Campaigning with the Kennedys
Joan gave birth to the couple’s first child on February 27, 1960—a daughter they named Kara—Gaelic for “dear little one,” which they’d picked out from a book of old Irish names. Ted came home from Wisconsin, a key primary state, and seemed to relish his new role as father. “I have never seen Ted so excited,” the new mother wrote to Lord Beaverbrook. “Ted is away all week traveling around Wisconsin, and now West Virginia, making speeches for Jack. He phones home every night and asks, ‘How is my daughter?’ I love the way he enjoys using those two new words—my daughter!”
Ted made known his dreams of having a big family. By now, Bobby had seven children, and Ted wanted Joan to keep up with Ethel’s baby-a-year schedule. “He wants nine,” Joan once said. “He says if his mother hadn’t had nine, I wouldn’t have him.”
Joan stayed home with Kara for just six weeks before joining her husband on the campaign trail. Ted was overseeing eleven western states, and Joan was quickly learning that when one Kennedy was campaigning, all Kennedys were expected to join. There were coffee parties, Rotary club lunches, radio interviews, and rallies. Joan later described it as a whirl, rushing from one event to the next and eating whenever food was offered, because they could never be sure when the next offer would come.
“I felt rather like a tourist,” Joan said, “entertained, but as though none of what was going on really had anything to do with me. After all, there had never been any talk of Ted going into politics himself. He was still planning on private practice after his graduation from law school.”
Since their wedding and Ted’s graduation, the couple had largely lived with Joan’s in-laws in Hyannis Port and Palm Beach when they weren’t staying in hotels and living out of suitcases on the campaign trail. Despite the chaos, Joan was easing into her life as a Kennedy, and she loved her new family. She didn’t always feel like she fit in—they were far more competitive than she, and try as she might, she never could get herself too worked up about politics—but she admired Rose and quickly bonded with her sisters-in-law, Ethel and Jackie.
“I never felt any anger of being swallowed up by such a large family, because I saw immediately all the in-laws were individuals in their own right and were respected as such,” Joan told a reporter in 1962. “They all have their own interests and social life, and when we all come together, this gives us a lot to talk about.”
Joan, nicknamed “Joansie” by the family, was especially embraced by the Kennedy women: “I felt accepted as a little sister almost at once,” she said. “When I first learned I was expected to make some public appearances during the president’s campaign, I felt totally unprepared. Jackie, who was pregnant, heard me say I didn’t have the proper clothes for campaigning, and she insisted on lending me so many of hers. I think that for a girl to lend her clothes to another girl is one of the greatest signs of friendliness there is.”
In the spring after Kara’s birth, Jackie stepped in to help Joan by renting a house for her and Ted in Georgetown, about two blocks away from Jackie and Jack; Jackie also hired an Irish nanny to help Joan with Kara. Having Jackie keep watch over her made Joan feel like she had an older sister, someone who understood her and helped keep her safe. When Joan went to Washington with her baby, Jackie took them through the house and even stocked it with groceries.
Jack tapped Joan to escort him on one campaign trip to West Virginia, so Jackie lent her clothes and offered suggestions about the role she was to play. “We’d chat, talk about campaigning, and I’d ask her questions and she’d say, ‘Seems to me you’re doing the right thing,’ or she’d make suggestions about how to work the room.” Jackie also had an ulterior motive: She wanted to keep Joan close to her husband so that when a photographer inevitably snapped a picture of him alongside an attractive woman, the odds were heightened that the attractive woman was a family member rather than a stranger who could fuel the rumor mill. It was in keeping with the role Joan had been assigned within the family: As the pretty one, most of the jobs she got had more to do with her appearance than her ability.
“I remember [Jackie] saying to me, ‘Stay very close to Jack. Just glue yourself to him,” Joan recalled. “‘Don’t let anybody else wiggle in, especially when they’re taking those pictures. . . . They’ll love meeting you because your name is Kennedy, whereas Jean Smith is Jean Smith even though she’s his sister.’”
No one was staying very close to Ted at this time, however. During the campaign, he once flew to Hawaii to meet Peter Lawford and Frank Sinatra for a fund-raiser. Someone spotted him leaving his first-class seat and talking to a European beauty queen who was sitting farther back. Lawford got word and contacted campaign worker Dick Livingston, who was dispatched to meet Ted at the airport. Livingston quietly registered the woman at a hotel away from Ted. “That night Frank is having a dinner party and Teddy hasn’t shown up, and Frank is getting pissed,” Livingston later recalled. “And finally Teddy arrives with this beauty queen on his arm. I thought Frank was going to get up and whack him, he was so pissed off.”
While the press in those days never reported on the Kennedy men’s roving ways, rumors inevitably reached the wives. Joan, at least ostensibly, refused to believe them. “She acted like Rose,” Chellis recalled. In a sense, Chellis was right: Like Rose, Joan came to some psychological accommodation that allowed her to go on. And like Rose, the exact nature of that accommodation, whether it consisted of denying the truth even to herself or simply deciding to contain it, was not something she revealed to anyone. The difference was that, for Rose, the denial proved sustainable. Joan would not be so lucky.
Just as it’s tough to imagine a time of chaste, chaperoned courtship, it seems dated to ponder a political campaign without a professional campaign manager. But in 1960, that was the norm, so the large Kennedy family was dispersed across the country to convince voters that Jack was neither too young nor too Catholic to become president. Joan’s first primary state was West Virginia, which was important because it was just 1 percent Catholic. “If Jack could win there, or do well, it would augur well for a national race,” Joan said. Joan’s job was to “look nice and be friendly,” which she seems to have pulled off without much effort. In fact, when she went down to the West Virginia mines with brother-in-law Jack, she “got whistled at by the miners.” In the sexism-drenched backdrop of the era, Joan considered it a compliment, and Jack’s handlers thought it was great. But, as entertained as Jack was, he didn’t like Joan being a distraction, so he became more cautious in his use of her. Joan wrote:
It turned into a bit of a joke: when Jack’s campaign people sat around talking about “Where can we use the mother?” or “Where do we pull the sister in?” and my name came up, invariably someone would answer with “Joan? She’s too beautiful to use.” Jack thought it was great, and when he gave everybody souvenirs at the end of the campaign, mine was a cigarette box with those words engraved on it.
Not that Joan was off the campaigning hook. Gerard Doherty, a thirty-three-year-old state lawmaker who’d become one of Ted’s primary political advisers, had seen how quickly voters warmed up to Joan. She was down-to-earth, surprisingly relatable, and candid—sometimes too much so for the Kennedy family. She revealed to a journalist that Jackie wore wigs and that Jack’s bad back kept him from lifting his children. The family was upset enough that they asked “Joansie” to backtrack, which she dutifully did. Despite the Kennedys’ displeasure with Joan’s openness, voters reacted well to her candor, so Doherty put her in heavy rotation.
Joan once joined Ethel on a trip to Chicago where the two spent three days attending a dozen teas, rallies, and meetings, mostly with female voters. Joan was even asked to represent the Kennedy women on a televised program that would have sat her alongside other prominent political women, including Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of Jack’s vice presidential nominee, and Muriel Humphrey, wife of perennial Democratic frontrunner Hubert Humphrey. Joan’s nerves wouldn’t allow it: “I don’t know if I’ll know what to say,” she said, rejecting the request.
When Jack learned he’d won the presidency, Joan and Ted were at his side, along with a big gathering of family and friends who’d converged on the Cape house on November 8, 1960. By the morning after the election, the votes had been tallied. Soon after, Ted and Joan joined Bobby and Ethel for a few days of relaxation in Acapulco. During that trip, Bobby confided in Ted that he wasn’t going to seek Jack’s vacated Senate seat when it became available in 1962. This put some pressure on Ted to go for the seat. It was important to their father, Joe, to keep it in the family. Jack had been allowed to choose a temporary successor in Benjamin Smith, a Kennedy family friend, and when the special election came in 1962, Ted would have just turned thirty years old—the minimum age to serve as a senator.
With Bobby out—and, in fact, about to be tapped by his president brother to become the US attorney general—that left Ted as the only Kennedy man available to run. Trouble was, Ted didn’t know if he wanted to enter into politics. His wife certainly thought his plan was to stick with lawyering. Before Ted lay two distinct paths, and so much of Joan’s future would be determined by what he chose. Whereas Ethel and Bobby were a partnership, Joan’s role in her marriage was much more passive: Ted made the decisions, and she could only wait and see.