The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [281]
The next morning, Jack arrived for breakfast at the ten-acre estate in the flats of Beverly Hills where his father was staying. Joe spent much of the day around the pool at the sprawling Beverly Hills mansion of Marion Davies, the former movie star and mistress to the late William Randolph Hearst. He had installed a bank of phones around the pool so that he could talk to one power broker after the next without an interruption while he basked in the California sunshine. Not only had Joe outlived most of the other powerful men of the 1930s, but he was also in the midst of the greatest triumph of his life, helping to propel his son to the presidency of the United States.
Joe would get no closer to the delegates than this. His son’s enemies were whispering that Jack was nothing more than a thespian who mouthed the script his father had given him. Joe could not afford to be seen so close to Jack that he might be giving him his lines. What his detractors scarcely appreciated was the subtlety of Joe’s efforts, how little he sought for himself, and how pointedly his son ignored his father’s conservative thinking on most of the major issues of the day.
Joe’s hands had no fingerprints, or it would have been clear that he had left his mark all over the campaign. His was the hand behind much of the money that had flowed into West Virginia and other states. “These things happened,” reflected Tip O’Neill. “Jack didn’t always know about them. But the old man had made his own arrangements over and above the campaign staff.” Jack had tried to move beyond his father’s ways. In the Maryland primary, the candidate’s old friend Torbyrt Macdonald recalled, Joe wanted to pass out twelve-dollar-a-day stipends to make sure that poll workers showed up, but he and Jack vetoed the idea.
“All his way through his existence Dad had relationships and contacts none of the rest of us had,” Teddy told his biographer, Burton Hersh. Joe had acquaintances, not only at the highest levels of business and politics but at the lowest levels of American life. “I remember in 1960 my brother saying to Dad, almost jokingly, ‘The states you have are Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York.’ “
With the help of New York City’s Democratic bosses, Joe had helped deliver the largest city in America to his son. He worked with other bosses to whisk away northern New Jersey from under the vigilant eyes of Governor Robert Meyner. He helped to add Illinois by talking to Mayor Richard Daley, whom he had known from the time this boss of bosses was a city council member. Daley turned away from Illinois native son Adlai Stevenson in favor of a man like himself, a Catholic who looked like a winner.
Jack respected all that his father had done. He did not treat Joe as the ultimate arbiter of his political future, however, but as just another source of insight and advice that he assayed and sometimes rejected as fool’s gold. As the two men sat down for breakfast, Jack had a crucial decision to make in choosing his vice presidential running mate, and father and son discussed various possibilities while Timilty and Rose listened in. “What about Lyndon?” Joe asked. That set Timilty off on a tirade against the Texas senator, mouthing words that most of Jack’s supporters would have gladly amplified. The former Boston police commissioner pointed out that earlier in the week Johnson had savaged Jack in a dual presentation before the Texas delegation. The unseemliness of the politician’s display was diminished only by Jack’s cool riposte, which dissipated the Texan’s meanness in laughter and irony.
Johnson had not come into the hot dusty political street to duel with Jack in the primaries but had sought to win the nomination