Bobby Kennedy

by Larry Tye

  To drive home those contrasts, Bobby put in place a campaign framework more scientific and dynamic than any seen before in Massachusetts. He knew they wouldn’t win if he relied on the Democratic regulars, who lined up to support the reelection of Governor Paul Dever but had less sympathy for JFK’s audacious bid for the Senate. So Bobby set up a parallel structure—a party of, by, and for his brother Jack. The campaign recruited 286 local secretaries, most new to politics but not to their communities. He also set up committees that made everyone involved feel special: Women for Kennedy, Italians for Kennedy, Dentists for Kennedy. So what if the groups overlapped. “The key,” Bobby explained, “was that we got a large number of people to do some work instead of trying to get a few people to do a lot of work.” While he excelled at organizing, he knew not a thing about schmoozing, which in Massachusetts meant asking thousands of volunteers, “How’s by you?”—then listening as if you cared. “I never heard Bob Kennedy ask anyone ‘How’s the family?’ ” said Larry O’Brien, who coordinated the field organizers and diagrammed, in a sixty-four-page black-bound book, the nuts-and-bolts organization to implement Bobby’s grand strategy. “The entire hand-shaking, small-talking side of politics was repugnant to him; he often said to me, ‘Larry, I don’t know how you stand it.’ ”

  With the message and sales force in place, they needed a merchandising plan. State law required only twenty-five hundred nomination signatures, but the Kennedy campaign handed in a record 262,324, with all the names going into campaign files and the milestone noted in newspapers. It signed up a hundred thousand new voters, most in districts that always went Democratic. Whereas Democrats typically focused on Boston and a handful of other cities, Bobby insisted on organizing every town with more than six hundred voters, of which there were nearly three hundred. He got the campaign going full tilt in the summer rather than waiting for the traditional Labor Day kickoff. By then, he reasoned, Lodge would have been uncatchable. Bobby was there at headquarters every morning at eight, making decisions that other managers left hanging, charting the course by which his brother and sisters crisscrossed the state, and leaving at midnight or whenever the last stamp was licked. He even inserted his and Ethel’s new baby into the fray. When Joseph II was born that September, the popular Archbishop Richard Cushing baptized him in a highly publicized weekday ceremony that a Lodge aide said “cut our hearts out.” Bobby was in constant motion, like a jittery welterweight, and the toll could be measured on his bathroom scale: He lost twelve pounds during the campaign. When he saw no KENNEDY FOR SENATOR sign on a building visible to anyone crossing the bridge from Irish Charlestown to the Italian North End, he commandeered the tallest ladder he could find and hung a banner himself. “While I was holding the ladder,” JFK assistant Dave Powers remembered, “I was wondering how I could explain it to the Ambassador and Jack when Bobby fell and broke his neck. I also said to myself, if I had his money I would be sitting at home in a rocking chair instead of being up there on the top of that ladder.”

  One might have expected to find the aging ambassador sitting home in a rocker. He was a year shy of the traditional retirement age and was more prosperous than the silver-spooned Lodges. But he had built his fortune expressly so he could see his sons in high office. Jack had brought Bobby on board largely to tame Joe, and the younger son handled his dad like a master. Anyone passing Bobby’s office was likely to hear this pacifying telephone refrain: “Yes, Dad. Yes, Dad.” In truth, Joe backed off willingly; he knew Bobby was hard-boiled like him and as fixated on Jack’s winning. But both brothers recognized there were certain pivotal objectives that nobody but their father would have the brashness or venality to accomplish as they tried to take down a three-term incumbent.

  Newspaper endorsements were key back then, and The Boston Post broke with Lodge days before the election—and a day after Joe agreed to lend its editor a cool half million dollars. Joe denied any link, but Bobby conceded, “There was a connection,” and Jack told a reporter, “We had to buy that fucking paper, or I’d have been licked.” It was Joe who realized that Lodge’s role as campaign manager for Eisenhower created an opening with Massachusetts supporters of Eisenhower’s Republican opponent, Senator Robert Taft. When Taft lost his bid for the nomination, his followers found a home in Independents for Kennedy, an organization Joe dreamed up in between sending fat checks to the conservative Taft and the liberal Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson. Organizations with misleading names like Improvement of Massachusetts Fish Industry were founded with an equally political purpose: to let Kennedy family members and others circumvent the thousand-dollar state spending limit. Each of seven Kennedys gave one thousand dollars to each of five such front groups.

  Joe Kennedy’s generosity also helped ensure that Senator Joe McCarthy wouldn’t use his clout with Catholics and conservatives to help his fellow Republican Lodge, who was no fan of McCarthy. But just when Joe thought he had expunged McCarthy and McCarthyism from the campaign, an old New Dealer whom Jack had recruited to bolster his standing with liberals proposed a newspaper advertisement simultaneously attacking McCarthy and Communism. Gardner “Pat” Jackson believed his ad, which underlined Jack’s support for civil liberties, was just the split-the-difference solution the candidate and campaign manager wanted. Joe thought the idea was insane, and when Jackson started to read the text at a campaign meeting, Joe erupted. “I can’t estimate how long he poured it out on me,” Jackson recalled. “It was just a stream of stuff—always referring to ‘you and your sheeny friends.’ ”*1 The next morning an embarrassed Jack tried to explain his father to Jackson: “I guess there isn’t a motive in it which I think you’d respect, except love of family.” Moments later he corrected himself: “And more often than not, I think that’s just pride.” Joe denied the incident ever took place, saying that “Pat Jackson has been living off that story for years.”

  A similar mix of love and pride drove Bobby to make his own uncompromising declarations during the campaign. A group of Boston pols of the kind his grandfather called Dearos—for “dear old North End,” the city’s oldest and quaintest neighborhood—wandered into Kennedy campaign headquarters one day and were shocked on two counts by what they encountered. They couldn’t believe a twenty-six-year-old was running a serious statewide campaign. Worse, rather than being welcomed as sage advisers, they were barely acknowledged. You have two options, the campaign manager told them: Lick stamps or get lost. They left and never returned, which was just what Bobby had in mind. “Those politicians just wanted to sit around and talk about it and have their pictures taken at the rallies,” he said. “That’s all they did.”

  He took the same brick-wall approach with Democratic governor Dever, a favorite of the Dearos, making clear there would be no merging of campaigns and that the Kennedys could look out for themselves. Dever was beside himself, knowing how difficult it would be for him to win on his own, and he telephoned Joe: “I know you’re an important man around here and all that, but I’m telling you this and I mean it. Keep that fresh kid of yours out of my sight from here on in.” Dever presumed that Joe would side with him and the other slighted old-timers. None of them grasped that Bobby was operating from Joe’s playbook and with his backing. It was no accident that one heard the very phrases used over the years to smear the father now visited upon his son: He was vindictive, ambitious, frosty, and ruthless; he behaved like a spoiled brat; he played dirty pool; he was an SOB.

  “Ruthless” was the label that stuck. Journalists and political foes would use that adjective throughout Bobby’s career, from his years with the Rackets Committee to his work as attorney general and legislator. But it first came up here, in this Senate campaign where he was, finally, in charge. Those who got to know him realized that he was more rude than ruthless. He was too shy and unassimilated to make nice the way Jack did. And he was too busy. Besides, who cared what people thought of him so long as they liked his older brother, the one asking for their votes? Jack withstood shocks throughout
a nasty campaign because Bobby offered himself as the lightning rod. While JFK emerged with his honor intact, Bobby was branded as a consigliere. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking the egg,” Jack said looking back. “Every politician in Massachusetts was mad at Bobby after 1952 but we had the best organization in history.” Joe understood even better: “Ruthless? As a person who has had the term applied to him for 50 years, I know a bit about it. Anybody who is controversial is called ruthless. Any man of action is always called ruthless. It’s ridiculous.”

  The payoff came on election day. It was clear early that evening that Eisenhower would achieve his clean sweep, but the Massachusetts Senate race was a nail-biter. In an era before computers and electronic calculators, when results arrived community by community, Bobby tallied each with his faithful slide rule. By three in the morning the trend confirmed the success of his strategy of going it alone and drumming up support town by town. Jack beat Lodge by 71,000 votes, bucking national as well as state trends that favored the GOP and doomed Governor Dever. Kennedy’s margin of victory was almost identical to the number of ladies who attended the receptions hosted by Rose Kennedy and her daughters, and Lodge made the connection: “It was those damned tea parties.” Rose had a different take: “At last, the Fitzgeralds have evened the score with the Lodges!” But Joe knew that while his money, his wife, and his girls had done a lot, this triumph was Bobby’s at least as much as Jack’s.

  Bobby was less confident. He attributed Jack’s win in large part to the shortcomings of Senator Lodge, whom Bobby described as “a very, very lazy man as a campaigner.” The “philosophy of the campaign,” the young manager said, was enlisting an army of volunteers and pushing them as hard as they’d allow. What about strategy and judgment? “I don’t think politics requires much,” he insisted, “except effort.” It was classic Bobby: uncomfortable looking back, tongue-tied, and not wanting to ballyhoo his role even when he had pulled off the most improbable of victories and helped write the manual for the modern congressional campaign.

  Jack understood those feats whether or not Bobby did, which is why, four years later, he asked his little brother to once again interrupt his career as a Senate sleuth and serve as political point man. By now Jack had shifted his attention to the national stage and set his sights on the second spot on a 1956 Democratic presidential ticket headed once again by former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson. It was early for a little-accomplished first-term senator to be making a move—too early, felt Joe, who saw the ticket as doomed to the same trouncing by Eisenhower as four years before. But if Jack wanted to try, Bobby would be there at the convention on Chicago’s South Side, buttonholing delegates he didn’t know and pitching the case for a fresh face from the voter-rich Northeast. He’d even do what Jack dreaded most: He’d let Dad know that his sons were ignoring his counsel. Kenny O’Donnell listened as Bobby placed the call to Joe’s vacation home on the French Riviera. “The Ambassador’s blue language flashed all over the room,” recalled O’Donnell. “The connection was broken before he was finished denouncing Jack as an idiot who was ruining his political career. Bobby quickly hung up the telephone and made no effort to get his father back on the line. ‘Whew!’ Bobby said. ‘Is he mad!’ ”

  Stevenson left it to delegates to pick his number two, figuring it would add drama to a convention with hardly any. He was right, with seven senators, two governors, and the mayor of New York all scrambling for votes. It came down to just two—Jack and Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee—with Kennedy at one point just fifteen votes shy of victory. Kefauver won out in the end, having earned the reward by making two bids for president and chairing a Senate committee that took on organized crime. Joe, who may have played an unseen role in the reversal, was delighted, but Bobby would call that defeat one of his most disappointing moments. He acknowledged that he had been outplanned and outhustled, which were the very skills that had helped him stage Jack’s successful run for the Senate. He didn’t know, until then, what it felt like to lose. Crushed as he was, by the time he reached Jack’s hotel room he had steeled himself to buck up his brother: “This is the luckiest thing that ever happened to you.” He was right. Jack’s strong run had left him a leading contender for the nomination in 1960, and losing the second spot on the ticket had eliminated the possibility that his Catholicism would be blamed for Stevenson’s inevitable drubbing.

  Bobby extracted a series of hardheaded lessons from the setback. First, he needed a better grasp of the parliamentary procedures of the convention and ways to keep tabs on delegates. This was Bobby in his familiar role as campaign mechanic. Second, he learned that schmoozing, however unpleasant, counted. Kefauver “had visited [delegates] in their home. He had sent them Christmas cards. We couldn’t shake them,” Bobby recalled. “Believe me, we’ve sent out lots of Christmas cards since.” This was Bobby the backslapper, an uncomfortable task he took on for Jack’s sake. His learning continued when he accepted Stevenson’s request to help in the general election campaign, although now he focused on what not to do. Bobby had detected one bad habit in Stevenson: reading rather than only referring to the text of speeches. The candidate also spent too much valuable time shaking hands, and he was forever losing his luggage, his speeches, and his way to the next campaign stop. “In 1952, I had been crazy about him. I was excited in 1956, at the start,” Bobby said. “Then I spent six weeks with him on the campaign and he destroyed it all.” In the end, a more worldly-wise and cynical Bobby quietly marked his own ballot for Eisenhower.

  He had never disguised the fact that he saw the Stevenson campaign as a dress rehearsal for the bid everyone knew Jack would make four years hence. But the calculating way he took perpetual notes and kept the campaign at a distance made him seem more like a journalist than a Stevenson partisan. The candidate found that tremendously off-putting—he referred to Bobby as the Black Prince—and so did the real reporters. “Bobby had come along without the slightest intention of helping Stevenson. The Kennedys could hardly wait for Stevenson to lose to begin their campaign for Jack,” Harrison Salisbury, a Pulitzer Prize winner and op-ed editor at The New York Times, wrote in his memoir. “Still, I thought Bobby might at least go through the motions. He could have appeared at Stevenson’s side in the Catholic towns and made a few calls to the Catholic bosses. Not Bobby. Not once did he lift a finger….He was a hard-nerved political operator, I thought, a typical Kennedy.”

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  OUTSIDERS, WHO SAW the family as a tight-knit, like-minded tribe, believed in the idea of a “typical Kennedy.” Joe had planned it that way, and he taught his children that siblings and parents come first and last, while journalists and other interlopers should be kept beyond arm’s length. That was why he set up worlds-unto-themselves family compounds on Cape Cod and in Palm Beach. A brood of nine children made it even easier, constituting their own social club, baseball team, and campaign clique. Joe saw his kids as interchangeable enough that when Joe Jr. died, the family could transfer its political dreams to Jack, and after him to Bobby.

  Inside the clan, the differences in personality were dramatic and defining, most notably Bobby versus Jack. Growing up, the two were separated by a yawning eight and a half years. Bobby wasn’t quite eleven when Jack headed to Harvard; by the time Bobby started there, Jack had been to war and back. Bobby cherished memories of Jack taking him for walks and telling him about faraway and fantastic universes. Jack mainly remembered Bobby squealing when the older siblings and their friends raided Joe’s liquor cabinet. As they grew, more than years came between them. “All this business about Jack and Bobby being blood brothers has been exaggerated,” said their sister Eunice, who was midway between the two agewise. “They had different tastes in men, different tastes in women.” Jack had gotten a small sample of his brother’s capabilities in the 1946 congressional campaign, but Bobby’s work was mainly on the sidelines, and the two seldom socialized in Jack’s early years in Washington.

  So when Joe insisted he include hi
s younger brother on his trip to the Middle East and the Orient in the fall of 1951, Jack moaned that Bobby would be “a pain in the ass.” Yet traveling in close quarters for twenty-five thousand miles, including to trouble spots like Vietnam, let Jack see Bobby as a grown man with his own opinions. The brothers met Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, just before he was murdered, and they saw India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who Bobby said “didn’t pay the slightest attention to my brother but was just destroyed by my sister Pat.” For Jack, the trip was a quick way to beef up his foreign policy résumé; it went deeper for Bobby, who was struck by the human dimension of scenes he witnessed and people he encountered: “These countries were struggling for independence, or had just gained their independence and were trying to right themselves and create a future.” Having Bobby along began as a burden for Jack, but in the end it saved his life. Bobby arranged for his brother to be flown to a U.S. military hospital on Okinawa when an adrenal condition flared up, and he sat at his bedside when Jack’s temperature shot up to 107. “They didn’t think he could possibly live,” Bobby remembered. It was the second time priests had given the congressman last rites.

  By the time the brothers got home, they had forged a bond and discovered how much they shared. Both were weaned on beach and ocean, which would draw them back forever. Each had contemplated a career in journalism or academia that would let them explore the world and share their observations. Neither started out as a good speaker but both made up for it with self-effacing humor and irony. Bobby was as intelligent as Jack, although less of an intellectual; Jack had Bobby’s toughness, although he was better at disguising it. “They were kind of twin spirits,” Ethel says. “One would start a sentence and the other would finish it.” Both were ambitious for their own sake, and for their father’s, although Jack had less to prove, and he had Bobby as a buffer.