“I tell you, doctor,” Monroe said in one session. “I’m glad he [Jack] has Bobby. It’s like the Navy—the president is the captain and Bobby is the executive officer. Bobby would do absolutely anything for his brother and so would I. I will never embarrass him. As long as I have memory, I have John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”
According to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Robert Kennedy came to inhabit the fantasies of her [Monroe’s] last summer,” although in another session, Monroe asserts, “As you see, there is no room in my life for him [Bobby]. I guess I don’t have the courage to face up to it and hurt him. I want someone else to tell him it’s over,” she says. “I tried to get the president to do it, but I couldn’t reach him.”
Life magazine gets one of Monroe’s final interviews, published weeks after her August 1962 death. When asked whether many of her friends had rallied around her when she was fired by Fox, “There was silence,” Life reports, “and sitting very straight, eyes wide and hurt, she had answered with a tiny, ‘No.’”
In those final summer days, would Marilyn Monroe have counted the Kennedy brothers as “friends”?
In 1964, Frank A. Capell, an anti-Communist author, self-publishes a pamphlet titled “The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe” (later expanding it in 1969), alleging that Bobby’s affair with the actress had ended in a death sentence carried out by Communist agents hell-bent on keeping Monroe from exposing Bobby’s dealings with Castro.
Numerous other conspiracy theories regarding whether Marilyn Monroe was murdered—and if so, by whom—engage public imagination to the point that twenty years later, in 1982, the LA district attorney’s office agrees to review the ongoing controversy. Ultimately, however, they conclude that had the actress indeed been murdered, it “would have required a massive, in-place conspiracy covering all the principals at the death scene on August 4 and 5, 1962,” and concluded, “Our inquiries and document examination uncovered no credible evidence supporting a murder theory.”
Marilyn Monroe’s original cause of death—a barbiturate overdose marked on her death certificate as “probable suicide”—stands.
* * *
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 “politically dangerous” investigation into organized labor—Bobby sets his target on James Riddle “Jimmy” Hoffa, head of the 1.3 million-member transportation-based Teamster union.
On February 19, 1957, Eddie Cheyfitz, a lawyer for the Teamsters, invites the two men to dinner at his home. It’s their first meeting, and after sizing one another up—Hoffa finds Kennedy’s handshake weak; five-nine Kennedy looks down on Hoffa’s five-five stature—tension builds over dinner conversation that amounts to what Bobby calls “a complete fabrication” of information about the union. He demands a physical contest: “Hoffa, I’ll just bet I can beat you at Indian hand wrestling.”