The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  And, sure enough, the men of power and influence repaired whatever was reparable after this disaster. They soothed the Kopechnes, wooed officials, won special treatment. No autopsy was performed. No one else present has ever talked. The only charge brought against Kennedy was for leaving the scene of an accident. He bargained a plea of guilty in return for the minimum sentence, suspended. He lost his driver’s license for a year. At the Grand Jury hearing, he was treated respectfully; other witnesses did not have to explain difficulties in their testimony. Despite all the damage Chappaquiddick did to Kennedy, he was reelected to the Senate, welcomed back by his colleagues, and remained a contender for the presidency. He has successfully “stonewalled” attempts to discover more about that mysterious night. William Buckley criticized the way Chappaquiddick was handled; but Sherrill considers it a masterpiece among cover-ups, one in which Kennedy was given the benefit of every legal doubt while cooperating as little as possible with the investigation.

  For the first nine hours or so after he drove the woman to her death he said nothing about the accident because, he explained later, he was out of his mind. Then for the next week he stayed in seclusion and avoided the press because, he said, he was recovering from the physical ordeal of the accident (he did break out of his hiding to attend the Kopechne funeral, but he said that was not an “appropriate” time to talk but promised to talk when the time did become “appropriate”). Not long thereafter his attorneys became engaged in a fight to block the inquest from being open, and while that was pending Kennedy excused himself from talking by saying his lawyers wouldn’t let him while his case was in litigation. As soon as the inquest was launched, Kennedy had a perfectly fine reason for keeping quiet because the cooperative Judge Boyle ordered all inquest witnesses not to talk about what they had testified. That order held until the inquest transcript was released, which brings us back to the present moment when Kennedy was saying, “The facts of this incident are now fully public, and eventual judgment and understanding rests where it belongs. For myself, I plan no further statement.”

  Ironically, Kennedy’s very success in evading the full scrutiny and pressure of the law disqualifies him for the presidency. A man for whom other men of power and fame are already willing to stretch and bend the law, to whom they will lend the support of their reputations, should not be further raised above the law by holding the nation’s highest office. Sherrill quotes, for its irony, Kennedy’s later attack on President Nixon’s attempted cover-up of Watergate: “If this country stands for anything, it stands for the principle that no man is above the law.” No man should be given special treatment. Yet the crush of affectionate loyalists works always for such special treatment of a Kennedy.

  The loyalty perdured, though some were angry at Kennedy for damaging the family prospects they all share. Sorensen, after penning Kennedy’s TV defense, crossed out references to his brilliant future in a book he was completing on the Kennedy legacy. By being weak, by having to rely on them, he disillusioned his own defenders, who remained loyal to him even as they lost respect for him. Yet reliance on them had led him into this trap. Reliance on the honorary Kennedys can, after a while, sap the strength of real Kennedys. With so many “Kennedys” around, serving him and being serviced by him, he ceased to be fully one himself. In all the bumbling rush to save his reputation, the man disappeared; and people who would do anything to save the family name were, by that very willingness, tainting the name.

  III

  IMAGE

  If you had said to a man in the Stone Age, “Ugg says Ugg makes the best stone hatchets,” he would have perceived a lack of detachment and disinterestedness about the testimonial. If you had said to a mediaeval peasant, “Robert the Bowyer proclaims, with three blasts of a horn, that he makes good bows,” the peasant would have said, “Well, of course he does,” and thought about something more important. It is only among people whose minds have been weakened by a sort of mesmerism that so transparent a trick as that of advertisement could ever have been tried at all.

  —GILBERT CHESTERTON

  10

  Creating the Kennedys

  Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

  —SAMUEL JOHNSON, Idler No. 40

  One of John Kennedy’s boyhood friends told the Blairs that he had never heard of a “PR man” till he met his schoolmate’s father. Joseph Kennedy used professional public relations people; but he was his own best manager of reputations. He early learned the techniques for getting attention. In this he resembled the Hollywood “moguls” who could shape American taste though their own sense of taste was deficient. Still, what the moguls did for “starlets,” Kennedy would do for his offspring.

  He took great pains to have the Kennedys portrayed in public as, invariably, winners. One of the first difficulties he had to face in this project was the existence of one Kennedy who clearly seemed a loser. When his daughter Rosemary proved slow at learning, Kennedy urged her to try harder—that, after all, was how he made his sickly son John play football. As with his other children, he was tenderly compelling, but compelling. He expected results. But he got none. By the time Gloria Swanson, a believer in health foods, suggested that Rosemary try them, Kennedy blew up at her; told her not to tempt him with false hopes. He had faced the fact that Rosemary was a permanent loser, retarded from birth; the best doctors could do nothing for her. One of the “Four Horsemen” around Kennedy warned Ms. Swanson that the subject was too sensitive, she should not bring it up again.

  But if all the Kennedys could not be winners, they could be made to appear winners. Rosemary’s deficiencies were disguised as long as possible—she was even presented at the English court with the rest of the Ambassador’s family. And when she went to a home for the retarded, that fact was denied for decades. At first it was said she had entered a convent to teach. When James MacGregor Burns was given access to the family for his first biography, he relayed the family line that Rosemary had a vocation to “help care for mentally retarded children.” Joseph Dinneen and Joe McCarthy repeated that story in early biographies. Even when it became clear that Rosemary was not doing any teaching, her father could not confess that she was retarded from birth. He told the press that she had suffered a childhood attack of spinal meningitis. When the Kennedy Foundation was set up, and money was given Archbishop Cushing to establish a home for the retarded, the Archbishop heeded Kennedy’s wishes and said the donation was for care of “poor children.” Later, when the truth about Rosemary came out, the generosity of the Kennedys helped improve mental care for the handicapped. Eunice Shriver, especially, became identified with the Special Olympics. But for decades Joseph Kennedy succeeded in hiding what he obviously considered a family disgrace.

  The impulse to hide weakness led to the sequestration of John Kennedy’s medical records. The Blairs, in their search for doctors who had treated the young Kennedy, found it hard to document the precise time and place of various treatments. His bad back had been with him from childhood, but he told John Hersey that it originated in the strain of rescuing his comrades after his boat was sunk. (Those comrades do not remember his mentioning any back injury at the time.) The habit of covering up his multiple health problems culminated in the series of lies about his Addison’s disease. When Lyndon Johnson revealed the existence of this problem in the 1960 campaign (thereby incurring Robert Kennedy’s fieriest anger), the Kennedy camp issued outright denials. Its spokesmen later rationalized this by saying he did not have Addison’s disease because the public wrongly thought the disease invariably fatal: so it would give a false impression to use the term, even though it was the correct one. But they not only did not use the term. They expressly denied it was applicable in any sense, and portrayed Johnson as a candidate willing to invent any lie convenient to his purposes. (The family sealing of the President’s autopsy report would later fuel conspiracy theories inimical to Johnson.)

  When Edward Kennedy was caught cheating at Harvard, his father took step
s to cover that up, too—including the employment of the young man who had taken the exam for his son. But the patriarch’s skill was more often used for enhancing the family’s good points than in suppressing the truth about defects. The selling of his sons began with their Harvard careers, where he urged them on to athletic distinction. He had, from their boyhood days, introduced them to influential people who would sponsor them (later he had Justice William Douglas take Robert to Russia with him). He wanted his sons to study with famous professors—and sent Joseph, the eldest, to the London School of Economics, where Harold Laski not only instructed the boy but let him travel with him. Arthur Krock developed the family line on Laski, one that has been endlessly repeated—that the patriarch disliked Laski’s Marxism but wanted his sons exposed to all views. Actually, Kennedy was a celebrity hunter; he was more interested in what a man could do for his boys than in what the man thought. Felix Frankfurter had described Laski as “the greatest teacher in the world.” To be thought that by a Frankfurter was to possess power, and Kennedy meant to send his sons where the power was.

  The point, in other words, was not to study with Laski, but to have studied with him. So, in his Who’s Who biography, John Kennedy claimed for years that he was a “Student of London Sch. Economics, 1935–36.” Actually, his health made him withdraw before he could attend any classes. Unlike his brother, he never studied under Laski, though the family worked hard to develop the impression he had—James Landis, Dean of Harvard Law School, even claimed that Kennedy got his ideas for Why England Slept from Laski.

  The first major effort at selling John Kennedy was the Ambassador’s treatment of his senior paper, which he turned into a best-selling book. Just as studying with Laski mattered less than being known for having studied with him, writing a book mattered less than being known for having written one: “You would be surprised how a book that really makes the grade with high-class people stands you in good stead for years to come. I remember that in the report you are asked to make after twenty-five years to the Committee at Harvard, one of the questions is ‘What books have you written?’ and there is no doubt you will have done yourself a great deal of good.”

  When his son’s book appeared, the Ambassador sent a copy to the Royal Family, another to Churchill. Given Henry Luce’s opening plug for Wendell Willkie, Kennedy was tactful enough not to send it to Roosevelt. But he did send a copy to Harold Laski, which was a mistake. Laski, with whom John Kennedy is supposed to have studied, and from whom James Landis claimed he took this very book’s ideas, wrote to the doting father:

  The easy thing for me to do would be to repeat the eulogies that Krock and Harry Luce have showered on your boy’s work. In fact, I choose the more difficult way of regretting deeply that you let him publish it. For while it is the book of a lad with brains, it is very immature, it has no structure, and dwells almost wholly on the surface of things. In a good university, half a hundred seniors do books like this as part of their normal work in their final year. But they don’t publish them for the good reason that their importance lies solely in what they get out of doing them and not out of what they have to say. I don’t honestly think any publisher would have looked at that book of Jack’s if he had not been your son, and if you had not been ambassador.

  Kennedy no doubt agreed that the book was published because of his position. After all, that is why he wanted such a position—to help his boys. And he was less interested in what his son had got out of the academic exercise than in what he could get out of it as a political exercise—which, it turned out, was a great deal.

  It should be remembered that Laski was reading the completed book, after Arthur Krock’s ministrations to its style and the Ambassador’s additions to its content. The Blairs show in parallel passages how literally Kennedy copied extracts from his father’s letters directly into the final text. The senior paper on which the book is based was even more ragged in structure and style. Carl Friedrich, the famous political scientist who judged it, explained why the paper should not get a magna cum laude: “Fundamental premise never analyzed—much too long, wordy, repetitious. Bibliography … spotty. Many typographical errors. English diction repetitive. Cum laude plus.”

  It was unpromising material. But Joseph Kennedy was a great promoter. He had Krock rewrite the manuscript, retitle it, find it an agent. He supplied charts, statistics, and arguments himself. He arranged for Luce to introduce it, in a campaign year, by describing it as relevant to the election. Kennedy paid to send out 250 free copies, over twice the publisher’s norm in those days. Thus, blessed by the New York Times (in the person of Krock), and the Time-Life organization (in Luce), the book sold 80,000 copies in America, enough to put it briefly on the best-seller list in the summer of 1940. An English edition sold well too. Beginning with a school paper that “half a hundred seniors do” every year, the elder Kennedy had created a Promising Young Thinker in the public mind. Much of the Kennedy legend would turn on his future treatment as a scholar, an historian, a writer. When the Ambassador arranged for his son to travel to useful places with press credentials, Krock celebrated him as a brilliant young journalist. Krock even claimed that Kennedy, as a journalistic stringer in England, predicted the surprise 1946 defeat of Winston Churchill, though the Blairs uncovered clip files and letters to disprove that claim. John Kennedy the writer was almost entirely the creation of Joseph Kennedy the promoter. It is significant that, when the father wanted a ghost for his own 1940 book, Why I’m For Roosevelt, he did not turn to “the writer” in the family, but to that writer’s writer, Arthur Krock.

  The next step in the selling of John Kennedy was the celebration of his wartime heroism. The heroism was real. Kennedy saved the life of Patrick McMahon. He undertook the most dangerous assignments in looking for rescuers. His physical courage can never be questioned. If anything, he took unnecessary risks. But to this basis of heroism John Kennedy added a number of legendary embellishments. He released to biographers a preliminary and inaccurate draft of the citation for his Navy and Marine Corps Medal. This citation says his boat was rammed “while attempting a torpedo attack on a Japanese destroyer” and that he “personally rescued three men.” The later citation corrected the errors. The attempted torpedo attack becomes a simple “collision” there, and he is said to have “contributed to the saving of several lives.” The changes were not incidental. Kennedy had put his own men in for the Silver Star, a combat medal, and had been put in for one himself. This application was downgraded to the life-saving award given all three officers of the PT boat. (Enlisted man John Maguire assisted in the rescue too, but got no medal.)

  Kennedy repeatedly tried to establish that he was on the attack when his boat was sunk. In the account he gave to John Hersey, who first wrote up his adventure for The New Yorker, he claimed that “Kennedy saw a shape and spun the wheel to turn for an attack.” Later, when the Ambassador arranged for Reader’s Digest to run a condensation of the New Yorker piece (reprints of which became campaign handouts over the years), John took special care that the phrase “turn for an attack” was retained while other sections were cut.

  In fact, interviews with others on the boat make it clear that there was no attempted attack. The destroyer loomed over the idling PT boat before anyone knew it was near. This was a sore point for the crew, and even more so for its skipper. After all, two men died in the collision—was Kennedy as negligent in the Solomon Islands as his brother would be at Poucha Pond? It was fear of that charge that made Kennedy falsify the story of his boat’s ramming. The event is mysterious in itself. How did a light plywood boat made for speed and maneuverability manage to get itself cut in two by a more ponderous destroyer? It had not happened before. It did not happen again. It was a mystery to Kennedy himself. Just after his rescue, a friend named William Liebenow asked, joking, “How in the world could a Jap destroyer run you down?” Kennedy replied, “Lieb, I actually do not know.”

  It is not clear from the accounts laboriously gathered by the Blai
rs whether Kennedy had shut off one or more of his boat’s three motors, was idling them, or stalled them, or what watch conditions let an expected boat bear down on 109 without warning. Kennedy would cryptically tell Robert Donovan, after the Bay of Pigs invasion, “That whole story [of PT 109] was more fucked up than Cuba.” And Barney Ross, of the PT crew, was astonished when the New Yorker account came out, showing an alert crew consciously on the attack—a story that makes the collision even harder to explain. Ross told the Blairs: “Our reaction to the 109 thing had always been that we were kind of ashamed of our performance.… I had always thought it was a disaster, but he [Hersey] made it sound pretty heroic, like Dunkirk.”

  There was nothing in the handling of PT 109 to be very proud of. Its assignment was to intercept destroyers running men and supplies through a strait; or, if they missed at the first passage, to hit the ships as they returned north before dawn. The 109 was part of a four-boat detachment whose leader spotted the Japanese and went for them, expecting the others to follow. Kennedy, for some reason, was out of touch, and did not make that initial attack. He waited for the second chance, two hours later, and was caught off guard. His boat fired none of its torpedos and spotted no enemy ship till the Amagiri sliced it in two.

  It may be said in extenuation of Kennedy that PT boats in general were poorly equipped with navigation and radio equipment. Their record was dismal—the plywood hulls, the topheavy and unreliable torpedos, made them floating explosions waiting to happen. PT boats were romanticized in war propaganda after one took MacArthur off the Philippines. Recruiting had taken place among Ivy Leaguers and the rich—those who had sailed their own boats—and the individualism of the skippers, together with the unpredictability of the boats’ performance, made some Navy officers consider them a menace to the American cause.