Kennedy: The Classic Biography (7 page)

He was not free from vanity about his appearance. He knew that good pictures were the lifeblood of politics, and he resented photographers who waited to snap him brushing perspiration from his brow during a speech. He would not pose in honorary Indian headdresses or marshal’s hats, and could avoid putting them on or take them off faster than most photographers could raise their cameras. As a Senator he often recoiled at the sight of the pale, gaunt, early Congressional pictures still in use by some Massachusetts newspapers, and he always ordered his Administrative Assistant Ted Reardon to make certain more timely portraits were submitted.

His only brushes with the law arose from his earlier tendencies as a driver to ignore both traffic signs and traffic. The only occasion he was stopped when I was with him was when he sped to a mere forty-five MPH in order to pass a car in a sparsely settled area of Washington. Unfortunately it was a thirty-five-mile zone, and the car was a police car. Inasmuch as the Senator was not recognized by the two officers, was without his wallet and driver’s license, could not find the auto’s registration and decided not to claim the privileges of his office, they were prepared to take him for booking to the nearest precinct station (with me driving) until I walked back to their car and gave his name and occupation. “Why didn’t he say so?” the officer demanded; and, after peering once again into the Kennedy station wagon window, proclaimed, “Yep, it’s him all right,” and waved us on our way.

Through all these years, as John Kennedy learned and grew, it was my unique privilege to learn from him and to grow with him. Our relationship grew as well. After I had worked with him a month he increased my pay. Three months later, when his other legislative assistant moved out, he increased my responsibilities. In the next few years, our working together on legislation, speeches, Massachusetts politics and
Profiles in Courage
brought us closer together.

Before his back flared up, we played touch football. We went to the movies in Palm Beach, in Washington and in his father’s basement at Hyannis Port, the low quality of some of the films in no way diminishing his enjoyment. We swam in his pool at Palm Beach while discussing politics and personalities. In 1956 I attended my first National Convention with him. From that summer of 1956 through November, 1960, we traveled together constantly, and long hours of conversation and observation in airplanes, airports and hotels forged a bond of intimacy in which there were few secrets and no illusions.

Some say that in time I talked and gestured, as well as thought and wrote, like the Senator. I doubt that he ever thought so, but occasionally, for reasons of time more often than mischief, he would have me assume his identity on the telephone.

It took me a few years to address him as “Jack” instead of “Senator,” and we agreed in 1957 that the decorum befitting a national political aspirant required that I return to calling him “Senator” in the presence of others. But “Jack” was still the accepted salutation in private until January 20, 1961.

HIS FAMILY

The most important people in his life, however, were the members of his family, and particularly his father, his brother Bob and his wife Jacqueline.

The roles of Bob and Jacqueline emerge throughout the pages that follow. The role of Joseph P. Kennedy in his son’s undertakings was neither so large as the father sometimes liked to claim nor so small as he sometimes preferred to pretend. The usual areas of parental influence were often exaggerated by the detractors of both father and son into a Svengali-puppet relationship. Those who knew Jack Kennedy as a strong and self-sufficient person, with drive and desire and independence since early manhood, agreed with the thoughts Jacqueline Kennedy expressed to a 1959 biographer who had overstated the influence of both Joe, Sr.’s wishes and Joe, Jr.’s death: “No matter how many older brothers and fathers my husband had had, he would have been what he is today—or the equivalent in another field.”

Even in campaigns the father concerned himself almost entirely with tactics, almost never with substance. He knew that Jack disagreed with him sharply on most matters of public policy, and that they spoke for two different generations. Although the Ambassador seldom refrained from pronouncing his own views, he rarely tried to change Jack’s, and never sought to influence his vote. Jack, in turn, never in my experience argued with his father. “I don’t attempt to convert him and he doesn’t attempt to convert me,” he said. Both agreed they could disagree agreeably. “You couldn’t write speeches for me,” Joseph Kennedy said to me at our first meeting at Hyannis Port in the fall of 1953, in tones I later learned were friendly. “You’re too much of a liberal. But writing for Jack is different.”

Father and son could scarcely have been more different. The “very few” members of the National Association of Manufacturers who supported his election, the President smilingly remarked to their 1961 convention, must have been “under the impression that I was my father’s son.” Both had a natural charm—but the father, though very emotional underneath, was often dour and gruff while his son kept outwardly calm. Both had a winning Irish smile—but the father was capable of more angry outbursts than his infinitely patient son. Both had a tough inner core, capable of making hard decisions and sticking to them—but the father had a more aggressive exterior compared to his son’s consistently gentle composure. The father’s normal conversation was often filled with hyperbole—his son’s speech, in private as in public, was more often characterized by quiet understatement.

Both had a hatred of war, but the father leaned more to the concept of a Fortress America while his son felt our concern must be global. On domestic matters, while preferring the simpler machinery and lower taxes of an earlier era, the father emphasized personalities as much as issues. “Do you realize,” his son said to me in 1953, “that his first choice for the Presidency last year was Senator [Robert A.] Taft and his second was Justice [William O.] Douglas?”

Father and son also had much in common: a delightful sense of humor, a fierce family loyalty, a concern for the state of the nation, endless vitality and a constant air of confidence no matter how great the odds or the pressures. (“I still don’t know how I did,” the candidate said after getting the usual cheery word by telephone from his father after the second Nixon-Kennedy debate. “If I had slipped and fallen flat on the floor, he would have said, The graceful way you picked yourself up was terrific’”)

They also admired, with good reason, each other’s political judgment, and it was in this area that they most often collaborated. The senior Kennedy understood the inner workings of politics and politicians. He enjoyed talking to the older professionals, getting progress reports on his son and suggesting the right emphasis for campaign advertising and television. In the 1958 re-election campaign a slogan in which considerable funds had already been invested was discarded because he felt, with some justification, that “Be proud of your vote” might be misunderstood and resented by the opponent’s fellow Italian-Americans.

During that same campaign, perhaps stepping over the fine line between tactics and substance, the Ambassador, as he was known, talked to me at length about the gist of a proposed television speech, in effect delivering such a talk to me by telephone. Finally he subsided with the comment: “At least that’s what I would like to hear.” And I, more in daring than in disagreement, said, “But, Mr. Kennedy, maybe you don’t reflect what the typical voter would like to hear.” “Hell,” the man whose fortune ran to hundreds of millions exploded, with more feeling than logic, “I’m the only typical man around here!”

He could be, I observed, exceedingly warm and gentle, despite the legends which emphasized only a fierce temper, a curt manner and a cynical outlook. Yet Mr. Kennedy often contributed to his own legend with elaborate claims about himself and his children. Even his son Jack did on occasion. When a newspaper story on Eunice Kennedy’s wedding stated that a Kennedy business associate had smilingly acknowledged that its cost would run into six figures, the Senator exclaimed, “Now I know that story is a phony—no one in my father’s office smiles.”

But leaving the legend aside, the Ambassador at home was a likable man. I saw him only at his home, for he almost never came to his son’s office, though they talked frequently by telephone. I had no difficulty in getting along well with him. I admired the spirit of public service he had helped implant in his sons, after his own service as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Chairman of the Maritime Commission and Ambassador to Great Britain.
²

I also admired his devotion to his children, to their education, happiness and success. However domineering his manner may have seemed, he had instilled in them a will to win without ever breaking their spirits. “I grew up in a very strict house,” said the Senator, “where there were no free riders.” His father had sent his sons to secular public and private, not parochial, schools and taught them to learn from Harold Laski as well as Herbert Hoover. He permitted each child to choose his own career, companions and political philosophy, however they may have differed from his own. He never discussed business or money at the dinner table, but he did talk about politics and personalities. He took pride in his children’s educational and literary achievements (“Although,” the Senator told me of this successful, well-informed man, “I’ve almost never seen him read a serious book”).

To assist his son’s fight to the top, he was willing to do anything—even stay out of the fight. He was not “banished,” as rumored in the fall of 1960, but took the same summer trip to Europe he had taken for many years. “He is not going to participate actively in the campaign,” the Senator said, “but he never has. But I will be talking with him frequently…. His interest is constant.”

The Ambassador knew that he was a controversial figure and that in his son’s Presidential campaign his own opinions were better left unsaid and his participation unseen. He knew he had endowed his sons with enemies as well as friends. Much of the liberal suspicion of the Ambassador was in fact unfounded. While it is true that his conversation at times reflected the ethnic antagonisms and epithets that had long characterized East Boston and Massachusetts, this hardly made him an anti-Semite; and when he took a group of us to lunch at his country club in Palm Beach, he boasted that he was the only Gentile member.

His son Jack, who was singularly immune to prejudices of any kind (although he, too, would refer in private political discussions to “the Italians” or “the Jews” or “the Irish” in the same way he talked about “the farmers” or “the veterans”), resented the manner in which his father’s views on race and religion were both overstated in the press and attributed to his sons. More than one group of voters had to be reassured in 1960 that Jack Kennedy was independent of his father’s policies and positions. Harris Wofford, who worked on race relations in the 1960 campaign, tells of Kennedy’s reaction to the news that Negro leader Martin Luther King’s father had announced his support—after the Senator’s phone call to Mrs. King—stating he had previously planned to vote against Kennedy on religious grounds. “That was a hell of an intolerant statement, wasn’t it?” said Kennedy. “Imagine Martin Luther King having a father like that.” Then a pause, a grin and a final word: “Well, we all have our fathers, don’t we?”

But Jack Kennedy knew that his father was no bigot, whatever his enemies might say; and far from regarding him as a handicap or embarrassment, he had strong filial feelings of loyalty and love. Once, lunching with a noted radical’s son who was involved in a complicated altercation with the senior Kennedy, he asked, “Do you always agree with your father? No? But you love him?” Smiling with pleasure at his companion’s affirmative answer, he leaned back and said simply, “Same here.” At times he was annoyed by exaggerated statements in the press about his father’s forcing him into politics or masterminding his campaign (particularly when it was the Ambassador himself who was both directly and correctly quoted). But he never disowned, disclaimed or apologized for his father or his father’s money. He was grateful that Joseph Kennedy’s many successes—in such diverse industries as banking, shipbuilding, investments, movies, liquor, real estate and oil—had made possible for his sons the financial independence which assists political success. At our first strategy meeting on the Presidential campaign in 1959, the Ambassador made clear that the family’s full financial resources were available, if needed. (“Not all of them, Dad,” said Bob in mock horror. “Don’t forget Teddy and me.”)

Until his stroke in December, 1961, Joseph P. Kennedy was the vibrant center of Kennedy family life—a constant source of praise and criticism, advice and commands, laughter and wrath. With each successive tragedy that befell the family, he showed the others how to close ranks and march ahead—though some say he never got over the loss of his oldest son Joe.

Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. had been a young man of many qualities—handsome, husky, gregarious, talented, aggressive, and adored by his eight younger brothers and sisters as well as by his parents. He talked openly of someday reaching the Presidency. Jack, the next oldest, often fought with him but also sought to be his intimate and, for a time, his imitator. They attended the same schools, traveled together in Europe, participated in similar sports. Both enlisted in the Navy before Pearl Harbor and both preferred hazardous duty.

Rejecting the rotation home that two tours of combat duty and some fifty missions over European waters had earned him, Joe volunteered for an experimental mission—flying a Liberator bomber loaded with explosives from which he would bail out once a control plane had directed it on target. With an earth-shaking blast that was never explained, his plane disintegrated in the air while still over England.

In a private book of tributes which he edited, Jack wrote:

I think that if the Kennedy children…ever amount to anything, it will be due more to Joe’s behavior and his constant example than to any other factor.