Bobby Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  Bobby’s friends were even less impressed with their host and let him know it. “Helping themselves to his alcohol, testing his cigars and pulling out books, all without being asked or invited to.” O’Donnell was replaying the scene in his memory. “None of us liked him because of what he had done in the war, and he had to know that by the way he was being treated. I don’t think he was used to that . . . certainly not in his own home.”

  The one person most appreciating these two worlds colliding was Bobby. He understood only too well what he was watching. And he savored it. Joseph Kennedy had wanted his third son to toughen up. Well, look at him now . . . the boy his father had called a “runt” was showing him who he’d become.

  “I remember being kind of disgusted because at that party his father presented him with an enormous check for keeping the pledge,” O’Donnell recalled, which was not to drink or smoke until he reached twenty-one. It was a promise neither of his older brothers had succeeded in keeping. “I thought it was fairly disgusting if that’s the best your father can do is write you a check as opposed to spending time with you. But, again, I realized Bobby had a fairly tough relationship with the old man.”

  There was one person Bobby most wanted Ken to get to know. “We arrived earlier than the others because Bobby wanted me to meet Jack.” Meeting the newly elected congressman in person came as a surprise to O’Donnell. He spotted in Jack a quality he hadn’t before. It was mutual. “Jack seemed quite astonished that this rough, tough crowd were not only Bobby’s friends but that Bobby fit in with us so well.” The older brother quickly became the center of the party.

  Jack Kennedy had won the general election that November with 73 percent of the vote. That same night, two other war veterans were among the many who won seats in Congress in that first postwar election: Richard Nixon, a California Republican who’d been a navy officer, and the new senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, a marine. The latter boasted that he possessed the electoral advantage of being “a Republican with a Democratic name.”

  • • •

  Bobby Kennedy began his senior year by scoring a touchdown in Harvard’s 52–0 opening-game trouncing of Western Maryland College. Days later, he appeared to be out for the season, with a broken leg. Valiantly, he’d tried to continue playing until it became obvious he couldn’t.

  As a salute to his guts, Coach Harlow ended up putting him in, despite his condition, in the final game, against Yale. Because of that gesture, Bobby reached the goal on which he’d set his heart. “He had a broken leg; he had a cast on his leg,” his future wife, Ethel, later looked back admiringly at her Bobby. “He really wanted to get his letter.”

  By season’s end, Bobby was not only hanging out with the hardened jocks, he was one of them. No longer the sensitive soul of his altar boy days, he’d earned his father’s respect—but at a price.

  Bobby and Ethel on their wedding day, June 17, 1950.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  COMMITMENT

  “For anyone to achieve something, he will have to show a little courage.”

  —ETHEL KENNEDY

  World War II, which began for Europe in 1939 and for the United States two years later, came to its final awful end by late summer 1945. But the state of euphoria felt by the victors after the long conflict soon started its retreat.

  Three months before V-E Day, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met in Yalta, a resort city on the Black Sea, to plan the landscape of postwar Europe. Stalin had insisted on holding on to military and political control of the countries of Eastern Europe—above all, Poland—as a buffer against possible German aggression. What Americans at the time would remember is that the Soviet dictator soon reneged on his promises of “democratic institutions” and free elections “responsive to the will of the people” in all these lands. It was obvious that, whatever he’d agreed to across the conference table, his word could not be trusted.

  President Truman, alert to Stalin’s westward ambitions, now signaled the U.S. resolve to restrain them. Henceforth, America’s policy would no longer be détente with Russia but containment. The Cold War had begun.

  The spring of 1947, as Bobby was finishing his junior year, had seen the early stirrings of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. Coinciding with this historic shift in American foreign policy, two newcomers to Washington—freshmen members of Congress, a Republican and a Democrat—found themselves one April night traveling in the same train compartment. One, the Democrat, was Bobby’s brother Jack. He and the Republican, Dick Nixon, both serving on the House Education and Labor Committee, had been invited to western Pennsylvania by fellow congressman Frank Buchanan for what would be their first public debate. Returning to D.C. at the end of the evening on a sleeper, Jack Kennedy and Dick Nixon spent hours lying in their berths, debating the emerging conflict with Russia.

  That conflict would come to an early reckoning in late June of 1948 when the Russians cut off ground access to Berlin, a city entirely surrounded by Soviet-occupied East Germany. The United States and Britain both responded by sending in planes to provide the marooned population of West Berlin with food and necessary provisions. The Berlin “Airlift” would continue for almost a year.

  • • •

  Two tragedies—the arranged “disappearance” of Rosemary in 1941 and the death of Joe Jr. three years later in 1944—had reduced from eight to six the number of Bobby Kennedy’s siblings. Bobby’s family, essential to who he was, had begun to fall around him. In the summer of 1947, it was his brother Jack whose life was on the line. Taken seriously ill in London, he was discovered to have Addison’s disease, a chronic disorder of the adrenal glands. The attending physician wondered if Kennedy would even live out the year. Arriving back in New York, he was given the last rites of the Catholic Church.

  Then, in May of 1948, came tragedy. His sister Kick—christened Kathleen—was taken from them. Five and a half years older than he, she’d been 1938’s “debutante of the year” when presented at court in London during her father’s ambassadorship. She’d been the high-spirited American girl, a third of the sought-after “Golden Trio,” as they were dubbed, along with her dashing, charming brothers Joe Jr. and Jack.

  Then, in 1944, while working for the Red Cross in London, she married—it was a civil ceremony with only her brother Joe in attendance—a titled Protestant whom she’d met when she first came to the country. It was against her family’s wishes then; four months later, her husband, William “Billy” Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington, was killed in action in Belgium. It came a month after the death of Joe Jr.

  In 1948, she herself would perish in a plane crash over the South of France. A grieving Bobby made his way to London. While there, he saw the long-running West End comedy The Chiltern Hundreds, in which one of the characters is an American millionaire’s daughter who captures the heart of an Englishman like Hartington. Infatuated with the actress, he began taking her out, with the relationship growing serious enough for him to bring her along for a visit to his sister’s gravesite at Chatsworth, Billy’s ancestral estate. The relationship wouldn’t survive Bobby’s return home, his father’s disapproval, most of all his growing commitment to another.

  By the fall of that year, it was time for the first presidential election since the end of the war. Running against Truman was a strong challenger, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, the favorite to win and end the Democrats’ lengthy hold on the White House. But what happened next was a stunning upset.

  Truman won his come-from-behind victory that November thanks to an extraordinary Democratic sweep in the Midwest farm belt. Minnesota’s young Eugene McCarthy, who’d defeated the left-wing faction in the primary, won election to Congress. A former Benedictine seminarian running as an anti-Communist liberal, he had won the party primary over a “popular front” Democrat. He was described in the press as “the new type of Catholic politician, the intelligent Catholic whose judgments and acts stem from a consistent
social philosophy based on the natural law and who is working for the right ordering of society for the good of everyone.” For McCarthy and other Catholic progressives, New Deal–style social justice and anti-Communism worked hand in hand.

  The Cold War was only getting icier and more dangerous. Bobby Kennedy, deciding he had graduated from Harvard “without knowing anything” and rejecting the alternative of business school, was starting his first year of law school at the University of Virginia. Like many of his fellow Catholics, he took the view that Roosevelt’s agreements with Stalin had been betrayals of American values. He believed a failing FDR had been taken in by his wartime ally’s assurances, throwing the small defenseless countries of Eastern Europe to the mercy of Soviet commissars. For him, the Catholic Church would stand now as the lone reliable bulwark against the advancing menace.

  Bobby became especially vehement when he read reports of Hungary’s Communist government arresting the staunchly anti-Nazi and also anti-Communist Cardinal József Mindszenty on the day after Christmas, 1948. Driven by outrage, he put together a denunciation of the cardinal’s imprisonment and torture to run in a Boston Sunday paper. America should demand, he argued, that Mindszenty be released.

  “We can look back over the last four or five years,” he wrote, broadening the argument, “and see the colossal mistakes that we have made. . . . Every day someone is heard to say, ‘How could anyone be so stupid as to act like that? Yalta, Potsdam, how ignominious!’  ” His call to arms concluded: “Here is a great opportunity for forceful action. . . . Let us not now once again grovel in uncertainty. LET US NOT FAIL.”

  His global anti-Communism would be rivaled by a more personal passion. He was seeing Ethel Skakel regularly, and with deepening interest. But he soon faced a daunting adversary. The one who held his heart was tempted to become a nun. For such a devout Catholic girl, educated by Sacred Heart sisters, the call of such a vocation was not only common but received by many Catholic families as a blessing. That didn’t make it less tragic for her boyfriend. “How can I fight God?” he asked a pal. Fortunately for Bobby, she chose him.

  Bobby was now in his second year at UVA Law. By now the sense of confidence America had gained by winning the war, its assumptions of invincibility wrought by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were turning to a public nervousness. The danger that had loomed so recently from Berlin and Tokyo now arose from Moscow. At the end of September 1949, shocking America and the world as well, President Truman announced that the Soviet Union had exploded an atom bomb. In just four years from V-J Day, America’s nuclear monopoly was no more.

  The Cold War news continued to be disquieting. On October 1 the revolutionary leader Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, his Red Army in total control of the Chinese mainland. China, our heroic, long-suffering ally in World War II, had been taken over by the Communists.

  Jack Kennedy was among those now blaming the Communist victory on the Truman administration. “The responsibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State. So concerned were our diplomats with the imperfection of the democratic system of China after twenty years of war and the tales of corruption in high places that they lost sight of our tremendous stake in a non-Communist China.”

  That January, during the law school’s winter break, Ethel and Bobby celebrated their engagement at a party hosted by the bride’s parents in Greenwich, Connecticut. Before returning to Charlottesville, they headed off to ski at Sun Valley.

  Meanwhile, public concern over the Communist threat began to center on the home front. In January, a New York jury convicted American diplomat Alger Hiss—a Harvard Law graduate and protégé of Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter—in his second trial for perjury. A prince of the American liberal establishment—Hiss had served as executive secretary at the UN founding conference in San Francisco—he had denied under oath passing government documents to Moscow. The jury, and much of the country, was now convinced otherwise. Richard Nixon, the congressman who’d brought forth convincing evidence against the prominent diplomat, seized upon the jury’s verdict as evidence of a far broader, ominous danger.

  On the Senate floor, Nixon railed against FDR and Truman both: “The conspiracy would have come to light long since had there not been a definite effort on the part of certain high-level officials in two administrations to keep the public from knowing the facts.” Continuing, he declared that “the great lesson to be learned from the Hiss case is that we are not just dealing with espionage agents who get thirty pieces of silver to obtain the blueprint of a new weapon . . . but a far more sinister type of activity, because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy.”

  Taking his cue from Nixon’s words, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy now exploited the country’s fears of subversion at the top. McCarthy had won his seat three years earlier, earning over 61 percent of the vote by tagging his Democratic opponent as “communistically inclined.” He now went national with his claims.

  Soon after Nixon’s speech, at the beginning of February 1950, the little-known McCarthy was booked to address a GOP women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia. There, spurred by the bold insinuations of the California Republican and appropriating chunks of Nixon’s own language, the Wisconsinite claimed to know the names of 205 Communists holding jobs in the Department of State. Pacing the stage, he singled out as the “most traitorous” those “bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths” and denounced the “whole sorry mess of twisted, warped thinkers [who needed to be] swept from the national scene.”

  “Today we are engaged,” he declared, “in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time, and ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down—they are truly down.”

  For McCarthy, the Wheeling speech, the first stop on what was scheduled as a routine Republican Party speaking tour, became a galvanic event: it was as if he’d shot himself out of a cannon. Yet McCarthy would continue to juggle the number of “loyalty risks”—205 one minute, 57 the next, 81 another—and reveled in making exorbitant claims of the present danger.

  In fact, the official assessment of the Communist danger was dire enough. The National Security Council report No. 68—or NSC-68, as it became known—was overseen by a distinguished study group, whose members included Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen, a diplomat of considerable Russian experience. Presented to President Truman in April and labeled “Top Secret,” it would not be declassified for a quarter century. Among its conclusions: “The Soviet Union is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world. With the development of increasingly terrifying weapons of mass destruction, every individual faces the ever-present possibility of . . . destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself.”

  NSC-68, which warned of the Soviet plan for “complete subversion” of Western governments, soon became the underlying philosophical rationale for the Cold War as waged by the United States.

  That June, Bobby Kennedy married Ethel Skakel at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenwich, Connecticut. Congressman Kennedy was his brother’s best man, the eighteen-year-old Teddy one of the ushers. For his part, Jack professed himself in awe of his brother’s willingness to make such a lifetime commitment to another human being.

  Over twelve hundred guests were invited to the ceremony, and more than that attended. Afterward, the newlyweds set off on a trip to Hawaii where, as they were enjoying its waters, a startling incident occurred. Already a distance into the ocean themselves, they suddenly heard a voice shouting for help. As Ethel described it, “Bobby turned and saw the person in trouble. He swam out—it was a long way—got him and brought him back.” The swift action exhibited by her new husband made for a lasting memory of his courage, quick-wittedness, and obliv
iousness to danger when someone needed help.

  Leaving Hawaii, the newlyweds returned to the mainland where they made a leisurely road trip east across America to Charlottesville. Bobby would now complete his final law school year at the same time as he and Ethel began their married life.

  One week after the Kennedy wedding, the United States found itself at war in Korea. Occupied by Japan for most of the century, since V-J Day the country was now divided between a Soviet-allied North and a pro-Western South along the 38th Parallel. On June 25, without warning, Northern forces—ninety thousand of them—swept across the border. Within hours, news reports cited attacks all along the 38th Parallel, and within four days Seoul had been taken. At the United Nations in New York, the Security Council voted to come to South Korea’s assistance, with the United States to provide the main military force. The Soviet Union hadn’t been present at the voting, thus forfeiting their chance to veto the action. For the first time since World War II, American men were called back to the battlefield, this time against the Communists.

  Our GIs were once more on the battlefield, this time feeling a sense of betrayal. In the minds of the soldiers, as well as their families waiting for them, there were questions. Why did a nation that had vanquished both Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan now find itself slogging its way up a country that, two months before, most fighting men had never heard of? Why had we fought a world war to protect Czechoslovakia and Poland only to see them become Soviet satellites? And why did we “lose” China? Most terrifyingly, after having invented the atomic bomb, how did we have it stolen from us by the Russians in just four years?

  Soon, there started to be answers to these questions. And they were found close to home. It had started in February with furious headlines that began to explain how America’s biggest secret had reached enemy hands. A scientist named Klaus Fuchs was arrested. A physicist who’d been a Communist Party member in Germany before he fled the Nazis, he’d spent time involved on the Manhattan Project, the covert U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb. It now was revealed that from the moment he’d arrived in America, he’d been passing information about the atomic bomb program to the Soviets. In June, the trail led from Fuchs to the American Julius Rosenberg—recruited as a Soviet agent in 1942—who then was arrested for his role in the conspiracy.