The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [376]
Proud vintner that he was, Alsop brought forth precious bottles of 1945 Chateau Lafite Rothschild. The wine, as Alsop would be glad to tell you, was clearly too tannic to be drunk and needed years more in the cellar to be worthy of its heritage. Alsop noted that the hapless man who was his president paid more attention to reading the label than to tasting the wine. Alsop would have been better off filling the bottle with vin ordinaire and recorking it than to waste his prized vintage on Kennedy.
This was a modern version of the fairy tale of the princess who, when asked to sleep on a mattress under which has been placed a pea, passes a restless and sleepless night, thereby proving her noble blood. Kennedy, as Alsop saw him, would have slept through the night. Although Alsop was probably correct that the president could not taste the subtle nuances, it is also possible that he thought the celebrated wine tasted like undrinkable swill but in deference to his host drank it down.
Although Kennedy had his own friends in journalism, Bobby played an instrumental role, monitoring the press, doing whatever he could to see to it that the Kennedys were portrayed in the most admirable of terms. For the most part this was not an onerous task. Many of Washington’s premier journalists were eager collaborators, as much the seducers as the seduced. These reporters rationalized that they were advancing a desirable political agenda, but what they were advancing for the most part were their own careers.
The Kennedys liked to create a collegial relationship with those who wrote about them, so that the author and the subject seemed to be working together, like two artists painting the same portrait. After writing a draft of his classic book The Making of the President 1960, Theodore White sent the manuscript to Bobby that he said was “full of errors … but also full of affection and respect.”
“Do keep this as a personal document for your eyes alone,” the journalist wrote. White doubtless would not have sent the manuscript to Bobby if it had been less than brimming with what he called “affection and respect.” Bobby, for his part, did not attempt to paint a thick coating of pastels over any harsh coloring. He was smart enough to write only narrow, fact-based criticisms, telling White that he “would be delighted to discuss” larger matters of emphasis on some occasion.
Many journalists thought of themselves as helpmates of the administration. Several of them, such as Ben Bradlee of Newsweek and Charles Bartlett, a syndicated columnist associated with the Chattanooga Times, were among the president’s closest friends, and many of their competitors also nuzzled up to the administration as best they could, suggesting possible cabinet appointments, tempering unfavorable stories, offering unsolicited suggestions.
The president was adept at using his journalist friends to reward and punish his enemies. One of the few matters on which Jack and Bobby did not agree was in their attitude toward Paul Corbin, who had been such a controversial figure during the campaign. Corbin’s mailing of fake anti-Catholic letters during the Wisconsin primary was only a tiny sampling of his deviousness. Bobby had a close friendship with Corbin that neither the president nor many of the attorney general’s other friends understood. “Kennedy’s notion about Corbin was that he belonged to Bobby,” recalled Bob Healy, a Boston Globe reporter and a family intimate. “That was his favorite line.”
Corbin looked upon the world as an interlocking series of conspiracies, his paranoia projected onto everything he saw. He was a man of intelligence and disarming candor, as well as a prodigious researcher, and he spun his tales out of a flax of truth, half-truth, conjecture, and dark