Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [56]
It was the wrong move. Jack wasn’t happy. “He got in the car, turned around, and stuck his finger in my belly,” Dalton recalled a half century later. “ ‘Don’t you ever let that happen to me again.’ ” Now he got the picture. “I was to take care of him with drunks. I was his caretaker, his bodyguard. That son of a bitch! Right in the belly! ‘Don’t you ever’!”
Jack’s rough treatment of his old pal was a sign of something off-kilter in the relationship. For him, the problem with Dalton wasn’t about getting waylaid by the Fall River drunks; rather, it was about the campaign, his father, and the way things felt stalled. The final moment for Dalton came at a meeting where Joe Kennedy tore into him for leasing a new campaign headquarters without his permission. “He didn’t like the building,” O’Donnell remembered. “He thought we’d paid too much for it. He didn’t like the owner. He thought the location was bad, and they had a great brawl about it.”
When Jack refused to stand up for his campaign manager, Dalton had no choice except to quit. Bobby made the gesture of trying to soften the blow by asking him to stay on as speechwriter, but Dalton left the office that day with his belongings and never returned. “I decided that I could no longer play a role in the Kennedy campaign in view of the feeling which had developed. I wrote John a little note saying I was through and then I told him that I was through.” Listening to him so many years later, it was obvious that Dalton never got over the way he’d been discarded.
Once Bobby arrived, he began working eighteen-hour days to get the campaign workers focused and up to full speed. “I didn’t become involved in what words should go in a speech, what should be said on a poster or billboard, what should be done on television. I was so busy with my part of it that I didn’t see any of that.” Most important, when he moved in, their father moved out.
This was, just for the record, not Bobby Kennedy’s first involvement in a Jack Kennedy campaign. He had a talent for organization. In the ’46 race, as a twenty-year-old, he’d asked for the toughest area, East Cambridge, territory loyal to the former Cambridge mayor Mike Neville, Jack’s strongest opponent, Tip O’Neill’s candidate. But Bobby took it slowly, laying the groundwork, spending time playing softball with the kids of the neighborhood, killing the notion that the Kennedys thought themselves superior. His brother ended up doing better in that community than anyone had expected.
Bobby enjoyed one advantage over Jack, and it had to do with their attitude toward Joe. While his brother was stubborn in his dealings with their father, Bobby was respectful and needy for love. This created a smooth relationship, even if one layered with guile. He proved to be the essential cog in the Kennedy machine. No one else could have done what he was now doing. There he was, having left his job in Washington, working all out in the campaign, using his father’s resources—money and public-relations clout—to produce the maximum impact where it counted, on the hearts and minds of the Massachusetts voters. Charlie Bartlett remembers listening to Bobby on the phone with the senior Kennedy. “Yes, Dad,” Bobby kept repeating, “Yes, Dad.” However, he wasn’t taking orders; rather, he was pacifying. Where Jack always took their dad with a grain of salt and didn’t mind letting him know it, the younger Kennedy boy never treated him as less than the paterfamilias.
It was now May and the election was six months away. Out in the field, Larry O’Brien was helping the cause by building the organization from the ground up, one Kennedy “secretary” at a time. What this meant, at a very basic, very significant level, was the creation of a totally different political network from that of the regular Massachusetts Democrats. “Our secretaries were making weekly reports to me, and they were growing more sophisticated from week to week. . . . For a long time neither Lodge nor the Democratic regulars realized what we were doing.”
At their April 6 meeting at