The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Teddy may not have had Bobby’s skills at managing a campaign, but he was an exuberant, outgoing campaigner like his grandfather Honey Fitz, who would click his heels and sing “Sweet Adeline” at the hint of a request. When Teddy stood at factory gates at five in the morning, he reached out and grabbed the gnarled hands, slapped backs, and shouted his brother’s name, trumpeting Jack’s virtues to the very heavens. And when his car stopped in traffic once, he jumped out and slapped as many bumper stickers on other waiting cars as he could before setting off again on the endless campaign road.

  Teddy was a carefree, youthful presence and seemed to carry none of the heavy burden of ambition and power borne by Jack and his father. He wooed voters not with logic or passion but with endless zeal. He went door to door in Mount Washington, a Republican town that Jack could hardly expect to carry, but on election eve, when the votes started coming in, Jack saw immediately that the town was his. Then he remembered all the hours Teddy had put in going “house to house.”

  The Republican candidate was an Italian-American from East Boston who was making a minor profession out of being defeated by Jack Kennedy. Celeste had gotten up after being walloped by Jack in the 1950 congressional race and was ready to be knocked to the canvas again eight years later. He had almost no money, and his tedious television spots ran five minutes while Jack’s professionally produced epics went on for a half hour. Celeste thought that he at least would get some free publicity when Jack finally agreed to a debate put on by the League of Women Voters in Winthrop. That evening Ted Sorensen showed up instead, and the Republican candidate refused to debate a surrogate.

  The men around Jack were a tough, intelligent, ambitious lot. They spoke in the shorthand of power, a language that Teddy was only fitfully learning. And they worked as if they were seeking not Jack’s reelection in Massachusetts but the first vote in his campaign for the presidency. Those

  who could not keep up fall back, like Ted Reardon, the candidate’s longtime aide and friend.

  For all his ambition and brutally realistic assessment of his associates, Jack found it almost impossible to fire anyone. Francis X. “Frank” Morrissey would have been a superb candidate. He ran the Boston office with a slap-on-the-back, what-can-I-do-for-you congeniality. He seemed like a modestly romantic Irish-American character, until one realized that blarney is just another word for lies. He was a spy for Jack’s father and considered by one insider little more than “a professional tattletale.”

  Jack had received two devastating letters about Morrissey. One accused Morrissey of referring constituent problems “to a law firm, and in other cases shakes them down.” A second anonymous letter stated that Morrissey and his associate “have been running in and out with women, and intoxicated, and having the life of a Riley … it is in my opinion that they both are a couple of pimps.”

  The allegations in the letters may not have been true, but Jack considered the matter important enough to keep them among his confidential office papers.

  Jack’s newest aide, Myer “Mike” Feldman, was a tall, lean attorney with a self-effacing manner that only partially hid his high ambition. Feldman had grown up in an orphanage in Philadelphia. He had graduated at the top of his class at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and had that quickness of mind and tongue that Jack liked. If Feldman had a weakness, it was that he fit too comfortably into his defined role as Sorensen’s subordinate, a quality that was probably one of the reasons Sorensen recommended him in the first place.

  Feldman sent out a press release under Jack’s name saying that he was calling for a higher minimum wage. Jack’s two aides were used to issuing all manner of words in Jack’s name, from speeches to magazine articles, that sometimes he had not even read. That was how closely Sorensen had learned to mimic Jack’s idea and style. This press release was like scores of others, but when Joe saw it, he became livid. He was working with the business community raising money and seeking their support. He was conservative himself and fed up with such liberal kowtowing to the working class as guaranteeing them a basic, ever-rising minimum hourly wage when it was sheer gumption that pulled a man out of poverty. He considered the press release a debacle, tying Jack to labor and its limited constituency. He railed against the release and called for the firing of Feldman, the architect of the disaster. Joe probably felt that he had a special say in this matter. Out of his own pocket, Joe was paying Feldman $15,000 a year, doubling his government salary.

  Joe marched Feldman in to see Jack and told his son that his new aide had betrayed him. Then Feldman, in his studious, low-key manner, told his side of the story, asserting that what he had done was right and good. “I think it’s the right position,” Feldman said as Jack listened intently. “We need the labor vote, and this is how we get them excited. Without them, we’re not going to win big the way we have to win.”

  After hearing his aide out, Jack told his father that Feldman would not be leaving the staff. It was a rare instance when Jack refused to go along with his father’s advice. Even after this experience, Feldman’s assessment of Joe was generous. “The father had a lot of clout,” he said. “The father was active in the campaign. Only behind the scenes, he wasn’t out in front, even though he was enlisting the aid of all the businessmen. But everybody knew that he was there; everybody knew this was his function. And he performed it very well. He raised a lot of money. And he deserves a lot of credit.”

  While the others worked fervently in Massachusetts, Jack flew across the country giving speeches for other Democrats. He was running for the presidency of the United States, even if he hadn’t announced yet. That did not mean, however, that he was going to give in easily to the repetitious nature of most conventional campaigning. As he traveled from city to city, he added to his speeches a touch of humor here, some unexpected witty dialogue there, and then on to the next performance. To stave off boredom, Jack created his own private moments of levity. When he went to Hawaii to help local Democrats, he took Red Fay with him. At each stop he introduced his old navy buddy, first as the distinguished “Congressman Fay” from the mainland, then as the former cook on PT-109, and on the last stop as “Dr. Fay,” the renowned surgeon.

  Jack’s friend Smathers, the new chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, pushed him to fly into Wisconsin for a day to help the underdog William Proxmire win his race in a state that had not sent a Democratic senator to Washington since the New Deal. “But find him some feminine companionship,” Smathers told Joe Miller, the campaign director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “He likes that when he’s on the road.” Miller demurred, but he did line up the board that Jack had requested for his bad back.

  “I really hate this,” Jack muttered to Miller during the interminable day. “It’s meaningless.” But that day he was brilliant at hands-on politicking, saying one thing to the Polish-Americans, something else to a group of blacks, and still other words over a Catholic radio station. It was a compelling day, and it may have been the crucial factor in Proxmire’s narrow victory.

  On a campaign trip to California in October, Jack dictated a lengthy confidential letter about his own Senate race to Steve Smith, admonishing his brother-in-law, “Be sure to keep this letter under lock and key or destroy it after you have taken notes from it.” Jack was running his own campaign, and he was running it with the most extraordinarily detailed concern. He saw his state as a complex matrix of peoples and groups that had to be wooed individually, each with a subtle, tailored approach.

  The labor unions were crucial, and Jack had a different approach to each union leader. “I think it will be well for dad to call Dan Donovan of the Longshoremen’s,” he wrote. He thought Steve should consider having the Longshoremen’s leader “write a letter which we could pay for to all of his union members saying what a great fellow I am.” He wanted Reardon to “call Vic Turpin of New Bedford, head of the fishermen’s union.” Steve was to write a letter to Max Dobro, president of the Boston Taxi
Drivers Association. Jack was fed up with Governor Furcolo’s refusal to work with him. “You might suggest to Kenny [O’Donnell] that he make it clear to the appropriate Furcolo people that there are quite a few people disturbed by the apparent ‘knifing,’ and who wonder whether the Irish are going to continue to support Italian candidates when the Italians won’t vote for Irish candidates.”

  Jack was in control of his own political destiny, even if he felt it wise to keep secret just how much he dominated every gesture and every step. He was largely the mastermind of a campaign that O’Donnell and Powers boasted was “probably as nearly perfect in planning … as an election campaign in an off-year could be.” Teddy, the official campaign manager, was so irrelevant that in Jack’s three-page memo he did not mention his kid brother except to ask, “Should we get Eunice and Jean up in order to expand our coverage, especially as we are losing Teddy?” Jack mentioned his father only once, asking him to make a phone call. Joe contributed an estimated $1.5 million to the campaign coffers, made crucial phone calls, and talked his son up, but he was no éminence grise controlling the campaign.

  Joe still believed that his conservative, isolationist political judgment was impeccable. After rereading an interview he gave to Life in 1945 in which he outlined his worldview, he marveled at the perfect precocity of his views. “I wouldn’t change a single word,” he told the Boston Sunday Herald in April 1957. “If, as chances, facts and later developments have made me look like something of a prophet, if only a Cassandra, don’t forget that time has been on my side,” he said with unbecoming immodesty. “But I have no pride in any of that,” he said, although his every word belied that statement. The obvious conclusion was that by disagreeing with his father and supporting domestic social programs and an internationalist foreign policy, Jack was foisting wrongness on the world. Yet Joe had decided to withdraw from public life and leave it to his sons, vowing never to speak on matters of national import.

  Joe set out to use every personal relationship that he could to advance Jack’s cause. Jack and his minions complained mightily about anti-Catholic prejudice, but the Kennedys had already learned to have it both ways, publicly condemning those who stood against Jack because of his faith, while privately wooing those Catholics ready to vote for Jack largely because he shared their faith.

  Those Protestant ministers who talked menacingly of a popish plot to elect Jack would have given their Sunday offering to learn the extent to which Archbishop Cushing, soon to be a cardinal, was working with Joe to promote Jack’s candidacy. “I have told Jack of our talk about getting out the vote and Jack agrees that that and that alone is the only problem,” Joe wrote Cushing in May 1958.

  If Jack was going to win the largest victory in Massachusetts history, propelling him toward the White House, he needed Catholic voters to get out there in unprecedented numbers. Later in the campaign, Cushing wrote Joe telling him that he had authorized a statement to be read at every mass in the archdiocese of Boston on September 21, 1958, making it practically a religious mandate to vote: “Among our civic obligations, the highest priority should be given to the duty to vote…. Those who have not registered are reminded that they must register now to be eligible to vote in the November elections…. No good citizen will neglect this important duty.”

  It was a dangerous business for the princes of the Church to promote Jack’s candidacy while seeming not to promote it, and it required a political subtlety worthy of a Medici. Some Church leaders lacked all such sensitivity. In May 1958, the bishop of Covington, Kentucky, wrote Cushing: “I do hope that sometime in the not too distant future Mr. Joseph Kennedy will see his way clear to do something for us. One hesitates to admit this or to include it in a letter, but a project of this kind aided by him, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, would be a great political aid to him in a Democratic state like Kentucky.” For speaking so bluntly, the bishop deserved to wear a dunce cap, not a cardinal’s peaked red hat. No matter the merits of his case, the foolish bishop would not be given a farthing. Cushing replied that he doubted “if you can get any help from the Kennedy Foundation” because the foundation would now be directed toward research. Then he sent both letters on to Joe.

  In the decade that Joe had overseen the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, he had seen how useful philanthropy could be to his family, and especially to Jack. After his son’s election to the Senate, Joe had asked Lawrence O’Brien, then the president of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ Health and Benefit Fund, to do an analysis of the foundation’s role. O’Brien concluded that during Jack’s senatorial campaign “a program was carried out in a manner which created good will for the Kennedys as a family. This was bound to inure to the benefit of any member of the family who became a public figure without any attempt at actual exploitation … their political enemies are at a disadvantage in bringing the existence of … the Foundation into political discussion.” The Kennedys did not have to talk about the foundation to reap its benefits, while their opponents could not even admit its existence without harming themselves.

  The Kennedy Foundation was an exquisite machine for the creation of goodwill and a perfect device to help Jack in his race for the presidency. And yet, with the guidance of Sarge and Eunice Shriver, Joe now turned the foundation primarily to financing research into mental retardation. The mentally retarded did not vote, and the papers would not celebrate these grants the way they did many of the earlier ones. But so little research had been done in this area that the Kennedy Foundation would have an enormous impact. Jack or Bobby could have criticized their father for such single-minded largess, giving away a chunk of the family’s political capital, but they and their siblings celebrated this effort and took part in furthering it.

  Although Joe never mentioned Rosemary’s name, it is inconceivable that he would have taken such a step without thinking of her life. Rosemary, then, would make her own tremendous contribution to the world, for out of the loathsome lobotomy, the savagery that had called itself science, would come research to change the lives of these often-forgotten Americans and of the unborn. Did Joe feel guilty? Was his support of research into mental retardation an attempt to balance the scale before he met God’s judgment? Or was guilt a strong enough word to describe Joe’s emotions?

  Joe had hardly become a man of pure beneficence. At the age of seventy, he had begun to have an old man’s jealousies and was suspicious of those who might try to pry away the power that was so much the essence of his life. He had always been a vital, energetic man. He had never accepted life’s cards but had drawn from the bottom of the deck or slapped down an ace from up his sleeve. He had no cards to trump this hand. He had always looked ahead: for several years he had been planning a massive mausoleum where he and Rose would be buried in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts. Cushing had arranged for the Church to donate a prominent plot of the kind normally reserved for bishops, on which would sit a great marble structure.

  Joe was beginning a decline about which he could only rage in sputtering disbelief. “I am really disgusted with the setback that I had last week,” he wrote Cushing in June. “I thought that I was in bang-up shape and I had just finished a physical checkup. I sometimes get as leery of doctors as I do of politicians.” Joe was suffering in his right arm from a painful neuritis, an inflammation of nerves. Six weeks later he wrote Beaverbrook: “I haven’t been fit company for man or beast for six months.”

  Jack’s aides had learned to walk warily around the candidate’s father. Joe’s relationship with Des Rosiers had ended, and he assumed it was one of his manly prerogatives to hit on one of Jack’s campaign secretaries, a beautiful twenty-year-old woman who found his attentions unseemly and frightening.

  This was one activity that the two Kennedys, father and son, had perfectly in common. Back in Boston during a campaign fund-raiser. Jack noticed a pretty young brunette looking up at him as he spoke. Afterward, he asked one of his staff members to get her name and phone number. Jack was a forty-one-yea
r-old U.S. senator with aspirations to the presidency. The young woman was a twenty-year-old Radcliffe College student, but that difference did not prevent him from calling her. Nor did it prevent the young woman from replying and agreeing to meet the senator.

  Jack had all the charismatic glamour of a movie star. He was aging the way Cary Grant did, with the years heightening his handsomeness, deepening his tanned, manly features. He was irresistible to an adventurous, sophisticated young woman bored by the narrow social rituals of her class and time. Jack was not one for elaborate rituals of seduction; from him there would be no roses, no flowery sentiment, no midnight phone calls, no impassioned vows. He asked the young woman her views of the issues of the day, and that proved seduction enough:

  At the beginning, he would ask me my opinion about politics, about the speech he’d just made, about something he’d read. What can I say? I was twenty years old and it certainly worked on me. I happened to be a kind of bluestocking, and it was important to feed my vanity in that department as opposed to just saying, “Well, gee, you’ve got pretty blue eyes.” I wanted to be more than that. Cliffies were supposed to be smart. And in the courtship phase, it seemed to me that I was special. The fact that he wanted to know what I thought made me think he liked me and knew me as a person. Was that accurate? I doubt it. He liked me because I was pretty and because I came from the right class. My family tree had a statue on Beacon Hill and he liked that a lot.

  And me. I was living a novel. Years of daydreaming about romance had prepared me excellently for his seduction. Part of me recognized that there was a lack of connection to this man, a lack of intimacy, but it looked so wonderful. In addition, I thought, “Oh, this is amazing. He’s handsome. He’s glamorous. He’s a senator. He’s president.” It seemed quite wonderful except that it didn’t feel good. I was naive. I was pseudo-sophisticated. Above all, I was emotionally isolated, a truly lethal combination. It was important that the phone would ring, that I would be picked up, that we would have dinner together after some event or party and hash it over as if we were really lovers, really companions. But the reality of the connection? Not memorable at all.