THE CAMPAIGN: Pride of the Clan

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In the midst of the crucial West Virginia primary last spring, Jack Kennedy sent a crisis message to his kid brother, Ted, 28, who was busily running interference in the coal mines of Beckley. In his daily talkathon of 20 or more speeches, Jack’s vocal cords had given out, and he badly needed a substitute. Teddy hurried to his brother’s side and enthusiastically read Jack’s speech to an audience of miners in Ravenswood. As Ted Kennedy recalls it, “I was saying to the audience, ‘Do you want a man who will give the country leadership? Do you want a man who has vigor and vision?’, when Jack took the microphone and said in a hoarse whisper, I would just like to tell my brother that you cannot be elected President until you are 35 years of age.’ So back to the boondocks I went.”

Like every other major politician, Candidate Kennedy has a chorus of voices talking for him. He speaks through the 15 or so smooth-talking, dedicated young men who direct Operation Kennedy (TIME, Feb. 15), the tough and efficient political machine that has impressed and astonished the professional politicians of the nation. He speaks through hundreds of grey-flanneled local volunteers from Maine to Hawaii. He speaks words of honey or vitriol that would be impolitic coming from him through a chorus of guest campaigners, ranging from Colorado Football Star Byron (“Whizzer”) White to Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. (who attacked Hubert Humphrey’s war record in the bitter West Virginia primary). But Jack Kennedy’s presidential campaign, indeed his whole political life, has a quality rare in U.S. political history. He speaks with the voice of the remarkable Kennedy family, and the talkative Clan Kennedy speaks with authority for him from platform to parlor, from banquet to back room.

There is Bobby, 34, his dogged, hardworking (and usually “worried) campaign manager, lining up the local organizations, discussing the shirtsleeved facts of politics with the bosses and the kingmakers. There is Teddy, the legman, working and talking at the lowest level of the campaign, climbing out of West Virginia mine shafts, soaring off Wisconsin ski jumps, buttonholing Idaho delegates, doing whatever is required of him. And, when the campaign script calls for their special talents, there are the glamorous Kennedy sisters: tawny-haired Eunice Kennedy Shriver, 38; leggy Patricia Kennedy Lawford, 36, wife of the movie star; and Jean Kennedy Smith, 32, the slim, tanned baby sister of the family. Together and separately, the sisters knock on doors, preside over kaffeeklatsches, and shed their charm at political banquets, receptions and rallies. And finally, there is Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, 69, who willingly pitches in (sometimes in French, if the occasion calls for it) whenever her hard-running son needs her.

The one voice that has not been heard aloud since Jack Kennedy went into public life is the managerial Boston baritone of Joseph Patrick Kennedy, 71, father of the clan, who has deliberately chosen the role of public silence to play down the fact that he is the dominant force in making the remarkable Kennedy family what it is today.

Cable-Stitched. The Kennedy clan is as handsome and spirited as a meadow full of Irish thoroughbreds, as tough as a blackthorn shillelagh, as ruthless as Cuchulain, the mythical hero who cast up the hills of Ireland with his sword. The tribal laws permit extremes of individualism, though most Kennedys look alike when they smile. When they are together, the family foofaraws are noisy and the discussions continuous, but when they are apart, their need for constant communication strains the facilities of the telephone company and the U.S. postal service. No matter where they happen to be, the Kennedys are a cable-stitched clan. The sisters communicate by long distance at least once a week; Jack and his brothers hold daily strategy meetings by telephone or in person. Father Joe, whether in his Manhattan office, his summer home in Hyannisport, his winter palace in Palm Beach, or his between-seasons residence on the Riviera, gets the latest daily report from one of the boys, and when Mother Rose makes one of her frequent trips to the ateliers of Paris, she can count on weekly letters, with the latest intelligence from each of her children.

Though intramural competition is intense, the clan swarm like bees around a queen when one member makes a louder hum than the others. Thus, when Teddy was a brawny end at Harvard, every Kennedy became an expert football coach and traveled in T-formation to Cambridge on autumn Saturdays to watch him play. In Bobby’s heyday as the grand inquisitor of the Senate McClellan committee, when he was making Jimmy Hoffa squirm, the clan became totally absorbed in the investigation, discussed it over every dinner table and every long-distance telephone call and beat a path to the white marble Senate Caucus Room. Even the in-laws are not immune to the sudden fevers: Bobby’s wife Ethel, often accompanied by two or three of her older children, was a daily onlooker at the hearings last summer, well into the seventh month of her seventh pregnancy. When the Peter Lawfords encountered a new parlor game, Conversations,* it was only a matter of days before all the Kennedys were doing what comes naturally in all their parlors all over the U.S. And when Jack got into politics, the entire clan plunged in with him as quickly as they would join a family game of charades or touch football.

Belle of Boston. The clan came by its political instincts easily. The Kennedys and Mother Rose’s family, the Fitzgeralds, came to Boston more than a century ago, in the great avalanche of immigration that followed the Irish potato famine. The families prospered, and both grandfathers, John F. (“Honey Fitz”) Fitzgerald and Patrick J. Kennedy, went into Democratic politics—Pat as a backstage oligarch, Honey Fitz as a frock-coated ham who could weep at will at a stranger’s wake, made Sweet Adeline his theme song, served three terms in Congress and was a memorable mayor of Boston.

But an understanding of the political Kennedys of 1960 begins with an understanding of Patrick’s boy Joe, whose shrewd Irish instincts were first and foremost focused on making a name and a fortune. Pat Kennedy did so well with a string of saloons and a flyer in banking that he could afford to send young Joe off in style to the Boston Latin School and Harvard. After graduation, Joe went to work as a $1,500-a-year bank inspector, but such small-bore jobs were not for him. When he heard that Columbia Trust Co.—in which his father owned an interest—was about to be absorbed by a larger bank, Joe borrowed $45,000 from sentimental depositors and rich cousins, bought a controlling interest in the bank and shook the city’s Brahmin banking circles by making himself, at 25, the youngest bank president in the U.S. and the first Irish-American ever to achieve such eminence in the city of Boston.

Several months later Joe married Rose Fitzgerald, the eldest of Honey Fitz’s six children, and the belle of Boston. The dynasties were linked at a nuptial Mass performed by William Cardinal O’Connell. The following year, when his first son, Joe Jr., was born, Joe vowed to give each child he sired a million-dollar trust fund at the age of 21. It was a promise that would have staggered greater millionaires, as Jack, Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Bobby, Jean and Teddy relentlessly and regularly followed Joe Jr. into the world. But old Joe could have begotten as many children as an Oriental potentate with 50 wives and still have enough left over to make his grandchildren and great-grandchildren millionaires.

Bulging Warehouses. As his tribe and fortune increased, Joe Kennedy moved out of Boston into the big time of Wall Street, then on to other bold ventures in Hollywood, Florida, Texas, Britain and Chicago and the far corners of the world. His bankroll today is estimated at more than $200 million. As a Wall Street plunger, he specialized in damming up huge stock pools (in partnership with such fellow beavers as Harry Sinclair and “Sell ‘Em Ben” Smith), inflating the stock through rumors and erratic—but well publicized—selling and buying, then selling short for big profits. Later, as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Joe helped write the stern Government regulations that stopped the very stock market practices that had made him rich.

A tough and tightfisted operator, Joe made some bitter enemies as he acquired his millions (many of his embittered ex-associates refuse to speak of their ventures with Joe Kennedy, or to him). He was a foresighted speculator: anticipating the end of Prohibition, Joe made a quick trip to England in 1933, cornered the import franchise for British Scotch (Haig & Haig, Dewar’s) and gin (Gordon’s) for $118,000. Then he wangled a Government permit to import thousands of cases of his whisky and gin for medicinal purposes, and when repeal came, the Kennedy warehouses were bulging and ready to flow. After 13 years of giddy profits, Joe sold his British franchise for $8,500,000—and paid off the two top officials who had run his distribution company for him with a niggardly $25,000 each.

In the late ’20s, Joe Kennedy went into show business, flourished as a board chairman, special adviser or reorganizer of five film, vaudeville and radio companies (Paramount, Pathe, First National, Keith-Albee-Orpheum and RCA). Since the war he has applied his Midas touch to Texas oil investments and real estate in Manhattan, Palm Beach and Chicago. Joe Kennedy’s fantastic purchase of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, the world’s largest and ugliest commercial building, from Marshall Field & Co. in 1945, still glazes the eyes of real estate speculators. Joe got the Mart for $12.5 million, putting up just $800,000 in cash. He promptly mortgaged it for $18 million. Today the Mart (which is expertly managed by Eunice Kennedy’s husband, Sargent Shriver) is worth $75 million, brings in annual rentals that exceed its original purchase price.

Although he was often absent from home while he amassed his millions (his daughter Patricia, born during a hectic, seven-week business deal, was a month old before her father saw her for the first time), Joe Kennedy has always had firm ideas on his children’s upbringing. Rose Kennedy, a pious Catholic, supervised her children’s religious education, and all of the girls went to Catholic schools (Manhattanville and Sacred Heart convents in the U.S. and Britain). But for his sons.

Joe insisted on a secular education like his own. The boys attended private preparatory schools and Harvard. Bobby and Teddy studied law at the University of Virginia, and Joe Jr. and Jack each spent a term at the London School of Economics under the late Harold Laski, an agnostic, a Socialist and the proponent of some fiscal notions that were on the other side of Joe Kennedy’s moon.

“Let ‘Em Fight.” Wherever the family circle rolled—Boston, Bronxville, Washington, London, Palm Beach, the Riviera, Hyannisport—there were new and exciting experiences, tastes, sounds, discussions. During the long summers on Cape Cod, the Kennedys became fiercely competitive at tennis, sailing, swimming, golf and parlor games. Sibling unity as well as sibling rivalry was encouraged: once Joe Kennedy found himself in a violent argument with his two older sons. “Let ’em fight,” he said later. “The important thing is that they fight together. I can take care of myself.” At times the daily Donnybrooks (often accompanied by the obbligato of Joe Kennedy’s private ticker tape on the front porch) drove Rose to a simple prefabricated shack she had erected as a retreat on a remote corner of the Hyannisport property. “It’s solitary confinement not splendor I need.” she explains. “Any mother will know what I mean.”

The Hyannisport neighbors, mostly Pittsburgh millionaires, sniffed at the Kennedys as “moneyed Boston Irish,” and the clan drew closer together. In the community sailing races on Nantucket Sound the Kennedy boys were savage contestants, and an annual softball game between the “Barefoot Boys” (the Kennedys and allies) and the “Pansies” (the neighbors) was fought out each Labor Day on the Kennedy lawn. Jack usually pitched, Bobby and Teddy sometimes pouted when their homemade rules were not observed, and celebrated house guests were occasionally dragooned into the game. Once the late Senator Joe McCarthy made four errors playing shortstop for the Barefoot Boys, was retired in disgrace.

Ambassadors at Large. The Wall Street crash unnerved Joe Kennedy and persuaded him to put aside his innate conservatism and become an ardent supporter and a lavish financial backer of Franklin Roosevelt. As SECommissioner and chief of the Maritime Commission, where he performed a notable service to his country by salvaging and reorganizing the bankrupt U.S. merchant marine, Joe lived in Washington for long stretches, frequently brought the family down to meet President Roosevelt and the top dogs of the New Deal. When Roosevelt appointed Joe Kennedy as U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—the first Irish-American to hold the job—the clan moved into the embassy residence on Prince’s Gate and immersed themselves in international problems. Summer vacations were spent exploring Europe. Joe Jr. toured the Franco front in Spain; Jack visited Moscow and Berlin on the eve of World War II. Some times the entire tribe would swarm over to Paris for a weekend with Ambassador William Bullitt (“People didn’t seem to mind,” explains Rose, “and we didn’t care where we slept”).

As the threat of World War II began to grow in Europe, Ambassador Kennedy’s isolationism and his respect for Nazi Germany’s military might led him to speak up bluntly and pungently against U.S. involvement on Britain’s behalf. Although he remained in London until the Battle of Britain, his break with the Administration was irrevocable. Roosevelt accepted his resignation, and Joe Kennedy’s political career came to an abrupt and embittered end.

Advantages & Obligations. With his million-dollar trust funds. Joe assured his children of financial independence. “I put them in a position where each one of them could spit in my eye and tell me where to go,” he has said, “and there was nothing to prevent them from becoming rich, idle bums if they wanted to.” There was the implicit assumption, however, that each Kennedy, freed of the necessity of earning a living, had a duty to make his life worthwhile. Says Rose: “Joe told the children that they had plenty of advantages, but that these advantages carry with them certain obligations.” Like the English gentry of the 18th century, the Kennedys expected each son to excel in a different career. There was no question that young Joe, a bright, confident boy and a natural leader, would go into politics and in due course become President of the U.S. As a 25-year-old member of the Massachusetts delegation to the Democratic Convention of 1940, Joe Jr. footnoted political history by being the last holdout for James Farley, against Roosevelt’s third term.

The family had vague feelings that Jack might become a teacher or a writer. He was a sickly, bookish boy who preferred Billy Whiskers and James Fenimore Cooper to the family calisthenics (“I wasn’t a terribly good athlete,” he admits, “but I participated”). A passing-fair student at Choate (although an atrocious speller), Jack reached his second stage at Harvard, graduated cum laude in 3½ years, and at the suggestion of Arthur Krock rewrote his thesis into a bestseller, Why England Slept. By implication it refuted most of Joe Kennedy’s dogmas about keeping out of war with Nazi Germany.

The Grim Years. The war and its after math shook the Kennedy family to its roots. First Jack, a naval lieutenant on duty in the Solomons, was reported missing in action. His gallant and harrowing role in rescuing the crew of his PT boat after a Japanese destroyer had sliced it through is one of the great tales of heroism in the South Pacific. Jack was still recovering in a naval hospital when the family learned that Naval Lieut. Joseph Kennedy Jr. had been killed over the English coast. After two complete tours over enemy waters, Joe Jr. had passed up home leave orders to volunteer as the pilot of a highly secret “drone” plane,which was aimed at a Nazi V-2 launching site. Once the overloaded plane, crammed with explosives, was at cruising level, Joe and his copilot were instructed to parachute to safety while the Vega Ventura escorts guided the drone by radio on to its target. Just before their scheduled jump, the plane exploded. The bodies were never found. (Bobby, a sophomore at Harvard, quit school a few months later to serve as a seaman aboard a destroyer that was named in honor of his hero brother.)

Three weeks after Joe’s death, Kathleen’s husband, the Marquess of Hartington, was killed in Normandy in infantry action. A lively, pretty girl, Kathleen (“Kick”) met the young nobleman, heir of the Duke of Devonshire, during her debutante days in London. When she returned to Britain as a Red Cross worker during the war, Kathleen saw the marquess again, and they decided to be married. It was a poignant, Montague-Capulet romance: both the Catholic Kennedys and the Anglican Cavendishes were bitterly dismayed (Lieut. Joe Kennedy took leave from his naval air base to give his sister in marriage at a drab civil registrar’s office in London, but the rest of the Kennedy clan made no sign of recognition). A month after the wedding, the marquess went off to war with the Coldstream Guards. Four years later, the widowed Kathleen was killed in a plane crash in France, not far from the scene of her husband’s death.* Her death was especially shocking to Jack, who had been closest to Kick when they were growing up.

Rosemary, the eldest of the Kennedy daughters, was a childhood victim of spinal meningitis, is now a patient in a nursing home in Wisconsin. Says Joe Kennedy: “I used to think it was something to hide, but then I learned that almost everyone I know has a relative or good friend who has the problem. I think it best to bring these things out in the open.”*

Warming Up. After Joe Jr.’s death, Jack Kennedy stepped instinctively into his brother’s shoes. “Just as I went into politics because Joe died,” he explained later, “if anything happened to me tomorrow, my brother Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate, and if Bobby died, Teddy would take over for him.” In the family war councils it was decided that Jack should make his political debut in the congressional race for Boston’s Eleventh District—a Democratic citadel that includes Cambridge and Harvard, but is largely made up of slums and the middle-class Irish and Italian wards of East Boston. It was home ground for Honey Fitz, and the area where Joe Kennedy was born, but Jack was a complete stranger. He rented a carpetbagger’s quarters in the Hotel Bellevue in order to qualify as a “resident,” and plunged into the primary campaign against eight opponents. At first he was shy and ill at ease, but as the campaign warmed up, so did he. Watching his son shake hands on a busy corner of Maverick Square, old Joe was frankly amazed: “I never thought Jack had it in him.”

Honey Fitz, brimming with pride, provided his grandson with a phalanx of seasoned ward heelers, but Jack preferred the rank-amateur assistance of his college friends, wartime shipmates and Ivy Leaguers who flocked to help out in the campaign. The old pols were disgusted, until Jack and his youthful supporters won handsomely, with 42% of the vote. On the night of the primary victory, old Honey Fitz, 83, crawled up on a table, danced a stiff-legged Irish jig and sang Sweet Adeline. It was the swan song for the old, colorful and rascally breed of Boston Irish politics.

Congressman Kennedy took his oath of office on the same day and at the same moment as a young freshman from California, Richard Nixon. Their paths were destined to cross again. In three lackluster terms in the House, Jack kept his distance from the machine-tooled Massachusetts delegation (he was the only member to refuse to sign a petition for a presidential pardon for the doughty James Michael Curley, his grandfather Fitzgerald’s ancient political rival—then languishing in jail for mail fraud). In 1952 Jack was ready to play for higher stakes. At the clan councils he toyed with the idea of running for the governorship, but eventually decided to make an audacious try for the Senate seat of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.-“When you’ve beaten him, you’ve beaten the best,” advised Joe Kennedy. “Why try for something less?”

In his Senate campaign Jack called out the clan. Bobby was a meticulous campaign manager, crisscrossing Massachusetts like an anxious welterweight, head down, looking up through bushy eyebrows with a baleful stare. State Senator John Powers asked Joe Kennedy for his wife’s services as a campaigner. “But she’s a grandmother,” he protested. “Yes, but she’s beautiful, and she’s the mother of a Congressman, and we need her,” was the reply. Rose went to work, with Eunice, Pat and Jean, at the famous Boston tea parties, and the Clan Kennedy smashed Cabot Lodge and turned back the Eisenhower riptide by 70,000 votes. (“It was those damned tea parties,” Lodge said afterward.)

For old Joe Kennedy the family prospects were looking up after some grim years. Not only were the boys doing all that would be expected, but the tribe was picking up some attractive new in-laws:

¶ Robert Sargent Shriver, 44, is a Maryland aristocrat, a Yaleman and a former Newsweek assistant editor. In 1946 Joe Kennedy asked him to look over some diaries young Joe had written during the Spanish revolution and appraise them for posterity. “Sarge” Shriver’s candid verdict was negative, but he impressed Joe and stayed on the family payroll, met and married Eunice while she was doing social work in Washington. Shriver runs Jack Kennedy’s Midwestern political headquarters, has ambitions for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Illinois.

¶ Stephen Edward Smith, 32, heir of a Manhattan tugboat-barge fortune, married Jean, youngest daughter of the clan, soon found himself beguiled into duty as the administrative officer of Jack’s Washington GHQ. Although his grandfather, William E. Cleary, served three terms in Congress as a Democrat, Steve disclaims any political longings.

¶ Peter Lawford, 36, the film and TV star, who met Patricia Kennedy at a cocktail party given by Eunice in Chicago in 1952, brought her back from a world tour with a long-distance proposal from Los Angeles to Tokyo. Lawford, the only Protestant in the tribe, at first drew thunderbolts from Joe Kennedy (“The only thing I would hate worse than an actor as a son-in-law is an English actor”), but a peace treaty has been signed. The Lawfords live in the Santa Monica home of the late Louis B. Mayer and are members in good standing of another, lesser clan—the Hollywood social swarm that buzzes around Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.

By all odds, the postwar prize of Clan Kennedy is Jack’s wife (and the mother of his 2½-year-old daughter Caroline), the former Jacqueline Bouvier, 30. A limpid beauty who would have excited Goya into mixing his rose madder, Jackie Kennedy is the quintessence of cultured, luminous young womanhood. Since breaking an ankle at a family touch football game and losing a baby after the 1956 convention, she has made her own determined amendments to the tribal laws, restricted her campaigning to such niceties as wowing the Louisiana Cajuns with a speech in Sorbonne French, and entertaining politicians at her Georgetown home with fine food, vintage wine and sparkling conversation. She accompanies Jack to Sunday Mass at nearby Holy Trinity Church when he is in town.* If her husband reaches the White House, Jackie Kennedy will be the most exquisite First Lady since Frances Cleveland.

“We Can’t Agree.” Jack Kennedy’s decision to run for the presidency in 1960 was made a short month after he lost the vice-presidential nomination to Estes Kefauver at the 1956 convention. Jack counted on his father for tactical opinions and financial support. But on the major decisions he was his own man. Old Joe’s advice to stay out of the vice-presidential race at the 1956 convention went unheeded, and it went unheeded again early this year when, because of the Catholic issue, he asked Jack to withdraw from the presidential campaign. “Our disagreement on policy is total,” says Jack. “We never discuss it. There is no use, because we can’t agree.” But Joe Kennedy is not so far out of the campaign as Jack would like people to believe. He is in almost daily touch with one or the other of the campaigning Kennedys, talks with an authoritative air to friends. (“Not for chalk, money or marbles will we take second place. Nobody’s going to make a deal with us in a back room somewhere for second place on the ticket.”)

This week, as the last bunting was being tacked up in Los Angeles, the city braced for a mass movement of convention-bound Kennedys. Bob is already on duty establishing the clan’s convention headquarters, getting ready for the all-important, last-minute dickering. Jack headed for Cape Cod for a week’s rest before moving on to Los Angeles and his moment of truth. Joe and Rose will pitch camp in a mansion, rented for the duration of the convention. Pat Lawford, a resident Californian, will have a front-row seat on the convention floor as a member of the California delegation, but she may have to cast her first ballot for Governor Pat Brown, the favorite son. From their Chicago and Washington homes, the Shrivers and Smiths will bear down on Los Angeles. The gathering of the clan, with peripheral in-laws, intimate friends, well-wishers and family retainers, should hit Los Angeles like an earthquake.

One member of the clan will not be present. Jack’s wife Jackie plans to remain in Hyannisport and watch the convention on television. (If Jack wins the nomination, she will make a quick trip to Los Angeles to join him.) Her contribution to the Kennedy campaign and the dynasty’s future will be the newest member of the clan, who, if the luck of the Kennedys holds out, will be born on or about Election Day next November.

* Two people secretly assume the identities of two famous persons and begin a conversation in the manner of their alter egos. From this, the other players try to guess their identities.

* If Kathleen and her husband had lived, she would now be Duchess of Devonshire, first lady in waiting to Queen Elizabeth and a niece by marriage of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Her husband, in all likelihood, would have received his father’s commission as grand master of the craft of Freemasons, along with his ducal rank, and, says Joe Kennedy, “I’d be father-in-law of the head of all the Masons in the world.”

* Rosemary’s misfortune has resulted in the major Kennedy philanthropy, which is the good fortune of the mentally retarded, and typically, an all-absorbing project of the entire clan: the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation. Since its inception in 1948, the foundation has spent $13.5 million on a dozen homes and hospitals for the mentally retarded in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois and California. This year $10 million is being spent recruiting eminent doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists to work on a dramatic new research program. Bobby is the president but Sarge Shriver is the managing director of the foundation and each of the brothers and brothers-in-law is a member of the board, but the prime movers of the foundation come from the distaff side: Pat Lawford runs the West Coast operations, Eunice Shriver is in charge of the Midwest, and Jean Smith is responsible for the East Coast. Says Founder Joe Kennedy: “Everybody has a locality.”

* Whose grandfather, Henry Cabot Lodge, defeated Honey Fitz by a scant 30,000 votes in a 1916 Senate race.

* Kennedy is one of the few candidates ever to turn down the requests of photographers for pictures of himself in church.