by Larry Tye
Bobby hardly needed more reasons to despise Roy, but Cohn gave him one nonetheless when he tried to smear Kennedy’s younger brother Ted with unfounded rumors about Ted’s association with “pinkos.” For his part, Cohn had his own new gripe: that just before the Army-McCarthy Hearings, Bobby had told Mary Driscoll, McCarthy’s longtime secretary, “I couldn’t find Joe, but I want you to give him a message. In these hearings, I’m going to do nothing to hurt him. In fact, I’m going to protect him every way I can, and I still feel exactly the same way as I always have about him. But I’m really going to get that little son-of-a-bitch Cohn.” Cohn said Driscoll repeated the remarks to McCarthy and then to him, “and any doubts I had as to where Bobby stood were crystal clear.” As for his invitation to fisticuffs, Cohn said it was fortunate for him that Senator Mundt had intervened because “I don’t think my physical condition, not being a mountain climber or running kayaks up and down the Colorado River or something, I don’t think I would have been too much of a match for him.”
Bobby threw his punches in ways that Cohn could not see but surely felt as much as if the two had done battle with bare knuckles. He leaked to the press embarrassing material on Cohn and Schine, including a letter Roy had asked subcommittee staff to sign attesting to their loyalty to Senator McCarthy. He tossed lifelines to Annie Lee Moss and other beleaguered witnesses. And when the hearings were done, Bobby was the one who rigorously reviewed every word of testimony. To make sure he got his final report right, he did what the Kennedys would always do, enlisting the help of a more experienced collaborator—in this case James M. Landis, the brilliant former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and a longtime friend of Joe Kennedy’s. The two closeted themselves in a rented cottage near the Kennedy home in Hyannis and produced a seventy-eight-page summary of the evidence that was fine-tuned and evenhanded enough that the subcommittee Republicans accepted everything but the damning conclusions for their own final report, instead of relying on less complete material assembled by their own lawyer. Even McCarthy was impressed by Bobby’s fairness.
The full Senate rendered a decisive verdict on its errant colleague. Zeroing in on his failure to cooperate with two panels of senators who had been investigating him—behavior that his fellow lawmakers said was “contrary to senatorial traditions”—they voted sixty-seven to twenty-two to rebuke the Wisconsin Republican. McCarthy scored a semantic victory when “condemn” was substituted for “censure,” and a substantive one when no mention was made of his anticommunist jihad. Still, as the condemned senator himself noted, “I wouldn’t exactly call it a vote of confidence.”*11 Cohn already was gone, resigning shortly after the hearings concluded rather than waiting to be fired. All the Democrats and half the Republicans present elected to admonish McCarthy, but one name was noticeably missing: Bobby’s brother Jack. Recovering from major back surgery, he excused himself from weighing in against a family friend who remained popular in Catholic-heavy Massachusetts. With Bobby’s help, JFK had prepared a speech admonishing McCarthy—but only for his abusive language and the misdeeds of his staff.
The roller-coaster ride with Joe McCarthy left its mark on Bobby as it did on America. It got his blood flowing and his mind churning, a welcome change after six months in the slow lane with Herbert Hoover. He made a mortal enemy of Roy Cohn, whom he never forgot or forgave. He had his first brush with legendary personalities who would figure prominently in his life—from Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, who belatedly orchestrated McCarthy’s downfall, to J. Edgar Hoover, who was already compiling secret files on this third Kennedy son. Bobby had picked up bad habits, like believing the nation was overrun with enemies within, and good ones, like investigating his adversaries with rigor and care. He was back on center stage now, and he would stay there for the rest of his life.
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HIS TIME WITH Joe McCarthy was the most controversial chapter of Bobby’s life precisely because it was so counterintuitive. Neither his detractors nor his defenders could understand how this most revered of progressive Democrats could have jump-started his career as a protégé of the most reviled of reactionary Republicans. Each side settled for answers that reinforced its own simplistic vision of Bobby and conveniently distorted his record.
His enemies have unfairly saddled him with too much of the McCarthy legacy. “Bobby’s first investigatory chore for McCarthy had to do with the alleged homosexual influx into the State Department,” the conservative columnist Victor Lasky wrote in his RFK biography The Myth and the Man. It was a fiction repeated until it was accepted as fact. In truth, McCarthy held a single hearing on the issue and the record makes clear that Bobby was not there. The left was even harsher, with I. F. Stone calling Bobby’s investigation of Allied shipping an example of McCarthyism at its worst. In fact, as most of Stone’s fellow journalists acknowledged, that probe was just the sort of meticulous research that happened too seldom at McCarthy’s subcommittee. Kennedy couldn’t win: He was bashed as tone-deaf when he stood by his friend Joe McCarthy, and condemned as backstabbing when he did not.*12
It is unclear where the rumor began about McCarthy being godfather to Bobby’s firstborn, Kathleen. Authors and journalists echoed it often enough that they stopped footnoting it, but they continued citing it as the clearest sign of how close Kennedy was to McCarthy. Even Kathleen’s mother, Ethel, asked recently whether it was true, said, “He was. I think he was.” Kathleen, who would enter politics herself and know firsthand the stigma of being associated with Joe McCarthy, has “no idea” where the rumor came from but double-checked her christening certificate to confirm that it was false. “It’s bizarro,” she says, adding that her actual godfather was Daniel Walsh, a professor at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, Ethel’s alma mater, and a counselor to the Catholic poet and mystic Thomas Merton.
Bobby’s defenders have been equally footloose with the facts about the Kennedy-McCarthy connection, trying to wash the Wisconsin senator out of Bobby’s record. Kenneth O’Donnell, Bobby’s Harvard roommate and lifelong friend and colleague, insisted that Bobby “didn’t know Joe McCarthy from a cord of wood” when he went to work for him in 1953, and “even the supposed links between Joe Kennedy senior and McCarthy are exaggerated.” O’Donnell’s claim might have been convincing if other friends didn’t remember things so differently. The Washington lawyer Barrett Prettyman recalled McCarthy speaking in 1951 at his and Kennedy’s law school, then spending the evening at Kennedy’s home. Years before that, when Bobby was an undergraduate, “he and Ken O’Donnell would hotly debate about McCarthy. Bobby was all alone in defending him,” said Sam Adams, who played football with Kennedy and O’Donnell at Harvard.
Others offered more nuanced justifications for why Bobby embraced McCarthy. To Edwin Guthman, a journalist who became Bobby’s press secretary and crony, it was all about pity—“pity for an acquaintance who could be a pleasant companion but who had made a ruin of his career; pity for the men and women and their families whom McCarthy had forced needlessly and unfairly to live under a cloud.” He was right about the former, but it was only belatedly and grudgingly that Bobby even acknowledged those victimized by McCarthyism and McCarthy. Ted Kennedy said Bobby went to work for the subcommittee at a time when “the extent of McCarthy’s vile exploitation of anticommunist hysteria had not yet fully registered with him or indeed the country.” The reality is that it had registered by then with journalists, Presidents Eisenhower and Truman, and certainly with the targets of McCarthy’s inquisitions. Bobby’s daughter Kerry, meanwhile, says her father “vociferously objected to and fought throughout his four months with McCarthy—he fought against the senator and against Roy Cohn….And after four months, which is not a long time, he left, and he was immediately hired by the Democrats to be their counsel in stopping McCarthy.” She is right about Cohn, if not McCarthy, whom Kennedy explicitly vowed to protect as he went after Cohn, and she understates by nearly half the time her father worked for the senator.
B
obby himself felt less inclined to rationalize or explain. His world was divided into friends and fiends, white hats and black, and pariah pal Joe McCarthy would always be one of his righteous ones. “The man is dead,” he told one reporter who pushed him to separate himself from McCarthy, “and I’m not going to do it.” He preferred not to talk about that part of his past even inside his own family. Yet he had maintained a relationship with the senator from Wisconsin even after a scarlet letter of condemnation had transformed him from the country’s most talked-about political figure to its most shunned. Kennedy kept McCarthy in the information loop after the Democrats took over the subcommittee, and he visited the senator about a week before he died.*13 Most telling, a year after McCarthy’s colleagues rebuked him, Bobby could not bring himself to listen to the journalist who had helped expose the flaws in the senator and his movement.
The setting was a Junior Chamber of Commerce celebration in Louisville in January 1955, when Bobby’s Allied shipping investigation had won him a cherished place on the chamber’s list of ten outstanding young men of the previous year. The keynote speaker was CBS’s Murrow. “They had us ten at the top of some bleacher, and when Edward R. Murrow got up to speak, Bobby—I was sitting next to him—started scrambling down the back of the latticework like a monkey, down to the ground,” recalls Ernest Hollings, another honoree who would later serve alongside Bobby in the U.S. Senate. “He said, ‘I wouldn’t be caught dead listening to that son of a bitch.’ ” At the time, Hollings didn’t understand what he meant, but he learned afterward that Kennedy resented Murrow for helping topple his friend McCarthy. And it wasn’t just Murrow: Bobby kept a list of McCarthy’s early enemies, including his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, and shunned them in ways that made clear he had never quite forgiven them.
Grudges are commonplace in politics, but there was a particular hypocrisy in this one: It ignored Bobby’s own rather spectacular role in toppling the senator he had embraced as a mentor and friend. It wasn’t only that he had gone to work for McCarthy’s Democratic foes. Bobby fed those senators questions on Annie Lee Moss and other controversies that embarrassed not just Roy Cohn and David Schine but their boss, and he meticulously compiled the evidence the full Senate used to call McCarthy to account. Had it been anyone else whose behavior he was critiquing, Bobby would have been quick to pin a name on it: Judas. But he couldn’t face his own deep-seated conflicts—between instincts of loyalty and veracity, and between his ideology and his humanity—so he overcompensated by lashing out at others who were more transparent and consistent in opposing the rabble-rouser from Grand Chute.
When he got word that the senator had died in the spring of 1957, Bobby sent his staff home for the day. Kennedy’s secretary said that was the first time she ever saw tears in his eyes. “It was all very difficult for me as I feel that I have lost an important part of my life,” he explained in his diary. Four days later he joined one hundred priests, two thousand well-wishers, and Vice President Nixon at a pontifical requiem mass for McCarthy at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in Washington. Then he followed the flag-draped mahogany coffin to a rare state funeral in the Senate chamber, listening alongside seventy senators as the chaplain lauded McCarthy’s determination “to expose cunning foes who under cowardly cover plot the betrayal of our freedom.” The next morning, while Jack stayed home, Bobby honored his former boss and friend by flying to Wisconsin for his burial.
Yet so strong was the new consensus that McCarthy had been a demagogue if not a liar that even Bobby retreated slightly over the years. In Appleton, he preferred to quietly mourn from the choir loft, out of the media spotlight. On a TV news show in 1964, in the midst of his New York Senate campaign in which McCarthy was anathema to most of the electorate, Bobby sought to downplay his role with the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations: “I saw other investigations taking place in which I had no part, of which I didn’t approve. I didn’t approve of the procedure. So after working with the committee for approximately five months, I went to Senator McCarthy and said I disagreed with the way the committee was being handled.” By the time Bobby ran for president in 1968, he had a convenient new spin on his tenure with McCarthy: “When my complaints to the Senator about the reckless procedures employed in investigations were ignored, I submitted my resignation and, in fact, wrote the minority report which censured the senator.” It was true—and it was the first time he had acknowledged, even to himself, his part in his friend’s undoing.
In later years Kennedy also would be the one railing against attaching the label of traitor to government workers, or anyone else in a land of free speech, by virtue of their membership in an organization or party. The more mature Bobby would relate not to the rhetoric of a demagogue but to its victims. He would acknowledge rather than justify his earlier errors of judgment and method, be it on Vietnam or on civil rights. But not in this unfledged and boldfaced stage, when his conduct hinted at the worst as well as the best of what would come later. And not with someone who had befriended his family and himself the way Joe McCarthy did.
What Bobby Kennedy couldn’t see then, and possibly ever, was that what made Joe McCarthy dangerous was not just the senator’s badgering tactics and reckless staffers like Roy Cohn. It was the senator himself. He was a bully and a con man. The state of the nation in the early 1950s was one of dread—of Joseph Stalin, of atomic spies like the Rosenbergs, and of free nations falling like dominoes as Communists took over the planet—and McCarthy masterfully manipulated those fears. He wantonly ruined careers and lives. His line—“McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled [up]”—was irresistible, and so, to believers like Bobby, were his coarse charm and bravado.
For Bobby to repudiate McCarthy would have meant parting ways with his father, who was so much like the senator. Both were passionate about their families and their particularized visions of America. Both saw things in Bobby that few did back then, from a willingness to work harder than anyone else to his standing true to unfashionable ideals. Both were less insightful about their own shortcomings and how they were hurting Bobby even as they were trying to help. Bobby’s loyalty to Joe McCarthy ultimately grew out of his devotion to Joe Kennedy—and to the end Bobby defended his friend as he did his father.
The truth is that he had always been of two minds about the controversial senator. “I liked him and yet at times he was terribly heavy-handed,” Bobby said. “He was a very complicated character. His whole method of operation was complicated because he would get a guilty feeling and get hurt after he had blasted somebody. He wanted so desperately to be liked. He was so thoughtful and yet so unthoughtful in what he did to others. 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 he could be so cruel to others.” It was precisely what people would say over the years about Bobby.
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*1 Americans might have been misled about Bobby’s politics, but not the Soviets. “Kennedy is an ultra, an apostle of anti-Communism, who pursues the laurels of McCarthy and Dulles,” according to Za Rubezhom, a Soviet magazine covering political news (State Department memo, “Soviet Press Criticism of the President’s Family,” June 19, 1962).
*2 A case study of Joe’s Midas touch was the Merchandise Mart in downtown Chicago. It was the world’s biggest and ugliest commercial building, occupying ninety-three acres of rentable space, rising twenty-four stories, and drawing Chicagoans to a block-long speakeasy that served expensive drinks and free lunches. Joe bought the Mart from a desperate Marshall Field in 1945 for $13.2 million, which was $17 million less than it had cost the department store mogul to build it in 1930 and $18 million less than his accountants said it was worth. Joe put up just $1 million in cash, and he protected himself from the huge taxes that had plagued Field by placing his ownership in family trusts. While Field worried that federal and state lessees, who occupied 40 percent of the space at below-market rates, would move out when their lea
ses expired, Kennedy wanted them gone. He could and did replace them with companies able to pay full price. The bottom line: Annual income quickly exceeded what it had cost to buy the building and helped pay the bills for Kennedy and his heirs until 1998, when the Mart was sold for $625 million, or fifty times what Joe had paid for it. (Nasaw, The Patriarch, 588–89 and 612, and Whalen, Founding Father, 379–80.)
*3 He refused in no small measure because his legs curved out so awkwardly, a fact that FDR confirmed at a White House meeting by having the would-be ambassador drop his trousers. “Someone who saw you in a bathing suit once told me something I now know to be true,” Roosevelt teased Kennedy. “Joe, just look at your legs. You are just about the most bowlegged man I have ever seen” (“Taft Was the Politest Man in Town,” New York Times, July 5, 1981).
*4 John Knowles got to know Hackett during a summer when both were at Exeter Academy, and he said Hackett was the inspiration for the carefree athlete Phineas in Knowles’s coming-of-age novel A Separate Peace.
*5 Just how much he gave McCarthy is uncertain, since disclosure of political donations was not required in the 1940s and ’50s. The syndicated columnist Drew Pearson put it at $50,000. Secretary of the Senate Bobby Baker said it was ten times that much, which would have made Kennedy McCarthy’s most generous benefactor. Kennedy insisted that he gave “only a couple of thousand.” Whatever the amount, the money reinforced McCarthy’s inclination to stay out of Massachusetts in 1952, when his support could have substantially boosted fellow Republican senator Lodge’s standing against Jack Kennedy among Catholic and conservative voters (Pearson and Anderson, “Voters Must Weigh Bobby’s ‘Know-How,’ ” Washington Post, May 3, 1968; author interview with Bobby Baker; and McCarthy, Remarkable Kennedys, 26).
