The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (60 page)

In speech after speech, politicians had taught Americans to think of communism as a massive Red tide, the onrushing currents crushing everything in their wake. Jack thought, or at least part of him thought, that communism was more like a malignancy, a fungus that grew in darkness and want and could be cured or arrested by men of will and foresight. It was that image of Marxism-Leninism as “a kind of disease which can befall a transitionary society” that was promoted by MIT Professor Walt Rostow, whose thinking would influence Jack. This disease did not threaten healthy societies, or threatened them only fitfully.

Jack began to hold a very different, contradictory vision of the situation in Indochina. In some of his speeches he now saw the non-Communist
South Vietnamese as a people worthy of American help, no matter what the cost. He took a step away from what he had seen and felt and knew to embrace ideas that pandered to American political clichés and paranoia.

“Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike,” Jack said in 1956. If South Vietnam was indeed the finger in the dike saving the West from drowning in a sea of communism, then its people had to be given whatever they needed, at whatever cost.

A scarlet thread ran through Jack’s beliefs. This was his concern over the omnipresent threat of the Soviet Union. He saw Russian communism as a singular monolith, the world’s greatest colonial power, an aggressor tempered by neither time nor opposing might. To him, this cold peace of the modern age was the continuation of war by other means.

In his private reflections, Jack could be as dark as his father. In preparation for one 1957 speech, he jotted down: “Fighting thousands of miles from home in a jungle war in the most difficult terrain in the world—man to man—with the majority of the population hostile and sullen—or fighting guerilla warfare. The more troops we send the more will pass across the frontier of the battle. It will be another Korea without the limited terrain.” That was a terrifying vision, in the middle of the American century, a crippled giant slowly bleeding to death on ground it neither knew nor wanted. “The U.S. is willing to make any sacrifice on behalf of freedom,” he noted, but he wondered whether “American servicemen [can] be the fighters for the whole free world, fighting every battle, in every part of the world.” There, as Jack saw it, was the tortured dilemma.

B
obby was drawn to the sounds of controversy wherever he heard them, and early in 1954, they were heard nowhere in Washington louder or more stridently than on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which he had only recently left. He returned this time as minority counsel on the Democratic side.

It was in some ways a curious appointment. Bobby still liked Joe McCarthy, whom most of the Democrats on the committee considered their nemesis. Bobby shared with the Wisconsin senator a hard-nosed, fundamentalist, militant anticommunism. McCarthy was a proud Catholic who stopped priests on Capitol Hill when he saw them to pay his respects. Bobby would have done the same whereas Jack would have rushed by seemingly embarrassed to be seen with them. McCarthy was tough-talking, unpretentious, fun to have up at Hyannis Port, the kind of man with whom Bobby felt comfortable.

Like McCarthy, Bobby was a hater. He hated in the way that some men loved: consumed with his hatred, he brought to it all his mental and emotional strength. He usually chose the targets of his vituperation with exquisite judgment. Seated across the committee table was one of the persistent hatreds of his life, Roy Cohn.

“Bobby did come back,” Cohn recalled in his autobiography. “But … he didn’t come back to fight McCarthy, he came back to fight me.” Soon after Bobby joined the committee, Cohn writes, the new minority counsel sought out McCarthy’s secretary and told her: “I want to give you a message. In these hearings, I’m going to do nothing to hurt [McCarthy]. In fact, I’m going to protect him every way I can, and I still feel exactly the same way as I always have about him. But I’m really out to get that little son of a bitch Cohn.”

In what became known as the Army-McCarthy hearings, the senators were presented with compelling evidence of a conspiracy to thwart the legitimate workings of American government. The culprit, however, was not a Communist or a fellow traveler, but Roy Cohn and his boss, Joe McCarthy. Cohn had used his power to see that their colleague G. David Schine, now a private in the U.S. Army, received special treatment and was relieved of such tasks as peeling potatoes or cleaning his rifle. The more the facts were presented, the more outrageous McCarthy became in his attempts to attack those who criticized him. And the more he scowled and vilified his enemies, the more millions of Americans watching on television saw a McCarthy they had not seen before.

While this compelling drama played out, Bobby and Cohn glowered at each other across the table. Cohn recalled that “whenever I said anything or tried to do anything, he would always have this smirk on his face, which I suppose was designed to get under my skin and did get under my skin.” Unlike his nemesis, Bobby had a brilliantly focused hatred that made him an immensely dangerous enemy.

Bobby understood that the sword that would reach Cohn’s heart was tipped with a poisonous mixture of humor and ridicule. On June 2, 1954, Bobby wrote a memo for Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson to help prepare him for the next day’s hearings. Cohn had testified that Schine was investigating the Communist infiltration of the making of the atomic bomb. “As you were on the atomic energy committee over in the House, you might wish to pursue this matter and ask him what peculiar background and experience Mr. Schine had had to equip him to delve into this important question,” Bobby wrote. “I do not think certainly there is anything against youth, but the point is that I don’t believe that Mr. Schine had any experience in atomic or hydrogen bomb affairs…. It seems to me you could make the
whole business rather ridiculous if you approach the questioning of Cohn on this matter in rather an incredulous way, if you know what I mean.”

Jackson knew what Bobby meant. A week later Jackson questioned Cohn about Schine purportedly setting up a worldwide psychological warfare program. Jackson mixed his words with a fatal dose of sarcasm, his disdain for Cohn unmistakable. For weeks, Cohn had been watching Bobby sliding questions over to the Democratic senators or whispering in their ears, and he had little doubt who was the architect of this mockery. Just after the day’s hearings had ended and the television cameras were shut down, Cohn walked over to Bobby and berated him.

“I want you to tell Jackson that we are going to get to him on Monday,” Cohn said, as Bobby remembered. It was Bobby, though, who was the major target of Cohn’s ire. “You hate me!” Cohn exclaimed.

“If I hate or dislike anyone, it’s justified,” Bobby replied. “Do you want to fight?” Cohn asked, his voice loud enough that reporters turned and listened.

“You can’t get away with it, Cohn!” Bobby exclaimed, standing toe to toe with the diminutive attorney. “You tried it with McCarthy, and you tried it with the Army. You can’t do it.”

The next day Bobby was the lead story in the largest newspaper in America. “Cohn, Kennedy Near Blows ‘Hate’ Clash” read the New York
Daily News
headline. Although the paper attempted to tell the story with requisite balance, the reality was that Bobby had defeated Cohn much worse than if he had fought him physically and left him lying sprawled out and bloodied.

Bobby had discovered an irresistible weapon. He had taken the rude putdowns that were the essence of humor at the Kennedy dinner table and sharpened them into a brutally disdainful sarcasm. The shaft of this weapon, though, was barbed on both ends, at times hurting the one who wielded it as much as its victims. It turned opponents on one issue into enemies who never forgot.

W
hen Bobby returned in the evening to his rented house on S Street in norhwest Washington, he was not greeted by the kind of refined setting that Jack met when he arrived home a few blocks away. Bobby and Ethel had three children by now, and seemingly twice as many dogs. Both the children and the dogs had the run of the house, jumping up and down on furniture and tearing up and down the narrow stairs. There was no drinking or smoking allowed and some of the dinner guests would have sold their birthright for a glass of sherry.

Bobby and Ethel were living in the middle of tree-lined, cobblestoned Georgetown, the preferred bastion of the old Washingtonians known as
“Cave Dwellers.” Some of these genteel folk took inordinate pleasure in spotting such outrages as a congressman’s wife eating her soufflé with a soup spoon. From all appearances, Bobby and Ethel didn’t give a damn. It was a mark of immense audacity for them to live as they did, though perhaps less so since they appeared totally unaware that theirs was an unusual household. There was much talk about these eccentric Kennedys, but their behavior was more Skakel than Kennedy.

B
obby had an awesome toughness of mind and body. When Teddy called him in the fall of 1953 and invited him up to watch a football game at Yale, Bobby knew that his brother would not be playing before tens of thousands in Saturday’s Harvard-Yale game. His brother had just returned to Harvard. Probation meant that for a year he could not play varsity football. Instead, Teddy had joined the team at Winthrop House and traveled down to New Haven for the annual game against Davenport, one of Yale’s residential colleges.

Teddy had gone through a couple of tough years, and it was a measure of Bobby’s love for his brother that he drove up from New York, where he was working on the Hoover Commission’s plan to reorganize government. Bobby was the least likely of spectators, however, and as soon as he got to New Haven he talked Teddy into finding another uniform so that he could join his brother on the field.

The two brothers stood stalwartly together on the line, Bobby at end and Teddy at tackle, playing with a ferocity rare in such a modest competition. Bobby was on the verge of his twenty-eighth birthday and out of shape, but his opponents across the line would not have known. “Bobby … could play in that league like a tiger,” Teddy recalled. “I mean, he was very good, and it was great fun.” Was it any wonder, then, that to young Teddy, brotherly love was the highest love, and that he saw in his two big brothers the very models of what a man should be?

Life was decidedly better now for Teddy. For the most part, the academic life of Harvard was just a dreary routine that he passed through on his way to good times. He was a drudge who managed to earn more Bs than Cs, doing far better in his grades than his father had done. He took one course with Professor Arthur Holcombe on the Constitutional Convention that excited him. Not only was Holcombe a brilliant professor teaching his last year, but he had also taught Teddy’s father and brothers. The legendary professor may have moved Teddy intellectually, but he was unimpressed by his student. “I think academic activities came out third [after athletic and social activities],” Holcombe reflected from retirement. “He did just what was necessary to remain in good standing.”

Teddy was not much of a student, but he had willing helpers, including Bobby, who shipped some of his old term papers up to Harvard. Bobby admitted that one of them, an essay on the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, “seems a little technical, but perhaps you can water it down a little bit and still be able to use it.” Teddy had been thrown out of college for cheating, but neither brother seemed to understand that copying term papers was as serious an offense as cheating on an exam. They lived in their own moral universe and had a code singular unto themselves.

At Harvard, for the first time in his life, Teddy had good friends, most of them his fellow football players. Several of these college buddies became lifetime friends whose identification with Teddy and his life was almost total. He brought them down to Hyannis Port, where they played spirited games of touch football and ate immense quantities of good food prepared by the Kennedys’ cook. Teddy didn’t brag about his famous family. During freshman year, it wasn’t until one of his new friends, Claude Hooton Jr., noticed a caricature in the
Boston Globe
that looked surprisingly like his classmate that he realized that Teddy was not an heir to the Kennedy Department Stores on the Cape but heir to something a bit larger. Teddy was by most measures a good and thoughtful friend whose graciousness sometimes even embarrassed Hooton. After a rugby match Hooton hurriedly showered and put on his tux for the big dance that evening. When Hooton picked up his friend, Teddy was carrying two corsages, one for his date and one for Hooton’s.

Teddy could drink more beer than any of his buddies and still be up at dawn for a sail or a tennis game while his friends lay in bed, pillows over their heads, trying to quell their throbbing hangovers. He wasn’t the sort who went looking for a fight, but if a fight came looking for him, he didn’t duck down the alley. One summer sailing with David Hackett in Maine, he was rowing a dinghy to their boat when a smart aleck in a yacht made the mistake of shouting to Teddy that he should row faster, and then challenging him. Teddy and Hackett scampered up onto the yacht and, as the occupants hurried on deck, threw them, one after another, into the Atlantic.

Anyone who knew Teddy would have laughed at the idea that the man was a pallid inheritor, the last and least of the Kennedys, feeding off the scraps of heritage. He was living an intrepid life, one summer going out west to work as a forest ranger, another year heading out to be a crewman on a race from California to Hawaii. He and Hooton went off one summer to teach water skiing in California. Driving back east they were nearly arrested when they attempted to sell their auto in New Orleans without title papers. Teddy called Jack’s office, where Bobby said he had never heard of his brother. Bobby called back later and they were freed.

Teddy did not have Jack’s sophisticated charm or his subtle gamesmanship. He developed a rating system from A to F that he applied to every woman he met, including his own sisters. Even if a woman was an A, he was soon ready to move on, to go back with his buddies, before heading out another evening to score again.