Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [100]
Meanwhile, Jack Kennedy’s performance on the Rackets Committee impressed one of Bobby’s assistants. Pierre Salinger, a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post who Bobby hired as an investigator, saw Senator Kennedy zero in on whatever relevant issue was at hand: “John F. Kennedy had clearly done his homework. . . . In what is essentially a nebulous area, he was very incisive in his questioning. He was able, with a question or two, to do what it seemed to me to take hours to get to from other people on the committee.” He was careful not to lump the clean labor executives in with the bad. “Senator Kennedy made a special effort not to join the Republicans and conservative Democrats on the committee when it came to dealing with honest union leaders like Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers.”
Yet even the UAW was held to account. In Ken O’Donnell’s words, Jack “was not only good in terms of defending the union, but several times, armed by Bobby, he went right after the union and was probably tougher on them than some of the Republicans. He criticized them for the use of violence against their own men and against the company. He was tough, but tough in an appropriate way. The intellectual ability of Senator Kennedy and Bob Kennedy was established with the UAW. Reuther and the UAW saw the Kennedy brothers as not only honest, keeping their word, but also that they were both smart as hell. It wasn’t an image that the union had held of either brother up until that point.”
The Democratic governor of Maine, Edmund Muskie, who would enter the Senate himself in 1959, said the hearings made Kennedy a heavyweight there. It was the facing down of the criminals that impressed them. “I think that his performance in the Senate added tremendously to his stature, and to the respect which all his Senate colleagues, even those with a different political philosophy, had for him. I know that it was performances like this that enlisted the support of people like Dick Russell and other giants of the Senate. They did respect him. It wasn’t just because they liked him, because they were attracted by his charm, because he had a way with words. They respected his guts . . . respected him as a man.”
But Kennedy cited the struggle for labor reform as further proof that “the Presidency is the source of action . . . There is much less than meets the eye in the Senate.” Yet his service on the Rackets Committee gave Jack another memorable victory. He’d made himself a reputation, as had his brother. Both were seen now as tough, independent reformers, racket busters. The image remains suspended in the mind, in black and white, of the two of them staring insolently at the crude thug there in the witness seat. We see Bob, the hot-blooded Irish cop, asking questions close into the microphone; Jack, the cool brother, tapping his fingernails on his teeth, that old habit that betrayed his cunning.
Jack Kennedy made few new personal friends from the time he entered politics. But that was about to change. On a warm winter Sunday early in 1959, Ben Bradlee, a correspondent for Newsweek, and his second wife, Tony, were wheeling a baby carriage along N Street in Georgetown. In it was their baby boy, Dino. Another couple, Jack and Jackie Kennedy, were also enjoying the winter sunshine, with two-year-old Caroline. The couples, similar in background, quickly became friends.
Bradlee had been a young naval officer in World War II, and his experience had included being at the helm of his destroyer as it navigated Japanese waters. The bond with Kennedy was secured further by their prep school and Harvard backgrounds. Bradlee would say that he was, in fact, higher up in the social “stud book” than Jack Kennedy, having descended from an old New England family around a lot longer than the immigrant Kennedys. Ben was the sort of guy—smart, handsome, ironic, and seemingly fearless—that Jack liked on sight. A working journalist, Bradlee now counted as