He was a close friend of the Kennedys’, gay and gregarious at dinner parties. Though not noted for his wit—no one had ever accused him of an overdeveloped sense of irony, which after all was to be found mostly in peoples and nations that history had defeated, and Bob was undefeated. He had a certain gaiety and ingratiating charm, an ability to talk about things other than shop. “Why is it,” asked Bob Kennedy, “that they all call him 'the computer’ and yet he’s the one all my sisters want to sit next to at dinner?” That loyalty to the Kennedy family, which had begun in 1961, endured through
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