Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (6 page)

Although Bobby persuaded Kenneth O’Donnell, his Harvard classmate, to join the campaign, Bobby preferred to remain at the Justice Department, where he was enjoying his work as a prosecutor. Besides, Bobby saw no place for himself alongside his father, who had established himself as the major domo of the operation. Working largely behind the scenes, Joe supervised how his large contributions to the campaign should be spent on publicity and monitored the content of Jack’s speeches and campaign messages he considered essential to attract voters. He bypassed campaign finance laws by setting up statewide committees supposedly dedicated to advancing the state’s shoe, fish, and textile industries, but which in fact were subterfuges for advancing Jack’s candidacy. He lent the publisher of the
Boston Post
$500,000 to keep his paper afloat and to assure an endorsement of Jack, which could attract as many as forty thousand votes. As Jack later told a reporter, “We had to buy that fucking paper.”

After the campaign, Lodge complained that he was overwhelmed by Joe’s spending. But during the campaign, O’Donnell believed that despite all Joe’s money, they were headed for an “absolute catastrophic disaster.” O’Donnell saw Joe as out of touch with current state interests and popular ideas and as too strong-minded or dogmatic to see the error of his ways. Joe was a brilliant businessman, but he consistently misread the state of public affairs. His views on foreign policy were particularly out of sync with current majority sentiment. He advocated a return to isolationism in the early Cold War years at a time when the country was receptive to a new internationalism to beat back communism. He also misread the country’s mood in the presidential election, believing that Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate, would decisively defeat Eisenhower in 1952.

O’Donnell argued that the only one who could rescue Jack from defeat in the Senate race was Bobby, whose family influence and visceral feel for Massachusetts politics would make the necessary difference. Not only could he bring a required discipline to the campaign, but he was also the only one who could rein in his father and persuade him to support a separate Kennedy operation rather than rely on the state’s traditional Democratic Party apparatus.

Bobby initially resisted suggestions that he take over the direction of the campaign, but the role offered an irresistible opportunity to prove himself to Joe and Jack: His mastery of the challenge would show his father and brother that he deserved their regard as one of the family’s leading lights. After taking on the assignment, Bobby threw himself into the fight with uncommon energy, working eighteen-hour days and creating an incomparable organization that set up separate offices from the local party ones in every city and town across the state. He blitzed voters with 1,200,000 brochures, which landed on every doorstep in Massachusetts. Two journalists monitoring the campaign described Bobby’s organization as “the most methodical, the most disciplined and smoothly working state-wide campaign in Massachusetts history—and possibly anywhere else.”

Jack gained an astonishing victory. In a year when the Republicans won all the principal races in the state—a 200,000-vote victory for Eisenhower and a 15,000-vote margin against the sitting Democratic governor—Jack defeated Lodge by 70,000 ballots. Although Jack’s personal attributes made the greatest difference in a contest with an opponent who largely shared his views on most foreign and domestic questions, a considerable part of the success belonged to Bobby. It was during this campaign that Jack and Joe realized, as a mutual friend of Jack’s and Bobby’s said, that Bobby “had all this ability.” Jack was greatly impressed by Bobby’s achievement, and suddenly Joe discovered that “he had another able son.”

In January 1953, Joe used ties to Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, the new chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee, to make Bobby a minority counsel. Although Bobby would take considerable heat for serving with McCarthy, whose ill-founded attacks on political opponents as national security risks enraged many Democrats, Bobby’s work stood apart from the senator’s. Where McCarthy’s probes played fast and loose with the facts and questioned the loyalty of those being scrutinized, Bobby established a reputation as scrupulous about the evidence cited in reports and as loath to accuse anyone of disloyalty to the country. And though he resigned after six months out of disgust with McCarthy’s methods, he shared Joe’s anxiety about an internal communist threat to the United States. It had been his and Joe’s explanation for why Bobby chose to work with a senator who was under such fierce criticism for reckless, unwarranted accusations against Americans with no alleged communist connections.

Bobby’s identification with McCarthy added to an already negative picture of Joe and Rose’s third son as a carbon copy of his father—difficult and arrogant. And truth be told, he was a “very cross, unhappy, angry young man.” Often during evening social engagements at someone’s dinner table, he would provoke quarrels with anyone who disagreed with him. Ted Sorensen remembered him as “militant, aggressive, intolerant, opinionated, and somewhat shallow in his convictions . . . more like his father than his brother.”

Perhaps Bobby’s most distinguishing feature was his indifference to negative opinion about him. In April 1954, when McCarthy began attacking the Department of the Army as infiltrated by communists and his Senate subcommittee investigated the charges, Bobby signed on as the lead counsel for the Democratic minority. It provoked sharp criticism from McCarthy’s allies that Bobby was a tool of those who wished to smear the country’s best defender against internal subversion. During the hearings, after a heated argument and near fistfight with Roy Cohn, the Republican majority’s chief counsel, Bobby wrote the subcommittee’s minority report, which roundly condemned McCarthy’s accusations and tactics. A Senate censure vote of McCarthy in December 1954 vindicated Bobby and the Democrats who had recommended the reprimand. It signaled the collapse of McCarthy’s influence and won Bobby praise for his integrity. With the Democrats having gained control of the Senate in the November elections, Bobby was rewarded with an appointment as the chief counsel of the Investigations Subcommittee.

The McCarthy episode included a striking bit of irony. Democratic senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, who would become a principal antagonist of Bobby in the late fifties and sixties, was an unacknowledged ally of Bobby’s in battling McCarthy. As Senate minority leader in 1953–54, Johnson had been under considerable pressure to strike at McCarthy. But he shrewdly cautioned Senate liberals to wait until McCarthy began attacking conservatives and their favored institutions. Consequently, when McCarthy and his top aides hit out at Protestant clergymen and the Army, Johnson moved against them, arranging to have the Army-McCarthy hearings televised in the expectation that they would reveal McCarthy’s sinister character and unsavory methods and would undermine his public standing. Moreover, when it came time to appoint a Senate committee to consider McCarthy’s censure, Johnson persuaded conservative Democrats and Republicans to serve. It was an effective strategy that made Senate and national audiences receptive to Bobby’s report.

Although Jack and Bobby both worked in the Senate, and saw each other on a regular basis—socially, if not professionally—they operated in separate spheres: Bobby focused on domestic corruption as the subcommittee’s chief counsel and Jack increasingly concerned himself with foreign affairs. Because Bobby had not spent time abroad, except for his 1948 and 1951 excursions, Joe insisted that he travel to the Soviet Union with associate Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, who was a compulsive traveler to remote lands. Bobby spent much of the 1955 trip arguing with his Russian hosts until Douglas told him, “You can never argue with these fellows, so why don’t we just forget about it,” and not spend evenings “trying to convert some guy who will never be converted.” By the end of the trip in September, Bobby had become sympathetic to the Soviet masses, especially the various ethnic groups in Central Asia he viewed as victims of communist exploitation that was the equal of anything European nations had done to Asian and Middle Eastern peoples under colonial rule. His sympathy for Soviet citizens, however, did not reduce his distrust of the Kremlin: On his return, he publicly warned against being fooled into concessions to Moscow without reciprocal commitments.

In 1956, he and Jack came together again on trying to make Jack a potential presidential candidate. It was a considerable reach: A first-term thirty-nine-year-old senator with no visible credentials as a national political leader, Kennedy needed to expand his public profile as an attractive personality with whom millions of people could identify and as someone capable of dealing with the communist threat abroad and the racial divide at home.

Jack and Bobby saw the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nomination as a giant step toward the Oval Office. Traditionally, the vice presidency had been a burying ground of political ambitions. Vice presidents had come and gone without much public notice of who they were or what they had accomplished. By contrast, Vice Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman had performed admirably after succeeding to the presidency on the deaths of William McKinley in 1901 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, respectively, and winning elections in their own rights, in 1904 and 1948. They had significantly increased public regard for vice presidents and how service in the office could prepare someone for the presidency. Moreover, Richard Nixon’s three years as an active vice president under Eisenhower from 1953 to 1956 had added to the view that the office counted for something, especially since Nixon seemed likely to run for the higher office in 1960 at the end of a second Eisenhower term or if Ike lost his bid for reelection.

When Jack and Bobby told Joe, who was out of the country, that Jack was about to try for the vice presidential nomination at the Democratic convention, Joe exploded in anger. Initially, he had been ambivalent about the idea. In October 1955, when Eisenhower was recovering from a heart attack and speculation abounded that he would not run again, Democrats believed that they might recapture the White House the following year. In these circumstances, Joe agreed that the vice presidential nomination was worth fighting for. At least, he believed it worthwhile to have Tommy Corcoran, a prominent Washington fixer and friend, approach Lyndon Johnson about making Jack the VP candidate. It was accepted wisdom that Johnson, the Senate majority leader, was running for president, and that he had a better chance than Adlai Stevenson, who had lost to Ike in 1952, to win the White House. Joe told Johnson that if he would publicly announce his candidacy and privately commit to taking Jack as his running mate, Joe would finance his campaign.

But Johnson was reluctant to make a commitment before he was certain that Ike was not running. In addition, he believed it a mistake to get out front and become the object of a stop-Lyndon campaign. No southerner had won the presidency since before the Civil War and Johnson’s identification as a Texas segregationist would make it difficult enough for him to get his party’s nomination and win the White House without the additional burden of having the first Catholic running mate. Memories of Catholic governor Al Smith’s losing 1928 campaign suggested that any Catholic on the ticket could be toxic.

Johnson’s rejection of Joe’s proposal infuriated Bobby. “He believed it was unforgivably discourteous to turn down his father’s generous offer,” Corcoran recalled. Johnson’s response was perfectly understandable. He saw Joe’s suggestion as more helpful to Jack’s ambitions than his own and he had no interest in being a stalking horse for Joe’s wish to put a son in the White House. Bobby was so focused on the family’s ambitions that he could not see Johnson’s side of the issue. It also did not help that Johnson would acknowledge Bobby when they passed in the corridors of the Senate Office Building with a patronizing “Hi, sonny!” Jack was less frustrated by Johnson’s decision, accepting it as nothing more than self-serving politics.

By the time Jack decided to get in the race for vice president anyway, it was clear that Ike was running and likely to win a second term and Stevenson was the most likely Democratic nominee. Joe opposed Jack’s decision because he thought that Stevenson would be badly beaten and that the defeat would partly be blamed on Jack’s Catholicism, which would then damage his chances for a future presidential nomination.

But Jack and Bobby believed that a vice presidential nomination would give Jack the sort of national visibility that would propel him into the presidential nomination in 1960. Stevenson, however, was not sold on Jack as a running mate; he thought he needed a southerner or a border-state senator. To avoid alienating the Kennedys, who could be an important source of campaign financing, Stevenson refused to pick a vice president. Instead, he told the convention to decide for him. It produced a sharp contest in which Jack ran second to Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver on the first ballot. Conservative southerners, including Johnson’s Texas delegation, backed Kennedy against Kefauver, who had antagonized them with his support of civil rights. Kennedy took a second ballot lead over Kefauver, 648 to 551½, just 38 short of nomination. Liberals, however, irritated by Jack’s failure to vote for McCarthy’s censure, fearful that Jack’s Catholicism would hurt the ticket, and appreciative of a border-state senator’s backing of civil rights, rallied behind Kefauver, who won the nomination on the third ballot.

Commentators agreed that Jack had done himself nothing but good as a national political figure by his performance at the convention, where his attributes as a young war hero and attractive personality impressed many of the delegates. The defeat, however, frustrated Jack and Bobby. Jack was depressed, saying, “This morning all of you were telling me to get into this thing. And now you’re telling me I should feel happy because I lost it.” At first Bobby was inconsolable, complaining, “They should have won and somebody had pulled something fishy.” He lamented their ignorance of convention procedures that could have made a difference, but he filed away the lessons for the future. Moreover, he took solace from the belief that Jack was now “better off,” and Stevenson was “not going to win and you’re going to be the candidate next time,” he told Jack.