The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [214]
Jackson knew what Bobby meant. A week later Jackson questioned Cohn about Schine purportedly setting up a worldwide psychological warfare program. Jackson mixed his words with a fatal dose of sarcasm, his disdain for Cohn unmistakable. For weeks, Cohn had been watching Bobby sliding questions over to the Democratic senators or whispering in their ears, and he had little doubt who was the architect of this mockery. Just after the day’s hearings had ended and the television cameras were shut down, Cohn walked over to Bobby and berated him.
“I want you to tell Jackson that we are going to get to him on Monday,” Cohn said, as Bobby remembered. It was Bobby, though, who was the major target of Cohn’s ire. “You hate me!” Cohn exclaimed.
“If I hate or dislike anyone, it’s justified,” Bobby replied. “Do you want to fight?” Cohn asked, his voice loud enough that reporters turned and listened.
“You can’t get away with it, Cohn!” Bobby exclaimed, standing toe to toe with the diminutive attorney. “You tried it with McCarthy, and you tried it with the Army. You can’t do it.”
The next day Bobby was the lead story in the largest newspaper in America. “Cohn, Kennedy Near Blows ‘Hate’ Clash” read the New York Daily News headline. Although the paper attempted to tell the story with requisite balance, the reality was that Bobby had defeated Cohn much worse than if he had fought him physically and left him lying sprawled out and bloodied.
Bobby had discovered an irresistible weapon. He had taken the rude putdowns that were the essence of humor at the Kennedy dinner table and sharpened them into a brutally disdainful sarcasm. The shaft of this weapon, though, was barbed on both ends, at times hurting the one who wielded it as much as its victims. It turned opponents on one issue into enemies who never forgot.
When Bobby returned in the evening to his rented house on S Street in norhwest Washington, he was not greeted by the kind of refined setting that Jack met when he arrived home a few blocks away. Bobby and Ethel had three children by now, and seemingly twice as many dogs. Both the children and the dogs had the run of the house, jumping up and down on furniture and tearing up and down the narrow stairs. There was no drinking or smoking allowed and some of the dinner guests would have sold their birthright for a glass of sherry.
Bobby and Ethel were living in the middle of tree-lined, cobblestoned Georgetown, the preferred bastion of the old Washingtonians known as “Cave Dwellers.” Some of these genteel folk took inordinate pleasure in spotting such outrages as a congressman’s wife eating her soufflé with a soup spoon. From all appearances, Bobby and Ethel didn’t give a damn. It was a mark of immense audacity for them to live as they did, though perhaps less so since they appeared totally unaware that theirs was an unusual household. There was much talk about these eccentric Kennedys, but their behavior was more Skakel than Kennedy.
Bobby had an awesome toughness of mind and body. When Teddy called him in the fall of 1953 and invited him up to watch a football game at Yale, Bobby knew that his brother would not be playing before tens of thousands in Saturday’s Harvard-Yale game. His brother had just returned to Harvard. Probation meant that for a year he could not play varsity football. Instead, Teddy had joined the team at Winthrop House and traveled down to New Haven for the annual game against Davenport, one of Yale’s residential colleges.
Teddy had gone through a couple of tough years, and it was a measure of Bobby’s love for his brother