Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Eventually Jackie acknowledged that sex with JFK was unsatisfactory because “he just goes too fast and falls asleep,” and she wondered if she had somehow failed him. Using clinical words he feared would offend her, Finnerty offered specific advice about helping Kennedy to make sex more enjoyable for her by engaging in foreplay. “Nobody had ever talked to her this way,” said Finnerty. Together they scripted an approach she could use with JFK to discuss their sex life without offending his masculinity. She would portray herself as being “left out” of the sexual experience and talk in a factual way about how he could help her.

  As planned, Jack and Jackie had the conversation over dinner, and she reported to Finnerty that their sexual relations became more satisfying as a result. (Several months later, Bill Walton would confide to Gore Vidal that JFK had started calling Jackie “the sex symbol.”) When Kennedy asked how she could speak so authoritatively, she told him a priest in confession had recommended she consult her obstetrician, who had suggested several books. “Kennedy never thought she would go to that much trouble to enjoy sex,” said Finnerty. “This impressed him.” JFK didn’t abandon his womanizing ways, but Jackie no longer had reason to believe that their difficulties with sexual intimacy had been her fault.

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  Joe Kennedy’s role in the 1960 campaign had demonstrated how smoothly and silently he operated the levers of power. As Ted Sorensen observed, “The Ambassador was never present, but his presence was never absent.” While JFK gathered support in the primary contests—the first time a candidate used primaries so effectively—Joe Kennedy worked the political bosses.

  Joe had entertained Democratic power brokers at Hialeah racetrack and phoned them frequently to make certain their delegations, particularly in the Northeast industrial states, went for his son. “If Jack had known about some of the telephone calls made on his behalf,” said Kenny O’Donnell, “. . . [his] hair would have turned white.” There were numerous reports that Joe Kennedy spread large sums around during the primary and general campaign to buy support, even enlisting the aid of the Mafia in Chicago, where he had substantial business interests, although he typically left no written record. “Joe Kennedy would use indirection,” said Carmine DeSapio, the Tammany Hall leader in New York City. “He would have one of his people approach a fella and get him some business. There would be money involved, but it was a matter of exchanging courtesies.”

  After the election, Joe was shrewd enough to create an impression of distance from Jack. An article in the New York Times before the inauguration recounted that while the elder Kennedy had grown more conservative, JFK had grown more liberal. Joe Kennedy would not be a “tyrannical old man running the nation through an obedient son-President.” The article repeated what Jack had told Time magazine the previous July: “Our disagreement on policy is total. We never discuss it. There is no use because we can’t agree.” On many issues, especially in foreign policy, that statement held true, but in some crucial areas, mainly economic matters, the Ambassador’s influence remained strong. Joe Kennedy and the new president talked by telephone, as Joe later revealed to William Manchester, “sometimes four or five times a day.”

  The Ambassador remained firmly in charge of the family’s political operations. JFK’s election created a vacancy in his Senate seat that needed to be filled until the term ended in 1962. “It was another one of the old man’s fiats,” said Charley Bartlett, “that Teddy would go for the Senate.”

  The baby of the Kennedy family was too young—just twenty-eight—and unseasoned to be appointed as a replacement, so Jack insisted that the outgoing Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Foster Furcolo, keep the seat warm by naming Benjamin A. Smith, the mayor of Gloucester, who had roomed with JFK at Harvard. Kennedy chose Smith over Massachusetts congressman Torbert Macdonald, another Harvard roommate and longtime friend who assumed he would get the nod.

  The ruggedly handsome Macdonald had been a college football star and PT boat hero before marrying the actress Phyllis Brooks. He graduated from Harvard Law School and won a congressional seat in 1954. Kennedy and Macdonald shared a bantering sense of humor and, more conspicuously, “they were tailhounds together,” said Ben Bradlee. Macdonald “chased everything, drank a lot and got into fights,” said his congressional aide Richard Krolik. For those reasons, Joe Kennedy vetoed Macdonald for the Senate seat, and JFK kept him at arm’s length once he became president. “Torb was quite conscious he had been passed by,” said Krolik.

  Nothing was said publicly about the family’s plan for Teddy, although JFK confidentially tipped the Boston Globe’s political reporter Bob Healy, who wrote that “the latest backroom word” was a possible run by the youngest Kennedy. Almost immediately, Joe Kennedy took command of the new campaign, arranging a job for Teddy as an assistant attorney general in Massachusetts and orchestrating an extensive speaking schedule throughout the state.

  Teddy had been a garrulous charmer since his boyhood; at age twelve on a train trip from Florida he slipped away to the observation car to tell the fortunes of two women, a skill he had just learned. Jack “used to say he wished he were like Teddy,” said Dorothy Tubridy, an Irish friend of the family, because Teddy was “so full of life” and “easy to talk to.” JFK also often remarked that “Teddy on the hoof was the best politician of the family.”

  But Teddy had also stumbled more than the others. He had a fondness for alcohol and a tendency toward boisterous behavior that earned him a reputation as “the scapegrace younger brother,” in Schlesinger’s words. After he was kicked out of Harvard for cheating on a Spanish test, his father straightened him up by making him spend two years in the army. Teddy eventually graduated from Harvard and followed Bobby to the University of Virginia Law School. The Kennedys began talking up his political prospects as early as the mid-fifties. JFK “would mention him in a very casual way,” recalled Tom Winship, longtime editor of the Boston Globe.

  Like his older brothers, “Ted had no real choice” about his political destiny, said his wife, Joan. During the presidential campaign, JFK put Teddy in charge of the western states as a way of giving him more exposure. As president, Jack continued to help Teddy in quiet ways, sending him off to Africa on a fact-finding trip to enlarge his experience.

  With his Ben Smith maneuver, Kennedy managed to alienate an important power broker in Washington. Edward J. McCormack, the attorney general in Massachusetts, had wanted the interim appointment as a platform for his own Senate run. JFK’s choice created a considerable strain with McCormack’s uncle John, the House majority leader, whose support Kennedy needed for his legislative program.

  An even more important hindrance to Kennedy’s relations with Congress was his decision to marginalize Lyndon Johnson. LBJ entered office in a precarious position despite his undeniable contribution to the Democratic victory. (“Without Johnson,” said Schlesinger, “Kennedy would have lost Texas and perhaps South Carolina and Louisiana.”) LBJ and Bobby Kennedy were already at loggerheads—a mutual mistrust that had begun when RFK served as a staff lawyer in the Senate, and Johnson had dismissed him as little more than a clerk. At the Democratic convention Bobby had tried to talk Johnson out of the vice presidency after he had accepted—a display of contempt that made Johnson tearful and “sealed their enmity,” said LBJ aide George Christian.

  With JFK’s narrow election victory, the Democrats forfeited real control of the legislative branch with the loss of twenty-three seats in the House. On paper, Democrats held majorities (262–174 in the House and 65–35 in the Senate). But the Eighty-seventh Congress was dominated by a powerful coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans. The southerners controlled half of all the committees in the House and nine out of sixteen in the Senate. Left to their own devices, these conservative forces were poised to defeat every progressive New Frontier initiative Kennedy presented.

  Although Johnson had been dismissed as a retrograde Texan by Kennedy’s professorial brain trust, he had pushed through the Civil Rig
hts Bill of 1957 when he was Senate majority leader, and he instinctively favored New Deal–style government spending more than Kennedy did. With his experience, his contacts, and his temperament, Johnson was well positioned to help pass Kennedy’s program.

  Johnson took office believing he could carve out a unique role that would perpetuate his power in the Senate. Montana senator Mike Mansfield—a “likable man” who resembled “an amiable exhausted monk”—had been Johnson’s whip and dutiful subordinate. When Mansfield was elected the new majority leader, the Vice President proposed that the Democratic senators reelect Johnson as the chairman of their caucus. In effect, Johnson would continue to function as majority leader. Johnson told his longtime aide Bobby Baker that he could do JFK the most good in the halls of Congress, “the place I know best,” because Kennedy’s associates “don’t know any more about Capitol Hill than an old maid does about fuckin’.”

  Mansfield supported the plan, but Johnson’s old enemies, including Albert Gore of Tennessee and Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, argued that it would be unconstitutional for a member of the executive branch to supervise his party’s legislators whenever they formally conferred. When Mansfield said he would resign if Johnson were not elected, the caucus assuaged their leader by endorsing Johnson with a vote of 47 to 17. But the unexpectedly large number of negative votes had a chastening effect, convincing Johnson to attend caucus meetings only in a token capacity. “The steam really went out of Lyndon, didn’t it, when they wouldn’t let him in,” Kennedy said later.

  The second rebuff to Johnson’s ambition came when Kennedy named Lawrence O’Brien as his special assistant for congressional relations—the chief advocate and horse trader for the legislative agenda. At that point, “Johnson beat an angry and humiliating retreat,” recalled Sorensen. O’Brien was “tactful and courteous” with Johnson, said LBJ aide Liz Carpenter, pointedly including him in strategy sessions with Mansfield. But Johnson mostly limited himself to his required ceremonial role of presiding over the Senate and injected himself in the legislative process only when asked by O’Brien or JFK.

  In Jack Kennedy’s Irish mafia, Larry O’Brien was the canny counselor, a graduate of Northeastern University known for his people skills and common sense. Bespectacled and plain-featured, O’Brien had a russet crew cut, gravelly voice, and the “ovoid torso of a bouncer.” He first worked for Kennedy in the 1952 Senate campaign. Kennedy recruited him in part because O’Brien and his father were well connected in the Democratic power structure of Springfield, the largest city in western Massachusetts.

  Both of O’Brien’s parents had emigrated from County Cork, and he had been born six weeks after JFK. Larry O’Brien Sr. had operated a rooming house as well as a number of rental properties before the Depression wiped him out. He leased a saloon in a property he had once owned and put his son to work behind the bar at age eighteen. Larry developed a bartender’s cordiality, an ability to chat up even the most sullen customer.

  During the 1952 campaign, he proved a master at registering voters, deploying campaign workers efficiently, and getting out the vote on election day. O’Brien admired Kennedy’s “audacity” in taking on the seemingly invincible Republican Henry Cabot Lodge. O’Brien was also delighted by the young congressman’s engaging inquisitiveness. “Once he came to my cafe and tried his hand at drawing beer from the taps,” said O’Brien. “Next he wanted to know where beer came from. . . . Nothing would do but that we go . . . for a guided tour of the walk-in cooler where we kept our barrels of beer . . . [which] led . . . to a detailed discussion of the profit margins on each glass of beer sold.”

  Since Kennedy’s first days in Congress, he had shown little appetite for political persuasion, so O’Brien was the President’s logical surrogate, spreading his ready affability across Capitol Hill, from the most obscure small-town representative to influential party leaders. On weekends he and his wife, Elva, threw Sunday brunches at their Georgetown home for congressmen, administration officials, and reporters.

  Adversaries as well as allies appreciated his “winning mixture of blarney, candor and political insight.” O’Brien was a committed New Deal liberal and a member of Americans for Democratic Action. But he was also a realist, and recognized the need to follow Kennedy’s lead. JFK found his low-key style more attractive than Johnson’s full-throttle cajolery.

  Politicians, journalists, and scholars often wonder what might have happened if Kennedy had turned over his congressional operations to Johnson. Galbraith observed that Kennedy “always used less power than he had in dealing with the Congress and dealing with the public; Lyndon Johnson, in contrast, with a better understanding of power, always used slightly more than he had.” But for all Johnson’s legislative talents, Kennedy felt he had to keep the Vice President in check. If Johnson had been unleashed, “he would have found it hard to refrain from running the whole show,” said his aide Harry McPherson.

  Instead, Johnson entered the political wilderness, a “frustrated force of nature,” in Joe Alsop’s words, whose loss of influence was agonizingly conspicuous. After running the Senate, now he could only carry out orders—a supernumerary confined to “powerless obscurity.” Johnson was “a proud and imperious man of towering energies and passions,” wrote Schlesinger. “Self-effacement” was “unnatural.”

  Kennedy was elaborately courteous to LBJ in what Schlesinger called “a doomed relationship,” issuing edicts that the Johnsons be included in all official ceremonies, state dinners, and even the private dinner dances. But Johnson sometimes seemed awkward in those glamorous settings. At the dance in March, Jackie placed the Vice President next to Vivian Crespi, who watched in amazement as he piled portions of both choices of entrée—chicken and fish—on his plate. Observing “the young beauties exuding sex, exhibiting their wares,” Lady Bird was heard to drawl, “does remind you of Scott Fitzgerald, doesn’t it?”

  Both Johnsons knew about JFK’s sexual wanderings. A womanizer himself, LBJ could hardly be shocked. Dating back to the Senate, Johnson had shown a wistful admiration for Kennedy’s prowess with the opposite sex. Harry McPherson recalled an evening when he noticed Kennedy and George Smathers standing at the back of the Senate chamber. “They were laughing and joking,” said McPherson, “waiting for a vote. Every once in a while Smathers and Kennedy would glance up at the balcony where there were two gorgeous women. Then the vote was taken at 10 p.m., Smathers looked up at the balcony and signaled, and he and Kennedy disappeared. Suddenly I felt a large hand on my shoulder. It was Johnson: ‘Now where are those sons of bitches going?’”

  Once Kennedy was president, Johnson mused about his apparent recklessness. “You know what he does at night?” Johnson told McPherson. “He gets in a convertible and he drives to Georgetown to see one of his girlfriends.” LBJ added that Kennedy’s prowling was “driving the Secret Service crazy. They are right behind him.”

  McPherson suspected that Johnson’s information had come from J. Edgar Hoover, who had been cozy with LBJ for years. “J. Edgar Hoover has Jack Kennedy by the balls,” Johnson told some reporters at Time. “Johnson said he was waiting for someone to blow the whistle on Kennedy,” recalled CBS president Frank Stanton, a close friend of the Vice President. “But the press was completely in Kennedy’s hands and Johnson knew that. Johnson didn’t criticize Kennedy. It was only that he knew he was getting away with it.”

  In small doses JFK seemed to enjoy LBJ’s company, “poking fun at him in a gentle way,” recalled Ros Gilpatric. During a visit in Palm Beach, the President invited his Vice President for a cruise, where Gilpatric observed them sitting on the fantail as JFK “spent two or three hours going from state to state and just dredging out of Johnson every bit of the latest political gossip and lore he could elicit.”

  Among his friends, Kennedy called Johnson “Riverboat Gambler” and “Landslide”—referring to his election to the Senate in 1948 with a margin of only eighty-seven votes. JFK “really likes [LBJ’s] roguish qualities,” wrote Ben B
radlee in his journal. “But there are times . . . when LBJ’s simple presence seems to bug him.” Kennedy could laugh about Johnson because he was “a strange figure,” said Joe Alsop. “The President used to say [he] wasn’t like anyone he’d ever known . . . somewhat monstrous . . . larger than life . . . [with] a comic side.” At least once, in a conversation with Bradlee, JFK expressed concern about LBJ’s honesty, saying he was “not on the take since he was elected [VP]. Before that, ‘I’m not so sure.’”

  In Joe Alsop’s view, Kennedy treated Johnson better than he did Adlai Stevenson, “whom he loved to tease and held really in contempt. . . . He didn’t have any contempt for Johnson.” Kennedy assigned LBJ to tasks that seemed to invest him with greater importance than his predecessors: supervising the space exploration program, chairing the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, and frequently traveling abroad. (During his time as vice president, Johnson visited thirty-three countries and made more than 150 speeches.) But these responsibilities were tangential, his overseas trips seen by the press as mere “errands.” In the view of Johnson aide Lloyd Hand, “Johnson would have to be seen as one of the least utilized vice presidents in terms of what he could contribute.”

  LBJ’s demeanor in meetings only exacerbated the situation. “I can’t stand Johnson’s damn long face,” Kennedy told George Smathers. “He just comes in . . . with his face all screwed up, never says anything. He looks so sad.” Whenever Johnson was asked his opinion, he would say, “I agree with the President.” “I know he didn’t do that when the President called him privately,” said Joe Alsop, but “he didn’t want anyone to hear him disagree with the President.”