Over the period from ’57 to ’59, Kennedy also had to build bridges with another key power in the Democratic Party: labor. Kennedy had started his Capitol Hill career on the Education and Labor Committee and made a name for himself by being tough on suspected Communist sympathizers among the union leaders. Now Bobby and he were targeting the corrupt ones.
The Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, to be famously known as the “Senate Rackets Committee,” was formed in January 1957. Senator John McClellan initiated the temporary panel to investigate the rivalry between Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa for the presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Both men were accused of bribery and, in Hoffa’s case, fraud. McClellan brought Bobby Kennedy with him from the Government Operations Committee. He named him chief counsel and investigator. Bobby, in turn, named Ken O’Donnell, his administrative assistant, as his top aide.
Jack worried what this would do to him politically. Bobby’s new job now associated his brother with the Republicans and pro-management Democrats who dominated the committee. Any attacks on organized labor by Bobby Kennedy, a bulldog in pursuit of his goals, would be seen by labor and its political friends as an attack by Jack.
Bobby understood this. “If the investigation flops . . . it will hurt Jack in 1958 and in 1960, too. . . . A lot of people think he’s the Kennedy running the investigation, not me. As far as the public is concerned, one Kennedy is the same as another Kennedy.”
That mention of 1958 alluded to Jack’s reelection campaign. Seeing his weak opposition, Senator Kennedy begged Republican pals back home in the Commonwealth to put up a stronger candidate so he could at least prove something. What he ended up demonstrating was his overwhelming support among Massachusetts voters as he defeated the martyred Vincent J. Celeste, representing the Republicans, 1,362,926 to 488,318. The result of this rout was that Joe Kennedy at last saw great worth in Ken O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien. Not only had they delivered the goods; they’d done so without taking up much of Jack’s precious time. The efficiency of their performance had the effect of ensuring less interference from Joe, who now trusted the pair of them, in the big contest to come.
The Rackets Committee managed to strip Dave Beck of his title as president of the Teamsters Union and also to expose, by use of wiretaps, a plot set up by Hoffa and organized crime figures to establish phony locals to vote him in as president. This was new ground Bobby Kennedy was plowing. Over at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Director J. Edgar Hoover still refused even to recognize the existence of the Mafia.
That November a meeting of organized crime figures in Apalachin, New York, was discovered by local police. But when Bobby Kennedy asked the FBI for records on the bosses, he discovered it had none. So he opened up his own hearings. The star witness was Salvatore “Sam” Giancana, heir to Al Capone. Kennedy interrogated him about his operations, which included hanging his victims on meat hooks and stuffing them into trunks of cars.
Robert Kennedy:
Would you tell us anything about any of your operations, or will you just giggle every time I ask you a question?
Sam Giancana:
I decline to answer because I honestly believe my answer may tend to incriminate me.
Kennedy:
I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.
Bobby Kennedy was both fearless and relentless. On the wall of his office, buried in the basement of the Senate Office Building, was a quotation from Winston Churchill: “We shall not flag or fail. We shall never surrender.” It didn’t win him any friends in the labor world, or in those political fiefdoms where union leaders freely operated. A number of big-city mayors felt the heat and didn’t like it, didn’t like the paths Bobby Kennedy was heading down.
Meanwhile, Jack Kennedy’s performance on the Rackets Committee impressed one of Bobby’s assistants. Pierre Salinger, a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post who Bobby hired as an investigator, saw Senator Kennedy zero in on whatever relevant issue was at hand: “John F. Kennedy had clearly done his homework. . . . In what is essentially a nebulous area, he was very incisive in his questioning. He was able, with a question or two, to do what it seemed to me to take hours to get to from other people on the committee.” He was careful not to lump the clean labor executives in with the bad. “Senator Kennedy made a special effort not to join the Republicans and conservative Democrats on the committee when it came to dealing with honest union leaders like Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers.”
Yet even the UAW was held to account. In Ken O’Donnell’s words, Jack “was not only good in terms of defending the union, but several times, armed by Bobby, he went right after the union and was probably tougher on them than some of the Republicans. He criticized them for the use of violence against their own men and against the company. He was tough, but tough in an appropriate way. The intellectual ability of Senator Kennedy and Bob Kennedy was established with the UAW. Reuther and the UAW saw the Kennedy brothers as not only honest, keeping their word, but also that they were both smart as hell. It wasn’t an image that the union had held of either brother up until that point.”
The Democratic governor of Maine, Edmund Muskie, who would enter the Senate himself in 1959, said the hearings made Kennedy a heavyweight there. It was the facing down of the criminals that impressed them. “I think that his performance in the Senate added tremendously to his stature, and to the respect which all his Senate colleagues, even those with a different political philosophy, had for him. I know that it was performances like this that enlisted the support of people like Dick Russell and other giants of the Senate. They did respect him. It wasn’t just because they liked him, because they were attracted by his charm, because he had a way with words. They respected his guts . . . respected him as a man.”
But Kennedy cited the struggle for labor reform as further proof that “the Presidency is the source of action . . . There is much less than meets the eye in the Senate.” Yet his service on the Rackets Committee gave Jack another memorable victory. He’d made himself a reputation, as had his brother. Both were seen now as tough, independent reformers, racket busters. The image remains suspended in the mind, in black and white, of the two of them staring insolently at the crude thug there in the witness seat. We see Bob, the hot-blooded Irish cop, asking questions close into the microphone; Jack, the cool brother, tapping his fingernails on his teeth, that old habit that betrayed his cunning.
• • •
Jack Kennedy made few new personal friends from the time he entered politics. But that was about to change. On a warm winter Sunday early in 1959, Ben Bradlee, a correspondent for Newsweek, and his second wife, Tony, were wheeling a baby carriage along N Street in Georgetown. In it was their baby boy, Dino. Another couple, Jack and Jackie Kennedy, were also enjoying the winter sunshine, with two-year-old Caroline. The couples, similar in background, quickly became friends.
Bradlee had been a young naval officer in World War II, and his experience had included being at the helm of his destroyer as it navigated Japanese waters. The bond with Kennedy was secured further by their prep school and Harvard backgrounds. Bradlee would say that he was, in fact, higher up in the social “stud book” than Jack Kennedy, having descended from an old New England family around a lot longer than the immigrant Kennedys. Ben was the sort of guy—smart, handsome, ironic, and seemingly fearless—that Jack liked on sight. A working journalist, Bradlee now counted as a close friend a man bent on achieving the presidency. “Nothing in my education or experience had led me to conceive of the possibility that someone I really knew would hold that exalted job.”
Bradlee soon saw clearly the obstacles ahead for his new pal, what he called “the mines” he’d have to navigate: “His age—at forty-three, he’d be the youngest man ever elected president, and the first one born in the twentieth century. His religion—too much of America believed that a Catholic president would have to take orders from the pope in Rome. His health—he’d
been given the last rites several times. His father—Joseph P. Kennedy’s reputation was secure as a womanizing robber baron, who’d been anti-war and seen as pro-German while he was ambassador to Britain during World War II, and pro-McCarthy during the fifties.”
When Bradlee asked Jack if it didn’t seem “strange” to him to be running for president, Kennedy offered even his friend a stock reply: “Yes, until I stop and look around at the other people who are running for the job. And then I think I’m just as qualified as they are.” When he asked if he thought he could pull it off, Kennedy’s answer was even more studied: “Yes. If I don’t make a single mistake, and if I don’t get maneuvered into a position where there’s no way out.”
It was, in fact, a troubled time, as the 1950s were coming to a close. The country that had proudly, gloriously led the forces that vanquished the Axis dictators now had a growing set of worries when it looked beyond its borders in almost any direction. From the earliest moments of his run for the presidency, the country that Jack Kennedy was hoping to convince he could lead was beset by an unsettling feeling. Americans sensed they were losing pace in the Cold War, and weren’t sure how this had happened. The Soviets were moving worldwide; we were fading as a global power, not dramatically, but undeniably.
In October 1957, the country even became wary, suddenly, about the grandfatherly leadership of Dwight Eisenhower. The launching of the Soviet space satellite Sputnik sent an ugly shiver down the spines of complacent citizens long convinced of their country’s enduring edge against the “Soviet menace.” We’d been told by Wernher von Braun and Walt Disney—in 1955 more than 40 million of us had watched on TV the gung-ho film Man in Space, which they’d made together—that the United States would be the first to launch a satellite into orbit. Now the Russians had done it. Our leaders had committed the worst sin a politician can—as Churchill once noted: to promise success and then fail.
The second tangible sign of losing pace came on New Year’s Eve 1958. That evening the Cuban president, Fulgencia Batista, a dictator who’d been up until that moment agreeably rotten, sneaked out of Havana at midnight and headed into exile. His departure allowed the bearded leader Fidel Castro, a young lawyer-turned-guerrilla clad in fatigues, to come down out of the Sierra Maestra and assume power. When Castro, who’d sold himself as a democratic reformer, announced his allegiance to Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet Union had an ally ninety miles from our coast.
There was also intangible evidence of America’s failure to keep pace against the encroaching Soviet menace. As we fought the battle of the global game board, there came a creeping sense ours was not the winning side.
Kennedy had run on the spirit of the returning vet in ’46, then, in 1952, had catapulted himself past the Yankee order in Massachusetts, thanks both to the creative way he again worked his own tribe and also to its own rising self-estimation.
Now, with Ike aging and the decade slowing, the candidate saw how his fellow Americans were reacting against the dullness, feeling a restless urge to do something. Even in their prosperity, they knew the times weren’t living up to their aspirations, felt the pang of their unchallenged spirits. Jack Kennedy, having been out there in a way no one else was, sensed the mood of the country in a way uniquely his own, and now staked his claim on the task of getting us moving again.
28. New Hampshire Primary
29. West Virginia Debate
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HARDBALL
See DiSalle and make sure he is going to meet his commitment.
—The candidate’s instructions, October 28, 1959
At the 1956 Democratic Convention, Jack Kennedy had allowed himself to be at the mercy of the delegates. From now on, he was going to call the shots. He would be the one making other politicians do his bidding. He would do, on a national scale, what he’d accomplished at home, when grabbing control of the Massachusetts Democratic Party committee. This would mean wooing those he could, playing hardball with the ones he couldn’t.
In early November 1958, Kennedy won reelection to the U.S. Senate for his second term by a margin of three to one. Later that month Jack stopped by Tip O’Neill’s office, wanting to talk to Tip’s top guy, Tommy Mullen, about how the vote had gone in their district, the one Jack himself had once represented. Tip remembered, “Together, the two of them, Mullen and Kennedy, went over the district precinct by precinct—where the Irish lived, where the Jews lived, and so on, with every ethnic group. Jack wanted to know how each one had voted because he intended to use that information on the national scene for the 1960 presidential election. I’d never seen anybody study the voting patterns of ethnic and religious groups in a systematic way before, and I don’t think that most people realized then, or appreciate now, that Jack Kennedy was a very sophisticated student of politics.”
Looking around, Kennedy wasn’t impressed by the field he would face. “There’s nothing there in 1960,” he told a doubting Charlie Bartlett, who argued he should wait at least eight years. “This is really the time,” Jack insisted. The Rackets Committee had made him a celebrated figure. Bobby, too. “For the couple of years there, all you heard was the name Kennedy,” Ken O’Donnell recalled. Jack’s tough, evenhanded treatment of both labor and management had shown “a different kind of Democratic politician.” He gave the impression of being independent, fearless.
At the same time, the Kennedy brothers were creating a reputation for themselves as dangerous enemies, even when it came to fellow Democrats. Thanks to them, George Chacharis, a onetime millworker who was the mayor of Gary, Indiana, went to prison for conspiracy and tax evasion. Pierre Salinger recalls that Jack preferred killing a politician to wounding one. “ ‘A wounded tiger,’ he always said, ‘was more dangerous than either a living or a dead one.’ ”
It was Salinger’s first exposure to Jack Kennedy’s ruthlessness. Up until then, Jack had appeared, on the surface, the one with the easygoing nature. Salinger was fascinated. He was learning what Ken O’Donnell and others had before him. Bobby was the one who’d gained the reputation for ruthlessness, but Jack could be pitiless.
Two important strategy meetings, looking to the immediate future, were staged six months apart in 1959. The first, with everyone flying to the Kennedy family house in Palm Beach, was held in April. It was here Jack revealed himself as a man fully in charge of his troops and the operation upon which they were embarking.
“At Palm Beach, the senator was in full command,” Ted Sorensen recounted. “He was still his chief campaign manager and strategy advisor. He knew each stage, the problems it presented, the names of those to contact—not only governors and senators but their administrative assistants as well, not only politicians but publishers and private citizens. He kept in touch with the Kennedy men in every state, acquired field workers for the primary states, made all the crucial decisions, and was the final depository of all reports and rumors concerning the attitudes of key figures.”
Sorensen knew, by now, his boss’s special way of dealing with “rumors.” “Whenever word reached him of a politician who was being privately and persistently antagonistic, the senator would often ask a third party to see the offender—not because he hoped for the latter’s support, but because ‘I want him to know that I know what he’s saying.’ ”
Ted Sorensen, now a veteran well acquainted with Jack’s thinking and his wishes, briefed the others in Palm Beach on the campaign to date. O’Donnell recalled, “Sorensen dominated much of this meeting—with the exception of the senator, of course. He’d done a great deal of research on each primary and the pros/cons for and against, so he talked and we listened. Then Senator Kennedy and his father would respond accordingly. Bobby, Larry, and I had little to contribute. We listened carefully.
“The main thrust of the first conversation was that the senator planned to set up some sort of organization in Washington, D.C., reasonably rapidly,” O’Donnell continued. “This was the first and critical step towards putting together professional organiza
tions. Steve Smith, husband of Jack’s sister Jean, was going to come down from New York, open and run the office in Washington, to begin organizing the campaign. Sorensen had been the record-keeper on where the candidate stood with regional party leaders. As Steve took over and became more and more familiar, he increasingly took over that role from Sorensen. He oversaw the filing system that recorded how Jack stood with the delegates and politicians across the country.
“If the senator met a delegate and the delegate said that he’d support Kennedy if he ran for president . . . then either Dave Powers or Ted would make such a notation on the card and give it a number. The numbering system began with a ten. If a delegate was a ten, that meant he was a totally committed Kennedy man.” The card was then “returned to the main file in the Washington campaign office and then the senator would write the person a thank-you letter.”
According to O’Donnell, “There was still an element of hush-hush: Steve Smith’s headquarters bore no mention of the Kennedy campaign. They couldn’t have asked for a more anonymous office without lying: the sign read simply, ‘Stephen E. Smith.’ ” The Kennedy campaign was still, at this point, purposely under the radar.
In addition, the Kennedy team at Palm Beach had moved on to the wider issues facing the candidate throughout the country. Sorensen took notes of the questions posed. It came down to what had been learned in 1956: Who calls the shots when picking delegates, and how do we influence them? This inevitably led to the question of which state primaries the candidate would have to enter.
It was not clear if winning primaries, even a great many of them, would be enough to secure the nomination. As recently as 1952, Kefauver had won practically all of them; still, the convention had “drafted” Stevenson. The goal now was to win as many primaries as possible, meanwhile convincing the big-state governors to climb aboard the bandwagon. It was still a common practice for governors to run in their own state primaries, then arrive at the convention to broker their delegates in backroom deals.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 62