The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (73 page)

“When Ted told Jack about the ‘bug,’ Jack was really embarrassed,” Joan said. “Jack blushed scarlet when he found out.” Jack had been doubly careless, careless in the words he had spoken, and careless in the way he had left them lying around as he did his clothes, leaving them there for somebody else to pick up.

After their short honeymoon, the newlyweds moved to the house in Charlottesville where Teddy would be finishing up his last year in law school. Teddy was a wealthy young man, but he figured that being married might save him some money. “I do remember that when I moved into the house. Ted dismissed the maid!” Joan recalled. “I had to clean, cook, do the laundry, and I really learned a lot. It was fun—for a while!!”

Teddy’s parents were correct in thinking that marriage would bring a new discipline to their youngest son. “Cadillac Eddie” could not go roaring through life any longer. He ended up building his own house on Squaw Island near the family compound in Hyannis Port so that he and Joan could join the rest of the family there. In Virginia, Teddy settled down to a more sedate life as a married student, and he and Joan developed a loving relationship. He poured himself into preparing for the school’s prestigious moot court contest in which he and Tunney argued a mock case in front of a distinguished panel of jurists that included Stanley Reed, a Supreme Court justice, and Lord Kilmuir, lord chancellor of England. There were forty-nine other teams of ambitious attorneys-to-be, but as most of the Kennedy family sat in the hall, Teddy’s voice soared above the words and logic of all the others, and he and Tunney won the competition.

Upon graduation in June 1959, Joan thought that her husband would
now have time for his wife. But Teddy secreted himself away in Jack’s old Boston apartment on Bowdoin Street to cram for the law boards.

When that hurdle was passed, Teddy was off again to work in the most important endeavor of his life—helping Jack win the Democratic presidential nomination.

19
“A Sin Against God”

O
n the first day of April 1959, Jack sat outside on the veranda of the Kennedy home in Palm Beach outlining a plan to win the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. Around him were most of the closest associates who would carry out his strategy. First of all, there was thirty-three-year-old Bobby, who, wherever he alighted or however much he paced back and forth, sat always at his brother’s right hand. Jack’s father was there as well, and though seventy-year-old Joe appeared at times to have reached an old man’s slippered years, he could still rise up and speak with a force and perception that guided everyone, including his eldest surviving son.

Jack was forty-one-years old, on track to become the youngest elected president in American history, and all of his associates resonated with youth as well. Thirty-one-year-old Steve Smith was the other family member there that afternoon. Steve may only have been a brother-in-law, but unlike Peter Lawford and Sarge Shriver, he was so much accepted within the inner sanctum that he had nearly become another Kennedy brother. Steve had a charm and wit that rarely left him, and these qualities were valued by Jack and Bobby as much as his political savvy.

Thirty-year-old Sorensen had been anticipating this moment since the day he arrived in Jack’s senatorial office. He was a crucial presence too, affecting a courtier’s subtle airs, dropping his words into the dialogue with perfect acumen. Thirty-five-year-old Kenny O’Donnell was also present, as brash and caustic as ever, with his flitting, penetrating Irish-American eyes. There was yet another pair of shrewd Irish-American political eyes there that day; they belonged to Larry O’Brien, who had moved down from Massachusetts to join the operation full-time. Louis Harris, the pollster, had been invited as

well; he was decidedly a Kennedy pollster, for he always seemed to have results more favorable to Jack than his colleagues. The other person present was Robert Wallace, Jack’s legislative aide.

Although the campaign was not yet organized, Sorensen noted later that the meeting had a tone of “quiet confidence.” As he saw it, these men had “a job to be done,” and they were the people to do it. That confidence colored the whole gathering and emanated from the candidate himself.

Jack’s potential competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination all had more distinguished legislative or political careers than he did, but he had taken each man’s measure and found that the nearer he got to them the taller he stood. As Jack saw it, the distinguished-looking Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri had the gravity of a helium balloon. Senator Lyndon Johnson was made of weightier stuff, but he was a southerner, and that was an albatross that even the adroit Lyndon could not wrest from around his neck. Senator Hubert Humphrey was simply too liberal; his political medicine kit was full of purgatives and medicines too strong for most Americans. As for Adlai Stevenson, twice his party’s nominee, the man was a proven loser.

To win, Jack knew that he could not step gingerly through the primaries but would have to run boldly forward among the people, many of whom now barely knew his name. Jack was a brilliant geographer of America’s political landscape. He grasped the nuances of political America the way his grandfather Honey Fitz had understood the world of Boston’s North End. Non-Catholic staff members would have to be the ones to go out to certain states. Bobby, for his part, would do a series of speeches in the South, where he was being lauded for his attack on corrupt unions. Jack’s staff had already amassed a file of fifty thousand five-by-seven cards listing the names of crucial people in all fifty states. Jack had met most of these people. The cards listed the name by which he called them, where he had met them, and why they were important. In the age before widespread use of computers, this card collection was a treasure unique to Jack’s candidacy.

Jack went on ticking off each state, naming its Democratic leaders and setting out a unique approach to take there. He was conceding nothing, not even Texas to its native son, Lyndon Johnson. As Jack talked on, his father interjected, “I want you to read Judge Landis’s column.” Joe’s comment was an intrusion that no one else at the meeting would have made. Jack took the paper, tucked it under his arm, and went on with his state-by-state litany. Landis, his father’s friend, had helped Jack on many occasions with ideas and articles, but there was plenty of time to read the material. “Give that back to me!” Joe exclaimed. “You’ll just lose it!”

Joe was not the presence at this meeting that he had been during earlier
campaigns, and it rankled him that Jack was not listening closely enough to his counsel. Joe was, if anything, even more determined that he would have a major role in Jack’s victory. Later, in the study, Joe affirmed the one role that was truly his. “I’m going to tell you, we’re going to win this thing,” he said authoritatively. “And I don’t care if it takes every dime we’ve got. We’re going to win this thing!”

Bobby turned to his father. “Now wait a minute, Dad,” Bobby laughed. “There are others in the family.”

The one new face in the Monday and Friday strategy meetings in Jack’s Senate offices was Joe Miller, a political operative from the Northwest. Miller had worked on a string of Senate Democratic victories from Oregon to Wisconsin. He had a cocky, joshing air that did not always sit well with Bobby. These meetings had the levity of a scene in the counting room at a Las Vegas casino. Bobby was obsessed with the campaign, and those like Joe Miller who kidded around were squandering time and attention and deserved to be shunted aside.

Jack, however, liked the man he called “Smiling Joe,” a brusque former football player with the brush-cut hair of an army private. Miller traveled with Jack on a campaign jaunt to Hawaii in July. On Saturday evening at Honolulu’s Princess Kaiulani Hotel, Jack was having a meeting with a group of local leaders to discuss the future of Hawaii, but the ever-present Sorensen and the other aides were missing. He had still not shown up the next morning.

“Where the hell are they?” Jack fumed. Miller explained that some of the aides had met young women.

“I brought them here to hunt delegates, not to hump hula girls!” Jack exclaimed. Jack’s aides identified so profoundly with their candidate that they, for the most part, adopted his sexual habits as well, a practice that on this particular Sunday morning Jack found less than a compliment.

Miller had a tight working relationship with labor union leaders and Democratic Party principals in the West. In September he headed off on a month-long trip, starting with the AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco, and then visiting ten western states, all paid for by the Kennedy patriarch.

When Miller returned to Washington, he prepared several memos. The detailed, seven-page document addressed to Bobby was a frank rendering of the situation with the labor movement. Miller had been startled at the intensity of the hostility toward Jack among many union people. He detailed the reasons labor leaders mistrusted Jack, one of which was that they had misread his role on the labor bill. Jack’s work on the McClellan Committee “created perhaps understandable resentments in the labor movement.” As a result,
working people and their leaders were angry and felt that Jack was “too rich, too slick, and dominated by his family … not one of the boys in the Truman manner.”

Miller dictated a state-by-state report on his trip, seeking ways to change the perception of Jack among labor people. Then he typed another memo himself, giving the only copy to Jack’s prim secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, a woman who prided herself on her absolute discretion when it came to the senator from Massachusetts. Miller told Lincoln that this sensitive document was for the senator’s eyes only. The memo dealt with the single most potentially damaging problem he had encountered.

“A remarkable revelation emerged from my 100-plus dialogues,” Miller wrote in an unpublished memoir. “Virtually everyone I talked to mentioned Kennedy’s sex life as a barrier to his nomination. I was taken aback. Not that I hadn’t heard a story or two myself. Nevertheless, in all my travels, political and social contacts with him, I had seen nothing to indicate that he was a philanderer. He was all business, the business of winning the Democratic presidential nomination.”

Miller concluded that this was a serious enough matter that it could blow Jack’s candidacy away. In his memo he said that the only effective way to end the rumors was for Jack to keep Jackie at his side on all his trips.

Within a day or two an angry Sorensen took Miller to lunch at the Methodist Building cafeteria. “You have been participating in some ugly talk about the senator’s private life,” Sorensen raged. “We will not dignify scurrilous gossip by acknowledging it. I am speaking not only for myself, but also for the senator and Bob Kennedy. Such talk will not be tolerated.”

Miller was stunned. He was not saying that the stories were true. He did know that Jack’s campaign should know about the widespread rumors. He railed back at Sorensen as vigorously as the aide condemned him, and when they left that afternoon neither man had backed off. Miller, though, found that he was not invited to an important strategy session at Hyannis Port, and from then on his role in the campaign diminished.

J
ack had received a series of the most explicit possible warnings that he simply had to rein in his sexual conduct. For the past two and a half years he had sat on a committee that in its investigation of corruption in the labor movement showed how mobsters seduced vulnerable politicians and businesspeople with money, favors, or women, slowly enveloping them in a web of deceit. His own behavior in Havana and elsewhere had advertised his predilections to those best able to exploit them.

Already, in March 1959, Jack feared there might be a wiretap on one of
his telephones. By then he was having to deal with an obsessed Georgetown matron, Florence Kater, who had rented an apartment to his secretary, Pamela Turnure. Turnure was a sensuous version of Jackie, a provocative, sumptuous presence among the dowdy professional women who largely peopled Jack’s office. Kater had taken a picture of a man she said was Jack, with his hand over his face, exiting Turnure’s Georgetown residence at one o’clock in the morning. She also claimed to have a tape recording of their activities in the apartment. Kater charged that in July 1958 Jack had confronted her and her husband, threatening that if the couple did not stop bothering him, Leonard Kater would lose his government job. In the months since then, Florence Kater wrote that James Mclnerney, Jack’s attorney, had visited her seven times. She had in her possession what appeared to be a signed note from Mclnerney dated January 24, 1959, when she handed the attorney copies of the photo and tape.

It was a different time in American journalism, and no newspaper or magazine printed a word of the woman’s charges or what Kater purported to be a photo of Jack “racing like a scared turkey bird from his girlfriend’s house in his own self-incriminating pose as he tries to run out of camera range.” She was, however, an obsessed woman who seemed likely to go far to expose Jack’s alleged philandering.

Jack needed no more flashbulbs going off in the Washington night to alert him to the imminent danger of exposure. And now Miller had given him a memo about the ubiquitous rumors. The political operative was a forceful, highly opinionated man who could have been faulted for setting forth his truths unshorn of nuance. But Miller was no liar, and that Sorensen so quickly silenced him sent a signal that others should tiptoe lightly outside Jack’s bedroom door and keep their mouths tightly clamped.

Jack believed that he could get away with his conduct without costs or consequences. He felt that others could do the same. His friend Chuck Spalding’s marriage was full of the kind of volatility that never surfaced in Jack’s relationship with Jackie. “Here comes the agony and the ecstasy,” Jack whispered to Chuck as his wife approached. “Why don’t you do what I do? Why get a divorce?”

What Jack accepted as a civilized solution was emotionally impossible to the Spaldings, who saw it as institutionalizing the rankest hypocrisy. As Spalding looked back on his long friendship with the Kennedys, he saw that Joe’s sexual conduct was a malady that he inflicted on his sons, causing them damage even if they could not see the ravages of their conduct. “It just tears at the human fundamentals,” Spalding reflected. “When I first saw Jack—coming from a Catholic family—it was good to see some of that animal freedom.
Some of it was like a soldier home from the war who has run into normal life. How many people think they can take Gloria Swanson on their vacation and make it work? But that doesn’t mean others can make it work. It left the Kennedy men with vulnerability in that area. It was like a contagious disease.”