Read Online Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House by Robert Dallek - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Dallek
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served six years in the House, Bobby was at Harvard, mainly playing football and arguing about politics, the topic of most interest to him after athletics. After graduation in 1948, Bobby followed the Kennedy tradition of foreign travel, and in Jack’s footsteps as a correspondent for the Boston Post . Eager to go where history was being made, he traveled to the Middle East: Cairo, Jerusalem, and Lebanon. He wrote several dispatches about the emerging state of Israel, which birth he witnessed firsthand as the British prepared to leave Palestine and Arabs and Jews prepared for war. The grand tour took him to Italy and through Belgium, Holland, and Germany. During the trip, the death of his oldest sister, Kathleen, in a plane crash greatly distressed him, as did talk of a war with Russia, which seemed to be imminent, according to the diplomats and military men he spoke with in Vienna. He saw such a conflict, which could well include the use of atomic bombs, as too horrifying to contemplate. But at the end of the year, after he had returned to the States, the arrest and trial of Hungary’s Catholic prelate, Cardinal Mindszenty, moved Bobby to advocate “forceful action.”
In September 1948, Bobby entered the University of Virginia Law School, where he assembled a respectable record, graduating in June 1951 in the middle of his class. It was a major improvement over Harvard, where his poor academic record had made his Virginia application a near failure. In June 1950, while in law school, he married Ethel Skakel, the daughter of a Chicago coal industry millionaire, and in July 1951, the first of their eleven children was born.
In the fall, he joined his congressman brother on a seven-week trip to the Middle East and Asia. Joe had to talk Jack into inviting Bobby, whom Jack saw as “moody, taciturn, brusque, and combative,” and seemed likely to be “a pain in the ass.” But family ties trumped personal tensions; Jack felt obliged to put up with his younger brother’s irritating qualities. Still, Jack was never entirely happy about his father’s directives, whether about familial relations or politics. “I guess Dad has decided that he’s going to be the ventriloquist,” Jack told a friend about Joe’s pressure on him to cast a congressional vote, “so I guess that leaves me the role of dummy.” At the same time, Jack never lost sight of how Joe’s fame and money had been so instrumental in facilitating his rise in politics. As Jack said later about his career, Joe made it happen.
During the trip, Jack for the first time took a shine to his younger brother, who charmed him with his sense of humor and playfulness by teasing people. As important, they shared a sense of how the United States needed to deal with the emerging Asian countries they visited. They agreed on “the importance of associating ourselves with the people rather than just the governments, which might be transitional.” In Indochina, where the French were fighting to hang on to their colonies, Bobby and Jack saw it as a losing cause that ran counter to the will of the masses. They believed that Western nations, including the United States, were putting themselves at a disadvantage in competing with communism by not identifying themselves with the aspirations of the majority of Asians for freedom from colonial control. They took away from the trip a mutual affinity for rescuing emerging nations from the grip of communism. Bobby’s religious orthodoxy made him more doctrinaire than Jack, who was more skeptical about church teachings and a little cynical about all institutional affiliations. Nonetheless, they found enough in common to imagine working together on future political issues.
The moment came in 1952 when Jack ran for the Senate from Massachusetts. His candidacy was something of a long shot; he aimed to unseat the storied Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., whose family—father and son—had held the seat for forty-five of the last sixty years.
In September 1948, Bobby entered the University of Virginia Law School, where he assembled a respectable record, graduating in June 1951 in the middle of his class. It was a major improvement over Harvard, where his poor academic record had made his Virginia application a near failure. In June 1950, while in law school, he married Ethel Skakel, the daughter of a Chicago coal industry millionaire, and in July 1951, the first of their eleven children was born.
In the fall, he joined his congressman brother on a seven-week trip to the Middle East and Asia. Joe had to talk Jack into inviting Bobby, whom Jack saw as “moody, taciturn, brusque, and combative,” and seemed likely to be “a pain in the ass.” But family ties trumped personal tensions; Jack felt obliged to put up with his younger brother’s irritating qualities. Still, Jack was never entirely happy about his father’s directives, whether about familial relations or politics. “I guess Dad has decided that he’s going to be the ventriloquist,” Jack told a friend about Joe’s pressure on him to cast a congressional vote, “so I guess that leaves me the role of dummy.” At the same time, Jack never lost sight of how Joe’s fame and money had been so instrumental in facilitating his rise in politics. As Jack said later about his career, Joe made it happen.
During the trip, Jack for the first time took a shine to his younger brother, who charmed him with his sense of humor and playfulness by teasing people. As important, they shared a sense of how the United States needed to deal with the emerging Asian countries they visited. They agreed on “the importance of associating ourselves with the people rather than just the governments, which might be transitional.” In Indochina, where the French were fighting to hang on to their colonies, Bobby and Jack saw it as a losing cause that ran counter to the will of the masses. They believed that Western nations, including the United States, were putting themselves at a disadvantage in competing with communism by not identifying themselves with the aspirations of the majority of Asians for freedom from colonial control. They took away from the trip a mutual affinity for rescuing emerging nations from the grip of communism. Bobby’s religious orthodoxy made him more doctrinaire than Jack, who was more skeptical about church teachings and a little cynical about all institutional affiliations. Nonetheless, they found enough in common to imagine working together on future political issues.
The moment came in 1952 when Jack ran for the Senate from Massachusetts. His candidacy was something of a long shot; he aimed to unseat the storied Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., whose family—father and son—had held the seat for forty-five of the last sixty years.
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