The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  In international affairs the whole political lexicon had changed from the era just two years before. Then Joseph Stalin was “Uncle Joe,” and many Americans believed that Russia and America would walk arm in arm and army to army into the postwar world. The public mood was shifting radically, and Jack was entering a Congress in which politicians of both parties had begun to flay away at Communists and communism.

  Jack, of all the newly elected members of Congress, was the first to berate publicly a putative Communist, months before Senator Joseph McCarthy or even Congressman Richard Nixon had begun their own attacks. On the day after Truman’s historic speech, Jack interrogated Russell Nixon, the legislative representative of the United Electrical Workers, before the House Labor Committee. The former Harvard instructor had taught Jack back in his college days, but Jack showed him no deference.

  “Could you tell me whether Julius Emspak is a Communist?” Jack asked, referring to the union’s secretary-treasurer. This was the kind of question that Senator McCarthy would soon make notorious, asking witnesses to cough up the names of others.

  “You do not need to rely on me to tell you that,” Russell Nixon replied. “He testified before the Senate Labor Committee … and said he was not.”

  “For your information, he was a Communist and proof can be provided,” Jack said. This was the kind of exchange that led a Catholic magazine, The Sign, to call Jack “an effective anti-Communist liberal … more hated by Commies than if he were a reactionary.”

  Later that month Harold Christoffel appeared before the House Labor Committee. Christoffel was the honorary president of United Auto Workers local 248 at Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company outside Milwaukee. The union was in the midst of a brutal, nearly yearlong strike in which almost half the workers had given up their membership and returned to work. That in itself was a rebuke to the leaders, and left alone, the rank and file might soon have condemned them. Nonetheless, they were paraded before the House Labor Committee.

  Christoffel may have considered fidelity to a foreign ideology more important than loyalty to his own government; in 1941, at the time of the Soviet-Nazi alliance, the union leader had led a seventy-six-day strike at a war production plant. That was an unseemly business, but to those with deep concern for civil liberties there was something equally unseemly about Jack berating Christoffel and asking him whether he was a Communist or had been a Communist. And there was something unsettling about Jack’s recommending perjury charges; in fact, the labor union leader was eventually sentenced to sixteen months to four years in prison.

  The young congressman was so furiously anti-Communist that when China fell to Mao’s army, he blamed the Democratic administration, giving a speech that any Republican would have gladly given. “The responsibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State,” he said on the floor of the House.

  Jack might attack the State Department and take a few swipes at alleged Communists, but he was not the kind of politician who reveled in controversy. When James Michael Curley was convicted and sentenced to prison for mail fraud, the Massachusetts Democratic pols lined up to sign a petition to get Curley pardoned. Jack owed Curley for having retired from Congress, leaving his seat open. Moreover, Curley was wildly popular among Massachusetts Democrats. To ignore Curley now might make Jack an outcast in his own party. Yet if he joined with the others, he became just another political hack, a self-righteous hypocrite no better than the man he had succeeded.

  He turned to Mark Dalton for advice, though, like most men, Jack often sought not advice but confirmation of what he already intended to do. “Jack was fearless,” Dalton recalled admiringly. “He would listen to you, and if he decided you were right, he would go with you. Everybody wanted him to sign the Curley pardon. He came to me and asked me what I should do. I said, ‘Listen, you haven’t got your seat warm down there. And these bastards are putting you over the barrel. Tell them to go to hell.’”

  On the floor of the House, Jack went up to John McCormack, the head of the Massachusetts delegation, and asked about the pardon. “Has anybody talked with the president or anything?” he asked.

  “No,” McCormack replied, knowing full well what lay behind the question. “If you don’t want to sign it don’t sign it.”

  Jack did not sign the petition, though he knew it was a bad thing to make enemies in politics, for enemies remember when friends forget. McCormack didn’t stand up publicly against Jack. He just held on to every scrap of the political patronage, and worst of all, he remembered.

  As a freshman congressman, Jack carried with him the bitter memories of a wartime capital full of what he considered the self-serving and the self-seeking. He was hoping to find something else in Washington this time. In September, he traveled back to Choate for the school’s fiftieth anniversary and gave one of the most heartfelt speeches of his young life.

  Until recently he had been at best ambivalent about the word “politician,” disdaining the title, particularly in a gathering like this one. This evening, though, he proudly wore that appellation so as to inspire some of these youths as well as other distinguished alumni not to retreat into private enclaves of privilege but to come forward and stand for election, as he had.

  He pointed out that despite all the contributions of Choate men, there was “one field in which Choate and the other private schools of the country have not made a great contribution and that is the field of politics…. In America, politics are regarded with great contempt; and politicians themselves are looked down upon because of their free and easy compromises.”

  The speech was reprinted in the alumni bulletin as “Jack Kennedy’s Challenge,” but it was a challenge that Jack himself met only partway. He could stand before the Choate youths and fill the room with inspiring rhetoric, but when he returned to Washington, he was like Gulliver in the land of Brobdingnag, so close to the realities that he smelled only the stench and saw only the endless compromise. “Everything you said is true—only more so,” Jack wrote Clare Boothe Luce, a woman of studied cynicism and disdain who had long since forgiven Joe for betraying her in the 1940 presidential campaign.

  As the months went by, Jack became less and less a forceful advocate and more of an ironic, disinterested bystander. He brought the same emotional distance that he kept from everyone in his life to the world of politics. He was living in a small, disordered house in Georgetown with his sister Eunice. Thanks to their father’s intervention, twenty-six-year-old Eunice had an important position, the first executive secretary in juvenile delinquency at the Justice Department. Eunice did not have that common liberal malady of loving humankind more deeply in the abstract than the specific. She not only talked endlessly about the problems of troubled youth but also often brought groups of troubled girls home for Sunday dinner.

  Although Jack tolerated his sister’s eccentricities, he much preferred spending his evenings in the company of an endless parade of women. In some of the newspaper photos of the time, his eyes appeared dark and hollow, his features seemingly twice their size in his thin face. Yet he had a sexual aura that made him nearly irresistible. The Associated Press named Jack one of the fifteen most eligible bachelors in America. Even if Jack ran well behind Cary Grant and Clark Gable, he was the only politician on the list alongside the biggest stars in Hollywood.

  Jack enjoyed the company of another Democratic freshman, Congressman George Smathers of Florida. Smathers had already met Jack’s father in Florida, and he had more than an inkling of what the Kennedy men were all about. Joe had purchased a part ownership in Hialeah Racetrack and he generously invited Smathers, a young assistant U.S. attorney, to his box.

  “Joe was using me to sit with these pretty girls,” Smathers recalled decades later, full of admiration for the sheer duplicity of the man. “Joe was married, and it made him look all right. He didn’t look like a real old guy with all these pretty young Florida girls following him around. So that�
�s what he used me for. There were always these good-looking girls. And they would snap pictures, and I was always there.”

  Smathers’s office was just down the hall from Jack’s in the House Office Building. The Florida legislator was a handsome man of elegant bearing who as often as not preferred pulchritude to politics. Smathers adhered to the southern tradition that a successful politician better dress like one, and he was a veritable dandy in fancy suits.

  Jack, for his part, didn’t mind a wrinkled suit, scuffed shoes, or white socks. The two young politicians did share, however, a common interest in women. Like his friend, Jack did not believe that quality and quantity were mutually exclusive and he ran through any number of young women. On one occasion, Jack’s old friend Rip Horton went out with Jack and his date, a blonde from Florida. The woman was stunning enough to have kept most men occupied for at least several dates, but Jack got rid of her before the evening was over.

  Rip was staying at Jack’s house, and soon afterward another woman showed up. Rip was amazed at the audacity of his friend, but even more so the next morning when Jack emerged from his bedroom with yet another woman, who apparently had arrived during the night.

  Jack’s friends might have been impressed, but in America of the late 1940s, the boyish Catholic politician could not afford to be seen as overly happy with bachelorhood. “Guess I just haven’t found the right one yet,” he told one interviewer, in words that Jimmy Stewart could have spoken in a Frank Capra film.

  “I really prefer the homebody type of girl. One who is quiet and would make a fellow a nice, understanding wife and mother for his children. The color of her hair or her height wouldn’t make much difference. Just as long as she’s a homebody is all that counts. When I find her, even politics will take a back seat then.” The interviewer never asked the wistful bachelor why he did not date women who came at all close to his supposed ideal.

  Washington was full of tedious, somber men who prattled on with what passed as seriousness. Jack’s friend Smathers could play that game too, but when he came off the platform, and the reporters had put away their pencils, by all appearances the man didn’t give a damn. It was all a splendid joke, and at times he and Jack stood on the sidelines ridiculing much of the spectacle that took place before them. Politically Jack was virtually schizophrenic: at times he was seriously and passionately concerned about his country, and at other times he dismissed the whole business as a silly circus.

  “He was a guy whose father had a lot of money and he wasn’t quite sure how Joe got it. It didn’t interest him too much where he got it,” Smathers recalled. “He just knew he had it, it was easy to come by, and he didn’t think about it. And people who worked around him were the ones who had to talk to him about poor people. But Jack was very sympathetic. He was a very sweet guy. Just a real sweet man.”

  Early on the Florida congressman noticed that his compadre was not at all what most of the women he bedded took him to be. As freshman legislators, the two bachelors had been relegated to the distant reaches of the House Office Building. Smathers walked with such long easy strides that it was nothing more than an invigorating jaunt to the Capitol. For Jack, getting to the floor of the House was often a different matter.

  “Jack was crippled, and he couldn’t walk well,” Smathers remembered. “So the bells would ring for a quorum call or a vote. And I would go over and say, ‘Come on, Jack.’ And he would lean on me, and we would trudge our way to the elevator, which was about seventy-five yards, and catch that and go down three floors to the basement, then have to walk again and get on a tramway car that would take us across underground from the old House Office Building to the Capitol. Then we would get off there and have to go up three floors, and then again, you had to walk about half a block to get to the floor to vote.

  “So that was a long walk for a guy who had a bad hip and a bad back and a bad everything else then. So he would lean on me, and we would get over there. And we’d vote. So that’s really how we became very close friends, just through the labor of getting from our office over to vote. He was a pretty brave guy. He didn’t complain about hurting. But you could see the hurt.”

  Smathers recalls Jack being sickly from the first day he met him but there came a point when his condition dramatically worsened. In August 1948, Jack traveled to Ireland to spend some time with his sister Kathleen before heading off to the Continent on a congressional junket. Jack was an Anglophile who had no Irish mud on his English boots. He stayed with his sister at Lismore, the Irish castle owned by her deceased British husband’s family. The group spent most days playing golf, as close to the common sod of Ireland as most of Kathleen’s aristocratic friends ever traveled.

  Jack had a bad back and wasn’t about to test it by swinging a golf club. He decided to go off to see whether he could find the old Kennedy homestead. It was a peculiar journey for a man who had once found it expedient to say that his father was born in the more fashionable Winthrop, not the largely immigrant community of East Boston, and who had managed to get into Harvard’s Spee Club only by latching onto friends whose forebears had not been born in humble Irish cottages.

  One of the other houseguests, Pamela Churchill, the shrewd, socially astute wife of Churchill’s son, Randolph, did not play golf either, and she agreed to accompany him. Pamela was a connoisseur of upper-class men, and she found Jack rather disappointing in his immature boyish ways, a woefully less sophisticated man than his brother Joe. Pamela had a courtesan’s adeptness at casual conversation, and she carried on in full form on the hundred-mile drive through the Irish countryside. Whether or not Pamela expected to see a Kennedy castle rising out of the heather, she surely had not anticipated a thatched cottage outside of which stood a menagerie of pigs, goats, and chickens, and a sturdy outhouse, while inside resided an unaccountable brood of children and a modest couple who called themselves Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy.

  “I spent about an hour there surrounded by chickens, pigs, etc., and left in a flow of nostalgia and sentiment,” Jack recalled a decade later. “That was not punctured by the English lady turning to me as we drove off and saying ‘That was just like Tobacco Road.’ “

  Pamela might have wanted to hold a perfumed handkerchief over her nose, but for the first time in his life Jack had looked straight on at his heritage and admired it. It was disappointing to him that his sister did not feel the same way.

  “When we got home, we were very late for supper, but Jack was very excited,” Pamela recalled. “He said, ‘We found the original Kennedys.’ I remember Kick saying, ‘Well, did they have a bathroom?’ And he said, ‘No, they did not have a bathroom.’ And I think that she was interested but not in the same way that Jack was.”

  Jack traveled to London before heading off on his congressional junket. He had hardly arrived when he collapsed in his hotel. A British doctor gave Jack the potentially devastating news that he had Addison’s disease, a condition marked by an insufficiency of the adrenal glands. These glands, the size and dimensions of a small strawberry, sit on top of the two kidneys. They play a crucial role in physical and psychological health, pumping steroids into the system. These hormones regulate metabolism, sexual characteristics, and the ability to handle stress and injury.

  The disease has no distinctive signs itself and masquerades in many guises. Its victims often just seem vaguely tired. They sometimes have stomach troubles, diarrhea, or vomiting, symptoms they blame on bad food or nervousness. Jack had been ill so often, and had overcome so many maladies, that he tended to ignore complaints that would have sent anyone else to a doctor. He may well have already been suffering from Addison’s for a year, or perhaps considerably longer. The weakened victims of Addison’s often do not die of the disease itself but usually of something else, such as getting a tooth pulled or the flu. By the summer of 1947, the introduction of a new wonder drug, cortisone, had changed the prognosis of the disease from almost certain death to a manageable condition.

  The press was told that young Jack
had suffered a temporary relapse of the malaria that he picked up at the end of his service in the Pacific. It was a war hero suffering from his war injuries who was carried from a London hospital in pajamas to an ambulance and through the streets of London to the hospital on the Queen Elizabeth, where a private nurse ministered to him. It was a war hero who was carried by ambulance from the New York docks to a private plane to fly him to another ambulance that took him to a private room at the New England Baptist Hospital.

  Although the family attempted to minimize the seriousness of the matter, saying that Jack’s condition was only temporary and that he would spend only a few days in Boston for “observation,” the photos of Jack entering the hospital belied all this. He was dressed in a suit and tie, as if these clothes would mask the seriousness of his condition. But the man lying under a blanket on the stretcher wore a death mask, his face haunted and bony, his chin slumped against his chest.

  Addison’s disease turns its victims into medical Dorian Grays. Jack often had gloriously tanned skin that seemed to exude a sailor’s health. He had thick brown hair that probably would never turn gray. This was all due to Addison’s disease. The malady is so insidious that at first it seems not like a disease but like a slow draining of the spirit. Its victims lose weight, muscular strength, and their appetite, slowly declining toward death.

  At the Lahey Clinic, Jack had a series of appointments with the prominent endocrinologist Dr. Elmer C. Bartels, who would treat him for the next thirteen years. By then Jack was already injecting himself with cortisone. “He had to take medicine,” Bartels said. “He’d forget to take it, or not take it with him on trips.”