Bobby Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  Watching closely, Ken O’Donnell thought he saw the solution. Only a Kennedy, he decided, could push the interfering father to the side and get the campaign moving forward. As it stood, Jack couldn’t do either. O’Donnell believed he knew who could: Bobby.

  In O’Donnell’s view, the younger brother had learned how to handle the father. Unlike his brother, who kept his distance, Bobby was now practiced in maneuvering him, while Jack never could . . . nor did he especially want to.

  Curious, Ken once had asked Bobby to explain why he never told his father to back off. The reply he received startled him. Bobby explained that he liked their relationship the way it was. While Jack wasn’t invested in his father’s feelings, Bobby had grown up with his heart set on winning them. Achieving even a measure of his dad’s attention was, for him, a victory. The son who’d worked the hardest to gain the father’s attention and respect now knew just how to do it.

  “I knew Bobby was the one with enough sense, who was tough enough and a regular enough guy to run the campaign. And he’d be the only one able to turn to the father and say, ‘No, Jack won’t do it.’ ”

  Meanwhile, the weeks were passing. And there was still the question of whether the Senate was the goal. If Governor Dever decided to go for it, that would close the door to Jack. But early in April, Jack got word the governor wanted to meet with him. “Jack,” he said, “I’m a candidate for re-election.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” the younger man shot back. “I’m a candidate for the Senate.”

  But the conversation wasn’t over. Dever had more to say. Putting Jack on notice, he told him to expect no help from the regular Democratic organization. What he said carried an unmistakable subtext that wasn’t lost on Jack. I know this state, and I believe Lodge is unbeatable. You’re on your own, buddy.

  Jack heard every word, the unspoken warning included. But it didn’t matter. All that counted was that he was in the race he wanted. What he needed now was a way to win it.

  Bobby checking vote returns, Senate election night 1952.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE KENNEDY PARTY

  “He was a Kennedy, which was more than a family affiliation. It quickly developed into an entire political party, with its own approach, and its own strategies.”

  —THOMAS P. “TIP” O’NEILL, JR.

  Over the half dozen years I worked for him, I heard Tip O’Neill—a storied figure in Massachusetts politics—give a great many campaign fundraising speeches. Tip had started as a fifteen-year-old campaigning for Al Smith in 1928 and would go on to a long career. Serving thirty-four years as a U.S. congressman, he spent the last ten of them as U.S. speaker of the house. There was little he didn’t know, or hadn’t seen, when it came to the ambitions and strategies involved in running for office.

  In those speeches I’d listen to him delivering, one rule he preached applies neatly to John F. Kennedy’s 1952 Senate run. “Every campaign,” Tip would declare, “needs three elements to succeed: the candidate, the money, the organization.” The problem for Jack was the conflict among all three factors. The man with the money was keeping the campaign from building the organization, and the candidate was unable to stop him.

  Jack had the ability, most of the time, to keep his father at a distance, but not always. There were occasions when he’d get under Jack’s skin—for example, when they played golf together. Ethel Kennedy knew that her father-in-law had the nasty habit of trying “anything to distract you when you were putting.” Jack, she said, was thrown off his game by Joe. “But Bobby wasn’t,” she added.

  Thus it was that, at this critical moment, Ken O’Donnell, acting on his own, summoned Bobby. “I told him you’ve got to come up here. It’s chaos. You’ve got to take over.”

  Ken’s summons caught Bobby by surprise. He’d been fully occupied with his assignment at the Justice Department. He hadn’t paid much attention to what was happening up in Massachusetts.

  For O’Donnell, this was a window into the complex family relationships. “Bobby didn’t talk to Jack. Bobby didn’t know what Jack was doing. And Jack didn’t know what Bobby was up to. Neither cared very much what the other was doing.” He added, “I’d been under the impression that they were peas in a pod. They certainly were not.”

  Bobby was annoyed at Ken for attempting to rope him in. How could he, with no experience in politics, take charge of a campaign for the United States Senate? It made no sense; he didn’t know the state at all. And, he reminded Ken, what about his own life? He was working a big anti-corruption case in Brooklyn, and had a job where he could see a career ahead.

  “He just made it very clear that he didn’t want to come. He didn’t feel he was necessary or would be helpful. He just did not want to do it.” The irony, of course, was that if Bobby had never gotten O’Donnell the job, he’d never have been facing his pressure, nor would he have been forced to reckon personally with Jack’s dilemma.

  In the end, Bobby took a few days to think about it before phoning to tell Ken, “Okay, I guess I’ll have to do it.”

  But only half the battle was won. Now came the task of convincing Jack Kennedy to put his political future in the hands of his twenty-six-year-old brother. Even for a broken campaign, it was an unlikely notion of how to fix it.

  The trick would be getting the two of them together. The opportunity came in a car ride from Quincy, a suburb south of Boston. Now, for the first time, O’Donnell was really sticking his neck out, having summoned Bobby north. With both brothers as his audience, he laid out his views. And they weren’t pretty. The campaign was stalled for lack of a leader, with Mark Dalton too scared of their father to do his job.

  Jack didn’t like hearing any of this, especially from a non-Kennedy. “He felt,” Ken said, “that I’d been telling tales out of school to his brother . . . instead of telling him, whom I was really working for.”

  Angry or not, Jack listened. He sat there, in that car, as O’Donnell let fly with the unwanted truth. Then it was Bobby’s turn. The moment had arrived: he offered to help.

  “Why don’t you come up?” Jack responded. And that was that.

  Ethel would later say that it was that moment, in the car headed to Boston, when Jack met the essential condition. Bobby Kennedy would now quit his job, leaving Washington to take charge of the campaign, for one reason, and one reason only: “His brother asked him.”

  “He loved his brother,” Ethel told me. “It was a very tough thing for him to do because he felt like he was on his way to making a name for himself. He went up, and it was a big sacrifice.” In truth, it can’t have been that easy for her, either. Their daughter, Kathleen Hartington Kennedy, named to honor the memory of her late aunt Kick, was now nine months old, and Ethel was three months pregnant with their next child.

  It was mid-April when Bobby took over, from the very start working eighteen-hour days and making it clear who was in charge. Handling their father was at the top of the agenda. Charlie Bartlett, one of Jack’s closest friends, recalled overhearing a phone conversation. “Yes, Dad,” Bobby kept repeating. “Yes, Dad.” He was keeping the father out of the decision making by convincing him it all was being done exactly his way.

  From Jack’s political beginnings in 1946, recruiting volunteers had been key to his efforts. The idea was to hand any newcomer an immediate, achievable task, such as writing thank-you notes on behalf of the family. It was a way to make them part of what Tip O’Neill called “the Kennedy Party.”

  In his new role, Bobby controlled the campaign’s finances, deciding, among other bottom-line issues, who’d be paid and who wouldn’t. “How much money is the candidate going to give us to spend in our district?” he was asked at one early meeting. The questioner was referring to what’s commonly known as “street money,” the cash campaign workers expect for getting voters to the polls on election day.

  The Kennedy for Senate campaign, Bobby now made clear, was a strictly volunteer operation, no exceptions. “Listen, kid,” the man d
emanded, “you want campaign people out working for you, you gotta pay ’em—and you can afford it. The Kennedys are rich.”

  Hearing this, Bobby got up, grabbed the fellow by his collar, and hustled him out the door, saying as he did: “Would you mind getting lost . . . and keeping yourself lost!”

  Later, after that victim of Bobby’s wrath had gone to Jack to complain, Bobby set the candidate straight. “Look, you get one guy like that crying, then you have to pay him and his volunteers to work. Then other people hear about it, and they want to be paid to volunteer, and then we’ll end up spending a million dollars in Boston alone. I’m not going to have him around. You asked me to run this campaign. I didn’t want to, but now I’m here, so I’ll run it my way.”

  Decades later, Ethel would defend her husband’s conduct. As she saw it, Bobby was simply making sure everyone knew who was boss. He was now saying, “I’m the one.” So don’t go running to Jack. It’s just going to backfire on you.

  Jack Kennedy would one day famously say that a person gets only one reputation in life. It was from occasions like this, to be widely talked about, that won Bobby his. The word used was “ruthless.”

  “Bobby has taken over the management of the whole campaign,” his father wrote with obvious relish to twenty-year-old Ted, his fourth son. “He works fifteen hours a day and is showing remarkable good sense and judgment.” But it was Bobby’s toughness putting the campaign back on track that gratified him most.

  As Jack’s campaign ramrod, Bobby soon learned how suited he was to the part. Those who met him for the first time saw a hard-driving, take-no-excuses street fighter. He seemed to them that way—and he was. He wasn’t in the friend-making business; that was Jack’s job.

  But O’Donnell was cheered at having his old roommate as his new captain. “Any decision you needed, Bobby made.”

  Here’s Bobby describing what he wasn’t doing: “I didn’t become involved in what words should go into a speech; what should be said on a poster or billboard, what should be done on television. I was so busy with my part of it that I didn’t see any of that.”

  What he actually did, working those eighteen-hour days, was the equivalent of commanding an army in battle.

  Since Governor Dever had made it clear to Jack that he was on his own, the Kennedys had proceeded to build a total political network of their own. It was entirely divorced from the entrenched Democratic organization controlled by Dever. “Our secretaries were making weekly reports to me,” Bobby would say, “and they were growing more sophisticated from week to week. For a long time neither Lodge nor the Democratic regulars realized what we were doing.”

  Having constructed a Kennedy operation unto itself, Bobby insisted on total loyalty. There could be no dual allegiances even to Democrats in other races. He was the unassimilated Irishman forever on the lookout for traitors and trimmers. He didn’t mind making fierce judgments even if it meant making enemies. What mattered to him was winning, and the only way to do that was to keep people in line.

  Jack was learning how to use Bobby. He could do what the candidate could not. Bobby’s role was to be the bad guy, and to be seen as such. Few realized the campaign’s profound secret: that candidate Jack, favorite of all who encountered him, was capable of the most heartless call. His easy charm belied his interest at winning at all costs.

  Looking at Jack’s hard-nosed dealings with Paul Dever gives a useful illustration. Back in the spring, the governor had figured it was smart to cut the Kennedy campaign loose. He’d been fearful of being held back by an effort he saw as doomed—no matter how attractive the young candidate or admirable his war record. A factor influencing him, too, was his high regard for the political strength of Henry Cabot Lodge. The two were contemporaries, and the governor had watched Lodge’s rise since they’d served together in the 1930s as Massachusetts state representatives.

  By autumn 1946, the ground had shifted. The growing popularity of Eisenhower had put all Democrats onto the defensive. With the Kennedy campaign now smartly organized and energized, Dever thought joining forces might be a good idea. Why not do it?

  His relationship with Joe Kennedy was good, with Jack less so. While the father was for an alliance with Dever, Jack resisted. He regarded himself as better off running an independent campaign, pitching himself to those voters in the suburbs and small towns who saw him as a new kind of politician. Knowing that this meant crossing both the governor and his father, the trick was cutting Dever loose with the minimum of damage.

  “Don’t give in to them,” he instructed Bobby, now tagged as the bad guy. “But don’t get me involved with it.” Cold-bloodedly he wanted the bearer of the bad news to be the bad guy.

  Another ploy the Kennedy campaign used was a pincer maneuver. It attacked Lodge from the left on economic issues. It struck him on the right on foreign policy, playing on that front to the growing conviction, especially among Catholics, that FDR had sold out Eastern Europe at Yalta and Truman had given away China. For this particular call to arms, the Kennedys were the ready and perfect messengers.

  “Kenny and Bobby would go out at night and make speeches,” Rose Kennedy recalled. “Eunice and Pat and Jean would be out making calls and showing the terrific interview Jack had given on ‘Meet the Press.’ All of us were doing something ten or fifteen hours a day. Usually everyone would be back and in bed by twelve. Then we were up again before eight. We just had a wonderful summer.”

  That September Bobby and Ethel became parents for the second time. Joseph Patrick Kennedy II, like his older sister, Kathleen, was named to celebrate a lost Kennedy child and sibling. Bobby was keeping their memory close.

  There was disturbing news as well on the family front. As it had before, the spotlight turned to Joe Kennedy’s notorious anti-Semitism. The Lodge campaign recruited New York Republican congressman Jacob Javits to lead the attack. Javits—his own father a Talmudic scholar who’d earned his living as both a janitor and a Tammany Hall gofer—had chosen to join the Republican Party in reaction to the Democratic corruption he’d seen in New York City as a boy.

  As a rare Jewish Republican in Congress, he cut a distinctive figure. When he told a Jewish audience in Mattapan that his Democratic colleague now running for Senator Lodge’s seat was “the son of his father,” they understood. As Tip O’Neill put it years later, “He didn’t have to be any more explicit.”

  There was also the matter of Joe’s ties to Senator Joe McCarthy. A friend, in fact, of the entire family, he had dated two of the candidate’s sisters, Eunice and also Pat, who found him charming when he hadn’t had too much to drink.

  Almost three years after the Wheeling speech, the word “McCarthyism” now had meaning around the world, and carried more than a hint of menace. Still, Massachusetts, with its large number of Irish American voters, remained his strongest area of support nationally. Any criticism by Jack would cost him on election day.

  McCarthy knew Jack and liked him, indeed counted him as a covert backer. How Jack regarded him had remained a matter of speculation until the appearance on newsstands, less than a month before the November 4 election, of the October 13, 1952, edition of the liberal weekly magazine The New Republic.

  It revealed how, back in 1950, Congressman Kennedy had told that audience of Harvard grad students it was his belief McCarthy “may have something” with his mission to uncover Communists in the government. On that same occasion, according to the TNR article, Jack Kennedy had also admitted to preferring his Republican colleague Richard Nixon, now his party’s nominee for vice president, over liberal Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas in their 1950 California senatorial contest.

  Nixon had tried—successfully—to turn Congresswoman Douglas’s progressive activism into a scorching negative, saying, among other accusations, that the three-term congresswoman was “pink down to her underwear.” What Kennedy revealed, speaking to those students in that post-election seminar, was that he’d actually rooted for Nixon.

  It was all true.
Jack had indeed maintained friendly relations with Dick Nixon. The cordial rivalry among Nixon, George Smathers (D-FL), and himself—after the other two had moved up to the Senate in 1950—made, in fact, for a friendly prod to his own efforts to join them. The New Republic writer had also nailed him ideologically: Jack Kennedy was no liberal. “His position cannot exactly be called ‘liberalism’; it might be referred to as ‘popularism’—a willingness to give the people what they want in specific situations while shunning the generalities of a liberal philosophy.”

  Jack Kennedy had actually made a point of separating himself from the Democratic liberals. “Tell them I’m not a liberal,” he ordered his top congressional aide, Ted Reardon, in answer to a charge that he’d failed to fall in line with certain sectors of his own party. “I never joined the Americans for Democratic Action or the American Veterans Committee. I’m not comfortable with those people.”

  Earlier that year, at the hundredth anniversary of his Harvard club, a member was talking about the spirit of Harvard College and saying how glad he was that the school had produced neither “a Joseph McCarthy or an Alger Hiss.” On hearing that coupling, Kennedy jumped from his chair. “How dare you compare the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” and left the room.

  As for his father, the very thought of expediently separating himself or his family from Joseph McCarthy was unacceptable. When one of Jack’s campaign aides, the progressive activist Gardner “Pat” Jackson, passed around a draft “Declaration of Conscience” condemning “the twin evils of McCarthyism and Communism,” Kennedy senior went wild. “You and your . . . sheeny friends . . . are trying to ruin my son’s career.”

  As the campaign drew to a close, a big challenge became the need to keep Joe McCarthy, running for easy reelection in Wisconsin, out of Massachusetts. Getting nervous, Lodge was now desperate enough to enlist his Senate colleague’s “help.” Would McCarthy consider coming into Massachusetts on Lodge’s behalf?