Kennedy: The Classic Biography (4 page)

I cannot single out any one day as the time I began to understand John Kennedy as a human being. Gradually I discovered that the simplicity of this man’s tastes and demeanor was, while genuine, deceptive as well as disarming. Although he possessed unusual empathy, and a remarkable sense of what was fitting and appropriate for every kind of occasion, he never “put on an act,” feigning anger or joy when he did not feel it. Nevertheless his hidden qualities outnumbered the apparent. The freshman Senator from Massachusetts, with all his “ordinary” ways, was an enormously complex and extraordinarily competent man.

I came to marvel at his ability to look at his own strengths and weaknesses with utter detachment, his candid and objective responses to public questions, and his insistence on cutting through prevailing bias and myths to the heart of a problem. He had a disciplined and analytical mind. Even his instincts, which were sound, came from his reason rather than his hunches. He hated no enemy, he wept at no adversity. He was neither willing nor able to be flamboyant or melodramatic.

But I also learned in time that this cool, analytical mind was stimulated by a warm, compassionate heart. Beneath the careful pragmatic approach lay increasingly deep convictions on basic goals and unusual determination to achieve them. “Once you say you’re going to settle for second,” he said in 1960 regarding the Vice Presidency, “that’s what happens to you in life, I find.” Jack Kennedy never settled for second if first was available.

Many who knew him only casually mistook his refusal to display emotion as a lack of concern or commitment. James McGregor Burns, whose pre-Presidential Kennedy biography and subsequent public statements made much of this same point, irritated the Senator (and his wife) considerably. “Burns seems to feel,” he told me, “that unless somebody overstates or shouts to the top of their voice they are not concerned about a matter.”

The more one knew John Kennedy, the more one liked him. And those of us who came to know him well—though we rarely heard him discuss his personal feelings—came to know the strength and warmth of his dedication as well as his logic. As John Buchan wrote of a friend in John Kennedy’s favorite book,
Pilgrim’s Way
, “He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly but because he felt deeply.” John Kennedy could always look at himself objectively and laugh at himself wholeheartedly—and those two rare gifts enabled him to talk lightly while feeling deeply. As he said himself about Robert Frost, “His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation.”

There were other qualities beneath the surface. Under that seemingly fortunate and gay exterior lay an acute awareness of the most sobering kinds of tragedy. He lived with the memory of a much admired older brother killed in the war and the memory of a sister killed in a plane crash overseas. Add to this a history of illness, pain and injury since childhood, and the fact that another sister was confined to a home for the mentally retarded, and one understands his human sensitivity. No mention was ever made of any of these subjects by the Senator. But his familiarity with tragedy had produced in him both a desire to enjoy the world and a desire to improve it; and these two desires, particularly in the years preceding 1953, had sometimes been in conflict.

His mental processes—so direct and clear-cut in conversation—were not uncomplicated either. He was at that time considered with some disdain to be an intellectual by most Massachusetts politicians and considered with equal disdain to be a politician by most Massachusetts intellectuals. As an undergraduate at Harvard, particularly during his early years, he was thought by one of his tutors (Professor, later Ambassador, Galbraith) to be “gay, charming, irreverent, good-looking and far from diligent.” Yet he graduated
cum laude
, and his Professor of Government, Arthur Holcombe, found him “a very promising pupil. An interest in ideas and in their practical uses…came naturally to him.”

At the age of twenty-three he had expanded his highly regarded senior thesis—representing, he wrote his father, “more
work
than I’ve ever done in my life”—into a distinguished book on
Why England Slept
, a well-reasoned and well-regarded analysis of that nation’s lack of preparedness for the Second World War. At the age of thirty-five he continued to be widely read in history, biography and politics. But he had little interest in abstract theories. He primarily sought truths upon which he could act and ideas he could use in his office.

His reasons for seeking political office were mixed. In subsequent years he would scoff at the magazine writers who explained his career in terms of some single psychological motivation—to prove himself to his father, or to outdo his late older brother, or to preserve an old family custom, or to be the instrument of Irish revenge. He had, in fact, assumed as a youth that politics was barred to him so long as his older brother Joe—more robust and extroverted and nearer to the traditional image of a Massachusetts politician—aspired to that profession. (Perhaps young Jack foresaw the charge that he and his two younger brothers would later hear of “too many Kennedys.”) Early in our acquaintance he told me that he had considered careers as a lawyer, a journalist, a professor of history or political science, or an officer in the Foreign Service. (A brief try at Stanford Business School apparently persuaded him to seek more interesting fields.) But after Joe’s death, he entered the political arena—
not
to take Joe’s place, as is often alleged, not to compete subconsciously with him, but as an expression of his own ideals and interests in an arena thereby opened to him.

His entry was neither involuntary nor illogical. “Everything seemed to point to it in 1946,” he said. Both his grandfathers had held elective office, and as a boy he had accompanied his Grandfather Fitzgerald to political rallies, heard him sing “Sweet Adeline,” and watched him, he once told me, waste too much time afterward with hangers-on while his grandmother waited patiently in the car. An old-time Boston chronicler, Clem Norton, believes young Jack’s first speech was to a group of Fitzgerald’s cronies at a Parker House Hotel gathering. After the boy had been waiting outside for an hour or so, he was brought in, and old John F. picked him up and placed him on a table with the words: “Here’s my grandson, here’s the finest grandson in the world.” To which young John F. responded, “My Grandpa is the finest grandpa in the world.” And the crowd cheered Jack Kennedy’s first public speech.

But, as always, he was listening and learning more than speaking. He listened to his father discuss his own high appointive offices and Roosevelt and the New Deal at the dinner table. At Harvard, on an assignment from Professor Holcombe, he had spent a year reading every utterance of an obscure Republican Congressman. (“The thought,” he later wrote, “that some zealous and critical sophomore is now dissecting my own record in a similar class often causes me some concern.”) As a student and assistant to his father, he had met politicians in England, France and elsewhere.

In the South Pacific he had debated politics with his companions amid the grim toll of international political disorder. In a brief fling at journalism he had observed power politics at Potsdam and the San Francisco UN Conference and covered the British elections.

All this had sharpened his interest in public affairs and public service. “I never would have run for office if Joe had lived,” he said. But Joe had died, a seat was open, and Jack Kennedy knew he wanted to be a participant, not an observer. He was, in many ways, an old-fashioned patriot—not in the narrow nationalistic sense but in his deep devotion to the national interest. He had compared firsthand the political and economic systems of many countries on several continents, and he greatly preferred our own. He shared Buchan’s belief that “democracy…was primarily an attitude of mind, a spiritual testament” and that “politics is still the greatest and the most honorable adventure.”

Although by the time we met in 1953 he had achieved considerable success as a politician, he had no grandiose picture of himself as a chosen savior of mankind from any specific evil. But he did recognize, with his customary objectivity that put both modesty and ego aside, that he possessed abilities, ideals and public appeal which could be combined to help the nation with whatever problems it faced. In all the years that followed, however the problems and his public image may have changed, that private vision of himself and his role never altered.

DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES

When I first began to work for him, it seemed we had nothing in common.

He was worth an estimated ten million dollars, owing primarily to the vast trust funds his father had established many years earlier for each of the nine Kennedy children, and he had been accustomed to the social circles of Palm Beach, New York and the French Riviera. My own background was typical of a middle-income family in a Middle Western city, Lincoln, Nebraska.

I had never been out of the United States and rarely out of the Middle West. But the Senator, as a student, tourist, assistant to his Ambassador father (1938), naval officer (1941-1945), journalist (1941 and 1945) and Congressman (1947-1953), had traveled to every major continent and talked with the presidents and prime ministers, the shopkeepers and scholars, of some thirty-seven countries.

I had been seventeen years old when the Second World War ended. He had been one of its genuine combat heroes. Having pulled strings to be accepted for active duty, when his back might have excused him from service altogether, he inspired and assisted his shipmates to safety when the torpedo boat he commanded, the PT-109, was rammed in two by an enemy destroyer during a night operation in the Solomons. An expert swimmer from his days at Cape Cod and on the Harvard swimming team, he had towed one injured sailor three dark and freezing miles, grasping the man’s life-belt strap in his teeth, although his own back and health had been shattered.

He had attended the exclusive Choate Preparatory School for boys, graduated with honors from Harvard, and studied briefly at Princeton,[17] Stanford and the London School of Economics. My total tuition in six years at the University of Nebraska, from which I received my degree in law, could not have paid for a single year at Harvard.

He was a Catholic—by heritage, habit and conviction—and a friend of Cardinals. I was a Unitarian, a denomination whose absence of dogma and ritual places it at the opposite end of the religious spectrum.

He had never been to the prairie states; I had never been to the New England states. He was thirty-five (born May 29, 1917), and I was twenty-four—although I carefully kept my age a secret from him at the time, and he seemed more amused than astonished when he learned it two years later.

His two grandfathers, the sons of Irish immigrants, had both been prominent and successful politicians in their native Boston; mine were poor immigrants from Denmark and Russia. (He once sent me a postcard from Copenhagen, admiring its beauty and wondering “why the Danes ever emigrated.”)

His father had gained fame and power through skillful, sometimes cynical, operations in the worlds of finance and commerce; and Joseph Kennedy’s 1940 break with the administration of Franklin Roosevelt after holding a series of appointive offices in it had been followed by an increasingly outspoken conservatism, although he remained a registered Democrat. My father, on the other hand, had been a crusading lawyer and reformer—a student on Henry Ford’s “peace ship,” a pioneer for human rights and woman suffrage, the draftsman of Nebraska’s unique unicameral legislature, the founder of its all-public power system, an insurgent Republican Attorney General, an associate of the independent Senator George Norris and a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt—although remaining a registered Republican.

As a Congressman and candidate for the Senate, Jack Kennedy had been privately scornful of what he called the “real liberals,” and he knew and cared comparatively little about the problems of civil rights and civil liberties. He never joined the Americans for Democratic Action and was skeptical of the liberal American Veterans Committee. I had helped organize a Lincoln chapter of the ADA and a local race relations organization, lobbied the Nebraska legislature for a fair employment practices bill and joined in a Supreme Court brief
amicus curiae
on the school desegregation cases.

Although he came to know and understand from his constituents, as a Congressman and candidate, the problems of poor housing and unemployment he had never experienced as a Kennedy, his chief interests were in foreign affairs. Mine were domestic. He asked me one day in 1953—long before national politics was on our horizon—what Cabinet posts would interest me most, if I ever had a choice; and I replied, “Justice, Labor and Health-Education-Welfare.” “I wouldn’t have any interest in any of those,” he said emphatically, “only Secretary of State or Defense.”

Yet all these differences made very little difference in his attitude.
He was not simply a sum of all the elements in his background—a Catholic war veteran from a wealthy Boston family who had graduated from Harvard. His most important qualities he had acquired and developed on his own, and those who attempted to pigeonhole him according to the categories in his case history were sadly mistaken.

Clearly he was proud of his military service, his Purple Heart and his Navy and Marine Corps Medal. As a constant reminder of that brush with death, he kept on his desk preserved in plastic the coconut shell on which he had scratched his message of rescue from that far-off Pacific island. As a young Congressman he had been a leader in the postwar efforts of the more progressive veterans’ organizations to secure passage of a Veterans’ Housing Bill. But he was neither a professional warrior nor a professional veteran. He never boasted or even reminisced about his wartime experiences. He never complained about his wounds. When a flippant high school youth asked him, as we walked down a street in Ashland, Wisconsin, in 1959, how he came to be a hero, he gaily replied, “It was easy—they sank my boat.”