Opinion | The young, tough guys behind the election of John F. Kennedy

Vincent Bzdekis a senior editor at the Post and author of “The Kennedy Legacy: Jack, Bobby and Ted and a Family Dream Fulfilled.”

The Irish Brotherhood

John F. Kennedy, His Inner Circle and the Improbable Rise to the Presidency

By Helen O’Donnell with Kenneth O’Donnell, Sr.

Counterpoint. 502 pp. $30

In the 52 years since John Kennedy’s life and promise were cut short by Lee Harvey Oswald, his story has inspired close to 2,000 books, a rate of nearly two for each of the 1,000 days of his presidency. It’s the Kennedy family’s distinct brew of triumph and tragedy — their beauty and charm and idealistic impulses, with a knack for human wreckage stirred in — that keeps us coming back to read more. But after so many books, it’s fair to ask if there is anything new to say.

Rather than trying to add information, Helen O’Donnell, the daughter of one of Kennedy’s most trusted aides, Kenny O’Donnell, recounts a well-trod story in a fresh way in “The Irish Brotherhood.” O’Donnell is a writer and producer who worked as a researcher for MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on his book “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero,” but this is a personal project.

She’s dug up a wonderful trove of tape-recorded interviews her father did with NBC White House correspondent Sander Vanocur. O’Donnell uses them not so much to shed light on what happened in Kennedy’s early career and the runup to his election as president as to render an intimate, novelistic sense of what it was like to be there. Through dialogue and anecdote, she re-creates the heady experience of a band of unknowns electing the first Catholic president. We watch as a squad of war-hardened vets take down the backroom kingmakers of the day and usher in the modern political era, with its TV debates, its candidates hopscotching the country in airplanes and its dawning power of celebrity.

Advertisement

“They were a new, post-World War II generation trying to shake up the drab, colorless political system and toss out the political hacks that they believed had moved the country off track,” O’Donnell writes. “They were upstarts, outsiders, tough guys. ... They were young, arrogant, reckless, and smart as hell.”

They were indeed young. When Kennedy took office at 43, he was the nation’s youngest elected president; Bobby, his attorney general, was 34. Pierre Salinger, his press secretary, was 35; Kenny O’Donnell, his closest aide, was 36; Larry O’Brien, his campaign manager, was the old man at 43.

The star here is O’Donnell, a rough-edged, blue-collar tough guy from Worcester, Mass., where his father was a football coach. The great equalizer, the GI Bill, paid for him to go to college after World War II, and he took the money and went to Harvard, a school he would have never been able to afford in another life. He and Bobby met on the football field, where, by this account, Bobby had no talent whatsoever, surviving by sheer determination and force of will.

Advertisement

O’Donnell quickly became the Kennedy family’s consigliere, variously described as the Gatekeeper, the Cobra, the designated bad guy, and the go-between for John and Bobby. (He was portrayed by Kevin Costner in the Cuban missile crisis thriller “Thirteen Days.”)

Some of the gripping anecdotes his daughter has unearthed include one from the long night that preceded Jack’s first win, in a race for a Massachusetts House seat when he was 29. When campaign manager Bobby woke up the next morning and it was finally plain that victory was secure, he promptly threw up in a wastebasket.

We also get a first-person account of just how close to death John Kennedy was in January 1955, after two failed back surgeries and the start of treatments for Addison’s disease. In one harrowing weekend, Kennedy’s temperature spiked to 105 degrees, and he was given last rites by a family priest — a ritual that occurred multiple times. “Suddenly,” O’Donnell told Vanocur, “I was not particularly interested in his political situation, but rather his survival.” O’Donnell’s vivid account fleshes out the human details of Kennedy’s never-ending medical peril, which Robert Dallek documented so well from medical records in “An Unfinished Life.”

Advertisement

What may be most revelatory, however, are the unvarnished accounts of the hardball, take-no-prisoners politics that undergirded much of Kennedy’s success. When, for example, Pennsylvania Gov. David Lawrence dragged his feet about endorsing Kennedy as it became clear that the presidential nomination was Kennedy’s for the taking in early 1960, the candidate minced no words. Lawrence, hoping for political favors, wanted to keep control of his delegates before the convention, where he might promise them to Hubert Humphrey or Lyndon Johnson, who had not spent time fighting it out in the primaries. Staring directly at Lawrence, a Catholic, and his cronies during a speech in Pennsylvania, Kennedy told them that they had “better think what was going to happen to the Democratic Party if the candidate who has won all the primaries and amassed all the delegates can be denied the nomination simply because he is an Irish Catholic.”

The message Kennedy sent, according to O’Donnell: “You are not a kingmaker and the days of political backroom deals with only the insiders involved, well, John Kennedy would not stand for it.”

“It was the toughest, coldest, and most direct speech I had ever heard John Kennedy give publicly,” O’Donnell said. “He never took his eyes off Lawrence and it was cold as ice.” Afterward, “big tough steelworkers and hardworking fellows ... were asking for him to sign his photograph and wanted to get his autograph.”

Advertisement

In an earlier, sadder book on the friendship between Bobby and her father, “The Common Good,” Helen O’Donnell chronicled the devastating impact that the deaths of Bobby and John had on those whose careers were so defined by theirs. Kenny O’Donnell blamed himself for John’s assassination. He had arranged the fateful trip to Dallas in November 1963 and was in a car about 10 feet behind Kennedy’s when Oswald’s bullets struck.

In a moving first-person introduction and epilogue in the earlier book, Helen O’Donnell wrote that after Bobby’s assassination, his presence hung over the house “like a ghost.” Her father began drinking heavily, and his political career went into a death spiral. O’Donnell died of alcoholism in 1977 at age 53, just months after his wife died of the same illness.

But that story is not this story. This is a story of brotherhood, action and aspiration.

Once, when visiting the Kennedy compound long after its glory days, Helen O’Donnell saw Bobby’s widow, Ethel, standing alone under the portico of Jack’s former home. Ethel said to her: “Don’t forget all the good times. There may have been difficult days, there was tragedy, but never forget how much fun we all had along the way. Not often does one get to live your dreams, and we did, they did.”

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLyxtc2ipqerX6m1pnnYqKynn12pvLazx2aerrGjYq%2BmtMinm2asmJp6prjEnKuip55ivKd5yaifp2WWYrimus2em7JnYmV%2BdnuPbWZsaF9nhnOCk2ucbWWVZrOleZBqnG1lkmp%2BcXmYb2mfm5aWr6R%2FkGmWrKyfp8ZvtNOmow%3D%3D