Not infrequently, father and son played the same field—or, more accurately, the father played the son’s field. Washington socialite and longtime Kennedy family friend Kay Halle remembered an evening at a posh restaurant in the capital when a waiter brought her a note saying friends at another table wanted her to join them. It was Joe, Jack, and Bobby. “When I joined them the gist of the conversation from the boys was the fact that their father was going to be in Washington for a few days and needed female companionship. They wondered whom I could suggest, and they were absolutely serious.”7

Mary Pitcairn, a friend of Eunice’s who dated Jack Kennedy on occasion, offered more disturbing detail:

Mr. Kennedy always called up the girls Jack was taking out and asked them to dinner. He came down and took me to the Carleton Hotel—then the fanciest dining room in Washington. He was charming. He wanted to know his children’s friends. He was very curious about my personal life. He really wanted to know. He asked a lot of personal questions—extraordinarily personal questions….

He did something that I heard he did to everyone. After dinner he would take you home and kiss you goodnight as though you were a young so-and-so. One night I was visiting Eunice at the Cape and he came into my bedroom to kiss me goodnight! I was in my nightgown, ready for bed. Eunice was in her bedroom. We had an adjoining bath. The doors were open. He said, “I’ve come to say goodnight,” and kissed me. Really kissed me. It was so silly. I remember thinking, “How embarrassing for Eunice!” But beyond that, nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I think all this confused Jack. He was a sensitive man and I think it confused him. What kind of object is a woman? To be treated as his father treated them? And his father’s behavior that way was blatant. There was always a young, blonde, beautiful secretary around. I think it was very confusing to Jack.8

How Eunice felt about the fraternity-like atmosphere in the Georgetown house is not clear. She adored her brother; in her eyes he could do no wrong. Though she always indignantly dismissed the stories of their father’s extramarital flings—they were unfounded rumors, Eunice insisted, spread by people who mistook innocent flirting for immoral behavior—she saw little of concern in Jack’s dalliances. He was single, after all; this was how unmarried men behaved.

For that matter, Eunice was too busy pursuing her career to pay much mind to the comings and goings on Thirty-first Street. Tall and thin, with reddish-brown hair and high cheekbones, the fifth child of Joe and Rose had from a young age stood out for her deep religious conviction, fierce intelligence, and almost superhuman willpower. Like Jack, she had suffered chronic health maladies throughout her life, including back problems and stomach ailments that left her perpetually underweight (the family nickname for her was “Puny Eunie”), and, like him, she had willed herself through the pain, ignoring doctors’ pleas to slow down, put on weight, and get adequate rest. Instead she pressed on, racking up sporting trophies left and right (she was a superior athlete) and exuding seriousness of purpose. “Eunice was born mature,” her mother later said, “and because she was so close to Rosemary a special social responsibility developed within her, which later showed up when she went to Harlem to do social work.”9

“Of all the kids in the family, Eunice was far and away the strongest-minded,” George Smathers would observe in 1976. “Sort of the leader of the clan. Very tough when she wanted to be.” He added that the twenty-five-year-old Eunice would have loved to be the Kennedy to run in the Eleventh District in 1946: “If she’d been a little older, and if it had been today, when a lot of women are running for office, I suspect the history of the Kennedy clan would have been quite different.” Mary Pitcairn said: “She was highly nervous, highly geared, and worshiped Jack. I always thought she should have been a boy.” In the Georgetown salons, when the men adjourned for political talk and cigars after the meal, Eunice often went with them, lighting her own stogie, rather than join the women in the drawing room. She shared with her brother a keen political sense, which is one reason they got on so well. Both of them had a singular ability to size up a political situation almost instantly.10

In Washington she threw herself into her work on behalf of troubled youth, even bringing boys and girls home to Georgetown for dinner on occasion. She organized a celebrity golf tournament to raise money for projects helping local youth offenders, and encouraged a national organization of sportswriters and broadcasters to have its members write about the matter and coach troubled youths in sports they themselves played. She even took to the road, speaking in various locales around the country on the plight of children languishing in juvenile detention centers such as the DC Receiving Home in Washington. Shriver assisted her in these efforts, having been dispatched to Washington from Chicago by Joe Kennedy to serve as her all-purpose aide. (Thus the peculiar characteristics of Shriver’s position: working for Eunice, and courting her, while being paid by her father.)11

Shriver, naturally, saw a lot of the townhouse, and therefore of Jack. He found he liked the congressman, liked his intelligence and charm and self-possession, and enjoyed spending time with him. Shriver also relished attending the dinners over which Jack presided, since they afforded a chance to meet politicians from various parts of the country.

On one occasion, Shriver remembered:

I ended up alone at a table with this freshman Republican from California I’d never met before. It was the oddest experience: I felt like I couldn’t get a handle on this guy. I couldn’t pin down what his opinions on anything were. He bobbed and weaved, like a cowardly boxer. Half the time, it seemed he was barely paying attention to me. He’d be looking over my shoulder at the other tables, as though he were trying to eavesdrop, trying to figure out what the other congressmen were saying. It’s rare that someone makes as strong an impression on you as this guy did on me. But I came away thinking that he was smart, crafty, and a scheming conniver, more interested in establishing his position with Jack and other luminaries than in anything I was saying.12

So went Sargent Shriver’s first encounter with Richard Nixon.