In April, Franklin Roosevelt, the man who led the country back from the Great Depression and on to victory in World War II, died. He was succeeded in office by Vice President Harry Truman, just months before a mildly known Missouri senator.
By month’s end, Hitler and Eva Braun were facing the end in his Berlin bunker. In San Francisco, meetings were being held to plan the postwar order. From every victorious capital came delegates to attend the founding conference of what would become the United Nations. To cover the event from a “serviceman’s” perspective, the Chicago Herald-American had hired PT boat hero Jack Kennedy.
Back in Maine, Bobby was continuing to be frustrated in his attempts to get into the war. The war in Europe ended on the 8th of May, V-E Day. Soon after, Bobby dispatched further discouraging news to friend Hackett. He’d not succeeded, after all, in his latest ambition. “Am not going to fly. I found out yesterday as I failed a test in Flight Aptitude. This, of course, hurts me, but everything bad that happens now people say it’s God’s will so I guess I will chalk that up to it also. I guess the rest of this war is going to have to be won by you and your brothers for I think the Kennedys have all about shot their bolt.”
But for the Kennedy family, there now came a stirring moment. On July 26, the U.S. Navy launched a new destroyer, the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Jean Kennedy was chosen to christen it. “My heart is with it and will stay aboard as long as I live,” Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., said.
With Hitler dead and the war in Europe over, what remained was the war in the Pacific. To end it, President Truman made the decision to use the newly developed atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The result, following a devastation the likes of which the world had never seen, was the Japanese surrender. V-J Day came on the 2nd of September.
Without telling his father, Bobby headed alone to Washington, hoping to convince Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal to release him from officers training and assign him as a regular seaman on the new ship named for his oldest brother. His request accepted, he was scheduled to report for duty in February of the new year.
It was then, in early 1946, that Bobby—now a swabby, or regular seaman—headed off on the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.’s maiden voyage in the Caribbean. It must have been an extraordinary experience, to sail aboard a destroyer bearing the name of the brother who’d been such a vital force and influence for the first twenty years of his life.
From Guantánamo Bay, he sent a sympathetic view of his shipmates, who were mostly Southerners. They possessed, he wrote family friend Lem Billings, “a lot of something a lot of those guys at Harvard lacked.” In a letter to his parents, he phrased it differently: “I certainly am meeting people with a different outlook & interests in life.”
Though his active service aboard the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. would be brief, his impulse to give up officers training and enlist as a common seaman had been a first—large—step toward being his own person.
What was hard to deal with was his sense of failure at having seen no action in the war. It counted for little that it had been largely his family’s decision and not his own. That didn’t work for him as a man. He couldn’t help feeling forever open to the charge he might have found a way to risk himself in combat, but hadn’t. There would always be that question he dreaded most, “Where were you in the fighting?”
• • •
When Bobby returned to dry land in the spring of 1946, he joined a conflict of a different sort. Few were not aware that Joseph Kennedy had long wanted his namesake, Joe Jr., to enter politics. Fate had intervened, making Jack now the bearer of that ambition. Yet what happened next was not, as often portrayed, a case of his being press-ganged into service. Bobby, as Jean observed, was the obliging one, forever wanting his father’s approval. Jack did what he wanted to do.
After his brief foray stringing for the Chicago Herald-American at the U.N. conference, Jack had realized what he wanted was to make news, not cover it. His experience in the South Pacific had changed him. “The war makes less sense to me now,” he wrote, “than it ever made and that was little enough—and I would really like—as a life’s goal—in some way at home or at some time to do something to help prevent another.”
His old friends weren’t surprised. It was only partly, the way they saw it, the acceptance of a family obligation. Here’s Lem Billings’s view: “I think a lot of people say that if Joe hadn’t died, Jack might never have gone into politics. I don’t believe this. Nothing could have kept Jack out of politics. I think this is what he had in him, and it just would have come out, no matter what.”
By the spring of 1946, when Bobby received his honorable discharge, his older brother was already headlong into his race for Congress in Massachusetts’s 11th District, which comprised Cambridge, Charlestown, and East Boston.
Jack’s courageous military service was a big advantage. Still, in the language of politics, he was a carpetbagger. “I had never lived very much in the district,” he admitted later, at the start of a planned memoir. “I had lived in New York for ten years and on top of that I had gone to Harvard, not a particularly popular institution in the 11th Congressional District.”
To overcome this handicap, he spent months walking up and down the steps of “triple-deckers,” those three-story Boston dwellings with families living one on top of the other. For larger groups, he’d pause before entering, putting on what he termed his “BP,” the Big Personality, which others would one day call his “charisma.”
No one would ever deny the benefit of his father’s bottomless war chest. Still, it was Jack himself who was the major selling point of that first campaign. And magnifying the power of his BP—which soon became more natural to him—was the local knowledge of his war record. To reinforce his appeal, of course, the Kennedy money bought saturation exposure in newspapers, on radio ads, in widely distributed campaign literature, and even newsreels featured in local theaters.
Family members threw themselves into the fray with pride and enthusiasm. The youthful vitality of his attractive sisters, especially, who were up from New York, made Jack’s home team an eye-catching bunch. Jean looked back on these early days: “Eunice and Pat and I rented an apartment on Beacon Street and took a film around. People would call up and have twelve of their friends and whomever they wanted and then we’d show the film. Instead of getting too much into the nitty-gritty of the questions because none of us were politically astute, we would say what he was like as a brother and things like that.”
Bobby Kennedy was just as excited about his brother’s campaign. His Harvard friend Kenny O’Donnell remembered it as the first time he’d ever heard him mention Jack. “I didn’t realize how Bobby worshipped him, could not stop talking about him. I think it was the first time Jack had paid any attention to him.”
In truth, Jack wasn’t as eager to have Bobby hanging around as his brother was to be a part of it all. The far-from-outgoing Bobby clearly lacked the upbeat nature for dealing either with voters or volunteers. Making an executive decision that his gung ho effort might be better off without his “Black Robert,” the candidate fobbed him onto his navy buddy Paul “Red” Fay, who’d arrived from California to pitch in.
“It’s damned nice of Bobby wanting to help,” Jack told Fay, “but I can’t see that sober, silent face breathing new vigor into the ranks.” He said the best plan was to make known to the press that the younger brother had arrived to help, but then get him quietly out of the way. “One picture of the two brothers together will show that ‘we’re all in this for Jack.’ Then you take Bobby out to the movies or whatever you want to do.”
The photo taken, Fay did as suggested and led Bobby off to a local theater that offered both a film and a live performance. Fay thoroughly enjoyed himself and couldn’t stop laughing. For his companion it was a different story. “From his expression,” Fay remembered, “he might have been paying last respects to his closest friend.”
The next of Jack’s buddies to have Bobby handed
off to him was Lem Billings, who smoothly dispatched the younger brother out to knock on doors in enemy territory. He’d chosen three wards in East Cambridge, an area where one of Jack’s several opponents was expected to dominate. It was here that Bobby’s naval experience—the ability to be at ease with people from different backgrounds—came into its own. Instead of doing what was expected, appealing to actual registered voters, Bobby won neighborhood fans by playing softball with the local kids. By being himself, the candidate’s brother managed to subvert the reputation of his family. Said a local political figure, “It had the effect of proving the Kennedys weren’t snobs.”
Bobby, it turned out, had made another conquest. On a group skiing trip to Quebec that Christmas, his sister Jean had brought along her roommate Ethel Skakel from the Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in New York City. She had noticed Bobby with more than casual interest. “Wow!” is how she remembered him on first sight. On weekends that spring, she again joined the Kennedys, this time, to help in Jack’s election. The campaign “was really fun,” she remembered. “We’d ride up to Boston and lick stamps.” But she also put in time, when he was around, keeping an eye out for Bobby. Unfortunately for her, “he took a left turn” and started dating her sister. “Ah, that was a black period,” she ruefully admitted.
Ken O’Donnell’s reaction when Bobby introduced him to his older brother was less breathless. “He asked me to work on the campaign. I said yes, but never followed through. I wasn’t that interested in him politically. I just didn’t think he had much future in politics.”
Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., then a state legislator representing Cambridge, had even less interest in the young Kennedy now running so vigorously, and so visibly. He was backing Jack’s top rival, former Cambridge mayor Mike Neville, a political ally. Finally meeting Jack for the first time, Tip was incredulous: “I couldn’t believe this skinny, pasty-faced kid was a candidate for anything!”
In Tip O’Neill’s old-school world, politics required an approved rise in the ranks, time loyally served, dues paid, and credits amassed. You didn’t just come walking in one day, looking boyish and carried aloft by Dad’s money, and ask to be elected a Member of the United States Congress. War hero or not.
Tip was far from alone among his fellow Dems and their supporters in his disapproval. Watching the daily outpourings of cash spent on Jack, the backers of one candidate, Joe Russo, began pinning $20 bills to their jackets and calling them “Kennedy Buttons.” This mockery would cost him. Locating another Joe Russo, the Kennedy operation got him to put his name on the ballot, too—making for a confusing pair of Joe Russos and siphoning off votes from the original.
But when it came to getting his own name on the ballot, Jack nearly didn’t. When the deadline for filing voter petitions of candidacy arrived and then passed, the crucial documents remained in a stack atop a filing cabinet in the campaign headquarters. It was Red Fay who suddenly spotted them after having seen a late-edition newspaper item reporting John Kennedy had failed to file. It was 6:30 p.m. The government offices were closed. Here’s Fay’s account of what happened next: “Then, very quietly, the candidate and some loyal public retainers went down, opened up the proper office and filed the papers.”
In the end, what counted for more than the middle-of-the-night saves, the dirty tricks such as fielding phony candidates, or even the bankroll being spent, was a simple, gripping story told by a masterful writer. In The New Yorker for June 14, 1944, the young John Hersey wrote “Survival,” chronicling the saga of PT-109 and its commanding officer, Lieutenant (junior grade) John F. Kennedy, who’d made such an extraordinary effort to keep his crew together in a desperate situation. Abridged in the Reader’s Digest, the article was reprinted by the Kennedy campaign and mailed first class to every household in the 11th Congressional District.
His story set Jack completely apart from the other three candidates for the nomination. None of the others had done anything like it. Only he had the war record, the looks, the charm, and, with all that going for him, the willingness, even with his often crippling back, to climb the stairs of every triple-decker in the district.
Though only twenty-nine, Jack’s medical records had already grown voluminous. And now the strains of the effort he’d been making drove him to the edge of his endurance. “He was as thin as a straw,” said one onlooker who watched him marching in the annual Bunker Hill Day Parade, held the day before the primary. “We didn’t think he’d last the parade.” And he didn’t. Near collapse, he wound up being taken to the hospital.
The next night, when the results came in Jack had taken 42 percent of the vote and, with it, the Democratic nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives. With few Republican voters in the 11th District, he had, in effect, won a seat in the United States Congress, the same one his mother’s father had held.
In September Bobby returned to Harvard, now as a regular student. He was given credit for the two years he’d served in the V-12 officer-training program, leaving him just his junior and senior years to go. But what he cared most about right now was making the football team.
At five-ten and 165, he was an unlikely candidate. But he made it on grit. He would come to practice an hour early, stay an hour later. Knocked down, he would get up again. In friend and biographer Arthur Schlesinger’s words, “His real field of concentration at Harvard was football.”
Though their father had been a star of Harvard baseball, and Jack had been a splendid swimmer, both winning letters in their sport, none of the Kennedys had won that distinction in football. Jack wasn’t healthy enough for the game, and Joe had been kept on the bench in the all-important 1937 Harvard-Yale contest, which kept him from earning his letter. Bobby was determined to do what neither older brothers had done: win that “H” in football.
Ken O’Donnell was certain to get one. His older brother Cleo was captain of the Harvard team in the 1946 season. The brothers had grown up in Worcester where their father had for a decade coached Holy Cross, a team that had just made it to the Orange Bowl. Ken and Bobby had quickly found they had much in common. “I didn’t even realize he was Ambassador Kennedy’s son,” O’Donnell said later. “I read in the Boston Post one day that his son had done very well in a scrimmage.” They shared, incidentally, an antipathy toward Harvard coach Dick Harlow. Bobby couldn’t forgive him for keeping his oldest brother off the field in the Yale game. Ken dismissed Harlow as nothing more than a drillmaster, an erratic one at that.
Like his brother Jack—likely because of it—Bobby was accepted into Spee, a final club. But upon seeing Spee reject another Irish Catholic classmate—he lacked Bobby’s Milton Academy stamp of approval—he resigned, and began spending his social time at the Varsity Club hanging around with O’Donnell and the other jocks.
“Bobby began to meet other kinds of people, people who didn’t give a damn who he was,” O’Donnell recalled. “For Bobby Kennedy the choice of friends could have been very simple. He was obviously one of the more desirable social types. I mean, all the girls would like to have gone out with Robert Kennedy. He was a handsome boy then and very wealthy and from a well-known family. But he made his choice clearly from the beginning. He made a decision about the fellows he wanted to be with, a very irreverent, disinterested group of fellows just out of the service. They had been all over the world. One fellow who hung around with us was a fighter pilot in China who’d just come back from serving with General Chennault.”
It should be added here that Ken O’Donnell himself was a figure of heroic stature. In World War II, he’d flown numerous missions over Europe as a bombardier. In one legendary exploit, he’d climbed down into the open bay to loosen a bomb that had gotten stuck. For a few wild moments, he’d been hanging out there over the open sky.
“At first they didn’t like him very much,” O’Donnell reported of the guys to whom he introduced Bobby. “They didn’t want to pay any attention to him; they didn’t think he was that good a football playe
r, and they thought he was just a rich kid who happened to be hanging around. But after about six months, he became one of the group.”
As O’Donnell described them: “These were fellows returning from the war, ones who could never have gone to Harvard before but had been recruited as football players. Ten or twelve of us lived in the Varsity Club. Bobby spent most of his waking hours there.”
His friend also proved himself on the field. “I can’t think of anyone who had less right to make varsity than Bobby,” O’Donnell said. But he found a way, working his way up from the lowest squad. “He’d come in from his end like a wild Indian. If you were blocking Bobby, you’d knock him down, but he’d be up again going after the play. He never let up. He just made himself better.”
He faced serious competition for a slot on the team. It was before the Ivy League was formed, when Harvard was still offering athletic scholarships, still engaged in big-time football. The team went 7 and 2 that season, reaching 18th, at one point, in the national rankings.
Bobby’s new crowd talked often about politics. Ken was a steadfast defender of the New Deal and Roosevelt. Bobby was just as tough on offense, taking his father’s skeptical position on FDR.
In November, at the end of the season, Bobby invited the entire football team out to Hyannis Port, the occasion being his twenty-first birthday. In recalling the scene, O’Donnell paints a vivid picture: “Quite bluntly, they weren’t the type of fellows Joseph P. Kennedy was used to his son associating with—or any of his children. I think he was a bit taken aback. Jack’s friends were the Lem Billings type: elite, educated. Bobby’s crowd, myself included, were rough, tough fellows, returned war vets, hardened by what we’d seen.”
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