The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Joe called Dalton every few days, spending hours seemingly going over every detail of the campaign. As the weeks went by, however, Dalton realized there was another secretive campaign about which he knew nothing. Many of the old politicians who had first opposed Jack now had smiles on their faces, a lilt to their walk, and the name “Kennedy” on their lips.

  Joe spent an estimated three hundred thousand dollars on the campaign. That was enough to blanket the area with billboards, distribute one hundred thousand reprints of John Hersey’s PT-109 article, and place scores of radio and newspaper ads and placards on the trolleys. Joe believed that every man had his price, and he would pay that amount, but not a dollar more. He believed, moreover, that if you set your money in plain view people would steal it, your friends as easily as your enemies. Most campaigns had all sorts of unaccountable cash expenses. Joe had Eddie Moore set up an elaborate accounting system, detailing even the smallest expenditures on triplicate forms.

  Those who hoped to work with the Kennedys learned that parsimoniousness was next to godliness. Dave Powers didn’t rent chairs for the campaign office; he borrowed them from a funeral parlor. When he took Jack around to the bars, he offered a round of drinks to the assembled. The patrons, who had been drinking beer all night, immediately developed a taste for liquor from the top shelf, ordering a gentleman’s drink, scotch or bourbon whiskey. When Powers offered them drinks again, he pointedly offered them a round of beers. That was the Kennedy way.

  Joe was merciless in wresting out any possibility of failure. Joseph Russo was a minor candidate, hardly of concern to Jack. But Timilty and an associate visited another Joseph Russo, a janitor, and paid him to put his name on the ballot and split the Russo vote. “They gave me favors,” Russo recalled years later. “Whatever I wanted. I could have gone in the housing project if I wanted. If I wanted an apartment, I could have got the favor. You know?”

  Jack had been brought up to think of such gambits as part of the colorful panoply of urban politics, fancied by such irascible players as his own grandfather, Honey Fitz. When the chuckles ended, though, the fact remained that his father had stolen candidate Russo’s votes as surely as if he had stood in the polling places tearing up ballots. If Jack did not know about it beforehand, he surely did when he learned that there would be two Russos on the primary ballot.

  Jack was no innocent either in the way the campaign was exploiting his war career. He had never been comfortable when the newspapers called him a hero, and now his own people exaggerated even those exaggerations. “Naval hero of the South Pacific” he was called in one campaign news release, as if he had single-handedly defeated the Japanese.

  Not only did Jack have his father masterminding the campaign, but the whole family, except for little Teddy, was out working the hustings. Rose was a Gold Star mother who could speak mother to mother about her beloved Jack. Eunice was a woman of fierce intelligence and energy who irritated Jack at times by standing on the platform soundlessly mouthing the very words he was speaking. Nonetheless, Eunice, Pat, and Jean were a formidable trio, setting up teas and meetings, working as hard as any of the volunteers, heading out each morning from their suite at the Ritz-Carleton. Jack’s beloved sister Kathleen was missing only because she was living in London.

  In the last weeks of the campaign, Bobby showed up too, still dressed in navy blue. Jack deputized Red Fay to take his brother to a movie and show. Red was a talker, and he found the taciturn, morose Bobby a formidable burden, even for a few hours. Red had a risqué wit and a devilish interest in good times. His charge was a self-righteous Puritan, who wrinkled up his nose at an off-color joke as if he smelled something foul.

  Jack had seen that part of Bobby shortly after Joe Jr. died. Over Labor Day, Bobby had come upon Jack and his old PT-boat buddies and their wives sitting drinking forbidden booze in the kitchen in Hyannis Port. His father rationed family and visitors to one drink before dinner. When Bobby, a scrawny little Savanarola, lectured them, Kathleen laced into the would-be snitch, telling him to get lost and tossing him out of the room like a mongrel pup.

  Bobby was attempting to don the clothes worn by his father and big brothers. Upon graduating from Milton, Bobby had entered the navy’s V-12 officer training program. He headed off to Harvard while most young men his age were drafted. Bobby was hardly a shirker. Even after Joe Jr.’s death, he fancied himself a navy aviator; he would honor his big brother by following in his oversized shoes. But he didn’t seem to know what he was, or what he should be, what was authentic and what was not.

  “I am not sure, between you and me, just how much I go for flying but I guess that’s the best thing to do,” he mused to Dave Hackett. “There are so many complications and decisions to make and I am so mixed up.” He had a politician’s self-consciousness about what the world might think of him, and he wanted it on his resume that he had been a navy pilot. “I know that there will be a great deal more risk in this, but I think that it will be a lot more exciting, stimulating, and will do more good when I get out,” he wrote his father.

  His father pulled no special strings to help Bobby in that quest, and when he failed the flying aptitude test, that particular dream came to an end. The fact that his two older brothers had made their own heroic contributions to the war effort did not diminish Bobby’s desire to stand within sight of the flash of combat. Like Joe Jr. and Jack, he had been instilled with the ideal that a true man rushed forward to the sound of strife, neither retreating nor pointing to his brothers’ wartime service as evidence that his family had done enough. His father, though, would risk no more calls from priests waking him from a fitful sleep. Instead, as the war ended, Joe saw to it that Bobby was assigned to one of the nation’s newest destroyers, the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., on which he would win no combat ribbons.

  For the rest of his life, Bobby would sail with his brothers’ legacy. On the destroyer, the sailors did not know that the scrawny young seaman was the younger brother of the hero for whom their ship was named.

  It was fitful, unsatisfying duty, sailing down the Atlantic coast to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. The best part of it, as far as Bobby was concerned, was that he was meeting the kind of fellows he hadn’t met at Harvard. They were mainly uneducated southerners who had a strength that his fancy friends rarely had. That didn’t make his duty any more palatable. After six weeks he was transferred, rising, as he wrote, “from the lowest grade of chippers, painters & scrubbers, the 2nd Division, up into one of the highest grades of chippers, painters, & scrubbers, the 1st Division.”

  When Bobby arrived in Boston late in Jack’s campaign, he was sailing on another ship with his brother’s name on it. Jack was eight years older than Bobby, a man who had experienced a world that Bobby had scarcely visited. Nevertheless, Bobby was not going to swab the deck, ordered around by the likes of Lem Billings and Red Fay.

  Bobby insisted on taking over three of the toughest wards in East Cambridge, the lair of Jack’s strongest opponent. He worked with the residents in a way that Jack and his highborn friends never could. He ate spaghetti with the adults and played football with the kids, and maybe Jack didn’t win the majority of the East Cambridge votes, but he did far better there than he would have without Bobby’s efforts. Bobby’s own little entourage included his sister Jean and her friend and fellow Manhattanville student, Ethel Skakel.

  Joe Kane coined Jack’s campaign slogan—” A New Generation Offers a Leader”—and it was with the new generation of veterans that Jack was at his best. He may not have spoken in the firm, resonant cadences of a great speaker, but when he talked to his fellow veterans in the primary and later in the general election campaign, he spoke as truthfully and authentically as he ever did.

  Jack could have offered himself up to the returning soldiers as “their” man, set to head down to Washington to unlock benefits that they deserved for their rich sacrifices. He did not do that. He saw these eighteen million Americans, 43 percent of the adult male population, as representing “me
ntally the most able, physically the best … in truth members of a citizens’ army.” These veterans were his natural constituents in a sense that no other group could ever be. He had shared with them what was for him, as for most of them, the most profound and the most formative experience of his life.

  After World War I the authentic patriotism of the returning veterans had been transmuted in the American Legion into reactionary, jingoistic pseudo-patriotism, hostile to new ideas and immigrants. This time Jack thought it could be different if only the veterans looked beyond their own narrow interests to those of all Americans. “I have noticed among many friends I knew who have come home … one common reaction since their return—a letdown,” he said.

  I have seen it in many of their faces, I have heard many of them mention it—the realization that home is not what it was cracked up to be…. In civilian life, many of them feel alone. In the last analysis they feel they have only themselves to depend on. What they do not always understand and what all of us in this country sometimes forget is that the interdependence is with us in civilian life just as it was in the war, although perhaps it is not as obvious…. In a larger sense, each one of us is dependent on all the people of this country, on their obedience to our laws, for their rejection of the siren calls of ambitious demagogues. In fact, if we only recognized it, we are in time of peace as interdependent as soldiers were in time of war.

  Would Americans divide themselves in interest groups by age, class, and race, or was there truly an interest common to all Americans? Jack believed that the veterans should ask what they could do for their country, because they would benefit that way more than from narrow special-interest bills. America was their special interest.

  Jack thought the veterans should lead the nation, with concern for policies that would maintain the peace and build a strong and prosperous nation. In his most passionate speeches, he was saying little more than he had in his hurriedly written letters from the Pacific when he vowed that the men who had died would have given their lives for something more than maintaining the lives of easy compromise and moral squalor that had seemed to him so prevalent in political Washington.

  Jack was pleading for America’s veterans not to retreat into private life, leaving the public arena to the predators, the self-interested, and the narrow parochial interests who shouted only their own names and their own causes. “If we turn our veterans organizations into mere weapons for obtaining special benefits for ourselves at the expense of society, we shall be sending ourselves down the rocky road to ruin.”

  Jack was fighting not only to end up first in the primary but also to create the illusion of health. He admitted to no one how much he suffered. When he had to walk up three flights of stairs for the Massachusetts Catholic Order of Foresters Communion Breakfast, he was limping. “You don’t feel good?” asked Thomas Broderick, a friend, solicitously. “I feel great,” Jack said.

  Whatever the pain, he always said he felt fine, but at night in his little suite at the Bellevue Hotel he sat soaking in the tub, hoping the hot water would ease his back pain. One afternoon, another of the old politicians, Clem Norton, found the exhausted candidate in his room at the Bellevue crying, bemoaning the fact that he had agreed to this race.

  Jack may have felt half dead at times, but he was nonetheless able to project a magical aura of stardom. It wasn’t just the billboards and the pamphlets that did it, but that ineffable quality that had somehow attached itself to his wasted frame. When he talked to the students at East Boston High School, the girls rushed up to him afterward shouting “Sinatra! Sinatra!” comparing him to another emaciated-looking sex symbol.

  A few days before the primary, fifteen hundred women showed up at the Hotel Commander in Cambridge for a tea party in Jack’s honor. They swooned over him, flashed their eyes, and smiled, and presumably thought of things other than the housing shortage and the unemployment rate.

  Joe had brought in sophisticated outside pollsters, and the candidate knew that he was well ahead. For his birthday at the end of May, the family got together in Hyannis Port in a celebratory mood. They all were taking part in the campaign, a mini-armada of Kennedys. Only fourteen-year-old Teddy had nothing to do with the campaign and seemed a spectator to the compelling drama.

  Joe looked down the long table and asked each of his children to proclaim a toast to the future congressman. In the family, this was the time for juvenile put-downs. Each Kennedy attempted to top the last in the outrageousness of their toasts and the rudeness of their words. Then, finally, it was Teddy’s turn.

  “I would like to drink a toast to the brother who isn’t here,” Teddy said solemnly. They all stood then and toasted Joe Jr., and if they did not cry, it was only because they did not believe in shedding tears, not any longer. They remembered afterward that it was little Teddy who had made the toast, little Teddy who had his own sense of family.

  By mid-June, Jack had to wear a back brace and arrange his schedule so that he could fit in half a dozen scalding hot baths a day and back rubs by “Cooky” McFarland, a boxing trainer. By rights he should not have even considered marching in the annual Bunker Day parade through Charlestown the day before the June 1946 primary. But the other candidates would be there, and he could hardly advertise his health problems that until now he had hidden so convincingly.

  It was a hot Boston day, and by the time Jack reached the reviewing stand he was staggering ahead, nearly collapsing. State Senator Robert Lee happened to live right there, and Jack was carried into the politician’s home. Lee called Joe, who told him to wait until a doctor arrived and his son could be moved. Lee stood and watched the twenty-nine-year-old candidate turn yellow and blue. “He appeared to me as a man who probably had a heart attack,” Lee remembered. “Later on I found out it was a condition, which he picked up, probably malaria or yellow fever. We took off his underwear, and we sponged him over, and he had some pills in his pocket that he took. That was one of the questions his father asked, did he have his pills with him.”

  No news of Jack’s condition got out, and the whole Kennedy family was there the following evening in the headquarters on Tremont Street to hear the happy results. Jack had scored a formidable success in the primary, defeating the other nine candidates with 22,183 votes, 40.5 percent. His closest challenger, Michael J. Neville, the mayor of Cambridge, stood far behind with 11,341 votes. The authentic Joseph Russo received 5,661 votes, while another 799 votes went to the faux Russo.

  Of all the people who were there that evening at headquarters, only Joe seemed strangely out of sorts. “I got the impression that night that Joe was disdainful of us all,” Dalton recalled. “I just couldn’t understand it. He wasn’t going around saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you for what you’ve done for my son.’ He wasn’t doing that at all.”

  Joe may well have been haunted by his dream of what might have been. Joe Jr. would have walked along the route of the Bunker Day parade, firm of stride, strong of manner, shaking hands, and slapping backs. He would have needed no microphone this evening, no urgent hands to push him up to the platform, no sitz baths, no doctors to monitor his steps, no sad reticence.

  13

  A Kind of Peace

  The Harvard College that Bobby returned to in the fall of 1946 was bursting its walls with veterans wanting an education. The university took over the Brunswick Hotel in downtown Boston to house 115 lucky married couples and mandated that any student who lived within a forty-five-minute commute would have to live at home.

  Now with the largest student body in its history, many of the totems of civilized life at Harvard seemed like silly rituals, a waste of money and time. Men found themselves sleeping in beds stacked on top of each other. In the dining halls where waiters had always served Harvard men, students stood in line grasping metal trays. Some of the frosh hardly knew what to do, but to Bobby and the other veterans these double-decker bunks and newfangled cafeterias were standard issue.

  There were 659 Harvard men who died
in the war. Those who returned safely were several years older in age, and decades older in experience. They might listen to scholarly pretenders tell them how to think, but not what to think nor how to live or how to drink.

  In classrooms, a man who had parachuted into Burma or flown a bomber over Germany listened with both a hunger for knowledge and a hardy reserve of skepticism. When one veteran who had lost a couple of fingers in the war got drunk, no proctors dared to point theirs at him in rebuke. Another student had had his ear burned off. When he came rolling in drunk at dawn, no one said anything.

  Bobby was a veteran but he was far different from most of the former GIs matriculating at Harvard. He bore a name that was almost as honored at Harvard as it was elsewhere now, and he was voted into the Spee Club with an ease that Jack had not experienced.

  Bobby could easily have passed his days in the world of clubs and class and privilege within its gilded enclave. But he was not comfortable sitting among heirs who thought that what their families had done in the past was more important than what they might do in the future. He was bored with the endless social palaver, and he spent little time at Spee. One of his friends, a Catholic, had been rejected and Bobby took that as an assault on his very faith.

  Bobby went out for football and on the playing field met many of his closest lifelong friends. He was no more a natural athlete than he had been at Milton, but he had awesome quantities of determination and mindless physical courage. As a 165-pound end, he shared the honor with two backs of being the lightest players on the team. In scrimmage, he kept blocking Vince “Vinnie” Moravec, the 200-pound first-string fullback, a task that was akin to running into a slab of granite.

  “For Christ’s sake, would you tell that little bastard to stop hitting me so hard!” Vinnie yelled at Wally Flynn, an end. “He’s gonna get kicked!”