Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  Joe Kennedy, still watching the purse strings, wasn’t above keeping his eye even on the funds the Senate provides its members for hiring staff. “I told him,” Davis said, “what I thought the salaries should be, in line with the money we were being allocated. I thought he was going to go through the ceiling!”

  She was surprised because she’d set the pay levels for the skilled staff members she’d picked based on the standard allocations from the Senate. But while this might seem routine practice, and wholly acceptable, her focus on the reality of the office’s likely day-to-day needs was, in fact, shortsighted. Her eye to office management and not political strategy, she was failing to consider the larger picture. It simply wouldn’t have occurred to her that the Kennedys, father and son both, intended to start right away building a wider constituency, one that would extend far beyond the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

  The money, therefore, had to stretch further.

  For this reason, Jack rejected both the top-drawer hires and the top-of-the-line pay scale. According to Davis: “He said, ‘Well, I don’t think we’re going to be able to work that out.’ And I said, ‘Well, why not?’ He said, ‘Well, number one, I have to have a Polish girl on the staff, I have to have an Italian on the staff, I have to have an Irish girl on the staff, I have to have, you know, these different ethnic groups.’ And I said, ‘That’s ridiculous! You know, a staff member is a staff member.’ He said, ‘No, you don’t understand. I’ve got to have these ethnic groups.’ “

  Rejecting the pay levels she’d determined appropriate for the newcomers, Kennedy figured sixty dollars a week about right as an upper limit. He believed Mary herself was asking for too high a weekly check.

  Hearing this, she was having none of it. “Sixty dollars a week! You’ve got to be joking. Nobody I’ve lined up would be willing to accept a job at that salary. I have to have competent, capable staff who can back me up. If I don’t, I won’t have a life to call my own.”

  She remembered only too clearly what came next: “His famous reply to me was, ‘Mary, you can get candy dippers in Charlestown for fifty dollars a week.’ And I said, ‘Yes, and you’d have candy dippers on your senatorial staff who wouldn’t know beans. If that’s what you want, I’m not taking charge of it.’

  “He didn’t believe me. And that’s when I said, ‘Uh-unh. Not me.’ “

  So Tip O’Neill’s memory was on the button. She’d continued to stand up to Kennedy despite numerous attempts on his part to win her over. He’d simply pushed her past the breaking point, and his cajoling was to no avail. After six years of working for him, Davis knew the man too well. The issue, for her, anyway, wasn’t the money in and of itself. It was a question of whether Jack Kennedy, born to great wealth, was going to give her, Mary Davis, what she knew the U.S. Senate had decided was owed to anyone taking the supervisor job Jack was offering her.

  In the end, he didn’t budge.

  What can be seen here is how the financier Joseph Kennedy exerted enduring control over anything in his son’s life having to do with money. Well able to maintain his independence on the matters that counted most with him—policy, politics, his personal associations—Jack was faced with the fact that his father still could tell him what to do if there were dollar signs involved.

  There was another rule in play here: when you worked for the Kennedys, you quickly learned that a staffer is a staffer. You needed to understand the limits of the relationship, and also the borders. Mark Dalton had learned that the hard way. As he would tell me, all those years of dedicated volunteering for Jack were forgotten the day he went on the Kennedy family payroll. Before him, the beloved Billy Sutton—the onetime press secretary, entertainer, and live-in buddy—had suffered the same fate. It seemed that he’d asked his salary to be upped from sixty-five dollars a week, a request Jack didn’t take well.

  Larry O’Brien, shrewder politically than the others, understood the problem and avoided it. “If you work for a politician, he tells you what to do, but if you maintain your independence, you can now and then tell him what to do.” Seeing the lay of the land, he decided to return to Springfield after helping Jack win the Senate race.

  O’Brien had the situation nailed. He’d worked hard to achieve a balance of mutual respect in his relationship with Jack, and he intended not to let it get out of balance. Even as his loyalty grew, so did his awareness of the senator-elect’s nature. The man so steadfast in his friendships, carrying along pals from prep school, college, the navy, and his social world, looked upon staff as employees. He had his needs; they had their tasks. Each was obliged to understand his place as well as his task, to honor the bounds of his role and its tenure. The Kennedys believed that anyone could be replaced. So it was, even with a onetime boon companion like Billy Sutton.

  Cut loose from the role he’d so cherished and filled so well, Billy still, years later, loved revisiting spots where once he’d hung out with Jack: the diner downstairs from 122 Bowdoin, Jack’s apartment, the federal buildings where Jack’s offices had been, and political hangouts such as the Parker House hotel. He was like a toy soldier waiting for its young owner to come back.

  There’s a measure of defense to Kennedy’s cutthroat approach to personnel. In Washington, a city packed with people who kiss up and kick down, Jack never kissed up. Although it may not perfectly justify the harshness of his discarding people like Dalton and Davis and Sutton, each of whom had been powerfully loyal to him for a decent number of years, it does put it in the context of the place and its morality. Isn’t the definition of a just man one who treats all the same? Jack Kennedy was equally his own man in both directions, caring no more for the feelings of those of higher authority than he was of those who served—or ceased to serve—at his pleasure.

  His cheapness, though imposed by his father, came at some cost. George Smathers caught sight of the chaos left in Mary Davis’s wake: “I’d go down to his office and it would always seem as in so much pandemonium, such a disarray . . . Everyone in his back office was very friendly, but it didn’t seem to me as though there was any organization to it, and I used to tell him so.” Jack couldn’t believe he was hearing this from a colleague whose own operation was hardly a model of professionalism.

  Smathers, to his credit, actually saw past the seeming daily disorder to what lay behind. “His mind was on bigger things. I never did feel that he was a well-organized man either in his personal life or in just the mundane matters of running an office. If the work got done, that was all that really concerned him.”

  His victory over Henry Cabot Lodge had placed him on a career pedestal sufficient for most men. Yet in Jack’s own mind he was merely at the foot of the mountain he now contemplated climbing. To reach the top he would need to further share his vision and also himself, to let a lot more people know who Jack Kennedy was. Even more important, he’d have to successfully signal the country he was ready to lead it.

  It was simply a matter of random placement, but Jack Kennedy’s new Capitol Hill office was directly across the hall from that of the new vice president. Richard Nixon was in Room 362, Kennedy in 361. Already, both their futures, at least on the surface, seemed mapped out.

  The inhabitant of 362, many figured already, was tagged to be his party’s nominee for president once the incoming Ike finished his two terms. Opposite him, the senator assigned to 361 was marked to spend—and end—his political career as a New England Democratic moderate, a rich man’s son with a celebrated war record who’d shown himself to be a tough Cold Warrior. Being a Roman Catholic, the limitations to Senator Kennedy’s political future were clear to any observer. Hadn’t the country been electing Protestants to the White House since the first peal of the Liberty Bell?

  Even before Kennedy moved into Room 361, he was interviewing people to sit at its desks. One of the hopefuls was a twenty-four-year-old lawyer from Nebraska. Ted Sorensen had grown up a world apart from the Ivy League, from Cape Cod, from the Stork Club, and from the U.S. Navy. He came from Scan
dinavian and Jewish parents, had been a conscientious objector and a dedicated supporter of Adlai Stevenson. What grabbed Jack about him, perhaps, was a reference he presented that praised his “ability to write in clear and understandable language” and, more important, called him “a sincere liberal, but not the kind that always carries a chip on his shoulder.” Jack liked him already.

  The result was a five-minute meeting in the hallway outside the office of the Massachusetts senator. Of the encounter, Sorensen would write, “In that brief exchange, I was struck by this unpretentious, even ordinary man with his extraordinary background, a wealthy family, a Harvard education, and a heroic war record. He did not try to impress me with his importance; he just seemed like a good guy.”

  Sorensen was surprised even to have been summoned for an interview. He’d sent in his application despite hearing that Jack hired only staffers his father himself might choose. Meaning Irish Catholics, and with few exceptions to this rule. Yet it took only five minutes for Kennedy to make the decision to hire the young stranger. It was another example, one of the most important in its consequence, of Jack not being his father’s son.

  Ted Reardon, tapped to run the Kennedy senate office just as he had the House operation, understood what was happening. Jack was starting to reach beyond his old regulars and past the Massachusetts Irish. He was upgrading his team. He wasn’t picking new pals; he had different criteria now. “Jack had the ability to have guys around him whom, personally, he didn’t give a damn about as a buddy . . . but he was able to get what he needed from them.”

  Ted Sorensen was the ideal Kennedy staffer. Not only would he go on to help draft some of Kennedy’s most glorious words, ones that stirred the world and resonated down through the decades, but he knew his role. In time it became hard for either man to say who had written what. Ted offered many of the lyrics, but it was always Jack’s music. If they were never social intimates, theirs was a collaboration of the heart. Indispensable as he was, Ted Sorensen would write extraordinary prose under the spell of Jack Kennedy.

  However, there were issues Sorensen wanted to resolve before coming on board. Although anti-Communist, he was also anti-McCarthy, and so requested a second interview with the senator-elect. It was then he voiced to him his concerns that “he was soft on Senator Joe McCarthy and his witch-hunting tactics. JFK must have thought I was a bit odd, as well as headstrong and presumptuous, a new job applicant asking questions about his political positions. But he did not resent it, calmly explaining that McCarthy was a friend of his father and family, as well as enormously popular among the Irish Catholics of Massachusetts.”

  Kennedy went on to tell Sorensen he didn’t “agree with McCarthy’s tactics or find merit in all his accusations.” Hearing it all, Sorensen accepted. Now, for the first time, Jack had someone at hand whom neither his father—nor his late brother—would have hired. For Jack Kennedy, Ted Sorensen would be his “intellectual blood bank,” providing him the Churchill-like phrase-making we now associate with him. “I never had anyone who could write for me until Ted came along,” Kennedy would later tell Tip O’Neill. There was cruelty in the comment, and it bothered O’Neill. Before Sorensen arrived, Jack had gotten speechwriting help from his former Harvard tutor, Joe Healey, who was also a good friend of O’Neill’s.

  As for Sorensen, he understood the boundaries. “I never wanted to be JFK’s drinking buddy; I wanted to be his trusted advisor.” It was enough for him—or, at least, he protested as much to the end—to be “totally involved in the substantive side of his life, and totally uninvolved in the social and personal side.”

  Clearly, Jack had found a devoted ally, someone who could see through to the idealist in the politician. Sorensen knew whom he was serving. “He was much the same man in private as he was in public. It was no act—the secret of his magic appeal was that he had no magic at all. Few could realize, then or now, that beneath the glitter of his life and office, beneath the cool exterior of the ambitious politician, was a good and decent man with a conscience that told him what was right and a heart that cared about the well-being of those around him.”

  Yet it didn’t take Sorensen long to realize he and Jack came from very different worlds. “During my first year in JFK’s Senate office, when dropping me off after work to catch my bus home, he confessed that he had never ridden one in his life.”

  They spent an enormous amount of time together, working, thinking, and planning. Not long before his death, Sorensen wrote this: “I do not remember everything about him, because I never knew everything about him. No one did. Different parts of his life, work, and thoughts were seen by many people—but no one saw it all.”

  In the beginning she was Jackie Bouvier. The year was 1951. To hear the name now conjures up that early time and a young, fresh beauty untouched by fame and position.

  But what was it about this young woman? Looks, certainly. Jackie was stunning, with large eyes so far apart it took two eyes to see them. Her beauty was original. She was elegant, self-contained, aristocratic. To Jack she was the only woman he “could” have married, he once confided to Red Fay.

  Charlie Bartlett had been one of Jack’s best friends ever since they met and began hanging out together in Palm Beach in 1945. Now living in Washington, where he was working for the Chattanooga Times, he remained a careful observer of his pal. “The thing to remember, and that really made him special in my book, was a mind that went right to the problem. I mean, he must have inherited it from his old man. When you discussed anything with Jack, politics mainly, he’d go right to the bottom. He had a wonderful way of separating all the crap from the key issue. . . . It made him great fun to discuss things with.

  “He always had a pretty clear picture of the motives of the people he was with, and he was good on that. I don’t know how to say it, but Jack wasn’t, sort of, in love with humanity. He was cool. His attention moved quickly. That mind would start going, and he did get bored awfully easily. This was part of his being spoiled, and I found it sometimes annoying. I mean, if you wanted to get into a long story, why, you were apt to not have Jack with you at the end of it.”

  When the moment came for settling on a partner, Jacqueline Bouvier managed to grab his attention and hold it. She possessed both the personality and the pedigree. She also lacked what Jack himself lacked: a childhood cushioned by a warm upbringing. She, too, had been raised by a cold, willful mother and had a father—the handsome but philandering, alcoholic stockbroker known as “Black Jack” Bouvier—who did exactly as he pleased. Whether she told him about her childhood, or he intuited it once they’d met, it could have made her intriguing. Jack was most of all driven by curiosity.

  Asked once to describe Jackie in a word, he chose fey. Her otherworldly qualities made her unlike all the other women he’d known and dated. She was detached, elusive, like him.

  Jackie, who’d spent her first two years of college at Vassar, followed by a junior year in France, was finishing her college degree at George Washington University. She felt about France the way Jack did about Great Britain. Like Jack, she’d sought escape and refuge in books when she was young, especially as she sought shelter from her parents’ stormy marriage. Her father, John Vernou Bouvier III, was as unreliable as he was attractive, and her parents’ 1928 marriage lasted just a dozen years. Jacqueline Lee—Lee was her mother’s maiden name—was the firstborn child, in 1929; her sister, Caroline Lee, known as Lee, came four years later. Jack Bouvier was sixteen years older than Jackie’s mother, Janet. Jack Kennedy, twelve years Jackie’s senior, noticed that their age difference seemed to appeal to her.

  Jackie’s part-time job at the Washington Times-Herald as an “Inquiring Camera Girl” resembled the one Inga Arvad once had held, while requiring far less writing. All Jackie had to come up with were brief captions for the snapshots she took of whoever was being featured that day.

  The encounter that set off the romance between Jack Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier occurred one evening at Charlie Bart
lett’s house. “I leaned across the asparagus and asked for a date,” Jack would recall in a much-quoted line. A Georgetown dinner party was a perfect setting for what began—at least, in the eyes of others—as a fairy-tale union, and became an almost mythical one.

  Even at the outset, though, the courtship was uneven; nothing out of the ordinary there. Jack would ask her out for a date, then disappear. Yet he always returned. Following his election to the Senate, he proposed in ’53, and she accepted. The chemistry between them, however you try to analyze it, was undeniable, and they knew it.

  While he was wooing her, Jack presented Jackie with copies of his two favorite books, John Buchan’s autobiography, Pilgrim’s Way, and Lord David Cecil’s Young Melbourne. These men each expressed, in their different ways, ideals of honor, sacrifice, and political nobility that continued to inspire him. When she learned his favorite poem was Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” she memorized it. In the years to come, he would often have her recite it for him.

  “Jack appreciated her. He really brightened when she appeared,” Chuck Spalding recalled. “You could see it in his eyes. He’d follow her around the room watching to see what she’d do next. Jackie interested him, which wasn’t true of many women.”

  Jackie’s temperament, though, was very far from the rambunctiousness of the large and competitive Kennedy brood. “Jackie was certainly very bored by politics and very bored by the very aggressive camaraderie of the Kennedy family, which was absolutely foreign to her nature,” Alistair Forbes said. “Fortunately, I think, she also spotted that it was really foreign to Jack’s nature.” She saw him as being more sensitive and “much less extroverted than they all were.”

  Jackie offered the handsome and popular young senator a social status he didn’t quite have on his own. For all their recently amassed wealth, his family was still nouveau riche and thus lacked entrée to certain clubs, certain circles. Jack knew it, didn’t like it, but made the best of it. His friends, mostly, were like him—the sons of the successful—but others, met at Choate and Harvard and in Palm Beach, were from old money or old bloodlines. Charlie Bartlett, himself an old-line Yalie, could see the effect the Bouvier name had on his friend.