by Larry Tye
There was one last reason why a job with Joe McCarthy was so appealing to Bobby Kennedy. Like so much in Bobby’s life, it had to do with Joe Kennedy. Bobby knew his father admired McCarthy, and he saw the senator as a reflection of much that he loved in his dad. By working for a tough-minded jingoist like McCarthy, Bobby hoped he could erase the public’s lingering memory of Joe Kennedy as a Nazi apologist and even, as many British had believed him to be, a coward. What RFK failed to see was that his father—an isolationist who argued that Communists, like fascists, could be accommodated until their regimes collapsed from within—was far less of a cold warrior than McCarthy was and than Bobby was becoming. “Joe’s methods may be a little rough,” Bobby would confide about McCarthy to a pair of journalists, “but, after all, his goal is to expose Communists in government, and that’s a worthy goal. So why are you reporters so critical of his methods?”
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JOE MCCARTHY COULDN’T say no to Joe Kennedy. Of course he would give Kennedy’s son a job, it was just a question of what position would be right for Bobby and for the sticky committee politics of 1953. The Wisconsin senator had just been easily reelected and named chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations along with its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. But McCarthy wanted to hire another ambitious and combative young lawyer, Roy Cohn, to run his staff. Like Bobby, Cohn was a Democrat, had worked in the Justice Department, and boasted family connections, although his were not nearly as powerful as the Kennedys’. Unlike Bobby, Cohn had been a top-notch student at top-drawer schools, and he had a photographic memory along with a record of accomplishment. He’d already helped send America’s most notorious spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, to the electric chair, and he had zealously prosecuted a dozen high-level homegrown Communists he said were conspiring to overthrow our government. There was another factor in Cohn’s favor: He was Jewish. This gave McCarthy cover at a moment he was being attacked as anti-Semitic by the journalist Drew Pearson and the Anti-Defamation League.*7 Not giving the top job to Bobby offered McCarthy a different kind of cover, deflecting charges that the appointment was a payoff to his patron Joe Kennedy.
McCarthy’s solution was to make Cohn chief counsel. Ex-FBI agent Francis “Frip” Flanagan would stay on as general counsel, and Bobby would start as Flanagan’s assistant, with the promise of eventually replacing him. The arrangement was confusing even to its architect, who never was one to exercise control over his underlings. When reporters asked who would be doing what, McCarthy sheepishly smiled, spread his hands wide, and confessed, “I don’t know.” What was obvious was that Bobby was one of six assistant counsels at the committee, earning less than half of what Roy did. With official lines of authority hazy, an informal hierarchy of duties and loyalties took shape. It soon became apparent, Cohn said, that Kennedy “was my enemy,” with Flanagan confiding to Cohn that “first of all, he isn’t crazy about Jews. Second, you’re not exactly a member of the Palm Beach polo set. And thirdly, you’ve got the job he wanted.” For his part, Cohn saw in Bobby the Irish toughs who prowled the streets when he was growing up in the Bronx, and he knew how to bully back. “Roy treats [Kennedy] as a gofer. Literally as a gofer,” observed the Washington journalist Murrey Marder. “Not as a lawyer, fellow counselor, or anything like that. As a kid. A rich bitch kid.”
McCarthy was as new to the workings of the subcommittee as Kennedy was when they both came aboard in January 1953, but there was no mystery where the chairman stood or where he was heading. The senator said from the start that his subcommittee would be a beachhead in the crusade against Communism, and that he alone would set the agenda and hire and fire staff. To witnesses in his hearings, he seemed like a one-man inquisitor, judge, jury, and executioner. Whichever side one came down on regarding Joe McCarthy—was he an uber-patriot or a bullying demagogue?—anyone aligned with him at that high point in his climb to power knew what they were getting: the scariest man in America.
Kennedy worked on several issues, but the investigation that absorbed nearly all of his time and defined his tenure with the subcommittee was the Greek shipping scandal. It revealed that Greece, West Germany, Norway, and other close U.S. allies were profiting by shipping goods to and from Red China at the very moment that we were at war with China and its North Korean accomplice. Bobby laid out names and numbers for the committee and the public: Western vessels handled 75 percent of the China trade, with the Communist Bloc accounting for just 25 percent. The value of goods shipped by the West added up to $2 billion since the outbreak of war in Korea. More than half the vessels carrying out this trade flew under the flag of our most special overseas partner, Great Britain. And it was not just food and staples that were being traded. British ships carried Communist troops, Kennedy said, along with strategic materials including rubber, fertilizer, and petroleum. Adding to the affront, many of the ships were paid for with loans subsidized by U.S. taxpayers and intended to help our World War II allies rebuild their merchant fleets.
To dig up those figures, Kennedy and his researchers had worked into the nights poring over the Lloyd’s of London shipping index, reviewing British parliamentary debates, and rechecking reports from the U.S. Maritime Commission and the Central Intelligence Agency. That kind of doggedness would have confounded anyone who had known Bobby during his lazy law school years, when he still was searching for a calling. The Greek probe catapulted him back into campaign mode, which was double the pace of the typical Capitol Hill staffer then and made him stand out. So did his rumpled bearing. He drove to work in a beat-up station wagon left over from the 1952 Senate race. In the office the sleeves of his J. Press shirts were rolled past the elbows, his collar was open and frayed enough to signal old money to anyone who noticed such clues, his slim necktie was loose, and he continued to wear white woolen athletic socks long after he was advised that they clashed with his narrowshouldered business suits. What set him apart even more was that rather than pulling strings from behind the scenes, the way anonymous congressional staffers normally did, Bobby was the star witness in the shipping hearings.
McCarthy didn’t care how his assistant counsel looked or where he sat as long as he generated blockbuster material like this. “It seems just unbelievable, unheard of, in the history of the world, I believe, that a nation would have ships owned by its nationals transporting the troops to kill its own soldiers,” the chairman railed at a hearing in May 1953. Complimenting Bobby on the charts he had prepared that broke down the embarrassing pattern by nation and goods, McCarthy added, “I think it would be an excellent thing if each of the mothers of the 3,700 British casualties could have a copy of that chart.” Subcommittee Democrats were equally exasperated, which was a first. “I notice a hundred British ships at a minimum are engaged in this trade and traffic,” said Senator John McClellan of Arkansas. “I wonder how much that offsets, if it does not equal at least, the contribution the British are making in the Korean War on our side as allies. I think it is a pertinent observation. Whose war is it, the United Nations’ or the United States’ war?”
His senators were delighted by the sparks Kennedy’s findings were producing with the media and public, but research findings were not enough. They also wanted to show that Congress could change things even if the State Department couldn’t or wouldn’t. With Bobby beside him, McCarthy held a press conference to announce that he had personally negotiated a pact under which the Greek owners of 242 cargo vessels agreed to stop trading with Red China, North Korea, and other Communist countries. That, the chairman predicted, would reduce China’s seagoing commerce by as much as a third and hasten victory in the Korean War.
The Eisenhower administration was not amused. It was one thing for the Republican senator to hold captive the foreign policy of Democratic president Harry Truman, but now McCarthy was undermining a Republican administration by antagonizing its friends in Britain and stirring up anticommunist critics at home. After months of back-and-forth with the executive branch in the spring of 1
953, McCarthy told Kennedy to draft a letter asking the president just what U.S. policy was on our allies trading with our enemies. The senator signed it, and Bobby delivered the letter to the White House. Eisenhower faced a Hobson’s choice: embarrassing the British, or defying Congress and the public. Vice President Richard Nixon came to the president’s rescue, convincing McCarthy that he had fallen into a partisan trap by writing a letter originally proposed by Democratic senator Stuart Symington. Then Nixon got McCarthy to withdraw the missive before it was officially received by the president. Reporters caught on, but when they asked McCarthy, he lied, saying he had never authorized the letter to be delivered. As for Bobby, he had gotten a lesson in realpolitik. The idealistic young lawyer believed in what the committee was doing and didn’t understand why his boss had backed down, since the facts backed him up. When a reporter demanded to know whether he had been to the White House, Kennedy “appeared flustered and asked, ‘Did somebody see me go in there?’ ”
Bobby’s role in the shipping investigation earned high marks from most journalists and other commentators, including some who offered their first—and last—words of praise for McCarthy. Drew Pearson, one of McCarthy’s earliest and staunchest critics, wrote that the subcommittee “was absolutely right about probing the entire Greek shipping scandal” and should keep pressing. The New York Times columnist Arthur Krock said Kennedy had conducted a “Congressional investigation at the highest level, with documentation given for every statement represented as a fact and with conclusions and opinions expressed dispassionately despite the provocations of what is disclosed.” What Krock and Pearson didn’t say, but was understood, was that Bobby’s rigor was the antithesis of his boss’s provoke-but-seldom-prove approach. Not bad for a young man who had flunked his law school course on research. McCarthy, meanwhile, bumped Bobby’s annual salary from $4,952.20 to $5,334.57—a nice gesture although, even in today’s dollars, the total would amount to a modest $47,335.02.
Not everyone was impressed. Winston Churchill’s cabinet felt the United States was being predictably isolationist and naïve by not acknowledging how a cutoff in trade with China could harm Hong Kong and England’s other Asian outposts and push the Chinese to trade more with the Soviet Bloc. Britain acknowledged that there had been a tenfold jump in exports to China at the start of 1953, but it insisted the rise was temporary, overall shipments were modest, and no goods were weapons-related. America had to understand, the British added, how reliant their island nation was on exports. David Ormsby-Gore, an English diplomat and baron who knew Joe Kennedy and his boys well enough to speculate on patterns in their behavior, was convinced the subcommittee investigation had less to do with Britain’s reliability as an ally than with Kennedy clan loyalties: “Deep down Bobby felt that this was a treacherous act by the British and was in line with the history of the way the British had behaved to the Irish people and so on. There was a strong emotional suspicion of Britain and, of course, an anti-colonial attitude which was perfectly natural in America.”
Roy Cohn had his own reservations about Bobby’s investigation. He said the Allied shipping probe “was so strong and so violently against the President that even McCarthy, who was not one to pull back, thought that this was going a little too far based on the facts in the thing. And he would not back up Bobby insofar as an open break with the White House….[Bobby] was really very militant. I’m not saying I disagreed with his militancy, but he certainly had it.”
His eagerness to swipe at Kennedy was not new, but this time Cohn was half right. Bobby was militant—rightfully so—in his pursuit not just of allies who were double-crossing us, but of an Eisenhower administration that had covered it up. Kennedy’s official report on the affair, filed in July 1953, argued that “this shocking policy of fighting the enemy on the one hand and trading with him on the other cannot be condoned.” In his fealty to McCarthy, however, Bobby failed to appreciate that the State Department and White House were understandably furious that the senator repeatedly questioned their foreign policy, generally on grounds less lofty than with the shipping crisis. Kennedy also bit his tongue when McCarthy caved in to White House pressure to withdraw the letter that Bobby had drafted and the senator had approved. And, as Drew Pearson would point out, when a similar moral quandary came up thirteen years later about America’s cutting off aid to countries trading with our battlefield enemy in North Vietnam, a more worldly and, to Pearson at least, a less idealistic Senator Bobby Kennedy voted no.
At the end of July, barely a month after he filed his report on the shipping scandal, Bobby submitted his letter of resignation to the McCarthy subcommittee. It was and wasn’t a surprise. He had just started work in mid-January and had not planned to stop that soon. Furthermore, he had nowhere to go. Yet his big investigation was done, and he was unnerved by the office’s disarray and his sense that McCarthy might be self-destructing. Frip Flanagan, Bobby’s boss and mentor at the subcommittee, had been pushed up to the full committee. J. B. Matthews, an ordained Methodist minister hired to replace Flanagan under the new title of chief of staff, was fired less than three weeks later for publishing an article claiming that Protestant clergy constituted “the largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States.” In early July, all three of the subcommittee’s Democrats—Senators John McClellan, Stuart Symington, and Henry Jackson—quit the panel and vowed to stay away until McCarthy gave them a say in how it ran. The chairman’s rule by fiat might have been tolerable to Bobby if he had been asked to step into Flanagan’s job, something McCarthy had promised him. Kennedy would have been more upset had he known that Jean Kerr, McCarthy’s administrative assistant who would soon become the senator’s wife, had confided to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that it would be “unfortunate” if McCarthy tapped Bobby for the post, although she didn’t say why and Hoover didn’t disagree.
What really scared Bobby was the prospect that with Flanagan gone, there would be nobody to shield him from Roy Cohn. Their relationship had started out sour and quickly turned toxic. The two young lawyers approached the world from opposite poles. Bobby meticulously organized his files, cross-checked depositions, and prepared detailed reports and charts to bolster his findings. By contrast, chaos seemed to follow Roy everywhere. He disdained working out of the subcommittee’s crowded suite, preferring a nearby private office building where his desk was stacked high with open folders of scribbled notes. During his reign as chief counsel, phones rang but were not answered, staff filtered in and out without direction, and the confusion was obvious at hearings he staffed. “Most of the investigations were instituted on the basis of some preconceived notion by the chief counsel or his staff members and not on the basis of any information that had been developed,” Bobby would say, looking back. “No real spade work that might have destroyed some of their pet theories was ever undertaken.” Donald Ritchie, the official historian of the Senate, came to the same conclusion half a century later after reviewing newly opened records of two years of closed-door hearings by Cohn and McCarthy: “After they’re finished, after all 500 of these people come in, there’s not a single person that McCarthy investigates who goes to jail for perjury or for contempt….Cohn thought he could bully and badger people into confessing and they went off on just wild goose chases in those hearings.” Bobby, too, believed in making full use of his investigative powers, but not to the point of bullying and badgering, at least not then.
Two more things got under Kennedy’s skin about Cohn. The chief counsel was a homosexual, which was difficult for Bobby to accept. Worse was that Cohn made little effort to hide this fact even as he publicly denied it. In the 1950s, homophobia was ingrained in American culture, and it ran deep in the Kennedy veins. “I think Roy’s homosexuality must have bothered Bobby a lot,” says Anthony Lewis, a New York Times journalist who went to prep school with Cohn and to college with Kennedy and who covered both over the years. “Those were ancient days….Bobby would have been good on gay rights as he was o
n all such things as soon as somebody told him: ‘Hey, these are people.’ ”
Yet even as Bobby insisted he was quitting the subcommittee simply because of Roy Cohn, nothing about his departure was simple. “When Cohn took complete charge of the staff in June, 1953,” he wrote, “I left.” In fact, Cohn never took complete charge. Kennedy was slated to report to Matthews when he was named chief of staff on June 22, then to his successor, ex–FBI agent Frank Carr, who was hired after Matthews was fired in early July. And Bobby’s letter said his resignation was effective not in June but “as of the close of business July 31,” with a story announcing it in the next day’s New York Times. Although critics would accuse Kennedy of overplaying his conflict with Cohn, understating his time with the controversial McCarthy, and trying to look as if he walked out as a matter of conscience, there was more to his misdirection than that. He likely was doing McCarthy a favor by delaying his official resignation so it would not come at a moment when the subcommittee appeared to be coming unglued. McCarthy had just sacked Matthews, its Democratic members had quit, and maintaining stability—or the appearance of it—was important to the chairman.