by David Nasaw
Joseph Kennedy had tried on a few occasions to get a peek at the address but had been politely refused. His chief worry was that his son, having given a magnificent farewell address to the Massachusetts State Legislature, could not possibly do as well in Washington. He was wrong. The speech was electrifying. Jack had had many collaborators, advisers, and editors—and solicited and reviewed drafts from Adlai Stevenson, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Ted Sorensen, among others. Still, the words he delivered from the Capitol steps on January 20 were his, including the one sentence that was most remarked upon at the time—and continues to be fifty years later: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” The thought was not a new one. It had been included in earlier speeches, including the acceptance speech in Los Angeles.
It would be fruitless indeed—though many have tried—to figure out exactly how this particular thought got put into these particular words. The resemblance is nonetheless striking between this idea as expressed in John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s inaugural address and his father’s lifelong insistence that his children enter public service and do something worthwhile, that they devote themselves not to making money—he had done that for them—but to the greater good of the larger community.
After the inauguration, while the new president and vice president and their wives were honored at a lunch given by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, Kennedy hosted a luncheon for about 150 family members and friends in a private room at the Mayflower Hotel. He and Rose were then driven to the White House, where they watched the inaugural parade from the front row of the reviewing stand.
As the lead-off car with the president approached the reviewing stand, Joseph P. Kennedy stood up and took off his hat in a gesture of deference to his son. “It was an extraordinary moment,” Eunice would later remark. “Father had never stood up for any of us before. He was always proud of us, but he was always the authority we stood up for. Then, just as Jack passed by and saw Dad on his feet, Jack too stood up and tipped his hat to Dad, the only person he honored that day.”30
That evening, his wife recalled, “Joe wore the white tie tails he had seldom worn since the ambassadorship, and had found to his satisfaction that they still fit quite well, nearly twenty years later.” He and Rose attended the largest of the five inaugural balls, then returned to their rented house on P Street. “We didn’t stop for a visit or farewells at the White House. . . . Joe was so determined to avoid any appearance of influencing Jack that he did not set foot in the White House except once during the rest of that year,” when Jackie invited him to visit his grandchildren in their new home.31
—
With his two oldest boys settled in Washington—and his daughters, except for Rosemary, all married with children of their own—Kennedy’s attention was now turned to the baby in the family, Edward Moore Kennedy. Sometime after the inauguration, Ted visited Hyannis Port and went out on the Marlin with his father and Cardinal Cushing. After they had finished their fish stew lunch, Kennedy turned to his younger son, “Now that Jack and Bobby are where they should be, we have to find something for you.” At twenty-eight, Ted was too young to run for the Senate, but in two years, when the term of Jack’s Senate replacement, Benjamin A. Smith II, expired (an interim appointment in Massachusetts could be for only two years), he would be thirty, the minimum age to serve. Before even contemplating a run for elective office, Ted needed to get some seasoning in Washington or elsewhere. “When Jack became President and Bob Attorney General,” Joseph Kennedy wrote Richard Steele of the Worcester Telegram on February 20, “I urged Ted not to move out West, as he thought of doing, but to dig our roots even deeper in Massachusetts. I am glad to see that he is doing just that.” Ted took a house in Boston and a job as assistant district attorney for Suffolk County.32
Like Jack before him and with the family fortune at his disposal, Ted spent the two years running up to the election touring the state and lining up support. His father assigned Frank Morrissey to look after him and introduce him to everyone he should know. Kennedy went through his old lists of Massachusetts contacts compiled for Jack years ago and sent them on to his youngest son. “They are likely out-of-date now, but could be of some use.” Eunice, watching from the sidelines, was impressed with the way her father turned aside the rather vocal objections to Ted’s running for Jack’s seat. “He predicted unparalleled success for Teddy in politics and argued that Teddy’s success, and his differences in temperament and approach, would actually strengthen Jack and Bobby. . . . He was just as interested in Ted and his generation as he had been in the future of my older brother eighteen years before.”33
His children were grown up and doing quite well for themselves, but Joseph P. Kennedy was still head of the family—and lord of Hyannis Port. Jean Kennedy Smith remembers the afternoon just after her brother’s election when the president, the attorney general, and assorted family members and friends were playing touch football in the front yard. Lunch at Hyannis Port was served promptly at 1:15. At about 1:12, Joe Kennedy appeared on the porch and hollered at his children to come inside. “Come on, hurry up, food’s getting cold.” Jean and Jack were the farthest from the house and the last ones up the stairs. As they approached the house, Jack whispered to his sister, “Doesn’t he know I’m the President of the United States?”34
Ted recalled a similar scene. Caroline was crying over something and the president had picked her up to comfort her when an aide appeared to say there was an urgent call. The president put his daughter down and went into the next room to take the call. When he returned, his father told him sternly that he didn’t care what the emergency was, “never leave a crying child.”35
—
The older I get the less inclined I seem to want to write an autobiography,” Kennedy wrote Jess Stearn of Newsweek on February 6. “The real reason may be that after reporters have made an investigation of my past life and I read it, I can’t imagine adding enough to the reports to make a dent anywhere. Of course, a lot of the ‘facts’ have been repeated so often that they are considered true by most people. That applies to the bad as well as the good. As I sit in my office and try to dig out from all the correspondence that I have received, I am realizing how insignificant it is compared to the fact that I am now the father of the President of the United States. I will probably just let the history of my life stand as it stands, and I am quite sure that nobody will care a damn. I have never written this long about the subject before because I never had a son President of the United States, and I felt I was entitled to a better break than I was getting. But I think I am over it now.”36
He took up again—with new enjoyment—his old familiar role as family cheerleader. There was, in those first hundred days, much to cheer about. The president’s approval ratings were extraordinary through March and into April. And then, in the middle of the month, came the Bay of Pigs fiasco: the bombing raids organized by the CIA, the invasion of the fourteen hundred Cuban exiles, the death of one hundred of them, the capture of the others, and the administration’s embarrassment at getting caught in a series of lies and being so thoroughly and publicly humiliated by Fidel Castro. When Rose heard what had happened in Cuba, she put in a call to “Joe who said Jack had been on the phone with him much of the day, also Bobby. I asked him how he was feeling and he said ‘dying’—result of trying to bring up Jack’s morale after the Cuban debacle.” Like his sons, Joseph Kennedy was furious with the CIA for misleading the president. “I know that outfit and I wouldn’t pay them a hundred bucks a week. It’s a lucky thing they were found out early.”37
Later, after the president had issued a statement taking full responsibility for what had happened, Bobby suggested that they “call Dad, maybe he can cheer us up. And they did.” Their father told them they had done the right thing. They were lucky that their most serious crisis had occurred early in the administration
. He predicted Jack’s approval ratings would start to climb again after he accepted responsibility for the fiasco. “Americans love those who admit their mistakes.”38
—
He forwarded to his sons in Washington only a few names for appointment and did so gently for the most part. The exception was Francis Morrissey, who had been his eyes and ears in Boston since 1946 and was now Ted’s chaperon and adviser in Boston. Morrissey had been lobbying for the appointment for almost two years now, well before Jack had been nominated or elected. Kennedy had insisted that he would “help” if he could but that Morrissey was “mistaken” if he thought the position had been “marked” for him. “You know that I would work very hard to get the job for you. But when you say that it has been ‘marked’ for you, you are way off base. . . . I cannot imagine I could ever have said that to you. Help you to get it, I would. But to promise it to you would be kidding you as well as myself.”39
True to his word, Kennedy asked his son the president to forward Morrissey’s name for the vacant federal judgeship in Boston. The president, knowing full well that Morrissey was not the first—and would certainly not be the last—unqualified nominee to be put forward, was noticeably peeved by the negative comments in the press.
“Look,” Arthur Schlesinger recalled him complaining, “my father has come to me and said that he has never asked me for anything, that he wants to ask me only this one thing—to make Frank Morrissey a federal judge. What can I do?” McGeorge Bundy responded that his father shouldn’t have asked, but having been asked, the president had no choice but to turn him down. And indeed that was precisely what he did—or almost. When the Justice Department, as was standard procedure in such nominations, requested a report on Morrissey’s qualifications from the American Bar Association Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, the response was that he was unqualified for the post. President Kennedy let the nomination die, but to placate Morrissey and his father, he did not appoint anyone else to the vacancy, causing a serious backlog in the courts but leaving open the possibility that he would try again later.40
—
James Landis was one of the only Joseph Kennedy associates to accompany his son to the White House. At his first full news conference in Hyannis Port on November 11, the president-elect announced that he was reappointing Allen Dulles at the CIA and J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, asking Clark Clifford to lead his transition team, and bringing Pierre Salinger, Ken O’Donnell, and Ted Sorensen with him to the White House. He then added that he had asked James Landis, “former dean of the Harvard Law School, member of the SEC, chairman of the CAB, to undertake a study” of the federal regulatory agencies. Landis would subsequently be appointed as a special adviser to the president and his responsibilities enhanced. Kennedy was delighted. Next to Bobby, he trusted no one to watch out for his son as he did Jim Landis.
As a special assistant, there was no need for Landis to undergo an FBI investigation, until President Kennedy, embarrassed in June 1961 when a White House aide was found to be in arrears on his taxes, “ordered routine post hoc FBI checks on all White House staffers, regardless of status or rank, including Special Assistant James Landis.” The FBI asked the IRS for Landis’s tax returns, but the IRS couldn’t find them. Instead of going through channels, the district director in charge called Joseph Kennedy’s New York office and reported the problem to Tom Walsh, his tax expert, who got in touch with Kennedy at once. Joe Kennedy put through a call to Landis, who couldn’t be located; he then phoned Landis’s law partner, Justin Feldman, to find out who at the firm did the partners’ tax returns. A half hour later, he called Feldman again to say that he had located Landis, who admitted that he hadn’t filed the missing tax returns. “I got him off a platform in Pittsburgh, told him to go see Bobby and then to get his ass back to New York. I told him I want those goddam tax returns filed and those taxes paid as soon as possible.”
After learning first from his father and then from Landis that he had not filed any tax returns for at least five years, Bobby called the commissioner of internal revenue and asked him to see Landis. The commissioner advised Landis to get in his returns as quickly as possible. Kennedy lent him the money he required to pay the penalties he had incurred.
Landis resigned his position at the White House. No reason was given for the resignation, though the New York Times reported on September 8 that he had been accused of adultery in a divorce suit filed by his wife. The White House said only that Landis had made it clear on accepting the appointment that he didn’t want to remain in place past June.
The intelligence division of the IRS opened an investigation as to whether Landis had voluntarily paid his back taxes, which would have protected him from criminal charges, or done so “involuntarily” after being discovered as delinquent. Landis, under questioning, admitted that he had filed the returns only after being warned to do so by Joseph P. Kennedy, who had heard about the problem from an IRS employee. The question of whether this constituted a “voluntary” filing was referred to the attorney general’s office.
Bobby disqualified himself and handed the case off to Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, who decided he had no choice but to prosecute. Landis, by this time near suicidal, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to thirty days in jail, most of them spent at Columbia Presbyterian under guard. He was released in October 1963, disbarred in July 1964, and found dead in his pool, an apparent suicide, that same month. Bobby Kennedy, loyal to the end and devastated that he had been unable to protect his family’s dearest friend, attended the funeral but did not speak.41
—
Kennedy spent the summer of 1961, as he had the previous ones, at his villa at Cap d’Antibes. He kept in touch with his children by telegram and telephone and made sure to send along his observations and advice to the president and the attorney general.
To Bobby’s secretary, Angie Novello, he reported that he had been monitoring Voice of America broadcasts, which he found “much better this year than the last five years.” He recommended that the attorney general “find out whether the USIA are finding out what countries are listening to these reports and what kind of circulation they have.”
To Evelyn Lincoln, the president’s secretary, he reported on his conversations with the “topside” people in Europe and recommended that “it would be a good idea to have somebody read the national press of each country every day. It would be of great help to the President.” He also asked Lincoln, almost conspiratorially, to “please tell the President my friend [Galeazzi] came over from Rome on Sunday and talked with the important man [Pope John XXIII] on Friday and told him that he was seeing me, and the important man said that he [President Kennedy] was doing very good work and that all of his people should definitely let him alone. That order could go out if the President wants it.” The implication was that the Vatican had finally come to terms with the fact that there was a Catholic president in the White House.42
To Lyndon Johnson, who remained on much better terms with him than with his sons, Kennedy jokingly suggested “a conference on the state of French political affairs that might be held here at Antibes. . . . Our agenda would be something as follows:43
9:00 Golf
12:00 Swimming at Eden Roc
1:00 Cocktails
1:30 No Metrecal, but plenty of lamb and chicken
2:30 Nap
3:30 Talk about Khrushchev and Berlin
3:35 " " de Gaulle and Bizerte
3:40 A little ride up the mountain
6:00 Day’s agenda
6:30 A little swim
7:30 Cocktails
8:30 Dinner
10:00 Voice of America
10:15 Discussion on what everyone is doing in Washington
11:00 Sleep
“Hearing from you was a pleasure,” Johnson wrote back, “and I must say that I have never met a man with a greater a
bility to lay out an agenda for a conference. I think that after a month of such activity, we would certainly have the problems of the world solved—or at least we would be better rested and better able to solve them.”44
—
Kennedy flew home on September 4 to celebrate his seventy-third birthday with the grandchildren in Hyannis Port. “My own children,” he wrote Walter Annenberg, who wanted to get a photograph for his Philadelphia Inquirer, “seem to feel a sense of obligation to their father for permitting their children to ruin the carpets, spoil the lawn, mess up the house in good style, and so forth and so forth. So the least they can do is to bring them all to the birthday party, and hope and pray that at least their children will look good in the picture.”45
In October, he consulted with John Royal of NBC about the three-hour film of the pre-inaugural gala that he had commissioned and owned the rights to. If the network did not want to buy it, he was considering spending his own money to have it edited down to an hour or so and used “for Democratic meetings and possibly local stations.” He was also thinking about producing a record of the concert but had made no firm plans as yet. Nothing would come of either idea for a half century until, in January 2011, on the fiftieth anniversary of the inauguration, the JFK Library released footage of the gala.46
In November, Kennedy checked himself into the Lahey Clinic for his annual checkup, which found him in good health. His blood and urine tests were normal. “The electrocardiogram showed no change from all the ones you have had in recent years. I thought your general physical condition was excellent,” the examining doctor reported. “Hope you have a good Winter.”47