The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (105 page)

Many journalists thought of themselves as helpmates of the administration. Several of them, such as Ben Bradlee of
Newsweek
and Charles Bartlett, a syndicated columnist associated with the
Chattanooga Times,
were among the president’s closest friends, and many of their competitors also nuzzled up to the administration as best they could, suggesting possible cabinet appointments, tempering unfavorable stories, offering unsolicited suggestions.

The president was adept at using his journalist friends to reward and punish his enemies. One of the few matters on which Jack and Bobby did not agree was in their attitude toward Paul Corbin, who had been such a controversial figure during the campaign. Corbin’s mailing of fake anti-Catholic letters during the Wisconsin primary was only a tiny sampling of his deviousness. Bobby had a close friendship with Corbin that neither the president nor many of the attorney general’s other friends understood. “Kennedy’s notion about Corbin was that he belonged to Bobby,” recalled Bob Healy, a
Boston Globe
reporter and a family intimate. “That was his favorite line.”

Corbin looked upon the world as an interlocking series of conspiracies, his paranoia projected onto everything he saw. He was a man of intelligence and disarming candor, as well as a prodigious researcher, and he spun his tales out of a flax of truth, half-truth, conjecture, and dark fantasy. There was a dark side of Bobby too, and Corbin was in a sense the manifestation of that part of the attorney general’s complex psyche.

“Corbin was abrasive and wild, but for Bobby he was a loyal lapdog,” recalled Larry Newman, a White House Secret Service agent whose fiancée was one of the attorney general’s secretaries. “Corbin could do things for Bobby that had deniability. But he was denied access [to] lots of things. Kenny [O’Donnell] blocked him. And he resented that, and he blamed Kenny.”

Bob Healy, who had served in the air force in World War II in O’Donnell’s bomber unit, was privy to his friend’s thinking. “Kenny just didn’t trust Corbin,” Healy said. “He was always telling them [the Kennedys] to beware of Corbin.”

O’Donnell fancied himself the administration’s leading hard-nosed political operative, and Corbin’s endless pushing represented a threat to him. Corbin’s supposed closeness to Communist activists when he had been a CIO organizer in the early 1940s was enough of a problem that he had not been offered a position in the administration. Instead, he had been shuttled over to the Democratic National Committee, where he worked as a special assistant to Chairman John M. Bailey.

One afternoon in late August 1961, according to John Seigenthaler, Kennedy called his good friend Ben Bradlee. The president had just learned from O’Donnell that Corbin was not at his DNC office but hanging out at the pool at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington. Years later Bradlee admitted wistfully that “whereas I think Kennedy valued my friendship … he valued my journalism most when it carried his water.” As Bradlee talked to the president, it became clear that this would be one of his water-carrying days. “I may have talked to him on the phone,” Bradlee recalled. Both Seigenthaler’s detailed recollections and the evidence of the
Newsweek
article largely confirm that Bradlee did indeed call Corbin at the hotel. Seigenthaler, moreover, believes that both the president and O’Donnell were probably listening in on the conversation.

Corbin had a daring disregard for all the small-scale dissembling of daily politics, and when the
Newsweek
editor asked him what he was doing, he rashly told him the truth. “Sitting by the swimming pool,” Corbin said, “with a scotch in one hand and a blonde in the other.”

Bradlee asked the Democratic operative what his future plans were, a not-unreasonable question, especially if the president was listening. “Stay here for sixteen years,” Corbin said. “That’s what I’m going to do. Eight years with Jack and eight years with Bobby. And if Jack doesn’t do better, we’ll run Bobby in ‘64.” After quoting Corbin’s devastating comments, the article in the September 4, 1961, issue of
Newsweek
concluded: “Jolly Paul Corbin sticks to his jokes, and his friends. But whether his friends can afford to stick with Jolly Paul is something else again.”

Bobby was infuriated when he learned of Corbin’s boasts. “Fire him!” he told Seigenthaler. “Get him out of there. I don’t want him working over there tonight.” Bobby calmed down and Corbin kept his job. Bobby had a deep visceral loyalty to his friends and aides that the president simply did not have; if there had been any doubt about that, the attorney general proved it by even now not disavowing his friend. As for Corbin, he guessed from which direction the knives had come and who had wielded them. He could not afford to make the president his enemy, but O’Donnell was a different matter. Corbin took his time, but he planned a revenge complicated and subtle enough to overcome perhaps even his formidable foe.

B
obby had another political matter on his mind, as did Jack. That was the political future of their youngest brother. After the election, Teddy had thought about moving west and starting a new life for himself there with Joan, one-year-old Kara Anne, and a second child due in September 1961. It was precisely the dream that the president had once held: heading out into the anonymity and space of the West, that richest of American metaphors for freedom. That road west was, if anything, even more appealing to Teddy than it had been to young Jack Kennedy.

Of all the Kennedy brothers, young Teddy had the greatest of possibilities for human happiness. He pursued pleasure exuberantly and laughed so deeply that cries of tragedy were obscured. Teddy had run the campaign in the West and could have been bitter about the region voting so dramatically against his brother’s bid for the presidency. But he was not a man who held grudges, and he thought himself and the West a natural mix.

When Teddy went out to Wyoming for a week during the primaries, he and a local politician, Teno Roncalio, searched for Kennedy delegates from morning until evening. No matter how late they worked or how much they caroused, at six the next morning Teddy was already up, ready to head out for a vigorous hour of horseback riding. Roncalio, who preferred the bunk to the saddle, had the unhappy chore of galloping alongside his eastern visitor. On one of those rides Roncalio reflected on Jack’s earlier visit. Roncalio could not imagine the senator from Massachusetts getting up to ride at dawn across landscape that he considered uninhabited for good reason. At the end of that visit, Roncalio drove the candidate to the airport in Casper. The wind was blowing a good thirty knots, but Roncalio had the top down. The candidate looked out on a landscape empty of everything but occasional sagebrush racing alongside the car. “Good Lord, why do you live here?” Kennedy exclaimed, a question he would not have asked if Wyoming voters had been within hearing distance.

Teddy knew why westerners lived where they did, and for a few intense hours he was ready to pack up and join them. The time of Conestoga wagons and homesteaders was over, but for Teddy the dream was the same. “I was there the night that it was decided to move Teddy’s residence out west,” recalled Evelyn Jones, the housekeeper. “And then all of a sudden in the same night the decision was changed.” Teddy’s father had convinced him to follow in his brother’s footsteps.

For Joan it was a melancholic moment whose full import it would take her years to realize. “We wanted to move to Arizona,” she recalled wistfully. “We thought we’d have fun and live our own lives, just the two of us, and
Kara and the baby on the way. Ted loved his family and his father but I think for him it was freedom from his father. Ted felt he was being pushed into public life. He could not do what he wanted to do. Nobody disobeyed grandfather.”

On a day after the 1960 Thanksgiving holiday, twenty-eight-year-old Teddy went to see the president-elect to tell him of his plans to run for the Senate seat being held in trust by a family friend, Ben Smith, until the 1962 election. In doing so, Teddy would be making the most crucial move in his own life, setting off on a road that closed up behind him with each step forward. He asked his brother for a post in the new administration that would give him some stature before he returned to Massachusetts for the campaign. Teddy was thinking of something in foreign affairs. If the president had gone along, there would have been an Attorney General Kennedy on the domestic front who never practiced law, matched on the foreign front by another Kennedy brother whose overseas experience consisted largely of guarding NATO headquarters in Paris.

Teddy was not even thirty years old, the minimum age for the U.S. Senate. The president-elect did not intend to pander to his brother’s ambitions, setting him up and guiding him until a real opponent toppled him. Teddy would have to get out there and get himself recognized. “Don’t lose a day,” he admonished. “Teddy, you ought to get out and get around. I’ll understand, I’ll hear whether you are really making a mark up there. I will tell you whether this is something that you ought to seriously consider.”

That was not the president-elect speaking. That was the firm older brother who was not about to have his brother riding on his success. Teddy took his brother literally and within a few hours was off to Africa with two Democratic senators for five weeks on a junket they had been planning for months. As much as this impressed his brother, it was equally a lesson to Joan. As little as she had seen her husband during the campaign, now he was suddenly jetting off halfway around the world for a month, leaving her alone with their newborn daughter. That was a lesson reinforced a year and a half later, in September 1961, when Teddy slept through the birth of their second child, Edward Moore Jr.

W
hile his brothers were running the country, Teddy returned to Boston to begin work as an assistant district attorney and give speeches all over the state, setting up his race. Teddy would forever after assert that he was the one who decided that he wanted to enter politics and run for the Senate. “Nobody forced me to run,” he told his biographer Burton Hersh. “I wanted
to.” It was essential to his own sense of manhood that he think of the decision as his own.

Teddy had one small problem. This was a lack of credentials other than his name. This difficulty would only be exacerbated if the first important magazine profile of Teddy, a
Redbook
article, was published as it had been written. William Peters, the author of the article, had submitted his draft to Teddy for comments and vetting, and the putative candidate could not decide how strongly to attack the proposed piece.

Teddy wrote Bobby, enclosing a copy of the draft and telling his brother that the article portrayed him as a “wealthy personable lightweight.” Teddy was indeed wealthy and personable, and many in Massachusetts thought that he was such a lightweight that if he were not tethered down he might float away. Teddy, in fact, not only was aware of his own failings but harbored an un-Kennedy-like insecurity that he displayed at times like a badge of honor.

Most politicians enjoy a moment or two of self-deprecating humor to establish themselves as modest fellows before they start trumpeting their supposed accomplishments in language that in any other field would be considered bragging. At a Temple Israel breakfast, Teddy jumped up to speak when he thought he heard the speaker say “the brother of the president.” He sat down sooner than he intended, to laughter and applause, when he realized it was the “president of the brotherhood” who had been introduced. Teddy not only laughed that morning but added the story to his repertoire of tales. He was so likable on the public platform that if likability were the king of attributes he would have been carried to Washington on the shoulders of the adoring masses.

Teddy would never be particularly adept at the political skill of giving journalists the illusion of candor while subtly feeding them precisely the information he wanted them to have. In this instance, he had been honest with Peters, and as one of his advisers told him, “the article should be fair warning to us to handle similar interviews differently in the future.” What was remarkable was how sensitive Teddy was to anything that tasted even mildly sour. Peters’s article was a box of valentine chocolates, however, compared to the rotten fruit that would one day be heaved his way. As he got into politics, he picked up a shield of suspiciousness that would become second nature, and in difficult situations a studied inarticulateness.

Teddy was not secure in his own judgments, and he would begin his career in politics as he would one day probably end it, listening too much and too readily to those around him. In this instance, he was listening to two advisers who appeared to have more expertise about journalism than he did. One was his old college friend and Harvard teammate, John Culver. The
Iowan had played fullback, but off the field he was not one for plowing through the line but for finessing his way around end. He was all for shrugging it off, asking for only a couple of changes. Culver realized, as Teddy wrote Bobby, that there was “little reason for a 30-year-old Senate aspirant legitimately laying claim to the honeymoon glow that his brother as president currently enjoys.”

Hal Clancy, a former Boston newspaper editor, represented another kind of analysis with which Teddy would grow familiar, an exaggerated, hysterical overreaction. Clancy played to the political paranoia that was always lying there just beneath Teddy’s smooth veneer, the idea that there were people, most of them with smiling faces, who, if they got within reach, were ready to knife him between the ribs. Clancy felt that the article was “politically damaging in the extreme … the real danger is that at subsequent times with lazy newsmen this article with its general overtone of immaturity, intellectual weakness, and emotional sterility will be ‘rehashed’ repeatedly and the unfavorable image crystallized.”

What was so striking about Teddy’s anger was that everything he and his advisers objected to most strongly was the truth. Clancy fumed at Peters’s observation that Teddy had traveled to Africa and Latin America to gather material for political speeches and so he might have “two continents to talk about.” That was precisely what he had done, and it was no feat of investigative reporting to make that observation. Teddy, for his part, told his brother that he and his advisers felt that one of “the most politically undesirable references” was Peters’s statement that “there are those in Massachusetts, as elsewhere, who are already grumbling about a Kennedy family dynasty.” Even in these idyllic early months of the New Frontier, a reporter could walk down Boylston Street and hear a certain amount of grousing on that score, from Democrats and Republicans alike.