Bobby Kennedy

by Larry Tye

  The conflict between the president’s determination to intervene and his ambassador’s instinct to keep out reached a climax during Joe’s trip back to Boston in November 1940, when he gave an interview to Louis Lyons of The Boston Globe. The newspaper’s editors saw Kennedy as a local man who meant well, and they envisioned the interview as a breezy feature—but tenacious newsman that he was, Lyons merely moved the bombshells down to paragraph six. “I’m willing to spend all I’ve got left to keep us out of the war,” Kennedy vowed. “There’s no sense in our getting in. We’d just be holding the bag.” What were Britain’s chances against the Nazis? “Democracy,” Kennedy told Lyons, “is finished in England. It may be here.” What America should do, the diplomat added, is “aid England as far as we can.” As for joining the fight, “I say we aren’t going in. Only over my dead body.”

  The story revealed nothing that Joe hadn’t been preaching in private, but it was a step too far, not just for the British but for Franklin Roosevelt. Kennedy believed in a laissez-faire foreign policy, even in the current crisis. He was convinced that capitalism, if not democracy, would prevail. In the meantime we should do business with Hitler and his fellow fascists as a way to keep them engaged. For Joe—and later for his next-to-youngest son Bobby—personal realities always trumped policy abstractions. “I have four boys,” he had confided to a friend, “and I don’t want them to be killed in a foreign war.”

  The Globe story gave Roosevelt the excuse he was waiting for to fire his uncontrollable ambassador, slamming the door on Kennedy’s dream of being elected president, or even a ward boss in Boston. Yet Joe was not one to wallow in might-have-beens. His vision all along, as he told a mate, was “that future generations of school children will automatically remember three names together: Washington, Lincoln and Kennedy.” If he couldn’t be the Kennedy to make that happen, there were always his sons. He had already set up trust funds for all his offspring, ensuring that “financially speaking, [they] could look me in the eye and tell me to go to hell.” Now he would zero in on his side of that bargain: His children—he included all of them but had in mind the boys—should give something back to the country that had made the family rich. Self-interested as he was, he was also a patriot.

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  NAMES WERE CHOSEN with intentionality in the Kennedy family. Patrick Joseph was proud of his son, but calling him Joseph Patrick relieved the boy of the burden of a more ethnic first name and of being a junior. Joe, by contrast, wanted his firstborn to be a chip off his block, and Joe’s first choice to carry the Kennedy flag all the way to the top was his namesake, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Jr. Joe Jr. had all the traits the old man valued. Standing nearly six feet tall, with chestnut hair, broad shoulders, and sapphire-blue eyes, he radiated a manly magnetism. He could be abrasive or charming, depending on his purpose. But there was no question about his bravery, or where he stood on his father’s call for appeasement. He had faced down a Communist firing squad during the Spanish Civil War and had flown so many bombing missions in his second tour with the Naval Air Corps that he was due to come home by the summer of 1944. Instead, the twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant volunteered for his most hazardous mission: piloting a plane loaded with explosives over the English Channel early on the evening of August 12. The plan called for him to turn radio control over to two B-17s that would steer the dronelike weapon to a Belgian launching pad for Germany’s dreaded V-2 rockets while he parachuted to safety. But before Joe Jr. and his copilot could eject, their aircraft exploded. The next day a pair of Navy chaplains delivered the horrifying news to the Kennedy family, leaving everybody but Joe Sr. sobbing and wailing. He never would recover, but mourned in private, only later confiding in a letter to a friend that “my plans for my future were all tied up with young Joe, and that has gone smash.”

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the second son, was named after his mother’s father, reminding Boston voters of the boy’s connection to the impish and affable John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, who served two terms as mayor of Boston and three as a congressman. Young John became a war hero like his older brother, although he fought on the water and half a world away. More bookish than Joe Jr. and slowed by a stream of maladies ranging from scarlet fever to whooping cough, John had dreamed of a career out of the limelight. A college professor, maybe, or a journalist. But with his firstborn gone, Joe Sr.’s aspirations shifted to the son he called Jack. It was a simple question of succession, as his grandfather explained on the very day the family learned Joe Jr.’s fate. “At dinner that night Honey Fitz said to Bobby, ‘Look, your father and I were counting on Joe Jr. to be the next governor of Massachusetts. Since he’s not here…it should be Jack,’ ” recalls Pete MacLellan, a high school friend of Bobby’s who was at the dinner. While the office would change, the family’s ambitions never did, and just two years after Joe Jr.’s death, John Kennedy ignored the political odds and his precarious health to run for a congressional seat from Massachusetts.

  What about Bobby, Joe and Rose’s most dutiful and most brittle child? “Robert Francis” was a less calculated selection of names than his brothers’. Robert was as common as appellations came then, whereas Francis could have been a memorial to his paternal uncle, who died before his second birthday; to his maternal grandfather, whose middle name was Francis; or to Saint Francis of Assisi, which is the angelic interpretation the family prefers. Like Saint Francis, Robert F. Kennedy was gentle as well as intense, and he, too, found solace in nature and with animals.

  If Rose had had her way, her third son would have entered the priesthood. From the first, she and Joe had informally earmarked who would be each child’s primary caretaker, and she was Bobby’s. He was her favorite, too, in part because he needed her the most. Rose’s mother worried that Bobby would “be a sissy” because he was surrounded by sisters, “but of course,” Rose said, “this didn’t happen.” She was firm with her other eight but referred to Bobby as “my own little pet.” He volunteered to sit next to her on the plane when the family was traveling and nobody else offered, and he regularly told her how beautiful she looked.

  It was different with Joe. The question of who Robert Francis was and what would become of him didn’t even occur to his father in the early years, when his full attention went to the “golden trio” of Joe Jr., Jack, and their second-oldest sister, Kathleen. Just getting a word in at the dinner table was difficult for the younger tier. Bobby felt invisible the way middle children often do, a hazard more pronounced when there are eight siblings. He also was the runt of that impressive litter, standing only five feet nine in a family of six-footers, with little of the Kennedy eloquence, moxie, good looks, or athleticism. What he did have were buck teeth, a slight stammer, and a disposition dark enough for Jack to call him Black Robert. “I was the seventh of nine children,” Bobby explained later. “When you come from that far down, you have to struggle to survive.” His family got a taste of that tenacity when Bobby was just four. He was so resolved to swim like his big brothers that he jumped into the deep waters of Nantucket Sound prepared to drown if he couldn’t float. Luckily Joe Jr. was there to rescue him. “It showed either a lot of guts or no sense at all,” Jack said, looking back.

  That determination, born of insecurity, was not easily shed. In his teens, Bobby wrote to his father in cramped and barely legible handwriting: “I wish, Dad, that you would write me a letter as you used to Joe & Jack about what you think about the different political events and the war as I’d like to understand what’s going on better than I now do.” He was pleading less for news than for acknowledgment, and he was thrilled when his father responded with a two-and-a-half-page missive.

  Joe had reasons for his low expectations. Like him, Bobby was a second-rate student forced to repeat a year—although the father replayed his last one in high school, whereas the son stayed back in third grade. And unlike his brother Jack, Bobby’s most impressive academic achievement was the number of schools he attended—ten in all—rather than his perform
ance at any of them. The changes were a function both of his parents’ peripatetic lifestyle and of their changing notions of what was best for Bobby. For high school, Joe arranged for him to attend the prestigious St. Paul’s in New Hampshire, but Rose, distressed at the thought of her most devout child steeped in Episcopalianism, transferred him to Portsmouth Priory, a Rhode Island boarding school run by Benedictine monks. He spent three years there, grades eight through ten, but why he left is unclear. Some ex-classmates tie his departure to a cheating scandal in which he at least looked at a pilfered exam. Rose blamed Bobby’s disappointment with the Priory’s headmaster, food, and accommodations, which became a bit better after Joe’s donation to the school building fund. MacLellan, his friend and classmate, offers the likeliest explanation: When Portsmouth couldn’t promise that it could get Bobby into Harvard, Joe enrolled him for his junior and senior years at Milton Academy in Massachusetts, where he’d have as clear a shot as Joe had when Patrick sent him to Boston Latin.

  In letters home from prep school, Bobby expressed his delight when he avoided failing subjects like English and French, although all he managed in those classes were C’s, and in his senior year he got a D in geometry. He also made light of his mediocrity in swimming, football, and romance. Entering Milton as the “new kid,” he didn’t know his classmates’ names and called enough of them “fella” that that quickly became his own nickname. It was one of countless signs that Bobby didn’t fit in. “He was neither a natural athlete nor a natural student nor a natural success with girls and had no natural gift for popularity. Nothing came easily for him,” remembered his closest schoolmate, Dave Hackett, for whom things did come easily.*4 “What he had was a set of handicaps and a fantastic determination to overcome them….We were both, in a way, misfits.” His friend Piedy Lumet, known in her Milton days as Mary Bailey Gimbel, says Bobby back then was “shy and whimsical and a little bit solitary.” And he had a classic pose: “He mostly stood on one foot with the other toe resting on top, his head a little bit down, looking out from underneath his forelock….I thought of him sort of looking like a bat trapped in a pantry, you know? I mean, ‘How did I get here?’ ”

  For his part, Bobby told a biographer that “what I remember most vividly about growing up was going to a lot of different schools, always having to make new friends, and that I was very awkward. I dropped things and fell down all the time. I had to go to the hospital a few times for stitches in my head and my leg. And I was pretty quiet most of the time. And I didn’t mind being alone.” All of that eventually would make him sensitive to children in general, and particularly to the misfits. At the time, it was even more hurtful than he let on.

  If bouncing between schools and feeling like a perpetual outlier constituted Bobby’s least favorite memories from childhood, his most cherished came from the family’s vacation getaways where the only outsiders were ones they had invited. In 1933, when Bobby was barely eight, Joe bought a 15,000-square-foot Mediterranean Revival estate in Palm Beach for the not-so-small fortune of $120,000 (more than $2 million in today’s terms). Americans across the continent were devastated by the Great Depression, but not the Kennedys. Their mansion had been built by a Philadelphia department store family who called it La Guerida, or “bounty of war,” a name even more appropriate given how Joe made his money. His and Rose’s kids flew in from colder climates for Christmas vacations, filling to overflow the six bedrooms. There was half a football field (176 feet) of beachfront to play along, to which Joe added a pool and tennis court. He also indulged himself with an enclosed solarium—his children called it the bull pen—where he spent his days naked but for a hat, with a telephone planted in his ear.

  Much as Bobby and his siblings liked Florida in the winter, the house that felt most like home was in Hyannis Port, a little waterfront community on Cape Cod to the southwest of the bustling village of Hyannis. The Cape was not Joe Kennedy’s first choice to spend his summers. That would have been Cohasset, which was closer to Boston and in a world of blue bloods who couldn’t keep him from renting but made it clear he wasn’t welcome. So in 1926 he leased, then four years later bought, the Malcolm cottage in Hyannis Port, where the summering millionaires from Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Chicago were less hostile. There was one house to start with, a rambling 1904 white clapboard, along with a tennis court, swimming pool, and private beach. Situated at the end of the lane, the sprawling structure’s most inviting feature was a long deck with sweeping views of the blue-green Atlantic Ocean. Joe equipped the house with enough amenities to entertain his children, and later his grandchildren, by installing a Swedish bath, private motion picture theater, and wine cellar with sipping room. The two-and-a-half-acre lawn that separated the houses from the water was perfect for touch football. The front porch held a ticker tape machine that let Joe follow the markets, and that also encouraged Rose to retreat to the prefabricated shack in the corner of the yard that was her refuge.

  The Cape was where Rose and Joe’s children cemented their bonds to one another. The rest of the year they were at boarding school, in the military, or traveling, but whenever they could they headed to Hyannis Port. Ted and Bobby loved visiting on their own when the main house was buttoned up for winter, and they would bundle up in the apartment above the garage to talk about school, girls, and the big dreams of little boys. Joe Jr. taught Bobby to pass and catch a football there. Jack spent endless hours reading in his room and walking on the beach, sometimes letting Bobby tag along beside him. Even his oldest sister, Rose Marie, was there in the early days, before her mental disabilities were deemed unmanageable and she was sent to live at a convent in Rhode Island. That carefree family time was so appealing that a young Bobby would write home asking his parents, “When are you going to open the house in Hyannisport? I will be a constant visitor when you do.”

  Not all his memories from home and family were sweet ones, however. In the early years Bobby would cower upstairs, with his sisters, while Joe Jr. and Jack duked it out on the first floor. He lived in fear as well as awe of his dad, too. In summers, when everyone was on hand, Joe expected the children in the dining room five minutes before mealtime. It was a rule so strictly enforced that Kennedys were known to abandon whatever boat they were on and swim for their lives so as not to break it. Rose and Joe drilled into their offspring the importance of knowing what was happening in the world by quizzing them at mealtime, and they fine-tuned everyone’s language skills by insisting that only Spanish or French be spoken on specified evenings at the dinner table. Rose oversaw weigh-ins every Saturday to determine who needed calories added or subtracted over the next week. Yet even as their life in Hyannis Port was governed by stricture, what the children remembered more were the parlor games and athletic contests. There were community sailing races on Nantucket Sound and trips to the Cape Cod Creamery on Sea Street. Best of all, for Joe and his kids, was being at home with just the family. They were difficult to tell apart when they smiled, a herd of fiery Irish purebreds. To hell with exclusive Harvard social clubs, and neighbors who didn’t like Catholics or Celts. The Cape Cod compound was a place to live out their collective dream of Kennedy self-sufficiency, not just for Joe’s children but for the generations to follow. As they aged it would be the only place Kennedy siblings, and Bobby in particular, could always be kids.

  Bobby’s college career was again reminiscent of his father’s—getting into Harvard on the strength of his high school’s reputation as much as his own record, and, with grades as mediocre as those at Milton, spending part of his time at college on academic probation. But whereas pursuing and catching women was second nature to Joe, and to his boys Jack and Joe Jr., Bobby had to work at it. “I am now chasing women madly but it looks as if I lack the Kennedy charm as I have yet to find a girl who likes me,” he confided to a friend. “But then I don’t quit easily so I’m still in there struggling.” And while Joe Sr.’s college era was a serene one for America, in Bobby’s case World War II intervened. That meant that his fi
rst two years after high school were focused less on schoolwork, although he did get academic credit, than on becoming a soldier like his older brothers. He’d enlisted while he was at Milton in 1943, and a year later, with help from his father, he was accepted into the Navy’s V-12 College Training Program and the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, at Harvard and then at Bates College in Maine. After two long years of watching the war from ivy-covered campuses, he got the Secretary of the Navy’s permission to quit his leadership training and, at the lowly rank of seaman, he was purposely assigned in February 1946 to a destroyer named after the fallen Joe Jr. But the vessel never made it out of the Caribbean, and the only scars Bobby got were the product of a fistfight with a shipmate, a case of infectious hepatitis that showed up the year after his discharge, and the humiliation of once more landing in the shadows of his war-hero brothers.