by Garry Wills
Besides the competition with other males, and especially his father, there was a testing of himself, his potency. Did he “have it” for girl after girl? Could he maintain the numbers? To understand this discipline of lust, it is useful to turn again to Montaigne, that shrewd observer of sexual behavior, who says the ill or aging sometimes must rely on the tickle of lust to reanimate them. This was especially true of the chronically ailing Kennedy, who had the physical assertiveness of the partly crippled.
It is becoming more obvious as time passes, and the sequestration of medical records is pierced, that Robert Kennedy was not exaggerating when he said his brother passed half his days on earth in terrible pain. He was sickly from birth, with allergies, an unstable back, and other unspecified illnesses that shuttled him in and out of hospitals all through his youth, and that were followed by the carefully hidden Addison’s disease of his later years. With a truly staggering willpower Kennedy refused to acquiesce in his own debilities; not only rose again and again after collapsing, but took on further challenges. He seems to have needed danger and risk and adventure, physical or moral, to keep an edge on his life. If he took to his bed; it would not be to die. He courted danger—driving fast (he turned a car over on himself and Torbert Macdonald in Europe, and crashed into a dock with his PT boat in the Pacific). He went out for sports that were clearly beyond his physical capacity—spurred on, as always, by his father, who wrote him at Harvard: “Good luck to you on the swimming and as to football, remember to be as good as the spirit is.” He volunteered for PT boat service, though a boat that size, repeatedly slamming the water, would rattle his back viciously. He had a cult of courage that helps explain his interest in football players, war heroes, and astronauts.
Some thought Kennedy could not have approved James Roosevelt’s slurs, in the 1960 campaign, at Hubert Humphrey’s “draft dodging”; but Kennedy advised journalists to look up his opponents’ war records. Referring to Nelson Rockefeller’s diplomatic service in Latin America during World War II, he asked Newsweek’s Ben Bradlee, “Where was old Nels when you and I were dodging bullets in the Solomon Islands?” Kenneth O’Donnell says that President Kennedy stopped mocking Douglas MacArthur after reading his World War I citation for bravery on the battlefield. Military service and manhood went together in his mind, and he was quick to accuse an opponent of shirking. During his youngest brother’s Senate race against Eddie McCormack, he asked Bradlee, “When are you going to send one of your ace reporters to look into Eddie’s record?” Bradlee asked what that meant, and Kennedy said McCormack had resigned from the Navy, the day he graduated from Annapolis, on flimsy medical excuses. “Dave Powers had all the information and he’ll give it to you.”
I think it is only fair to assume that Kennedy’s constant self-testing, the lashing of his body back to a sense of its powers, contributed to his continual, almost heroic sexual performance—a way of cackling at the gods of bodily debility who plagued him, “I’m not dead yet.” This performance would be especially important in the macho world he admired, the Hemingway–Mailer–Sinatra world, because he was denied two items in its trinity of manliness, broads and booze and brawls. Among his many ailments, Kennedy had inherited his father’s weak stomach, which precluded drinking—which, de facto, eliminates most occasions for brawling.
Kennedy senior, who had or thought he had ulcers most of his life, drank no alcohol and ate bland food. His way of taking a young girl out to lunch was to show up in her hotel room, invite himself in, and send two eggs down to be soft-boiled not more than three minutes—according to Charlotte McDonnell he carried the fresh eggs in his pockets, and wrote his instructions on their shells. His second son, too, did not drink or eat rich foods. The Blairs quote many people wondering at his huge appetite for ice cream, though he disconcerted hostesses by picking without interest at the meals they served him. Abstention from drinking is very noticeable when you spend long hours in nightclubs, as John and his father did—in fact, it takes an almost inexplicable taste for such places to stay in them while not drinking. During long nights in the Solomon Islands, where there was little to do but drink, Kennedy gave away his liquor coupons. But even a teetotaler can keep his macho credentials in order if he doubles the order on broads to compensate for non-performance at the booze.
Kennedy’s ailments no doubt gave him license with some women, beginning with those of his family. Even the puritanical Eunice, aware of the courage of his daily life, remained as loyal to the President as did the puritanical Robert. They realized how many pleasures were denied him. Cripples are often very strong in that part of them that is not directly incapacitated. Those closest to Kennedy understood his need to demonstrate virility to himself and others.
But, if anything, this understanding at the personal level raises in more pointed fashion the political implications of large-scale satyriasis. Risk-taking may be the right therapy for an individual; but the commander of a PT squadron should know ahead of time if one of his officers administers self-therapy by crashing expensive boats into valuable docks.
In the same way, a woman a day might help keep the doctor away; but an omnivorous approach to women can compromise the presidential policy as well as reputation. Kennedy had more reason than most people to know this—he was certain, from an early age, that the FBI had at least one set of tapes taken while he made love to a woman suspected of espionage. His father had told him to fear J. Edgar Hoover’s use of such tapes. And his grandfather Fitzgerald had been driven from a political campaign by threats to reveal his relationship with a “Toodles” Ryan. Yet, incredibly, John Kennedy continued to make compromising assignations in the White House itself. When he inherited Judith Campbell from Frank Sinatra, he was making love to another woman who might be under investigation—and, as it turned out, was. Overlapping her affair with the candidate, and then with the President, she was intimate with Sam Giancana, who was (a) more or less permanently under investigation for suspected criminal activities, and (b) being approached by the CIA to help assassinate Castro. On several grounds the President’s love life was bound to end up in another FBI folder.
Why would a man take such risks? The answer seems obvious: because they were risks. (Montaigne: “Both the act and depictions of it should have a whiff of the criminal about them.”) According to Campbell, he tried to arrange even more compromising meetings than their White House trysts, including a threesome arrangement in a hotel room. Like his father inviting Gloria Swanson to travel openly with him on the steamer to France, Kennedy asked Campbell to fly on Air Force One. As she comments on this incident: “I think he just loved intrigue.” Setting up risky meetings could take more of his energy than did completion of the tryst. As John Buchan’s hero, Richard Hannay, says in The Thirty-nine Steps, “It was risks after all that he was chiefly greedy about.”
The love of risk, the taste for compromising intrigues and hairbreadth escapes, may lead to an “interesting” life; but it can lead, as well, to international trouble if indulged in the White House. Kennedy admired risk-takers, not only on the football field or the field of battle, but in everyday life. People around him were constantly challenged to display their macho. Those who advised against the Bay of Pigs invasion, Harris Wofford has revealed, were mocked by the President for “grabbing their nuts” in fear. On the other hand, told that his appointment of Robert Kennedy as Attorney General would cause a storm of protest, he turned to his brother and said, “Let’s grab our balls and go.” Ballsiness was a category as important to him as to Hemingway or Mailer, and he must have been delighted when Joseph Alsop began referring to him at Washington dinner parties as “a Stevenson with balls.” The adventurous services appealed to Kennedy, while President as well as in his Navy years—the PT raiders, the Green Berets (whose romantic symbol he invented), the CIA’s “special action” teams, the counterinsurgents who promised to perform for him like real-life James Bonds (and who did some of their jungle exercises to an admiring audience at Hyannis Port). Kennedy w
as intrigued by the U-2 pilot Gary Francis Powers, considering him weird but brave. Later, he admired the legendary counterinsurgent Edward Lansdale.
Admiration for the courage that takes risks can have odd policy consequences, as we shall see. But this very love of dash and freedom had conspicuous exceptions on the “new frontier.” The Kennedy administration, brashly taking on bureaucrats, was timorous if not obsequious with the oldest bureaucrat in town, J. Edgar Hoover. When Robert Kennedy needed information on the layout of the University of Alabama, during the integration struggle there, he did not ask the FBI field office to check facts, but caused a terrible flap by asking the Pentagon to make air photos of the campus. While Justice Department marshals risked their lives at black demonstrations in the South, FBI agents stood on the sidelines taking notes. The series of unworthy southern choices for the federal bench was caused, in part, by superficial FBI reports on the candidates.
These derelictions continued, as Victor Navasky notes in his book on the Kennedy Justice Department; yet J. Edgar Hoover was mysteriously immune to the Kennedy feistiness. Not only did Robert allow Hoover’s noncooperation; the Attorney General himself co-operated with requests from Hoover—like that for a phone tap on Martin Luther King. Granted, Hoover was a sacred cow; but the Kennedys showed a passivity toward him out of keeping with their activism in other areas, an activism that positively courted risk. Arthur Schlesinger remembers the priorities of postelection euphoria:
On Wednesday night after the election he relaxed at dinner with several friends. The group fell into an animated discussion of what the President-elect should do first. One guest suggested that he fire J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, another that he fire Allen W. Dulles of the Central Intelligence Agency. Kennedy, listening with apparent interest, egged his friends on. When they opened their papers the next morning, they were therefore a little irritated to read a Kennedy announcement that Hoover and Dulles were staying in their jobs.
No explanation was given. Dulles would have to go after the Bay of Pigs. But Hoover kept doing outrageous things, and remained. The President would take on U.S. Steel and Nikita Khrushchev, but not Mr. Hoover. The Attorney General would cut corners to “get Hoffa,” but he breathed no wish to get, or even check, his own subordinate at the Justice Department. To guarantee protection for civil rights demonstrators, he formed new kinds of legal posses, but he let FBI agents stand on the sidelines useless and unrebuked. As Navasky wrote: “It was ironic that the FBI—the only intelligence agency directly under the Attorney General’s jurisdiction—was the only agency which he did not feel free to bully, pressure, harass, and pull rank on.” There was no “ballsiness” in either Kennedy’s attitude toward Hoover.
The strange passivity of Robert, this most energetic man, is noticeable in one other area, the investigation of his brother’s death. He not only showed a lack of curiosity about the killer (or killers); he took steps to quash rumors of conspiracy—gave exclusive post-assassination interview rights to William Manchester, who opposed any conspiracy talk; sequestered the autopsy report; supported the Warren Commission without even reading its report. Harris Wofford argues persuasively that Robert feared the uncovering of CIA plots to kill Castro, since these involved Sam Giancana, who involved Judith Campbell, who would involve the dead President. As Navasky says: “Any list of RFK priorities would have to begin with his brother’s reputation.” If that is the case, then the Kennedy servility toward Hoover is explained. From the time of Inga Arvad, Hoover had knowledge that could have ruined the Kennedy reputation and career. Hoover was willing to use that kind of information on targets like Dr. King and Philip Berrigan; but the information was more potent unused where men in power were concerned. The mere threat of its use kept such men “in line.”
In fact, one of John Kennedy’s motives in appointing Robert to the Justice Department was no doubt to have his most trusted agent “handle” Hoover. That appointment was risky at the public level; Kennedy courted charges of nepotism, and Robert was young for the job. But it was a caution taken at the private level—no other man was Kennedy’s intimate as Robert was, privy to the family secrets, certain to do anything to keep them secret, speaking for the family in sessions with Hoover. Another person, given the choice of ruining Dr. King’s reputation or John Kennedy’s, might hesitate. But not John Kennedy’s brother.
To many people’s surprise, Robert Kennedy earned a reputation as his brother’s “best appointment.” His record at Justice was mixed, as Navasky has argued, but it included many achievements. There may, indeed, have been a compensatory ardor in Kennedy’s work for civil rights. He had to assemble his own team and use his own devices, since he had denied himself any opposition to Hoover’s wiretapping, to his obstruction in the integration cases, to his slipshod screening of federal judges. There is an air, in the later Robert Kennedy, of doing penance—not, I think, for his own earlier “ruthlessness,” as it is fashionable to say; but for his own later sense of helplessness against a man who brazenly frustrated the government’s support of civil rights. Robert had been appointed by his brother to contain the threat of Hoover—which made him acquiesce in Hoover’s campaign to destroy King. That was a terrible burden to sustain; and it makes a mockery of any talk that John Kennedy’s sexual affairs were irrelevant to his politics. His brother’s earlier freedoms put Robert Kennedy in a moral prison.
3
Sisters and Wives
And the old man—having his mistresses there at the house for lunch and supper. I couldn’t understand it! It was unheard of!
—BETTY SPALDING, visitor at Hyannis Port
In 1970, my wife and I were at Eunice and Sargent Shriver’s house in Rockville, Maryland, for a dinner welcoming Patricia Lawford back from Europe. It was the first time we had seen Joan Kennedy, who was a natural beauty with little makeup on, still looking much younger than her years. Edward Kennedy came late from the Senate floor; we were already seated. But from the moment he arrived there was a hum of invisible wires strung across the room, from Kennedy to Kennedy, alive with continual semiprivate communication. Eunice, no matter what the conversation in her vicinity, heard and laughed at each of Edward’s jokes at another table, and vice versa.
When their nurse took the Kennedy children swimming at Taggert’s Pier, back in the thirties, they all wore the same color bathing hats, so they could be distinguished from the other children—you knew at once if it was a Kennedy in trouble, or if one had not been rounded up for the trip home. Ever since they have been wearing invisible caps that signal to each other on a radio frequency no one else can use.
Driving home, I asked my wife if she had noticed this phenomenon, and its corollary—she had. The corollary was that Joan Kennedy barely said a word at table, or was addressed, after her husband arrived. She wears no invisible cap; she sends no signals. There are honorary Kennedys and real Kennedys, as Sargent Shriver has had occasion to learn. But Joan Bennett Kennedy suffered a double disadvantage at the family table—she is not only not a Kennedy, but not a man. My wife and I were not surprised, a few years later, when reports of Joan Kennedy’s drinking became public.
One has to be tough to marry into so close a family, to fight for attention, for one’s own space to turn around in. Inga Arvad’s son claimed there was something almost incestuous in the closeness of Kennedys to Kennedys; and, in her innocent way, Rose Kennedy bears out that insight: “Joe thought the children would never be married because they all enjoyed going out together so much. They were stimulated by each other’s interests and plans, problems and ambitions.” Ethel Skakel could become a Super-Kennedy, taking all their competitive games (even the breeding one) to new extremes. Jacqueline Bouvier could make her bargain, mark off her space, and let the family flow, a little bit awed, around her quiet pose. But Joan Bennett was shoved, half a century after the mold had been broken, into Rose Kennedy’s role; and not even Rose’s own daughters can live that way anymore.
Gloria Swanson, having
agreed to Rose’s humiliation on a steamer trip to Europe, ingenuously wonders how the wife could put up with such boorishness:
Virginia [Swanson’s friend] grasped the curious situation in which she was taking part the first day on the ship, but whether Mrs. Kennedy did or not I couldn’t tell. Only a few years older than me, Rose Kennedy was sweet and motherly in every respect. Most of the time she and her female relative treated Virginia and me like a pair of debutantes it was their bounden duty to chaperon.… If she suspected me of having relations not quite proper with her husband, or resented me for it, she never once gave any indication of it. In fact, at those times during the voyage when Joe Kennedy behaved in an alarmingly possessive or oversolicitous fashion toward me, Rose joined right in and supported him. In the salon after dinner one evening, he openly and without apology talked and joked confidentially with me and left the other three women to converse among themselves; but when a man at the next table turned his chair around to look at me, Joe became white as chalk, leaped to his feet and loudly ordered the other man to mind his own business and stop staring at me. Before I could think of how to conceal my mortification, I heard Rose emphatically agreeing with Joe’s action, saying she didn’t understand how I stood being on constant public display, unable to travel two steps without my husband or somebody else to protect me. She thought it was shocking. Was she a fool, I asked myself as I listened with disbelief, or a saint? Or just a better actress than I was?
Of course Rose knew. And of course she had to pretend she did not. That kind of acting came naturally to women of her generation and faith and social position. The men in the family, and even her daughters, were not embarrassed by the mother’s plight, but proud of her submissiveness to it. If courage is ballsiness, that is by definition not a quality for women. Their nobility is in patience, in long-suffering, in just those things that would disgrace a man. This attitude is displayed by Tito Gobbi, the great baritone, in his 1979 autobiography. Boasting of his mother’s uncomplaining virtue, he wrote: