AHC: RFK as McCarthy's chief counsel, 1953

IOTL Bobby lost out to Roy Cohn quite narrowly, reportedly because Hoover was cool on the idea. Let's say McCarthy goes ahead anyways. Would RFK's career be destroyed, or would he go out with a blast before he becomes irretrievably tainted?

I'll chip in later. ;)
 
If this were to happen I think that this would save McCarthy from the Army-McCarthy trials therefore save his career or at least until McCarthy manages to get himself in trouble.
 
No, because IOTL they were sympathetic to Bobby because he was fighting unsavory characters like Hoffa and opposing Cohn and McCarthy starting in 1954. ITTL that's not going to be the case. I'd say he figures out very quickly that what McCarthy is doing is not what he signed up for, and quits within 18 months. If RFK was working for someone who actually knew what they were doing, then he could've used it as a career-booster. McCarthy apparently didn't even know that Earl Browder was leader of the CPUSA until prompted. :rolleyes: Thankfully, the media never knew that McCarthy was godfather to his daughter Kathleen (I kid you not), that he attended McCarthy's funeral in 1957, that McCarthy was a family friend, etc. Why? Because he was just as fiercely loyal to friends, even if they were thrown under the bus by the rest of the world, as ruthlessly hunting down and eliminating enemies.

So, how does this 18-month stint turn out? If McCarthy and Bobby somehow got a high-profile Commie, then that could be for Bobby what Hiss was for Nixon a few years earlier. Having McCarthy be semi-competent is approaching ASB territory though.
 
If this were to happen I think that this would save McCarthy from the Army-McCarthy trials therefore save his career or at least until McCarthy manages to get himself in trouble.

No kidding. McCarthy would put complete trust in Bobby's judgment, and not be disappointed as he was with Cohn and Schine. But neither of them would work for him, and Bobby certainly would not want two gay men whom he despised as his subordinates. No great loss since neither are particularly competent anyways.
 
No kidding. McCarthy would put complete trust in Bobby's judgment, and not be disappointed as he was with Cohn and Schine. But neither of them would work for him, and Bobby certainly would not want two gay men whom he despised as his subordinates. No great loss since neither are particularly competent anyways.

Bobby was homophobic? :confused:
 
So, would any real Commies be unearthed, or McCarthy survive politically until his 1957 death due to lack of Army-McCarthy hearings? Due to his close relationship with McCarthy, I can see Bobby trying to persuade the Tail-Gunner to ditch the bottle with limited success.
 
From what I read when people asked McCarthy to get away from the bottle he would agree with whoever asked and the next day act like that conversation never happened. However great a chief counsel Bobby is I don't see it happening.
 
It has to do with their personal relationship, not job performance. Among other things, Bobby once helped McCarthy to bed when he became drunk and started pawing a woman at a party, was a friend of the family's, and was godfather to his firstborn child. So there's a bit to draw on, to say the least. But that's just an aside. Which scenario is more likely: petering out eventually, or landing a real Commie and thus national glory?
 
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Wolfpaw

Banned
No Cohn means no Army-McCarthy hearings. They were completely his fault, McCarthy didn't even want to investigate the Army until the Army started fighting back against Cohn's psychotic harassment.

No Army-McCarthy hearings means that McCarthy's going to be around longer and probably remain popular or at least not nosedive like he did IOTL. Bobby would likely be able to curb some of McCarthy's excesses (for a time, at least) and direct him to investigate (if you can even call what McCarthy did "investigating") things that wouldn't ruin him. I can certainly see Kennedy helping to lead a McCarthyite investigation into defense plants and schools, both of which McCarthy wanted to investigate both before and during Cohn's dragging him into a confrontation with the Army.

That being said, there may be the anti-anti-Semitic backlash that the McCarthy team so worried about IOTL, so that might tarnish Bobby's reputation a bit.
Han: don't derail the thread, but the short answer is a very emphatic yes.
There's actually never been any proof that Schine was gay. In fact he was a notorious playboy. The whole idea of Cohn and Schine being lovers is specious slander that was also leveled at McCarthy even though the Senator was quite the womanizer himself.

If there were any romantic feelings they were all on Cohn's part. He had a really obsessive affection for Schine and went out of his way to ensure that Schine was treated like a prince. Schine, being the flat-out idiot that he was, just took it for granted (because he'd grown up like a prince) and it wasn't like he was going to stop living on easy street because his pal may have the hots for him.
 
Where does anti-Semitism come in here? :confused: But to be honest I don't see Bobby staying very long, at least no more than 2 years. He has bigger fish to fry, and Rackets is much safer politically, if infinitely more demanding. That's where he earned his creds as an investigator, not with Scoop and Joe. But yes, he'd probably see that this is a dead-end career path and move on to something else, probably another committee or a congressional run, since the first offer for a safe seat had come in back in '51.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
So, would any real Commies be unearthed, or McCarthy survive politically until his 1957 death due to lack of Army-McCarthy hearings? Due to his close relationship with McCarthy, I can see Bobby trying to persuade the Tail-Gunner to ditch the bottle with limited success.
If Bobby helps McCarthy get his "Reds in our Schools" investigations off the ground, they'd probably unearth a couple "pinkos" or professors/deans/trustees with "Red" sympathies.

McCarthy's 1957 death was completely avoidable. While he did have some nasty medical issues, none were life threatening. McCarthy's death was almost completely due to the 1000-fold increase in his drinking during and after the Army-McCarthy hearings along with the severe depression he fell into after his humiliation.

You could make the argument that McCarthy's depression was actually suicidal; he would often say how he was ready or waiting to die and blatantly ignored doctors' advice to stop drinking to save his liver (which was rapidly becoming a poisonous lump of asphalt). There's a rather horrific story of McCarthy finishing a glass of bourbon, telling two friends that his doctors told him that if he drank another drop he would die, and then refilling the glass to the brim and drinking it in one or two gulps right in front of them, smiling all the while.

Nobody's going to get McCarthy to ditch the bottle. Period. Even when he "stopped drinking" all he did was switch from hard alcohol to beer :rolleyes:
 
Of course not. Ironically this might sour RFK on McCarthy, since the thing he despised above all else was cowardice, and especially moral cowardice. That falling-out didn't happen IOTL, but quite plausible. What I mean by "real Commie" is a Hiss-type conviction.
 
Could you clarify this a bit; I'm not entirely sure of what you mean.

You mentioned an "anti anti-Semitic backlash". In order for there to be a backlash against anti-Semitism there has to be a highly visible anti-Semitic act on McCarthy's part, and I don't see that as plausible. Cohn and Schine were Jews, RFK was completely unprejudiced against Jews and had many Jewish friends, and I don't know about McCarthy.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
Well Hiss-like cases were really hard to find. McCarthy and his team did spend a lot of time trying to find similar cases but when they couldn't find any they just started attacking people who'd so much as looked sideways at something colored red.

If they found pinks among the "liberal egghead jackals" and "moral deviants/perverts" in the school system, this could be enough to give McCarthy's crusade a second wind.
 
"Eggheads" is a tough sell unless you have a Tail-Gunner like climate. "Moral deviants" is certainly something Bobby would be... highly enthusiastic, to say the least, about rooting out, but he'd have to ditch Cohn, or at least keep him off those cases. "Henceforth, the only *cigarettes* around here will be the ones I smoke." If they can prove that the suspects in question are both gay and pinko, then double bonus points in many eyes. Hell, Edna might help out on that one, being so self-loathing and so deeply closeted as to be a parody.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
You mentioned an "anti anti-Semitic backlash". In order for there to be a backlash against anti-Semitism there has to be a highly visible anti-Semitic act on McCarthy's part, and I don't see that as plausible. Cohn and Schine were Jews, RFK was completely unprejudiced against Jews and had many Jewish friends, and I don't know about McCarthy.
Okay, I see what you're saying.

As you rightly pointed out, Bobby bore no animus towards Jews nor did McCarthy (who was acutely sensitive to accusations of bigotry). Cohn was viewed as a sellout by a lot of Jews and half of the time people forgot that the tall, blond and (IIRC) blue-eyed Schine was Jewish at all. There doesn't have to be a highly visible anti-Semitic act because at the end of the day you have an awful lot of Jews being hauled in front of a repulsively aggressive, cruel, and outright abusive team of investigators dominated by Irish Catholics. It isn't very hard to see why something like that could be construed as at least partially motivated by anti-Semitism.

And besides, people can just go and look up Papa Kennedy's feelings towards Jews and use that to blacken Bobby.
 
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Wolfpaw

Banned
"Eggheads" is a tough sell unless you have a Tail-Gunner like climate.
Lucky for us that's the exact climate this is taking place in ;)
"Moral deviants" is certainly something Bobby would be... highly enthusiastic, to say the least, about rooting out, but he'd have to ditch Cohn, or at least keep him off those cases.
Cohn doesn't need to be ditched, he actually led (not helped, led) almost every single case that had to do with hounding out gays. Hell, he and Bobby might even bond over it ;):p The funny thing is that everybody knew Cohn was gay but you know what journalistic SOPs were back then, especially if the target was as powerful as Cohn was. I mean, Cohn didn't even try to hide his homosexuality in later life and people still only found out he was gay after he died from AIDS (which he'd always told people was liver cancer).

If you want to talk about self-hatred you don't have to go all the way to Hoover as Cohn works just as well. He was a Jew who viciously persecuted Jews and a homosexual who persecuted homosexuals
even more viciously, both of which he took great pride in.
 
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