The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  12

  The Prisoner of Image

  Arm, arm, my name!

  —SHAKESPEARE, Richard II

  Roger Mudd was a regular guest at Kennedy house parties. Robert Kennedy filmed a relaxed interview with Mudd in the 1968 campaign. It seeemed inevitable that Mudd would interview Edward Kennedy if he ran for President. But Kennedy tried to put it off. All through the summer of 1979, he had been feeding speculation while dodging questions on his future. He hoped to keep the matter buttoned up until October 20, when he had to appear with President Carter at the dedication of the Kennedy Library. But Tom Southwick, his young press secretary, thought it best to get the (presumably sympathetic) session with Mudd out of the way before a heavy schedule of actual campaigning began. On September 29, Mudd was in Hyannis Port to tape what Kennedy thought would be a genial discussion of the nation’s plight. Still not an announced candidate, Kennedy planned to repeat his offered-in-sadness strictures on President Carter’s competence.

  But Mudd, like many reporters who had been close to the Kennedys, had to prove he was not their minion. Edward must submit to the scrutiny his elders evaded. The very charm of John Kennedy, the intensity of Robert, worked against Edward. Their success at contriving appearances now put journalists on guard, made them adopt a compensatory harshness. Defenders of Richard Nixon rightly complained that their man received a ferocious coverage from which Kennedys had largely been exempt. After Watergate, it was a point of pride for journalists to exhibit omnidirectional skepticism.

  And so, as Burton Hersh says, “Mudd set Kennedy up.” He bore in with personal questions. What was the state of his marriage? Why did he need so many advisers to help him tell the story of Chappaquiddick? What of reports linking him with other women? How does he differ from his brothers? Why did he say he looked at a clock in the car, after fetching Gargan, when there was no clock in the car? Mudd even took on a dramatic role to ask one question in the most offensive manner: “What happens, Senator, if some heckler stands up at a rally, a Kennedy rally, and says, you know, in the loud voice, red-faced, he’s angry at you, and he says, ‘Kennedy, you know you were drinking, you lied, and you covered up.’ What—what are you going to tell him in a situation like that?”

  Kennedy was clearly disconcerted at being heckled in his own home by a man he thought his friend. With the cameras turning, he stumbled backward, verbally off-balance and finding no firm ground beneath him. Even when Mudd returned to questions Kennedy had been expecting, he was disoriented, still, and inarticulate:

  MUDD: What would you do different from Carter?

  KENNEDY: Well, in which particular areas?

  MUDD: Well, just take the—the question of—of leadership.

  KENNEDY: Well, it’s a—on—on what—on—you know, you have to come to grips with the—the different issues that we’re—we’re facing. I mean, we can—we have to deal with each of the various questions that we’re—we’re talking about, whether it’s in the questions of the economy, whether it’s in—in the areas of energy.

  Mudd’s editing and later commentary were deftly hostile; they made Kennedy look even more dithery, as his weak answers were distributed throughout the hour show. In his added remarks Mudd said Kennedy’s marriage existed “only on selected occasions,” and called the Senator a “captive of his bushy-tailed staff.” Mudd used shots of the Chappaquiddick scene to back up this judgment: “It is now obvious that Kennedy and his advisers plan to volunteer nothing more on Chappaquiddick, or make any attempt to clear away the lingering contradictions.”

  All the images of the past were there—the compound at Hyannis Port, scenes of the family clustering around its matriarch, a Kennedy on the hustings, shots of the crowd—but here they were arranged as in a nightmare-reversal of the old iconography of Kennedy brains and bravery. The brothers had lived by expert contriving of appearances; but their survivor was being dismantled, aspect by aspect, in terms of the old impressions. Kennedys were by definition bright and glib—but this one stammered incoherently. Kennedys were tough and took the initiative—but this one collapsed under questioning. Kennedys used TV to create desired impressions—but this one was being destroyed by TV, before our eyes.

  Not quite before our eyes, though. CBS, defying Kennedy’s wishes, ran the documentary three days before he announced his campaign; but did it on the same night that a rival network ran the movie Jaws. The audience for Mudd’s show was small; but even that became a disadvantage for Kennedy. Various journalists had received a transcript of the show, and leaked it ahead of schedule, most of them to ridicule it in print. It would have been better for people to see Kennedy than to read the excerpts treated, later, with derision by those who had been friendly to the Kennedys, people like Jimmy Breslin and Mary McGrory. Rambling sentences, spoken, get tied together by inflections, by the tonal trajectory of a thought. Even John Kennedy’s expert performance at press conferences left behind a printed record of incomplete, interrupted, circumlocutious answers. For that matter, Mudd was less than word-perfect in his performance. One question read in its entirety: “You were not aware—did not—you did not figure that the—that the main road …” Asked what, precisely, he wanted to know about Chappaquiddick, Mudd had at first no specific question to offer, then fumbled his way into one: “When you came back to the cottage, after your car had left the bridge, and you got Mr. Markham and Mr. Gargan to go with you, you noticed that the time was approximately 2:15—2:20, 12:15 …” These things are less noticeable as conversation weaves them into inflected continuities; but Kennedy did not get the benefit of that fact as his more garbled answers were reprinted and made fun of in column after column.

  Kennedy not only looked bad in his own right; he was made to look even worse by contrast with exaggerated memories of his brothers’ wit and verbal presence of mind. And he was clearly not in charge of the way he was portrayed. President Kennedy managed to appear where and how he liked on television. He used the medium; it did not use him. He once rebuked his brother Robert for bringing in a camera crew without preparing him; sent Kenneth O’Donnell to view the film; decided it was not flattering; and had the network kill it. The Kennedy skill at charming or coercing reporters had developed early—John Kennedy had a reference to his father’s anti-Semitism taken out of the Dinneen biography. At the Justice Department, Robert Kennedy’s agents investigated Victor Lasky for publishing an unfavorable book about his brother. Jacqueline Kennedy was as concerned with the proper control of journalists as any of the family she married into. When the White House staff was sworn to secrecy about its years of service, Maude Shaw had been overlooked. Perhaps, as a British nanny, she was considered discreet by type; or, as a noncitizen, less easily bound to silence. When she published an adoring memoir of her time in the White House, Mrs. Kennedy deeply resented it—perhaps for revealing that she, Maude, had been the first to tell Caroline about her father’s death. Mrs. Kennedy asked that this detail be removed from Manchester’s book—which shows that she was not merely concerned with accuracy, but with making sure that she was seen in the best light. Mrs. Kennedy was also bitter about “Red” Fay’s harmless and playful memoir, perhaps because he mentioned the gossip about rifts in the Kennedy marriage:

  A marriage between a beautiful, enamored young lady and a worldly public figure in his mid-thirties is not as simple a matter as the union of a teen-age boy with the girl next door.… There is no question that the demands of public life placed an unusual strain on the marriage of these two bright, attractive young people. Gossip mongers wanted to interpret the slightest deviation from what “newly married Town Square U.S.A.” would do as a telltale sign of unrest.… With Jack’s candidacy for the Democratic nomination now widely recognized, there were persistent idle rumors that Jack and Jacqueline were suffering marital differences.

  It was not enough to deny such rumors; one had to pretend they did not exist, erase them from the record entirely.

  Edward Kennedy was always the least manipulative of t
he Kennedy brothers, the most candid and outgoing, the one little given to posing or appearances. When Senator John Kennedy underwent back surgery, he used this moment of apparent weakness to project an image of strength—he was writing a book flat on his back, turning adversity into opportunity. When Senator Edward Kennedy had back surgery following his plane crash, he asked the family’s academic courtiers to give him a seminar on political and economic matters. He was not the teacher, but still a pupil. The tame professors came, and performed; but the contrast with Sorensen’s use of such men during John’s illness was striking.

  Eventually, of course, Edward had to come out with his own campaign books; but he simply went through the motions. His brothers planned books to support their political careers in multiple ways. John’s theme of courage prompted most reviewers to remind their audience of the author’s war record; his concentration on the Senate made him a candidate for the next profile in courage. Robert’s The Enemy Within gave a “law and order” justification to the author’s reputed ruthlessness—people want cops to be tough. That newspapers noticed these books helped their authors. But it has been largely a blessing for Edward that few can remember his books.

  In 1968, just after Robert published a collection of speeches to help his campaign (To Seek a Newer World), Edward came out with his own collection, Decisions for a Decade. It was foolish to publish similar volumes so close together, since the younger brother had to be careful not to outshine the older. Beyond that, however, he succeeded in embarrassing them both by demonstrating that they used the same speechwriters (or writers who cribbed from each other). Peter Lucas, in The Reporter, listed eight interchangeable passages from the two books.

  Here, for instance, is Robert: “One Latin American President told me succinctly: ‘If you want a government that says always “yes, yes, yes,” you will soon have to deal with a government that says “no, no, no.”’”

  And Edward: “As a Latin American president once said to an American official: ‘If you demand a government which says “yes, yes, yes,” you may finally get one that says “no, no, no.”’”

  Or Robert on local government: “To meet the problem, Jefferson urged the division of the nation, within each state and community, into what he called ‘republics of the wards.’”

  And Edward: “What we need, in a favorite phrase of Thomas Jefferson, is to ‘divide the counties into wards,’ creating small units of government.” And so on.

  The younger brother’s lackluster performance may have been expected while older brothers were still around to shine, to get first crack at the best writers, at their brightest phrases. But even after the death of both brothers, on the eve of his own first run for President, Edward issued a book more damaging than helpful to him. Our Day and Generation (1979) is a collection of rhetorical snippets from Kennedy speeches interspersed with “family of man” pictures, visual and verbal clichés juxtaposed within wide margins as if to emphasize the poverty of thought.

  Naturally, the tame professors paid homage. But this time they gave the game away. Henry Steele Commager took blame for assembling the book, and pretended in the introduction to derive “a consistent philosophy” from the tags and campaign sentences he calls “observations and admonitions.” Then, to complete the humiliation of attendants, Archibald MacLeish contributed a foreword that claims more can be learned from these Kennedy “papers” than from “professional pollsters or propagandists.”

  Trying to use the Kennedy image, Edward has constantly been undone by it. Tricks that worked twice all seem to fail on the third try. Dramatic touches from the older brothers’ repertoire become mere bathos when Edward invokes them.

  Roger Mudd, in his TV interview, made a sardonic reference to Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick speech, forcing the Senator renounce one of its weepier claims:

  MUDD: Senator, when you gave your television—televised speech after Chappaquiddick, you mentioned thinking that there was some awful curse that was hanging over the Kennedy family. Do you still think that?

  KENNEDY: Well, I don’t—I don’t think so any more. I mean, there were a sudden series of circumstances which happened in fairly rapid sequence at that time, which I think probably helped me to reach that—that observation. In the period of the last ten years, I—I think life has been—been much more probably normal in—by general standards, and it’s been—been able to reach a sense of—of perspective of life on it, which I—I wouldn’t say that that viewpoint is—is mine any—any longer.

  This last of the glamorous Kennedys, pleading to be treated as “normal,” has traveled far from the memories of Camelot.

  The worst blow came when commentators like John Chancellor compared the Chappaquiddick talk to Nixon’s Checkers speech. That had always been a symbol, for Kennedy admirers, of the contrast between their man and the Republican he defeated. Nixon had “no class,” as John Kennedy put it; no taste, no sense of style. He crawled and whined his way back onto the ticket with Eisenhower in 1952, making an emotional appeal to the public to let him run despite rumors about a “slush fund.” He invoked his dog. Now it was a Kennedy’s turn to plead that constituents would keep him in the Senate. He invoked his curse. Life magazine treated Kennedy as a bumbling contriver of appearances, one who not only did not contrive what he wanted, but was caught trying to: “He was simply hustling heartstrings, using words, cashing in on the family credibility.” John Chancellor said that Nixon at least had the excuse of a presidential campaign’s pressures—an excuse Kennedy lacked. It is the ultimate betrayal of Kennedy appearances to come off second best to Richard Nixon. Theodore Sorensen, the verbal cosmetician, labored hard on the hopeless assignment Edward gave him. But everything he did just made things worse. Quoting himself, Sorensen had Edward recite the closing paragraph of Profiles in Courage. Life observed: “There was also some decidedly awkward talk of morality and courage, including an eloquent passage from his brother’s book, which Teddy recited as though oblivious to the way the meaning rebuked him.”

  Each time he evokes his brothers, he seems to dwindle beside the shadowy evocations. Yet he must go on evoking them. He is a prisoner of his brothers’ charm, which he must trade in even as he seems to cheapen it. It was regard for the family name, and a sense of the family power, that made him seek Kennedys first, not the police, at Chappaquiddick. And it was that very delay that made him, and the family, look so bad. And having relied on the image while trying to preserve it, he had to keep using it to rescue him from the trap it had led him into. All the ghosts had to be summoned now. Only if people were bowing to the ghosts could he hope to slip by the constable. He was using the Kennedy name, but using it up. The Kennedy loyalists came and served, but they looked ridiculous doing it—like the professors who bowed to his speechwriters’ platitudes. Other people gave in, one more time, to the Kennedy influence; but grumbled as they did so. The whole point of being a Kennedy was, in the father’s scheme of things, to look good. But now being a Kennedy meant looking bad, and making others look bad, even as the Kennedy name won a series of dim little victories over minor officials. At least seven people had to be distracted by what remained of the Kennedy dazzle:

  1. Edgartown Police Chief Dominick Arena, watching the recovery of Ms. Kopechne’s body, was told that Senator Kennedy wanted him back at the police station. Arena did not have Kennedy brought to him, to the radio car which was the sole communications center of his police force. He left the car with the divers, crossed on the ferry, and heard Kennedy’s admission of involvement. He asked for a statement, and left the Senator alone with Gargan to confect it. Gargan took down the minimal statement. Arena then typed it; Kennedy was not even asked to sign it. Arena demanded no expansion on the statement, and therefore did not learn about others on the island—which meant that the partygoers slipped away, to be asked no official questions for six months. Then Arena let the body be removed without an autopsy. He did not cite Kennedy for leaving the scene of an accident until pressured by journalists’ questionin
g. He felt obliged to be cooperative, even to the point of personal risk, when dealing with a Kennedy. “I’ve been so cooperative that they’re going to put me on the stand and make a jackass of me.”

  2. Dr. Donald Mills, the substitute medical examiner, did not give the body an external observation. He did not turn it over. He pulled down Ms. Kopechne’s slacks only far enough to feel her “tummy” (his word). He sent the body to the mortuary expecting an autopsy, but was flustered into signing a release when a man came to him speaking for Senator Kennedy. “I was almost pushed to the point of irrationality and blackout as I did my best to answer the barrage of questions.” The doctor’s reward for being impressed by “the Kennedy man” (as he called Dun Gifford) was, he later said, to live with accusations that he had been bought by Kennedy money. The power of the Kennedys is precisely that they do not need to buy deference.

  3. Dukes County Special Prosecutor Walter Steele led reporters away from any gossip about the party, and carpentered the minor charge which Kennedy plea-bargained with Steele’s support.

  4. District Attorney Edmund Dinis kept the case away from the Grand Jury as long as possible. Dinis asked for a Pennsylvania court to exhume the body for an autopsy, but had too little information to support his request. Three months after the accident, he had not talked to any of the partygoers.

  5. Judge Bernard C. Bronminski, who presided over the exhumation hearing in Pennsylvania, was facing reelection in a heavily Catholic district, and delayed his finding until after the election. Then he decided against exhumation, since fuller medical evidence might lead to “speculation”—as if slimmer evidence reduced illgrounded speculation.

  6. Judge Wilfred Paquet brought in a priest to pray for the Grand Jury when he addressed it, and counseled inaction.

  7. Judge James Boyle put on the strangest performance. He (a) presided at the leaving-of-the-scene hearing, and volunteered that Kennedy had been punished enough, a statement that should have disqualified him from (b) presiding over the later inquest on Ms. Kopechne’s death where (c) he blocked, directed, or took over the questioning process, defending Kennedy before (d) accusing Kennedy of perjury, after which, as he later admitted, (e) he was required by law to issue an arrest warrant, though (f) he didn’t. Judge Boyle is the best example of the way men of independent standing react to the aura of power around a Kennedy, even while they resent or belittle that aura. It is Edward Kennedy’s fate to be treated in terms of an image he is felt not to have earned. The image by which he is judged may have been false or hollow from the outset; but that does not help him. If for no other purpose, it remains valid for one—to tie his actions to stylistic claims he can neither fully embody nor entirely relinquish.