Bobby Kennedy

by Larry Tye

  It was a miracle that Bobby found time for any intellectual exercise at all, given his burdens as attorney general and father of eight children, all preteen or younger. But he managed to fit into his schedule one last thing: voice lessons. He was a relentless self-improver and this may have been a way to get better at giving the speeches he delivered across the country. Or maybe it was with an eye on the White House or some other elective office. With Bobby it was always more than one thing. He knew that he and Jack spoke with a similar Boston accent, but that while people found Jack’s softly reassuring, his came across as nasal and jarring. So for a few weeks in 1963 he took lessons from a respected New York speech therapist. But, said press aide Ed Guthman, “he became increasingly bored doing the repetitive exercises she required and stopped when he got the woman’s first bill and thought it was outrageously high.”

  He was funny about money. He probably had more of it than any of his siblings, given Ethel’s wealthy family, but he also spent more, given all his kids and the cost of sustaining Hickory Hill. His $25,000 salary as attorney general went to charity. He was a soft touch for staffers in a squeeze, and for strangers like Sergeant York whose stories touched him. Yet his staff and friends got used to the fact that while he never carried cash, he expected them to, and to spring for meals, tips, shoeshines, and other expenses that seemed negligible to a man of means. “We’d stop by a newsstand, and he’d hit me for a quarter for this or that; or if he wanted Life or Time, or a candy bar at Schrafft’s. He tried to charge a sandwich at Schrafft’s once,” said the journalist Peter Maas. The funniest incident, Maas added, occurred when they were at a service together at an Army chapel: “The collection plate started coming up the aisle towards us, and I could see him starting to look around. I knew what was going to happen. The basket got closer and closer, and finally it was just one pew away, and he nudged me, and I reached in my pocket and pulled out a dollar and gave it to him. He looked at it, and he turned around to me and nudged me again and whispered, ‘Don’t you think I should give more?’ ”

  Joe had left Bobby a fortune that by then exceeded ten million dollars, and he praised his son by calling him “the stingy one in this family.” He also relished needling Bobby about that. It was “Joe’s favorite joke about the family,” the journalist and Kennedy friend Arthur Krock recalled. “Bobby was penurious, which [Joe] ‘corrected’ at Metropolitan Club luncheons with me in Washington by ordering the most expensive dishes either of us could find on the menu and signing Bobby’s name to the check.”

  Having grown up comfortable but not rich, Joe understood the average American’s scramble to get by. That was something his children had to learn. One day press aide Jack Rosenthal was driving to Hickory Hill with Bobby to work on the attorney general’s testimony. “His driver drove us. It was like four o’clock on a summer afternoon….We were stalled in traffic and inched along, and he was getting visibly agitated. And he finally says with real impatience, not directly to me, just sort of to the world, ‘What do you suppose all these people do when they get home so early?’ And I knew at the moment I shouldn’t say and didn’t say, ‘Well, they go pick up their dry cleaning and they get their kids from school; they do all the things that you’ve got people to do for you.’ But the point was, he wanted to be doing something productive and useful and was furious at having to waste time.”

  Joe had spent much of his life plotting to get a Kennedy into the White House, but once that happened, the proud patriarch generally refrained from joining in the seminars, parties, and rest of the Kennedy scene in Washington. He had accepted a front row seat in the viewing stand at Jack’s inauguration, tipping his top hat and receiving a tip back, the only person Jack so honored. But he didn’t stop at the White House before leaving Washington, and he visited just once that whole first year. He had already taught his boys all he knew about how to attain power and what to do with it. While he relished Jack’s calls and advised him when asked, he wondered whether his counsel was welcomed and held himself in check. “Jack doesn’t belong any more to just a family,” conceded Joe, whose family had been his purpose. “The family can be there. But there is not much they can do sometimes for the president of the United States.” As elated as he was at seeing his dreams realized, Joe was depleted. “I have had it,” he confided to a Life magazine editor in explaining why he wouldn’t grant an interview in December 1961, a few months after he turned seventy-three. “The future reputation of the Kennedys will be made by the President, the Attorney General, and I am very hopeful, by Ted.”

  Eight days later, Joseph Patrick Kennedy suffered a massive stroke, after a round of golf in Palm Beach, on day 322 of the presidency he had helped orchestrate. By the time Jack and Bobby got to his bedside the news was dismal. “The doctors came to the family and said, ‘Look, this strong, virile man is going to be imprisoned in a body that won’t work even if he recovers,’ ” recounted Lem Billings. “It was an opportunity to pull the plug. But Bobby said no, let him fight for his life.” His doctors were right in their prognosis. Joe lost the use of the right side of his body and would spend the remainder of his life in a wheelchair, unable to speak, write, or otherwise make his thoughts clearly known. Yet those around him believed he was taking in all that he heard, saw, and read. There was one word he could manage, although he used it to affirm as well as deny: “No.”

  All his children were shaken, but none as deeply as Bobby. Joe had continued to dispense career advice to his third son, telling him only the previous Thanksgiving that “he should move to Maryland and become governor—then president [in] 1968.” The boy he had taken longest to come to know now understood Joe better than any of his offspring. The more his father retreated to the background, the more Bobby accepted that he had been tapped to take over the roles of patriarch and protector. It wasn’t just because Jack was too busy being president. Family never had meant to him what it did to Joe and Bobby. And Bobby would need to take care of much more than practical matters like executing the family trusts. Joe counted on him to watch out for Jack and Ted, mend whatever needed fixing, and keep the clan as one. The stroke formalized the transition.

  As busy as he was, the attorney general managed to visit Joe nearly every weekend on Cape Cod or in Florida. “Bobby would fly down to Palm Beach at 6 A.M. and be back at noon, just to say hello for fifteen minutes,” recalled Tish Baldrige, the First Lady’s social secretary. He searched in vain for possible cures for the paralysis. He supervised Joe’s caretakers and swam alongside when his father was getting therapy in the pool, yelling, “Attaboy, Dad. Keep it up and you’ll be walking out of here in no time.” He told his father, as he always had, about developments that mattered in the family and the world. Only now it was a monologue, with no biting responses or certainty his father was even hearing. It was Bobby’s way not just of being there, but of saying goodbye. Once, when Joe staggered as he tried to get out of his wheelchair alone, “Bobby grabbed his father,” recalled Rita Dallas, Joe’s nurse. “Mr. Kennedy tried to struggle loose and began swatting at him with his cane. We were horrified! The Secret Service men sprung to attention and moved in. The President wisely refrained from getting involved….[Bobby] gambled a blow to the face and kissed his father. ‘That’s what I’m here for, Dad.’ He smiled. ‘Just to give you a hand when you need it. You’ve done that for me all my life, so why can’t I do the same for you now?’ ”

  Joe’s incapacitation was a loss and a gain for Bobby. He desperately missed turning to his father for bucking up and for razor-sharp advice. “His interest in life has been his children—not his business, not his accomplishments, not his friends, but his children,” Bobby wrote about Joe. “Any lasting contributions we might have made have been in a large part due to the effect he had on our lives.” But his father’s sidelining made Bobby independent and self-confident in ways he never had been, freeing him not just from Joe’s firm grip but from the limits of seeing himself, and being seen, merely as Joe Kennedy’s son. The axiom th
at no man is ever fully grown while his father is in the picture rang truer for Bobby than for most.

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  BOBBY HAD ACTED as his brother’s keeper throughout his campaigns, and he took that role even more seriously now that Jack was in the White House. Often, that entailed helping make the right picks for key posts such as secretary of state. The president wanted Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, an enlightened internationalist, but Bobby knew that having a staunch segregationist represent the United States would be grist for the Soviet propaganda mill. “I really stopped Fulbright,” he claimed. Others wanted Adlai Stevenson, but JFK had “never liked him,” Bobby said, and neither had he. (Stevenson’s son and namesake says his father had, in effect, been offered the job, and having it pulled back “finally killed him.”) The ultimate choice, Dean Rusk, turned out to be Bobby’s least favorite cabinet member, and he used his 1964 oral history with the Kennedy Library to take a last swipe. JFK “was his own secretary of state,” Bobby said, and after the ’64 election the two Kennedys had been planning on “moving Rusk out, perhaps to the United Nations, and appointing Bob McNamara secretary of state.”

  The attorney general continued vetting appointments throughout the administration, everywhere from the cabinet to the Supreme Court. He troubleshot for JFK around the globe, from Brazil and Japan to the Ivory Coast. He also jumped in on issues as diverse as the Berlin Wall, the space program, tax reform, a nuclear test ban treaty, and whether to build a dam in Ghana. Bobby said no to this last project, pointing out that the Ghanaian president was “playing ‘footsies’ with the Soviet Union” and that the proposed aid had “no strings attached.” JFK said he could “feel the cold wind of [RFK’s] disapproval on the back of my neck,” but he approved the loan anyway. It was one of the few times the brothers publicly and strongly disagreed, but even then Jack appreciated that Bobby had in mind the country’s best interests and his. He gave his brother the broadest portfolio any president had given not just his attorney general, but any cabinet officer.

  That brief included politics, despite Bobby’s vow that it shouldn’t. Politics was an inherent part of governing: A president and his cabinet had to rally support from Congress and the public. Politics also informed the dual nature of the office of attorney general: on the one hand, the guardian of the sacred rule of law, as embodied in the blind lady of justice; at the same time, a counselor to the president, setting legal and, inevitably, political guidelines. Bobby steered well clear of shameless politics, as he demonstrated by indicting friends and insulating himself behind incorruptible aides. But he also fused, more effectively than most, the dual traditions of high purpose and string pulling.

  With more than four hundred thousand jobs to dispense, the U.S. postmaster general historically had the most political position in Washington. Not so under the Kennedys. “The chief political manager of the Kennedy Administration was also very much in charge of the political aspects of the Post Office Department. That man was not Democratic National Chairman John Bailey, who was largely a figurehead. The man in charge of both was Bobby Kennedy, the Attorney General,” J. Edward Day, Kennedy’s postmaster general, reported in his memoir. “One afternoon I talked to him three times by telephone about a single rural letter carrier who was to be appointed in a small town in Mississippi.”

  Partisan politics came into play when the Kennedys responded to what they felt were unfair attacks on their policies and patriotism from the John Birch Society and other right-wing organizations. Bobby led the counterattack. First his liberal allies formulated a twenty-four-page secret plan for choking off those organizations’ appeal and money. In late 1961, he drafted the IRS, already an ally in the war against the Mob, to conduct broad-based audits of “alleged extremist groups” to determine which ones were so political that they violated their tax-exempt status. There were two problems with the initiative, which became known as the Ideological Organizations Project. It employed the same inverted logic as the attack on organized crime: Target the supposed lawbreakers, then look for a tax law they might have broken. That might have worked if the agency had cracked down equally on the left as well as the right. But nineteen of the twenty-four groups it focused on in its final phase were “right-wing,” as were fourteen of fifteen whose very existence it threatened by recommending revoking their tax-exempt status. Luckily for the Kennedys, Richard Nixon’s later bid to politicize the IRS—including compiling an “enemies list”—was egregious enough that when Congress got around to investigating, it focused mostly on Republican abuses and less on Bobby’s. Luckily for Bobby’s enemies, only four groups—three conservative and one liberal—actually received letters of revocation.

  Bobby didn’t always get his way. His investigators had learned that Sherman Adams, President Eisenhower’s chief of staff, had accepted from a Boston textile maker close to half a million dollars in cash in addition to the famous vicuña coat and oriental rug that had compelled Adams to resign in 1958. By the summer of 1963 the Justice Department had enough evidence, in the form of canceled checks, to indict Adams and embarrass the Republicans. “Eisenhower, in retirement, got wind of this,” said Bobby Baker, the keeper of Capitol Hill secrets whom Bobby called Little Lyndon. Using Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen as an intermediary, Ike offered JFK a deal: Block the Adams indictment, due to be announced the next day, and Eisenhower would owe Kennedy an equally huge favor. Jack called Bobby and ordered him to put the indictment “in the deep freeze,” Baker recounted. Bobby balked at playing politics with his judicial process, at which point the president pulled rank: “I’m president. If you can’t comply with my request then your resignation will be accepted.” Baker’s story, which he says came from Dirksen, is corroborated by Herbert Stern, a former federal judge in New Jersey who heard a nearly identical version from Edward Bennett Williams, the attorney for the Boston textile manufacturer who made the payoffs to Adams and tipped off Bobby. “I nearly fell off my chair,” Stern recalls. Not long after he made the deal, JFK cashed in his chit not just with Eisenhower but with Dirksen as well. Kennedy’s nuclear test ban treaty looked as though it might die in the Senate until the minority leader and ex-president endorsed it.

  Nothing was as important to the Kennedys politically as their own electability, and nobody in the family was better at delivering that than Bobby. Jack’s Senate seat in Massachusetts became vacant after he took over as president, and Joe insisted it go to Ted. Ted didn’t know whether he wanted it, and Jack and Bobby fretted over how it would look with another Kennedy coming to Washington. They had a little time to think it over, because Ted wasn’t old enough to be named as Jack’s replacement and there would be a new election to fill the seat nine months after he had turned the required age of thirty. In the meantime, the Democratic governor agreed to name the Kennedy family friend Ben Smith as interim senator, and Joe persuaded his older sons it was Ted’s turn. Bobby then headed to Massachusetts to help Ted prepare for his maiden debate against a strong primary opponent, Attorney General Eddie McCormack. Bobby trumpeted his arrival with the words “Have no feah, we are heah.” His advice was a classic blend of directness and sassiness. If Ted was asked why he wanted to be senator, “Tell them why you don’t want to be sitting on your ass in some office in New York.” When Teddy had the opportunity to pose a question to his opponent, Bobby advised, “Ask Eddie McCormack what he thinks of the situation in West Irian,” a province in Indonesia that Bobby had recently visited. “He’ll think it’s West Iran and he’ll talk about the Middle East and he’ll look like a fool.”*19 Ted won the primary by a two-to-one margin and the general election by 10 percentage points.

  JFK’s planned run for reelection in 1964 represented a more consequential political face-off. At times Bobby adamantly refused to get involved. He would stay on as attorney general and his brother-in-law Steve Smith could run the campaign. Newly released material from the Kennedy Library, however, shows that by the spring of 1963, Bobby had instructed key administration officials
to begin assembling material on JFK’s accomplishments that could feed into the 1964 election drive. Everything Bobby had done from the time he took office—from deciding how his civil rights programs would affect the votes of Southern whites and blacks nationwide to calibrating the president’s moves in hot spots like Cuba—made it clear that he had never taken his eye off the next election. In his official version, presented in his oral history after JFK’s death, Bobby said he started talking with his brother in the fall of 1963 about “what basis I could get out as attorney general,” because the controversy inherent in that office would be “such a burden to carry in the 1964 election.” Jack, he added, said that was “impossible to do because then, also, it would make it look as if we were running away from it….The only basis which I could sort of get out was that he wanted me to manage the campaign or something, so that I’d get out at that time.”