The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  The Senate was as close to a natural aristocracy as could be found in American politics, and Jack fit into the clubby collegial atmosphere as he had not in the rowdier, more populist House. A patina of authority descended on Jack, as it did on all members of the Senate, even one as youthful and naturally irreverent as the junior senator from Massachusetts. “Knowing him from then on was not knowing him at all, because once you become a member of the club, everything about you changes,” reflected Dave Powers.

  Even Jack’s old friend Charles Bartlett noticed that a change had come over him. Up until then, nothing gave Jack greater pleasure than employing his wicked wit on the buffoons, mediocrities, and pretenders with whom he felt he served in Congress. Charley was a man of courtly civility who would no more have passed on Jack’s indiscretions than he would have written about them as a journalist. But now Jack was forgoing his usual playful put-downs. “Dad says don’t knock anybody,” Jack explained, although in closing down much of his wit he was shutting off part of himself.

  Jack’s ambition came into focus. He was a man concerned only with what you would do for him tomorrow. Loyal Anthony Gallucio had traveled the state by bus, eating at cheap restaurants and treating his employer as if he were an impoverished candidate, not the son of one of the wealthiest men in America. He had given his all to the campaign, his formidable organizing skill, energy, wit, and integrity, and he assumed that he would be going to Washington in Jack’s enlarged office, a minimal reward for his two years of relentless effort. Jack called finally to give him the news. “I’ve got no money,” Gallucio recalls Jack telling him.

  For six years, Mary Davis had not simply served as an excellent secretary to Jack but used her astute political sense to promote the congressman in a myriad of ways. For several years she had been working in the office six days a week, then finishing up her work Sunday at home. She lined up a number of new secretaries and clerical workers for his expanded staff, agreeing on salaries that could reasonably be paid out of Jack’s allotment.

  “Well, I can’t pay any more than sixty dollars a week,” Jack replied.

  “Sixty dollars a week!” Davis exclaimed. “You’ve got to be joking. Nobody I’ve lined up would be willing to accept a job at that salary. And I wouldn’t ask them.”

  “Well, that’s the way it’s going to have to be.”

  “Where are you going to get somebody competent for sixty dollars a week? You cannot do that.”

  “Mary, you can get candy dippers in Charlestown for fifty dollars a week.”

  “Yes, and you’d have candy dippers on your senatorial staff.”

  Mary was being paid only ninety dollars a week. Salaries on the Senate side were higher, and she asked to be raised to the one hundred fifteen dollars a week being offered her by a freshman congressman. “Mary, you wouldn’t do this to me,” Jack replied incredulously, unwilling to go beyond a 10 percent raise.

  It would have been nothing for this multimillionaire heir to pay this loyal woman an extra eight hundred dollars a year, less than he spent during his weekends in New York. Jack, like the rest of his family, considered it part of the livery of service to be poorly paid. Those who sought market value for their services were expressing their disloyalty and they deserved to be gone, and gone Mary Davis was.

  The most notable person Jack hired that January—and the most important aide he ever hired—was twenty-four-year-old Theodore C. Sorensen. That the lanky, soft-spoken Sorensen would join the staff as Jack’s chief legislative aide was a mark of two great ambitions, Jack’s and Sorensen’s.

  The position would have been a natural for a gregarious, witty Irish-American who had worked his way through Harvard Law School and could be counted on to work with loyal devotion and political savvy. When Sorensen was thinking about working for Jack, he was warned that he would have to pass Joe’s scrutiny. But in half a century, Jack’s father had hired only one non-Catholic.

  Sorensen stood doubly disadvantaged. His mother was of Russian Jewish heritage, while his Protestant father was a member of those extraordinary progressive Republicans from Nebraska who formed around Senator George Norris. Sorensen arrived in Washington, however, with impeccable academic credentials: a Phi Beta Kappa in college, he had been first in his law school class at the University of Nebraska. He was also a talented writer who had published articles in liberal publications such as The New Republic and The Progressive.

  Sorensen could have stayed in Lincoln, started a law practice, and run for political office himself, but his ambition was different from Jack’s. There are those with public egos—politicians, talking-head journalists, preachers—whose pleasure is in the appearance, the speech, the sermon, the byline, the applause. And there are those with private egos—aides, editors, directors—who prefer to stand behind watching others reading lines and performing actions of which they consider themselves largely the creator.

  That latter kind of ego is so disguised that it is mistaken for humility when it is often the opposite. Sorensen fancied himself a liberal idealist, but that liberal idealism ended when the young Nebraskan chose his employer, a politician to his right on most important issues, but a politician with an eye on the big prize of political life.

  Sorensen would temper his ideas and his words so that he would sound perfectly like Jack. The man was so adept at mimicking Jack that he occasionally pretended to be the senator on the phone. Sorensen did this so well that the danger was that he would think that he played Jack better than Jack played the role himself. Bobby spotted this quality in Sorensen, calling him in these early years “far more interested in himself” than in the Jack Kennedy he was supposedly serving.

  Sorensen was often called brilliant, but he was more the brilliant mimic, be it of ideas or styles. If he had been an artist, only an expert would have been able to tell that his work came not from the master himself but from someone painting in the same school, copying the master’s brush strokes.

  Sorensen and the rest of Jack’s staff wrote the speeches and articles that left the office stamped with Jack’s name, even if on occasion he hardly had time to glance over them. That process began in Jack’s first days in office when Sorensen flew up to Boston to meet with a group of scholars and economists put together by James Landis, who had left the deanship of the Harvard Law School and was now working full-time for Joe.

  Jack thought that problems were solved by calling in the premier experts in the field. You heard them out, by word or memo, and then using their wisdom you decided what was best to do politically. In this process, Sorensen was not the originator but the transporter of ideas who translated those ideas into the politically plausible, in language full of sound logic and occasional eloquence.

  After this first meeting, Landis addressed a memo not to the senator but to his father. Joe had put together a formidable team of attorneys and accountants who worked out of a family office on Park Avenue in New York City, largely hidden from public view. Their sole purpose was to advance the fortunes of the Kennedy family, the most important Jack and his vision of becoming president of the United States.

  In May 1953, Jack presented a series of three speeches in the Senate titled “The Economic Problems of New England: A Program for Congressional Action.” He sketched a portrait of a region proud of its past and its seminal role in so much of American life. But he also described a region whose fishing grounds and forests were becoming depleted while its traditional industries, such as textiles, were moving south to a haven of cheap, nonunion labor and abundant resources. Worse yet, it was a region where “government management and labor have resisted new ideas and local initiative.” Kennedy called for the creation of a Regional Industrial Development Corporation, job retraining, a higher minimum wage, increased business incentives, and the serious investigation of freight rate discrimination.

  As Jack stood speaking before a nearly empty Senate, he was reading words that Sorensen had written and promoting ideas that were largely not his own. He was not a plagi
arist, however, but a politician, and he deserved the accolades he received for looking not simply at his state but at his region and trying in a serious, analytical way to be a national senator.

  When Jack left Capitol Hill early for a party in Georgetown, or flew up to New York for an engagement, he knew that Sorensen would most likely still be there, writing articles and op-ed pieces, speeches, and letters, all with Jack’s name on them, for publications including the New York Times Magazine, American Magazine, The New Republic, and the Atlantic.

  Jack liked men who were quick studies and there was no quicker study than Ted Sorensen. Within months, he had Jack down perfectly. “The Atlantic Monthly article was approved without substantial change by the senator; and both he and his father liked it very much,” Sorensen wrote Landis, with whom he had apparently co-authored a piece for Jack’s byline titled “New England and the South.” “I am looking forward to more collaboration in the future.”

  Jack’s political life was in competent hands, but he still had a major problem if he ever hoped to run for president. His good friend Jim Reed observed that Jack thought of women as “chattel … in a casual, amiable way.” They were a pleasurable sideshow to the business of life, in which men were the only players.

  Jack would have gone on a bachelor indefinitely if he had not been so politically ambitious. In Eisenhower’s America, a perpetual bachelor was considered most likely not an asexual mama’s boy or a high-living libertine, but a closet homosexual. “We used to kid Jack all the time about getting married,” recalled Ben Smith, one of his Harvard roommates. “I remember in the 1952 campaign he said that if he won he would get married.”

  “You know, they’re going to start calling you queer,” Morrissey told Jack after the election. Jack decided that he would put on the velvet shackles of marriage, but he would do so only because he knew how to pick the lock.

  Jack had met Jacqueline “Jackie” Bouvier at a dinner party at the Bartletts’ house in Georgetown in May 1951. Twenty-one-year-old Jackie had a wispy, gaminelike voice more suitable to a geisha than a sophisticated young woman who had studied at Vassar, the Sorbonne, and George Washington University. Despite the twelve-year difference in their ages, or perhaps in part because of it, Jack was intrigued enough to want to go out with her afterward for a drink. When they got out on the tree-lined street, there sat one of Jackie’s beaus asleep in her car, waiting for her, and Jack made a discreet retreat. Jack was so busy with his campaign for the Senate that he rarely saw Jackie, but he invited her to Eisenhower’s inauguration in January 1953, and then started seeing her regularly.

  Jackie was working as an inquiring photographer for the Washington Times-Herald. It was a superficial job, running around the capital, taking pictures of prominent Washingtonians, and asking them benign, obvious questions. She had incredibly wide-spaced eyes that missed nothing, and nothing of what she truly saw found its way into her column. Although her manners were impeccable, she had a devastatingly wry humor that suggested the caustic way she viewed lesser mortals. Once, while driving with her stepbrother Hugh D. Auchincloss III from Washington to Newport, police stopped their car on the Merritt Parkway. While the Connecticut trooper stood there preparing to write a ticket, Jackie innocently and oh so generously offered: “Excuse me, officer, but your fly is undone.” The policeman murmured a thank-you and hurried off without writing a ticket.

  Jackie did not talk much about her own childhood. Her parents had divorced when she was a young girl, and she had sought solace in horses and poetry and hours of dreamy introspection. She had an adventurous soul and as a girl had enjoyed many books that boys generally read, from Kipling’s Jungle Book to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. With her wistful imagination, she once decked out her stepbrother in a deerstalker hat, an Inverness cape, and a royal Stewart kilt so that when they traveled around Scotland he looked like the young Sherlock Holmes.

  Her father, John “Black Jack” Bouvier, had lost everything in the Depression except his charm and his eye for a well-turned ankle. Black Jack worked the magic of his charm on no one more than his own daughter. When she went to see Gone With the Wind, she thought the irresistible Rhett Butler the image of her father, while the beautiful, manipulative Scarlett O’Hara resembled her mother and gentle Ashley Wilkes reminded her of her new stepfather.

  After the debacle of her first marriage, Janet Bouvier, Jackie’s mother, decided not to marry for romance the second time. She proved her case by managing to marry Hugh D. Auchincloss, a gentleman whose most important assets were his name, his wealth, and his constancy. She expected her two daughters to follow her own lead in choosing a man to marry.

  Jackie was a subtle, impeccably mannered, immensely literate young woman fascinated by the rebel artistic spirits of her age. In her essay that won Vogue’s fifteenth Prix de Paris Contest, she wrote that the three men she would most like to have known were Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Sergey Diaghilev.

  Jackie admired Baudelaire and Wilde as “poets and idealists who could paint their sinfulness with honesty and still believe in something higher.” That was a heretical thought. Jack’s mother and sisters would have found Jackie’s creative heroes little more than pied pipers of decadence, hardly the models for a proper young woman. These daring artists lived on the dangerous edge of their time, and Jackie was drawn to them and their art and lives.

  Jackie wrote: “If I could be a sort of Over-all Art Director of the Twentieth Century, watching everything from a chair landing in space, it is their theories of art that I would apply to my period, their poems that I would have music and paintings and ballet composed to.”

  Jackie knew all about Jack’s sexual proclivities, and she condemned him no more than she did Baudelaire and Wilde, or her father for that matter. She was swept away by love for this handsome young politician. Jack, however, appeared more distant.

  Jackie flew off to London to cover the coronation of Queen Elizabeth on June 2, 1953. On the return flight, Jack surprised her by greeting her plane when it stopped in Boston on its way to New York City. Jackie’s mother was a superb judge of the male ego, and she had set up Jackie’s trip and paid for it in part just so something like this might happen.

  “If you’re so much in love with Jack Kennedy that you don’t want to leave him,” she told her daughter, “I should think he would be much more likely to find out how he felt about you if you were seeing exciting people and doing exciting things instead of sitting here waiting for the phone to ring.”

  Even though Jack had decided to marry Jackie, he was not swooning with courtly love. When he called Jim Reed to tell him about Jacqueline Bouvier, he was so uncertain about the whole business that he told Jim that he “might” marry Jackie while at the same time asking his friend to be one of the ushers. Jack wrote Red Fay asking him to be best man at his wedding. The prospective groom made one small oversight that suggested his inquietude about the approaching nuptials: he did not mention the name of the woman he was marrying.

  The women Jack had gone with over the years had understood the sophisticated game he was playing. Dinner at the Stork Club, ‘21,’ or other elite watering holes. Lighthearted repartee. Quick, efficient sex. A few smiles. A laugh or two. No painful revelations. No cloying commitments. No midnight phone calls. No grasping emotions. No jealousies. And good-bye.

  Jack had been especially attracted to wealthy divorcées who played the game as well as he did. One of the women he had dated for years was Florence Pritchett. Flo was a gorgeous model who had a laugh that rang out like struck crystal. Jack had met her back during the war when she had divorced her rich husband. Flo could always make Jack laugh and that was among the greatest gifts you could give the man. He saw her off and on over the years. He was not a man to send flowers or gifts, but he understood that with Flo jewels were in order. On her twenty-seventh birthday in June 1947, he wrote in his appointment book: “Flo Pritchett’s birthday! SEND DIAMONDS.” Diamonds were not quite enough and within a few months Flo
had married her second wealthy husband, Earl Smith. “Florence Pritchett was a serious girl,” Fay recalled. “She turned him down. She didn’t think he was big-time enough. She wanted to make sure she was going to get there. It was very unsettling to him.”

  “I was very stuck on her [Pritchett],” Jack told James MacGregor Burns in 1959. “It was rough, but … I’m not … the tragic lover…. At least that was the girl I liked, and I’ve had some other girls that I’ve liked but … it’s never been sort of a depressing experience.”

  Jack told Fay that he was both “too young and too old” to marry. He was not far wrong. He was too young in that he still had a bachelor’s eye. He was too old in that he was not only set in his ways but embedded in them, and he was self-aware enough to know that no mere ceremony was going to change that. Beyond that, as he wrote Red, he knew the extent to which his political career depended on his appeal to women. “This means the end of a promising political career as it has been based up to now almost entirely on the old sex appeal,” he told his friend.

  When his son left for a trip to France in the weeks before the wedding, Jack’s father worried that he might get “restless” about the marriage, for Joe knew where Jack’s restlessness usually led him. “I am hoping that he will … be especially mindful of whom he sees,” Joe wrote Torby Macdonald, who was planning to accompany Jack. “Certainly one can’t take anything for granted since he became a United States Senator. That is a price he should be willing to pay and gladly.”

  Along time before Inga had talked of those two roads that faced Jack, the one toward freedom and love and wondrous uncertainty, the other a well-defined, arduous track leading toward power and a place in history. For all her beauty and charm, Jackie represented another long, hard step up that narrow road to power. And though that was the direction Jack had chosen, he still looked fitfully over his shoulder at the road not taken.