The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  His friend Chuck Spalding was working for Gary Cooper. The lanky, taciturn Montanan conveyed a sense of manly heroism and dignity that nothing he did or said could obstruct or diminish. Jack was what they called a war hero, but what was he compared to Cooper, who portrayed Sergeant York, the great hero of World War I, inhabiting his very life, and played the role of Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls. During those weeks in Hollywood, Jack studied Cooper as if he were learning an exotic language, attempting to see whether he could speak it without an accent.

  Jack saw Cooper as a consummate artist of charisma and endlessly pondered how the man did it. For hours, Jack discussed with Spalding the nature of stardom. How was it created? Why was it that crowds swarmed around Cooper? What was it about Spencer Tracy, a man of undistinguished looks, that made him such a star? Did he, Jack Kennedy, have what it took? Did he have this quality of stardom? Or could he create it?

  The star-making machinery took obscure young actors and actresses and set them up on the pedestal of fame to be worshiped and emulated. The process may have seemed patently transparent, churning out nothing but one fraudulent creation after the next, an endless parade of interchangeable performers. The reality, however, was that the public had to connect to that person on the screen, and if it did so in a profound and visceral way, then a star was born. That process could be manipulated only so far. That was what obsessed Jack—whether, in Spalding’s words, “he had it or he didn’t have it.”

  As candid as he was with Chuck, Jack always held back a part of himself, the self-critical, manipulative self that sent the other Jack Kennedy on his public pathway. Of all his male friends, Spalding probably saw more of the spectrum of Jack’s personality than did anyone else and had deeper insights into his friend. Chuck saw that Jack was a natural seducer and that women were merely the temporary objects of his game.

  Spalding observed that Jack’s obsession with bedding every attractive woman who even momentarily passed across his horizon was not primarily about sex. The act itself was usually nothing more than a quick release. It was about testing his power and charm and will. It was not sexual impotence he feared but the possibility that he, the Jack Kennedy he had created, wouldn’t work anymore.

  What better test of his powers, though, than to seduce Olivia de Havilland, who had played the angelic Melanie Wilkes in Gone With the Wind. Jack was usually proudly disheveled, but this afternoon, as he was about to meet Olivia for drinks at her house, he prepared his toilet at the Beverly Hills Hotel with detail and refinement.

  Jack fixed Olivia with deep, glowering eyes. He flattered her with subtle phrases. He paraded his wit before her. Nothing could ruin his little recital more than speaking his lines too long or too loud. He rose to say good-bye to the star, finally turning and opening what he remembered as the front door. As he turned the knob and moved to head out into the world, tennis rackets and luggage came tumbling down out of the closet he had mistakenly opened.

  The closest most veterans got to Olivia de Havilland was a front-row seat at the Bijou, but Jack fancied he could have whatever he wanted, from an assignation with a movie star to a privileged seat at the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco in the spring of 1945. His peers would have been delighted simply to have been there, but Jack wrangled an assignment as a reporter for Hearst that would have been the dream of any journalist.

  Jack wore his seriousness as lightly as it could be worn. One evening Arthur Krock found his erstwhile new colleague propped up on his hotel bed in impeccable evening clothes trying to reach the managing editor to tell him, “Kennedy will not be filing tonight.”

  When he arrived in San Francisco in late April, Jack had neither the giddy optimism of the more vocal internationalists nor the paranoia of right-wingers who believed that this so-called United Nations would end American sovereignty. In his first articles he had the cautiously hopeful attitude of most of his fellow veterans. He compared what was going on to “an international football game with [Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav] Molotov carrying the ball while [Secretary of State Edward] Stettinius, [British foreign minister Anthony] Eden and the delegates tried to tackle him all over the field.” He continued to employ sports metaphors, accusing Molotov of “throwing curves” while the United States “juggled the ball.”

  The Soviets, the Americans, and the British, however, were playing different games with different rules, and Jack struggled to understand. During these three weeks he was chronicling not the inspiring beginning of a world organization but some of the first mistrustful bickering of the cold war. He tried at first to comprehend the world from the Russian position. “Americans can now see that we have a long way to go before Russia will entrust her safety to any organization other than the Red Army,” Jack wrote. “The Russians may have forgiven, but they haven’t forgotten…. This being true, it means any organization drawn up here will be merely a skeleton.”

  Jack understood that it was inevitable that veterans would be disillusioned. They were men of dual simplicities, those of youth and those of war. Now was the time for the old men to make the peace, building a world organization that was “the product of the same passions and selfishness that produced the Treaty of Versailles.” Jack discovered “one ray of shining bright light. That is the realization, felt by all the delegates, that humanity cannot afford another war.”

  As the days went by, even that ray of hope dimmed. He saw the spectacle of the Russians dickering to win admittance for White Russia and Ukraine as separate states, while the United States backed the admittance of pro-Fascist Argentina. He saw Britain struggling to maintain its empire. And he saw a Russia whose armies sat ensconced in Eastern Europe, imposing their own new tyranny on subject peoples.

  Jack had arrived in San Francisco sharing most of the affinities and aspirations of his generation, but as he left he sounded more like the old men who had made the peace than the young men who fought the war.

  “Our preoccupation with the war and our desire to remain on good terms with our Red allies has prevented us from taking a strong stand against Russian infiltration through Europe,” he wrote shortly before leaving. “That time is over and it is becoming evident that the Big Three relationship is at the crossroads.”

  Jack’s fling as a journalist was not over. From California he traveled to London, where he covered the British election for Hearst. Churchill was one of Jack’s authentic heroes, the personification of his nation’s noble struggle against Hitler. It was almost unthinkable, then, that Churchill’s victorious compatriots would turn him out of office. It pained Jack to hear the great man booed by a surly, ungrateful populace. Yet when Labor won, he saw that the British people were tired of nothing but “toil and sweat.” He saw the profound class nature of British society and how it had created, in Disraeli’s words, two nations.

  Jack spent his time with the nation of wealth and privilege and observed a society in which at times the nobility and purpose of the battlefield seemed just another casualty of war. One weekend he was at one of the great houses of England. Some of the other guests had driven over to the races at Ascot, where the upper class was resurrecting its prewar social rituals, but Jack preferred to sit at the country estate talking about war and peace. Up on the third floor, beneath a harsh light, he observed a group of young men playing poker. A year before, the lights had been out in London, and many of them had been risking their lives. Now the lights had come on, and these gentlemen turned their risks to the gaming table. They played with abandon, and that afternoon one of them lost a fortune, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 pounds.

  When Jack was not musing with his male friends, he was squiring beautiful women around London’s nightspots. His thin face had a wan, poetic cast, suggesting sensitivity to the will and desires of women that his conquests soon learned did not exist. One of the women he saw in London, the tennis champion Kay Stammers, found him British in his casual disregard. “He really didn’t give a damn,” she recalled. “He liked to
have them around, and he liked to enjoy himself, but he was quite unreliable. He did as he pleased.”

  At the end of July, Jack traveled with Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal to war-ravaged Germany. As he flew above the once-great cities, he wrote in his diary: “All the centers of the big cities are of the same ash gray color from the air—the color of churned up and powdered stone and brick.” He scribbled down no unique insights about the ravaged land, but he had a journalist’s realization that the gritty facts came first, no matter how unpleasant.

  Jack recorded that the Russian soldiers, on entering Berlin, had spent their first seventy-two-hour passes largely “raping and looting” and were now stripping the land of everything of value, from factories to manpower. He also recorded that in the allied-occupied port of Bremen, the American and British troops “have been very guilty of looting,” and that navy personnel said that a congressional fact-finding committee had been interested only in “lugers and cameras.” It was as if much of the selfishness, greed, lust, and pettiness that had been dammed up during the war had broken loose, washing over the desolated landscape of Europe.

  On the last stop of his German tour, Jack traveled to Hiker’s legendary mountain redoubt, high above Berchtesgaden. Allied bombs had gutted Hitler’s chalet, and the allies had stripped his “eagle’s nest” of rugs and paintings, but the aura of the Führer remained. Jack stood there in the immense round living room from which he looked down on all sides on endless expanses of forest. He saw no pockmarked landscape, no smoking ruins, no haunted faces, only pristine forest. Jack had just been in Potsdam, where he had seen President Harry S Truman, a matter so inconsequential to him that he did not even mention it in his diary. He noted that General Dwight D. Eisenhower “easily won the hearts of those with whom he worked,” but no one impressed him as did Hitler.

  “You can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived,” he noted in the final page of his diary. “He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.”

  Jack was arguing that if a leader is judged simply by how much he changed the world, then Hitler was the great man of his age, a political artist who transformed the world through his evil. Although Jack’s comment displayed an appalling insensitivity to the ravages of Nazism, he was no apologist for Hitler. He was studying politics and politicians, picking up bits and pieces of people and ideas that he might find useful in his own career, even if they came from Hitler.

  Since researching Why England Slept, Jack had been dissecting the nature of leaders in a democratic society. Could a democratic leader transform the world for good as much as Hitler transformed it for evil? He observed Englishmen voting their bellies, not their souls. He watched German girls selling themselves for a lipstick. A month before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he mused about “the eventual discovery of a weapon so horrible that it will truthfully mean the abolishment of all the nations employing it.” In such a world, was greatness possible?

  When, in April 1946, twenty-eight-year-old Jack declared that he would seek the Democratic nomination for Congress from his grandfather’s old eleventh congressional district, he was doing more than putting on clothes his father had laid out for him. Inga Arvad probably understood Jack more deeply than anyone. Even before the war she had prophesied that Jack would enter politics. During the war, he had joked to Red Fay that he could feel “Pappy’s eyes on the back of my neck,” and told his friend that “when the war is over I’ll be back here with Dad trying to parlay a lost PT-boat and a bad back into a political advantage.” That was the cynical posturing that was one part of Jack. Red rarely heard the more serious Jack who for hours discussed running for office with Lannan and Spalding. Jack scrutinized the prospect from many angles. He observed other politicians. He courted publicity in Massachusetts for months. He waffled back and forth in front of friends. Lem thought his closest friend would be entering law school. But Jack was no more interested in enduring the tedium of case law than he was in leading the outsider’s life of a journalist or entering a business world that he largely disdained.

  Jack had grown up in Bronxville and prep schools and knew nothing about his prospective constituents and their ways. The district included middle- and upper-class people around Harvard and parts of Beacon Hill, but most of the residents were working class and poor. They were so solidly Democratic that the winner of the primary would inevitably win in the general election. There were some new arrivals and many second- and third-generation Americans who had not been able to move away from their immigrant ghettos.

  Whether they were Italian, Irish, Polish, Portuguese, or Chinese, these new Bostonians dreamed of the day when they would live somewhere else. But for now they lived among the shipping yards, freight depots, oil tanks, and factories, and close by the state prison. Jack’s deepest political interest was not these inner-city residents and their mundane problems, but the world far beyond. Jack’s biggest job, as Time phrased it, “was to convince the 37 different nationalities in some of Boston’s grimiest slums that he was not just the wealthy son of Joe Kennedy … but rather an attractive individual in his own right.”

  In the triple-deckers that lined the long gray streets, the kitchen was the center of the home, especially in these cold winter days, for the flats did not have central heating. A knock on the front door was a stranger’s knock. Someone apprehensively hurried through the frigid, shut-off rooms to greet a visitor who as likely as not brought bad news, not good.

  These days the door often opened on a pallid, rail-thin, tousle-haired young man standing there with a nervous smile, a faltering greeting, and a manner and dress that instantly signaled that he was not one of them. One of the flats Jack visited was that of Dave Powers, a navy veteran whom Jack hoped to enlist in his cause. He stayed in Powers’s cold living room for a half hour chatting away, asking the Charlestown man to accompany him to a speech for Gold Star mothers at the American Legion the following week.

  Powers had a sense that Jack was “aggressively shy.” Any man of even modest sensitivity would be shy knocking on the doors of people he did not know and asking them to support him for reasons he was not even fully sure of himself. Jack’s was not the ham-handed, eyes-averting shyness of insecurity, but the shyness of a man thrust into a world in which he would be dependent upon the kindness of strangers, a world he did not know, and one in which he did not feel comfortable.

  Jack half mumbled his prepared speech to the honored mothers in a virtual monotone, looking up only occasionally as if to be sure the audience was still there. “I think I know how all you mothers feel, because my mother is a Gold Star mother, too,” he droned. The audience knew that the speech had ended only because the young candidate stopped speaking. By any measure, the speech had been a disappointment, but the mothers rushed forward to greet Jack as if he had been the most stirring of speakers. To them, Jack was no longer a privileged outsider. He was a young man who needed them, and they responded not simply with their votes but by buttonholing their friends and relatives and telling them about this fine young Kennedy.

  Powers sensed what was happening. Despite his pledge to work for a fellow Charlestown man, John F. Cotter, Powers signed on with Jack. Powers led the candidate up the back staircases of his neighborhood where Jack was greeted not as a stranger but as a friend.

  Jack may have impressed the Gold Star mothers, but he was far from a stellar candidate. His own campaign manager, Mark Dalton, would probably have made a better candidate. The thirty-one-year-old Harvard Law School graduate was a true son of Boston. One of his brothers was a priest; the other was the political editor of the Boston Traveler. Dalton had fought a war that few veterans had fought. He had been at D-Day in the
sixth wave and landed on Okinawa in the last major land battle of the war.

  Dalton had no money to run. Beyond that, he had a kind of moral rectitude that struck the hard-edged politicians around Jack as naivete. Dalton was a man who took the rhetoric of the campaign as literal truth. He was a passionate speaker when he believed in something, and the first time he introduced Jack, he delivered such a forceful speech that poor Jack’s speech sounded, by contrast, as thin and weak as his appearance.

  After that address, Jack and Dalton drove over to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where Joe sat in the living room of his suite with Joe Timilty, the Boston police commissioner. The two older men had listened to the radio address, and by the time the candidate and his campaign manager arrived, they had had ample time to evaluate Jack’s pallid performance. They told Jack and Dalton that never again would they appear together on the same platform; the contrast was too great.

  Joe had let his sons take their chances standing in the front lines with other young Americans. That was the last time he would play what he considered a fool’s game, abiding by the simple rules that guided others. Mark had the title “campaign manager,” but he was simply a handsome face on the platform and a name on a letterhead.

  Joe ran the campaign, but he did it in such a surreptitious way that no one knew just which strings he had pulled and how hard he had pulled them. Even the fact that the congressional seat had suddenly opened up probably was the result of Joe’s manipulation. The incumbent congressman, James Michael Curley, was facing an indictment for mail fraud; Joe Kane, who was intimately involved with the campaign, later asserted that Joe had paid Curley twelve thousand dollars to retire and had promised more money when Curley decided to run for mayor of Boston.