Read Online Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House by Robert Dallek - Free Book Online Page B

made the greatest difference in a contest with an opponent who largely shared his views on most foreign and domestic questions, a considerable part of the success belonged to Bobby. It was during this campaign that Jack and Joe realized, as a mutual friend of Jack’s and Bobby’s said, that Bobby “had all this ability.” Jack was greatly impressed by Bobby’s achievement, and suddenly Joe discovered that “he had another able son.”
    In January 1953, Joe used ties to Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, the new chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee, to make Bobby a minority counsel. Although Bobby would take considerable heat for serving with McCarthy, whose ill-founded attacks on political opponents as national security risks enraged many Democrats, Bobby’s work stood apart from the senator’s. Where McCarthy’s probes played fast and loose with the facts and questioned the loyalty of those being scrutinized, Bobby established a reputation as scrupulous about the evidence cited in reports and as loath to accuse anyone of disloyalty to the country. And though he resigned after six months out of disgust with McCarthy’s methods, he shared Joe’s anxiety about an internal communist threat to the United States. It had been his and Joe’s explanation for why Bobby chose to work with a senator who was under such fierce criticism for reckless, unwarranted accusations against Americans with no alleged communist connections.
    Bobby’s identification with McCarthy added to an already negative picture of Joe and Rose’s third son as a carbon copy of his father—difficult and arrogant. And truth be told, he was a “very cross, unhappy, angry young man.” Often during evening social engagements at someone’s dinner table, he would provoke quarrels with anyone who disagreed with him. Ted Sorensen remembered him as “militant, aggressive, intolerant, opinionated, and somewhat shallow in his convictions . . . more like his father than his brother.”
    Perhaps Bobby’s most distinguishing feature was his indifference to negative opinion about him. In April 1954, when McCarthy began attacking the Department of the Army as infiltrated by communists and his Senate subcommittee investigated the charges, Bobby signed on as the lead counsel for the Democratic minority. It provoked sharp criticism from McCarthy’s allies that Bobby was a tool of those who wished to smear the country’s best defender against internal subversion. During the hearings, after a heated argument and near fistfight with Roy Cohn, the Republican majority’s chief counsel, Bobby wrote the subcommittee’s minority report, which roundly condemned McCarthy’s accusations and tactics. A Senate censure vote of McCarthy in December 1954 vindicated Bobby and the Democrats who had recommended the reprimand. It signaled the collapse of McCarthy’s influence and won Bobby praise for his integrity. With the Democrats having gained control of the Senate in the November elections, Bobby was rewarded with an appointment as the chief counsel of the Investigations Subcommittee.
    The McCarthy episode included a striking bit of irony. Democratic senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, who would become a principal antagonist of Bobby in the late fifties and sixties, was an unacknowledged ally of Bobby’s in battling McCarthy. As Senate minority leader in 1953–54, Johnson had been under considerable pressure to strike at McCarthy. But he shrewdly cautioned Senate liberals to wait until McCarthy began attacking conservatives and their favored institutions. Consequently, when McCarthy and his top aides hit out at Protestant clergymen and the Army, Johnson moved against them, arranging to have the Army-McCarthy hearings televised in the expectation that they would reveal McCarthy’s sinister character and unsavory methods and would undermine his public standing. Moreover, when it came time to appoint a