by Larry Tye
The Kennedy brothers seldom said thank-you for masterful strokes like that or anything else—and they never said it to each other. It was understood. Voicing it would sound syrupy, and they made so many decisions jointly that it would be unclear who should thank whom. But throughout the last year Bobby had gone so far beyond any call of duty that over Christmas, Jack wrote out what he couldn’t say face-to-face, in the teasing meter that the brothers often used. “For Bobby—The Brother Within—who made the easy difficult,” the president-elect inscribed in a richly bound red leather copy of Bobby’s book The Enemy Within. Jackie added, just above, “To Bobby—who made the impossible possible and changed all our lives.”
* * *
*1 “Sheeny” is an ethnic slur for a Jew.
*2 Joe encouraged the competition within the family by, among other things, offering a thousand-dollar prize to the daughter-in-law who invited the best dining partner for him at a dinner for ten she hosted. “I was [Ethel’s] candidate,” recalled Nancy Dickerson, CBS’s first female correspondent. “She wanted to book me ‘before Eunice gets you’ ” (Dickerson, Among Those Present, 69).
*3 Judge Marjorie McKenzie Lawson, a Kennedy campaign coordinator in West Virginia, said there was nothing wrong with the kind of modest walking-around money she was given: “It was doled out at about a dollar an hour to people who were willing to ride around and talk to people in the woods somewhere and bring them to meetings” (Lawson OH, October 25, 1965, 15–18, JFKL).
*4 British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who habitually carried an umbrella, pursued a policy of appeasing the Nazis before World War II, when Joe was America’s ambassador to Britain and a supporter of Chamberlain. “Umbrella man” is another way of saying bootlicker.
*5 While Jack always was a natural on television, Bobby never was, and he taught his children that watching TV was a waste of time.
*6 Mitchell said his visit was a political one, to assist Carl Sanders in his bid for governor of Georgia, and that Bobby agreed to help even though that meant not sending in federal voting registrars to enforce civil rights laws. Bobby told a different version, saying Mitchell “never asked for anything.” (Bass, Taming the Storm, 171; RFK OH, December 4, 1964, 348, JFKL.)
*7 The colonels served as aides-de-camp to the governor’s staff and their titles, scores of which had been bestowed by governors, date back to a time when the state was hard-pressed to find educated Georgians willing to serve.
*8 While that was the first time the public heard the governor’s version, he actually had laid it out in 1967 in an oral history for the Kennedy Library. It went unnoticed in part because Vandiver wanted it to, asking that his disclosure be placed on a different tape from the rest of his interview (Kuhn, “ ‘There’s a Footnote to History!’,” Journal of American History).
*9 This was a touchy subject for Nixon, who had more to say on the matter: “[Campaign Press Secretary] Herb Klein, in response to inquiries from the press, asked me what comment I had on Robert Kennedy’s action. I told him: ‘I think Dr. King is getting a bum rap. But despite my strong feelings in this respect, it would be completely improper for me or any other lawyer to call the judge. And Robert Kennedy should have known better than to do so.’ Under the circumstances, Klein answered the press query by saying that I had ‘no comment’ on the matter.” Nixon then took the matter to Attorney General Bill Rogers, one of his campaign advisers, and Rogers strongly recommended that the White House say it had ordered the Justice Department to investigate whether King’s constitutional rights had been violated. “Had this recommendation been adopted,” Nixon wrote, “the whole incident might have resulted in a plus rather than a minus as far as I was concerned. But Rogers was unable to get approval from the White House for such a statement” (Nixon, Six Crises, 362–63).
*10 After the campaign, some reporters and Republicans charged that the Kennedys had stolen votes in Illinois, with help from everyone from the Mafia to Chicago mayor Richard Daley. But the Prairie State hadn’t decided the election, and the Kennedy tally wasn’t heavier than normal in districts where unions loyal to the Mob or Daley had allegedly pulled votes out of thin air or graveyards. Whatever underhanded techniques Cook County Democrats did use were balanced by equally shady manipulation by downstate Republicans. “Elections then were not as clean as we think they are today,” says Bill Daley, son of the legendary mayor and a former chief of staff to President Obama. “The only thing I can state is that at the end of that, my dad said, ‘Recount every ballot in the state. We’ll pay for half of it. The Republican Party can pay for half of it.’ And they refused to pay for half of it” (Author interview with Bill Daley).
Chapter 4
GETTING JUSTICE
NOBODY HAD STRIVED more tirelessly than Robert F. Kennedy to make John F. Kennedy president, with the possible exceptions of the candidate himself and their father, Joseph P. Kennedy. Jack’s future was set now, for four years at least, and probably eight. Joe, too, had what he wanted: a son in the White House. But what about Bobby?
Joe had been contemplating the question nearly as long as he had the paths of his eldest sons. He made plain his goals three years before in a Saturday Evening Post profile entitled “The Amazing Kennedys,” which envisioned “the day when Jack will be in the White House” and “Bobby will serve in the Cabinet as Attorney General.” The article continued, “If this should come to pass, of course, the joy of the senior Kennedy would know no bounds.”
Making that dream a reality would strain even Joe’s capacities. How would the country and the Congress react to the most politically conflicted job in government going to the president’s campaign manager and brother, who was just turning thirty-five? Senior political aides had run the Justice Department before, but never had so close a relative of the president been named to the cabinet or any top administration posting. Only twice had a younger man been U.S. attorney general—one was the former attorney general of Pennsylvania, whose father had been a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, the other was a veteran of the Delaware Legislature and U.S. House of Representatives—and both held office in the early 1800s, when the job was part time, there was no Department of Justice to oversee, and the salary was meager because the attorney general was expected to take on private clients.
More intriguing were the family dynamics that surrounded Bobby’s appointment. These played out far from public view, in tones so whispered that even siblings weren’t sure who was saying what to whom. The easiest to read was Joe, who paced nervously around his winter manse in a custom-made white suit and horn-rimmed glasses. He wanted someone in the cabinet to protect Jack’s flank and tell him the hard truth, especially since most of his other nominees were strangers to him. Joe knew the attorney general’s expansive portfolio would let Bobby dabble in foreign as well as domestic affairs, offering advice where needed and fattening his own résumé for high office. As a business tycoon who lived his own life on the edge of lawlessness, Joe also grasped how useful it could be having America’s chief law enforcement officer at his dinner table. And he had no illusions about his eldest surviving son. The capital teemed with the enemies, both Republican and Democratic, that Jack had made during his swift climb to power, while skeletons continued to pile up in his bedroom closet. Nobody had shielded Jack more effectively from himself and his adversaries than Bobby, even when that meant lying. It was Bobby who squashed rumors not just of Jack’s being distressingly ill but of his having had a secret earlier marriage (the first was true, the second not). Now they needed a bulwark more than ever at the same time that Bobby needed the right job. Joe would not be easily denied. “Fuck public opinion,” his father coolly instructed the president-elect. “He’ll do a good job.”
What Jack wanted was less obvious. He was a master at reading popular sentiment, and he confided to Jackie late one evening his worry that the public would decry as nepotism his naming Bobby and it would wipe out his postelection honeymoon with the press and lawmakers.
He also knew his brother was no soft touch, having watched him manhandle election foes and grill roughneck Teamsters, and he realized the qualities that would enable Bobby to bring the Justice Department to life might make it tough to keep him in line. So even as he was telling a journalist friend that “Bobby’s the best man I can get,” Jack quietly explored his options for the post. Connecticut governor Abraham Ribicoff preferred and got Health, Education, and Welfare; Adlai Stevenson preferred State and got the United Nations. Over the course of the campaign JFK had become increasingly comfortable standing up to his dad—but he wasn’t sure he wanted to do that on a matter like naming Bobby attorney general, on which Joe felt so strongly and made so much sense.
In trademark fashion, Jack tried to have this difficult conversation through surrogates. First he enlisted his Senate buddy “Gorgeous George” Smathers to see whether the old man might be open to Bobby’s taking another job. Jack and Smathers were sitting next to the oversized Kennedy swimming pool in Palm Beach, with Joe at the far end enjoying his morning newspapers. “Excuse me, Mr. Ambassador, Jack and I have just been talking about Bobby,” Smathers said. “I thought he could be assistant secretary of defense, and then in a year or so, he could move up.” Ignoring Smathers, Joe summoned to his side the soon-to-be leader of the free world and let him have it: “Your brother Bobby busted his ass for you. He gave you his life blood. You know it, and I know it. By God, he deserves to be attorney general of the U.S., and by God, that’s what he’s going to be. Do you understand that?” Jack responded as he had been taught, “Yes, sir.” JFK tried again a short time later, this time via the Washington power broker Clark Clifford. Thinking it “truly a strange assignment—the President-elect asking a third party to try to talk to his father about his brother. Only the Kennedys!”—Clifford flew to New York and did as asked. Joe still wouldn’t budge. “Bobby is going to be Attorney General. All of us have worked our tails off for Jack, and now that we have succeeded I am going to see to it that Bobby gets the same chance that we gave to Jack,” Clifford recalled Joe telling him. “I would always remember the intense but matter-of-fact tone with which he had spoken—there was no rancor, no anger, no challenge.” Joe’s determination surprised Smathers and Clifford, but not Jack, who knew when to surrender.
Bobby’s own wishes were the most difficult to untangle. Even he couldn’t decipher them or admit having ambitions of his own after a lifetime of indoctrination that the family came first. Starting just after the election, he and Jack parsed every scenario as they walked barefoot along the deserted beach in Hyannis Port, their unruly hair swept straight up by the late-autumn breeze, their focus finally on what was best for Bobby. “He wanted to know what I wanted to do,” Bobby recalled. One by one, then and later, Jack mentioned government posts he felt made sense and Bobby countered with jobs that drew him to other realms entirely. What about something at the State Department involving Latin America, or that secretary-in-waiting spot at Defense? Terrific training, the brothers agreed, but awkward for either secretary to be second-guessed by the president’s little brother. The White House staff was another possibility, but it was awfully close for JFK’s comfort, and Bobby worried that “I had been working with [Jack] for a long time, and I thought maybe I’d like to go off by myself.” For brothers, he added, “or at least for the two of us—we had to have our own areas. I had to be apart from what he was doing so I wasn’t working directly for him and getting orders from him as to what I should do that day.” Neither law nor business held any more appeal for Bobby than they had before. Lying in bed next to Ethel he ticked off other possibilities—he could run a nonprofit (he already was president of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation), run a newspaper (he enjoyed courting reporters and had briefly been one himself), or teach, travel, or simply spend a year reading (he relished the thought of each but never seriously considered any). Jack also mentioned that he could arrange for Bobby to serve out the remainder of his term as senator from Massachusetts. Annoyed, Bobby made clear that he didn’t want a hand-me-down. The only way he would be a senator, thanks very much, was to win the office on his own.
The attorney general idea kept reeling him in. It was the first option Jack had offered, but Bobby was torn. He worried that “nepotism was a problem.” He reasoned that “I had been chasing bad men for three years, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing that.” He told the about-to-be head of state, “I didn’t want to be in government.” This young man who rarely vacillated in making difficult calls during his brother’s campaigns couldn’t make up his mind when it came to thinking about himself. A similar indecision would plague him years later when he weighed running for the Senate, then the presidency. He had a stunning array of options available to few men in history, but he felt, too, the onerous expectations of his parents, siblings, and public. He wanted to do what was right but couldn’t say for sure what that was. Could he handle being the nation’s top legal authority and cop? Doubts like those had never stopped him when he was diving into Cape Cod’s deepest water to test whether he could swim, or calling out the British for trading with Red China. Part of him yearned to stop being a Kennedy for once and withdraw into the family he was building with Ethel. He also wanted his big brother to seek him out, and any sign that Jack was having doubts would crush Bobby.
During a desperately needed vacation in Acapulco, Bobby tried to focus on anything but his future. When he got back, Jack needed him as a sounding board and emissary in the frenetic search to fill other key jobs in the administration before the inauguration. As for who’d run the Justice Department, “we just vacillated back and forth,” he remembered, “almost like we did on the Vice President.” Finally, five weeks after he had sat up monitoring the votes that made his brother president, he realized it was time to make a choice. So he drove himself on an asking-and-listening tour of Washington, stopping to see everyone whose opinion he valued or felt he should.
“Nothing but headaches,” advised William P. Rogers, the outgoing attorney general who, to underscore his point, would leave his successor a large bottle of aspirin. “Do it,” countered FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, although not long after Bobby left, he told others he hadn’t meant it. Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas knew Bobby better and cared about him more, and over lunch they analyzed options ranging from running for senator or governor in Massachusetts to making his home and career in Maryland. “I told him I thought he would make a fine Attorney General, but that at some juncture in his life he should start a course that was wholly independent of Jack,” Douglas said. “It was now time to think of himself.”
Bobby agonized over his decision one last time at home that evening with Ethel and his friend John Seigenthaler. Acknowledging that “this will kill my father,” he picked up the telephone and called Jack to say no. No, he didn’t want to be attorney general. No, he couldn’t be talked into it. Jack listened, then invited him to breakfast the next morning at his redbrick townhouse in Georgetown. Over bacon, eggs, and strong coffee, the elder brother used the same “ask what you can do for your country” reasoning that would rally the nation the following month. “If I can ask Dean Rusk to give up a career; if I can ask Adlai Stevenson to make a sacrifice he does not want to make; if I can ask Bob McNamara to give up a job as head of that company [Ford Motor]—these men I don’t even know—if I can ask them to make this sacrifice, certainly I can expect my own brother to give me the same sort of contribution. And I need you in this government,” Jack said, according to Seigenthaler, whom Bobby had brought along for moral support. As soon as Jack went back into the kitchen, Bobby started assembling a point-by-point rebuttal, but Seigenthaler reminded him that it hadn’t been his brother talking, it was the president-to-be. The conversation was over. Jack reappeared and announced, “ ‘So that’s it, general. Let’s go.’ [Bobby] sort of laughed, and maybe cussed a little. And that’s it, and we went.”
Like most Kennedy stories, that one has romance and enough truth to make it liv
e on. The full story is even better. Bobby wasn’t quite the object of the last-minute dragooning that he and his friends suggested. Justice Douglas recalled the lunch he had with Bobby, which took place well before that breakfast with Jack, saying that “by the time he left my office, he had made up his mind to be Attorney General.” Senator Smathers remembered that he had acted as Jack’s emissary twice regarding the attorney general’s job—once with Joe Kennedy and the other time with Bobby, who, according to Smathers wanted the posting as much as his father wanted him to have it. It was Jack who balked, Smathers told the Miami Herald, and the Florida senator agreed to try to persuade Bobby to take a job at the Defense Department. His response was as ice-cold as his father’s had been, Smathers said: “Whenever I want your advice, I will call you. And you might tell my brother if he has anything to say to me he can call me direct.” By the time Jack finally made his choice, Bobby’s was clear. He did what he had done with each of his earlier jobs—following the advice of his father, then explaining it with a flourish that buried the qualms and burnished the legend.
His enemies said his hesitation was an act from the first. “Kennedy people try to make out that when Jack became president, he and their old man insisted that Robert become the attorney general. That’s a lot of crap,” Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa wrote in his memoir. “The spoiled brat blackjacked John into giving him the job.” Hoffa cited as evidence the Miami Herald story quoting Senator Smathers, but the union leader also knew what drove Bobby almost as well as Bobby did. Attorney general was the only job that made sense for him. It tapped his legal and investigative expertise. It let him pursue social justice while handling political matters for his brother. And it gave him the tools to fight the fights he had promised never to abandon—against Roy Cohn, Lyndon Johnson, and, highest on his list of evildoers, James Riddle Hoffa.