With a curious yet very human morality she had rejected the idea of any privilege and rarely visited her father in the White House. And perhaps she unconsciously blamed her father for her mother’s death because he had struggled for political power while his wife was dying. Later she had wanted to lose herself in Europe, but by law she had to be protected by the Secret Service as a member of the immediate presidential family. She had tried to sign off on that security protection, but her father had begged her not to. Francis Kennedy told her he could not bear it if something were to happen to her.
A detail of twenty men, spread over three shifts a day, guarded Theresa Kennedy. When she went to a restaurant, if she went to a movie with her boyfriend, they were there. They rented apartments in the same building, used a command van in the street. She was never alone. And she had to give her schedule to the chief of the security detail every single day.
Her guards were two-headed monsters: half servant, half master. With advanced electronic equipment they could hear the lovemaking when she brought a male friend back to her apartment. And they were frightening—they moved like wolves, gliding silently, their heads tilted alertly as if to catch a scent on the wind, but actually they were straining to listen to their earplug radios.
Theresa had refused a “net security,” that is, security of the closest kind. She drove her own car, refused to let the security team take an adjoining apartment, refused to walk with guards alongside her. She had insisted that the security be a “perimeter security,” that they erect a wall around her as if she were a large garden. In this way she could lead a personal life. This arrangement led to some embarrassing moments. One day she went shopping and needed change for a telephone call. She thought she had seen one of her security detail pretending to shop nearby. She had gone up to the man and said, “Could you give me a quarter?” He had looked at her with shocked bewilderment, and she realized that she had made a mistake, that he was not her security guard. She had burst out laughing and apologized. The man was amused and delighted as he gave her the quarter. “Anything for a Kennedy,” he said jokingly.
Like so many of the young, Theresa Kennedy believed, on no particular evidence, that people were “good,” as she believed herself to be good. She marched for freedom, spoke out for the right and against the wrong. She tried to never commit petty mean acts in everyday life. As a child she gave the contents of her piggy bank to the American Indians.
In her position as daughter of the President of the United States it was awkward for her when she spoke out for pro-choice abortion activists, and lent her name to radical and left-wing organizations. She endured the abuse of the media and the insults of political opponents.
Innocently, she was scrupulously fair in her love affairs; she believed in absolute frankness, she abhorred deceit.
In her years abroad there were incidents from which she should have learned some valuable lessons. In Paris a group of tramps living under one of the bridges tried to rape her when she roamed the city in search of local color. In Rome two beggars tried to snatch her purse as she was giving them money, and in both cases she had been rescued by her vigilant Secret Service detail. But this made no impression on her general faith that man was good. Every human being had the immortal seed of goodness in his soul, no one was beyond redemption. As a feminist she had, of course, learned of the tyranny of men over women, but did not really comprehend the brutal force men used when dealing with their own world. She had no sense of how one human being could betray another human being in the most false and cruel ways.
The chief of her security detail, a man too old to guard the more important people in government, was appalled by her innocence and tried to educate her. He told her horror stories about men in general, stories taken from his long experience in the service; he was more frank than he would ordinarily have been, since this job was his last assignment before retiring.
“You’re too young to understand this world,” he said. “And in your position you have to be very careful. You think because you do good for someone they will do good for you.” Just the day before, she had picked up a male hitchhiker, who assumed that this was a sexual invitation. The security chief had acted immediately; the two security cars forced Theresa’s car to the edge of the road just as the hitchhiker put his hand in Theresa’s lap.
“Let me tell you a story,” the chief said. “I once worked for the smartest and nicest man in the government service. In clandestine operations. Just once he got outsmarted, caught in a trap, and this bad guy had him at his mercy. Could just blow him away. And this guy was a real bad guy. But for some reason he let my boss off the hook and said, ‘Remember, you owe me one.’ Well, we spent six months tracking this guy down and we nailed him. And my boss blew him away, never gave him a chance to surrender or turn ‘double.’ And you know why? He told me himself. This bad guy once had the power of God and therefore was too dangerous to be allowed to live. And my boss didn’t have a feeling of gratitude, he said the guy’s mercy was just a whim and you can’t count on whims the next time around.” The chief did not tell Theresa his boss had been a man named Christian Klee.
The election of Francis Xavier Kennedy as President was a miracle of American politics. He had been elected on the magic of his name and his extraordinary physical and intellectual gifts, despite the fact that he had served only one term in the Senate before being elected to the presidency.
He was called the “nephew” of John F. Kennedy, the President who had been assassinated in 1963, but was outside the organized Kennedy clan still active in American politics. In reality, he was a cousin, and the only one of the far-flung family who had inherited the charisma of his two famous uncles John and Robert Kennedy.
Francis Kennedy had been a boy genius in the law, a professor at Harvard at the age of twenty-eight. Later he had organized his own law firm, which crusaded for broad liberal reforms in the government and the private business sector. His law firm did not make a great deal of money, which was not important to him, since he had inherited considerable wealth, but it did bring him a great deal of national fame. He crusaded for the rights of minorities and the welfare of the economically disabled, he defended the helpless.
Kennedy had swept the country along with him in his campaign for the presidency. He had proclaimed he would write a new social contract for the American people. What makes a civilization endure? he asked them. It is the contract between the governors and the governed. The government must promise public safety from crime, from economic hardship; it must promise to every citizen the right and the means to pursue the individual dream of enjoying personal happiness in this life. And then, only then, would the governed be obligated to obey the common laws that ensure civilization. And Kennedy proposed that as part of that sacred social contract all major questions in American society be settled by referendums rather than by decisions made by the Congress, by the Supreme Court or by the President.
He promised that he would wipe out crime. He promised that he would wipe out poverty, which was a root of crime and a crime in and of itself. He promised a national health insurance program financed by the state and a Social Security System that would truly enable workingmen to have a comfortable retirement.
To affirm his dedication to these ideals and to remove the armor of his own personal wealth, he proclaimed on television that he would give his personal fortune of forty million dollars to the Treasury of the United States. This was done in a highly public legal ceremony that was shown by every television-station news program in the country. The image of Francis Kennedy’s grand gesture had a huge impact on every voting citizen.
He flew to every major city in the country, and his automobile cavalcade covered the small towns. His wife and daughter by his side, their beauty flanking his, he overwhelmed the public consciousness. His three debates with the Republican presidential incumbent were triumphs. The combination of his wit, his intelligence and his youthful exuberance completely destroyed his opponent. No President
had ever entered his first term of office more beloved by the populace. He had conquered everything except fate. His wife had died of cancer before his inauguration.
Despite his crushing sorrow, Francis Xavier Kennedy managed to enact the first step of the program. During the election process he had made the daring political move of naming his personal staff in advance so that the electorate could approve them. He had named Oddblood Gray, a black activist, as his liaison with Congress on domestic affairs. He had selected a woman to be his running mate and made the political decision that she would also function as a member of his staff. The other nominations were more conventional. And it was this staff that helped push through his first victory, the revision of the Social Security laws so that every workingman could be sure of enough money to live on when he retired. The tax to finance this revision was paid by the profits of the giant corporations of America, and these immediately became his deadly enemies.
But after this initial victory, Kennedy seemed to lose momentum. His bill to give the people a referendum vote on major issues was defeated by Congress, as was his call for a national health insurance plan. And Kennedy himself was losing energy in confronting the stone wall Congress put up before him. Though Kennedy and his White House staff fought with an almost desperate ferocity, more and more of their plans were defeated.
The knowledge that in the last year of his presidency the battle was being lost filled him with a despairing anger. He knew that his cause was just, that he was on the side of what was right, that he held the moral high ground, that his course of action was the most intelligent for the survival of America. But it seemed to him now that intelligence and morality had no weight in the political process.
President Kennedy waited until everyone on his senior staff had been served tea.
“I may not run for a second term,” he said evenly. Looking over to the Vice President, he added, “Helen, I want you to prepare to make your run for the presidency.”
They were all struck dumb, but Helen Du Pray smiled at him. The fact that this smile was one of her great political weapons was not lost on these men. She said, “Francis, I think a decision not to run requires a full-length review by your staff without my presence. Before I leave, let me say this. At this particular point in time I know how discouraged you are. But I won’t be able to do any better, assuming I could be elected. I think you should be more patient. Your second term could be more effective.”
President Kennedy said impatiently, “Helen, you know as well as I do that a President of the United States has more clout in his first term than in his second.”
“True in most cases,” Helen Du Pray said. “But maybe we could get a different House of Representatives for your second term. And let me speak of my own self-interest. As Vice President for only one term I am in a weaker position than if I served for two terms. Also your support would be more valuable as a two-term President and not a President who’s been chased out of office by his own Democratic Congress.”
As she picked up her memorandum file and prepared to leave, Francis Kennedy said, “You don’t have to leave.”
Du Pray gave everybody the same sweet smile. “I’m sure your staff can speak more freely if I’m not present,” she said, and she left the Yellow Oval Room.
The four men around Kennedy were silent. They were his closest aides. Kennedy had appointed them personally and they were responsible solely to him. The President was like a strange kind of Cyclops with one brain and four arms. The senior staff was his four arms. They were also his best friends, and, since the death of his wife, his only personal family.
Du Pray closed the door behind her, and there was a small flurry of movement as the men straightened their folders of memorandum sheets and reached for tea and sandwiches. The President’s chief of staff, Eugene Dazzy, said casually, “Helen may be the smartest person in this administration.”
Kennedy smiled at Dazzy, who was known to have a weakness for beautiful women. “And what do you think, Euge?” he said. “Do you think I should be more patient and run again?”
Eugene Dazzy had been the head of a huge computer firm ten years before, when Francis Kennedy first entered politics. He had been a cruncher, a man who could eat up rival companies, but he had come from a poor family, and he retained his belief in justice more out of a practical sense than a romantic idealism. He had come to believe that concentrated money held too much power in America and that in the long run this would destroy true democracy. And so when Francis Kennedy entered politics under the banner of a true social democracy, Dazzy organized the financial support that helped Kennedy ascend to the presidency.
He was a large affable man whose great art was the avoidance of making enemies of people whose important wishes and special requests the President denied. Dazzy bowed his balding head over his notes, his tubby upper body straining the back of his well-tailored jacket. He spoke in a casual voice. “Why not run?” he said. “You’ll have a nice goof-off job. Congress will tell you what to do and refuse to do what you want done. Everything will stay the same. Except in foreign policy. There you can have some fun. Maybe even do some good.
“Look at it this way. Our army is fifty percent under quota, we’ve educated our kids so well they are too smart to be patriotic. We have technology but no one wants to buy our goods. Our balance of payments is hopeless. You can only go up. So go get reelected and relax and have a good time for four years. What the hell, it’s not a bad job and you can use the money.” Dazzy smiled and waved a hand to show that he was at least half kidding.
The four men of the staff watched Kennedy closely, despite seemingly casual attitudes. None of them felt Dazzy was being disrespectful; the playfulness of his remarks was an attitude that Kennedy had encouraged in the past three years.
Arthur Wix, the national security adviser, a burly man with a big-city face—that is, ethnic, born of a Jewish father and an Italian mother—could be savagely witty, but also a little in awe of the presidential office and Kennedy.
Wix had met Kennedy ten years before, when he had first run for the Senate. He was an Eastern seaboard liberal, a professor of ethics and political science at Columbia University. He was also a very rich man who had contempt for money. Their relationship had grown into a friendship based on their intellectual gifts. Kennedy thought Arthur Wix the most intelligent man he had ever met. Wix thought Kennedy the most moral man in politics. This was not—could not be—the basis of a warm friendship, but it did form the foundation for a relationship of trust.
As national security adviser, Wix felt that his responsibilities obliged him to be more serious in tone than the others. He spoke in a quiet persuasive voice that still had a New York buzz. “Euge,” he said, motioning to Dazzy, “may think he’s kidding, but you can make a valuable contribution to our country’s foreign policy. We have far more leverage than Europe or Asia believes. I think it’s imperative you run for another term. After all, in foreign policy, the President of the United States has the power of a king.”
Kennedy turned to the man on his left. Oddblood “Otto” Gray was the youngest man on Kennedy’s staff, only ten years out of college. He had come out of the black left-wing movement, via Harvard and a Rhodes Scholarship. A tall, imposing man, he had been a brilliant scholar and a first-rate orator in his college days. Kennedy had spotted under the firebrand a man with a natural courtesy and sense of diplomacy, a man who could persuade without threats. And then in a potentially violent situation in New York, Kennedy had won Gray’s admiration and trust. Kennedy had used his extraordinary legal skills, his intelligence and charm, and his clear lack of racial bias to defuse the situation, thus winning the admiration of both sides.
After that, Oddblood Gray had supported Kennedy in his political career, and urged him to run for the presidency. Kennedy appointed him to his staff as liaison with the Congress, as head man to get the President’s bills pushed through. Gray’s youthful idealism warred with his instinctive genius for politics. And to so
me extent, naturally, idealism suffered defeats, because he really knew how government worked, where leverage could be applied, when to use the brute force of patronage, when to skip in place, when to surrender gracefully.
“Otto,” Kennedy said. “Give us the word.”
“Quit,” Gray said. “While you’re only just losing.” Kennedy smiled and the other men laughed. Gray went on. “You want it straight? I’m with Dazzy. Congress shits on you, the press kicks your ass. The lobbyists and big business have strangled your programs. And the working class and the intellectuals feel you betrayed them. You’re driving this big fucking Cadillac of a country and there ain’t even power steering. And you want to give every damn maniac in this country another four years to knock you off, to boot? I say let’s all get us the fuck out of here.”
Kennedy seemed delighted, the handsome Irish planes of his face breaking into a smile and his satiny blue eyes sparkling. “Very funny,” he said. “But let’s get serious.” He knew they were trying to goad him into running again by appealing to his pride. None of them wanted to leave this center of power, this Washington, this White House. It was better to be a clawless lion than not to be a lion at all.
“You want me to run again,” Kennedy said. “But to do what?”
Otto Gray said, “Damn right I want you to run. I joined this administration because you begged me to help my people. I believed in you and believe in you still. We did help, and we can help more. There’s a hell of a lot more to do. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and only you can change that. Don’t quit that fight now.”
Kennedy said, “But how the hell can I win? The Congress is virtually controlled by the Socrates Club.”
Gray looked at his boss with the kind of passion and forcefulness found only in the young. “We can’t think like that. Look what we’ve won against terrible odds. We can win again. And even if we don’t, what could be more important than trying?”