by David Nasaw
He had a gift for friendship, though he knew it did not always come easily, that one had to work at it, stay in touch, celebrate the good times, offer condolences in the bad. When Walter Howey lost his wife in the spring of 1954, Kennedy wrote him from Palm Beach, even though they had not spent time together in years. “I am not sure I will do well with this letter even though I want to write it,” he began, aware that Howey had suffered severe professional and financial setbacks. “I have known that you have been hurt and that you are having a terrible time. I also know that your dear wife died. I just couldn’t write you a letter because what could I say? . . . All I can say is what I feel deeply—that my best and dearest friend has suffered a great loss and that his sorrow is shared by me. I can’t do anything for you except pray for you and that I will do. If you want me for anything, just let me know.”19
The only thing that mattered more to him than his friends was his children. The Kennedy boys and girls, he was convinced, could do whatever they wanted once they made up their minds to do it. Each had his or her minor flaws—Jack was rarely punctual, was very messy, and had still not, his father complained, “learned the art of taking care of himself”; Bobby never quite knew what he wanted to do next; Teddy was too much of a playboy; Eunice didn’t take care of her health; Patricia couldn’t make up her mind; Jean never seemed to take anything seriously. Each of these shortcomings could and, he was sure, would be corrected as they grew up.20
The Kennedys were beginning to expand in size now. The first newcomer was Ethel Skakel, whom Bobby married in June 1950, at the end of his second year of law school in Virginia. Ethel Skakel was the daughter of a self-made Protestant millionaire father and an Irish Catholic mother. She had grown up in a mansion outside Greenwich and gone to Manhattanville with Jean, who had introduced her to Bobby. Wealthy, Catholic, athletic, pretty, with a grand sense of humor and six siblings of her own, she had no trouble fitting into the Kennedy clan and ended up adoring her father-in-law as much as he adored her. The same would happen with Robert Sargent Shriver, the next to join the family.
Eunice had met Sarge in Washington in 1946 when she was working at the State Department and sharing a town house with Jack. Shriver, whose father, once wealthy, had lost the family fortune during the Depression, had gone to Yale College and Yale Law School, seen action as a battleship gunner during the war, then returned to work at Newsweek. Soon after they met, Eunice introduced Shriver to Kennedy, who was looking for someone to edit Joe Jr.’s letters from Spain for publication. When Shriver reported that the letters were unpublishable, Kennedy, admiring his honesty and intelligence, recruited him to work in Chicago at the Merchandise Mart. After eight months there, his employer—and future father-in-law—called Shriver back to Washington to help Eunice in her new job, organizing a committee on juvenile delinquency in the office of the attorney general. In the summer of 1948, Shriver was sent back to Chicago as assistant general manager of the Merchandise Mart and chief representative of the Kennedy family’s political interests. Three years later, Eunice moved to Chicago to work with the House of the Good Shepherd and the Chicago Juvenile Court. They would marry two years after this, in May 1953.
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In 1950, Ted Kennedy followed his three brothers and father to Harvard. He played freshman ball in the fall and did quite well. “Dad made all my home games, where he helped out the coach by pacing the sidelines wearing a beret and shouting instructions.” When spring came, Ted threw himself into practice “to the extent that my grades suffered, my Spanish grade especially. I worried that if I flunked or made a D on the final exam, I wouldn’t be eligible to play football in the fall.” He might have studied harder or gotten tutoring, but he took what he thought was the simple way out and had a friend take his exam for him. The boys were caught, given a year’s suspension, and “told we could come back if we’d done something useful with that time.”
Ted’s first call on being suspended was to his brother Jack, who agreed to prepare their father for the news. He then left Cambridge for Hyannis Port. “My father met me in the sunroom,” Ted recalled in his memoirs. “He alternated between disappointment and anger for quite a while. . . . The more we talked, the quieter his voice would get. But then the phone would ring; one of my brothers expressing concern, offering advice. And when I came back into the room, he’d tee off on me again. ‘There are people who can mess up in life and not get caught,’ he advised me at one point, ‘but you’re not one of them, Teddy.’” The day after their first go-round, as his father began to understand the possible fallout from his son’s suspension for cheating, “he was absolutely wild and went up through the roof. For about five hours. From then on he was calm. It was just ‘How do we help you?’ And he never brought the thing up again.” Ted might have transferred and continued his schooling, but he didn’t want to. He and his father decided that he would enlist in the army and return to Harvard after two years of service.21
On June 25, Ted took his physical and was assigned to basic training at Fort Dix. He wanted to volunteer for duty in Korea but was talked out of it by his brothers during a lunch in New York. “Both were appalled, and strenuously argued against my volunteering. ‘Mother and Dad have suffered enough. . . . We can’t afford to have you go over and risk getting killed. You just can’t do this kind of thing. Go where the army assigns you.’”22
Kennedy, who knew nothing of Ted’s dreams of becoming a war hero like his two oldest brothers, arranged to get him an assignment with the CIC, the Counter Intelligence Corps. Ted trained with the CIC for two months, after which he was transferred to Camp Gordon in Georgia, ostensibly because he was too young for the CIC and never should have been there in the first place.
On learning that his son was now going to be a MP, Kennedy contacted Anthony Biddle with “a tremendous personal favor to ask you.” He wanted Biddle, who had joined the army from the diplomatic corps during the war and still had contacts there, to arrange to get Ted “an interesting assignment, Paris, for instance, where he could learn the language and learn something about the place. . . . Now you know I wouldn’t bother you with this if it did not mean a great deal to me. I hate to ask favors from my personal friends but since he is only a private and we are not asking for transfer from one sphere of his duty to another but rather an assignment in his own present branch of activity, I would appreciate it if you could arrange this for me.” Biddle did Kennedy the favor he asked and Ted was assigned to Paris, where he served out his time.23
Fortunately for everyone, the cheating incident was kept quiet. Ted had left Harvard, his father told his friend Sir James Calder, “because he got restless and enlisted in the regular army.” That he had been suspended for cheating would not become public knowledge until the spring of 1962, when Ted was running in a primary election for the U.S. Senate and got a call from brother Jack in the White House, warning him to “get that Harvard story out.” Whether the president had learned that the press already had the story, we do not know. Ted took his brother’s advice and had the story released to the Boston Globe, which ran it on the front page. He was castigated for his cheating, then praised for his candor in admitting to it.24
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Although Ted’s dismissal from Harvard was kept secret, the ninety West Point cadets who were expelled for cheating that same spring had no such luck. Their story was front-page news for weeks.
Editorials demanded that Army football coach Earl Blaik, whose team had been decimated by the scandal, resign or be fired; President Truman expressed his concern; the Senate launched an investigation; Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas demanded that the football programs at West Point and Annapolis be suspended, if not permanently ended. Cardinal Spellman, on the other hand, declared that “to err is human, to forgive is divine” and asked the presidents of three Catholic colleges in New York, Fordham, Iona, and Manhattan, to admit West Point students who applied for transfer.
Father
Cavanaugh of Notre Dame recalled years later that he, Arthur Houghton, and Kennedy had discussed the scandal during an August cruise on the Marlin, Kennedy’s fifty-one-foot yacht. They had just finished their fish chowder luncheon and were looking at yet another story about the expelled cadets in the New York Times when, Cavanaugh recalled in his oral history, “Kennedy shot a question at me. ‘What would it cost to send all of these young fellows through Notre Dame?’” Cavanaugh, without knowing how many of the students were in their first, second, third, or fourth year, quickly calculated that it would “run almost to a half million dollars” (about $12.4 million in purchasing power today). Kennedy’s response was immediate: “I want every one of them to have an opportunity to go through Notre Dame, all expenses paid. Let us agree upon two conditions. My name will not be made known, and none of these young men should participate in intercollegiate athletics. . . . Otherwise, people will think that Notre Dame’s benefactor is trying to buy athletes for the university.”25
The offer was announced on August 21, 1951. Each of the ninety expelled West Point students was sent a Notre Dame application and an offer letter that explained that while the unnamed benefactor did “not condone the act of the cadets,” he realized “the limitations of means for the purpose of getting an education by which some of the cadets and their families are restricted. . . . The offer is made to athletes and non-athletes, to Catholics and non-Catholics.” The only requirement was that the students “meet the standards and academic requirements of Notre Dame.”26
Thirteen West Point students registered at Notre Dame that September, twelve received funds from Kennedy, and every one of them graduated. Upon graduation they were given the name of their benefactor. The story made it to the back pages of a few newspapers, but nobody took notice, as by then the scandal was very old news. Kennedy wanted it that way, not because he shied away from positive publicity, but because there were too many loose ends he didn’t want to unravel. Jack was getting ready to run for higher office and wouldn’t be helped by stories of how his father had rescued West Point cheaters. Worse yet, Kennedy feared the story might lead reporters from West Point to Harvard and Ted Kennedy. It was better to keep the matter quiet.
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It would not be entirely accurate to say that Joseph P. Kennedy was mellowing with age. But it would be foolish to believe that he had not been affected by the passage of time and the tragedies that had befallen three of his four eldest children. He was as opinionated, volatile, argumentative, driven, fearful of boredom, and anxious to be doing something significant and remain in the public eye as he had ever been. But now well into his second decade of retirement and knowing that he would never again return to Washington or take on a full-time position in private business, he was in the process of creating a new life for himself. Rather than push back against his status—as senior citizen, retired businessman and public servant, philanthropist, and grandfather-to-be—he took hold of it, spent more time with his friends, welcomed daughters- and sons-in-law, presided over the family foundation, and concentrated his considerable attention and talents on pushing his children wherever they wanted to go.
Thirty-four
THE NEXT SENATOR FROM MASSACHUSETTS
Jack had been reelected without opposition in 1948. He had a Republican opponent in 1950 but crushed him with 82 percent of the vote. That same year, two of the young veterans he had entered Congress with, Richard Nixon of California and his good friend George Smathers of Florida, ran for and were elected to the Senate.
Jack had never much liked the House of Representatives and never been much of a congressman. He had sided with labor and voted for health care reform, housing relief, and every New Deal or Fair Deal welfare issue that came before him. But these were not “his” issues, not his specialty. His forte was foreign policy, which to a great extent was the purview of the Senate.
His seat from the eleventh district was as safe as any in Washington. He could have remained in the House, his mother remembered, “for the next thirty or forty years, rising by seniority . . . to become an extremely influential old man, perhaps Speaker of the House. The prospect of spending his life that way bored Jack intensely.”1
The only way up and out was to run for higher office. In 1952, he was faced with two possibilities. He could run against incumbent senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., or, if Democratic governor Paul Dever chose to campaign for the Senate, Jack could run for governor. In either case, he had to make himself better known to the voters of the state, as he had earlier to the men and women of the eleventh district.
He began his campaign for statewide office—he didn’t yet know which it would be—in the spring of 1949. For the next three years, he spent almost every weekend traveling the state, “driving to various civic, fraternal, political or veteran group meetings on Friday night and Saturday, appearing at Catholic communion breakfasts or Protestant church socials on Sunday and then hurrying back to Boston to catch the Federal at Back Bay station on Sunday night and crawling into a sleeping-car berth for the trip to Washington.” “No town was too small or too Republican for him,” recalled Dave Powers, his “booking agent” for these weekend campaign trips. “He was willing to go anywhere, and every group was glad to have him, not only because he was an interesting political figure and a well-known war hero, but because he never charged a dime for expenses.”2
The congressman pushed himself and his aides relentlessly. They marveled at his stamina, his unflappable affability, his ability to connect with audiences, his willingness to shake as many hands as were extended to him. His back still bothered him—and would for the rest of his life—but it didn’t stop him or slow him down. Wherever he went that spring, he told his listeners that although he had no set plans for the future, if they would be so kind as to give him their names and addresses, he would contact them later if he needed them. Large numbers obliged. His list of contacts, some of them Democrats, some independents or Republicans, grew until it included hundreds of names from every part of the state.
His father supported him through it all, offering advice, solicited and unsolicited, and making sure he had all the money he needed. In August 1951, with statewide elections still fifteen months away, Kennedy wrote Tim McInerny, a former Boston Post editor whom he had known and worked with for years, about joining his son’s campaign as researcher and publicist. It would not, he cautioned McInerny, be a big job, at least for now. Much of the work would be done by Kennedy, James Landis, who had connections in Washington, and the staff at the New York office. “I know you will remember that we are not strangers in Washington, and I am not a stranger to the newspaper men or columnists, and when the campaign starts I, myself, will do all the things I think are necessary, and, therefore, it will not require very much of your time. . . . I wanted your services occasionally for digging up an item that might be of value in the state.” When McInerny asked for more money than Kennedy was willing to give him, Kennedy cautioned him that there would be “no occasion for entertainment and travel. . . . We are not exploiting somebody whom nobody has ever heard of, and we are not going to ask any favors from people that I have not done some favors for before or that I can do at some future time.”3
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To burnish his foreign policy credentials, Congressman Kennedy set off that fall of 1951 on a twenty-five-thousand-mile, seven-week tour of the Middle East and Asia. Accompanying him were his sister Patricia and his brother Bob, who left behind him his wife of sixteen months, Ethel Skakel, and the first Kennedy granddaughter, Kathleen, born in July 1951. The three Kennedys met with Generals Dwight Eisenhower and Matthew Ridgway in Paris; Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the French military commander, and Premier Bao Dai in Vietnam; Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Arab leaders in Israel; British officials and national leaders in Iran; Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in India; and Liaquat Ali Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, just hours before he was assassinated. Their final stop was Kor
ea, where Jack was taken ill—a common occurrence on trips during which he pushed himself beyond his limits—and flown to Okinawa with a temperature of 106. After a course of penicillin and adrenal hormones for his Addison’s disease, he was judged well enough to fly home.
His father cheered him on and offered public relations assistance from the United States. “If possible,” he cabled him in New Delhi on October 13, 1951, at the start of his journey, “try and get some news service to report your activities each location. Good for build up here.” On November 2, he informed Jack of the media campaign he had set up for him on his return: “Radio program National hookup night November 14. Boston Chamber of Commerce Lunch Nov. 19. What about Kate Smith’s afternoon television hour? [At the time, Patricia was working for Kate Smith.] Have interview National Hookup probably night of 15th. Write me names important people you talked with for newspaper publicity and air talks. Telephone me upon arrival in Europe.”4
Jack cabled that he would be returning to Boston “on the morning of the 12th or perhaps on the 11th for publicity—and then I could come to N.Y. on the same day to work on the speech.” He asked his father to get hold of recent articles by Justice Douglas on Iran, William Bullitt on India, and Gardner Cowles, the founder and publisher of Look magazine. He also wanted to look at the articles and speeches Governor Dewey had delivered when he returned from abroad and the “last 8 weeks copies of the Economist.”5