The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  “Well, I think in the first place the problems are more difficult than I had imagined they were,” he said when asked after two years how his experiences had matched his expectations.

  Secondly, there is a limitation upon the ability of the United States to solve these problems … and I think that is probably true of anyone who becomes president, because there is such a difference between those who advise or speak or legislate and … the man who must select from the various alternatives proposed and say that this shall be the policy of the United States. It is much easier to make the speeches than it is to finally make the judgments, because unfortunately your advisers are frequently divided. If you take the wrong course, and on occasion I have, the president bears the burden of the responsibly quite rightly. The advisers may move on to new advice.

  Kennedy looked at everything in his life through the prism of politics, not only the most monumental questions of life and death and the endless array of issues, from civil rights to education, but even the smallest social events and the media coverage of his children. The photo spreads, be they of the children or Jackie or the loving family at play, enhanced his popularity, spilling over onto his political image. He pushed Caroline and John Jr. forward to be photographed by the popular magazines Look and Life, an enterprise that was immensely profitable to their owners and may well have subtly tempered some of their political criticism. Jackie tried to shelter her children from the flashbulbs and the public’s preening obsession, but the president always managed to work around her. As soon as his wife left Washington, it was not only other women who entered the White House to amuse the president but at times photographers to capture images of his children.

  A political architect of the emerging media society, Kennedy created a model that his successors would try unsuccessfully to match. He did not believe, as some would have, that image was everything, but he did think of image as a kind of costuming that allowed him to walk where he wanted to walk and to do what he wanted to do. More than any previous president, his wife and family were portrayed extensively and lovingly in the social pages of the newspapers, the back-of-the-book coverage in the news weeklies, and elaborate spreads in the women’s magazines and on such television programs as Jackie’s spectacularly successful tour of the newly restored White House in February 1962, watched by forty-six million Americans.

  With this kind of coverage, Kennedy did not have to worry about carping journalists who thought it was their professional obligation to attack him. This was not a trifling business to him, and he negotiated over the filming of his children and his wife’s program as if an important treaty were at stake. The danger was that such coverage risked trivializing his presidency, turning him into a star and denying him the natural gravitas of his office.

  A week after Jackie’s tour of the White House, the president had another splendid triumph when the astronaut John H. Glenn Jr. spun around the world three times in America’s first orbital space flight. On the morning when Glenn was being picked up from the tranquil waters of the Bahamas, however, the president was in a foul mood. He was sitting at his desk reading Time when he called Hugh Sidey, the magazine’s White House correspondent, into his office.

  “Where did you get this goddamn item about me posing in this suit for Gentleman’s Quarterly?” Kennedy asked, throwing his copy of Time on the desk. Sidey fancied himself a serious reporter who had nothing to do with the trivia that sometimes found its way into the back of his magazine. He had no idea that Kennedy’s press secretary had allowed the Gentleman’s Quarterly photographer to represent his pool photo as an exclusive, and that Time was merely reprinting it.

  “I … I … I don’t know, Mr. President,” Sidey stuttered. “I’ll try to find out.”

  That was the stock answer that Kennedy heard too many times a day. He came around from the back of the desk and shook his fist in Sidey’s face. “You sons of bitches are out to get me,” Kennedy said, his face red and distorted. “You do this stuff, this personal stuff, as much as you can. You’re out to discredit me. People are remembered in this life for only one thing. They remember Coolidge because he appeared in that Indian war bonnet. They remember Arthur Godfrey because he buzzed the tower at Teterboro Airport. They’ll remember me as the man who posed for this.”

  Kennedy would have raged on indefinitely, but Tazewell Shepard, the naval aide, gently injected himself to tell the president that Glenn had been picked up and was on the line. “Sidey, you son of a bitch, stand there and see if you can get this right.

  “Oh, Colonel Glenn, what a great day!” Kennedy said into the phone as if all morning he had been waiting for this moment.

  Sidey might be invited into the Oval Office for both exclusive interviews and condemnation, but no journalist in Washington was closer to the president than Joseph Alsop. Even though Kennedy had known Alsop for years as a social friend, the columnist had the audacity to write the president-elect saying that he viewed Kennedy’s election with “mixed feelings.” Instead of being angry at what others would have considered an intolerable impudence, Kennedy brilliantly co-opted the columnist. It proved to be among the most useful of the president’s many seductions. Alsop turned his column into a bully pulpit for the administration and used his considerable social power to advance Kennedy. Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, a connoisseur of power, watched on with admiration at the way the president led Alsop away from the paths of journalistic righteousness and turned him into his steward and shill. “Kennedy used Joe,” reflected Galbraith. “Joe assembled the Washington establishment for Kennedy. He convened them for Kennedy.”

  Most of his life Kennedy had striven to be part of the upper-class, old-line Protestant world that Alsop so perfectly exemplified. The president and first lady were regular guests at dinner parties at Alsop’s splendid Georgetown home, but even now the columnist needed to display his supposed social superiority. To Alsop, the stiletto of class was a shiv always ready to be drawn, in a quick feint invisible to the untrained eye. He used it eclectically and was perfectly willing to stick it into the president of the United States.

  Proud vintner that he was, Alsop brought forth precious bottles of 1945 Chateau Lafite Rothschild. The wine, as Alsop would be glad to tell you, was clearly too tannic to be drunk and needed years more in the cellar to be worthy of its heritage. Alsop noted that the hapless man who was his president paid more attention to reading the label than to tasting the wine. Alsop would have been better off filling the bottle with vin ordinaire and recorking it than to waste his prized vintage on Kennedy.

  This was a modern version of the fairy tale of the princess who, when asked to sleep on a mattress under which has been placed a pea, passes a restless and sleepless night, thereby proving her noble blood. Kennedy, as Alsop saw him, would have slept through the night. Although Alsop was probably correct that the president could not taste the subtle nuances, it is also possible that he thought the celebrated wine tasted like undrinkable swill but in deference to his host drank it down.

  Although Kennedy had his own friends in journalism, Bobby played an instrumental role, monitoring the press, doing whatever he could to see to it that the Kennedys were portrayed in the most admirable of terms. For the most part this was not an onerous task. Many of Washington’s premier journalists were eager collaborators, as much the seducers as the seduced. These reporters rationalized that they were advancing a desirable political agenda, but what they were advancing for the most part were their own careers.

  The Kennedys liked to create a collegial relationship with those who wrote about them, so that the author and the subject seemed to be working together, like two artists painting the same portrait. After writing a draft of his classic book The Making of the President 1960, Theodore White sent the manuscript to Bobby that he said was “full of errors … but also full of affection and respect.”

  “Do keep this as a personal document for your eyes alone,” the journalist wrote. White doubtless would not have sent the manuscrip
t to Bobby if it had been less than brimming with what he called “affection and respect.” Bobby, for his part, did not attempt to paint a thick coating of pastels over any harsh coloring. He was smart enough to write only narrow, fact-based criticisms, telling White that he “would be delighted to discuss” larger matters of emphasis on some occasion.

  Many journalists thought of themselves as helpmates of the administration. Several of them, such as Ben Bradlee of Newsweek and Charles Bartlett, a syndicated columnist associated with the Chattanooga Times, were among the president’s closest friends, and many of their competitors also nuzzled up to the administration as best they could, suggesting possible cabinet appointments, tempering unfavorable stories, offering unsolicited suggestions.

  The president was adept at using his journalist friends to reward and punish his enemies. One of the few matters on which Jack and Bobby did not agree was in their attitude toward Paul Corbin, who had been such a controversial figure during the campaign. Corbin’s mailing of fake anti-Catholic letters during the Wisconsin primary was only a tiny sampling of his deviousness. Bobby had a close friendship with Corbin that neither the president nor many of the attorney general’s other friends understood. “Kennedy’s notion about Corbin was that he belonged to Bobby,” recalled Bob Healy, a Boston Globe reporter and a family intimate. “That was his favorite line.”

  Corbin looked upon the world as an interlocking series of conspiracies, his paranoia projected onto everything he saw. He was a man of intelligence and disarming candor, as well as a prodigious researcher, and he spun his tales out of a flax of truth, half-truth, conjecture, and dark fantasy. There was a dark side of Bobby too, and Corbin was in a sense the manifestation of that part of the attorney general’s complex psyche.

  “Corbin was abrasive and wild, but for Bobby he was a loyal lapdog,” recalled Larry Newman, a White House Secret Service agent whose fiancée was one of the attorney general’s secretaries. “Corbin could do things for Bobby that had deniability. But he was denied access [to] lots of things. Kenny [O’Donnell] blocked him. And he resented that, and he blamed Kenny.”

  Bob Healy, who had served in the air force in World War II in O’Donnell’s bomber unit, was privy to his friend’s thinking. “Kenny just didn’t trust Corbin,” Healy said. “He was always telling them [the Kennedys] to beware of Corbin.”

  O’Donnell fancied himself the administration’s leading hard-nosed political operative, and Corbin’s endless pushing represented a threat to him. Corbin’s supposed closeness to Communist activists when he had been a CIO organizer in the early 1940s was enough of a problem that he had not been offered a position in the administration. Instead, he had been shuttled over to the Democratic National Committee, where he worked as a special assistant to Chairman John M. Bailey.

  One afternoon in late August 1961, according to John Seigenthaler, Kennedy called his good friend Ben Bradlee. The president had just learned from O’Donnell that Corbin was not at his DNC office but hanging out at the pool at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington. Years later Bradlee admitted wistfully that “whereas I think Kennedy valued my friendship … he valued my journalism most when it carried his water.” As Bradlee talked to the president, it became clear that this would be one of his water-carrying days. “I may have talked to him on the phone,” Bradlee recalled. Both Seigenthaler’s detailed recollections and the evidence of the Newsweek article largely confirm that Bradlee did indeed call Corbin at the hotel. Seigenthaler, moreover, believes that both the president and O’Donnell were probably listening in on the conversation.

  Corbin had a daring disregard for all the small-scale dissembling of daily politics, and when the Newsweek editor asked him what he was doing, he rashly told him the truth. “Sitting by the swimming pool,” Corbin said, “with a scotch in one hand and a blonde in the other.”

  Bradlee asked the Democratic operative what his future plans were, a not-unreasonable question, especially if the president was listening. “Stay here for sixteen years,” Corbin said. “That’s what I’m going to do. Eight years with Jack and eight years with Bobby. And if Jack doesn’t do better, we’ll run Bobby in ‘64.” After quoting Corbin’s devastating comments, the article in the September 4, 1961, issue of Newsweek concluded: “Jolly Paul Corbin sticks to his jokes, and his friends. But whether his friends can afford to stick with Jolly Paul is something else again.”

  Bobby was infuriated when he learned of Corbin’s boasts. “Fire him!” he told Seigenthaler. “Get him out of there. I don’t want him working over there tonight.” Bobby calmed down and Corbin kept his job. Bobby had a deep visceral loyalty to his friends and aides that the president simply did not have; if there had been any doubt about that, the attorney general proved it by even now not disavowing his friend. As for Corbin, he guessed from which direction the knives had come and who had wielded them. He could not afford to make the president his enemy, but O’Donnell was a different matter. Corbin took his time, but he planned a revenge complicated and subtle enough to overcome perhaps even his formidable foe.

  Bobby had another political matter on his mind, as did Jack. That was the political future of their youngest brother. After the election, Teddy had thought about moving west and starting a new life for himself there with Joan, one-year-old Kara Anne, and a second child due in September 1961. It was precisely the dream that the president had once held: heading out into the anonymity and space of the West, that richest of American metaphors for freedom. That road west was, if anything, even more appealing to Teddy than it had been to young Jack Kennedy.

  Of all the Kennedy brothers, young Teddy had the greatest of possibilities for human happiness. He pursued pleasure exuberantly and laughed so deeply that cries of tragedy were obscured. Teddy had run the campaign in the West and could have been bitter about the region voting so dramatically against his brother’s bid for the presidency. But he was not a man who held grudges, and he thought himself and the West a natural mix.

  When Teddy went out to Wyoming for a week during the primaries, he and a local politician, Teno Roncalio, searched for Kennedy delegates from morning until evening. No matter how late they worked or how much they caroused, at six the next morning Teddy was already up, ready to head out for a vigorous hour of horseback riding. Roncalio, who preferred the bunk to the saddle, had the unhappy chore of galloping alongside his eastern visitor. On one of those rides Roncalio reflected on Jack’s earlier visit. Roncalio could not imagine the senator from Massachusetts getting up to ride at dawn across landscape that he considered uninhabited for good reason. At the end of that visit, Roncalio drove the candidate to the airport in Casper. The wind was blowing a good thirty knots, but Roncalio had the top down. The candidate looked out on a landscape empty of everything but occasional sagebrush racing alongside the car. “Good Lord, why do you live here?” Kennedy exclaimed, a question he would not have asked if Wyoming voters had been within hearing distance.

  Teddy knew why westerners lived where they did, and for a few intense hours he was ready to pack up and join them. The time of Conestoga wagons and homesteaders was over, but for Teddy the dream was the same. “I was there the night that it was decided to move Teddy’s residence out west,” recalled Evelyn Jones, the housekeeper. “And then all of a sudden in the same night the decision was changed.” Teddy’s father had convinced him to follow in his brother’s footsteps.

  For Joan it was a melancholic moment whose full import it would take her years to realize. “We wanted to move to Arizona,” she recalled wistfully. “We thought we’d have fun and live our own lives, just the two of us, and Kara and the baby on the way. Ted loved his family and his father but I think for him it was freedom from his father. Ted felt he was being pushed into public life. He could not do what he wanted to do. Nobody disobeyed grandfather.”

  On a day after the 1960 Thanksgiving holiday, twenty-eight-year-old Teddy went to see the president-elect to tell him of his plans to run for the Senate seat being held in trust by
a family friend, Ben Smith, until the 1962 election. In doing so, Teddy would be making the most crucial move in his own life, setting off on a road that closed up behind him with each step forward. He asked his brother for a post in the new administration that would give him some stature before he returned to Massachusetts for the campaign. Teddy was thinking of something in foreign affairs. If the president had gone along, there would have been an Attorney General Kennedy on the domestic front who never practiced law, matched on the foreign front by another Kennedy brother whose overseas experience consisted largely of guarding NATO headquarters in Paris.

  Teddy was not even thirty years old, the minimum age for the U.S. Senate. The president-elect did not intend to pander to his brother’s ambitions, setting him up and guiding him until a real opponent toppled him. Teddy would have to get out there and get himself recognized. “Don’t lose a day,” he admonished. “Teddy, you ought to get out and get around. I’ll understand, I’ll hear whether you are really making a mark up there. I will tell you whether this is something that you ought to seriously consider.”

  That was not the president-elect speaking. That was the firm older brother who was not about to have his brother riding on his success. Teddy took his brother literally and within a few hours was off to Africa with two Democratic senators for five weeks on a junket they had been planning for months. As much as this impressed his brother, it was equally a lesson to Joan. As little as she had seen her husband during the campaign, now he was suddenly jetting off halfway around the world for a month, leaving her alone with their newborn daughter. That was a lesson reinforced a year and a half later, in September 1961, when Teddy slept through the birth of their second child, Edward Moore Jr.