The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  “Let me knock you down,” the attorney general whispered to the champ. Bobby threw a haymaker, and Torres fell to the ground, apparently knocked out. Anything was possible to Bobby’s kids if your name was Kennedy, even knocking out the champion of the world. It was a life lesson that was simply wrong, but it was taught again and again—that anyone could do anything, there were no limits, and courage was the trump card besting ability, training, wind and storm, gravity and wisdom.

  During one Hyannis Port summer, Bobby imported groups of Green Berets, the army’s elite new counterinsurgency fighters, and had them perform their derring-do in front of the Kennedy children. The young, would-be heroes in the war against communism swung from trees and jumped over barricades. They were intrepid soldiers whose enemy was the routine, the bureaucratic, and the predictable. Bobby’s brother-in-law Sarge Shriver was general of a different army, the Peace Corps; he sent young women and men out to fight with other kinds of weapons. Shriver felt uncomfortable about Bobby proudly parading soldiers on the summer fields of play. These were games in which the black card of death was often dealt. Shriver found something so disquieting about the whole business that he kept his brood away until the soldiers had left.

  Ethel was her children’s instructor, not by rote but by example. She taught them that for a Kennedy the only answer to “too much” was “even more.” At the Washington International Horse Show, her children watched as she suddenly decided to compete in an exacting competition in borrowed clothes on a borrowed mount on which she had practiced for only five minutes. Others had practiced for months, even years, to guide their horses over the hurdles, but such tedium was not for Ethel. She did not win a ribbon, but she finished, and she had shown her sons the blood that coursed through their veins.

  At Halloween most mothers tried to restrain their rambunctious sons from thinking of the annual event as a respite from the rule of law and considered it a time when a treat was infinitely preferable to a trick. Not Ethel. She drove her children to the sedate precincts of Georgetown, where bewildered neighbors watched as she led her motley brood in a “trash barrel assault” on the home of her sister-in-law Jean.

  Jokes, to Ethel, always had an edge to them. She not only liked to win, be it tennis, charades, or politics, but believed that it was her right to win. Ethel was looking for an edge, no matter what it might be, and she taught her children this as well.

  If Ethel had been a middle-class mother in Baltimore or Binghamton, she probably would have been considered dangerously manic. But she was celebrated in the Washington of the New Frontier. The journalists adored her, for she enlivened even the most mundane of moments. In Rome at the end of one European trip, the reporters gave their beloved hostess a Vespa. Ethel jumped on the scooter she had never driven before, roared around the block again and again, and stopped only when she went banging into a car.

  At Hickory Hill there was only one song that was sung, and only one dance that was danced, and that was whatever song and dance Bobby and Ethel had chosen. Ethel was a spiritual cop, always scanning the crowds, looking for any traitors less than loyal to her Bobby and to their lives as Kennedys. Bobby’s wife could smell the taint of betrayal where others sniffed only roses.

  Bobby’s favored reading material ran to popular biographies and political books, not the heavy tomes he thought had to be lifted to become a heavyweight intellect. He created the Hickory Hill seminars in which the ladies and gentlemen of the New Frontier heard some of the major intellectuals of their day, a regimen decidedly easier than having to read them. After listening, the Democratic gentry were supposed to question these great minds in eloquent discourse. The ladies, it turned out, were supposed to listen and learn and keep quiet; when Mrs. Nicholas Katzenbach was so bold as to ask a question, she had the feeling that Bobby cringed at her bad taste.

  Even Bobby at some point seemed to realize that these seminars were exposing not great minds but vapidness and pretensions. On one occasion the host left the living room and sat outside. “Don’t you want to come in?” he said to Seigenthaler, who also had walked out. The aide had been willing to go to Alabama, where he had been beaten unconscious by a mob, but he was unwilling to listen to any more of this. “What do you think?” Bobby asked. “This should be on tape,” Seigenthaler said, his irony nicely played. “You should have television cameras in there.”

  As often as not, no matter what time of day or night, there was some great momentary drama unfolding on stage central at Hickory Hill. It was perhaps a cook tired of morn-to-midnight orders who had thrown her apron to the ground and stomped out. Or possibly one of the kids, Joe II or Bobby Jr., was lying there with a bloody arm, victim of some daring combat in the recesses of the five-acre estate. Freedom was the byword, not of course for the harassed staff, but for the children and animals, including Meegan, the two-hundred-pound Saint Bernard, and the legendary Brumus, a dog who expressed his liberty by urinating on guests. Sandy the sea lion felt so free that one day he left the swimming pool where he feasted on fish and headed down the road, presumably preferring the more sedate National Zoo. The honey bear was frightening to those who had seen bears only in picture books, but the animal was gentle enough, preferring to curl up in one of the bookcases.

  Only the bravest of hearts dared to walk down into the basement. That was Bobby Jr.’s terrain, and he was not simply a lover of nature in its most popular forms, but of the exotic and even dangerous species. There the visitors had to be alert to one of Bobby Jr.’s falcons, or some great snake suddenly slithering across the cold concrete. When Ethel led two reporters down into the darkness, she was attacked by a coatimundi. The reporters, throwing their notebooks to the wind, pulled the anteater-like animal off their hostess, and led Ethel upstairs, where she was bandaged.

  The guests began their evening by warily petting Brumus. Then they were expected to become exotic animals themselves, to perform some act that had not been performed before, to tell an outrageous tale, to do everything but slap their flippers and jump for fish. It was all very well for the ebullient Ethel, pregnant with her eighth child. Art Buchwald could reel off his latest humor column. The columnist Rowland Evans could pass on some political gossip. Professor Arthur Schlesinger treated the world like a classroom. But for those who were shy or just socially reticent, it could be the most excruciating of evenings. “When I go to Hickory Hill, I always feel like a chimp having to perform,” Joan Kennedy lamented, her beauty not attribute enough. “Kennedy life can be rough on human beings.”

  Whereas most Washington hostesses set out their engraved seating cards after laboriously determining status and interests, at Hickory Hill the most disparate peoples were thrown together. That was the idea, to shake things up so that the only predictable outcome was that anything might happen short of fisticuffs and duels.

  In that most famous of Hickory Hill soirees, Ethel extended the dance floor all the way to the pool and set out tables around the water, including one rather precarious perch on a wooden plank out over the pool itself. Ethel, a woman who never saw wet paint she didn’t have to touch or a can of shaving cream that she did not consider a potential spray gun, was such a leader of pranks that she went into the pool in her gown first. Schlesinger and another guest were soon pushed in to join her. It was a thumb in the eye to all the sanctimonious cave dwellers of Georgetown who acted as if civility and boredom were synonymous.

  Bobby was a quiet partner in his wife’s pranks. He thought that he could have it all, college high jinks and serious endeavors, a life as intense and passionate in its moments of play as in the long serious hours of public service. Jack enjoyed good conversation, lovely women, and loyal friends, but he stayed a thousand leagues away from the frenetic fun and games at Hickory Hill. “I never once saw the president and Jackie out at Hickory Hill,” recalled Rowland Evans. “And I know I would have been there.” As close as he was to Bobby, the president compartmentalized his younger brother as much as he did everyone else, from his wife to his lov
ers.

  On one of the few occasions when the president came out to Bobby’s for dinner, the children rampaged through the house, creating a cacophony of shrieks and shouts. “I say out!” Kennedy exclaimed. “I’m the president of the United States and I say out!” He may have been president, but at Hickory Hill, Kennedy was just another tedious adult whose orders went unheeded.

  25

  Lives in Full Summer

  Jack and Jackie were impresarios of style. In the emerging society of the last years of the twentieth century, style was substance, and the famous Kennedy style was as much a part of history as legislation and summit conferences. Norman Vincent Peale and his ministerial colleagues had condemned Jack’s faith, fearing that if he were elected, the pope would stand behind him whispering orders. The ministers would have been closer to the mark if they had condemned Kennedy’s style, for that was the engine that would help lead America away from the narrowly Protestant society of the midcentury.

  Washington was the most provincial of the world’s great capitals, a somnolent, socially suffocating city full of the prejudices and mores of the South and the wary, conservative attitudes of any company town. Any culture beyond the road shows of Broadway musicals and the local opera and ballet companies that performed in a movie theater and a college auditorium was a dangerous, foreign business. To Kennedy, the Eisenhower years had reeked of flabby self-satisfaction. As the young president saw it, in the name of conservative Americanism, the Republican administration had celebrated the mediocre and elevated the second-rate. Eisenhower, however, had lived perfectly comfortably in the White House; what Kennedy viewed as hopelessly pedestrian decor was to the Republican president a statement of stolid virtues.

  “You know, we really ought to have the nicest entertaining here with the greatest distinction,” the new president told Letitia Baldrige, the social secretary, on his first day in office. That comment was a subtle critique of the Rotarian-like atmosphere of the last eight years. Baldrige took the president at his word, starting with the first party for the staff. The Eisenhower administration had served only lightly spiked fruit punch, but that particular abomination hardly fit the definition of “greatest distinction,” and Baldrige ordered that alcoholic drinks be served.

  The president’s grandfather and father had both made part of their fortunes in the liquor industry, and though he was not much of a drinking man himself, Kennedy hardly saw a scotch and soda as the devil’s drink. It was only after the convivial staff event that he learned that liquor was not served at major functions in the White House and he had outraged many of the Baptists in America.

  The fundamentalist teetotalers may have been sincere, but across America they were achieving not high morality but low hypocrisy. Though prohibition was long gone, the country was riven by a patchwork of bottle laws and drinking regulations that many Americans had learned to evade or avoid. As the Baptists mounted their assault, Kennedy’s first reaction was irritation that he had unknowingly attacked one of the silly double standards of the age; if a politician started attacking all the petty hypocrisies of his constituents, he would not be reelected.

  “You know, the fact that you put one over on us and served hard liquor that first party—and we have been serving it ever since—was the greatest thing that’s ever been done for White House entertaining,” he told Baldrige a few months later when the controversy was forgotten. “It’s relaxed the whole thing, and you’ve proved it to be a success, and I just want to say thank you.”

  A stylish social life served his administration’s image, but that alone did not explain Kennedy’s involvement in the intricate details of White House events. In part, he enjoyed the respite from a desk full of woes and worries. The president did not like to be bored, and his social life was an attempt to transform the tedious rituals of Washington into amusement.

  With his sense of detail, the president enjoyed nuances that many men neither appreciated nor even noticed. For a ceremony at the first state dinner for President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, two hundred soldiers would not do. Three hundred was not enough. Even a thousand was not enough. Kennedy wanted two or three thousand. He wanted them tall and handsome, plenty of blacks too, and nobody overweight or wearing glasses. And he wanted bagpipers too, hundreds of them as well, weaving their way across the South Lawn.

  These grand ceremonial functions were not simply trifling asides to the business of government, but symbols of the nation’s greatness. And never in American history had they been carried out with such grace and elegance. The most memorable gift the president gave each visiting head of state was the event itself, symbolizing in its uniqueness a detailed concern for that nation and its leader.

  In July the state dinner for President Mohammad Ayub Khan of Pakistan took place at George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, the guests arriving down the Potomac River by boat. Although most commentators celebrated the event, some critics complained about Americans honoring this heathen and his entourage by drinking gin and tonics on Washington’s grave. Those who criticized the exquisite party and said it was a wasteful extravagance could not have imagined that forty years later the evening would still be remembered in Pakistan and America while the issues discussed between the two presidents had long been forgotten.

  These White House evenings had become the best parties in America. Jackie was the beautiful hostess of these events, blessing them with her elegance. There was good wine and quick wit. The guest lists were eclectic, including business leaders and artists, philanthropists and athletes, politicians and authors.

  Kennedy clearly understood the political advantages of being seen as a benefactor of the arts, and he had the intellectual integrity to honor not just those who served his party or his ambition but also those who served the high truths of their art. In November 1961, he invited the incomparable Spanish cellist Pablo Casals to dinner at the White House. Casals had stopped playing publicly as a protest against the fascist Franco who held his beloved Spain in bondage.

  Great artists and great art do not serve the state and might indeed be seen as dangerous, even subversive. “We believe that an artist, in order to be true to himself and his work, must be a free man,” Kennedy said that evening. He invited Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer, for his own evening, Andre Malraux, the French novelist, for a different event, and on another inspiring evening all the Nobel Prize winners in the Western Hemisphere. He resurrected the Presidential Medal of Freedom so that he and his administration could celebrate accomplished Americans for their contributions not to him and his administration but to American life and culture.

  The Washington Star reported that “for the first time in almost 50 years, Washington has no wealthy extrovert with social position who can rightfully claim the local title of society queen. The truth of the matter is that the nation’s first lady … actually is the town’s best party giver.” The president and first lady were the progenitors of a new kind of Washington social life. The very society that had spurned Kennedy’s parents and that he had been groomed to enter was beginning to die. In Washington it was the beginning of an era when achievement and celebrity brought one to the head of the list, not lineage and formal manners.

  The president and first lady consciously celebrated what was best in American life, in antiques and music, in art and food. They signaled that this nation of nations should celebrate its freedoms and diversity not merely in speeches but in its culture. Jackie was a true admirer of the arts, and her husband rightfully deferred to her in these matters, enjoying credit for a taste that was largely his wife’s.

  The president was no more the creator of this immense opening up of the American spirit than he was of the other social movements sweeping the world. But he identified with it, even though there were potential political costs in doing so. Freedom was dangerous, and a man who chose his own church and his own faith might choose none at all, or mindless nihilism, or despair. As for cultural pursuits, many Americans viewed fine art, fine foods, an
d fine objects apprehensively, as if their passionate pursuit suggested an effete, un-American quality.

  The Kennedys promoted cultural and social events as if without them life was only partially lived. They made the White House the nation’s model of taste, the celebrant of American culture. Kennedy’s critics would later suggest that this was nothing more than gauze over the camera, softening the harsh lines by which his actions deserved to be viewed. It was all, they sniffed, a triumph of style over substance. The Kennedys’ achievement was to turn style into substance and to celebrate the opening up of broad new cultural and social vistas that would never again be shut down. Unlike any administration since, the Kennedys turned the White House into an inspiring symbol of culture and style without equal.

  Kennedy’s style, substance, and savvy came together in his televised press conferences. Since the Kennedy years, presidents have learned to squeeze all the juices of spontaneity out of their media conferences, but Kennedy was the first president to give regular, live, televised press conferences. At the time it seemed a daring departure from the controlled appearances of previous occupants of the Oval Office.

  Kennedy had a bemused way of looking out on the assembled press as if no one in Christendom, and certainly not his aides, could ever imagine what questions he might be asked. He played on the reporters, knowing those who wanted their moment of preening time on television, those who had serious questions, and those who had a special cause or area that they always asked about. He used his disarming wit and grace to turn back the more mean-spirited questions on the reporters who asked them. He was at his best, however, when he was asked philosophical questions, the ones he could answer by expressing the existential dilemma of a president dependent on aides and officials and yet standing alone, responsible for his own hard judgments.