The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [238]
In January 1957, the new Senate formed a special eight-member Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field. The chairman, Senator John L. McClellan, was a cautious man of subtle political skills. In a move that was as shrewd as it was compassionate, the senator insisted that the largely disgraced Senator McCarthy sit on what became known as the Rackets Committee. Jack was invited to join as well, and he reluctantly agreed to serve. The select committee was likely to receive immense publicity, but serving on it might make him appear a foe of unionism.
During the next three years, Bobby served as chief counsel in an unprecedented investigation of corrupt labor-management practices. This work was part of a history of Senate investigations, including the Nye Committee’s exploration of international arms trading before World War I, the Kefauver Committee’s examination of organized crime, and the McCarthy Committee’s inquiry into American communism.
Bobby was not the first chief counsel to play a crucial role in an investigation. He was the first, however, to so overshadow the senator in whose service he was presumably acting that few remember these historic hearings as the work of the so-called McClellan Committee. While publicly deferring to McClellan, Bobby largely orchestrated the emergence of his own celebrity. He did so surely knowing, as the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote in March 1957, that if he came “out of his investigation with as much credit as seems likely, the nation can count on having the Clan Kennedy on the political scene for two, or three, or four decades.”
Bobby helped make sure that he was exalted in the general media. His father had taught him that nothing just happened. A few extraordinary humans made what was called history. Bobby had listened well. Calculated self-promotion did not embarrass him the slightest bit. Bobby had been so upset by Edward R. Murrow’s historic See It Now program opposing Joe McCarthy in March 1954 that nine months later he walked out of a speech that the journalist gave in Louisville. That didn’t prevent Bobby, however, from going on Murrow’s Person to Person show in September 1957; the New York Times reported that Bobby and Ethel “were charming and poised … and their five children were delightfully disheveled.”
In February 1958, Francis X. Morrissey, Jack’s executive secretary in his Boston office, wrote Bobby congratulating him on the honorary degree from Tufts University in Boston that he was about to receive. “We have been working on this for the last three months…. It is essential that you let no one know you have received it until they announce it from the University itself.” A month later Morrissey wrote Bobby again to alert him that when the Boston papers hadn’t initially run a picture of the counsel for the Senate Rackets Investigating Committee with his wife and new baby, Michael Le Moyne, he had taken steps to ensure that the Boston Traveler ran it.
Even the most personal and seemingly spontaneous moment could be as scripted as an inaugural address. Joe wrote Bobby: “I think some reporter should ask Bobby [Jr.] ‘where his Daddy is and what he is doing’ and Bobby’s answer should be ‘he’s chasing bad men like a cowboy.’” Bobby knew many reporters who would have been delighted to ask that question. Bobby was astutely cultivating journalists, the crucial element in creating his legend. In 1957 his Christmas gift list contained thirty-seven journalists, ten photographers, and sixteen radio and TV technicians. The next summer he invited them out to Hickory Hill for a swim and touch football.
Comradeship and calculation blended impeccably. Reporters gave Bobby their stories early and told him what had been edited out. Murray Kempton, a New York Post columnist proud of his fierce independence, identified so much with Bobby that he even suggested a letter that Bobby should write to two attorneys who opposed him.
With Bobby, there was always a bottom line, and the bottom line was that the journalists