The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [242]
This was not the kind of matter Bobby liked discussing. When he was taking testimony from a Portland madam, Bobby became so embarrassed that Chairman McClellan asked whether he might take over. Jack was not embarrassed at all by such talk. These hearings nonetheless were the most extraordinary warning that if he hoped to be president of the United States, he would have to conduct his personal life with a caution that did not come naturally to him.
Bobby and Jack were performing not only before a national television audience but also before their own family. Every day Ethel sat in the hearing room in a choice seat held for her by one of the guards. Jackie sat there many days too, as did Teddy whenever he could get away from his studies. Even Joe, as opposed as he was to this interminable spectacle, showed up at least once and sat watching his sons. It was a tableau of loyalty that helped to further the image of the Kennedys as a peerless family, steadfast to the core.
The audience watching on television and journalists writing feature articles on the Kennedys noted the youthful vigor of the two brothers seated side by side. Jack was thirty-nine, though he looked ten years younger, and thirty-one-year-old Bobby looked as if he could have just graduated from college. Of the one thousand letters the committee received one week, four hundred were what the New York Daily News called “mash notes,” most of them asking for autographed pictures.
The Eisenhower years were not a time when youth was considered to have special merit, but youthful Bobby identified with the young and tentatively began reaching out to them as his natural constituency. “It’s ridiculous to wait until a man is 40 to give him a responsible job,” Bobby said. “By that age he may have lost most of his zeal.”
Bobby was fearless intellectually and physically, and not just when the cameras were focused on him. A woman reporter from Joliet, Illinois, had disappeared, presumably murdered by the labor mobsters she had exposed in a series of articles. Stories like that only emboldened Bobby. He and his associate Jim McShane traveled to Joliet Prison to interview an inmate who said that he knew where the reporter was buried. The two men went with the prisoner to a farm field where Bobby took his turn shoveling in an unsuccessful attempt to find the body.
Bobby learned that all across the country lived brave people like this reporter who were willing to stand up to evil at the risk of their livelihoods and sometimes their very lives. It rankled Bobby that some of the Washington know-it-alls whispered that John Cheasty had told of Hoffa’s perfidy only because he wanted a job on the committee. Bobby knew that the sickly Cheasty had lost far more than he gained, and he was only one of scores of examples.
Sometimes even Bobby was dumbstruck by the quiet, unaccredited heroism of some of the witnesses. George Maxwell, a Cleveland labor relations consultant, agreed to testify before the committee that he had negotiated sweetheart contracts for major carriers with Hoffa. “I don’t understand it,” Bobby beseeched him, realizing that even he himself was becoming cynical. “You will ruin yourself, your business, if you testify like that.” Maxwell replied, “I tell the truth, Mr. Kennedy.”
The great experiential moment of Bobby’s life lay in these hearings, which largely defined his view of the world and of the American people the way World War II had defined Jack’s worldview.