In May 1964, the recently widowed Jackie Kennedy is playing tennis with Reverend Richard T. McSorley in McLean, Virginia, at Bobby and Ethel’s six-acre Hickory Hill estate (which was briefly Jackie’s—she and Jack bought the place in 1955 and lived there for a year before selling it to Bobby and Ethel). The game allows Jackie unexpected freedom and cover to talk with the priest openly about her struggles—with grief, depression, her obsessive mental replaying of Jack’s violent death, and thoughts of taking her own life, an act forbidden by her Catholic faith, but one she’s grown sympathetic to.
“I was glad that Marilyn Monroe got out of her misery,” she says of the actress. “If God is going to make such a to-do about judging people because they take their own lives,” Jackie says, to Father McSorley’s alarm, “then someone ought to punish Him.”
Chapter 26
On a sheet of ruled notebook paper, Bobby writes the word Courage.
It’s Christmas Eve, 1963. Bobby’s two younger siblings, Ted and Jean, are representing the family among eight hundred notables gathered for the rededication of New York’s Idlewild International Airport as John F. Kennedy International Airport. Mayor Robert Wagner extolls the late president as “a brilliant practitioner of intercommunication.”
Bobby sits alone with his notebook. He’s been asked to write the foreword to the memorial edition of JFK’s Profiles in Courage. In a few words, he must distill the bravery that marked his late brother’s character. The assignment also contains a painful and private challenge for Bobby—incorporating courage into the next phase of his own life, a life without his brother.
Bobby describes the technique Jack used to successfully mask a lifetime of physical pain: “Those who knew him well would know he was suffering only because his face was a little whiter, the lines around his eyes were a little deeper, his words a little sharper. Those who did not know him well detected nothing. He didn’t complain about his problem so why should I complain about mine—that is how one always felt.”
By contrast, Bobby always wears his intentions on the surface. A trait, he explains, born of determination. “I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down, you have to struggle to survive.”
“The Kennedys moved fast,” the New York Times columnist George Vecsey observes, humorously describing two separate occurrences when Bobby “almost knocked down” Vecsey’s wife and “almost mowed down” Vecsey himself.
Bobby loves to tackle, but his real skill is tenacity. “I can’t think of anyone who had less right to make varsity than Bobby,” his 1947 Harvard teammate and friend Kenny O’Donnell tells biographer Chris Matthews. “If you were blocking him, you’d knock him down, but he’d be up again going after the play. He never let up. He just made himself better.”
Not everyone views Bobby’s forceful manner positively. When Jack begins his first Senate term in 1952, Ted Sorensen (an attorney hired as JFK’s researcher, who would go on to become a speechwriter and trusted political adviser) gets a jarring introduction to Bobby’s style of play.
“In a photo opportunity for a magazine article,” he recalls, “JFK, RFK, and I went across the street to the Capitol lawn to simulate a touch football game in which JFK threw me a pass with RFK defending. As I reached up for the ball, I felt a powerful and unsportsmanlike shove and went down onto the muddy grass in my one good ‘Senate suit.’” Sorensen developed an early impression of Bobby as “militant, aggressive, intolerant, opinionated, somewhat hollow in his convictions.”
Like Sorensen, in 1952 Bobby is also a Senate staffer, working for first-term Republican senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. While Sorensen’s position is merit-based, Bobby secures his through Kennedy connections—McCarthy’s a pal of Joe Sr. and has not only vacationed with the family, but dated two of Bobby’s sisters, Pat and Jean. Bobby, a 1951 graduate of University of Virginia Law School, works for just six months on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee for Investigations, but the stint tarnishes his reputation for over a decade. “In those days,” Sorensen recalls, “[Bobby] was a conservative, very close to his father in both ideas and manners, sharing his father’s dislike of liberals.”
On January 31, 1957, Bobby becomes chief counsel for the newly formed Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, popularly known as the Rackets Committee. Though Bobby has inside knowledge of his brother Jack’s presidential ambitions—and according to his sister Jean, their father is “really mad” about a