The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (44 page)

Despite all the cliches about jocks as mindless semi-illiterates who read nothing but the sports page, these men had a fierce concern for the world in which they lived. Many evenings they debated the political future of their country. Despite its image in certain quarters, Harvard had a predominantly conservative, Republican student body. The Varsity Club was different. Sam Adams, Bobby’s friend from Milton, was the one Republican bobbing up and down in a sea of Democrats. The others took special delight in pillorying poor Sam as the relic of a dying class.

“We’re going to take the country away from you, Sam,” opined Kenny, the son of a football coach. “You guys have had it long enough.”

Bobby had not jumped out of a burning plane over Belgium or lost his fingers in the Pacific, and he knew far less of life than most of his teammates. He might have been a subject of mild derision among his mates, little Bobby painting his sailboat while others fought the war. It said much about Bobby
and the caliber of these men that he was no more a figure of amusement at the Varsity Club than anyone else. Half a century later, when the men who had been there those many evenings were asked what had been Bobby’s special role, they all said the same thing. “He was one of us.” There were no leaders. There were no followers. “He was one of us.”

Even among this group, however, the man was a controversialist. Bobby enjoyed nothing more than slithering into a genteel conversation, increasing the intensity of the argument to a level only slightly below physical combat, and then slithering away again as his friends went at it, red-faced and blustering.

“Nick, I think he does that on purpose,” Wally told Nick Rodis one day. “He’s a little son of a bitch.”

Bobby was more conservative than most of his friends, often mouthing the self-serving homilies that he had learned at his father’s knee. There are few signposts on the road between righteousness and self-righteousness, and Bobby marched briskly ahead, heedless of where he might be headed. What made Bobby something more than a rich boy who took his good fortune as proof that all was right with the world was his sense of justice. He didn’t like unfairness. He didn’t like bullies. And he wasn’t afraid.

Bob had many Catholics among his friends. Unlike the prep school Harvard football team of his father’s day, public school men, most of them Catholics, dominated the postwar team. When the team played Holy Cross, there were more Catholics on the field for Harvard than among the Catholic college’s eleven.

Father Leonard Feeney, a charismatic Jesuit priest, headed the St. Benedict Center, just down the street from Harvard Yard. Feeney was a man of fierce faith who converted scores of Harvard students, turning philosophy majors into Catholics, and newly born Catholics into priests and nuns. He walked with the banner of faith into the very citadel of secular rationalism. He was the kind of man Bobby might have been expected to follow. But Bobby was not a man to accept received wisdom, whether it came from the dons of Harvard or a popular priest.

Bobby listened to Feeney and he did not like what he heard. The priest took literally Boniface VIII’s
Unam Sanctam
that “it is wholly necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” Feeney was a Catholic Billy Sunday, excoriating the infidels and prophesying spiritual death for all those who stood outside the Catholic faith.

Bobby’s football teammate Chuck Glynn recalls how Bobby confronted Father Feeney and then went straight to Archbishop Richard Cushing to complain about the priest. Bobby was only one of many voices that in the end condemned Father Feeney. Shortly before he was excommunicated,
Father Feeney and his followers stood in Boston Common on Sunday afternoons. There he condemned “people like the Jews [who] are loudmouthed and stupid like Archbishop Cushing,” and yelled out at those who spoke out: “I hate you—a dirty rotten face like that! You dogs. Go home! I will ask the Blessed Virgin to punish you.”

T
hese men around Bobby were not like Jack and Joe Jr., who thought that it was a man’s natural calling to score with as many women as he could. They had been out in the world, however, and among them Bobby seemed haplessly naive. On one occasion, Bobby somehow managed to set up a date with Shirley Flower, who bore the exalted title of Miss Lynn, Massachusetts. Bobby was terrified by the prospect.

“What am I gonna do with this girl?” he asked a group that included Nick, Kenny, and Chuck. “Well, she lives in Lynn,” Chuck told her. “Take her out there, give her a couple of drinks, buy her a sandwich, and see what happens. And report to us.”

“Well, what’d you do, Bobby?” Chuck asked the next day at the Varsity Club. “We went to a movie and had a soda.” “Then what happened?” “Well, geez, I kissed her and she opened her mouth.” “Oh, heavens, Bobby, that’s terrible.”

Bobby drove his friends down to Hyannis Port, racing his old Chrysler with its bare tires down the narrow roads, frightening men who had jumped out of burning airplanes. His parents were used to having their sons bring college friends to the Cape, but for the most part, Joe Jr. and Jack had brought young gentlemen.

But now hordes of roughnecks descended on the pristine precincts, men who in Eunice’s eyes were “tough and rough … all big and bulky and very unsophisticated,” wearing army fatigues and wrinkled shirts, so unlike her exquisitely dressed father. Rose and Joe learned the background of men such as Nick Rodis, whose father was in the produce business and never made more than thirty-five dollars a week in his life. Then there was Paul Lazzaro, whose dad worked in a factory.

Joe hardly spoke to Bobby’s friends, not even nodding hello to Wally when he sat next to him in the private theater watching Al Jolson in
The Jazz Singer.
When Joe did speak, as often as not it was to push the pedagogical imperative of the family. One weekend Kenny O’Donnell and Bobby sat over dinner joking about how they had come in last in a sailing race at Harvard. Joe blustered and fumed, getting more and more infuriated at the young men.

“What kind of guys are you to think that’s funny!” he exclaimed as he got up from the table, unwilling to sit any longer and listen to such blasphemy.

As for Rose, her face was a mask that rarely displayed its displeasure, but she could not contain herself. She and Joe had not sent their son to Harvard to have him socialize with working-class ruffians. If they belonged at Hyannis Port, it was in the kitchen with the cook and the chauffeur. Bobby’s friends were so bemused by his mother that they gave her a nickname, “Billie Burke,” after a Hollywood actress known in part for her high-strung, scatterbrained roles.

One weekend, Rose lectured her son on his woeful excuse for friends. “Bobby and his mother were having this conversation,” Flynn recalled. “She wanted to know why he didn’t have some other friends from other places. And one of our guys was standing there where she couldn’t see him. He could hear her. And it was too bad.”

Rose and Joe may have blamed Bobby’s friends in part for their son’s abysmal academic record, which landed him on probation in 1947. In his postwar tenure at Harvard, Bobby received thirteen Cs, two Ds, and not a single B or A. When he graduated in March 1948, nothing in his record suggested that he was anything but a shadow of Joe Jr. and Jack.

J
ack wasn’t taking his role as the newly elected congressman from the eleventh district with ponderous seriousness. On the morning of his swearing-in, Jack sat at a drugstore counter and ordered two soft-boiled eggs and tea. As he waited for his order, Billy Sutton, his driver and general factotum, paced nervously. “We’ve got to get up there! Mr. McCormack is anxious that you get there.” The most powerful Democrat in Massachusetts was sitting there waiting for Jack to finish his eggs.

“How long would you say Mr. McCormack has been here?” Jack asked as he toyed with his food.

“Twenty-six years,” the detail-minded Sutton answered after an instant’s calculation. “Well,” Jack replied, still eating his eggs, “don’t you think Mr. McCormack wouldn’t mind waiting another ten minutes?”

Most twenty-nine-year-old congressmen would have attempted to appear older by dressing with funereal seriousness and speaking ponderously. Jack was so nonchalantly boyish that he was sometimes stopped when he attempted to walk out on the House floor and harshly warned that a page had no place there. This happened enough times to Jack and two of his colleagues that the House instituted a new rule that pages had to dress uniformly in blue blazers and white shirts.

Jack may not have affected the gravitas of his political elders, but he knew that he was entering a Congress in which the problems were as large as they were intractable. Cold winds blew across Europe, which was experiencing its worst winter in memory, a spate of blizzards and frigid days that cursed the efforts to clear away the rubble of the war and build new lives.

In Britain alone, unemployment stood at six million. Across the expanses of Europe, the last echo of the bells of victory had died out, and uncertainty was the most positive characterization of the prevailing sentiment. Winston Churchill had given a prophetic speech in Missouri the previous March that helped define the new era. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” he thundered ominously.

In March, as Jack sat in the House chambers, President Truman addressed a nervous, querulous Congress and asked for a $400 million aid package for Greece and Turkey. His historic speech set forth the themes that would be developed later in the Marshall Plan, an unprecedented package of aid to a beleaguered Europe.

The Marshall Plan stands now as one of the strongest achievements of American diplomacy. At the time, however, politicians and publications of both the Right and the Left challenged the president’s initial proposal. What was most ominous to those who thought that they had warehoused their weapons for good was Truman’s proposal “to authorize the detail of American civilian and military personnel” as supervisors and advisers.

Time
asked what would happen to the glorious ideals of international cooperation if the United States bypassed the nascent United Nations. “Was it politically wise to support the government of Greece, which was hardly a model of democracy?” the weekly asked. “Wouldn’t this program lead to the same kind of imperialism which Great Britain had followed so long and which Americans had so sternly criticized in the past?”

The Kennedy who spoke out loudest on these issues was not the young congressman from Massachusetts but his father. Joe remained as isolationist as he had ever been, and he considered the pathetic state of the once-great Britain ample evidence of his prescience. He was a man who took pleasure in bad news as long as it justified his own prophetic fears. Now an impoverished Britain had to dismantle its empire and pull back from its involvements in Europe, just as he had said it would in what the island nation had dared to call victory.

As Joe saw it, America had stepped in before to rescue Europe from itself, and he did not want his nation to step in again. He opposed the Marshall Plan as a massive giveaway of American wealth. Joe was all for letting the tired peoples of Europe have their desperate fling with communism if they
chose. America would stand back from it all, its gold still in its vaults, growing rich and happy away from the dark dreams of the rest of the world.

At the same time as his father was beating his drum of isolationism, Jack was making a different sound. Congressman Kennedy was a lowly freshman, and he did not have the platform his father still could occasionally command. But that spring, in a speech at the University of North Carolina, Jack stated that he was in favor of aid to Europe, specifically supporting the controversial proposal to Greece and Turkey.

Truman talked of “free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation.” Language was one of the first victims of the cold war, for these were not pristine democracies full of “free peoples” but authoritarian regimes whose primary virtue was that they were not Communist. In this darkening world, an enemy of the Soviet Union was a friend of the United States. Jack was resolved to support the authoritarian rule of the Greek military, just as he was resolved that his government should take dark and secret measures to combat Communist subversion. Jack supported whatever measures were necessary to contain a Soviet Union that he believed pushed relentlessly outward, driven by traditional Russian expansionism and fortified by Communist ideology.

Jack accepted the reality that the Soviet Union would soon have its own nuclear arsenal. And he envisioned, decades from now, a possible nuclear Armageddon. “The greatest danger is a war which would be waged by the conscious decision of the leaders of Russia some twenty-five or thirty-five years from now,” he told his youthful audience, whose age was defined by the atomic bomb. “She will have the atomic bomb, the planes, the ports, and the ships to wage aggressive war outside her borders. Such a conflict would truly mean the end of the world, and all our diplomacy and prayers must be exerted to avoid it.”

The young congressman had touched on the darkest irony of the age: the massive power of nuclear weapons made their possessors unwilling to use them, but the nuclear arsenals would build up over the years to create a confrontation that could end life on the planet. Two or three decades hence, as Jack saw it, an American president might have to make decisions of awesome finality and moment.

In his early months in Congress, Jack attempted to cut his own private path through the endless bramble of politics. He had set out publicly in a direction far from his father’s on international issues, but on the economy he advocated a balanced budget in a hectoring voice that could have been Joe’s.

For a pro-labor Democrat, the major issue of the day was the attempt by the Republican Congress to push through the Taft-Hartley Act, which would radically limit the role of unions in American life. Much of the American public was tired of the endless strife and rancor of the union movement,
from the belligerent arrogance of the United Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis to the obstructiveness of leftist militants such as Harry Bridges of the West Coast International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union.