Jack was so weak that he could not even attend the sailboat races but instead had to watch them on land sitting in a chair, observing the finish line with binoculars. That did not prevent him from more vigorous nocturnal activities that attracted the prurient attention of Mrs. Kelly, who oversaw activities at the Old Kimball House, where the group was staying. The maids started spending more time examining Jack’s sheets than changing them. Marvin thought that hotel personnel were listening in on phone conversations.
As good fortune would have it, Mrs. Kelly was Catholic. Marvin and his friends decided that Jack would have to take the good lady to mass. “We plopped him into a bathtub of cold water, got him down to the lobby,” Marvin recalled. “There was Mrs. Kelly with her car in the driveway. After that, no espionage, no gossip, full security, full cooperation.”
Jack had what in many ways was an aristocratic conception of life. He identified with Cecil’s Melbourne and the young lord’s “Renaissance ideal of the whole man, whose aspiration it is to make the most of every advantage, intellectual and sensual, that life has to offer.” He could be acerbic about his déclassé fellow citizens, but such views were anathema in his egalitarian nation, doubly so in a politician seeking the votes of many people he thought well beneath him.
Down in Palm Beach over the Christmas holiday, Jack read Cecil’s new biography of the adult Melbourne, Lord M. or The Later Life of Lord Melbourne, a companion volume to the biography of young Melbourne that he had admired so much as a young man. Then he had read those eloquent pages portraying a dispassionate, elegant, hedonistic, young aristocrat who was the model of what he himself aspired to be. Now he read about a Melbourne who came as close to a portrait of what he had become as anything else he was likely to have read.
Even as prime minister, Melbourne had a temperament that was “all salt and sunshine. The world might be a futile place, but how odd it was, how fascinating, how endlessly full of interest! By now he had acquired the skill of a life-long hedonist in extracting every drop of pleasure from life that it had to offer…. A cynic who loved mankind, a skeptic who found life thoroughly worth living, he contrived to face the worthlessness of things, cheerfully enough.”
This Melbourne was as wearily aware of the sheer futility of most human endeavor as he had been as a young man. Yet as prime minister he became one of the great leaders of his time, and a gracious mentor to the young Queen Victoria. He loved the ladies still and was named a correspondent in a famous divorce case, a charge that he beat, as he did any challenge to his honor.
Jack loved to read the story of Melbourne and other richly ornate tales of European history. Like Melbourne, he had an aristocratic conception of marriage. His was not a middle-class union in which adultery was a crime against the human trust that held the couple together during the ceaseless competition and uncertainties of life. Nor did he hold the bourgeois illusion that a mere marriage saved one from the essential isolation of life. He did not give all of himself to Jackie in part because all of himself could not be given. He had his own world-weary sense of men and women and their perpetual games. That he lay in bed reading Lord M. and thinking occasionally of sweet Gunilla in Sweden did not mean that he was unhappy with his wife or thought his marriage a failure.
David Cecil’s book may well have been what set him to musing, scribbling notes that he surely meant only for himself. He was an American senator, but he wrote that he preferred reading European history. It was “more interesting because of [the] leisure class.” American history was the “struggle to survive” and “except on Western frontier [was] not glamorous.” European women were interesting because they were “women of leisure.” As for American women, they were “either prostitutes or housewives … [and did] not play much of a role in culture or intellectual life of country.” The “Civil War [was] glamorous … but only in Virginia because of remarkable personality of leaders.”
The Civil War may have been momentarily glamorous to a gallant young officer riding a thoroughbred steed alongside General Robert E. Lee, but hardly so for a tattered, barefoot Irish peasant walking behind in the dust with his rusty musket on his shoulder and hardtack in his kit. And that is where Jack’s ancestor would surely have been if he had fought for the Confederacy.
“Jack did have aristocratic instincts,” reflected his old friend Charley Bartlett. Jack, however, was a self-conscious aristocrat, and a self-conscious aristocrat is no aristocrat at all. He knew—and this rankled enormously—that he still would not be welcome in such haunts of the Brahmin elite as Boston’s Somerset Club, as either a member or possibly even as a guest.
In these notes Jack pondered an essential contradiction in his own life and nature. If not for his father and the lessons of the war, he might have lived a life extreme only its pursuit of pleasure, as a snobbish dilettante, dipping into the arts, endlessly amusing himself. Even if Jack had wanted to live that sort of life, he realized that there was no stylish leísured society in America like the society he found so attractive in London.
Most of Jack’s contemporaries were fascinated by the lives of the most adventurous elements of the middle class or the working class. Jack, however, found that American history “tend[s] to lack romance and drama, except the romance and drama that can be found in the story of a people and a country expanding from a beachhead to the most powerful nation on earth.” For him, American political history was in part a dreary business, unlike European history, with its grand, gaudy aristocratic lives that from a distance appeared “bright with color and romance” against a gray background of the “squalor and quiet desperation” in which the masses existed.
Worldly upper-class women, especially Europeans, intrigued Jack. Even his own wife, as sophisticated as Jackie was, had a girlish, unformed quality and could not compare with the great ladies of the past. He could applaud the virtue and achievements of such exemplary American women as Jane Addams or Susan B. Anthony, but he would have preferred to have the Marquise de Pompadour or Catherine the Great as his dinner companion.
In private, Jack placed a higher value on wit than virtue, cleverness than sincerity. At times he could hardly tolerate the relentless industriousness of American life, a philosophy encapsulated for him in Longfellow’s words: “Life is real! Life is earnest!/And the grave is not its goal.” He much preferred the European view of Lord Byron, who, while willing to die for Greek freedom, would have wanted to do it in a properly cut coat. Jack could quote approvingly Lord Byron’s axiom: “Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,/Sermons and soda water the day after.”
Scribbling his notes in Palm Beach, Jack wrote that as bad as American women were, politicians were their equals, “rather pompous,” their “humor unsophisticated.” What was impressive about them was “the vituperation that surrounds them on the floor of Senate, in newspapers etc.”
Jack occasionally revealed his disdain for many of his colleagues among trusted friends, blasting all the cant and stupidity that swirled around him in a cathartic purging. On one of his trips a few years later, he was flying with Ben Bradlee of Newsweek and Chalmers Roberts of the Washington Post when he set off on one of his minor rants, calling Senator Stuart Symington “Stubum” and deriding the elegant Missouri politician as little more than a well-dressed fool. If a word of what Roberts considered Jack’s “gratuitous insult” had gotten out, Jack would have unnecessarily made a new enemy, even if the Washington cognoscenti chuckled at the accuracy of his invective. But it did not get out because Jack, like Bobby, had a sixth sense about which journalists could be trusted.
There were moments, though, when another Jack Kennedy rose from his seat, a man imbued with the highest aspirations of his office. In his first term in the Senate, he did few things as memorable as his speech on Vietnam in April 1954. Everything he said that day could have been extrapolated from what he had seen and felt three years before on his trip to Asia. But he said it now on the floor of the Senate, his words unparsed by expediency, his logic true, and hi
s words audacious in their implications. He saw that in Vietnam there was no possibility of preventing a Communist takeover unless the French granted a subject people their independence. He was in favor of the $400 million aid program only if the French worked toward ending their colonial regime.
“I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people,” he told the Senate. “Moreover, without political independence for the Associated States [Vietnam], the other Asiatic nations have made it clear that they regard this as a war of colonialism; and the ‘united action’ which is said to be so desperately needed for victory in that area is likely to end up as unilateral action by our own country.”
After the fall of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, the French settled for an ignominious peace that split Vietnam in two, with Ho Chi Minh in the North believing that he had won only half a victory, and the South left a dissident, troubled land riven with all the scars of colonization.
In speech after speech, politicians had taught Americans to think of communism as a massive Red tide, the onrushing currents crushing everything in their wake. Jack thought, or at least part of him thought, that communism was more like a malignancy, a fungus that grew in darkness and want and could be cured or arrested by men of will and foresight. It was that image of Marxism-Leninism as “a kind of disease which can befall a transitionary society” that was promoted by MIT Professor Walt Rostow, whose thinking would influence Jack. This disease did not threaten healthy societies, or threatened them only fitfully.
Jack began to hold a very different, contradictory vision of the situation in Indochina. In some of his speeches he now saw the non-Communist South Vietnamese as a people worthy of American help, no matter what the cost. He took a step away from what he had seen and felt and knew to embrace ideas that pandered to American political clichés and paranoia.
“Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike,” Jack said in 1956. If South Vietnam was indeed the finger in the dike saving the West from drowning in a sea of communism, then its people had to be given whatever they needed, at whatever cost.
A scarlet thread ran through Jack’s beliefs. This was his concern over the omnipresent threat of the Soviet Union. He saw Russian communism as a singular monolith, the world’s greatest colonial power, an aggressor tempered by neither time nor opposing might. To him, this cold peace of the modern age was the continuation of war by other means.
In his private reflections, Jack could be as dark as his father. In preparation for one 1957 speech, he jotted down: “Fighting thousands of miles from home in a jungle war in the most difficult terrain in the world—man to man—with the majority of the population hostile and sullen—or fighting guerilla warfare. The more troops we send the more will pass across the frontier of the battle. It will be another Korea without the limited terrain.” That was a terrifying vision, in the middle of the American century, a crippled giant slowly bleeding to death on ground it neither knew nor wanted. “The U.S. is willing to make any sacrifice on behalf of freedom,” he noted, but he wondered whether “American servicemen [can] be the fighters for the whole free world, fighting every battle, in every part of the world.” There, as Jack saw it, was the tortured dilemma.
Bobby was drawn to the sounds of controversy wherever he heard them, and early in 1954, they were heard nowhere in Washington louder or more stridently than on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which he had only recently left. He returned this time as minority counsel on the Democratic side.
It was in some ways a curious appointment. Bobby still liked Joe McCarthy, whom most of the Democrats on the committee considered their nemesis. Bobby shared with the Wisconsin senator a hard-nosed, fundamentalist, militant anticommunism. McCarthy was a proud Catholic who stopped priests on Capitol Hill when he saw them to pay his respects. Bobby would have done the same whereas Jack would have rushed by seemingly embarrassed to be seen with them. McCarthy was tough-talking, unpretentious, fun to have up at Hyannis Port, the kind of man with whom Bobby felt comfortable.
Like McCarthy, Bobby was a hater. He hated in the way that some men loved: consumed with his hatred, he brought to it all his mental and emotional strength. He usually chose the targets of his vituperation with exquisite judgment. Seated across the committee table was one of the persistent hatreds of his life, Roy Cohn.
“Bobby did come back,” Cohn recalled in his autobiography. “But … he didn’t come back to fight McCarthy, he came back to fight me.” Soon after Bobby joined the committee, Cohn writes, the new minority counsel sought out McCarthy’s secretary and told her: “I want to give you a message. In these hearings, I’m going to do nothing to hurt [McCarthy]. In fact, I’m going to protect him every way I can, and I still feel exactly the same way as I always have about him. But I’m really out to get that little son of a bitch Cohn.”
In what became known as the Army-McCarthy hearings, the senators were presented with compelling evidence of a conspiracy to thwart the legitimate workings of American government. The culprit, however, was not a Communist or a fellow traveler, but Roy Cohn and his boss, Joe McCarthy. Cohn had used his power to see that their colleague G. David Schine, now a private in the U.S. Army, received special treatment and was relieved of such tasks as peeling potatoes or cleaning his rifle. The more the facts were presented, the more outrageous McCarthy became in his attempts to attack those who criticized him. And the more he scowled and vilified his enemies, the more millions of Americans watching on television saw a McCarthy they had not seen before.
While this compelling drama played out, Bobby and Cohn glowered at each other across the table. Cohn recalled that “whenever I said anything or tried to do anything, he would always have this smirk on his face, which I suppose was designed to get under my skin and did get under my skin.” Unlike his nemesis, Bobby had a brilliantly focused hatred that made him an immensely dangerous enemy.
Bobby understood that the sword that would reach Cohn’s heart was tipped with a poisonous mixture of humor and ridicule. On June 2, 1954, Bobby wrote a memo for Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson to help prepare him for the next day’s hearings. Cohn had testified that Schine was investigating the Communist infiltration of the making of the atomic bomb. “As you were on the atomic energy committee over in the House, you might wish to pursue this matter and ask him what peculiar background and experience Mr. Schine had had to equip him to delve into this important question,” Bobby wrote. “I do not think certainly there is anything against youth, but the point is that I don’t believe that Mr. Schine had any experience in atomic or hydrogen bomb affairs…. It seems to me you could make the whole business rather ridiculous if you approach the questioning of Cohn on this matter in rather an incredulous way, if you know what I mean.”
Jackson knew what Bobby meant. A week later Jackson questioned Cohn about Schine purportedly setting up a worldwide psychological warfare program. Jackson mixed his words with a fatal dose of sarcasm, his disdain for Cohn unmistakable. For weeks, Cohn had been watching Bobby sliding questions over to the Democratic senators or whispering in their ears, and he had little doubt who was the architect of this mockery. Just after the day’s hearings had ended and the television cameras were shut down, Cohn walked over to Bobby and berated him.
“I want you to tell Jackson that we are going to get to him on Monday,” Cohn said, as Bobby remembered. It was Bobby, though, who was the major target of Cohn’s ire. “You hate me!” Cohn exclaimed.
“If I hate or dislike anyone, it’s justified,” Bobby replied. “Do you want to fight?” Cohn asked, his voice loud enough that reporters turned and listened.
“You can’t get away with it, Cohn!” Bobby exclaimed, standing toe to toe with the diminutive attorney. “You tried it with McCarthy, and you tried it
with the Army. You can’t do it.”
The next day Bobby was the lead story in the largest newspaper in America. “Cohn, Kennedy Near Blows ‘Hate’ Clash” read the New York Daily News headline. Although the paper attempted to tell the story with requisite balance, the reality was that Bobby had defeated Cohn much worse than if he had fought him physically and left him lying sprawled out and bloodied.
Bobby had discovered an irresistible weapon. He had taken the rude putdowns that were the essence of humor at the Kennedy dinner table and sharpened them into a brutally disdainful sarcasm. The shaft of this weapon, though, was barbed on both ends, at times hurting the one who wielded it as much as its victims. It turned opponents on one issue into enemies who never forgot.
When Bobby returned in the evening to his rented house on S Street in norhwest Washington, he was not greeted by the kind of refined setting that Jack met when he arrived home a few blocks away. Bobby and Ethel had three children by now, and seemingly twice as many dogs. Both the children and the dogs had the run of the house, jumping up and down on furniture and tearing up and down the narrow stairs. There was no drinking or smoking allowed and some of the dinner guests would have sold their birthright for a glass of sherry.
Bobby and Ethel were living in the middle of tree-lined, cobblestoned Georgetown, the preferred bastion of the old Washingtonians known as “Cave Dwellers.” Some of these genteel folk took inordinate pleasure in spotting such outrages as a congressman’s wife eating her soufflé with a soup spoon. From all appearances, Bobby and Ethel didn’t give a damn. It was a mark of immense audacity for them to live as they did, though perhaps less so since they appeared totally unaware that theirs was an unusual household. There was much talk about these eccentric Kennedys, but their behavior was more Skakel than Kennedy.
Bobby had an awesome toughness of mind and body. When Teddy called him in the fall of 1953 and invited him up to watch a football game at Yale, Bobby knew that his brother would not be playing before tens of thousands in Saturday’s Harvard-Yale game. His brother had just returned to Harvard. Probation meant that for a year he could not play varsity football. Instead, Teddy had joined the team at Winthrop House and traveled down to New Haven for the annual game against Davenport, one of Yale’s residential colleges.
The Kennedy Men Page 46