Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [12]
JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, JR., JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, SR., AND JOHN F. KENNEDY ARRIVING IN SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND, JULY 1938
John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston
I am sure it was always, in some sense, in his mind. Is the story true, as has sometimes been printed, that the ambassador originally thought of—expected Joe to be the great political figure of the family?2
That's the sort of trite story that all these people who used to go interview Mr. Kennedy—you get so tired of people asking for anecdotes, and he'd always produce this thing that Joe would have. You know, how can I say? Because I never knew Joe. And, obviously, I suppose Joe would have run for politics, and then Jack, being so close to him, couldn't have run right on his heels in Massachusetts. Maybe he would have gone into something literary. But it's just not as simple as that story sounds. And then once Joe was dead, you know, Mr. Kennedy didn't do any strange thing of saying, "O.K., now we run you." Everything just evolved—they came back from the war—I don't know.
The story sounded, to me, too pat and mechanical. Joe was a classmate of mine at Harvard, but—
I've got a feeling, from what I think of Joe and everything, that he would have been so unimaginative, compared to Jack. He would never have—I think he probably would have gotten to be a senator, and not much higher. I don't know if that's prejudiced, but I don't think he had any of the sort of imagination that Jack did.
Well, certainly I knew him moderately well, and he did not have the imagination or the intellectual force or intellectual interest. He was a most attractive, charming fellow and would have been, I think, very successful in politics, but I don't think he would ever have carried things to the point the President did. The vice presidency then was on his mind sort of sometime before 1956?
Well, it's funny—they were talking about that in, I guess, around October–November 1953 at the Cape. But yet I know the night that Jack ran for the vice presidency in Chicago, he didn't want to then at all. And you know, it was just a last-minute thing when Stevenson threw the convention open, and, all that taught them so much of how to do things in California in 1960 because no one was prepared. And I remember being in that office and Bobby trying to get someone to paint signs.3 I mean, he wasn't trying for the vice presidency.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY DURING JOHN F. KENNEDY'S SENATE CAMPAIGN, MASSACHUSETTS, 1952
John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston
That was, when he came to Chicago in 1956, he was not coming, really, to—
No. He didn't—he didn't want it. You know, he thought Stevenson would be defeated, and it would be because—and one of the reasons would be because he would have been a Catholic on the ticket with him, so it could only have been a hindrance to him. But then when all that thing got thrown wide open, I don't know who said, "Make a race for it," or what. It just really happened that night.
There must have been some sense in his mind, because I remember Ted Sorensen coming—or perhaps, at least, in Ted's mind—coming to see me on the Cape that summer, before the convention, and discussing this—and I telling Ted that I was for it and that I knew other people in the Stevenson circle were for it. You remember then Ted had a memorandum prepared on the Catholic vote.4
Ah, yes. That's right. I didn't realize it was then. The funny thing with Jack that would make it very hard in these interviews for me to sound as if I make sense, is that he never spoke of his sort of secret objectives, or of plotting things. Life with him was always so fast—of what you were doing that day. He always talked at home of what he was thinking about, or people. I mean, people say he never talked about politics at home with me, but that's all that was talked about. But he'd never sort of plot little goals and tell you when he was aiming for them then, and life with him was just so fast—that it isn't until you look back that you see what happened when.
SENATOR JOHN F. KENNEDY AT THE 1956