The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Jack saw no contradiction between giving a compelling, idealistic speech and an hour later bedding a coed. He could have it all, and he did. He cynically and compulsively exploited his power in his sexual conquests. He picked up his young mistress at her Radcliffe dorm in his car. When McGeorge Bundy, the Harvard dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, and a man in whom the blood of his Puritan ancestors still flowed true, learned of Jack’s audacity, he purportedly was outraged. He did not think it appropriate that Jack, a Harvard overseer, should be seducing young women under the dean’s sheltering tutelage.

  There was the dangerous, reckless part of Jack, but to see him simply as a hapless roué would be to photograph his loins and call it a portrait. There was still the other Jack Kennedy whose words resonated out of a deep place in his spirit and his mind.

  At the beginning of his senatorial campaign, Jack gave Memorial Day talks in Brookline and Dorchester. He did not turn to Sorensen for his words but scribbled some notes on a few sheets of his U.S. Senate letterhead stationery. The words were as structured as if he had gone through half a dozen drafts.

  This was a sacred day to Jack, as it was to many in his audience. Memorial Day was not a holiday for shopping or socializing, not a day to be wrenched out of its proper setting and set down next to Saturday and Sunday to make a three-day weekend. It was an occasion to stop and to remember. Jack was a son of war, a philosopher of that experience, and he reiterated the themes of his spiritual life. He disdained politicians who trafficked in patriotism and sentiment, wearing the flag as their preferred costume. That was not what he was doing this morning. His was a noble speech—short, deeply felt, and reflecting the becoming modesty of a man who believed he was a lesser being than those he honored.

  “These men … died for honorable and eternal things—for home and family—for comradeship—and for the indomitable questions of youth,” he told his audience. War was for Jack what it was for brothers—a natural training ground for youth, a field of heroes and heroisms, the plain of honor for every true man. He went on to repeat a theme that had entered his life with the war and Joe Jr.’s death. “Because their sacrifice is a constant stimulus to us on the long road forward, they didn’t die in vain…. But the world is poor without them for they were the flower of our race, the bravest and the truest.”

  Jack ended his talk with a passage from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The classic book of spiritual journey might have seemed far removed from Jack’s life, but he apparently knew at least one passage by heart; he wrote the words verbatim and with almost perfect accuracy in his handwritten notes.

  Then said he, I am going to my Father’s; and though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me, that I have fought His battles but now will be my rewarder…. So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.

  It was the Jack Kennedy who spoke words like these who inspired the sons and daughters of Massachusetts. This was the man for whom the people of Massachusetts voted in unprecedented numbers in November 1958, giving him 874,608 votes, or 73.6 percent of the total. They knew nothing of the Jack Kennedy who holed up in a hotel with a young woman. Nor did they know of the pain he so often suffered and the silvery needle that he injected into his body, deadening his pain. There were several Jack Kennedys, or at least several disparate parts of Jack Kennedy, and as he set out in earnest to win the presidential nomination, both the best and the worst were alive within him.

  Teddy and Joan’s wedding was scheduled to take place three weeks after Jack’s landslide reelection. No one expected Teddy’s wedding to be as magnificent as those of his big brothers. Teddy was only a law student, not a senator, and though the Bennetts were well off, they were not immensely wealthy like Bobby’s in-laws or Jack’s mother-in-law. But it would be a major wedding, with 475 guests filling St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Bronxville.

  Teddy was like a spectator at his own wedding, taking a walk-on part in an important familay ritual. Teddy wanted Father John Cavanaugh, the president of Notre Dame University, to officiate at the wedding. The wry, urbane churchman was a dear friend of his father and the family. Shortly before the ceremony Teddy came to the priest and said that he had changed his mind, though it was clearly his father’s decision. Teddy’s was a dynastic wedding, and he had to be married by Cardinal Spellman, the most celebrated Catholic leader in America.

  Teddy’s bride was a virgin, and that aspect of the marriage had its natural appeal, but even their honeymoon was tied up in family ambitions. “We almost had to go to Lord Beaverbrook’s house in Nassau,” Joan recalled. “Joe said to Ted and me that this good friend of mine has this lovely house in Nassau. And you should go down.” As the youngest child, Teddy was a natural courtier, a genial supplicant to his siblings and his elders, a young man with a perfectly honed sense of who mattered and who did not. Teddy wrote the press magnate a letter that could have been a model for Emily Post. “I remember at the closing days of Jack’s campaign that you were kind enough to extend to Joan and myself an invitation to visit you on our honeymoon from November 29th to December 3rd,” he began in his handwritten letter. It was a perfect beginning, reminding Beaverbrook of the invitation, and listing the intended dates. “I couldn’t help but think that my brother Bob did trap you into extending this invitation, but I am much to [sic] ungentle-manly and entirely too excited about this prospect even to let this opportunity go by.”

  As the wedding day approached, Teddy’s feelings of dread mounted. This was not the nervous stomach expected of a bridegroom, but a deep sense of disquiet. Joan was full of immense unease as well. Neither of them, however, felt comfortable enough with the other to voice any of their doubts.

  Teddy sensed that what he was going to do was not right, not right for him, and not right for Joan. He was getting married because he was supposed to get married. He was being led up to the altar by his parents’ firm hands to say vows he was not ready to say. He waited for the day like someone about to have an accident who knows that in the final instant there is nothing he can do, that he can neither veer away nor even brace himself, but must simply wait and see what damage is wrought.

  Jack had been filled with his own sense of dread before his wedding, though nothing as overwhelming as what Teddy was feeling. Jack should have understood what Teddy was experiencing. Jack knew that Teddy was not the vibrant, carefree young man he appeared to be. “Teddy, who has all the physical apparatus of being rather easygoing, a rancher or something, you know really taking life easy, he got an ulcer for a while there last year because he didn’t know if he was going to be able to stay in law school, because he’s not terribly quick,” Jack told Burns in 1959. For Jack, the ranch was his metaphor for freedom, for that road he had not taken. Jack did not seem to grasp that it was not just his studies that troubled his little brother but his impending wedding. Or more likely Jack chose not to tell his biographer that unpalatable truth.

  Teddy was always doing whatever his father wanted him to do, and in marrying Joan he would be doing it again. “He stayed in and has done pretty well,” Jack continued, “but that demonstrates that’s really induced by outside pressures, because he’s most physically well-balanced and healthy but I mean it’s gotten to him now so he’s doomed to this treadmill too.” Teddy would be getting on the same arduous road that Jack was traveling now, and as his big brother saw it, there was no room to turn around and head back. Teddy’s anguish, then, was not a trivial matter. This marriage would put an end to most of whatever secret dreams Teddy had for a life in a wild, untamed world far beyond the family compound.

  During the last week before the wedding Teddy went out drinking with his friends in New York nightclubs. He had a trust in the world beyond his family that his brothers no longer
had. He talked to his friends about his doubts, and they shook their heads and said that there was nothing he could do. On the evening before the ceremony, when all should have been joy and anticipation, he took a close old friend aside and said that he feared he was making a dreadful mistake.

  On that late November 1958 night, a great storm fell on Bronxville. Frigid winds blew at near-cyclone force, felling trees that had stood for decades, shattering windows, knocking down power lines, leaving much of the town in darkness. Even such a merciless act of nature as this was not going to postpone the wedding. In the morning the guests arrived, driving warily through streets littered with downed trees, flooded gutters, and broken glass. Bracing themselves against the frigid winds, they ran into the church.

  As the last arrivals hurried into the vestibule, they were startled by a brilliant burst of light. One of the wedding gifts was a professional film of the wedding, and the church was lit up with floodlights like a Hollywood set. All of the participants wore hidden microphones. Jack was Teddy’s best man. As the two brothers stood behind the altar waiting for the ceremony to begin, Jack could see the anxiety on his baby brother’s face. Teddy was about to take vows of fidelity. Jack told him that he would still be able to do what he pleased when he got married. Jack was the best example of that. Teddy could have whatever women he wanted and live much as he had as a bachelor. These were unseemly words of advice for a wedding day, but they were an attempt to bolster Teddy and to prepare him for all the obligations that he would face as a Kennedy man. For Jack, sex was a residue of freedom outside his world of obligations and ambitions and he was telling Teddy that he could have that freedom too.

  After the ceremony Teddy and Joan flew to Nassau. On the third night of their four-day honeymoon, Beaverbrook decided that his houseguests needed a romantic interlude by themselves. A boat took the couple to an isolated island where they could spend twenty-four hours by themselves. “We were dumped there for an overnight,” Joan recalled. “It was the worst experience of our life. It was a little cottage, practically a shack, on this tiny island, just sand. We slept on these mats. There were bugs, and it was a nightmare.”

  When the newlyweds returned from their honeymoon, Joan sat down to view the wedding film. She watched in appalled fascination at Jack giving his unconventional marital advice to his little brother. Joan had so wanted to believe that all her doubts were silly anxieties, but watching the film renewed her premonitions of what would face her as a Kennedy woman.

  “When Ted told Jack about the ‘bug,’ Jack was really embarrassed,” Joan said. “Jack blushed scarlet when he found out.” Jack had been doubly careless, careless in the words he had spoken, and careless in the way he had left them lying around as he did his clothes, leaving them there for somebody else to pick up.

  After their short honeymoon, the newlyweds moved to the house in Charlottesville where Teddy would be finishing up his last year in law school. Teddy was a wealthy young man, but he figured that being married might save him some money. “I do remember that when I moved into the house. Ted dismissed the maid!” Joan recalled. “I had to clean, cook, do the laundry, and I really learned a lot. It was fun—for a while!!”

  Teddy’s parents were correct in thinking that marriage would bring a new discipline to their youngest son. “Cadillac Eddie” could not go roaring through life any longer. He ended up building his own house on Squaw Island near the family compound in Hyannis Port so that he and Joan could join the rest of the family there. In Virginia, Teddy settled down to a more sedate life as a married student, and he and Joan developed a loving relationship. He poured himself into preparing for the school’s prestigious moot court contest in which he and Tunney argued a mock case in front of a distinguished panel of jurists that included Stanley Reed, a Supreme Court justice, and Lord Kilmuir, lord chancellor of England. There were forty-nine other teams of ambitious attorneys-to-be, but as most of the Kennedy family sat in the hall, Teddy’s voice soared above the words and logic of all the others, and he and Tunney won the competition.

  Upon graduation in June 1959, Joan thought that her husband would now have time for his wife. But Teddy secreted himself away in Jack’s old Boston apartment on Bowdoin Street to cram for the law boards.

  When that hurdle was passed, Teddy was off again to work in the most important endeavor of his life—helping Jack win the Democratic presidential nomination.

  19

  “A Sin Against God”

  On the first day of April 1959, Jack sat outside on the veranda of the Kennedy home in Palm Beach outlining a plan to win the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. Around him were most of the closest associates who would carry out his strategy. First of all, there was thirty-three-year-old Bobby, who, wherever he alighted or however much he paced back and forth, sat always at his brother’s right hand. Jack’s father was there as well, and though seventy-year-old Joe appeared at times to have reached an old man’s slippered years, he could still rise up and speak with a force and perception that guided everyone, including his eldest surviving son.

  Jack was forty-one-years old, on track to become the youngest elected president in American history, and all of his associates resonated with youth as well. Thirty-one-year-old Steve Smith was the other family member there that afternoon. Steve may only have been a brother-in-law, but unlike Peter Lawford and Sarge Shriver, he was so much accepted within the inner sanctum that he had nearly become another Kennedy brother. Steve had a charm and wit that rarely left him, and these qualities were valued by Jack and Bobby as much as his political savvy.

  Thirty-year-old Sorensen had been anticipating this moment since the day he arrived in Jack’s senatorial office. He was a crucial presence too, affecting a courtier’s subtle airs, dropping his words into the dialogue with perfect acumen. Thirty-five-year-old Kenny O’Donnell was also present, as brash and caustic as ever, with his flitting, penetrating Irish-American eyes. There was yet another pair of shrewd Irish-American political eyes there that day; they belonged to Larry O’Brien, who had moved down from Massachusetts to join the operation full-time. Louis Harris, the pollster, had been invited as

  well; he was decidedly a Kennedy pollster, for he always seemed to have results more favorable to Jack than his colleagues. The other person present was Robert Wallace, Jack’s legislative aide.

  Although the campaign was not yet organized, Sorensen noted later that the meeting had a tone of “quiet confidence.” As he saw it, these men had “a job to be done,” and they were the people to do it. That confidence colored the whole gathering and emanated from the candidate himself.

  Jack’s potential competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination all had more distinguished legislative or political careers than he did, but he had taken each man’s measure and found that the nearer he got to them the taller he stood. As Jack saw it, the distinguished-looking Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri had the gravity of a helium balloon. Senator Lyndon Johnson was made of weightier stuff, but he was a southerner, and that was an albatross that even the adroit Lyndon could not wrest from around his neck. Senator Hubert Humphrey was simply too liberal; his political medicine kit was full of purgatives and medicines too strong for most Americans. As for Adlai Stevenson, twice his party’s nominee, the man was a proven loser.

  To win, Jack knew that he could not step gingerly through the primaries but would have to run boldly forward among the people, many of whom now barely knew his name. Jack was a brilliant geographer of America’s political landscape. He grasped the nuances of political America the way his grandfather Honey Fitz had understood the world of Boston’s North End. Non-Catholic staff members would have to be the ones to go out to certain states. Bobby, for his part, would do a series of speeches in the South, where he was being lauded for his attack on corrupt unions. Jack’s staff had already amassed a file of fifty thousand five-by-seven cards listing the names of crucial people in all fifty states. Jack had met most of these people. The cards li
sted the name by which he called them, where he had met them, and why they were important. In the age before widespread use of computers, this card collection was a treasure unique to Jack’s candidacy.

  Jack went on ticking off each state, naming its Democratic leaders and setting out a unique approach to take there. He was conceding nothing, not even Texas to its native son, Lyndon Johnson. As Jack talked on, his father interjected, “I want you to read Judge Landis’s column.” Joe’s comment was an intrusion that no one else at the meeting would have made. Jack took the paper, tucked it under his arm, and went on with his state-by-state litany. Landis, his father’s friend, had helped Jack on many occasions with ideas and articles, but there was plenty of time to read the material. “Give that back to me!” Joe exclaimed. “You’ll just lose it!”

  Joe was not the presence at this meeting that he had been during earlier campaigns, and it rankled him that Jack was not listening closely enough to his counsel. Joe was, if anything, even more determined that he would have a major role in Jack’s victory. Later, in the study, Joe affirmed the one role that was truly his. “I’m going to tell you, we’re going to win this thing,” he said authoritatively. “And I don’t care if it takes every dime we’ve got. We’re going to win this thing!”