CHAPTER SEVEN
1960-1961
That night of Jack's acceptance speech and the days afterward had the feel of emergence from a six-month trek through the winter wilderness into the Fourth of July. The endless cramped car and bus and small-airplane trips through the primary states were forgotten. The bucking broncos, the daunting ski ramps, the bad food, the fatigue, Jack's laryngitis--it had all been worth it.
We celebrated at Pat and Peter Lawford's house in Hollywood the night after the convention. Sammy Davis Jr. was there, and Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole. Jack goaded my college pal Claude Hooton and me to challenge Sammy and Frank to a songfest. Claude and I belted out "Heart of My Heart," and "Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine," and "Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home." We trotted out "Sweet Adeline" in honor of Honey Fitz. Jack joined in. Frank and Sammy came back with the best they had. Frank must have sung his whole repertoire. I can't recall who won.
Politics intruded when Jack returned to the Senate. During a special session of Congress scheduled by Majority Leader Johnson, Jack bid for a leadership role in trying to push through bills for housing, new minimum wage legislation, aid to education, and medical care. The first two were voted down; the second two passed in watered-down form. These measures probably would have met the same fate no matter who was leading the fight for them--Jack or Johnson himself--but their failure allowed Time magazine to comment that the Democratic nominee had encountered "a nightmare series of grim surprises and jolting defeats."
Things smoothed out after that. My family, along with Jack's aides and close friends, managed a couple of sunlit days at the Cape, sailing, swimming, and bantering. It was like old times--except for the throngs of sunglassed, camera-waving tourists who suddenly filled Hyannis Port and strained against lines of policemen and barricades to peer into the grounds for a glimpse of Jack.
As campaign manager, Bobby could not wait to get going. As laughter and footballs floated across the lawn, Bobby worked the telephones, called strategy sessions, and exhorted all hands to gird for battle. He scarcely let up until election night.
Jack launched himself into action. He shored up relations with party leaders who had been skeptics: former president Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, whose early disdain he melted in a visit to Hyde Park. Trailing Nixon and his running mate Henry Cabot Lodge by six points in the Gallup polls at the end of July, Kennedy-Johnson drew even a month later, despite increasing Republican attacks on Jack's character and his Catholicism. Jack blunted the momentum of the latter on September 12. He addressed, on live television, a convention of southern Protestant ministers at the Rice Hotel in Houston, a move that his aides, supporters, and even the normally fearless Bobby had advised against.
Facing these conservative clerics who had regarded him as a likely agent of the Vatican whose loyalties were to the pope rather than the American people, my brother stood at ease behind the podium and delivered one of the pivotal speeches of his career. He was not the Catholic candidate for president, he told the stony faces before him; he was the Democratic Party's candidate for president who happened to be a Catholic. Speaking without a trace of defensiveness, projecting respect for the values of the clergymen in the ballroom but without apology for his own creed, Jack gradually disarmed the ministers. "If the time should ever come," he assured them, "when my office would require me to either violate my conscience, or violate the national interest, I would resign the office." He subtly peeled back the layer of righteousness regarding "the Catholic question" and exposed the bigotry that lay beneath:
If this election is decided on the basis that forty million Americans lost their chance of being president on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our people.
The ministers sent him offstage with a standing ovation.
Then came the event that might very well have made the difference in the outcome of the campaign: the autumn series of televised debates, or "joint appearances," between him and Richard Nixon.
Robert Sarnoff, the chairman of NBC, initiated the debate discussions on the night that Richard Nixon secured the Republican nomination in Chicago on July 27. He offered both candidates a total of eight hours of free airtime for a series of debates. Jack accepted immediately. Nixon thought it over for four days (with Eisenhower, behind the scenes, urging him not to do it) before he said yes. As negotiations evolved, all three networks agreed to telecast the proceedings. Congress suspended its "equal time" provision, which would have mandated participation even by fringe and special-interest candidates, for the occasion.
Jack's quick decision surprised none of us. He had thought a great deal about the merging of the new medium and the political process. He intuitively comprehended that his own attributes played well on the small screen. And he understood, as few did then, that one ignored the promises and perils of the televised image at one's peril. He had written a prescient article on the subject for TV Guide in November 1959. The "revolutionary impact" of television, Jack declared, had "altered drastically the nature of our political campaigns, conventions, constituents, candidates and costs."
The debates commenced on September 26 at the CBS studio in Chicago, with the legendary producer Don Hewitt running the show. Jack prepared, as he would for each debate, by sitting on his bed in his hotel suite, listening to Peggy Lee records, and inviting his staff to pepper him with trial questions related to the night's topic: domestic policy, in the first debate. He had a stack of file cards filled with facts and figures about every issue imaginable. When he felt he'd mastered the material on each card, he'd flip it into the air and watch it flutter to the floor.
As he donned his dark suit and knotted his tie in the hotel that first evening, he told Dave Powers that he felt "like a prizefighter about to enter the ring at Madison Square Garden." Dave shot back, "No, it's more like being the opening-game pitcher in the World Series, because you have to win four of these."
On the car ride to the studio, Jack was lost in thought. The people with him could sense his tension. At CBS, a technician took a look at his starched white shirt and told him it would flare up under the television lights. He sent Powers back to the hotel to retrieve a blue shirt, and changed into it in the greenroom.
Nixon arrived looking a good deal more nervous than Jack. He was wearing a light-colored suit, which seemed to accentuate his persistent five-o'clock shadow. Don Hewitt urged each candidate to submit to a makeup artist. Both stiffened. Jack, who'd needled Hubert Humphrey for wearing TV makeup in Wisconsin, said he would not go into the makeup room unless Nixon went first. Nixon said he would not go in unless Kennedy were seen going in as well.
And so Nixon stayed out of the makeup room, trusting in the tube of sticky film sold over the counter as "Lazy Shave." Jack stayed out, too--more or less. He ducked into his own dressing room instead, and sat still while an aide named Bill Wilson dabbed a little drugstore makeup on his cheeks and forehead to absorb perspiration.
Ted Sorensen and Bobby hung around the dressing room for a little while, then left a few minutes before airtime. Bobby recommended one final bit of advice to Jack: "Kick him in the balls."
Jack refrained; but he was inside Nixon's head long before Howard K. Smith greeted the national audience. He outfeinted Nixon, obliging the vice president to stalk onto the set first and then sit for several minutes perspiring under the hot lights. With little more than sixty seconds before airtime, people began to seriously wonder where my brother was. He was in the men's room. He strolled to his podium with only about fifteen seconds to go, calmly sat down in his chair, and glanced about placidly while Nixon stared helplessly at him. Bill Wilson later said he realized then that JFK had "psyched out" Nixon before the debate even began.
The content of those debates may have passed into insignificance, but scholars continue to study their effect as a transitional moment in broadcasting. My brother treated the camera (and by extension, each of the seventy million viewers) as an intimate friend; he gazed steadily into the lens as he spoke. During Nixon's remarks, he calmly jotted notes. His opponent darted his dark eyes from the camera to Smith to Jack to his own notes, accentuating his aura of tension. When Jack spoke, Nixon frowned at him and sneaked glances at the camera.
Richard J. Daley didn't need anyone to tell him who'd won that opening debate. As the studio lights went down, the Chicago mayor burst from the room where he'd been watching and bounded into the greenroom to congratulate my brother. It was our first sign that we'd won. Ted Sorensen recalled that on the flight back east aboard the Caroline, a Convair 240 propeller plane that Jack leased from our father, Jack was exhausted but happy.
My brother relaxed with a bowl of soup and reviewed his replies to questions with almost total recall. "You can always improve afterward," he told Sorensen, "but I would settle for the way it went. I thought it was all right."
Of the remaining three debates, polling showed that audiences thought my brother won the first one, 39 to 23 percent (with the rest undecided), as well as the second, originating in New York, by 44 to 28. For the third round the opponents were on opposite sides of the country: Jack in New York, Nixon in California. This was the only debate that Nixon won in the polling, by 42 to 39. Jack won decisively in the last one, 52 to 27. Roughly 120 million people saw at least one of the debates, according to NBC, forming the largest audience ever to watch and focus on one topic in history.
Now all we had to do was win the election.
The issue of race hung at the edges of the 1960 campaign, seldom acknowledged but on the minds of everyone. On October 19, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Atlanta when he joined a protest at a segregated restaurant. The students involved were soon released, but King, the true target, was sent to a state penitentiary. His wife, Coretta, was understandably terrified for his safety. Many people thought it was politically unwise for Jack to get involved in the incident. The risks of advancing too far ahead of public opinion could drive white voters to the other candidate. Nixon ignored the incident. Jack didn't. He telephoned Mrs. King to express his concern. Then Bobby reached the governor of Georgia by telephone and persuaded him to order King's release.
Through the fall, all of us traveled for Jack. I spent ten days blanketing Washington, Oregon, and California. I mostly visited colleges, four or five a day. I saw lots of enthusiasm. Jack was getting young people involved.
At the outset, Nixon was heavily favored to win the election. The debates closed the gap considerably, but they didn't give Jack a lead. There was little sudden movement in the opinion polls in those days.
On the clear, crisp election day of November 8, 1960, the extended family began to converge on the Cape house. People filtered in throughout the afternoon and evening: the candidate and his wife, Bobby and Ethel, Sarge and Eunice, Pat and Peter, Jean and Steve, Joan and myself. The Gargans were there. Dad had invited some of his eclectic friends: the former president of Notre Dame, Father John Cavanaugh; the New York theatrical producer Arthur Houghton; and Carroll Rosenbloom, owner of the Baltimore Colts. We dined on Maryland crabs and then found comfortable places for viewing the returns, most of us at Bobby's house next door.
The tallies from the eastern states came in the first hour after the polls closed. Jack won Connecticut easily. In the first couple of hours, in fact, it was looking like a blowout. Late in the night, the returns began to shift. The numbers were moving Nixon's way. Jack clung to a narrow lead, but obviously it was going to be close. Not until early morning did the trend shift back his way again. Illinois firmed up, and then Nevada, New Mexico, Hawaii. Illinois was the key state, and it went narrowly for Jack.
Even though the election was close--a cliffhanger in every sense of the word--I had always believed that Jack was going to win, even when the odds were something like nine to five against him. I suppose I believed that Jack could do anything he wanted.
And believe me, I knew the odds. I was so certain of Jack's victory that I placed a Las Vegas bet on it. My winnings would have given me enough money to buy a new car, a really fancy new car. The speedy Aston Martin DB4 had just come out of England a couple years earlier, and I really wanted one. Well, I won that bet, but I never bought the car. I made the mistake of telling Dad about it, and he hit the roof. "This is just--this just makes no sense!" he fulminated. "Foolish! I'm appalled that you'd get into this kind of thing! You're not going to collect that money." He really went after me tooth and nail. I never did collect on my bet, and I've always wondered what happened to the money. Dad was right, of course--as usual.
Bobby and I, exhausted, excused ourselves from most of the gaiety that followed Jack's victory. Along with our wives and Dave Hackett and his family, we headed for a few days of relaxation in Acapulco. (Dave, a childhood friend of Bobby's, was soon to distinguish himself as head of President Kennedy's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime.)
It was under the bright Mexican sunlight that Bobby confided in me a surprising piece of information: he did not plan to seek Jack's vacated Senate seat in 1962. Bobby was never as politically driven as the myth would have you believe. He improvised his life to an astonishing degree.
The seat was being held by a good man named Benjamin Smith, who'd been appointed by Governor Foster Furcolo to fill out Jack's term when Jack resigned shortly after Christmas 1960. I thought the world of Ben Smith. He had been my brother's roommate at Harvard, and I can remember hearing Ben say that if he had to shovel every ton of coal out of West Virginia to make Jack president, he'd do it.
The story has been told that Smith's appointment was arranged specifically to clear the way for me in 1962: he'd agreed to "hold" the seat until I was old enough to run at age thirty; then he would step aside. The truth is more complex. First, a slightly complicated bit of election background. My brother had four years remaining on his six-year Senate term when he was elected president. By law, the governor was only allowed to appoint someone to fill the vacancy for two years, until the next federal election, which was in 1962 (coincidentally, the year I turned thirty). The election in 1962 was in turn to fill the last two remaining years of my brother's six-year Senate term. Then, whoever won the election in 1962 would have to face the voters again in 1964 if they wanted to be elected to a full six-year term.
Governor Furcolo had appointed Ben to fill the first two of the remaining years of my brother's term "in the interest of promoting party unity." Jack and Furcolo had a tense relationship, and it seems that the governor had been resistant to appointing Jack's chosen person to the post. Some people felt that Furcolo himself wanted the appointment since he had run and lost for the Senate a few years before and felt that Jack had not gone all-out to support him at that time. I don't know whether Furcolo really wanted the post for himself. But I do know that there was some tension there.
The attorney general of the state, Edward McCormack Jr., was planning to launch an all-out campaign for the Democratic nomination for the 1962 election to fill out the two years remaining on the term. Eddie was the nephew of House Speaker John McCormack, and the son of Edward "Knocko" McCormack Sr., the Speaker's brother and a tough South Boston bar owner.
"Knocko" was just one of the colorful characters with colorful nicknames who have flavored Boston politics from the days before Honey Fitz down through the present time. They are part of the city's folklore. There was Peter "Leather Lungs" Clougherty, a supporter of McCormack's whom Jack never forgot because "Leather Lungs" took him for three thousand dollars once by cashing his checks. There was J. Ralph "Juicy" Granara, so nicknamed by Tip O'Neill because of his habit of chewing tobacco, though Juicy himself preferred to be called "the Colonel." Juicy was a former vaudeville dancer, an aide to several officeholders, a sometime mayoral candidate, and the Official Greeter of Boston. He made headlines in 1950 by retracing the midnight ride of Paul Revere "behind the wheel of a motor-car with the windshield wiper swinging," as the Boston Globe reported it, "humming under his breath, 'For I Must Go Where the Wild Goose Goes.'"
There was "Muggsy" O'Leary, Jack's longtime driver. It was completely typical of Jackie's self-humor that she used to enjoy telling of the time when Muggsy, impatient to transport her to an appointment, scowled at his wristwatch and then bellowed, "C'mon, Jackie, fer chrissake! Move yer ass."
No list of legendary Boston nicknames would be complete without "Tip"--the moniker sported by my great friend, the late Thomas Philip O'Neill Jr. The Democratic congressman for thirty-four years and Speaker of the House for ten could trade one-liners with the best of them. When a narrow vote was approaching once, Tip sought out Jimmy Burke, his fellow congressman from Massachusetts, and told him, "I need your help on this one. It's important to me." When Burke replied, dubiously, "I don't know. This is a tough one," Tip growled back, "I don't need your vote when it's not tough!" But as much as I relished Tip O'Neill's turn of a phrase--he once labeled Ronald Reagan "Herbert Hoover with a smile"--I revered him for his statesmanship. He took a tough, effective stand toward ending the Vietnam War, was a powerful partner with me in forging peace in Northern Ireland, and remained a staunch champion of working people. As a footnote to that salty tongue of his, Tip never made it personal. He and Reagan remained on friendly terms "after 6 p.m.," as Reagan himself put it.
Both of the elder McCormacks harbored political ambitions for Eddie. And to put it mildly, they didn't harbor a lot of love for the Kennedys. In 1947, Jack's first year as a congressman, he and John McCormack had locked horns on whether to press for Mayor James Michael Curley's release from jail. (He'd been sent up for a second time, after a conviction for mail fraud.) McCormack led the fight to get him pardoned; Jack refused to go along. In 1956, Jack and the congressman tangled again, over who would lead the Massachusetts delegation to the Democratic convention. So there was a history of tensions between the two political families.
I remember riding along with Jack Crimmins, my longtime driver, through a South Boston neighborhood one day when we passed Knocko's house. Knocko was up on a stepladder with a hammer and nails. Jack pulled the car over, leaned out the window, and called, "Hi, Knocko! What are you doing up there?" Knocko yelled down, "I'm shingling the house. And every time I pound a nail in, I think I'm pounding it into that young Ted Kennedy's tail." I didn't quite catch this, and asked what Knocko had said. Crimmins, who was holding back laughter, said, "I'll tell you about it later on. I have to park first."
I understood my sudden opportunity as soon as Bobby confided his lack of interest in the Senate seat. But did I want to make that run in '62? There were many reasons to tell myself no. Inexperience was among the biggest. What had I mastered? In what areas had I proven my bona fides? Then there was the question of public opinion. If I won, would I be seen, and dismissed, as a mere beneficiary of the Kennedy family's political power? As someone for whom it was simply "my turn"?
Of course I wanted to make that run. My reasons were hardly frivolous. All my life, as I've said, I had wanted to catch up. I'd worshipped my father as a young boy. I had been swept up by the dash and nobility of Joe Jr., and admired his wartime self-sacrifice even as I wept over it. Jack and Bobby had been godlike figures to me and my sisters. Now Jack was about to be installed as a world leader, and Bobby had already earned national recognition as Jack's right-hand man and as a warrior against crime and injustice.
I remembered again my father's words to me as a boy: "You can have a serious life or a nonserious life, Teddy. I'll still love you whichever choice you make. But if you decide to have a nonserious life, I won't have much time for you. You make up your own mind. There are too many children here who are doing things that are interesting for me to do much with you."
I was ready to step into the public arena alongside these men who were my father and brothers. To be of use. And to catch up.
But first I needed some seasoning. As soon as we returned to the States, I paid a visit to Jack in his Washington office. "Look," I said. "I'd like to be a part of the administration." I told him that I was interested in arms control. In fact, I cared about it passionately. This was the height of the cold war. The Berlin crisis was intensifying, fueled by the flow of refugees from the Soviet-controlled eastern sectors of that divided city to the autonomous and economically thriving West Berlin (part of the postwar Federal Republic of Germany). The exodus would lead a frustrated Khrushchev to start building the Berlin Wall the following August. The American U-2 spy plane and its pilot Francis Gary Powers had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May, infuriating the Russians. This occurred only a month after the United States had deployed ballistic missiles to Italy, adding more nuclear warheads capable of striking Moscow to the ones in place in the United Kingdom.
I knew that arms control would be a priority with Jack. An appointment somewhere in the State Department, say, would give me, at twentyeight, the chance to learn a complex and substantive issue, to be involved with competent people, and to travel and gain experience that would help me when I was ready to declare for the Senate.
Jack considered this. Then he brushed it aside. "Just go back to Massachusetts," he told me. "Every day you're up there, you're doing yourself some good. If you get involved in arms control, the world is never going to know about you or what you're doing. Go up there, Teddy, and get to work."
And then Jack was seized by another thought. "Go up to Massachusetts," he repeated, then added, "But before you do that, go back to Africa." (He was referring to my 1956 visit to Algeria as a reporter for the International News Service.)
"Back to Africa?" I said.
"Yes. Go back and see what's going on over there. That's a continent that's going to be enormously important. There are all kinds of things happening down in the Congo. This Tshombe's on the loose. And there's this East-West struggle going on in these countries. The Belgian Congo has just obtained its independence from Belgium."
As I stammered that I had little time to put such a trip together, Jack grabbed the telephone and rang up a Senate Foreign Relations staff member named Carl Marcy. Marcy told him that a group of senators had left on a fact-finding tour of West Africa just two days earlier. "If your brother leaves tonight," Marcy said, "he can catch up with them in Salisbury, Rhodesia. He can take an overnight flight to London. We'll set up briefings for him the next day. Then he'll go overnight again to Cairo, and get on an eleven o'clock plane and fly six hours down to Salisbury. He'll arrive around six o'clock and he can join them for dinner. They'll leave again the next day."
I said, "I don't have my passport. I'm not sure Joan is going to like this. I mean, come on."
Jack said, "It's a great opportunity."
I left that night, December 1, for four weeks in West Africa with Senators Frank Church, Frank Moss, and Gale McGee. I joined the entourage as an observer, paying my own expenses. The senators were initially sort of glad to see me, but after the first headlines when we landed in the Congo--"Ted Kennedy Arrives with His Senate Delegation"--they cooled down just a little. Still, it was an incredible trip.
We were looking at the numerous independence movements in these countries, with an eye to whether the United States, with its various development programs, or Soviet communism would fill the vacuum of the old colonial powers.
We saw a Rhodesia still trying to yank itself free from the grip of the United Kingdom, and on the brink of violent upheaval. Years of bloody civil war between black nationalists and local European interests lay ahead. In Liberia, the small coastal republic settled by American slaves before the Civil War, we saw the economic fruits of U.S. investment and shared technology, and we also sensed the resentment of marginalized native Liberians that would erupt in bloody revolution twenty years later.
At the time of our visit, the overwhelming mood was optimism: a thrilling sense of expectations for President Kennedy. The United States was still the great symbol of hope to many anticolonialist revolutionaries, including Sekou Toure, who helped liberate Guinea from France, and who admired my brother; and Kwame Nkrumah, the brilliant prime minister of Ghana, author of the "Motion of Destiny" manifesto, leader of the Pan-African movement, soon to form bonds with Martin Luther King and President Kennedy.
I briefed the president-elect upon my return. I must say that my notes didn't provide the impact of our previous conversation about Algeria. But Jack was already ahead of the curve, on Africa and India as well. He believed that these areas would be the great testing grounds for whether democracy or communism would supplant the colonial powers.
In January 1961, Joan, Kara, and I moved to Boston, as Jack had suggested. Joan had found a small apartment on the top floor of a building in Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill. It was a wonderful little neighborhood. William Dean Howells had lived there while editor of the Atlantic in the 1870s. Louisa May Alcott had called it home.
Joan and I traveled to Washington to be there for Jack's inauguration. My parents had rented a house for the festivities, and we stayed with them. A day before the actual swearing in, an enormous snowstorm had hit Washington and the city was blanketed with snow. Unlike Boston, which is accustomed to clearing the streets and handling large snowfalls, Washington has less equipment to deal with snow removal and its drivers often are not proficient in maneuvering in wintry conditions. As a result, on the morning of my brother's inauguration, we almost didn't make it to the Capitol for the ceremony.
As we left my parents' rented house and piled into the cars that were to take us to the Hill, we were filled with joy and anticipation. The temperature was still quite low and everything was icy, but it was no longer snowing. As our driver tried to pull out of his parking place, we heard nothing but the sound of the engine and the whirring of the tires as they spun around and around. He tried again and again, but simply was unable to get traction on the ice and snow. None of us was happy, but my father was furious. "Hurry up. We're going to be late," he shouted. But we were stuck. Finally, my father decided to take things into his own hands. I can still see him getting out of the car in his full dress clothes, shouting and gesturing at the driver and directing him on how to turn the wheel, how to back up, move forward, while Dad finally just pushed the car, providing the necessary muscle to power the vehicle out of the parking spot. It was classic Joe Kennedy: take charge and do it right, even if it means having to do it yourself. We made it to the inauguration.
As we sat on the east side of the Capitol--until Ronald Reagan, all of the inaugurations took place on that side--we were all overwhelmed with emotion. Here we were, at the beginning of this new decade, with nothing but hope and promise ahead of us. I remember saying a silent prayer for my brother and for our country. The older brother and godfather that I had revered for my whole life, the war hero who had sneaked my twelveyear-old self aboard a navy vessel, the older, wiser brother who persuaded a young adolescent not to run away from home, the second father who had interceded when his boneheaded kid brother had screwed up at Harvard, the man I loved so deeply and had worked so hard to elect was going to be the president of the United States. At noon on the sunny, frigid Friday of January 20, 1961, my brother John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as our thirty-fifth president.
Later that same day, Jack announced his cabinet. His choice of Bobby for attorney general ignited controversy and charges of nepotism from press and party leaders alike. Jack had first offered the position to Senator Abraham Ribicoff, but he declined. Ultimately, against the counsel of his political advisers, Jack decided he wanted his brother by his side. Bobby was reluctant, but Jack and Dad (an advocate of the idea from the start) persuaded him.
The renewed bond of comradeship and trust that Bobby and Jack had forged on that seven-week tour of the East had taken deep roots. Bobby enjoyed his unqualified access to President Kennedy in moments of national and international crisis, and his counsel led to light in the darkness when even the judgments of generals and career diplomats proved inadequate to the task.
Jack learned to value Bobby's advice above all others the hard way. The first crisis of his administration that flowed from an act of aggression advocated by military minds was only weeks away.
Now it was time for me to get back to my own future in Massachusetts. Elective office had been on my mind as early as my days at Milton, where I first learned debating. I even debated national health insurance there. I was interested in public issues by then, and I was interested in people, and everything around me--my family's civic concerns, my brothers' careers--reinforced those interests. But I had a lot of groundwork to do first. Jack counseled me to get around the state. He said he'd take some soundings to see how I was doing before he weighed in on whether or not I should think of running for the Senate in 1962. His advisers were to a person opposed to my running, but Jack wanted me to get out there to see if I had the stuff.
First, it was time to go to work. Shortly after the inauguration, I was sworn in as a dollar-a-year assistant district attorney in the office of legendary Suffolk County district attorney Garrett Byrne--the man who, among his many accomplishments, had won convictions in the million-dollar Brinks robbery several years earlier.
I vividly remember the first case I tried in Byrne's office. Now, to be totally candid, I've loved telling this story so much over the years that I've taken to "improving" it with a few flourishes and embellishments. But the essential facts are absolutely true.
I had been in the DA's office for just three days when I was handed my first file--prosecuting a fellow named Hennessy for driving under the influence. After attending a Red Sox-Yankees double-header at Fenway Park, the defendant had consumed twenty-six drinks at the Little Brown Jug and crashed his car into Kenmore Square. My assignment was to prosecute Hennessy for driving under the influence and to free the people of Suffolk County from this danger on the public roadways.
As I prepared for trial, I devoured all of Clarence Darrow's closing arguments. Even though he was a defense attorney and not a prosecutor, I was inspired by his eloquence and thought process.
On the day of the trial, I was ready. I had a bar bill showing that Hennessy had bought the twenty-six drinks. I had the waitress who was going to testify that she had served him those drinks, as well as the arresting officer, who was prepared to describe how Hennessy had fallen out of his car, glassy-eyed, and was unsteady on his feet.
Oh, yes, I was ready.
As I walked into the courtroom, I saw the clerk hand the case file to a defense attorney, who apparently was seeing it for the first time. I thought to myself, Ha! This poor fellow doesn't have a chance.
I put on my case and felt good about it. When it came time for the defense, they rested without putting on a single witness. They didn't offer anything until the closing argument, when the defense attorney stood up and said, "Hennessy over there has been working since he was twelve years old." Then the lawyer looked me up and down, and then the jury all looked at me. I thought, What does that have to do with anything? Then the lawyer said, "His principal crime is that he cheered for the Boston Red Sox." I saw the jury smile, every one of them. "And when the Red Sox beat the Yankees--in a double-header--who wouldn't want to celebrate!"
I thought, Oh my God, what does this have to do with anything?
The defender went on, "Hennessy is a carpenter, and if he's convicted today, he will lose his automobile license and won't be able to go from job to job. He's going to be on welfare, and he has seven children. It's going to cost the taxpayers of Suffolk County fifteen hundred dollars a month to support him if he's convicted." I thought I saw the jury looking at old Hennessy with sympathetic eyes. Then the lawyer said, "The defendant's name is HENNESSY." When he emphasized "Hennessy," half of the jury nodded their heads. Then he said, "My name is Bobby STANZIANI." And the other half of the jury nodded their heads. I knew it was all over.
Twenty-six minutes of deliberation. Not guilty!
I was a little more successful prosecuting armed robbery cases.
The people in the district attorney's office were great--and helpful. There was Jack Crimmins, who had been Paul Dever's driver when Dever was governor. He knew every road in Massachusetts. He was a great fellow. If he'd ever had an education, he'd have been president of a bank. We became good friends, and Jack would drive me around those roads as I got to know all of Massachusetts.
The cases in the DA's office lasted from ten till noon, and from two to four. Francis X. "Frank" Morrissey, a friend of my father's who had also been a great supporter of Jack's, would arrange for me to go to a different place each day after work, a social club or a lodge, and give a talk. There are hundreds of such clubs in Boston. Frank would drive. I'd talk about whatever came to mind--my trip to Africa, for instance; I could do forty-five minutes on that one, with slides. I thought I was getting to be quite the orator.
Then the president of the United States called me up and said, "I hear you're talking for a very long time. How long do you talk?" I said, "Forty minutes." Jack said, "If I can do the State of the Union in twenty-three minutes, you can do Africa in twenty-five."
I said I'd try.
Frank Morrissey introduced me to a dozen or so state representatives in Boston who became the backbone of the organization I was slowly forming. They widened the range of meetings I'd attend: Communion breakfasts on Sundays at any and every church I could get to. School dinners. I set up my office at the same old apartment at 122 Bowdoin Street that Jack had used in his campaign--and that was the registered voting address for so many of our family members. It was a small compressed place with a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bathroom, that we rented for $115 a month. When the landlord threatened to raise the rent to $125, I contemplated leaving. But I didn't. My brother stayed there one night when he was president-elect, before giving a talk to the Massachusetts legislature--he said he preferred it to a hotel.
I hired my first staff assistant, Barbara Souliotis, during that time, and she has been with me ever since. After all these years, I think Barbara can probably read my mind. Barbs has a knack for spotting and hiring talented staff members and she is beloved by our constituents. She's been called a role model for running a senator's district office. I did amazingly well in my first hire.
Perhaps the most satisfying part of this new phase of my life was that I received the full measure of my father's focus and advice. My mother writes of me in her memoir that "quite considerably more than the other three boys, he had the wonderful advantage of having sustained attention and influence from his father.... Joe spent a great deal more time with Ted than with the other boys, and that counted." This is true, and those times were golden to me, as when we rode horseback side by side. And yet I was a child then. I was legally an adult when I entered Harvard, but as my Spanish exam transgression showed, I had not yet put away my childish things. Now, less than a year from my thirtieth birthday, I approached my father as a man, and it was as a man that he accepted me.
In the springtime, weeks before I told him that I was privately planning to run for the Senate, I could not know for sure whether he would approve, or even think me a good fit for public office. But I had a helpful advocate in Frank Morrissey, who issued updates to Dad on my community efforts. With his gift of gab and way of "gilding the lily" on my Boston-area talks so that Dad would hear only positive things, Frank raised my approval rating with the only "constituency" who then counted. My father thought I was just on fire up there. I will never forget a pivotal conversation Dad and I had on the subject in the early summer of 1961. We were out on the boat off Hyannis Port, a couple of fellows enjoying the sunshine and the lazy roll of the boat against the blue waves. Dad was talking about Jack and Bobby, when abruptly he shifted the subject. He said, "Well, Teddy, now these boys are well set in terms of their political lives, and now it's your turn. I'll make sure they understand it."
This was a great uplift and a great thrill. I was privy to an extended seminar in Dad's extraordinary judgment. In his own way, he was as much a living encyclopedia as Honey Fitz had been. He still knew the names of people who had worked on the waterfront from years past. He knew the fishing industries. He knew the old families. He could say to Frank Morrissey, "Now, look, are the Fulhams still in the fishing business?" Frank would say, "Yes, John Fulham has taken that over." "Has he? Well, I knew his father. Have Fulham get some of those people in the industry together and have them meet Ted."
My father had a great sense of the city. He'd lived in East Boston and knew the people there. He had a good feel for the newspapers, especially the Globe and the Traveler. The Globe was the voice of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Boston, and we could not assume any sympathy from its pages. The Traveler, the evening publication of the Herald, was ideologically conservative (as the Herald remains to this day, under Rupert Murdoch). But a man who was destined to become my lifelong friend and had been one of the paper's ace reporters became my press secretary. Edward T. Martin--Eddy--was Irish Catholic and a smart and fit product of East Boston, a marine veteran with a twinkle in his warm brown eyes. He'd covered Jack's early political career and his inauguration. His sharp wit coexisted with a political perception as sharp as that of anyone I've known, and a desire to do good in this world. Eddy died in 2006, and I still miss him.
One of the most interesting and inspiring things I worked on that year was the Cancer Crusade, where I joined with Dr. Sidney Farber, a pioneer in children's cancer research, and a Republican named Lloyd Waring. I learned so much from Dr. Farber. Our goal was to raise awareness about the disease and money for cancer research. We traveled around the state and I gave fund-raising talks to two or three audiences a night for two or three months. This experience was a cornerstone of my interest in health matters throughout my Senate career. And it was certainly an inspiration for my work years later to bolster federal funding for cancer research at the national level.
I was enjoying it all immensely. Politics and public service were in my blood. The euphoria of campaigning was almost an end in itself. I loved every corner of the state it took me to, and the people I met. I loved meeting with the students of Ware High School at nine o'clock on a cold January morning, with five more high schools still to visit before the day ended. I loved the tours of woolen factories and the people of the League of the Sacred Heart. I loved showing up at the plant gates, even when some of the workers brushed past me, ignoring my outstretched hand. I loved the summertime picnics all along Route 128, and the communion breakfasts.
I remember how moved I was at some of the plants and factories. I learned that West Virginia had no monopoly on squalor or hard labor. In some of the tanneries on the North Shore, I was advised to put covers on my shoes so the acid on the floor wouldn't take the soles off. In the shoe manufacturing plants, women and men would spend the day grabbing a length of leather and then bringing a heavy slammer down on it to shape it, or to punch eyeholes and buttonholes into it. I would walk down a line and find that many workers had lost two or three fingers. I met people who were too embarrassed to smile because their teeth were so damaged, because of what was in the water they drank.
But campaigning, of course, is hardly the whole of politics; it is merely prelude.