4

HAUNTED  BY  TED  KENNEDY’S  SHOES

            Looking back on the whole thing, I probably should have apologized to Senator Ted Kennedy, and I did consider it a couple of times.  He used to drop by occasionally to see Jim Wright, and I could easily have buttonholed him for a moment.  But to tell the truth, I never knew how the Senator might react if I told him I was the fellow involved in matter of the shoes.  So I just kept quiet.

            It all started with Mitch Elderson, but I can’t really blame him.  He was just trying to do me a favor, and he didn’t do that for many people.  Fat because he was forever eating and melancholy for reasons he never disclosed, Mitch was one of my bosses in the city room of the Fort Worth Star- Telegram back in the early 1960’s. 

            In his prime I’m sure Mitch was a crackerjack newspaperman.  But when I knew him he was just whiling away his few remaining years before retirement.  Occasionally he would fill in as City Editor.  This meant he was responsible for directing the efforts of about 20 or so reporters like myself in gathering and writing the news in the Fort Worth area.  What made this so strange is that Mitch detested news.  He hated for anything to happen--especially anything people would be interested in reading about.

            On slow news days, Mitch tolerated his job responsibilities pretty well.  In the early afternoon as the morning paper reporters straggled in to work,  he would quietly pass out ho-hum assignment slips.  After that, he would  just sit and vegetate, hands clasped  Buddha-like on the City Desk.  Of course the phones were always ringing, but usually other guys on the desk would answer them.  Only in the most unusual circumstances did his desk mates intrude on Mitch’s ritual reveries.

            When the reporters came in from their beats, Mitch would take a perfunctory look at their stories and wordlessly pass them over to the Copy Desk to be given headlines and dummied into the paper.  Then he would pick up his hat and go home.  He was the only City Editor I ever knew who hated news. 

            One night just before deadline for the four-star edition, the Miss Texas contestant from Fort Worth beat out dozens of other shapely and talented girls and won the statewide title.  This was a big deal for hometown folks, easily worthy of a Page One story and the obligatory bathing suit picture.  When the Associated Press bulletin came in from Galveston, Mitch’s brow wadded up like a K-Mart throw rug.  “Umm,” he grumphed.  “Might have known it.  Nothing else would do her.  She just had to go down there and win.”  

            Despite his idiosyncracies--or perhaps because of them--I really liked Mitch, and he always treated me well.  For one thing, he knew I enjoyed national politics.  Like thousands of other reporters across the nation, I yearned for a piece of the action in the escalating presidential campaign of 1960--the classic battle between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. 

            One day late in September,  as the campaign was moving into high gear, I saw Mitch peer over his glasses in my direction.  He motioned for me to come over to the City Desk.     

            “Would you like to go out to Arlington State College?” he asked. 

            “What’s happening out there?”

            “Teddy Kennedy is supposed to be making a talk.  We’re going to have to cover it,  I guess,” he sighed.

            “Teddy Kennedy is making a campaign speech at a state college?  Won’t the Nixon-Lodge people raise hell about that?”

            “I surely hope not,” Mitch murmured.

            It wasn’t a Pulitizer Prize type of assignment, but I was pleased  with this chance to get a first-hand look at a younger brother of the man who might soon be President.  In Texas, as in virtually every part of the country, each day was bringing new momentum to the race between the brainy, tousled-headed Massachusetts Senator and the buttoned-down political pro who had dutifully served eight years as Eisenhower’s Vice President.  And because Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas was on the ticket as Kennedy’s running mate, the campaign already had become the biggest day-to-day story in our state.

            Only two weeks before, John Kennedy had made a crucial appearance before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association.  He presented a shrewd, head-on challenge to the myth that, because of presumed loyalty to the Vatican, no Catholic should ever be entrusted with the Presidency.  With his straight-forward speech and forthright answers, he won the respect if not the support of many distrustful Protestant clergymen. 

            This was important, because even with Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, the fate of Texas’s 24 electoral votes was still very much in doubt.

            That summer, prior to John Kennedy’s nomination at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, I had read that his younger brother Teddy was busily rounding up Kennedy delegates in several Western states.  I was eager to see this 28-year-old political wire-puller who, with another brother, Robert, 34, stood at either elbow of the 43-year-old Massachsetts Senator who aspired to be the 35th President of the United States.

            When photographer Wilburn Davis and I arrived at Arlington State College, at first we couldn’t find any sign of Ted Kennedy.  At the administration office, the staff professed to know nothing about plans for any such visit.  Then, as we wandered around the front of the Student Center, we nearly bumped into our quarry.

            Lean and dynamic in those days, Ted Kennedy had just whooshed up in a gleaming white convertible.  Handsome in a gray suit with a PT-109 clasp on his tie, he was welcomed and applauded by several hundred ASC students and faculty members.  After working the crowd, he began looking around for a speaker’s stand--or at least something to stand on.

            Finding nothing, he began speaking from a spot in the roadway near the car.  Then, frustrated because he could see the faces of only the few people nearest him, he stopped for a moment, shucked off his coat and then his shoes, and climbed up on the hood of the shiny convertible. 

            This was exactly the type of spontaneous, decisive action his youthful listeners were expecting to see--and they loved it.  And his political appeal was squarely aimed at them. 

            “We need the help of all of you here--we need the young people and their ideas,”    Kennedy cried.  The crowded nodded and clapped and whistled. 

            But not all his listeners were focused exclusively on political concerns.  “Isn’t he wonderful?” one coed sighed dreamily.

            Her female companion, likewise transfixed by the exciting young man on the car hood,  could gurgle only three words:  “Yes--just wonderful!”

            Before his enraptured audience, Kennedy ticked off a litany of what he called Republican failures to lead the nation--the stoning of U.S. officials in Latin America, protest rioting in Japan which forced President Eisenhower to cancel his scheduled visit, and the upsurge of communism in Cuba.

            It was a fine speech.  The only trouble was, from a reporter’s standpoint, it was devoid of any new news.  Every issue Ted Kennedy raised was old hat--a collection of worn-out old topics explored time and again in national utterances by either John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or both.

            This is the ultimate anguish for a reporter--to have several pages of quotes--all old, dull or uninteresting.  Back at the office that day, I must have ripped a dozen false starts out of my old Underwood manual, feverishly trying to come up with a substantive lead that contained something new, exciting or different about Teddy’s speech.  Finally, with my copy deadline looming and Mitch casting anxious glances in my direction, I decided in desperation to give up on substance and fall back on froth and cuteness:

                                       SHOELESS  KENNEDY  CAMPAIGNS

                                           ACROSS  AREA  FOR  BIG  BROTHER

                                                        By Marshall Lynam

                        Some politicians take off their coats and loosen their ties

            before lighting into the opposition.

                        But Ted Kenedy, 28-year-old brother of Senator John F.

            Kennedy, did better than that while stumping for the Democrats

            in the Fort Worth area Friday.

                        He took off his shoes, too.

                        It happened at Arlington State College.  Arriving there at

            noon, young Kennedy found there was no speaker’s stand.

                        Unhesitatingly shucking his shoes as well as his coat, he

            climbed up on the hood of a gleaming white convertible.

                        Moving back and forth in his stocking feet across the groaning

            hood, he lit into the Republicans for assertedly letting America’s

            prestige drop in the eyes of the world...

            From this point on, I devoted 16 paragraphs to a conscientious report on the  tired old issues Teddy recycled in his speech.  Near the end of the story, however, I did include this unfortunate one-sentence observation:

                        Before Ted put this shoes back on, a nosy reporter looked

            inside and found they were imported British models. 

            After handing in my story to Mitch, I never gave it another thought. I was very much aware that the products of my literary efforts, like those of all newspaper reporters, are used mainly for wrapping fish and lining the bottoms of bird cages.  I had no reason to think I would ever hear of this story again.  I was wrong.  In 1966 the story, like a ghostly boomerang which had been circling in the Bermuda Triangle for six years, came sailing back to haunt me.

            Over these intervening years, of course, tumultuous events had occurred.  John F. Kennedy won the 1960 Presidential election by a hairbreadth popular vote margin (with the help of Texas).  Two years later Ted was elected by Massachusetts voters to fill his brother John’s former seat in the Senate.   President Kennedy was killed by a madman in Dallas in 1963.  And now, in 1966, the third brother, Robert, was serving his second year as a Senator from New York--destined to be killed by yet another madman in 1968. 

            The passing years also had wrought significant changes in my own life.  After leaving the Star-Telegram in 1962 to work as a Congressional staffer, my viewpoint on newspapers had broadened considerably.  As a reporter, I used to think politicians were just chronic bellyachers in their complaints about news stories.  But in four years as a staffer on the Hill, I learned that elected officials sometimes had legitimate reasons for accusing reporters of being incompetent, careless,  or just plain mean.  My heart was still in the newsroom, but I had seen many instances where my boss, Jim Wright, had what I thought was a justifiable beef about a story.

            In the office we suscribed to a clipping service which provided us with a copy of every newspaper story in Texas that mentioned Jim Wright.  When one of these packages of clippings came in, inevitably he would find one or two stories that infuriated him.  One night, an hour or so after the rest of the staff had gone home, the phone rang on my desk.

`            “Marshall, have you seen this scurrilous damn story on the Trinity canal?” Jim Wright demanded.       

            “I’m not sure which story you mean.  I’ll be right in,” I said.

            As I opened the door to his office he was hunched over his desk, rereading the offending story.  As I got closer, I could see his face was crimson.  Suddenly he slammed the clipping down on his desk so hard it sent other clippings fluttering into the air like maddened butterflies.

            “Who is this stupid jackass Harold Weston?  He makes up a bunch of phony statistics and claims that our Trinity project is a just a big boondoggle!” he thundered.

            I picked up the clipping and glanced at the byline.  “Oh--it’s that guy from the Herald,” I said.  “He damn well knows better than this.  He came by here and I gave him the Corps of Engineers study with the accurate cost-benefit figures.”

            “You gave him the accurate figures and then he goes ahead anyway and writes tripe like this?”

            “I’m afraid so.”  

            “Why do newspaper reporters do things like this, Marshall?” he asked, almost pleading.  “We work our butts off for a project that will benefit all of Texas, and then we have to put up with crap like this.”

            By this time he was beginning to calm down.  His face was no longer flushed, and he leaned back in his chair, idly toying with a ballpoint pen.

            “I just don’t understand what makes these fellows tick,” he sighed.  “Do you know, Marshall, I even remember a story years ago about Ted Kennedy. He came down to make a speech, and while he was there, some rattle-brained idiot from the Star-Telegram looked inside his shoes--looked inside his shoes, mind you--and then wrote in the paper about them being imported from England.”

            I gulped, unsure whether or not he was baiting me.  After all, if he read the story, hadn’t he seen my name on it?  But then, who pays any attention to bylines?  From his expression I decided he was not merely taunting me.  He was dead serious.  And then, fumbling for something appropriate to say,  I took the coward’s way out.

            “Is nothing sacred to them?” I croaked.

            Over the next few weeks, every time I recalled this conversation, I smiled--not because I had kept Jim Wright in the dark, for that to me that was not a smiling matter.  What actually made me smile was my own cowardice--cowardice so blatant it was funny.  Then, while still trying to decide whether my hypocracy was funny or sad, one day I got a call from a friend and fellow Hill staffer, Janet Howard.

            Janet was an attractive, politically savvy young woman from Brownwood, Texas, who worked for one of our Senators, Ralph Yarborough.  She told me this was the birthday of Tom Wilson, a mutual friend on the Hill.  She invited me to join a bunch of Senate people gathering after work for a couple of shooters to help Tom celebrate.

            I arrived at the little cocktail lounge in Plaza Hotel about 6:30, and the party was well underway.  Rather than offend Tom by refusing to toast him on his birthday, I knocked off a couple of vodka martinis and soon felt considerably better about Tom, his birthday, the Constitution of the United States, my case of athlete’s foot, and practically everything else.  In this spirit of goodwill and camaraderie, I introduced myself to a fellow I didn’t recognize who was sitting at our table.

            He gave me his name, and I asked him where he worked.

            “I’m Administrative Assistant to Senator Ted Kennedy,” he said.

            Feeling a twinge akin to the Twilight Zone,  I managed to gurgle something about being pleased to meet him.  At this point I urgently needed another vodka, so I invited my new acquaintance to join me. 

            By the time the drinks came I had regained my composure and was actually enjoying my conversation with the fellow.  He had a great sense of humor, we swapped a couple of laughs about recent antics on the Hill.  The vodka was making me even more intelligent and amusing than usual.

            “Those of us who work in the House don’t usually share secrets with you wizards from the the House of Lords,” I  laughed, “but I’m going to tell you a funny little story.”

            And I did.

            At least I thought it was funny.

            He didn’t.

            “You son of a bitch,” he said, getting up from the table.

            At first I thought he was going to hit me.

            “I’m sorry,” I said, clumsily standing up.  “I just thought you’d get a kick out of it.  I didn’t mean to make you mad.”

            “No, no,” he protested.  “You don’t understand.  I’m not mad.”

            “You’re not?”

            “No--of course not.  I was just surprised.  You just cleared up a mystery that’s been bugging me for six years.”

            “I did?” 

            “Yes,” he said, explaining that he had been working with Teddy in the 1960 campaign.  About a month before the election--approximately when Teddy might have been returning to Massachusetts from Texas--the two of them were rushing downtown to a big campaign rally in Boston Common.

            “We were running down the street, late as usual, when all of a sudden Teddy reaches out and grabs me.  ‘Wait a minute,’ he said.  He looked down at my feet, mad as hell, and said, ‘Are those imported shoes?’”

            By this time everybody around our table in the cocktail lounge was listening, unable to make sense out of what my new friend was saying.  I could have explained, but I didn’t.

            “Anyhow,” he continued, “I held up one of my shoes for him to see.  I said,  ‘Yeah, Teddy, these are brand new Italian models.  Just got ‘em.  Really proud of ‘em. Don’t you like the little tassels?’”      

            Teddy, it developed, did not like the tassels.  Nor the Italian shoes.  Nor shoes from England.  Nor any damn shoes from any damn place other than those  from Massachusetts shoe factories like those in Lynn and Lowell and Salem.  Teddy’s furious  words, as recalled by his staffer, were these:             

            “You silly jerk! Don’t you know that you never go to a political rally wearing imported shoes!”  

            I never did apologize to Senator Kennedy.  If I had, I could have told him how to avoid any future problems like this.  Just by making sure a speech contains a tiny smidgin of news that a hard-working reporter can use for a lead.