The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (69 page)

The reality was that if Jack’s chances for a presidential nomination had
rested on his legislative record, he would scarcely have been considered a plausible candidate. He had no stellar record of bills stamped with his bold mark, as did Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas, another potential candidate. Nor did he stand at the forefront of a political issue, as Humphrey did on civil rights. Neither of these men, however, had the captivating persona that Jack was exhibiting on speaking trips that took him from Arkansas to New York City, Baltimore to Mississippi. He was deemed worthy of a
Time
cover in 1957, and major articles appeared in magazines ranging from women’s periodicals such as
McCall’s
and
Redbook
to mass general-interest magazines such as the
Saturday Evening Post
and
American Weekly,
to more obscure, policy-oriented publications such as
Foreign Policy Bulletin
and the
National Education Association Journal.

As he flew from state to state and interspersed his days in Washington with one interview after another, Jack continued to be cursed by bad health. His bad back and Addison’s disease were burden enough. Then the dog that Jackie had given him for Christmas in 1956, when they were staying at his father’s New York apartment, set off such a severe allergic reaction that he had an asthma attack and the animal had to be given away. For a long time afterward, he became sick again every time the couple stayed in the apartment at 277 Park Avenue.

On another occasion while he was in New York Hospital, Jack checked out to go to a friend’s house for dinner. The friend had a dog, and by the time Jack checked back into the hospital, he was breathing so badly from his asthma that the hospital staff became frightened.

In the middle of September 1957, Jack developed an abscess on his scarred back that induced a high fever and such wrenching back pain that he entered New York Hospital. The doctors drained the abscess and put him on a heavy dosage of penicillin and streptomycin.

Jack wanted to minimize the whole business, but a vibrant, youthful politician did not spend over two weeks in the hospital for his annual checkup. Dr. Janet Travell, his personal physician, wanted to tell the press that her patient had “a small abscess on his back.” Jack would have none of that. “You know, that’s a very ugly word,” he told her. “I don’t want to have an abscess.” Since there was an epidemic of Asian flu making its rounds, the word went out that Jack had “a virus infection.”

Jack left the hospital on October 1 and flew to Hyannis Port. During his weeks in the hospital, Bobby, George Smathers, and Governor Foster Furcolo of Massachusetts had given speeches in his stead, but now Jack was about to fly to Canada to give a talk. He was so weak that he canceled a dinner that Lord Beaverbrook was planning for him on the trip so that he could rest.

Dr. Travell had the impression that Jack was “discouraged.” Joe and Rose
had brought Jack up
never
to be depressed, or if he was feeling low,
never
to admit it, not to himself, and certainly not to the world. It was a measure of how down he felt that he could admit that he was feeling downcast.

“You know, what you need is a real good hot-tub bath,” Dr. Travell said. It was hardly a suggestion that seemed likely to bring on a dramatic change.

“You know, I haven’t been in the bathtub since I entered New York Hospital because of the wound in my back,” Jack said, looking at the doctor. “I can’t go on with another great big gaping hole.”

The words had a slight tinge of self-pity, an emotion unknown to Jack. “You don’t have a great big gaping hole in your back, and there’s no reason why you couldn’t get right into a hot tub and soak,” the doctor said as Jack stared at her in disbelief. “You haven’t seen what is there. It’s been covered by the dressing. You’ve got a dressing on it.”

Jack took his bath, and Dr. Travell believed that it was “a cake of soap that saved the day and a hot tub bath.” But when Jack left to fly to Canada, he took the same scarred and aching body with him, and his health was hardly demonstrably improved.

J
ackie had an impeccable sense of how to memorialize special occasions. On their fourth wedding anniversary in 1957, she prepared an illustrated book titled “How the Kennedys Spoil Wedding Anniversaries.” The sketches were wondrously whimsical, but as always with Jackie, there was a subtle edge to her humor. The first drawing in the exquisite book portrays Jack lying in bed with the diligent Jackie at his side. In the second drawing the couple has changed places, and Jackie is in bed, while Jack watches over her. The pictures made light of an unpalatable truth. If they disclosed a hidden irony in Jack’s young wife, the gift also suggested that this was a woman who cared enough for her husband to sketch these gentle scenes of their marriage.

There were persistent rumors that Joe had headed off a divorce by promising Jackie a million dollars if she would stay with her husband. There is no evidence that any such offer was made, and it hardly would have been enough of a payoff to keep a despondent Jackie in a dreary marriage. If her fidelity to her marriage was indeed purchased, she was the consummate actor, not only keeping the Kennedy name but also displaying interest in her husband’s career.

“I was alone almost every weekend while Jack traveled the country making speeches,” she recalled. “It was all wrong.” Jackie had an intense inner life that even Jack did not fully know. She was a woman not simply of mood swings but of dramatic changes in her perceptions of the world around her.

One day she would flirt with Jack with those gaminelike eyes, as her mother recalled, “writing him little jingles and poems and bringing him little presents with appropriate rhymes accompanying them.” Then the next time she saw him, she would be so coldly uncaring that Chuck Spalding believed that her feelings toward her husband had gone from love to hate.

Only Jackie truly knew what she felt toward her distant, philandering husband, and this deeply private woman was not about to unburden her soul in the authorized American psychological fashion. “Look, it’s a trade-off,” she reflected later. “There are positives and negatives to every situation in life. You endure the bad things but you enjoy the good…. One could never have such a life if one wasn’t married to someone like that. If the trade-off is too painful, then you just have to remove yourself, or you have to get out of it. But if you truly love someone, well….”

J
ack would not have been a Kennedy man if he had not wanted to carry on his line, and it had been painful that it was proving so difficult for him and Jackie to have a child. It was both a relief and a blessing when, on November 27, 1957, Jackie gave birth by cesarean section to a squalling baby girl who her father declared was “as robust as a sumo wrestler.”

“She’s easily the prettiest baby in the room, don’t you think,” the proud father asked the nurses. Jack took his friend Billings to the nursery at New York’s Lying-in Hospital and stood looking at the newborn through a glass window. “Now, Lem, which one of the babies is the prettiest?” he asked his friend, seeing no need to point out the obvious. Jack’s mother-in-law, Janet Auchincloss recalls that, when Lem made the mistake of pointing out another baby, Jack “didn’t speak to him for three days.”

Soon after the baptism of Caroline Bouvier Kennedy three weeks later at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Jack and his favorite carousing buddy, George Smathers, headed off to Havana for the first of two trips there. They were accompanied on one of their Cuban trips by Bill Thompson, who was often around Jack when pleasure was the aim.

The Cuban capital was a corrupt, lascivious place, the product in part of an unholy alliance among President Fulgencio Batista, American business interests, and American mobsters. Jack had seen that the deadly hand of colonialism and neocolonialism was losing its grip all over the world and that America should stand with the rising forces of nationalism. By that measure, Jack should have supported the students at the University of Havana who had been bludgeoned when they protested the increasingly totalitarian regime. Jack, however, joined the millions of Americans visiting Havana to gamble at
the casinos, drink Cuba libres, and, by their presence, help to sustain the dictatorship.

Soon after his arrival, Jack met with Ambassador Earl Smith, a Palm Beach neighbor and the husband of one of his former lovers, Florence Pritchett. Smith was an apologist for Batista, full of tales of how the dictator was America’s stalwart friend and an implacable enemy of the leftist guerrillas in the hills. That conversation and a talk to the embassy staff were the sum total of Jack’s serious work in Cuba.

Jack was not much of a gambler, but Smathers recalled that his friend took great interest in the floor show at the Tropicana Nightclub with its parade of gorgeous showgirls and a statuesque French cabaret singer and actress, Denise Darcel, whom he managed to meet. At the Hotel Nacional’s casino, Jack had his picture taken with the manager, Thomas McGinty, who had once been his father’s bootlegging partner. A picture is evidence of nothing more than that Jack had stood next to a gangster running mob-controlled gambling, but Jack was appearing with distressing frequency among those whose hands he should not even have shaken. In February 1958, for instance, an FBI surveillance team noted that on a speaking engagement in Tucson, Jack had been accompanied to church by a man the FBI identified as a close friend of Joseph Bonnano, a top organized crime figure.

In Havana, Jack and Smathers went to visit Batista. Smathers had an amiable relationship with the Batista regime, but as a potential presidential candidate, Jack was foolish even to be there. Another of his father’s bootlegging partners, Owen Madden, had known Batista early in the dictator’s career in Cuba. Now, by his presence, Jack was giving added credibility to a dictator who kept his tenuous hold on power by a regime of increasing violence, threats, and brutal reprisals.

“Batista had a big uniform on,” Smathers recalled. “And when we went in to see him, he had these two guns that he pulled out of the drawer, and laid them out on the desk so you could see them. And one of them was looking at Jack and one of them was looking at me. I was thinking, ‘You better say the right thing if you want to get out of here in one piece.’ And then he made us go with him out to a great big tent where it was the custom that any mother who had had a baby, they would bring them there and they’d line up, and they had a lot of the priests and bishops and Catholic hierarchy there. And Batista made Jack and me stand up there with him and they’d give us a baby and we’d pass the baby down the line. And everybody would kiss the baby. And about thirty-five babies, forty babies go by. And Jack would look at me like, ‘How many more do you see out there?’ So we sat there one whole afternoon kissing babies. That was fun. If you look back on it. Anyway, we had a lot of fun in Cuba.”

Jack was forever off on his pursuits of pleasure, but he always returned to live within the bounds of family. Joe and Rose had created in their children a family that was like a temple into which no outsider could ever enter and those standing outside looking in could not begin to understand the rituals that took place within its precincts. No wonder, then, that Jack’s sisters were no more interested in marrying young than he was. In the end, they did not so much marry into other families as bring their husbands in as members of the Kennedy clan. The first to marry was thirty-one-year-old Eunice. Her husband, thirty-eight-year-old R. Sargent “Sarge” Shriver, was already at work for Joe at the Merchandise Mart. Sarge came from a distinguished, though now threadbare, Maryland Catholic family. He had gone to Yale University, where he was a baseball star, and served as a navy officer in World War II. He was a man of deep religious and philosophical concerns who tried to live a good dutiful life as a steward of God’s earth. His depth was not always apparent, for he could be a man of tiresome garrulousness with a salesman’s upbeat pitch, who exhausted listeners with his sheer enthusiasm. Sarge liked fine things, silk suits, antique furniture, and first-class restaurants. He was devoted to Eunice, fortunately enough, for over their nearly seven-year courtship she at times treated him more like a hapless retainer than a worthy suitor.

Sarge and Eunice were profoundly religious, and their wedding took place in May 1953 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral with Cardinal Francis J. Spell-man officiating, along with three bishops, four monsignors, and nine priests. At the elegant reception Eunice told the guests, “I found a man who is as much like my father as possible.” This was not true, even if Eunice believed it, but in her mind it was the highest honor she could give a man. She adored her father and was perpetually bewildered when others held him in lesser esteem than she did. Whatever doubts Eunice may have had about her new husband, her marriage to Sarge would prove to be the most successful and deepest of any of the Kennedy marriages.

Pat was not so fortunate. She had always been fascinated by Hollywood. In California she met Peter Lawford, a British-born movie star to whom she became engaged after an acquaintance of scarcely two months. Joe investigated the men whom his daughters dated even casually, and it is one of the unanswerable questions why he did not condemn this marriage before it ever took place. Joe was close enough to Hoover that the FBI director surely could have told Peter’s potential father-in-law of his dossier, which included a 1946 investigation involving “White Slave activities in Los Angeles” and four years later, a call girl’s statement that Peter was “a frequent trick.” Peter was not Catholic, and so the wedding took place in April 1954 at the Church of St. Thomas More in New York City, before about three hundred guests.

Jean married a man more like her father than any of his sons. In Stephen “Steve” Smith’s heritage flowed a rich mixture of politics and business. Steve’s grandfather, William Cleary, had worked alongside his Irish compatriots building the Erie Canal. Cleary saved enough to buy a tugboat and start Cleary Brothers, the family company that employed Steve. Cleary went on to serve three terms in Congress. Twenty-eight-year-old Steve was brash, tough, and rudely charming, an elegant dresser with an eye for women, and he was accepted by Joe and his sons as one of them in a way that the seemingly prissy, morally sensitive Sarge would never be. The couple was married in May 1956 at the same St. Patrick’s Cathedral where Eunice and Sarge had wed, but twenty-eight-year-old Jean settled for a more modest wedding and a far larger wedding gift, an enormous diamond pin.