by Larry Tye
The defining distinctions in temperament and outlook crystallized as the two spent more time together as young adults. Jack would always be the handsome older brother whose silky-smooth polish made begrudging Bostonians tag him as a “Fifth Avenue Catholic” and “Harvard Irishman.” Bobby was all Gaelic, bristling with energy and trusting his gut. If the Church had been their calling, Jack would have been pope, Bobby a parish priest. Jack looked past women he met unless they were young and gorgeous. Bobby was interested in nearly everybody, grasping a hand and peering into a face in ways that made a person feel a genuine connection. Each stood as the other’s best man when they married, but when Jack wanted to relax, he turned to his even younger brother Ted, not the more prudish Bobby. When Joe offered all his children one thousand dollars for not drinking until age twenty-one and another thousand for not smoking, Bobby collected, Jack indulged. “Jack has always been one to persuade people to do things,” his father said. “Bobby tends to tell people what to do.”
Their singularities were easy to spot on the football field. Jack hung back, protecting his wounded back and aristocratic bearing, while Bobby charged into anyone, kids included, who was foolish enough to stand between him and the end zone. It was apparent, too, in the swimming pool. Both made the Harvard team, where their acclaimed coach Harold Ulen remembered Bobby as “very heavy in the water,” while Jack “could float very well.” That, family biographers Peter Collier and David Horowitz wrote, was a metaphor for what separated the two: “Jack’s sensibility was buoyantly literary; Bobby’s was heavily moral, however inchoate. Bobby sought responsibility as compulsively as Jack tried to evade it.”
Those very divergences let them construct a brotherly alliance that would become as celebrated in the political sphere as the one between Wilbur and Orville Wright in aviation. Each brother had trained for his role in their campaigns, Bobby by molding himself into a relentless prosecutor, Jack by reading, traveling, and perfecting his smile. The division of labor was perfect—Jack as statesman, Bobby as hatchet man—and perfectly suited to the Kennedy family business. “It was politics that brought them together,” Eunice said. “That’s a business full of knives. Jack needed someone he could trust, someone who had loyalty to him. Jack knew he had a person like that with Bobby around.” The newspaper columnist Stewart Alsop called it a “sweet-and-sour brother act” in which “Jack uses his charm and waves the carrot, and then Bobby wades in with the stick.” Theirs was a reversal of normal sibling roles, with the younger doing extraordinary things for the elder. Bobby was his brother’s keeper. Sometimes that role brought out his warmheartedness, but it could also make Bobby defensive and vindictive. When Bobby told someone “No,” Jack added “I’m sorry.” Jack made friends, Bobby enemies—the appropriate outcomes for a politician and his sideman.
Yet those roles belied their characters in ways that elevated Jack and diminished Bobby. “John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic, Robert a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist,” observed Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., biographer to both. Joe realized from the start that the yin-and-yang tandem could be unstoppable, and Jack came to see that over time. The press called Bobby as steely as Joe, and Jack as tender as Rose, but they had it exactly backward. “Jack would cut you off at the knees,” said Kenny O’Donnell. “Bobby would say, ‘Why are we doing that to this guy?’ ”
Bobby and Jack were the fulcrum of Kennedy dynamics in those years, but other relationships were forming that would fascinate the public as the Kennedys became America’s First Family. None was more beguiling than Jackie’s with Bobby. Jacqueline Lee Bouvier had met John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the spring of 1952, just as Bobby was taking over the Senate campaign. She realized from the first that being involved with Jack meant being entangled with his family, particularly the patriarch, and she reached Joe in a way that none of his other daughters-in-law could. She also instinctively understood the Kennedy mix of mind-boggling narcissism and unmatched altruism.
Jackie saw the tender promise of Bobby that neither the public nor Jack appreciated back then. When her second pregnancy went wrong and the daughter she planned to name Arabella was stillborn, Jack was unreachable off the coast of Italy. It was Bobby who rushed to her bedside, consoling her and quietly arranging for the baby’s burial. When Jackie sat dumbfounded by the family’s fascination with sports, Bobby would explain, then let her know it was okay to cheer from the sidelines. “You knew that, if you were in trouble, he’d always be there,” she said of her brother-in-law. He is “the one I would put my hand in the fire for.” Reading press reports of his ruthlessness, Jackie added, “I just thought, ‘If they could have known the compassion of that boy.’ ” And hearing everyone else describe Bobby as the son most like Joe, she insisted he was in fact “least like his father.”
One arena in which Bobby had always shown his softer side was his faith. All the Kennedys called themselves Catholic, but Bobby practiced his religion in ways that endeared him to his mother and distinguished him from Jack. During his three years at Portsmouth Priory School, he went to church the required four times a week plus the three optional services. Ritual played an even bigger part of life in his and Ethel’s home than it had in Rose and Joe’s. The young couple outfitted each of the thirteen bedrooms with a Bible, holy water, and a crucifix or statue of Saint Mary. There were prayers every morning, before and after each meal, and at bedtime when the children assembled to recite as one “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Benediction was offered for the family, too, and as the list of deceased relatives grew, the children named each one and asked God to vault them straight to heaven. Also named were the saints they prayed to—Anthony to end poverty and find a parking place, Francis for the growing menagerie, and Christopher when they took off in a plane. Bobby’s Saint Christopher medal never left his neck, which made sense given his nonstop traveling.
Most observers assumed Ethel was the keeper of the flame of faith, and that she was more wed to liturgy than Bobby. But the reassurance he found in his religion was apparent when, as a young man, he stepped over the railing and volunteered as an altar boy at St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis, to the delight of his mother, who attended early mass every morning. He did the same thing in random cities across America during his many investigations and campaigns. “The priests couldn’t believe the delicacy with which he did it,” recalls advance man James Tolan. “They told me they never saw an individual serve mass in that way other than a seminarian.”
His Catholicism was integral to his politics, too. It reinforced the sense of public service drilled into the children by Rose and Joe. It was consistent with his commitment to the sanctity of the family—and to big ones like he was born into and that he and Ethel would more than replicate. Bobby shared the Church’s conscientious division of the world into good and evil, along with its judgment that Communists are godless and the poor blessed. His life centered on three totems in those years of early adulthood: the Democratic Party, the Kennedy family, and God.
But he distinguished between the faith’s divinity and its hierarchy. While he held the former sacrosanct, he had always challenged Church authorities, from parish priests to the pope. Back in his undergraduate days, he joined other Harvard Catholics at lectures by Father Leonard Feeney, an influential Jesuit priest who warned that the Jews “are trying to take over this city” and preached that only Catholics could be saved. Bobby was embarrassed enough by those diatribes to discuss them with his brother Ted and his father, who arranged for him to meet with Archbishop Cushing to convey his concern. Even a Kennedy found it difficult to confront a prelate in those days, and Bobby’s courage likely played a role in Feeney’s eventual expulsion from his order and excommunication from the Church. In later years, Bobby lobbied the pope to name a liberal replacement for New York’s archconservative Cardinal Francis Joseph Spellman. And when he piled the children into the station wagon for the ride to church—they had to attend starting as toddlers, although they stayed
in the back with a nursemaid until they were “church broke”—he “always carried a Bible with him,” recalls Bobby Jr. “When the priest started talking about the right-wing stuff he would pointedly read the Bible or he would read the Catholic newspapers at the back of the church.” He called it “an awful thing” that the Church taught that babies, his or anyone’s, were born in sin. He told his kids that “priests were Republicans and nuns Democrats.” He also told them they needn’t trust clerics to mediate the word of God when they could read it for themselves in the Old Testament and the New.
That next generation of Kennedys loved the family vacation retreats at least as much as Bobby and his siblings had, in Palm Beach and especially on Cape Cod. Bobby eventually bought the Hyannis Port house next to Joe’s, Jack the one next to that, with other siblings moving nearby. The six acres on which the three original houses sat became known as the Kennedy compound. With so many children and later grandchildren on hand, there had to be rules. Each guidepost offered a lens into the Kennedy way of doing things. It had been okay since Bobby and Jack were young to grab a ride to town with the chauffeur, but only if he was heading there on an errand. It was all right to go sailing, if you let the governess know. The tennis courts were open anytime, but siblings had to take turns. As they aged, Joe’s offspring and their guests were welcome to join him for a drink before dinner, but just one, and only until the dinner bell rang. One way to know where you ranked in the Kennedy hierarchy, and where the sibling who invited you did, was whether you got a seat on the family plane for the trip back to Washington (Jack’s and Bobby’s friends generally did, Ted’s and the girls’ rarely). The one topic that Joe had always banished from the dinner table was money (Bobby’s habitual line was “Send the bill to the Park Agency,” which managed Joe’s millions).
Every rule, including that one, had an exception. It manifested itself one night when Joe was on a tirade. “There is no one in the entire family, except for Joan and Teddy, who is living within their means. No one appears to have the slightest concern for how much they spend,” he stormed. Then he turned to Ethel and said, “And you, young lady, you are the worst.” It was true, but it was more than Bobby could take. “I think you have made your point,” he said, as Ethel ran out of the room and he followed. When they returned minutes later, Jack rescued the evening, the way no one but Jack could. “Well, kid, don’t worry,” he said to Ethel. “We’ve come to the conclusion that the only solution is to have Dad work harder.” Even Joe laughed.
The Kennedys had a rulebook, too, for playing their favorite game (football) in their favorite spot (the great lawn), although it was not one any professional or college team would recognize. A standard guideline for Bobby, Jack, and the rest was that if you could touch the ball, you should be able to catch it. No need to suggest plays if you were a guest, no matter whether you had quarterbacked in high school or the pros; the Kennedys handled the play calling. Bobby’s personal rules depended on the composition of his team. If it was big and slow, he allowed passing only from behind the line of scrimmage, since scrambling wouldn’t help. If it was light and fast, it was okay to throw the ball anywhere, anytime, to anyone in front of you or behind.
The rules so confused Dave Hackett, Bobby’s friend since high school, that he drafted a training manual. At the dinner table, “prepare yourself by reading The Congressional Record, US News & World Report, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, The Nation, The Democratic Digest, The Ensign, and the manual How to Play Sneaky Tennis….Anticipate that each Kennedy will ask you what you think of another Kennedy’s (a) dress, (b) hairdo, (c) backhand, (d) latest achievement. You will find that ‘Terrific!’ is a satisfactory answer.” As for athletic contests like football, “the only way I know of to get out of playing is not to come at all, or to come with a broken leg…if you want to become popular, show raw guts….Oh yes! Don’t be too good. Let Jack run around you every so often.” And “don’t, under any circumstances, let Ethel fool you. Never treat her either as pregnant or as a woman. Her husband has spent all of his spare time developing her change of pace, her timing on reverses, her endurance, and so forth, and she will make you look silly.”
The singer Andy Williams saw that firsthand when he showed up on the Hickory Hill tennis court with his big toe in a cast. “You’re not going to let a thing like a little old broken toe stop you—we need a fourth,” Ethel said. Williams inspected the other players—the elite mountaineer Jim Whittaker with a bandage covering a recent vein surgery, Ted Kennedy wearing a back brace, and Ethel seven months pregnant—then grabbed a racket.*2
Since these were the Kennedys, there were rules for politics as well, although no friend would dare write them down: Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names. Don’t get mad, get even. When you screw up, say so, no excuses. Guests were instructed that what went on in Hyannis Port must not be divulged to anyone outside the family, and above all not to the press. In all matters, Kennedys by birth came first, with in-laws like Sargent Shriver and Peter Lawford distant seconds. There also was a first among the Kennedy equals: the paterfamilias, Joseph Patrick. The last and unifying edict was that everyone be held to the rulebook but the Kennedys themselves.
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BOBBY WAS THE first and singular choice to quarterback the campaign to which all the others had been building: Jack’s 1960 bid for the presidency. No one else could be counted on to execute the tactical details and craft a master strategy. Nobody else could be trusted with the family secrets of paying for and pulling off a venture this bold. No one, with the exception of Joe, had earned it more, by getting Jack to the point where he was not just one of the wannabes but the man to beat for the Democratic nomination.
The Kennedys knew from the first that their biggest obstacle to the nomination would be a candidate who was too wily to show his cards. So in the fall of 1959, nearly a year before the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, Jack dispatched Bobby to the ranch in Stonewall, Texas, that Lyndon Baines Johnson had initialed after himself, the same way he had his wife and daughters. It wasn’t an assignment that Bobby relished, and he was determined not to play LBJ’s game. So, direct Bostonian that he was, he tried to get to the points fast: Are you running for president? If not, whom will you back? But that was neither the Southern way nor Johnson’s. First, Bobby had to accompany him on the deer hunt he staged for all his guests, especially ones he knew would be uneasy in that setting. Bobby was handed a powerful shotgun instead of the standard rifle, and when he fired, the recoil sent him reeling backward and to the ground, wounding his brow and his ego. “Son,” LBJ said, “you’ve got to learn to handle a gun like a man.” Bobby took away three messages from his trip—that Johnson would neither run himself nor seek to block Jack’s candidacy (wrong on both), and that he didn’t fight fair (right). LBJ’s custom of ambushing his prey from the comfort of an elevated concrete platform “isn’t hunting,” Bobby concluded, “it’s slaughter.”
JFK and Bobby mapped out a strategy for the nomination that called for entering ten primaries, of which only two really mattered. The first bellwether would be on April 5 in Wisconsin, an uncomfortable setting for a Massachusetts Democrat. With a political heritage that swung between La Follette progressivism and McCarthy conservatism, there was no natural fit for Kennedy-style moderation. The Wisconsin economy was built on cheese, milk, and other commodities that the Kennedys consumed in substantial quantities without caring how they got to the kitchen table. Add to that an opponent, Hubert Humphrey, who was a popular senator from the bordering state of Minnesota, and most campaign managers would simply have skipped Wisconsin and headed directly to the next week’s primary in Illinois. Not Bobby. All those hurdles let him position his brother just where he wanted him: as the underdog. He’d advised Jack not to run in Wisconsin, Bobby told reporters, some of whom believed him. Savvier ones knew that a third of the state was Catholic like the Kennedys and, as The New York Times was reporting, that private Kennedy polls showed him with 60 percent support among Wisc
onsin Democrats. Bobby managed the campaign just as he had orchestrated congressional investigations, learning as much as possible about the outcome before wading into battle, lowering expectations so that a modest victory looked major, and seldom ducking journalists but almost never confiding in them.
Humphrey might have had a shot if the race had been fought on a more level field. The Kennedys opened eight offices to Humphrey’s two. Bobby had on his staff one of America’s savviest pollsters, Louis Harris, who could measure shifts in public opinion quickly enough for the candidate to adjust. Harris was backed up by an army of Bobby and Jack’s siblings, friends, and retainers from Massachusetts and Washington, while Humphrey relied on volunteers from Minnesota able to drive down on the weekends, along with support stitched together at the eleventh hour from unions and the state party. Jack flew in on the Caroline, his private twin-engine Convair equipped with a bed, galley, and desk with a swivel chair; Hubert motored down in a rented bus that his staff outfitted with an army cot, blanket, and pillow. “Once, as we started into the darkness of the rural countryside, I heard a plane overhead,” Humphrey recalled. “Bundled in layers of uncomfortable clothes, both chilled and sweaty, I yelled, ‘Come down here, Jack, and play fair.’ ”
Always the Happy Warrior, Humphrey said he didn’t mind being outgunned or out-glamored, but he couldn’t forgive the “ruthlessness and toughness” displayed by the Kennedys, and most of all Bobby. One upsetting instance was “Bob Kennedy’s peddling the story that my campaign was being financed by Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa,” Humphrey complained later. “Both he and Jack knew the story was untrue and could have stopped it.” Equally infuriating were anonymous anti-Catholic mailings sent across the state—mainly to Catholic households—which ensured a turnout of angry Catholic Democrats along with Catholic Republicans who crossed over. The apparent culprit in both cases was Paul Corbin, a Kennedy aide famous for his whimsical and deceitful tactics. “If you have a job and you want to get it done, and you don’t care how it’s done,” said campaign aide Helen Keyes, “send Paul Corbin out to do it.” Corbin was sufficiently devoted that he eventually converted to Catholicism so that Bobby and Ethel could be his godparents. Bobby loved him back, above all for his outrageousness. Humphrey was right that whether or not Bobby ordered up the dirty tricks, he did nothing to stop them, and their success ensured they were a fixture of U.S. campaign culture from then on.
