The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Bobby loved this father who spoke such unparsed words and struck down conventional wisdom with a flick of his rhetoric. Bobby mimicked his father’s bluntness and copied his verbal flourishes, but the two men did not see the world the same way. Joe sought to pull America back from all the sordid complexities of the rest of the world to live in a sanctuary of peace and civility. Bobby wanted to move aggressively forward. Unlike his big brothers, Bobby had not seen war. Despite Joe Jr.’s death, Bobby did not fully understand the wages of heroism. He saw politics in part as a venue for courage, where men stood up and proved the worth of themselves and their nations.

  Hypocrisy is the grease of politics, but Bobby used this lubricant only sparingly. When he invited the distinguished black diplomat Ralph Bunche to speak, Bunche replied that he would not speak before a segregated audience, a stipulation that Bobby surely must have expected. Bobby knew, then, that he would be confronting a Virginia law that prohibited blacks and whites from sitting together in public meetings. Bobby called together representatives of student government and asked them not simply to put forth a resolution calling for an integrated audience but to sign the document.

  The students were all for integrating the speech, but they blanched at putting their names on a document that might be widely publicized, bringing rebuke down on their families. These young men had walked most of a long hard mile, but they had pulled up short of the finish line; they could have been saluted for how far they had come, not condemned for the few feet farther they were unwilling to walk.

  Bobby ranted at them, barely comprehensible, his words even less understandable as a Boston accent in a sea of southern drawls. In the end the students voted down the resolution that they would have had to sign, but the Student Legal Forum adopted it.

  This was not the first time that the university, one of the most liberal institutions in the state, had been confronted with this problem. Up until then the school had liberally applied the grease of hypocrisy by prominently posting a notice stating that a hall was segregated and then allowing blacks and whites to sit wherever they chose.

  Bobby would have none of that. The matter was of such seriousness, the dispute so rancorous, that it came before Colgate Darden, the president of the university. Darden declared that the lecture was not a public meeting at all but an educational meeting, and could go on unsegregated.

  For the first time in his life Bobby had confronted the most terrible American conundrum of his age, the question of race. He was not a fledgling politician who saw himself as an arbiter between different interests and peoples, seeking a consensus that would push society ahead inch by inch. When he saw what he called truth, he went for it, and woe betide those who stood in his way waving what he considered a white flag of compromise and expediency.

  The youngest Kennedy man entered Harvard in the fall of 1950. Teddy had none of the social ambitions of his father or, to a lesser extent, his brother Jack. Nor had he the disdain for the narrow social elites of Cambridge that marked Bobby’s college tenure.

  As a boy, Teddy had been not the youngest in the family but often among the newest boys in many of the schools he attended. To get along he developed a genial, conciliatory manner. He was interested in good times more than in great ideas, and he surrounded himself with young men of similar instincts. Most of his friends were football players and other athletes, the amiable sort who would make a natural transition from the gridiron to the manly world of business.

  Many of Teddy’s friends had been shuttled off to prep school during their parents’ unseemly divorces. They were largely trophy children paraded home on holidays. Some of them spoke disdainfully of their parents or dismissed them irreverently. Teddy’s friend Claude Hooton Jr. was startled to hear one of their companions calling his mother by her first name. That was unheard of back in the Texas that he called home.

  Teddy took literally the biblical injunction to honor one’s parents. He always called Rose “Mother” and Joe “Dad.” Whatever Teddy’s friends thought of their own parents, when he took them down to Hyannis Port for the weekend, they sat a mite taller at the dinner table and watched their words more carefully than they ever would have in their own homes.

  Teddy’s father had taught him that he had a special responsibility as a Kennedy man. But what was that admonition to an eighteen-year-old finally free of all the constraints of prep school life and of his father’s overwhelming presence? He didn’t like rules, be they silly speed limits or other regulations that sought to hold him back from the life he intended to live.

  Bobby’s football teammate Wally Flynn recalled that Teddy asked Wally and Nancy, his wife, to chaperone a party at a Harvard club to which they no longer belonged.

  “Teddy, am I going to get in trouble?” she asked, knowing full well that Teddy was up to something that was not quite right.

  Teddy’s friends at Harvard had their own special moral code, and it was a code that played into the part of Teddy that was weak and intellectually slovenly. These athletes considered academic course work a tedious, largely unnecessary regimen that kept them from playing sports and having a good time. They helped one another with their studies, choosing the easiest courses, passing on notes, cramming together for exams.

  In the fall semester, Teddy took a course in natural science, a subject in which he and his friends had not an iota of interest. One of the fellows had taken a lot of physics in prep school. That led to the obvious solution. During the final exam the amenable friend sat up front in the amphitheater of the Allston Burr Science Building, writing in big letters in his blue book while Teddy and his buddies sat behind copying the answers.

  For Teddy, it was a morning of little moment, but it set him apart from his brothers’ lives. Joe Jr. might have had a tutor priming him beforehand, or even handing him the previous year’s exam, but he would not have done what Teddy was doing. Nor would Jack. Bobby would perhaps have struggled mightily with the dilemma, and if he had gone along, it would have been only to get a good grade. But Bobby’s friends at Harvard were too proud and too morally straight to attempt such a thing. And so, probably, was Bobby.

  In the spring Teddy took Spanish I. He had no natural instinct for languages, and he was appalled at the idea of having to study what he considered a useless subject for yet another semester. Somehow if he could get an A, he would be relieved of his language requirement.

  Teddy and Warren O’Donnell, Kenny’s younger brother, went for a walk the night before the final exam.

  “How are you doing?” Warren asked.

  “This is a tough one,” Teddy recalled saying as the two men walked through Harvard Yard. “I’ve got to get that C minus or I can’t play football in the fall.”

  Teddy and Warren decided to see another friend who was a crackerjack Spanish student. The young man was a scholarship student and he was open to suggestion. “Fine, hell, I’ll be glad to take that thing,” he said, agreeing to pose as Teddy the next morning and ace the Spanish exam.

  For the rest of his life, Teddy would be surrounded by overly solicitous people who called themselves his friends and were ready to do what they had to do to get him what they thought he wanted. In this instance, Teddy stood by saying little while his friends pushed this young man, even waking him up the morning of the exam, prodding him to get dressed and fill in for Teddy.

  There appeared to be a calculated passivity in Teddy, as if he thought himself less morally culpable if he had given no command. Others might have considered Teddy’s conduct doubly dishonorable: if he was going to cheat, then he should at least have had the gumption to do it himself without bringing in a gullible innocent. That was a subtlety lost on the Harvard dean, who, when the cheating was discovered, treated each young man equally and expelled them both for at least a year.

  For Teddy, as for his brothers, the overwhelming fear was not what he did but what their father would think of what he did. Joe was a man of limitless ambitions for his family, yet he did not rage at his youngest
son for betraying the Kennedys while Jack was thinking of running for the Senate or governor. As tough and merciless as Joe could be, he cared now more about his son’s life than his family’s future.

  “Initially, my father just thought about what the impact was going to be on my life, etc., so he was initially very very calm,” Teddy recalled. Joe did his own inventory of what it would mean, learning that after a year his son could be reinstated. “And then after he got a feel for that sort of thing, he went through the roof (that was about twenty-four hours later) for about five hours and then he was all fine and never brought it up again.”

  For Joe, the mystery was not that Teddy had cheated, but that he had cheated for so little. “The father was terribly disappointed in Ted’s doing something as foolish as that when there was so little at stake,” recalled the other young man, who after being thrown out of Harvard got to know Teddy’s father. Joe made a grand symbolic gesture to suggest that he believed young men should have a second chance. When members of Army’s football team were thrown out of West Point in a cheating scandal, he paid their way to study at Notre Dame.

  For Joe, the matter may have been behind him, but for Teddy, yanked unceremoniously out of his happy Harvard life, it was not. Teddy’s father did not believe in penance, but Harvard did, viewing a term in the armed services as suitable punishment. “If I had a good record in the Army, this would resolve and satisfy them,” Teddy said. One day later in the spring of 1951, he went down to the U.S. Army recruiting office and signed up. When Teddy returned to the house, Joe discovered that his son had signed up for four years, not two. Teddy was no student, but he could certainly tell two years from four, and it was probably a mark of his anxiety that he had not even noticed.

  “When I signed up for four years, it was just a matter of paper shuffling,” Teddy recalled. “They had three forms at the recruiting office and I had no idea. I went down with the idea to sign up for two years … it was just an administrative type of thing.” That may have been true, but it took the considerable efforts of his father to rectify the error.

  After basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, Teddy transferred to Fort Holabird in Maryland, where he intended to enter Army Intelligence. He had scarcely started the program when he was abruptly terminated and sent to Camp Gordon in Georgia to be trained as an MP. From there he sailed to France on the Langfit.

  Teddy had a self-deprecating sense of humor and was perfectly willing to make himself the butt of his own jokes. On the long crossing he did not write of his female conquests back in Georgia, as Joe Jr. might have done, or of being here while his friends whooped it up in the exalted confines of Harvard and other young men died in Korea. He wrote instead of the minor misfortune of having been chosen for KP, a duty that had him supposedly contemplating going AWOL in Norfolk. “However, upon considering my welcome back in New York by my family … I concluded that to make the crossing now was the only thing left to do,” he wrote, his humor still intact. His major accomplishment, as he saw it, was that he lost fifteen pounds.

  Teddy did not look toward Europe as his big brothers had as a place to test their manhood and their minds. The Continent was not the dangerously inviting place it had been before the war. But Europe was still full of young Americans whose wanderlust had brought them to the cafes of Paris and the steps of Rome in search of adventure and culture they felt they could not find at home. Teddy was not the kind of young man, however, who was deeply attracted to foreign accents. He served out his time as a member of the NATO honor guard outside Paris, a lackluster, ceremonial duty, and though he went bobsledding in Switzerland, the adventures he sought were back at Harvard.

  Now that Teddy’s scandal was behind him and the matter had effectively been kept quiet, Joe had one major duty to perform before the family could go on as he wanted it to go on. He had been responsible for Rosemary’s lobotomy. So too was he responsible for her care. Joe had sent Rosemary to several psychiatric hospitals before he had settled upon Craig House in upstate New York. The private psychiatric hospital catered to the wealthy and famous, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, who spent nine weeks there in 1934. Rosemary was in all likelihood the only patient to spend years there, however, shut away behind the barred windows high above the Hudson River.

  Joe had turned his eldest daughter into the unmentionable Kennedy, as exorcised from the family dialogue as if she had been condemned to a biblical shunning. Was it possible that this man who at times still cried when his eldest son’s name was mentioned cared so little for whatever was left of his eldest daughter? Did he dismiss her because she was a mere woman, bearing none of the noble manly traits and prospects of his sons? Could he simply walk away from his daughter’s life, never looking back? Or did he know too well what he had done and feel too much, finding it unbearable to mention her name? Could he not stand to see what damage the scalpel had done to a sweetly compliant young woman who had once made her debut before the king and queen of England? Was Rosemary his secret torment? That answer lay only within Joe, and there it would always reside. But it was a terrible truth that lay there, whatever it was. Joe was either a monster in his unconcern or a man keeping matters within his own heart that no one should have to keep hidden.

  Joe had never expressed any interest in the problems of mental retardation, but his friend Archbishop Richard Cushing had told him about a well-regarded Catholic institution, St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children in Jefferson, Wisconsin. In 1949 Joe traveled there and arranged for the building of a small home alongside Alverno House, in which resided lifelong adult residents. In August, when the construction was finished, two nuns traveled to Craig House and brought Rosemary back to the modest house where she would spend the rest of her life watched over by several nuns. But Joe did not go to visit her or see her. Nor for years did anyone else, not her mother or any of her brothers and sisters. The first visit to Rosemary probably took place in 1958 when Jack made a secret trip to St. Coletta’s during a campaign swing.

  Jack did not like confrontation. He found the endless battles between Democrats and Republicans not a real war but a wearisome and tedious routine. He had one of the worst attendance records in the House of Representatives, missing over one-quarter of the roll-call votes during three terms. Only some of those absences could be attributed to his many illnesses.

  He simply could not tolerate sitting through committee hearings and House debates, pretending to listen to the pious posturing and platitudes of so many of his colleagues. That said, he was no more interested in wandering through the streets of East Boston or Somerville listening to what most politicians called “the real people.” That to him was equally tedious.

  Jack treated his district the way many British members of Parliament treated their borough, as little more than a convenient device that won them election and a place to return to primarily when they sought reelection. Reading Jack’s travel itinerary for the first half of 1949, the uninitiated might imagine that he was the congressman from the right side of Manhattan, not from the wrong side of Boston.

  During those six months, Jack spent at least a dozen weekends in New York at the Waldorf or St. Regis, as often as not with one woman or another. There was good theater to be seen, good restaurants to frequent, good times to be had, and it was a damn sight better than hanging out at the American Legion in Brighton.

  A year later, Jack suddenly started taking a deep interest in attending such homey events as the kickoff dinner for the Home of Aged Italians in East Boston, the Lexington Minute Men banquet, the Boston Jubilee baked bean supper, the South End Post Number 105 American Legion dinner, and the Army Day Dance, 2nd Brigade, 101st Infantry, at the Cambridge Armory. He had begun wooing Massachusetts like a forgotten lover—or more accurately, like a politician who had decided to run for either governor or senator in 1952.

  When George Smathers learned that Jack was going to announce for Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.’s seat, the newly elected Florida senator walked across the
Capitol to the House side to try to talk his friend out of the race. Smathers could have made a formidable argument that the race against Lodge would be political suicide.

  The Republican senator, bearer of one of the most celebrated political names in America, was the perfect model of the old Brahmin ideal of stewardship. He was a man of prickly independence, with a quick, nervous irritability that his detractors chalked up to snobbishness. He had the kind of integrity that occasionally comes from generations of wealth. At six feet three inches tall and with lean, patriarchal good looks and public manners as impeccable as his dress, the fifty-year-old senator had a stunning public presence. Lodge had a handsome Italian-born wife, Francesca, and was most decidedly a family man.

  Lodge and Jack had many parallels in their lives. As a senator in his early forties, Lodge had every reason not to serve in combat in World War II. He had done so, however, with valor and distinction, then returned to reclaim his Senate seat in the same election that sent Jack to Washington.

  Lodge was a man of moderation and thoughtfulness when those virtues were not always common. He was an internationalist who on many of the issues of the day sat on the same side of the aisle as Jack. In what boded to be a Republican year, Lodge appeared impregnable.

  Smathers was appalled at the way his friend was throwing away his political career. As a former House member, Smathers had floor privileges and he wandered around until he found Jack lying on a couch in the cloakroom. Jack was in such a state that he could not even stand up. Smathers reached down and pulled his legs down onto the floor. The two men walked onto the House floor and stood leaning on the bar at the back of the room. “My God, man, I don’t see how you can possibly think about running,” Smathers implored in a loud whisper, “when you can’t even get up and down.”