Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy

by Kenneth P. O'Donnell, David Powers, Joseph McCarthy

Overview

This classic New York Times bestseller is an illuminating portrait of JFK—from his thrilling rise to his tragic fall—by two of the men who knew him best.

As a politician, John Fitzgerald Kennedy crafted a persona that fascinated and inspired millions—and left an outsize legacy in the wake of his murder on November 22, 1963. But only a select few were privy to the complicated man behind the Camelot image.
 
Two such confidants were Kenneth P. O’Donnell, Kennedy’s top political aide, and David F. Powers, a special assistant in the White House. They were among the president’s closest friends, part of an exclusive inner circle that came to be known as the “Irish Mafia.” In Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, O’Donnell and Powers share memories of Kennedy, his extraordinary political career, and his iconic family—memories that could come only from intimate access to the man himself.
 
As they recount the full scope of Kennedy’s journey—from his charismatic first campaign for Congress to his rapid rise to national standing, culminating on that haunting day in Dallas—O’Donnell and Powers lay bare the inner workings of a leader who is cherished and mourned to this day, in a memoir that spent over five months on the New York Times bestseller list.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316716253
Publisher:	Little, Brown & Company
Publication date:	09/01/1983
Edition description:	1st ed.
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 1.50(h) x 9.50(d)

About the Author

Kenneth P. O’Donnell(1924–1977)was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in March 1924, and was the founding member of what the press dubbed the “Boston Irish Mafia,” which also included David F. Powers and Larry O’Brien. His father was the famed Holy Cross football coach Cleo O’Donnell. Kenneth O’Donnell became a bombardier pilot, a war hero, and a graduate of Harvard University, where he played football with Robert F. Kennedy. He was later inducted into Harvard’s football hall of fame, and many of his records remain unbroken to this day.
O’Donnell met John F. Kennedy in 1946, and through his relationship with Bobby Kennedy, became John Kennedy’s top political aide from that point forward. During the 1960 political campaign, he worked hand in glove with Jack and Robert Kennedy as they developed the “Kennedy machine” and drove it to victory.

Once in the White House, John Kennedy named O’Donnell special assistant and appointment secretary; nobody got to see Jack Kennedy without first going through O’Donnell. He was with Kennedy that fateful afternoon in Dallas, Texas, in 1963.

After Kennedy’s death, O’Donnell stayed on for one year in the same role with then-president Lyndon Johnson. He also became executive director of the Democratic National Committee and is credited with helping to create the modern DNC. He later left Washington to return to Boston, where he ran for governor in 1966, losing in a very tight race. Later, as a political consultant, he worked with senators Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. He remained close to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis throughout his life, helping her to establish the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. He also remained a close friend and advisor to Bobby Kennedy. O’Donnell collaborated with Dave Powers on the now-classic memoir Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye. O’Donnell was later made famous in the film Thirteen Days, in which his relationship with Jack and Bobby Kennedy is accurately portrayed by Kevin Costner. O’Donnell died in September 1977 at the age of fifty-three.

David F. Powers (1912–1998) was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in April 1912. He is best remembered as a congenial, spirited, funny Boston Irishman who, along with Kenneth O’Donnell and the late Larry O’Brien, made up the original “Boston Irish Mafia.” He also happened to be one of President John F. Kennedy’s best friends. The two met in the winter of 1946, when Kennedy, then a young and largely unknown Congressional candidate, famously climbed the stairs of Powers’s triple-decker house in Charlestown and asked for his help. The two formed an immediate bond. Powers was likely at Jack Kennedy’s side from that night until the fateful afternoon in Dallas in November 1963. He had no particular duties with Kennedy, but Kennedy always knew that he had his back. In the White House, Powers was named special assistant to the president, and he served to provide a much-needed humorous lift during some of the president’s most difficult days. After Kennedy’s death, Powers remained close with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and their children. From 1964 forward, he worked hand in glove with Mrs. Onassis to establish the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and rightly went on to become its first curator. He and Kenneth O’Donnell penned the book Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, which has become a classic. Powers died in 1998 at the age of eighty-five.

Read an Excerpt

Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye

Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy

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By Kenneth P. O'Donnell, David F. Powers

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1972 Kenneth P. O'Donnell and David F. Powers
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-3778-4

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CHAPTER 1

The End of the Beginning

Our memories of president John Fitzgerald Kennedy go back from Dallas over seventeen crowded years to the winter of 1946 in Boston, when he was a young war veteran getting into politics for the first time in a free-for-all fight for a vacant Congressional seat and liking the taste of it. But when Dave Powers and I think of John Kennedy now, we both remember him as he was on the Thursday morning of November 21, 1963, when he was leaving the White House to go to Texas. That day before he died was a good day, when he was looking forward eagerly to his best years. Everything seemed right for him, and for all of us. As he said at the time, quoting one of those obscure Victorian English poets only he seemed to know and remember, "Westward, look, the land is bright."

Later it was reported that President Kennedy was tired and irritated that day because Vice-President Lyndon Johnson had forced him, in a long and bitter argument, into making the trip to Texas against his will. With the 1964 election year coming up, the Democrats in Texas were split into two warring factions, with Governor John Connally's conservatives not speaking to Senator Ralph Yarborough's liberals, and Johnson, so the stories said, had insisted on the President going down there to patch things up. It appeared to Kennedy, one reporter wrote, that "Johnson ought to be able to resolve this petty dispute himself; the trip seemed to be an imposition."

That wasn't the trip we planned, nor was it the President Kennedy we saw boarding Air Force One that morning. "I feel great," he said to me. "My back feels better than it's felt in years." A new treatment of calisthenics had strengthened his back muscles, and he was able to play golf again for the first time since he crippled himself planting a ceremonial tree at Ottawa in the spring of 1961. Along with his good health, Dave and I never saw him in a happier mood.

His big worry of the previous two years, the threat of a nuclear war with Russia, was safely behind him. He was elated over the signing of the nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets a few weeks earlier, which he regarded as his greatest accomplishment. Now he was doing the thing he liked even better than being President, getting away from Washington to start his campaign for reelection in a dubious and important state, with twenty-five electoral votes, where he was sure he could win the people even though many of the bosses and most of the big money were against him. It was a tough political challenge that he relished with much more enjoyment than he found in his executive duties in the White House.

If the trip to Texas was not something special for the President, not just a tiresome feud-patching chore, he would not have made it the occasion of his wife's first appearance on a Presidential campaign tour, much to his delight and to the astonishment of all of us. I almost fell over when he told me Jackie was coming with us. I knew then how much winning Texas meant to him. He regarded the Connally-Yarborough battle as a minor annoyance that he could easily straighten out, as he soon did before he reached Dallas. He was thinking of a bigger thing, his own votes. That morning when he came aboard Air Force One, he tucked into the edge of the mirror in his dressing room a card with three figures that he would use to needle the Democratic leaders in Texas. The figures reminded him that in 1960 the Kennedy-Johnson margin in Texas over Nixon-Lodge was only 46,233 votes, but Johnson, also running alone in another slot on the ticket for U.S. Senator against Republican John G. Tower, had a plurality of 379,972, while Price Daniel, the Democratic candidate for governor in the same election, won by 1,024,-792. The President was going to do some sharp talking in Texas about the big difference between his own vote and those of the other Democratic candidates. He had asked Dave Powers to get him the figures the day before while they were swimming together in the White House pool. "Great man for the small details, always the perfectionist," Dave said when he showed me the figures that morning. Nobody had to force President Kennedy to go to Texas, least of all Lyndon Johnson; he could not have been held back from going there.

Texas and Florida were the two states where President Kennedy was planning to make his strongest effort in the 1964 campaign. He had campaigned in Florida the previous weekend. Johnson had not been closely involved in the planning of the coming campaign and suspected that Bobby Kennedy was engineering a move to dump him as the Vice-Presidential candidate in 1964 because of his connection with Bobby Baker, the Johnson protégé whose scandals case had just been revealed. Johnson was sure that Bobby Kennedy had been behind the exposure of Baker, a ridiculous assumption because a scandal of any kind in Washington reflecting on the Democrats was the last thing the Kennedys wanted. Furthermore, President Kennedy never had any thought of dumping Johnson. I was sitting with the President and Senator George Smathers on the way to Florida the Saturday before we went to Texas, when Smathers asked him if he was planning to get rid of Johnson because of the Baker case.

The President glanced at Smathers and said, "George, you must be the dumbest man in the world. If I drop Lyndon, it will make it look as if we have a really bad and serious scandal on our hands in the Bobby Baker case, which we haven't, and that will reflect on me. It will look as though I made a mistake picking Lyndon in 1960, and can you imagine the mess of trying to select somebody to replace him? Lyndon stays on the ticket next year."

Actually, Lyndon Johnson was not anxious for the President to go to Texas. He did not want the President to see for himself how little prestige and influence the Vice-President then had in his own home state. Since he had joined the New Frontier ticket, his fellow conservatives in Texas had turned against him. The more liberal Texas Democrats, such as Senator Yarborough, had always been against him because he was looked upon as a conservative. As Vice-President, he felt sidetracked and ignored, and sorely missed the patronage and the power he had enjoyed back in Texas when he was the majority leader in the Senate.

Johnson blamed his fallen prestige on Bobby Kennedy. He felt that Bobby had taken over his rightful position as the number two man in the government, which was true enough. The President himself sometimes pointed out with amusement that many of Bobby's friends in the administration, who were always trying to push Bobby into running the State Department as well as the Justice Department, looked upon his younger brother as the real number one man in the government. I remember how annoyed President Kennedy was one day when he went to a meeting in the White House with Bobby and several of his assistants from the Justice Department and found a television camera and sound-recording equipment in the room. It was to be a confidential and rather sensitive discussion on the timing of the administration's proposed civil rights bill. The President and the Vice-President, who was also present, and Larry O'Brien, our Congressional liaison assistant, and myself all felt that the civil rights legislative action should follow our new tax reduction bill for political reasons. The Justice Department wanted to push first on the civil rights bill. This was to be an argument on the question, with Bobby and his aides asking for civil rights action now and the President asking them to stall it for a while. Now we discovered that Bobby's press relations people in the Justice Department had given a television network permission to tape the whole discussion as a scene in a documentary news show on Bobby's role as a champion of civil rights.

To put it mildly, the President did not feel comfortable sparring with Bobby and his Justice Department assistants over civil rights before a television camera. I don't think Bobby realized that his press people had put the President in an embarrassing position. Bobby, whose reputedly ruthless heart was actually as soft as a marshmallow, never wanted to cause anybody any embarrassment, least of all his brother. Pierre Salinger, the President's press secretary, made the mistake of assuming that anything Bobby's people wanted to do on television would be all right with the President. Pierre, anguished and shaken, learned later from the President, much the toughest of the Kennedy brothers, that the next time such a situation happened, Pierre's head would be handed to him. I was asked to take a careful look at the tape of the meeting, and when I reported back to the President, he said to me, "How did I look?"

"You looked like a frightened antelope," I said. Arrangements were made with the network to kill the tape.

As Vice-President, Johnson did a slow burn for three years as he watched the constant buildup of Bobby Kennedy in the press and on television by Bobby's aides in the Justice Department and by his many friends in the Washington press corps. Bobby himself was not too conscious of the buildup that he was getting, and he was entirely unconscious of the irritation that it was giving to Johnson. Bobby never had any particular hard feeling against Johnson, never really thought much about the Vice-President one way or another. When Jack Kennedy offered the Vice-Presidential nomination to Lyndon at the 1960 convention, Bobby was surprised but not vehemently opposed to the idea—anything that Jack wanted to do was all right with Bobby. In fact, Bobby was shocked and confused by my angry outburst when I first heard that Johnson was being offered the number two spot on the ticket. One of my jobs was keeping the labor leaders happy and all of them were then against Johnson. I thought Stuart Symington would get us as many votes in the South, and the labor people liked Symington. I went straight to Jack Kennedy, as we called him before he became President but never afterwards, and told him behind a closed door in the bathroom of his hotel suite that I thought he was making the biggest mistake in his career. "You won the nomination as President last night as a knight on a white charger," I said to him. "Now in your first move after your nomination you're going against the people who backed you." He became livid with anger, and hurt because his judgment was being questioned. After he explained to me his interesting reasons for offering Johnson the nomination, which I will go into later in this account in detail, he said something to me that I have always remembered: "Get one thing clear, Kenny, I'm forty-three years old, and I'm the healthiest candidate for President in the country, and I'm not going to die in office."

President Kennedy was always uncomfortably aware of Johnson's unhappiness in the Vice-Presidency and leaned over backwards in an effort to keep him involved in important government affairs and to give him a feeling of participation in the important affairs of the administration. He issued a firm order that everybody in the White House was to be courteous and considerate with Johnson and put me in charge of seeing to it that the order was not ignored. I became friendly with LBJ and with his aides, Walter Jenkins and Bill Moyers, and spent evenings with him, listening to his problems and complaints, which were mostly imaginary because he certainly was not being slighted as he claimed. The President always included him in the National Security Council meetings and Congressional leadership meetings and tried without much success to get him to participate in the policy discussions. Johnson was given the responsibility for directing the space program and was sent on important overseas missions. The President loved it when Johnson invited a camel driver from Pakistan to come to Washington. "If I tried that," Kennedy said, "I would have ended up with camel dung all over the White House lawn."

Only two men in the government, Johnson and Bobby Kennedy, were given the special privilege of entering the President's office at any time unseen through the back door from the garden, without following the normal route through the front door from my appointment secretary's office. Neither of them ever abused this privilege and seldom came to see the President without calling me first. Johnson called and asked to see the President often with various personal complaints, frequently about Bobby. The President and I worked out a set routine for handling Johnson's laments. The President would first hear him out alone, and then call me into his office and denounce me in front of Johnson for whatever the Vice-President was beefing about. I would humbly take the blame and promise to correct the situation, and the Vice-President would go away somewhat happier.

I remember one day when Johnson's complaint about Bobby ("That kid brother of yours") involved Sarah T. Hughes, the same lifelong Texas friend who later as a Federal judge in Dallas swore Johnson in as President in the hot and sticky cabin of Air Force One after the assassination.

"Damn it, Kenny, you've gone and done it again," the President said when he called me into his office. "Lyndon, you go ahead and tell him yourself what's happened this time."

Johnson began a long recital of woe, prefacing it, as he usually did, with a recollection of John Nance Garner describing the Vice-Presidency as a thankless office with as much prestige as a pitcher of warm spit, but Johnson used another word in place of spit. He explained that he had asked Bobby Kennedy a few months earlier for a Federal judgeship in Texas for Sarah Hughes, and when the Justice Department told him that Mrs. Hughes, then sixty-five, was too old for the position, he had offered the appointment to another well-known Texas lawyer. After Johnson explained sorrowfully to Mrs. Hughes that she couldn't have the job, the Berlin crisis broke in that August of 1961. The President and Secretary Dean Rusk decided that the American flag would have to be displayed in Berlin, and the Vice-President was sent there for a visit. When he returned, he learned to his deep embarrassment that Mrs. Hughes had been given the Federal judgeship after all, and, checking around, he found out how "ole Lyndon had been done in behind his back as usual."

One day on Capitol Hill Bobby Kennedy had encountered another prominent Texan, Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House, and asked the Speaker when a couple of bills that the Justice Department was especially interested in would be getting out of the judiciary committee. Rayburn ventured the opinion that the Justice Department's bills might never get out of committee if his friend, Sarah Hughes, did not get a judgeship in Texas. Bobby explained that she had been suggested by Johnson, but she was too old for the appointment. "Son, everybody looks old to you," Rayburn said. "Do you want those bills passed, or don't you?" The next day Sarah Hughes was appointed to the Federal bench.

Johnson cried, "Mr. President, you realize where this leaves me? Sarah Hughes now thinks I'm nothing. The lawyer I offered the job to after your brother turned Sarah down, he thinks I'm the biggest liar and fool in the history of the State of Texas. All on account of that brother of yours!" The President was unable to keep from laughing, and the Vice-President, seeing the humor of the situation, laughed, too.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye by Kenneth P. O'Donnell, David F. Powers. Copyright © 1972 Kenneth P. O'Donnell and David F. Powers. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction,
A Note about the Narration,
A Note about the Title,
ONE: The End of the Beginning,
TWO: Getting into Politics,
THREE: The Lodge Fight,
FOUR: Onions Burke and the 1956 Convention,
FIVE: Going Nationwide,
SIX: Wisconsin and West Virginia,
SEVEN: How Lyndon Got on the Ticket,
EIGHT: The Big One,
NINE: Forming a Government,
TEN: The White House,
ELEVEN: The Showdown with Khrushchev,
TWELVE: "Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye",
THIRTEEN: Our Short Stay with LBJ,
FOURTEEN: Reminiscences,
Acknowledgments,
About the Authors,
Index,