The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  In Havana, Jack and Smathers went to visit Batista. Smathers had an amiable relationship with the Batista regime, but as a potential presidential candidate, Jack was foolish even to be there. Another of his father’s bootlegging partners, Owen Madden, had known Batista early in the dictator’s career in Cuba. Now, by his presence, Jack was giving added credibility to a dictator who kept his tenuous hold on power by a regime of increasing violence, threats, and brutal reprisals.

  “Batista had a big uniform on,” Smathers recalled. “And when we went in to see him, he had these two guns that he pulled out of the drawer, and laid them out on the desk so you could see them. And one of them was looking at Jack and one of them was looking at me. I was thinking, ‘You better say the right thing if you want to get out of here in one piece.’ And then he made us go with him out to a great big tent where it was the custom that any mother who had had a baby, they would bring them there and they’d line up, and they had a lot of the priests and bishops and Catholic hierarchy there. And Batista made Jack and me stand up there with him and they’d give us a baby and we’d pass the baby down the line. And everybody would kiss the baby. And about thirty-five babies, forty babies go by. And Jack would look at me like, ‘How many more do you see out there?’ So we sat there one whole afternoon kissing babies. That was fun. If you look back on it. Anyway, we had a lot of fun in Cuba.”

  Jack was forever off on his pursuits of pleasure, but he always returned to live within the bounds of family. Joe and Rose had created in their children a family that was like a temple into which no outsider could ever enter and those standing outside looking in could not begin to understand the rituals that took place within its precincts. No wonder, then, that Jack’s sisters were no more interested in marrying young than he was. In the end, they did not so much marry into other families as bring their husbands in as members of the Kennedy clan. The first to marry was thirty-one-year-old Eunice. Her husband, thirty-eight-year-old R. Sargent “Sarge” Shriver, was already at work for Joe at the Merchandise Mart. Sarge came from a distinguished, though now threadbare, Maryland Catholic family. He had gone to Yale University, where he was a baseball star, and served as a navy officer in World War II. He was a man of deep religious and philosophical concerns who tried to live a good dutiful life as a steward of God’s earth. His depth was not always apparent, for he could be a man of tiresome garrulousness with a salesman’s upbeat pitch, who exhausted listeners with his sheer enthusiasm. Sarge liked fine things, silk suits, antique furniture, and first-class restaurants. He was devoted to Eunice, fortunately enough, for over their nearly seven-year courtship she at times treated him more like a hapless retainer than a worthy suitor.

  Sarge and Eunice were profoundly religious, and their wedding took place in May 1953 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral with Cardinal Francis J. Spell-man officiating, along with three bishops, four monsignors, and nine priests. At the elegant reception Eunice told the guests, “I found a man who is as much like my father as possible.” This was not true, even if Eunice believed it, but in her mind it was the highest honor she could give a man. She adored her father and was perpetually bewildered when others held him in lesser esteem than she did. Whatever doubts Eunice may have had about her new husband, her marriage to Sarge would prove to be the most successful and deepest of any of the Kennedy marriages.

  Pat was not so fortunate. She had always been fascinated by Hollywood. In California she met Peter Lawford, a British-born movie star to whom she became engaged after an acquaintance of scarcely two months. Joe investigated the men whom his daughters dated even casually, and it is one of the unanswerable questions why he did not condemn this marriage before it ever took place. Joe was close enough to Hoover that the FBI director surely could have told Peter’s potential father-in-law of his dossier, which included a 1946 investigation involving “White Slave activities in Los Angeles” and four years later, a call girl’s statement that Peter was “a frequent trick.” Peter was not Catholic, and so the wedding took place in April 1954 at the Church of St. Thomas More in New York City, before about three hundred guests.

  Jean married a man more like her father than any of his sons. In Stephen “Steve” Smith’s heritage flowed a rich mixture of politics and business. Steve’s grandfather, William Cleary, had worked alongside his Irish compatriots building the Erie Canal. Cleary saved enough to buy a tugboat and start Cleary Brothers, the family company that employed Steve. Cleary went on to serve three terms in Congress. Twenty-eight-year-old Steve was brash, tough, and rudely charming, an elegant dresser with an eye for women, and he was accepted by Joe and his sons as one of them in a way that the seemingly prissy, morally sensitive Sarge would never be. The couple was married in May 1956 at the same St. Patrick’s Cathedral where Eunice and Sarge had wed, but twenty-eight-year-old Jean settled for a more modest wedding and a far larger wedding gift, an enormous diamond pin.

  They were truly a clan now, and Bobby’s, Jack’s, Sarge’s, and Steve’s families built their own homes nearby in Hyannis Port. There they lived together in the summer beneath the overwhelming shadow of Joe, who dominated his sons-in-law almost as much as he did his sons. The Kennedys were grandiose in their ambitions, and there were jealousies, pettinesses, and spats large and small, but Joe had taught them all that the world outside must know nothing of the internal workings of the family. Thanks to Joe, they were all wealthy, with scarcely a worry about the mundane details of living that preoccupied most Americans. Fortune estimated the family wealth at $350 million in 1957. Even if the fortune was only $100 million, as Forbes considered a possibility, it was still “one of the great American fortunes.” The Kennedys spent exuberant, exquisite days together in the summer on the Cape and in the winter in Palm Beach, each holiday together only reinforcing their feelings for each other and their sense of how different they were from the world beyond.

  In the spring of 1956, the graduating Catholic students at Harvard held a celebratory get-together. Archbishop Cushing stood greeting the students beside Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey. Cushing knew none of these students and was delighted when Teddy appeared in line. “What are you going to do next year?” the bishop asked.

  “I am going to try to go to Harvard Law,” Teddy answered.

  “I think they will take you all right,” Pusey said. If the Harvard president was saying that in public, then Teddy was an apparent shoo-in, and Cushing sent Joe a letter of congratulations. It did not matter that Teddy had a mediocre grade point average and a cheating scandal against him. He was a Kennedy, and that outweighed everything else.

  Teddy was not, however, accepted at Harvard Law School. Joe did not

  let matters stand there but asked Cushing to intercede with Pusey. “I didn’t get anywhere in my intervention,” Cushing wrote Joe. “He [Pusey], himself, was just as much surprised as I was that Teddy didn’t get over the ‘hurdle’ of the aptitude test. If there is anything else I can do for the boy let me know. Like yourself, I think he has an abundance of latent abilities and a fascinating personality.”

  If the Kennedys had been a poor family and Teddy had been asked to wear his brothers’ clothes, he would have been unable to pour his outsized frame into Jack’s or Bobby’s pants or shirts. It was his brothers’ lives that he was being asked to don, and he was having a difficult time even walking in the costuming of their lives.

  Teddy headed down to the University of Virginia in the fall of 1956 to pursue a law degree. Wherever he went, he was an echo of his brothers who had gone before him. This time it was Bobby who had left footprints that his younger brother was trying to fill. Teddy simply did not have the quickness of his big brothers, and he had to make up for this with sheer diligence. He pored over the legal texts so many times that he risked wearing the words off the page. When he finished his long hours of study, he was not interested in changing his little piece of the world but in having a rousing good time.

  Teddy had enough money in his trust fund to live more like a country gent
leman than a law student. He and his friend Varick John Tunney, the son of the former heavyweight boxing champion, rented a gracious, three-bedroom, red-brick house that looked out on a splendid view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. “Cadillac Eddie” they called Teddy, and Cadillac Eddie he was, a souped-up, ebullient, twenty-four-year-old driving his battered old Oldsmobile convertible, its broken, plastic back window snapping in the air and his loyal German shepherd at his side, speeding ninety miles an hour along the country roads.

  Cadillac Eddie roared along, once outrunning a Virginia police lieutenant, Thomas Whitten. The next Saturday night the officer lay in wait, and when Teddy pulled over, Whitten thought he looked “weak as a cat.” Even after this incident, Teddy ran a red light and was caught again.

  His big brother Joe Jr. had died a hero’s death, and Jack had risked his life saving his men, but there was nothing heroic about this business. Teddy was showing willful disregard, not only for his own life, but for those he endangered by his recklessness. His father had pleaded with his sons to drive within society’s laws. Teddy listened to everything else his father told him, and he followed the precepts of his family, but about this, he paid Joe no heed. Teddy was playing his little joke on the tyranny of time, and nothing was going to change him, not his father’s admonitions, not speeding tickets and warnings, not pleading friends. Nothing.

  Teddy was oversized in everything from his biceps and his appetites to the splendidly resonant quality of his baritone voice. He was the natural speaker in his family, not Jack or Bobby, and when in October 1957 it came time to dedicate a gymnasium in his sister Kathleen’s honor at the new campus of Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, Teddy was chosen to give the address. His mother was there, as well as his sister Jean, and his sister-in-law Ethel, but it was unthinkable that one of them would stand up and talk when a Kennedy man was available.

  The auditorium was full of privileged Catholic women whose education in becoming exemplary wives and mothers would be largely worthless unless they married a spouse like the splendid specimen of Catholic manhood who addressed them. To most of them, including Teddy’s mother, sister, and sister-in-law, the choice of a husband overwhelmed every other decision in a woman’s life. It was understandable why Jean walked up to her brother during the reception, bringing with her Joan Bennett, a blonde, twenty-one-year-old Manhattanville student. Jean had met Joan at a party and knew that she came from what was considered a fine Catholic family. Her father, Harry, was a prominent advertising executive, and she and her sister Candy had been brought up to exemplify all the virtues of traditional Catholic womanhood.

  As Teddy talked to Joan that afternoon, he could hardly have been unaware of the two characteristics that largely defined her. At five feet, seven inches, Joan was a head taller than most of her classmates, but it was her stunning beauty, not her height, that set her apart. She had worked as an actress-model on national television, and if sheer loveliness was what mattered, she could have been a movie star. She was a woman who bore herself with more modesty than many women of such beauty would have considered appropriate. Since her childhood, Joan had learned that her beauty drew people to her. Beauty was the reason she was standing here next to what she considered a “darn good looking fellow,” and it was a secret code that opened all the doors of life.

  Another quality of Joan’s was apparent even on first meeting. That was a startling innocence and lack of guile. She was full of a breathless incredulity that made some people think that she was rather stupid. She was in fact an intelligent young woman, but with an apparent lack of insight into the darkness of much of the world around her. She looked away from whatever was dark or distressing and moved always toward the light.

  Teddy was delighted to go out with women who were willing to do things the nuns told them they must not do. Joan, however, was a potential wife, and he treated her with respect and subtle deference. They went skiing and dancing. Wherever they went, they were chaperoned. He invited her up to Hyannis Port the following summer to meet his mother, who put Joan through a test that included playing some Brahms on the piano and professing her faith. The Kennedys checked Joan out further with Mother Elizabeth O’Byrne, the president of Manhattanville, who raved about the young woman. No one marked it against Joan that both her parents were heavy drinkers.

  Teddy’s romantic life was the one arena of adventure left to him, and he took immense pleasure in all the sexual games of bachelorhood. During the summer of 1958, he was still only twenty-six years old, and he was more like Jack than Bobby in his enjoyment of life as a single man. His mother and sisters talked about Joan, and it was clear that if he was going to obey the mandates of his family, he should follow his brothers and sisters into matrimony.

  Teddy and Joan were walking along the beach on Labor Day weekend. They had rarely been alone, and they were lovers neither physically nor emotionally. They prowled around each other with wary uncertainty, both knowing the stakes of the game they were playing. “What do you think about getting married?” Teddy asked as nonchalantly as if asking for a dinner date.

  “Well, I guess it’s not such a bad idea,” Joan answered, replying with the same shrug-of-the-shoulders dispassion as Teddy.

  “What do we do next?” he asked, as if he had just made a business deal.

  For Joan, this was in many respects the most crucial moment of her life, and over the years she reflected time and again on it. At first she thought that Teddy “proposed in a very off-hand manner” because he was “kind of guarding himself in case I said no.” Teddy’s reticence, she realized later, was perhaps not the mark of a shy lover overwhelmed by the depth of his emotion and the fear that he might be turned down. His seeming inarticulateness was an articulate expression of his feelings.

  The next morning Teddy told Joan that she had to meet his father, who had just arrived home from France. The sixty-nine-year-old patriarch sat in his great wing chair in the far end of the living room, looking at Joan like a monarch holding court. Joan walked tentatively into the room and sat at Joe’s feet on an ottoman.

  “Do you love my son?” Joe asked. It was the crucial question, but it was rarely asked so boldly. This was no social chitchat but an intense interview. Joe had been home only a few hours, but he seemed to know everything about Joan and her family. “When the interview was over—and it was an interview—he said if we wanted to get married, we had his blessing.” Joan remembered. “At the end, I felt terribly relieved. He may have been tough, but he did make you feel at ease. When I returned home on Monday, I told my parents, and they were very happy.”

  Joan may have been happy, but Teddy was sending out distress signals to anyone who chose to read them. “I was young and naive then, but looking back, there were warning signals,” Joan recalled. “We didn’t see each other from the time of his proposal until the engagement party.” That evening at the Bennett home in Bronxville, he arrived when the event was half over. “So he wouldn’t embarrass my mother, he chose to come in the back way, through the maid’s quarters,” Joan said. Teddy ran up the stairs, bringing with him an engagement ring that his father had picked out and that he had not even seen until Joan opened it.

  Joan saw that Teddy was acting purposefully disdainful toward all the rituals of his engagement. She would never have behaved so rudely as her fiancé, but she too had her doubts about the approaching wedding. Joan went to her father and told him of her overwhelming fear and reservations.

  Bennett thought that his daughter’s happiness mattered more than family appearances. He went to Joe and told him that Joan wanted either to postpone the wedding or to end the engagement.

  Joe was a man who took care of problems, and Teddy was a problem. Joe and Rose considered it their own achievement to be marrying off a son whose endless escapades worried both his parents. Marriage would settle Teddy down and minimize the prospect of any embarrassing scandals. Joe was not under any illusions that a lack of love and commitment was any reason to stop a marriage. He r
ailed at Bennett and his sentimental nonsense and insisted that the wedding go forward. Few men could stand up to the full titanic force of Joe’s temper and will, and Bennett was not one of them. The wedding would go on as scheduled.

  Teddy was in charge of Jack’s 1958 reelection campaign, by far the most important political duty he had ever had. All that stood between Jack and a race for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination was a landslide reelection to the Senate. That would signal to the rest of America that John F. Kennedy was indeed Massachusetts’ favorite son. The 1958 race had all the earmarks of the earlier Kennedy senatorial campaign, though the stakes were much higher and his opponent was not the formidable Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. but the largely unknown Vincent J. Celeste.

  There was a self-indulgent lassitude to Jack’s baby brother. Teddy could be guilelessly charming one moment and the next turn into the spoiled scion, insisting on the prerogatives of his name. He did not run the campaign the way Bobby had six years before, berating incompetents, humorlessly pushing the staff to their limits. He did not run it at all but allowed others on Jack’s staff to direct matters.

  Teddy was used to being handled. There was always someone there writing a speech for him, making an introduction, driving his car, fetching a Coke. He didn’t require any help, however, with the female sex. He was obvious in his attentions and heedless of the Kennedy pattern of always having a beard at your side. When he went out putting stickers on automobiles, he brought with him an entourage of pretty young women. Even the usually adoring Boston Globe could not avoid noticing, writing that wherever he went the very engaged Mr. Kennedy was “customarily surrounded by a flock of young beauties.” His mother had tried to teach her son to cultivate good careful habits, like always having another man at your side. Teddy, however, did what he pleased.