The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (4 page)

Governor Stevenson’s campaign committee had selected Senator Kennedy to narrate a film produced by Dore Schary, titled
The Pursuit of Happiness
. On the opening night of the convention, eleven thousand delegates (and millions more on television) watched and listened as Kennedy narrated an emotional depiction of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and the ideals of the party. Kennedy, tanned and fit, a low and conversational timbre in his voice, performed exceptionally There was applause throughout the film and the crowd roared its approval at its conclusion. When Jack walked out onto the podium to take a bow, nodding and smiling in his contained way, he was met by a floor demonstration led by the Massachusetts delegation. Jack Kennedy, a complete unknown outside the Eastern seaboard, had suddenly been discovered by a national audience. The Kennedy brothers learned something about their candidate that night: Jack was good in person, but he was far better on film. The
New York Times
reported the next morning that “Kennedy came before the convention tonight as a movie star.”
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The Stevenson leadership now had a problem: they didn’t really want Kennedy as Adlai’s running mate, but they didn’t know quite how to dispose of him. The governor offered him the nominating speech and the text to go with it. Jack accepted the offer and threw away the speech. He and Theodore Sorensen, his twenty-eight-year-old aide, worked all night on his remarks, and the next day wowed the convention delegates a second time. Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell later wrote that “it was a little like the story of the Irish girl who worked so hard at converting her Jewish boyfriend to Catholicism that he became a priest.”
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Jack was now pressuring Stevenson to select him as his running mate, whether Stevenson wanted him or not. In messages to his father, Jack characterized his activity as merely getting his name out and testing future waters, not angling for the spot of running mate.
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If Joe found out what was really going on, he could without warning call Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago, or Robert Wagner, mayor of New York, both of whom periodically received briefcases full of campaign money from him, and cut his errant boys off at the knees.

Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of the Democratic party’s great deliverer and a close friend of Stevenson, was thought to be key to the vice-presidential selection. A Kennedy aide hastily arranged a meeting. It went disastrously. Kenny O’Donnell remembered that about twenty people, including members of the press, watched as she bored into Jack about his association with communist-hunter Senator Joseph McCarthy. Why hadn’t he supported the censure of McCarthy, she asked? Jack’s answer did not satisfy her and she eyed him coldly. After twenty more minutes of tense exchange, Mrs. Roosevelt broke off the encounter. The reason why she had so humbled Jack had more to do with Joe Kennedy, whom she detested, than with Jack’s unwillingness to take on McCarthy. She later told Gore Vidal that in his final disgraceful weeks as her late husband’s ambassador in London, Joe Sr. had insisted on visiting the president in Hyde Park. Kennedy had spent no more than ten minutes with FDR when an aide rushed up to Mrs. Roosevelt to tell her the president urgently wanted to see her. She walked in the room to find the president white-faced and furious. He invited Kennedy to step outside. “I never want to see that man as long as I live,” he told her. Her uncle David Gray, the wartime American ambassador to Ireland, was sure that Kennedy had proposed that Roosevelt make a deal with Hitler.
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Before and during the convention, “Mrs. FDR,” as she came to be known, communicated her pronounced disregard for the Kennedys to Stevenson. It was a problem for Jack, then and later.

Nothing, however, could discourage Bobby, who prowled the convention floor, yellow pad in hand, cornering floor leaders and asking them to commit to Jack. Bobby was now back in his assault mode. When there were no taxis to be found outside the convention hall, Bobby simply stepped out in front of a car, which screeched to a halt. He opened the driver’s door and informed the man that he needed the car. The driver seemed to understand that there was no point in arguing and agreed to take the Kennedy group downtown. En route he asked Bobby for his autograph, to which Kennedy replied, “We’ll do that later.”
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There were other discoveries during those hectic days. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, whom Jack had married in September 1953, had come to the convention initially excited to be part of her first Kennedy campaign. She was eight months pregnant. A touching picture shows her beautiful and open-faced, standing on her seat with a Stevenson sign cheering at Jack’s nominating speech.
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She followed Jack around, shook hands with everyone she could, sat in on the late-night meetings, and was soon exhausted. Their room at the Conrad Hilton was choked with cigar smoke. No one slept, tempers were short, and Jack’s back was killing him. Between hurried meetings with his lieutenants, Jack received an unending train of fixers, reporters, and well-wishers. He ultimately persuaded Jackie to move in with his sister Eunice. This was her first bitter dose of being Jack Kennedy’s political wife — and she hated it. When Jack moved down to the Stockyards Inn, which was closer to the convention hall, she didn’t accompany him, nor did she visit him until the convention was over.

Democratic nominee Stevenson was probably leaning toward Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey as his choice for running mate, or possibly Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, but didn’t have the nerve to ignore the claim of Tennessee’s other senator, Estes Kefauver, who had won several primaries and had a block of loyal delegates at the convention. On August 17 at 11 P.M., Stevenson went to the convention hall and formally threw open the vice-presidential nomination. The delegates themselves would choose. What had begun as something of a beauty contest for Jack was shaping up into a floor fight — and Kefauver, after months of campaigning for the party’s top spot, had a singular advantage. Rather than beat a strategic retreat, the Kennedy brothers decided to make a fight of it.

Back at the Stockyards Inn at around midnight, Jack asked Bobby to call their father in France. “Tell him I’m going for it.” Having referred this unenviable task to Bobby, Jack walked out of the room. O’Donnell watched as Bobby dialed the number and got his father on the phone. The old man exploded at the news and shouted, “Jack’s a total fucking idiot and you’re worse!” After several more seconds of obscene invective, the line went dead. Bobby put the phone down. “Whew. Is he mad!”
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The vice-presidential campaign turned into a frenzied circus, with Humphrey volunteers visiting lakefront bars and taverns at 2:30 A.M. in search of delegates and Kefauver holding a press conference at 4 A.M. The Kennedys worked through the night trying to get speakers to nominate Jack later that day and desperately calling key delegations to round up votes before the balloting began. At noon the convention was called to order. As the delegates listened to Connecticut governor Abraham Ribicoff nominate Jack, Bobby was trying to find someone to give the seconding speech for his brother. He ran into Massachusetts congressman and House majority leader John McCormack and “practically carried him to the platform.”
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McCormack, who was nursing ambitions of his own after having been nominated by his delegation for president, felt as if he was being suborned. With Bobby standing behind him, he gave a seconding speech that was so weak he scarcely mentioned Jack’s name.

To no one’s surprise, Senator Kefauver achieved a large lead on the first ballot, but fell short of the required majority. Kennedy was a distant though impressive second. On the second ballot, Jack’s sterling convention performances and early-morning deals with other aspirants, such as New York City mayor Robert Wagner, who now had dropped out, began to pay off. Suddenly there was a Kennedy stampede and Jack stared unbelievingly at his TV set in his hotel room as he surged ahead of Kefauver, 618 to 551. He was soon within 38 votes of winning. As he hurriedly dressed to go over to the hall to accept the vice-presidential nomination, a cordon of Chicago police arrived at the hotel to serve as an escort. On the convention floor as delegations demanded to be recognized, there was pandemonium. Unexpectedly, Senator Gore, who was thought to be a Kennedy supporter, withdrew in favor of his fellow Tennessean Kefauver. This touched off a new stampede away from Kennedy toward Kefauver. Minutes later it was over. The vice-presidential nomination went to Kefauver.

Jack was angry and very disappointed but had the good judgment to hurry over to the convention, mount the rostrum, and, with a sad smile on his face, congratulate Kefauver. Bobby, bitter at a list of people including Stevenson, put on a brave face for his brother and later consoled him that he was better off to have lost. Jack responded to this sarcastically, “This morning all of you were telling me to get into this thing, and now you’re telling me I should feel happy because I lost it.”

The Kennedy achievement at the 1956 convention had been extraordinary, in fact, the product of Jack’s grace and Bobby’s pure aggression along with a large quotient of luck. Jack was now seen as someone with star appeal who in defeat was a good sport. And he had done this without actually joining the doomed Democratic ticket. Bobby, O’Donnell, and the rest had gotten an indispensable insight into the mechanics of the convention as well into the loyalties of several key bosses. It would serve them well in Los Angeles at the 1960 Democratic convention. They had catapulted their man onto the national stage.

It was revealing of his sense of the order of things that after the convention Jack left his ailing and exhausted wife with her mother in Newport and headed off to confer with his father in southern France. He and his younger brother Teddy then boarded a 40-foot yacht with several unattached female guests for a two-week cruise in the Mediterranean. Jackie was meanwhile struggling with her pregnancy. On August 23, she was rushed to the hospital due to internal bleeding. Doctors performed an emergency cesarean delivery, but the infant, a girl, was stillborn. Jack, unaware of all of this, remained at sea and did not learn of it until the yacht docked at Genoa. His rather extraordinary absence made the national press.
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When Bobby, who was then in Hyannis Port, heard the news, he rushed to Newport to be with Jackie, now in critical condition. He got there in time to be at her bedside when she regained consciousness and gave her the sad news about the child whose burial he had already arranged. When Jackie finally did speak to Jack, he told her that he wasn’t going to cut his cruise short. Bobby and his father soon straightened Jack out on this score and he flew home. But Jackie, embittered and depressed, wanted nothing to do with him. She refused to go back to Hickory Hill, the home in northern Virginia Joe Kennedy had bought for her and Jack. She told Bobby that she could not bear to see its empty nursery. (Bobby and Ethel moved in to Hickory Hill after Jack and Jackie chose not to live there.) Both
Time
and nationally syndicated columnist Drew Pearson reported that a divorce might be in the offing. The press also alleged that Joe Kennedy had offered Jackie a million dollars to stay with Jack. Whatever deal was struck — and the precise nature of it is not clear — it involved money and the emotional allegiance of Jackie’s father-in-law, Joe, and her brother-in-law, Bobby. Henceforth, they would be her protectors.
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December 20, 1956

Chicago, Illinois

B
obby’s role in protecting Jackie was emblematic of the place he had carved out in the family firmament — the stoic, dutiful third son who would do his father’s bidding. After graduating from law school in 1951, Bobby had spent the next six years shuttling among government jobs and political assignments arranged by his father. Joe Kennedy was a political friend of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the chair of the Senate Government Operations Committee, and arranged for Bobby to get a position as legal counsel. Shortly after Bobby joined the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations as an assistant counsel in the fall of 1952, the subcommittee counsel, Francis D. “Frip” Flanigan, got a call from the elder Kennedy: “You’ll have no problem with Bobby. But if you do, call me and I’ll fly up and kick him right in the ass.”
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He would have, too. The patriarchal order of the Kennedys combined Joe’s constant and heartfelt encouragement of his children, his funding of their trusts (and other forms of emoluments), and his unbending insistence that father knows best. Jack’s independent status as a senator combined with his natural evasive ability gave him some autonomy from his father, but this was not the case for Bobby.

Jack had warned Bobby away from taking the job as counsel to McCarthy, but to no avail.
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With his work ethic and Catholic sense of communist Armageddon, Bobby threw himself into McCarthy’s investigation, successfully revealing that the British merchant marine had done business with communist North Korea. But he soon broke with fellow committee counsels, Roy M. Cohn and G. David Schine, whose draconian tactics and homosexual attachment appalled Kennedy.
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He quit the drunken McCarthy and his powerdrunk camp followers in July 1953, but he took his fervent anticommunism with him.

After serving for several months as his father’s assistant on the Hoover Commission, a job he found frustrating in the extreme, Bobby applied for the job of (the Democrats’) minority counsel to McCarthy’s investigations subcommittee. After he got it, he was soon engaged in pitched warfare against Roy Cohn. When the Democrats took control of the Senate after the midterm elections in 1954, Bobby became chief counsel to the Permanent Subcommittee for Investigations chaired by Arkansas senator John McClellan. It was here that the twenty-nine-year-old Bobby found his true metier as a crusading investigator. It was also from this position that he began to challenge his father. In 1955, Bobby launched an investigation of Eisenhower’s self-interested secretary of the air force, Harold Talbott. Soon there was commentary that Kennedy’s own father had engaged in similar behavior with his Haig & Haig distributorship when he served in Roosevelt’s first administration. Father Joe sent his son a stinging denial of the charge but it was a sign of things to come.
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Bobby, with his bulldog style of locking onto every fact and mechanically dismembering his witness in cross-examination, routed Talbott out of office. It was as if his own wealth as well as his reservations about the ethics of his father impelled him to a public form of expiation. In summing up the difference between the two Kennedy brothers, Massachusetts governor Paul Dever remarked that Jack was “the first Irish Brahmin” and Bobby “the last Irish Puritan.”