The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [276]
Two decades before, Joe had sat with President Roosevelt in the White House. That day he had given up what he thought was his own chance for political immortality to endow his sons with their chances for power. Joe had never traded in his marker, and though for years it had seemed valueless, he would make it pay out now.
Joe was a man who never forgot and rarely forgave. He surely was aware of the exquisite irony of this moment. The son and namesake of the president who had shoved him off the pages of history was helping Joe’s own son to reach the White House. FDR was a great man and a poor father. He had given his son an immortal name, an awesome persona, and natural grace, but little of the strength, will, and ambition that was his own essence. FDR Jr. was a self-indulgent, heavy-drinking namesake. The former congressman had been a lobbyist for the Trujillo dictatorship and a distributor of Italian cars in Washington, work that Joe’s own sons would have never considered.
Franklin Roosevelt Jr. bore what in West Virginia was the most glorious of names. He was the son of the man whose New Deal had, as many in the state saw it, given shoes to people who had walked barefoot, electric light to those who had sat in darkness, and bread to those who were hungry. By rights, FDR Jr. should have been having this discussion, not with the centrist Jack but with the liberal Humphrey, who was a proud, happy defender of the New Deal legacy. That’s where his mother Eleanor would have placed him, or with her beloved Adlai Stevenson, not with who she considered the opportunistic Jack Kennedy.
FDR Jr. would have served Jack mightily by coming to West Virginia to speak for his candidacy and stand beside him, as if Jack too were an equal stalwart of the New Deal and its legacy. For the Kennedys, that was not enough, and they pushed Roosevelt to speak words that proved to be both untrue and unspeakable. Jack’s staff had come up with documentation that Humphrey had not served in World War II. “I remember discussing it with Ken O’Donnell and with Bobby Kennedy,” Feldman recalled. It was then, in Feldman’s words, “made available to Franklin.”
This was the kind of material that was dropped into the laps of friendly journalists, not shouted from the campaign platform by a man bearing one of the most revered names in American politics. “Bobby had been bringing pressure on me to mention it,” Roosevelt recalled. “He kept calling—five or six calls a day.” Bobby cared nothing about Roosevelt’s reputation, or he would have backed off.
“Is FDR Jr. there tonight?” Jack wrote on his notepad. “The best thing would be some veterans group there. I have to be extremely careful however—as so many people want to stick it to me.”
FDR Jr. began his assault on Humphrey with shrewd insinuations, lauding Jack as “the only wounded veteran” in the race. That was a mite too subtle and on April 27, he told an audience: “There’s another candidate in your primary. He’s a good Democrat, but I don’t know where he was in World War II.” That was so unseemly that the Washington Star characterized it as “a new low in dirty politics.”
A good politician learns to keep his distance from the mean and the ugly, to let others dismiss those he would fire and to have surrogates speak the ugly words