The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [191]
Dalton would have been appalled if the Kennedys had proposed handing out ten-dollar bills at the polls, but he had no complaints about the higher duplicities of the emerging media age. Dalton had a wife and family now, and a legal practice to support them. Running a campaign was more than a full-time job, and for the first time in his dealings with Jack, he became a paid employee. Dalton was under the considerable illusion that being paid changed nothing, but he was now expected to couch his words in an inferior’s deferential phrasing.
At a meeting with a group of Democratic politicians at the swank Fall River Social Club, Dalton made what he thought was a good solid point when he realized that Jack was glaring at him, apparently angry that he was being upstaged. As they hurried out of the club, a group of men at the bar spotted Jack. “Oh, there’s Kennedy!” one of them shouted. The men jumped off their bar stools and went to embrace the candidate they thought of as a hero.
Dalton fancied himself the campaign manager, not a bodyguard or a coat-handling lackey, and he left Jack to extricate himself alone from his cloying followers. When Jack finally got back to the car, he turned toward Dalton, sticking his finger at him. “Don’t you ever let that happen to me again! Do you hear me?”
Dalton was already sick of being pushed around by Jack’s father, second-guessed on everything he did, receiving never a thank-you, never a note of grace, nothing but push, push, push. And now Jack was treating his campaign manager as if he owned him.
“Ball game over!” Dalton recalled. “Ball game over! The shock of recognition was complete. I knew what I was dealing with, and I was dealing with a really bad man, an absolute ingrate. And also I was insulted because he thought I was a patsy. If I had misestimated him, then he—with all the adulation and sycophants around him—had misestimated me. I was stunned. I had almost an emotional physical reaction.”
A few days later Dalton sat at a meeting at the Bellevue Hotel with Joe and the eight or so top campaign aides. “The father wanted me out right from the start,” Dalton said. “It was as simple as that. And so he decided to get me out, and he started pushing me around. So between John’s ingratitude and the old man’s actions there, the thing came to an end pretty quickly.”
Dalton recalls that at that meeting “Joe Kennedy blasted the living daylights out of me, absolutely blasted me in front of these people.” One of the other participants, John Galvin, recalls the day somewhat differently: “Mark didn’t like the old man’s style; he resented the old man, who was a son of a bitch…. He wasn’t laying into Mark. He was just saying, he was being kind of, oh, unreasonable, saying some unreasonable things about people and whatever.”
Dalton’s pain amplified every slight and magnified every curt query into an assault on his very being. Everyone in the room that day saw how distressed the campaign manager had become. Dalton did not confront Joe or run raging from the room, but slunk away, leaving the Kennedys and their ambitions behind forever.
Years later, Bobby spun his own mean version of this sad tale: “Mark Dalton was going to be the campaign manager, and then he had what amounted to, I guess, a nervous breakdown about it…. He wouldn’t come out of his room. I guess it was the pressure about it and everything. I was working in Brooklyn, so I came up.”
There was at times a high selfishness to the Kennedys, a cold, impenetrable core that displayed itself to anyone who was expendable, and in the long run that was almost anyone outside the family. Those who got close to that core often found themselves pushed out a door that locked behind them. Now Dalton was gone. Billy Sutton had been shuttled aside too,