The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (22 page)

1962

February 2 — 28, 1962

World Trip

A
t the beginning of 1962, when the Washington press corps collectively alighted upon the obvious with a sense of discovery, namely that Bobby Kennedy was “the second most powerful man in Washington,” certain reporters like Life’s Paul O’Neil and the
New
York Times’s Anthony Lewis dug beneath the opaque surface of the attorney general. There they found a matrix that was far more complex and contradictory. O’Neil wrote:

He is motivated — in his concern for his friends and allies, in his almost emotional refusal to be swayed by wealth and social position, and in his pugnacity as well — by a stern and literal belief in concepts of good and evil which most humans abandon after childhood, and by a sense of duty to family and country which overrides his own considerable ambition. . . . Though he clings to attitudes the world considers impractical in the extreme, he practices them with a calculating pragmatism.
¹

Even the magazine cover portraits of Bobby seemed to convey the contradictions. On
Life’
s January 1962 cover, Bobby, with his unlined face and Vitalis-coiffed hair, looks like an altar boy.
Time
’s February cover, an impressionist portrait of multicolored brushstrokes, catches the sharp angles in his face, the raptor nose, and the brooding eyes that suggested anger or aggression.
²

The press’s primary point of reference to Bobby was of course Jack, but in essential ways they could not have been more different. The president had migrated from his family’s Irishness. In many ways he was more like his friend British ambassador David Ormsby-Gore, a detached gamesman whose tastes in books, women, and public affairs were those of an aristocrat. Jack Kennedy went to church the way one might go to a club, drank sparingly, and avoided all forms of ethnic chauvinism.
³
He moved through his days, as John Kenneth Galbraith later wrote, “alert, alive, amused, amusing.”
⁴
However taut, he was an upbeat, charming character who made it a point to carry the burden lightly.

Bobby was a throwback to his immigrant great-grandparents — moody, unappeasable in his distaste for the powerful, fatalistic with flashes of joy and humor, and profoundly and actively Catholic. Watching Bobby at work one day in his cavernous office, a journalist described him “patting the arms of his chair in a slow and feverish rhythm, looking off into the beyond with that expression of muted despair.”
⁵
This was not a happy man. His best friend in prep school, David Hackett, said that at school Bobby was a “misfit” and an awkward young man. From this uncenteredness sprang his compensatory ferocity, with its complement of brilliance and blindness. Bobby did not regard politics as the art of the possible. He instead saw politics as a moral crusade in which causes were both lance and shield. Anthony Lewis, who was no uncritical admirer of Bobby’s at the time, thought that “in a tormented way, he was trying to do everything on the merits.”
⁶
Everything, Lewis might have added, except when it came to the ultimate cause — Jack. There the merits gave way to an unsparing ruthlessness.

Commanding the Kennedy sanctum, Bobby was fiercely loyal and fiercely demanding of loyalty, and unusually protective, even solicitous, of clan members. When the mother of Bill French became seriously ill, Kennedy arranged for French to be flown to Ohio and later called him to ask how she was.
⁷

Outside that sanctum, the idealist emerges, armed with a vaulting ambition to change the world, particularly that of the poor, the young, and the sick. But whichever dimension of Robert Kennedy’s personality prevailed, they all, as Gore Vidal once said, had a moral essence, making his temperament basically that of an authoritarian.
⁸

No one in the press understood him as well as the newspaper columnist Mary McGrory, and she ascribed his nature to his ethnic origin; he was a Celt, and a Celt at heart is a pessimist — a victim of fate or history who goes down lyricizing his defiance, as Robert Emmet did.
⁹
At times McGrory communicated with him in a sort of ethno-historic shorthand. One message she left for him read: “Maud Gonne called to inquire if Kevin Barry still intends to bomb the Post Office.”
¹⁰
The integument of Irish Catholicism sealed Bobby’s view of man as fallen, but added, paradoxically, the notion that the world, though temporally doomed, could be redeemed through corporal acts of mercy. Thus his ministrations in the realm of the mentally ill, the poor, and the distressed youth. Late one morning, Kennedy disappeared from his office and turned up in East Harlem a few hours later. He had decided to track down members of a gang called the Viceroys, and, once he did, sat on a curb, tie loosened, hair askew, listening to what the gang members had to tell him. He returned to his office late that afternoon. “He looked like a bop himself,” one Viceroy later told a journalist admiringly.
¹¹

The final twist in the multiveined matrix of his personality — his gentility — was evident in his fascination with children and his own childlike devotion to those who served him. When his secretary Angie Novello sent him a memo appealing to him to “notify his immediate staff of his whereabouts at all times,” he jotted a laconic reply: “What if I’m lost. Love.”
¹²

Ben Bradlee of
Newsweek
asked the president for an estimate of Bobby — “and never mind the brother bit.” Jack replied, “First, his high moral standards, strict personal ethics. He’s a puritan, absolutely incorruptible. Then he has terrific executive energy. We’ve got more guys around here with ideas. The problem is to get things done. Bobby’s the best organizer I’ve ever seen.”
¹³
Despite his deep admiration for Bobby, Jack tried to steer clear of the “puritan” during off-hours on weekends and evenings. Sometimes this was difficult. At a White House dinner in November 1961 for Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, Gore Vidal was amazed to feel a hand — Bobby’s — peeling his hand off of his step-sister Jackie’s shoulder. Bobby apparently could not brook the fact that Vidal, a known homosexual, was touching Jackie. A violent argument erupted between the two men.
¹⁴
Hearing of the confrontation, Jack, who liked Vidal, blithely remarked, “Just don’t get me involved, would you?”
¹⁵

Bobby’s faith was deep, constant, and literal.
¹⁶
His Jansenist Catholicism carried over into reflections about the afterlife. When the wife of Protocol Chief Angier Biddle Duke suddenly died, Bobby dictated a telegram: “Still it must be a consolation to you to know that she is now raised above all earthly problems, the everlasting joy and light of heaven are hers and that she smiles down on you from what must be a very high place in Paradise.”
¹⁷
One Sunday morning at St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis Port, when an altar boy failed to show, Bobby came forward and substituted flawlessly — Latin, presentation of the cruets, and all. One of his briefs against Castro was the destruction of the Catholic Church in Cuba.
¹⁸

Insiders in Washington were starting to conclude, as
Time
put it, “that while Jack may now be president of the United States, Bobby is fast becoming the chief of the clan — perhaps by Kennedy standards a more enduring and more important position — and toils to protect the prestige now reflected from the White House as Father Joe toiled to protect and enlarge the family’s investments in Wall Street.”
¹⁹

Jack had always felt that one area where Bobby needed development was in foreign affairs. Sometime in December 1961, he suggested that Bobby go on a trip around the world. Bobby’s initial reply was that he couldn’t spare the time, but the president insisted. There were other factors that encouraged such a trip. An elderly Japanese acquaintance of the brothers, Hosono Gunji, who had squired Congressman Kennedy and his younger brother around Japan in 1951 (and had corresponded with Bobby for ten years thereafter) relentlessly proposed a visit. Additionally, there was pressing diplomatic business Bobby could do. Heightened tension between the United States and Indonesia’s flamboyant nonaligned leader, Achmed Sukarno, over the status of Dutch West New Guinea (as well as Sukarno’s refusal to release a captured CIA pilot named Allen Pope) had strained relations to the breaking point. A visit by the attorney general, given his political standing, offered the prospect of negotiated resolution. Ethel Kennedy too was all for the trip, seeing it as an opportunity to showcase the fashions of Madame Paul, her Swiss-born couturière. By early January 1962 it was settled; the four-week trip was on.

Before leaving for their first destination, Japan, Bobby and Ethel flew to Los Angeles for a send-off party hosted by Peter and Pat Lawford at their beachfront home in Santa Monica. At Peter Lawford’s direction, the attorney general was seated between actresses Kim Novak and Marilyn Monroe; Ethel was seated a couple of tables away.
²⁰
In an interview years later, Lawford rejected any suggestion that he was deliberately dangling forbidden fruit before the Kennedy family’s puritan; it was simply that Monroe “had wanted to meet him.”
²¹

The Hollywood press turned the party into something of a political premiere, flashing pictures and shouting questions at the guests as they alighted from their Cadillacs, Aston-Martins, and so forth. About two hours into the party, Monroe arrived in a VW bug driven by a young man she described to the press as “a sailor,” who had picked her up earlier that afternoon. After taking her seat next to Bobby, she scrawled a note in red lipstick on a napkin and handed it to him: “What does an attorney general do?” Sometime later, Bobby asked her to dance the twist, which he had slightly mastered after a lesson from Harry Belafonte at Hickory Hill. According to Lawford, Ethel watched this with a steady gaze.
²²
It was the beginning of a perilous tangent. A few days later in Tokyo, while touring the famous Ginza district with his Japanese hosts, Bobby was asked what he thought of the beauty of Japanese women. He quickly reminded his hosts (and possibly himself), “I am a married man.”
²³
Married or not, he was now entering into the heady precinct of celebrity.

Time
likened the impact of the Kennedys’ visit to Japan to the minor earthquake that hit Tokyo during their stay. The Kennedys encountered a political situation that was highly uncertain. There had been periodic strikes and violent anti-American protests. The attorney general’s first address at Nihon University in Tokyo was a success, in part because Bobby made fun of his murderous attempt at Japanese. The Japanese press the next day depicted this as
honne
, their word for true feeling. But at his next stop, Waseda University, he was hissed and booed by several hundred Marxist students. As he was being drowned out, Bobby reached down and pulled one of the hecklers up on stage and offered him the microphone. The young man launched into a high-pitched diatribe while the attorney general, smiling, stood alongside him, seeming to listen to the nonstop, anti-American imprecation.
²⁴

When the young man finally finished, Bobby took back the microphone. Suddenly there was a blackout. Someone located a battery-operated bullhorn and Kennedy resumed telling the students that the reason his brother had sent him to Japan was to hear from young people who wished to speak out. United States ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer, a former Harvard professor, translated these sentiments into flawless Japanese, and soon the crowd began to turn. Finally, the school cheerleader led the audience in the school song, “Miyako no seihoku,” which Bobby and Ethel insisted on learning. (It later became the favorite party song at Hickory Hill.)

After this unusual encounter, the press coverage became enormous. Bobby did a succession of interviews through the skilled interlocution of Reischauer, who would later comment on how fascinated the Japanese were by Kennedy’s blunt responses. The newspaper
Yomuri
praised his “frankness, simplicity, and courage.” Kennedy, it noted, would go anywhere, see anyone, and try anything in his quest to understand Japan. Only his Catholicism seemed to get in the way. Outside Osaka at an ancient Buddhist temple, Bobby was asked to light an incense stick. “What are the implications if I do this?” he asked Ambassador Reischauer. When the ambassador told him it simply showed respect, Bobby reminded him that he was a devout Catholic. “You’re sure it won’t look like I’m worshiping Buddha?” he asked. When reassured, he lit the stick.
²⁵
(This became another of Jack’s sarcastic anecdotes about his brother, who, he would inform people with straight-faced mockery in Bobby’s presence, was a sophisticated and ecumenical Catholic.) Whatever the case, the trip did reveal something unexpected — that Bobby, although lacking Jack’s witty self-possession, had a powerful effect on people because of his unaffected openness.

Ethel, in her own Panglossian way, complemented him perfectly with her tanned, lithe presence and consistent demonstration of enthusiasm over erudition. The first night in Tokyo, she left the water running in the bathtub and it flooded down to the next floor. The next day, she started a speech she had clearly never seen before, stopping and commenting, “Gosh. This sounds like a terrible graduation speech,” then inviting the audience to “just call me Ethel.” At a formal luncheon, Ethel asked Japanese politician (and later prime minister) Yasuhiro Nakasone, “Did I read that your cats have no tails?” There was silence. The Japanese couldn’t quite comprehend this one, either.
²⁶
Nor did Madame Paul’s hairbows, which appeared regularly on Ethel’s beehive (matching the color of her dresses), conform in the slightest with Tokyo’s understated couture. But Ethel’s sheer vivacity did conform to the Japanese idea of Americans as enthusiasts. The Kennedy visit, in good part because of its shock value, was a total success.