The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [378]
Of all the Kennedy brothers, young Teddy had the greatest of possibilities for human happiness. He pursued pleasure exuberantly and laughed so deeply that cries of tragedy were obscured. Teddy had run the campaign in the West and could have been bitter about the region voting so dramatically against his brother’s bid for the presidency. But he was not a man who held grudges, and he thought himself and the West a natural mix.
When Teddy went out to Wyoming for a week during the primaries, he and a local politician, Teno Roncalio, searched for Kennedy delegates from morning until evening. No matter how late they worked or how much they caroused, at six the next morning Teddy was already up, ready to head out for a vigorous hour of horseback riding. Roncalio, who preferred the bunk to the saddle, had the unhappy chore of galloping alongside his eastern visitor. On one of those rides Roncalio reflected on Jack’s earlier visit. Roncalio could not imagine the senator from Massachusetts getting up to ride at dawn across landscape that he considered uninhabited for good reason. At the end of that visit, Roncalio drove the candidate to the airport in Casper. The wind was blowing a good thirty knots, but Roncalio had the top down. The candidate looked out on a landscape empty of everything but occasional sagebrush racing alongside the car. “Good Lord, why do you live here?” Kennedy exclaimed, a question he would not have asked if Wyoming voters had been within hearing distance.
Teddy knew why westerners lived where they did, and for a few intense hours he was ready to pack up and join them. The time of Conestoga wagons and homesteaders was over, but for Teddy the dream was the same. “I was there the night that it was decided to move Teddy’s residence out west,” recalled Evelyn Jones, the housekeeper. “And then all of a sudden in the same night the decision was changed.” Teddy’s father had convinced him to follow in his brother’s footsteps.
For Joan it was a melancholic moment whose full import it would take her years to realize. “We wanted to move to Arizona,” she recalled wistfully. “We thought we’d have fun and live our own lives, just the two of us, and Kara and the baby on the way. Ted loved his family and his father but I think for him it was freedom from his father. Ted felt he was being pushed into public life. He could not do what he wanted to do. Nobody disobeyed grandfather.”
On a day after the 1960 Thanksgiving holiday, twenty-eight-year-old Teddy went to see the president-elect to tell him of his plans to run for the Senate seat being held in trust by a family friend, Ben Smith, until the 1962 election. In doing so, Teddy would be making the most crucial move in his own life, setting off on a road that closed up behind him with each step forward. He asked his brother for a post in the new administration that would give him some stature before he returned to Massachusetts for the campaign. Teddy was thinking of something in foreign affairs. If the president had gone along, there would have been an Attorney General Kennedy on the domestic front who never practiced law, matched on the foreign front by another Kennedy brother whose overseas experience consisted largely of guarding NATO headquarters in Paris.
Teddy was not even thirty years old, the minimum age for the U.S. Senate. The president-elect did not intend to pander to his brother’s ambitions, setting him up and guiding him until a real opponent toppled him. Teddy would have to get out there and get himself recognized. “Don’t lose a day,” he admonished. “Teddy, you ought to get out and get around. I’ll understand, I’ll hear whether you are really making a mark up there. I will tell you whether this is something that you ought to seriously consider.”
That was not the president-elect speaking. That was the firm older brother who was not about to have his brother riding on his success. Teddy took his brother literally and within a few hours was off to Africa with