Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [64]
Joe Kennedy, still watching the purse strings, wasn’t above keeping his eye even on the funds the Senate provides its members for hiring staff. “I told him,” Davis said, “what I thought the salaries should be, in line with the money we were being allocated. I thought he was going to go through the ceiling!”
She was surprised because she’d set the pay levels for the skilled staff members she’d picked based on the standard allocations from the Senate. But while this might seem routine practice, and wholly acceptable, her focus on the reality of the office’s likely day-to-day needs was, in fact, shortsighted. Her eye to office management and not political strategy, she was failing to consider the larger picture. It simply wouldn’t have occurred to her that the Kennedys, father and son both, intended to start right away building a wider constituency, one that would extend far beyond the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The money, therefore, had to stretch further.
For this reason, Jack rejected both the top-drawer hires and the top-of-the-line pay scale. According to Davis: “He said, ‘Well, I don’t think we’re going to be able to work that out.’ And I said, ‘Well, why not?’ He said, ‘Well, number one, I have to have a Polish girl on the staff, I have to have an Italian on the staff, I have to have an Irish girl on the staff, I have to have, you know, these different ethnic groups.’ And I said, ‘That’s ridiculous! You know, a staff member is a staff member.’ He said, ‘No, you don’t understand. I’ve got to have these ethnic groups.’ “
Rejecting the pay levels she’d determined appropriate for the newcomers, Kennedy figured sixty dollars a week about right as an upper limit. He believed Mary herself was asking for too high a weekly check.
Hearing this, she was having none of it. “Sixty dollars a week! You’ve got to be joking. Nobody I’ve lined up would be willing to accept a job at that salary. I have to have competent, capable staff who can back me up. If I don’t, I won’t have a life to call my own.”
She remembered only too clearly what came next: “His famous reply to me was, ‘Mary, you can get candy dippers in Charlestown for fifty dollars a week.’ And I said, ‘Yes, and you’d have candy dippers on your senatorial staff who wouldn’t know beans. If that’s what you want, I’m not taking charge of it.’
“He didn’t believe me. And that’s when I said, ‘Uh-unh. Not me.’ “
So Tip O’Neill’s memory was on the button. She’d continued to stand up to Kennedy despite numerous attempts on his part to win her over. He’d simply pushed her past the breaking point, and his cajoling was to no avail. After six years of working for him, Davis knew the man too well. The issue, for her, anyway, wasn’t the money in and of itself. It was a question of whether Jack Kennedy, born to great wealth, was going to give her, Mary Davis, what she knew the U.S. Senate had decided was owed to anyone taking the supervisor job Jack was offering her.
In the end, he didn’t budge.
What can be seen here is how the financier Joseph Kennedy exerted enduring control over anything in his son’s life having to do with money. Well able to maintain his independence on the matters that counted most with him—policy, politics, his personal associations—Jack was faced with the fact that his father still could tell him what to do if there were dollar signs involved.
There was another rule in play here: when you worked for the Kennedys, you quickly learned that a staffer is a staffer. You needed to understand the limits of the relationship, and also the borders. Mark Dalton had learned that the hard way. As he would tell me, all those years of dedicated volunteering for Jack were forgotten the day he went on the Kennedy family payroll. Before him, the beloved Billy Sutton—the onetime press secretary, entertainer, and live-in buddy—had suffered the same fate. It seemed that he’d asked his salary to be upped from sixty-five dollars a week, a request Jack didn’t take well.
Larry O’Brien, shrewder politically