The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  That holiday the family celebrated both Bobby’s and Sarge’s birthdays. After dinner Joan sat down at the piano. This was not an evening for only sentimental old Irish ballads. The Twist had suddenly become the rage at the Peppermint Lounge in Manhattan. And so, while Joan played, Jackie gyrated before the group in her pink Schiaparelli slack suit. Teddy decided he would give the dance a go. His mother adored her last-born, but she noticed, “He is so big and has such a big derrière it is funny to see him throw himself around.”

  Jack was amused too as he sat smoking a small cigar, observing the proceeding as a spectacle staged for his special benefit. The only Kennedy who appeared out of sorts was the Kennedy who was in large part the creator of this evening. Joe sat quietly. He was not a man who complained, but he said that he had little taste in his mouth and felt “blah.” Rose thought for the first time that her seventy-three-year-old husband looked old.

  Joe’s sons left as quickly as they had arrived, and the beach was soon cold and deserted. Joe flew down to Palm Beach, as he did each winter season. One day he was walking on the beach with Frank Waldrop, the former editor of the Washington Times-Herald. The two men’s friendship went back three decades. “It’s so incredible about Jack as president,” Waldrop enthused. “You must just feel so great.” The old editor had an endless curiosity about the human condition, and he was always probing people, but he was startled by Joe’s answer. “I get awfully blue sometimes,” Joe said, and the two men continued silently down the beach.

  A conservative in style as well as politics, Joe liked things to stay as they had always been. Unlike many nouveaux riches, Joe and Rose did not feel the need to constantly redecorate. The Kennedy homes in Palm Beach and Hyannis Port had stayed much the way they were in the 1930s. Though some accused the family of being parsimonious, Joe and Rose viewed each sofa and chair as part of their lives.

  Joe still played golf, teeing off at precisely eight o’clock every morning, not waiting even a minute for a late arrival. One day he went out to play golf with his daughter-in-law Ethel, taking along his oldest grandson, nine-year-old Joe II, as the caddy. He loved his grandchildren, but he wanted them to see that sports were not a respite from serious endeavors but a veritable graduate school of life. Joe still won at golf, and golf was the one sport he still played. Although as usual he beat the determinedly competitive Ethel, in the process he managed to lose two golf balls. Joe II could not find the balls, and for that the youth received one spectacular life lesson. “I had to stay outside for three hours after the game looking for the balls,” Joe II recalled. “When I came home Grandpa didn’t speak to me because I didn’t find one of his balls.”

  The Kennedy patriarch treated Joe II’s little brother David more gently. Joe was watching over his six-year-old grandson, reading him stories and trying to find something suitable on television for him to watch. Joe was supposed to go to a dinner with the president, who was in town only for the day, but he stayed for a long time with the boy, trying to see that he was not feeling too much alone.

  All his life people had waited for Joe and had seen him off on his grand adventures, but now he was the one who waited and saw others off. In the morning he got up and set off to the airport to wave good-bye to his son who would be leaving on Air Force One after a one-day visit to Palm Beach. “I’m going to the airport with your father,” Joe called out to four-year-old Caroline. “Would you like to come along?” Caroline hopped into the car and perched on her grandfather’s knee. Many adults were apprehensive around Joe, nervous that they might set him off somehow or that he would freeze them with his cold stare. His grandchildren, though, saw a different man, one who had endless time for their games. He wasn’t one for fawning baby talk but had a gentle concern for a child’s separate world.

  After the plane took off, Joe returned to the estate and played with the grandchildren for a while. He had been a more emotional parent than Rose, and he was a more emotional grandparent as well, full of an abiding, self-indulgent love, a blessing to children who would soon learn the burden and expectations of the Kennedy name.

  After romping with his grandchildren, Joe headed out to play golf with Ann Gargan, his niece. Ann had been training to become a nun when she developed what was diagnosed as multiple sclerosis and left the order. She was better now and had become a companion to Joe, spending more time with him by far than Rose did. Ann drove him a few blocks to the Palm Beach Country Club.

  “I really don’t feel too well today,” Joe said, “but it must be the cold I’ve had.” He was hardly one to go inside because of a little sniffle. He was not a man for excuses, not for himself or for anyone else. Nor was he about to use one of the newfangled electric golf carts that sat there ready to be employed by the sedentary and slothful.

  On the sixteenth hole Joe said he felt ill and sat down. The caddy hurried to bring over a golf cart, and Ann shepherded her uncle home as quickly as she could. “Don’t call any doctors,” he admonished his niece as she helped him walk into the house and upstairs to his bedroom.

  Rose arrived home after mass and shopping to find her husband lying in bed. “He needs rest,” she said after looking at him. Rose should have called for a doctor, but there had always been a gentle conspiracy between Rose and Joe. She and her husband had never mused morbidly about life but had insisted that their children get up, shake off their illnesses or injuries, and move on. They had always been the best example of that, and it was hardly the time to turn timid.

  By midafternoon, though, Rose agreed to call a doctor. The doctor scarcely had to look at Joe before he called an ambulance to carry him to Good Samaritan Hospital. As the ambulance sped across to West Palm Beach with sirens wailing, Rose headed out for her daily afternoon round of golf. “He’ll be fine, you’ll see,” Rose told the chauffeur. “I just cannot let this get me down. I must keep up my schedule. I have my routine. I’m going to play golf now, Frank. Yes, I will play.”

  After Rose played golf, she returned to the house for her afternoon swim. She had faith in God and faith in routine, and she did not let this incident shake either belief. By the time the president and attorney general arrived that evening, they knew that Joe had had a serious stroke and the prognosis was not good.

  Joe’s son-in-law Steve Smith believed that Joe had “nothing more to live for; his sons now being in power and having no further need for him, so the stroke came as a kind of solution.” Death might have been a solution, but surely not this, a proud, intractable man imprisoned in a broken body, unable to speak much more than gibberish, his intense blue eyes now his engine of communication, his arms striking out at those who offended him where once a word or two would have been sting enough. His right leg, right arm, and the right side of his face were paralyzed, and though his mind was lucid, try as he would, he could not speak coherently.

  When Joe was brought back to the house in a wheelchair, everyone pretended that life was the same. His sons wanted the best for their father, but they could not make him walk or bring his speech back. Rose tried to be there for her husband within the strictures of her routine, but when she entered his room, he screamed “No!” and with his good left arm dismissed her with a gesture. For years they had maintained a relationship of mannered civility. Rose turned and walked away, keeping the distance from her husband in sickness that she had kept in health.

  Joe wanted his grandchildren to be with him, but they had not learned to pretend, and some of them were afraid of this strange, gurgling, twisted old man. When he reached out to touch them, they fled from his embrace. He sat in the wheelchair crying.

  Joe had all these women around him now, pushing his wheelchair, soliciting his tortured phrases, whispering to him, talking in low voices about him in the distant corridors. Luella Hennessey, the nurse who had gone with the Kennedys to London so many years before and had overseen the births of the grandchildren, arrived to help oversee his care. She took the daily calls from the president and held the receiver up to Joe’s ear so tha
t he could make his incoherent grunts into the phone. Another nurse, Rita Dallas, had been brought in to manage the other nurses and a major part of the burden of his care.

  Ann Gargan, though, was in many respects the most important person in Joe’s daily life. Ann and her brother Joe were the proverbial poor relatives, welcomed at the family table but relegated to the most distant seat, always at the beck and call of their betters. Ann sought to make herself indispensable, cutting Joe’s meat up into bite-size pieces, interpreting his wishes, thwarting the harsh regime of rehabilitation that the physical therapists sought to impose on her uncle.

  Joe was flown up to the Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in New York City where he settled into Horizon House, a bungalow on the institute grounds. His children came, one after another, and whispered in his ear. One of them covered the old man’s twisted hand with a scarf. Bobby and Ethel hurried around the little house, checking everything out, pronouncing, “Everything works, Dad.” His children attempted to bolster him with their relentlessly upbeat cheerleading. They stood outside his door tense with anticipation, steeling themselves for this moment. Then they rushed into the room bursting with optimism, before rushing out again, their shoulders slumped with despair.

  “For a group of people who don’t want to face bad things, it was hard,” reflected Dr. Henry Betts, who became Joe’s full-time physician. “It was harder than death because with death they always went on. They’d go home, by God, and they’d find diversion and fun and work and they’d go on, because they had repressed it in a way. But how could you repress this? It was around all the time. It was harder than death. So it was just terrible on all of them.”

  Joe had grown to love Jackie more than any of his other daughters-in-law and had an affinity with her as deep as with any of his daughters. She did not try by encouraging words to pull him to his feet, but he sat there with her head in his lap. She kissed his twisted hand and caressed his face, and he seemed to grow tranquil.

  Joe learned that the president was arriving later that day, and he motioned that he wanted to wear his finest suit and a beautiful tie. When he was elegantly dressed, an aide pushed his wheelchair outside on the patio to await his son. Joe could not stand up on his own, but when he saw his son striding toward him, he pulled himself to his feet, and with his crippled hand gave the president the same salute he had given him on inauguration day. Kennedy had struggled with his father’s will and power all his life, but he loved him with an unabashed emotion unlike anyone else. He rushed forward and embraced the old man, kissing his face.

  That day Kennedy could well believe that his father might learn to walk and talk again and return to being the great patriarch of the family he had always been. When he and Bobby returned for another visit, the old man once again started to rise out of his wheelchair. A doctor hurried forward to steady him, but Joe pushed him away. Bobby rushed forward, and Joe struck out at him with his cane, screaming and flailing at him. The doctor pressed Joe down in his chair, while the Secret Service men stood ready to protect the president if his father struck out against him. Bobby loved his father deeply too, and he kissed his father and talked in sweetly soothing tones, calming the old man.

  Joe had always been a problem solver, and this was the most maddening of conditions. He followed the therapy, made some progress, and then relapsed. That was the way it always was in rehabilitation, but he had been in such good physical condition prior to the stroke that his doctors believed he might yet walk far up the road to recovery.

  Joe had always managed to avoid domesticity’s fatal embrace, but in this dollhouse of a bungalow, he and Rose were living together as they had not done during most of their marriage. Rose ordered meals from Joe’s favorite restaurant, La Caravelle, and in the evening the couple sat together in front of the television, proper Rose in her stocking feet, watching the same programs that married couples all across America were watching. Ann Gargan had become a pushy, discordant presence, and the doctors had told the family that it would be best if family members other than Rose came only for short visits. Their mandate was mainly directed at Ann, who packed up and left. Her departure had added to the tranquillity as well. It was a reassertion of Joe and Rose’s marriage and their life together. Joe was no longer prone to his terrifying fits, striking out against not only anyone within reach but seemingly at life itself and its terrible ironies.

  “He was very content with her [Rose],” said Dr. Betts, the specialist in charge of Joe’s daily care. “He liked having her around. That’s my observation. His children told me that he did not like having her around—she made him nervous—before his stroke, she was always upset about something else and she wanted to change something…. Well, she didn’t make him nervous when I saw him. I mean, he loved having her around.”

  On Father’s Day in June 1962, Joe’s children called in the morning as if by doing so they had fulfilled their familial obligations. Then, in the afternoon, they surprised their father by descending en masse on the cottage. The president, Bobby, Teddy, Jean, and Pat stood before their parents and put on a skit about growing up Kennedy. These were jokes for them alone, and Joe and Rose laughed until they were sore. And when the play was over, the players stood and applauded their parents, saluting their father and his life. There were gifts and food and endless reminiscences, and when the evening was over, Joe’s children had the grace not to make dramatic good-byes but slipped out into the night and stood waiting for their siblings to join them.

  The sweetness of this evening hung over the bungalow until Ann called from Detroit. When Joe set the phone down, he was full of the fearsome rage that Rose had hoped was gone for good. Rose did not know what had gone wrong and had no idea that Ann was beseeching Joe to let her back inside the Kennedy fold, crying over the phone. Again and again Ann called, day after day, imploring him, begging to be asked back.

  Rose was used to being alone, and having to watch over Joe unsettled her established daily routine. When it came time for her to go to Hyannis Port for the summer, as she had for the past three decades, Rose called Dr. Betts to ask his advice. “I could tell Ann to stay in Detroit and I could stay here, or I could go to the Cape and let Ann come back,” Rose said. “Now what should I do?”

  The Kennedys readily solicited advice from experts, often searching until they found someone to tell them what they wanted to hear. The doctor had been around the Kennedys long enough, and he was not about to be drawn too far into this family affair. “I don’t know, I don’t think it’s for me to tell you what to do,” he said, “but I can tell you that your husband is most happy when you’re there.”

  The doctor told Rose as clearly as he could that if she cared about Joe’s happiness, she should be with her husband, but Rose was not satisfied with that answer. She called back several times, and each time he told her the same thing.

  Rose left the institute for her summer at Hyannis Port, and soon afterward Ann returned. “Uncle Joe, the family has put me in charge of you,” she told him as he sat in his wheelchair, “and you’ll have to do as I say from now on.” The old man had what his nurse thought was “a wild look in his eyes.” Then his shoulders slumped. The prison of his marriage had become his only freedom, and even that was gone now.

  After his holiday Dr. Betts returned to Horizon House, and he was startled to see that Ann was in charge now and Rose was gone. “I think she [Rose] made her decision, and she couldn’t cope, she could not cope with a bad situation,” Dr. Betts reflected. “And from that moment on Ann Gargan was in charge. Ann did not make him happy. She was devoted to him, but she was much more manipulative. He loved her and hated her. She stirred him up, and I personally think he would have been much happier to just settle down and be content with his wife for all those years.”

  Joe traveled to Hyannis Port that summer with Ann, and though Rose was in the same house, it was his niece who was never away from his side. He was supposed to return to the institute for further rehabilitation so that he might learn
to walk and talk again, but he never did. Ann had him dressed sometimes in a suit and tie, and on occasion he traveled to New York and sat behind his desk. He even flew once to Chicago.

  Time had always been Joe’s friend, time and ritual and routine, his moments perfectly orchestrated. Now he sought the same control over his days, checking his watch to see that every minute of his diminished day was set as firmly as it had been when all was well. He turned away any therapist or guest who arrived even a minute late, and a family member who dared show up after the appointed hour was met with immense displeasure.

  When the president came for the weekend, Joe would have his wheelchair moved out on the porch where he had a clear view of the helicopter carrying his son. He was always there too when the president departed and the helicopter lifted across the field where his sons had all once played football. He would sit and watch until the helicopter disappeared in the sky, and when they pushed him back into the house, sometimes the old man would be crying.

  26

  Dangerous Games

  Outside of the president, there was no one in government as important to Bobby as J. Edgar Hoover, the sixty-six-year-old director of the FBI. Although the FBI was an empire of its own, Bobby was technically Hoover’s boss, and the two men had to work together on a multitude of serious matters ranging from civil rights to organized crime. For years Bobby had been writing political valentines to the imperious Hoover, congratulating him in language that even Caesar might have found exaggerated. It was impossible, however, to embarrass Hoover by celebrating his greatness too effusively, and by dint of Bobby’s correspondence and his father’s equally fulsome tributes to the director, it might appear that the new attorney general and the FBI chief would work well in tandem.