The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [233]
While Jack was basking in the sun, Jackie began hemorrhaging. The doctors performed a cesarean section, but the baby was stillborn. When Jackie woke up, it was not Jack who was sitting there by her bedside but Bobby. It was Bobby who was always there, but as much as he watched out for his sister-in-law, he was watching out even more for his absent brother.
A hospital official stated that the baby died owing to the mother’s “exhaustion and nervous tensions following the Democratic National Convention.” When Jack learned that the baby had died, he sailed on. It took a call from George Smathers to convince Jack that he should go home to his grieving wife. “I told him, ‘You ought to come back,’ which he did,” Smathers recalled.
For Jackie, the fact that her husband had not returned was like a light so brilliant that even a blind woman would have seen its flashes. She had written a poem to a noble, star-crossed hero, but that was not the husband who returned to her.
Bobby was doing far more than advancing Jack’s political career and tidying up after his romantic sojourns. In his own right, Bobby was a man of extraordinary ambition, energy, and cunning. Bobby did almost nothing without explicitly mixed motives, and made no move without figuring out all that might go wrong.
Bobby attempted to ingratiate himself with J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI chief, seeing him twice early in 1954 on what were considered personal matters. He visited the FBI chief again the next year when he was planning to take a trip to the Soviet Union. Hoover suspected Bobby not as a cryptic liberal but as someone from an equally treacherous category, a publicity lover. “Kennedy was completely uncooperative until he had squeezed all the publicity out of the matter that he could,” Hoover noted about a subject before the subcommittee, Bobby having had the bad taste not to realize that Hoover was the one to do the squeezing.
In the summer of 1955, Joe arranged for Bobby to go on a six-week trip to the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Joe was forever pushing his sons to confront their truths in spirited debate with those of radically different positions. Douglas favored a less rigid, more accommodationist policy toward the Soviet Union, and the liberal jurist was the worthiest of choices to debate Bobby as they journeyed around regions of the Soviet Union where, since the revolution, few Westerners had gone.
Douglas was a proud humanist whose faith looked no higher than the peoples of the earth. He found it notable that, as they flew above routes that Marco Polo had once traversed, Bobby sat in the plane not boning up on the agriculture of Uzbekistan or literacy in Kazakhstan but reading his Bible. And wherever they went, Bobby grasped the Bible in his left hand to ward off the evil virus of communism and lectured to the Marxist true believers, trying to convert them.
In Omsk, near the end of the trip, Bobby fell sick and ran such a high fever that Douglas feared he might die. Bobby refused to see a doctor, saying, as Douglas recalled, “Russian doctors are Communists and he hated Communists.” The justice insisted, and a young, white-clad woman doctor walked in to minister to a delirious Bobby. She stayed in the room for thirty-six hours straight until Bobby’s delirium ended, the fever broke, and he began to get well. He arrived in Moscow in decent shape but about twenty pounds lighter than when he had begun the trip.
“As a result of this rather extensive