CHAPTER 2
Robert Kennedy: Adviser-in-Chief
As Kennedy searched for the men who would become his closest White House associates, his campaigns and House and Senate service gave him some feel for what he could expect from interactions with advisers. His experience in the military and as a keen observer of public policy had made him more than a little cynical about so-called experts. He was conversant with Irish leader Charles Parnell’s counsel: “Get the advice of everybody whose advice is worth having—they are very few—and then do what you think best yourself.”
Kennedy saw decision-making and governing as a high-risk business and the advice of the experts as essential, but always to be viewed with measured skepticism. He never doubted that advisers were eager to help and had his best interests at heart, but he also understood that they were competitors for his attention and might be intent on ingratiating themselves with him. Only members of his family could be fully trusted to act in the unselfish interest of their son or brother. It was a caution his father had preached repeatedly to his sons and daughters: Only your closest relatives would put your needs and ambitions first or ahead of theirs.
When Jack first entered politics in 1946 to run for a House seat from Boston, his principal adviser was his father, who financed the campaign and presided over all the major decisions on Jack’s candidacy. As Jack put it to a friend at the start of his reach for a House seat, “There goes the old man! There he goes figuring out the next step. I’m in it now, you know. It’s my turn. I’ve got to perform.” Joe believed that if Jack were to get anywhere in politics, he needed his help. Joe saw the twenty-nine-year-old Jack as “rather shy, withdrawn and quiet.” Joe worried that he lacked his drive and that of Joe, Jr., who “used to talk about being President.” But Joe’s concerns were overdrawn: Winning and being the best were family watchwords that Jack had fully absorbed. He played competitive sports—football and yacht racing—with a fierce determination. He told a reporter in 1960, “The fascination about politics is that it is so competitive. There’s always that exciting challenge of competition.”
Yet at the start of his political journey, Jack had little confidence in his ability to attract voters. He had limited affinity for the false camaraderie common among Boston politicos. “Backslapping with the politicians,” he acknowledged, was not his idea of a good time. “I think I’d rather go somewhere with my familiars or sit alone somewhere and read a book.” Mingling with an audience after giving a speech was nothing he relished. And speechmaking was an ordeal. In 1946, his delivery was stiff and wooden, with no trace of humor to lighten his remarks. He read his speeches, reluctant to depart from the text for fear he would lose his place and embarrass himself by unconvincing off-the-cuff reflections. He was like a novice teacher reluctant to make eye contact with students whose boredom would be all too apparent in their looks.
But Joe believed that he could create the conditions that would allow Jack to overcome his natural limitations as a conventional politician. Just as he had succeeded in building a fortune for himself from small beginnings, so Joe assumed that he could turn Jack into a winning candidate for high office. But first he had to repair his own damaged public standing: His poor judgment on British dealings with Hitler, his affinity for American isolationism, and his alleged anti-Semitism were liabilities opponents would try to attach to his son. In 1945–46, he improved his reputation in Massachusetts by promoting well-publicized programs of economic expansion for Boston and the state.
At the same time, he worked quietly to launch Jack’s political career: He persuaded James Curley to give up his Eleventh Congressional District seat to return to his old job as Boston’s mayor by offering to finance the campaign and help him pay legal fees incurred fighting fraud charges. When one of Jack’s potential opponents for the Democratic Party’s congressional nomination in the district and his supporters offered to help Jack run for some undesignated office in the future if Joe would agree to keep him out of the race, Joe dismissed their demand as “crazy,” saying, “My son will be President in 1960.”
Whatever Jack’s limitations—and they included attacks on him as an interloper or carpetbagger who had only recently taken up residence in the congressional district—he had the advantage of being a war hero, which was a compelling asset only months after the end of the war. Polls Joe commissioned advised Jack to emphasize his wartime service. They also indicated that Jack’s identification with the storied Kennedys and Fitzgeralds would be valuable in the campaign. The importance of the family connection was not lost on Jack. “My biggest help . . . getting started,” he recalled in 1960, was “my father having been known. . . . That’s a far greater advantage to me, I think, than the financial. Coming from a politically active family was really the major advantage.”
Nonetheless, Joe’s investment of more money than normally went into a Boston congressional race gave Jack high visibility among voters. Joe paid for one hundred thousand reprints of a Reader’s Digest summary of a New Yorker article about Jack’s wartime heroism in rescuing the crew of his torpedo boat, which was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer. The spending on the offprint was a small part of the $250,000 to $300,000 Joe is supposed to have put into the campaign. It was an unprecedented sum for a congressional primary. “With what I’m spending I could elect my chauffeur,” Joe joked. Two political journalists compared the lavish flow of money to “an elephant squashing a peanut.”
A campaign aide and veteran of Boston politics compared the nomination fight to a war that required three things to win: “The first is money and the second is money and the third is money.” California Democratic Party boss Jesse Unruh later echoed the point in the sixties: “money is the mother’s milk of politics,” he said. Joe’s cash allowed the campaign to hire a public relations firm that saturated the district with billboard, newspaper, radio, and subway ads; flattering pictures of Jack, the war veteran prepared to fight for the needs of district voters, became a familiar sight to its residents. Jack threw himself into the campaign with dawn-to-dusk appearances punctuated by appeals to voter patriotism that warned about the growing communist threat, which a Navy veteran like Jack would know how to fight. The election outcome was all Joe could have hoped for: Jack beat his closest primary rival by a two-to-one margin and defeated his Republican opponent in November by nearly three to one.
Once in office, like many congressmen from safe districts, Jack seemed to have secured a lifetime job. But it wasn’t the job he wanted. From the first, he saw the work of a congressman as unrewarding. “We were just worms in the House—nobody paid much attention to us nationally,” he complained. He saw service there as a stepping-stone; when the time and circumstances seemed right, he would run for a Senate seat, which in turn would be a prelude to a race for the presidency.
As he reached for the higher rungs on the political ladder, Jack needed more help and someone he could rely on to discuss campaign plans and strategies. His father would supply the money and give him access to people who could promote his candidacy first in Massachusetts and then around the nation. But Joe, already sixty-four when Jack ran for the Senate in 1952, could not be constantly at his side, and he remained enough of a controversial figure that his help was best given behind the scenes.
The alternative was Jack’s younger brother, Bobby, who initially did not seem like an appropriate choice as campaign manager and confidant. Born in 1925, he was eight years younger than Jack, and the seventh Kennedy child. Four sisters had followed Joe, Jr. and Jack. Joe, Sr. was not very invested in Bobby, as the boy was called. Before Bobby could hypothetically run for president in 1964, Joe would be seventy-six. If one of his sons were to reach for the White House in his lifetime, Joe assumed that it would have to be Joe, Jr. or Jack, and Joe, Jr.’s death made Jack the focus of Joe, Sr.’s ambition.
Besides, Bobby was Rose’s son. His diminutive size alongside his more robust brothers stirred Rose’s maternal protectiveness, as it did with Rosemary, the first dau
ghter and third child, who suffered from birth defects that compelled special attention to her needs. Unlike the somewhat rebellious Jack and Kathleen, the second sister, who married an English nobleman in 1944 outside the faith, Bobby was the obedient, observant child, most devoted to his mother’s insistence on fidelity to their Catholicism. He became an altar boy and shared his mother’s affinity for regular church attendance. He stammered as a child and seemed most in need of parental reassurance, which he reciprocated with attentiveness to his parents’ demands for putting family first. No one was more faithful to Joe’s dictates about family loyalty and winning every contest than Bobby. He became a crusader of sorts for the Kennedy reputation. Combative and intolerant of any criticism of his family or of opposition to his father’s and brother’s ambitions, Bobby became the principal and devoted manager of the family’s political campaigns.
In 1952, when Jack ran for the Senate, Bobby was not very close to his older brother. While Bobby was growing up, Jack was already off at Choate and then Harvard. During the war, as Jack served in the Pacific, Bobby attended prep school at Milton Academy. After graduation in 1944, he enlisted in the Navy, where he served until 1946. Bobby joined Jack’s congressional campaign that year, but he was not welcomed with open arms. “It’s damn nice of Bobby wanting to help,” Jack wrote a mutual friend, “but I can’t see that sober, silent face breathing new vigor into the ranks.” To the contrary, Jack worried that Bobby would do more to antagonize than attract voters. Bobby had a reputation as “kind of a nasty, brutal, humorless little fellow,” who was “tough on himself and tough on the people around him.” Jack assigned him to East Cambridge, an area unfriendly to Jack’s candidacy, where Bobby would be largely out of the way and couldn’t do much harm. But his campaign work impressed Jack and the professional party operatives Joe paid to secure Jack’s election: Though Jack lost the East Cambridge wards to his opponents, the vote was closer than anticipated, for which Bobby, who had disarmed some of the hostility to the Kennedys by playing softball with local teenagers in a park, got the credit.
While Jack served six years in the House, Bobby was at Harvard, mainly playing football and arguing about politics, the topic of most interest to him after athletics. After graduation in 1948, Bobby followed the Kennedy tradition of foreign travel, and in Jack’s footsteps as a correspondent for the Boston Post. Eager to go where history was being made, he traveled to the Middle East: Cairo, Jerusalem, and Lebanon. He wrote several dispatches about the emerging state of Israel, which birth he witnessed firsthand as the British prepared to leave Palestine and Arabs and Jews prepared for war. The grand tour took him to Italy and through Belgium, Holland, and Germany. During the trip, the death of his oldest sister, Kathleen, in a plane crash greatly distressed him, as did talk of a war with Russia, which seemed to be imminent, according to the diplomats and military men he spoke with in Vienna. He saw such a conflict, which could well include the use of atomic bombs, as too horrifying to contemplate. But at the end of the year, after he had returned to the States, the arrest and trial of Hungary’s Catholic prelate, Cardinal Mindszenty, moved Bobby to advocate “forceful action.”
In September 1948, Bobby entered the University of Virginia Law School, where he assembled a respectable record, graduating in June 1951 in the middle of his class. It was a major improvement over Harvard, where his poor academic record had made his Virginia application a near failure. In June 1950, while in law school, he married Ethel Skakel, the daughter of a Chicago coal industry millionaire, and in July 1951, the first of their eleven children was born.
In the fall, he joined his congressman brother on a seven-week trip to the Middle East and Asia. Joe had to talk Jack into inviting Bobby, whom Jack saw as “moody, taciturn, brusque, and combative,” and seemed likely to be “a pain in the ass.” But family ties trumped personal tensions; Jack felt obliged to put up with his younger brother’s irritating qualities. Still, Jack was never entirely happy about his father’s directives, whether about familial relations or politics. “I guess Dad has decided that he’s going to be the ventriloquist,” Jack told a friend about Joe’s pressure on him to cast a congressional vote, “so I guess that leaves me the role of dummy.” At the same time, Jack never lost sight of how Joe’s fame and money had been so instrumental in facilitating his rise in politics. As Jack said later about his career, Joe made it happen.
During the trip, Jack for the first time took a shine to his younger brother, who charmed him with his sense of humor and playfulness by teasing people. As important, they shared a sense of how the United States needed to deal with the emerging Asian countries they visited. They agreed on “the importance of associating ourselves with the people rather than just the governments, which might be transitional.” In Indochina, where the French were fighting to hang on to their colonies, Bobby and Jack saw it as a losing cause that ran counter to the will of the masses. They believed that Western nations, including the United States, were putting themselves at a disadvantage in competing with communism by not identifying themselves with the aspirations of the majority of Asians for freedom from colonial control. They took away from the trip a mutual affinity for rescuing emerging nations from the grip of communism. Bobby’s religious orthodoxy made him more doctrinaire than Jack, who was more skeptical about church teachings and a little cynical about all institutional affiliations. Nonetheless, they found enough in common to imagine working together on future political issues.
The moment came in 1952 when Jack ran for the Senate from Massachusetts. His candidacy was something of a long shot; he aimed to unseat the storied Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., whose family—father and son—had held the seat for forty-five of the last sixty years. Moreover, Jack had hardly distinguished himself as a congressman and was reaching for the Senate office when the Republicans seemed likely to win the 1952 presidential campaign. President Truman and the Democrats were in poor standing over the stalemated Korean War, and the Republican nominee, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, an architect of victory in World War II, enjoyed considerable popularity in the state, where supporters sported “I like Ike” buttons.
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 Mass
achusetts 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.