THE DAY WAS unremarkable. It was an early spring morning with a deep chill in the air, courtesy of one of those stiff New England breezes off the cold Atlantic Ocean that refuse to give winter up for good.
Kenny sipped his coffee in Harvard Square, which he’d called home since escaping Worcester, Pleasant Street, and Holy Cross. He was standing just beyond the brick walls that surrounded Harvard College, walls convenient before the end of the war for keeping the moneyed Yankees safe from those pesky immigrants—the Irish, Italians, and Greeks, whose wish to have their kids attend Harvard was until very recently just a pipe dream. Some of them, however, like Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., a friend of Kenny’s father, Cleo, another up-from-the-bottom Irishman, had somehow broken through and gotten into Harvard. Cleo was smart enough to go to Harvard. He just did not have the dough. Somehow, Joe Kennedy had pulled that off.
This didn’t surprise Cleo. “Darn smart fellow,” Cleo always said. “Darn smart. Not my cup of tea, but darn smart.”
For Kenny, Cleo’s rebellious second son, that always translated into I don’t like the guy, but I admire any Irishman who can kick down some Yankee doors and succeed.
Just then, Kenny’s eyes glanced across the headlines of the morning paper. He moved quickly from the national news to the local Boston political front. Like his father, Kenny was a political junkie. He was at a newsstand that served up lousy but hot coffee and a few slightly stale donuts. It was not far from the small apartment that he shared with his young, blue-eyed bride, Helen.
She was also from Worcester, the Turkey Hill neighborhood to be exact. Her maiden name was Sullivan. Like the O’Donnell clan, the Sullivans were blue-collar, struggling, hardworking Irish. Helen’s father, Bart, was a tradesman, first generation not long off the boat from county Cork. Like so many of the Irish, he had come here seeking the American dream. But it had all ended in despair. Bart’s beloved mother and sister had died on the journey over, of some dread disease that seemed to plague especially the poor. Bart landed in Boston alone, embittered, and already homesick. He eventually made his way to Worcester with the help of some friends and set himself up as a tradesman, half electrician, half jack-of-all-trades. There he met a blue-eyed Swedish beauty by the name of Hilda.
They married. The Sullivans were what you might call working-class poor. Hilda had cleaned the homes of the upper middle class and the wealthy, who could afford such extravagances.
Bart and Hilda had two children: a daughter, Helen Mary, and a son, Robert. But this new family could never compete with the one Bart had lost, and in the end their ghosts (and the liquor that suppressed their memory) won out.
Helen spent much of her young life retrieving her father after hours from some bar or tracking him down after days on a bender. Her first date with Kenny had been interrupted by such an excursion. Cleo and Alice, Kenny’s parents, liked Helen but saw trouble and suggested they were too young. Kenny told them to go to hell, just as he had when he enlisted and lied about his age, telling his father the day he left. Cleo had been furious in an Irish way that suggested more pride than anger.
After Kenny married Helen, they soon had their first son, Kenny Jr. Their marriage had occurred rapidly despite the fact that Kenny’s financial situation would seem to have ruled it out. Apparently, Kenny Jr. was coming, wedding license or not.
Once married, Helen was as eager as Kenny had been to escape Worcester. They moved to a lousy, small, postwar apartment in Cambridge. It was so cheap in fact that one night after a few too many beers, Kenny and his older brother, Cleo Jr., managed, while wrestling, to go right through the wall and land in the living room of the next apartment!
No matter. The apartment was the Ritz-Carlton as far as Helen was concerned. Never had Kenny seen someone so happy with so little. She was also an athlete, a sports nut, and competitive as hell, so she fit right in with Kenny’s boys, the “Harvard Irregulars” as Kenny jokingly called them. And she got along splendidly with Kenny’s chum, sort of an adopted kid brother, Bobby Kennedy.
Robert Francis Kennedy was Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s sixth child. He had become Kenny’s and the Harvard football team’s best pal. Bobby was not the best athlete and he made the Harvard football team by sheer determination and toughness. It was a trait Kenny would come to admire and later find himself unsuccessfully trying to rein in.
It was the spring of 1946 when Bobby, as he was known to the gridiron gang at Harvard, wanted Kenny to meet his older brother Jack. On the appointed day, Kenny was waiting for Bobby, who was late—nothing new.
Kenny was bored. He didn’t know why he was here, and he didn’t much care about meeting Bobby’s older brother. Bobby had been pestering the hell out of Kenny about it, though. So Ken figured, Well, okay, after some prodding from Helen. What the hell, I might as well meet the guy. Get it over with, for Christ’s sake.
In the end, it would be a meeting that was remarkable for what did not happen. Lightning did not strike. Ken did not shake Jack’s hand and know right away he was meeting a future president and the man who would change his life. Instead, Kenny found him to be a nice guy, clearly a young man of wealth and means, handsome, but otherwise totally unremarkable.
“He seemed too boyish and shy to be running against experienced politicians like Mike Neville and John Cotter in that tough congressional district,” Kenny later reported to his pals. Kenny was unimpressed, but Jack was running for Congress, so he agreed to help. “Yeah, sure,” he had said to Bobby, “I’ll do it, but as a favor to you. He’ll never make it.”
Bobby, who clearly idolized his older brother, saw only success for Jack. And rightly so: Jack was a war hero, author, journalist, bon vivant, and generally nice guy. “He’s going all the way,” Bobby had announced to Kenny with his adoring (though politically naive and uninformed) enthusiasm.
“Whatever you say, Bobby,” Kenny had laughingly replied.
Of course, Jack would go all the way that year, going on to win the 1946 open congressional seat, in large measure due to a remarkably funny, perceptive little Irishman from the town of Charlestown, which lay just across the Charles River from Boston. His name was David Francis Powers. Dave would later become a good pal of Kenny’s, almost as close to Kenny as he was to Jack. But that was yet to come.
Later, Kenny would laugh at himself when people asked him about his first meeting with Jack. Shit, he thought, I wish I had been that perceptive. Honestly, though, he just seemed like another returned vet. Nice guy, rich kid, playboy, good looking, and Joe Kennedy’s son. Nothing more.
But Bobby pressed. Bobby always pressed when he wanted something. He could be a pain that way. What Bobby wanted now was for Kenny to see in his brother what he saw—a hero and a future president. Mostly, what Bobby wanted Kenny to see and understand was that his brother was, above all else, a natural politician.
As a young returning vet in Massachusetts in 1946, Kenny did not pay a hell of a lot of attention to Congressman Jack Kennedy. Jack was Ambassador Joe Kennedy’s boy, after all, and the ambassador was not very popular among those working-class Massachusetts men who had risked life and limb fighting in the Pacific during the war. Joe Kennedy had been recalled from his ambassadorship in England around the time of American intervention in the war for comments that were construed as sympathetic toward the Axis powers.
Furthermore, most people in the state, war vets or not, had no clue who Jack Kennedy was. It wasn’t personal. He was just an obscure congressman; just another son of a famous family, a rich kid with connections. Most Massachusetts voters did not give a damn about their congressman or senator anyway. Hell, most could not even name them.
It was the governor who controlled the power, the jobs, and, most important, the patronage. At the time, that power was held by Robert F. Bradford, Massachusetts’s fifty-seventh governor, who would serve only one term, from his election in 1947 to 1949, because in those days Massachusetts’s governors were elected to two-year terms. Bob Bradford, who had replaced Mauríce Tobin as governor, was a pipe-smoking Harvard fellow. He was highly thought of and came from a respected family. He was the scion of “an old traditional Yankee, Brahmin family,” as Kenny would describe them. In a manner of speaking, he embodied everything Jack and Kenny were not. Bradford was a socially aware Republican governing at a time when the men returning from the war were reshaping the political climate in Massachusetts, as well as across the nation. The overall political atmosphere in 1946 into which young war vet Jack Kennedy stepped is critical to understanding what happened next.
Immediately after the war, Maurice Tobin had been governor. Tobin had been mayor of the city of Boston from 1938 to 1944. In 1944, he was elected governor with a largely liberal agenda. Unfortunately, he was opposed at every turn by the Republican-dominated legislature and eventually was defeated by Bradford in 1947. For Kenny, the political atmosphere in the state was stained by “those terrible Boston politicians” whose “ethics” left Kenny and many voters like him looking for a political alternative.
This is the way most vets and voters of his age demographic looked at it, too, especially those in the western part of the state, which included the industrial area of Worcester. They were outsiders who did not have much use for Boston pols.
In 1946, in addition to Bradford winning the governorship, a rich, well-respected Yankee by the name of Henry Cabot Lodge had beaten David Ignatius Walsh for Senate. Walsh had been lieutenant governor, had already served in the Massachusetts Senate, returning in 1926, and had served until Lodge soundly defeated him.
In fact, Lodge had even carried Boston, the first time in recent history that a Republican had won the city. It was an impressive display of political power as far as Kenny was concerned. There was, in fact, a tremendous revulsion toward the Democrats growing among the voters.
The Republican slogan was “Had enough?!” And apparently the voters had. So they sent the Democrats packing. The Democrats were also victims of the economy. There were still breadlines everywhere. You could not buy the things you needed. It was tough to find jobs. Even returning vets looking for work to feed their families could not get jobs.
Walsh had also been in part a victim of a campaign involving The Boston Post, which did not like him, and in fact most of the working-class press felt the same way. Still, Walsh was one of the few state politicians at the time who was, or appeared to be, honest.
Walsh was an isolationist and very conservative. He was out of step with the change in the pulse of the voters and especially with the returning vets. Times were changing, and he had failed to take the temperature of the public as Lodge had.
Into this time of great political change in Massachusetts stepped young Jack Kennedy, a new breed of politician in the right place, at the right moment. He won with the help of a few working-class Irish vets, who early on sensed that Jack was the real deal.
Jack began by recruiting some of his old war vet buddies as well as personal school chums to help on the campaign. The political machinations would, in this campaign at least, be left to his father, Joe, to handle. Among those who jumped into the campaign were young war veterans, such as Thomas Broderick. Broderick was a small, wiry fellow and had first met Jack in 1943 in the Pacific Theater. “I was attached to the LST-353,” Broderick recalled later. “It was during a bombing attack. We had to race to go rescue some officers on another LST, turned out to be his. They had been hit, so we took them aboard; and then when we got to the safety of the beach, the War Department had someone there taking pictures because we had rescued so many officers. One thing led to another. He overheard me telling the photographer I was from Boston; and then he turned around to introduce himself. ‘Hi, I am Jack Kennedy,’ he said. ‘I am from Boston.’ It was,” Broderick would laugh later, “a hell of a situation under which to meet.”
When Jack decided to run in ’46, Tom Broderick was one of the fellows Jack called. “Can you help?” “You bet,” Tom had answered. Kenny noted, “As inexperienced as Jack was in organizing a campaign, Kennedy seemed to know by intuition how to select committed people and recruit staff with no previous political background or connections who would turn out to be conscientious and able, and usually tireless, Kennedy crusaders.” Many of them would stay with Jack through this campaign and the many campaigns to come.
Jack explained to Dave Powers, who had joined the crusade, that he wanted young, new people, preferably veterans, not experienced politicians. “Get me some people who have not been involved in politics,” he told Dave, “fellows like yourself, with no experience, preferably just out of the service. I don’t want experienced politicians, who bring their own agenda, their own baggage and ideas. I want fellows like yourself.” Billy Sutton, another Boston Irishman, who like Powers, Broderick, and others was drawn to Jack by his youth, his war record, and the fact that he was of his generation, felt and agreed with Dave Powers that even early, during the ’46 campaign, “Jack Kennedy was a breath of fresh air.” From the start of the first campaign in 1946, Jack demonstrated an evident disdain for the overblown rhetoric and corny style of the older generation of politicians. As Kenny described it, Kennedy was “well suited to the changing times; his air of quiet refinement and his unaffected and sincere platform manner were a welcome contrast to the hard-boiled pols of the previous [James Michael] Curley era.”
Writer Francis Russell wrote, “When Jack Kennedy appeared without forewarning on the Boston political scene in 1946, the middle-class suburban Irish hailed him with joy and relief. After a half a century of oafishness—Honey Fitz [singing] ‘Sweet Adeline,’ Southie’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade enlivened by japers like 300-pound Knocko McCormack mounted on a dray horse, of deft operators and blackmailers, of silvercrossed younger pols—this attractive, well-spoken, graceful, witty, Celtic, Harvard-bred and very rich young man was what every suburban matron would like their son to be. In fact, many of them came to see Jack as their son.” That, Kenny explained later, is how Jack won in 1946, by being someone genuine and new to the political scene. Truly that breath of fresh air. He could afford this of course, because in this race and the subsequent one, he left the business of politics to his father and a few of his father’s well-chosen loyal staff, including Joe Kennedy Sr.’s right-hand man, Joe Kane. This would remain true until 1952, when Jack shocked them all by bringing together the Irish Brotherhood. At that point, the political futures of Jack Kennedy and Kenny O’Donnell would change forever.
It became quickly apparent that there was something different and new about Jack Kennedy from the moment he arrived for duty as a congressman in Washington on January 3, 1947. He had just gotten off a private plane from Palm Beach, where the Kennedy family spent the holidays. Ted Reardon and William “Billy” Sutton, Kennedy’s two young political lieutenants from Boston, nervously checked their watches and stared helplessly at the revolving doors of the famed Statler Hotel Washington while they waited for Jack. This was his first day in Congress, and he was already late.
When he finally arrived at the Statler, Jack announced that he was starving and wanted to go the drugstore across the street to have some breakfast. Reardon and Sutton were horrified. They had just driven all night in a snowstorm down from Boston in Jack’s sister Eunice’s Chrysler. They were tired, cold, and hungry themselves, but breakfast would have to wait.
“Speaker John McCormack’s been calling every ten minutes looking for you!” Billy Sutton announced, agitated, the blood rushing to fill his face. Despite his small frame, Sutton looked as though he might just take a poke at the newly arrived and very tardy congressman from the Eighth District in Massachusetts. “John McCormack wants you on the Hill right now for a party caucus, and he means now.”
Kennedy smiled and waved Sutton off. With that, he turned on his heel and began sauntering toward the front door, his hands stuffed into his pockets in what would become a very familiar pose. Despite his back pain, he walked with the grace of an athlete as he headed toward the drugstore across the street.
Jack knew almost as soon as he arrived that he was uninterested in minority whip and dean of the Massachusetts delegation John McCormack’s offer of tutelage in the ways of the House of Representatives. Jack Kennedy was determined to steer his own course, which was evident to McCormack.
“Mr. McCormack has been getting along fine without me here in Washington for twenty-eight years,” Kennedy said as Reardon and Sutton rushed to catch up with him. “He can get along without me for another fifteen minutes. Let’s go into the drugstore and get some eggs.”
The other thing Jack knew almost immediately after arriving in Congress was that he needed to begin planning his exit. But he would need to assemble the right team to help him calculate his next move. What he wanted was a group of tough, like-minded, blue-collar, no-bullshit vets who thought the way he did. He wanted outsiders who were tired of looking in from the outside at all Washington’s political game playing and its outdated, traditional decorum.
Still, nobody paid a hell of lot of attention to Jack until he refused to sign a petition for a presidential pardon for James M. Curley. Curley, the longtime mayor of Boston and former congressman from Jack’s own district, had held the seat that Jack Kennedy now held. Mayor Curley had gone to jail and deserved to be there. Jack Kennedy, who it would seem was fostering larger political ambitions of his own, should have been first in line to sign Curley’s pardon petition. But he didn’t. He said no. He didn’t even show up.
Consequently, Boston’s political insiders were pissed at both Jack and his father.
After all, this pardon was for James Michael Curley, the mayor of Boston, who was still mayor even while doing time at the federal correctional institution in Danbury, Connecticut.
Curley had been convicted of wartime construction fraud but remained a popular figure in Boston and was, as Kenny put it, “a martyred hero in young Jack Kennedy’s political district.” He was not the kind of guy you voted against. Curley had even shown up in the courtroom in a wheelchair, though he had never needed one before he was convicted. He was also wearing a neck brace too big for his neck and complaining of at least nine ailments, including, he was certain, an “impending cerebral hemorrhage.” How he could foresee a brain hemorrhage was anyone’s guess.
As it turned out, Kennedy was the only one among the Massachusetts congressional delegation to withhold his signature from the petition. People were stunned but reasoned it must be a fluke. Somebody needed to bring him up to speed on the way politics worked in Boston.
The stories began to circulate quickly among the returned vets. Kennedy had been handed the petition to pardon James Michael Curley on the floor of the House, right in front of the assembled House members and a full press gallery. Then Jack Kennedy shocked everyone and refused to sign.
The war vets who made up the Harvard gridiron gang and the Harvard varsity football team—Kenny, Nick Rodis, Paul Lazzaro, and others—took notice. Kenny was not pissed but quietly surprised, maybe even slightly impressed.
The second thing Jack did really made Kenny think twice. Jack attacked the American Legion for its strong opposition to low-cost public housing projects. Boston pols were really pissed this time. Jack had done either the boldest or the dumbest thing possible as a returning vet.
The American Legion was stunned at first, then livid. Who the hell did Joe Kennedy’s kid think he was? And Joe was right there with them. Everyone wanted to know, What the hell was Jack thinking?!
Jack Kennedy’s attack on the American Legion in 1949 was remarkable. This time everyone could see very clearly that Jack understood exactly what he was about. Oh, he got it all right. He understood politics, their politics, but what he was telling them, loud and clear, was that their politics were not his politics. A new day and a new era were dawning, and Jack Kennedy meant to be the guy who would shape that future.
Is he nuts? Kenny asked himself as he read about it first in the Boston papers while sipping that lousy newsstand coffee. He tried to evade Bobby’s toothy, told-you-so grin.
Jack’s attack on the American Legion was, as Kenny recalled, “like attacking or opposing J. Edgar Hoover, the Boy Scouts, and Billy Graham.” You just didn’t do it, especially if you had political ambitions beyond the Eighth Congressional District in Massachusetts.
Kenny said, “In those days nobody, and I mean nobody, challenged the conservative brass and powerful American Legion. Nobody who wanted to stay in politics, that is. But Jack was frustrated, didn’t give a damn, and unlike so many others, his political gut told him of changing times. He could smell it in the wind. In that computer-like mind of his, he knew the risk would be worth it. He wasn’t worried about the boys in the smoke-filled back rooms. No. Jack was focused on an entirely different audience.
“As a returning vet and a young congressman, he had been working his tail off to organize veterans’ groups into a united, cohesive group to support a low-cost housing bill. The bill was urgently and desperately needed in postwar America. So urgent was the need that even a right-wing conservative like Senator Robert Taft stood up and sponsored the damn bill. However, the American Legion, which was supporting the private real estate and construction interests, had fought the bill every step of the way. They fought and fought hard.”
Ultimately, the debate, which moved to the floor of the House, was over a so-called Bonus Bill that the American Legion was sponsoring as political cover for their opposition to federal funds for low-cost public housing projects. Jack sat and listened to the debate and the evasion and the lies. Finally, Jack had had enough. His Irish temper got the best of him during a heated debate on the House floor. Not heeding an aide’s warning to keep his cool, Jack rose to speak. In what would eventually become a familiar gesture to Kenny and the nation, he ran his hand nervously through his tousled, thick red hair before beginning. Was he nervous or just so angry that he had to take a minute to control himself?
It was hard to tell. Tapping his finger rapidly on the desk, Jack began a tirade that escalated with each deadly, well-directed word. Finally, he ended his outburst with his conclusion that “the leadership of the American Legion has not had a constructive thought for the benefit of this country since 1918!”
There was an audible gasp from the gathered House members. After the shock wore off, one after the other scrambled to the microphone to make sure they were on record condemning young Congressman Jack Kennedy’s inappropriate, unwise, and simply unpatriotic remarks. Was he even an American?
Everyone condemned him. Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi declared the American Legion “to be the most patriotic organization in the United States,” indicating without saying so that Jack didn’t know a hell of a lot about patriotism. Echoes of Joe Kennedy’s shady past underlay dog whistles like these.
Even Edith Nourse Rogers, a longtime Kennedy supporter, felt compelled to make a public apology for her fellow representative from Massachusetts, gently reminding House members that the Kennedy family had suffered a loss in the war. Jack had been terribly injured as well. Perhaps, just perhaps, he had been affected in “some way we are not currently aware of,” she had said, giving Jack’s father a chance to save his son’s career.
What the House members didn’t know was that Joe was even madder than they were about what Jack had said. Joe had his own unfulfilled, unfinished ambitions, and Jack was screwing them up. “He’s going to become a one-termer,” Joe had bellowed at anyone who would listen.
Jack Kennedy’s father angrily counseled him to retract his statement. Even Jack’s war-vet pals called his small, closet-like office, urging Jack to make an immediate apology retracting the statement before he faced certain “political ruin.”
Jack held his ground. He was dismayed by how many people ran for the door, but he also noticed who did not run. In those people he saw the political future. So he asked for the floor, looking for more time to speak.
Relieved, the Speaker of the House granted him the time right away. Everyone assumed Jack had come to his senses or that his father had persuaded him to apologize. Everyone assumed he was going to use the time to fall on his sword for his foolishness and retract his statement.
They were wrong. Instead, he took the opportunity to denounce the Legion one more time, just in case somebody had missed the point the first time. With his unrepentance reiterated, Jack made his way slowly, painfully back to his office, which felt somehow even smaller on this particular day. His back was hurting like hell. The glacial silence on the House floor and the ice-cold stares from many members—not to mention how quickly they moved to get away from him lest he speak to them or lest their photos be taken together—told Jack Kennedy, as he walked down that long aisle, that once again his idealism had cost him friends. When he finally arrived back at his office, he slid painfully into his chair, nodding his head in thanks for the coffee from his loyal aide Ted Reardon.
“Well, Ted,” he said with a wry smile, “I guess we are gone.” Reardon, a young Irish guy from Worcester and a friend of Kenny’s, looked up and smiled.
“Not so fast,” Ted explained. “Attacking the leadership of the American Legion is not the same as attacking the membership. You might be okay.”
Jack’s ears perked up. Another political lesson. But they would have to wait and see what kind of mail they got in order to judge who was right: Jack and Ted or the Old Guard led by Jack’s father.
It would turn out that Ted Reardon had been dead-on. The mail ran ten to one in support of Jack’s position. The remark would make headlines, raise eyebrows, and transform Jack into a hero among returning veterans—men who knew a bit about heroics and knew the difference between the talkers and the doers. They were ready to fight the political war, but they needed a leader. In young Jack Kennedy they might well have found one.
It would turn out to be one of the most remarkable moves Jack Kennedy made during his six years in the House of Representatives. Jack Kennedy’s decisions on these two points were a startling display of political courage and independence. They were not the sorts of the things you would do if you wanted a long political career in Massachusetts or anywhere else. They were definitely not the kinds of things you would do if you wanted to be president of the United States someday.
On the other hand, these two “bold acts of political independence,” as Kenny later called them, also made returning war vets take notice. Suddenly, this boyish, skinny, shy kid with the year-round suntan was becoming a hope, a beacon of light for those who had risked their lives to save the country; hell, they had helped save the world only to return home and find politics as usual. As Kenny put it: “We were finding that politicians wanted to keep things the way they were before the war. We felt cut out of the process by the establishment and ignored by older politicians who thought we had nothing to offer.”
Maybe, just maybe, they saw in young Jack Kennedy some hope. “Here was a guy,” Kenny argued quietly with some friends over a beer on the front steps of the Harvard Varsity Club, “who is one of us. And maybe Jack Kennedy will be able to take on these politicians and the establishment.”
“You sound like Bobby!” one of his pals teased Kenny.
Kenny paused, smiling his slight, reserved smile. Yeah, maybe he was sounding a bit like Bobby. But maybe Bobby was right.
Kenny was impressed enough to ask Bobby to set up a second meeting in Kennedy’s suite at the Bellevue Hotel—the grand dame of Boston hotels, situated at the corner of Beacon and Bowdoin streets, a stone’s throw from the historic Massachusetts State House.
Yes, Kenny was impressed, and this time when he and Jack shook hands, Kenny was firmly on Jack’s team.
The American Legion fracas, like the Curley incident, would end up doing Jack Kennedy more good than harm. It proved to vets that he was their man, the guy they could turn to, and somebody who, most importantly, was his own man. It showed that Jack Kennedy was not a guy afraid to take political risks. That should not have been a total surprise to anyone who understood his war record.
If they had only known about Jack’s health and the risk it posed for his entire political career, they might have had second thoughts. Still, nobody knew about that then. Nobody but his father knew or understood how many times Jack had faced death. Anyway, Jack was all about taking a risk if the reasons made some political sense.
The results of the American Legion struggle were especially a surprise for the old party brass in Massachusetts, who had expected Jack to be a team player. They wanted him to be a seat warmer while they taught him the ropes and made sure the Kennedys’ fortune was as indebted to them as possible.
Jack understood their type more than they knew. He had gotten into politics to satisfy his own ambitions and not to follow in his dead brother’s footsteps or to realize his father’s dreams. He was no seat warmer, and the party establishment would have to learn that he made his own decisions. Jack wanted it understood that he had gotten into politics to be his own man. Jack Kennedy was a self-possessed striver. Kenny, for his part, very much liked what he saw.
“More often than not,” Jack later told Kenny, “the morally right thing to do turns out to be the politically right thing to do as well.” At the time of his stand against the Legion, however, very few people would have agreed that Jack was pursuing the moral high ground. The vets did, though, and Jack understood this better than anybody, except maybe the American Legion, whose brass watched in horror as their membership sided with Kennedy. Politically astute, they moved quickly to invite this vibrant young politician to speak at their next state convention, where he received an overwhelmingly warm welcome.
Later, when the American Legion incident was far in his rearview mirror, Jack laughed about it with Kenny, his brother Bobby, and his dad at their Hyannis Port compound as they tried to decide what the next move in his career would be. The one thing Jack knew for sure was that the House of Representatives was not for him.
“Had I retracted the statement, I would have done myself more harm than I could have suffered by sticking to my political guns. But my friends didn’t realize it at the time; and, frankly, neither did I,” he said in a rare moment of self-reflection.
The voters of Massachusetts were about to see for themselves whether this new breed of politician was what they wanted in the United States Senate, and Kenny O’Donnell was about to make a decision that would seal his fate. His life would soon be forever intertwined with those of Jack and Bobby Kennedy.