Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [153]
Blough, Jack realized, had already released the announcement. “You have made a terrible mistake,” he said. “You have double-crossed me.”
To Ken O’Donnell, it was a shocking episode. “These guys felt they were so powerful they could stiff the president of the United States without consequences.” He also saw how livid his boss was. “He was white with anger.” Big steel had betrayed its workers and “made a fool of him.” Discussing it with Ben Bradlee, Jack explained he wasn’t about to take a “cold, deliberate fucking.”
The president’s credibility was now on the line because he’d acted as broker. Labor leaders, he knew, would never trust him again. The steel industry, meanwhile, assumed, “wrongly, he could not or would not do anything.” O’Donnell, who’d watched him at work in Massachusetts, knew what sort of surprise they were in for. “You find out about these guys in these steel companies, where they have been on vacation, who they have been with on vacation,” he instructed.
His instincts told him where the corporate chiefs were vulnerable. “I don’t think U.S. Steel or any other of the major steel companies wants to have Internal Revenue agents checking all the expense accounts of their top executives,” Kennedy told Red Fay, who, before becoming undersecretary of the navy, had himself been a Republican businessman. “Too many hotel bills and nightclub expenses would be hard to get by the weekly wives’ bridge group out at the Country Club.”
The next day, Attorney General Robert Kennedy announced that, under the antitrust laws, a grand jury investigation into the steel industry’s pricing had been ordered. Subpoenas to produce documents were served on U.S. Steel. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara instructed the Pentagon to purchase steel “where possible” from companies that had not raised prices. Later that day, in a press conference, Kennedy addressed the issue: “. . . the American people will find it hard, as I do, to accept a situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185 million Americans.” By the next night, eight steel companies that had announced price hikes canceled them.
The president’s response to the pullback was to congratulate the steel companies for honoring the public good. “Kennedy’s style of politics: you never paint a guy into a corner,” O’Donnell later observed. “You give the other fellow as much credit as you can. So, he wants a statement thanking the steel companies for realizing their commitment to the United States Government was more important than their commitment to their stockholders.”
But the swords were sheathed only when the mission was accomplished. America’s competitiveness was restored, but revenge had also been extracted. Robert Kennedy later confessed the rough tactics employed. “We looked over all of them as individuals . . . we were going to go for broke . . . their expense accounts and where they’d been and what they were doing. I picked up all their records . . . I told the FBI to interview them all, march into their offices the next day! We weren’t going to go slowly. . . . So, all of them were hit with meetings the next morning by agents. All of them were subpoenaed for their personal records. I agree it was a tough way to operate, but under the circumstances, we couldn’t afford to lose.”
When the action settled, Jack Kennedy didn’t like being left alone. If no one else happened to be around for the evening, he’d ask Dave Powers—now, like Ken O’Donnell, a presidential special assistant—to stay and have supper with him. They’d then spend the evening together until it was time for Dave to escort him to his bedroom. When he was finally ready to sleep, it’d be: “Good night, pal. Will you please put out the light?”
What’s curious—and fascinating—are the fixed orbits JFK assigned to this circle of friends. He always exhibited great fondness for his “Irish mafia” of O’Donnell, O’Brien,