The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [437]
Teddy did not arrive in the Senate to confront men whom most of his constituents abhorred, like the segregationist Senator James Eastland. Teddy came as he was, as a young politician with much to learn, and fifty-nine-year-old Eastland liked him and gave him a choice assignment on the immigration subcommittee. Eastland told him: “You want something, you come over and speak to me,” as he would never have said in similar circumstances to either of Teddy’s big brothers. In the Senate it was a high honor to be liked. It meant that your word could be trusted, that you played square and understood your colleagues’ problems as if they were your own. And without question, Teddy was liked.
The president looked on in awe at Teddy’s youthful vitality, energy, and health. At times, though, he took rich pleasure in knocking his brother off his newfound perch of principle. On one occasion at a White House patty the new senator noted that the army’s new rifle was putting hundreds out of work who had been working in Massachusetts factories building the earlier version. “Teddy, these are your problems now,” Kennedy told his kid brother with rich pleasure. “Tough shit.”
Teddy was an apt student in the school of politics, and he did not bore in obsessively on the president. He understood the efficacy of humor, bracketing his serious requests in ribaldry. When he called his brother in March 1963 to talk about the problem of wool imports, Teddy knew that this was a subject that mattered profoundly to Massachusetts clothing manufacturers and their workers. Instead of beseeching the president for help, he painted a savagely amusing picture of the patrician Republican Governor Christian Herter running around the Commonwealth in his German Mercedes Benz as he sought to keep out the nefarious imports. “Everyone turns around and takes a look,” Teddy said as Jack laughed audibly, “[as] he drove up to that wool meeting … that really let the balloon air out of every balloon in there.”
“But, of course, it’s tough,” the president told his kid brother, as if he were talking about nothing so banal as wool but life itself. “I tell you, boy, we went through that yesterday for two hours …”
“Yeah,” Teddy interjected, as if he could feel what his brother had gone through. “… about what we would do on wool. You see, those guys don’t want to give up that market.”
The president’s problem with wool imports was just one of an endless list of difficulties he was facing. For Kennedy, the spring of 1963 arrived without blossoms. “The major wheels of Kennedy’s legislative program to get America moving again internally have yet to turn,” Look stated in an article titled “Why There’s Trouble in the New Frontier.” Kennedy remained an immensely popular president, but there were danger signs out there. “In the field of party politics, where he was expected to be strong, President Kennedy is in trouble,” wrote Doris Fleeson, a political columnist. Kennedy had not followed the fundamental axiom that the garden of politics must be tended from one end to the other. He had largely left it to his minions to work the politicians, and they had not done their job well. It was hard, though, to push a Congress that stood deeply divided on the social and moral issues of the day. Kennedy was having problems enough with the Democratic majority, who, as was their wont, were more concerned with their reelection than with his presidency. Some members of his own party were boldly criticizing Kennedy’s refusal to push forward on crucial issues. “In rough issues … the