The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [201]
Even Jack’s old friend Charles Bartlett noticed that a change had come over him. Up until then, nothing gave Jack greater pleasure than employing his wicked wit on the buffoons, mediocrities, and pretenders with whom he felt he served in Congress. Charley was a man of courtly civility who would no more have passed on Jack’s indiscretions than he would have written about them as a journalist. But now Jack was forgoing his usual playful put-downs. “Dad says don’t knock anybody,” Jack explained, although in closing down much of his wit he was shutting off part of himself.
Jack’s ambition came into focus. He was a man concerned only with what you would do for him tomorrow. Loyal Anthony Gallucio had traveled the state by bus, eating at cheap restaurants and treating his employer as if he were an impoverished candidate, not the son of one of the wealthiest men in America. He had given his all to the campaign, his formidable organizing skill, energy, wit, and integrity, and he assumed that he would be going to Washington in Jack’s enlarged office, a minimal reward for his two years of relentless effort. Jack called finally to give him the news. “I’ve got no money,” Gallucio recalls Jack telling him.
For six years, Mary Davis had not simply served as an excellent secretary to Jack but used her astute political sense to promote the congressman in a myriad of ways. For several years she had been working in the office six days a week, then finishing up her work Sunday at home. She lined up a number of new secretaries and clerical workers for his expanded staff, agreeing on salaries that could reasonably be paid out of Jack’s allotment.
“Well, I can’t pay any more than sixty dollars a week,” Jack replied.
“Sixty dollars a week!” Davis exclaimed. “You’ve got to be joking. Nobody I’ve lined up would be willing to accept a job at that salary. And I wouldn’t ask them.”
“Well, that’s the way it’s going to have to be.”
“Where are you going to get somebody competent for sixty dollars a week? You cannot do that.”
“Mary, you can get candy dippers in Charlestown for fifty dollars a week.”
“Yes, and you’d have candy dippers on your senatorial staff.”
Mary was being paid only ninety dollars a week. Salaries on the Senate side were higher, and she asked to be raised to the one hundred fifteen dollars a week being offered her by a freshman congressman. “Mary, you wouldn’t do this to me,” Jack replied incredulously, unwilling to go beyond a 10 percent raise.
It would have been nothing for this multimillionaire heir to pay this loyal woman an extra eight hundred dollars a year, less than he spent during his weekends in New York. Jack, like the rest of his family, considered it part of the livery of service to be poorly paid. Those who sought market value for their services were expressing their disloyalty and they deserved to be gone, and gone Mary Davis was.
The most notable person Jack hired that January—and the most important aide he ever hired—was twenty-four-year-old Theodore C. Sorensen. That the lanky, soft-spoken Sorensen would join the staff as Jack’s chief legislative aide was a mark of two great ambitions, Jack’s and Sorensen’s.
The position would have been a natural for a gregarious, witty Irish-American who had worked his way through Harvard Law School and could be counted on to work with loyal devotion and political savvy. When Sorensen was thinking about working for Jack, he was warned that he would have to pass Joe’s scrutiny. But in half a century, Jack’s father had hired only one non-Catholic.
Sorensen stood doubly disadvantaged. His mother was of Russian Jewish heritage, while his Protestant father was a member