True Compass (13 page)

"Boys, you've got to climb," Auguste called back. "You've got to get up to the top of the mountain."
Or perish
, was the unspoken implication.

I owe my life to Tunney. He looked around and spotted another route--a couloir, a corridor formed by large rocks. John managed to wedge himself in between the rocks and move his shoulders upward, while keeping his knees braced against the sides. In this way he managed the fifteen or twenty feet to where Auguste waited. I studied his movements carefully and then emulated them, which is why I am not hanging out there to this day.

On the far side of the peak was a funicular. We took it back down, and I found myself wondering why we hadn't taken it up as well. I made my mind up that was one sport I would never, ever get into.

The next day we climbed the Matterhorn.

Back at the University of Virginia, in the classroom, I threw myself into the study of law as never before. In this pursuit, as in our travel and good times, John and I sparked one another. We teamed up for the classic law school exercise known as moot court. The competition in this extracurricular drill consisted of seventy-five teams, with debates structured as tennis tournament eliminations. The process spanned nearly the whole of my three years at UVA.

"Free Speech" was the issue at hand, and John and I took the more liberal position. We had to write briefs that were the product of enormous research. To prepare for our oral arguments, we practiced against a team that we would not meet in the pairings, but which held the opposing view. By the time we reached the semifinals, the quality of competition had skyrocketed. The finals were in May 1959, and Bobby--who'd been through early rounds of the competition when he was in law school--and my sister Pat came down from New York to watch.

We had worked hard to get to this point in the competition and every nerve was on end. The pressure was only heightened by the caliber of our judges: retired Supreme Court justice and former solicitor general of the United States Stanley Reed; the former solicitor general and attorney general who had famously cross-examined Hermann Goring at the Nuremberg trials, the lord chancellor of the United Kingdom David Maxwell Fyfe, the Earl of Kilmuir; and U.S. Court of Appeals judge for the Fourth Circuit Clement Haynsworth (ten years into the future, as a senator, I would vote against Judge Haynsworth's nomination by Richard Nixon to the Supreme Court). Our opposing team was led by Wayne Lustig, a silvertongued southerner who made what even John and I considered an A-plus argument. Yes, the pressure was definitely on.

In the most exciting and rewarding moment of my life to that time, and among those of all time, John and I were declared the winners of the moot court competition. We were overjoyed.

Another great tradition at Virginia Law School was the Student Legal Forum, and I was in charge of getting distinguished legal and political figures to come and speak to the students. I was successful at getting some real stars to visit the forum, because I had an ally in Jack. He helped us get Hubert Humphrey, who came down and was captivating. A thousand students showed up to hear him, which pleased Jack enormously when he heard it. We brought in Edward Bennett Williams, who was just then defending Jimmy Hoffa in court. We tried to sandbag Williams on whether Hoffa even had a tenable defense, but he blew us out of the water in about thirty seconds. We had the great union leader Walter Reuther, who was dynamic and spellbinding. We had Victor Riesel, the hard-nosed antiracketeering labor columnist, who just a few months earlier had been blinded by sulfuric acid thrown into his eyes by an assailant on a Manhattan sidewalk. Supreme Court justice William Brennan was another one of our incredible speakers.

I still wince a little when I recall the time we invited Prescott Bush, George Bush's father and George W.'s grandfather, a distinguished senator from Connecticut and an enormously gracious, dignified person. But not exactly a big marquee name at the University of Virginia Law School. As the date of his appearance drew near, we saw the reverse of what usually happened with ticket requests: instead of increasing, the demand grew less and less. We'd drawn a thousand spectators for Humphrey and eight hundred for Williams. But with Prescott Bush, as the reality of the numbers started to sink in, we realized we'd need only about four or five hundred seats. Then we thought we'd better get down to two hundred.

We ended up listening to Prescott Bush in a small room with seventy-five chairs. But he was incredibly pleasant. We had dinner afterward--and, like most speakers, he was much more interesting at the dinner.

Several weeks later, as I was driving Jack to some appointment or other in Boston, my brother reached over and honked the horn. He pointed to another car. "I know who that is," Jack exclaimed. "That's Pres Bush!" In the passenger seat was his son, George Herbert Walker Bush. Both cars stopped, and we all got out and yakked it up. The Bushes were headed up to Maine. George Bush mentioned to me that his father had told him about his visit to Virginia Law School and "the nice young Kennedy boy." I had privately disagreed with some of Prescott Bush's views, but I had a cordial personal relationship with him--just as I would have with the next two generations of Bushes.

After the family's traditional Thanksgiving dinner in Hyannis Port in November 1956, Jack and Joe Sr. left the table and repaired to the study near the living room for a private talk. When they emerged, grinning, arms around each other's shoulders, the rest of us learned that Jack had decided to run for president in 1960.

Their talk apparently had been a kind of moot court in reverse: Jack citing all the reasons why he should not run (he was Catholic, only thirtynine, none of the party's leaders had indicated any support for such a move), and our father countering each one. Jack would not announce his decision until early in the election year. But a charge of energy ran through our family at once. Getting Jack reelected to the Senate, and then helping him become president--this had become our mission.

In October 1957, I got "aced out," courtesy of Jack, of a chance to see a professional football game, and as a result ended up meeting my future wife. The occasion was a Sunday afternoon talk that Jack "suggested" I give at the dedication ceremony for the Kennedy Physical Education Building at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart. Our family had donated the building in memory of Kathleen. My mother, Eunice, and Jean had all attended Manhattanville College, as had the former Ethel Skakel.

I had spent Saturday night in Dad's New York apartment with Jack. Giving a talk at a women's college was the last thing on my mind. The Washington Redskins were in town to play the 3-1 Giants, and Dad and I had planned to go see the game on Sunday. It was Jack, not me, who'd originally agreed to give the talk. But when my brother showed up at the apartment and saw me there he said, "Oh! Dad, since Teddy's here, why don't we let him do it? I want to go to the football game."

I didn't think that was a terribly good idea. I'd looked forward to seeing that game. Jack held his ground: it was going to be a great game, and
he
wanted to see it. Our father said, "Fine. Why don't you two work it out?" We worked it out, and Jack went to the football game.

I went to the college with my sister Jean. I gave the speech. It was successful enough, I suppose. After my remarks that Sunday afternoon, Margo Murray, a friend of Jean's, took me by the hand and introduced me to an exquisitely beautiful young student named Joan Bennett, who had just turned twenty-one. Jean was with Margo for the introduction, but she had not met Joan before either. I learned later that Joan had done some modeling and was a gifted piano player, which earned her a lot of points with Mother.

I definitely wanted to see more of Joan. I thought fast, and talked Margo and Joan into driving me to the airport for my flight back to Virginia. Joan and I hit it off in the car. I took her out every time I came up to New York, and almost before we knew it we were on a fast track toward marriage. The family was thrilled. She was beautiful, she was fun, and she played piano duets with Mother. It was time for me to think about settling down and getting married, and Joan seemed like a perfect match.

As for that football game--Jack had the great pleasure of watching the Giants get buried by the Redskins, 31-14.

PART TWO

Brotherhood

Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Library

CHAPTER SIX

Kennedy for President

1958-1960

Jack's reelection to the Senate in 1958 was never in serious question. He was skyrocketing now as a public figure. The camera emphasized his youth, his elegance, his good looks, his quick wit. But while his reelection to the Senate was not in doubt, the
margin
of victory was very important. Jack's presidential ambitions in 1960 were now a given, at least within the family and closest advisers. That required that every public step along the way be marked with as much evidence of achievement as possible.

A great deal of Jack's charm, of course, was substantive, a factor of his unconcealed principles. His political candor was as fresh and bold as his style, and like his style, it won over audiences who might have resented it in any other candidate. He'd drawn a standing ovation in Jackson, Mississippi, after a talk in which he endorsed school desegregation; he won the support of the governor of Kansas even though he had earlier voted against high farm price supports. He accepted speaking dates before southern Protestant ministers and the American Jewish Congress in New York.

Bobby had managed Jack's first Senate campaign, but now he was absorbed as chief counsel for the Senate Labor Rackets Committee under Chairman John L. McClellan. His lacerating exchanges with the powerful Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa were earning him national attention. So Jack asked me to run his campaign. I relished the opportunity. I was still a year from law school graduation and was courting Joan, but the chance to help my brother, while at the same time getting a baptism in electoral politics, was irresistible.

So after my final examinations in June, I hurried home to Massachusetts and joined the senator's reelection team. Jack named me campaign manager, though I was glad to have such able hands as Larry O'Brien, Kenny O'Donnell, and Jean's husband, Steve Smith, to show me the ropes. Here were three immensely talented and loyal political professionals at the core of a group whose names would forever be associated with that of President John F. Kennedy. "A mixture of amateurs, professionals, eggheads and hardheads," the
New York Times
admiringly called them.

Larry O'Brien was an army veteran, a former union president at age twenty-two, and a Democratic operative when he came aboard my brother's 1950 Senate campaign. Like Bobby, Larry was passionate about organization. The slightly younger Kenny O'Donnell was also an army vet who was Bobby's roommate at Harvard after the war. A principled and politically sensitive man, he, along with Larry, remained at Jack's side through the presidential years as a special assistant and member.

Steve Smith was more than a brother-in-law; he was like a brother in our family. A soft-spoken and elegant man, Steve had been an air force lieutenant before joining his father's vast New York tugboat and barge empire, Cleary Brothers, Inc. An eventual heir to the fortune, he developed a genius for financial management--eventually overseeing the Kennedy family's investment operations--as well as for personnel supervision. Steve would go on to manage Bobby's Senate campaign, and my own.

A fourth member of the team was Ted Sorensen, who was virtually inseparable from Jack. (The two of them toured fifty states together between 1956 and 1959.) Ted had signed on to be the new Senator Kennedy's legislative aide in 1953, as an earnest, horn-rimmed twenty-five-year-old just a couple of years out of Nebraska. And there was Pierre Salinger. Jack had recently hired the dapper thirty-three-year-old journalist and veteran press officer on Bobby's recommendation. Pierre had impressed Bobby as an investigator for the Senate Labor Rackets Committee. He would serve as press secretary to Jack.

I took Joan to the house at Hyannis Port for a week in June to get her acquainted with my mother and father. And then we all set to work getting Jack reelected.

We held our first strategy meeting at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. All the volunteers assembled in a meeting room upstairs, and Jack looked at me and said, "All right, Teddy--now you go on up and give them a speech. Talk about the organization and what you're going to do in the campaign, and then I'll say a few words." I'd never given a campaign strategy talk before. I said, "What exactly do you think I ought to say?" Jack ticked off several details about how he thought the organization should go, and then sent me up. I guess I did okay. Then Jack spoke, and, as usual, charmed and inspired everyone.

Our biggest challenge was overcoming the apathy of people who thought Jack was a shoo-in for reelection. (He probably was, but as I say, the
margin
was what counted.) And so we focused on generating turnout. We set up telephone banks and sent volunteers out for door-to-door efforts. I shuttled weekly between Massachusetts and my law classes at the University of Virginia.

We stumbled upon some unexpected controversies. One of them reflected the ancient tensions between the Irish and the Italians in Massachusetts, still intense in the late 1950s.

We'd come up with a campaign slogan for Jack, simple yet geared to our goal of a large turnout. It was: "Make your vote count. Vote Kennedy." We discovered that it wasn't so simple--certainly not in the Italian community. A group of Italian-American leaders from around the state converged on Boston and demanded a meeting with me at my brother's headquarters at the Bellevue. They sat down at a conference table opposite me and said, "This is an insult to Italians!"

I told them I didn't understand. "What we're trying to do is say, 'Make your vote count. Your vote counts for Senator Kennedy in 1958 and it's also a vote, really, for 1960. Your vote is important. Make your vote count.'"

They said, "No, no. The way we interpret it is that the vote counts if it's for an Irishman, but it doesn't count if it's for an Italian. [The Italian they had in mind was Vincent J. Celeste.] So therefore it's directed at us, and we resent it."

Pretty soon, the head of every Italian-American organization in the state was denouncing the slogan. We had to tear up all the literature and change it. I mentioned the crisis to Jack, who was as baffled as I. "I don't know. We'll work it out."

We worked it out by calling Dad up from the Cape.

We all sat down with one of his friends, an advertising man named John Dowd. Dowd worked at it all day long, trying out slogan after slogan. He was wearing a pinstriped suit, as I recall, with white checks on it, and he had suspenders and a mustache that moved when he talked, and dark, very groomed hair. He had five different pencils and pads of paper. He'd write out a slogan and hand it to Dad, and Dad would look at it and say, "No, that doesn't work, Dowd. That's not good. You can do better than that. That's not good." And then Dad went across the street to Bailey's restaurant and had his lunch, a chocolate soda. That's all he'd eat. He loved ice cream, but he didn't want to gain weight, so he had just this one chocolate soda.

He came back in half an hour. "How are you doing now, Dowd?" Dowd wasn't doing so well. By this time he was perspiring, and the dye in his hair was starting to run. After several more hours of frantic scrawling, he handed Dad yet another slip of paper with yet another slogan: "He has served Massachusetts with distinction." I thought that one, frankly, to be a little like a Schenley's whiskey ad, but my father liked it. So that became the slogan. "Kennedy. He has served Massachusetts with distinction."

One person not ready to agree that Jack had served Massachusetts with distinction was Vincent Celeste. Celeste may have understood that he had little hope of winning, but he and his people were not about to go down without a fight. I recall the night that he took the fight, almost literally, to Jack's window.

Jack had rented an apartment at 122 Bowdoin Street in Boston. This was the subject of much amusement in the family because so many Kennedys were registered to vote with that as their address. It was a small apartment, but Jack and Jackie, Bobby and Ethel, and I were all registered out of this small apartment.

Jack loved to take his bath at 122 Bowdoin to soak his back and refresh himself before evening campaign events. This was the time he valued the most in his day, in certain ways. He was then at his most relaxed and funniest, and he came away with a sense of purpose and seriousness. I always sat in the bathroom with him as he called out instructions and asked questions.

Just outside the apartment was a fairly large parking lot. One evening, while Jack was in the tub, I heard noises down there, went to the living room, and looked out the window. I saw eight or ten people lighting a bonfire in the parking lot--a sizable bonfire. Then someone began to speak at the top of his voice. It was Vincent Celeste.

Jack called to me to ask what in the world was going on. I said, "Vincent Celeste is having a rally." "What's he saying?" "He says you're a phony, your supporters are phonies, and he's going to whip you."

That caught Jack's interest. As Celeste ranted on, he kept asking from the tub, "What's he saying now?" And I'd repeat what Celeste was saying. I could see it was getting under my brother's skin, even though there were only about forty people in the crowd. But then some of the press started to show up, and so of course it became a big deal, especially to my brother. It was funny and ridiculous, and Jack laughed--but it really did get under his skin.

In the election, we got the margin we'd hoped for, and then some. Jack defeated Celeste by 874,000 votes, garnering nearly 75 percent of the votes cast, the most lopsided victory in the state's history.

On November 29, 1958, in St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in Bronxville, New York, Virginia Joan Bennett and I were married. Cardinal Spellman performed the ceremony. Jack was my best man; Joan was escorted by her father, Harry Wiggin Bennett, and her sister Candace was her maid of honor. My sisters were among the attendants. Among the ushers were Bobby, Joe Gargan, Lem Billings, my law school classmates John Tunney and John Goemans, and my Harvard classmates Claude Hooton and Dick Clasby. My father and mother and Mrs. Bennett were looking on.

Joan wore a white satin wedding gown and carried a bouquet of white roses. My wedding gift to her was a clover-shaped pin that had belonged to my mother.

We weren't able to take an extended honeymoon because of my law school schedule. We made up for that later. For the short time we had available, we accepted the invitation of Lord Beaverbrook to spend our honeymoon at his beautiful estate in the Bahamas. Since his time in London, my father had remained friendly with Beaverbrook, the imperious and eccentric publisher of the
Daily Express
and other British newspapers. The truth is that Joan and I hadn't expected to be quite so friendly with him on our honeymoon. When we arrived at his estate, he didn't seem to know quite what to do with us. He certainly didn't make himself scarce. We ate every meal together. For him--and therefore for us--that meant a baked potato, and only a baked potato, for lunch. Dinner was not much better. We were served exactly one daiquiri apiece before dinner and then something that was definitely not standout cuisine. Our host recommended several times that we visit a nearby little island that was completely deserted. That sounded tantalizing, but somehow his lordship never got around to providing transportation there. And so we spent all our time on his estate. We got to know it... well.

I graduated from law school the following June, and Joan and I finally took that deferred honeymoon vacation, a five-week trip through Chile and Argentina. We were in some of the most challenging skiing country in the world. Joan was in the early stages of her pregnancy with Kara, and was not a big skier, but she did not hesitate when I offered to help her to learn in the Chilean Andes. She grew adept in an amazingly short time. We trekked on southeastward to Argentina, traveling by riverboat and in the backs of trucks over bumpy roads, and staying at inns that had no heat. Finally we succumbed to a little luxury at a beautiful resort in Bariloche, Patagonia. We visited Buenos Aires, and then returned home, where we were massing to launch Jack's presidential campaign.

That campaign started in earnest after a meeting at Hyannis Port after Labor Day weekend 1959. It was decided that Bobby would return to his role as the overall coordinator of Jack's campaign. Steve Smith would set up the administrative and financial operations. Larry O'Brien would supervise the state primaries. Only sixteen of those existed at that time, and thus a great deal of influence over delegates was still wielded by the political establishment in each state.

Every state was critical, because Jack's nomination was a long shot. Even had he not been young, Catholic, and relatively unknown, he'd still have had to contend with Democratic party lions such as Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, Stuart Symington of Missouri, and Mayor Robert Wagner of New York. Only Jack and Humphrey actually entered most of the Democratic primaries, and they yielded only 584 out of a total of 1,521 votes that would be cast at the convention. Thus several other hopefuls were focused on courting party leaders around the country for delegates. (Bobby predicted early on that LBJ, not Humphrey, would emerge as Jack's main rival, and he was right.) Nor would the perils decrease should he survive the primaries and emerge as the party's nominee: public opinion polls showed that even though Democrats were in good favor, Jack would face very stiff competition in the general election against the likes of Nelson Rockefeller or Richard Nixon.

I was assigned to campaign in the eleven western states. I'd volunteered for those states--and in the back of my mind I always kept alive the possibility of moving out there after finishing school. Joan and I had seriously discussed living in California after my sister Pat urged us to come, but we vetoed it in the end because Dad didn't think too much of the idea.

And so I never became a westerner. Not officially. But the months I spent barnstorming the Rocky Mountain states for Jack turned out to be a series of action-packed escapades that featured bucking broncos, coldeyed strangers with six-shooters drawn, hair-raising close calls in small airplanes, and even the prospect of a guided missile attack.