with a smile on her face about her children’s habit of bringing home flocks of friends who would track sand into the house. But never before had any of their many residences been as crowded and chaotic as the house on North Ocean Boulevard would be that holiday season. Jack brought with him his valet and secretary; Jackie, who arrived in early December after the birth of John Kennedy, Jr., brought a children’s nurse, a maid, a private secretary, and a press secretary. The beach house was overflowing with “cooks, maids, gardeners, pool men, chauffeurs, hairdressers, and barbers commuting or living in the servants’ wing,” Thurston Clarke has written. “Add to this cast of characters politicians and dignitaries flowing through the house at all hours, Secret Service agents patrolling the grounds, and reporters camped outside the gate, and you have the ingredients of a Preston Sturges or Kaufman and Hart screwball comedy, in which several generations of an eccentric family trip over one another in a creaky mansion where the phones never stop ringing, doors never cease slamming, typewriters clack around the clock, doorbells sound perpetually, and guests never stop arriving and departing.”21

  Kennedy did not seem to mind at all. He had his own bedroom on the top floor, his own servants, chauffeurs, chefs, a gorgeous secretary, and an even more gorgeous masseuse. Despite the hubbub, he stuck to his regular routines: mornings in his bullpen, nude and smeared with coconut oil, swims in the ocean and the pool, a daily round of golf, sometimes with the president-elect. He did not sit in on any of the meetings his son held with staff, advisers, and potential cabinet appointees.

  The only cabinet post he had any interest in was attorney general, which he insisted go to Bobby. The president-elect, Bobby later told Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., offered him the position “immediately after the election,” but he turned it down. “I said I didn’t want to be Attorney General,” he later confided in an oral history. “In the first place, I thought nepotism was a problem. Secondly, I had been chasing bad men for three years and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing that.” After Bobby said no, the position was offered to Connecticut governor Abe Ribicoff, one of Jack’s earliest supporters, who also declined. On Thanksgiving, after Bobby returned to Palm Beach from a brief Acapulco vacation, Jack asked him again and he again said no.

  Joseph Kennedy refused to budge. His sons listened as he explained why Jack needed someone in the cabinet in whom he had complete and absolute trust. The Kennedys would always be outsiders, unable to fully trust anyone but family members. Jack needed all the protection he could get; only Bobby was going to put his welfare first.

  The president-elect was uneasy about pressuring Bobby anymore and concerned, as Bobby was, about the nepotism issue. He decided to offer Bobby the number two position at the Defense Department and asked Clark Clifford, who was running his transition team, to go to New York to explain to Kennedy, who had flown there after visiting Jackie and his new grandson in the hospital, why Bobby should not be named attorney general. Clifford agreed, though he thought it rather odd that the president-elect had asked “a third party to try to talk to his father about his brother.” Clifford met Kennedy at Kennedy’s apartment and presented his carefully rehearsed case against the appointment. “I was pleased with my presentation; it was, I thought, persuasive. When I had finished, Kennedy said, ‘Thank you very much, Clark. I am so glad to have heard your views.’ Then, pausing a moment, he said, ‘I do want to leave you with one thought, however—one firm thought.’ He paused again, and looked me straight in the eye. ‘Bobby is going to be Attorney General. All of us have worked our tails off for Jack, and now that we have succeeded I am goin
g to see to it that Bobby gets the same chance that we gave to Jack.’ I would always,” Clifford recalled years later, “remember the intense but matter-of-fact tone with which he had spoken—there was no rancor, no anger, no challenge.” The father had spoken, and his sons, on this issue at least, were expected to obey.22

  Jack was the first to come around. He did not want to disappoint his father, and just as important, past experiences had proven to him that more often than not Joseph P. Kennedy knew what he was talking about. The initial criticism of his choice of his brother as attorney general would be brutal, he knew, but it would subside. He had, he told Bobby, assembled a sterling cabinet, but most of them, including Robert McNamara as secretary of defense and Dean Rusk as secretary of state, were strangers. He repeated now to his brother—as his father had to him—that he needed someone in the cabinet whom he could trust to tell him the truth at all times.

  Bobby might have been able to withstand pressure from his father or from his brother, but the two together were too much for him. In mid-December, he accepted the position of attorney general.

  —

  Though Kennedy made only this one demand on his son, he encouraged his daughter Eunice to add one more. Eunice had spent much of November recuperating from an operation in a Boston hospital, for what, we do not know. While there, she read the annual report to Congress of the Mental Health Association and was dismayed to find no significant mention of “mental retardation.” She called Dr. Robert Cooke of Johns Hopkins, one of the Kennedy foundation’s key consultants, and suggested that the foundation take up the slack and sponsor its own national conference on mental retardation. Her next call was to her father, to whom she repeated her idea for a national conference, sponsored by the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation. “‘Just lie down and get well, for God’s sake,’ he replied, ‘and when you come to Florida, we’ll discuss it again and see what turns up.’” Eunice, persistent as ever, raised the subject again in Palm Beach. Her father listened carefully, then suggested that the two of them go upstairs and talk to Jack. “This movement needs the federal government behind it. The President can give it the prestige and momentum we can’t give it if we work for 100 years and had 100 times as much money to put into the field.”23

  Kennedy suggested that his son follow the Hoover Commission model and establish a presidential commission on mental retardation. When the commission had delivered its recommendations, he could ask Congress for legislation and funding to implement them. Eunice and Dr. Cooke contacted ex-president Herbert Hoover to solicit his advice on “what sort of an organizational structure was needed to have a commission like this.”24

  The president-elect supported the plan, asked Myer Feldman, who would become special deputy counsel in the White House, to work with Eunice, and suggested that she ask Dr. Howard Rusk to recommend a panel chairman. Nine months later, on October 11, 1961, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy announced that he was creating a presidential panel on mental retardation in a statement so strong that it landed on the front page of the New York Times. There were, the president declared, approximately five million mentally retarded persons in the country. Mental retardation “disables ten times as many as diabetes, twenty times as many as tuberculosis, twenty-five times as many as muscular dystrophy and 600 times as many as infantile paralysis. . . . Our goal should be to prevent retardation. . . . Failing this, we must provide for the retarded the same opportunity for full social development that is the birthright of every American child.”25

  —

  The inauguration of the thirty-fifth president—the youngest ever to be elected—was scheduled for January 20, 1961. Three days before, Joseph P. Kennedy took a commercial flight to Washington and moved into the house on P Street that he had rented for the week. On his arrival, he made it clear to his friends in the press and to Jack’s staff that he didn’t “want to have any calls from anybody.” Instead, he spent the next “three days in the Senator’s office in the Old Senate Office Building, doing the same kind of work I did when I was fifteen years old—sorting out letters and answering telephones.” Invited by several of his friends in the press to a dinner for his son, he procrastinated, then declined. “While it seems silly for me not to have it over and say I would love to come, I just still haven’t got used to going to dinners where my son is. Perhaps after another six months I will become calmer about it. But since I haven’t attended one in my life while he has been in public office, I find it hard now to start.”26

  Until the Kennedys arrived in Washington, America had for the most part kept its entertainment, political, and intellectual elites carefully compartmentalized. This would all change, and rather dramatically, in January 1961. The mixing and matching of elites was noticed first at a dinner that Jean and Steve Smith gave at their Georgetown home on January 17 for family members, friends, and some of the entertainers Frank Sinatra had brought with him for the pre-inaugural gala at the National Armory.

  It was the father who had introduced the Kennedys to Hollywood and vice versa, but it was his children—Pat, who married Peter Lawford; Jack, who had wined and dined and dated his way through Hollywood as a young man; and the rest of them—who built the bridges between the entertainment and political worlds that would stand for the next fifty years and more. And it was Jack who added to this mixture the intellectuals: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Frost, and Norman Mailer.

  The gala, the ostensible purpose of which was to raise enough money at $100 a ticket to retire the Democratic Party debt, was scheduled for nine P.M., the night before the inauguration. The snow had started falling at noon, become a near blizzard by four P.M., and paralyzed a city not known for its skill in handling poor weather. After a concert of classical music at Constitution Hall that started late, Kennedy and Rose, with Ted and Joan in their limousine, drove to the National Armory for the gala, which had been held up because neither entertainers nor audience could get there on time.

  Never before (or since, perhaps) have the stars of Hollywood, Broadway, the London stage, television, and the recording industry come together for a night like this one. Joseph Kennedy, ever alert to the possibilities of combining entertainment and politics, had arranged for the gala to be filmed and for the rights to belong to him exclusively. Frank Sinatra was the star, but he had brought with him Harry Belafonte, Milton Berle, Leonard Bernstein, Nat King Cole, Tony Curtis, Bette Davis, Jimmy Durante, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson, Gene Kelly, Janet Leigh, Fredric March, Shirley MacLaine, Ethel Merman, Laurence Olivier, Sidney Poitier, Juliet Prowse, Anthony Quinn, and many others. The only one missing from the extended Sinatra entourage was Sammy Davis, Jr., who had been subject to the vilest whispers, jokes, and hate mail since he had announced his engagement to the beautiful blond Swedish actress May Britt. The decision to exclude him would wrongly be blamed on Joe Kennedy, but not by Davis Jr., who insisted in his autobiographies that it had been made by the president-elect.27

  The gala began late and went on until after one thirty in the morning, when the president-elect concluded it with a short speech, thanking Sinatra and “the happy relationship between the arts and politics which has characterized our long history [and] reached culmination tonight.” Rose and Jackie had gone home long before and missed the dinner and party at Paul Young’s restaurant, planned and paid for by Joseph Kennedy and scheduled for midnight. The party did not begin until two A.M. or so when the guests arrived from the gala to dance to the music of Lester Lanin’s band and eat “a buffet of high-WASP food such as Lobster Newburg and Strawberries Romanoff.” Jack’s friend “Red” Fay, who had somehow ended up escorting Angie Dickinson, recalled in his memoirs being “greeted by Mr. Kennedy, who barked with no intent to bite, ‘Wait until I tell your wife how you are conducting yourself.’ Then, without missing a comma, he turned to Angie, ‘How are you, dear? You look lovely. Why are you wasting your time with a bum like this fellow?’ With a friendly wave he sent u
s into the room so as to greet the next guests.”

  It had indeed been a glorious party. Even the president-elect was impressed. Early that morning, as the dinner was coming to an end, he motioned “Red” Fay to join him in the “pantry just off the kitchen. Out of earshot of the others, he said with emphasis, ‘Have you ever seen so many attractive people in one room? I’ll tell you Dad knows how to give a party.’” The Washington Post reported the next day that when the dinner finally broke up at about four A.M., Joe Kennedy told his departing guests, ‘Just wait until you see the party we throw four years from now.’”28

  The morning of the inauguration, it was so cold that the snow that had fallen the day before had hardened into ice. Rose woke early and went to Mass, where she saw her son but didn’t join him in his pew. The dignitaries who had been assigned seats on the Capitol steps were supposed to be in them by eleven A.M. Kennedy, Rose, Ted, his wife, Joan, and cousin Ann Gargan were dressed and ready to go early enough, but the snow- and ice-covered streets and sidewalks made getting anywhere near impossible. “As our driver tried to pull out of his parking place,” Ted recalled in his autobiography, “we heard nothing but the sound of the engine and the whirring of the tires as they spun around and around. . . . None of us was happy, but my father was furious. ‘Hurry up. We’re going to be late,’ he shouted. But we were stuck. Finally, my father decided to take things into his own hands. I can still see him getting out of the car in his full dress clothes, shouting and gesturing at the driver and directing him on how to turn the wheel, how to back up, move forward, while Dad finally just pushed the car, providing the necessary muscle to power the vehicle out of the parking spot. It was classic Joe Kennedy: take charge and do it right, even if it means having to do it yourself. We made it to the inauguration.”29

  Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy were seated at the far end of the first row, which displeased Rose enormously, as they “were left out of everything except the panoramic pictures.” Cardinal Cushing began the ceremonies with an endless invocation, enlivened only when smoke caused by an electrical fire rose from the lectern. After Cushing was finished—and the fire extinguished—Marian Anderson sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Sam Rayburn administered the oath of office to Lyndon Johnson, Robert Frost stumbled through a poem, and Chief Justice Earl Warren administered the oath of office to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who, after shaking hands with Richard Nixon, delivered his inaugural address.