The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [272]
These were the best moments, and though there may have been only a few of them, they were plentiful compared to what Bobby faced on his campaign trail. He went to the places Jack would not go, and did the things his brother did not want to do. In Milwaukee, Bobby managed the volunteers and the professional staff, prodding them and pushing them out into the homes and byways of the state.
During the winter campaign, Bobby left Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on a train with Chuck Spalding, traveling to some little burg to give a talk to a group so small and so obscure that his brother couldn’t be bothered. The snow blew up in blizzard force across the frozen countryside. Down and down it fell with such ferocity that the engineer stopped the train in the countryside, still a full nine miles from their destination. While the other passengers sat and waited for rescue, Bobby led Spalding off the train. The two men walked the nine miles through the storm to a meeting hall where probably no one would even show up.
“I don’t think that I could say enough to emphasize that aspect of Bobby,” Spalding reflected. “Like somebody with a coat turned up, bare-headed … just driving from place to place…. You can’t paint that picture too vividly. I haven’t seen it matched by anybody in anything, in any other field…. He was searching this thing out for his brother, and he literally couldn’t rest.”
Young Teddy did not have the tight-jawed, humorless intensity of Bobby, but he too strode manfully into that cold Wisconsin winter in service of Jack’s ambition. One afternoon while Jack was soaking his battered back in a motel bathtub in yet another obscure Wisconsin town, twenty-seven-year-old Teddy was pacing in the living room like a football player trying to get the coach’s attention so that he could enter the fray. Jack, who could hardly look at Teddy without reflecting on the glories of unbridled youth, sent his little brother out to distribute handbills.
This was the most trivial of tasks, but Teddy approached it as if the election might rest on his afternoon endeavors. In this brutal winter, he was not content to place the handbills under frozen windshield wipers but instead opened car doors to set the political tracts on front seats. As he reached into one sedan, a ferocious bulldog jumped up off the floor and clamped his teeth into a meaty section of Teddy’s forearm. He yanked his arm back and looked at the bloody imprint on his arm, a wound that should have sent him scurrying to the emergency room. Instead, Teddy soldiered on, putting the handbills into more cars in the parking lot.
Teddy’s greatest opportunity to show his fidelity to his brother’s cause came on a ski slope outside Madison. He found that the crowd was far more interested in watching the ski jumpers soaring one hundred feet into the air than in listening to Ted’s little speech about his brother. Teddy was a man of endless good humor, and it was probably in that joshing vein that someone shouted out that they would listen to him well and good if he would make one jump himself. What had begun in jest became a deeply serious challenge. Teddy trudged up the slope wearing boots that were not his own, carrying skis he had never used, to attempt a sport that he had never tried or even seen. “I went to the top of the 180-foot jump,” he recalled, “and watched the first three jumps. Then I heard the announcer say, ‘And now at the top of the jump is Ted Kennedy, brother of Senator John F. Kennedy. Maybe if we give him a round of applause, he will make his first jump.’”
Two decades before, Teddy had stood in a similar place, a frightened seven-year-old on the cliff at Cap d’Antibes, knowing that he had to dive into the water or betray his two brothers who stood below shouting at him to jump. No brother