by Larry Tye
When Bobby met with McCarthy to say he was leaving, Kennedy told an interviewer years later, the senator “asked me to stay on for a month. But I said I would have to resign. But he kept me on the payroll for a month.” He actually stayed on the payroll for two more months, until August 31, according to Senate records. What work he did in July and August, if any, is unclear, but the “interim” report he finished in late June turned out to be the last one on the Allied shipping situation. He kept secret until after McCarthy died his willingness to delay the timing of his quitting, at which point he began referring to the six months that he worked for the subcommittee instead of the seven that he mentioned in his resignation letter and the seven and a half for which he was paid. To him, the details didn’t matter and any obfuscation was a price he willingly paid to stay loyal to his ex-boss.
Bobby’s letter of resignation explained that he planned “to enter the private practice of law at an early date,” something he never did and never intended to do. “I have enjoyed my work and associations on the Subcommittee,” he wrote to McCarthy. “Please accept my sincere thanks for the many courtesies and kindnesses you have extended to me.” The senator’s response was even more upbeat, saying “I very much regret seeing you leave” and “I sincerely hope that you will consider coming back later on in the summer.”
Letters like these often are window dressing, but in this case they sincerely reflected the bond the senator had formed with his young aide. McCarthy reserved a place for Bobby at his wedding, his dinner table, and his deathbed. Other Kennedy family and friends have downplayed the politically incorrect friendship, but Ethel, who knew it best, neither whitewashes nor sugarcoats. While the public may have thought McCarthy a monster, she says, he actually “was just plain fun….He didn’t rant and roar, he was a normal guy.” (Cohn, she maintains, truly was monstrous.) Sometimes Bobby would visit the senator at his apartment on Capitol Hill to discuss work. Other times the outings were social, with Ethel and Bobby bringing their toddler daughter Kathleen along. McCarthy “just wanted to hold her. We’d be talking and then he’d say something to her. He was just crazy about her,” recalls Ethel. “I have had that kind of bond with somebody else’s baby and so I understand that it can happen. It’s like falling in love.”
That warmth cooled somewhat over the years. As the public perception of McCarthy evolved, so did Bobby’s telling of what he said on his way out the door. The Boston Post journalist John Kelso was curious, since Kennedy left so soon after the Democratic senators did, so he asked Bobby whether the two were linked. “Although an effort was made in some quarters to bolster the claim that Kennedy, too, had quit in anger,” Kelso wrote in 1953, “he himself vehemently denied the allegation.” In 1960, three years after McCarthy’s death when Bobby was climbing the political ladder, he wrote that “I told McCarthy that I disagreed with the way the Committee was being run, except for the work that Flanagan had done, and that the way they were proceeding I thought it was headed for disaster.” Two years later, as he tilted ever more leftward, his explanation grew more colorful: “I told [McCarthy] I thought he was out of his mind and was going to destroy himself….He was on a toboggan. It was so exciting and exhilarating as he went downhill that it didn’t matter to him if he hit a tree at the bottom.”
No one will ever know just what Kennedy actually told McCarthy in their private exit interview. He may well have warned about Cohn, and he likely let the senator himself off the hook too easily. Casting Cohn as a master manipulator, however true, was also convenient: It let Bobby stay close to McCarthy while distancing himself from the worst of his committee’s and subcommittee’s excesses. Whatever Bobby’s reason for leaving, his timing was just right, since the Wisconsin senator’s worst days were just ahead. There are hints that J. Edgar Hoover may have tipped off his friend Joe Kennedy to McCarthy’s impending woes, with Joe persuading Bobby it was time to go. That would explain why Bobby quit before lining up another job. Cohn later joked that Bobby owed him a debt of gratitude: “Would Bobby Kennedy have become a liberal icon had he been Joe McCarthy’s right hand during his ‘witch-hunt.’ ”
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THE NEXT HALF year would be the most tedious in Bobby’s twenty-year public life, working for the blandest of ex-presidents. Herbert Hoover is best remembered for two violations of the public good: He ushered in a Great Depression that he seemed incapable of ending, and he rigorously enforced Prohibition at a troubled time when Americans thirsted for a stiff drink. But Presidents Truman and Eisenhower recognized that the mining engineer turned politician knew more than anybody else about efficiency, and they enlisted him to run a blue-ribbon panel aimed at making the government more productive. It was for that noble purpose—in the form of the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government—that Bobby signed up in the summer of 1953.
Hoover had been one of Bobby’s boyhood heroes, and the former president’s portrait would forever occupy a place in Bobby’s home, but this job simply didn’t engage him.*8 To compound his misery, Bobby was administrative assistant to one of the commission’s most illustrious members: his father. Joe Kennedy was a longtime friend of Hoover, who shared his isolationist views on America’s role in the world. It was hard enough for Bobby to be indebted to his father for his school admissions and early jobs, but now Joe was Bobby’s boss as well. The commission was populated mainly by old men (Hoover had just turned eighty, Joe Kennedy was a spry sixty-four), and Bobby’s first assignment was to investigate the Weather Bureau (the only tempests he could forecast were political ones).
Bobby had always had an excess of energy, and while working for Senator McCarthy he had spent it on issues at the heart of the national debate. Now that he was on the sidelines, that steam got bottled up, and the best place to release the pressure was on the athletic field. He did so in nearly heroic style one weekend afternoon just months after he started with Hoover, at a park in Washington, D.C. College students kept hitting baseballs into the middle of a football game Bobby was playing with his brother Ted and their friends. Ted, who was five inches taller than Bobby, faced off against an equally big baseball player, “but Bob broke in and announced that he’d do the fighting. It was like a scene in ancient Rome, with each side putting forth its gladiator,” remembered Larry O’Brien, an aide to Senator Jack Kennedy. “It became a bloody brawl, with each man determined to score a knockout. But neither could and finally the fight stopped when they simply couldn’t raise their arms any longer.”
Bobby had been getting into dustups like that since he was a boy, taking on foes who were beefier than he was but less ferocious. Sometimes it was in the schoolyard, on other occasions in bars. Afterward, no one was ever sure what had set him off, but the fights somehow cleansed him. Now they were happening more often, and it was harder for Bobby to see the risk or to settle down afterward. “That was the period 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,” said Lem Billings, Jack’s old roommate. “He was filled with so many things he wanted to do, but he felt he wasn’t accomplishing anything….He just didn’t see his future.”
Six and a half months after he started work with the Hoover Commission, he resigned, leaving the weather to take care of itself. Half a year was about the same time Bobby had put in with the McCarthy subcommittee and his other jobs. These short spurts showed a lack of patience—a common failing among his peers, especially those with the financial freedom and political connections to move on quickly. And when the chance opened early in 1954 to return to the action on Capitol Hill and the Subcommittee on Investigations, Bobby jumped. His bosses this time were the Democrats—McClellan, Symington, and Jackson—who a month before had rejoined the panel with a promise from McCarthy that they could hire their own lawyer and play a bigger role in decision making. For McCarthy, the new arrangement ensured that the Senate would give
him funds he wanted in order to expand his probes into Communist infiltration of the government. For Bobby, the new job meant a chance to joust again with his bête noire, Roy Cohn, this time from a near-equal position on the other side of the partisan aisle.
The Democrats came back just as McCarthy was raising the stakes in his battle against Communism by challenging the sanctity of the U.S. Army. The senator’s special focus was New Jersey’s Fort Monmouth, the main research campus for the Army Signal Corps and a linchpin in the command and control of this country’s combined armed services. Julius Rosenberg had worked there, and the subcommittee suspected the base was a beehive of spies.*9 But in mounting this assault on the military, McCarthy made two strategic errors. First, he failed to see that the Cold War was cooling off. The UN Command had signed an armistice in July 1953 with North Korea and China, and many of the same Americans who had backed him in his earlier crusades now were eager for a stand-down with the Soviet Bloc. McCarthy also failed, as he always had, to police the overeager Roy Cohn and his coddled assistant G. David Schine, the scion of a hotel and movie theater magnate who had been working as a committee consultant since the spring of 1953. McCarthy’s fealty to Cohn, and Cohn’s to Schine, would be the undoing of all three.
Senator McCarthy won the first round on a knockout early in 1954. He made an example of an Army dentist named Irving Peress, who had invoked the Fifth Amendment in refusing to fill out a loyalty form asking whether he was or had been a member of a subversive organization. Today, that might be seen as a legitimate expression of his rights to free association and privacy, but in the fraught 1950s, loyalty trumped confidentiality, the hint of Communist sympathies could earn one a place on a career-stifling blacklist, and pleading the Fifth was taken as a confession of guilt (McCarthy branded men like Peress “Fifth-Amendment Communists”). Despite that red flag, Peress’s bosses had approved his promotion from captain to major and eventually authorized an honorable discharge. It still is unclear whether Peress actually was a Communist (fifty years later he insisted he wasn’t “for one minute” while he was in the Army, but he wouldn’t say whether he had been before), and the senator was not arguing that a dentist could threaten national security. The point, McCarthy said, was that the military’s coddling of Peress—five officers had been involved in his induction, six in his promotion, and thirteen more in his discharge, yet nobody paid proper attention to his unanswered loyalty questions—laid bare the potential for “deliberate Communist infiltration of our Armed Forces.” While Bobby returned to the subcommittee too late to weigh in on the Peress probe, in March 1955 he led his own investigation of the dentist, concluding that the Army was guilty of bureaucratic bungling but not of a treasonous breach. In February 1954, however, the question on the lips of every anticommunist American was “Who promoted Peress?”
The Army was not like the Voice of America, the International Information Agency, and other early targets of McCarthy, which lacked the resolve and clout to resist. McCarthy was now slinging his mud at the mighty bastion of the U.S. military. The generals were outraged and their commander in chief was, too. And when McCarthy accused Eisenhower of being a Johnny-come-lately not just to the Peress case, but to the wider “necessity of getting rid of Communists,” opinion seemed to turn on the wild and willful senator. The CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow devoted all thirty minutes of his See It Now broadcast on March 9, 1954, to exposing McCarthy’s overreaching. “The line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly,” Murrow warned. “This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to stay silent—or for those who approve.” Two days later the Army delivered an even more damaging volley when it leaked to senators and the press a blistering thirty-four-page memo laying out dozens of cases in which Cohn and Schine had applied pressure—including a reported threat to “wreck the Army”—unless it gave a commission to Schine, who was due to report to his draft board. When that effort failed, the McCarthy aides pressed for weekend passes for Schine, clearance for him to serve his time with the subcommittee rather than the armed services, and other privileges never dreamed of for a buck private. The Army had provided a motive for McCarthy’s attacks that everyone could understand and even his defenders found offensive: revenge.
Bobby was on the sidelines for those battles, but he was back in the spotlight for another high-profile confrontation the same day the Army unveiled its memo. McCarthy was investigating Annie Lee Moss, a black mother of four and widow who worked as a communications clerk with the Signal Corps. Like Peress, Moss was presented as a case study in the military’s cosseting of Communists—but this time it wasn’t the witness who came out looking the fool, it was the interrogator, Roy Cohn. In his haste to point fingers, Cohn said Moss had been visited by a white “Communist organizer” named Robert Hall, apparently confusing him with a black union organizer of the same name whom Moss said she did know. A reporter who recognized the slipup tipped off Bobby, who tipped off the Democrats, who charged that Cohn was inept in miscasting Moss, a loyal American, as a subversive. The press recognized that this was more than just normal partisan sniping. A week after his earlier broadside against the Wisconsin senator, Murrow made him the focus of another show, this time proclaiming Moss’s innocence and McCarthy’s guilt. Bobby had finally succeeded in exposing Cohn’s recklessness, although in the process he exposed McCarthy’s malfeasance for relying so heavily on Cohn.*10
There was one more reverberation for Bobby from the Annie Lee Moss affair. In the wake of her testimony, Senator Jackson asked Bobby to visit FBI headquarters and look at its file on Moss. It was his first encounter with his father’s old friend and his future nemesis J. Edgar Hoover, and neither the FBI director nor the Senate aide would forget their strained introduction. Hoover said the file was off-limits to the committee Democrats; Bobby persisted, knowing that the agency had been sharing information with McCarthy and the Republicans. The FBI chief wasn’t used to being second-guessed, and he advised his senior staff that “the attitude of Kennedy in this matter clearly shows need for absolute circumspection in any conversation with him.” Bobby also took notice, later writing, “They lied to me….They were making information available to the committee, and they were telling me they weren’t.”
By the end it was Cohn, Schine, and McCarthy who were on trial, not Moss, Peress, or the Army. The Eisenhower administration decided this was the place to take a stand against McCarthy, and it found an unlikely ally in the wily and influential minority leader of the Senate, Lyndon Johnson, who had been advising liberal Democrats not to pounce until the Wisconsin lawmaker did something that offended conservatives, too. Putting the Army in his crosshairs turned the tide. The public might have accepted that individual dentists and teletype operators were fellow travelers or party members, but the notion that the U.S. Army was a nest of Communist moles strained credulity.
The subcommittee held a series of inquiries between April and June 1954 that became known as the Army-McCarthy Hearings. Gavel-to-gavel coverage on two national television networks made these the most widely watched and riveting sessions ever held by Congress. The same cameras that had helped make Joe McCarthy into a national figurehead now helped Americans see the extent to which he had overpromised and underperformed. McCarthy was temporarily relieved of his chairmanship and Cohn of his role as counsel. McCarthy suggested that Bobby run the investigation, but acting chairman Karl Mundt of South Dakota insisted they hire someone new and neutral. Ultimately, the lawyer the public would remember most was Army Special Counsel Joseph Nye Welch, who came from a Brahmin firm in Boston and tangled repeatedly with the senator from Grand Chute. Using his usual method of histrionic accusation, McCarthy called into question the patriotism of a young associate of Welch’s who was no longer involved in the case. Welch froze in horror before the cameras. “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” the Boston barrister expl
oded in a singular moment that proved McCarthy had met his match. “Let us not assassinate this lad further….Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
It was a question much of the country was asking by then. Edward R. Murrow’s hard-hitting television exposés had dented McCarthy’s armor, as had enterprising newspaper reporters like Philip Potter of the Baltimore Sun and columnist Drew Pearson. Over thirty-five days, as many as twenty million Americans watched the 187 hours of televised hearings. The more they heard of Cohn’s antics in trying to cushion the Army duties of his sidekick Schine, the less they trusted his charges against the military. The more they saw the senator ignore not just parliamentary procedure but common courtesy, the less they were willing to listen to or believe anything he said.
One thing the cameras could not capture was how the simmering animosities between Cohn and Kennedy were reaching a full boil. Newspaper reporters saw that close-up at the end of a long day of hearings in mid-June, and they couldn’t say enough about it. Bobby had been feeding his Democratic senators questions aimed not just at tripping up Cohn and Schine but at exposing them as fools and liars. Schine had already shown his indifference to facts in a monograph he wrote for the subcommittee that put the Russian Revolution in the wrong year and confused Marx with Lenin and Stalin with Trotsky. This time Senator Jackson, at Bobby’s coaching, ridiculed Schine’s plan for waging psychological warfare against the Communists by enlisting church leaders in a battle for the souls of men and, if that failed, appealing to less noble instincts through the dissemination of Hollywood pinups. When the hearing recessed, Cohn strode up to Kennedy and, according to Bobby, threatened to “get” Jackson by revealing something he had written that was “favorably inclined toward Communists.” Kennedy: “Don’t you make any warnings to us about Democratic senators.” Cohn: “I’ll make any warnings to you that I want to—any time, anywhere. Do you want to fight right here?”