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CHAPTER ONE

The Last Patrician
Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy


By MICHAEL KNOX BERAN
St. Martin's Press

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HE BECAME A QUESTIONER, A DOUBTER, BUT THAT IS not how he began. It is an old story: before he rebels, the heretic is among the most pious of priests. Only those who have thoroughly understood a system can act decisively to change it. Augustine was a perfect pagan, Paul a perfect Jew, before each became a revolutionary Christian. Luther was a priest before he became a Protestant. It was only because he had embraced the orthodoxies of his age--embraced them with the passion of a believer--that Bobby Kennedy was able to become, at the end of his life, so constructive a critic of those orthodoxies.

    He grew up amid contradictions, a confusion of identities, a profusion of faiths. His life was grounded in Yankee realities: prep schools and Ivy League colleges, summers on the Cape. But he did not adjust to them in the ready and easy way his brothers did. He was shyer, quieter, more withdrawn. Vestiges of the old life, the life of his ancestors, so different from the secular Yankee world in which the father sought to envelop the children, perplexed him. Beside his father's worldliness there was his mother's piety, her daily attendance at Mass, her constant resort to prayer and contemplation. Her faith made a deep impression upon the young Bobby, deeper than the impression it made upon his brothers. For a time, it is said, he considered becoming a priest. Who knows? He might have been a good one. But his father had different ideas.

The Meaning of the Malcolm, Cottage

THE HOUSE ITSELF tells the story. In 1926 Joseph Kennedy turned thirty-eight. He was a stock speculator and millionaire who four years before had left the investment banking firm of Hayden, Stone & Company to play the bull market of the twenties on his own. More recently he had acquired a controlling interest in a motion picture company with operations in New York and California, and it is probable that he continued to derive profits from the illegal distribution of bootlegged liquor. At all events, Joseph Kennedy had by 1926 become a rich man; in the spring of that year, when he moved from Boston to New York, he hired a private railroad car to take his family south. But Kennedy did not want his children to become New Yorkers, and in the summer of 1926 he returned to Massachusetts, took his family to the Cape, and there rented a house known as the Malcolm cottage at Hyannis Port. Bobby Kennedy, who had been born the previous November, was not yet a year old.

    Two years later Joseph Kennedy bought the Malcolm cottage outright for some $25,000. It was not such a lot of money to a young millionaire who, like Kennedy, was fond of occasional extravagance. He claimed that he lost $1 million on the movie Queen Kelly, his failed attempt to showcase his sweetheart, Gloria Swanson. And he agreed to put up a horse called Silver King, one of his studio's principal box-office attractions, in a stable that, at $25,000, cost as much as the Malcolm cottage itself. The big spender in Hollywood was, however, curiously reticent when it came to throwing his money around on Cape Cod. Even after he enlarged it, the Malcolm cottage remained a conspicuously modest place, a New England summer house, spacious and comfortable, but not at all grand, a rambling, white-shingled, somewhat ordinary house, the chief distinction of which lay in the great swath of lawn that separated it from Nantucket Sound. It was the house of a successful lawyer, a well-off banker, not an American tycoon.

    Later the family would acquire the neighboring houses: Bobby bought the adjacent property, and Jack bought the house next to that, a nondescript residence on Irving Avenue, some distance from the water. Legend has exaggerated the glamour of the place; the very name the press gave the property--the Kennedy "compound," with its air of institutional, of vaguely military, dullness--proclaimed its plainness. Not even the most fanciful commentator could call it an estate. For Joseph Kennedy to have bought--and retained--so modest a property was out of character. It is almost a rule: the successful American--Vanderbilt, Frick, Rockefeller, Hearst, Gates--builds himself a house commensurate with his fortune. And yet Kennedy, though he was no less vain than the constructors of our various American Xanadus, refused to build himself a monument to his plutocratic pluck. Some would doubtless argue that the reason for such unwonted modesty lay in the fact that the Kennedy fortune was never as great as has been supposed, that misapprehensions of the extent of the family's wealth began in 1957 when Fortune magazine estimated the family's net worth at $250 million, roughly double the actual figure. But even allowing for exaggeration, Kennedy's wealth would surely have permitted him to buy a bigger house than the one he did. Not Kykuit, perhaps, the Rockefeller mansion in Pocantico Hills, or Matinecock Point, the Morgan estate on the north shore of Long Island, but something more impressive than the Malcolm cottage. Why, then, did he buy it? Why did he choose Hyannis Port? His business ventures were taking him farther and farther afield, to Hollywood, to Chicago, to London; wouldn't a summer place closer to New York, his base of operations, make more sense? Wasn't Southampton, or Oyster Bay, or Glen Cove a more natural choice? Hyannis wasn't even friendly to the Kennedys when they arrived--or later. Watching the neighbors wave after her brother's election to the presidency, Eunice Shriver commented sourly, "They never showed such interest." The Kennedy "compound," however unglamorous that formulation sounds, was actually an improvement on the original name. For years the Kennedy property was known simply as the "Irish house."

    He must initially have hoped for acceptance. He would not repeat the mistakes he had made in the Brahmin resort at Cohasset, where he and Rose had been blackballed at the country club. By taking a modest house at Hyannis, Joseph Kennedy would impress his Protestant neighbors with his restraint, would convince them that he, too, despised vulgarity. Far from resembling the gaudy perfection of a Rockefeller residence, with Picassos and Miros on the walls, Joseph Kennedy's houses tended toward a distinct shabbiness. Guests were surprised to discover that, despite the expense of their upkeep, the houses were never quite clean. But the ingenious strategies failed; the modest houses, the modest sailboats, the modest cocktail hour (one drink before dinner) failed to convince the Yankees (and the Middle Western WASPs who were becoming increasingly prominent at Hyannis) that Joseph Kennedy was one of them. "It was petty and cruel," one WASP recalled. The women "looked down on the daughter of `Honey Fitz'; and who was Joe Kennedy but the son of Pat, the barkeeper?"

    His money did not impress them, and neither did his genuine successes. Rose Kennedy spoke hopefully of a day when the "nice people" of Boston would accept her husband, but the day never came. When Kennedy did an admirable job as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the "nice people" spoke darkly of his knowledge of the crooked and indirect ways of Wall Street; only a very corrupt man, they said, could have made the stock market honest. When he proved (at first) to be a popular ambassador to the Court of St. James's, the descendants of the Four Hundred (FDR among them) laughed at the spectacle of "a red-haired Irishman" being taken into the camp of the English. "Do you know a better way to meet people like the Saltonstalls?" the young Joseph Kennedy asked, naively, after he had been appointed to the board of directors of the Massachusetts Electric Company. But the Saltonstalls remained aloof; so, too, did the Harvard classmates who booed and jeered him at his twenty-fifth reunion; so, too, did the clubbable people who continued to refuse his applications for membership in their clubs.

    Why then did he stay? Why did he not retire from the scene of his disgrace, flee from the memory of his humiliation? It is true that he moved out of Boston and took houses in New York, in Riverdale and Bronxville (as well as in Palm Beach). But he continued to maintain his principal residence at Hyannis, and he encouraged his children to think of Massachusetts as home. His decision to stay was, to say the least, out of character. Joseph Kennedy's inclination, when confronted with the possibility of failure or rejection, was to cut his losses and get out: thus the ignominious retreats from Hollywood in the thirties and from England and national politics in the forties. Failure of any kind reduced him to almost pathological despair. Gloria Swanson recalled how Kennedy, when he realized the full magnitude of the Queen Kelly disaster, slumped in a chair and "held his head in his hands": "Little, high-pitched sounds escaped from his rigid body, like those of a wounded animal whimpering in a trap." And yet, in spite of the proportions of his social failure in Massachusetts, Kennedy determined to stay. Stubbornness may have played a part in that decision, but it is not the whole explanation. There was an element of calculation as well, a hope of gratification generationally deferred. The establishment oligarchs may have determined that he was unable to live up to the standards of their civilization; it would be different with Bobby and his brothers. It was for their sakes that he refused to give up, refused to surrender his little toehold in New England, refused to become an expatriate and join rich Europeans in a life of polo and purchased titles. Massachusetts would be more than a political base for his boys; it would enable them to become something he himself could never hope to be. Joseph Kennedy could not have been elected to the Board of Overseers at Harvard, but his son Jack could--and ultimately did--obtain that high Brahmin honor. "If an Irish Catholic can get elected an Overseer at Harvard," Joseph Kennedy said, "he can get elected to anything." The elder Kennedy knew what it was like to have the patent-leather jack-boot of class thrust in his face; but not Bobby and his brothers. They would escape his fate.

Mastering the Mores of the Establishment

IT IS EASY to parody the more naive attempts of critics to describe the vast and secret powers of what used to be called the Protestant establishment in America, that shadowy preserve of old boys and DAR matrons that, according to E. Digby Baltzell, amounted to an indigenous aristocratic caste. In 1962 Richard Rovere published an essay that was perhaps just such a parody--a parody of the mixed sensation of delight and despair the paranoid prole feels when he thinks he has proved beyond all shadow of a doubt the existence of an elaborate conspiracy superintended by men like David Rockefeller and John J. McCloy with the assistance of the Council on Foreign Relations, Skull and Bones, J. P. Morgan & Co., and the Racquet Club. Joseph Alsop, for his part, stated for the record that "there is no such thing" as an "American aristocrat," and that "anyone using that phrase" would have been "dismissed as `common'" by those uncommon people who, although they might have acted like aristocrats (by, among other things, dismissing their fellow citizens as "common"), really weren't.

    Scoffers like Revere might scoff, and covert snobs like Alsop might deny, but Joseph Kennedy never for a moment doubted the existence of an American aristocracy. He long remembered every snub, every rebuke, every cut he received from those who, he fancied, belonged to it. And how could he, the wunderkind of the Street, have forgotten the humiliation of sitting in the reception room at 23 Wall, waiting to see Mr. J. P. Morgan, Jr., and being informed that Mr. J. P. Morgan, Jr., was too busy to receive him? Whether Kennedy ever admired the so-called "Protestant" or "Eastern" establishment will always be a question, but there can be no doubt that he had considerable respect for what he perceived to be its power. A mastery of its mores was, he was convinced, essential to anyone who wished to hold power in the republic beyond the next election or two. He had, in his own career, fatally misjudged the strength, the toughness, and the ruthlessness not only of such grandees as FDR and Averell Harriman but of their implacable capos, men like Hopkins, Frankfurter, and Ickes. His belief was not an unreasonable one: after the failure of his English embassy, the patricians turned on Kennedy savagely, turned on him in a way they never would have turned on one of their own.

    His mistake might in other circumstances have seemed a venial one: he had, in an unguarded moment, offered a gloomy assessment of the future of democracy in England. That was all, but that was enough. Kennedy had only to contrast the way the preppy oligarchs treated him with the way they treated Alger Hiss to see a genteel hypocrisy at work. Kennedy offered a gloomy prophecy of England's future; Hiss betrayed his country and engaged in treason. Hiss, however, was an insider, one who had distinguished himself at the Harvard Law School, clerked for Mr. Justice Holmes, and impressed Secretary Acheson. At the time of Hiss's indictment for perjury in 1948, David Rockefeller attempted to persuade his fellow trustees of the Carnegie Endowment to give the estimable but penurious young man a paid leave of absence (Hiss himself had offered to resign as president of the Endowment). Adlai Stevenson and Felix Frankfurter testified to Hiss's good character at the trial, and so, too, did John W. Davis, the West Virginia lawyer whose service as Solicitor General, Ambassador to England, Democratic presidential candidate, founding member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and lawyer for the House of Morgan had made him into a pillar of the Eastern ascendancy. The establishment that vilified Joseph Kennedy, and never forgave him, took pity on Alger Hiss and never forgave his accusers.

    Seen from the perspective of his struggles with the grandees, Joseph Kennedy's choice of the unpretentious Malcolm cottage makes perfect sense. It is no wonder that he should have been anxious to ensure that Bobby and his brothers develop, through their experience of the Cape, New England manners, New England accents, a New England sensibility. It is no wonder that he should have desired them to attend not the Catholic prep schools (Canterbury, Portsmouth Priory) that Rose favored, but such quintessentially Protestant institutions as St. Paul's, Milton, and Choate. Joseph Kennedy had himself been educated at the Boston Latin School, but although this venerable institution had once graduated the cream of the Brahmin crop, by the time Kennedy entered it in 1901, it had lost much of its social cachet. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the sons of Boston's Brahmin and New York's Four Hundred families were sent in greater numbers than ever before to be educated in the "English" fashion at boarding schools modeled on the great English public schools; it was to these schools that Kennedy sent his own sons to be educated. There Bobby and his brothers would learn the secret language of the better sort of people, the code of the "nice people" of Boston, would learn about the things that the rest of the world didn't: "tennis, table manners, foreign and ancient languages, good pictures, fine music, French wines, the little harbors of Penobscot Bay" (so runs Nelson Aldrich's catalog of patrician esoterica in his book Old Money). Their memories would be indistinguishable from those of their patrician peers, memories that together form a kind of collective unconscious of the preppy race: memories of "stumbling recitations of the Anabasis, the feel of grass tennis courts under bare feet, an embarrassing performance in the Tavern Club play, a coming-out party at Hammersmith Farm (everybody was there), the steamed mirrors at the Racquet Club ..."

    The sons would gain more than memories at these Etons manque; they would learn to compete with a grace, a humor, a nonchalance, that quite eluded the father. Joseph Kennedy impressed upon his sons the importance of excelling not only at tennis, but also at sailing and (mindful of Dink Stover, the hero of Owen Johnson's Stover at Yale) football. (Kennedy drew the line at polo; when Teddy expressed an interest in the sport, his father informed him that Kennedys did not play polo.) The waters of Nantucket Sound and the playing fields of Milton and Choate would work their Anglo-Saxon magic and transform Bobby and his brothers into something Joseph Kennedy himself had never been able to become--competitors who not only won races, but who also won over the very opponents they bested. Christopher Matthews, in his study of the two men, has shown that even Richard Nixon, Jack's great rival, could not help but love and admire his adversary: Nixon burst into tears when it appeared likely that Kennedy would die in 1954 following back surgery, and he became "euphoric" when he learned that Kennedy wanted to visit him in Florida a few days after his defeat in the 1960 election. The Kennedy siblings, George Plimpton observed, played touch football stylishly, with good humor and a ready wit, in contrast to the plodding Secret Service agents who sometimes joined in their games. Nice people played football one way, Secret Service agents--and the rest of the world--another. When "touch" was played on the lawns in front of the Ambassador's house at Hyannis Port, Plimpton recalled, "you had them"--"the Secret Service men--"along with the dogs and the children and the sisters and the house guests ... quite a mob of people." The numbers, however, were "cut down quite quickly," mostly, it seemed to Plimpton, "because of the hard-nosed play of the Secret Service people." "They'd been shut up in their sentry boxes or lurking about, whatever it is they do, and the touch football games gave them a chance to star, to perform." The agents played the game in a manner Plimpton thought "brutal and humorless":

In the huddle they'd talk about running "post patterns," and they'd scrabble plays in the grass. The slightly hysterical and charming play of Jackie, say, which was full of little yells and darting, unpredictable runs in the wrong direction, wasn't quite suitable. So, by and by, people would drift away from the game--ostensibly, to get ready for dinner or ... meet Uncle Ted coming in from his afternoon yacht race ... and finally, in the dusk, there'd be four or five adults left, furious and panting, rushing quickly across the lawn and most of them were Secret Service people.

Joseph Kennedy would never have understood why Plimpton thought the behavior of the Secret Service agents ("whatever it is they do") so lacking in charm, so lacking in grace--so appalling, in fact, that the nice people had to make up excuses to escape. When in the late forties Bobby and his Harvard friend Kenny O'Donnell "joked at dinner about finishing last in a sailing race," Joseph Kennedy was outraged. "What kind of guys are you to think that's funny?," the Ambassador demanded before quitting the table in disgust. Like the Secret Service agents who spoke of "post patterns" and scrabbled plays in the grass, like Richard Nixon himself, Joseph Kennedy had not been educated at Milton or Choate; he was quite as incapable as the most graceless of the agents, with their "brutal" and "humorless" approach to competition, of speaking a language with which George Plimpton could have sympathized, of emitting the numerous little "recognition signals" (Joseph Alsop's phrase) that taken together indicate that one belongs, that one understands the rules, that one appreciates good form, that one knows how to dress for dinner or enjoy a postrace drink with Uncle Ted.

    Joseph Kennedy did not speak George Plimpton's language, but the result of his efforts at assimilation was that his sons did speak it, and as fluently as Plimpton himself. He did not understand what his sons had become, but at some level he was glad they had become it. Joseph Kennedy was not what the preppies called a clubbable man. Bobby, Jack, and Teddy were. They were initiated into the rituals of the preppy elite, made friends with the George Plimptons, the Ben Bradlees, the Joe Alsops of the world, were invited to join all the clubs from which the father had been excluded. Kenny O'Donnell said that Bobby had been invited to join "almost all" the best clubs at Harvard. (In 1950, alas, not even a Kennedy could aspire to Porcellian.) The brothers became masters of the "New England manner," in Arthur Schlesinger's words, and so consummate was their mastery that some critics were incapable of distinguishing them from the genuine article. Teddy White's evocations of the Kennedys read at times like an Emily Post text designed to instruct duller Americans in the fine points of patrician etiquette. White was amazed that Jack Kennedy, sipping a daiquiri on election night in 1960, should have had the presence of mind to talk about art, not politics, with his friend Bill Walton. This suitably highbrow topic was discussed, White tells us, in a "large white room furnished to Mrs. Kennedy's taste in antiques" without any interruption from "radio, TV, or the communications center." Jack's ruminations on the nature of art ended only when, "promptly at eight," dinner was announced and he and Walton went into the "elegantly different" dining room of Kennedy's Hyannis Port house. Take note, America: when Jack Kennedy finally did settle down to watch the returns that would determine his fate, he watched them "on a small leather-covered TV set that his wife manipulated to bring into focus." The smallness and scarcity of television sets in Kennedy residences are a favorite theme of Kennedy aficionados like White; television might have helped make Jack Kennedy President, but he himself, we are assured, watched the vulgar medium as little as possible.

    The unrefined air of East Boston hung about Joseph Kennedy, an offense to Brahmin and Four Hundred sensibilities; Bobby and his brothers would grow up in a more suitable environment, would progress, as naturally and inevitably as the Stimsons and Achesons of the world, from sailboats and prep-school playing fields to the highest affairs of state. Jack Newfield was wrong to call Bobby a quintessential Boston Catholic. Bobby and his brothers may have gone to college in Cambridge, but they never went to Boston for any reason other than to solicit votes. By the time they reached manhood, they were closer to the world of the Social Register than they were to the world of Honey Fitz.

Toward the Vineyard

LIKE SO MANY of their triumphs, the Kennedys' achievement in mastering the code of the Brahmins looks different in retrospect. Sailing off the Vineyard with Social Register swells appears a less enviable experience in the context of Chappaquiddick. Like the Harvard-Yale game or the first sail of the summer, the Edgartown Regatta was a Kennedy family tradition, one of those ritual events that mark the passing seasons. It offered the Kennedys a chance to catch up with old friends who summered on the island--the McNamaras, the Bundys, the Katzenbachs--and to burnish the family's intellectual credentials by cultivating literary preppies like John Marquand, Bill Styron, and their proteges. (Bobby met the young Philip Roth on the Vineyard in the middle sixties.) But the regatta also offered the Kennedys a chance to let go, to find relatively anonymous release in a crowd of lawyers and stockbrokers dazed by sun and drink. In the thirties an "overly boisterous celebration" of a regatta victory in an Edgartown hotel resulted in Joe Junior and Jack spending a night in the Edgartown jail. The Kennedy regatta parties in 1966 and 1967 were memorable affairs--happy occasions, if a trifle wild; the Kennedy brothers were able to relax on the Vineyard in a way they couldn't at Hyannis Port, where Mother and Dad frowned upon excess.

    Islands like Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket are extraordinarily illuminating guides to the social history of Protestant New England. This history is nowhere more evident than in the evolution of the islands' architecture; to go from the Vincent House in Edgartown to Captain Lawrence's house or Dr. Fisher's house there is to see how the harsh and unforgiving life of the early settlers gave way to the more opulent civilization of the great sea captains and rich merchants who succeeded them. More opulent, but hardly less severe. The old Federal houses of Edgartown and Nantucket, for all their elegance of design and splendor of proportion, retain still the memory of the austere God-fearing men who built them, men who in the midst of wealth deplored the corruption of their souls, and who in the apogee of prosperity looked into their Bibles to ponder the lesson of Job. In time, however, the gloomy introspection of old New England gave way to the masques and revels of its foppish descendants, and a once-formidable race of Brahmins degenerated into a supine tribe of mere preppies. The Kennedys had the misfortune to infiltrate the old Protestant aristocracy at the height of its decadence. They came too late, and mastered its customs too well.

    Teddy himself competed in the 1969 Edgartown Regatta; he apparently enjoyed himself as he drank beer and sailed his boat, the Victura, in the sultry afternoon. The race itself was something of a disappointment: the Victura finished in ninth place. No matter: the Kennedys had won the real race. They now "owned" a Senate seat that the Brahmins had once considered almost as their personal property. Ted could look on with serene magnanimity as the preppies made off with a sailing trophy. After the customary drink (rum and Coke) with the other sailors on the victor's boat, Ted was driven over to Chappaquiddick Island by his chauffeur for a party in honor of the "boiler room" girls who had worked for Bobby in his 1968 presidential campaign. Garry Wills has said that Ted's presence at the party was itself an act of noblesse oblige, the honorable deed of a sad-eyed man who, haunted by his brother's ghosts, felt it his duty to comfort the peasants who had plowed his family's fields. And yet it is difficult to believe that the party was simply a chore for Teddy; on the contrary, it seems to have been precisely the kind of preppy blowout he enjoyed. The guests at the Lawrence cottage drank deeply that night, but not, in the context of the moment, outrageously. Nor was Ted the only preppy on the Vineyard to have a good time on the Friday night of regatta weekend. When, after the accident, he attempted to construct an alibi, he did so by appearing in the lobby of his Edgartown hotel--at half past two in the morning--to complain about the noise other revelers were making. The alibi was never used; in 1969 not even the most fastidious old boy felt a need to put on a blazer to go into a deserted hotel lobby in the middle of the night. The sad attempt to construct an exculpatory chronology, if it did nothing to prove Ted's innocence, does reveal something of the overheated atmosphere of Edgartown on regatta weekend. The behavior that led up to the accident at Chappaquiddick was not anomalous; it was indeed perfectly explicable in terms of the mores of a preppy watering hole in the middle of the twentieth century. "Oh my God, what has happened?" Teddy is said to have exclaimed several times as he was driven to the Vineyard's airstrip the next day for the flight back to Hyannis Port. A short time earlier he had, at the Edgartown police station, given an account of the accident the night before in which he admitted that he had been the driver of the 1967 Oldsmobile that had careened off Dike Bridge and plunged into the dark waters below. What had happened? The Kennedys had at last fulfilled the patriarch's dream; they had arrived, but had arrived only to discover that the promised land of the patricians was not an altogether happy one.

(C) 1998 Michael Knox Beran All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-312-18625-8




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