Bobby Kennedy

by Larry Tye

  That fall he headed back to finish his degree at Harvard, where he achieved an athletic honor that had eluded Joe Jr. and Jack during their time at the college. It was more a tribute to Bobby’s fortitude than his skill on the football field, since he’d broken his leg in practice early in the season. But the coach was impressed with how he’d continued playing until he literally fell down. So, in the season-ending Harvard-Yale game, Bobby was sent in—cast and all—for just long enough to qualify for the cherished crimson-and-white H signaling that he had played for a varsity team.

  After college, Bobby knew he “just didn’t know anything,” he recalled. “I wanted to do graduate work.” The only professional schools he considered were business and law, and having “no attraction to business,” that left law. His grades in college weren’t good enough to get into Harvard or Yale, the law schools he and Joe would have preferred, but the University of Virginia agreed to take him with the understanding that “unless he does better work than he did at Harvard, he is most unlikely to succeed in this Law School.” He did, sort of, spending some time studying but at least as much skiing, golfing, and flying off to see his family in Massachusetts and Florida on the weekends. Especially boring to him was a one-hour course on legal research in which he scored a zero. “It’s the way he was brought up,” explained his law school friend George Tremblay. “He saw how his father operated….He saw how his brothers operated, and, you know, I guess he figured if he ever practiced law that he wasn’t going to be spending much time looking up law in some law library, that somebody would be doing this” for him.

  Although Bobby’s life had been devoted to following the lead of his brothers, there was one domain where he was the trendsetter: marriage. Bobby was the first of the boys to wed and the first to give Joe and Rose grandchildren, which was a surprise and delight given his early disappointments with girls. It was different with Ethel Skakel, whose honey-blond hair, sparkling eyes, and easy laugh made her appealing if not ravishing. Ethel’s ties to the Kennedys were forged years before at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, where she roomed with Bobby’s kid sister Jean. The two became best friends, with Jean the straight one of the pair and Ethel her gleeful corrupter. The Manhattanville nuns imposed a rigid code of conduct, which they enforced by handing out demerits and the punishments that went with them. Ethel and Jean had earned enough black marks—for everything from “loud screaming” to putting a sign on a priest’s Cadillac saying NICE COLLECTION, FATHER—to jeopardize their coveted off-campus privileges. The girls’ solution: toss the demerit book down the incinerator. (Fifty years later, neither will say who did the tossing.) Rose Kennedy came up with a solution of her own: building a temporary wall in their dormitory room to make it harder for the girls to talk and easier for Jean to become again the honor student she had been before meeting Ethel. Some friends, then and later, held Ethel up as a model of quiet sophistication. Others dismissed her as naïve. Both were right, and the blend was disarming. “Her face,” her college yearbook said, “is at one moment a picture of utter guilelessness and at the next alive with mischief.”

  Those idiosyncrasies, Jean was convinced, made Ethel the perfect jaunty tomboy who could bury the blue funks Bobby got from worrying whether he could measure up to the older Kennedy men. Bobby was entering law school when the girls were starting their senior year at Manhattanville in the fall of 1948. Ethel was so star-struck on first meeting him that she now says “it was like looking at George Clooney.” As for Bobby, he “was momentarily mad about me,” she remembered. “He took me out for two weeks. The only trouble was that for the next two years he took out my older sister” Patricia. Pat finally decided that Bobby was too immature and unlettered; at the same time, Bobby realized that Pat would never care enough about sports or about him. And although Ethel was sufficiently intrigued by Jack Kennedy that she stumped door-to-door in his first campaign for Congress, then based her senior thesis on his book Why England Slept, the brother she was truly smitten with had always been Robert Francis. Cheered on by Jean, Ethel kept showing up—on the tennis courts and ski slopes, and at Kennedy family vacations—until Bobby couldn’t help but notice. What drew them to each other, however, was more than her persistence and his rebound from Pat. They were each other’s second selves. As shy as Bobby could be in social settings, Ethel loved being around people and could keep talking as long as there were listeners. He was complicated; she was easy. “Laughter,” Ethel explained, “is better than tears.” That uncensored eagerness to jump in made Bobby’s siblings feel they had another sister. “If you don’t marry Ethel,” Jack joked, “I’ll marry her.” Her devotion to Bobby and to God made Rose forget why, when they were in college, she had walled Ethel off from Jean.

  The next challenge was synchronicity. By the time Bobby asked for her hand, Ethel was weighing becoming a nun. “How can I fight God?” Bobby asked Jean as they walked the beach in Hyannis Port. Ethel’s spiritual drive wasn’t new; she had been attending mass and saying her rosaries every day, and during college she was invited into the Children of Mary, a Catholic lay association that focuses on spiritual development. After months of contemplation, Ethel had an epiphany: The best way to serve her God was by giving her heart to Bobby, the only man she’d ever loved like that, and raising a brood of believers numerous enough to form their own parish.

  Ethel was marrying into a family strikingly similar to the one in which she was raised: devoutly Catholic, avidly athletic, and steadfastly anticommunist. George Skakel, her father, was nearly as rich as Joe Kennedy and more self-made. The onetime railway clerk owned the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, one of America’s biggest privately held companies that made energy products such as foundry coke and crude petroleum. Like Rose, Ethel’s mother, Ann, was more religious than her husband, although she and George had a modest seven children compared to Rose and Joe’s nine and the Skakels were as deep-dyed Republican as the Kennedys were Democrats. The ten-acre Skakel estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, was even larger than the Kennedys’ in Hyannis Port or Palm Beach. Ethel and Bobby shared a love of the outdoors and an inability to sit still. She was one of the few people as addicted as he was to victory, in sports and everything else. As for the Kennedys, “I just thought that they were as much fun as our family,” Ethel says. She and Bobby even looked like brother and sister, from protruding front teeth to thick mops of hair that made them seem like teenagers.

  They were wed on June 17, 1950, at St. Mary Roman Catholic Church in Greenwich, with the reception back at the Skakel home and a honeymoon in Hawaii. Pope Pius XII sent his blessings. George gave away the bride, who was wearing a gown of white satin, and The New York Times considered the nuptials newsworthy. Jack Kennedy was Bobby’s best man, and younger brother Ted was an usher. Ethel’s sister Pat flew in from Ireland to serve as maid of honor. Joe and George settled up afterward for furnishings that Bobby’s friends and Ethel’s brothers broke during the bachelor party at the Harvard Club. When it was all over—the long flirtations and involved celebrations—the couple headed to Charlottesville for Bobby’s last year of law school, and Ethel settled into her lifelong project of being Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy.

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  BOBBY MADE HIS biggest mark at the University of Virginia not in the classroom but at the Student Legal Forum, where he served as president during his third year. He enticed to campus such esteemed speakers as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, and former Harvard Law School dean James Landis, all cronies of Joe Kennedy, who delivered a speech of his own to Bobby’s schoolmates shortly before Christmas in 1950. Five months later Bobby hosted another of his father’s friends, Joseph McCarthy, who was already building his reputation as the most unbridled anticommunist in Washington. It was Bobby’s first significant interaction with the senator and an occasion memorable less for McCarthy’s fiery talk than for what happened when Bobby and Ethel had him to dinner afterward. McCarthy “asked for a drink right away,” recalled E. Ba
rrett Prettyman, Jr., an editor of the law review who was there. “We began to ask him questions. In the beginning, he was very sure-footed in his responses, but as he began to get sloshed, he began to get tangled….He just went to pieces. And he began to realize he was embarrassing himself, so he would get more embarrassed, and drink more, and people began to slip out.” Before the night was out, McCarthy had pawed a female guest and Bobby had helped him to bed. Prettyman was horrified. But in that early encounter, as in most later ones, Bobby glossed over the senator’s flagrant flaws, recalling only that “I liked him almost immediately.”

  In 1951, Bobby graduated from Virginia smack in the middle of his class, with no idea what to do with his legal degree. He landed his first job later that year—thanks to a phone call from Joe—with the U.S. Justice Department. He spent a couple of months with the Internal Security Division in Washington, investigating Soviet spies, real or imagined, then a few more months in New York at the Criminal Division, helping prepare corruption cases against former officials of the Truman administration. National security and political corruption would be central to his later career, but his officemates from the time remembered only that he was a son of privilege who seldom bothered to cash his paychecks and who often kicked off his shoes and worked in his stocking feet. They also agreed that he was no legal scholar. Barely three months into his work in the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office, Bobby reluctantly resigned to help his brother Jack, who had won his first race for Congress in 1946 and, in his third term, was readying what looked like a quixotic challenge to Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts.

  While Jack didn’t know whether his kid brother was the man for the campaign job, Joe did. The older Bobby got, the more Joe paid attention. And the more the father heard and saw, including Bobby’s record as a single-minded prosecutor, the better he realized that this was the one of his children who most clearly mirrored his own wants and needs. Bobby understood Joe’s bottom-line message: that family came before anything, and that in a crunch, it was only your siblings and parents you could count on. Bobby felt more deeply and cared more passionately than his brothers and sisters did about matters worldly and personal. He was proudly Celtic like Joe and P.J., and more Catholic than either of them. He saw the world in the same black-and-white terms—good guys and bad—as his father did, in contrast to Jack’s more nuanced perspective on international affairs. Communists, for Bobby as for Joe, were the most loathsome of bad guys.

  Bobby’s performance in that 1952 Senate race convinced Joe just how good this neglected son could be. Nationally, everyone knew the election would be a Republican grand slam. After twenty years of New Deal and Fair Deal Democrats, the country wanted a change in the White House, and the five-star general who had led the Allied forces to triumph over Hitler was heading the GOP ticket. Henry Cabot Lodge was managing Eisenhower’s presidential campaign at the same time that he was running himself for a fourth term in the Senate. The key, Bobby understood, was decoupling Massachusetts from the Eisenhower express and making sure every voter in the Bay State was introduced to another hero in the war against Hitler—his brother Jack. Fearing that anything received in the mail would go out with the garbage, Bobby signed up twenty-eight thousand volunteers who delivered door-to-door nine hundred thousand copies of a tabloid reminding voters not just of JFK’s wartime gallantry, but of how JOHN FULFILLS DREAM OF BROTHER JOE WHO MET DEATH IN THE SKY OVER THE ENGLISH CHANNEL. Bobby had his sisters and his mother—wearing skirts embroidered with VOTE FOR JACK KENNEDY—hold parties for every matron and maiden who wanted to sip their tea and shake the hand of their handsome brother John. “Every old woman wants to be his mother,” old hands quipped, “and every young woman dreams of being his mistress.” It was the 1950s version of social media, and the results were impressive: seventy thousand women of Massachusetts shared the Kennedy kettle, and many stuck around as campaign volunteers.

  Even more impressive was the outcome on election day: Eisenhower took Massachusetts by 200,000 votes, a sweep that cost the incumbent Democratic governor Paul Dever his job, but JFK beat Lodge by 71,000 votes thanks to Bobby’s unrelenting and nearly flawless campaign to identify his brother’s supporters and get them to the polls. If Jack Kennedy was “the first Irish Brahmin,” Dever observed after watching Bobby at work, “Bobby is the last Irish Puritan.” That wasn’t meant as a compliment, but Joe took it as one. Bobby’s iron-fisted approach worked. He had split ranks with Dever and other old-school Democrats and looked out only for Jack. Joe had always taught his children that it was not enough to fight hard if you finish second. “For the Kennedys,” the patriarch pronounced, “it’s the [outhouse] or the castle—nothing in between.” Now that Bobby had helped Jack claim the keys to the castle, “Mr. Kennedy found he had another able son,” said Lem Billings, Jack’s prep school roommate. Joe may or may not have uttered the often repeated line that Bobby “hates like me,” but he did say “Bobby’s as hard as nails” and “I’m like Bobby.”

  Pleased though he was, Joe was not one to look back, even on successes. With the election over and Jack headed to the Senate, Joe demanded of Bobby: “Are you going to sit on your tail end and do nothing now for the rest of your life? You better go out and get a job.” And Senator Joe McCarthy had one for him, thanks in large measure to the generous donation Joe Kennedy made to the senator’s campaign fund.*5 The elder Kennedy had known the Wisconsin legislator for years and was convinced he would catch on with mainstream America. The Joes had a lot in common: Both were defiant Irishmen, although Kennedy’s wealth made him the “lace curtain”*6 kind whereas McCarthy, who began life as a chicken farmer and grocer, was “shanty” Irish. Each had been an FDR Democrat, then grown disillusioned. Kennedy shared McCarthy’s disdain for left-wingers, especially on the home front. Yet as much as a man’s politics mattered to Kennedy, that man’s temperament mattered more. That is why the Massachusetts magnate could count as friends the ultraconservative Joe McCarthy and the archliberal William O. Douglas, perhaps the only man in America able to make that claim. Kennedy liked that McCarthy “was never a crab. If somebody was against him, he never tried to cut his heart out. He never said that anybody was a stinker. He was a pleasant fellow.” Such stilted language was classic Joe Kennedy. Classic, too, was Joe’s inability to see or care about McCarthy’s victims. When the senator started his anticommunist agitation, “I thought he’d be a sensation,” Joe recalled, adding that McCarthy was “the strongest man in the United States next to Eisenhower.”

  Bobby was delighted at the prospect of working for McCarthy, even if his friends and brother Jack were not. Bobby respected McCarthy’s ties to the Kennedys. McCarthy had met JFK during World War II in the South Pacific, where Jack would win a medal for rescuing his PT boat crew and McCarthy would pick up the nickname Tail-Gunner Joe along with a reputation for embellishing his combat record and injuries. The senator dated Bobby’s sisters Patricia and Eunice in Washington when they visited Jack, and in Hyannis Port, where Eunice thought it fun to push McCarthy out of her father’s boat until she learned he couldn’t swim. The bachelor also showed interest in younger sister Jean, who was impressed but felt that a twenty-year age gap was too great. McCarthy played shortstop for the Barefoot Boys, the Kennedy softball team, when they staged their annual game against a team of Hyannis Port neighbors they dubbed the Pansies. (McCarthy was benched after making four errors at shortstop.) And he cracked a rib during one of the storied touch football games on the Kennedy lawn. When he was in Palm Beach, McCarthy would stop by the Kennedy mansion for a bourbon and a chat with Joe.

  But the connection went beyond the social and familial. Like his father, Bobby was drawn to qualities in McCarthy that echoed his own: his roughneck spirit, his unapologetic embrace of religion, and his willingness to take on and, if need be, shame the political establishment. This third Kennedy son had taken up McCarthy’s cause in impassioned debates with friends during his undergraduate years at Harvard in the 1940s. When
he was studying law at the University of Virginia, Bobby argued forcefully that President Roosevelt had sold out U.S. interests in his 1945 Yalta agreement with the Soviets on the configuration of postwar Europe. The legislator and his young admirer both had the instincts of alley fighters, which Bobby believed they’d need in a Cold War where the enemy fought dirty. McCarthy had grasped sooner than other politicians just how frightened Americans were of creeping Communism. We had beaten easy-to-see foes in the Nazis and the Empire of Japan, but now our World War II ally of convenience, Soviet Russia, was quietly planting its revolutionary seeds across Europe and in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. China had fallen in 1949 to Mao Tse-tung and the Marxists, with McCarthy and his allies demanding of the Truman administration, “Who lost China?” It was three years since the Wisconsin senator had fueled a Red Scare at home by claiming to have a list of 205 active Communist Party members and Soviet spies who were embedded in the State Department. A year later he went to the Senate floor to denounce former secretary of state George C. Marshall for “always and invariably serving the world policy of the Kremlin.” The bloody and inconclusive war in Korea, where China battled on behalf of the North and the United States backed the South, cemented McCarthy’s case: His name was now an ism and America was fertile ground for his message about enemies lurking in our midst.

  Working for McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations would give Bobby a front row seat at the biggest show in Washington in the early 1950s: the holy war against a Communist conspiracy that the senator called “so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” Bobby, too, was alarmed about what he saw as the “serious internal security threat to the United States,” and he thought that “Joe McCarthy seemed to be the only one who was doing anything about it.” Bobby had shown where he stood on the issue as early as his first job, at the attorney general’s Internal Security Division, when he investigated Bolsheviks. Later, as his brother’s campaign manager, he attacked Massachusetts senator Lodge for being soft on Communism. Those views were consistent with his commitment to his faith, since the Catholic Church in the early 1950s was ardently anticommunist and pro–Joe McCarthy. McCarthy, meanwhile, tapped religious imagery in warning his audience that “this is the era of Armageddon—that final all-out battle between light and darkness foretold in the Bible.” Bobby suspected then and afterward that the senator’s critics were anti-Catholic as well as anti-McCarthy.