MR. PAUL KIRK: Good evening, everyone. And welcome to the Kennedy Library Forum. I think it’s only fitting before we begin this program at John Kennedy’s Library that we just reflect for a minute on the passing of John Kenneth Galbraith this past weekend.
When I was in college several years ago, Ken Galbraith taught a course called Economics I. And needless to say, when you came into the classroom he was a giant of a man. And I was thinking that if all one could have on one’s epitaph were the words He made us think and he made us laugh, that would be pretty good. And Professor Galbraith clearly did that with our class of students. But also, with respect to this Library, he was called upon by candidate Kennedy, first of all, for some ideas about the debates with Richard Nixon. He was a man whose breadth of intellect went far beyond economic policy. He was involved in foreign policy and tax policy, the nuclear testing issue. And one of his great theses, which is obviously true today and has remained true -- the importance of investment in public education as a way to build an asset not only in this country, but in the underdeveloped nations of the world. And, obviously, President Kennedy appointed him Ambassador to India. And as was mentioned in this morning’s Globe, the President asked that every cable that was sent by Ken Galbraith from India back to the State Department that the President of the United States receive a copy. He had such enormous respect for Ken Galbraith’s wisdom and his judgment and, obviously, his sense of humor. And he was a man who believed deeply, above all, in economic justice and used his intellect to try to move our country and other countries in that direction. So I just wanted to take a moment and allow you as well to reflect on that. His oral history is here at the Library, which we treasure and is greatly valued here at the Library.
I did find a quote that probably provides a reasonable bridge between the mention of Ken Galbraith and the panel that we have here this evening. It was a quote attributed to President Kennedy in a book authored by Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye. And after the President was elected, he was obviously thinking about a cabinet and how he could have a cabinet that would be reflective not just of his own campaign, but of the breadth of the country. And he had great respect for Robert Lovett who had served in the Roosevelt administration and the Truman administration. And he was a Republican banker. And so, in talking to Kenny O’Donnell about the situation, and looking for perhaps a Republican to come to his cabinet. He’s quoted in Kenny’s book as follows.
“I’m going to talk with Lovett, and see what he can do for me. If I string along exclusively with Ken Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger and Seymour Harris and those Harvard liberals, they’ll fill Washington with wild-eyed, ADA types. And if I listen to you and Powers, and John Bailey and Dick McGuire, we’ll have so many Irish Catholics that we’ll have to organize a White House Knights of Columbus Council.”
[laughter]
So I want to welcome the chartered members of the White House Knights of Columbus Council here on our panel. And I want to welcome all of you folks on behalf of our Board of Directors, on behalf of John Shattuck, our CEO of the Foundation, and also Deborah Leff, our able Director of the Kennedy Library. And for those of you who came here tonight under the impression that you might be singing along with the Irish Tenors, that’s not the case. But you won’t be disappointed. Allen Goodrich, who is the Chief Archivist of the Library, decided that the term that used to describe the Irish in the Kennedy White House was no longer politically correct. So from now on, we’re going to call them the Irish Tenors.
[laughter]
I want to thank, first of all, C-SPAN for making this broadcast and bringing a television audience into the Kennedy Library to take advantage of an opportunity for tonight’s forum. And, also, to tell you folks and to tell our viewing audience that this forum was planned in conjunction with a new exhibit here at the Library called A Journey Home: John F. Kennedy in Ireland. It’s here tonight. It’ll be here until next spring. And I think our guests at the panel would attest to the fact that this was the happiest, most emotionally rewarding time of John Kennedy’s presidency, his trip to Ireland.
So we thank Jurys Hotel of Dublin for helping to sponsor that exhibit. And once again, we thank C-SPAN for its broadcasting. We also thank the Bank of America, the lead sponsor of the Kennedy Library Forum Series, and to Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Corcoran Jennison Companies, as well as The Boston Globe, Boston.com, and WBUR which broadcasts the Kennedy Library Forum Series.
Forty years ago, a fellow by the name of Ken O’Donnell -- whose name I just mentioned -- ran for Governor. And I assisted him in that effort. And it gave me - so often happens in politics, one of its great gifts are the friends you make and the people you meet. And that campaign introduced me to the three guys up here who are your panelists this evening.
You all know Chuck Daly. Chuck’s a remarkable individual who basically has spent his entire life in public service or in non-profit activities to help advance important causes. A decorated veteran of World War II and Korea, from the Kennedy White House to the University of Chicago and to Harvard University, President of the Children’s Fund and the Joyce Foundation, and served for several years as Director of this Library Foundation and the Library itself. And he goes on in his work as the Director of the American Ireland Fund and Independent News and Media, always working to make our planet and our people better each and every day. And so we welcome Chuck, along with his colleague, Richard K. Donahue, outstanding lawyer, enlightened business leader who worked in the Kennedy White House and, I think, from that day to this, has only worked to further connect and underscore and forge his connection with the Kennedy legacy. By that I mean he was a Founding Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation, serves presently as Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors. He was the Founding Chairman of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award and has been an enormously generous benefactor to this institution as he has to all the causes of culture and other things in the greater Lowell area. And his wife, Nancy, and their tremendous family are here tonight as well. So let’s give the Donahue clan a round of applause for their attendance.
[applause]
Jack McNally from Webster, Massachusetts and the young Democrats of Worcester County to the Kennedy White House. Pretty quick way to travel. And an able administrator. An Ambassador for the Kennedy White House and the thousands of people who came there during the thousand days. He went on to direct the Small Business Administration from 1980 to 1989, has done an oral history for this Library, and contributed many mementos, memorabilia, and important treasures that we will value here for time in memorial.
Moderating or facilitating our discussion this evening is Dick Flavin, who needs no introduction to any Boston audience. Dick was former Mayor Kevin White’s first Press Secretary, political commentator, playwright, author, humorist. And I’ll tell you, there’s a guy … When you think about one of the most important things a guy could ever do … If you grew up in Boston in the ‘40s and ‘50s and figured that sometime later you’d be in a car with Johnny Pesky, Dom DiMaggio, Dick Flavin, and they had a conversation with Bobby Dorr who couldn’t make the trip. But they were on their way to spend a couple of very important days with the then ailing Ted Williams. If that isn’t a boyhood dream come true, I don’t know what it is. But Dick deserved that. He wrote -- if you hadn’t heard it, I don’t know if we’ll hear it tonight -- Teddy at the Bat, which is an enormously moving tribute to Ted Williams. He wrote the play as a tribute to Tip O’Neill, our Speaker of the House. He’s won seven Emmy Awards. And he’s a great Bostonian and a great guy. And we thank Dick for passing up the Red Sox/Yankees game to be with us this evening. [laughter] So Dick, over to you, pal.
[applause]
MR. DICK FLAVIN: Thank you, Paul. And by the way, we owe a great debt of gratitude to Paul Kirk, and the wonderful work he has done for this Library, and his dedication for all these years. Thank you, Paul.
[applause]
Well, return with us now to those golden days of yesteryear when it was considered a high honor to be on the White House press -- or the White House staff, I should say -- and when such service led to things other than grand jury appearances. [laughter] These fellows here were part of what was known as the Irish Mafia. And I suppose with names like McNally and Donahue and Daly that they qualified. I still can’t figure out how Pierre Salinger ever made it. But he was one of them. And they had no agenda other than to serve their country and to serve their boss and the programs that he espoused. And they weren’t looking for other things in politics. They were just looking for those things.
And these men have always been kind of a mystery to people. People always wondered, “What was it like working for JFK? What was it like in that House on a day-to-day basis?” And this is our chance to find out. And I thought we’d begin at the beginning and find out how it was that they, individually, came to be there. So, Dick Donahue, I’ll start with you and ask you how you came to be on the White House staff.
MR. DICK DONAHUE: Well, I came really by accident. But I got involved with John Kennedy when he was a Congressman. He was running, at that time, for the United States Senate against Henry Cabot Lodge. And there was an opportunity … I had been asked by one of his advance men if I would work in the campaign. And I not only worked in it, I really enjoyed it.
I got to know him rather well. And so, when that campaign was over and he was successful, we had … The next matter was the question of the control of the Democratic State Committee. I was a member of the Democratic State Committee. And that’s an unbelievably intricate political organization of 40 men and 40 women from various districts. And we did have the right to elect our own chairman, chairperson. I was not a candidate. But there was a candidate. And he was a candidate that Jack McNally knows very well, was sponsored by John McCormack, the Speaker of the House. So the question would be: it would be McCormack against Kennedy when the election came up. The question would be, Kennedy -- who was this sort of young, bright, not so shining star -- would he be able to beat John McCormack? And so the campaign went on. The McCormack candidate was one with the marvelous name of Onions Burke. Onions Burke was from … Where was it, Jack?
MR. JACK McNALLY: He was from North Hatfield. He was an onion farmer up in the Connecticut River Valley, but had spent his entire career in politics and was very much attuned with John McCormack who was the Speaker of the House.
MR. DONAHUE: So that campaign went on and was a very, very charged campaign. We were successful. And McCormack’s candidate had lost. And that was, unfortunately, the first national recognition that they had of John Kennedy as a strong political figure.
We then came to 1958 when he was running for reelection against a really outstanding candidate, Vincent Celeste. I mean a household name. You’ve never forgotten it.
MR. MCNALLY: You’re the only one.
MR. DONAHUE: The important part about it was that, at that time, he was looking for running in 1960 for the Presidency. And in ’56 he had dipped his hat lightly into the sea of political intrigue running for Vice President and happily lost. So we were planning the ’58 campaign to run like a presidential campaign. Instead of having an event and you showed up at the event, we made the event. And we showed up. And we basically ran it very much as a presidential campaign. After he was successful in that, then it looked like there would be no stopping him. And he was, again, very, very much in the national scene. He asked at that time, through Kenny, if I would work in the primary in Wisconsin. I had never been to Wisconsin. And it was the middle of winter. And it really wasn’t that nice. I was way up there in Eau Claire. And Eau Claire is very good. It’s got a nice chill to it. But got a chance to … And then we had a lot of national press, and we were doing a lot of things. We were not supposed to win. It was next door to Humphrey. He was the next state over. He was the extra Senator from Wisconsin. We managed to win there. And the question was, would we win big or would we win little? And I don’t know. I never understood the difference between big and little. But win is the important one.
After that, I was asked to go to West Virginia. So I went down to West Virginia. And we stayed down there. West Virginia was the introduction to politics about religion because everybody was writing then, “Could a Catholic be elected? Could a Catholic be nominated?” And frankly, when I flew into West Virginia, I got in a cab. And I was being driven down to a lovely hotel, the Canorr Hotel, which we ended up buying, I think.
MR. DALY: By the vote?
MR. DONAHUE: Oh, no. We didn’t pay for it. [laughter] But I said to the cab driver, “Do you know, is there a presidential campaign coming up? Do you know anything about it?” The guy says, “I don’t know. I’m voting for the guy that’s running against the Catholic.” Oh? This is nice. That’s the introduction.
And so, we went and we fought. And actually that was, I always felt, John Kennedy’s best campaign ever and most important, because he really broke through and made the call to the people of West Virginia. He was not disqualified from the presidency because he was Catholic. It was the most emotional television broadcast I think he ever made. Frankly, that’s a tape that’s lost. It was never kept. In those days, they recycled tapes. But he won that. And that sort of projected him forward. It did not, however, project the question of religion out of the campaign.
I went from there to the Democratic National Committee where I worked organizing the greater part of the industrial east and south through the campaign there, and ended up election night down in Hyannis where we were accepting the returns in a much … by telephone. You didn’t have all of these fancy computers and all of that stuff. We had six women and two men. Six women were wives. My wife was one of them. And we were at the … and Paul, and Ralph Duncan, and I were at the end of the table. And it was a T-table. And people would call in. And we would get some returns. And we had some way of following the flow of the election.
It was, however, a very mixed flow. The first flow we had we were doing very well. And the other members of the family in the other room were preparing for the White House. And the tide did not stay. It was stopped. And we didn’t get it over. So we went to bed very late. He had not been elected. Nixon had not conceded. The next day he announced that he had won because we knew that our count was better. And Nixon’s count was imaginary.
So we went down to the Armory in Hyannis, and accepted the nomination. And then he came off the stage. He said, “I’d like to see you, Larry, and some others over at Bobby’s house this afternoon.” So that afternoon we went over and met the people at Bobby’s house. There were about eight of us. And he started passing out assignments. “I want you to do this. You do that,” and everything else. And there was putting together the government. And frankly, I was only interested in the campaign. I didn’t know about putting together the government. I didn’t know where you get a Secretary of State, where you get a Secretary of the Treasury. Where do you get them? But I suppose you just answer the phone.
[laughter]
MR. FLAVIN: Exactly.
MR. DONAHUE: But that’s how I got involved in that. And I stayed at that until just a week before he was assassinated when, by that time, my mind had taken control of my emotions. And I decided it would be better to be practicing law than working around Washington.
So we came back to … We were coming back, my wife and several of the children -- because they were not all born by then -- were back in Lowell. And that’s where I was when he was shot. And that’s how I got involved.
[laughter]
MR. FLAVIN: Jack McNally, you’re a local boy also and were involved in those early campaigns, too.
MR. McNALLY: Yes. Actually, Dick and I followed the same path pretty much. I was the President of the Young Democratic Club of Worcester County, as Paul indicated early on. A fellow by the name of Paul Glennon, who was an attorney and a professor in Worcester, was kind of the Director for Worcester County, and asked me if I would become, what we called the Campaign Secretary in those days, for Southern Worcester County. And I did that. And of course, we were successful and so forth.
We then … Dick talked about it. We went on to the 1956, which was really the fight for control of the Democratic State Committee which, as Dick said, was 40 men and 40 women. What Dick didn’t tell you was, in those days, Dick Donahue was John F. Kennedy’s candidate to be Chairman of the Democratic State Committee. And it was give and take, and so forth. But one of the problems that we had in those days is that Onions Burke had been tied in with John McCormack, had been tied in with Harry Truman, was very much involved in the control of political patronage all through those years. And people on the State Committee in those days, they had an uncle or a cousin or a brother that worked in the post office because of Onions Burke. But Onions Burke -- and I’ll be the first to say it -- was not a good guy, by far. [laughter] And we found that out in our days.
And as it started out -- and I might touch on this a little bit, Dick, and correct me if I’m wrong in my numbers. But it started out that, with the about 80 people that they had in the State Committee, Burke had about 30 sure votes. Now, the Kennedy group -- which really was Kenny O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien working without direct knowledge of the president to get control of the State Committee. And keep in mind that the ambassador was totally opposed to all of this and didn’t want to get into a fight with John McCormack. Or he didn’t want to get into a fight with Onions Burke. But really what it came down to was who would go to Chicago in 1956 as the leader of the Democratic Party in Massachusetts. Was it going to be the United States Senator, John Fitzgerald Kennedy? Or was it going to be the Speaker of the House, John McCormack? And that’s really what it came down to. McCormack, on one hand, was saying, “Well, I’m not going to get involved at all. But Onion Burke is my guy.” So he didn’t get involved, but in the meantime started to build these votes up.
And Kenny … The President asked Kenny one day, “How many votes do you have?” And he said, “Maybe 20. That means there’re 30 questionable votes.” And at which time the President said, “Okay. I want to know everything about every one of those 30. I want to know where they live. I want to know where they work. I want to know what time they get home from work. I want to know who they listen to. I want to know who influences them.” And that was part of my job to do the field research -- if you recall, Dick -- on those guys and come back with a complete report of who they were. And then the President, the Senator as he was, at that time, took it upon himself to contact and call every one of these people.
And when it finally came down to the election, it seems to me that the final vote -- I think there were 78 people voting. It seems that it was 47 to 31. And Pat Lynch, who was the Mayor of Somerville, actually became the Chairman of the Democratic State Committee. John Kennedy went on to Chicago. And I think that was really the basis for the beginning of his being a national figure in politics.
Following that, Dick, I, as Dick did, was involved in the 1958 campaign with that heavyweight from … Where was he from? Revere? Yes. Vincent Celeste. And I’ll tell you an interesting story. They had him in Webster, Massachusetts. We had a newspaper publisher, typical small town, John Lonergan. And the Chairman of the Republican Town Committee brought Vincent Celeste around. Now the Chairman of the Town Committee weighed about 350 pounds. And as he brought him into the newspaper to be introduced, he said … The publisher came out with a cigar forever in his mouth, looked at him, and he said to him, he said, “Raymond, I got to tell you, it takes a big man to carry a dead horse around.”
[laughter]
MR. DALY: Very good.
MR. McNALLY: That was his introduction to it. We were then on to the convention in Los Angeles. And at that time I was assigned to work with Kenny O’Donnell. And actually, we worked -- between Kenny and Pierre Salinger, we put out a daily newspaper at the convention in Los Angeles. It went to every single delegate.
MR. FLAVIN: A daily paper?
MR. McNALLY: A daily newspaper delivered to their room before they got up at 6:00 in the morning.
MR. FLAVIN: How much of a staff did you have?
MR. McNALLY: We had a staff of about six volunteers that actually put the paper together, wrote the paper. And then I had about 30 people from the Young Democratic Club of Los Angeles who actually, literally, from 2:00 a.m. ‘til 6:00 a.m., delivered that paper to every single delegate.
MR. FLAVIN: And what was your position on the paper?
MR. McNALLY: I was the manager, the General Manager of the paper, a Publisher if you want to call it that.
MR. FLAVIN: Good. It’s a better title, Publisher.
MR. McNALLY: And then, from that time, we went … I went on to the White House as Kenny O’Donnell’s deputy or Kenny O’Donnell’s assistant. And the rest is history.
MR. FLAVIN: Thank you. Well, Chuck Daly comes at this from a different background and a different perspective. Tell us how you ended up being where you were.
MR. CHUCK DALY: Just sitting here, the first thing I was thinking about was now that John Galbraith’s gone. But that leaves only about three of us left alive, so we can tell all the lies we want.
[laughter]
But the only problem with that idea is that Allan Goodrich has hours and hours of tapes of President Kennedy that carry the truth. So we have to be somewhat careful.
This is National Immigration Day today. I’m an immigrant. And I’m a naturalized U.S. citizen now. I came here and was in the Navy and the Marine Corps. Then I was working in San Francisco and Central America. And like my family, I worshiped Franklin Roosevelt. I thought Stevenson was the closest thing to Roosevelt. I was a Stevenson Democrat.
I knew of John Kennedy vaguely as a rich guy with a difficult father. That changed somewhat after 1954. I was very bored. So I went to Columbia in journalism and picked up a ticket to be a journalist. And I got a fellowship, a Congressional Fellowship. And at that time the staffs were very small. The members of the House and Senate were paid $22,500 dollars a year. So they could use anyone they could pick up. And I was able to work in the office of Stewart Udall, who was a pro-Kennedy person, and then Senator Kennedy.
In the Senate office, it was almost comical how staffers tried to stay close to the Senator and keep others at a distance. I was able to have very little involvement in the campaign. So I went to work for an organization called the Democratic Study Group, which was a group of liberal northern and western members of the House who couldn’t get much help from the National Committee, which was run by Paul Butler and was very conservative and obviously didn’t get much help from the campaign. But they were focused on winning the White House, as they should have been.
Election day came. And I thought about everyone pushing and shoving for a job. So I took my wife and two young boys and got on a space available on a troop ship to Hamburg, bought a Volkswagen and bummed around Europe living as a freelance writer. I got to know Karl Stuart(?) who was the Nazis’ greatest fighter pilot, mainly for shooting down unarmed Russian airplanes and the head of the Hitler paratroops. And then the living got a little thin. So I then wrote an article about how it feels -- under the name of Lillian Garner -- about how it feels to be the mother of a high school football player. [laughter]
So about that time Larry O’Brien, who was running the Congressional Relations Office, decided he needed help with those liberal House members, many of whom ran ahead of the President, but were in close elections and needed help getting reelected to try to strengthen the President’s hand in the Congress. So he told the White House operator to find me. And he told her I was traveling in Australia. Actually, I had been in Austria. [laughter] But they’re amazing. So, in due course, I was on the line. And to my surprise, he offered me a job, the Congressional Liaison in the West Wing of the White House.
It was a complex matter for me to decide because I had worked to help get rid of Batista in Cuba. And I was a little doubtful about how it would be viewed by the FBI and also by the White House. I didn’t discuss that with anyone other than my wife. I went to Washington, rented a room upstairs at a real estate office, fourth floor, 12 East Capitol, and went on to work in the West Wing. The FBI called the place I was living to check up on me. I had just left for a limousine for the White House, so they made quite a fast check. Many years later, I, under the Freedom of Information Act, looked at my FBI record. The nastiest thing in there was that, in 1936, shortly after coming to America, my father got a traffic ticket in Rockford, Illinois. They had nothing about Cuba.
So we were all young. Jim Corman, a Congressman, wrote me many years later. He said, “Your skin was just beginning to clear up. But you were helpful.”
[laughter]
MR. FLAVIN: So you’re in the Legislative Office. Dick’s in the Legislative Office.
MR. DALY: I can tell you how I met Dick for the first time.
MR. FLAVIN: Oh good, good.
MR. DALY: First day of the job, I walked in there. And I had known … He was kind of a legend for … Well, I won’t get too much into it because his family is here. [laughter] But we went … I sat in Larry’s office. And the persons I had never met were Mike Manitoss(?). And they said, “Mike is going to handle the Congressional Liaison with the Senate. Henry Hall Wilson from the south, we call him Molasses Mouth, he handles the southerners. Richard Donahue handles the big cities in Philadelphia daily, the industrial.” And then, about that time, Dick turned to me. He said, “That leaves all those intellectual sons-a-bitches. They’re yours.”
[laughter]
MR. FLAVIN: Jack, you worked with Kenny O’Donnell who was the de facto Chief of Staff, really. They didn’t have that title.
MR. McNALLY: Yes. I was, in effect, Kenny’s deputy, involved with a number of the administrative functions, White House. Also responsible for the public affairs. And dealt with Dick and Chuck and taking care of their congressional people who had literally hundreds of thousands of people who wanted to visit the White House, and so forth. So I was very much involved in that.
And it’s interesting. We talked about this the other day, Dick -- how the President was very much interested in these people. And one of the stories is that he went around the country. He’d say, “Come and visit me. It’s your house.” And they came. They didn’t come by the thousands, they came by the millions.
And I remember this very distinctly. And I think it tells, really, the true story of what John Kennedy was all about. One Saturday it was hotter than the blazes in Washington. And I was over in Kenny’s office talking to Kenny. And the President came out. And he said to me, “John, who are all of those people in the back?” I said, “Mr. President, they’re all the people waiting to get in the White House.” Now this is about quarter of twelve. I said, “Unfortunately, they’re not going to get in, because at 12:00 the Secret Service shuts down the gate.” He hit the roof. He said, “You go down and get somebody down there in the back of the line. I want anybody and everybody that’s in that line to get in the White House.” Well, trying to convince the Secret Service of those things at times was not easy. But, as Dick would tell you, I got my Irish up, and we had a couple of policemen down at the end of that line. And everybody that was in that line actually got into the White House. But the President was so concerned about it that, literally, about 20 minutes after 12:00, he walked over to the White House and greeted these people that were going through the public lines, which he had never done. And from that day forth, there was always -- anybody that was in that line at 12:00 went into the White House. Now that was the type of person … He had a genuine interest in the people.
MR. FLAVIN: Well, you talked about your interactions with him on that day.
How often did you fellows interact with the President?
MR. McNALLY: Only when he wanted to interact with you, you could. [laughter] I would say that’s probably the best description. Or if you had a problem or something, that …
MR. DONAHUE: It really depended upon what was the matter at hand. If we were involved in a close vote in the House, for instance, you might be talking to him almost everyday. Certainly, the times I talked to him most was at the end of the day. Because I’d be down chatting with Kenny and bringing back all of the scandal I had picked up from my minions. And he’d come out and say, “What’s going on?” Because all he wanted to know was, “Tell me what’s up. Who’s doing what?” and all that. And we’d spill it out. And then he would give you the direction. And you’d follow those directions. But he was very good about that. But he wasn’t one for … You didn’t hang around his office or go in and sit down and put your feet up and say, “What are you going to do tonight?”
[laughter]
MR. DALY: I do think Dick was first among semi-equals here in his relationship with the President. When the House was in, when the Congress was in session, they used to have the Tuesday breakfast for the congressional leaders. And afterwards, Larry and all of his staff would be there and be available for questions and follow-up and what went on in that breakfast. But more often than not, at the end of that, the President would pull Dick aside from the rest of us and kind of ask what’s going on, or chat or whatever. So there was a closer relationship Dick had.
I could illustrate on the need to be known basis, more or less, we would see him. For example, there was a wonderful Congressman called Clem Miller, a freshman Congressman, the first one to represent the first district in California as a Democrat since World War I. That district runs from San Francisco to the Oregon border. His consuming interest, and the reason he got elected, was the environment. And those of you who know California, Point Reyes National Seashore is a wonderful, wonderful, thousands of acres of park that runs from the north part of the Golden Gate all the way along the coast for many, many miles. And that was his, really his creation.
He was killed at the end of his first term campaigning. He was killed before the ’62 election. And the judgment was that the only way he could hold that seat was if his wife would run. Being an environmentalist, he had a stone cottage in Rock Creek Park where he and his wife and their five daughters lived. So I went out to see her. And I can remember as I remember yesterday, she was there with her arms tightly crossed, in some agony, these little children all around her. I explained to her how much Clem had worked for this. And she knew that and how, in our judgment, the only way that he could hold that seat was if she ran. She wanted to know if his executive assistant could run. And I said, “He sure could. And he’d like to run. And he’d lose.” And then she said, “Well, I want to tell you what Clem thinks about widows inheriting members’ seats.” And she referred to a person who had died in Oregon and verbatim could recite some of Clem’s comments about that, and about the unworthiness of that way to conduct congressional special elections by inheritance.
So I went back and I told Ken the situation. And he said, “You better go in and … And I said, “In my opinion, Kenny, if the President would call her, she would run.” And Kenny, being a lot smarter than I am, said, “Come on in. Let’s go in. And you tell him.” [laughter] So I told him that. And he said, “There goes that seat.” And, unfortunately, he was quite right.
MR. FLAVIN: You fellows, all in your 30s back then, young families, obviously working long, long hours, how sensitive was the President to … There were obviously pressures on you beyond your jobs.
MR. DONAHUE: I don’t think particularly sensitive. [laughter]
MR. DALY: I think that Mrs. Kennedy was sensitive to that. At age 12, if one of our children reached age 12, they could be honorary ushers. And so, the older of my two boys then had been doing that for a while. And then, when young Douglas got to be 12, it was about the 12th of November of 1963, he was eligible to go in and be an usher. So the older boy, Michael, lorded over him and said, “What are you going to say when you meet the President?” And Douglas said, “I’ll just say, ‘Hi-ya Prez.” So they went in. And they had some spaghetti or something on the floor of the White House in one of the East Wing rooms. And Mrs. Kennedy said hello to them. And then, when Douglas had the opportunity to meet the President, he went, “Uh.”
[laughter]
MR. McNALLY: That was a common occurrence.
MR. FLAVIN: I’m sure.
MR. McNALLY: Some of my boys and Chuck’s sons worked together. They just got absolutely tongue-tied. I mean they couldn’t say a word.
MR. FLAVIN: Well, how about you fellows? Particularly Jack and Dick, you go back, way back, long, long before the Presidency. What was your first take on JFK? Did you ever see back then that there might be a time, a half a century or more later when we’d be holding forums like this, and he would become this great, gigantic figure in history?
MR. DONAHUE: Well, he was certainly somebody different. He just wasn’t another Paul. He was a guy that had a lot of class, a lot of background, and a lot of resume, if you will. Because our family talked about the Kennedys and the power of the Kennedys and could there be a Catholic President. So he was very, very unusual. But he was not particularly impressive. He wasn’t the world’s greatest speaker when he started, except that, when he spoke, all that happened was you just wished he had more that you could … he would go on a little bit longer. He could speak very clearly and sum up his thoughts very, very succinctly and sit down. And that was just all together different than what we had known from the bloviators that we had on the stump at that time.
MR. McNALLY: I think what you have is … He started out, he always gave you the impression of being a great patriot. And he was always dedicated to that -- we’re talking about the Irish Tenors here -- he was dedicated to that Irish heritage. And he had that Irish spirit and the Irish faith that really came through. And that’s what helped to make President Kennedy what he was. He had a love of learning that never failed him. He had faith. He had devotion. He had a love of life. And that’s really what your Irish heritage, for those of us that are the Irish Tenors, really saw in him.
MR. DONAHUE: He was also a pretty good guy, you know.
MR. McNALLY: He was. He was a good fellow.
MR. FLAVIN: You talked about, earlier, the bump in the road in 1956 with the battle for control of the state party with John McCormack. There was another little event six years later when Ted Kennedy was running for the Senate against the Speaker’s nephew, who was really more than his nephew. He was as close to the Speaker as most sons are to fathers, or closer even. You fellows who were in the legislative end of things, how did that affect your work? You had to deal with the Speaker and with his people.
MR. DONAHUE: John McCormack was a very unusual man. He was a great, great speaker and a great, great Democrat. We knew, working with him on a dayto-day basis, that he was concerned about his nephew’s failure to gain ground or Ted’s willingness to blow by him, and all of that stuff. But he never raised an issue like that. He was great. He stayed on his side of the track and we stayed on ours. So I would just say he was a marvelous, marvelous citizen.
MR. DALY: I agree with that completely.
MR. FLAVIN: What about, Robert Kennedy was Attorney General, of course. But he was almost a Deputy President in many ways, because, well, he was. Did you fellows interact with him often?
MR. DONAHUE: Sure. But they are two different people. And they have two different characters. I mean Bobby could be abrupt. He was abrupt. He was very, very opinionated and very certain that he was right. And frequently, sometimes he was. But he didn’t accept failure under any circumstances. He didn’t accept correction from anyone. But he was devoted to his brother and just would do whatever was necessary. And so, everything that he did was based upon what could he do to elevate his brother’s stature.
MR. McNALLY: And he expected everybody else to do the same.
MR. DALY: I think that, like a lot of us, he learned a whole lot about civil rights. From the time he came to Washington … And it’s true of many, many of the rest of us in the Kennedy Administration -- white guys from fine backgrounds or easy backgrounds compared to many, many Americans. I think that he was tough and he was opinionated. And he was definite. But he also learned a lot. And he was capable of change. I got to know him quite well in the years following 1963, and I think a very different piece of work over the years.
MR. FLAVIN: You fellows are all Irish. And in the summer of ’63, the President took a trip to Ireland. Were you in on that at all? That was a glorious …
MR. DONAHUE: McNally’s trip. [laughter]
MR. McNALLY: That was, Dick. One of my responsibilities was Director of Presidential Travel, Presidential Tours and so forth. And that trip involved not only Ireland, but it involved Germany and it involved England, and so forth. And Ben Bradley, at the time, was with Newsweek Magazine. Ben Bradley, at the time, wrote that the President’s trip -- trying to recall the words that … you know in those days my hair was brown as was Dick’s. And now the little things have changed.
But he said that Germany and England are trips of politics. Ireland is a trip of his heart. And I think that basically describes that whole trip. It was a trip from day one that he enjoyed, that he wanted to do. And I know Dick and I were together on that trip, a good most of the miles on that trip. And I can never forget ‘til the day I die, the great adulation, the millions of people along as we went from the airport down O’Connell Street to Phoenix Park. I have never seen a scene like it before or since. And I don’t think it’ll ever be repeated in the history of our world. It was just a tremendous … Everybody was smiling. There was nobody protesting, nobody arguing. It was just a wonderful scene to see. And I think that was the whole history of that trip.
MR. DONAHUE: Well, the trip had more to it than that. They had McNally. And McNally was running the trip. And he was running that and running the people around him. And if they chose to try to deflect some idea that he had, obviously taking his direction from the President, he just went where he wanted to go. And they just got the enormous admiration of these people who stayed with them. And they took him.
But the most important part of that trip, for me, was his speech before the Dáil, the Irish legislature. It was … I didn’t know it until I just read about it the other day. It was the first time that both Houses of the Congress of Ireland met in a common session. And Kennedy addressed it. And I also learned that it was the first time they took down the netting over the floor so people couldn’t throw things at the members on the floor. [laughter] They did it just for Kennedy, you know. But it was the best expression I knew of how an Irishman should feel about Ireland, but not be a part of Ireland.
MR. DALY: Amen.
MR. DONAHUE: I mean just being a citizen of the United States, but recognizing where he came from. And it was just beautifully done. And, of course, the ovation was thrilling. As a matter of fact, he got them to even patch up some disputes between the parties.
MR. DALY: I wasn’t there. That was a trip for the old hands. And that was a very good idea in itself, though I omitted(?) it. The majority of the persons in Ireland saw him or think they saw him. Today, people say, “I was there.” And obviously, that legacy lives.
There was a young politician, and comparatively young, Garrett Fitzgerald. Prime Minister twice in his due course. I wrote down what he said to me once. He said, “He showed us more of what we were and what we could be. We Irish in Ireland had been taught to serve and not to lead. He inspired us.” And I really think the American political point of view and the joys of the trip and all that, it was an important point of view of his beloved Ireland. It was vital. It was just such a terrific thing.
MR. FLAVIN: Dick, you left the administration in November. Tell us about that. What were your reasons? And tell us about your leaving.
MR. DONAHUE: Well, I was working on two things at that time: the Civil Rights Bill, trying to put together the coalition because civil rights could not get through the Congress of the United States without Republican support. We had done everything with merely Democrats. And so, to get this through, we had to put together a coalition. That took a lot of work. And that’s one of those things that Bobby did a fabulous job on -- to convince the Republicans that this was something that was necessary for the country. But, indeed, that was work I felt that was done. I mean I knew the votes. We knew the counts. We knew how we could get it. So that part of my work was over.
The second thing was my family was back in Massachusetts because we had determined sometime in the summer that we just did not want to spend the rest of our life in Washington. So we bought a home with no furniture. But it was a big home, but it had very little furniture. We got the home. And I stayed in Washington until this part was over. We had had … One of the things unique about my service, we had had all the family in for a picture with the President, which nobody else on the staff had. And I also had a letter from the President accepting my resignation. So I was back in Lowell, and practicing law, hopefully successfully. And then, of course, the President got assassinated.
MR. DALY: I would say something about the picture Dick referred to. The Donahues were leaving just a short time after President Kennedy’s baby son, Patrick, had died. I knew the Donahues were coming in for the picture. So I was down around Kenny’s office hanging around. And the President came out and said, “What have I got today?” And it was his first day back in the White House. I think the first day back from that agonizing time. And Kenny says, “Nothing.” And he said, “No, I have the Donahues.” And I said, “He cancelled.” “Put him back on.” So they came in. And the picture was really … It was a magnificent picture of Nancy with a bunch of children and the President smiling as if it was the happiest day of his life. And it’s a picture I’m sure the Donahue’s treasure, and I do, too.
MR. FLAVIN: And all of this took place shortly before the assassination. Everyone who was alive back then remembers exactly where they were at the time of the assassination. And you fellows, more than anyone, would remember exactly where you were and what happened. Can you go through with that?
MR. DALY: I can say something. I don’t have as many children as Dick does. But I had them at fair expanse. And they’re aged from 56 to 14. My late wife and I had children. And I have two young sons. And Christine has been after me to write a journal, so that they would know some of these things. And with the advice from Dick I have been scribbling some things down. And I just … For all of us, November 22nd is not an easy time for anyone. But I’ll just summarize a few things I had in there:
It was a Friday. Lunch in the White House mess. I was sitting around at a table reserved for senior staff. It was half empty because it was Friday. And the Tuesday and Thursday members of Congress were all at home, playing golf or whatever. Just after 1:30, Jack McNally walked in and came over to our table and whispered, “The President has been shot. And how bad, I don’t know. Get back to your offices.”
I called Mary. She said, “They’ve killed him.” I said, “No, they haven’t. I’ve been shot, and I’m not dead.” I went down to the Press Office. Paul Souther(?) was there because Salinger was in one place. And Malcolm Kilduff was in Dallas. The ticker was there. It said, “President Kennedy was shot today just as his motorcade left Downtown Dallas.” Then the [pause] … Then the tape came out of the telegraph. And we knew that that was that. I made some calls home and then went back down to the mess for an early meal, served in silence by the Philippino stewards. One of them was weeping. Nobody was talking. We were just eating. And I think, for the first time ever, the White House mess ran out of steaks.
And I thought about going out to Andrews Air Force Base where they were bringing him back. And I thought, “For what? There’ll be new friends and asskissers,” and so on. I went back outside of the West Wing. It was all lit up as if there was another great party. And I moved on to the portico and the walkway framed by the tall pillars outside his office. It was a beautiful night. There were stars, warm.
Then I went back into Kenny’s office. And I was sure that the President was gone forever. But I saw some person from LBJ’s office standing beside his desk, the place they had never been. Upstairs … I went upstairs and asked Kenny, asked them to call Kenny who I knew would be at Bethesda Hospital. And I’m sure he had gone there from Andrews. I said, “It’s a tough world.” He said, “Nothing tougher.” I said, “Some people are sniffing around your desk. Anything I should do?” He said, “Get my business out of the middle drawer and the FBI files out of the bottom side drawer.” And I took the files and went upstairs to my office. I knew that Kenny regularly shortstopped Hoover’s gossip. I didn’t know he had buried that papered poison. I checked to see if my name was on any of the folders. And it wasn’t. So I left them unopened.
A while later, the guard said that the vehicle was coming in from Bethesda. And I went outside. There was a squad of riflemen in dress uniforms. I began to realize we were in show business. I went back upstairs and sat there through the night.
Then in the Saturday morning, the day following the assassination, in came the Congressional mail. And all but one had been written before the noontime on Friday. That one was from the Democrats from California. I read it again. I couldn’t believe it. I just tossed it on the sofa. About that time, a guard from the West Wing called and said, “Mr. Daly, your pal Jimmy Breslin is here, and he won’t go away. He wants to see you.” “Tell him, I’ll open the office, and I’ll have him come on up.” He was a good friend. He was a hustling Herald Tribune columnist who always wanted something. But inside, there was a lot of decency in him. He plunked his fat tail onto my sofa and lit a cigar, and said, “I want you to know the whole freaking world feels just as you do.” I said, “Oh yeah? Why don’t you read this?” And I tossed him the letter and then got rid of him.
The next day Salinger said, “How did your pal get the letter? It’s in the Herald Trib this morning.” And Jimmy’s column began, “Oh, on Saturday. Oh, it must have been almost 24 hours since the murder of the President of the United States. The member of Congress who represents one of the great Senators of culture and human decency for which California is so famous sat at his desk on Capitol Hill, and dictated a letter to Lyndon Banes Johnson. The letter received and was on view yesterday. The salutation stressed the fact that Lyndon Johnson is now President, is addressed President Lyndon Johnson, President of the United States.”
Dear Mr. President, this is to say that I, and it is hoped all members of Congress, feel it is my duty to stand behind you and support you at this time. I would also like to say at this time that at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, I voted for you against John Kennedy.
I called Jimmy and said, “That was an off-the-record thing.” I pretended I was outraged, and “You shouldn’t have done it.” He said, “Screw you. Maybe I got a couple of words wrong. But the message is right. So you should be glad I sunk that bastard. He’s as dead as Kennedy.”
So then on the 24th we had to go up to the Capitol. The President’s body was up there. The staff lined both sides of the steps. A while later a photographer saw a person in Germany. Found a photo taken by a German photographer. And it shows the staff on both sides of the Capitol steps, and Mrs. Kennedy and her two children [pause] holding one in each hand, and all of us looking right at her, all of us except one person, Kenny O’Donnell. And his eyes were off to the left. And he was … As always, his eyes were right on the President.
The next day, there was at least one bit of good cheer. They had a mass at St. Matthews. And then they had a funeral procession to Arlington. And the State Department had that part organized. And they had the President and his immediate family. Then next in line -- there were a line of cars -- next in line was going to be the fancy persons all over the world. There was this midget from Ethiopia, Lion Ajeda(?), whatever his name was, and this tall Frenchman, this pompous Frenchman in a plain suit. And de Valera from Ireland, the President of Ireland, virtually blind, and then this young, young President in the hearse. So they were going to follow him. They thought they were. Then Jack McNally gets up. And he’s changed the arrangements. They stayed. And the cars with Kenny O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien and Dick Donahue and all the rest of the President’s staff followed the President’s family. Then he said, “It’s okay for those fellows to come along.”
MR. FLAVIN: Actually, McNally is the first guy to ever run a Presidential funeral, because we didn’t have any training for that. That wasn’t part of our thing. The President was shot. And the question is how could it be done? And how would it be? And so, McNally took over, as he did almost everything, with a little stentorian tone in his voice, but with a lot of authority. So how did you run it, Jack?
MR. McNALLY: I’ll tell you this. Let me say this, that what I did 43 years ago I would do today, Dick. Because one thing that was most important to John F. Kennedy was his staff; the guys that were with him from day one, who were loyal to him. He had absolutely no use for the so-called protocol types from the State Department. And the funeral had been lined up. And by the way, I didn’t take a course in 101, how you handle assassination of a President.
What happened was we had everything lined up and on going into the church. In fact, Dick, I recall you were standing outside. And I grabbed … Dick was standing on the staircase with a badge on. And I pulled him in to go in with the staff. And I had one of the State Department people tap me and say, “You can’t bring people in like that.” And I said, “The hell I can’t.” He was one of us. And you did. And we went in. We were in, and during the mass one of the Secret Service Deputy Chiefs came up to me and said to me, “They’re moving the White House staff cars.” And I said, “The hell they are. You get out there and you move those cars where they were. And don’t let anybody move them at all.” And that’s exactly what happened. When we came out of the cathedral, we went down the stairs and right into the cars. And the White House staff, the Irish Mafia, if you want, was where they belonged then and where they’d be there today if it were to happen again.
That’s my answer. And to the guy who wrote the book Death of a President, all I refer to is that, in this Library, there is a copy of a letter from Jackie Kennedy to me three days after the funeral thanking me for what I had done. So I say, Bill Manchester, wherever you are, the hell with you. [laughter] [applause]
MR. FLAVIN: Well, we thank you all for what you’ve done.
MR. DALY: Thank you, Dick.
MR. FLAVIN: And it’s time to open this forum up to you folks in the audience. So we have two microphones here. Please go to the microphone to ask whatever questions that you have so that we can get your voice on C-SPAN. Are there any questions? [pause] While we’re waiting for someone to get the gumption up to ask a question, I’ll ask a question. But you, Chuck, you stayed on. And you stayed on, Jack, for the first part of Lyndon Johnson’s administration. Draw comparisons between working for him and working for JFK.
MR. McNALLY: There was no comparison.
MR. DALY: I think the biggest mistake he made -- you can understand it in a time of tragedy and so on -- he didn’t fire us all. Or find us other jobs. When Truman took over, of course, he hadn’t been allowed to be in the White House when he was Vice President. But I think he unloaded the FDR staff and got his own players in there.
Johnson just went over backwards to make us feel welcome and treated us far better than he treated his own staff, far better. I know in the week following the funeral, he called each one of us in. And in my case, he said, “I know you’ll never love me the way you loved Jack.” I never called the guy Jack in my life. “But I want you to stay through the end of the Congress, through the end of that unfinished business.”
So he really, I think, did want us to stay. It was a time, as you all know, of tragedy and uncertainty and turmoil. So that was probably a good judgment. But it took a toll, I think, on him and probably on his presidency. And having said that, following the election, he had a good, solid majority and, except for the tragedy of Vietnam, really built on what had been created, particularly in the way of civil rights.
I found him … I did a poor thing when I worked there for him. I kept notes on why I thought he was not only arrogant and vulgar, but possibly even unstable because he was so hypnotized by … First, you had medals by the need to win in Vietnam, and so on. And I think that it was probably a poor judgment on my part. But anyway, I threw all those notes away. And I do try to forget them because they were unfair to him.
MR. FLAVIN: Jack, what was your take?
MR. McNALLY: The first thing is that Ken O’Donnell, after the assassination, took a few weeks off, leave, at which time the President asked me to go over and sit in Kenny’s desk, act as the Appointment Secretary, but not really be the Chief of Staff, but to act in that capacity. I found him extremely difficult to deal with in that position. I’ll give you one example. The Secretary of Defense, Bob McNamara, came over one day and was standing there. And he had called for him to come over. And so, I went in. And he was on the phone. And he looked up at me. And I said to him, “Secretary McNamara is waiting out there.” And he said, “Let him wait.” He said, “I’ve been waiting for this phone call for 15 minutes.” You know, it was … You never knew what to do or how to do it with him. And he was difficult. But I do agree with Chuck. I think he bent over backwards to try to be good to the Kennedy staff and that type of thing. But you really didn’t … It was a total different ballgame.
MR. DALY: He offered my two sons a ride to California, where they were from, on Air Force One. It was a big deal. It made me worry about what they thought life was going to be like after the White House. So I bought them one-way tickets on the Greyhound Bus to come back from San Francisco to Washington, which they did. [laughter] One of them came back. He looked as if he had a lobotomy because he had all the hair missing on the side of his head. And I said, “Michael, what happened to Douglas?” He said, “He fell asleep on the floor of the Greyhound Bus going out of Chicago. We had to cut him loose.” [laughter]
AUDIENCE: You’ve heard a lot about negative feelings between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Did you experience any of that? Any firsthand experience of the enmity between them? [pause]
[laughter]
MR. FLAVIN: Don’t everyone talk at once. [laughter]
MR. DONAHUE: No. There’s no question that there was no love lost. But it wasn’t as apparent, just in day-to-day dealings. Although Bobby was given to dismissive relationships, dismissive comments about Lyndon. But Lyndon wasn’t particularly generous in his comments about Bobby. And he was terribly jealous of his strength and was terribly afraid that he was the rival that was going to knock him out. So yeah, there was some uneasiness. They didn’t hang out together. And they didn’t go out for a beer after work. It was real. But it was the way it existed.
MR. DALY: You could feel it. President Johnson, not long after the assassination, assembled the Cabinet and the staff in the East Room and gave them a talk, a very positive talk, and so on. And you could just see the body language of Robert Kennedy when we were back over in the West Wing. I behaved very badly during that time, too. And I just walked by Bobby, talking to his very close friend, Kenny. And I said, “Hey, Kenny. Did you write that goddamn speech?” And Bobby said, “Thanks a lot.” So it was just … It was sour.
AUDIENCE: Presidential press conferences are a bit different nowadays. Can you tell us a bit about JFK’s relationship with the media?
MR. DONAHUE: He loved it. It was sort of a game for him in the sense whether it was Pierre and whoever else was on the staff, to get together the questions that they could expect. But they anticipated the questions. And he also knew his audience. He knew who they were and who to call on and when to call on them. And he liked the cajoling back and forth. He did it with sort of a vengeance. But also when he got some nasty questions, he was not above remarking that, “I won’t call on that so and so again.” [laughter] But he liked it. He just liked the interplay with the press. He was basically a newspaper man himself. And so he knew what they had to do for their job. And so he wanted to make it better.
MR. DALY: He got one terrible question by a person who talked about an allegation about the communist sympathies of two particular persons. And you could see the bluntness and the disgust with which he put that question down, and said he hoped that those persons haven’t been damaged by that question. The other person I could never figure out was May Craig.
MR. McNALLY: That’s right.
MR. DALY: Pierre would advise him not to call on May Craig. But she’d have the most incredibly detailed questions about an obscure matter. For example, “What about the one-way street on North Capitol?”, or something like that.
[laughter] But she had him going.
MR. FLAVIN: You were talking about the President getting angry from time to time. What about in private when he’s with you fellows? Did he have a temper?
MR. DONAHUE: Sure, he had a temper. And he could be … I mean what he would do is cut you cold. He would dismiss you with a nod. I mean he wasn’t a jolly, hail-fellow-well-met. He was working all the time. And if you had done something wrong or if he didn’t agree with you, you knew very quickly by the way he responded that …
MR. DALY: Jack, what did he tell you if you failed to head off that one person in front of him?
MR. McNALLY: Oh. This was an interesting one. There was a group of women in this country.
MR. DALY: More interesting to you than most others.
MR. McNALLY: That’s right. Women on Wheels. And the original thing was they were in Washington for a convention. And that they would come in the afternoon for a special tour. And that I would greet them in the East Rose Garden. And they would never get to the West Wing.
Well, a fellow by the name of Mike Mansfield got to the President, or got to Kenny who mentioned it to the President. And he said, “All right. Have them come over here, and I’ll see them.” Well, they went on their tour of the White House. And the White House police were bringing them across from the East Wing to the West Wing, but outside the Rose Garden. And he spotted them coming. And he said -- I was there with Kenny -- And he said, “Who’s that group?” “It’s the Women on Wheels.” “Who invited them?” Kenny said, “You did.” [laughter] He then looked at me, and he said, “John, do you see that woman coming?” She was one of the 80 State Committee people from Massachusetts. Yeah. She was one of the 80 State people from Massachusetts, who had opposed him. [laughter] And he said, “John, if that woman gets within ten feet of me, you will have had it, I will tell you.” [laughter]
MR. DALY: That’s not what he said.
MR. McNALLY: Well, I tell you, I had three of the burliest White House policemen block her every view no matter which way she went. [laughter] And he meant it.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. October 1962. What was it like on your level inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Was it as brinkmanship and terrifying as it turned out to be as we learned later?
MR. DONAHUE: There’s no question. I mean we were not knowledgeable about what was going on other than there were threats. But you did know from the people that you associated with, Kenny and those people who were in constant contact with the President, that it was not a happy time. And it was no time to be talking about frivolous things. It would be better to go home and say your prayers, because it was very, very tense.
And then, when the question of the interdiction of the Russian ships, we traced that with the TVs minute by minute. And it was almost an audible sigh of relief when there was a turn-back of one of the Russian ships. We had obviously diffused the Cuban Missile Crisis. But it was very anxious leading up to it. And it was very, very happy times once it went away.
MR. McNALLY: I think, Dick, one of the things leading up to it -- Dick told you the tensions we had -- is that I, as Kenny’s deputy, was doing many things on a day-to-day basis, on an hour to hour basis that Kenny, himself, would always take care of, and wouldn’t do. But he was so involved with the operations of what was happening that he was passing all of these things off. And it was, as Dick said, a very tense moment. But none of the three of us were involved in those details.
MR. DALY: I was in a hotel in Los Angeles ready to share some tokens to some of my liberal Congressmen. And I called Larry when the public news broke and said, “What do I do now?” He said, “You might as well come on home.” That’s about all we knew about it.
MR. FLAVIN: You mentioned Larry. You mentioned Kenny, in particular. Tell us about your coworkers, the guys that you worked with. What were the relationships? Were there rivalries within the staff? You read all about these nowadays, how everyone is trying to beat everyone else out in the White House and all that.
MR. DONAHUE: Sure. There were always rivalries. But we had the best accommodation among us, mostly because we worked together. The only way you’d get involved with a rivalry would be someone who hadn’t been involved in the past. I mean we had different qualities of people, people who started with him. I mean you take Dave Powers. They started back in Charlestown when he was running for Congress.
And the next group would be people who came along in the ’52 campaign and the ’58 campaign. And then you had the election campaign itself, which brought us a whole new group of people. Now, there were opportunities for appointments. And some of those who came late to the party thought that, because they put a bumper sticker on, that they were entitled to recognition as Assistant Secretary of State or something. [laughter] And they could involve themselves because they were, none of them without ego. And they would frequently interject themselves through their political godfathers into what’s going on. So that you had those backgrounds that defeated or at least impeded what we were trying to do.
But there was never any real animus. I mean there was some elbowing. There’s no question about that. And the elbowing really came from people trying to do their job and trying to get ahead of the line. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
MR. DALY: I think it was markedly …
MR. McNALLY: I think the White House staff, we really didn’t have an awful lot of that going on, Dick, at all. And basically, in the early days, the first month or two months of the administration, a lot of us lived together. And we were all young with young families. And we had, there was a camaraderie there that I don’t think has existed ever since.
MR. DALY: I think it was remarkable. I think that Kenny O’Donnell, to me, symbolized the quality of this Presidency in that he was very, very honest with the President, who wanted facts. He was blunt. The tapes in this Library repeatedly show his great value. There’s no sense of self-service. There was loyalty, but loyalty, not this little lapdog loyalty, but loyalty that required honesty. And I think Donahue is the same. It was a respectful irreverence.
And a mark of Kennedy was he would have persons of that nature around him. And also, another mark, in the formation of that staff, not just the White House staff, was that he gave very few persons, and in particular Donahue, a virtual veto over many, many of the appointments. Dick had to sign off on a lot of the would-be Assistant Secretaries, or whatever. And it gave him a chance, first of all, to make his own evaluations and to advise the President of his opinion. But it also gave him a pretty good handle on those guys and women when they were in the administration further down the road.
And Kenny -- I will say, Kenny was to me the hero of the staff in the standards he set and the standard he set for us to adhere to. And he was one beautiful guy when he had difficulty. I remember Dick had put together the coalition he talked about in the House, particularly on the Civil Rights Bill. We had to have a coalition. Therefore, the bill wasn’t perfect from some person’s viewpoint. The one guaranteed vote we had in Judiciary was Libonati from Chicago because Chicago congresspersons, all men in that day, vote as they’re told to vote. You cannot believe he screwed it up. So we ended up with Jim Corman having to risk his congressional career at a critical moment casting a vote. I complained to Kenny about it because he had a direct, very close relationship with Mayor Daly. I said, “Congratulations. Your guy just killed a very good Congressman.” Corman won by 49.8% of the vote the following election with a couple of mavericks on the 1%. Two days later, Libonati came up to Rostenkowski on the floor of the House and said, “They told me I can’t be a Congressman anymore.” And Rostenkowski said, “Who told you that?” And Libonati whispered the name. And Danny said, “Jesus, Libby, you had a great, great career.” [laughter]
Donahue was just as bad. He called the Mayor of Jersey City once and said, “Mr. Mayor, I got to tell you, you can’t be Mayor anymore.” And the guy said, “What are you talking about, kid?” He said, “Tell me one reason.” He said, “You forgot to be a citizen.”
MR. DONAHUE: Well, the reason that happened was he was the Mayor of either Jersey City or I don’t know where. But he had made an application for a passport.
And the State Department found out that, indeed, he was not a citizen. So how he could … He was going over to visit the homeland. And he was going to visit with people. So there were no visits. So we had to get him … So I … It was John V. Kenny, JVK, who was the boss of that area. So I called him up. And I told him. I said, “You know, you got a Mayor that’s not a citizen. And you’ve got to do something about it.” And he said, “Well, how much time have I got?” And I said, “How much time do you need?” And he said, “Well, could you give me a couple of weeks?” I said, “Whatever you need.” I said, “We’re not going to pull the plug on him until you tell me you’ve got the thing wrapped.” He called back. He said, “It’s all taken care of.” And so, he had made arrangements so that the guy would now resign. And they would replace him with a very qualified candidate.
MR. DALY: So you see, Dick really is a very gracious fellow. I had the outline of the story right. [laughter]
MR. FLAVIN: Ask you this one final question, the three of you. If a stranger came up to you on the street and said, in a word, in a few seconds, “What was John F. Kennedy like? What was the essence of this man?,” what would you say?
MR. McNALLY: Let me start it off, perhaps. I remember this as if it happened yesterday. On the night that he died, Éamon de Valera, President of Ireland, had said, and I want to quote him, “We came to regard the President as one of ourselves, though we were always aware that he was the head of the greatest nation in the world.” And I think that summed up President Kennedy. He was one of us.
MR. DONAHUE: I think, more than that he was one of us, he was a very special person with an unbelievable interest in everybody. He was interested in who you were, what you did, and what he could do to help, or what he could find out from you. He was terribly inquisitive. And he constantly pressed and pressed and pressed until you finally knew that you had now told him all you knew about the subject. But then he used that again and again coming back.
He had a catholicity of interest that just ranged from wherever. He could be talking about ball scores, and then switch off to poetry. And he would do that all the time, everyday. So he had the universality of his personality that never changed. But he was also a bright, witty, humorous, good guy, and a great job, and did a great job for us, this country.
MR. DALY: I still spend much of my time in Ireland. And a couple of years ago, a member of the Kennedy family came over to Bantry. And after the end of the visit, just rekindled again this always burning flame about Kennedy. And they were talking about him. And one guy said, “Jesus, Charles, he must have been a great piece of work.” And he was. [laughter]
MR. FLAVIN: Well let’s see. He was a great man. And it’s a great country. And it’s a great country because good men like this were willing to serve. And God help us all. Let’s hope that continues. Thank you very, very much.
[applause]
END