The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  he turned and whispered to Bob Healy of the Boston Globe and Theodore White: “You know, they all think that Kennedy has a trick and if they can learn it they can become president of the United States too.”

  Jack’s campaign was supposed to have ended at this triumphant rally at Boston Garden. The Republicans, however, had purchased four hours of national television time on this final evening. At the last moment the Democrats bought their own half hour on ABC directly following the Nixon marathon. So Jack’s quest for the presidency ended at historic Faneuil Hall in a nationally televised speech before a smaller, less raucous gathering than the one he had just addressed at Boston Garden.

  Fifteen years before, a young Jack Kennedy had stood not far from here giving his first campaign speech. Now, campaigning for himself for the last time in his life, he was elegant in dress and manner, his wit exquisitely honed, his phrasing eloquent, his speech resonant, his voice firm.

  “This is the campaign, and it’s now come to an end,” he began as he looked out on an audience full of Bostonians who had seen him first win election to the House. “I think this old hall reminds us of how far we’ve been as Americans and what we must do in the future.” American history resonated through Boston in ways it did in no other city in America, and that history resonated through Jack as it had through few other presidential contenders.

  This was Jack’s last chance to send supporters bursting into the streets ready to rally their forces to the polls. But that was not the kind of speech Jack was giving this evening. This was a solemn, somber speech, as if he realized far better than anyone else the sheer magnitude of what the next president would face. He invoked Lincoln’s election of 1860, though one hundred years later the nation was not on the verge of civil war. He invoked Wilson’s election of 1912, though the world did not face world war. He invoked Roosevelt’s election of 1932, though America was no longer a land in which one-third of the people lived in poverty.

  “The campaign is now over,” he said at the end of a long speech, at the end of a long day, at the end of a long campaign. “You must make your judgment between sitting and moving. This is a race not merely between two parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, or between two candidates. It is a race between the comfortable and the concerned. Those who are willing to sit and lie at anchor and those who want to go forward. This country has developed as it is. We are here tonight because in other great periods of crises we have chosen to go forward.”

  It is one thing to call a man dispassionate when he seems unaffected by what happens to others. It is something else when he exhibits an impenetrable cool

  when it is his own future at stake. As Jack sat in his parents’ home in Hyannis Port watching images on the television set and hearing late returns from various aides who scurried in and out of the living room, there was not a glimmer of anxiety in his voice or a moment’s irritability at the twists and turns of what would prove in the popular vote to be the closest presidential election in American history: in the end fewer than 120,000 ballots, out of 69 million, separated the two candidates. Jack was no more elated at an early computer projection on television that he would win than he was by a later projection that he would lose. He was slightly ahead at close to four in the morning when Nixon appeared before the cameras to say that if the present trends continued, his opponent would win. Jack’s aides poured out their wrath on the television screen, upset that Nixon did not do the honorable thing and concede. “If I were he, I would have done the same thing,” Jack said, effectively silencing those throwing epithets at the screen.

  Jack went to sleep while Bobby and the others kept watch. All night long, Bobby worked the phones, helping to run up a long-distance bill of about $10,000. In Illinois, Mayor Daley had proved his fidelity to Chicago’s dubious politics by not tabulating the city’s final votes until the heavily Republican downstate ballots had all been counted and he knew what it would take to win. California came in for Jack finally, and by dawn it was clear that he had won, but no one considered waking Jack. Although it would become part of American political myth that, with Daley’s help, Jack won fraudulently, even without the questionable Illinois votes, Kennedy still had 276 electoral votes to give him a bare majority.

  When Sorenson entered Jack’s bedroom at 9:30 A.M., he addressed the man sitting in pajamas in his bed as “Mr. President.” Early in the afternoon, at the Hyannis Armory, the president-elect went before the cameras for the first time. Jack had insisted that his father be there, and Joe had reluctantly agreed. Jack stood there now with his wife, two brothers, three sisters, and his mother. The president-elect spoke with self-confidence and control, and almost no one noticed that out of sight of the cameras and most of the reporters his hands were trembling.

  Book Three

  21

  The Torch Has Been Passed

  On the day before the inauguration of the thirty-fifth president of the United States, a fierce storm fell upon Washington, blanketing the capital with eight inches of snow, stranding ten thousand cars across the city, grounding planes, and slowing trains. Crews worked during the night cleaning the main roads, and by noon on January 20, 1961, a crowd of twenty thousand stood on the Capitol grounds in the twenty-two-degree cold, braced against the eighteen-mile-an-hour winds and looking up at the portico where the nation’s leaders sat outside to witness the ritual of passage. One million other Americans began gathering along Pennsylvania Avenue to greet the new president as he traveled in a parade that would carry him to his new home in the White House.

  The onlookers had bundled themselves up against the fierce cold wearing an eclectic collection of wool coats, snowsuits, fur hats, ski jackets, hiking boots, galoshes, mufflers, face masks, hoods, and scarves. Up on the podium, seventy-year-old Dwight Eisenhower, then the oldest president in American history, sat wrapped in a heavy topcoat and scarf. The other largely aging politicians and officials were equally protected against the cold, many of them in top hats or homburgs. In the row upon row of largely indistinguishable black and gray coats, hats, and pale faces, there was one tanned, radiantly healthy-looking man.

  Forty-three-year-old John F. Kennedy was the youngest elected president in American history, and he stood there the personification of the nation’s energy and ambition. The new president tended to speak quickly, but this noon he spoke with a careful, deliberate pace:

  Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

  The audience listened closely, the words seemingly resonating so deeply that they did not even applaud until Kennedy had spoken nearly five minutes. He appeared to be a strong young leader for a difficult new age. Kennedy had many virtues to bring to his presidency. He had a political mind as sharp as that of any of the politicians who surrounded him, but he understood nuances and subtleties on a deeper level than did most of Washington’s narrow men. This was a brilliant attribute, nurtured by his father’s influence, cultivated at the Court of St. James’s and in his extensive travels, honed in the House of Representatives, where he was as much an observer as a participant, and seasoned in the Senate, where he had to deal with a complex, contradictory world. He had a sense of history that was not an academic’s abstract vision but a vivid sense of human character moving through time.

  Kennedy’s father had taught him that he could make history and write it in his own name. And so he was setting out on this day as if he had a massive mandate and his youth was an added virtue. He had always been a cautious leader, and he knew that the path ahead was fraught with dangers both known and unknown, but he set forth an uncharacteristically bold and daring message:

  In the long history o
f the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

  Many who heard the new president’s words thought of him as a hero. Kennedy was a philosopher of courage who had written a book on the subject. Although those listening did not know it, during his life Kennedy had struggled against physical disabilities that would have hobbled most men. He considered politics at its highest level an arena for heroism, a colosseum where a few good men performed noble acts whose merits were often only dimly perceived by the rancorous, fickle masses.

  And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

  As much as Kennedy wanted to sit in the company of greatness, he knew that no longer could civilized men stand on fields of battle fighting each other with bullet, sword, and fire when at any moment they might be enveloped in mushroom-shaped clouds vaporizing all humanity. The young leader’s great test would be in part to see whether he could define political courage in a new way for a nuclear age.

  Kennedy called upon the citizenry to face the new era with intrepidness. The president wanted millions of Americans to rise out of their privatism, shake off their passivity and cynicism, and move forward in acts of sacrifice and selfless service. Since there appeared to be no great war to be won, and no immense frontier to conquer, it was unclear just where this journey would lead, or what this leader would light with the torch he raised.

  Kennedy believed that as president, his overwhelming concern would lie in international affairs, and his entire speech dealt with America’s relationship to the rest of the world. He said nothing of the greatest American moral dilemma of the age: the political and economic disenfranchisement of the majority of black people. Sorensen had added the only vague reference to civil rights on the eve of the inauguration when Wofford had lobbied the speech-writer to add the words “at home” to the president’s commitment to human rights “at home and around the world.”

  Kennedy talked “to those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery,” but he said nothing of the four million Americans who would have starved if not for the surplus foods the government gave them or of the tragic lives of millions of migrant laborers across America whom Edward R. Murrow had poignantly portrayed in his recent documentary Harvest of Shame.

  Kennedy’s eloquent idealism was a cup overflowing, and the new president’s auditors heard what they wanted to hear and needed to hear, be they black ministers in the South, the poor and hungry of his own land, the peoples of Europe, or the masses of Asia and Latin America. Even Castro had reached out to the new administration, saying that he was willing to “begin anew” in his relations with the United States, while Nikita Khrushchev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the chairman of the Council of Ministers, hoped for a “radical improvement” in the two countries’ relations. As Kennedy stood there on this day in which the sun could not heat the earth, he seemed to be promising warmth where there was cold, and light where men lived in darkness.

  On the ride up the broad expanses of Pennsylvania Avenue, Kennedy insisted that he and Jackie ride in an open car so that people could see their new president in the clear cold air of the winter afternoon. Kennedy was not only a leader but also a leading man, and thirty-one-year-old Jackie a stunning model of a first lady. She was a woman of certain mysteries that would not be easily unraveled. She smiled with coy grace and waved her gloved hand.

  There was yet another reason why so many Americans greeted this new president and first lady with such joy and anticipation. Just two months before, on November 25, 1960, Jackie had given birth to a son, John F. Kennedy Jr., and for the first time since Theodore Roosevelt’s residency, the White House would be full of children’s shouts and laughter. Since the day of John Jr.’s birth, the Kennedys had been inundated with telegrams, flowers, booties, sweaters, and a zoo of stuffed animals, the start of an immense fascination with the president’s namesake, as well as a delighted interest in his sister, Caroline. It added to the president’s aura of youthful vitality that his parents were still alive and healthy, and with so many brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts, he seemed to belong not to a family but to a clan.

  The presidential limousine finally reached the reviewing stand in front of the White House. There sat Kennedy family members, esteemed officials, and close friends. As the president drove by, Joe rose up out of his seat to salute his son. The Kennedy patriarch had been his children’s great enthusiast, but no matter what honors they merited, what race they won, he had never stood to pay tribute to their achievements. But today he stood, saluting the son whom he had always called “Jack” but who now, in public or among outsiders, would be “Mr. President.” Joe’s simple gesture was not only a profound act of deference and respect for the office of the presidency, but equally a symbol of the passing of the generations. Kennedy looked up at the reviewing stand and saw his father standing there saluting him. The new president took off his hat and tipped it to his father.

  While the president’s greatest destiny was just beginning, Joe’s was nearing its end. He had achieved what few men do, his transcendent dream embodied in this president bearing his name, but in doing so he had lost part of his son. “Jack doesn’t belong anymore to just a family,” he reflected. “He belongs to the country. That’s probably the saddest thing about all this. The family can be there, but there is not much they can do for the President of the United States.”

  During the campaign, Joe had bragged that while he would keep quiet until election day, afterward he would have his say. “I assure you that I will do it after that, and that it will be something worthwhile,” he boasted to Newsweek. “People may even see a flash of my old-time form.” Once the election was over, however, Joe seemed not to be concerned anymore with embroiling himself in all the minutiae of politics, and he never made the statement he had so vociferously promised. When the president-elect asked his father to suggest candidates for secretary of the Treasury, Joe replied: “I can t.

  Joe cared primarily about his sons’ futures now, and he had just one request to make of his son: that he name Bobby as his attorney general. As much as Kennedy wanted to reward Bobby for his endless work in the campaign, he would no more have made his brother attorney general than name an intern as America’s surgeon general. It was unthinkable to make the nation’s premier attorney a man who had never practiced law. Kennedy’s critics would argue that thirty-five-year-old Bobby was too young, too brash, too ambitious, and too rude.

  Kennedy did not dare confront his father with these truths; instead, at the swimming pool at the Palm Beach mansion, he deputized Smathers to suggest gently to Joe that Bobby would make a formidable assistant secretary of Defense. Joe would not even listen to such drivel. “Goddamn it, Jack, I want to tell you once and for all. Don’t be sending these emissaries to me. Bobby spilled his blood for you. He’s worked for you. And goddamn it, he wants to be attorney general, and I want him to be attorney general, and that’s it.”

  As ambitious as he was, Bobby had his own doubts about the political wisdom of becoming his brother’s attorney general. Unlike the presidentelect, Bobby had not cordoned off his inner emotions from the world. One of those who had become privy to Bobby’s thinking and feeling was John Seigenthaler, a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean. Seigenthaler had first covered Bobby during the McClellan hearings. Like Charles Bartlett and Ben Bradlee and a few other reporters, Seigenthaler had incomparable access to the Kennedys and got stories
many of his colleagues could never get. Yet as the months went by more and more of what he heard and saw never made its way into his journalism.

  Seigenthaler was sitting with Bobby after he had spent a long, discouraging day running around Washington talking to various people about whether he should become attorney general. That was the Kennedy way. Seek out the most knowledgeable people, get their best judgments, and then make up your own mind. In this instance, everyone from Supreme Court Justice Douglas to Senator McClellan had shaken his head in dismay at this harebrained idea. Only Hoover, who at the FBI would be working most intimately with Bobby, said that he should accept the appointment.

  Bobby called his brother to tell him that he had decided against it. “We’ll go over in the morning,” Bobby said as he set down the telephone. “This will kill my father.”

  Early the next day, Bobby and Seigenthaler drove over to the presidentelect’s home in Georgetown. Over breakfast, the three men discussed the appointment. Bobby detailed the reasons why he had to turn it down, and his brother told him that he had to say yes.

  “You want some more coffee?” Kennedy asked.

  “Look, there’re some more points I need to make with him,” Bobby told Seigenthaler as his brother walked into the kitchen.

  “I think the points have all been made,” Seigenthaler said.

  When Kennedy returned, Bobby set off again. The president-elect would not have put up with this endless palaver from most men. He had heard everything he needed to hear, and he had heard it tenfold. It was time to get on with things and walk outside into the cold morning and tell the waiting reporters what would become the most important appointment of his administration. “That’s it, general,” Kennedy said, cutting his brother off and calling him by his new title. “Let’s grab our balls and go.”