Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Catholicism offered Rose the deepest solace; she was a daily communicant, often sitting through two masses a day. Once, in urging Jackie to take a day-long religious retreat, Rose revealed, “I have spent a long happy life with a few baffling as well as tragic moments, and I have found that these spiritual signposts . . . have helped me tremendously.” But when Rose tried to impose her piety, Jackie bristled. Jackie had been grounded in a more casual Catholicism. Her mother once told her Newport friend Marion “Oatsie” Leiter, “It might be noticed that Jackie could always be on a horse but not necessarily at mass.” Jackie admired Rose’s faith but struggled with her own beliefs, once admitting to Harold Macmillan the thought that “there was just nothing afterwards—or some great vague peace.”

  Jackie chafed under the regimented way Rose ran her own life: the daily ocean swims, four-mile walks, and nine holes of golf (usually by herself). By her own admission, Jackie liked “to live in a disorganized—or free way,” focusing intensely on whatever task engaged her, but keeping a fluid schedule. She often slept late and thought nothing of declining when Rose asked her to join guests for lunch—habits that irritated Rose. When Rose pushed too far, Jackie would mimic her mother-in-law’s tinny voice behind her back—irreverence that shocked Jackie’s secretary, Mary Gallagher.

  Jackie recognized the pressures of Rose’s life even as she similarly endured her own husband’s infidelity. Jackie once said she understood that Rose grew up—and indeed raised her son Jack—with the dictum “you don’t reveal yourself. . . . Jack didn’t want to reveal himself at all.” By Jackie’s analysis, “It must have been difficult for [Rose] to be married to such an extremely strong man . . . whose life was like a roller coaster zooming, accelerating, going up and down . . . having nine children . . . it almost took her breath away.”

  The cause of that angst, Joe Kennedy, also happened to be Jackie’s favorite in the family. Like his wife, he had the vigor of someone a decade younger than his seventy-two years, with a tall and lean physique, fine features, and pale blue eyes by turns icy and mischievous. His personality was peppery and aggressive, which he leavened with a flashing smile and quick-witted charm. Jack Kennedy once called his mother “the glue” that held the family together while Rose described Joe as the “architect of our lives.”

  It was Joe’s competitive ethos that conditioned his children. “We don’t want any losers around here,” Joe said. “In this family we want winners.” His main forum was the dinner table where he forced his children to think quickly and defend their views. “He would drop a depth charge,” said Kay Halle, “and watch the reaction.” One houseguest compared the dinnertime experience to “living in an intellectual wind tunnel.”

  Few visitors to the Kennedy household wished to encounter Joe Kennedy’s cold, disapproving stare. Once up in Hyannis Port, Joe shot “the look” Jackie’s way when she arrived at lunch fifteen minutes late. Joe was in what Chuck Spalding called “one of his Emperor Augustus moods. . . . He started to give her the needle, but she gave it right back. Old Joe was always full of slang and so she told him, ‘You ought to write a series of grandfather stories for children, like, “The Duck and the Moxie” and “The Donkey Who Couldn’t Fight His Way Out of a Telephone Booth.”’” The table fell silent as everyone anticipated an angry reaction, but instead Joe “broke into an explosion of laughter.”

  Perhaps because of Joe’s unabashed outspokenness, Jackie could talk frankly to him. In her letters she always called him “Mr. Kennedy,” and adopted a tone that varied from flirtatious to reverential. “I used to tell him that he had no nuances,” she recalled, “that everything with him was either black or white, while life was so much more complicated than that. But he never got angry with me for talking straight to him; on the contrary, he seemed to enjoy it.” Sitting together on the porch at Hyannis or the patio at Palm Beach, “they would talk about everything, their most personal problems,” Bill Walton said. “She relied on him completely, trusted him, and soon adored him.”

  Joe Kennedy went out of his way to please Jackie, not only because he liked her, but because he knew she was an asset for his son. According to Oleg Cassini’s brother Igor (“Ghighi”)—the gossip columnist Cholly Knickerbocker whom William Manchester called “the Gibbon” of the Kennedy court—“Joseph Kennedy told me he had offered Jackie a million dollars not to divorce Jack” when the marriage was wobbly in the mid-fifties. There was no proof of such a transaction, nor could it be entirely disproved either. But on smaller matters, Joe Kennedy showed consistent generosity to Jackie.

  When she wanted to buy a horse, Joe stepped up to pay for it, a gesture she accepted with care. Before proposing a “very quiet and beautiful” bay mare, she made numerous trips to Virginia and vetted twenty-three horses. “Honestly I can’t see the point of saving a couple of thousand dollars and not having a winner,” he wrote back. “You know all of us Kennedys don’t like second prize. So get the horse you like and send me the bill.”

  With her customary insight, Jackie painted one of her Ludwig Bemelmans–style watercolors that captured Joe Kennedy’s role in the family in one image: a horde of Kennedy family members cavorting on a beach, while overhead an airplane pulled a banner saying, “You can’t take it with you. Dad’s got it all.” Joe proudly hung the painting in the Palm Beach villa.

  FIVE

  Jack Kennedy’s appointment of his brother Bobby as attorney general was a brazen act of nepotism that would have been unthinkable by the standards of later presidencies. Bobby was just thirty-five and had meager legal experience. After graduating from the University of Virginia Law School, he had worked briefly in the Justice Department and then served as an investigator for two Senate committees, where he made a name for himself with his aggressive questioning. On the first of those committees, he was a protégé of his father’s friend Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, during his witch hunts for communists in the federal government. Bobby also had a political imprint after running his brother’s presidential campaign with a tough-guy style that made countless enemies, including Lyndon Johnson.

  Yet with the exception of a few mild protests from legal scholars and editorial writers, the press and the Congress acquiesced in the appointment. Only one senator, conservative Republican Gordon Allott of Colorado, voted against confirmation. Washington reporters were so complaisant that Bobby had gathered nearly a dozen of them for dinner in a private room at the Occidental Grill to ask their advice on government postings, including his own appointment to the cabinet. Jack Kennedy was confident enough about his immunity from criticism that the night after the inauguration he would joke during the annual Alfalfa Club dinner, “I just wanted to give Bobby a little legal practice before he becomes a lawyer.”

  Joe Kennedy suggested the move and urged it on both of his sons. By Joe Kennedy’s reckoning, even the strongest personal and party loyalties were no substitute for blood fealty. Bobby at the Justice Department could protect Jack from FBI director Hoover and his compromising investigative files. Jack could speak candidly to Bobby in an atmosphere of complete trust; Bobby in turn could give his brother “the unvarnished truth, no matter what,” as JFK put it.

  Jack and Bobby were eight years apart, and until Jack ran for the Senate in 1952 they were not particularly close. Bobby had grown up small and scrappy, alternately ingratiating and sarcastic, with a brooding personality that inspired Jack to nickname him “Black Robert.” While Jack enchanted people at first meeting, Bobby was an acquired taste. He often made a poor initial impression, playing with his sandy forelock, his pale blue eyes furtive, his manner abrupt, his shoulders permanently slouched. His salient trait was stubborn physical courage, most notably on the football field where he was usually overmatched. “He reminds me of a little donkey in the middle of the road, refusing to budge as a dozen autoists shriek their horns,” wrote Joe Kennedy’s cousin and political adviser Joe Kane.

  As the seventh of nine children, Bobby struggled for the approval of a father wh
o was focused on the achievements of his two eldest sons. “One had the impression that the family competition had been hardest on him, forcing him to scramble for everything,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger. Joe Jr. was the superstar, and Jack, after scraping through Choate, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a thesis on Britain’s inadequate preparation for World War II that became a best-selling book. Bobby muddled through a series of boarding schools and finished at Harvard without distinction.

  Joe Kennedy was nearly sixty years old when Bobby graduated in 1947, with a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions, the product of Wall Street speculation, liquor distribution, Hollywood filmmaking, and real estate. He had established trust funds worth $10 million for each of his children, making them financially secure. With the end of his own public life a bitter memory, Joe had shifted his sights to political office for the next generation. “I thought money would give me power, so I made money,” he once said, “only to discover that it was politics—not money—that really gave a man power. So I went into politics.” But Joe also believed in government service as a worthy calling. As Henry Luce, the flinty proprietor of Time-Life, observed, “It would take a very great dramatist-novelist . . . to mix the rhythm of earthy selfishness and higher loyalties that explained the motivation of Joseph Patrick Kennedy.”

  Joe Kennedy’s grand political scheme had envisioned elective office for either Joe Jr. or Jack, but not Bobby (the Ambassador briefly thought of “buying The Boston Post for Bobbie to run”). With the death of Joe Jr. in 1944, the sole focus of Joe’s ambition became Jack, “not because it was natural for him or that it was his desire,” Joe explained to Massachusetts politician John McCormack, but because it was only right that Jack take up the eldest son’s “obligations and desires.”

  It also followed that Bobby would be asked to help his brother at the appropriate time. He had finally attracted his father’s attention by applying himself impressively as a Justice Department lawyer just as Jack began preparing for a difficult Senate contest. The campaign needed a strong and trustworthy manager, a job that suited Bobby’s talents. When the call came, he earned the admiration of his father and brother with his fierce loyalty, hard work, and determination. The 1952 Senate race established the good cop/bad cop roles that the brothers would continue to play in subsequent campaigns and into the White House: Jack set a high tone while Bobby did the dirty work.

  By the end of 1960, Jack Kennedy had assembled most of his “new generation of leadership” to direct the nation into the “New Frontier” of the coming decade, a terrain of “unknown opportunities and perils” as well as “unfilled hopes and unfilled threats.” His team had an overtly bipartisan feel, and a self-consciously intellectual cast, with more eggheads (including fifteen Rhodes scholars) than had been assembled by any president, including Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  The close election results influenced the composition of the Kennedy administration: a plurality of only 112,881 ballots out of 68,832,818 total votes cast, which was the smallest victory margin (49.7 percent to 49.6 percent) in a century—“so thin as to be, in all reality, nonexistent,” wrote Teddy White. “The election of 1960,” White observed, was “totally devoid of cause or issue . . . nothing stirred Americans but the personalities of the candidates and the religion of one of them.” Only anxiety about Soviet military strength resonated with voters, and both Kennedy and Nixon exploited that fear by asserting their ability to get tough with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.

  As president-elect, Kennedy understood that doubts about his experience lingered (during his fourteen years in the House and Senate he had been “just a member of the pack” who seized no great issues). Now he needed eastern establishment gravitas. As early as October, he had told New York Times columnist Cyrus L. “Cy” Sulzberger that he would emulate Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, installing Republicans in important positions “in the interests of national unity.” Kennedy relied heavily on the guidance of two of those Roosevelt-Truman Republicans, Robert Lovett and John McCloy, after they both rejected top cabinet positions for themselves. When Kennedy’s longtime aide Kenny O’Donnell, probably the most liberal voice on his immediate staff, questioned the wisdom of such inclusiveness, Kennedy replied, “If I string along exclusively with . . . Harvard liberals, they’ll fill Washington with wild-eyed ADA [Americans for Democratic Action] people. . . . I can use a few smart Republicans. . . . Anyway we need a Secretary of the Treasury who can call a few of those people on Wall Street by their first names.”

  Kennedy’s three GOP choices—Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and Douglas Dillon—passed muster with his council of wise men. McNamara and Bundy were only nominally Republicans. Both had voted for Kennedy, and McNamara belonged to the ACLU and the NAACP, while Bundy had been a visible supporter of Kennedy since early in the campaign. Only Dillon was a partisan, having served Eisenhower as under secretary of state and contributed $26,000 to Nixon’s campaign. But the three men fit the prerequisite Kennedy had mentioned to Sulzberger, with “basic thinking . . . close to his own.” All would rapidly move into Kennedy’s inner circle.

  McNamara had been president of Ford Motor Company for only thirty-four days when Kennedy tapped him for secretary of defense in early December. McNamara was dazzled by Kennedy’s winning personality and nimble mind, marveling at the “range of issues which [JFK] had thought and worked out in his head.” Kennedy already knew that McNamara was a rare bird in the business elite—a wizard with numbers as well as a highbrow whose Ford colleagues once presented him with four volumes of Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History. Uncomfortable with country club socializing, McNamara refused to live in the posh suburb of Grosse Pointe, choosing instead more distant Ann Arbor, where he belonged to two book groups with University of Michigan professors. In keeping with Kennedy-style vigor, McNamara was a fearless mountain climber as well.

  According to Schlesinger, McNamara had “striking gifts” that appealed to Kennedy, including an “inquiring and incisive mind,” a “limitless capacity for work,” and a “personality which lacked pretense.” McNamara also projected the lanky athleticism of an outdoorsman that fit nicely with the New Frontier image. He was six feet tall, with a glossy pelt of dark hair brushed back from his forehead, and “the blotched pink complexion of one who has lain too long in a bathtub.” He wore rimless glasses that gave him an academic air, and his superficially austere manner masked a temperament of intense emotions that occasionally made him unexpectedly tearful.

  He was a year older than Kennedy and had grown up in modest circumstances in California, the son of an Irish Catholic sales manager for a shoe company. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Berkeley, majoring in economics with minors in philosophy and mathematics, then earned an MBA from Harvard. After serving as a statistical analyst during World War II, McNamara joined a cadre of ten men called the “Whiz Kids” at Ford, where he rose rapidly through management. “The things that most men have to turn to books and reports for, Bob is carrying around right in his head,” said an unabashedly admiring Henry Ford II.

  McGeorge Bundy exuded similar self-assurance and braininess behind a deceptively cherubic face defined by pink cheeks, thinning sandy hair, and “a faintly quizzical expression.” The Bundys traced their roots back to the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, and his mother’s family included Cabots and Lowells. “Mac” was the third son of five children in a household that prized serious discourse and clever one-upsmanship. At Groton he was legendary for ostentatious displays of intellect, once delivering a lecture on the Duke of Marlborough from a blank sheet of paper.

  Mac was the first student to matriculate at Yale with three perfect scores on his entrance examinations. The Yale literary magazine described him as “sly of wit and with a wicked gleam in his eyes.” He wrote a column for the Yale Daily News, where he earned a reputation for political iconoclasm. His commentaries on national and world affairs, combined with his Brahmin demeanor, prompted the nickname “Mahatma Bundy.”


  By the time Bundy rose from a tenured professorship in American foreign policy at Harvard to become the university’s dean of the faculty at age thirty-four, he had made an impressive list of connections, including Henry Stimson, FDR’s secretary of war, Douglas Dillon, and Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state. Bundy’s wife, Bostonian Mary Lothrop, was a relative of Ben Bradlee’s, and Bundy’s mother was close to Corinne Alsop, the mother of columnists Stewart and Joe. Bundy even had links to Kennedy. As a boy at the Dexter School in Brookline, he was two years behind JFK, and Bundy had been a wartime friend of Kathleen Kennedy, who asked him to serve as master of ceremonies on a quiz program she ran at an American Red Cross canteen in London. Bundy and Kennedy had renewed their acquaintance in 1957 when JFK was elected to Harvard’s Board of Overseers. As early as 1959, Kennedy decided Bundy should be in his administration. Before he settled on national security adviser, JFK even considered him for secretary of state.

  Douglas Dillon appealed to Kennedy because of his impressive portfolio of government experience. In addition to his service at Foggy Bottom, Dillon had been ambassador to France and was known as a committed internationalist with conservative economic views. Joe Kennedy may have been a longtime Democrat, but he told his son that “there weren’t any Democrats who knew about money,” recalled Charley Bartlett.

  Although Dillon was eight years older than Kennedy, the two men had much in common. Both were sons of overbearing self-made men. Dillon’s paternal grandfather, a Polish Jew named Sam Lapowski, had emigrated to Milwaukee, where he set up a machine manufacturing business and changed his surname to Dillon, the maiden name of his French Catholic mother. Doug Dillon’s father, Clarence, preceded him at Harvard, and was rejected by the university’s exclusive “final” clubs, an indignity also suffered by Joe Kennedy as an Irish immigrant’s grandson. Similarly, both JFK and Doug Dillon were admitted to Spee, an important badge of acceptance at Harvard, although a cut below the Porcellian Club.