Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [75]
Within days of the Army-McCarthy hearings, Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, a Republican, introduced a resolution to censure his colleague and remove him from the chairmanship of his committees. It read, in part, “Were the Wisconsin senator in the pay of the Communists, he could not have done a better job for them.” Now that public opinion had turned on him, the Democrats were free to cast Joe McCarthy as their ultimate archvillain.
Jack Kennedy had a McCarthy problem and he knew it. Joining his fellow Democrats, who were now calling for McCarthy’s head on a pike, put him in a serious dilemma. For one thing, up until this moment he’d successfully managed to say nothing on the subject of Joe McCarthy’s harsh tactics. It was a silence he would, in the years to come, always have to answer for. Outside the Senate, moreover, he was actually known to be quite friendly with the man. The pair of them had hung around together during Jack’s early congressional days, and McCarthy, handsome in a Black Irish way, had been out on dates with Jack’s sisters. A close friend of Bobby’s wife, Ethel, McCarthy was a kind of unofficial uncle to their two young children, especially the eldest, Kathleen. Because of his friendship with the Kennedys, McCarthy had refrained from endorsing his fellow Senate Republican Henry Cabot Lodge in the race he lost to Jack. The December before, Jack had been a guest at McCarthy’s wedding, as had many of the Kennedy family.
Another problem for Jack was Bobby’s closeness to the senator. For half the previous year, he’d been a McCarthy staffer. Their father, a financial supporter of the Republican senator as well as a friend, had helped pave the way for the job. However, Bobby had quit, smarting under the fact that he was outranked by the senator’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, a fellow whom he despised. But his departure didn’t last long. The next January he switched sides, hired now by the investigating committee’s Democratic minority as its chief counsel.
When the time came for the Democrats to move against McCarthy, it would fall to the twenty-eight-year-old Bobby, despite his continued personal loyalty, to write the draft of the Democratic members’ report on the senator’s out-of-control conduct. While it targeted Cohn’s behavior, it placed responsibilities on the committee’s chairman. “Senator McCarthy and Mr. Cohn merit severe criticism,” and “the Senator cannot escape responsibility for the misconduct of Cohn. Nor can he excuse the irresponsibility attaching to many of his charges. The Senate should take action to correct this situation.”
Still, it was one thing to staff the committee report, as Bobby, acting in his official capacity, had done. It would be a very different matter to vote for the historic censure of a colleague—a man who was also a friend—as Jack would now be asked to do.
There had actually been rumblings against McCarthy in the Senate for several years at this point, including a declaration made by his own party members that denounced smear tactics—in effect, McCarthyism—without mentioning the names of any specific lawmaker. In response, McCarthy contemptuously dubbed Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who originated the declaration, along with the six fellow Republicans who joined her, “Snow White and Her Six Dwarfs.” With the Army-McCarthy hearings having weakened McCarthy and made him at last vulnerable, Senator Flanders’s intention was now to deliver the coup de grâce.
Yet, even given the rising swell of condemnation, Jack Kennedy remained resistant when it came to voting to censure a man whose wedding he’d attended, for whom his brother had worked, and to whom his father had provided sizable contributions. Had Jack joined the vote against McCarthy, it would have meant a dramatic, even traitorous break with his father and brother, who’d devoted themselves so totally to his career and were not ready to abandon a fellow anti-Communist