The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (76 page)

Jack did not like being around liberals such as Adlai Stevenson, whose very manhood he doubted. As for professional diplomats, they were little more than eunuchs. “I know how they are at the State Department,” he said. “They’re not queer, but, well, they’re sort of like Adlai.” Jack hated being grouped with liberals like Adlai. “I’d be very happy to tell them I’m not a liberal,” he had declared in the
Saturday Evening Post
several years earlier in an unfortunate lapse into candor. “I never joined the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) or the American Veterans Committee (AVC). I’m not comfortable with those people.”

Jack felt that there was a high prissiness to the Stevensonian liberalism of his day. As he saw it, these men preferred to profess pure virtue among their peers than to have their ideas sullied in the grimy arena of political life. Jack truly liked the sweaty, profane, cynical, street-savvy politicians whom men like Stevenson would walk across the street to avoid. When they had to, these ADA liberals would put out their right hands to shake hands with such politicians while keeping their left hands clamped over their noses. Among those progressives who accepted at face value Jack’s conversion to their political faith, there was the hope that he was more principled than he appeared but as tough as his legend, and that he might make the term “practical liberal” no longer seem an oxymoron.

Jack made a brilliant move in the way he cultivated the academic community in the Harvard-MIT nexus. The engine of contemporary American liberalism was housed in the elite universities; the candidate thought of their professors not only as a source of ideas but also as a powerful group to be co-opted. Among these intellectuals were many men so outsized in their professorial vanity that they could be had for the cheapest of coinages—a request for their advice. He used their ideas much less than they imagined.

The first time Jack met his Academic Advisory Group at the Harvard Club in January, he told them: “I don’t want any of you to worry about the politics of the situation. You don’t have that skill. Forget it. I’ll do that. You just worry about the substance.” The nineteen academicians left the meeting that afternoon largely converted to Jack’s candidacy. They took his stipulation as a compliment. It could be seen equally as a mark of Jack’s belief that
“ideas” were only another category that had to be processed through political realities that he felt the academicians did not truly understand.

Back in Wisconsin, Jack thrust his hand out to factory workers in Milwaukee and stood at the bar in American Legion halls in innumerable towns and cities, and he discussed the farm problem and Social Security. The journalist Stewart Alsop, often a far more perceptive observer than his more celebrated brother Joe, found that in Wisconsin, Jack was “an unexpectedly self-conscious and diffident man.” On one occasion, the journalist watched as a group of bubbly cheerleaders surrounded the candidate to give a cheer that they had spent much time preparing. “Right sock, left sock, rubber-soled shoes; we’ve got the candidate who can’t lose,” they chanted while Jack “wore a rather bemused air, as though he had unexpectedly found himself knee-deep in midgets.” Alsop found Jack at his best as a political pedagogue speaking to youthful audiences. Alsop noted that in one short speech at Wisconsin State College at Whitewater, Jack quoted “Aristotle, George Bernard Shaw, Walter Lippmann, Professor Sidney Hook, President Eisenhower, Thomas Jefferson (twice), John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln.”

T
hese were the best moments, and though there may have been only a few of them, they were plentiful compared to what Bobby faced on his campaign trail. He went to the places Jack would not go, and did the things his brother did not want to do. In Milwaukee, Bobby managed the volunteers and the professional staff, prodding them and pushing them out into the homes and byways of the state.

During the winter campaign, Bobby left Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on a train with Chuck Spalding, traveling to some little burg to give a talk to a group so small and so obscure that his brother couldn’t be bothered. The snow blew up in blizzard force across the frozen countryside. Down and down it fell with such ferocity that the engineer stopped the train in the countryside, still a full nine miles from their destination. While the other passengers sat and waited for rescue, Bobby led Spalding off the train. The two men walked the nine miles through the storm to a meeting hall where probably no one would even show up.

“I don’t think that I could say enough to emphasize that aspect of Bobby,” Spalding reflected. “Like somebody with a coat turned up, bare-headed … just driving from place to place…. You can’t paint that picture too vividly. I haven’t seen it matched by anybody in anything, in any other field…. He was searching this thing out for his brother, and he literally couldn’t rest.”

Young Teddy did not have the tight-jawed, humorless intensity of Bobby, but he too strode manfully into that cold Wisconsin winter in service of Jack’s ambition. One afternoon while Jack was soaking his battered back in a motel bathtub in yet another obscure Wisconsin town, twenty-seven-year-old Teddy was pacing in the living room like a football player trying to get the coach’s attention so that he could enter the fray. Jack, who could hardly look at Teddy without reflecting on the glories of unbridled youth, sent his little brother out to distribute handbills.

This was the most trivial of tasks, but Teddy approached it as if the election might rest on his afternoon endeavors. In this brutal winter, he was not content to place the handbills under frozen windshield wipers but instead opened car doors to set the political tracts on front seats. As he reached into one sedan, a ferocious bulldog jumped up off the floor and clamped his teeth into a meaty section of Teddy’s forearm. He yanked his arm back and looked at the bloody imprint on his arm, a wound that should have sent him scurrying to the emergency room. Instead, Teddy soldiered on, putting the handbills into more cars in the parking lot.

Teddy’s greatest opportunity to show his fidelity to his brother’s cause came on a ski slope outside Madison. He found that the crowd was far more interested in watching the ski jumpers soaring one hundred feet into the air than in listening to Ted’s little speech about his brother. Teddy was a man of endless good humor, and it was probably in that joshing vein that someone shouted out that they would listen to him well and good if he would make one jump himself. What had begun in jest became a deeply serious challenge. Teddy trudged up the slope wearing boots that were not his own, carrying skis he had never used, to attempt a sport that he had never tried or even seen. “I went to the top of the 180-foot jump,” he recalled, “and watched the first three jumps. Then I heard the announcer say, ‘And now at the top of the jump is Ted Kennedy, brother of Senator John F. Kennedy. Maybe if we give him a round of applause, he will make his first jump.’”

Two decades before, Teddy had stood in a similar place, a frightened seven-year-old on the cliff at Cap d’Antibes, knowing that he had to dive into the water or betray his two brothers who stood below shouting at him to jump. No brother stood below now, but the way Teddy felt, Jack might as well have been there. “I wanted to get off the jump, take off my skis, or even go down the side,” he admitted, “but if I did, I was afraid my brother would hear of it. And if he heard of it, I knew I would be back in Washington licking stamps and addressing envelopes for the rest of the campaign.”

Of course, that was not true, and Teddy surely knew it, but this was another of the endless challenges of a Kennedy man. He later told his friends that he was as terrified as he had ever been, but he knew that he had to jump,
watched as he was by a crowd of more than eight thousand. He pushed off and flew into the air, and crashed to the earth seventy-five feet down the runway, as the spectators scattered. Teddy got up, brushed himself off, and gave his speech for his brother.

Teddy was a rousing celebrant of a campaign worker, and as much as he appreciated the women he met along the trail, he had come to love his family life with Joan. “I have never seen Ted so excited as he was on February 27th [1960] when his daughter, Kara, was born,” Joan wrote Lord Beaver-brook. “Ted is away all week traveling around Wisconsin, and now West Virginia, making speeches for Jack. He phones home every night and asks, ‘How is my daughter?’ I love the way he enjoys using those two new words—my daughter!”

T
he Kennedys fanned out across the state in multitudes. Three of Jack’s sisters, Eunice, Pat, and Jean, dusted off their tea sets and arranged a series of coffee klatches in which the good ladies of Wisconsin met the handsome young candidate and other members of his glamorous family. Wherever Humphrey looked, he saw Kennedys. It was like competing against the mythological nine-headed hydra: every time he thought he had sliced off his opponent’s head, there was yet another smiling, garrulous Kennedy greeting voters.

A few days before the April primary, part of the state was inundated by ugly anti-Catholic literature. The pamphlets were sent primarily to Catholics, many of whom had seemed likely to vote for the Minnesota senator. The recipients were outraged by this slander of their faith. It did not occur to many of them to ask why Humphrey, that most genial and unprejudiced of men, would countenance such a foul assault. The pamphlets were enough to convince all but the illiterate that they had best vote for Jack rather than his bigoted opponent. Humphrey’s people cried foul, and the conservative
National Review
charged rightly that Bobby’s associate, Paul Corbin, had been behind the campaign. And behind Corbin stood Bobby, who, in the words of Edwin O. Guthman, his press secretary, “was willing to do anything to get Jack elected.”

Jack won the primary by a resounding 56 percent of the vote, but he had done so poorly in the heavily Protestant regions of the state that his victory was not overwhelming enough to scratch Humphrey from the race. The Minnesota senator vowed to continue on to the West Virginia primary, even though he had only a few coins in his coffers. There was no better champion of the working man and the poor than Hubert Humphrey, and the mountainous state was full of working men, unemployed, and forgotten poor, many of them tucked up in Appalachian hollows. West Virginia was
95 percent Protestant, and if the electorate voted their religion as much as they had in Wisconsin, Humphrey had a good chance of winning. For Jack, these same demographics created a very different logic. If he won, the Democratic presidential nomination most likely would be his. If he lost, he would prove what his detractors had argued all along, that a Catholic was simply unelectable.

Jack had an added disadvantage in this vital race. While Humphrey was the most voluble of politicians, Jack was losing his voice. It was so bad that as he flew across the state in the
Caroline,
the campaign plane that his father had contributed to the campaign at nominal cost, he communicated by writing notes on pieces of paper. “My poll … in W.V. showed me
41%[,]
HH … 43–44%—rest undecided—but the rest are Protestants,” he wrote on a pad of paper. “The reason I think we should do well if we get
over
40% is
UMW
[United Mine Workers] will get word out
Byrd
is getting
meaner.
The fundamentalists are getting active [preachers]. To drag out 50% under these conditions seems optimistic.”

J
ack had a serious personal matter on his hands during the crucial West Virginia primary. His personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, put in her private files a handwritten, two-page letter dated April 8, 1960. Three days later his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, who has no memory of this incident, sealed the letter while being witnessed by his assistant. The letter stated:

I talked today with bobby baker [a top Lyndon Johnson aide]. He informed me that three weeks ago an attorney he knew named Mickey Wiener from Newark (?) Hudson Co. called him. Wiener stated that if Sen. Johnson would give $ 150,000 to the wife of “a well known movie actor” (baker did not know her name or who the actor was) she would file an affidavit that she had had an affair with me. Baker said he thought it was blackmail, and did not inform Johnson of the matter. He did tell Joe Alsop that he was concerned about an attempt at blackmail of me and did not go with the details….

John Kennedy April 8th

In his sexual adventures, Jack had begun a descent into provinces he once would never have visited. He had indeed seen a woman who was married to “a well known movie actor.” She was Alicia Darr, the former wife of the French actor Edmund Purdom. Darr had apparently first met Jack in 1951,
when, according to FBI reports, she was running a “house of prostitution” in Boston. Darr moved to New York City, where, the FBI said, she rendered the same services but with the highest class of client. Darr made the transition from whore to mistress to wife of a movie star. Her marriage failed, however, and in the spring of 1960, Darr was in such financial trouble that she had been jailed for cashing bad checks, according to European papers.

Clark Clifford, a powerful Washington lawyer and lobbyist, recalled that in the spring of 1960 he had been asked by Jack to deal with a matter so serious that “public knowledge could have blown the Kennedy nomination out of the water.” If this was indeed the matter, whatever Clifford may have done to end this threat, there is no evidence that Darr blackmailed Jack.

T
he Kennedys were in what they considered the most difficult, most crucial campaign of their lives, and they threw every weapon they had into the fray. Politicians trade in whatever commodity is cheapest to them, be it access, votes, promises, flattery, or money. The Kennedys were wealthiest in money, and they spread their lucre around West Virginia in large amounts, mainly in cash and doubly in silence.

The sheriffs controlled both the law and politics, and they were the ones whose palms were most generously greased. One of Joe’s rich friends, Eddie Ford, got up from his table at Chicago’s Statler Hotel, where he held court daily, and drove down to the Mountaineer State in a big Cadillac with Illinois license plates, carrying with him a suitcase full of money. “He’d pick up a sheriff who was powerful,” recalled Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, “and he’d say, ‘I’m a businessman from Chicago, and I’m on my way to Miami. I think this young Kennedy would be great for the country, and I’d like to give you three thousand dollars to see if you can help him. I’ll be coming back this way, and I’ll be happy to give you a bonus if you’re able to carry the town.’”