The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Douglas was a proud humanist whose faith looked no higher than the peoples of the earth. He found it notable that, as they flew above routes that Marco Polo had once traversed, Bobby sat in the plane not boning up on the agriculture of Uzbekistan or literacy in Kazakhstan but reading his Bible. And wherever they went, Bobby grasped the Bible in his left hand to ward off the evil virus of communism and lectured to the Marxist true believers, trying to convert them.

  In Omsk, near the end of the trip, Bobby fell sick and ran such a high fever that Douglas feared he might die. Bobby refused to see a doctor, saying, as Douglas recalled, “Russian doctors are Communists and he hated Communists.” The justice insisted, and a young, white-clad woman doctor walked in to minister to a delirious Bobby. She stayed in the room for thirty-six hours straight until Bobby’s delirium ended, the fever broke, and he began to get well. He arrived in Moscow in decent shape but about twenty pounds lighter than when he had begun the trip.

  “As a result of this rather extensive and arduous Russian journey, I began to see a transformation in Bobby,” Douglas recalled. “And in spite of his violent religious drive against Communism, he began to see, I think, the basic, important forces in Russia—the people, their daily aspirations, their humanistic strains, and their desire to live at peace with the world.”

  Bobby may have seen all that, but he also had heard enough to reinforce his most rigid views of Marxist totalitarianism, from the loudspeakers spewing propaganda in the fields and factories (“It just drives you out of your mind”) to the absence of any voices of dissent, spirited or otherwise. He saw Russian colonialism at work in the segregated school system that separated the Asian and Russian populations. As he sat with his hosts eating such exotic fare as lamb’s brain, he saw too that there were few Communists in this Communist land. He saw a Soviet Union attacking the colonial powers of the West in Africa and Asia while running its own empire in Central Asia. He showed a perceptive awareness of one of the great ideological struggles of his time, not communism versus capitalism, but Russian imperialism versus the nationalistic instincts of subject peoples within the Soviet empire.

  When Bobby returned home, he parlayed the journey into a bounty of publicity and goodwill. Douglas may have believed that Bobby’s experiences in Russia had begun to open him up to a world more divergent and complicated than any he had imagined. Yet Bobby successfully hid that awareness in the many interviews and speeches that he gave and the articles that he wrote.

  Bobby had had an opportunity that no American official had ever had before—to meet with the largely forgotten peoples of Central Asia, whose nationalistic aspirations would explode into life three decades later. Yet Bobby remained as much an ideologue as the Communists he despised, and no more interested in the story of the individual human life than they were. Bobby had gone to the Soviet Union on a political mission, and he was not ready to display reportorial snapshots in lieu of ideas.

  It is out of the specificity of human experience, however, that empathy grows. Nowhere did Bobby tell the tale of the woman doctor who saved his life, presumably because it would have given his audience the idea that a Communist could be a human being. Nowhere did he make Douglas’s essential point, that these were people, not ideological stick figures. Nowhere did he draw the obvious conclusion that as offensive as the ethnically segregated schools might be, Americans could hardly condemn them too loudly until they changed their own segregated system.

  Any other twenty-nine-year-old political figure in the nation’s capital would have been ecstatic to have a fourteen-page Q&A in U.S. News & World Report and would have assumed that the then-conservative publication would treat him fairly. Bobby not only edited the transcript and suggested an added question and answer, but got the magazine to state that he had been off the government payroll during the six weeks he was in Russia. He invited a reporter from the Boston Globe down to the Cape for another lengthy feature article.

  Bobby was a terrible speaker. His high-pitched voice was sometimes almost inaudible, and his sheer discomfort at being up on the podium communicated itself to his audience better than his words. Yet he agreed to give the prestigious Gaston Lecture at Georgetown University in October 1955, to talk about his trip. He was so dreary an orator that even his own secretary, Angie Novello, told him: “The pictures were great, but I think you could have spoken better than that.” He was still mining the trip nine months after his return, writing a lengthy article for the New York Times Magazine on “The Soviet Brand of Colonialism.”

  Bobby continued to ingratiate himself with Hoover, going to see the FBI director to tell him about his trip and the following year writing him the kind of fawning letter that was de rigueur for impressing Hoover (“I hope the United States enjoys your leadership for a long time”). The next year Hoover sent Bobby a copy of his book, The FBI Story. Bobby had the exquisite good sense to ask the director to autograph the best-seller, saying that he would “cherish it even more.”

  For all Bobby’s calculation and shrewd ambition, he had time for friendship and family that Jack simply didn’t allow himself. He touched his children and kissed them, enveloping them in his warmth as his parents rarely had done when he was a little boy. He did not discard his old Harvard football buddies because they were no longer useful to him but kept up a correspondence in which they humbled each other with their rude put-downs. When Nick Rodis or Kenny O’Donnell came to Washington, they had to come out to Hickory Hill, the new house in McLean, Virginia, that he and Ethel had bought from Jack, or they would feel the blunt blows of his wrath.

  In a matter of weeks, Ethel and Bobby had transformed a Hickory Hill that under Jackie’s tutelage had been a sedate, elegantly appointed estate into an eclectic amalgam of summer camp, zoo, boot camp, college fraternity, political headquarters, and religious retreat. Less than intrepid visitors were well advised to turn around and drive back down Chain Bridge Road to Washington.

  Ethel had the high skittishness of the Skakel clan. Handing off her newest baby to the latest nanny or maid like a football, she ran to be present whenever Bobby made a speech or quizzed a witness in a Senate hearing. The couple played tennis matches with all the intensity of the finals at Wimbledon and had discussions with their friends over dinners that were equally competitive.

  Years later Rose mused that when a family has everything, sooner or later it must experience loss. Ethel’s losses began on October 3, 1955, when her parents, George and Ann Skakel, died in a private plane crash in Oklahoma. Ann had spent much of her life with a drink in her hand, and her family mourned her with as much liquor as tears. Bobby kept his wife away from the Skakels’ Greenwich home for their nonstop Irish wake, an absence that only exacerbated the growing tensions between the two families. As much as Bobby tried to succor his wife, her parents’ death left Ethel with a white-knuckled fear of flying so extreme that sometimes he had to cancel trips.

  The Skakels and Kennedys had two different visions of life. The Skakels were full of matchless exuberance, an unbounded generosity of spirit, and a blithe unconcern for the world beyond their gated precincts. Bobby was a Catholic Puritan who puckered up his lips at the taste of liquor. He was profoundly concerned with making his mark on the world, disdainful of mere inheritors, and impatient with those beyond his intimates whose words would not advance him. Both families kept a tight hold on their truths. But for the Skakels, there was no excuse for Ethel not joining her six brothers and sisters to mourn their parents as they should be mourned and limiting her presence to an appearance at the funeral. Bobby had a worthy excuse. As a Skakel, his wife had two possible solaces: religion and liquor, her family’s secondary faith. If alcoholism could be passed on, either by inheritance or proximity, then his wife was vulnerable.

  During the 1956 presidential campaign, Bobby traveled with Stevenson. He was supposed to be a campaign aide, but he spent most of his time taking notes and making observations. “Bobby accompanied Stevenson on his presidential campaign at his father’s
request,” according to Rose, “because of course Joe thought Jack would eventually run [for president] and anything that Bobby could learn from Stevenson’s campaign would be useful.” For months Jack had been ingratiating himself with the Democratic candidate, but that did not mean that he and his brother still admired him. Stevenson was the archetypal liberal that the Kennedy brothers abhorred. He had what they considered a prissy, overrefined quality. “He’s got no balls,” Bobby told O’Donnell. “I think he’s a faggot.”

  The liberal ladies might swoon over their precious champion, but Bobby privately sneered. The Democratic presidential candidate stood on the campaign podium saying that he was going to take on big business. A true man who had the gumption to attack Wall Street, however, would have shouted words that came from his heart. Stevenson stood there reading the speech. His words were eloquent, his voice was cultured, but he exuded nothing more, as Bobby saw it, than “an appearance of insincerity.” Stevenson tinkered for hours over his eloquent speeches and squandered days in meaningless discussions with his campaign staff. Bobby’s attitude toward Stevenson was not helped when one day Joe called the candidate and Stevenson moaned: “Oh, my God, this will be an hour and a half.”

  While Bobby stayed close to Stevenson, Jack traveled from state to state giving speeches that advanced his own celebrity more than they did the Democratic presidential candidate. The good liberal matrons of the suburbs might be “madly for Adlai,” but Jack aroused passions in younger women. At Ursuline College in Louisville, Kentucky, the female students blocked his car shouting, “We love you on TV!” and “You’re better than Elvis!” They had seen him on television presumably at the convention and had connected with his persona. Like Elvis, Jack had his own unruly mop of hair that he brushed back casually with his hand. Later that month in Queens, New York, when hordes of older women nearly fainted away during his speech, he was the one who made the Elvis connection. “The Republicans remind me of two Elvis Presley records,” he said. “For three months before election they serenade the people with ‘I Love You, I Want You, I Need You.’ But the rest of the year they change their tune to ‘You’re Just an Ole Hound Dog.’”

  As the weeks went by, Jack became primarily concerned with salvaging every last ounce of gain he could from the impending electoral debacle. Stevenson went down to ignominious defeat, winning only seven southern states. In politics much that passes as politeness is little more than organized hypocrisy. Bobby wrote the defeated candidate a warmly disingenuous letter. “I hate to impinge on your well-deserved rest but I wanted to write and thank you for your many kindnesses to me during the campaign,” he wrote in a handwritten note on Jack’s Senate stationery. “I regret that I was not able to make more of a contribution but your allowing me to travel with you was a wonderful opportunity and experience for me.” He did not find it expedient to mention to the former Illinois governor that he had been so appalled at what he saw that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to vote for Stevenson but had pulled the lever for Eisenhower.

  Even before Bobby wrote his note to Stevenson, he had flown off to California to begin an investigation of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters as chief counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. For months he had been badgered by Clark R. Mollenhoff, an investigative reporter, to investigate the union’s corruption. Mollenhoff was a glowering hulk of a man who spoke in a hectoring, belligerent tone that offended many he sought to convince. “He had a tendency to use acid sarcasm, and he was inclined to be irritable or rudely blunt when he was crossed,” Mollenhoff said of Bobby, though he equally could have been describing himself. “Occasionally, I taunted him by questioning his courage to take on such an investigation,” Mollenhoff recalled. “At other times I prophesied such an investigation could do for him what the Kefauver crime investigation did for [Chief Counsel] Rudolph Halley.”

  Union corruption was a canvas on which Bobby could write his name in bold letters. He knew, however, that every action he took now could impinge on his brother’s campaign for the presidency. It was a daring move going after corruption in the largest, most powerful union in America, though as he began his investigations he thought he would be clipping away a few precancerous growths on a healthy body. Even so, he risked alienating millions of union men and women whose votes Jack would need.

  The Teamsters president, Dave Beck, was a plump, aphorism-spouting burgher more comfortable sitting around with Republican businessmen than his fellow labor leaders. As the Republican White House saw it, he was the perfect exemplar of a new conciliatory age when labor statesmen and wise businessmen could walk together. Although Bobby had no vendetta against Beck, the labor leader and his associates were bound to portray Bobby as a union-busting rich boy out to make his name by trying to destroy a powerful organization that looked out for the good workingmen and -women of America.

  Bobby’s father was adamantly opposed to Bobby involving himself in such a dubious enterprise. The primary result, as Joe saw it, would be Jack’s loss of labor support. There may have been another reason Joe became so upset, a reason that he could not tell his son. In his hand, Joe held a map of power in America far more extensive, detailed, and truthful than anything Bobby or Jack grasped. Joe saw the dark tunnels that burrowed under America. He saw where they led and how they entered the soft underbelly of American life. He knew what a dangerous enterprise it would be even to chart these tunnels, to say nothing of attempting to close them off. Joe may also have feared that Bobby’s quest would lead to his own father’s activities. He argued with Bobby as he had never done before, but Bobby gave him no ground. Joe went to Justice Douglas and asked him to plead with his son to give up this crazed mission, but nothing dissuaded Bobby. Others might have thought that Bobby was nothing but his father’s puppet, but Joe was not pulling the strings that Bobby danced to now.

  Bobby put together a stellar team that included Carmine Bellino, the former head of the accounting unit at the FBI. Bellino could read a page of figures as if they were fingerprints, and he put in seven-day weeks. “Unless you are prepared to go all the way, don’t start it,” Bellino cautioned Bobby as they began. “We’re going all the way,” Bobby answered.

  On his first trip to the West Coast, Bobby discovered what to him was another America. He was a conservative Democrat who had been brought up with a certain ambivalence toward left-leaning unions that pushed militantly against the owning class. In a few weeks, though, he was confronted with union leaders who struck out militantly not at management but against their own union brothers and sisters. These local leaders forged sweetheart deals and pocketed bribes and concessions. Their minions bludgeoned honest workers who stood up to them and intimidated the rank and file into silence. As Bobby interviewed source after source, the twisted trail of corruption led higher and higher until he was confronted with the stark suspicion that Beck himself was corrupt. In one instance alone, Beck may have pilfered $163,000 from the union treasurer to build the kind of palatial house in which once only the bosses had lived.

  Bobby and his staff pored over documents and interviewed scores of people. It was often a tedious, frustrating business, running down one lead that turned back on itself, then following another that did the same, and always traveling, from Los Angeles to Portland and Seattle to Detroit and Chicago.

  On a frigid December day five days before Christmas, Bobby and Bellino hurried back to their room at Chicago’s Palmer House to pore over subpoenaed documents that detailed the relationship between Beck and Nathan W. Sheferman, a so-called labor relations consultant. As the two men meticulously examined the documents, they realized that they now had the evidence to prove indisputably that Beck was not the “labor statesman” he purported to be, but a criminal who had betrayed the trust of the men and women who drove trucks across America and delivered bread and beer to stores. These documents had the power to put a man in prison and to begin to shut down a golden spigot of corruption that had benefited everyone from union offic
ials to extortionists, from politicians to thugs, and from sweetly scented, refined business gentlemen to common murderers. And this was not the end of the story, but only the preface.

  In January 1957, the new Senate formed a special eight-member Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field. The chairman, Senator John L. McClellan, was a cautious man of subtle political skills. In a move that was as shrewd as it was compassionate, the senator insisted that the largely disgraced Senator McCarthy sit on what became known as the Rackets Committee. Jack was invited to join as well, and he reluctantly agreed to serve. The select committee was likely to receive immense publicity, but serving on it might make him appear a foe of unionism.

  During the next three years, Bobby served as chief counsel in an unprecedented investigation of corrupt labor-management practices. This work was part of a history of Senate investigations, including the Nye Committee’s exploration of international arms trading before World War I, the Kefauver Committee’s examination of organized crime, and the McCarthy Committee’s inquiry into American communism.

  Bobby was not the first chief counsel to play a crucial role in an investigation. He was the first, however, to so overshadow the senator in whose service he was presumably acting that few remember these historic hearings as the work of the so-called McClellan Committee. While publicly deferring to McClellan, Bobby largely orchestrated the emergence of his own celebrity. He did so surely knowing, as the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote in March 1957, that if he came “out of his investigation with as much credit as seems likely, the nation can count on having the Clan Kennedy on the political scene for two, or three, or four decades.”