The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (3 page)

In the late ’40s and early ’50s, at least, there was little evidence of such a metamorphosis. Jack was struggling terribly with his illnesses and Bobby, bottled-up and pathologically shy, was maladroit beyond measure. Having grown up in a family of male stars, of which he simply wasn’t one, Bobby’s duty had been to step aside for those who were. He had nothing of Joe’s good looks or robust physique, or Jack’s self-possessed bookishness. The family photos of Bobby as an adolescent during the ’40s show an overcast, almost embarrassed, gaze. He was small, and in the first test of the Kennedy male — athletic achievement — he was a failure. “I dropped everything,” he later recalled. “I always fell down. I always bumped my nose or head.” Once at a party at the Kennedy home in Bronxville, New York, Bobby picked up a glass of tomato juice with such force that he shattered it, sending the juice and shards of glass everywhere.
¹⁵
With brother Joe (ten years older) and brother Jack (eight years older) away at college or later in the war — and with his father as yet unable to detect anything worth advancing in his third son — he grew up in the company of his mother and three sisters (Eunice, Pat, and Jean), attending no fewer than ten different schools. He performed indifferently. For all of this, journalist and family friend Arthur Krock saw something unusual in the third son when he was fifteen, “a kind of savage individuality” born of compensation and struggle.
¹⁶

The constant element in Bobby’s life outside his family became the Catholic Church. He was an avid altar boy throughout high school. If Joe Jr. could tell you all about FDR’s cabinet and brain trust, and Jack about Marlborough and Sir Walter Raleigh, Bobby knew the lives of the saints and their feast days. “Bobby has taken his religion seriously,” his mother Rose commented, suggesting perhaps that her husband and the two older boys treated it more as a family ritual than as a system of personal belief.

Everything seemed to come hard to Bobby. When his father sent him up to Boston in 1946 to help out with Jack’s campaign for Congress, the candidate didn’t quite know what to do with his younger brother. “I can’t see that sober, silent face breathing new vigor in the ranks,” Jack observed to a friend, suggesting that Bobby be sent to the movies.
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The friend, Paul Fay, found Bobby monosyllabic and mournful: “Words came out of his mouth as if each one spoken depleted an already severely limited supply. . . . From his expression he might have been paying his last respects to his closest friend.”
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But if all detectable forms of political bonhomie were lacking, what was not was the steely drive to execute. Dave Powers, the unemployed World War Two veteran and Charlestown politico whom Jack befriended one evening in January 1946, remembered advising Bobby not to knock on people’s doors before 8 A.M. or after 10 P.M. — “that way they might vote for Jack.”
¹⁹
Powers estimated that Bobby was hitting around three hundred homes and apartments per day. “He looked like he was about sixteen but the effect he had was very positive. When he asked people to vote for Jack, you would have thought he was inviting them to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Bobby wasn’t smooth but he was tough, very tough. After Jack’s election, Bobby went back to Harvard, where his central ambition was to make the football team. As with the ’46 campaign, his talent was sheer will. With unremitting practice and wild aggression, he won a letter in 1947, accomplishing the feat in the Harvard-Yale game with a fractured leg in a cast. “The major difference between Bobby and his brothers,” said Ethel Skakel, whom he married in 1950 after nearly six years of courtship, “is that Bobby always had to fight for everything.”
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Marriage to Ethel confirmed him in the way his upbringing had not; she was his anima, his other self in the Jungian sense — giggly, outrageous, and deeply nurturing. A few months before his trip with Jack and Pat to the Middle East and Asia in October 1951, a daughter was born to Bobby and Ethel. They named her Kathleen Hartington, in memory of Bobby’s deceased sister and her husband. Joe Kennedy Sr. saw and appreciated what Jack may have not — that in Bobby the family had a soldier who could work long hours in the shadows and ask nothing for it.

Along the way of their 25,000-mile trip in the fall of 1951, Bobby dutifully kept a journal in his cramped handwriting. The conclusion he and his brother reached was that nationalism was the determinant force of the age, stronger than either communism or capitalism, and that the United States was aligning itself with reactionary forces through second-rate diplomatic representation. They felt that the bipolar approach to containing communism wouldn’t work because it usually meant association with discredited local despots or the embattled colonial powers. In country after country they visited, terrorism, putsches, full-scale civil warfare, seemed hours or even a few city blocks away. Two days after their meeting with Pakistani leader Liaquat Ali Khan, he was murdered. In India, Prime Minister Nehru warned them over dinner, between longing glances at their sister Pat, that the French and their Western supporters were, as Bobby wrote, “pouring money & arms down a bottomless hole.” “We have only status quo to offer these people. Commies can offer a change.”
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As Bobby explained it in 1967, the trip made a “very, very major impression” on his brother — and nowhere more so than Vietnam.
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After arriving and viewing the French
défilade
at the air base with General Jean De Lattre de Tassigny, the Kennedys were taken to the palace of South Vietnam’s so-called strongman Bao Dai, who looked, Jack thought, as if he had been “fried in Crisco.” They were “wined and dined” and housed in a single room, the only one in the palace that had air conditioning. His back giving him problems, Jack spent the night on the floor with Bobby and Pat alongside in the beds. General De Lattre personally took command of their tour from that point on, flying them over an area where the French Foreign Legion was doing battle with the Vietminh and presenting the Kennedys to the people of Hanoi in a flag-waving parade. (“Ironic,” Bobby later said.)
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The Kennedys came away deeply impressed by the redoubtable De Lattre — a brave man who had borne his own son’s death before succumbing himself to cancer in 1952 — but did not buy the French line one bit. Back in Saigon, Jack and Bobby found out the names and addresses of the best reporters and showed up at their lodgings to get the real story. What they heard was that the French cause, for which the United States was now airlifting weaponry, was doomed. Were a plebiscite held throughout Vietnam, the communist Ho Chi Minh would get 70 percent of the vote, Bobby noted in his journal.

From Vietnam, the Kennedys traveled to Singapore, then to war-torn Malaysia, where they toured Kuala Lumpur, surrounded and under siege, in a tank. From there they flew to Japan, their last stop before Korea. Jack, having struggled throughout the trip with his bad back, was suddenly hit with a high fever, the result again of his failing immune system. Bobby and Pat had him airlifted to a military hospital in Okinawa where, during the first night, his fever rose to 106 degrees. Bobby later said, “Everybody there just expected that he’d die.”
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But slowly Jack’s fever subsided and he was flown back to the United States. The family and its trusted retainers went into their denial routine, secreting Jack somewhere in Virginia, pending his improvement, and telling the press that his malaria had flared up again during the trip. During his convalescence, Jack drafted a radio address about his trip that he read on the Mutual Broadcasting Network on November 14. For its time, it was a farsighted exegesis about the defining power of Third World nationalism, which, Kennedy felt, was the proper bulwark against communism. It was also Kennedy’s first enunciation of the doctrine of counterinsurgency, a policy that would bedevil his presidency in Vietnam and Cuba.

In his radio address, Jack blasted United States diplomats in insurgent Asia for “toadying” to the wishes of the European powers “with no eagerness to understand the real hopes and desires of the people to which they are accredited.” He was also harsh in his criticism of American policy in Vietnam. “For the U.S. to have aligned itself with the desperate effort of a French regime to hang on to the remnants of empire” without exacting in exchange political reform in Indochina was a serious mistake. The war could only be won if France conceded independence to the Vietnamese. “To check the southern drive of Communism makes sense but not only through reliance on force of arms. The task is rather to build strong native non-Communist sentiment within these areas and rely on that as a spearhead of defense.”
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This sounded right, but hadn’t Bobby written in his journal that Ho Chi Minh would win if there were elections? So which was it — Ho Chi Minh or the French? In statements during that fall of 1951 in New York and Massachusetts, Jack set forth the idea of a “third force” — both anti-French and anticommunist — that could satisfy nationalist aspirations as well as stymie the Vietminh. This, in fact, emerged as America’s covert policy in Vietnam in 1952—1953, as the French war effort headed toward bloody defeat.

One witness to the Americanization of France’s war in Vietnam was the English novelist Graham Greene, who had arrived for his second visit in October 1951. (As Jack lay at the edge of death in the military hospital in Okinawa on the night of October 31, Greene lay, awake but dreaming, in an opium den gazing at the lovely, sprawled figure of a woman as he recited Baudelaire’s “Invitation au Voyage.”)
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Greene is thought to have patterned the hero of his novel
The Quiet American
on Edward Lansdale, an American counterinsurgency expert whom he met in Vietnam in 1954. In the novel, the earnest, enthusiastic CIA station chief Alden Pyle is doggedly determined to fight the communist Vietnamese the
American way
.
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In theory, as Kennedy had advocated, this meant finding and arming that “third force.” In practice, it meant giving the pretender, Colonel The, the newest generation of
plastique
, which produced in one sanguinary afternoon on la Rue Catinat in Saigon a sudden hurricane of human limbs. It was the perfect hell of good, anticommunist intentions — the old story of the ends justifying the means. It was also the prologue of the peculiar tragedy of the Kennedys, one in which Bobby, the moralist like Pyle, touched off a lethal chain reaction in his vendetta against Fidel Castro.

But this was to come later. The most important outcome of the trip was that in the course of 25,000 miles together — through palaces, military parades, states of siege, war zones, and the long hours of travel in between — these two sons became brothers. Jack, who had avoided what he thought was the leaden company of his dour younger brother, saw what Bobby’s Harvard buddy Kenny O’Donnell valued so much — the wry humor, the hawklike power of observation, as well as his indefatigable determination to do his duty.
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And Bobby, for the first time, enjoyed his older brother’s encompassing curiosity and piquant humor. In Okinawa at the hospital, in the quiet hours when he thought Jack was going to die, Bobby must have also reflected on his brother’s vulnerability.

Once home, Jack turned his energies toward running statewide in Massachusetts. Bobby joined the Justice Department and went to work in New York in the tax division. In April 1952, Jack got the break he’d been looking for: an open shot at the United States Senate when Governor Paul Dever decided to run for reelection. But the campaign was soon a complete mess due to Joe Kennedy’s insistence on controlling everything and his habit of overriding campaign manager Mark Dalton. Jack seemed unwilling to or incapable of reining in his father, so Kenny O’Donnell, who was working on the Senate campaign, called his old Harvard football teammate Bobby Kennedy for help. But Bobby brushed him off: “Don’t drag me into it,” he told O’Donnell.
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O’Donnell called him back twice the next day. “Jack’s going to lose,” he said. There was a long pause at the other end of the line.

“OK. OK.” Then another pause. “Goddamnit.” About a week later, Bobby called O’Donnell back to confirm his decision. “I’ve thought it over and I suppose I have to do it.”

With his total level of sacrifice, legion hours, and precision of execution, Bobby transformed Jack’s campaign for the Senate into a winner. Ambassador Kennedy meanwhile did what he was best at, putting money into the right hands. This two-track approach to political persuasion that the Kennedys perfected in 1952 — Bobby moving the machine and Joe moving the money — foreshadowed their run for the presidency in 1960. Jack was able to overcome a 300,000-vote plurality for Eisenhower in Massachusetts to beat popular Senate incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge by 70,000 votes. Jack later observed that there wasn’t a politician in Massachusetts who could stand Bobby after the ’52 campaign was over, but “we had the best organization in the state.” Among the family’s male stars now, nobody was now regarded as tougher. Lest Bobby rest for a month or so on his laurels, his father was there to remind him within days of Jack’s victory: “Are you going to sit on your tail end and do nothing now for the rest of your life? You’d better go out and get a
job
.”
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August 18, 1956

Chicago, Illinois

T
heir father told them it was a stupid idea. If Adlai Stevenson chose Jack as his running mate at the Democratic convention in Chicago, he would do it to get the Catholic vote. When Stevenson lost, which Joe Kennedy thought he would, Jack would be blamed — and he would be finished politically. Right before he left the country in June for his French Riviera home in Cap d’Antibes, he again warned his sons about the idea. Jack and Bobby would probably have heeded their father’s advice had Joe accompanied them to the convention. But with their father out of touch, Jack and Bobby, in battle mode with a nucleus of tough young men like Kenny O’Donnell and Torbert McDonald around them, went for a long shot. They had no particular strategy in mind and no experience in the arcane maneuvers of political conventions. But no sooner had they arrived in Chicago than they began plotting in their rooms at the Ambassador East and the Conrad Hilton, and on the first day of the convention began making the rounds in the Amphitheater where the conclave was being held. Then the unexpected took place.