The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [252]
Teddy was in charge of Jack’s 1958 reelection campaign, by far the most important political duty he had ever had. All that stood between Jack and a race for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination was a landslide reelection to the Senate. That would signal to the rest of America that John F. Kennedy was indeed Massachusetts’ favorite son. The 1958 race had all the earmarks of the earlier Kennedy senatorial campaign, though the stakes were much higher and his opponent was not the formidable Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. but the largely unknown Vincent J. Celeste.
There was a self-indulgent lassitude to Jack’s baby brother. Teddy could be guilelessly charming one moment and the next turn into the spoiled scion, insisting on the prerogatives of his name. He did not run the campaign the way Bobby had six years before, berating incompetents, humorlessly pushing the staff to their limits. He did not run it at all but allowed others on Jack’s staff to direct matters.
Teddy was used to being handled. There was always someone there writing a speech for him, making an introduction, driving his car, fetching a Coke. He didn’t require any help, however, with the female sex. He was obvious in his attentions and heedless of the Kennedy pattern of always having a beard at your side. When he went out putting stickers on automobiles, he brought with him an entourage of pretty young women. Even the usually adoring Boston Globe could not avoid noticing, writing that wherever he went the very engaged Mr. Kennedy was “customarily surrounded by a flock of young beauties.” His mother had tried to teach her son to cultivate good careful habits, like always having another man at your side. Teddy, however, did what he pleased.
Teddy may not have had Bobby’s skills at managing a campaign, but he was an exuberant, outgoing campaigner like his grandfather Honey Fitz, who would click his heels and sing “Sweet Adeline” at the hint of a request. When Teddy stood at factory gates at five in the morning, he reached out and grabbed the gnarled hands, slapped backs, and shouted his brother’s name, trumpeting Jack’s virtues to the very heavens. And when his car stopped in traffic once, he jumped out and slapped as many bumper stickers on other waiting cars as he could before setting off again on the endless campaign road.
Teddy was a carefree, youthful presence and seemed to carry none of the heavy burden of ambition and power borne by Jack and his father. He wooed voters not with logic or passion but with endless zeal. He went door to door in Mount Washington, a Republican town that Jack could hardly expect to carry, but on election eve, when the votes started coming in, Jack saw immediately that the town was his. Then he remembered all the hours Teddy had put in going “house to house.”
The Republican candidate was an Italian-American from East Boston who was making a minor profession out of being defeated by Jack Kennedy. Celeste had gotten up after being walloped by Jack in the 1950 congressional race and was ready to be knocked to the canvas again eight years later. He had almost no money, and his tedious television spots ran five minutes while Jack’s professionally produced epics went on for a half hour. Celeste thought that he at least would get some free publicity when Jack finally agreed to a debate put on by the League of Women Voters in Winthrop. That evening Ted Sorensen showed up instead, and the Republican candidate refused to debate a surrogate.
The men around Jack were a tough, intelligent, ambitious lot. They spoke in the shorthand