Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [117]
3. ROBERT FRANCIS KENNEDY (1925–1968) was the fifth of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's nine children, a lawyer, Senate committee counsel, and manager of his brother's 1960 campaign, after which the President-elect made him attorney general. Despite his formal mandate to run the Justice Department, as his brother's presidency unfolded, RFK served as his chief adviser and enforcer on virtually all matters that faced him. In 1964, after his brother's death, RFK was elected senator from New York. Four years later, he was assassinated while running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
4. THEODORE SORENSEN (1928–2010) was the son of Nebraska's progressive Danish-American attorney general and his Russian Jewish wife. Ted Sorensen joined JFK's staff in 1953 and, as a speechwriter, helped give the senator his voice, with the staccato phrases, contrapuntal phrasing, soaring rhetoric, and historical references so widely praised. Later, at the White House, Sorensen served as special counsel to the President. In the spring of 1956, Kennedy had him draft and circulate a memorandum that showed how many votes a Catholic running mate might bring to a Democratic ticket in 1956. (Since the 1928 landslide defeat of Al Smith, the only Catholic candidate ever chosen for a major-party ticket, many feared that Catholicism was a liability for a nominee.) But Mrs. Kennedy is correct that her husband did not overtly press Stevenson to put him on the ticket. When the Illinoisan made his unusual, surprise decision to throw open the nomination, and Kennedy made his hasty effort to win the prize, Joseph Kennedy, vacationing in Cap d'Antibes, was furious that his son would try something so ill planned. JFK later said he was glad that he lost, because when Stevenson was defeated by Dwight Eisenhower that fall, some Democrats might have pointed at his Catholic running mate.
5. RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON (1913–1994) had served from 1947 to 1951 with JFK in the House, where they were cordial colleagues. Nixon was a senator from California when chosen by Dwight Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican ticket. On November 7, 1960, Vice President Nixon lost the presidency to Kennedy by the tiny margin of 112,827 popular votes. By "Nixon business," Schlesinger means conspicuous ambition.
6. EUNICE MARY KENNEDY SHRIVER (1921–2009) was JFK's sister. In 1956, she was living in Chicago with her husband, Sargent Shriver, president of the city's Board of Education. Before her marriage, she had shared a townhouse with her brother in the Georgetown section of Washington. Tireless, greatly religious, Mrs. Shriver did pathbreaking work to bring the intellectually disabled into the mainstream and was always prodding Jack to do more to help the cause. (Their sister Rosemary [1918–2005] had been institutionalized in Wisconsin.) JFK indeed established the first presidential commission on mental retardation. Joseph Kennedy once said that had Eunice been a man, she might have been president.
7. TORBERT MACDONALD (1917–1976) was a Kennedy chum, captain of the Harvard football team, and one of JFK's roommates at Harvard, who was married to Phyllis Brooks, a B-movie actress of the 1930s. He served as a Democratic member of Congress, representing Malden, Massachusetts, from 1954 until his death.
8. In 1956, the chairman of the state Democratic party was a loud conservative named William "Onions" Burke (1906-1975), an onion and tobacco farmer and barkeeper from Hatfield, Massachusetts. Burke was plotting to keep the state's delegation out of Adlai Stevenson's hands at the Chicago