Bobby Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  It was then that they heard from their always unpredictable father. “It’s the best thing that ever happened to you,” came the vigorous voice from the Riviera. Less than a year before, when he’d made the approach to Johnson, the senior Kennedy had imagined his son on a winning ticket. But that was then. The outlook now was for a Democratic loss in 1956. Not only was his son now free from the coming wreckage but, even better, an attractive alternative for next time.

  But for Bobby, the eleventh-hour defeat was still tough to accept, and it left him seething. He’d imagined it would be a fair fight—and it turned out to be anything but. Behind the scenes, he suspected, strings had been pulled.

  The milling delegates at a political convention may look like a stadium crowd at a sports event. But the individuals filling these seats aren’t there randomly. Each delegate is present either at the behest of a political boss or else owing to a candidate’s success in a primary. Conventions in those days, before primaries became dominant in selecting presidential nominees, were more fluid. Delegations, often led by governors or party leaders, were free to make decisions in the moment. Once Stevenson threw the choice for his running mate to the convention floor, it became a live contest, with all the unpredictability that goes with it.

  At the 1956 conventions the expected candidates—Kefauver, Gore, Wagner, Humphrey—were suddenly joined by a new face, who’d made his national debut in their midst. Recognizing the excitement he’d generated on the first night, Jack saw his chance. His prediction to Tip O’Neill that “lightning” could strike in Chicago had been correct. Seizing the moment, and charging through all the time pressure and chaos, the Kennedys and their team managed for a thrilling half day to capture much of it in a bottle.

  But Bobby saw that at the climactic moment of the vice president fight, the contest had been tilted by those running it. Rayburn and the governors, who controlled the levers, had used them to stop the upstart Kennedy.

  Leaving Chicago Bobby started to go back over what he’d seen and learned. He understood the extent to which his brother would need his skills to put it all together. The lessons were these: first, they had to create from scratch a state-by-state national organization; second, they’d have to achieve backroom clout, enough to muscle the bosses when necessary and keep them in line; and, third, they’d have to overcome the religious issue which had reared its head in the final hour. That meant winning every open contest on the way to the convention. The Kennedys could not afford to lose a single primary.

  For my family, our awareness of the situation in Chicago came that Friday afternoon, as the convention was ending. We were on our way home from the store in our ’54 Chevy Impala. On the radio, the states’ delegates were being called upon to declare their choices. “Kefauver” was a familiar name by then, “Kennedy” an unknown. My mother, once she later realized what had happened, couldn’t help but see it as an echo of Al Smith’s rejection back in 1928.

  • • •

  Two days after Chicago, Jack Kennedy headed to the South of France. Pausing to stop to visit his father, he proceeded to meet up with his younger brother Ted, old Harvard pal Torby Macdonald, and a bevy of more pleasurable company awaiting them on a yacht. He hadn’t altered these plans despite the fact that Jacqueline was seven months pregnant. When she delivered a stillborn daughter on August 23—Arabella, as her mother would call her—the child’s father was still on the Côte d’Azur, relaxing after the strains of the convention six days earlier.

  It was Bobby who raced through the night from Hyannis Port to Newport where his sister-in-law was staying at her mother’s. And it was he who made the choice, then, to keep his fun-loving brother in the dark about the sad trauma his wife was enduring.

  Proud, now, of his ability to take decisive action, he judged it unwise to summon Jack back quickly under such circumstances. Despite the fact that he knew Jackie had had a miscarriage the year before and now had to be suffering greatly, he felt it best for her to begin healing in the presence of her own mother and family. Bobby decided that the last thing his fragile sister-in-law and her delinquent husband needed was an angry confrontation.

  It was Bobby to whom the task fell of telling his sister-in-law she’d lost her baby. It was also he who arranged for the infant’s burial. He was not the only party concerned about the situation. When Jack’s close Senate buddy George Smathers read in the papers what had happened and that Jack was still in Europe, he sent word that he either come back to his wife now or forfeit both his marriage and his political career. “If you want to run for president, you’d better get your ass back to your wife’s bedside, or else every wife in the country would be against it.”

  It wasn’t until the day after Arabella’s interment that Jackie finally heard her husband’s voice on the telephone. He was in the Mediterranean port town of Genoa. “I’m now committed to being a total politician,” Jack had recently sworn, having decided to focus on the difficult path leading to the largest prize of all. Smathers had reminded him he needed to think, too, about being a total husband.

  • • •

  That fall, with the Senate adjourned, Bobby set off to join the Stevenson campaign. Sacrificing weeks with his family, he would be serving, in reality, as a double agent. For Stevenson’s purposes, he was along to help the Protestant, divorced candidate connect with devout Roman Catholics. Bobby would play a liaison role in such rituals as introducing Stevenson to local bishops. For purposes of the Kennedy Party, it was to discover for himself the dos and don’ts of a national effort committed to winning.

  Mainly, the experience with Stevenson would teach him how not to run for president. “I came out of our first conversation with a very high opinion of him,” he would say of the two-time nominee. “Then I spent six weeks with him on the campaign and he destroyed it all.”

  For one thing, Bobby, who took pride in being able to make decisions, saw that Stevenson couldn’t. “You wouldn’t believe it,” he told Kenny O’Donnell when the campaign swung through Boston. “This is the most disastrous operation you ever saw.” But the nominee’s other big problem, as Bobby could see, was his failure to connect with real people. His critique was the same as my own dad’s of Adlai. “He talked over the heads of people.” Bobby’s example was classic: he’d seen the governor deliver an elaborate speech on world affairs to a group of twenty-five coal miners standing on the railroad tracks in West Virginia.

  Kennedy thought Stevenson quite simply spent too much time writing speeches and not enough campaigning for votes. To him, Stevenson’s belief in his oratorical ability caused him to miss the human aspect of a campaign. Bobby had watched his brother do it right, starting in 1946, traveling the state and meeting with crowds, introducing himself personally to voters who’d shown up. It was why, in 1952, Jack had kept sticking those pins into the Massachusetts map on his wall.

  Riding along with Stevenson also did little to lessen the younger Kennedy’s contempt for liberals.

  “The subject of Nixon came up, and I was strongly against making the campaign built around an attack on him.” Bobby recognized that the true believers surrounding Stevenson were deluding themselves. They thought that the country’s undecided voters shared their hostility for the Republican vice president. Bobby knew better, that the Nixon haters and the reliable Stevenson voters were one and the same—and that they constituted a minority of the electorate.

  The result of such close-up observation of the Democratic candidate had the effect of changing Bobby’s vote. He’d concluded that Stevenson wasn’t up to the job of president. He cast his ballot for Eisenhower and Nixon.

  And America agreed with him that November, overwhelmingly awarding Eisenhower a second term. The question now was who would succeed him.

  Here’s Ted Kennedy’s account. “After the traditional Thanksgiving dinner in Hyannis Port in November 1956, Jack and Joe, Sr., left the table and repaired to the study near the living room for a private talk. When they emerged, grinning, arms around each
other’s shoulders, the rest of us learned that Jack had decided to run for president in 1960.”

  As now was inevitable, Bobby would have two jobs, one on the inside, the other on the outside. The first involved, as before, his making sure their father was a help, not a hindrance. The convention had proven again the worth of that talent he’d first displayed in the uphill race against Lodge, acting as a bridge between his father and his brother.

  His other role, too, was by now familiar: Bobby was to be the enforcer, the heavy, making his presence felt in situations where Jack needed to remain at a distance.

  Rose Kennedy, watching her sons commit to this all-consuming enterprise, saw what role each would play. Jack would be the candidate, Bobby the one responsible for getting him elected. “It was understood,” she said, “that when Jack ran, Bobby would be his campaign manager.”

  The Kennedy brothers on the Senate Rackets Committee.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IRISH COP

  “I thought Teamster meant mob.”

  —KATHLEEN KENNEDY TOWNSEND

  Bobby Kennedy learned politics from the ground up. From his first volunteer effort in the Italian wards of East Cambridge—when he’d won over the neighborhood playing softball with the kids—to his taking charge of Jack’s 1952 campaign, he’d been immersed in its day-to-day demands. Now, with the challenge and disappointment of Chicago behind him, he was returning to the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

  One conversation in Chicago, connected to his work in Washington, left a strong mark. It had happened on the floor as the balloting had ended. A respected investigative reporter—Clark Mollenhoff of The Des Moines Register and Tribune—had gotten in his face, taunting him about a key factor in Kefauver’s success. “He did his investigations five years ago,” Mollenhoff reminded him, “and it got him enough clout to beat your brother’s butt.”

  He was referring to the Kefauver Committee’s televised hearings on organized crime that had made the Tennessean a household name across the country. That celebrity had carried him to the vice presidential nomination over Jack.

  Mollenhoff said that Bobby could do exactly what Estes Kefauver had made his name doing—taking on the mob. But now he was talking about the widening corruption in organized labor. This meant taking on prominent labor leaders closely allied to Democratic politicians as well as dangerous hoodlums. To pursue such criminals, they both knew, was a risky enterprise.

  Mollenhoff told Kennedy about Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Ed Guthman of The Seattle Times, who’d been engaged for eight years in an investigation of Teamsters president Dave Beck. Guthman, he explained, needed help from a partner like Bobby Kennedy, one with the law behind him. Having an ally with the power of subpoena would make all the difference.

  Guthman wanted a man who held such a weapon and the conviction to use it. He had to be certain that the person joining him in the hunt would not back off under pressure.

  Bobby listened and agreed to consider the mission. Next, Mollenhoff phoned Guthman, telling him the news. “A young lawyer from the subcommittee would like to come out and see you, and I hope you’ll help him.” His listener—unimpressed on hearing that it was Jack Kennedy’s younger brother—had a single question: “Can you trust him?”

  Both reporters had had too much experience with politicians afraid to take on organized labor. After grabbing a few headlines, they’d move on, leaving the reporter dangling and his sources in trouble. Both had seen good men pay dearly for sticking their necks out.

  Mollenhoff was the perfect man to vouch for Kennedy. He, too, was digging into the activities of the Teamsters, specifically those of a Detroit official named Jimmy Hoffa. Having been sold on Kennedy’s commitment, Guthman agreed to welcome him when he came west.

  As the year was ending, Bobby informed his father that he intended to use the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to bring to justice crooked labor leaders like Beck. Hearing this, Joseph Kennedy, now fixed on the idea of a 1960 presidential run for his eldest living son, was strongly opposed. Bobby, he angrily insisted, was being reckless. Pursuing such figures as Beck was politically dangerous and could hurt Jack with labor. This fight between father and son was, according to Jean, “the worst ever.”

  Two days after Christmas, Bobby met with his boss, Senator McClellan, and won the case for action. But for Democrats to target the labor unions required legislative finesse. McClellan’s panel needed to avoid trampling on the Labor Committee’s turf. To accommodate that, it was agreed to create a new panel, its members drawn equally from the two committees. That January, the Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field—soon to be known as the “Rackets Committee”—was formed with McClellan as chairman and Bobby Kennedy its chief counsel.

  Among the Republicans were Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Bobby’s old boss, Joe McCarthy. The Democrats included Kennedy of Massachusetts. Jack had agreed to serve as a member, but only because Bobby pressed him. “Bobby wanted me on that committee,” he said, because without him, his brother argued, it would have been too heavily conservative and anti-labor. There was also the factor of Kefauver’s crime-busting fame and its enduring electoral value.

  Whether or not Jack came on board, Bobby’s role as chief counsel meant the Kennedy name would always be identified with the inquiry. “If the investigation flops,” Bobby told Ken O’Donnell, whom he’d named his administrative assistant, “it will hurt Jack in 1958 and in 1960, too. A lot of people think he’s the Kennedy running the investigation, not me. As far as the public is concerned, one Kennedy is the same as another Kennedy.”

  Kennedy declared two rules for committee procedure, each of them learned the hard way watching Joe McCarthy as chairman. The first was to go for the facts and not just headlines; the second was about showing respect for those being investigated. He would never call a witness until the committee staff had thoroughly checked out his testimony ahead of time. Unless he was personally satisfied as to the credibility of the charges, he would never put a witness in front of the cameras.

  What Bobby most wanted to avoid was the sheer recklessness of the committee under his former boss, who’d made “McCarthyism” a term of infamy. “If we allowed witnesses to come before the Committee with no real idea of what testimony to expect from them, without first interviewing them, studying and checking their information we should have had utter chaos and confusion, plus many inequities,” he wrote later.

  He’d been an eyewitness to the human cost of this. “The most important advantage of checking and rechecking testimony is that it lessens tremendously the possibility of damaging an innocent person’s reputation. It is usually possible to find a witness who will testify to almost anything about a person who has been active in public life or who has taken a stand on issues: such a man is bound to have made enemies. . . . You cannot put a man—or a woman—on the stand, allow him to hurl accusations indiscriminately and, when the testimony is found to be untrue, disown him and accept no responsibility.”

  Ed Guthman, who’d convinced him of the enormity of the cause, could see that Kennedy both understood the need to expose Beck’s abuse of power yet was drawn to the even larger mission of saving a basic and very important American institution. The Teamsters were the largest union in the country, with a million and a half members in its rank and file. In the panel’s investigation of its president, Bobby—Guthman realized—was “more concerned with what the corruption, dishonesty and arbitrary use of power were doing to the democratic process and individual morality than he was with the specifics of the crimes that were being uncovered.”

  Two weeks after the Rackets Committee was formed, Bobby received a call from a New York lawyer with a story he thought he needed to hear. This attorney said he had been contacted by Teamster vice president Jimmy Hoffa and handed $1,000 as a down payment for infiltrating the new panel as a spy.

  When informed of the tip-off by Bobby, McClellan let FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover know. Go ahead and put this fellow on the committee’s payroll, Hoover instructed him. Any Hoffa payment to his spy would then be a criminal act, the bribery of a government employee.

  A week later, Kennedy, armed with that knowledge, met face-to-face with Hoffa at a dinner arranged by a Teamsters PR man. It was mutual hostility at first sight, starting with the handshake. “Here’s a fella thinks he’s doing me a favor by talking to me,” Hoffa said to their host after Bobby had left. To him, Joe Kennedy’s son was nothing but a “spoiled jerk.”

  The repulsion was shared. “Bob, who had an underlying distaste for the kind of people his father used to buy, recognized the devil in Hoffa,” New York columnist Murray Kempton would write, “something absolutely insatiable and wildly vindictive. He recognized in Hoffa a general fanaticism for evil that could be thought of as the opposite side of his own fanaticism for good, and therefore involved direct combat.”

  Three weeks later, an FBI sting operation caught on camera—right in public at Washington’s Dupont Circle—Hoffa’s mole handing over to him a manila envelope. In return, the Rackets Committee spy accepted $2,000 in cash. The trap had been set and sprung: Hoffa was under arrest.

  Ed Guthman, still covering the Teamsters corruption story, recalls getting the word. “It was Ethel Kennedy who roused us out of our beds at midnight so that we didn’t miss being at the United States Courthouse for our papers when Hoffa was arraigned.”

  The scene at the courthouse captured the growing antagonism between Kennedy and Hoffa. “He stared at me for three minutes with complete hatred in his eyes,” Bobby recalled. Hoffa then made clear it was going to be a long war. “Listen, Bobby, you run your business, and I’ll run mine. You go home and go to bed. I’ll take care of things. Let’s don’t have any problems.”