I FEEL TERRIBLY UNHAPPY YOU HAVE TO FACE YOUR BIGGEST CRISIS WITHOUT MOTHER OR ME. YOUR CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM WORTHY OF CHESTERTON MAGNIFICENT. WITH YOUR FAITH IN GOD YOU CAN’T MAKE A MISTAKE. REMEMBER YOU ARE STILL AND ALWAYS WILL BE TOPS WITH ME. LOVE DAD.
When at a later time Kick contemplated marriage to Peter Fitzwilliam, a British aristocrat whom Joseph Alsop described as “astonishingly good-looking, wonderfully easy and jolly, and with that curious aura of glamour sometimes conferred by great possessions long held and a great place in the world long maintained,” Rose Kennedy took the position “that if Kick married outside the Church a second time,” she would never speak to her daughter again and would “cut off relations with any members of the Kennedy family” who did.63 Years later, long after Kick and Fitzwilliam had died in a plane crash en route from Paris to the Riviera, Alsop asked Jack Kennedy, who was by then President, whether he would have sided with his sister or his mother (and the Church) in the event Kick had lived to marry Fitzwilliam. “With Kick, of course,” the President responded at once.64 His father had taught the son the supreme importance of devotion to family—and continued to remind him of its importance even after the son had reached the White House. In the spring of 1961, Arthur Schlesinger wrote, Jack Kennedy was in Hyannis Port
walking to his father’s house for dinner when Caroline, his daughter, came off the porch crying to him. As he started to comfort her, the kitchen door opened, and someone said, “Mr. President, they want you on the White House phone—they said it’s important.” Kennedy said, “Caroline, I’ll be back in just a moment. Let me go take this call.” When dinner began, there was an edgy silence. Finally Mr. Kennedy said, “Jack, I saw what happened outside. Caroline was in tears and came out. You had a call from the White House. I know there are a lot of things on your mind about your meeting with Khrushchev.… But let me tell you something: nothing that happens during your Presidency will be as important as how Caroline turns out. And don’t forget it.”65
Self-confidence is at the heart of the Kennedy phenomenon. Not the self-confidence of the New World entrepreneur or the Old World great-souled man: the Kennedys invented their own system of confidence-building, created their own inventory of tools and techniques. The father carefully nurtured the myth of Kennedy exceptionalism; the children grew up with the myth, believed it, drew strength from it. They were exceptional; theirs was, the father assured them, the grandest, the most exclusive club of all, a far more splendid affair than Porcellian or A.D. Joseph Kennedy taught the children to love one another even as he loved them, and love one another they did, as any number of witnesses have attested.66 The younger siblings worshiped the older ones with a cultlike devotion. Eunice worshipped Jack, Teddy worshipped Jack, they all worshipped Jack, and Bobby never spoke of his brother other than as a person apart, a sacred being. Jack himself had the self-confidence of one accustomed to commanding the love and even the idolatry of others: when he chose to project, nakedly and unapologetically, his high confidence in himself, the effect was striking. Opponents were quite literally undone. Ted Reardon, a Kennedy aide, remembered the first time Richard Nixon saw the young Jack Kennedy in action at a congressional hearing in the late forties. When “Jack started to talk,” Reardon said, “Dicky Boy sort of looked at him … with a look between awe and fear and respect.”67 Years later, when Kennedy, looking, television news producer Don Hewitt said, “like a young Adonis,” arrived in a Chicago television studio for the first of their presidential debates, Nixon was “physically overwhelmed” by his rival’s self-confident presence.68 From “the moment Kennedy strode in,” Nixon was “not the same man.”69 “Visibly deflated by his rival’s matinee-idol aura and seeming nervelessness,” the Vice President “slouched in his chair, his head turned away, a man in retreat.”70
The Kennedy cult of self-confidence had its rituals and its rites. Whenever he greeted his father, Jack Kennedy would make a fist, and the old man would wrap his hands around it, as if to affirm the son’s strength.71 The Kennedys learned to draw strength from the most elemental things: the sun, the wind, and the sea “elated” Bobby and Jack; clouds and rain “depressed” them.72 Bright sunshine, Jack Newfield observed, “quickly lifted Bobby’s spirits.”73 Their aides took to calling the brilliant sunny weather in which they so obviously delighted “Kennedy weather.” A friend recalled how Bobby, closeted one morning in a hotel suite, was unable to concentrate on his work: so entranced was he by the perfection of the cloudless blue sky he saw through the window that he could not apply himself to the business at hand.74 Jack Kennedy rehearsed for his first debate with Nixon in dazzling sunshine on the rooftop of his Chicago hotel; there he burnished the tan he had nurtured during a swing through California the week before. In an age when no one worried about melanoma, the Kennedys were astonishingly vain of the fact that their faces reflected the dazzling power of the sun. The sun, Jack Kennedy said, “gives me confidence.… It makes me feel strong, healthy, attractive.”75 When he was unable to escape the northern winter by flying to the tropics, he used a sun lamp instead.76 The sea and the sky similarly elated the Kennedys. They loved to sail and to fly, loved boats and airplanes, the exhilaration of motion. Emerson once said that he “never was on a coach that went fast enough for” him.77 The Kennedys knew what he meant. They, too, loved the feel of motion, loved the heightened sense of consciousness it produced, loved the way it stimulated the soul, the hundred thousand nerve endings that make human beings capable of ecstasy. The Kennedys’ capacity for exhilaration was directly related to their capacity for self-confident action; the joy they took in the world corresponded to the joy they took in themselves, as if they as much as the sun, the sky, and the sea were a manifestation of God’s plan, an extension of His divinity, an expression of His glory. There is a degree of narcissism at the heart of all the higher forms of self-confidence.
So pronounced was Jack Kennedy’s self-confidence that his rare stumbles seem inexplicable, out of character, the actions of another man. Why did the man who had taken down Cabot Lodge, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon lose it in Vienna, where his self-confidence deserted him and where he allowed Khrushchev to bully and intimidate him? The Bay of Pigs, too, shook Jack’s confidence in himself, and the experience was so novel to him that he is said to have done something that Kennedys do not do—he is said to have been on the verge of weeping, to have been “practically … in tears.”78 He soon enough recovered his customary equanimity, however, and he remained, to the end of his life, a supremely self-confident man.
Though Bobby studied the tools and techniques Jack Kennedy used to bolster his confidence in himself, he never achieved the same degree of self-assurance. Friends and family, Arthur Schlesinger said, sensed Bobby’s vulnerability and tended to be protective of him; they never thought that his self-confident brother needed protecting.79 When in March 1968 Bobby finally made up his mind to run for President, Teddy Kennedy warned Schlesinger not to try to dissuade him. If you “discuss it any longer,” Teddy told him, “it will shake his confidence” and undermine the magical self-possession a Kennedy needed in order to do those things that ordinary mortals could not.80 The less than supremely confident Bobby shrank from face-to-face encounters with opponents like Eugene McCarthy and Kenneth Keating, and he never became as confident a debater as Jack had been.81 When Bobby debated the question of Vietnam in a televised debate with Ronald Reagan, “the general consensus,” David Halberstam wrote, “was that Reagan … destroyed” him.82
If he never became as self-confident as his older brother, Bobby had by the early sixties come a long way from the underconfident young man who in 1953 had stammered through a toast at Jack’s wedding. The teenager who had been painfully shy around girls was capable, in 1962, of captivating Marilyn Monroe.83 The man whom Lyndon Johnson called the “runt” of the Kennedy litter “came to inhabit the fantasies” of a screen goddess’s last summer.84 Bobby’s relationship with Monroe foreshadowed, indeed, the overconfident
behavior that has characterized the Kennedys in the years since his death, years in which the family’s confidence in itself has at times been so excessive as to constitute a kind of hubris. In Bobby and Jack self-confidence was generally commensurate with talent and ability; it’s not clear, however, that these corresponded as closely in Teddy’s case or in the case of the third generation. David Horowitz, who with Peter Collier wrote a book about the Kennedys in the 1980s, described how self-confidence became a form of arrogance in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Bobby’s second son. In his memoirs Horowitz recounted the “surreal experience” of listening to a Harvard roommate of Bobby Junior’s—a person who knew of the young Kennedy’s heroin addiction—talk as though his friend’s intention to run for Congress in the next election was “perfectly natural.”85 Like so many other cults, Joseph Kennedy’s cult of self-confidence had entered an irrational phase, had become what Horowitz called a psychosis. At the “center of the psychosis,” Horowitz wrote, was the idea that a self-confident Kennedy “could get away with anything.”86
The decadence in which Joseph Kennedy’s cult of self-confidence culminated must not be permitted to obscure the achievements of its prime. Joseph Kennedy, it is often said, believed that it matters less what you are than what you seem to be.87 Like Sallust’s Caesar, he is said to have cared less about being virtuous than seeming to be so.88 This is usually taken to be yet another evidence of Joseph Kennedy’s dishonesty, and of the essential hollowness of the Kennedy phenomenon as a whole.89 In retrospect, however, it’s clear that the “confidence” games the elder Kennedy played were more than sleights-of-hand designed to fool a gullible public; in a more important sense they were tricks he wanted his boys to play on themselves. Joseph Kennedy seems instinctively to have realized that a self-confident person inevitably involves himself in an infinite number of acts of deception, of self-deception; the self-confident person, he knew, must think himself better than the facts at any given time would seem to admit. If one is to have any hope of becoming that which one wishes to become, one has to believe, in spite of the evidence, that one can become it. Only by believing—perhaps wrongly—that you are good enough to win will you have any chance of actually winning. Was he deceiving his boys—and inviting them to deceive themselves—when he told them that they were the best, that they “had the goods,” that with such talents and abilities as they possessed they need never settle for second place? Perhaps. Joseph Kennedy was a cunning man. But in his cunning it is possible to discern the methods not merely of a cunning man, but of a compassionate one as well.
The Anatomy of Self-Confidence
WHEN SOME FUTURE Burton comes to write his anatomy of self-confidence, he will have the unenviable task of explaining a quality that is at once difficult to define, difficult to obtain, and difficult to retain. Self-confidence is, along with love, hatred, and genius, among the most mysterious and elusive of human qualities. One need not be an absurd mystic to see that a highly self-confident person can, if he chooses, quite literally undo the self-confidence of another, can drain a less self-confident person of whatever self-esteem he possesses. Thus a supremely self-confident Jack Kennedy rapidly drained Richard Nixon of his self-confidence at their first debate in Chicago in 1960; thus the supremely self-confident Kennedy tribe slowly drained Joan Bennett Kennedy of her self-confidence during the years of her association with the family.90 On the other hand, the self-confident person can, if he wishes, choose to share his confidence with others, and through his compassionate acts can raise others to his own exalted level.
In formulating his ideas about the role of compassion in stimulating self-confidence, Bobby could look not only to his family’s example, but also to a wealth of Christian teaching on the subject. Compassion, in the traditional Christian view, involves an act of humiliation, of lowering oneself to the level of the object of one’s compassion: the person who occupies what is, in the eyes of the world, a higher and more responsible station in life—the priest, the parent, the teacher—lowers himself to the level of the student, the child, the parishioner, and by so doing assures the less exalted being that, in spite of the differences of their worldly positions, they possess a common humanity. In the ancient rituals of Christian humiliation, the well-born, the prosperous, the successful man was required to lower himself to the level of the least favored of men through a symbolic act, such as washing the feet of the poor on Maunday Thursday.* In so abasing himself, the prosperous man declared to the world that, notwithstanding the accidents of fate and fortune, he and the least favored of men were equals in the sight of God. Created in His image, the poor man and the rich man, the great man and the little man, were both of them brothers in Christ. For centuries this ritual of compassionate humility was repeated by the great ones of the earth; we read in Gibbon of Theodosius, “stripped of the ensigns of royalty,” appearing “in the midst of the Church of Milan” in a “suppliant posture” and humbling “in the dust the pride of the diadem.”91 The message was clear, and the poor man was supposed to be inspired by it: the humblest of human beings had within themselves the same divinely inspired potential of the great ones of the earth. Bobby’s own desire to walk among the least favored of men, to see and to touch the untouchables of our society, was nothing so much as a revival of this ancient Christian conception of compassion: he did then much of what Diana was later to do. In Harlem, in Watts, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bobby’s very presence proclaimed the revolutionary truth of the Gospels, that all human beings—Senators and streetwalkers alike—have been endowed by God with an unalienable dignity and value. It is, of course, the message of Christ himself, who in spite of His divinity, kept company with publicans and sinners, and “with sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick, and those that had the palsy.”92
In time this Christian conception of compassion was corrupted by snobbery and indifference; it was transformed into a merely donative charity, a matter of gold coins and silver ducats. The Maundy ceremony itself ceased to involve the poignant act of royal and other eminent persons washing the feet of the poor; all that remains today of the ritual is the distribution of Maundy Money by the sovereign. The old belief that an act of compassion—an act of love—might cleanse the heart of the cleanser and inspire the imagination of the cleansed was for the most part lost, to be kept alive only by organizations like the Salvation Army.93 And while, of course, practical—as opposed to ritual—acts of compassion continue to occur every day, they seemed to Bobby to occur less frequently now than in the past. This was particularly true, he believed, in the inner city. Bobby liked to tell the story of a priest who worked with a young gang leader whose gang had acquired “a reputation for violence that struck fear in the hearts of adults and children alike.”94 The priest “spent a great deal of time getting to know” the young man and his cohorts.95 He “counseled him in all sorts of troubles,” persuaded him of the value of learning, and eventually obtained for him a scholarship at university, where the young man flourished as a student.96 Bobby knew, however, that such Monseigneur Myriels are not so commonly met with in this world, and it was the very rarity of their compassion that made it seem to him notable.
When Bobby and a handful of other important men came to Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1966, they came as agents of a truer compassion than is embodied in the faceless, bureaucratized charity of the welfare state. The welfare state, so far from slowing the deterioration of the traditional institutional bearers of compassion—the schools, the families, the churches—undermined those institutions even more. For all the Enlightened thought that went into its construction, the welfare state was, like the Maundy Money itself, a feudal corruption of an older and better conception of compassion—a means of buying off the poor with gold coins, a means of making people content with their mediocre place in the hierarchy of society. This was not, Adam Walinsky observed, compassion: it was a kind of bribery, a way of perpetuating poverty, a method of
keeping people in their place.97
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