The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [377]
“Corbin was abrasive and wild, but for Bobby he was a loyal lapdog,” recalled Larry Newman, a White House Secret Service agent whose fiancée was one of the attorney general’s secretaries. “Corbin could do things for Bobby that had deniability. But he was denied access [to] lots of things. Kenny [O’Donnell] blocked him. And he resented that, and he blamed Kenny.”
Bob Healy, who had served in the air force in World War II in O’Donnell’s bomber unit, was privy to his friend’s thinking. “Kenny just didn’t trust Corbin,” Healy said. “He was always telling them [the Kennedys] to beware of Corbin.”
O’Donnell fancied himself the administration’s leading hard-nosed political operative, and Corbin’s endless pushing represented a threat to him. Corbin’s supposed closeness to Communist activists when he had been a CIO organizer in the early 1940s was enough of a problem that he had not been offered a position in the administration. Instead, he had been shuttled over to the Democratic National Committee, where he worked as a special assistant to Chairman John M. Bailey.
One afternoon in late August 1961, according to John Seigenthaler, Kennedy called his good friend Ben Bradlee. The president had just learned from O’Donnell that Corbin was not at his DNC office but hanging out at the pool at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington. Years later Bradlee admitted wistfully that “whereas I think Kennedy valued my friendship … he valued my journalism most when it carried his water.” As Bradlee talked to the president, it became clear that this would be one of his water-carrying days. “I may have talked to him on the phone,” Bradlee recalled. Both Seigenthaler’s detailed recollections and the evidence of the Newsweek article largely confirm that Bradlee did indeed call Corbin at the hotel. Seigenthaler, moreover, believes that both the president and O’Donnell were probably listening in on the conversation.
Corbin had a daring disregard for all the small-scale dissembling of daily politics, and when the Newsweek editor asked him what he was doing, he rashly told him the truth. “Sitting by the swimming pool,” Corbin said, “with a scotch in one hand and a blonde in the other.”
Bradlee asked the Democratic operative what his future plans were, a not-unreasonable question, especially if the president was listening. “Stay here for sixteen years,” Corbin said. “That’s what I’m going to do. Eight years with Jack and eight years with Bobby. And if Jack doesn’t do better, we’ll run Bobby in ‘64.” After quoting Corbin’s devastating comments, the article in the September 4, 1961, issue of Newsweek concluded: “Jolly Paul Corbin sticks to his jokes, and his friends. But whether his friends can afford to stick with Jolly Paul is something else again.”
Bobby was infuriated when he learned of Corbin’s boasts. “Fire him!” he told Seigenthaler. “Get him out of there. I don’t want him working over there tonight.” Bobby calmed down and Corbin kept his job. Bobby had a deep visceral loyalty to his friends and aides that the president simply did not have; if there had been any doubt about that, the attorney general proved it by even now not disavowing his friend. As for Corbin, he guessed from which direction the knives had come and who had wielded them. He could not afford to make the president his enemy, but O’Donnell was a different matter. Corbin took his time, but he planned a revenge complicated and subtle enough to overcome perhaps even his formidable foe.
Bobby had another political matter on his mind, as did Jack. That was the political future of their youngest brother. After the election, Teddy had thought about moving west and starting a new life for himself there with Joan, one-year-old Kara Anne, and a second child due in September 1961. It was precisely the dream that the president had once held: heading out into the anonymity and space of the West, that richest of American metaphors for freedom.