Joseph F. Gargan Oral History (08/05/2005)

In about three or four months, you’ll get a transcript of our conversation today, and at that time you can make any changes to it. If there’s something you forgot that you wish to add, you can just write it right into the transcript. If you have any second thoughts about something you say today and you want to pull it out of what would be the public record, you’re free to do that as well. This project is scheduled to last for another five-and-a-half years.

I don’t expect to be here that long.

Oh, come on. Nothing will be released prior to that five-and-a-half years. In other words, all of these transcripts of all the interviews we’re doing will be released at once. Your transcript that is released is the one that you will have cleared after you’ve looked at it.

Okay, fine.

I should tell you that whatever you say today in its raw form will be released in fifty years. In other words, the raw transcript is available.

That won’t do me any good because the people I might have something bad to say about, and I hope that’s not really anybody, but they won’t be around to hear it anyway.

That’s right, none of us will be. So that’s how it works. What we hope is that people will view this as an important chance to contribute to the historical record. This isn’t going to end up on the front pages of the Washington Post. This is for historians and political scientists down the road to have a better sense of Senator Kennedy and the times in which he lived. So we always try to make an appeal to people’s sense of history when we begin these things.

Okay, fine. Actually, that’s why I have a willingness to do it, frankly, and have done a couple of other things like that. If I ever were going to write a book— It’s been suggested by several people that I write a book, even if it’s just for my own children, and I probably should write something for them just so they’d have it. But if I was to write a book, I would title it, I always thought, I Was There. Because it turns out, in even reading your preparation, that I did have to be there on almost every special occasion that the Kennedys were involved in. So, for history, I’m delighted to do it. Thank you.

We’re very grateful. Thank you. Perhaps the best place to start would be if you could share with us some of your early memories of the Kennedy family: how you came to spend summers with the family and what you saw at the time.

Well, as you say in your memorandum, I was born in 1930. I forget the name of the hospital now, in Boston. My father was a Notre Dame graduate. He had been a war hero in World War I. He had gone to Notre Dame. There were very few people in the 20th century—as a matter of fact, I should write a book on him—very few people in the 20th century who had a record that he had. It was unusual.

He grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts. His mother and father were both dead by the time he was two years old (from what, I don’t know), but he had three older brothers. They worked in the mills in Lowell, which people did, the older brothers did. My father, being the youngest, was allowed to go to school. The older brothers worked. My Uncle Bill [Gargan], the oldest brother, I think, worked in the Boot mill, I remember, for like three dollars a week. They were woolen mills. And that supported the family. They had an Aunt Nell who took care of them.

My father was forced to go to school. The older brothers—particularly Bill, who was a very tough guy and known in Lowell to be very good with his fists, a big fellow—the three older brothers were bricklayers. And my uncle Bill, from the waist up, was an iron man. I’ve seen him pick up a piano and walk out with it. But anyway, they said, “Joe, you’re going to school.” So my father did go to school.

He was captain of Lowell High School, captain of Kimball Union Academy, and then he, because of that, because of his athletic prowess—and particularly going to Kimball Union Academy, which was in New Hampshire—he was taken by a football coach, I think assistant football coach (I believe from Dartmouth), named Jack Marks, to Notre Dame on a partial scholarship. He played football with Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, and very few people did that. He was injured while there; he had a knee injury. Though he would have been in the starting backfield in the team that played in 1913 and beat Army, he was not able to because he had a knee injury, which eventually resulted in him having an operation. So he really never played football again.

As a result of that, he became a cheerleader—actually, the first cheerleader that Notre Dame really, basically, ever had—and he was rather famous with that. And he became an assistant coach at Notre Dame. As an assistant coach, he coached the freshmen one year and they played Rockne’s varsity and they beat the varsity, much to Knute Rockne’s chagrin.

To move forward, from there he went into the Marine Corps. He fought at Belleau Wood, was wounded at Belleau Wood, wounded at Soissons, and was at Verdun at the time of the armistice. He was also, as a matter of fact, a very good cook, which we all learned later on growing up. When he was wounded, he’d go back to Paris. And probably recovering from his wounds in Paris, he would go to the great cooking schools of Paris at the time. So he could make a sauce or a gravy like nobody else.

As a result of that, after World War I, he became one of America’s first spies, and he was sent to the Philippines working for a company out there that I think Herbert Hoover’s family owned. It was a mining company. That was a cover. He was spying on the Chinese and the Japanese at that time. I believe he stayed there from 1920 to ’24. He came back, and it was after he came back that he, at some point, met Agnes Fitzgerald—I believe in Florida—who later became (I think it was in ’29) my mother—not in ’29, but they got married in ’29. Rose Kennedy was the maid of honor, and his brother Bill—who was this big, strong bricklayer—was the best man. Then I was born in 1930.

As a sidelight to that, before he got married, when the Billy Mitchell court martial took place, he was very friendly with Billy Mitchell. My father had written reports. I should ask sometime to get my father’s records under the Freedom of Information Act. I’ve never done that. But at the Billy Mitchell court martial, my father advised, to some extent, Billy Mitchell before the court martial. If you’ve seen the movie, you will recall that, at one point, the prosecutor says to Billy Mitchell, “Well, where do you say this attack is going to take place, General Mitchell?” And he says, “There will be an attack on the Hawaiian Islands”—and Billy Mitchell said that in 1927. Well, he got that information from my father because my father had been studying the Japanese as a spy. And, as a matter of fact, my father felt that the Japanese always knew he was spying on them because on one occasion when he got off the boat, a Japanese person said to him as he went down the gangplank, “Hello, Gargan. How are you?”

One of the reports my father wrote was to say that the earthquake that the Japanese had—whenever it was, ’22 or ’23—that something like 80 percent of the deaths of the Japanese did not take place from the earthquake but the high explosives they had buried underground in preparation, at some point, for a war with America.

So anyway, I was born in 1930. I grew up in Boston on 22 May Street, in Jamaica Plain. We had a very nice home life, which I remember to a certain extent because my father was very much into horses. He had worked, as a young man, in Hamilton, Massachusetts, and like a lot of young people do now—work at golf courses and become caddies and later become golfers like Arnold Palmer. My father was working in the stables at Hamilton, which was a polo area and still is.

Right, beautiful area.

So he became a very good polo player, of all things, this poor boy from Lowell. Later, when he was in the Philippines, he played polo. I think both in the Philippines and the Hawaiian Islands, he had occasion to play polo against General [George] Patton. He was stationed as a spy for about five years in the Philippine Islands. But anyway, I’ve got pictures of me riding horseback when I was two years old. I have no memory of that, but we certainly have the pictures. Then my sisters were doing the same thing. So we had a busy life there. Then we were going to Old Orchard Beach in the summer.

He was practicing law with a law firm in Boston called Graham, Gargan, & Sullivan. Jim Graham was one of the great trial lawyers of his time. And Sullivan—his name was Burke Sullivan—he was one of the great trial lawyers in real estate cases, in eminent domain cases, the taking of property. My father was doing a variety of things. I remember he represented the Lowell Gas Company for a period of time. For a couple of years, I worked summer jobs later on in my life for the Lowell Gas Company.

So we had a great time in Old Orchard Beach. We had a couple of ponies in Old Orchard Beach, I remember. There was a place called the Smith Stable. It only closed down about two or three years ago. It’s all land that’s being developed now, unfortunately—these big, huge houses right there along Route 128 in Boston. So they brought a young lady down, I remember, who lived with us, who took care of the ponies, gave us pony rides. I learned to ride very young. If you’re familiar with Old Orchard Beach, when the tide goes out, it becomes as flat as a table, and the tide goes out probably 300-400 yards. So that sand becomes as hard as a rock. It was great fun. You could race the ponies down the beach without anybody being in the way or fear of hitting a tree or falling off or anything else.

But all of that changed in September 18, 1936, because my mother died. That was, of course, a traumatic experience for everybody. I remember the day very well, though I was only six years old. I went in to see her in the morning; it was probably 6 o’clock. We had a maid called Lillian at that time who was sort of a cook and a maid. I went into my mother’s room, and she was lying on her back with her eyes open. As children would know—instantly—I knew that she was dead, that she had passed away.

I remember the funeral well, although we were not there. We were staying with a family named Dore. At that time we moved, my sister Ann [Gargan] was only two at the time; my sister Mary Jo [Gargan] was only four. My Uncle Bill—who, again, was this gentleman I’ve described of great strength, been a bricklayer all those years—he was building inspector for the city of Lowell. So he suggested to my father that he move the children to Lowell until he got his affairs straightened out.

And we moved to Lowell and we never left. We lived there with my aunt and uncle from 1936 until Mary Jo and I both got married in the summer of ’55. So we lived in Lowell. My Aunt Ann couldn’t have been a better mother. She was not our mother, but she couldn’t have been a grander person to us. My Uncle Bill was just very disciplined, very tough fellow. We all knew where we were supposed to be and what we were supposed to do.

My father was still practicing law. Then, in 1940, he went with the War Department. He was Chief Counsel. There is a mistake in here. He was Chief Counsel to the Undersecretary of War, Robert Patterson. They say Secretary of War, but he was Chief Counsel to the Undersecretary of War, Robert Patterson, who had been a judge, Judge Patterson in New York City. I believe he had tried cases as a young lawyer in New York in front of Patterson, and then Patterson asked him to come to Washington with him—I guess because he liked my father, but secondly, my father had this very great war record during World War I.

We were very happy in Lowell. My aunt and uncle were very good to us. But it was in the summer of 1942 that we were—Aunt Rose thought it would be nice (meaning Rose Kennedy) if I came down and spent a couple of weeks with what we called then Teddy Kennedy, now Senator Kennedy. So I went down and spent two weeks in July at the Cape, and it worked out very well.

We were sailing together. They had skippers in those days. They had what they called a “skipper class.” You had a skipper and you raced the boat. Teddy, at that time, would have been ten; I was 12. I’m two years older than the Senator. So they had a skipper class and you would race with a skipper. We would race Saturdays and Sundays in what was called a Wianno Junior. It was a 16-foot, Marconi-rigged sailboat called a Wianno Junior. We would race that on Saturdays, Sundays, and then on Wednesdays we would race another Wianno Junior. They had two, one of which was called The Ten of Us—meaning, the family before Senator Kennedy arrived—and the other Wianno Junior was called the One More. One was in Wianno and one was in Hyannis Port. So we raced those two boats, and that was the beginning of the Senator’s sailing career. It worked out so well, sometime in August they asked me to come back. So I spent two more weeks in the month of August.

I was also a ferocious rider. I loved to ride horseback because my father had taught me at a young age. There was a family in Lowell that was importing horses from New Mexico, I believe. They were bringing them in on trains, and then they were selling them in New England. They were half-broke, western ponies, basically. So there were two McGuire boys—this was the McGuire family in Lowell—John McGuire family—and there were two boys, Gus McGuire and John, who were very good riders. The three of us were spending all our time riding these horses.

I still laugh today to see people walking around in Levis and overalls because I think it’s crazy—because we were riding around with cowboy boots and Levis and overalls as kids. But I still think of them as something you put on to shovel manure and not go to church in. Anyway, I was obsessed with horses—obsessed. I think we got out of school at about 3, 3:30, and the three of us would run home to their house and get on the horses and ride all afternoon until it got dark. But the result of that was, when I got into the seventh grade at 12 years old, I was flunking out.

In September of 1942, my father came back from Washington and there was a night train—they still had this train until a couple of years ago, because I still take the train to Washington. I like the train. But they had a thing called the “Night Owl.” It left Boston at 10 o’clock, and you got into Washington the next morning at 7:30. So he came up on the night train, told them to pack my bags, and we went back on the night train. The next thing I knew, I was in a school called Georgetown Prep as a boarder.

They made it very clear, very quickly, that the horseback riding was over, and the studies were to begin. You had to wear a coat and tie. You had to stand up to answer the professors, most of whom were Jesuit priests or Jesuit scholastics, and my life changed there overnight. But I still was coming to the Cape in the summer. In ’43 I came for the entire summer. From then on I came for the entire summer. Ted and I, there was no more skipper class. I was now 13 years old and Ted was 11, so we were sailing the boats by ourselves from then on, racing the boats.

Did you have an instant bond with Ted? Did you guys hit if off right away?

Immediately, there was no question. We got along very well, immediately.

Were there interests other than sailing that the two of you—?

Yes. I would say I was a very gifted athlete because my father was a very gifted athlete. I don’t take credit for that. I mean, I thank God for that blessing because it was a great thing to have. I could pick up a tennis racket and I could play. I could pick up a golf club and I could play. I never became a good tennis player or a good golfer because I never was that crazy about either sport, but I was a very good football player because I had tremendous speed. I could run the hundred-yard dash in less than 10 seconds—not on a regular basis, but I ran it from time to time in 9.8 at a time when the world record was 9.4. That wasn’t broken until Mel Patton in California years later. The fellow ran 9.3.

So we started playing touch football. We started playing softball in the backyard on that lawn that they always talk about. I could do those sports very well. He had, basically, an older person with him all the time who was an accomplished athlete, and he was—obviously, like any older brother—he was picking up those things from me, and I was having the opportunity to learn to sail and do these other things. We were waterskiing. As a matter of fact, we went waterskiing; we were using an aquaplane, and Ted Kennedy—Teddy Kennedy at that time—was rather chubby. He was chubby for a period of time and it was youthful, obviously. Then, as he grew older, that disappeared.

But I can remember, before World War II, 1942, and before, Mr. [Joseph] Kennedy—my Uncle Joe, I should say—gave both the Davalis, which was about a 35-foot to 40-foot cabin cruiser, to the Coast Guard, as people did during World War II, gave their boats to the Coast Guard. Also, there was a speedboat that he gave that we used to use for aquaplaning and stuff. He gave that to the war effort as well, much to our chagrin.

Anyway, before he gave the Davalis away, I can remember being out on the boat with Uncle Joe and Aunt Rose and Ted and some of the girls, like Jean [Kennedy Smith] and Eunice [Kennedy Shriver] and Pat [Kennedy Lawford]. And I would get on the aquaplane and hold the ropes, and Teddy would get on my shoulders. And then I would stand up on the aquaplane, and he would be riding on my shoulders. Then he would stand up on my shoulders and we would hold like this. And he was, we were only—that was ’43, so that was one of the war years and before Uncle Joe gave the boats away—so Ted would only be 11 years old at that time. So these were the kinds of things we were doing; this is the kind of growing up we did.

As my sister Mary Jo often says, looking back at that period, we were very blessed as children because the Kennedys had two young men in the service. One of whom, particularly early, Joe [Kennedy], was in harm’s way right away in Europe. President [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy, then known as Jack, was in the Pacific and definitely in harm’s way because he was in the PTs. Everybody knew the PTs. I saw some figures on it one time, but I think one out of every ten men in the PTs died, as I recall. The statistics might have even been higher than that, but they were very high. It was not a naval operation where people lived very long.

So as my sister Mary Jo says, we were particularly blessed because—though I think it was unconscious—we were given enormous attention by the family, because nobody really knew how long that war was going to last and that we might very well—I mean, I was 13 years old. In four years I could have easily been in the service. So I just missed it. My father definitely would have had me in the service, and you can believe I would have been in the Marine Corps, and the chances of coming back from that were not particularly good. He would have thought that was the thing to do, and I would have done it, as everybody else did.

I say to a lot of people who criticize the Kennedys, Joe Kennedy had enormous power. One of his best friends was James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy. James Forrestal came, from time to time, to the house and had lunch with us or stayed for dinner. Even in Palm Beach in 1943, ’44, ’45, I can remember Forrestal coming back. Sometimes James Forrestal was criticized because he did go out that window at the Bethesda Naval Hospital.

This is not known—I would guess nobody has ever talked about this, what I’m going to say now, but I was very impressed with him as a young man, because I was probably 14 years old when Forrestal came to Palm Beach to visit. He and Joe Kennedy were swimming, and they were probably ten to twenty yards out in the ocean, and Teddy and I came down to the beach to swim. The Palm Beach house had a long set of stairs that came down to the water because it had a big wall in front that was 25-feet high. I came down the stairs and Teddy came down. I had come down first—this is why I was impressed—and I was on the beach and Teddy had not come down yet, but we were going for a swim before lunch. We always went for a swim at 1 o’clock before lunch and then had lunch at 1:15. God help you if you were late for lunch, but anyway, that’s another story that I’ll tell you about. Anyway, my Uncle Joe, from the water, said, “Secretary Forrestal, this is my nephew, Joe Gargan.” Forrestal got up and walked out of the water up to the shore and shook my hand—and I never forgot that. I never forgot it. Later, when they criticized him for going out the window, I was always very disturbed about that because I knew that he had given everything he could to the war effort.

The thing I was going to say, Joe Kennedy could have easily kept both Jack and Joe out of harm’s way, and he made no effort to do that. Bobby [Kennedy] went into the Navy at age 17, and he could have said to Bobby, “For God’s sake, don’t go! Wait until you’re eighteen. Give us a break, will you?” But he did not. Bobby went into the Navy at 17 years old. So for all the criticism of Joe Kennedy, the fact is that he could have prevented and taken care of those boys, and he made no effort, as far as I know, to do so.

The thing I’m going to tell you that probably nobody really does know, it never was in history—I saw an article years ago in the Washington magazines—not that long ago, two or three years ago—and they did an article on Forrestal. It was a pretty fair article, but there was always a question of why he went out—he got so desperate—that such a strong, courageous man would go out the window of the naval hospital. Arthur Krock once came up to Cape Cod, and he was talking to Joe Kennedy in the sunroom—there was nothing ever kept from us children in the family. Arthur Krock said that Forrestal had been a Catholic, and he kind of got away from his Catholic religion at Princeton. Then he got married, and he never went back to the church after he got married. I don’t know what his wife’s feeling was about the Catholic Church at that time. But when he was in the Bethesda Naval Hospital, he kept calling for the admiral, who happened to be a Catholic, but he was also the top admiral in the chaplaincy corps in the Navy during World War II. I can’t think of his name. He was famous.

My father had a great friend, Admiral Bob White, who was also an admiral in the Navy, but this fellow—I can’t think of his name right now—was the head chaplain in the Navy, and he was a Catholic chaplain. Forrestal kept calling for him to come to the naval hospital because he wanted to go to confession and come back into the Catholic Church. It’s my understanding, from what Arthur Krock said, that his wife gave orders not to allow a Catholic chaplain or this particular admiral to come to see him because she did not want him to do that. He got very desperate and very frustrated that everybody, in effect, had left him. And his friend—this Catholic chaplain, an admiral who was a great friend of his, because he had obviously been Secretary of the Navy and he had command of everything—this admiral didn’t come to see him. And, in desperation, he decided to commit suicide, and he went out the window. That’s the true reason that that took place.

Wow.

That story has never, basically, ever been told.

Mr. Gargan, can I stop you for a second?

I’m trying to follow this in sequence, but I’d be delighted to be stopped.

Do you recall, unfortunately, another tragedy, which was the learning of the news that Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. had been killed in Europe on that special mission? Do you have any recollections of how the family—perhaps Ted Kennedy, if you can recall—reacted to that news and the impact that that death had on the Kennedy family?

Yes, I remember that very well because, once again, I happened to be there. What happened, basically, was—We always ate lunch, as I said, at 1:15. That was absolute rule in that house that you were on time for lunch. You were on time for dinner. We ate dinner every night at 7:15. You were not late, because the most important person in Joe Kennedy’s life was not the chauffeur or the captain of the boat, but the cook. The cook at that time, I believe, was a cook that Jack Kennedy had later, Margaret Ambrose. That’s who it was. She was a wonderful cook—an Irish lady, a terrific lady. That’s how much Rose and he loved Jack Kennedy, because when Jack became a Congressman, he allowed Margaret Ambrose to go to Washington and be a cook for Jack Kennedy while he was Congressman.

So you were on time. One time he did say to me—it’s in one of the books here, but it isn’t in the book exactly as the quote was, because he would sit, as I am sitting here at the head of the table, and if you were just a slight bit late for lunch—they always left this seat open so that everybody would charge in and take their seats—but they’d leave a seat open next to Uncle Joe so you’d be real close if he was going to give you a blast, which he rarely did.

Rose Kennedy ran the house with an iron hand, but everybody knew that if you weren’t doing what Aunt Rose said, then Uncle Joe would have a comment to make, and that’s all he had to do. He would wear his glasses like this, down on his nose, and he would simply look at you over the glasses and make his comment. This day I was about three minutes late. You didn’t have to get all dressed up. All you had to do was pull a pair of shorts on and a tee shirt and come in, hair all wet, not combed, it didn’t make any difference, and bare feet. That was the rig for lunch; that was the clothing for lunch. But we all went to swim together, and we all used the same men’s room to dry off and run upstairs.

So anyway, I’m about a minute late and I sit down on the chair and he looks at me over his glasses and he says, “Joey, if that cook leaves, you’re going with her.” Since the one thing I wanted was my summer vacations, and I knew they were guaranteed as long as I did everything Uncle Joe ordered, I was never late again.

But anyway, we had been to lunch. Every day after lunch, he would go up for his nap, about 2 o’clock. He would come down at 3:00, and he would go play golf at Oyster Harbor. He had just gone up for lunch, and all of the family was in what we called the “sunroom.” Jack Kennedy was there because he was back from the war. I thought Kathleen [Kennedy] was there but I’m not sure. I believe Pat Kennedy was there. Eunice and Jean and myself and Teddy—And I believe there was a little tiny rocking chair in that room—it’s still there in the sunroom, that little tiny rocking chair—and Aunt Rose, who was a little, tiny woman—with all her nine children and her golf and everything else—she was sitting in that little tiny rocking chair.

And I saw out of the corner of my eye—I was looking out towards the flag pole—a car pull up, and a couple of naval officers get out. Everybody was having such a good time. Oh, there was a young lady there too named Peggy Edgerton Byrd. I’m not sure how to spell her name, but she was English. I thank God for her in a way, because she was English and she was going to Radcliffe and she was a friend of Eunice’s and she was spending the weekend, so this had to be a weekend day.

Anyway, I got up because I didn’t want the family—they were having such a good time—I decided I’d go out and see what this was all about. I think you have a sixth sense too. I had already lost my mother. Jack was sitting there. As I’m going out to see these naval officers, I begin to perspire—I don’t even know why, but I remember that. I knew Bobby was not in harm’s way, and Jack was in the sunroom, had gotten back from the war. I had a sixth sense that this was not good, that two naval officers were coming up on the front porch.

So I went down through the screen door, and I went to speak to them and they said, “We’d like to see Ambassador Kennedy.” They were very solemn. So, again, my heart kind of got a little shaky, so to speak, because I was anticipating the worst, which I have to this day. If I get a sudden—not because of that, but because I have lost so many people in my lifetime who were close to me—if I get a surprise phone call now, I always tell myself before I pick the phone up that this is going to be bad news; don’t let it shake you.

When they said that, I said to myself, no, I’m not going to do that. I said, “Why don’t you wait here on the porch—there were some nice wicker chairs—and I’ll get Mrs. Kennedy.” So I went in. I spoke very quietly to Aunt Rose, and I said to her, “Aunt Rose, there are two naval officers on the front porch, and they’d like to see Uncle Joe. I think it would be a good idea if you spoke to them.” So she came out and she did speak to them. I was now—none of the children were aware of what was going on, the other children sitting in the room—and I was peeking out now and I’m watching her talk to them. Then I see her take—which surprised me—the two naval officers upstairs to Uncle Joe’s room. They were probably up there twenty minutes.

Uncle Joe came down, walked into the entranceway of the sunroom, which was a glass door with a curtain on it from top to bottom. He just stood there; he didn’t come into the room; he just stood in the doorway, and he informed them that their brother Joe had been killed, that they had just been notified by the Navy department that he had just been killed. Uncle Joe burst into tears. He was sobbing as he told them this. He turned around, went up the stairs, and went back to his room.

I can’t recall where Aunt Rose went at that time, but I recall that the children broke down, and they were very upset, consoling each other, holding each other, talking to each other. This went on for quite a while—at least, I’d say, half an hour. Then Jack Kennedy said, “Teddy, Joey, go get the sails. Joe wouldn’t want us sitting here crying. He would want us to go sailing. Let’s go sailing.” Teddy and I did go upstairs to get the sails to the Wianno Senior. We brought them down and they went sailing.

This girl, Peggy Edgerton Byrd, was English. I’d say she was about 18 years old—very pretty girl, I remember to this day. I had a huge crush on her. She had short blonde hair, and she looked a lot like Deborah Kerr, only she was prettier, to tell you the truth. She pulled me aside and she said to me, “Joey, let the family go sailing. You and I will do something else.” I got it right away. So she and I took a long walk down on the beach. Of course, I look back on that and say to myself, she was English, she had experience with this, and she was smart. She probably knew that this would be a sad moment for me as well.

So I remember we walked all the way down to Squaw Island, to the end. I remember she did the best thing in the world she could have done. We talked for a while and she held me. I was 14 years old and she consoled me and we talked about it. Because Joe Kennedy used to come—when he was at Harvard, before my mother died—a lot to the house on Sundays to have dinner. We’d have a big Sunday dinner. We’d have a roast beef or a turkey or something of that nature. He loved my father because my father and he did quite a bit of horseback riding together as well, at the Smith Stable, this same stable that I had learned to ride at.

We have pictures of Joe Kennedy Jr. riding with my father and also my grandfather, John F. Fitzgerald, who was a good horseback rider and often—I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures—often rode in the Columbus Day parade or St. Patrick’s Day parade, particularly when he was mayor of Boston. Anyway, Joe Kennedy used to hold me in his arms in an easy chair at our home in Jamaica Plain, so I had a great deal of affection for him. He’d roughhouse with me, as you would with a four-year-old or five-year-old, and I had remembered that.

So this young lady, she was a terrific girl—I’ve never seen her since, but I’ve never forgotten her—she said, “Let’s go swimming.” I said, “Okay, that would be great.” I had a pair of shorts on, that’s all, and a tee shirt. We had those colored tee shirts in those days, those striped tee shirts. In fact, there’s a picture of me with the PT 109 crew with one of those typical tee shirts. I took my tee shirt off, and I was absolutely appalled, because she slipped off her blouse and her shorts, and she went swimming in her panties and bra. Of course, you have to understand, this is 1944. For 14 years old, this was the most amazing thing that I had ever heard of or seen in my life. But again I say, she was really smart, because, I think, in looking back, this was an ordinary thing for a young English girl to do. But it drew my attention immediately off what I was sad about. I remember we must have been swimming for a couple of hours out there. We had a great time. She would climb up, I remember, on my shoulders and dive into the water.

Did you say how old she was?

I’d say she was 18—18 or 19—and I was, as I say, 14. We’d dive off the breakwater. We were right at the tip of Squaw Island. We talked a lot on the beach. We talked about Joe Kennedy and about Jack and Bobby being in the Navy. She told me some things about herself and being in England during the war and the bombings, the blitzkrieg and those kinds of things. So I remember we sort of shared a lot on the beach. Then we walked back. But it was very helpful, and the Kennedy children all came back from sailing about 4:30 or 5. Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Kennedy Senior, never got over that, never. There would be occasions, five or six years later, when we’d be at the dining room table, and a discussion would come up with young Joe, and he would clearly break down.

Aunt Rose was terribly struck by it, there’s no question about it, but she had that enormous faith, enormous devotion to the Rosary. And she would go to mass every morning, drive herself to mass, to the nine o’clock mass at St. Francis Xavier. She often had a rosary in her hand and would be saying it, because she walked all the time. I’m sure she lived to be 104 because she had good genes, but she also would walk your legs off even when she was 85. I remember, in Palm Beach, walking on the bicycle trail. You had everything you could do to keep up with her. And she did that two or three times a day. She’d walk in the morning; she walked after lunch for a couple of hours, and then at night after dinner, we’d walk for an hour. That’s how she handled it. I never really saw her break down on any occasion because she had this commitment to be there for the others. That was her thing. We have to be strong for the others; they’re going to need us now. That was the way she handled those kind of things.

I always believed, and even more so now, that part of that was because she was terribly crushed when my mother died. They were very close. This was an enormous blow to her that her best friend and her sister died so early. I’ve seen letters that Joe Kennedy wrote to President [Franklin] Roosevelt—this would be six months after my mother’s death, eight months after my mother’s death—saying, “I’m sorry. We will not be able to attend such-and-such a function at the White House because Rose is still grieving for her sister. She is still very much upset about her sister.” I’ve always looked back on that thinking that this was the training period in her life for the tremendous losses that she suffered later on. She managed to be the stiff upper lip, so to speak, for the rest of the family.

Jack was very strong about it, but that’s the way he was. Plus, he himself was suffering a great deal at that time. His back was bothering him. He was suffering intermittent attacks of malaria from his days in the Pacific. So he was always a very strong character. Because of Aunt Rose, Uncle Joe was wonderfully strong and brave. And we continued to go horseback riding, Uncle Joe and I and Teddy. The routine continued because that was Rose Kennedy’s way of doing things; we go on. Whatever we were doing before, we continue to do.

So Teddy and I continued our sailing, our sailboat racing. The rest of the children did the same thing—tennis lessons, golf lessons, sailing, projects. Whatever your duties were, you did them. That’s the way we handled these things. It was always an enormous, powerful example to me, because I’ve had some things happen over the years myself in life. I mean, later I was to lose President Kennedy, who I was very close to. Kathleen Kennedy was killed, I believe it was in 1947 when I was 17. I had been very close to Kathleen.

So I lost those people. I lost my father in May 1946. But I also lost my Aunt Ann and my Uncle Bill, who had brought us up. So I got used to people—and that’s just the way I put it—I got used to people dying around me over a long period of time. But I always learned from Aunt Rose’s attitude—not only about that but about other things, other failures—we have to get out. You have to get beyond that; you have to keep going.

My sister Mary Jo sometimes still has some anger about my Uncle Bill, who brought us up with my Aunt Ann. Uncle Bill didn’t expect to have two daughters in his life. He was the tough disciplinarian and hard worker all his life—bricklayer and all those kinds of things—and all of a sudden he had a teenage girl in his life, my sister Mary Jo, who was 16 or 17 years old. And these young men in automobiles were coming to pick her up for a date. I remember one young man named Buck Jones was going to pick her up one day. So Buck Jones arrived at the house, and my Uncle Bill said, “You’re Buck Jones? You’re Buck Jones? Nobody in this house is going out with anybody named Buck Jones. Get in your car and get out of here.”

Fifty years later, Mary Jo is still talking about my Uncle Bill and Buck Jones, until one day I said to her, “Mary Jo, that’s fifty-five years ago. You’ve got to get on with this. You’ve got to put this behind you.” I think it’s awfully good advice—whether it’s the loss, the actual death of a person or whatever—you do have to get on. You lose a job or whatever the thing is. It’s not easy. I don’t say it isn’t painful, but you’re not going to be bitter or angry or resentful. But the fact is, I did learn the important thing from Rose Kennedy.

My Uncle Joe was a tremendous, powerful example to me. Those who would criticize him I’m not receptive to at all because I think he did a remarkable job. People have interviewed me and said, “Wasn’t this a dysfunctional house? Wasn’t this really a dysfunctional family?” I said, “Dysfunctional? This is like growing up with the United States Marine Corps every day.” You had to be on time for lunch. You couldn’t eat breakfast, for instance, after 10 o’clock in the morning. If you came down for breakfast after 10, you didn’t eat because, again, the cook is getting lunch ready. She’s not going to be making breakfast all morning for you guys. Everybody has to finish breakfast before 10:00 or you don’t get to eat.

When Jack Kennedy was President, when Uncle Joe said that dinner would be at 7:15, the President showed up on time. That’s the truth of the matter. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We’d all be much better off, probably, in this world today if everybody was—And they’re very simple rules. Then, of course, I had six years with the Jesuits. As I say to people when somebody says, “The rules are this, Mr. Gargan”—I had to go visit a client of mine recently in an alcoholic dry-out center, and the lady said, “These are the rules.” I said, “Listen, let me tell you, young lady, I was taught by the Jesuits for six years. I’m used to doing what I’m told. So whatever your rules are, I’m delighted to follow them.”

So it was not a dysfunctional family. The luncheons with Aunt Rose—Again, during the war we were so blessed because my sisters came, I’d say in ’43, for the whole summer, and they started coming for the whole summer. I’ve always said it was a remarkable tribute to my Aunt Rose and Uncle Joe, because they could have—Uncle Joe had plenty of money, more than plenty of money—he could have sent us to the best camp in New England, the three of us. But they didn’t. With nine children of their own, they invited my two sisters, who were very young, and therefore a responsibility. If I was 14, Mary Jo was 12 and Anne was 10. So they were bringing a 10-year-old child into the house during World War II—all kinds of things going on, all kinds of worries. You have to pay attention to a 10-year-old child who’s going to be around boats and swimming and sailing. Who’s watching? You never wore helmets then on your bikes. You basically were not wearing life preservers either. We never wore a life preserver.

Was it Rose Kennedy or was it everybody that watched out for her?

Everybody, but that was your responsibility. The thing about, again, Joe Kennedy was that he emphasized that, but Aunt Rose set the pattern; she set the rules—not only the rules for our house, but for everybody else’s. It was a terrific burden off people. People should be doing this kind of thing today.

In the Hyannis Port community, Ted and I would have dates. I had a license two years before he did, so I could drive to the Wianno Club. I wasn’t drinking and Ted wasn’t drinking. All the boys made a commitment not to drink or smoke till they were 21, and I made the same commitment. So alcohol was not going to be a problem, which saved us a lot of trouble, to tell you the truth, that other people were getting into when we were growing up. I can give you a couple of examples of that. But anyway, when we would go to the Wianno Club with a date—in those days, the band and everything, drinking, stopped at 12 midnight. Uncle Joe would say to us before we left, “Listen, I want to make one thing clear to you. You understand, I want no mother calling me up at 12:30 in the morning wondering where her daughter is. So that means, gentlemen, have those young ladies home by 12:30 tonight.”

What Aunt Rose would do is—I found this out later; I didn’t know this was going on at the time—but she would call all the other mothers in Hyannis Port and say, “These are the rules that I’m setting. I’d be hopeful you’d set the same rules.” So then everybody’s got the same responsibility. Of course it worked.

If we were out sailing and we had a guest, we always had to tell her, leave a list of names or tell her who was sailing with us—Garrett Skank, Suey Deeds, Weegie Shepherd, whoever the girls were you’d have on the boat—because if their mothers were looking for them, she could say, “Oh, they’re out sailing with Joe and Teddy.” “Well, they have to come in for a piano lesson,” or they have to do this or that. So Aunt Rose would lower the flag to half-mast, which meant bring the boat in; there’s somebody aboard who has to get off. These are the kind of things that were going on.

Could I ask you to talk a little bit about Ted Kennedy being the youngest child in the family, whether you noticed if he was treated any differently as a result of that either by his parents or—? I’m trying to get a feel for what it was like for him being the youngest member of this very high-powered, active family.

Yes, he was not given special care, because once I moved into the house, we no longer had governesses around. We had had Miss [Alice] Cahill, and we had had another governess that first year, but then once he and I started playing together, the governesses disappeared. I don’t know that that was the reason, but as my sister Mary Jo points out, we were all given special attention, I think, because—I think it may have been unconscious or conscious— and this was true among the children we played with, I think, too—we were a special group.

You know, you’re in the middle of World War II; people are hearing about tragedies. Nancy Tenney, who lived across the street, who was Kathleen Kennedy’s best friend—Kathleen lost her husband in Europe and was notified of that, I think in ’44, a couple of weeks after Joe Kennedy. I think it was only three or four weeks after Joe Kennedy died. Her best friend was a girl who lived across the street named Nancy Tenney, and Nancy Tenney’s husband was killed at Midway. He was a pilot—very sad too, because he went out on a fifth volunteer mission, and on the fifth mission, he never came back. So here’s two people who were crazy about each other, Kathleen and—the best of friends. She’s still a very close friend of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the best of friends who each lost a husband in the war.

So this was the kind of thing that was going on. A lot of Jack’s friends were getting killed and Joe’s friends from Harvard. This was the atmosphere you were in. I remember one day Ted Kennedy and I are sailing off Edgartown. We had gone on a cruise in the Wianno Senior, which was a 26-foot sloop with a gaff rig.

What was the name of that boat?

The name of it was the Victura, but it was a 26-foot sloop and it had a gaff rig, which meant it had a little boom on the top of the mast that went out and a jib. We were on a cruise with some of the other boys—Garrett Skank and George Shannon, Dickie Rounds. These were our playmates. We had come out of Edgartown harbor, and we were sailing to Nantucket, and it was a foggy, sort of cloudy day. The fog was on the water, and we had just about enough wind to propel the boat, and all of a sudden we could hear these planes overhead and the slapping on the water. Of course, we pulled out the chart and we were in a practice bombing area. They weren’t dropping real bombs; they were dropping firebombs, but if one of those had hit the boat, it would have gone right through the deck and through the bottom of the boat. And we didn’t have a heck of a lot of wind, but we did sail our way out of there as fast as we could.

We were very conscious of the fact that this is a war. This is why I almost—This is a terrible thing that happened September 11 and all these other things, but this is hardly a war. What we’re talking about World War II makes September 11 look like an aspirin tablet. Call it what you want, but the fact is, we were constantly aware that all the lights on the cars were painted black halfway down. The window shades were all drawn to the bottom every night, and they were black so that we didn’t project any light toward the sea so the German submarines couldn’t sink our shipping. So you were constantly aware of this kind of thing.

Even when we would go down to Nauset Beach and Coast Guard Beach to swim in the big waves in a northeast breeze, you would be conscious of the fact that German submarines were off shore because of the fact that, in World War I, a German submarine actually landed out there where we were swimming. We went out there because the waves, in a northeast breeze, the waves there would be tremendously high, and we would go out there. So you were constantly knowledgeable that this was the war.

My father would come home for visits on weekends, and because he was Chief Counsel to the Undersecretary of War, he got more gas for his car, and he also had more stamps for eating so that he could get more food and all of those kinds of things. So you’re constantly aware of that. We were also constantly aware of it because we were working on the farm that Joe Kennedy had leased during World War II to raise his own vegetables and pigs and cattle and milk, so we had the extra food because of that. So there wasn’t a day that you weren’t very much aware of what was going on. Then people were being killed around you; people were dying.

So Teddy—that was a long way of answering the question. Yes, Aunt Rose and Joe Kennedy were particularly interested in Ted, because they cared about him very much as a mother and father, but also because he was the only son that they had. I saw an example of that years later—this may have been 15 years ago now—because I forget, Aunt Rose died when she was 104 a few years ago. That must be five years ago, wasn’t it?

It was ’97, wasn’t it? 1996, ’97.

Maybe it’s almost ten years ago, so this incident took place maybe 25 years ago. They were all sitting at the dining room table, and most of us had gotten up. Aunt Rose is talking to Eunice and Jean and Pat at the table, and they were all very well at that time. She was sitting here and they were sitting, talking and laughing and joking, and they were having such a good time. I happened to come from the kitchen through the dining room; I was just passing through. We had finished lunch and they were hanging around after lunch, as I say, laughing and talking with their mother. This may be the only real time I saw her get really emotional and break down, because she was so strong for everybody. And one of the girls said, “Well, mother, isn’t this wonderful? What more could you ask for but sitting around like this with your daughters?” She leaned forward and she said, “My sons, my sons. I wish I had my sons.” Boy, that’s tough stuff. That’s really tough stuff.

So yes, Teddy got special attention. In fact, I’ve heard her say that. When she was carrying Teddy, some people said to her, “Why are you doing this, Rose? Why are you having another child? You’ve got eight. Why are you having another child?” And she said, “What would I do if I didn’t have Teddy? He’s the only son I have left.” So yes, they cared a lot about Teddy. But you could not tell that they were giving him any more attention than she was giving to me or my sisters, Mary Jo and Ann. We were all treated equally.

In the dining room over there, there’s a small table that’s next to the window that was called the “children’s table.” The little children would sit at that table, unless there was a special person there for lunch or dinner like James Forrestal or Arthur Krock or somebody else important. She would always make sure that a couple of the little children sat at the big table so they could hear the conversation with this person. It could be Bishop [John J.] Wright would come—he wasn’t a bishop at that time; he was a monsignor who later became Bishop of Pittsburgh. He was an auxiliary bishop first in Boston, very smart guy.

So all the children, we were all treated equally, and there was a big effort made to make everybody understand that we were very important. Teddy was no more important than I would be or Mary Jo or any of us. But there’s no question, not to over-emphasize it, that they were very much aware that he might be the only boy they had left.

Have any of the sisters emerged as the matriarch of the family since the death of Rose Kennedy? Is there anybody who has kind of taken over that role?

Not really. Eunice would always be the person of most leadership, I would say—always was, is today, and always will be. Pat Lawford now is not well. And Jean Kennedy Smith, after the death of the President, they got a house in Southampton. And she comes to visit and came to visit often when her mother was alive, but she never had a leadership role. Eunice always did.

Eunice always had a program going. She always had a thing that she was interested in, a project. She was even in Washington, D.C. when my father was still alive, 1946, because I know that she used to borrow his car once in a while and not bring it back, and he was always saying, “Eunice, get that car back here.” Of course, that’s when Sarge [Robert Sargent] Shriver went to Washington to help her out on some project she had. And I remember then she was in Chicago and, of course, Sarge was Assistant Manager of the Merchandise Mart, and Eunice had some projects out there.

There was some home out there for wayward women or girls that she was interested in doing some work with. And I always remember there was a great guy who was a great friend of theirs—Bill Blair—he was also very close to Adlai Stevenson, who was Governor, of course, of Illinois. But anyway, I know when Eunice was very interested in this home for wayward women, if you could call it that—fallen women, juvenile women, whatever—this fellow who had a great personality, was very close to Eunice and Sarge in Chicago, called up. He was not married at this time, and he called up Eunice very seriously on the phone, and he was hiding his voice and he said to Eunice on the phone, “Is this where you save wayward women?” Eunice, very seriously, said, “Yes.” And he said, “Well, save one for me!” [laughs] Of course, Eunice was furious. But he was very famous as being Adlai Stevenson’s top assistant, number one man. So Eunice would be the one.

The other thing I would say, and I can safely say this for history on this taping, but there was no question in my mind that Eunice was Ted Kennedy’s favorite sister. When we would race on the sailboat, he always wanted Eunice aboard. Whether it was in the Wianno Juniors or the Wianno Seniors later when we had a great deal of success together racing the boat, Ted Kennedy had a great talent as a skipper—very good, gifted skipper—but he’d often want Eunice to come with us sailing. So we had great fun with Eunice. He admired her a great deal. To this day, I’m sure asks her for advice, talks to her, and she would be his favorite sister. Clearly the leader and also the closest to Rose Kennedy. They were very close.

Again, it was very interesting. Eunice was never well. At the same time, she was not what you would call sick or ill, but she was always fighting stomach problems and things of that nature. But that never slowed her down, never stopped her. She always with great courage would continue whatever project she was on or had to do, despite the fact that her stomach might have been bothering her or any kind of thing like that. So I think her mother and she probably shared that to a certain extent too. My Aunt Rose never had a real comfortable situation with her stomach either. She’d have an upset stomach from time to time.

She was always eating angel cake. We could never eat Aunt Rose’s angel cake, which was very carefully kept in the kitchen. She ate all kinds of custards, which I loved. She’d allow me to have one of her custards and all of those kinds of things. It wasn’t until years later when she was in New York—and Joe Kennedy always said, “If you’re not getting an answer from one doctor, seek some information from several others”—she finally, I think, went to an allergist in New York, who found out, of all things, she was allergic to eggs. It was the one thing she was eating all the time. What are there, fourteen eggs in an angel cake or something?

I think that probably that was one of the things that Jack Kennedy and Aunt Rose shared, and Eunice. He never had a real solid stomach. He would be very careful what he ate because he’d often have discomfort with his tummy, and he would be very careful about how much he ate. He had a lot of light stuff like creamed chicken and those things. Aunt Rose would have creamed chicken and rice all the time; Eunice would have that. I think it’s probably one of the things that made Jack Kennedy a great President, that, like so many other people who became very great, such as President Roosevelt, [he] had suffered. He knew what it was to suffer pain, to suffer discomfort, to have to work through difficulties to be successful. Jack Kennedy certainly had to do that, so did Eunice.

And yet, when people sometimes criticize Joe Kennedy and they’re interviewing me, or even people on the outside who may make a comment sometimes, I say, “Hey, listen, if his son didn’t become President of the United States, if he didn’t have three sons who became Senators, if he didn’t have all of those great things happen to him in his life, what he did for the retarded children would have been enough. That alone would have been enough.”

Eunice took that from him and ran with it. And that’s why we have all of the care that we’re getting today for the retarded, and for the Best Buddies that her son Anthony [Shriver] runs, and the Special Olympics. I was talking to Sarge Shriver a couple of years ago, I remember. There is no other organization in the world today that is in so many countries as Special Olympics. It’s in almost every country in the world and that’s remarkable—and that’s all Eunice Shriver. But the fact is, Sarge Shriver has been remarkably helpful. She was blessed to have him by her right side all those years, because he’s so gifted, so able, so smart, so organized. She was blessed to have him there. So I answered that question, for whatever it’s worth.

[BREAK]

We’ll start up again. Perhaps the best place to start would be to talk about John F. Kennedy getting into politics, running for the House and the Senate, your involvement in those campaigns, and if you could possibly try to remember whatever role Edward Kennedy might have played in JFK’s Massachusetts races. I realize this is a big topic, but let’s move into this period where JFK enters politics.

It was pretty clear in the Kennedy family that people were aware that young Joe was kind of—not kind of, he was definitely the leader of the family. He’d been to Harvard. He had done well at Harvard. He won the special award at Choate, I think, as the most outstanding athlete and student. I forget the name of the award, but I can remember that. Then he went on to Harvard. He was very attractive. He was handsome—a great personality, great charm—and he was, if you excuse the expression, kind of the “great white hope.” I don’t know that you’d call him the father’s favorite, but he certainly was very popular with the father, and the father had very high hopes for him because of all the qualifications he had and qualities he had.

So when he suddenly was taken away, it was a tremendous loss to the family, of course, because they dearly loved Joe. Everybody loved Joe, looked up to him, emulated him, respected him, and very definitely imitated him—his characteristics, his character. He had a great character. He was devoted to the church; he believed in it. I think that’s partly because of his, probably, his love of his mother and association with his mother.

I was telling the story the other day to a fellow named Dan Burns, who went to Fessenden with Ted and also went to one of the other schools that Ted was at, and then later was at University of Virginia Law School with the Senator. We were telling different stories about the Kennedys and he mentioned Joe Kennedy, who used to come and visit his house, the Burns’ house, when Joe was at Harvard. I remember there was a fellow named Robert Sullivan, who was a Superior Court judge in Massachusetts, and I had talked to him one day.

He told me a story that when he was at Harvard, he was invited to be in the Varsity Club. And he and a fellow named Ted Reardon and Joe Kennedy were all invited, which was a big thing at Harvard after your freshman year to be invited to be in this exclusive Varsity Club. You had to be an athlete and you had to be invited. So they were invited to be in the club. Reardon later became very close to Jack Kennedy and was his executive assistant in Washington when he was a Congressman. I knew Ted Reardon very well, had a lot of affection for him and a lot of respect for him. He was a great character and had a great personality and was very effective in Washington when he was working for Jack Kennedy.

But anyway, Sullivan tells this story. They’re in the Varsity Club. They’d been there almost a week, and it’s Friday and they’re sitting down. You got your meals there, all the members of the Varsity Club got their meals—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was a very social thing and very important and everything. So it’s Friday night and the meal was served and it’s meat. Reardon and Sullivan and Kennedy all look at each other and look at the plate with the meat on it, and they’re trying to decide what to do. There’s a doorway, like we’re facing there, a window in to the kitchen. He said Joe Kennedy, with great courage and absolutely fearlessly, goes up to the window and shouts into the cook, “Sullivan and Reardon and I are Catholics. Scramble us up some eggs. We’ll have eggs tonight. Next week have fish. We eat fish on Friday.” Sullivan said, “That changed everything at the Harvard Club.” From then on, on Fridays, there was a choice of fish if you were a Catholic. So it was a prime example of the kind of character young Joe was, and that had all been lost.

So what to do? Who’s going to run for President? Who’s going to be in politics? Which Joe Kennedy emphasized all the time at the dining room table. Not that he wanted anybody to serve in politics, but he never gets enough credit. Because the fact is, Rose Kennedy was the stable influence there. She was the strength and the power and the moral fiber. But he was grateful. He was very grateful to be an Irish-Catholic and be an American, and he said often at that table, “We have been given a great opportunity. I was given a great opportunity in this country, and I took that opportunity and I have been successful, and I’ve been able to make money, and now you have an obligation to pay that back.”

Eunice’s work with the retarded—the Special Olympics—all of those things come from that power of example, including the fact that politics is the most important thing there is in America. In other words, all your opportunities come from that. Financially, I am a financier and I’m very successful and there are ways of doing that. You work as hard as you can, you discipline yourself, and you do the job. Politics is the most important business in this country, and it’s the most poorly run. It is not done the right way. It is not organized. It is not done like a financial business. So you people have an obligation to do that, to be those kind of people, and pay back to this country the gifts that have been given to you.

That had to be in the back of everybody’s mind. Now Jack knew in his heart, I’m sure, that the father wanted him to run, but there was no effort made, as I saw it, and I was there. People have said, “Well, he picked Jack. He said, ‘Jack you have to run. Now that Joe’s gone, it’s your obligation.’” I never saw that happen. I think it was Jack knowing that the father felt that they had an obligation to pay back their gifts. And in addition, Joe was gone and he could not miss that point. Basically, Jack wanted to own a newspaper and be a writer. That would have been his first choice. But the opportunity came up. Because of the timing—it was ’46—there was a seat open in Boston for Congress. It was his grandfather’s old seat. There were a combination of factors that fell into place that made running for Congress in Boston make sense.

At that time, I was only 16 years old. I did not get involved in that campaign. I was involved sort of at a distance, because they were coming down to the Cape in the summer. There were other friends of his there. Lem Billings came up. A lot of fellows he knew in the war came to help him and to campaign for him. So I was very much aware of that, that he was running and that the family was interested, that Joe Kennedy was heavily involved. Aunt Rose was involved in going to speak to women’s groups and all that kind of stuff. So it was an overall effort, family effort. But I was basically too young to get involved in that. He did get elected, and then he went to Washington in January of ’47, as I recall, and I was at Georgetown Prep.

Coincidentally, another thing had happened at that time to affect my life, and in a way, his and Eunice’s. And that was, my father died May 22, 1946. So that’s, of course, a terrific shocker. He dies on the train coming back from Boston, and I remember Father [William F.] Maloney, the president of Georgetown Prep, coming into my classroom. I was a sophomore at the time. It was the end of my sophomore year. He came in, took me out, told me that my father had died. I remember, of course—I’m saying this for the record—I was terribly sad. But in a way, it still struck me how, even in a moment like that, you can be somewhat selfish, because I said to Father Maloney, the first thing out of my mouth was, “Do I have to leave school? Will I be able to finish Georgetown Prep?” So right away I’m thinking about myself. I’ve never forgotten that.

Anyway, again, it was a question of going on, moving on, and I knew that was what I was going to have to do. Father Maloney said right away, “No no no. You’re not going to have to leave school. You’ll be able to stay at school.” It was terribly nice.

I still remember, and I’m grateful for the number of people that were helpful. John McCormack’s office, and John McCormack himself—he was not Speaker of the House at that time, but he was a very powerful Congressman, of course, from Boston—he sent a car out for me, brought me to his chambers, his office at the Capitol in Washington. He was terribly nice to me. Other people were very nice to me. “We knew your father so well.” Talked so highly about my father, because my father, all during World War II, was not only Chief Counsel for the Undersecretary of War, he was also chief lobbyist for the War Department on Capitol Hill. Of course, he was naturally effective because, with his war record in World War I, nobody was going to question his ability to represent the War Department.

Anyway, they were terribly nice to me. Congressman McCormack arranged to have a special Air Force plane—I don’t know what field it would have been—to take me to Boston. So they took me to the airport in a special limousine, and I flew to Boston. I never forgot that. I was always grateful to John McCormack. This comes up later when Teddy is running himself, because John McCormack was so naturally supportive of his nephew, Eddie. Of course, I’m a very prominent campaign leader for young Ted, and I always had mixed feelings about that. My loyalty, obviously, would have been to Ted, who was my relative and my dear friend, but I never lost my gratitude to John McCormack.

Sure.

But what happened is they came down in the spring of ’47. Eunice and he are sharing an apartment on 31st Street.

Eunice and Jack?

Eunice and Jack are sharing an apartment on 31st Street. He’s the young Congressman. Eunice gets in touch with me and says, “We’re staying here. We’ve got an apartment on 31st Street. You’re welcome anytime to come in, Joey, and stay with us on weekends.” So this was a terrific thing for me because, of course, Dad was gone, and we had been very close. Though I was a boarder at Georgetown Prep, on weekends he would come and pick me up, and we’d spend the weekends together and things like that. That had all gone now.

But I would take the bus from Georgetown Prep to Bethesda, and I could take the streetcar down Wisconsin Avenue all the way right past 31st Street, and I would stay with Jack and Eunice over the weekend. It was great fun. The food was, of course, wonderful. Margaret Ambrose was the cook who had been given to Jack by his mother. So, all of a sudden, now I’m staying on weekends with him. It was a great experience. It was educational and it was great fun. Often what would happen is, I would ride the streetcar all the way to Capitol Hill and meet him in his office, and then we would go together in his car. He had an old beat-up Cadillac because Uncle Joe said, “You can’t look rich. You can’t look rich.” This was an old Cadillac from World War II. It was probably made in ’42 or ’43 or something—big black thing, four-door, all beat up. Nobody could be jealous of that. Of course, it had the congressional plates on it.

I would come in, go up to the Capitol, and often be able to see what was going on in the Congress or if he had a special thing going. I remember particularly one day, I was up there and Jack came in. I’m waiting for him. He comes into his office, and I’m sitting here in a chair in front of his big square. I think it was his grandfather’s—

Honey Fitz’s?

Honey Fitz’s desk. He came in. He was furious. He’s fuming and swearing and everything else. I can tell he’s really bull, but I don’t care. All I want to do is go home and have some of Margaret Ambrose’s food. This is a Friday afternoon. All of a sudden, this Texan comes in—you could tell he was a Texan right away because he had a Texas sombrero on, a cowboy hat, and he had a beautiful pair of brown, I remember, cowboy boots on—and he took his cowboy boots and he put them on the corner of Jack’s desk and sat back in the chair. And Jack’s muttering and swearing and calling the Congressmen different names because they had not voted on a bill that he was terribly interested in and had, apparently, worked very hard on.

What happens is—I don’t even know who this Congressman was, but he says, “Let me tell you something. There’s a lot of sons of bitches in that Congress,” this old Texan says. And he was elderly—to me, elderly—he was probably 65. He said, “Let me tell you this, Jack. There’s a lot of sons of bitches in this country, and they deserve representation.” I never forgot it. I love it.

That’s good.

Because it’s so true, too. Anyway, it was just so terrific that they were doing that, and I would come in and stay there. I was as welcome as if I was a brother. I had been very close to him after he came back from the war. We had developed a real close relationship. I loved movies and he loved movies, and I remember that he loved the movie Easter Parade. I don’t know when that was made, but it had to be just at the end of World War II. It was after he came back from the Pacific. It had Peter Lawford; Ann Miller was in it, Fred Astaire, and Judy Garland. There were a lot of fantastic dance scenes in it. We saw it four times.

On the Cape in those days, there weren’t theaters like you have now. You’d have a theater in Osterville; we had two theaters in Hyannis. There was a theater in Chatham and then a couple of other theaters in the small towns. So what we would do is we’d follow it from theater to theater. So we went to see Easter Parade four times. He got a straw hat and a cane, and he was around the house dancing like Fred Astaire. He was really taken by this movie; it was very funny. The only one he could get to go over and over again would be me, and I was used to it, not only because I liked movies, but at Notre Dame the only thing you could do was go to the movies.

South Bend was an industrial town of about 160,000 people. It had Ball Band there, and Studebaker, US Rubber, Singer Sewing Machine—all of these big companies. But there was no real entertainment except for the movie theater. We would go sometimes on a Saturday. You’d go in and have lunch, and then you’d go to a double feature in the afternoon, have supper in an Italian restaurant, and go to a double feature that night. So he picked the right guy. I would go to a movie anytime I got a chance. We had a good relationship. He treated me like I was his age, and I felt the same about him. We were just very good friends. So it was great fun being there.

He used to let me use his car with the congressional plates on it. I remember I was taking out a girl there whose next-door neighbor would come over and visit with him. I was 17 at the time, and this young lady, who was very pretty—she was a knockout, and her name was Bequita Radford. I think Bequita was for “little Rebecca” or something like that. But she was taking singing lessons, and she could sing like a lark, and he loved to have her sing a song. So she would sit at the table or on the porch or wherever we were, and he’d say, “Sing this, sing that.” She would sing. I remember her singing “The Man I Love.” He would love to hear this, “The Man I Love.” She could sing that thing like you were sitting in a Hollywood studio or in a theater in Washington, D.C.

So he would let me take his car to take her on dates. We’d go to the movies and one thing or another. I remember being over one time with her, and I think we were parking in Theodore Roosevelt Park, which was across the Potomac. So the police came and they looked in the window with their flashlights. “What are you doing here? Where’d you get this car?” Of course, it’s got congressional plates on it. So they take us in. I’m saying, “Listen, call up Congressman Kennedy. There’s no problem here. Just call him up.” They didn’t do that. They took us right to the station. I forget what they did with the car.

Of course, they do call him and, of course, he thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world. He thinks it’s really funny, so he says to them, “I don’t know him; never heard of him. Nobody should be using my car; he’s using my car?” We’re both in separate cells, the girl and I, sitting there and sitting there. Of course, it hits me right away, of course, he’s kidding. He’s really trying to give us the treatment. It was very funny, because about a half hour later he shows up with Eunice, and he comes back into the cell area, and he and Eunice are laughing like crazy. They think this is the funniest thing in the world.

What is also interesting about all that is they tell all these stories about President Kennedy and his romances and all those kinds of things. But the fact is, in those days, I used to come in from Georgetown Prep, we’d have a wonderful dinner, and then he would say, “We’re going to the movies, Joe.” He said, “Go to this address here, Joey. And there will be a girl there named whatever—Ruth O’Brien, Jean Jones, or whatever—and pick her up and bring her here, and then we’ll go to the movies.” So I would take the car, and I would go over and pick the young lady up. And then we’d come back, and Congressman Kennedy would drive the car. And the young lady, the date for the evening, would sit in the front seat. And I would sit in the back, and we would go to the movies.

He never had any money—never had any money. He’d always reach in his pockets, “Oh Christmas, Joey. Do you have any money? I was at Georgetown Prep, and as a junior, you got three dollars a week allowance. And I’d have the three dollars, of course, in my pocket. It probably cost me 40, 50 cents to get in, probably not even that. But in the streetcar, the bus, between the two, I had probably $2.50 left of my allowance. We’re up at the ticket booth at the theater, and I’d have to get my two dollars and fifty cents out and take the three of us to the movies—and he’d never pay me back. He’d never think of that.

Then we’d get home and go in and have one of those great, wonderful pieces of chocolate cake that Margaret Ambrose would cook up and some vanilla ice cream, and he’d say, “Okay, Joey, you can take Mary home now.” This was a regular routine. For somebody who was saying that he was such a big romantic fellow, even when he wasn’t married, I was chauffeuring the young ladies back and forth. So I always questioned all these stories that people would tell.

In 1950 you and Ted Kennedy went on a trip to Europe. Do you have recollections of that trip by any chance?

Gargan As a matter of fact, I even have a diary of that trip. That was another thing that Rose Kennedy—again, there’s Rose Kennedy, my Aunt Rose—she always emphasized to us that we should keep diaries. It’s one of the pieces of advice I did not follow—probably a lot of other pieces of advice I did not follow—that I regret very deeply because when the book The Making of the President was written, she said to me that summer after the election, and Jack Kennedy is now President Kennedy, she said to me, “See, Joey, I told you if you wrote a diary of all the advance work you did, it would be a bestseller today.” Because all he did was keep a diary, and then he made a book out of it, which is the truth.

But we were forced to take diaries with us on our trip to Europe in 1950 and to keep those diaries, which we did. And I still have mine, which is extremely interesting because it gives you instant memory of what took place, where you went, what incidents took place, all of that kind of thing. It was very helpful.

The reason for that trip was the Korean War because Joe Kennedy Sr. felt that the Korean War could end up being World War III and that all of the beautiful, historic landmarks in Europe that were still left and had not been destroyed by World War II might very well be destroyed this time. So he wanted us to go over there. That’s the kind of trip it was.

We flew into Rome. We flew from New York to Paris, and Paris to Rome. We got a Fiat convertible; it was the first convertible that Fiat had made after World War II. This was 1950. It was a beautiful little car, wonderful little car. We first stopped in Rome. We went to the Vatican. We did not have a visit with Pius XII, but Count Galeazzi, who was very close to Pius XII, came with the car for us. He gave us his chauffeur for a period of time while we were in Rome, which allowed us to go to everything, including the Vatican gardens where the Pope walked. We went into the Vatican gardens. We saw everything that you could see in Rome that was important that a lot of regular tour people would not get a chance to see, as I say, such as the Vatican gardens. We had front seats at the canonization of Maria Goretti, and that was quite beautiful.

Then we went to Naples, Sorrento. We stayed over in Sorrento and then we went to Capri, and we spent several days in Capri. Then we came back. We came back to Rome. We saw a few more things in Rome, and then we went to Florence. We spent a couple of days in Florence seeing the Last Supper. David’s statue happened to be in Florence at that time and we saw that. Then we went to Venice, and we saw all of the marvelous cathedral in Venice. It was kind of a funny story here, but we saw all of the things that you were supposed to see in Venice. We had great fun. Venice was, I don’t know how it is now, but that was one of the best times I ever had traveling anyplace. Venice was so much fun because of the canals and riding on the boats and all that kind of thing.

Sunday, we didn’t have much to do so we decided that we would go—I think it was on our agenda—to Lido Beach. So we were to take a ferry across, and then we would have to walk to Lido Beach, I remember. There was a very beautiful Italian girl on the boat. So we were both looking at her and thinking, God, she is a knockout—and she was. It was obvious she was a little older than us. I would say she was 23 or 24, but she was absolutely stunning. So I say, “Why don’t we talk to her?” And he says to me, “Oh no, she’ll never talk to us. Don’t be silly. Plus, she probably only talks Italian anyway, so you’ll never get to talk to her.”

In my brilliance, I couldn’t think of anything else, so I did go walk up to her and say to her, “Do you know what time this boat leaves and then what time we get to Lido Beach?” In perfect English she speaks right back to me and gives me the information and everything. She gives me a big smile and she’s very friendly, and I say to myself, “See, you dope, this girl is just terrific.” So I talk to her. I’m still embarrassed today when I think of it. We have so many Russian girls, for instance, working on the Cape and other people from other countries visiting here in the summer working, and every one of them speaks perfect English. It’s embarrassing to realize. I talked to this young lady, her name was Rose Marie, further that day to ask her how she learned to speak English. She said it was through reading the small paperback American books.

So now we’ve got a friend. So we’re saying to ourselves, oh good, she’ll tell us where to go. Ted had forgotten his bathing suit at the hotel. Fortunately I had mine. So we’ve got to get a bathing suit somewhere. We’re talking to her about that. We walk down the road to get to Lido Beach, and a guy comes by on a motor scooter and talks to her, and Ted says, “That’s it. There goes your girlfriend, Joe. She’s going to go with him”—and she doesn’t. She keeps walking with us.

We stopped at this little store, and the sales person is showing us all of these different bathing suits. They’re all the same. They’re the old American woolen bathing suit that must be 35 years old, 40 years old, and Ted’s looking at these things. Of course, half of them have holes in them from the moths, some of which have holes in the private part areas. So he finally finds a bathing suit that he could wear, and it’s close to a bikini, which we wanted no part of. All the men in Italy at this time, and the women, are wearing these teeny-weeny, yellow polka dot bikinis, and we want no part of this. I’ve got a regular, American, boxer short bathing suit, and he’s got this black woolen job and it’s hysterical.

We get down there. We’re fully dressed. He’s got his bathing suit; I’ve got my bathing suit. We get down there; the place is loaded. You can’t get into—they’ve got all these cabanas, and she says to us, “My cabana is down there.” She shows us about six cabanas down, about 200 yards down the beach. She says, “Walk down the beach and meet me there.” We’re trying to get into the cabanas. Nobody—“No no. Americans, no no. You can’t get in here.” So we can’t get in. We see this house on the side. Ted says, “Let’s go ask them if we can change into our bathing suits there.” We look around the house and there’s nobody in there. So Teddy says, “The hell with it. Let’s just change our suits quick and get out of here.” So he’s changing his suit, and he’s got his suit up to his waist like this and just gets it on.

My suit is down at my feet, and I’m trying to get my feet into it, and a woman comes, an Italian woman who must own the house, and she’s got a broom, and he goes out the door like a rocket. I’m still trying to pull up my bathing suit, and she’s beating me with the broom. Finally, I dash out of the house, and she’s screaming and yelling and, of course, all of a sudden these Italian police officers are riding down the road on bicycles, and they’re tooting their horns and blowing whistles and all this kind of stuff.

So we just say the hell with it, and we run right by the Italian guy at one of these cabanas blocking the gate. We just ran by him 100 miles an hour and out onto the beach. I could really run in those days. We run out as fast as we can onto the beach, and we fall on our bellies on the sand with our clothes underneath us, and we just lay there absolutely still. These Italian police are walking around the beach, and they’re looking and looking and they don’t see us. The thing is loaded; must be 10,000 Italians out there, men and women, all in these skimpy suits. And, of course, we were obvious as hell, but they still didn’t see us, particularly him in his 100-year-old woolen suit.

We did then walk down the beach. She’s got a girlfriend for Ted, which was really nice. She was really a very pretty girl too, this girlfriend for Ted. We stayed there all day, had a great time. The beach was beautiful. The sand was really nice. It was great fun. We swam all day and then we left the beach, and they said to us that they would meet us under that tower in San Marco Square right in front of the cathedral. They said, “We’ll meet you tonight,” about whatever agreement we made, and we’ll get something to eat.

What they were going to do, which was marvelous, because of course they spoke Italian, “We’ll take you shopping,” because Ted had mentioned to them he had to get some Christmas presents. That’s what every Kennedy always did when you went to Europe was buy presents for the family that you would give them at Christmas. Aunt Rose had told us that Venice had the most beautiful lace in the world. American women at that time—I guess all women in the world who were Catholics—wore bandanas over their heads to go in to church, or a hat. It was required to wear a hat in those days. So we were going to get his sisters these beautiful lace shawls, whatever you would call them.

So he had told the young lady that he was talking to that he wanted to do that. “We’ll take you shopping. They’ll cheat you. We’ll take you shopping.” It was a marvelous experience. They did meet us under the tower. We had something to eat and then we went shopping. In San Marco Square, if you’ve ever been there, it’s big and square, and all the shops surround the square. So they took us shopping. It was a marvelous, fun experience because they were speaking Italian and yelling at the clerks, “No no, we’re not going to pay this. Take it back,” throwing the stuff back at them and everything. Ted was able to buy all his Christmas presents for the relatives that he was going to be able to give out to them in Palm Beach. I bought presents, of course, for my sisters and my Aunt Ann and things like that.

Then we walked with them, had a great time. We rode them home in a motor taxi to where their houses were. We actually could have spent the next day there, but we were going to Lake Como from there, from Venice to Lake Como. I was dying to stay there because I was crazy about this girl Rose Marie. I had absolutely fallen in love with Rose Marie. Ted said, “No, no, Joe, we’ve got to go.” But I was brokenhearted that we didn’t stay an extra day. But we didn’t. We went to Lake Como and followed our trip.

We went from Lake Como to the south of France, and we stayed at Cap d’Antibes in the hotel there, and that was an adventure because Elizabeth Taylor and Nicky Hilton were staying at the same hotel, and we bumped into them. What happened is, we were by the pool, this gorgeous pool at Hotel Cap d’Antibes, and we had been waterskiing every day. But the waterskiing was so expensive that you’d want to get two or three people to go with you. The speedboat was like $50 an hour, something incredible, which wouldn’t probably be expensive today, but in those days, paying $50 just to use a speedboat—I think it was $50 for half an hour. So, obviously, if you got three or four people to water-ski, then you’d cut the thing down. So we were always looking for people to go with us.

So we’re sitting by the pool and Ted is saying to me, “Look at that girl over there, Joe. She looks like an American. I’d like to talk to her.” So, of course, it’s Elizabeth Taylor. And I’m saying to him, “You dope, that’s Elizabeth Taylor. We can’t talk to her.” He says, “What do you mean?” I said, “She must be on her honeymoon. I think she married Nicky Hilton.” One of the big things we did every day on our trip was we would—I think it was the New York Herald Tribune had a European paper that came out every day, and we would read the paper because we wanted to know the news of the war and other news, so we would read that every day because it was in English. I had read that she had married Nicky Hilton. So finally, when he realized that, he said, “Good God, they’ve got money! See if you can get her to go waterskiing with us, Joe. She’ll be able to pay for the boat.”

So anyway, sure enough, I go over to talk to Elizabeth Taylor, introduce myself, say we’re going waterskiing, and would you like to go. “Oh, I’d love to go,” she says. So I’ve got her lined up to go waterskiing. Ted can’t believe it. I’ve got a couple of other people going waterskiing, a couple of other Italian girls in these teeny-weeny bikinis. I don’t care; I’m happy as a clam because I’ve got somebody to pay for the boat.

At that point, Elizabeth Taylor doesn’t really mean anything to me, except that I saw her and fell in love with her when I was about 14 years old and saw the movie about five times National Velvet when she made that movie. Of course, it fit in with everything I loved about horses, and she was beautiful and the whole thing. So I’d been crazy about her ever since that movie, and I did go to see her. I think I drove my father crazy going to that movie. He had a friend who lived in the apartment house that he lived in take me to the movie a couple of times.

So here I am going waterskiing with my favorite movie star. And we’re all set to go, and she’s down at the dock with us, and we’re just about to get on the boat. And Nicky Hilton comes running down, absolutely tearing, because he says, “You’re not going anyplace with those two guys. You’re not going waterskiing with those two guys.” He’s almost saying “those two bums.” He has no idea even who we are, but the fact is, he’s on his honeymoon, and these two guys have already corralled Elizabeth Taylor and got her going waterskiing. So the end-all was that she didn’t go.

Did she end up paying for it?

No.

She was very nice to you.

Oh yes. She was very young at the time. She was much too young to get married. I think she was probably just 18. I was going to say 16, but I think she was 18, so it was crazy.

She must have been beautiful.

She was, no question about it.

But we went from there north into Austria, I think. Yes, we went to Austria. We even went through the Russian zone of Austria because I remember Ted giving them our passports upside down to see if they could read them, and they couldn’t, the Russian guys when we went into the Russian zone of Austria. I’m figuring, you clown. The next thing we’ll do is be put in a Russian jail and end up in a concentration camp because you’ve given them the passports upside down.

But anyway, they just brushed us through because we had an Italian car with an Italian plate on it that said “Roma,” so they thought we were Italians. It made it much easier for us all through Europe because everybody thought we were Italian. They weren’t even looking at our passports because Italians had run of the country, basically. If you were Italians, they didn’t care; they were just going to let you go through.

We did a couple of other crazy things, but I remember we were talking to Russian guards at different memorials in Vienna and all this kind of thing. I’m taking pictures of Ted talking to the guard; later, he’s taking pictures of me—of course, taking pictures of the Russian soldiers, which was a complete no-no. At any time we could have ended up in some gulag for the rest of our lives, but we didn’t.

How long were you on this trip?

About two-and-a-half months.

Really? It was a lengthy trip.

Oh, it was fantastic. We went to Austria; then we went to Germany, and we went to Frankfort, Wiesbaden, and Cologne. That was one of the things on the trip to Cologne, the cathedral. Then we went to Belgium, and we visited some friends of his in Belgium, then Paris. We spent about a week in Paris at the end. Then we took one of the American boats because Aunt Rose said, “You don’t want to go on a British boat. The food is terrible. You don’t want to go on an Italian boat.” I forget what the reason was. The food was good but it was all Italian. “Go on an American boat. The American boat food is fantastic.” And it was. We got on the boat. We were exhausted; we went to sleep right away because we were dying from being tired and taking the train and everything else.

We had stayed up very late the night before because we had met some friends of his from Milton Academy, five or six girls, and we took them all out to the Grand Signor, which was kind of a Paris nightclub, and they played the violin. And we had gone to a floorshow earlier at one of the famous strip shows, in the great show that everybody goes to see in Paris. I can’t think of the name of it. Then we ended up in the Grand Signor and we were—

The Moulin Rouge.

That’s it. We went there. Then we ended up in the Grand Signor that we really liked. We had been there before. There were about six of these girls from Milton, all of whom were very attractive girls, I remember. Then the two of us, we ran into Howard Johnson in this place. Howard Johnson was the owner of the Howard Johnson’s restaurants and all those kinds of things. We have got these six girls, which I’m very conscious of on our trip because we’re supposed to be seeing museums and everything, and Howard Johnson says, “Great to see you, Ted. Great to see you.” I think it was actually at the Moulin Rouge that we ran into Howard Johnson. We’ve got a front table. We’ve got six girls with us. We’re watching all these naked dancers going around the floor, and Howard Johnson says, “I’ll tell your father I saw you, Ted. I’ll tell your father I saw you.” And I’m saying, “Oh great, this is really good.”

Anyway, we got on the boat. We’re sitting at the captain’s table that night, and it was terrific because, of course, the captain’s table was, for some people, the place to sit, particularly if you were 55 years old to 75. But there wasn’t a good-looking girl at the table. It was all these elderly people, and people with money, and Ted and I. There was one good side of it: we’d come down to breakfast every morning—up early, down to breakfast. Ted was serving mass, I remember. There was a priest aboard. I don’t know if he was a visiting priest, the chaplain for the boat, or what, but he said mass every morning about 8 o’clock, and Ted would go and he would serve the mass every morning, and then we would go to breakfast.

We loved breakfast because you could get bacon and eggs, and pancakes, and chicken livers, kidneys, anything you wanted, steaks. Of course, here’s two young kids, one 18 and one 20. We’ve got nothing but appetite, so we’re having this great time. We had a great time on that trip, and that was the end of it. We sailed into New York harbor, and that was the end of the trip.

It sounds like a fantastic trip. Do you recall when Ted Kennedy first met Joan Bennett and when you first got to know her? I know you were an usher at their wedding, which was in 1958. Could you talk a little bit about Joan?

I remember that. The first time I met her, we were at the Cape, and for some reason that I can’t remember, he said to me, “This girl Joan Bennett is coming in on an airplane this afternoon. Go to the airport and meet her, Joey, and bring her to the house.” Where he was or what he was doing, I can’t remember, but I did do that. I brought her to the house, and she stayed for two or three days, and I did get to know her then. We did the usual things you do if you were a Kennedy guest—that’s sail and swim and go to the movies. Uncle Joe’s cellar, the basement was where he showed movies—

We had a very nice time, and I remember I really liked her. She was very attractive. She had a nice personality. She was just a very nice young lady. I had no inkling at that time, for whatever reason, that he was interested in marrying her or going to marry her. So I don’t know what year that was or when that took place, but that was the first time I met her.

Was she somebody who you would later see as comfortable with the political life? We’ve heard there was a shyness about her.

I think that’s probably, I would guess, exaggerated. We did do some other things together later on. When they got married in ’58, I was an usher. Later on, I would see them from time to time and particularly in the spring of 1959, so they weren’t married very long, now that I think of it.

But in the spring of ’59, Ted called me, wanted to go spring skiing. My wife, Betty, wanted no part of skiing. So she was going to go to South Bend to bring our daughter, Terry, who was then only six months old, to South Bend to visit the grandparents. So I decided I would go spring skiing with Ted. Now, there is talk—JFK has already announced, I believe, that he’s going to run for President—so there is talk about what are family members going to do and things of that nature. He may not have actually announced until the following January.

Yes, I think that’s right.

But the fact is, there was very clear indication that he was going to run for President, and we knew that in the 1958 campaign. We haven’t talked about the ’52 or ’58 campaign yet, but we’re talking about Joan, and this fits in with the Joan thing. But anyway, we did go spring skiing. A friend of his was there from Hawaii—John—the name will come to me. I can’t think of his name right now, but he was from Hawaii—great friend of Ted’s, went to Harvard with him. He was up there spring skiing with him and Joan.

I’ve got some beautiful pictures, as a matter of fact, of Joan and me and Ted at that time that I saw the other day just by chance. She was gorgeous. She was absolutely beautiful, but so were we. I’m not talking that much about myself, but Ted was obviously a very handsome fellow at that time, because we all had youth. And Joe Kennedy said to me once when I was 18, I forget what it was in relationship to, “Joey, never forget one thing. You’ve got youth. That’s the most important thing.” Now that I’m 75, I know how right he is.

That was the group, John and Ted and I.

It wasn’t John Tunney, was it?

No, his name was Gomens. I never saw John Tunney because he was basically in California and I was around Boston, and Cape Cod.

So we skied for three or four days, and we had a great time skiing. I got to see Joan. He had me racing Joan down the hill one time. I was an intermediate skier because I didn’t go that often. I went to Notre Dame and I was in South Bend, Indiana, so I wasn’t in a school like Harvard or the University of New Hampshire or someplace where you skied in the winter, although I did do some skiing in Michigan while I was at Notre Dame at a ski area called Caberfae. But we had a lot of fun. It was a terrific trip. I remember we ran into a young lady there. She was from Cooperstown, New York. I remember that simply because of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The Hall of Fame.

Her name was Ann Ferebee, and she skied with us and was kind of John’s date. She skied with us for the three or four days we were there. As a group we just had a wonderful time. I remember we drove down to another ski area south of that ski area, which had just opened up at that time. It’s rather famous now but they had just opened it up. They had a terrific restaurant down there run by an Italian, and we went down there. I remember they had one run that was called a “glade” at that particular ski area. It was all trees. You had to duck and bob and weave through all these trees. I never forgot it because it was so dangerous. I think I fell five times just to avoid hitting the trees. But anyway, I’d just say that that was a nice trip. Joan and I had a great time. We had a great rapport.

Later, Ted and I started to meet, I remember, in the fall. After that, he and I flew to Maine to meet with the Maine delegation that were going to be at the convention. A Jewish fellow who was the Senator from Connecticut—

Abe [Abraham] Ribicoff?

Yes, Abe Ribicoff was at the convention for the Maine delegation, and we talked and I got very friendly with Senator Ribicoff at that time. It became important later because at the convention my responsibility was the state of Alaska. And they voted very early at the convention, so they were very critical to what they were going to do. So Abe Ribicoff and I did a lot of talking on the convention floor as to what Alaska was going to do. It was a split delegation, as I remember.

Anyway, now we’re getting more and more into the politics of the Presidency. Then Ted calls me in early February of 1960 and says that he wants to meet me to go skiing. It’s in the middle of the week, I remember. We go up to Stowe, Vermont. He flies in and I drive up there. We meet and talk, and he’s going to go directly from there to Wisconsin to campaign in the Wisconsin primary. So he’s talking to me about that. He wants me to come. “It would be good, Joey. Come out for three weeks in the campaign in Wisconsin.” So we were talking about that. We were talking about West Virginia, the primary after that. He wanted me to go to that. I’m all excited now, keyed up, going to Wisconsin, doing the campaign things.

I remember it was February, in the middle of the winter in the middle of the week. So we were staying at the lodge in Stowe, and there weren’t many people there. We were sitting at the dining room table the first night together, eating and talking. We always skied early in the morning. We went up with what they called the “milk run,” with the milk cans in the morning. They sent the milk cans up at 7:30 to the lodge at the top of the mountain so they would have milk and things for the food to feed the skiers. So we would go on that first run. The good thing about it was that if it had snowed the night before, you got all that nice powder to ski on. But very few people would be up there that hour. So you could ski up and down. We’d ski up and down the mountain four or five times because there were no lines, and we’d ski until 9 o’clock. And then we’d come off the mountain and eat our breakfast and beat everybody and get five or six runs in before anybody else did.

So that’s what we were planning on doing, and we were talking about it. All of a sudden, this very pretty girl comes in and sits down at a table by herself. Ted says, “Oh God, that’s Piedie Gimbel.” So I said, “Who’s Piedie Gimbel?” He tells me, “The Gimbel’s store in New York. And she’s part of the Gimbel family, and she’s married to what-cha-call-it Gimbel, but they’re in a really tough divorce, Joe. Oh boy, this is really a bad divorce.” So I said, “Oh, really?” He said, “Yes, oh yes.” Anyway, she gets up and comes over and sits down at the table. He’s saying to himself, “Oh, my goodness. Her sitting at this table isn’t that good.” He doesn’t say it loud, but he says it before she sits down. He didn’t want to get in the middle of Piedie’s divorce situation.

For the next three days, despite all that, she skis with us. The next morning, we’re going to go up at 7:30—she’s there at 7:30. Up we go. We ski with her all morning. Off the mountain we come, have breakfast. So now Piedie Gimbel has become part of our entourage, so to speak. He’s sweating bullets over it, and he goes, “I don’t care. Nobody knows my name from anything anyway.” I’m just saying, “What difference does it make to me?” So we skied for two or three days with her, and then we went to Wisconsin. So that was the beginning of the campaign. He had gotten me up there to ski with him. Not only because he wanted a companion to ski, but he wanted to talk to me about going into the campaign and working for the rest of the year on Jack Kennedy’s campaign.

There’s a sort of funny ending story to this and that is, he took a cab to Burlington to take his plane back to Washington, D.C. Piedie Gimbel says to me just as he’s leaving, “Where are you going?” I said, “I’m going back. I live in Boston. I’m going back to Boston.” She said, “Ted said that you’d give me a ride back to Boston.” I’m not really thinking about it much, but I said, “Okay, fine. Sure, I can do that. As soon as he leaves, we’re going. Let’s pack our car and go. Have your stuff out here. We’ll go.” She was very nice, very attractive. I had no feeling except good friendship about it because she was a lot of fun.

But what I didn’t know was, we start down to Boston about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and a blizzard starts. She was staying with a friend in the north end of Boston, which would be a four hour trip, and it took me ten hours to go from Stowe, Vermont, to get her to the north end of Boston. I practically, I remember, kicked her out of the car. I was so glad to get her out of the car and into that apartment house, because during that ten hours, I spun around four or five times, and I had visions of this great automobile accident, ending up in the hospital, front page in the Boston Herald with Piedie Gimbel and Joe Gargan—who nobody knew from that pitcher of water—but I’d be this second man in the whole picture. I had all these visions of disaster.

Anyway, a couple of days later, I flew to Wisconsin. I worked three weeks in Wisconsin, and I worked a lot with Ted Kennedy in Wisconsin. He was Ted Kennedy, of course, at that time; he was not Senator Kennedy. We took trips together; we campaigned together. I remember being in—and I really saw the price of campaigning one of those particular days.

We went to Madison, Wisconsin, and at 4:30 in the morning we’re out in front of the Oscar Meyer plant, the meat packing plant. And Jack Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, is with us and we’ve got literature, Ted and I. We’ve got these blue suits on and ties and our little black shoes like I have on today, and there’s snow on the ground and it’s 14 below zero, and we’re out there with overcoats on. Jack has taken his overcoat off so he can shake hands with the people, Senator John F. Kennedy, and he’s shaking hands with these fellows coming out of work at 4:30, that shift. The shift could have changed at 5:00, but I remember being there at 4:30, and I remember it being 14 below zero.

Then there were people coming to work. So we were getting them both ways. I was getting the people coming to work, Ted was getting the people getting out of work off that shift, and Jack was shaking hands. And I’m saying, “Meet Senator Kennedy, running for President. Meet Senator Kennedy.” And I’m handing them this literature. Anyway, after an hour of this, I’m looking at Jack Kennedy’s hand, which is raw, absolutely raw. The skin is falling off because it’s so cold. And he’s shaking hands with these people and, of course, he’s shaking so many hands in that cold that it’s practically taking the skin off his hand. I’m shivering and I’ve got my overcoat on. I never forgot that day.

But we had different days like that of campaigning. In Wisconsin I was mostly in the office. I did a few things out in the field like that. They had an advance man basically working in Wisconsin named Jerry Bruno, who later became famous—an advance man—because that was his state. He was a union organizer. He had been a political person there before. So he knew where to go, what the plant gates were, what the best places for crowds were, all that kind of thing. He was the principal advance man there. Later, Jerry Bruno and I worked in West Virginia together as advance men. We had John Treanor, who was from Boston, who would set up the schedule for Senator Kennedy in West Virginia, and then Jerry Bruno and I would follow him up and do the publicity and public relations and everything in West Virginia. But Jerry Bruno was the main advance man in Wisconsin. I was working in the headquarters with Arthur Garrity, who later became U.S. Attorney.

Later became a judge, right?

It was the first time I met Sandy Vanocur. Yes, he did become a judge and got into the very controversial bussing situation, and I was a U.S. Attorney. I was First Assistant United States Attorney under Arthur Garrity. Anyway, I met Sandy Vanocur for the first time there. He came in and met us. Also, the fellow who later became editor of the Washington Post was out there as a sort of—

Ben Bradlee?

Yes, Ben Bradlee was basically kind of a young reporter at that time. So he came in and talked to us. Sandy Vanocur talked to me two or three different times. So I got to know those people. Of course, we carried Wisconsin, I think two-to-one, which was supposed to be a big victory because Wisconsin was next door to Minnesota, Hubert Humphrey’s hometown, and Humphrey should have done better.

So, all of a sudden, now the press is saying, “Oh well, there’s so many Catholics in Wisconsin. That’s why Kennedy did well. Now he’s going into West Virginia. West Virginia is only 4% catholic. Let’s see how he does in West Virginia.” So now they began to write all this “Catholic” stuff. Can a Catholic be elected? Can he be elected in West Virginia? This will be the big test, all this kind of stuff.

Right.

So we moved from Wisconsin to West Virginia. Again, I saw Ted there from time to time, but now he’s sort of moving out to be more of a campaigner than an organizer. I’m moving out to be more a campaigner and an advance man. This is the beginning of my real advance man situation with Jerry Bruno. As I say, John Treanor is setting the schedule and then giving it back to us, and then we’d go out with this big sound truck. It looked like one of your SUVs today that you’d have. We’d have a set of horns on the top to broadcast with, and the back would be full of literature to give out. We were going around doing the thing.

I remember we were in a town called Logan, West Virginia, and Jerry Bruno and I took a poll in Logan. We were only there about three days. He pretended he was from the Milwaukee Journal or something, and I said I was from the Boston Globe. So he took a poll and I took a poll in Logan, and we were running well behind Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia. We got a little panicky over it. We said, “Holy Toledo, this isn’t very good.”

So we began to do the campaigning. John was setting up the schedules, and we would go around and we’d announce, “See, hear, Senator John F. Kennedy, 10 o’clock, the courthouse square.” I think we were in there in March, so March 15th, whatever the date was. John would set the dates. Then we’d go over the things, and we’d make these announcements, and we’d ask people to take our literature, bumper stickers, little things like that. We were putting up little folders and stuff we had on his career, his military career. We had this Reader’s Digest story that told about his heroic rescue, which was very effective in West Virginia.

I can imagine.

The thing that the press didn’t know, and people didn’t know, was that per capita in West Virginia there were more men who served in the service than any other state in the Union, and that’s how the thing turned around. The press made a huge mistake because they kept talking this “Catholic” business. One thing that the West Virginians had, they were eating powdered eggs, powdered milk. They were in really tough shape, some of those poor miners in West Virginia. Like in Cabin Creek, a couple of years before we got there, I think they had 1,500 miners working. When we were there, there were like 52 because they had mechanized the mines.

In West Virginia, you don’t go down in a mineshaft 200 feet and then dig. In West Virginia, you dig out of a vein right from the side of a mountain, so the vein may be only twelve inches thick. So they’d go in on sleds—awful. God it was awful. No wonder they went in the service. To spend your life on these sleds going in like this on your belly and digging all day and then sending the coal out was just—you had to have more than courage. It was awful. And they lived in these mill towns, coal-mining towns. Everybody shopped at the same store. They lived in these little houses. It was tough living.

We would announce when people were coming, and we’d give what was called “one-sheets.” There were sheets as big as that mirror, three feet by six feet, and they had John F. Kennedy’s picture on them—he was running for President, etc. So we were putting those up. I remember we came into a little town called Hurricane, West Virginia. We were going to have a rally in front of the courthouse in this town; John Treanor had set this stop up, and it was going to be at 10 o’clock in the morning. And I said to a couple of the young ladies behind the counter in the clerk’s office, “Will one or two of you young ladies help us out? We’d like you to wear a John F. Kennedy straw hat and put a bumper sticker across your chest, and we have this little apron you can wear that says ‘John F. Kennedy’ on it.” You know, they looked at us with a cold stare, and they didn’t even react. They didn’t even answer us one way or another. And they had Humphrey stuff spread all over the courthouse.

We had to go to see the television station. We had to go to different places—the news rooms of the newspapers—to put this thing in the paper so somebody would know he was coming. So I finally said to Jerry, “The hell with it. Let’s tear all the Humphrey stuff down—put our stuff up.” So we went through the whole courthouse and tore the Humphrey stuff down and put our one-sheets up. We had all this masking tape, and we were putting all Jack Kennedy’s stuff up in the courthouse and putting the masking tape up and everything else. They were all looking out of the clerk’s office. I could see the girls all peeking down the hall, watching all this going on. So then I said to Jerry, “Let’s give it one more try.”

So I went back in and I said, “Will you help us? Will anybody here help us?” Two girls came forward and said, “We’ll help.” The day he came there we had a dozen girls, but it was tough sledding. I remember going into one town, and we were in this convertible. We often had guys, gentlemen, I should say, from West Virginia—or, as Frank Leahy, the great coach at Notre Dame, would say, “Lads.” We often had a “lad” from West Virginia driving the cars because they knew the directions. They knew where to go.

We came into this town; I’m sitting in the front seat and this fellow is driving. I think it may have been in Cabin Creek, and this fellow from West Virginia is driving a convertible. It’s a white convertible; it’s a rental car. We’ve got John F. Kennedy stuff all stuck to the side of the car with masking tape. And so as we had been driving down the street, we saw these coal miners. You couldn’t miss them because they had these helmets on with the lights on them.

So I said, “It would be good if we could get a couple of those guys to take some of our stuff,” to this fellow. So what happens but this big coal miner with a couple of other coal miners standing beside us comes up to the side of the car, and he says to me, “Let me have some of those Kennedy bumper stickers.” So I handed him the Kennedy bumper stickers, and he says, “Good. I just wanted to wipe my ass with these.”

So we had a whole bag of Kennedy pins in the front seat of the car, and this guy who’s driving the car, from West Virginia, says, “You want to wipe your ass with something? Here.” He handed him a handful of these pins; they had these big needle pins on them. “Wipe your ass with these, boy!” Anyway, we drove down the street. We went to see the TV station and the radio stations and everything and newspapers and gave out all our information, when we were coming and all that kind of stuff. We came back and, by God, this coal miner came out again on the street, and he said, “Listen. This time I mean it. Let me have some of those bumper stickers. I like your style, boy,” to the guy driving the car. “I like your style,” he says. “I want to help this guy Kennedy. Give me those things.”

That first week it was really tough. But Jerry Bruno and I were in the field all the time, every day. We were the ones seeing people. We were visiting—as the expression goes in the famous poem of Paul Revere—we were “visiting every Middlesex village and town,” so we knew what was going on; we had a feel for things. We could see, in the middle of that third week, that people were saying to us, “We’ll take that literature. Yes, give us some of those. You can put this sign here.” They were turning us down before, but now they’re saying, “Give us a couple of those one-sheets. You can put it up in the store window. Let me have some bumper stickers. We’ll give it out to some people.” So I’m saying to Jerry Bruno, “What’s going on here?” because all of a sudden, we’re getting some support and some help.

I’m saying to myself, I think this thing may be turning around. Well, what was happening is the veterans were saying to us, “We’ll take some of that stuff. Nobody is going to tell me that I can’t vote for a veteran with that kind of a record just because he’s a Catholic. I’m voting for Kennedy.” So we were picking this stuff up all the time. We could tell in the field—nobody else could tell—that we were beginning to turn the thing around because we were out there. We were telling them in the headquarters that I think we’re going to win this thing. They’re saying, “Oh no, Christmas! Don’t tell us! It can’t be going that well.” Even the candidate, President Kennedy, then Senator Kennedy, was somewhat pessimistic. That kind of thing continued, and it seemed to get better and better.

Then I think the television show that nobody ever really got a tape on, which was a great shame, was the television show that he did shortly before election day when he had his sisters on with him, and it was a phone call thing. He gave a talk first, a little speech, and then the sisters were all sitting around this table answering telephone calls. People would come in with a question. I was sitting that afternoon, before he did that television show, with Ted Sorensen and some of the other speechwriters, and Richard Goodwin was there. And Kennedy’s saying to them, “Come on, come on, you’ve got to come up with something. What am I going to say tonight? What am I going to speak about?” They never really did come up with anything that he liked.

Then, all of a sudden, he said, “I know what I’ll talk about. I’m going to talk about my brother Joe. You know, the fellow who died with Joe was from West Virginia—the fellow who was in the plane.” I think his name was Wilford John Willy. Yes, his name was Willy, and he was from West Virginia. What happened is, Jack Kennedy got on the television that night, Senator Kennedy, and he said, basically, “I took the same oath of office as an ensign in the Navy, as a Congressman in the Congress, as a Senator in the Senate, as I will take as President of the United States.” He talked a little bit about the fact that he was a Catholic, and that he hoped that nobody in West Virginia would vote against him as a Catholic, but would look at his record as an ensign in the Navy, as a Congressman in the Congress, and as a Senator in the Senate.

He said, “You know, my brother Joe died because his airplane was blown up in World War II. In the co-pilot’s seat, with my brother Joe, was a young man from West Virginia.” He said, “You know, as they were flying that airplane shortly before they died, neither one of them ever asked each other whether or not they were Catholic or Protestant. I’m hopeful that when you go to the polls to vote this Tuesday that you will not ask the question either—whether or not I am a Catholic—but vote for me because of my record in the Congress and in the Senate of the United States.” Then they opened the thing for phone calls. I think that talk was extremely effective.

What, of course, happened is we carried West Virginia two-to-one. The day before, or that night, Kenny O’Donnell asked me to drive Senator Kennedy the morning of the election. He had to take the plane back, the Caroline, back to Washington, D.C. in order to vote on a coal bill. So he’s going back and so he would not be there Election Day. But Kenny said, “Joey, take him to a few plant gates to shake hands with people before you put him on the plane.” So the next morning he came down, we got out, we got in the car, and I drove him around Charleston, West Virginia, to a few plant gates.

What was amazing was, as he was shaking hands, all of these people were saying, “I just voted for you!” The girls were up in the windows, I remember, hanging out the windows at one of these factories that we were visiting. They were all waving at him and saying, “We voted for you!” Of course, he gets in the car then, and I’m driving him to the airport, and he’s saying to me, “I can’t believe that those people are going to vote for me. I can’t believe we’re going to win this thing. Did you hear them, Joey?”

I said, “I know it, Jack. I know it.” I told him the story that we had been hearing it out on the trail, Jerry Bruno and I. But anyway, he goes back. And then Kenny O’Donnell said—when it was clear we had won two-to-one, I think by 9 o’clock that night—we knew we had murdered Humphrey in West Virginia. In fact, Humphrey came to the little headquarters where some of us used to work in Charleston. We used to play hearts there at night all the time. Anyway, Humphrey came and waited there until Jack came to the headquarters because he wanted to congratulate him. Kenny says, “You drove him in the campaign, Joey. Go out to the airport and meet him.”

He was coming in because one of the famous reporters at that time on television who has faded out long ago, but he was important at that time—he’d be like a Walter Cronkite, but he was not Walter Cronkite—wanted to see him, have Kennedy come right on at 11 o’clock so they’d get him nationally all over the country. So I met him at the airport. Senator Kennedy lands about a quarter of 11, so we’ve really got to hustle to get to this TV station.

He gets into the car; he’s in the passenger seat; I’m driving. His campaign manager from West Virginia is sitting in the back seat, and I take off. I don’t know if you’ve ever been at the Charles Town airport, but it’s on top of a mountain. What they did is they cut the top off a mountain, and you go down like this, and the road is very circular and fairly dangerous. So I’m going down that mountain road, 50-60, and the rocks are spilling off and falling down the cliff on the side of the road. All of a sudden, Jack Kennedy starts whacking me on the leg, and he said, “Joey, Joey, slow down. I think we’re going to win this thing. I think we’re going to win the Presidency. Let’s not die on this road tonight. Let’s get to the TV station, but let’s not die on this road.”

So we did get to the station. As a matter of fact, at one point, I made a wrong turn, and I’m driving down the wrong way on a one-way street for about four blocks, and these cars are all going in all kinds of directions, and the guy from West Virginia in the back seat lies down on the floor of the car in the back seat. But we did get to the TV station, and he made the interview to accept the fact that he had won West Virginia.

There is a story I forgot to tell you about West Virginia that sometimes people who know me ask me to tell, which I think is a cute story. We’re driving the truck that I described to you up and down these hollers of West Virginia and all these hills and everything else. And this particular day we’re traveling, and Jerry Bruno is in the car next to me, and we’re setting up a trip from Huntington, West Virginia. We’re going to go from Charles Town to Huntington, down along the Kentucky border, and then up to Logan, and back to Charles Town.

The car, this sort of SUV we have, black panel truck it was, with the horns on the top, keeps boiling over. This is fairly early in the campaign. So we’re still rather nervous because we’re in West Virginia, which is 4% Catholic. We’re supporting John F. Kennedy, who is clearly Catholic and the Catholic candidate for President. We know as well that the 4% of the Catholics mostly live in Wheeling, West Virginia, where the University of West Virginia is—which happens to be a catholic Jesuit university, which most people wouldn’t know. But anyway, we’re very nervous; the thing keeps boiling over.

I say to Jerry Bruno, “We just have to stop. We’ve got to go find water.” We see this farm and Jerry says, “God, we can’t go in there, Joe.” He’s figuring someone will come out with a shotgun and fire at us. So we drive in, and I see a well there with a big bucket next to it hanging off the side of the well. So I pull right up to it because now we’re steaming, and I open the hood of the truck. I pull the hood up. I’ve got to wait for a couple of minutes until the steam quiets down. While we’re doing that, out of the house comes this very pretty girl, about 16 or 17 years old, and she looks just like Daisy Mae out of the comic strip.

She comes over to us and talks to us, and I said, “I just want to have some water.” Now, we’re kind of nervous when she comes out because we’re saying to ourselves, is her father coming out with a shotgun right behind her? So nobody else came out of the house. Eventually, I was pouring the water into the truck. I get it filled; we top it off. Now Jerry Bruno is whispering to me, and he says, “Joe, remember, you’re the candidate’s cousin.” I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that. Why?” He said, “The girl’s in the truck.” I said, “What?” He said, “The girl’s in the truck.”

So now I peek around the hood, and I can see sitting in the middle of the truck is this young lady—as I say, dressed like Daisy Mae with shorts and this kind of shirt on, blouse on, and no shoes. She’s sitting in the middle of the truck. So I put the hood down. I don’t know what the devil I’m going to do. So I put the hood down, I hang the bucket up, and I go around and I say, “Okay, we’ve got to leave now. We’ve got to go. Thank you very much for the water.”

She said, “I’m going with you.” I said, “You can’t go with us.” She said, “I don’t want to stay here. This is terrible living like this. I want to go with you. I’ll go anyplace you’re going, do anything you want to do, but I don’t want to stay here any longer.” I said, “Look, you just have to get out of the truck. I can’t possibly take you in this truck. My boss will fire me. I’ll lose my job.” So she said, “No, please, please, just take me wherever you’re going.”

So I said, “Suppose I bring Senator John F. Kennedy to you. Suppose I bring him to visit you. Will you get out of the truck?” And she said, “You’ll bring John F. Kennedy to me?” And I said, “Yes, I’ll have him come and visit you.” So she starts to get out of the truck. She said, “When will you be here?” I said, “Well, is there a school right here? What town is this?” She says—imagine the name—she says, “Crum, West Virginia.” I said, “Really? Is there a little school here?” She said, “Yes, it’s right down the foot of the holler; there’s a school.”

I said, “Good. You know what I’ll do? I’m going right down to that school now, I’m going to talk to the principal, and I’m going to tell him that we’re going to drive right through here, and we’ll stop at that school and you’ll see. I’ll introduce you to John F. Kennedy. I promise you that.” So anyway, Jerry Bruno is now shaking his head saying, “Oh God.”

So we go down. I talk to the principal of the school. It’s a nice school, a nice-sized school. I said, “We’re going to come through here at 10:30 in the morning. Have all the children out on the street. It will make a wonderful stop. Senator Kennedy will love to see you all. Notify everybody in the area, get as many coal miners out as you can, and have them out here because he loves to meet coal miners. It will make a great picture for the papers, he and the coal miners.” So now I’m getting into it. I’m really building the thing up.

So anyway, we get that all set up and we leave. She knows exactly where we’re going to be. The whole thing is great. So I go back to Charles Town, West Virginia. Jerry and I do a couple of more trips. One day, about five days later, Pierre Salinger comes down and he says to me, “Your cousin wants to see you upstairs.” That always meant the candidate, Senator John F. Kennedy, wants to see me. “Jack wants to see you upstairs.” So I go upstairs. “Damn you, Gargan! I’ve told you, you never put any time for lunch on these schedules. Now you’ve put in an extra stop—Crum, West Virginia. Who told you you could put Crum, West Virginia, in?” I said, “Jack, it’s going to be terrific. You wouldn’t believe it. We’re going to have all kinds of coal miners out there. We’re going to have all these schoolchildren. What a stop. It’s going to be a great stop. It will make every paper in the country.” So anyway, he loved that—every paper. Bang, bang. I said, “It will be great—the picture, you and the coal miners, them with their hats on—it will be terrific.”

“You son-of-a-gun, Gargan. I want you to know, stop cutting out my lunch hour. You put too much on these schedules.” So I said, “Okay, all right. Okay, Jack.” I go downstairs and I tell Jerry Bruno the story, and he says, “Oh God, you’re going to learn your lesson one of these days.” So anyway, we can’t imagine what’s going to happen. We do the trip; we go to Huntington, West Virginia, which is great. We make a couple of more stops, which are great. Now we’re coming down the road towards Crum, West Virginia.

In those days, because it was the beginning of the campaign, we only traveled with the lead car, which is the car he was in, and one bus, that’s all. The press bus, in those days, would have 25 or 30 people. Sometimes it would be full, because now this campaign is really getting the press excited because it’s Kennedy, Humphrey. And the press are convinced that because he’s a Catholic, he’s going to take a beating in West Virginia. So now they’re watching it; they want to be a part of it. So down the road we come, and I see in front of us this huge crowd covering the road. I can even see these coal miners standing there because you can see those hats; you can’t see the lights, but you can see those hats they have on their heads.

So he says to the driver—we’ve got a guy driving, from West Virginia. The Senator’s in the passenger seat where he always liked to ride, and I’m in the back seat. He says to the driver, “Stop, stop, stop. God, look at that crowd! I want to walk down there. I want to walk down there.” So he gets out and I get out, and I start moving ahead of him because I can’t believe it myself. I can’t believe we’ve got this great-looking crowd and these children, all this kind of stuff. Anyway, out of the crowd, all of a sudden, comes Daisy Mae, running down the road in the same pair of shorts, white shirt, no shoes. She comes thundering down toward me. “You did it! You did it! You brought him here! You did it!” She leaps up in the air, grabs me, and wraps her legs around me. I can hear Senator Kennedy saying, “You son-of-a-gun, Joey. Now I know what we’re doing in Crum, West Virginia! Some guys are getting paid for this campaign, and some guys should be paying me. You’re one of the guys who should be paying me to be in this campaign.” But he did love it because the next day on the front page of the New York Times was the lead story—Crum, West Virginia—and it had this picture of him on the front page with all these coal miners. So it worked out really well.

Wonderful story.

Great.

But he never forgot that. “What ever happened to that girl in West Virginia?”

Anyway, the other story, which again shows you the Catholic thing, which was difficult. There was a fellow, I can’t remember his name, but he worked for the Baltimore Sun; I remember that well. His name just escapes me now, but it was one of the days that I did give Senator Kennedy lunch. It was on the schedule. I always gave him lunch, but we were always rushing, and he wasn’t crazy about that at all. He liked to have a little time to rest and a little time to just settle his stomach.

But anyway, we had stopped in this little restaurant. Basically, it had a few tables. Then it had this sort of long bar, luncheon bar, where you sat up on a stool. He was—that fellow from the Baltimore Sun, his name was on the tip of my tongue; it escapes me. But anyway, we were sitting there, and I had ordered a meal that he was going to have. It was some kind of soup, which he could eat, and some kind of light sandwich. This was a Friday. It was some kind of a lunch sandwich that he could eat that I made sure was not—that he didn’t get a ham sandwich or something else. I was watching him like a hawk.

Anyway, he’s talking to this fellow from the Baltimore Sun, who keeps talking to him, keeps talking to him. I’m watching the two of them because the fellow from the Baltimore Sun keeps pushing his sandwich—which is a ham sandwich—over towards Senator Kennedy, and he keeps pushing it over to him.

On purpose?

Of course, yes, it was on purpose. He was deliberately pushing the ham sandwich towards him. I’m watching him eat, because Jack always ate—whether it was at home, in Cape Cod, or on the road on the campaign—food wasn’t that interesting to him, basically, because he did have, from time to time, some stomach discomfort. So it wasn’t that interesting to him, and he’d often pick at it. So he’s picking at the soup. It would have been some kind of soup he could have eaten that day. Maybe it was pea soup or something he could eat on a Friday.

But anyway, I’m watching the sandwich, whatever it was. He’s kind of picking at the sandwich. He’d often take a sandwich and tear off a bite and eat the sandwich that way. So, all of a sudden, we’ve got to go. We’ve got a stop coming up. I said, “Okay, all the press, into your bus. The bus is leaving for the press. Get into the bus. We’ve got to go, Jack, we’ve got to go right now. Let’s go. Let’s get moving.” He turns to this guy from the Baltimore Sun, and he says, “You son-of-a-bitch. I watched you push that ham sandwich in my face. Don’t ever pull a stunt like that again, you understand? Don’t you ever do that again.” And he was a lead reporter for the Baltimore Sun. I never forgot that either.

Amazing.

I never forgot that incident.

You know, I think this might be a good place to stop because we’re sort of on the edge—I’ve got to get some lunch.

It is five minutes to one. I said to you on the phone, I can’t believe we can talk for four hours.

But in some ways, it’s a good natural break because when we do the next round with you, whenever we set that date up, we can start off with Ted’s ’62 campaign, because we’re right on the edge of that. So, in some ways, this is a good breaking point.

That’s fine. As I said, I was taught by the Jesuits. I follow the rules.

This has been really terrific today.

This has been wonderful, scheduling the interview with you. You were so cooperative. Thank you.

It doesn’t always happen. We’re very grateful.

I feel very strongly about it. I’m very grateful is what I am, to my Aunt Rose and Uncle Joe for the opportunities they gave me—and to Ted, which I’ll talk about when we’re doing the finish of the interview. The wonderful relationship we had, which I’m terribly grateful for. For every single thing, for every opportunity that they wanted to give him, and did give him, he always said, “I want Joey to go with me.” So that was the reason for the trip in 1950 to Europe. He always included me; I was always included in.

It’s one of the basic reasons I worked so hard in the campaigns. My wife always said, “Every time the fire bell rings, you go to a campaign.” There was some truth in that. But, at the same time, I loved Jack very much. We were very close, and I did want to work in the campaign, but I felt enormous gratitude as well. I don’t think there’s enough gratitude in this world today. I’m not criticizing anybody, but particularly we as Americans, as Joe Kennedy said so often—this isn’t original to me—but to be an American is such an honor and opportunity. We do owe it back for what we’ve got.

Have you ever had a chance to express your gratitude to Senator Kennedy?

Yes, I think that I have, perhaps on several different occasions. But it’s interesting you should ask that question, because I’m not getting younger and neither is he. And lately, a couple of times, it came into my mind that I want to make sure that I do that and make it very clear. I have thought of that recently quite a bit.

You’ve been very nice too, thank you. You’re both so highly qualified. I’m honored to have the opportunity to do it.

We’re thrilled.

[END INTERVIEW]