Bobby Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  “At one point, Bobby Kennedy almost ran against me for Congress,” Tip O’Neill wrote in his memoirs, Man of the House. “There was a rumor that he’d been thinking of running against Tom Dodd in Connecticut. When Dodd heard about it, he confronted Kennedy and asked if the story was true. ‘No,’ said Bobby, ‘but I am looking for a seat, and I may run up in Tip O’Neill’s district.’

  “I stormed into Jack’s office in the Senate. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘Tom Dodd says that Bobby may run against me. I’ve always been good friends with you and your father. If Bobby runs, you’ll never be able to outspend me. I can raise a quarter of a million dollars. And if you people spend more than that there’ll be a backlash. And what about loyalty? I’m telling you, Jack, if Bobby runs against me, it will be the dirtiest campaign you ever saw.’ ”

  The next morning Jack Kennedy phoned him. “I talked with my old man,” he said, “and these are his exact words: ‘Bobby will not be a candidate in Tip O’Neill’s district, and that’s all there is to it. Tip is a friend of the family.’  ”

  That summer, with his work on the arms trade concluded, Bobby gave notice he’d be leaving his job. He’d already made clear his strong feelings about the path to “disaster” he saw McCarthy on, including his refusal to jettison Cohn.

  Please accept my resignation as assistant counsel and deputy staff director of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, effective as of the close of business July 31, 1953.

  With the filing in the Senate of the subcommittee report on trade with the Soviet bloc, the task to which I have devoted my time since coming with the subcommittee has been completed. I am submitting my resignation at this time as it is my intention to enter the private practice of law at an early date.

  Senators on the permanent subcommittee were quick with their praise for Bobby’s work. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democratic senator from the state of Washington, emphasized his objectivity and careful documentation: “I was particularly impressed with the thorough, impartial and fair way in which you handled all matters coming to your attention. In all your investigations you were most diligent in adhering to the facts.” The implicit—anti-Cohn—message was clear.

  It had been a summer of two Kennedy weddings, beginning in May with Eunice’s to Sargent Shriver, then working for her father. Joe McCarthy’s wedding gift was a silver jewel box engraved “From the one who lost out.” The second was Jack’s in early September to Jacqueline Bouvier. One of the year’s major social events, it took place in Newport, Rhode Island, with six hundred guests attending and Archbishop Richard Cushing performing the ceremony. Bobby Kennedy was best man as his brother had been for him.

  There was another marriage to come. Two weeks after Jack’s, Joseph McCarthy wed his staff researcher Jean Kerr at Washington’s St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Eunice Shriver was one of the bridesmaids. Roy Cohn was an usher. Joe Kennedy and his sons Jack and Bobby all attended, as did his daughter Pat. Richard Nixon was there, too, although President Eisenhower made excuses. Outside the cathedral two thousand McCarthy supporters waited to cheer the couple.

  McCarthy’s honeymoon in the British Virgin Islands was soon cut short. He was called back to Washington to review new evidence his staff had collected on Communist infiltration of the United States Army. This information supported his current agenda. He’d recently been accusing the army of “coddling Communists,” of failing to remove security risks, and, also, of harassing Roy Cohn’s friend Schine, who’d been drafted that summer.

  Despite his own reservations about Schine, McCarthy put in a call on his behalf to Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens—who’d been a guest at his wedding—with a special plea prompted by Cohn’s distress. “I’d like to ask you a personal favor. For God’s sake, don’t assign him back on my committee. He’s a good boy, but there’s nothing indispensable about him. If he could get off weekends—that’s one of the few things I’ve seen Roy completely unreasonable about. He thinks Dave should be a general and work from the penthouse of the Waldorf!”

  McCarthy’s standing in the Gallup Poll was at its highest ever. Sixty-two percent of Republicans approved his combative stance against the army; only 19 percent disapproved. He even held a modest edge among Democrats: 39 to 38. When it came to Catholics, 58 percent backed him; only 23 percent disapproved.

  The subcommittee’s investigation now centered on the Army Signal Corps installation at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where McCarthy had zeroed in on Dr. Irving Peress. Just promoted to major in the Army Dental Corps, he’d been identified by subcommittee research as a Communist. In November McCarthy was angered to learn Peress had been given an honorable discharge. His battle with the army had begun.

  For his part, Bobby Kennedy, who’d resigned from the subcommittee, was at loose ends. Facing no financial need to make a living, he still needed a job, and a purpose. Beckoned by his father, he went to work for the commission headed by former president Herbert Hoover—to promote efficiency and economy in the federal government—on which Joe Kennedy sat as a member.

  “He had a lot of frustration in his Hoover Commission job” is how Lem Billings saw this period. “He’d decided to dedicate himself to the government, and he hadn’t found his niche, and he didn’t know where he was going to find it. This made him, at the time, an unhappy, angry young man.”

  It was then, said Billings, when “many people formed their ideas about him—people who didn’t know him, who met him in Washington at parties and sometimes found him antagonistic and argumentative. It was because he was frustrated inside. He was filled with so many things he wanted to do, but he felt he wasn’t accomplishing anything. He was getting nowhere. He just didn’t see his future.”

  Suddenly, a door opened. The Democratic senators on McCarthy’s subcommittee had lost patience with the chairman’s high-handedness. They especially resented his exclusive control over the hiring of counsel. To force a change, the Democratic members boycotted the current round of hearings, threatening to remain away until McCarthy agreed to share power over staff appointments.

  In January 1954, McCarthy agreed to give the Democratic senators a minority counsel, a clerk, and a voice in planning the subcommittee agenda. Arkansas’s John McClellan, the senior Democrat, used his new authority to hire Bobby Kennedy as Democratic counsel. In Roy Cohn’s view, Kennedy’s chief reason for now returning to the committee was to get him.

  Bobby’s father, who never wavered in his support for McCarthy, was proud of his younger son’s new ferocity, a pride that no doubt included any open warring with the formidable Cohn. “Put your mind at rest about that,” he reassured a friend, former secretary of defense Robert Lovett, who was worried about the “tough company” Bobby was keeping. “Bobby’s just as tough as a bootheel.”

  With all his hostility to Cohn and objections to the chairman’s tactics, Bobby had become close to Joe McCarthy personally. “You can’t believe it,” remembered Ethel Kennedy, swept up by the memories. “We’d go over there for drinks, Joe’s house.” Looking at her daughter Kathleen—sitting there with us—she told her, “You were a year old. You loved him and he loved you. We’d go over, and we’d be carrying you, and the minute they’d open the door, Joe would take you away. I was very happy holding you, but he’d say, ‘No, Kathleen’s mine.’  ”

  The conflict the zealous senator had begun with the U.S. Army was heating up. For him now, the rallying cry was: Who Promoted Peress? Angering him further was the fact that it had been Peress’s distinguished commanding officer, Brigadier General Ralph Zwicker, who’d just approved the dentist’s honorable discharge. “General, you are not fit to wear the uniform,” Joe McCarthy said with contempt in a closed hearing. “You’re shielding Communist conspirators.”

  With that outburst from McCarthy, a line had been crossed for Army Secretary Stevens. Zwicker was a highly respected field officer who’d come out of World War II with two Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart, and France’s Croix de Guerre. Ste
vens wasn’t going to let McCarthy browbeat such a man.

  “Just go ahead and try, Robert,” McCarthy now threatened when the army secretary dared resist letting Zwicker testify before his subcommittee. “I’m going to kick the brains out of anyone who protects Communists. Just go ahead. I will guarantee that you will live to regret it.”

  Secretary Stevens now counterattacked. He released a printed list detailing each attempt Roy Cohn had made at intimidating the army in order to gain special treatment for the recently inducted David Schine. Cohn’s insistence that his protégé be given a direct commission as an officer was just one of the preposterous benefits he’d demanded.

  To Bobby, the Senate Caucus Room had become a chamber of bad feelings. “Every night when I come home from work I feel my neck to see if my head is still attached,” he joked.

  Ken O’Donnell saw his friend’s conflict. “He thought,” reported O’Donnell, “that there were unfair aspects to the criticism of the senator. If Bobby had a weakness, that was it—whenever somebody was in real trouble or was being unfairly treated, then he was for him.”

  But he was also aware of Bobby’s anger “at the way they were treating witnesses. He was incensed at the Cohn-Schine investigations, and thought they’d lost all sense of direction.”

  One example of the subcommittee’s obsessive yet careless pursuit of its targets was the McCarthy panel’s handling that March of Annie Lee Moss. A teletype operator in the Army Signal Corps, this forty-nine-year-old African American widow was being portrayed as a known Communist who now had access to coded intelligence messages.

  Part of the evidence being used against her involved a man named Rob Hall who’d been known to regularly deliver her a copy of the Daily Worker. Bobby realized something was amiss when a reporter tipped him off that the fellow bringing around the newspaper was African American. Robert Hall, the known Communist activist and editor at the Daily Worker, was white.

  The following is from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing on March 11, 1954. First, Annie Moss is asked a question by Roy Cohn.

  “Isn’t it a fact that you regularly received the Daily Worker . . . through Rob Hall, one of the leading Communists in the District of Columbia?”

  But Bobby now had a question for Cohn himself.

  “When you spoke about the union organizer, you spoke about Rob Hall, and I think we all felt that he was a colored gentleman.”

  Cohn: I was not talking about a union organizer, Bob. I was talking about a Communist organizer.

  Kennedy: Evidently, it was a different Rob Hall.

  Cohn: I don’t know that it was. Our information is that it was the same Rob Hall.

  Committee chairman John McClellan: If one is black and the other is white, there is a difference.

  Cohn: I think that might be something we should look into and get some information on.

  Kennedy: I think so, too.

  That same month CBS’s Edward R. Murrow offered a special presentation of his See It Now program, entitled “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.” Invoking the credibility he’d earned as an American broadcaster in wartime London—with bombs falling around him—he made a patriotic case against McCarthy. He’d become, he said, a liability to our side in the Cold War.

  “We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay among our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies.”

  McCarthy loyalists were defiant. A week after Murrow’s CBS report had aired, the Wisconsin senator spoke to 1,200 men at a St. Patrick’s Day dinner in Chicago, reminding his audience that the saint they honored “drove the snakes out of Ireland and the snakes didn’t like his methods either.”

  “Traitors,” he told the admiring crowd, “are not gentlemen.”

  The ongoing conflict between McCarthy and Secretary Stevens had now reached the point of reckoning. Serious charges had been laid against the army in its handling of the Peress case. But what about the investigating subcommittee’s own conduct in regard to Schine? Its chairman now stood accused of abusing his power on behalf of a subordinate. That charge also hung in the air.

  With McCarthy attacking the army and the army firing back, the consensus formed that both those disputes needed to be resolved, and done so publicly. It was decided that the subcommittee itself would be the proper tribunal, but that McCarthy must remove himself from the chair. The Army-McCarthy hearings began that April. With Democratic leader Lyndon Johnson pushing hard, the decision was made to have them televised live. Detesting McCarthy, the Texan sensed the wind was about to shift.

  The American Broadcasting Company decided to cover the proceedings in the Senate Caucus Room gavel to gavel. For thirty-six days ABC’s daily coverage became a national obsession. The hearings addressed both McCarthy’s charges against the army and the army’s against him, specifically whether he or his staff had pressured the army to give special treatment and privileges to Schine. McCarthy would be both accuser and accused.

  Though Bobby Kennedy was the senator’s first choice to be chief counsel for the hearing, Senator McClellan objected.

  I still remember how that period seemed to me, even though I was only eight. I’d arrive home from school to find our new black-and-white Admiral TV tuned to those hearings. Something unusual was happening. Looking back, I realize my very Irish mom didn’t want to miss a minute of it. She wasn’t rooting for the army.

  The hearings began in late April. Two moments stand out. Weeks into the proceedings, Senator McCarthy made the mistake of going after Fred Fisher, a young law associate of Joseph Welch, the army’s counsel. The charge against Welch’s colleague was his membership in the National Lawyers Guild, a group tagged by the U.S. attorney general as a Communist front.

  Shaking his head in exasperated disbelief, Welch was now on the attack: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy persisted, Welch broke in with a simple plea, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” If the skilled trial lawyer had rehearsed his performance, as some believed he had, it took nothing from the drama and the moral power of his indictment.

  At this, the Caucus Room audience burst into applause. That loud clapping signaled a change in the national atmosphere: Joe McCarthy was headed downward.

  Two days later, it was the hostility between Bobby Kennedy and Roy Cohn that seized attention. With Kennedy assisting him, Scoop Jackson began to interrogate Cohn about his friend Schine’s qualifications. His questioning focused on a scheme Schine had devised for the U.S. government to promote democracy worldwide. One part of the “Schine Plan” was to approach fraternal organizations such as Elks Lodges for help. Jackson, enjoying himself, asked whether there were any Elks Clubs in Pakistan, for example. The unlikelihood of this drew an appreciative roar from the crowd.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Senator McCarthy jumped in, coming to Cohn’s rescue. It’s better, he declared, than “putting out the thirty-thousand-odd books written by Communist authors that we found in our investigations.” He was referring to the purge Cohn and Schine had conducted the year before in Europe.

  But as Jackson kept asking questions about Schine’s pet project, his broad smile remained. This drove Cohn beyond his boiling point. When the chair called a recess, he darted for Kennedy, where he jabbed a file in front of his face. “Tell Jackson we’re going to get him on Monday,” Cohn warned. “We’ve got letters he wrote to the White House on behalf of two known Communists.”

  “Tell him yourself,” Kennedy shot back. “Don’t threaten me. You’ve got a fucking nerve threatening me.”

  The taunting was now turning physical. Seeing Cohn cock his arm, bystanders stepped in
and stopped him. Bobby had gotten to his rival and knew it.

  Ken O’Donnell, watching the hearings in the Bellevue Hotel bar—a time-honored political hangout by the Boston State House—was startled by the response of the crowd. “Remember, it was a group there watching—Boston Irish politicians, some truck drivers, and hardworking guys—most tinged with anti-Semitism. So Cohn wasn’t the type of fellow you’d think they’d like. Yet every single person in that bar cheered and yelled and hoped he’d belt Bobby one.”

  My dad, whose parents were English and Northern-Irish Protestant, had a more measured view of McCarthy than Mom. Just as Jack Kennedy had, he thought he was onto something—yet was now convinced he’d gone too far. He was hardly alone in this estimate. Polls showed the senator’s national approval had dropped 15 points from 50 percent down to 35.

  Despite Bobby’s continued personal feelings for McCarthy, it now fell to him to draft the Democratic report on the Army-McCarthy hearings. It would become the basic record of senatorial misconduct for later use by the entire Senate in its proceedings against McCarthy. Clearly action needed to be taken. After weeks of insults, taunts, threats, and other examples of juvenile behavior, the Senate looked like anything but “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

  What Bobby wrote indicted McCarthy for “attacking the character and impugning the loyalty” of Secretary Stevens and others. He focused on Roy Cohn’s hectoring of the army on Schine’s behalf. On this score, however, he did not exonerate Cohn’s boss. “The Senator cannot escape responsibility for the misconduct of Cohn. The Senate should take action to correct this situation.”

  The ball was now rolling. In August a Select Committee divided evenly between Republicans and Democrats was asked to recommend the appropriate sanctions. The Senate was now moving to resolve the McCarthy situation by a vote to censure. For Jack Kennedy, this presented political danger. While McCarthy’s popularity around the country had been battered, he remained an admired champion in Kennedy’s backyard, with an entrenched appeal that more than matched Jack’s own. “Hell,” he told Arthur Schlesinger in 1953, “half my voters in Massachusetts look on McCarthy as a hero.”