The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [200]
None of the Kennedy men grasped the terrible danger of McCarthy. Across the nation men and women spent sleepless nights pondering whether they would be condemned for an acquaintanceship they once had, a petition they once signed, a belief they once held, a cause they once supported. This fear reached into the higher reaches of academe, into the unions, and into the bureaucracies of Washington. It even entered into the Kennedys’ own family. The fact that the matter was kept so quiet shows that in those years, fear was no stranger even among the Kennedy men.
During the summer of 1954, the FBI learned that Jack Anderson, then a reporter for columnist Drew Pearson, had information that after completing army basic training in 1951, “Teddy had not been permitted to go to a school at Camp Holabird, Maryland, because of an adverse FBI report which linked him to a group of ‘pinkos.’” Here, then, was just the kind of silent, unsubstantiated allegation that destroyed people. It had apparently been responsible for Teddy’s abrupt departure from Camp Holabird, destroying his Army Intelligence career, and now it might destroy his public honor.
FBI agent L. B. Nichols wrote Clyde Tolson, the FBI deputy director, that Joe “stated that he sent word to Drew Pearson that if he so much as printed a word about this that he would sue him for libel in a manner such as Drew Pearson had never been sued before.” Nichols reported that he had told Joe that there had been no such FBI report and that it may have been the case of “somebody confusing the FBI with some other investigative agency.” There may have been no formal FBI investigation, but Nichols told Tolson that “apparently some of the information which Anderson had on his son’s Army activities was accurate and Kennedy stated the army was somewhat incensed over how the information got out.”
Teddy, then, was probably a victim, if a minor one, of the Red Scare. If not for Joe, Teddy might have found himself permanently tainted. He was left unscathed, but neither his father nor his brothers appear to have grasped that if the finger of accusation could point at Teddy, then it could point at anyone. Men who exalted courage above all virtues surely should have known that when the name of your own son or brother is called out, then it is time to stand up and condemn those fingers pointing so wildly, often destroying lives with the flick of an allegation.
Joe did not quite see it that way. He shared many of McCarthy’s beliefs and reveled in his association with J. Edgar Hoover, who fancied himself the greatest of all Communist hunters. Joe’s friendship with Hoover may have saved Teddy’s reputation, and Joe took every occasion to flatter the FBI director.
The year before the threat against Teddy, J. J. Kelly, the special agent in charge of the Boston office, made one of his periodic visits to Joe in Hyannis Port. Joe told the agent that “if it were not for the FBI the country would go to Hell.” Then he referred to a series of newspaper columns regarding civil rights investigations. Although the name of the columnist has been blacked out in the FBI Freedom of Information documents, Joe was apparently referring to Drew Pearson. Joe told the agent that he believed that the columnist “was angling his columns at the Jews, Negroes and the Communist element behind the Civil Liberties outfit, as well as the NAACP.”
Joe’s endless devotions to the FBI director were the mark not of an unctuous poseur but of a shrewd man who understood his subject only too well. As much as Hoover loved power, he loved praise even more. And in the midst of the McCarthy era, the director received accolades and acclaim so extravagant that only a man of boundless egoism could have believed it. Even among this army of courtiers and sycophants, Joe’s fawning voice stood out as, in the words of the FBI special agent in Boston, “the most vocal and forceful admirer [of Hoover] that I have met.”
The Senate was as close to a natural aristocracy as could be found in American politics, and Jack fit