The Administration: More Than a Brother

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On the ten-acre estate at McLean, Va. (ten miles from Washington), the place is alive with barks, meows, neighs and other animal noises. Collectively, the four Kennedy boys and three girls own three dogs (an Irish setter, a Newfoundland, a Labrador retriever), two goats, a cat, 40 rabbits, three geese, a burro, a horse and four ponies. Near the house are a tennis court, two swimming pools and. of course, a touch-football field.

Wherever he is, Bob Kennedy is always at the beck of his brother. The relationship between Jack and Bobby is close but not constant. In the course of the ordinary week, they see each other no more than once or twice, talk on the telephone every other day or so. Such conversations are generally brief; by instinct, each of the brothers seems to know what the other is thinking, and long explanations are unnecessary. "It's by osmosis," says Jack Kennedy. "We're both cryptic."

But when the going gets rough, it is Bobby that the President calls for. When the Berlin Wall was raised one Sunday morning last summer, President Kennedy cut short a cruise aboard the presidential yacht and raced back to shore. He quickly digested dispatches, then gave his first order: "Get Rusk on the phone. Go get my brother." When it became apparent that the U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba was failing, President Kennedy's word was: "Get General Lemnitzer. Get the Attorney General."

"You Were For It." In the days that followed the Cuban fiasco, it was Bobby Kennedy who played the major role in trying to pick up the pieces. The President assigned the Attorney General to help investigate the role that the Central Intelligence Agency had played in the Cuba planning. To work with him, the President picked CIA Director Allen Dulles, Admiral Arleigh Burke and retired Army General Maxwell Taylor. Later, on grounds that the President should have his own close, trusted military adviser, Bobby pushed successfully for the appointment of Taylor to the White House staff. Among his other chores in the aftermath of Cuba, Bobby ticked off Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles, who had been telling newsmen that he had opposed the Bay of Pigs assault all along. Said Bobby to Bowles: "I understand that you advised against this operation. Well, as of now, you were for it." (If Bobby had had his way, Bowles would have been fired out of hand at the time.)

A month after Cuba, Bobby again played a major role in confronting Caribbean crisis. When the Dominican Republic's Dictator Trujillo was assassinated and anarchy threatened to sweep the island, President Kennedy was away on a state visit to France. Bobby moved into a command post on the seventh floor of the State Department to oversee the implementation of a plan for U.S. support of anti-Trujillo, anti-Communist Dominicans. He okayed a move to station U.S. Navy ships near the island in a show of force. Recalling that period, President Kennedy today acts as if it had been the most natural thing in the world for Bobby to take over. "Oh yes," he says. "That's because I was out of the country."