The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [199]
Bobby had a dogged, tenacious quality that he applied in full measure to his investigation of American allies trading with the Chinese. He discovered that three out of every four ships carrying goods into Chinese ports flew a Western flag. Many of these shippers also had contracts to carry allied defense goods to Western Europe. And all of this was happening when American boys were dying in Korea.
This devastating information seemed to verify American feelings that the world outside its borders was a duplicitous, dishonorable place. Bobby’s initial report was judicious and serious, the very model of the way the staff of a congressional committee should do its work. Bobby did not point to bureaucratic culprits in Washington to be grabbed by their disreputable necks and hauled before the justice of the McCarthy committee.
The report should have led to lengthy, spirited hearings in which a wide variety of viewpoints would be heard. It was, after all, a world of fearsome complexities. The Japanese appeared to be one of the worst violators. They were shipping only seaweed to China in exchange for iron ore, however, and that seaweed was hardly the stuff of which the Chinese could make bullets. As for the British, they had colonies in Asia and had been a trading nation for centuries; it was far more onerous for them to stop shipping to China than for the United States.
These points were made, but they were drowned out by the sheer force and fury of McCarthy’s rhetoric. What could a man say—a politician, that is—when McCarthy shouted on the floor of the Senate: “We should perhaps keep in mind the American boys and the few British boys, too, who had their hands wired behind their backs and their faces shot off with machine guns—Communist machine guns … supplied by those flag vessels of our allies…. Let us sink every accursed ship carrying materials to the enemy regardless of what flag those ships may fly.”
If McCarthy had been able to marry his rhetoric to Bobby’s research, he might have staved off his ignominious political end for a while longer. He was, however, a man rising to his worst instincts, and no one played to those instincts better than did Roy Cohn and his new associate, G. David Schine. While Bobby was working on his shipping report, these two dapper, diminutive inquisitors traveled around Europe pulling suspicious books off Voice of America library shelves, happily exporting fear and suspicion to American officials abroad.
Bobby had an immense dislike for Cohn, an emotion that Cohn fully reciprocated. When the two ambitious young men looked at each other, it was as if they were looking into a mirror that exaggerated their blemishes and faults. Cohn did Bobby one of the most valuable favors of his life. If Bobby had not abhorred Cohn so profoundly, he would probably have stayed with McCarthy, a man he personally admired, and would have borne the heavy burden of that livery for the rest of his political life.
The history of the Kennedys might have been different if Bobby had remained with McCarthy, or had taken the position of chief counsel. The family would have been so closely identified with McCarthy that Jack would have found it difficult to get the support of enough liberal and centrist Democrats