The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (50 page)

“Look, I’ll straighten this out right now.” Wally said looking at the stacks of dishes in the kitchen. “You go do what you have to do. I won’t get in your way tonight or anything else.” Bobby didn’t argue but left and shut himself away from the worst of the squalor.

Ethel and Bobby had nobody to take care of the tedious business of domestic life. Undone chores were simply piling up around them. Wally could see why nobody had washed the dishes. The sink was stopped up. He found some tools, got down under the sink, and cleaned out the whole system before putting it back together. Then he washed the dishes, took out bag after bag of garbage, spiffed up the place a little, broiled some steaks, and set the table.

“What’s going on?” Bobby asked, as he returned to the dining room.

“Nothing unusual. You wanted a steak dinner and I fixed the kitchen sink.”

“Where’d you learn to do that?”

“My mother taught me.”

Bobby shook his head in awe. That wasn’t exactly one of the things that he had learned from Rose.

B
obby was a dogged, pugnacious young man attempting to follow the same arduous pathway that his older brothers had set out on. But what Jack performed with fluid ease and grace, Bobby managed with awkward difficulty. He had no qualms in treating much of the rest of the world as helpmates in his ascent.

One day Bobby came charging into Jack’s office holding a stack of papers in his outstretched hand. “You’re Mary,” he said to Mary Davis, Jack’s secretary. “Yes, I am,” she replied, in no doubt about her name. “You’ve got to type this up for me right away,” he said urgently. “It’s one of my papers for school.”

“I can’t do that,” Davis insisted.

“You have to,” he insisted. “I’m Bob Kennedy.” That was the ultimate argument and it showed Mary’s gaucheness that he should even have to mention his name when it was so plainly obvious. The secretary still refused to type the paper and Bobby kept repeating his arguments. The woman still wouldn’t give in.

Bobby was a man trying to open a door with a key that had always worked before. But as much as he turned it in the lock, he was left standing in the cold. In the end, Mary called in Jack as the arbiter, who told his brother forcefully that his secretary had other matters to attend to besides typing his term paper.

Most of the papers that Bobby wrote during law school gave no scope to his mind and emotions, but in one major essay on the Yalta conference he wrote with the moral certainty of a man whose palette contained only two colors, black and white. “What is the rationalization of this most amoral of acts whose potential disaster has long since become for us present day catastrophe,” he asked rhetorically. “The God Mars smiled and rubbed his hands.” Bobby believed that staying “friendly toward Russia” was “a philosophy that spelled disaster and death for the world.” Even if Soviet armed might had allowed the Russians to march into Central Europe, “there would have been a great difference between Soviet stooge regimes set up by the Red Army and those strengthened by the acquisence
[sic]
and endorsement of the western powers. The former would have enjoyed no shred of moral authority.”

Bobby cared about politics, not law, and he took the Student Legal Forum at Virginia and turned it into a lecture series that brought in a number of important speakers, including his own father. Joe could have been a memorable teacher. He was so provocative, so perverse in his thinking, that he would have forced his students to reflect and to defend themselves.

Speaking in December 1950 during the middle of the Korean War, when a narrow patriotism had quelled most voices of discontent, he daringly said that the United States should pack up and leave Korea and all of Asia. He asked bluntly what business we had supporting “Mr. Syngman Rhee’s concept of democracy in Korea.” He seethed at the way the United States supported the French colonial regime in Indochina. And he didn’t care if all Europe became Communist. “The more peoples that are under its yoke, the greater are the possibilities of revolt.”

Bobby loved this father who spoke such unparsed words and struck down conventional wisdom with a flick of his rhetoric. Bobby mimicked his father’s bluntness and copied his verbal flourishes, but the two men did not see the world the same way. Joe sought to pull America back from all the sordid complexities of the rest of the world to live in a sanctuary of peace and
civility. Bobby wanted to move aggressively forward. Unlike his big brothers, Bobby had not seen war. Despite Joe Jr.’s death, Bobby did not fully understand the wages of heroism. He saw politics in part as a venue for courage, where men stood up and proved the worth of themselves and their nations.

Hypocrisy is the grease of politics, but Bobby used this lubricant only sparingly. When he invited the distinguished black diplomat Ralph Bunche to speak, Bunche replied that he would not speak before a segregated audience, a stipulation that Bobby surely must have expected. Bobby knew, then, that he would be confronting a Virginia law that prohibited blacks and whites from sitting together in public meetings. Bobby called together representatives of student government and asked them not simply to put forth a resolution calling for an integrated audience but to sign the document.

The students were all for integrating the speech, but they blanched at putting their names on a document that might be widely publicized, bringing rebuke down on their families. These young men had walked most of a long hard mile, but they had pulled up short of the finish line; they could have been saluted for how far they had come, not condemned for the few feet farther they were unwilling to walk.

Bobby ranted at them, barely comprehensible, his words even less understandable as a Boston accent in a sea of southern drawls. In the end the students voted down the resolution that they would have had to sign, but the Student Legal Forum adopted it.

This was not the first time that the university, one of the most liberal institutions in the state, had been confronted with this problem. Up until then the school had liberally applied the grease of hypocrisy by prominently posting a notice stating that a hall was segregated and then allowing blacks and whites to sit wherever they chose.

Bobby would have none of that. The matter was of such seriousness, the dispute so rancorous, that it came before Colgate Darden, the president of the university. Darden declared that the lecture was not a public meeting at all but an educational meeting, and could go on unsegregated.

For the first time in his life Bobby had confronted the most terrible American conundrum of his age, the question of race. He was not a fledgling politician who saw himself as an arbiter between different interests and peoples, seeking a consensus that would push society ahead inch by inch. When he saw what he called truth, he went for it, and woe betide those who stood in his way waving what he considered a white flag of compromise and expediency.

The youngest Kennedy man entered Harvard in the fall of 1950. Teddy had none of the social ambitions of his father or, to a lesser extent, his brother
Jack. Nor had he the disdain for the narrow social elites of Cambridge that marked Bobby’s college tenure.

As a boy, Teddy had been not the youngest in the family but often among the newest boys in many of the schools he attended. To get along he developed a genial, conciliatory manner. He was interested in good times more than in great ideas, and he surrounded himself with young men of similar instincts. Most of his friends were football players and other athletes, the amiable sort who would make a natural transition from the gridiron to the manly world of business.

Many of Teddy’s friends had been shuttled off to prep school during their parents’ unseemly divorces. They were largely trophy children paraded home on holidays. Some of them spoke disdainfully of their parents or dismissed them irreverently. Teddy’s friend Claude Hooton Jr. was startled to hear one of their companions calling his mother by her first name. That was unheard of back in the Texas that he called home.

Teddy took literally the biblical injunction to honor one’s parents. He always called Rose “Mother” and Joe “Dad.” Whatever Teddy’s friends thought of their own parents, when he took them down to Hyannis Port for the weekend, they sat a mite taller at the dinner table and watched their words more carefully than they ever would have in their own homes.

Teddy’s father had taught him that he had a special responsibility as a Kennedy man. But what was that admonition to an eighteen-year-old finally free of all the constraints of prep school life and of his father’s overwhelming presence? He didn’t like rules, be they silly speed limits or other regulations that sought to hold him back from the life he intended to live.

Bobby’s football teammate Wally Flynn recalled that Teddy asked Wally and Nancy, his wife, to chaperone a party at a Harvard club to which they no longer belonged.

“Teddy, am I going to get in trouble?” she asked, knowing full well that Teddy was up to something that was not quite right.

Teddy’s friends at Harvard had their own special moral code, and it was a code that played into the part of Teddy that was weak and intellectually slovenly. These athletes considered academic course work a tedious, largely unnecessary regimen that kept them from playing sports and having a good time. They helped one another with their studies, choosing the easiest courses, passing on notes, cramming together for exams.

In the fall semester, Teddy took a course in natural science, a subject in which he and his friends had not an iota of interest. One of the fellows had taken a lot of physics in prep school. That led to the obvious solution. During the final exam the amenable friend sat up front in the amphitheater of the
Allston Burr Science Building, writing in big letters in his blue book while Teddy and his buddies sat behind copying the answers.

For Teddy, it was a morning of little moment, but it set him apart from his brothers’ lives. Joe Jr. might have had a tutor priming him beforehand, or even handing him the previous year’s exam, but he would not have done what Teddy was doing. Nor would Jack. Bobby would perhaps have struggled mightily with the dilemma, and if he had gone along, it would have been only to get a good grade. But Bobby’s friends at Harvard were too proud and too morally straight to attempt such a thing. And so, probably, was Bobby.

In the spring Teddy took Spanish I. He had no natural instinct for languages, and he was appalled at the idea of having to study what he considered a useless subject for yet another semester. Somehow if he could get an A, he would be relieved of his language requirement.

Teddy and Warren O’Donnell, Kenny’s younger brother, went for a walk the night before the final exam.

“How are you doing?” Warren asked.

“This is a tough one,” Teddy recalled saying as the two men walked through Harvard Yard. “I’ve got to get that C minus or I can’t play football in the fall.”

Teddy and Warren decided to see another friend who was a crackerjack Spanish student. The young man was a scholarship student and he was open to suggestion. “Fine, hell, I’ll be glad to take that thing,” he said, agreeing to pose as Teddy the next morning and ace the Spanish exam.

For the rest of his life, Teddy would be surrounded by overly solicitous people who called themselves his friends and were ready to do what they had to do to get him what they thought he wanted. In this instance, Teddy stood by saying little while his friends pushed this young man, even waking him up the morning of the exam, prodding him to get dressed and fill in for Teddy.

There appeared to be a calculated passivity in Teddy, as if he thought himself less morally culpable if he had given no command. Others might have considered Teddy’s conduct doubly dishonorable: if he was going to cheat, then he should at least have had the gumption to do it himself without bringing in a gullible innocent. That was a subtlety lost on the Harvard dean, who, when the cheating was discovered, treated each young man equally and expelled them both for at least a year.

For Teddy, as for his brothers, the overwhelming fear was not what he did but what their father would think of what he did. Joe was a man of limitless ambitions for his family, yet he did not rage at his youngest son for betraying the Kennedys while Jack was thinking of running for the Senate or
governor. As tough and merciless as Joe could be, he cared now more about his son’s life than his family’s future.

“Initially, my father just thought about what the impact was going to be on my life, etc., so he was initially very very calm,” Teddy recalled. Joe did his own inventory of what it would mean, learning that after a year his son could be reinstated. “And then after he got a feel for that sort of thing, he went through the roof (that was about twenty-four hours later) for about five hours and then he was all fine and never brought it up again.”

For Joe, the mystery was not that Teddy had cheated, but that he had cheated for so little. “The father was terribly disappointed in Ted’s doing something as foolish as that when there was so little at stake,” recalled the other young man, who after being thrown out of Harvard got to know Teddy’s father. Joe made a grand symbolic gesture to suggest that he believed young men should have a second chance. When members of Army’s football team were thrown out of West Point in a cheating scandal, he paid their way to study at Notre Dame.

For Joe, the matter may have been behind him, but for Teddy, yanked unceremoniously out of his happy Harvard life, it was not. Teddy’s father did not believe in penance, but Harvard did, viewing a term in the armed services as suitable punishment. “If I had a good record in the Army, this would resolve and satisfy them,” Teddy said. One day later in the spring of 1951, he went down to the U.S. Army recruiting office and signed up. When Teddy returned to the house, Joe discovered that his son had signed up for four years, not two. Teddy was no student, but he could certainly tell two years from four, and it was probably a mark of his anxiety that he had not even noticed.

“When I signed up for four years, it was just a matter of paper shuffling,” Teddy recalled. “They had three forms at the recruiting office and I had no idea. I went down with the idea to sign up for two years … it was just an administrative type of thing.” That may have been true, but it took the considerable efforts of his father to rectify the error.