The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [290]
Joe had brilliantly distanced himself from Jack. His only faux pas was to have his beautiful young caddy in residence. Joe was described as “teaching [her] English during the golf rounds,” lessons that presumably continued later when he invited her to visit him in the United States.
While Joe was playing golf and lying in cabana 513 at Hotel du Cap, his new secretary, Bonnie Williams, arrived at Hyannis Port shortly before Labor Day. The Kennedys lived in a village within a village, their homes scattered around their own town square. The children frolicked on a broad plot of grass, and the parents hurried from one house to the next.
Jackie, Ethel, Eunice, and other adult Kennedys flitted in and out of the residences, but when Joe arrived in early September, Williams sensed an electric charge of excitement. Her boss was truly the patriarch, greeted with subtle deference, his smallest want taken care of by the help and the family.
Joe cut a splendid figure as he rode his horse each morning, impeccably attired in riding clothes. And as she sat next to him during the day he talked to some of the most powerful people in America. Jack called too, sometimes several times a day. Williams sensed that Joe wasn’t completely happy with her, and she thought that she knew why. Joe had impeccable manners, and he made no overt advance toward her, but she knew what he wanted and what she would not give.
Joe had been back scarcely two weeks when the chauffeur drove Joe and Williams to Boston for a flight to New York. All through the long ride Joe sat silently. On the plane to New York he said not a word. Finally Williams turned to him and spoke urgently: “You know I came to do one job, and that’s the way I want it. And if it’s going to be some other way, now is the best time to end it.”
Joe shrugged and gave no answer, but from then on Williams had no more difficulties with her seventy-two-year-old boss.
When Jack headed out on the campaign trail, he had an enlarged staff to service his needs. Among the new arrivals was Archibald Cox, an austere, cerebral Harvard Law professor who came down to Washington to oversee a group of academics writing speeches and preparing policy papers. Jack knew Cox as an adviser on labor questions, and it was fitting that Jack opened his campaign on Labor Day, giving a speech that Cox had written, before a vast crowd of sixty thousand in Detroit’s Cadillac Square. About halfway through the turgid lecture studded with facts and figures, the candidate pushed the pages away and ad-libbed his way through the rest of speech.
That was the last time Jack read one of Cox’s speeches. Cox and his colleagues were grievously disappointed at how few of their words Jack ever uttered, though their research and ideas often worked their way into his addresses, compressed into pithy phrases and slogans. For the most part, however, it was the prodigiously industrious Sorensen who wrote almost all of Jack’s speeches on the road, based in large part on Feldman’s research.
Cox began taking each speech that Jack gave in cities across America and comparing them with the talk that Roosevelt had given in 1932 in the same city. “I was just aghast from an intellectual point of view at the lower level of all Kennedy’s speeches,” Cox reflected. The Harvard professor