by David Nasaw
To stave off boredom (and loneliness), Kennedy brought with him to the South of France a large staff, including his secretary, Janet des Rosiers, who would later claim to have been his mistress since around 1948. He surrounded himself as well with his buddies Houghton, Reisman, “the Commish,” Morton Downey, Bart Brickley, and Fathers Theodore Hesburgh and John Cavanaugh, whom he imported in groups of two and three. “I get the boys all up in the morning at 6:45,” he wrote Ted. “I have a swim and we all have breakfast at 7:40; leave for the golf course at 8 o’clock, and then after the golf game three days a week we swim at Eden Roc and come home for lunch, have a sleep, dictate my mail when I wake up, have a rub at 6:15, and then have a little cold soup, cheese and red wine for supper at 7:30; then we sit on the veranda and listen to the radio until 10:30. We go out Friday nights to the Monte Carlo Galas. This isn’t the kind of existence that should appeal to anybody under 65, but . . . it seems to fill the bill. . . . I haven’t seen all those beautiful girls that everybody talks about being here in the South of France, but maybe when Jack arrives here next week he’ll find them.”19
He and his buddies were older now, more conscious of their weight and their hairlines, but with their wives left behind in the States, they felt obligated to at least tease one another and self-mockingly refer to their sexual appetites and attractiveness. “Houghton has lost the sight of both eyes,” he wrote Tim McInerny in August, “and twisted his neck out of position gaping at the young Marilyn Monroes, of which he tells me there are millions! As he repeatedly says—oh! If I were only 70 again I would spend the next 25 years on the Riviera!”20
For most of the summer, Èze was a bachelor’s paradise. Rose never stayed for long even when Kennedy assured her, as he did in July 1955, that he was not expecting any more guests, “except Bart Brickley and possibly Morton Downey and his wife for ten days or so. . . . You won’t have to see Houghton except for possibly one meal and they [the chauffeurs] can drive you over to play golf . . . whenever you want to. So, for heaven’s sake please don’t think that we can’t have any fun if you’re here because that is utter nonsense. It’s merely a question whether you like the place well enough and whether you get bored with so few things to do. We never go out at night except on Friday night to the Gala but sit up above and listen to the radio. Up to date nobody has arrived here whom you would know.” All in all, he was not making the best possible case for Rose to visit. In any event, she preferred to vacation on her own. Kennedy consulted with “the best hotel man in France,” who recommended that “if you do not want to stay on the Riviera, Switzerland is by far the best place to go unless you want to go to the musical festival in Salzburg.” Rose took the suggestion and spent her summer and fall vacations at a resort in Lausanne.21
There was nothing new or out of the ordinary here, as Jack, Eunice, and Jean acknowledged in their fortieth anniversary cable to their father:
Forty years you are wed to Rose
Where she goes nobody knows
But why she goes we are all aware
Because you are a great big bear
But this is all said in jest
After Houghton she loves you the best.22
As on previous trips to Europe, Kennedy intended to write about his findings when he returned to the States. “I expect when I get home,” Kennedy wrote Morton Downey on August 23, 1954, “I will have enough material for one good speech or article.” He had decided that as long as he didn’t speak in Massachusetts, he wouldn’t get in his son’s way or cause him any particular political problems.23
By mid-August, he had come up with an outline for the article or speech he would complete when he returned to the United States. “From my preliminary talks and my observations, I have come to the conclusion that there are three basic courses for the United States to follow in its foreign policy. One, to accept any of the challenges of the Russians or Chinese and drop the bombs or the guided missiles. . . . The Second alternative is really a continuation of our present policy—talking about the Communists all the time . . . and continue our efforts to maintain a cold war. . . . The Third alternative is to find out on what basis we can live in peace with the Russians.” Option three, he had concluded, was the only reasonable one. Fighting an endless cold war made no sense. The notion of deterrence was an absurdity. It was worse than futile to pile “up bombs we will never use except for defensive purposes, which unfortunately must come second after an attack.” Now was the time to negotiate, when the United States enjoyed military superiority.24
He still worried a bit about drawing attention away from his son or, worse yet, forcing Jack to have to distance himself or apologize for his father’s intemperance. Fortunately, the Senate would not convene in 1954 until after election day, in part to spare senators from having to publicly declare for or against a resolution to censure Senator McCarthy. “I have made quite a few observations on our foreign policy,” he wrote Tim McInerny in late August, “and I think if I get these various interviews and some others I am planning, I will have a very interesting story when I get back and, since the Senate is not in session, I can say what I want without hurting Jack.”25
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John Fitzgerald Kennedy celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday in May 1954. For thirty-four of those thirty-seven years, his father had worried about his health—and longevity. The steady dose of cortisone he took for his Addison’s disease had calmed his stomach, but his back was no better, perhaps worse, than it had ever been. By the spring of 1954, the pain had become so intense that he was using crutches everywhere, even in the Senate chambers, in the mistaken belief that taking pressure off his back would help it heal. In April, he visited the Lahey Clinic. In July, he checked into the Bethesda Naval Hospital, looking for relief but finding none. His father knew he was ailing but believed that with a bit of rest he would feel better. “I hope that you will take care of yourself for the next two or three months,” he wrote him on August 19, the day before the Senate went into a recess that would last until November 8, “and see if you can get in good shape before you have to go back to Washington.”26
In August, Jack was visited in Hyannis Port by the team from the Lahey Clinic that had examined him earlier in the spring. They recommended that he undergo surgery to fuse his spinal disks. If he did not do so, they warned, there was a good chance that he would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. If he went ahead, however, there was a high risk of infection because of his Addison’s disease. Jackie visited Kennedy in the South of France at the end of the month and brought with her the news of Jack’s decision to have the operation. Jack remained in Hyannis Port. He should have been resting his back but instead had accepted a number of speaking engagements.27
Kennedy returned from Europe that fall with every intention of making headlines again for himself and his ideas. On visiting Hyannis Port and finding Jack more seriously debilitated than he had imagined and about to submit to major and highly risky surgery, he put everything aside and, as he had thirty-five years ago when Jack’s life was threatened with scarlet fever, focused his attention entirely on his son.
Having lost one child to an operation that went terribly wrong, and knowing the risks entailed in this one, Kennedy advised against surgery. “Joe first tried to convince Jack that even confined to a wheelchair he could lead a full and rich life,” Rose recalled in a later interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin. “After all, he argued, one need only look at the incredible life FDR had managed to lead despite his physical incapacity. But even as Joe spoke, seeing that Jack was determined to go ahead, he finally told his son he’d do everything he could to help. ‘Don’t worry, dad,’ Jack replied. ‘I’ll make it through.’” Her husband didn’t sleep at all that first night at Hyannis Port. “His mind kept wandering back to the last letter he received from Joe Junior, the letter written right before his death, assuring his father that there was no danger involved and that he would
be sure to return. The memory was so painful that Joe actually cried out in the darkness with a sound so loud that I was awakened from sleep.”28
Jack checked into the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City on October 10. After three postponements, the operation was performed on October 21. Three days later, Jack Kennedy developed the infection that almost killed him. His temperature rose precipitously and he sank into a coma. A priest was called to administer the last rites. And then, as he had so many times before, Jack Kennedy rose from the near dead. He remained desperately but no longer mortally ill, with a wound eight inches long that would not heal.
Kennedy stayed in New York while Jack was in the hospital, answering questions about his health, responding to well-wishers and the hundreds of notes of encouragement that had been sent from all over the world. “Your cards came at a time when a little gayety was a much sought after thing,” Kennedy wrote to thank Carroll Rosenbloom in early November. “We have had quite a tough time with Jack and he has really suffered way beyond what anybody should be expected to endure and he has a long, long road still ahead.”29
On November 8, Congress reconvened with Jack still in the hospital, looking very much as if he would be absent for the entire session. The Democrats’ victory in the midterm elections in 1954 had won for the party a majority in the Senate and opened up new possibilities for committee assignments. Jack had served only one third of one term and would now be absent for much of the next year. He was in no position to ask any favors of the Democratic leadership, but his father, who had carefully spread his largesse among the party’s leaders in the form of generous campaign donations, was.
On the very first day of the session, Kennedy phoned Senator George Smathers of Florida to ask him to lobby Lyndon Johnson to put Jack on the Foreign Relations Committee. “After your call yesterday,” Smathers wrote Kennedy on November 9, “I went over and had another long talk with Lyndon about Jack. He is thoroughly sympathetic, but he certainly has his problems. . . . Lyndon has assured me he will do the best he can for Jack within the limitations imposed upon him by the seniority of these other fellows.” In the end, Johnson bypassed Kennedy, which made sense, as he was neither a Johnson loyalist nor a powerful Democrat whom the majority leader needed in his camp.30
On December 2, while Jack was still in the hospital, “most of the time in severe pain,” the Senate approved the McCarthy censure resolution by a vote of 67–22. Only one Democrat, John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, did not vote for censure, though he did not vote against it; his vote was marked as “unrecorded.” The senator might, had he chosen to, have instructed Ted Sorensen to pair him in favor of censure with an absent Republican who was opposed to it. He chose not to, either because he did not, at this moment in his life, want to go against his father’s wishes or because he believed that his constituents, like his father, did not believe that McCarthy had done anything to merit public censure.31
The Kennedys, Bobby and his father in particular, would remain loyal to Joe McCarthy until the very end, which was not far off. Overcome by alcoholism, depression, and acute hepatitis, Senator McCarthy died in May 1957. Kennedy telegraphed his wife, Jean Kerr McCarthy, to say how “shocked and deeply grieved” he had been “to hear of Joe’s passing. His indomitable courage in adhering to the cause in which he believed evoked my warm admiration. His friendship was deeply appreciated and reciprocated.”32
While the Kennedys were all too ready to forgive the senator’s trespasses, they would for the rest of their lives nurture an abiding hatred for Roy Cohn, who they believed had brought him down. When, in the summer of 1955, Morton Downey invited Cohn to his home in Hyannis Port for a weekend, Rose wrote Kennedy in France that “Bob was livid . . . Bob is sure he would not do it, if you were around.” Kennedy, whose temper was no longer what it had once been—and certainly not as volatile as his second living son’s—wrote him in Hyannis Port to say that while Downey shouldn’t have invited Cohn, “in the last analysis, we can’t tell people whom they should invite to their home; nevertheless, I am annoyed.”33
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On December 21, 1954, two months after his surgery, Jack was well enough to leave the hospital. He was transported by stretcher to a limousine that took him to the airport, then loaded him onto a private plane for the flight to Palm Beach. Covered from head to toe with a checked blanket, he managed a wan smile but looked more dead than alive. When his father saw the television footage, he worried that Jack might have reinjured his back on being carried into the airplane.34
Jack convalesced in Palm Beach in a makeshift hospital wing on the ground floor, cared for by a team of doctors and nurses and his wife and parents. The wound in his back opened up during the surgery did not heal; the pain did not subside. By February, Rose recalled to Doris Kearns Goodwin, “Joe came to the conclusion that something had to be done, so he flew to New York to see the doctors, and came back with a recommendation for a second operation. He recognized the high risk involved, but now he understood what Jack had meant in the beginning about not wanting to live unless he could really live.”35
Jack’s second operation, the chief purpose of which appeared to have been to remove the metal plate that had been inserted in his back during the first, was performed on February 15 and brought him a measure of relief. Early in March, he was able to walk without his crutches for the first time. “The Ambassador,” Dave Powers recalled, “said to me later when we were eating lunch, ‘God, Dave, he’s getting stronger all the time. Did you see the legs on him? He’s got the legs of a fighter or a swimming champion.’ Then the Ambassador said, and I often thought of it later, ‘I know nothing can happen to him now, because I’ve stood by his deathbed three times and each time I said good-bye to him, and each time he came back stronger.’”36
On May 27, 1955, seven months after his surgery and two days before his thirty-eighth birthday, Jack returned to the Senate, still in pain, but pain he could live with. “The results from the back operation,” Kennedy had written Galeazzi the month before, were “not what we had hoped for, but maybe time will correct it. [Jack] has gone through such a terrible ordeal.”37
Kennedy would continue to monitor Jack’s recovery and meet with his doctors. As heartbroken as he was about his son’s infirmities, he never let on—to Jack, especially—that he had any doubts that he would make a full recovery. “I am sorry you have been having trouble again with your physical condition,” he wrote from France in late July, “but I keep meeting people who have suffered a couple of years after operations and felt they would never be well and who are now playing 18 holes of golf every day and doing all the things that you want to do; but, as you say, let’s forget it as best as we can and see if being away from the scene of all your difficulties might not have a very good effect.”38
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During his long convalescence in Palm Beach, Jack had begun work on an article on political courage that was soon extended to a book-length manuscript. Like his father, who always sought research and editorial advice from his advisers, Jack asked Ted Sorensen, his chief aide in Washington, and to a lesser degree Arthur Krock, Jim Landis, and others, for assistance. By the summer of 1955, he and Sorensen had completed most of a first draft. Jack asked his mother, who was on her way to the South of France, to deliver the first and last chapters to his father. Jack showed up at the villa in early September with the rest of the book. “As usual,” Kennedy wrote his son Ted, sharing an insider Kennedy joke, “he arrived without his studs, with two different stockings and no underpants; so he walked off with a pair of brand new Sulka stockings of mine, a new pair of Sulka underpants of mine, and the last pair of evening studs I possessed. . . . He is back on crutches after having tried to open a screen in his hotel room, but if he hasn’t any more brains than to try that, maybe he should stay on crutches. His general attitude towards life seems to be quite gay. He is very intrigued with the constant rumors that he is being considered fo
r the Vice Presidency, which idea I think is one of the silliest I have heard in a long time for Jack.”39
Although Kennedy made light of Jack’s possibilities as a vice-presidential candidate in 1956, he was in fact taking them seriously. His fear was that Adlai Stevenson, who looked to be the probable candidate at the top of the ticket, had little chance of winning and that Jack, if nominated, would go down to defeat with him. The only Democrat he thought strong enough to defeat Eisenhower in 1956 was Lyndon Baines Johnson. In October 1955, Kennedy called Johnson to tell him that he “and Jack wanted to support [him] for President in 1956” in return for Johnson’s putting Jack on the ticket as vice president. Johnson told Kennedy that he “was not interested” in running.40
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With the return of the Democrats to the Senate majority in the 1954 midterm elections, Senator John McClellan, one of the many recipients of Kennedy campaign contributions, had become chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and hired Bobby as chief counsel. Bobby was, Kennedy wrote Ethel in July 1955, “gradually earning a place in the sun that he so well deserves.” He was delighted, he told Ethel, that Bobby no longer gave “a damn whether McClellan likes him or not.” “He has arrived at a period in his education when he has awakened to the realization that if you have the real goods yourself, you don’t care a continental what the other fellow thinks, and that’s a very important milestone to pass. . . . Now if Mr. Eisenhower decides not to run [for reelection in 1956], I am sure the Democrats can win and he’ll have the opportunity to get a very topside job out of that sort of a setup.”41
To broaden Bobby’s résumé, Kennedy had suggested that he travel that summer with Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas in Soviet Central Asia. “In 1955, when I finally got a visa,” Douglas recalled in his memoirs, “Joe Kennedy telephoned me and asked if I would take Bobby to Russia with me. He said, ‘I think Bobby ought to see how the other half lives.’ I told Joe that I would be happy to take his son. Joe was a crusty reactionary and a difficult man, but he was very fond of me and he cared a great deal about his boys. He had big plans for Bobby and probably thought that the Russian trip would be important in his education.”42