While his brothers were running the country, Teddy returned to Boston to begin work as an assistant district attorney and give speeches all over the state, setting up his race. Teddy would forever after assert that he was the one who decided that he wanted to enter politics and run for the Senate. “Nobody forced me to run,” he told his biographer Burton Hersh. “I wanted to.” It was essential to his own sense of manhood that he think of the decision as his own.
Teddy had one small problem. This was a lack of credentials other than his name. This difficulty would only be exacerbated if the first important magazine profile of Teddy, a Redbook article, was published as it had been written. William Peters, the author of the article, had submitted his draft to Teddy for comments and vetting, and the putative candidate could not decide how strongly to attack the proposed piece.
Teddy wrote Bobby, enclosing a copy of the draft and telling his brother that the article portrayed him as a “wealthy personable lightweight.” Teddy was indeed wealthy and personable, and many in Massachusetts thought that he was such a lightweight that if he were not tethered down he might float away. Teddy, in fact, not only was aware of his own failings but harbored an un-Kennedy-like insecurity that he displayed at times like a badge of honor.
Most politicians enjoy a moment or two of self-deprecating humor to establish themselves as modest fellows before they start trumpeting their supposed accomplishments in language that in any other field would be considered bragging. At a Temple Israel breakfast, Teddy jumped up to speak when he thought he heard the speaker say “the brother of the president.” He sat down sooner than he intended, to laughter and applause, when he realized it was the “president of the brotherhood” who had been introduced. Teddy not only laughed that morning but added the story to his repertoire of tales. He was so likable on the public platform that if likability were the king of attributes he would have been carried to Washington on the shoulders of the adoring masses.
Teddy would never be particularly adept at the political skill of giving journalists the illusion of candor while subtly feeding them precisely the information he wanted them to have. In this instance, he had been honest with Peters, and as one of his advisers told him, “the article should be fair warning to us to handle similar interviews differently in the future.” What was remarkable was how sensitive Teddy was to anything that tasted even mildly sour. Peters’s article was a box of valentine chocolates, however, compared to the rotten fruit that would one day be heaved his way. As he got into politics, he picked up a shield of suspiciousness that would become second nature, and in difficult situations a studied inarticulateness.
Teddy was not secure in his own judgments, and he would begin his career in politics as he would one day probably end it, listening too much and too readily to those around him. In this instance, he was listening to two advisers who appeared to have more expertise about journalism than he did. One was his old college friend and Harvard teammate, John Culver. The Iowan had played fullback, but off the field he was not one for plowing through the line but for finessing his way around end. He was all for shrugging it off, asking for only a couple of changes. Culver realized, as Teddy wrote Bobby, that there was “little reason for a 30-year-old Senate aspirant legitimately laying claim to the honeymoon glow that his brother as president currently enjoys.”
Hal Clancy, a former Boston newspaper editor, represented another kind of analysis with which Teddy would grow familiar, an exaggerated, hysterical overreaction. Clancy played to the political paranoia that was always lying there just beneath Teddy’s smooth veneer, the idea that there were people, most of them with smiling faces, who, if they got within reach, were ready to knife him between the ribs. Clancy felt that the article was “politically damaging in the extreme … the real danger is that at subsequent times with lazy newsmen this article with its general overtone of immaturity, intellectual weakness, and emotional sterility will be ‘rehashed’ repeatedly and the unfavorable image crystallized.”
What was so striking about Teddy’s anger was that everything he and his advisers objected to most strongly was the truth. Clancy fumed at Peters’s observation that Teddy had traveled to Africa and Latin America to gather material for political speeches and so he might have “two continents to talk about.” That was precisely what he had done, and it was no feat of investigative reporting to make that observation. Teddy, for his part, told his brother that he and his advisers felt that one of “the most politically undesirable references” was Peters’s statement that “there are those in Massachusetts, as elsewhere, who are already grumbling about a Kennedy family dynasty.” Even in these idyllic early months of the New Frontier, a reporter could walk down Boylston Street and hear a certain amount of grousing on that score, from Democrats and Republicans alike.
Teddy was worried about what Joan had said in the article, and that would become a theme of his life. Joan had what journalists came to admire as a priceless gift of candor but Teddy and his minions considered an endless predilection for political malaprops. She told the reporter that “the entire community” of Bronxville where she grew up “is so highly restricted that I actually never met a Jew as I was growing up.” In her gushing love for the Kennedys, she extolled the Hyannis Port house that had everything, including “their own projection room for movies. If you want a steam bath, they have that, too.”
Peters wrote that when Teddy was at the University of Virginia School of Law, the public schools and the university had been desegregated. “Yet Teddy, though he was there from 1956 to 1959, was unaware of either of these facts until told about them recently.” Teddy wrote his brother: “I feel that the Virginia segration [sic] issues very possibly are factually erroneous and will check this out.”
Teddy didn’t seem to grasp that from now on journalists and others would be examining every aspect of his life. He would not be able to cordon off the parts that he wanted to remain private. Nor would he always be able to edit his words before they went public. There was much that he would not want publicized, from his cheating scandal at Harvard to the difficulties he had suffered over false charges that he had been a leftist security risk, from his compulsive philandering to all the wild episodes of his past. His Harvard friends loved to tell the story of the time they were all challenged to bring a woman to a party, and good old Teddy arrived with a prostitute in tow. It was rambunctious Teddy at his irrepressible best and worst all in one, but it was hardly the conduct of a calculating young man planning to become a U.S. senator.
Teddy had an instinct for candor, a trait that Bobby was teaching him was a mistake. Teddy had told Peters: “The vital thing is to be able to sell the people on the answers you arrive at, and I think I’m qualified to do that.” To Bobby, the small matter of what his brother had told the writer mattered not at all. What mattered was what Bobby thought he should have said. Bobby insisted that his brother get the journalist to change the quote to this pretentious phrasing: “The vital thing is to enunciate clearly what you feel the issues are what you feel can be done in order to remedy the problems and the difficulties that we face.”
Peters pruned his article the way the Kennedys suggested, cutting away unpalatable truths, glossing the image, creating a portrait that looked less like Teddy but more like a palatable candidate for the U.S. Senate. Bobby was teaching his brother to create a public character called Edward Moore Kennedy who had little to do with the playful, spontaneous, genuine Teddy loved by his friends for what he was, not for what he might be. Teddy was being taught to shove his oversized personality into the modest casing of a cautious, careful public man, a lesson that he studied with far more attention than he had given to many of his classes at Harvard.
“Saddle up, Joansie!” Teddy yelled over the phone to his wife. “We’ve got a two o’clock tea at Lowell, then another one at four. There’s a banquet tonight in Boston and after that a coffee in Lawrence. We should be back at Squaw Island tonight. Did I tell you six are coming for lunch tomorrow? Could you
get lobster?”
As she listened, Joan made sure she got it all down in her little notepad. “White piqué suit—black cocktail dress—8 lobsters.” Then, when Teddy’s urgent soliloquy ended, she enthused, “Wonderful, dear! I’ll be up on the first plane.” Joan appeared to be in ecstasy. “I’m going to see my husband” she told the cook. “I haven’t seen him in six days.”
Both Joan and Teddy were living lives that they had not yet quite claimed as their own. This was not England, and Teddy was not planning to sit in the House of Lords, an inherited position that gives its occupant little say in the governing of the nation. His resume had only a few items on it other than his surname, but he was Edward M. Kennedy, a full-blooded Kennedy, and in Massachusetts he had every chance of winning a seat in the Senate.
Growing up, Teddy had been only a summertime Massachusetts resident, but in a short time he had managed to seem like a true son of the Commonwealth. Unlike Jack and Jackie, Teddy and Joan came across as an accessible couple whose happiness did not seem beyond the aspirations of middle-class life. There was a guileless vulnerability to Joan that set her apart from any other woman in the family. She sought to live a women’s magazine kind of existence, her life as perfectly turned out to public view as her living room and her children.
The Senate aspirant and his wife purchased their own summer home on Squaw Island, only a five-minute car ride from the rest of the family at the Hyannis Port compound. Their house had a light, happy motif, the blue carpet like the sea itself, set against the white walls, the comfortable chairs, and the reproduction antiques. The children were perfect too, little Kara and Teddy Jr. As her youngest grew a little older, Joan liked to dress them in matching brother and sister outfits. Joan, unlike Jackie, did not wear European designer dresses but was content, like most of the women of Massachusetts, to buy her dresses off the rack. There was something reassuring about this youngest Kennedy couple, from Teddy’s speeches and public demeanor to his beautiful devout wife and the modest way in which he set out to make his way in the Senate.
Teddy had a consuming love for life at Hyannis Port. He may have been only a holiday resident, but the hamlet would always be his one true home. This summer of 1961 would have been a splendid time even if his brother had not been president, for few things on earth compare to the pleasures of grandparents, siblings, and children surrounded by love and imbued with health, money, and above all the time to enjoy them. The sweetness of these weekends was incomparable, and as with all true pleasures, their sweetness was vividly felt by those who partook in them not only in memory but also within each moment.
When the helicopter set down on the grounds after the ten-minute jaunt from Otis Air Force Base, and the president stepped out and Caroline and her cousins rushed to greet him, there was perfection to the moment. The president went sailing on the Marlin, sitting there watching Jackie water-skiing. He even, against all advice, tried a few holes of golf. “You rich boys don’t have to pick up the tees,” quipped a family friend, Gerald Tremblay. The president said nothing, and it wasn’t until much later that Tremblay realized that Kennedy had left the tees there because he could hardly bend over.
One summer Kennedy dove off the Honey Fitz, the presidential yacht, undaunted by the seven- or eight-foot distance from the water that would have discouraged even many younger men. On one windswept cold day he took Jackie and half a dozen others out on the bay for a sail in the Victura. The wind got so strong, gusting twenty-five to thirty knots, that he turned the tiller over to a visiting youth who knew little about sailboats but much about presidential wishes.
These summer days became the focal point of the greatest photographic story of the epoch. The Kennedys were a parade of exquisitely photogenic characters, from a maternal Jackie gently toweling off her naked young son on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal to handsome Jack on the cover of Look riding his golf cart surrounded by his laughing children, nephews, and nieces.
There were twenty Kennedy children, and most of them, at one time or another, clambered on for a ride on the president’s gold electric cart, weighing it down as the vehicle lumbered ahead. No captions were needed to shout the message that this was a family graced with power, simplicity, and elegance. Kennedy was a man, as Alfred Kazin wrote in The American Scholar, who had it all and then some. Not only was he the president of the United States and a multimillionaire, but he was a man with “the naturalness of a newspaperman and as much savvy as a Harvard professor.”
The president and his brothers all understood how much the bounty of their days depended on their family fortune. The Kennedys treated their wealth like an enduring miracle. There was no business enterprise that might easily have justified the immensity of their wealth, no morally edifying story of daring entrepreneurship, just a series of vague tales and anecdotes. Joe had brought back this wealth from an amoral, often brutal world, and it was best not to ask too many questions about it but to be richly appreciative that none of them would ever have to venture back to the world whence it came. On one occasion Kennedy asked Thomas J. Walsh, the accountant who helped manage the fortune, who was richer, he or young Teddy. Kennedy may have been president, but these were matters hidden from him, and Walsh told him he could not tell.
No one would have watched the president’s endeavors with greater pleasure during the summer of 1961 than his father, but Joe was not there. He had rented a villa in the south of France and was gone that summer. “My father and mother wanted the children to have that house [in Hyannis Port],” Teddy recalled. “They didn’t want to be constantly telling them, you know, ‘Be quiet,’… I always felt, all of us felt, that it was because they wanted us to be there. They wanted the children to be there. I always interpreted that as being generous. My father never liked traveling. He liked that house. It was a great house, and he had a boat, and a cook, and his children. He was a very simple person in those areas.”
When Joe returned to Hyannis Port in the fall, he assumed authority over the houses and the land. He was seventy-three years old, but there would be no gentle, sweet-tempered decline, no sitting in the sun-dappled afternoons on the porch telling oft-told tales to those who only half listened even the first time he told them. He put on his riding boots each morning and rode out as he always had, his back ramrod stiff, his clothes impeccable, and his grip firm. One day he fell off his horse, and another day he fell down in the house, but no one dared to comment, not to his face. He was not taking his heart pills the way he was supposed to either, but no one monitored Joe’s conduct.
Joe continued to watch out for the other Kennedys. Luella Hennessey, the family’s longtime nurse, came to him saying that she had been offered $50,000 to write a story of her life with the Kennedys. It was a fortune to the woman, and she bubbled over with excitement at the wonderful tale she would tell. “Why, look at that contract, Luella!” Joe told her. “If you don’t have 375 pages for Doubleday and so many words that the printers are set up to do, you’ll lose everything. I’ve seen so many people lose everything trying to write a book. If you need money when you’re old, let me know. You’re a nurse. Stay with that.” Luella was happy she had such a true friend in Mr. Kennedy, and she turned down the book offer.
Joe was not much for outsiders, but that fall Frank Sinatra and Porfirio Rubirosa, the semicelebrated playboy, showed up for a party. The group of women who arrived that afternoon were rudely scrutinized by Frank Saunders, the chauffeur, who thought the guests “looked like whores.” Joe insisted that his black riding boots be polished each day, and in the evening Saunders took the oiled, gleaming boots up the back stairs to the patriarch’s room. There the chauffeur stumbled onto one of the afternoon arrivals pressed up against the wall being fondled by Joe. “I have your riding boots, Mr. Kennedy,” Saunders said, as if that would make his presence less embarrassing. “My riding boots!” Joe exclaimed. “Just in time.”
The best times were when the presidential flag flew over the compound. The big house was not an expansive
place that insisted on formality, for despite its size it remained a cozy house whose rooms seemed diminutive. On one such occasion the president was sitting with his shoes off next to Jackie on the triple sofa. Bobby rested in a nearby chair, and another friend, John Hooker Jr., sat next to Ethel on the stairs. Hooker recalled that suddenly “everyone in the room sprang to their feet. The president of the United States, within a second, had his shoes on and was standing straight up to welcome his father into the room.” At dinner it was Joe who sat at the head of the table, not his son the president.
Hooker was a decent athlete, and he was startled at the relentless competitiveness of the Kennedy men. He was a far better tennis player than Bobby, but the attorney general wouldn’t let it go at that and kept insisting on set after set, as if he could eventually wear Hooker down.
Over the long Thanksgiving weekend in November 1961, the Kennedy family played touch football against the Secret Service. These men spent their days guarding the president, but they were decidedly off-duty this afternoon, and they blocked Bobby and Teddy and the rest of the Kennedy gang, banging into the defense as they ran out for passes. High up in the second-floor window stood Joe, his fist clenched, doing what he always did, cheering on his beloved sons.
Another day during that drizzly weekend Bobby, Teddy, Steve Smith, and Red Fay had themselves a bruising game of touch football, playing until it got so dark that they could no longer see the football spiraling toward them in the chill of a New England late November. “All right, everybody into that wonderful Atlantic!” Teddy yelled, looking at Fay as if he thought his brother’s friend might turn tail. “Red boy, when that pink body hits that cold water, things are going to happen that you didn’t believe could happen to a grown man,” Teddy went on, anticipating the smack of the frigid Atlantic waters. “All right, everybody out into the black night bare-assed running as fast as you can.” The four men tore off their clothes and ran naked into the bay. “How I survived the plunge only the good Lord knows,” Fay reflected. “Literally for several days I felt the aftereffects.”
The Kennedy Men Page 82
