The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  When Clement ended his lengthy speech, demonstrators rushed forward carrying the banners boldly emblazoned “Kennedy for President.” In politics there is nothing more calculated than the illusion of spontaneity, and these Massachusetts delegates had been primed for their moment in the television spotlight. Jack was a candidate for the vice presidency, not the presidency, but in this one evening he had become a major presence in national politics. The star of the evening was the man whose cool voice exemplified the future of politics as much as the florid Clement represented the past. “Kennedy came before the convention tonight as a movie star,” wrote the New York Times.

  Jack’s fascination with Hollywood was not a dilettantish indulgence, but a formidable weapon in his rise to national power. The millions of Americans watching their television screens bestowed celebrity on those they chose to anoint. Celebrity was becoming the most desired new currency, readily cashed in for money or power, and by the time the convention was over no one in the vast hall had received more freshly minted celebrity than John F. Kennedy.

  Jack had another unique element in his panoply of power, and that was his beautiful wife. Seven months pregnant, Jackie was suffering in all the heat and turmoil of the convention. Only once, however, did she confess her discomfort. As she looked out the window of their tenth-floor suite, a reporter asked how she liked the convention. “Not much,” she sighed. But for the most part, she sat dutifully in a box, and during the week the television audience saw a tableau of marital happiness, a star married to a star.

  In his three and a half years in the Senate, Jack had been sick and absent so much that he had had no major impact. By all appearances, he had neither the record, the energy, nor the ambition to attempt to win such a prize as the vice presidential nomination. The reality was that the calendar of Jack’s life might have only a few pages that had not yet been turned over. If he aspired to national political office, he could not wait to be noticed. For the first months of 1956, he had coyly refused to proclaim his interest in the nomination while allowing Sorensen and others to work on his behalf.

  Jack spent his time promoting Adlai Stevenson, the putative Democratic presidential nominee. Stevenson’s strongest advocate within Jack’s family was his own wife, who for the first time took a strong interest in politics. Jackie was one of a myriad of educated women devoted to the former Illinois governor, applauding what she considered “his intelligence, farsightedness, and reasonableness.” She did not limit her words to whispered asides to her husband but used them in drafting in her own hand the very words spoken by the senator from Massachusetts in announcing his support for Stevenson’s candidacy.

  Ambition is often a wondrous tonic, and in advancing his candidacy Jack showed an energy and sheer pleasure in the high deviousness of politics that he had rarely shown before. For instance, in seeking to remove an anti-Stevenson man, William H. Burke Jr., from the chairmanship of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, Jack spread gossip accusing Burke of “spend[ing] the whole day with Carmine DeSapio,” the New York boss and Stevenson foe.

  Most politicians would have sought to replace Burke with a new chairman who would do his bidding. Jack realized that doing that would exchange new enemies for the old one. In a letter marked “Personal and Confidential,” Jack told one supporter, attorney Walter T. Burke (no relationship to William H. Burke Jr.) that “if someone who is as close to me as you is named, the feeling will generally be that this whole fight has been one for personal gain rather than a clear-cut attempt to establish an entirely new, impartial, and clean organization.” Instead, Jack proposed former Mayor Pat Lynch of Somerville. “While he is not overly close to me, the fact that he is acceptable to most of those who are on our side … makes him, I think, an ideal new face for the job.”

  When Stan Karson, a Stevenson campaign executive, talked to Jack soon after William Burke Jr. had been deposed, Karson left feeling “that for the first time since I have known him over the past few years, he appears to be in control of a political situation, knows it, and likes it.” Karson presumably believed that Jack’s interest was in masterminding the Stevenson campaign in Massachusetts, not positioning himself for the vice presidency by ingratiating himself with the former Illinois governor.

  Jack’s daunting problem was his Catholicism. Ever since Al Smith’s disastrous run for the presidency in 1928, it had become part of political catechism that a Catholic could not be elected to national office. Jack was not about to confront this issue directly. The shrewdest partisanship masks itself in a bland cloak of neutrality. Sorensen prepared a seemingly impartial report on voting records suggesting that a Catholic on the ticket would bring votes to Stevenson, not lose them, and then leaked it to the media. The Kennedy people also did another pseudo-neutral report winnowing down the possible vice presidential choices by criteria that included marital status (“Should be married, and with no previous divorces”). Jack’s picture-book marriage stood in stark conquest to the domestic lives of five other divorced candidates. When the sorting out was finished, Jack turned out to be the perfect candidate.

  Jack wanted Bobby beside him at the Chicago convention in July. With Sorensen and the others there was always the niggling doubt that they would put their own interests ahead of his, that they might prefer flattery to truth. With Bobby there was none of that. Bobby saw no greater honor, no higher goal, than to advance Jack. The younger Kennedy cut through all the cant and self-promotion and grasped the nubs of truth, no matter how unpleasant they might be.

  Jack called Congressman Tip O’Neill who had taken his old congressional seat, to try to get a delegate seat for Bobby. “Tip,” he said, “I’d like to have you name my brother Bob as a delegate to the convention. My brother Bob is the smartest politician I have ever met in my life. Tip, he is absolutely brilliant. You know you never can tell, lightning may strike at this convention out there, I could wind up as vice president. And I’d like my brother with credentials so he could be on the floor to really work for me.”

  O’Neill was a politician with a consummate understanding of politics as a game of endless exchanges. “As long as you feel that way about it, Senator, okay,” O’Neill said, taking his own name off as a delegate and letting Bobby go in his stead.

  Delegate credentials were not like ducats to a prizefight that could be sold, exchanged, or traded. One citizen, Robert P. Donovan of East Boston, was outraged that Bobby gave his home address as 122 Bowdoin Street, where he supposedly resided with his pregnant wife and four children along with Jack and his wife in a two-room apartment. Donovan protested to the state ballot law commission, whose commissioners were hardly going to cast out the favorite brother of their favorite son.

  At the convention, Jack had Bobby on the floor and Jackie in her seat, but he had one irreconcilable problem—his relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt. The late president’s widow was the moral center of American liberalism. Mrs. Roosevelt found Jack’s silence on McCarthy a coward’s lament.

  “She had seen me on a program a week or so before, and had not felt that I had been vigorous enough on McCarthy,” Jack recalled three years later. “So I went up [to see her], and my explanation was under the most adverse conditions, because she was in her room, she was hurrying to go downstairs…. It was like eighteen people in a telephone booth, and she was giving it just half attention—not listening really.”

  One of the reasons Jack did not like liberals was that many of them had an overweening sense of moral superiority and were under the misapprehension that a lecture was the same thing as a dialogue. By the summer of 1956, attacking McCarthy was no longer mortally dangerous to a political career. That Jack did not get in a few blows at the fallen McCarthy was one of the more inexplicable moves in his career. Instead of agreeing with Mrs. Roosevelt, Jack reached into his little bag of legalisms and spoke as if McCarthy had already died. “My point was that … because I had never really been particularly vigorous about McCarthy during his life, that it would really make me out to be
a complete political whore, for me to be really chomping and jumping … vigorous[ly] in my denunciation of McCarthy when he was gone.”

  Mrs. Roosevelt could not understand why the junior senator from Massachusetts would not denounce the evils that even he could now see. Jack did nothing, and this moral albatross remained tightly wrapped around his neck. McCarthy’s status as a family friend may have had something to do with his reticence. Beyond that, what Jack’s detractors never considered was the possibility that this man, so obsessed with courage, may have realized that he had hidden when he should have stood up, and that he said nothing now was a mark not of dishonor but of its opposite.

  Instead of choosing his own running mate, Stevenson took the dramatic step of throwing the choice open to the Democratic delegates. The Kennedy people had been prepared for all eventualities but this one, and they hustled the great floor seeking votes from delegates wavering primarily between Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and Jack.

  Neither Joe nor Teddy was among the Kennedy people frantically working undecided delegates. Joe was on the Riviera, an ocean away from what he considered a futile effort destructive to Jack’s presidential chances four years later. Teddy was on a trip to Africa, preferring adventure to politics. To give his journey the veneer of seriousness, he had set himself up with press credentials as a stringer covering the French forces in Algeria, but unlike his big brothers, he never managed to file a series of published stories. His father had warned him about spending “too much time” among the more pleasurable fleshpots. It was an admonition that had some muscle; true to the family pattern, Teddy was not traveling alone but had Fred Holborn, a Harvard instructor, for a companion.

  Jack had proved to be prescient in wanting Bobby to have delegate credentials so that he could be on the floor. Bobby employed the whole anthology of emotions in promoting Jack. He pled, argued, threatened, and cajoled as he moved from one delegation to the next. He saw that among some of these people even his most salient political arguments did no good. “So many people had come up to me and said they would like to vote for Jack but they were going to vote for Estes Kefauver because he had sent them a card or visited in their home,” he reflected afterward. “I said right there that as well as paying attention to the issues we should send Christmas cards next time.”

  Jack came a tantalizing thirty-eight votes short of winning on the second ballot before Kefauver surged ahead. During the voting, Jackie had been surrounded by well-wishers, but as the voting began to go against her husband, the adoring sycophants began sidling away until she was left alone, looking to one observer “a forlorn figure.”

  Jack may have lost that evening, but he was the largest victor of the week. He left the 1956 convention brilliantly positioned for a run at the presidential nomination in four years. The Boston papers celebrated their native son’s near-win, but Jack’s name was heard now in areas far distant from Massachusetts. The Clearwater Sun in Florida called him “one of the ablest and most promising young men on the American political scene today … substantial feeling exists among Democrats and other observers that he may have advanced himself a very long stride toward a presidential nomination in the years ahead.”

  Jack flew out of Chicago exhausted after not having slept for three nights. Jackie was exhausted too, and when the plane landed in New York, she took an air taxi to Newport to rest at her mother’s home. The admirable John F. Kennedy the newspapers were celebrating would have been on that plane with his wife to spend the last days of summer awaiting the birth of their first child. Even the most cynical of politicians would have joined his wife; no matter how boring he may have found married life, if he wanted to be president, he would do best to play the loving husband and father-to-be.

  Instead, announcing that he was going off on a two-week visit to Nice and the Middle East, Jack got on another plane to Paris. In fact, Jack was heading off on a Mediterranean yachting trip. Since March, when Jack already knew that his wife was pregnant, he had been actively negotiating for a yacht with the Mercury Travel Agency in Cannes. “I do not wish for personal reasons to have the direct responsibility or be in any way connected with the hiring of the boat,” he wrote H. W. Richardson at the travel agency in April. “I am sure you can appreciate my reasons.”

  Jack arranged for a Washington railroad executive and lobbyist, William Thompson, to sign the contract and pay $1,750 for the eighty-five-foot Vileshi and its four-person crew for two weeks beginning August 21, 1956. Those who disliked the big, brawny Thompson judged him little better than a procurer, but Jack considered him a friend with whom he shared an insatiable appetite for nubile young women. Jack and Thompson were the horsemen of the night, riding out together in search of sexual adventure, be it in Florida, Cuba, or elsewhere. Beyond their mutual pleasure, Thompson doubtless understood how useful it was to have such a well-placed friend, and arranging cruises brought better access than buttonholing the senator outside the cloakroom.

  For the senator from Massachusetts and potential presidential candidate, this excursion was unimaginably foolhardy. Jack was heading off on a yacht paid for by a lobbyist/executive, accompanied by several young women, and with a letter on file at the agency showing that he wanted his role kept secret.

  When Jack arrived in southern France, he spent a few hours with his parents at their villa. There is no evidence that Rose, who exalted family above all else, suggested to her son that it was inappropriate for him to be vacationing away from his twenty-seven-year-old pregnant wife who had already lost one baby. The talk was of the convention and the hack politicians who Jack thought had betrayed him.

  Jack had hoped that Gunilla might be with him on the yacht, but she took her marital vows literally. Jack was accompanied instead by a group that included Teddy and a number of young women. Teddy, a student of his older brother’s life, had yet another opportunity to take studious notes on the man he took as his ideal.

  For years, Jack had taken risks in the name of sexual amusement, but now there was a dangerous crescendo to his activities. Jack had nearly died after his operation in New York. There are those who rise out of a nearly fatal illness and its telling lesson of the transitory nature of human existence displaying a generosity of spirit that they had not exhibited before. Others leave their sickbeds believing that they must chase every bright flash of life, heedless of its costs to others or even themselves. Jack’s father had taught his sons that life must be sucked of its essence. Jack’s illnesses were more lessons on the same page. He sought everything now with an intensity that he had not showed before, not only political power but also pleasure, and pleasure to Jack meant sexual diversion.

  Jack had just come through the most physically exhausting political week of his life. He wanted to relax, and he would have found no relaxation listening to the mindless social chitchat of his in-laws, and no solace walking the Newport beach hand in hand with his pregnant wife. He took what was best from everyone around him. When he wanted to be amused, Lem or Red appeared, all but wearing clown suits. When he wanted to discuss public policy, Sorensen sidled into the room, all solemnity. When it was his political future at stake, Bobby and his father appeared. And when he sought relaxation, he wanted sex. “Unique among them,” recalled one of the Mediterranean revelers, “was a stunning but not particularly intelligent blonde who didn’t seem to have a name but referred to herself in the third person as ‘Pooh.’ She fascinated Jack, who was wound very tight when he arrived in Europe and almost completely unwound a few days later.”

  While Jack was basking in the sun, Jackie began hemorrhaging. The doctors performed a cesarean section, but the baby was stillborn. When Jackie woke up, it was not Jack who was sitting there by her bedside but Bobby. It was Bobby who was always there, but as much as he watched out for his sister-in-law, he was watching out even more for his absent brother.

  A hospital official stated that the baby died owing to the mother’s “exhaustion and nervous tensions following the Democratic National Convent
ion.” When Jack learned that the baby had died, he sailed on. It took a call from George Smathers to convince Jack that he should go home to his grieving wife. “I told him, ‘You ought to come back,’ which he did,” Smathers recalled.

  For Jackie, the fact that her husband had not returned was like a light so brilliant that even a blind woman would have seen its flashes. She had written a poem to a noble, star-crossed hero, but that was not the husband who returned to her.

  Bobby was doing far more than advancing Jack’s political career and tidying up after his romantic sojourns. In his own right, Bobby was a man of extraordinary ambition, energy, and cunning. Bobby did almost nothing without explicitly mixed motives, and made no move without figuring out all that might go wrong.

  Bobby attempted to ingratiate himself with J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI chief, seeing him twice early in 1954 on what were considered personal matters. He visited the FBI chief again the next year when he was planning to take a trip to the Soviet Union. Hoover suspected Bobby not as a cryptic liberal but as someone from an equally treacherous category, a publicity lover. “Kennedy was completely uncooperative until he had squeezed all the publicity out of the matter that he could,” Hoover noted about a subject before the subcommittee, Bobby having had the bad taste not to realize that Hoover was the one to do the squeezing.

  In the summer of 1955, Joe arranged for Bobby to go on a six-week trip to the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Joe was forever pushing his sons to confront their truths in spirited debate with those of radically different positions. Douglas favored a less rigid, more accommodationist policy toward the Soviet Union, and the liberal jurist was the worthiest of choices to debate Bobby as they journeyed around regions of the Soviet Union where, since the revolution, few Westerners had gone.