The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Smathers was not making a trivial point. A tough campaign is about as vigorous and sustained a period of physical activity as can be imagined, and running against a popular incumbent is the very definition of a tough campaign. There was a new nastiness to American politics as well. Smathers had won in 1950 by turning Senator Claude Pepper, a somewhat naive but decent reformist liberal, into a virtual traitor. (“Florida will not allow herself to become entangled in the spiraling spider web of the Red network. The people of our state will no longer tolerate advocates of treason.”) Jack’s friend and colleague Richard Nixon had done virtually the same thing to Helen Gahagan Douglas to win a Senate seat from California.

  “I’m running,” Jack replied firmly.

  “Why do you say that? You can’t even move. How can you run from a hospital bed? I don’t understand. I don’t think you ought to try. I think Lodge is too strong at this point.”

  “I’ve made up my mind,” Jack replied definitively. “I’m going to run.”

  From everything he had experienced, Jack knew that he couldn’t expect to live to a sweetly blanketed old age. He saw his plague of maladies not as an omen telling him that he must prepare for death rather than life, but as a goad pushing him out into a world that he probably would not long inhabit. Even Smathers did not know how sick Jack truly was. The columnist Joseph Alsop recalled that in the late 1940s, Jack “turned a strong shade of green: this odd skin color combined with his hair—still decidedly reddish—to make the congressman look rather like a bad portrait by Van Gogh.”

  When Alsop asked Jack why he exuded this strange color, he replied that he had “some kind of slow-motion leukemia. The disease, he explained, was a kind of blood cancer for which the doctors kept prescribing chemicals to cure. The latest chemical, he felt, had turned him green. He added in a flat tone, ‘They tell me the damn disease will get me in the end. But they also tell me I’ll last until forty-five, and that’s a long way away.’”

  Years later, in reflecting on what Jack had told him, Alsop concluded that Jack was talking about Addison’s disease, not leukemia. The chemicals Jack was taking that had turned him “green,” however, would probably not have been for Addison’s disease but for some other illness. There was, moreover, another strong witness to his purported cancer. “He had leukemia at one point,” Rose told Robert Coughlin in an unpublished, tape-recorded interview for her autobiography. “I remember because there was one doctor who

  could cure it, or who had specialized in it They don’t get over that

  [leukemia] very often.”

  Jack’s mother would not have invented an illness for a son so beleaguered by illnesses. His leukemia, or suspected leukemia, was yet another secret that had to be carefully contained. No record of this adult illness exists in any medical data that have yet been made public. However, if true, it adds even deeper poignancy to the life of a man plagued by disease and weakness, a man parading in the public arena as if he were the very totem of health and youth.

  Jack had another medical problem as he traversed the state weekend after weekend for close to two years, traveling with Frank Morrissey, his father’s friend. He had once again begun to suffer from “intermittent slight burning on urination” from “a mild, chronic, non-specific prostatitis.” He slept in the back of the car wrapped in a blanket while the chauffeur sped five or six hundred miles a weekend, getting him up for events where Jack shook half a million hands in the two years of his extended candidacy. Morrissey’s task was not only to estimate handshakes but also to report back to Joe on everything his son did and did not do.

  If Jack was going to run for the Senate against Lodge, he needed an imprimatur as an expert on foreign affairs. In January 1951, he set out on a five-week trip to Europe. He kept a daily diary of a journey that took him to England, France, Italy, West Germany, Yugoslavia, and Spain. Jack proceeded much like a diplomatic correspondent, interviewing American and foreign diplomats, world leaders, and American foreign correspondents. He was interested in Europeans in the aggregate, not in the star-crossed lives of individuals. He did not talk to workers, housewives, bureaucrats, businessmen, or students, noting their comments. On only one occasion in the 158-page diary did he write down a physical description of what he was seeing. That one instance suggests that he could indeed look on the world with a journalist’s vivid descriptive eye:

  Yugoslavia—Belgrade—Stones cold and damp—no heating—windows bleach clothes of poor quality—the streets full of crowds—partly due to the fact that there are such few stores. The crowds seem young and energetic many soldiers among them. Tito guard with … machine guns over their shoulders—all with red stars in their vests. Though they look strong—they are not healthy—The disease rate particularly tuberculosis is the highest rate of any country in Europe.

  Jack had come to Europe to learn, not to preach, and his diary is almost totally devoid of his own opinions. As he journeyed across this continent whose history had so defined him, he saw a world resonating with many of the themes he had observed in London before World War II. The great threat now was not Hitler but Stalin, and the European democracies faced Communist Russia with some of the same lassitude and uncertainty with which they had once faced Nazi Germany.

  Jack’s anticommunism was tempered by the terrible realities of war in a nuclear age, as well as his own subtle, ever-growing awareness of the complexities of the modern world. The Italians should have been doing their part, but he learned that “the Italian economy is so precarious—so poor—with the necessity of paying for food 6% of which they must export, that they hate to give up economic recovery for rearmament.” He was told that “many Germans do not want their country to become Korea [and] are sick of war—feel that strength cannot be built up to stop R. [Russia] on the land.” As for the French, he learned that “because of over powering strength of R. [Russia]—many French feel everything is hopeless … lack confidence in themselves—doubt if French who are expected to provide the mass of land troops for the defense of Europe can do so.”

  Joe made sure that Jack received major publicity during his trip. Upon his return he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and gave a talk over the Mutual Broadcasting Network on “Issues in the Defense of the West.” Most politicians fly off on junkets to stamp authority on their firmly held opinions. Jack had gone to learn. Nothing mattered more to him intellectually than these crucial issues.

  For the moment Jack threw away the little drum of anticommunism that he and his colleagues had beaten on so loudly that they had drowned out most other sounds. He picked up a different instrument now that played subtle, complicated notes. He and his colleagues had helped create an image of a Soviet monolith ready to strike, but now he had grasped the truths of nuclear detente.

  “Why should they [the Russians] take the risk of starting a war, when the best that they could get would be a stalemate during which they would be subjected to atomic bombing?” he asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1951. “Why should they throw everything into the game, why should they take risks they don’t have to—especially when things are going well in the Far East? In addition, Stalin is an old man, and old men are traditionally cautious.” He was all for helping Europe by adding four new American divisions to the two already there, but he was equally in favor of the Europeans stepping up and contributing substantially more to defense. These were impressive, well-considered arguments, and it was not without reason that Boston’s Political Times headlined its article on Jack: “Kennedy Acquiring Title, ‘America’s Younger Statesman.’”

  In October, Jack made a second, even more important journey, a twenty-five-thousand-mile, seven-week trip to Asia, traveling with Bobby and Pat. As Jack was about to set out, he mused to Lem about whether Bobby would prove “a pain in the ass.” The two brothers had never spent such an extended period together, and these weeks defined their relationship for the rest of their lives. Bobby admired his brother beyond all men. He admired Jack�
��s intelligence and grace and wit, but above all he admired his brother’s courage. He admired it because, in Bobby’s own words, “courage is the virtue” that Jack himself “most admired.” In Washington, Jack’s back had been letting him down so badly that he had been on crutches for seven straight weeks; he was finally walking freely only in September.

  With his various maladies, Jack might have flown into capitals from Cairo to Tokyo largely to have his passport stamped, returning to Washington to read foreign policy speeches written by Harvard scholars, but he wanted to touch the world with his own mind. As he had done earlier in Europe, he kept a detailed 180-page diary, primarily writing down what others told him.

  Jack was a relatively unknown, thirty-four-year-old, third-term congressman, but he traveled at the highest levels of political society. He did not walk into a president or prime minister’s office for a handshake, a photo, and a few perfunctory words, but in many instances sat down for serious dialogues in which he held his own. While many politicians retreated into the easy truisms of Right or Left, Jack was attempting to understand the complex, dark, uncertain world of 1951. This was not easy in an America that adored simplicity.

  A dangerous new world was opening up before Americans. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been sentenced to death in April for conspiracy to commit espionage by giving atomic secrets to the Russians. The Rosenberg trial suggested to many that a massive Communist conspiracy was alive in the land. On television Americans were mesmerized by the mobsters appearing before Senator Estes Kefauver’s Crime Investigating Committee, testifying about another dark world that linked racketeers, businessmen, and public officials. A treacherous cloud rose above the atoll of Eniwetok in the Pacific on May 12, when an H-bomb was first detonated. In Korea, GIs were fighting a brutal war against the North Koreans and the Chinese.

  In April, President Truman fired General of the Army Douglas MacArthur after he showed his disdain for presidential leadership by calling for a total war against China. As MacArthur made his dramatic, elongated farewell, the United Nations troops continued slogging their way back up the peninsula to roughly the Thirty-eighth Parallel, while UN and North Korean officials began negotiating a truce that none would dare call victory.

  In Paris at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) on the first leg of his trip, on October 3, 1951, Jack met General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Jack was impressed enough by Eisenhower to keep a detailed account of his meeting. Eisenhower appeared willing to grapple with the terrible postwar complexities and to forgo simpleminded solutions.

  Eisenhower looking very fit … Attacked those who criticized those who attacked settlements made during war. Said he was merely fighting a war. Had very little to do with them. States that he asked Truman at Potsdam not to beg Russians to come into war…. He mentioned that only one conversation he had had of importance at Potsdam and Truman mentioned there about supporting him for Pres in 1945 and had done so several times since…. Said $64 question was whether Kremlin leaders were fanatics—doctrinaires—or just ruthless men—determined to hold on to power—If first—chances of peace are much less than 2nd…. He talked well—with a lot of god damns—completely different type than MacArthur, seems somewhat verbose as does Mac. Does not believe Russ can be frightened into aggressive war by the limited forces we are building up.

  In Israel both Jack and Bobby kept extensive diaries, and there is scarcely any overlap in their accounts. Jack stood back from the accusations and hatreds and emotions and sought to understand. One of the burning questions of his life was whether a man who stood at such a psychological distance from the world could help to change it. These pages suggest that in this world detachment was a burning and necessary gift. “You can feel sense of dedication—especially in young people—willingness to endure hardship—essential,” he wrote, celebrating the strengths of the Israelis. That did not mean he was any less understanding of the plight of the Arab refugees whom the Israelis refused to take back, saying that “during war [they] went on own accord.” The Arabs refused resettlement elsewhere, however, because “Arabs don’t want to say ok for internal reasons.” As always with Jack, the omnipresent threat in the world lay in the Soviet empire. “We must convince Arab and Jews threat not each other but from the north,” he wrote.

  One evening in Jerusalem, Jack and Bobby went to the modest home of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion for dinner. Jack celebrated leaders who shaped history, and in helping to create the Israeli state out of the Palestinian desert, Ben-Gurion had surely done that. Jack was an observer of men, and by the evidence of his diary, he did not impose himself on this evening as much as take his measure of those around him, including the American ambassador, Monnett Davis, several other Israeli ministers, and New York Congressman Franklin Roosevelt Jr. The late president’s son was a large, handsome, and verbose political gentleman. Like his mother, he was considered a friend of Israel. FDR’s namesake was the center of this evening, not Jack, whose father’s reputation always went before him. “It was almost as if we weren’t there,” Bobby recalled of their time in Israel with the former president’s son.

  Roosevelt asked the inevitable question: Could there be a real peace between Arab and Jew? “It depended on the recognition of the liberal elements, responsive to the peoples wishes,” the prime minister said. “Present gov[ernment] not concerned with peace but protecting own action.” In this spirit of candor, Ambassador Davis boldly told Ben-Gurion that the Arab states were afraid of Israel. “How could Egypt with its large population be frightened” Ben-Gurion replied, with rhetorical flourish. “We wouldn’t want to go back to Egypt again. We had enough the first time.”

  As the evening grew late, his hosts led FDR Jr. up onto the roof, where he and others looked out on the ancient city. The Jewish sections were all lit up, while the Arab sections were as dark as the night, a distinction that said more about the differences between these two peoples’ lives and their conditions and the chances of peace than anything that had been said that evening.

  This was Jack’s last night in Israel. After writing in his diary about the dinner, he ended with a few lines of poetry. He kept his love of poetry private. Indeed, a few years later, when he would read poetry in his Capitol office with Jackie’s cousin Wilson Gathings, the young man had the impression that Jack feared that others in the family might find his interest unmanly.

  This evening, though, Jack wrote down four lines of a poem written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819. That year British troops fired upon a gathering of unarmed, peaceful Manchester radicals and about fifty thousand supporters seeking the reform of Parliament. When the troops finished, eleven people lay dead and one hundred more were injured. Shelley blamed Lord Castlereagh, then the government spokesman for civil matters in the House of Commons. That may not have been a judicious rendering of the culpability, but in “The Mask of Anarchy,” art has triumphed over the interminable debates of history. Castlereagh stands remembered and condemned in a work of great and savage splendor.

  Was there a Castlereagh among the leaders Jack had met this evening, an arrogant, myopic, reactionary politician leading his nation into unnecessary death? Was that why Jack chose these words? Or did he mean to suggest that a bloody hand reaches out to grasp a public man who seeks to change society radically? Was it that death waited up the road, an assassin holding a cool grip on his trigger, with history herself in his gun sights? Whatever Jack meant, a half-century later one reads these words with dread foreboding.

  I met murder [on] the way,

  He had a mask like Castlereagh

  Very smooth he looked yet grim

  Seven bloodhounds followed him.

  Unlike Jack, Bobby personalized politics; he always hung ideas on a human face. On his earlier trip to Israel, he had seen Jews acting nothing like the devious, avaricious race he had learned about sitting at his father’s feet. Nonetheless, he was still more offended by those speaking with what he considered a pro-Jewish bias than by those who vociferously
expressed a pro-Arab position. “Drove to Haifa with Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. and had all my questions on Israel answered but of course with a very pro Jewish slant,” Bobby wrote. “I think he has gotten so he believes it though…. U.S. consul a Jew. Talks about Arabs as if a teacher talking about child. FDR Jr. talks about Arabs ‘These people must learn if they don’t get on the ball we’ll cut them off without a penny.’ His love for common man stops at Jews and Negroes.”

  In this part of the world, history was written with blood and vengeance, and a man who entered politics knew that he might die if he lost, or die even if he won. Four days after Jack and Bobby met with Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan of Pakistan, he was assassinated. In his diary Jack noted that “assassinations have taken heavy toll of leaders in Middle and Far East,” and then made a list of some of the murders. Jack tallied seventeen assassinations in the past four years alone. From Mahatma Gandhi in India to Count Folke Bernadotte in Palestine, murders often changed history the way few laws or mandates ever could. Jack was a student of power, and the lesson of this lengthy list was that in Asia the assassin and his dagger always lurked in the shadows of the throne.

  Jack was far subtler in his judgment of others than his brother, and more understanding of the limitations of what some would call courage. When he sat down for lunch with Jawaharlal Nehru, he did not find the neutralist Indian prime minister to be a coward betraying the West. “Nehru—handsome … intelligent, good sense of humor,” he jotted in his diary. “Bored by westerners believes he is right—interested in … bigger questions.” Jack considered Nehru a wise leader who had made a shrewd assessment of the precarious position of his nation set between East and West.