OTHER THAN THAT one moment of anger at the pub, which in retrospect Kenny thoroughly enjoyed, the Kennedy forces had decided to take their loss in stride. Kenny hated admitting it, but Joe had been right. Stevenson could not beat President Eisenhower. Had Jack won the nomination for VP, he would have gone down with Stevenson. In the end, they were content to depart the convention with most of the delegates comparing Jack to Stevenson and wondering if perhaps they had made a mistake in their choice for the presidential nomination.
Jack had already decided to make the most of the opportunity fate had presented. Kenny suspected that Jack had made the decision the second he knew he was licked in Chicago in ’56. Jack was not, Kenny was fast learning, a man to waste time on might-have-beens. Mentally and politically he had moved on. Despite having been outmaneuvered, Jack had seemed to glide through the convention and the presidential campaign with the same intrepid profile that had won him a Senate seat in ’52. He was everywhere and anywhere campaigning for the Democratic ticket. Maybe he was the good political solider or maybe, just maybe, he was stocking up political IOUs. In contrast, Stevenson’s campaign lurched uncomfortably forward with a candidate who seemed at best ill at ease and at worst slightly contemptuous of the entire convention process.
As historian Robert Dallek noted, “Jack seemed to be everywhere, exuding charm, offering sensible pronouncements, and muting his competitiveness and ambition for greater national recognition with self-deprecating humor.”
In the end, Jack received slightly over twenty-five hundred speaking invitations from all over the country. He accepted about 150 of them, as Kenny remembered, traveling across twenty-four states.
With Kenny in tow, they began what was, no question, an early step toward 1960, designed to bring Jack into the key primary states. On this speaking tour, Jack’s implicit goals were getting his name out there, shaking as many hands as possible, doing television appearances, and remembering the name of every political leader or official who might be of some importance.
Bobby, on the other hand, had the unpleasant job of spending time with the Stevenson campaign and the candidate himself. One trip with Stevenson brought Bobby to Boston, where Kenny met his old friend for drinks.
Bobby was appalled at the Stevenson operation, saying to Kenny, “You wouldn’t believe it. This is the most disastrous operation you ever saw. He gives an elaborate speech on world affairs to a group of twenty-five coal miners standing on the railroad tracks in West Virginia.”
The campaign was apparently an utter disaster. It lacked focus, organization, any coherent plan of action, and, most important, an enthusiastic candidate. Kenny and Bobby concluded that the campaign’s “basic problem was that Stevenson had an intense distaste for politics and politicians.”
This was not the best approach to winning the White House. The experience taught Bobby a useful lesson: ultimately what not to do in a presidential campaign. Bobby emerged from the Stevenson campaign with several yellow note pads covered in his characteristic chicken scrawl. He would take notes about anything and anyone he thought important, not necessarily to help Stevenson (it was far too late for that) but with an eye toward his brother’s run in 1960. On Election Day, in November 1956, Eisenhower defeated Stevenson, and Bobby stowed his notebooks away in anticipation of the national campaign to come.
With the election of 1956 in the rearview mirror and President Eisenhower assured of four more years, Bobby was heading back to Washington, DC, eager to return to his own life and to accept his new post, which began in January 1957. It was a job he was terribly excited about, though up until now he had kept the details to himself: He would be chief counsel for the United States Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, chaired by their old friend from Arkansas Senator John McClellan, the very same one who had given Kenny and Bobby a tough political lesson at the Chicago convention.
The McClellan Committee, as it became known, and which was later widely known as the Rackets Committee, would prove a perfect fit for Bobby Kennedy’s determination and prosecutorial skills. Taking the job was not without major political and, as it turned out, personal risks as well, but Bobby knew well enough that while Kenny would support his decision, his father would be less than pleased. This understated the situation: Joe was pissed when he found out.
Bobby got a chance to tell his father and brother of his decision in December 1956, over the Christmas holiday. His father’s reaction was even worse than Bobby had feared. Joe and Bobby had what Bobby later described to Kenny as “a brutal argument,” but Bobby was determined. Even the attempt to dissuade Bobby by Kennedy family friend William O. Douglas, a man Bobby much admired, fell on deaf ears.
Bobby had made up his mind. He would be there when needed for Jack, but in the meantime he planned to follow his own path. Joe Kennedy foresaw in Bobby’s decision potentially disastrous consequences for Jack’s political future. Jack would need labor. The 1956 convention had shown how much labor and their liberal friends already distrusted Jack. Bobby leading an investigation into their business dealings and potential mismanagement would not help the situation much.
Bobby disagreed. He saw this as an opportunity to employ the Kennedy name in a fight for justice on behalf of the underdog. For a man who saw life in black and white, with precious little gray, this was the ideal opportunity to serve.
Bobby, however, did admit to Kenny that “if the investigation flops, it will hurt Jack in 1958 and in 1960, too . . . a lot of people think he’s the Kennedy running the investigation, not me. As far as the public is concerned, one Kennedy is the same as another Kennedy.”
Kenny was not a fan of McClellan, especially after the senator’s aloof performance and lack of support for Jack in Chicago, 1956. All the same, Kenny, who had been vehemently opposed to Bobby’s stint with the McCarthy Committee, found John McClellan and his subcommittee welcome relief this time around.
Ralph Dungan, a Philadelphia-born lawyer with an Irish background and strong political connections, had joined Jack’s office as a legislative assistant working with Ted Sorensen. Dungan remembered when Bobby joined the McClellan Committee and the first time he understood just how powerful and important Kenny’s role was with regard to Jack and his family: “Jack’s decision to join the McClellan Committee was certainly important. I was aware of where things cut in the Kennedy family. I can infer without ever having been in on the discussions, which I’m sure occurred between him and Bobby and Ken O’Donnell and the Old Man, that more than likely, this was decided in a family powwow—the decision would be taken with just these guys present. The arguments would go somewhat [like], ‘You’re going to get all this national publicity and television exposure.’ Plus, though Jack did not have the kind of crusading Irish Puritanism of Bobby, he had the crusading fighting spirit of the immigrants overall. He did not like to see the little guy stepped on.” In the end, Jack had joined the committee largely, he told his father, to support Bobby’s decision, and, sure, Bobby had asked him to join as a favor. Maybe. But Kenny and Jack saw political opportunity as well as peril. The truth was, it was done now; Bobby had made the decision. The key now was to make it work for Jack’s benefit.
When Kenny came to work for the McClellan Committee, little would happen to change his dim view of McClellan. Still, it was not McCarthy, and that was good news. Committee work would keep Bobby’s taste for fighting injustice satisfied without getting him into too much hot water or screwing things up too much for Jack. This at least had been Kenny’s view from the safe distance of the Kennedy political offices at 122 Bowdoin Street in Boston.
Kenny understood all too well the potential political pitfalls involved for Bobby and for Jack. Yet Kenny, despite having more influence over Bobby than Joe and knowing better than Jack what made Bobby tick, did not even bother to try to dissuade Bobby from taking the job.
Unlike Bobby’s stint with McCarthy, there were no arguments, battles, or long, drawn-out discussions and weeks of cold silences between Kenny and Bobby. While Kenny perceived there might be some problems with McClellan’s committee, given labor’s perception of the Kennedys, it was still a better choice than it might have first appeared to be.
While there was indeed no real worry that Jack might not win in his upcoming 1958 Senate race, the Irish Brotherhood needed to pull off a disproportionately big win as they eyed 1960 in order to convince any remaining skeptics among the national political elite of Jack’s viability at the polls. The postconvention bounce and glow from 1956 had set Jack up beautifully. But political leaders were now looking toward Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s VP, as a sure bet in 1960, and this made them all the less sanguine about Jack Kennedy’s staying power.
Sure, he had been in the spotlight at the Chicago convention and certainly during the national campaign four years previously, but compared to Stevenson, they argued, who wouldn’t shine brightly? Spotlights fade, however.
Nixon was a pro, a seasoned politician. He knew the ropes, had plenty of executive experience. Kennedy was young and green. While he had proven himself smart, handsome, charming, well versed in international issues, and a great speaker, he nevertheless had no major legislative accomplishments, certainly not when compared to Nixon.
As if those concerns were not enough, Jack had three further problems: He was Irish, he was a Catholic, and his father was Joe Kennedy. The outright opposition to Joe Kennedy on the parts of Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, and labor in general made these entities natural allies of Hubert Humphrey, the Minnesota senator who was eyeing the race himself.
As if these people needed yet another reason to oppose Jack Kennedy’s political aspirations, they now found one in Bobby Kennedy, chief counsel for Senator John McClellan’s committee on mismanagement in labor. This was a committee Eleanor Roosevelt, the Reuther brothers, and other labor interests despised on principle. Bobby’s job, as they saw it, was to allow the government and big business to stick their noses where they had no business being. Bobby’s background with McCarthy was the worst of all. Eleanor Roosevelt, in particular, found this association unforgiveable.
After all, Bobby had worked for McCarthy, who had been a friend of Joe Kennedy’s. When the Senate gathered to vote to censure McCarthy, Jack was conveniently nowhere to be found. In addition to having worked for McCarthy, Bobby had earned at the 1956 convention a reputation for arrogance, brashness, ill-tempered behavior, and downright pushiness as a result of his efforts on behalf of Jack’s failed struggle for the VP slot.
Eleanor Roosevelt had other reasons for distrusting Jack Kennedy and his candidacy. She detested his father; she not only saw him as a reactionary, but she also believed he was trying to buy the election for his son. She believed that Joseph Kennedy had an “odor of corruption” that threatened the Democratic Party and that he was, as she put it, “the real power behind his son.” She made clear that she wanted Adlai Stevenson, who had lost to Eisenhower in 1956; but she believed he had earned the mantle in 1960. Most important, she trusted Stevenson and felt no such trust for Jack Kennedy, his father, or his brother Bobby.
Walter Reuther, who was, as Kenny said, “terribly close” to Eleanor, was easily influenced by her views on Jack, and that, added to his own belief that the activities of the so-called McClellan Committee represented a real threat to labor unions in the country, made gaining their support and trust both difficult and yet essential if Jack was to win in 1960.
Many viewed Bobby as “a young kid who did not know his place,” as one pol had described Bobby to Kenny after Chicago. Kenny had laughed. Bobby hadn’t known his place since the football field at Harvard. After all, he’d pushed himself onto the team through sheer determination. It was a quality that did not much bother Kenny, and it was one of the reasons he had wanted Bobby to run the ’52 Senate campaign. He knew Bobby would be crucial in 1960 as well. But Kenny also knew full well that diplomacy was not one of Bobby’s strengths.
All these issues were swirling in the background as Larry and Kenny began to plan for the 1958 Senate race. They needed to prove Jack’s viability through sheer vote count, something professional politicians could understand. They would need to demonstrate with a major win in the 1958 Senate race that events of the past year had not been just a political fluke or a flash in the pan. They had to demonstrate that Senator John F. Kennedy was a national political figure who was here to stay and that, as such, he was a viable contender for the nomination in 1960.
This is where Kenny’s mind was when Bobby called him to request his help with committee work in DC. It caught Kenny off guard, though it shouldn’t have. When Bobby first went to Washington and as Kenny and Larry built the Kennedy organization, Bobby and Kenny would speak fairly regularly, at least a couple of times a week, about politics. And since they had left Chicago, they had been in touch even more than previously, almost once a day, sometimes twice a day. They both now understood that Jack was headed for the White House in 1960, and while Bobby might be sidelined in Washington by his own choice, there was no question they were in conversation regularly about a potential presidential campaign for Jack.
Increasingly though, Kenny noticed that their conversations were more and more about Bobby’s work on the committee. The task was becoming formidable, if not dangerous, politically and otherwise. Bobby was increasingly concerned.
“Not for himself,” Kenny explained. Bobby didn’t care or worry for a moment about himself. “Rather that he might screw things up and hurt Jack’s national prospects.”
So when Bobby requested that Kenny come down to Washington to work with him, Kenny was both taken aback and displeased. He thought that Bobby had understood his role was with the Kennedy organization in Massachusetts. In winning, they had finally overcome tremendous odds, not the least of which was opposition from the Old Man and Morrissey’s meddling and crises such as Jack’s health scare, in order to get the Kennedy organization up and running in the senator’s home state. They were on the verge of having the organization fully functioning and developing it into a force to reckon with in Massachusetts politics. From Kenny’s point of view, “this was just damn lousy timing,” and he told Bobby so.
Kenny was inclined to say no until Bobby made clear that it was more than just the McClellan Committee that concerned him. If things got bad, and they just might, the committee could hurt Jack with labor, damage his national reputation. Bobby needed Kenny’s help now.
“You talked to Jack, right?” Kenny asked as he sat on the edge of the bed in his bedroom in Winthrop. “Your brother is fine with this?” He was frankly surprised that Jack thought this was a great idea. Kenny assumed, wrongly as it turned out later, that if Bobby was making such a request, then the brothers had already talked about this.
Kenny said yes, under the impression that it was a request from Jack as much as Bobby. Somehow Kenny got the distinct impression that Bobby had replied in the affirmative, that he’d spoken to his brother. When an infuriated Kenny later pressed Bobby on the point, Bobby shrugged. Maybe he’d misled Kenny. But it was done now, so they might just as well get on with it. Kenny was not amused. As it would turn out, Jack was even less amused.
“I was to find out later,” Kenny laughed, “that Jack had nothing to do with Bobby’s decision to bring me to Washington and was frankly none too happy to see me there when I arrived.”
BOBBY HAD COME to the McClellan Committee after having served a turbulent and well-documented stint with the McCarthy Committee—a position Kenny had vehemently opposed and a job that had put their friendship to the ultimate test. It was a decision that would haunt Bobby for the rest of his life.
The committee, run as it was by Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, was terribly destructive, mean-spirited, and replete with a horrendous partisanship that persecuted people and did real damage to their lives, careers, and the U.S. senatorial institution itself.
“Joe McCarthy,” Kenny said, “was a vicious, sorry excuse for a human being and had no business in politics. He was a hater. Haters can only survive so long on the national political stage. The entire episode was a disgrace.”
On the McCarthy Committee, Bobby had been exposed to what he thought were some very grave violations and abuses of the authority of congressional committees. He was very sensitive about this and was determined that the McClellan Committee would get it right. From the start of his role as chief counsel with the McClellan Committee, Bobby was very meticulous about witnesses and very concerned about the content of their characters—partially out of innate kindness but also with an eye to what his appearance as a prosecutor projected to the American people. The power and position had been abused in the past. Bobby wanted to establish a different public face for congressional committees because he felt strongly that they could make a positive contribution to society.
Bobby planned to show that committees could go after those who broke the law without individual committee members being perceived as doing so themselves. During his tenure on the McClellan Committee, Bobby was under scrutiny. He was under serious political pressures of a kind he had never experienced before, and perhaps he felt a bit over his head. He did not want this to blow up in his face, which would hurt Jack terribly, perhaps destroy his chances for 1960 completely.
“This,” Kenny explained, “is what I stepped into when I came down to Washington in early 1957.”
What made the situation more complicated was that while Jack Kennedy had reluctantly agreed to serve on the committee, in no small part to support his brother, he had no idea how far out on a limb Bobby felt he had taken the Kennedy name. Nor did Jack fully understand the political pressures Bobby felt himself to be under.
Kenny was about to learn a vital lesson about the relationship between Jack and Bobby, a lesson that would be of critical importance in solidifying his leadership of Jack’s Irish Brotherhood. It would make him indispensable from here forward.
Once Kenny arrived in Washington, he went straight to see Jack. When he strolled into Jack’s outer office in the old Senate Office Building, he greeted Mary Gallagher, who had worked for Kenny at the paper company Hollingsworth and Whitney. She was Italian but had married an Irishman. Kenny had found her efficient, smart, and savvy. He had strongly recommended that Jack take her with him to Washington, which he had indeed done. Jack thought she was terrific, “even if you did suggest her,” he had teased Kenny. “Hi, Mary. He is expecting me,” Kenny assured her after some good-natured teasing back and forth. She did not doubt Kenny. He was not someone who made up excuses to see the senator, but given who Kenny was and his close relationship with Senator Kennedy, it was unusual that the senator would not have carved out more time on his schedule to see Kenny.
When she went into the senator’s office to tell him, the senator’s frosty reception told her something was wrong.
“He’s not happy,” she whispered to Kenny as he strolled toward the lion’s den, leaning forward to reassure her.
Kenny whispered, “Don’t worry. If he gets mad, I will just blame Bobby.”
Kenny did not think Jack would know exactly when he was coming, but he was sure Bobby had cleared it with him. It would turn out to be a bit more complicated than that. Kenny found out later from Bobby that Jack had actually been told only a few nights before at a dinner party at Bobby’s Hickory Hill estate that Kenny was coming down. Jack was furious. But Bobby was Bobby. Even Jack had to come to grips with that.
After a moment of icy silence, Jack wanted an answer to the obvious. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Kenny could tell by Jack’s cold stare that Jack was neither kidding nor amused.
“I assumed Bobby spoke to you.”
“About what?” Jack demanded.
“About my coming down here to work with him at the committee.”
Jack stared and said nothing, restraining his fury while Mary brought them coffee. The two men sat silently until she was safely outside the door. Kenny jumped in quickly, not inclined to give Jack another chance. “Don’t you two talk to each other?” Kenny asked incredulously.
“No,” Jack replied immediately, the answer catching Kenny off guard. “We talk through you. That’s your job, don’t you get that?”
Kenny suspected that Jack’s anger was in no small part due to the fact that he felt Kenny was his friend. It was a funny quirk that Kenny would come to see more and more in the Kennedy family: They were competitive with each other even in their relationships with friends and staff. Jack was admittedly angry because Kenny had not asked. Had not called him first.
Actually, Kenny had not understood these internal dynamics of being a Kennedy, but he sure as hell did now. It was a mistake he would not make again. He quickly moved the discussion from the committee itself to politics.
Kenny pointed out to Jack that his role would be much more than supporting Bobby and helping him get organized. He could also work the labor side at the same time.
“How?” Jack wanted to know, leaning forward to sip his coffee, despite a grimace of pain.
“I can talk to them,” Kenny explained, “and get them to understand the difference between Bobby and the senator. Give them a face, a person, a voice they can reach out to on a national level.”
“You think they know the difference between one Kennedy and the other?” Jack wanted to know.
“Maybe not now,” Kenny went on to explain, but that was why having him as a point person was key. He and Larry O’Brien had set up a similar situation in Massachusetts. People eventually came to see them as honest brokers who could not only speak to the senator for them, but who, when needed, also spoke for the senator himself.
Jack nodded. Kenny made clear that he and Larry would be in touch every day while he was in Washington. Nothing would be left to chance or go unfinished. If Larry needed him in Boston, Kenny would go. At the end of the day, when Bobby didn’t need him anymore, they’d shut the door of Kenny’s office at the committee and it would be Jack Kennedy’s Washington political operation.
Jack admitted that this all made some sense, as long as Kenny fully understood what his priorities were. Bobby’s needs, no matter how important, could never get in the way.
“But when it is finished, straight back to Boston. Do not forget the real goal here is 1958 and viability in 1960,” Jack said.
Kenny nodded and turned to go. Jack called him back. This conversation, Jack said to him, was between them. He did not want his brother to think he was second-guessing him. Kenny understood but suggested perhaps they should talk with each other directly in the future. Jack pointed toward the door.
Kenny laughed about it later. Jack was not particularly pleased, but the decision was one they would all have to live with, at least for the moment. Still, Jack had heard Kenny clearly. Increasingly their relationship would grow ever closer, ensuring such miscommunication would not happen in the future.
As Kenny headed out the door to find Bobby, he shook his head. He found himself once again in a strange position, vis-à-vis the Kennedy family. He had not planned to become the sounding board for both brothers or their go-between guy, but here he was. Maybe that was his role. The mechanic. The guy who got the job done. He didn’t yet know for sure, but he planned to have one straightforward conversation with Bobby, making clear he did not appreciate being the middleman.
For his part, Bobby couldn’t have cared less how Kenny felt and didn’t even listen to his complaints. He pointed out that Kenny had done him a similar favor in 1952, by going directly to Jack to bring Bobby in to run the 1952 campaign. So maybe now they were even.
The first people Kenny met in his new role were Angela “Angie” Novello and Carmine Bellino. Angie was Bobby’s personal secretary and, as Kenny dubbed her, “Bobby’s minder.” An attractive, smart woman originally from New Jersey, she had been working for another Senate committee when Bobby met her. They hit it off immediately, she later joked with a touch of irony. Angie thought Bobby was brash and arrogant and didn’t know his place. He thought she was smart as hell and just what he needed as his right hand at the committee. So he gave her the job as his secretary. The only problem was that Angie had not asked for the job. In the end, as Angie explained, “he was so persistent I gave in, but we agreed that it would be a one-month trial period. If I did not like him, I could leave and he would help me find another job.” As it turned out, Angie stayed with Bobby all the way until Los Angeles in June 1968.
Angie, who eventually got to know Kenny well, admitted to him later she’d been less than thrilled with Bobby when she first met him, finding him very pushy.
“I did not want the job,” Angie laughed, “but suddenly here I was. Working for the committee and Bobby.”
Kenny chuckled, explaining that her experience was not unique. “Bobby has a way of hearing yes,” Kenny explained, having just had a similar experience, “even when you say no.”
Angie was somewhat relieved. She thought it was just her. And, “when Kenny arrived,” Angie explained later, “absolute organization descended upon us. Suddenly, I could see over the top of my desk! Everything just fell into place, and I felt perhaps it was going to be okay.”
Along with Angie came her brother-in-law, Carmine Bellino. Bellino was a brilliant accountant and would turn out to be a key player, perhaps one of the most important people on the McClellan Committee, though Kenny could not have surmised this when he shook his hand that day. The handshake was weak, trembling. And Bellino looked every bit the accountant.
Kenny intended to bring more than order to the chaos of the McClellan Committee. He intended to use it as a platform to demonstrate to labor that, despite their misgivings, Bobby was not “out to get them,” that he was, in fact, on their side and could be trusted. In turn, Kenny hoped, they could and should trust Jack. Kenny wanted to convince labor that while the committee, with Bobby as chief counsel, certainly intended to go after corruption and abuses in the labor unions, they were targeting the bad guys: the Dave Becks, the Jimmy Hoffas, the Jimmy Crosses—not the good guys, not the Reuther brothers, the Gossers, and others like them.
In many ways, Kenny felt the contrasting style of the Kennedy brothers would serve the committee well, where Bobby could be brutally direct, prosecutorial, at times moving from relentless questioning to outright belittling of witnesses—all of which further enhanced a growing perception that Bobby was ruthless and would stop at nothing to win.
Jack Kennedy, on the other hand, proved, as Kenny said, “deft at moving witnesses in the direction he wanted them to go. He was always restrained, polite, never belittling, but always direct. Armed with all the facts before ever beginning his questioning, he never assumed anything. He knew well before he asked the question the answer he was looking for, and inevitably got it.”
Helen teased Kenny over the phone that evening of his first day in Washington, as they chatted from his temporary perch at the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue. “You mean to say, the committee is not targeting the labor guys you need for Jack in 1960.”
“So cynical,” he teased her in return. But this was closer to the truth than Kenny cared to admit. The cold, hard political reality of the time was that you could not be elected as a Democrat without the unions. The Irish Brotherhood had learned this the hard way at the 1956 Chicago convention. Kenny had to convince Walter Reuther and the AFL-CIO that Jack and Bobby could be trusted. By convincing labor, they would convince Eleanor Roosevelt and the liberals that Jack Kennedy should be the nominee in 1960.
But that was three years away. Right now, Kenny had to begin somewhere, so he began by reaching out directly to Walter Reuther’s guys at the United Automobile Workers union, the guys who had run from Jack as quickly as possible in 1956.
Whatever Kenny did in his new role at the committee, Jack was clear that he did not want to tangle with UAW politically. They were an incredibly potent political power that Jack, Kenny, Bobby, and Larry knew they would have to deal with to win in 1960. The truth was that the UAW had opposed Jack in 1956 as the vice presidential candidate because of the deal they had struck with Estes Kefauver. Bluntly, they had told Kenny and Bobby at the time in no uncertain terms that they did not feel John Kennedy was the kind of liberal leader they sought.
The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 was widely seen by the press as the cause for the unions’ lack of support for Jack in ’56. Liberals viewed this law, passed over Harry Truman’s veto, as an attempt by business and the Republicans to demobilize the union movement, undermining unions’ rights to strike and attacking their right to free speech. As a member of the House, Jack had voted against the Taft-Hartley Act. Even though the unions knew this, the ultimate passage of the law became an easy out for them.
“They opposed you,” Kenny explained directly to Jack, “because they did not feel or believe that you are a traditional liberal. They felt your father was and remains a reactionary. They feel uncertain and suspicious of your position and views on McCarthy. They have every reason in the world to believe that you, John Kennedy, a rich Irish Catholic, would be a conservative.”
Kenny continued, “The depth of their opposition to you can be found in their belief that you could not be trusted to vote with them on all issues at all times. When it comes down to it, from their perspective, you are a reactionary and a conservative just like your father.”
In other words, their suspicion of Jack had hardly changed since Chicago in 1956. This was not what Jack wanted to hear. And Bobby’s committee role was certainly not going to help the matter in the least.
“Fix it,” Jack had ordered Kenny.
It was not an easy task, but in many ways nobody was more suited to accomplish it than Kenny. Kenny’s background converged with those of the working-class tough guys that surrounded the Reuther brothers and filled the ranks of the UAW. Like Kenny, they were from blue-collar families who understood the value of a dollar and understood the plight of those who toiled in the difficult, often dangerous jobs that the unions sought to protect. Kenny knew well the risks these people took simply to feed their families, and he shared with them a healthy skepticism and distrust of management and the business interests they represented.
In time, the UAW would find in Kenny someone they trusted, a man with no ego whose word was his bond. Importantly, he spoke for John Kennedy, and if Kenny gave you his word, he gave it in the name of Jack Kennedy. It was a power that would be critical to Jack’s success with the labor movement.
But that was a few years away. Right now, Kenny was looking for a way in the door, someone within the UAW who would lend him a friendly ear. He finally found him in the person of Jack Conway, Reuther’s right-hand man, though their first meeting would get off to an inauspicious start.
The truth was that the UAW was totally opposed to Jimmy Hoffa’s heavy-handed union politics. Reuther and his colleagues had no truck with labor leaders who used their positions of power and influence for personal gain. Their real opposition to the McClellan Committee lay in their principled stance against government interference in labor management. This principle was far stronger than their dislike of or disgust with the Jimmy Hoffas in their ranks.
Kenny explained later, “The UAW did not, as has been misconstrued by the press, view the McClellan Committee as a weapon for bringing down Jimmy Hoffa and Walter Reuther. I did not detect any of that, at any time, in their conduct. I think they probably felt, which they do to this day, that the government ought to leave labor entirely alone. They felt strongly that it was up to the unions to police themselves and that the individual labor unions should clean themselves up, and they resented the hell out of the government intrusion. That principle extended even to the Teamsters Union.”
Kenny would come to understand, as he put it, that “there was no individual interest of theirs in this investigating committee, except to be opposed to it on the basis that the McClellan Committee was allowing the beasts of management and business, their ancient enemies, to influence government actions directed at the unions.”
Amid this “ancient” conflict, Kenny was tasked with balancing Bobby’s need as chief counsel to bring corrupt union members to account against Jack Kennedy’s wish to be elected president. To do so meant that Kenny had to solicit the support of the very labor unions Bobby and his brother were now investigating. It was a Herculean labor for which Kenny himself had no organizational support to draw on.