The Administration: The Man on the Hill

(See Cover)

In his walnut-paneled White House office, Lawrence Francis O’Brien held a hurried conference with his aides. He had been warned by Vice President Lyndon Johnson that an important Southern Senator was wavering on an Administration bill. “See what you can do with him,” O’Brien told a staffer. Then, as the meeting broke up, O’Brien turned to his telephone and called another Senator to thank him for a favorable vote the previous week. “I didn’t want you to think we didn’t notice and appreciate what you did,” said O’Brien in a low Yankee twang. “The President mentioned it at the leadership meeting this morning.”

During that same morning, O’Brien heard warnings, gave orders and expressed gratitude in a dozen other telephone calls; he talked to Congressmen, lobbyists, Democratic National Chairman John Bailey and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Between calls, he raced downstairs three times for quick conferences with President Kennedy. Then he was off to Capitol Hill for a meeting with Lyndon Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield in the Vice President’s office. After lunching on the run, O’Brien talked to a dozen Congressmen, examined the fever charts of a dozen pending bills. Returning to the White House in midafternoon, he held another staff conference, saw the President again, greeted North Carolina’s visiting Democratic Governor Terry Sanford, finally shrugged into his jacket and left for the Mayflower Hotel, where a Democratic National Committee cocktail party for Congressmen was in full swing.

All in all, that day last week was a relatively relaxed one in the life of Larry O’Brien, 44, whose job as President Kennedy’s Special Assistant for Congressional Relations makes him one of the most important of all New Frontiersmen—with responsibility for seeing to it that the Kennedy Administration’s programs become public law.

A Problem of Climate. To the casual observer, that responsibility might seem simple. After all, Democrat Jack Kennedy took office from Republican Dwight Eisenhower with lopsidedly Democratic majorities in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. But Kennedy won his way to the White House by such a perilous plurality (118,000 votes out of a national total of 68 million) that he could in no sense be considered to have a mandate that might compel Congressmen to go along with him. Indeed, many winning Democratic Representatives and Senators who led Kennedy on the ticket within their own constituencies, could reasonably decide that they knew better than the young President about what was good for the people.

In such a political climate, the job of convincing or, if necessary, pushing the Congress into following the Administration has become one of the toughest and most sensitive in Washington. It requires keen understanding of the equations of politics. The President’s man on Capitol Hill must know instinctively which Congressmen will respond to deference or flattery, which ones require threats or pressures from home, which ones will leap at the hint of presidential support in the next campaign. O’Brien possesses such understanding in good measure. And he is an expert in the political uses of power, patronage and persuasion.

Check It with Larry. In his operations on Capitol Hill, O’Brien’s greatest asset is the all-out backing of the President himself. In the first days of the New Frontier, Jack Kennedy made it obvious to Congressmen that Liaison Man O’Brien was armed with all the authority he might need. Senators and Representatives calling Kennedy with political proposals invariably were asked: “Have you checked that with Larry O’Brien?” They soon got the idea.

O’Brien knows precisely how far the President will go in making legislative concessions to Congress. More than once, when approached by Democratic congressional leaders with suggestions for compromises that might speed Administration programs through the Senate or House, O’Brien has accepted on the spot, without having to refer to the President.

As a man who prefers the carrot to the stick in his operations, O’Brien uses the power of the presidency sparingly. Time and again, congressional leaders have urged him to recommend that President Kennedy intervene directly in legislative matters. Time and again, O’Brien has refused, acting only in crucial cases when a presidential telephone call or White House talk with a key Congressman is most timely and can be most effective.

The Friendly Lobbies. Other top Administration officials follow the President’s lead in helping O’Brien move New Frontier programs through Congress—and it is indeed a crusty legislator who is not flattered by a friendly telephone call, made at O’Brien’s suggestion, from a member of the Kennedy Cabinet.

O’Brien has also made effective use of the pressures that can be brought to bear on Congressmen by the liberal lobbies that abound in Washington—notably that of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., under its own able legislative man, Andy Biemiller. When Administration legislative interests coincide with those of a particular lobbying group, O’Brien makes certain that one of his staffmen compares notes and coordinates efforts with the lobbyists. Intelligence is exchanged, a list is made of Congressmen whose votes might be swayed, and high-tempo lobbying techniques, ranging from direct-mail campaigns to carefully arranged visits from constituents, are turned on the solons.

The Use of Patronage. Just before O’Brien took over as President Kennedy’s liaison representative to Congress, he conferred with Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s man on the Hill, Bryce Harlow. From Harlow, O’Brien received a piece of sage advice: not to get too overtly involved with patronage problems. Said Harlow: “With patronage, you will have to turn down ten men for every one you say yes to. You make people unhappy instead of happy.”

O’Brien has followed that advice-up to a point. Officially, patronage is left to Democratic National Committee Chairman John Bailey, who works in consultation with O’Brien Staffman Dick Donahue. But O’Brien knows well that patronage is still a potent political instrument; he makes recommendations to Bailey on major appointments, and his suggestions receive top-priority consideration. Thus, when the 14 members of the Italian-American congressional bloc threatened to vote against the Administration’s feed-grains bill just to demonstrate their power, O’Brien quickly found out what was on their minds: no man of Italian descent had been appointed to a major Administration post. O’Brien promised to look into the matter for them, the bloc voted right, and a few weeks later the White House was pleased to announce the appointment of Salvatore Bontempo as head of the State Department’s consular service. For good measure, Michel Cieplinski was named as Bontempo’s assistant, mollifying an eleven-member Polish-American group in the House.

All Congressmen now know that, although John Bailey is the nominal dangler of political plums, O’Brien is really the man to see when they have a patronage problem.

Worlds Apart. For all the political power tools that he can command, Larry O’Brien’s greatest strength lies in his personal relationships with the members of Congress. He can talk their language. Like them, he is a political pro. He has the pro’s disdain for windmill-tilting amateurs. “The eggheads,” he says, “want the candidate to win on his own terms, to defy the party and interest groups. The egghead thinks it’s worthwhile to be defeated. I think it’s worthwhile to be elected.” This same pragmatic professionalism sets O’Brien apart from many of the other men who surround President Kennedy. “I don’t know what I’m doing in this crowd,” O’Brien once mused. “I didn’t go to Harvard, and I’m not athletic. I don’t even play touch football.”

Larry O’Brien was born in the Roland Hotel, a small hostelry that his father owned, in downtown Springfield, Mass., on July 7, 1917—six weeks after John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born, 75 miles across the state and a world apart, in his father’s big home in Brookline. Both Lawrence O’Brien Sr. and Myra Sweeney O’Brien were immigrants from County Cork. Myra was a proud, slender woman and a talented cook—her clam chowder, beef stew and soda bread were locally celebrated—who had worked as a domestic before her marriage. O’Brien Sr. was a scrappy redhead, and an up-and-coming real estate operator. By the time young Larry was born, his father owned a string of drab roominghouses, an insurance business and the Roland Hotel.

One Place to Go. Inevitably, the O’Briens encountered and bitterly resented the anti-Irish feelings that gripped western Massachusetts—the Yankee-bred hostility toward immigrants, the Puritan suspicion of Roman Catholics, the NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs on the factory gates. “My father ran into bigotry,” says Larry. “It made him a strong Democrat. It was one place for him to go. He wasn’t wanted elsewhere.” O’Brien Sr. became a Democratic Party organizer deep inside a Republican fastness. “It was the old story of the Irish immigrant becoming a citizen, a first voter and a politician at the same time,” says his son. “I can remember my father coming back home from the ’24 convention. He brought us hats in the shape of teapots.”

The O’Brien kitchen became a political headquarters, and Democratic leaders from Boston made their way there—notably, flamboyant James Michael Curley, archetype of The Last Hurrah breed, and smooth-tongued David Ignatius Walsh, first Irishman ever elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. Walsh was some times a trial: whenever he paid a call, he insisted on quizzing Larry on his American history and catechism. But Curley was another, headier cup of tea: as a bug-eyed boy, Larry listened spellbound as his father and Curley conspired like Sinn Feiners about the ways to break the hated Yankee Republican grip on western Massachusetts. And always there was a recurrent theme: “Our kitchen used to be the place where some of the boys would meet, and my father would say: ‘All right, now we’ll get the signatures.’ It was organizational politics, signatures on petitions, door-to-door canvassing. He was a great one for planning—all the things I wound up being involved in myself.”

In 1932, when Larry was a part-time helper in Springfield’s Democratic headquarters and his father was a state committeeman from western Massachusetts, the O’Briens defied their Irish Catholic neighbors and supported Franklin Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination, instead of Al Smith, who was the local favorite. O’Brien Sr. was denied a seat in the Massachusetts delegation for his heresy, but history proved that Father knew best.

When he was 20, Larry started taking night-school courses at the Springfield branch of Northeastern University (Jack Kennedy was a Harvard sophomore that year). He graduated in 1942 with an LL.B., but he had never had any real notion of practicing law: “If there had been a course in practical politics, I’d have taken that.” He was, in fact, getting all the practical politics he could absorb—accompanying his father around the state, stumping for Curley and every other Democratic candidate in sight, and chinning with ward heelers over the mahogany bar in his father’s restaurant. At 22, Larry was a rush-hour bartender in O’Brien’s Café and Restaurant and chairman of his political ward. That same year he ran for office for the only time in his life—and was elected president of the Hotel & Restaurant Employees Union.

The Best Man. During World War II, O’Brien marked time unhappily as an Army sergeant at Massachusetts’ Camp Edwards. His poor eyesight (20/400 vision) redlined him for combat duty. On one ten-day furlough he married Elva Brassard, the daughter of a Springfield house painter. They had courted sporadically for five years—on O’Brien’s terms. “It was always going to political rallies, or running over to see what the city council was doing,” recalls Elva O’Brien. “That was Larry’s idea of a date.” Their best man was Foster Furcolo, an old friend of O’Brien’s and a political comer.

After the war, Larry O’Brien returned to Springfield to manage the O’Brien Realty Co.—which had grown to include a gas station and a parking lot in addition to the restaurant—and to get back into politics. In Best Man Foster Furcolo, Organizer O’Brien had a ready candidate. Having come up through the wards, Furcolo was ready for the big time, and O’Brien was eager to handle his campaign for Congress. With his usual attention to detail, he gridded the Second Massachusetts District into 60 units, recruited a corps of “secretaries,” and kept a swarm of volunteers busy mailing campaign letters to their friends.

During that first Furcolo campaign, O’Brien devised many of the campaign techniques that later became standard operating procedure for John Kennedy’s state and national efforts. But 1946 was a Republican year, and Furcolo was defeated by a scant 3,295 votes. As soon as the returns were in, O’Brien went methodically to work on the 1948 campaign. And in the second Furcolo race, O’Brien brought in a winner, with a 15,000 plurality. In gratitude, Foster Furcolo asked O’Brien to come to Washington as his administrative assistant. Two years later, the two friends came to a mysterious and bitter parting of the ways (neither man will reveal the reason), and Larry O’Brien came back to Springfield vowing that he had quit politics forever.

Tea & Telephones. It was one of the briefest retirements in political history. Within six months O’Brien was hard at work, organizing Massachusetts for John Kennedy, then a third-term Congressman and an unannounced aspirant to the Senate. Kennedy had known O’Brien casually for five years, had spotted him as a campaign organizer of rare talent. Within a year, O’Brien had recruited 350 secretaries, 18,000 volunteer Kennedy workers. By the time Kennedy formally announced his Senate candidacy, O’Brien was all ready with a purring statewide political machine. The O’Brien brain was a supermarket of political innovations: the campaign tea parties, with Kennedy’s mother and sisters pouring (and an omnipresent guestbook to provide O’Brien with the names and addresses of potential campaign workers) ; the expanding “O’Brien Manual,” a handbook of organizational instructions written in language that any amateur could understand; the O’Brien Home Telephone Technique, rounding up women volunteers who would each call all the people listed on a single page in the telephone book, ask for support and offer transportation to the polls. Explains O’Brien: “The key to this is the full utilization of womanpower. Normally, women are wasted in a campaign. They have children. They can’t come to headquarters.”

To the Kennedy team, O’Brien was and is more than a skillful political organizer. He has the experience and understanding to serve as a bridge between the Democratic Old Guard and the New Frontier. The bright, eager young men around Jack Kennedy have always baffled and often offended the Skeffingtons of Massachusetts; but Larry O’Brien can talk to politicians in their own language and win them over. “He was the essential transition man for us with the Old Guard,” says Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, O’Brien was an invaluable professor of political science for the likes of Bobby, Kenny O’Donnell, Dick Donahue and other young members of the Kennedy group who were rank political amateurs in Kennedy’s successful 1952 senatorial campaign. They have since become a close-knit, highly professional team that is known in Administration circles as “the Irish Mafia.”

Big Thoughts. As a first-term Senator, Jack Kennedy had a legislative record that was nothing to brag about. But his political appeal was such that in 1956, when Democratic Presidential Nominee Adlai Stevenson threw the vice presidential nomination up for grabs at the party’s Chicago convention, Kennedy made a wildly disorganized eleventh-hour attempt for the prize. He lost to Estes Kefauver, but by so narrow a margin that it set the Kennedyites to thinking really Big Thoughts. Recalls Larry O’Brien (who had not even attended the convention): “After that convention, we began to realize that Kennedy could go all the way.”

With Larry O’Brien and his organization working as though their own lives were at stake, Kennedy won re-election to the Senate in 1958 by close to 900,000 votes, the biggest plurality in Massachusetts history. Kennedy’s reputation as a prime vote getter—presumably on a national scale—was correspondingly enhanced. And so, in late February 1959, Jack Kennedy called a special presidential strategy session at his father’s Palm Beach home. Present were Brothers Bobby and Teddy Kennedy, Brothers-in-Law Sarge Shriver and Steve Smith, Adviser Ted Sorensen—and Larry O’Brien. In this first formal planning for a Kennedy effort to reach the White House, O’Brien was assigned the job of establishing Kennedy organizations throughout the U.S.

Courthouse v. White House. Carrying out that assignment, O’Brien crossed the nation nine times, traveling 100.000 miles, talking deep into every night, stoking himself with three packs of Pall Malls, a Niagara of black coffee each day. He set up the local organizations, staffed mostly by enthusiastic amateurs in the states where Kennedy had to win presidential primaries to have any real hope for the Democratic nomination. O’Brien could also talk turkey with such patronage-minded politicans as a local West Virginia leader who told him bluntly: “I’m not interested in the White House. I’m interested in the courthouse.”

The primaries won, O’Brien was in Los Angeles setting up Kennedy headquarters a full month before the Democrats met to choose their candidate for President. In Los Angeles, O’Brien’s elaborate telephone and walkie-talkie system of instant, 24-hour communication with the convention floor and each state delegation headquarters was a marvel of modern political efficiency. After the convention, O’Brien applied all his tried and true organizational techniques to Kennedy’s winning campaign against Republican Richard Nixon. “It was dog work,” he recalls, “but it was worthwhile: it worked.” Jack Kennedy’s own post-election appraisal of O’Brien: “The best election man in the business.”

Immediately after Election Day, O’Brien drew an arduous assignment: checking the qualifications, background, weak points and strong suits of nearly 10,000 prospective officials in the new Administration. One afternoon in Palm Beach, going over the lists of names with O’Brien, Kennedy casually notified him of his new job: “By the way, I think this role of congressional liaison is for you.” As a graduate of both houses, Kennedy gave O’Brien a warning against the pitfalls of intimacy. “In politics,” the President-elect told him, “you don’t have friends. You have allies.”

The Unfigurables. In his campaigning travels, Larry O’Brien had come to know many Congressmen—but he had never dealt with them in their legislative capacity. Now it was time for just such dealing. First O’Brien huddled with a select group of Capitol Hill veterans, sought to make a knowledgeable estimate of the political shape of the 87th Congress. It was decided that the Senate, with a minimum amount of attention, would back most of the Kennedy program. But the House of Representatives was a different matter. The presession analysis showed that there were about 180 certain House votes for most New Frontier Programs, about 180 votes that were almost equally sure to go against the Administration. That left between 75 and 80 votes that were more or less unfigurable.

Next, O’Brien met early in February in his Mayflower Hotel suite with three of the canniest young Democratic members of the House: Missouri’s Richard Boiling, New Jersey’s Frank Thompson and Alabama’s Carl Elliott. Boiling had already gone over the list of New Frontier legislative proposals, estimated as things stood that only one—the housing bill—was a sure shot for House passage. The conferees ran through the entire roster of 437 Representatives—name by name, back-home problem by back-home problem, interest by interest and prejudice by prejudice. “We decided,” recalls one of the men who sat in on the Mayflower session, “that we had two target areas, the Eastern industrial Republicans and the moderate-to-conservative Southerners. We figured there were 40 Southerners we couldn’t touch—but we’ve modified that since, because we have touched some of them.”

As his staff contact man with Southern Representatives, O’Brien wisely selected Henry Hall Wilson Jr., 39, a North Carolinian who had done yeoman service for Candidate Kennedy in Wilson’s native state during the 1960 campaign. Wilson knew little about legislative dealing with members of Congress. “But we figured he could learn,” says Dick Donahue. “The most important thing was to get our own man, so that if he had any ties he had ’em to Larry instead of to a bunch of people he’s known and become obliged to on the Hill.”

The Absolute Key. In their studies of the House balances of power, O’Brien and his congressional advisers decided that there was a key man: Georgia’s Carl Vinson, chairman of the Armed Services Committee and one of the two or three most influential Southerners in the House. They decided that it was vital to lure Vinson away from the conservative camp; he could, among other things, bring at least a score of Southern votes along with him. Says Boiling: “Vinson was absolutely the key to the whole session.” O’Brien concentrated his own efforts on Vinson. The old gentleman won O’Brien’s genuine admiration—and O’Brien won his. As it has happened since that time, Carl Vinson and his house followers have voted down the line for the New Frontier’s programs.

The first major Administration legislative item to come up for floor vote in Congress found O’Brien with his organizational fences not yet in place. It was the feed-grains bill, which found rural and urban Congressmen bitterly divided. About the only appeal that O’Brien and his staffers could make to Democratic Congressmen was not to let the President down on his first bill—”Let’s win this one for Jack, Jackie and little Caroline.” The bill passed the House by seven votes—and since then O’Brien has been able to move more sophisticated weapons into action on behalf of the Administration program.

His bulky (5 ft. 11½ in., 187 Ibs.) frame and his reddish, whisk-broom thatch are a familiar sight in the Capitol’s corridors. In turn, Larry has made it his business to meet nearly all the inhabitants of Capitol Hill at a marathon succession of cocktail parties and at leisurely Sunday brunches on the O’Brien’s Georgetown terrace, with Wife Elva presiding at meals that include O’Brien potatoes. But O’Brien has remembered the Kennedy warning: although he is liked by nearly everyone, Republican as well as Democrat, on the Hill, he has made use of only one close friend: Representative Eddie Boland, the Congressman from O’Brien’s own district. (It was Boland who was the earliest to spot Jack Kennedy’s presidential potential. In 1946 he told O’Brien: “Kennedy’s a real comer. He can go all the way.”) On the Hill, Boland’s office has become an anteroom to O’Brien’s headquarters, and other Congressmen have come to regard the Springfield Democrat as the resident of Capitol Hill who has the most direct line to O’Brien.

The Tough Way. In the heat of battle, when persuasion fails. O’Brien is perfectly willing to play it the tough way. When Louisiana’s penny-pinching Representative Otto Passman decided to block a $600 million request for Latin American aid money in his House appropriations subcommittee, O’Brien’s operatives went quietly behind his back, lined up enough votes to pass the bill over the chairman’s objection; Passman eventually voted for the appropriation himself, rather than have it known he could not control his committee. Again, during the aid-to-education debate, Chicago’s Representative Roman Pucinski threatened to kill the public school measure by tagging onto it a parochial school amendment. O’Brien appealed to Chicago Boss Dick Daley, who immediately telephoned Pucinski: “Who sent you there, me or the bishop?” he growled. “And who’s going to keep you there, me or the bishop?” Pucinski has since remembered who sent him there.

Such political gamesmanship has won many a hot battle in Congress during the seven Kennedy months. The Administration has suffered defeats: its medical care for the aged bill was shelved without ever coming up for vote; its farm program was gutted; its school aid bill, now vastly diluted, is still in grave doubt. Its crucial foreign aid bill got relatively unscathed through the Senate, was murdered in the House—despite O’Brien’s valiant fight for sorely needed long-term borrowing authority—and some time this week will come compromised out of a Senate-House conference.

Despite the defeats and the enforced compromises, the Kennedy Administration’s legislative record compares favorably with any since the first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt. Steered intact through the divided 87th Congress were a $394 million depressed areas bill, an increase in the minimum wage from $1 to $1.25 an hour with expanded minimum wage coverage, an omnibus $6.8 billion housing bill, a controversial feed-grains bill, a huge, eleven-year, $21 billion interstate highways bill. Most of the credit belongs to Larry O’Brien, a man who hates to lose. “We never know when we’re beaten,” he says of himself and his staff. “We never say die.”

He does know that there is a time to compromise. Says he: “As realists, we want to get as much of our program through as we can. If you feel that you are getting as much as you can, all right. If you don’t get as much as you can, you’ve failed.” On that basis, no one can say that Larry O’Brien has failed.