Bobby Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  McCarthy richly enjoyed Lodge’s predicament. He agreed, with one condition: “I told them I’d go up to Boston to speak if Cabot publicly asked me to. And he’ll never do that; he’d lose the Harvard vote.” McCarthy never entered the state.

  • • •

  On the night before the election, General Eisenhower, the front-runner to be chosen the next day as America’s thirty-fourth president, arrived in Boston. His presence there was a five-star general’s salute to the man who’d served him in both war and politics. Eisenhower wasn’t one to forget that if it hadn’t been for Lodge he wouldn’t be headed to the White House.

  The early returns on the next evening showed Ike winning big in Massachusetts. By midnight, his plurality over Adlai Stevenson stood at 200,000. The word on radio and TV was that the state’s entire Democratic ticket—Stevenson, Dever, and Kennedy—would be going down together. Calling campaign headquarters from his apartment, Jack was frantic.

  When he got Bobby on the phone, he wanted to know what the hell was happening. But Bobby cut him off, telling him, “Look, on the basis of our numbers and our chart and the basis of what we have and our computations, we’re winning the race. And if the trend continues, even with a little drop-off, we’ll defeat Lodge. The television predictions are wrong.”

  Hearing but not believing him, Jack headed to the headquarters on Kilby Street and began working the numbers himself. “He went town by town—and we walked him through it,” Ken O’Donnell recalled. “But it became confusing to him and he just kept telling us the reports on the television and those we were giving him simply didn’t square.”

  At this point, Governor Dever called, saying they’d both lost and should concede together. Outside the window, rowdies—“Irish bums” O’Donnell called them—were shouting “Jack Kennedy, you’re a loser and a faker! You’re in the shithouse with your old man!”

  Their main target was Bobby. For those out in the street, he’d been the gatekeeper against the hacks and wannabes, the enforcer whose job it had been to bounce the nonproducers.

  For Bobby Kennedy, the campaign had been both a blooding and a bonding—with both the rough-and-tumble of politics, and with his older brother. Additionally, he’d learned an important truth about himself. It was that ability to make decisions.

  Finally, at six or six-thirty in the morning, Lodge, who’d been a personage on the Massachusetts political scene for twenty years, conceded. John F. Kennedy had beaten him by seventy thousand votes, each vote going against the Eisenhower landslide.

  Walking to Kennedy headquarters to offer his official concession along with his congratulations, Lodge looked his polished patrician self.

  As he saw him approach, Jack Kennedy couldn’t help but feel the formality of the moment and of the man about to face him. “What a bunch of bums we all look like,” he said. “Put a tie on, for God’s sake!” he instructed Bobby.

  As disheveled as they may have appeared to the outsider, the two brothers had performed a masterful feat. In an uphill contest they’d outpointed Lodge, the regular Democratic Party, and the historic odds. Bobby had made Jack a United States senator. The two of them could never forget what they’d been able to do together.

  Bobby confers with Joseph McCarthy and other senators.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CLAN

  “Bobby going to work for Joe McCarthy was as natural as a Jewish kid from CCNY joining the Communist Party in the nineteen thirties.”

  —JACK NEWFIELD

  Having taken on the challenge of running his brother’s race for the Senate, making many of those tough decisions that secured Jack’s surprise victory, Bobby now faced hard ones of his own. “What are you going to do now?” his father demanded to know, pointing out that his recent law school graduate son hadn’t, himself, been elected to anything.

  One thing he knew for sure—having seen the campaign battlefield from inside the trenches—was that seeking elected office for himself was out. He didn’t enjoy making speeches, nor did he have the patience for the continual backslapping. And he’d had more than enough of dealing with those hangers-on forever underfoot. He particularly despised the opportunists who’d stayed away during the fight, then had no qualms about showing up on election night. Whatever it was they wanted, those fair-weather types were never going to get it from him.

  It’s reasonable to assume Bobby regarded Lyndon Johnson as one such self-server. The Texas senator had phoned Jack with crack-of-dawn congratulations just as soon as the news hit the wires that he’d won. Johnson had gotten up especially early just to make sure his voice was one of the first new Democratic senators heard.

  Lurking behind Johnson’s message of welcome to each incoming freshman senator was a very real agenda, and one easy enough to spot. For the previous two years the Senate majority leader had been Ernest McFarland, who’d represented Arizona in the Senate since 1941. Unable to surmount the Eisenhower-led Republican landslide, McFarland now was out, and his opponent, Barry Goldwater, was in. It was this vacancy in the leader’s office that Lyndon Johnson was ready and eager to fill.

  The newly elected Jack Kennedy, well able to see what Johnson had been up to with his ingratiating telephone call, didn’t mind. Coolly political himself by this point, he wasn’t turned off by Johnson’s obvious angling for the leadership position. Bobby, though, had no such tolerance for it, and made clear his contempt for Johnson’s self-serving gesture.

  Despite Bobby’s reluctance to become a candidate himself, there were those around him, including Ken O’Donnell, who felt otherwise. Eager to keep alive the Kennedy organization, which had now proven itself so well, they fixed on a possible race for Bobby to enter. Republican Christian Herter had just narrowly beaten Paul Dever in what was for then a two-year term as governor. Herter would be up for reelection in 1954. The idea was for Bobby to take him on.

  To the loyally committed O’Donnell, it made perfect sense for Bobby to try to move into the State House and take charge in Massachusetts exactly as he had in his brother’s campaign. No longer as intimidated by Joe Sr. as he once had been, O’Donnell asked for a meeting, only to find out they were thinking along the same lines.

  When confronted with their plan, Bobby just as quickly let them know he was having none of it. “I’m tired of it,” he explained to Ken. “Tired of all the infighting and the lying. I’m much happier in Washington, quite honestly, just doing my own thing in my own way. I think Dad’s very frustrated with me at the moment. But I’m glad to get out of Massachusetts. I don’t like politics.”

  Down in Washington already—his seventh year in the nation’s capital—brother Jack was settling into his new office on the third floor of the Senate building. Needing to hire new staffers, Kennedy looked around and found himself impressed by Theodore Sorensen, a young attorney from Nebraska working on Capitol Hill. Would he come be his legislative assistant?

  For his part, the liberal Sorensen wanted to hear more about Kennedy’s connection to Senator Joseph McCarthy, which to him was a problem. Kennedy said that McCarthy was a friend of his father and his family and was enormously popular among Massachusetts Irish Catholics. Jack added that he didn’t approve of all McCarthy’s tactics, nor did he believe in all his accusations. Sorensen listened, and, obviously responding to Jack personally, decided to come on board.

  McCarthy himself had just landed a new job. Owing to the coattails of the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket, the number of Republicans and Democrats in the Senate was now equal. This meant that, as vice president, Richard Nixon’s tie-breaking vote would give his party control. This put the GOP into the majority, controlling the chairmanships of all committees and subcommittees. Senator Joseph McCarthy, the country’s most celebrated pursuer of Communists, became the head of the Committee on Government Operations and, by his choice, also its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The subcommittee held sweeping jurisdiction to probe any federal activity it chose. That meant anywhere the new chairman set his sights.

&
nbsp; A critical hire for him would be the naming of subcommittee counsel. As it turned out, he didn’t have to look far, since his old friend Joe Kennedy was working to convince McCarthy to give the position to his son Bobby.

  There were ways in which the forty-four-year-old senator and the twenty-seven-year-old Bobby Kennedy fit together better than one might have supposed. The older man was a farm boy from rural Wisconsin who’d dropped out when he was a young teen though later resumed his education. And while the younger went to elite private schools, it had now been clear for a long while that Bobby was the opposite of a snob. Both, moreover, were from large Irish Catholic families, with the McCarthy family’s seven to the Kennedy nine. That meant that taking McCarthy’s job would involve battling on behalf of the clan.

  McCarthy’s sense of mission carried an appeal as well. Above all, both he and Bobby were fighters. The idea of joining his staff, therefore, wasn’t a difficult notion. For Bobby, it was about flying the Kennedy flag alongside an old friend of his father’s. It also had the appeal of standing alongside one of those pugnacious sorts to whom he was drawn. And there was the cause itself, purging spies and traitors from the U.S.

  • • •

  Bobby was hardly alone in this pro-McCarthy sentiment. Many American Catholics believed from the start of Joe McCarthy’s notoriety that any and all establishment attacks on him were evidence of the same bigotry that had brought down Al Smith back in 1928. A Catholic rising to prominence in American life, they suspected, would find himself—at the behest of people who weren’t their own—put back in his place.

  Catholics also held to the belief that the war against Communism—an issue made passionate after the loss of Eastern Europe—was, essentially, their own conflict. Fully supported by Catholics around the world, the Church saw itself as the leading challenge to Soviet aggression.

  I grew up hearing that call to American Catholics to rally against Communism. Though only a young boy at the time, I remember how we prayed each Sunday “for the conversion of Russia” and my classmates arriving at school with five-dollar donations to help “ransom” Chinese babies from the Communists.

  Another prominent Irish Catholic voice during this era was Bishop Fulton Sheen. Ordained in the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, in 1919, he made his early career as a respected theologian and author. Reaching his first national audiences through radio in the 1930s, he moved on, in 1951, to the new medium of television. His Tuesdaynight broadcast from New York City, called Life Is Worth Living, reached as many as thirty million viewers.

  Sheen’s weekly ministry gained historic currency with a program airing in late February 1953. “Stalin must one day meet his judgment,” Sheen pronounced. As it turns out, the Soviet leader soon had a stroke and died. When Sister announced the Russian dictator’s demise in class and asked us all to pray, I remember wondering at the time what the intention was. Were we praying for him to go straight to hell? Or for an unlikely deathbed conversion? Or simply out of gratitude at his demise?

  • • •

  As it turned out, Senator McCarthy didn’t select Bobby Kennedy to be the committee’s chief counsel. He appointed him, instead, to a subordinate position—as assistant to the committee’s general counsel, Francis “Flip” Flanagan. For the job Bobby didn’t get, he picked Roy Cohn, a whiz kid a year younger. Graduating from Columbia Law School, he’d been named an assistant U.S. attorney when only twenty-one. A New York City judge’s son, Cohn made his name early on as part of the team prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—the husband and wife both convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and sentenced to death.

  Lyndon Johnson, meanwhile, had gotten his wish and became the newly elected Senate Democratic leader. One morning in the Senate cafeteria, McCarthy and his subcommittee staffers stood to greet the Texan as he passed their table. Only Bobby, the newcomer to the group, stayed seated. When Johnson stuck out his hand on being introduced, Bobby very deliberately refused to extend his own in return. Only after an embarrassing stretch of time did he grasp Johnson’s hand.

  “It’s about Roosevelt and his father,” Johnson told aide George Reedy by way of explaining the scene that had just occurred. For years, Johnson had dined out on his having sat there and witnessed FDR’s 1940 vow to “fire the sonofabitch,” namely Bobby Kennedy’s ambassador dad. Now, a dozen years later, that January 1953 breakfast-time encounter revealed, the Texan believed, the younger man’s bitter attitude toward him, one that was never to lessen.

  “Did you ever see two dogs come into a room and all of a sudden there’s a low growl, and the hair rises up on the back of their necks?” was how Reedy described the scene. “It was like that. Somehow he and Bobby took one look at each other—and that was it.”

  As his sister Eunice would politely phrase it, her brother had “a gift for estrangement.” Thus Roy Cohn, too, was poised to join the list of those on Bobby’s enemies list. The chief counsel, like his boss, was a limelight seeker, now making headlines when he suddenly set off on a self-assigned seven-day, seven-country European tour. Its supposed purpose was to purge State Department libraries in capitals like London and Paris, Bonn and Athens, of books by Communist writers.

  To accompany him, Cohn decided to invite a new friend, G. David Schine. The Harvard-educated son of wealthy hotel owners, Schine had recently self-published a pamphlet titled Definition of Communism, copies of which were left, like Gideon Bibles, in the company’s hotel rooms. After meeting the good-looking Schine, Cohn had wangled a job for him on the subcommittee staff as an unpaid “chief consultant.”

  The watching press didn’t take such a peculiar junket seriously. Reporters mocked the two young men in print at every dateline.

  It was difficult for Bobby to watch Cohn’s seemingly insatiable appetite for attention grabbing. Bobby took himself seriously, also the job he was doing. In Bobby’s mind, Cohn had pegged him as a daddy’s boy—and, worse still, no more than a gofer.

  Frictions were eased, if only temporarily, when a subcommittee assignment handed him in early 1953 sent him off on his own course. He was put in charge of investigating the shipping being carried on openly by Great Britain and other Western countries with Communist China, what his brother had called the “blood trade.” The Chinese, after all, were fighting and killing American and British soldiers in Korea; therefore, it made no sense that British shippers, especially, were so flagrantly arming and provisioning the battlefield enemy. Up until now, for reasons of Allied diplomacy, the U.S. had held back from confronting them.

  Calling the shots from his Senate basement office, Bobby, along with his colleagues, was able to discover that Britain—whose own troops were among the U.N. forces fighting along the 38th Parallel—was actually sending strategic war materials to the enemy. He documented that, since 1950, there had been $2 billion in trade by non-Communist countries with Red China. The final report revealed a total of 162 foreign ships delivering cargo—including oil, essential to the North Korean army—to China in the first three and a half months of 1953.

  In late March, McCarthy, at a press conference with Bobby standing alongside him, announced the subcommittee’s findings. Liberal columnist Doris Fleeson called the report “that rara avis, a documented and sober story produced by the McCarthy subcommittee.” Going on, she praised the thorough work done by Robert Kennedy. “It received much more credence . . . than anything else to which Senator McCarthy’s name is attached.”

  Yet his boss’s detractors chimed in as well, which brought forth a frustrated response from his assistant counsel. According to The Boston Post, Bobby was “alarmed and shocked at the manner in which the McCarthy haters hopped all over” the uncovering of mainly British trade with Communist China. “I really don’t know,” Bobby told the newspaper. “I’d supposed that it just didn’t make sense to anybody in this country that the major allies, whom we’re aiding financially, should trade with the Communists who are killing GIs.”

  But the article went on to make a point of s
eparating the junior Massachusetts senator’s brother from the Cohn-Schine pair and their recent antics. “Kennedy,” it read, “contrary to general belief, apparently, has not taken part in any of the McCarthy committee’s probes into subversives in the State Department, the Voice of America, and other government agencies. What he has done is work on ways to shut off strategic materials of war to countries in the Russian Zone, including North Korea. He’ll continue to do so.”

  Bobby, who felt nothing but contempt for the self-promoting shenanigans of Cohn, was more accepting when it came to the same behavior by McCarthy himself. He kept a warmth for the senator, and a respect for his goals, also honoring his status as a family friend. It appealed to Bobby, moreover, that Joe McCarthy was battling the forces of the establishment.

  But he worried that the ongoing fallout from Cohn’s schemes—as well as the committee’s loosely researched accusations—were going to ruin his boss. “Most of the investigations,” he later said, “were instituted on the basis of some preconception by the chief counsel or his staff members and not on the basis of information that had been developed. Cohn and Schine claimed they knew from the outset what was wrong; and they weren’t going to allow the facts to interfere. Therefore no real spade work that might have destroyed some of their pet theories was ever undertaken.”

  If Bobby could see the truth, McCarthy couldn’t. His assistant counsel had to accept that nothing was going to change.

  • • •

  Stubborn as ever, Joe Kennedy was still hoping to convince Bobby to run for office. Writing to a friend, he mentioned “confidentially” that his second son was “giving serious consideration” to establishing residence in Connecticut. In that way he’d be able to launch his political career out of range from Jack’s in Massachusetts.

  His success as a legislative aide seems to have lessened his resistance to a political life. He began to explore seriously a run of his own. It didn’t go unnoticed.