The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Jack did not have the politician’s grayish pallor from a life measured out in planes, auditoriums, public meetings, and too many smoky rooms. He looked like a great star arriving to grace a Hollywood premiere where the klieg lights played across the sky and the urgent masses stretched for a glance or an autograph. Exuding movie star sexuality, he was astoundingly handsome, his perfect white teeth set off against his tanned skin. He was a vibrant, charismatic figure who seemed to radiate healthful vigor.

  There was a daring, seductive quality to Jack, as if he would always be showing up out of a dark, mysterious night. “Yes, this candidate for all his record; his good, sound, conventional liberal record has a patina of that other life,” the novelist Norman Mailer wrote, “the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz.”

  Jack’s sexuality was real and dangerous, and while all the rest of the politicians nestled down at the Biltmore and other hotels, Jack was staying in a secret hideaway on North Rossmore Avenue, off in the long electric night, a continent away from Jackie, who had stayed on the East Coast. In his apartment, Jack heard not the murmur of jazz but the sweet laughter of young women, and shook not the sweaty palms of pols, but touched the willing young flesh of the likes of the beautiful Judith Exner. The Los Angeles police guarding him did not know what to make of the young women entering the apartment. It was the kind of entourage they had previously thought the exclusive right of movie stars, not of presidential candidates.

  The next morning, Jack arrived for breakfast at the ten-acre estate in the flats of Beverly Hills where his father was staying. Joe spent much of the day around the pool at the sprawling Beverly Hills mansion of Marion Davies, the former movie star and mistress to the late William Randolph Hearst. He had installed a bank of phones around the pool so that he could talk to one power broker after the next without an interruption while he basked in the California sunshine. Not only had Joe outlived most of the other powerful men of the 1930s, but he was also in the midst of the greatest triumph of his life, helping to propel his son to the presidency of the United States.

  Joe would get no closer to the delegates than this. His son’s enemies were whispering that Jack was nothing more than a thespian who mouthed the script his father had given him. Joe could not afford to be seen so close to Jack that he might be giving him his lines. What his detractors scarcely appreciated was the subtlety of Joe’s efforts, how little he sought for himself, and how pointedly his son ignored his father’s conservative thinking on most of the major issues of the day.

  Joe’s hands had no fingerprints, or it would have been clear that he had left his mark all over the campaign. His was the hand behind much of the money that had flowed into West Virginia and other states. “These things happened,” reflected Tip O’Neill. “Jack didn’t always know about them. But the old man had made his own arrangements over and above the campaign staff.” Jack had tried to move beyond his father’s ways. In the Maryland primary, the candidate’s old friend Torbyrt Macdonald recalled, Joe wanted to pass out twelve-dollar-a-day stipends to make sure that poll workers showed up, but he and Jack vetoed the idea.

  “All his way through his existence Dad had relationships and contacts none of the rest of us had,” Teddy told his biographer, Burton Hersh. Joe had acquaintances, not only at the highest levels of business and politics but at the lowest levels of American life. “I remember in 1960 my brother saying to Dad, almost jokingly, ‘The states you have are Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York.’ “

  With the help of New York City’s Democratic bosses, Joe had helped deliver the largest city in America to his son. He worked with other bosses to whisk away northern New Jersey from under the vigilant eyes of Governor Robert Meyner. He helped to add Illinois by talking to Mayor Richard Daley, whom he had known from the time this boss of bosses was a city council member. Daley turned away from Illinois native son Adlai Stevenson in favor of a man like himself, a Catholic who looked like a winner.

  Jack respected all that his father had done. He did not treat Joe as the ultimate arbiter of his political future, however, but as just another source of insight and advice that he assayed and sometimes rejected as fool’s gold. As the two men sat down for breakfast, Jack had a crucial decision to make in choosing his vice presidential running mate, and father and son discussed various possibilities while Timilty and Rose listened in. “What about Lyndon?” Joe asked. That set Timilty off on a tirade against the Texas senator, mouthing words that most of Jack’s supporters would have gladly amplified. The former Boston police commissioner pointed out that earlier in the week Johnson had savaged Jack in a dual presentation before the Texas delegation. The unseemliness of the politician’s display was diminished only by Jack’s cool riposte, which dissipated the Texan’s meanness in laughter and irony.

  Johnson had not come into the hot dusty political street to duel with Jack in the primaries but had sought to win the nomination by working his way through the backrooms and dark alleys of politics. As Jack had closed in on the nomination, the Johnson forces had slashed at Jack in attacks that could scar him in the general election. India Edwards, co-chairman of the Citizens for Johnson National Committee, told reporters, “Senator Kennedy, who appears so healthy that it’s almost illegal, is really not a well man…. If it weren’t for cortisone, Senator Kennedy wouldn’t be alive.” It was as ugly a bit of business as FDR Jr.’s attack on Humphrey’s war record, but this was far worse, for the Johnson camp’s allegations had the larger disadvantage of being true.

  Jack knew that Johnson was a brilliantly astute legislator and the most qualified choice for vice president, but the man was a southerner, and many northern urban Democrats had their own prejudice against those born south of the Mason-Dixon Line, considering them provincial, uncouth racists, stereotypes hardly dissipated by Johnson’s unsubtle, overweening persona. And yet Joe was not the first person to mention Johnson’s name. Before the convention, Feldman and Sorensen, men who billed themselves as liberals, had given Jack a memo in which they listed Johnson as an “outstanding possibility.” Over the weekend, Jack had seriously discussed that prospect with the Washington Post’s publisher, Phil Graham, one of Johnson’s closest advisers.

  Joe was a philosopher of power, and he looked straight on at decisions that made his sons wince. “We need Texas,” Joe said, an argument that was impossible to deny. Jack listened while his father ran through the strengths that Johnson would bring to the ticket, piling more and more weight on the scale. Joe presented arguments that Jack had already heard, then added his considered judgment to the mix. In the end Jack called Bobby at the Biltmore and asked him to set up a meeting to talk with Johnson about the vice presidential nomination.

  This was in many ways the most unpleasant task Bobby had yet performed for his brother, and he performed it poorly. Bobby could not accept the political charade of enemies donning the garb of friends overnight. His scorn was far more than a sneering disdain for a homespun southern vulgarian who had gone to Southwest State Teachers College in San Marcos, Texas. Bobby had his own firm reasons for loving some people and hating others, and no man ever moved from one category to the other. The Kennedys praised physical courage above all virtues, and it was one of the few qualities that Johnson did not have in excess. While Jack won his Silver Star helping to save the crew of PT-109, Johnson received the same high honor in the naval reserves, flying one combat mission as an observer. Bobby probably did not know Johnson’s war record, but Bobby was a man of brilliant instincts when it came to understanding the primitive drives of his fellow humans.

  Bobby sensed that Johnson was not a worthy man, as he defined the term. He knew, moreover, that Johnson bore the Kennedys no goodwill. Indeed, he learned a few months later from journalist Peter Lisagor that just before the Los Angeles convention, Johnson had berated Jack in language streaked with profanity, excoriating his brother as a scrawny, sickly mite so unable to govern that “old
Joe Kennedy would run the country.”

  “I knew he hated Jack,” Bobby admitted sadly that day, “but I didn’t think he hated him that much.” Even without this confirmation, though, everything Bobby knew and thought and felt told him that Johnson should not stand beside his beloved Jack as his running mate, bonded to him forever as his political brother. But Bobby was his brother’s liege, and he would do what Jack asked him to do.

  Those who were there that day had different tales to tell about how Johnson became the vice presidential nominee. “Well, you know, I don’t think anybody will ever know,” Jack told Feldman the following year. Bobby said later that Jack never intended to offer the nomination to Johnson. He was merely dangling it before the Texan’s eyes, thinking the prideful politician would never accept such a cheap cut of meat, and then to his brother’s dismay Johnson had simply gobbled up the offer before Jack could pull it back.

  It is unlikely, however, that Jack went to Johnson’s suite at the Biltmore merely to see whether the senator was interested enough to have his name firmly added to the list of candidates. More likely, Jack was surprised that Johnson was willing to accept an offer that he thought the Texan would have disdained, but only after leaving Johnson and learning how profoundly liberals and labor people opposed Johnson’s candidacy did Jack wish he could somehow back off.

  Jack waffled back and forth, wondering whether he had made one of the shrewdest judgments of his career or, in the name of expediency, had ripped out the very heart and soul of his party. This was largely the way Salinger and O’Donnell viewed it. “In your first move after the nomination, you go against all the people who supported you,” O’Donnell raged, speaking in the intemperate language in which the newly nominated Democratic candidate was not used to being addressed.

  Johnson had humbled himself to accept the nomination, and now suggestions were being made that he was unworthy and unwanted. Bobby came visiting with the unpleasant chore of asking Johnson to back out, but Johnson was not one to regurgitate meat he had swallowed whole. Not only did Bobby fail in his mission, but he did the most dangerous thing a person can do to a powerful politician. He humiliated Johnson. He made him do everything but beg on his knees.

  In the end, it seemed better for both men and for the party to go ahead with the nomination, but these wounds would fester. Johnson did not blame Jack. He blamed Bobby, whom his campaign aide, Jim Rowe, told him was “a ruthless son of a bitch,” an appellation that just as easily could have described the Texas senator.

  After the decision was finally made, the two tired brothers repaired to the Beverly Hills mansion. Bobby’s children cavorted in the pool, giving no thought to what was going on down at the Biltmore. And the elegant Joe sat there in a velvet smoking jacket and formal slippers with the embroidered initials JPK.

  Bobby worked the phones, trying to pull some of the outraged liberals back into the fold. Jack, his face drawn, worried that he might have destroyed his chances at the presidency. “Jack, I don’t want you to worry,” Joe said, his voice still tinged with a touch of Boston Irish. “In two weeks they’ll be saying it’s the smartest thing you ever did.”

  During his acceptance speech on the last evening of the convention, Jack’s face was streaked with fatigue, his deep eyes embedded in darkness. This evening he had a crucial message to convey. The somnolent Eisenhower years were ending, and the nation was heading into what Jack believed would be four of the most difficult, challenging years of its history.

  Everywhere Jack looked, he saw omens pointing to the rightness of his predictions, and a range of disquieting, dangerous problems. The Soviets had downed a U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory and captured its American pilot, Francis Gary Powers, alerting the American people to a dangerous, covert action. The papers were full of stories about young black Americans “sitting in” at lunch counters and cafeterias across the South, demanding rights that were clearly theirs and had long been denied. In Cuba, Fidel Castro had overthrown the corrupt Batista and spoke a militant Marxist language, condemning Yanqui imperialism. Across Africa and Asia, a new generation was ready to attempt to throw off colonialism. In South Vietnam, Viet Cong revolutionaries were killing village leaders by the hundreds, while in Saigon, President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, hunkered down, sequestered with their armies.

  In the most important speech Jack had yet given, he needed to set forth forcefully and eloquently the themes of his campaign. The speech, originally written by Sorensen and then passed around from aide to aide, had some compelling phrases, but they were lost in a compendium of clichés. Jack stood before the delegates and in a hurried voice told those assembled: “We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness…. Today our concern must be with that future. For the world is change. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do.”

  Despite the banality of much of the speech, one memorable phrase perfectly defined Jack’s aspirations as president and became the slogan of the campaign. “But I tell you the New Frontier is here whether we seek it or not,” he told the delegates and the millions watching on television. “New Frontier” brilliantly evoked the world that Jack saw ahead for America. New Frontier suggested both the romance of the American past and the dangerous future, opportunities as well as solutions, and passionate alertness, not passive acceptance. It was an irresistible slogan, with no taint of liberal perfectionism, no grand flourishes of rhetorical excess.

  All the Kennedys were there that evening in the sports arena to savor Jack’s victory, all except for the pregnant Jackie and Joe, who more than anyone deserved to be sitting behind his son on that great platform high above the delegates. Two nights before, Chuck Spalding had gone over to the Beverly Hills estate to congratulate Joe. He had wandered around until he found Jack’s father in an upstairs bedroom. “Where are you going?” Jack’s friend asked, startled to see that Joe was packing his bags.

  “I have to get on a plane tonight and get back to New York and get working on this thing,” Joe replied. “We’ve got to keep moving.” Spalding knew all the stories about the old man’s cynical grasp on his children, but he thought that Joe’s action was “an example of incredible restraint for somebody who has always been characterized as kind of a Machiavellian figure, moving his children around.”

  Even his most vociferous critics would not have begrudged Joe at least this moment with his son, but he clearly wanted no new photos of father and son standing together shoulder to shoulder. And he had important matters on his agenda. In New York City, Joe called Henry Luce, the most powerful publishing magnate in America. Luce felt that Joe was angling for a dinner invitation on the evening of his son’s acceptance speech. Luce proffered what was supposed to be proffered, and Joe arrived at the Manhattan home an hour or so before Jack’s speech.

  Clare Boothe Luce had probably been Joe’s lover while he was ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. That was long ago, and what the two men shared now was not a woman but similar views on the world of power. Luce knew that a man like Joe did not sit across the table from him this evening for aimless social chitchat. Luce published Time, probably the most powerful magazine in America. Luce was a conservative Republican, and Time’s take on Jack could have a crucial impact on the campaign.

  Instead of waiting for his guest to raise the only subject that mattered this evening, the publisher spoke directly. “Time Inc. realizes Jack will have to be left of center to get the Democratic nomination, and will content itself with arguing domestic economic matters politely.”

  “How can any son of mine be a goddamned liberal?” Joe retorted, as if any fool could see that Jack was moving leftward only to win and after his election would return to his natural conservative home.

  “But if Jack turns soft on communism, Time will cut his throat,” Luce said, as he remembered later.

  “Don’t worry about him being a weak sister,” Joe replied. It was all about toughne
ss and manhood, and his son would not be found wanting.

  Luce was one of the greatest power brokers in America, and early in the campaign, Jack met with the publisher. Luce’s immensely popular picture magazine, Life, had done more than any other medium to create the image of the Kennedys as a gloriously romantic, handsome, energetic clan, while selling millions of copies. Time had not been so kind.

  Jack was aware of the subtlest nuances of journalism. “I see Otto Fuerbringer got well and is back at work,” Jack said. Luce was startled that by reading the publication, Jack knew that the profoundly conservative editor was putting his imprint on the week’s news, inculcating opinion into the columns in such a seamless way that even the cognoscenti could not tell where fact ended and editorializing began. Of course, nothing flattered a journalist more than knowing he was being read, and read closely. Jack’s message went beyond that. Jack was signaling that there would be no subliminal ministering to his opponent without Jack understanding what was being done.

  Jack knew that this would be a close election, but after listening to Vice President Richard Nixon give his acceptance speech on July 28 at the Stockyards Amphitheater in Chicago, he became even more aware of the challenge he faced. Jack realized, as a more narrowly partisan politician might not have, that Nixon’s speech was “a remarkable political demonstration.”

  Like Jack, forty-seven-year-old Nixon was a veteran of World War II, a man of the new generation ready to assume power in the America of the 1960s. Both candidates were well versed in international affairs and strong anti-Communists who believed that the major challenge of the new administration would probably lie outside the nation’s borders.