The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [262]
“Where the hell are they?” Jack fumed. Miller explained that some of the aides had met young women.
“I brought them here to hunt delegates, not to hump hula girls!” Jack exclaimed. Jack’s aides identified so profoundly with their candidate that they, for the most part, adopted his sexual habits as well, a practice that on this particular Sunday morning Jack found less than a compliment.
Miller had a tight working relationship with labor union leaders and Democratic Party principals in the West. In September he headed off on a month-long trip, starting with the AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco, and then visiting ten western states, all paid for by the Kennedy patriarch.
When Miller returned to Washington, he prepared several memos. The detailed, seven-page document addressed to Bobby was a frank rendering of the situation with the labor movement. Miller had been startled at the intensity of the hostility toward Jack among many union people. He detailed the reasons labor leaders mistrusted Jack, one of which was that they had misread his role on the labor bill. Jack’s work on the McClellan Committee “created perhaps understandable resentments in the labor movement.” As a result, working people and their leaders were angry and felt that Jack was “too rich, too slick, and dominated by his family … not one of the boys in the Truman manner.”
Miller dictated a state-by-state report on his trip, seeking ways to change the perception of Jack among labor people. Then he typed another memo himself, giving the only copy to Jack’s prim secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, a woman who prided herself on her absolute discretion when it came to the senator from Massachusetts. Miller told Lincoln that this sensitive document was for the senator’s eyes only. The memo dealt with the single most potentially damaging problem he had encountered.
“A remarkable revelation emerged from my 100-plus dialogues,” Miller wrote in an unpublished memoir. “Virtually everyone I talked to mentioned Kennedy’s sex life as a barrier to his nomination. I was taken aback. Not that I hadn’t heard a story or two myself. Nevertheless, in all my travels, political and social contacts with him, I had seen nothing to indicate that he was a philanderer. He was all business, the business of winning the Democratic presidential nomination.”
Miller concluded that this was a serious enough matter that it could blow Jack’s candidacy away. In his memo he said that the only effective way to end the rumors was for Jack to keep Jackie at his side on all his trips.
Within a day or two an angry Sorensen took Miller to lunch at the Methodist Building cafeteria. “You have been participating in some ugly talk about the senator’s private life,” Sorensen raged. “We will not dignify scurrilous gossip by acknowledging it. I am speaking not only for myself, but also for the senator and Bob Kennedy. Such talk will not be tolerated.”
Miller was stunned. He was not saying that the stories were true. He did know that Jack’s campaign should know about the widespread rumors. He railed back at Sorensen as vigorously as the aide condemned him, and when they left that afternoon neither man had backed off. Miller, though, found that he was not invited to an important strategy session at Hyannis Port, and from then on his role in the campaign diminished.
Jack had received a series of the most explicit possible warnings that he simply had to rein in his sexual conduct. For the past two and a half years he had sat on a committee that in its investigation of corruption in the labor movement showed how mobsters seduced vulnerable politicians and businesspeople with money,