With the breaking of the Rosenberg story, the country’s suspicions about internal threats became real. That November, Congressman Jack Kennedy, speaking to a seminar at the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration, offered his own opinion on Joe McCarthy. “He may have something,” he told his listeners.
• • •
That spring, Bobby had been elected president of the UVA Student Legal Forum. Now, in the fall, he invited his father to address the group. The talk Ambassador Kennedy gave showed once again his readiness to spit in the face of mainstream opinion. Echoing his pre–World War II isolationism, he called for the U.S. to withdraw from Korea, end its occupation of West Berlin, and, for all intents and purposes, let the Communists have Europe. Having opposed Roosevelt when it came to stopping Hitler’s march across the face of Europe, he saw no reason to support Truman in his efforts to aid countries targeted by the Communists.
Not surprisingly, a number of Bobby’s classmates—many of them returning World War II veterans proud of their service—took exception. Objecting to the values Joe stood for, The Cavalier Daily, the university’s daily newspaper, ran a derisive editorial titled “Mr. Kennedy, the Dinosaur Is Dead.” Furious, Bobby set off for its offices ready to punch out the author. The only thing stopping him was that the person he confronted denied that he’d been the one to write it.
The other invitees that year were a varied group, including Justice William O. Douglas, Joe McCarthy, Arthur Krock, and brother Jack. In the spring of 1951, his final semester, Bobby took the bold step of inviting the distinguished United Nations envoy Ralph Bunche to speak. The previous December, Bunche had been the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
On hearing of what he’d done, a number of Bobby’s classmates, many of them Southerners, objected. They feared this would be a taint on their future—likely, political—careers. And Bobby could see this. In a rage, he called them “gutless.”
It soon became clear to Bunche that if he were to come, his audience would, under state law, be segregated. At this stage, he informed the student organization that he wouldn’t speak to such a group. Bobby’s response was an eloquent five-page letter to the university president, Colgate W. Darden. Here is a key passage:
Ever since its inception the lectures sponsored by the Student Legal Forum, while primarily designed for law students, have been open to the public at large. At no time did it occur to us that it would be possible or desirable to have Dr. Bunche lecture under any other arrangement. Indeed it did not appear to us then, and does not occur to us now, that there is any problem calculated to embarrass the University, unless the University should decide that it is necessary to create the issue itself by invoking an educational segregation policy which, as we shall attempt to point out later, is, in this instance, legally indefensible, morally wrong, and fraught with consequences calculated to do great harm to the University. There is no question but that Dr. Bunche will feel compelled to cancel his engagement if an educational segregation policy is invoked.
He went on to make his argument in Cold War terms:
We have previously suggested that the failure to invoke an illegal segregation policy is not likely to create any issue of consequence. On the other hand the invocation of such a policy is, we believe, calculated to harm the University, the Commonwealth of Virginia and, because of its propaganda potential, the United States. Publicity attending Dr. Bunche’s lecture is necessarily limited in its appeal. Publicity attending the cancellation of his lecture is not so limited. The implications are obvious. At a time when the United States is battling a daily propaganda war with Russia, the racial issue would probably be spread across the headlines in its most damaging aspect. We believe the results would be catastrophic.
Darden agreed, ruling that seating at the Bunche lecture would be fully integrated.
Despite Bobby’s prediction of three to four hundred people coming to the lecture, fifteen hundred turned up to hear Bunche make campus history. Afterward he stayed the night with the Kennedys. It was the “safest place,” Ethel said, even if it didn’t end up seeming that way. “They threw things at the house all night.”
In a pair of final-year papers, Bobby revealed his more conservative tendencies. One of the papers dealt with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution, both of which limit the power of the federal government. He accused the Supreme Court of failing to honor these restraints on the power of Washington. He argued the need to restore “effective control of the great Leviathan, the federal government.”
His other major project that last year looked at Yalta. He charged Franklin Roosevelt with forfeiting our country’s moral position by yielding over Eastern Europe. He called FDR’s concessions “the final step from which there was no salvation.” By allowing Stalin to subjugate Poland, whose sovereignty had been the cause of World War II itself, America had behaved “to our everlasting dishonor.”
Eunice, Pat, Bobby, Jack, and Jean together at Senate campaign headquarters.
CHAPTER SIX
BROTHER
“Every politician in Massachusetts was mad at Bobby after 1952, but we had the best organization in history.”
—JACK KENNEDY
That September, John F. Kennedy was readying himself for the next step of his career, preparing to run for the U.S. Senate against the Republican incumbent, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
In Massachusetts, the name “Cabot” produced an automatic respect, its origins in the state stretching back to the Mayflower. The family’s political lineage had begun with George Cabot, chosen to represent Massachusetts as U.S. senator from 1791 to 1796. The current senator owed his first name to his grandfather, Henry Cabot Lodge, who’d been a friend of Teddy Roosevelt’s, and represented his state in the United States Congress for thirty-seven years—six in the House of Representatives, thirty-one in the Senate.
The current Lodge had followed his grandfather into both of those chambers. He’d first served as a congressman in Washington for two terms starting in 1932. Moving to the Senate in 1936, he was an Army Reserve officer who went on active duty in 1941, despite still holding elected office. In 1942, his tank unit, fighting in North Africa with the British Eighth Army, was the first to engage with Hitler’s Afrika Korps.
Reelected in 1942 and still in uniform, a directive issued by President Roosevelt forced him to pick between politics and the active military. He chose front-line duty, becoming the first senator to do so since the Civil War. Serving in Europe, he won acclaim in 1944 by singlehandedly capturing a four-man German patrol. Ending the war as a lieutenant colonel, he returned home and bravely resumed his political career.
This aim required him to take on Senator David I. Walsh, a four-term incumbent. Lodge managed not only to defeat his Irish Catholic opponent, but to carry the Democratic stronghold of Boston. It was solid evidence that here was a patrician Yankee who enjoyed an unusual popularity among Irish voters.
With the approach of the 1952 election year, Lodge had enhanced his national prestige with his successful recruitment of General Dwight Eisenhower. He persuaded the Supreme Commander of the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization to enter the presidential race as a Republican.
Could John F. Kennedy beat such a man as Lodge? Historical precedent seemed to predict otherwise. In 1916, Jack’s politician grandfather, John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, had lost that year’s Massachusetts Senate race to the first Henry Cabot Lodge.
Despite Lodge’s seeming advantages, the younger man believed he could match them with his own. One significant card he held was the strength of his party, with FDR and Truman both having carried Massachusetts. As Jack had recently pointed out on the weekly news program Meet the Press—then in its infancy—it was “essentially a Democratic state.” That electoral truth meant Jack Kennedy, still only thirty-four, was able to see a fallback position. He could either go for the Senate now, or else run for governor and await the next chance.
What irritated him, however,
was the hard fact that it wasn’t up to him which office he might run for. Governor Paul Dever, a Democrat now serving his second term in the State House, still hoped to follow the career route taken by an earlier governor, Leverett Saltonstall. He wanted to move on to the United States Senate. But Dever had a genuine dilemma: if he made the Senate run against the formidable Lodge, it could become a career-ender. On the other hand, if he took the safer route and ran for reelection, he could well be stuck in place.
Kennedy couldn’t make his move until Dever made his.
Whichever the governor’s choice, Kennedy had great faith he could pull off a statewide win. His easy reelections in 1948 and 1950—with his heavily Democratic district never in doubt—had allowed him the freedom to go out into the commonwealth and make himself known. He’d seen the way voters responded to him; if he could get to them, he believed he could win them over.
Jack’s increasing focus was on foreign policy. To give himself credible experience as well as to seem more senatorial, he went off on a month-long trip early in 1951—starting in England and ending in West Germany—to study Western European rearmament. Then, to further strengthen his grip on the world situation, his father staked him that fall to a seven-week tour through the Mideast and the Far East. It would be a 25,000-mile trip that would take him to Israel, then Iran, Pakistan, India, Singapore, Thailand, and Indochina, finishing up in Korea, where the war the U.S. was fighting was in its second year.
Rather than have Jack set out alone, however, Joe Kennedy insisted that Bobby accompany him. This was far from welcome news to Jack, an extra piece of extra baggage he didn’t think he needed. As far as he was concerned, brother Bob was still “a pain in the ass.” But here was Bobby, married hardly a year and with a two-month-old daughter, always ready to answer his father’s call.
Reaching Vietnam, five years into a war for independence, the travelers couldn’t venture safely beyond Saigon for fear of the Vietminh insurgents. The stubborn fervor of their fight to liberate themselves from their French colonial masters impressed the Kennedy brothers. Had a fair election been called, Bobby could see Vietminh leader Ho Chi Minh taking 70 percent of the vote. Always drawn to underdog causes, he learned—and it struck at his own patriotism—that the Vietnamese now regarded the U.S., who supported the French, as equally their enemy.
En route to Korea, they were forced to abandon their schedule. Jack suddenly had become frighteningly ill. It was his Addison’s disease. Bobby immediately took charge. With his brother running a dangerously high fever, the only choice was to make an emergency detour. “We flew to the military hospital in Okinawa and he had a temperature of over 106 degrees,” Bobby recalled years later. “They didn’t think he would live.”
Under enormous pressure in such a frightening emergency so far from home, the younger brother proved himself quick-thinking, resourceful, and, above all, protective. As Jack’s condition appeared to worsen, Bobby did what was natural for him, praying all night for Jack to survive. For the second time in his life—the first had been the Addison’s episode four years earlier, in England—John Kennedy was given the last rites of the Church.
In February 1952, Bobby Kennedy, having signed on as an attorney in the Criminal Division, was presenting to a Brooklyn grand jury the Justice Department’s case against some former Truman officials charged with corruption. At the time, this mission constituted, as he later said, “one of the biggest tax prosecutions ever held.” Meanwhile, Jack, now recovered, was back in Washington, still unsure of his next political move.
Thanks to Bobby, Ken O’Donnell was working for Jack. Married in 1947 and the father of three children, he’d spent a year in law school after graduating from Harvard, then becoming a salesman for a Boston paper company. Always an avid student of Massachusetts politics, he was paying attention to the possibility of Jack’s going for the Senate and calculating the odds. Front and center, he saw, were Lodge’s solid electoral strengths: his strong statewide organization, his first-rate staff, and his high reputation for integrity. “He was a war veteran, he was smart, rich, handsome, and a Yankee politician who could deal with the Irish. The Irish liked him and he appeared to like them.”
But O’Donnell’s assessment of Lodge’s many positives didn’t paint the whole picture. He understood that the political landscape in Massachusetts was changing. And he sensed that his fellow World War II veterans were looking for an alternative to what amounted mostly to the same old choice—the patrician Lodge or Saltonstall model and the machine-backed hacks and crooks typified by Boston’s four-time mayor James Michael Curley, who’d served part of his mayoralty in prison. Speaker Tip O’Neill, Jr., whom I worked for in the 1980s, once gave me an insider’s estimate of Curley. “He was crooked even by the standards of those days.”
Young guys like Ken, with roots in the working class, had come back from the war and taken advantage of the GI Bill. An FDR-created federal initiative, it was a program that made an enormous difference to the postwar American world. Enacted as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, it offered returning servicemen a college education, something their fathers and mothers never had.
These voters, O’Donnell thought, who no longer slotted into the category of “reliable” Democrat, might well find a figure like John Kennedy appealing. Jack seemed to meld the new and the old, emerging with his own fresh tradition. “He started getting our attention because he made statements and did things that weren’t the norm for politicians in Massachusetts,” was how O’Donnell looked at it.
However, when Ken went to the meeting Bobby had set up, he was still in the dark about the brother’s intentions. The question hanging in the air was which office Jack would be going for. It was a source of more than a little irritation to him when O’Donnell raised it.
“I’m seriously considering running,” he confirmed to Ken. “But I’m not sure what exactly I’m going to do.” When O’Donnell pressed him further, he watched the congressman quickly turn cold, not liking to be asked a question to which he himself didn’t know the answer.
To defeat Lodge, the Jack Kennedy campaign needed to win a two-front war: excite those new-generation voters, adding them to the ethnic, working-class base any Massachusetts Democratic candidate already counted upon. It would need to attract those voters ready to support the popular Eisenhower for president, convincing them to split their ticket and send Congressman John F. Kennedy to the Senate.
Only in that way might young Jack win in a state that had consistently placed its confidence in Henry Cabot Lodge. It was clear, too, that Lodge would now make every effort to benefit from his close ties to the Republican now likely headed to the White House.
Jack’s campaign so far consisted mainly of the speeches he gave each weekend to whatever groups across the state would have him. He’d gotten these speaking engagements with that most basic of appeals, by offering to pay his own expenses. Afterward, he’d return to his Bowdoin Street apartment and head straight to the wall where he’d hung a large Massachusetts map. Sticking a pin into each locale where he’d now introduced himself sustained his confidence that he was making progress.
The problem with the campaign—O’Donnell could see the trouble right away—was that no one was in charge. You had Joe Kennedy, who was paying the bills. He’d occasionally show up and bark orders. And then you had Jack, who’d fly back from Washington. When neither was around, the headquarters went lifeless.
Mark Dalton, who’d held the title of campaign manager in the 1946 race, assumed he’d now get it again. Primarily a speechwriter, however, he was incapable of the necessary leadership. Most vitally, he couldn’t stand up to Joe Kennedy. Whenever the senior Kennedy made an appearance at the headquarters, Dalton simply avoided his glare. He was afraid to take even the minimal step toward building a statewide organization, reluctant even to begin naming “secretaries”—those community figures who’d be the links in the Kennedy-for-Senate network.
Nothing, in other words, was getting do
ne—for the basic reason that Jack himself was waiting for someone to come along and take charge of the campaign even as his dad was ensuring no one else did. The basic trouble was that Joseph P. Kennedy thought he understood politics. He didn’t. His notion of getting a political campaign up and running was to hire a roomful of campaign veterans and keep them under his thumb. But intimidation wasn’t the same as leadership. What he lacked was any strategic vision. With all his smarts for making money, he had no idea what moved the voter.
Except for Jack’s weekend forays into the state, the only campaign events being planned were the Kennedy “Teas.” Back in 1946, a first tea party hosted by the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s and his wife had been a grand success. Their war-hero son had been the star attraction on the receiving line—and now, that formula was being repeated.
But while the Teas were extraordinarily effective, they were a tactic, not a strategy. It was still necessary to get more happening. The postwar landscape was different, offering tremendous opportunity, but it needed to be cultivated. There were those upwardly mobile World War II vets now building new lives in those mostly Republican towns like Braintree and Malden, Melrose and Weymouth. A well-targeted approach would be needed to make them Kennedy supporters. The campaign needed a stronger taskmaster to help organize this, along with meeting its other goals.
Bobby Kennedy Page 8