The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [380]
What was so striking about Teddy’s anger was that everything he and his advisers objected to most strongly was the truth. Clancy fumed at Peters’s observation that Teddy had traveled to Africa and Latin America to gather material for political speeches and so he might have “two continents to talk about.” That was precisely what he had done, and it was no feat of investigative reporting to make that observation. Teddy, for his part, told his brother that he and his advisers felt that one of “the most politically undesirable references” was Peters’s statement that “there are those in Massachusetts, as elsewhere, who are already grumbling about a Kennedy family dynasty.” Even in these idyllic early months of the New Frontier, a reporter could walk down Boylston Street and hear a certain amount of grousing on that score, from Democrats and Republicans alike.
Teddy was worried about what Joan had said in the article, and that would become a theme of his life. Joan had what journalists came to admire as a priceless gift of candor but Teddy and his minions considered an endless predilection for political malaprops. She told the reporter that “the entire community” of Bronxville where she grew up “is so highly restricted that I actually never met a Jew as I was growing up.” In her gushing love for the Kennedys, she extolled the Hyannis Port house that had everything, including “their own projection room for movies. If you want a steam bath, they have that, too.”
Peters wrote that when Teddy was at the University of Virginia School of Law, the public schools and the university had been desegregated. “Yet Teddy, though he was there from 1956 to 1959, was unaware of either of these facts until told about them recently.” Teddy wrote his brother: “I feel that the Virginia segration [sic] issues very possibly are factually erroneous and will check this out.”
Teddy didn’t seem to grasp that from now on journalists and others would be examining every aspect of his life. He would not be able to cordon off the parts that he wanted to remain private. Nor would he always be able to edit his words before they went public. There was much that he would not want publicized, from his cheating scandal at Harvard to the difficulties he had suffered over false charges that he had been a leftist security risk, from his compulsive philandering to all the wild episodes of his past. His Harvard friends loved to tell the story of the time they were all challenged to bring a woman to a party, and good old Teddy arrived with a prostitute in tow. It was rambunctious Teddy at his irrepressible best and worst all in one, but it was hardly the conduct of a calculating young man planning to become a U.S. senator.
Teddy had an instinct for candor, a trait that Bobby was teaching him was a mistake. Teddy had told Peters: “The vital thing is to be able to sell the people on the answers you arrive at, and I think I’m qualified to do that.” To Bobby, the small matter of what his brother had told the writer mattered not at all. What mattered was what Bobby thought he should have said. Bobby insisted that his brother get the journalist to change the quote to this pretentious phrasing: “The vital thing is to enunciate clearly what you feel the issues are what you feel can be done in order to remedy the problems and the difficulties that we face.”
Peters pruned his article the