Bobby Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  The mail coming into his office was overwhelmingly pro-McCarthy. But Jack Kennedy needed to reply with the most careful and ambiguous of phrases. “I am giving attention to this situation, and I am hopeful that the outcome will be the one most desirable for the good of the Senate and the country.”

  “To understand my situation,” he told a reporter some years later, “you must remember that my father was a friend of Joe’s, as was my sister Eunice, and my brother Bobby had worked for him. So I had all those family pressures.” The Kennedys’ long personal involvement with McCarthy, he later told biographer James MacGregor Burns, was “really the guts of the matter.”

  Having read this far, readers should have picked up on my strong surmise that, for Jack, it was more than that. I’ve always thought that he—though maybe not as much as his brother—had a soft spot for Joe McCarthy. I think Jack loved the tumult in the man, the rebellious spirit that led him, finally, too far.

  Apart from his own unresolved feelings toward McCarthy, Jack was trapped on a fence between two very different sets of Massachusetts voters. There were those who saw the Wisconsin senator as their hero and others who marked him as a historic villain. Years later, when Jack had positioned himself as a liberal, he’d say he hadn’t known any of those whom McCarthy terrorized. But what he failed to say is that he’d never made the slightest effort to do so.

  With Jack there was always the issue of his bad health lying in the background. During this highly charged period of political turmoil leading into the fall of 1954, the attempts Jack had been making to maintain the pace expected of him began to fail. Having relied on crutches for most of the 1952 race, he now faced the prospect of a wheelchair. By the summer of 1954, the disease and the steroids prescribed for him since his first episode of Addison’s disease seven years earlier had placed him in dire straits. He’d dropped in weight from 180 pounds to 140. His back pain was so severe he waited in the Capitol between votes rather than try walking across Constitution Avenue to the Senate Office Building. His Addison’s disease made surgery all the more dangerous. Since his body couldn’t produce the necessary adrenaline, it reduced its vital ability to fight off infection.

  Despite such fears, he agreed to undergo an experimental operation at the New York Hospital for Special Surgery. There, an infection sent him into a coma. Bobby remained at his side, watching over him, as once again he was now, for the third time, given the last rites of the Catholic Church. Only after many hours had passed, with the outlook grim, did it look like his older brother was going to live.

  Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s legislative assistant, was afraid to ask the hospitalized senator where he stood on the upcoming McCarthy censure vote. There existed a long-standing procedure whereby Jack could “pair” with an absent senator holding the opposing position, this way putting himself on the public record. People would know where he stood. But as Sorensen later confirmed, he was afraid to even suggest this step, fearing “the wrath of the senator’s brother and father more than the senator’s.”

  On December 2, 1954, the Senate vote to “condemn” McCarthy for conduct “contrary to Senate traditions”—with Jack Kennedy still hospitalized up in New York—was 67 to 22.

  Not long after the Senate vote, Bobby went out with a few journalist buddies. “Why do you reporters . . . feel the way you do?” he asked them. “Okay, Joe’s methods may be a little rough but, after all, his goal was to expose Communists in government—a worthy goal. So why are you . . . so critical of his methods?”

  But over the years he’d known and observed McCarthy, seeing, he realized, that he’d created most of his problems himself. “His whole method of operation was complicated because he’d get a guilty feeling and be hurt after he’d blasted somebody,” Bobby wrote five years later. “He wanted so desperately to be liked. . . . He was sensitive and yet insensitive. He didn’t anticipate the results of what he was doing. He was very thoughtful of his friends and yet could be so cruel to others.”

  A husband and now the father of three—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., had been born that January—Bobby was now having to come to grips with life’s complexities. While he’d never forgo his penchant for dividing the world, as Ethel would say, between “white hats and black hats,” heroes and villains, he was learning vital lessons: your sympathies and your sense of justice are not always in congruence; those you root for are not necessarily the good guys.

  Jack and Bobby.

  CHAPTER NINE

  HAIL MARY

  “Well, I guess you could call it a Hail Mary. You throw it up and pray.”

  —ROGER STAUBACH

  With the coming of the new year, Senator Joe McCarthy—who’d been censured in December before the Congress adjourned—lost control of the Subcommittee on Investigations. The Republicans, minus the magic name of Dwight Eisenhower at the top of the ticket, were no longer on top in either the House or the Senate.

  John McClellan, Democrat from Arkansas, was now the subcommittee chairman, with Bobby Kennedy his chief counsel. As the months passed, however, Bobby’s thoughts began shifting to his brother’s ambitions and how he might help achieve them.

  In late September 1955, on vacation in Denver, President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in the early hours of the morning. Speculation quickly arose over whether he’d be able to serve a second term. One man, betting against a full recovery, saw an opportunity opening for his son.

  Joseph Kennedy, believing Ike would have to forgo reelection, now offered a deal to Lyndon Johnson, the new Senate majority leader. If Johnson agreed to run for the 1956 Democratic nomination, Kennedy would pick up the bill. There was a single condition. If the Texan won the Democratic nomination, he was to name Senator John F. Kennedy his vice presidential running mate.

  Whether it was the crassness of the offer itself—with its assumption Johnson’s political plans might be for sale—or the majority leader’s fear of losing, Joe’s scheme was rejected out of hand. Always cagey, Johnson may merely have been playing it safe. But it wasn’t the way it was taken. Bobby Kennedy, for one—not inclined to be sympathetic to the man—counted it as another affront to the Kennedy family.

  When the Democrats met in Chicago in the summer of 1956, they ended up again nominating Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. He’d won despite early strong competition from Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver. The real question left to be decided at the convention was who would be the Democratic vice presidential nominee. Well apart from his father’s amateurish proposition to the Senate majority leader, Jack Kennedy had mounted a quiet push to sell himself to Stevenson. The strategy was to make his Roman Catholicism not a liability but a bonus.

  Statistics compiled on Catholic voting patterns were key. These showed that the number of Catholics casting ballots for Roosevelt in the early years of the New Deal had begun to trail off in the 1940s, and then even more so by 1952. Having John F. Kennedy on the ticket, the argument went, might well bring those voters back to the Democratic coalition.

  Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen gathered the data and wrote a report. It was then passed to John Bailey, the Connecticut party chairman and ally, to sign and spread around. Widely circulated as “The Bailey Memorandum,” its purpose was to get Stevenson to see the light and select the junior senator from Massachusetts as his running mate.

  With the convention about to get under way, Jack Kennedy went to Tip O’Neill, calling upon the man who’d succeeded him for a favor—a large one. He asked O’Neill to cede to him one of the delegate’s credentials he’d been allotted. As a Member of Congress, O’Neill was given four delegates to name. When approached by Jack, he’d already awarded three of his four, and intended to keep the last for himself. Kennedy now wanted it. It was as blunt as that.

  Jack said he wanted it for Bobby. Calling his brother the “smartest politician” he knew, he pointed out that “lightning may strike . . . and I could end up on the ticket with Stevenson.” He wanted his brother to have full access to the delegates on the floor.r />
  For O’Neill, the forfeiture of his credential could be accepted as necessary political business. But he didn’t like it. Not one bit. Here was a perk he fully deserved and had put in time achieving, and now he was being asked to hand it over to a young guy he couldn’t even stand who’d once made noises about possibly bumping him from his congressional seat. “To me, he was a self-important upstart and know-it-all,” Tip would write, still simmering decades later. “I was simply a street-corner pol.” Once again, Jack escaped blame while Bobby was never forgiven.

  As Jack Kennedy arrived in Chicago, he already had the benefit of public recognition outside the political arena. His second book, Profiles in Courage, published earlier in the year, stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over thirty weeks.

  Based on that success, he was asked to narrate a twenty-minute documentary that would open the convention and be broadcast to the television audience. Pursuit of Happiness was a history of the U.S. focusing on Democratic presidencies from Thomas Jefferson through Harry Truman. Producer Dore Schary, a major Hollywood figure, was impressed with Jack’s performance. “All of us who were in contact with him immediately fell in love with him because he was so quick and charming and so cooperative, and obviously so bright and skilled.”

  From the first words he spoke—“Ladies and Gentlemen, I am Senator John F. Kennedy. To some, the Democratic Party represents a philosophy, a way of life and a point of view”—his personal appeal was unmistakable. He’d been handed a perfect vehicle with which to enter into the country’s consciousness. When he was introduced on the podium afterward, he was greeted by wild enthusiasm from the floor. As a result of this triumph, Stevenson asked Jack to be the one to formally place his name in nomination. On getting the offer, Jack expressed his concern that this was really a consolation prize, removing him from vice presidential contention. The nominee assured him it was not. But Stevenson’s denial masked his own indecision. He couldn’t bring himself to make the choice. With time running out, he flinched.

  With the convention ending the next day, Stevenson declared late Thursday night that “the selection of the vice presidential nominee should be made through the free processes of the convention.” Thus, he said, “the Democratic Party’s candidate for this office may join me before the nation, not as one man’s selection, but as one chosen by our great party, even as I have been chosen.”

  This, of course, left it to the assembled delegates to do what their chosen leader had been unable to—determine who might best help him beat the likable Ike. Stevenson’s public justification for passing the buck—according to the political spin from his headquarters—was to remind voters, aware of Eisenhower’s alarming heart attack, just how important choosing a vice president is. The very idea of Richard Nixon sitting in the Oval Office, he was convinced, would be sufficient to stampede voters to any Democratic candidate.

  It was clear who would be the early front-runner in this unexpected convention balloting. Tennessean Estes Kefauver, representing his state since 1939, had run vigorously in the 1952 convention, come awfully close—and kept running ever since. Kefauver continued to benefit from his series of televised hearings on organized crime in 1950. A well-recognized figure nationally, he was ready to claim the number-two spot on the ticket.

  It was at this moment that Jack and Bobby decided to go for it. With the clock ticking, they were about to take the risk of the game-winning touchdown. “Call Dad and tell him I’m going for it,” Jack told Bobby. Carrying news to their difficult, too often unpredictable father had become his job. So he picked up the phone.

  Joseph Kennedy was fond of telling his family, “Things don’t happen, they’re made to happen.” Only months before he’d been the one conniving to snag the VP nomination for his son; now Jack and Bobby were doing it, but with him a continent away, in the South of France. Jack could hear his father’s reaction to the news from across the room. He was calling him an “idiot” to be doing this. Idiot!

  “Whew!” Bobby said, putting down the receiver. “Is he mad!”

  Up in the Kennedy hotel suite, the first necessity was a plan to enlist delegates to their side. But despite frantic attempts to identify those they knew, they were coming up short. It was quite obvious they were in over their heads, at least at the start.

  Bobby knew several senators from his work on what was now the McClellan Committee. Finding the Arkansas senator himself, he went straight to the point. “What can you do to help?” he asked the lawmaker he’d been serving as right-hand man.

  The encounter was an education in itself. McClellan first let him know he thought his brother would make an attractive addition to the Democratic ticket. Now encouraged, Bobby pushed him further asking how much assistance could he be in gathering together other delegates for Jack?

  The Arkansas senator, who liked and admired Bobby personally, now had to be candid, and also a bit embarrassed. United States senators, despite their stature on the national stage, possessed little or no political clout at party conventions, he told him. Governor Orval Faubus was the one actually wielding power over his state’s delegation. McClellan was lucky to be a delegate himself, he confessed. All that he had to offer, as it turned out, was counsel.

  His advice: if you want to win a delegation at the next political convention, go to that state and “find out who has the power . . . and stop reading the newspapers.”

  The learning curve in those early morning hours, as Bobby tried working the system as he saw it, unfortunately kept producing setbacks. The good news was that every bit of education he absorbed he wouldn’t need to learn again. I once heard historian Arthur Schlesinger say, “Politics is essentially a learning profession.” These hours in the summer of 1956 were teaching him its basic dynamic.

  The truth is, the mere act of announcing for office creates a reality not present beforehand. Suddenly the new candidate sees himself as a force, one requiring those previously allied, hostile, or neutral, to choose. Each must decide whether to support the new candidate or not, responding publicly with positions of either loyalty or enmity. You become a figure, and potential rivals have to deal with you.

  During those few hours, the scene there in the International Amphitheatre changed. Jack Kennedy had now made himself a wild card in the proceedings, as well as a player on the national political stage.

  The Kennedys’ effort was facing powerful resistance in Chicago from Democratic Party liberals. Coming across the progressive Michigan governor, G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams, Bobby grabbed his arm. “Why are you against my brother?” he scolded him. Stunned, Williams pulled himself free and headed off. They assumed this was triggered by the family’s association with Joseph McCarthy.

  The convention vote for vice president took place that Friday in early afternoon. The first ballot had Kefauver in the lead with 4831/2 delegates; Kennedy in second with 304; Senator Albert Gore, Sr., of Tennessee with 178; New York City mayor Robert Wagner with 1621/2; Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey with 1341/2.

  On the second ballot, the Southerners were out in force to stop Kefauver because of his support for civil rights, which they took as regional betrayal. They began heading to Kennedy.

  Ted Sorensen recalled the moment. “The second ballot was underway and a Kennedy trend had set in. The south was anxious to stop Kefauver. Kennedy was picking up the Gore and Southern favorite-son votes. He was getting Wagner votes, too. Bob Kennedy and his lieutenants were all over the floor shouting to delegations to come with Kennedy.”

  Despite Bobby’s baleful treatment of him, Lyndon Johnson had jumped onto the bandwagon. “Texas proudly casts its vote for the fighting senator who wears the scars of battle, that fearless senator, the next vice president of the United States, John Kennedy of Massachusetts.” Kennedy was now beating Kefauver 504 to 395. It certainly looked as if he was headed to a 684 majority. Bobby was on the convention floor holding up his fingers in a Churchillian “V” sign.

  Unknown to him, a pattern of res
istance to Jack was beginning to emerge on two fronts. Both were owing to the candidate’s religion. Sorensen had gone to the Minnesota delegation to plead for the backing of Congressman Eugene McCarthy. “Forget it!” came his dismissive reply. “All we have are farmers and Protestants.”

  Then, there were the anti-Catholic politicians, who were now, on the second ballot, looking to stop the Kennedy momentum. Oklahoma governor J. Howard Edmondson phrased his own feeling on the matter this way: “He’s not our kind of folks.” The speaker of the house, Texan Sam Rayburn, was not so tactful. “If we have to take a Catholic, I hope we don’t have to take that little pissant Kennedy.”

  Since Rayburn was chairing the convention, he soon had the opportunity to act on his own clear bias and help steer the decision. With South Carolina, Illinois, and Alabama seeking recognition from the podium to shift their delegates to Kennedy, he instead recognized Edmondson, eager now to throw his state’s Gore votes to Kefauver. That settled, Rayburn next called on Gore, who threw his remaining votes also to Kefauver.

  “Let’s go!” Jack Kennedy ordered Sorensen the moment he realized what was happening, and began pushing his way toward the podium through hundreds of milling delegates. It was a master class in how to make pure gold from a bad break.

  His superb timing now added to his eloquence. Looking down and surveying the convention floor, he had every delegate’s attention fixed upon him. Stepping back gallantly from his own quest, he asked that the vote for Estes Kefauver be made unanimous. The gesture was spontaneous, gracious, memorable—and calculating.

  And it had the expected effect. The crowd loudly welcomed his call for party unity. The question now was where he stood. Their Hail Mary play, after all, had fallen short. “He was very depressed when he lost to Kefauver,” Jean recalled. Joe Kennedy’s children had been taught never to be content with losing.