The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  By the time the first movie ended—an American film about the heroic birth of Israel—the audience was full of deep emotion and a passionate sense of their relationship with Israel. As the lights went up, there stood Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., an apparition who moved the audience only slightly less than if Ben-Gurion himself had walked up the aisle. Then Congressman John McCormack, a man nicknamed “Rabbi John,” appeared, to another thunderous round of applause.

  And finally, when the two speakers had made their remarks, Congressman Kennedy strode onto the stage. When he finished his talk and walked off to more applause, a travelogue on Israel played on the screen. It was a glorious evening, especially if you were working for Jack. The campaign replicated the same approach in other heavily Jewish areas.

  While they attempted to manipulate the various ethnic groups and constituencies, the Kennedys maintained a well-earned cynicism toward much of the press. Jack was forever flattering journalism and journalists, but flattery is to respect what copper is to gold, the cheapest kind of currency. Jack applied it to those journalists inordinately attracted to its coinage.

  The Kennedys’ scorn for some members of the press was honestly won, and it presented a number of moral conundrums. When did generosity become a bribe? And who was guiltier, the supplicant with the outstretched hand or the patron who greased his palm with a few coins?

  Jack had observed for years the family’s relationship with Arthur Krock. His father would not think of issuing significant campaign statements without running them past Krock. The reporter was not a conniving hack seeking to supplement his miserable wages with handouts from Joe. He was the premier political columnist for the New York Times, the most important newspaper in America, and he was available at all times and all hours, for advice, help with speeches, or whatever sundry duty the family demanded. In the 1930s, Joe had offered to pay the journalist five thousand dollars for his work on Joe’s book supporting Roosevelt, and that may have been the least of it. It was whispered around the Kennedy camp that he was on the old man’s payroll. Better if he was, for if he was being paid only in access, deference, and the illusion of importance, he was a man who was bought cheaply indeed.

  If a man of Krock’s stature was so amenable, then certain lesser journalists and newspapers were even more so. In October, Lodge met with John Fox, the new owner of the Boston Post. The Post was a Democratic standard-bearer, at least it had been before Fox bought the troubled daily. Fox planned to endorse Lodge, however, support that Lodge thought easily worth forty thousand votes, enough to ensure his reelection.

  Lodge told the good news to one of his top aides, who mentioned the extraordinary endorsement to Joseph Timilty, Joe’s closest political associate. Joe went to see Fox. Joe knew that the paper was in financial trouble, and after the apparent application of a half-million-dollar loan, the next day the Post endorsed Jack.

  “I don’t know whether he arranged for him to get a loan or got him a loan or what,” Bobby recalled. “I don’t remember the details, but the Boston Post supported John Kennedy—and there was a connection between the two events. I don’t know … specifically what was involved, but I know he was an unsavory figure.” Jack was more blunt in speaking to the journalist Fletcher Knebel: “You know, we had to buy that fucking paper or I’d have been licked.”

  Boston’s thriving ethnic press was for the most part just as mercenary as the publisher of the Boston Post. These papers viewed the election not as a subject for vigorous reporting but as an enviable opportunity for political advertising. When one of Jack’s aides, Ralph Coghlan, went around Boston meeting the various editors, he reported that every paper, from the Armenian Hairenik and the Italian Gazzetta Del Massachusetts to the black Chronicle, expected ads in return for its support. In the inner world of the campaign it was all tit-for-tat, my favor for yours, a series of exchanges that had little to do with principles or ideas.

  For the Kennedy men, this was not only a campaign for the Senate but a testing ground, and they were perfecting techniques and strategy that they intended one day to employ to elevate Jack to the White House.

  After one particularly tough day on the campaign trail, an exhausted Jack sat in his father’s apartment on Beacon Street talking with his father and Morrissey about the campaign. As difficult as this Senate campaign was proving, Joe said that Jack must think further ahead. If he won in November, he would win the presidential nomination and election to the White House.

  “I will work our the plans to elect you president,” he told his son, in a voice brimming with assurance. “It will not be more difficult for you to be elected president than it will be to win the Lodge fight.”

  When Jack won the election by seventy thousand votes, or 51.5 percent, the candidate was not the only noble victor that evening; his father, brother, and mother had triumphed as well. Joe and Rose remembered so vividly how Honey Fitz had run against Lodge’s grandfather for the Senate in 1916, and how painful it had been when he lost. “At last the Fitzgeralds have evened the score with the Lodges,” Rose said.

  What more exquisite revenge for a century of slights than to best the senator bearing the greatest old Boston political name of them all. As he had promised he would do if he won, Jack sang “Sweet Adeline” that evening. This was not his own tune, however, but his grandfather’s political theme song, and he would no more look back at his immigrant past than would the shrewd young politicos who surrounded him.

  Joe had done what had to be done, and if this meant buying the Boston Post’s endorsement as one would buy billboard space, so be it. He had made at least one other crucial move. The man who ran for Jack’s seat that year, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr., insisted years later that Joe had pushed Governor Paul Dever to run for reelection when the man wanted to retire. Dever was a party politician who had built a machine across the Commonwealth dedicated to the advancement of the Democratic Party and its candidates and agenda. A man with high blood pressure and a heart condition, the governor had been advised by his doctors not to run.

  On this election evening there was only one dour face in Jack’s headquarters. That was his own father. Joe spent much of the time on the phone talking to the governor, hoping to hear that Dever had finally pulled ahead. The governor’s organization had helped Jack more than Dever. At four in the morning Joe gave up. “Paul is not going to make it. I guess I’ll go to bed.” Joe got up from his chair and turned back once more before he left. “I wonder if Jack Kennedy will ever realize what Paul Dever did for him in this election.”

  Dever had lost not only the election and possibly his health but the political organization that was much of his life’s work. During the campaign, Anthony Gallucio and others had traversed the state, bringing a myriad of new people into politics, the natural constituents for a Kennedy Democratic machine, similar to the Dever Democratic machine. Gallucio pleaded with Jack to keep the organization intact that they had so laboriously put together to further the Democratic Party. Jack replied curtly: “I’m going to run my own boat.” Jack did not see the Democratic Party as a sea that raised all boats or none. To him, politics was more like a series of locks that his ship would work its way through while other boats waited far behind. It was of little concern to him whether or not the other boats continued up the canal.

  For Bobby, the election was a victory in many ways. His sister Jean observed that in those months, he had proved himself to his father “very quickly and definitely.” He was only twenty-six years old, but he had no problem leading people twice his age, often bossing them with dismissive arrogance. He moved people around as if they were furniture, shoving them into this space or that. For the first time in his life he was a man of authority, and he used it willfully. He was his brother’s man. That was Bobby’s proud identity, a moniker he would carry the rest of Jack’s life.

  Bobby went down to the Cape a few weeks after the election for a weekend of football and sailing and good times with old friends. It was time to savor the
victory, like football players reliving each play of a close victory. Joe would have none of that. Life always lay ahead. “What are you going to do now?” Bobby’s father asked. “Are you going to sit on your tail end and do nothing now for the rest of your life? You’d better go out and get a job.”

  In December, Bobby told a reporter from the Cape Cod Times that he was “aiming for the post of Massachusetts attorney general” in a few years, but that he would first work in Washington to gain some experience. He could have gained that expertise working for any of a number of Democratic senators or congressmen. Instead, his father decided that he would call upon his Republican friend, Senator Joe McCarthy, to place Bobby in what boded to be the most publicized, most controversial staff position in the Eighty-third Congress: chief counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations chaired by the Wisconsin senator.

  Joe showed up in his limousine at McCarthy’s townhouse on Capitol Hill one winter evening. McCarthy was out in back grilling steaks, but he hurried inside, wearing his apron and holding a cooking fork. “How do you like your steak, Mr. Ambassador?” asked George Mason, one of the senator’s friends. “I have no time,” Joe said peremptorily and turned toward McCarthy. “Bobby will give me no peace,” Joe said. “He wants a job. He wants to come to Washington. You’ve got to give him a job. You’ve got to do something about Bobby.”

  Joe asked for few favors, and when he did, they were usually wrapped in velvet, but there was an urgent, imploring quality to this request. Joe was McCarthy’s supporter, fellow Catholic, and friend. Moreover, McCarthy was enough of a politician to realize when he could not say no. “I’ll talk to [Senator John] McClellan [the ranking Democrat] in the morning, and see what we can arrange.” With that, Joe turned and walked out the door, never having even taken off his homburg.

  McCarthy told Joe that he had already hired twenty-five-year-old Roy Cohn, another ambitious young lawyer, as chief counsel. Instead, the senator offered Bobby a slot as assistant counsel.

  Jack found McCarthy’s rhetoric vulgar and overweening but he was not about to attack him for such faults. Nevertheless, he was upset that Bobby was going to work for McCarthy, even if he thought it was for “political, not ideological,” reasons.

  Bobby had scarcely arrived in his new position before he made his presence felt in a variety of ways. One day Maurice Rosenblatt received word that Bobby wanted to see him. Rosenblatt was a leading anti-McCarthy activist and the anonymous author of a series of articles about Joe’s anti-Semitism and dubious business dealings in the City Reporter, a small liberal publication. He was not used to getting calls from the Kennedys. Rosenblatt walked over to the assistant counsel’s office in the Old Senate Office Building. “I walk in, and he gets up, walks around his desk, and puts out his hand, and I put out my hand,” Rosenblatt recalled with the most vivid and immediate of memories. “He pulls my hand and twists it, and I’m off balance, and [he] throws me onto a leather coach. No words or anything else. I blink and say, ‘What is this about?’ He says, ‘We have our eye on you.’”

  Bobby had a dogged, tenacious quality that he applied in full measure to his investigation of American allies trading with the Chinese. He discovered that three out of every four ships carrying goods into Chinese ports flew a Western flag. Many of these shippers also had contracts to carry allied defense goods to Western Europe. And all of this was happening when American boys were dying in Korea.

  This devastating information seemed to verify American feelings that the world outside its borders was a duplicitous, dishonorable place. Bobby’s initial report was judicious and serious, the very model of the way the staff of a congressional committee should do its work. Bobby did not point to bureaucratic culprits in Washington to be grabbed by their disreputable necks and hauled before the justice of the McCarthy committee.

  The report should have led to lengthy, spirited hearings in which a wide variety of viewpoints would be heard. It was, after all, a world of fearsome complexities. The Japanese appeared to be one of the worst violators. They were shipping only seaweed to China in exchange for iron ore, however, and that seaweed was hardly the stuff of which the Chinese could make bullets. As for the British, they had colonies in Asia and had been a trading nation for centuries; it was far more onerous for them to stop shipping to China than for the United States.

  These points were made, but they were drowned out by the sheer force and fury of McCarthy’s rhetoric. What could a man say—a politician, that is—when McCarthy shouted on the floor of the Senate: “We should perhaps keep in mind the American boys and the few British boys, too, who had their hands wired behind their backs and their faces shot off with machine guns—Communist machine guns … supplied by those flag vessels of our allies…. Let us sink every accursed ship carrying materials to the enemy regardless of what flag those ships may fly.”

  If McCarthy had been able to marry his rhetoric to Bobby’s research, he might have staved off his ignominious political end for a while longer. He was, however, a man rising to his worst instincts, and no one played to those instincts better than did Roy Cohn and his new associate, G. David Schine. While Bobby was working on his shipping report, these two dapper, diminutive inquisitors traveled around Europe pulling suspicious books off Voice of America library shelves, happily exporting fear and suspicion to American officials abroad.

  Bobby had an immense dislike for Cohn, an emotion that Cohn fully reciprocated. When the two ambitious young men looked at each other, it was as if they were looking into a mirror that exaggerated their blemishes and faults. Cohn did Bobby one of the most valuable favors of his life. If Bobby had not abhorred Cohn so profoundly, he would probably have stayed with McCarthy, a man he personally admired, and would have borne the heavy burden of that livery for the rest of his political life.

  The history of the Kennedys might have been different if Bobby had remained with McCarthy, or had taken the position of chief counsel. The family would have been so closely identified with McCarthy that Jack would have found it difficult to get the support of enough liberal and centrist Democrats to win the presidential nomination.

  None of the Kennedy men grasped the terrible danger of McCarthy. Across the nation men and women spent sleepless nights pondering whether they would be condemned for an acquaintanceship they once had, a petition they once signed, a belief they once held, a cause they once supported. This fear reached into the higher reaches of academe, into the unions, and into the bureaucracies of Washington. It even entered into the Kennedys’ own family. The fact that the matter was kept so quiet shows that in those years, fear was no stranger even among the Kennedy men.

  During the summer of 1954, the FBI learned that Jack Anderson, then a reporter for columnist Drew Pearson, had information that after completing army basic training in 1951, “Teddy had not been permitted to go to a school at Camp Holabird, Maryland, because of an adverse FBI report which linked him to a group of ‘pinkos.’” Here, then, was just the kind of silent, unsubstantiated allegation that destroyed people. It had apparently been responsible for Teddy’s abrupt departure from Camp Holabird, destroying his Army Intelligence career, and now it might destroy his public honor.

  FBI agent L. B. Nichols wrote Clyde Tolson, the FBI deputy director, that Joe “stated that he sent word to Drew Pearson that if he so much as printed a word about this that he would sue him for libel in a manner such as Drew Pearson had never been sued before.” Nichols reported that he had told Joe that there had been no such FBI report and that it may have been the case of “somebody confusing the FBI with some other investigative agency.” There may have been no formal FBI investigation, but Nichols told Tolson that “apparently some of the information which Anderson had on his son’s Army activities was accurate and Kennedy stated the army was somewhat incensed over how the information got out.”

  Teddy, then, was probably a victim, if a minor one, of the Red Scare. If not for Joe, Teddy might have found himself permanently tainted. He was left
unscathed, but neither his father nor his brothers appear to have grasped that if the finger of accusation could point at Teddy, then it could point at anyone. Men who exalted courage above all virtues surely should have known that when the name of your own son or brother is called out, then it is time to stand up and condemn those fingers pointing so wildly, often destroying lives with the flick of an allegation.

  Joe did not quite see it that way. He shared many of McCarthy’s beliefs and reveled in his association with J. Edgar Hoover, who fancied himself the greatest of all Communist hunters. Joe’s friendship with Hoover may have saved Teddy’s reputation, and Joe took every occasion to flatter the FBI director.

  The year before the threat against Teddy, J. J. Kelly, the special agent in charge of the Boston office, made one of his periodic visits to Joe in Hyannis Port. Joe told the agent that “if it were not for the FBI the country would go to Hell.” Then he referred to a series of newspaper columns regarding civil rights investigations. Although the name of the columnist has been blacked out in the FBI Freedom of Information documents, Joe was apparently referring to Drew Pearson. Joe told the agent that he believed that the columnist “was angling his columns at the Jews, Negroes and the Communist element behind the Civil Liberties outfit, as well as the NAACP.”

  Joe’s endless devotions to the FBI director were the mark not of an unctuous poseur but of a shrewd man who understood his subject only too well. As much as Hoover loved power, he loved praise even more. And in the midst of the McCarthy era, the director received accolades and acclaim so extravagant that only a man of boundless egoism could have believed it. Even among this army of courtiers and sycophants, Joe’s fawning voice stood out as, in the words of the FBI special agent in Boston, “the most vocal and forceful admirer [of Hoover] that I have met.”