One of the Family

At Washington cocktail parties, wavy-haired Steve Smith breaks them up with impersonations of Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. He is about the most graceful dancer of all the New Frontiersmen. On the golf course, he shoots in the low 80s. At 35, he has the youthful good looks of one of those mayor-for-a-day teenagers. He is also John Kennedy's brother-in-law, and a pretty tough politician in his own right.

Presently, Smith is undertaking an important assignment from his White House inlaw. His job, preparatory to Kennedy's 1964 campaign for reelection, is to smooth over Democratic splits in New York, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. In those four states, with an electoral-vote total of 119, Democrats got beat in key gubernatorial contests in 1962, and they have been blaming each other ever since.

Never Conned Twice. No sooner had he married the President's youngest sister, Jean, in 1956 (Cardinal Spellman officiated), than Smith got involved in the Kennedy political fortunes. In 1958, he left his job as vice president of his own family's tugboat firm to run the Boston headquarters of Jack's Massachusetts Senate campaign. Up to then, Smith's only political connection was through his grandfather, William E. Cleary, who built the tugboat fortune and 40 years ago served three terms in Congress. Steve caught on to politics fast. Said a veteran of that first campaign: "Those characters up there could con him into a lot of things. But he learned. He never got conned in the same way or by the same guy twice. And still he had a way of making everyone like him."

In early 1959, Smith went to Washington, where he set up an unobtrusive little office at the foot of Capitol Hill. His mission: to organize early logistics for Kennedy's presidential assault; the election was still 22 months away. He pored over lists of possible pro-Kennedy delegates, set up the candidate's pre-convention campaign trips, went himself into at least 30 states that year. But with the nomination won and the general election campaign heating up, Smith found himself grounded in Washington, handling intricate home-office details for the far-flung campaigners. "He was like a key supply-corps general who spent the war in the Pentagon," recalls a Kennedy aide. "You never heard about him on the outside. But we couldn't have won the war without him." Adds another staffer: "He was indefatigable--he was great."

The Obvious Man. After the election, Smith briefly held a State Department job, accompanied Vice President Johnson on a round-the-world trip. When old Joe Kennedy suffered a stroke in December 1961, Smith moved to New York to oversee some Kennedy financial enterprises. But last summer he turned up again in Boston--this time to lend his now mature experience to ironing out the wrinkles in Teddy Kennedy's victorious senatorial campaign.

Then, in January, he got his current cubbyhole office at the National Democratic Committee headquarters in Washington. He has no title ("I'm just helping out''), but it is likely that Steve Smith will become Kennedy's presidential campaign manager next year. As a White House staffer says, "Steve is the obvious man for the job, because the Kennedys are always going to have one of the family in charge rather than an outsider. That's just the way they are."

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