Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens—and then everybody disagrees.
—Senator Alexander Wiley quoting a Russian observer (1947)
JACK’S ARRIVAL in Washington in January 1947 coincided with a dramatic turnabout in Democratic party fortunes and mounting national concern about the communist threat. With numerous labor walkouts over insufficient wage hikes to meet a 6.5 percent inflation rate in 1946 and growing fears of communist subversion and expansion, the country had rewarded the Republicans with a fifty-eight-seat majority in the House and a four-seat advantage in the Senate.
Harry Truman took the brunt of the public beating. In his twenty-one months in office his approval ratings had fallen a staggering 55 points, from 87 percent to 32 percent. Republicans joked that the president woke up feeling stiff most mornings because of trying to put his foot in his mouth. They wondered how Roosevelt would have handled the country’s problems, and asked, “I wonder what Truman would do if he were alive.” Members of Truman’s party offered little comfort. Arkansas congressman J. William Fulbright suggested that the president appoint Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg secretary of state and then resign so that, in the absence of a vice president, Vandenberg could replace him. Truman privately responded that Fulbright should be known as “Halfbright.”
Rising Soviet-American tensions over Eastern Europe, Greece, Turkey, and Iran—all of which Moscow seemed intent on dominating—aroused fears of another war. And though an American monopoly of atomic weapons gave the United States a considerable advantage, the American public shuddered at the possibility of killing millions of Soviet citizens. A civil war in China between Chiang Kaishek’s nationalists and Mao Tse-tung’s communists aroused additional fears that U.S. armed forces might have to intervene in Asia. Columnist Walter Lippmann wondered how a president who had lost the support of the country could possibly deal effectively with these foreign threats. As troubling, alleged communist infiltration of the government seemed to threaten the country’s traditional way of life. In 1946, news of a Soviet spy ring in Canada and accusations of “communist sympathizers,” or even party members, in the government agitated the public. Massachusetts’ own Joseph Martin, the new House Speaker, declared that there was “no room in the government of the United States for any who prefer the Communistic system.”
NO SPECIAL CEREMONY among the Kennedys marked Jack’s entrance into Congress. The family, especially Joe, saw it as little more than a first step. John Galvin, the 1946 campaign’s public relations director, recalled that the Kennedys were “always running for the next job.” (Years later Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Jack and Bobby’s friend and associate, was asked whether Maryland lieutenant governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Bobby’s eldest child, was interested in a higher office. “Is she a Kennedy?”he replied.)
For freshman House Democrats eager to make their mark, the next two years under Republican control promised little personal gain. A system that favored the most senior members of the majority party meant that newcomers such as Jack would do well to establish themselves as strong voices for local constituents and temporarily give up any idea of leading significant legislation through Congress. But Jack’s agenda did not include some major legislative triumph. He was less interested in what he could accomplish in the House, which he never saw as providing much opportunity for significant national leadership, than in using the office as a political launching pad.
“I think from the time he was elected to Congress, he had no thought but to go to the Senate as fast as he could,” Arthur Krock said. “He wanted scope, which a freshman in the House cannot have, and very few actually of the seniors; so that I think the House was just a way-station.” Kennedy campaign biographer James MacGregor Burns agreed: “The life of the House did not excite him. It is doubtful that he spent ten minutes considering the possibility of the speakership.”
This is not to suggest that Jack had little regard for the leaders of the Eightieth Congress. Speaker Martin and majority leader Charles A. Halleck of Indiana commanded his respect, as did veteran Democrats Sam Rayburn of Texas, whose service in the House dated from 1912 and included fourteen years as Speaker, and John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, the party’s second-most-powerful House member. But most of the leadership (the Republican chairmen and ranking minority members of the chamber’s principal committees) impressed the twenty-nine-year-old Jack Kennedy as being gray and stodgy—as indeed they were. Ranging in age from sixty-eight to eighty-three, the dominant figures on the Appropriations, Ways and Means, Rules, Banking and Currency, and Foreign Affairs Committees were all conservative men who worshiped at the altar of party regularity and, in the words of one observer, looked like legislators—“industrious, important, responsible, high-minded, and—however deceptively in certain cases—sober.” As for many other members of the House, Jack seemed to share Mark Twain’s view: “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
Though in theory Jack liked the idea of being one of only 435 congressmen in a country of 150 million people, he had certainly felt a greater sense of accomplishment and satisfaction from the publication of his book and the wartime heroics that had given him national attention. His friend Chuck Spalding said that “the job as a congressman after he had it for a little while began to look like a [Triple A] League job to a major-league player.” One House colleague watched Jack saunter into the chamber with his hands in his pockets and an attitude that said “Well, I guess if you don’t want to work for a living, this is as good a job as any.” Jack said of another Massachusetts representative, “I never felt he did much in the Congress, but I never held that against him because I don’t think I did much. I mean you can’t do much as a Congressman.” Jack was often so downcast about the day’s work in the office or on the House floor that he practiced swinging a golf club in his inner office to relieve the tedium.
“We were just worms in the House—nobody paid much attention to us nationally,” Jack said. “Congressmen get built up in their districts as if they were extraordinary,” he declared in 1959. “Most other Congressmen and most other people outside the district don’t know them.” Lem Billings recalled that Jack “found most of his fellow congressmen boring, preoccupied as they all seemed to be with their narrow political concerns. And then, too, he had terrible problems with all the arcane rules and customs which prevented you from moving legislation quickly and forced you to jump a thousand hurdles before you could accomplish anything. All his life he had had troubles with rules externally imposed and now here he was, back once again in an institutional setting.”
Jack’s advance had to be carefully orchestrated. Running too soon for the governorship or a Senate seat could work against him, his reach for higher office taking on the appearance of self-serving ambition devoid of serious interest in public service. And that would have been misleading, because genuine idealism and a core concern with the national well-being were central to his eagerness for political advancement. He also needed to learn some things before taking the next step. “I wasn’t equipped for the job. I didn’t plan to get into it, and when I started out as a Congressman, there were lots of things I didn’t know, a lot of mistakes I made, maybe some votes that should have been different,” he recalled. One of them was supporting Republican attacks on Roosevelt, particularly his “concessions” to Stalin at Yalta, which became synonymous with wartime appeasement of Russia.
Since so few congressmen ever end up with memorable legislative records, election to higher office can be a useful yardstick of performance in the Lower House. For most, however, the House is as high as they get. Indeed, of the thousands and thousands of men and women who served in the House between 1789 and 1952, when Jack would try for the Senate, only 544 won seats in the Upper House. But being a Kennedy was about changing the odds.
BECAUSE NO ONE could be sure when Jack would undertake a statewide campaign, first he had to secure a hold on his congressional district. To this end, he and Joe hired reliable aides to staff Washington and Boston offices that could respond effectively to constituent demands. At the same time, convinced that it was never too soon to begin reaching for higher office, Joe began using his money and connections to build Jack’s public image, both in Massachusetts and beyond. The objective was to identify Jack with as many major national issues as possible: It would help make him less cynical about being a junior congressman with no influence and would make it more likely that voters would see him as a worthy representative trying to do right by both the Eleventh District and the national interest.
In Washington, Jack occupied room 322 in the Old House Office Building, a two-room suite in “freshman row,” where all the newcomers were housed. It was “about as far from the Capitol… as you could get,” one of Jack’s aides said. Ted Reardon headed the staff. Though bright, talented, handsome, and athletic, Reardon was a passive character who was content to be a man Friday. He “had a brain but unfortunately he didn’t use it that much,” one of his office mates recalled. “I used to get annoyed with him. He just wouldn’t apply himself. Much of the time, he wasn’t in the office.”
The other Washington staffer who came down from Boston was Billy Sutton, “the court jester,” as Jack and the rest of the staff called him. Sutton was Mr. Personality, buzzing around the Capitol, quickly getting to know everybody who was anyone. “It was good,” the office secretary said, “because if you needed anything, Billy always knew somebody.” Jack saw Sutton’s gift for mimicry and affinity for practical jokes as a valuable asset, especially when set alongside daily office chores. Billy was a perfect intermediary. Jack once encouraged him to get on the phone and imitate radical congressman Vito Marcantonio of the American Labor party. At Jack’s urging, Billy called fashion designer Oleg Cassini’s wife and in a heavily accented voice asked her to speak at a rally for Progressive party candidate Henry Wallace. Jack dined out for days afterward on her “speechless indignation.” More important, Jack did not like greeting constituents—pressing the flesh, as his fellow congressman from Texas Lyndon Johnson described it—and was especially put off by tales of woe from constituents looking for help. “I can’t do it,” he told his Boston staff after listening to just a few of the many favor seekers scheduled to see him. “You’ll have to call them off.” Sutton, with his gift of gab, was able to satisfy most constituent complaints on his own.
The mainstay of the Washington office was Mary Davis. A year younger than Jack, she joined his staff after eight years as a secretary to other congressmen. She was a pro who managed everything. “Mary Davis was unbelievable,” Billy Sutton said. “She could answer the phone, type a letter, and eat a chocolate bar all at once. She was the complete political machine, knew everybody, how to get anything done…. When Mary came in, you could have let twelve people go.” Jack “never did involve himself in the workings of the office,” Mary herself said. “He wasn’t a methodical person. Everything that came into the office was handed to me. I took care of everything. If I had any questions, I’d take them in to him at a specific time and say, ‘Here, what do you want me to say about that?’ Nothing would land on his desk. I’d pin him down on the spot, get his decision, then do it.” Davis was paid sixty dollars a week, but wanted more, citing her experience, background, and talent, and mindful of the family wealth—$40 million, if Fortune magazine was to be believed. Jack would not budge, promising only to “talk about it one of these days.”
The Boston office served Jack equally well. Frank Morrissey, an attorney who was Joe’s eyes and ears, oversaw the staff, which worked on the seventeenth floor of the federal building downtown. Morrissey, who spent most of his time practicing law or taking care of errands for Joe, left the daily work in the hands of Joe Rosetti, a war veteran attending night classes on hotel management at Northeastern University. Rosetti worked hard but did not like politics. “No matter how many good things you did for Jack’s constituents, the only thing they remembered is what you couldn’t do for them. That irritated me a great deal,” Rosetti recalled.
The principal work of the Boston office fell to Grace Burke, an unmarried fifty-year-old lady who, like Mary Davis, was the soul of efficiency and devoted to serving Jack. “She was very dedicated,” Rosetti said. “She would not allow anything to take place in that office that was going to be detrimental to Jack. She kept her three-by-five cards, her filing system, had her own personal contacts at City Hall and the State House. She was on top of everything.”
The effectiveness of Jack’s two offices rested partly on Joe’s commitment to pay the costs of hiring more staff than any other congressman. Mary Davis said that “in those days Congressmen made twelve thousand dollars a year, plus a small expense allowance and they didn’t have as many fringe benefits. So I was told that any expenses for Jack or the office were to be sent to Paul Murphy in New York. He had full charge of issuing checks and, of course, seldom questioned anything. Jack wasn’t an extravagant guy.”
Joe also put his money and influence to work crafting Jack’s public reputation. In January 1947, the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce named Jack one of the ten outstanding young men of 1946. Joe helped arrange the selection through Steve Hannagan, a prominent New York publicist (or “press agent,” as such operators were then known). Hannagan enlisted the backing of the nationally famous singer Morton Downey and Union Pacific Railroad president William M. Jeffers, a selection committee judge, to promote Jack’s candidacy. Joe was “more than delighted” at Jack’s number one ranking among the ten, with the boxer Joe Louis number seven, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. ninth, and Bill Mauldin, the creator of the famous wartime “Willie and Joe” cartoons on life in the U.S. Army, tenth.
In subsequent months, a stream of favorable newspaper and radio stories Joe helped generate in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and other outlets served Jack’s image as a rising political star. “GALAHAD IN THE HOUSE,” Paul F. Healy, a Jack booster, declared in a Massachusetts Catholic paper. “In a poll of the Congressional Press Gallery he would be picked as one of the five young congressmen most likely to succeed,” Healy wrote in July 1950. “As a former author, newspaperman, embassy attaché, and war hero, Kennedy takes his legislative responsibilities extremely seriously. He is one of a small group of World War II veterans who have done much to raise the moral and intellectual tone of the House. Lacking the seniority that wields so much power in Congress, these men have exerted influence by sheer intelligence and integrity.”
JOE’S HELP CAME at a price: Jack often felt compromised or too much under his father’s control. In February 1947, when he gave an interview to a Washington journalist who said “that it was nice to meet Kathleen’s brother,” Jack replied, “For a long time I was Joseph P. Kennedy’s son, then I was Kathleen’s brother, then Eunice’s brother. Some day I hope to be able to stand on my own feet.”
No sophisticated psychological understanding is required to see that a largely unspoken but omnipresent concern for Jack as he turned thirty was to separate himself from Joe and establish a more autonomous sense of self. At a cocktail party shortly after Jack entered the House, Joe turned to Kay Halle, a family friend, and said, “I wish you would tell Jack that he’s going to vote the wrong way…. I think Jack is making a terrible mistake.” Jack bristled: “Now, look here, Dad, you have your political views and I have mine. I’m going to vote exactly the way I feel I must vote on this. I’ve got great respect for you but when it comes to voting, I’m voting my way.” Joe smiled and said, “Well, Kay, that’s why I settled a million dollars on each of them, so they could spit in my eye if they wished.” “I guess Dad has decided that he’s going to be the ventriloquist,” Jack told Lem, “so I guess that leaves me the role of dummy.”
Joe’s intrusiveness was nothing the Kennedys wished to advertise; indeed, Joe and Jack may have staged the exchange in front of Halle as a way to publicize Jack’s independence. Their intense concern with public image, especially now that Jack was a congressman, certainly makes it conceivable. His father’s reputation as an appeaser, isolationist, and anti-Semite—or at least someone ready to accommodate himself to Nazi domination of Europe—seemed certain to hurt Jack’s political standing if it were known that Joe had a big part in what Jack did. And so the objective was to keep as quiet as possible about Joe’s behind-the-scenes political machinations.
Jack, however, appreciated that Joe’s assertiveness and connections gave him considerable advantages. For example, his father was instrumental in arranging Jack’s appointment to the House Education and Labor Committee, where he could have a say in major battles that were looming over labor unions and federal aid to education. Jack said later that he did not remember how he came by the selection, but it seems transparent that John McCormack, in response to Kennedy pressure, agreed to give Jack the assignment. (The Republican leadership bestowed the same award on Richard Nixon, a promising California freshman they wanted to help after he had won an upset victory over prominent liberal Democrat Jerry Voorhis.) Jack also gained appointment to the Veterans’ Affairs Committee and membership on a special subcommittee on veterans’ housing, another issue certain to command national attention in the coming session.
Jack was grateful for his father’s and McCormack’s help in giving him a part in public discussions about education, housing, and labor. But he was also eager to demonstrate his independence from them. Billy Sutton remembered Jack’s arrival at Washington’s Statler Hilton on the morning of January 3, 1947: “His hair was tousled, he was completely tanned [from a vacation in West Palm Beach]; black cashmere coat and a grey suit over his arm.” Sutton and Ted Reardon reported several calls from McCormack’s office asking for Jack’s attendance at a Democratic caucus. “We should be in a hurry now, Jack, make it snappy…. You have a caucus meeting. You’ve got two pretty good committees: Labor and Education, District of Columbia.” “Well,” Jack replied, “I’d like a couple of eggs.” As Jack ate breakfast, Billy and Ted kept pressuring him to get a move on: “Mr. McCormack is quite anxious that you get up there,” Billy said. Jack asked, “How long would you say Mr. McCormack was here?” When Billy answered twenty-six years, Jack responded, “Well, I don’t think Mr. McCormack would mind waiting another ten minutes.”
COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENTS and self-education or not, Jack’s congressional work was a source of constant frustration to him. He was a fiscal conservative who often felt out of sync with the demands of constituents eager for federal largesse. He also had little patience with the resistance to legislation he saw as essential to the national well-being; it reminded him of the adage “with what little wisdom the world is governed.” Nor did he have much, if any, regard for doctrinaire politicians on the left and the right—congressmen who seemed to put wrongheaded principles above compromise and good sense.
He was never happy with having to slavishly support constituent demands, but he understood that accommodating himself to this political reality was essential if he hoped to be reelected. In the first two months of his term, he considered proposing that the 1948 Democratic National Convention be held in Boston. “An excellent political manoeuvre [sic],” one adviser told him. It seemed certain to impress local businessmen, who would profit from such a development, and would create feelings of pride among Eleventh District voters that Jack was establishing himself as a party leader. But he seemed less in tune with the eagerness of his many relatively poor, working-class constituents for expanded government programs or more New Deal “liberalism.” “In 1946 I really knew nothing about these things,” Jack said ten years later. “I had no background particularly; in my family we were interested not so much in the ideas of politics as in the mechanics of the whole process. Then I found myself in Congress representing the poorest district in Massachusetts. Naturally, the interests of my constituents led me to take the liberal line; all the pressures converged toward that end.”
Jack’s fiscal conservatism could be seen in his antagonism to unbalanced budgets, which he believed a threat to the national economy. In 1947, he openly opposed a Republican proposed tax cut, which he attacked as not only unfair to lower-income citizens but also a menace to economic stability. In 1950, he spoke out against Democratic-sponsored spending plans on social programs that could lead to a “dangerous” $6 billion deficit; he instead suggested a 10 percent across-the-board cut in appropriations. do not see how we can go on carrying a deficit every year,” he declared on the House floor. “Does not the gentleman think that a very important item in the cold war is the economic stability of the country so that we have resources in case of war?”
Roosevelt’s New Deal had put in place Social Security, unemployment insurance, and public housing, which Jack saw as being sacrosanct among his constituents and impossible for an Eleventh District congressman to oppose without committing political suicide. But privately he had substantial concerns about some of them. “The scarlet thread that runs throughout the world—is one of resignation of major problems into the all absorbing hands of the great Leviathan—the state,” he declared in a poorly crafted 1950 speech at the University of Notre Dame. He warned against the “ever expanding power of the Federal government” and asserted that “control over local affairs was the essence of liberty.” His conservatism partly found expression in a vote with the Republican majority for the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution (limiting presidents to two terms). The act of revenge against Franklin Roosevelt, as it was known, had much appeal to Jack as an indirect way to retrospectively censure FDR for having fostered “socialist” measures, run for a fourth term as a sick and dying man, and “appeased” Stalin at Yalta.
At the same time, however, Jack had genuine compassion for the needs of the blue-collar workers dependent on government to ease their lives. The failure of Congress to act on some social welfare measures he considered transparently vital to the well-being of deserving citizens frustrated him and added to his discontent about serving in the House. In particular, Congress’s failure in 1945–46 to enact housing legislation impressed him as a dereliction of duty to veterans. Federal remedies for the country’s housing shortage, which affected thousands of returning veterans in Boston and around the country, commanded his full support. The absence of wartime construction and the rapid growth of postwar families made this a compelling concern. In February 1947, he told a Boston radio audience of his high hopes for passage of the Wagner-Ellender-Taft Bill, which he described as “desperately needed.”
But he was disappointed, despite outspoken demands on his part for congressional action. He could not understand why some members of the House would not rise above their political self-interest and false assumptions about free enterprise for the sake of larger national needs. “The only time that private enterprise alone anywhere near met the demand for houses was in 1925,” he told his colleagues in April. By July, his frustration at House inaction boiled over in an attack on the Republican majority, which, he said, was willing to help big-business interests, but the veterans’ “drastic” need of affordable dwellings would have to wait on “an investigation of the housing shortage.” Since the facts were already known, Jack declared on the House floor, “this gesture by the Republican party is a fraud…. They have always been receptive to the best interests of the real estate and building association, but when it came to spending money to secure homes for the people of this country, they just were not interested.”
Jack’s strong advocacy of federally financed housing won him warm praise in his district. One supporter sent a letter to all the Boston newspapers, lauding Jack’s “moral courage.” And although the personal political benefit of supporting veterans’ housing was not lost on Jack, the selfishness of the realty interests and the shortsightedness of conservative VFW and American Legion leaders (who had aligned themselves with those interests) legitimately upset him. Quoting a Catholic newspaper, Jack called the American Legion a “legislative drummer boy for the real estate lobby.” In response, a Legion spokesman belittled Jack as an uninformed “embryo” congressman. When the Legion then supported what Jack saw as a fiscally irresponsible bonus bill for veterans while continuing its opposition to the housing measure, Jack told the House that “the leadership of the American Legion had not had a constructive thought for the benefit of this country since 1918!” After this outburst, Jack, who believed it “terribly important” to his political future to be seen as “rational” and “thoughtful,” worried that he had gone too far. “Well, Ted,” he told Reardon when he got back to the office, “I guess we’re gone. That finishes us down here.” But his principled stand redounded to his benefit: public reaction was strongly in his favor, especially from veterans, whose letters backed him ten to one.
It was an important lesson. A humane government looking out for the powerless or less powerful was a necessary counter to business interests that thought primarily about the bottom line. In 1947, Jack did not think of himself as a New Deal liberal, but the housing fight was a first step in that direction. Additional steps were sometimes small, as the struggles over the power of labor unions, which became the major issue before Congress during 1947, reveal. As a representative of a working-class district, he felt duty-bound to speak and vote for the interests of the unions, which were under sharp attack for putting their own needs above the national good. Jack was mindful of the long struggle for labor rights stretching back into the nineteenth century and culminating in the victories of the 1930s that legalized collective bargaining and secured the right to strike. But he saw the unions as fiercely self-serving and no more ready than corporate America to put the needs of the country above their own interest. Communist infiltration of the unions, which allegedly made them vulnerable to manipulation by Soviet agents putting Moscow’s needs before those of the United States, especially troubled him. In subcommittee hearings in 1947 on communist subversion of the United Electrical Workers and the United Auto Workers, Jack hammered away at witnesses suspected of communist sympathies and, in the case of the UAW, of impeding American industrial mobilization in 1941 when Soviet Russia was allied with Nazi Germany. A motion to bring perjury charges against union leaders whom Jack believed part of a communist conspiracy gave him standing as a tough-minded anticommunist intent on ferreting out and prosecuting subversives.
Nevertheless, he opposed measures that would make labor again vulnerable to management’s arbitrary control over wages and working conditions. When the House considered the excessively harsh Hartley Bill in April 1947, which would have substantially reined in labor’s right to strike, Jack called instead for a balanced law as a way to head off labor-industry strife destructive to the nation. He acknowledged that the unions “in their irresponsibility have been guilty of excesses that have caused this country great discomfort and concern.” But while the bill before the House had attractive features, it would “so strangle collective bargaining with restraints and limitations as to make it ineffectual.” It would “bring not peace but labor war—a war bitter and dangerous. This bill in its present form plays into the hands of the radicals in our unions, who preach the doctrine of class struggle.” A vote for the Hartley Bill, he said, would be a vote for industrial warfare.
Jack’s dissent put him in company with 106 other House opponents of the bill, who were swamped by 308 Republicans and conservative Democrats ready to risk industrial strife. When the more moderate Taft-Hartley version emerged from a conference committee in June, Jack briefly considered voting for it. But the interests of his district, the conviction that such a vote would end his House career, and the defects in a bill he saw as still too draconian toward unions persuaded him to join 78 congressmen in opposing 320 supporters. After Truman vetoed Taft-Hartley, the House and Senate, with Jack voting to sustain the president, overrode the veto.
By the end of 1947, Jack’s voting record on supporting the unions received a perfect score from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO): eleven out of eleven correct votes. Given Jack’s district, the votes are not surprising, but they little reflect the ambivalence Jack felt on labor issues.
Jack was no more comfortable with battles over federal aid to education. As a Catholic representing a heavily Catholic district, he became an immediate exponent of helping parochial schools. The anti-Catholic bias on the issue angered and frustrated him. In 1947, a representative of the Freemasons testifying at a subcommittee hearing on educational aid sounded familiar clichés about Catholic loyalty to Church over country. “Now you don’t mean the Catholics in America are legal subjects of the Pope?”Kennedy sharply asked the witness. “I am not a legal subject of the Pope.” When the man cited canon law overriding all secular rules, Kennedy replied, “There is an old saying in Boston that we get our religion from Rome and our politics from home.”
The willingness of the committee to hear from such a witness speaks volumes about the outlook of many in the Congress and the country toward helping Catholic schools with public funds. In 1947, twenty-eight states had laws against “acting as a trustee for the disbursement of federal funds to non-public schools,” and the U.S. Senate Education and Labor Committee had reported out a bill that “would make it impossible for the states to use any of the federal funds for parochial schools.” A Gallup poll found that 49 percent of Americans favored giving federal aid entirely to public schools, while 41 percent wanted part of it to go to parochial institutions; the division between Protestants (against) and Catholics (for) on the issue seemed unbridgeable.
Jack shared the view of most American Catholics that legislation forbidding any aid to religious schools was discriminatory and unconstitutional. In this, he was in harmony with the Supreme Court, which had ruled in a 1947 New Jersey case, Everson v. Board of Education, that public monies could be used to reimburse private-school students for bus transportation. By its 5–4 decision, the Court had declared direct aid to pupils, regardless of where they attended school, no violation of First Amendment restrictions on making laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” Kennedy took this to mean that noneducational services such as bus rides, health examinations, and lunches could be freely provided to students in public and private, including religious, schools. But although Jack would consistently support this sort of federal aid, he was not without reservations about the whole idea of federal financing for schools, which states and counties had traditionally paid for. He was concerned that “present federal educational activities are tremendously costly” and might impose a “staggering” burden on taxpayers. To rein in what he feared could become runaway costs, he urged that such aid to education be given only when there was a demonstrable need. In addition, he called for federal requirements that states make greater efforts “through properly balanced taxation and efficiency of operation” to improve their own educational systems.
Jack was also unhappy with being identified as a Catholic congressman promoting parochial interests. It is true that public stands for equal federal treatment of public and parochial schools won him high praise from Catholic Church and lay leaders. (One Catholic newspaper called him “a white knight” committed to “courageous representation of his constituency.”) But he was uncomfortable with the perception that he was a spokesman of the Catholic Church and a captive of his Catholic constituents. He wished to be known as a public servant whose judgment rested not on narrow ideological or personal prejudices, and little mattered to him more during his term in the House than making clear that he operated primarily in the service of national rather than more limited group interests.
A controversy concerning Boston mayor Curley demonstrates Kennedy’s eagerness to create some distance between himself and the ruling Catholic clique in Boston. After his return to the mayor’s office in 1946, Curley had been indicted for fraudulent use of the mail to solicit war contracts for bogus companies. The following year he was convicted and sent to the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, to serve a six-to-eighteen-month term. Seventy-two years old, suffering from diabetes and high blood pressure, Curley asked the court for clemency, citing a physician’s prediction that his imprisonment would be a death sentence. When the judge refused his plea, 172,000 of Curley’s supporters, about a quarter of Boston’s population, petitioned President Truman to commute the sentence. John McCormack asked New England congressmen to support the request.
All the Massachusetts representatives followed McCormack’s lead except for Jack. When McCormack approached him about signing, Kennedy asked whether the president had been consulted. McCormack said no and, irritated with the young man’s implied defiance, declared, “If you don’t want to sign, don’t sign it.” Having learned from the surgeon general that Curley’s imprisonment was not life-threatening and that he would receive proper care in the prison hospital, Jack refused to sign. Because his district was a Curley stronghold, Jack worried that he might now be “politically dead, finished,” as he told Ted Reardon.
At the same time, however, Jack saw good political reasons to resist. He was not beholden to district party regulars; his election had been more the result of building a personal organization than of getting help from the traditional pols. Moreover, it defined Jack as a new kind of Boston politician, a member of a younger generation with broader experience and a wider view of the world. It also allowed Jack to please Honey Fitz, who despised Curley for having cut short his political career. More important to Jack, though, was the injustice of giving Curley something he had denied other constituents: backing for an undeserved pardon. When Curley was released after five months and returned to the mayor’s office with declarations that he felt better than he had in years, Jack gained in standing as a politician who thought for himself.
Though Jack was feeling his way on domestic issues, tacking between political expediency and moral conviction, he felt more comfortable in dealing with major foreign policy questions. His book, wartime experience, and newspaper articles about postwar peacemaking gave him a surer sense of what needed to be done.
In March 1947, after the president announced the Truman Doctrine proposing aid to Greece and Turkey as a deterrent to Soviet expansion in the Near East, Jack spoke at the University of North Carolina in support of the president’s plan. He believed it essential to national security to prevent Europe’s domination by any single power. To those who warned that aiding Greece and Turkey would provoke Moscow and possibly lead to another global conflict, he invoked the failure at Munich to stand up to Hitler as a miscalculation that had led to the Second World War. A firm policy now against Soviet imperialism would discourage Moscow from dangerous adventures in the future, he predicted. To those who believed that America should rely on the United Nations to preserve the independence of Greece and Turkey, Kennedy cautioned that it lacked the wherewithal to meet the challenge. America’s aim was “not to dominate by dollar imperialism the Governments of Greece and Turkey, but rather it is to assist them to live in freedom.” The president’s policy was “the only path by which we will reach security and peace.” Jack was equally enthusiastic and outspoken about the Marshall Plan to restore economic health and stability to Western Europe with loans and grants of up to $17 billion.
Of course, while Kennedy’s stand for an internationalist policy rested on the belief that Truman was right, it also sprang from a concern to separate himself from his father. Recently, Joe had publicly complained that the United States lacked the financial means to meet its obligations at home and send hundreds of millions of dollars abroad to combat communism. His solution was to let the communists take over Greece and Turkey and other nations, predicting that these communist regimes would collapse after proving to be unworkable. An isolationist, prosperous United States would then become a model for both industrial and emerging nations, in which we could comfortably invest. Joe’s shortsightedness was evident to foreign policy realists, who warned that allowing Soviet expansion to go unchecked would be a disaster for all the democracies, including the United States. Joe’s bad judgment irritated Jack, who understood that it was more the product of personal concerns about family losses than reasoned analysis of the national interest. But Joe’s misjudgments made Jack more confident about a public career: On foreign affairs, he correctly believed that he was much more realistic than his “old man.”
NO ONE IN 1947 would have described Jack as ready for a leading role in national affairs. His first term in the House was a kind of half-life in which he divided his time between the public and the private. He was never indifferent about the major issues besetting the country; housing, labor unions, education, and particularly the communist challenge to U.S. national security received close attention between 1947 and 1949. But he was a quick study, and as only one of 435 voices in the House—and a junior one in the minority party at that—he found himself with ample time to enjoy a social life, especially since his large, able office staff took care of constituent demands. An English friend who lived around the corner from him in Georgetown remembered Jack as “a mixture of gaiety and thought…. He seemed quite serious, and then suddenly, he’d break away from reading and start to make jokes, and sing a song. But I think he did appear to be quite a serious thinker and always probing into things—literature, politics, etc.”
Though having turned thirty in May 1947, his boyish good looks and demeanor bespoke not ambition and seriousness of purpose but casualness, ease, and enjoyment. Rumpled jackets, wrinkled shirts, spotted ties, khaki pants, loose-fitting sweaters, and sneakers were his clothes of choice; the expensive tailored suits he wore only out of deference to the customs of the House—and even then, perhaps not as often as he should have.
A rented three-story town house at 1528 Thirty-first Street in Georgetown, which Jack shared with Billy Sutton; his twenty-six-year-old sister Eunice, who worked at the Justice Department for a juvenile delinquency committee; and Margaret Ambrose, a family cook, had the feel of a noisy, busy fraternity that reflected casual living. Despite the presence of George Thomas, a black valet, who struggled to keep a rein on Jack’s sloppiness, clothes were draped over chairs and sofas, with remnants of half-eaten meals left in unlikely places. Billy Sutton recalled how people were always “coming and going, like a Hollywood hotel. The Ambassador, Rose, Lem Billings, Torby, anybody who came to Washington. You never knew who the hell was going to be there but you got used to it.”
Jack’s idea of a good time was an unplanned evening with a friend. One young woman, who resisted any romantic involvement, recalled how “he would come by, in typical fashion, honk his horn underneath my garage window and call out, ‘Can you go to the movies?’ or ‘Can you come down to dinner?’ He was not much for planning ahead. Sometimes I’d go down for dinner and he’d be having dinner on a tray in his bedroom and I’d have my dinner on a tray in his bedroom. He was resting, you see? The back brace and different things would be hanging around. Then he’d find out what was at the movies and he’d get dressed and we’d go to the movies. And I’d pay for it because he never had any money.” When he stayed home, he could be found sprawled in a chair, reading. Or as a reporter said, “Kennedy never sits in a chair; he bivouacs in it.”
Jack still took special pleasure in athletics, reportedly making a habit of pickup football, basketball, or softball games with local teenagers. An Associated Press reporter described Jack in full uniform at a high school football practice. The team’s star halfback, who thought Jack was a new recruit, gave him a workout, catching and throwing passes, running down punts, and tackling. “How’s the Congressman doing?” the coach asked the unsuspecting halfback. “Is that what they call him?” he replied. “He needs a lot of work, Coach.” (Given Jack’s health problems, was the A.P. story a puff piece?)
For all Jack’s devotion to his social life, he had few close friends. Not that he couldn’t have drawn other congressmen, journalists, and Washington celebrities into close ties. His charm, intelligence, and wit made him highly attractive to almost everyone he met. But he felt little need for what current parlance would describe as male bonding. His strong family connections and frenetic womanizing gave him all the companionship he seemed to need.
He quickly developed a reputation as quite a ladies’ man. “Jack liked girls,” recalled fellow congressman George Smathers. Smathers, thirty-three and the son of a prominent Miami attorney and judge, shared a privileged background and affinity for self-indulgence that made him one of Jack’s few good friends. “He came by it naturally. His daddy liked girls. He was a great chaser. Jack liked girls and girls liked him. He had just a great way with women. He was such a warm, lovable guy himself. He was a sweet fella, a really sweet fella.” A contemporary gossip columnist for a New York newspaper supported Smathers’s recollections. “Palm Beach’s cottage colony wants to give the son of Joseph P. Kennedy its annual Oscar for achievement in the field of romance. The committee says that young Mister Kennedy splashed through a sea of flaming early season divorcees to rescue its sinking faith in the romantic powers of Florida.” Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas remembered Jack as a “playboy,” and New Jersey congressman Frank Thompson Jr., another of Jack’s friends in the 1950s, said that “the girls just went crazy about him”; he had “a smorgasbord of women” to choose from.
Most of these women were one-night stands—airline stewardesses and secretaries. “He was not a cozy, touching sort of man,” one woman said. Another woman described Jack as “nice—considerate in his own way, witty and fun. But he gave off light instead of heat. Sex was something to have done, not to be doing. He wasn’t in it for the cuddling.”
He wanted no part of marriage at this time. His friend Rip Horton remembered going to his Georgetown house for dinner. “A lovely-looking blonde from West Palm Beach joined us to go to a movie. After the movie we went back to the house and I remember Jack saying something like ‘Well, I want to shake this one. She has ideas.’ Shortly thereafter, another girl walked in. Ted Reardon was there, so he went home and I went to bed figuring this was the girl for the night. The next morning a completely different girl came wandering down for breakfast. They were a dime a dozen.”
Several of Jack’s contemporaries and biographers have concluded that he was a neurotic womanizer fulfilling some unconscious need for unlimited conquests. Priscilla Johnson, an attractive young woman who worked on political and foreign issues for Jack in the fifties, concluded that “he was a very naughty boy.” (She rejected invitations from him to go to his hotel suite at the Waldorf-Astoria when they were in New York.) Kennedy family biographers Peter Collier and David Horowitz have described his affairs as “less a self-assertion than a search for self—an existential pinch on the arm to prove that he was there.” This is shorthand for the view that Jack was a narcissist whose sexual escapades combated feelings of emptiness bred by a cold, detached mother and a self-absorbed, largely absent father. They quote Johnson: “I was one of the few he could really talk to. Like Freud, he wanted to know what women really wanted, that sort of thing; but he also wanted to know the more mundane details—what gave a woman pleasure, what women hoped for in marriage, how they liked to be courted. During one of these conversations I once asked him why he was doing it—why he was acting like his father, why he was avoiding real relationships, why he was taking a chance on getting caught in a scandal at the same time he was trying to make his career take off. He took a while trying to formulate an answer. Finally he shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know really. I guess I just can’t help it.’ He had this sad expression on his face. He looked like a little boy about to cry.”
Johnson and others thought it was as much the chase as anything that excited Jack. “The whole thing with him was pursuit,” she said. “I think he was secretly disappointed when a woman gave in. It meant that the low esteem in which he held women was once again validated. It meant also that he’d have to start chasing someone else.” Like Johnson, Doris Kearns Goodwin sees more at work here than simply “a liking for women. So driven was the pace of his sex life, and so discardable his conquests, that they suggest a deep difficulty with intimacy.”
A sense of his mortality may also have continued to drive Jack’s incessant skirt-chasing. The discovery of his Addison’s disease, his adrenal insufficiency, in the fall of 1947 put a punctuation point on the medical problems that had afflicted him since childhood. Although the availability of DOCA made his problems treatable by the late 1940s, no one could be certain that the disease would not cut short Jack’s life. His English physician, who diagnosed the Addison’s disease during Jack’s 1947 trip to Ireland, told Pamela Churchill, “That young American friend of yours, he hasn’t got a year to live.” Jack was not told this, but his cumulative experience with doctors had made him skeptical about their ability to mend his ills. Moreover, when he came home from London in September 1947, he was so ill that a priest came aboard the Queen Mary to give him extreme unction (last rites) before he was carried off the ship on a stretcher. In the following year, when bad weather made a plane trip “iffy,” he told Ted Reardon, “It’s okay for someone with my life expectancy,” but he suggested that his sister Kathleen and Reardon go by train. “His continual, almost heroic sexual performance,” Garry Wills said, was a “cackling at the gods of bodily disability who plagued him.” Charles Spalding believed that Jack identified with Lord Byron, about whom Jack read everything he could find. Byron also had physical disabilities, saw himself dying young, and hungered for women. Jack loved—perhaps too much—Lady Caroline Lamb’s description of Byron as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
Events affecting Jack’s sister Kathleen deepened his feelings about the tenuousness of life. Jack and Kathleen, as their letters to each other testify, had a warm, affectionate relationship. Jack was closer to her than to any of his other siblings. They shared an attraction to rebelliousness or at least to departing from the confining rules of their Church and mother. Jack had supported Kick in a decision to marry Billy Hartington, outside of her faith. Billy’s death in the war had brought her closer than ever to Jack. Each had a mutual sense of life’s precariousness, which made them both a little cynical and resistant to social mores. And so in the summer of 1947, during his visit to Lismore Castle in Ireland, Jack was pleased to learn that Kathleen had fallen deeply in love with Peter Fitzwilliam, another wealthy English aristocrat and much-decorated war hero. A breeder of racehorses and a man of exceptional charm, with a reputation for womanizing despite being married to a beautiful English heiress, Fitzwilliam reminded some people of Joe Kennedy—“older, sophisticated, quite the rogue male.” Jack saw Kathleen’s determination to marry Fitzwilliam—who would have to divorce his current wife first—despite Rose’s warnings that she and Joe would disown her, as a demonstration of independence and risk taking that he admired. Before any final decision was reached, however, a tragic accident burdened the Kennedys with a far greater trauma. In May 1948, while on an ill-advised flight in stormy weather to the south of France, Kathleen and Fitzwilliam were killed when their private plane crashed into the side of a mountain in the Rhône Valley.
Jack found it impossible to make sense of Kathleen’s death. When it was confirmed by a phone call from Ted Reardon, Jack was at home listening to a recording of Ella Logan singing the lead song from Finian’s Rainbow, “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” She has a sweet voice, Jack said to Billy Sutton. Then he turned away and began to cry. “How can there possibly be any purpose in her death?” Jack repeatedly asked Lem Billings. He later told campaign biographer James MacGregor Burns, “The thing about Kathleen and Joe was their tremendous vitality. Everything was moving in their direction—that’s what made it so unfortunate. If something happens to you or somebody in your family who is miserable anyway, whose health is bad, or who has a chronic disease or something, that’s one thing. But, for someone who is living at their peak, then to get cut off—that’s the shock.”
Kathleen’s death depressed Jack and made him more conscious than ever of his own mortality. He told the columnist Joseph Alsop that he did not expect to live more than another ten years, or beyond the age of forty-five, “but there was no use thinking about it… and he was going to do the best he could and enjoy himself as much as he could in the time that was given him.” He queried Ted Reardon and George Smathers about the best way to die: in war, freezing, drowning, getting shot, poisoning? (War and poisoning were his choices.) “The point is,” he said to Smathers, “that you’ve got to live every day like it’s your last day on earth. That’s what I’m doing.” Chuck Spalding remembered that “he always heard the footsteps…. Death was there. It had taken Joe and Kick and it was waiting for him. So, whenever he was in a situation, he tried to burn bright; he tried to wring as much out of things as he could. After a while he didn’t have to try. He had something nobody else did. It was just a heightened sense of being; there’s no other way to describe it.”
Spalding’s recollections are not a sentimental exaggeration about Kennedy or the influences that played on him. Kathleen’s death seemed to heighten not only his determination to live life to the fullest but also his ambition for a notable public career. It is clear that the initial shock of Kick’s death greatly distracted him. Billings said that “he was in terrible pain…. He couldn’t get through the days without thinking of Kathleen at the most inappropriate times. He’d be sitting at a congressional hearing and he’d find his mind drifting uncontrollably back to all the things he and Kathleen had done together and all the friends they had in common.” He had trouble sleeping through the night, repeatedly awakened by images of Kathleen and him sitting and talking together.
AFTER KATHLEEN’S DEATH, stoicism about accepting the uncontrollable joined a healthy determination to go forward and build a successful political career. During his first year and a half in Congress, Jack had already considered running for a statewide office. He wanted to get to the Senate, but if he won the nomination in 1948, it would mean challenging incumbent Republican Leverett Saltonstall. Since early polls showed New York Republican governor Thomas Dewey taking the presidency from Truman that year, and since Saltonstall, a popular moderate, would be difficult to beat, Jack backed away from challenging him. He focused, instead, on the possibility of running for governor. As a prelude, he began spending three or four days a week in Massachusetts speaking before civic groups—less to make clear where he stood on public questions than to get himself known by as many attentive citizens as possible. He largely stuck to safe issues such as the communist danger, at home and abroad, veterans’ benefits, a balanced approach to labor unions, and the need to increase New England’s economic competitiveness.
The most striking feature of his travels around the state is the energy it required and how forcefully it demonstrates his determination to advance to higher political office. The trips from Washington to Boston by plane and back to D.C. by train in an uncomfortable sleeping-car berth that left him bleary-eyed the next day were reason enough not to take on the job. Visits to the 39 cities and 312 towns in Massachusetts by car were an additional argument against launching a statewide campaign he might not win. He followed a grueling schedule, often attending twelve or more events a day, speaking at Communion breakfasts, church socials, Elks clubs, fraternal groups, Holy Name Societies, PTAs, VFW or American Legion chapters, volunteer fire departments, and women’s organizations. To reach as many towns as possible, Jack, his driver (an ex-prizefighter), and two or three of his supporters usually began the day at dawn and ended at midnight, eating cheeseburgers and drinking milkshakes along the way. John Galvin, who accompanied Kennedy on many of these weekends, remembered that with no state expressways and few nice motels, “we usually ended up sleeping in a crummy small-town hotel with a single electric lightbulb hanging from the ceiling over the bed and a questionable bathtub down at the far end of the hall.”
Jack suffered almost constant lower back pain and spasms in spite of his 1944 surgery. And no wonder: X rays of his back showed that by 1950, the fourth lumbar vertebra had narrowed from 1.5 cm to 1.1 cm, indicating further collapse in the bones supporting his spinal column. By March 1951, there would be clear compression fractures in his lower spine. At his age, this may have been another indication of the price paid for his steroid therapy. At the end of each day on the road, Jack would climb into the backseat of the car, where, as his friend and expert on state politics Dave Powers recalled, “he would lean back… and close his eyes in pain.” At the hotel, he would use crutches to help himself up stairs and then soak in a hot bath for an hour before going to bed. “The pain,” Powers added, “often made him tense and irritable with his fellow travelers.”
Like a general fighting a war, Powers had tacked a state map to the wall of Jack’s Boston apartment on Bowdoin Street and began using colored pins to show where they had been. Jack pressed Powers to fill the gaps with dates in the neglected cities and towns. “When we’ve got this map completely covered with pins,” Jack would say, “that’s when I’ll announce that I’m going to run for statewide office.”
Jack was away from Washington so much that veteran Mississippi congressman John Rankin told him and Smathers, who was spending a lot of time in Florida preparing for a 1950 Senate campaign, “You young boys go home too much…. I’ve got my people convinced that the Congress of the United States can’t run without me. I don’t go home during the Session because I don’t want them to find out any different…. You fellows are home every week—you’re never around here…. And your people are finally going to realize the Congress can run just as good without you as with you. And then you’re in trouble.”
By the fall of 1947, Massachusetts’ newspapers had begun speculating that Jack was a possible candidate for the Senate or governorship. And by 1948, Henry Wallace’s Progressive party backers in the state declared themselves ready to support him for governor. Since he seemed to be a strong labor advocate and his anticommunism would have little impact on foreign policy as governor, he was more acceptable to Progressives than his rivals for the nomination, traditional Democrats former governor Maurice Tobin and Paul Dever, the front-runner. Progressives also considered Kennedy much preferable to incumbent Republican governor Robert F. Bradford.
But a private Roper poll in June 1948 persuaded Jack not to run. The survey showed Jack losing to Bradford, 43.3 to 39.8 percent. Neither this small margin nor a straw poll of Democrats that put Jack and Tobin in a dead heat and Jack ahead of Dever by almost two to one was enough to convince him otherwise. More important was evidence that only five months before the election, he had made little impression on Massachusetts voters as a potential governor and officeholder: 85 percent of the Roper survey said they knew too little about Kennedy to predict whether he would be a good governor, while 64 percent said they did not have enough information to cite anything about him or his policies that they particularly liked. So it was time to wait. In the meantime, reelection to the House was assured. With no challenger in the primary or the general election, Jack received 94,764 votes, over 25,000 more than in his first race.
Jack had no illusions about winning higher office: As he knew from the history of Massachusetts politics, money and a winning strategy were essential for success. His father’s wealth relieved him of fund-raising concerns. And so in January 1949, he began focusing on the issues that he believed could carry him to the State House or the Senate in 1952.
If Jack needed additional inducement to bear the burdens of a statewide campaign, he found it in the public response in 1950 to a family tragedy suffered by Mayor James Curley and the passing of his grandfather, Honey Fitz. Early in the year, the deaths of two of Curley’s four surviving children—five others and his wife had already passed away—stunned Boston. Curley’s forty-one-year-old daughter Mary died unexpectedly from a cerebral hemorrhage and her thirty-six-year-old brother succumbed the same day in the same way. Eight months later Honey Fitz, at age eighty-seven, died of old age. Curley’s tragedy had brought over 50,000 people from around the state to his home to pay their respects. Likewise, more than 3,500 people attended the church service to mark Honey Fitz’s passing. To Jack, it was more than a demonstration of affection for two legendary public figures; “it made him realize” more fully than before, Billings said, “the extraordinary impact a politician can have on the emotions of ordinary people”—indeed, on the substance of their lives. This was something good and powerful, and it stirred not only Jack’s heart but his ego.
In laying the groundwork for a 1952 campaign, Jack could have chosen to emphasize domestic matters such as education, veterans’ housing, unemployment, union rights, rent control, health care and insurance, reduced government spending, and lower taxes—all of which he addressed repeatedly during his first two House terms. But he did not see these as stirring the kind of public passion that he hoped to summon in a statewide race. The key, he believed, to commanding broad and favorable attention was a focus on foreign policy, anticommunism in particular. As he would say in a speech in 1951, “Foreign policy today, irrespective of what we might wish, in its impact on our daily lives, overshadows everything else. Expenditures, taxation, domestic prosperity, the extent of social services—all hinge on the basic issue of war or peace.”
IN CONSISTENTLY SEIZING upon foreign affairs and anticommunism as his campaign themes, Jack identified himself not with one party or the other but with the national interest. When it suited him, he could be highly partisan. During the 1948 presidential campaign, for example, he aggressively attacked the Grand Old Party for its support of special interests and “perpetual, unending war on all fronts against the rights and aspirations of American workers.” He called the Republicans “vicious” and complained that “they follow the Hitler line—no matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth.” Once he launched his own campaign in 1949, however, he aimed to win voter backing by espousing “Americanism.” (Jack may have remembered the observation of Pennsylvania Republican boss Boise Penrose in 1920 when asked for the meaning of “Americanism,” which Warren G. Harding was advocating in the presidential race. “Damned if I know,” Penrose disarmingly replied. “But you can be sure it will get a lot of votes.”)
“Americanism” for Jack mostly meant anticommunism, and his political timing was astute. In January 1949, American anxiety over the communist threat was reaching fever pitch. Between 1946 and 1949, warnings of communist infiltration of U.S. government agencies—especially the State Department—had filled the air. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had said that no less than 100,000 communists were at work in America trying to overthrow the government. Cardinal Spellman of New York warned that America was in imminent danger of a communist takeover. Under what Secretary of State Dean Acheson later described as “the incendiary influence” of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Truman administration felt compelled to set up the Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program. In January 1949, 72 percent of Americans did not believe that Russia genuinely wanted peace. A like number later in the year said that Moscow wanted to rule the world.
Events abroad gave resonance to these concerns. In 1948, a successful communist coup in Czechoslovakia had solidified Soviet control of Eastern Europe; Western Europe, despite the Marshall Plan, was still far from a postwar economic recovery and seemed vulnerable to communist political subversion and military attack; and the civil war in China between the nationalists and communists had just turned decisively in Mao’s favor with the planned retreat of Chiang’s forces to Formosa.
Jack began using foreign policy issues for a statewide campaign as early as the fall of 1947. In an endorsement of a $227 million aid request to defend Italy from “the onslaught of the communist minority,” Jack depicted the country “as the initial battleground in the communist drive to capture western Europe.” Jack’s strongly worded appeal reflected his genuine concern about the Soviet threat to Europe and America, but he also knew that it was excellent politics in a state with a significant Italian voting bloc. Nor did he overlook the political advantage (from Massachusetts’ Jewish and Polish minorities) of urging an end to a Palestine arms embargo, which deprived Jews of “the opportunity to defend themselves and carve out their partition,” and the admission to the United States of eighteen thousand displaced Polish soldiers, which was a small atonement for “the betrayal of their native country” by FDR at the Yalta Conference. Jack made no mention of Roosevelt’s limited options in helping Poland as the war was ending or of his father’s readiness to sacrifice Poland to Hitler’s ambitions five years before.
The common thread running through these pronouncements was the defense of the West against a communist advance. At times, however, overreaction to communist dangers and political cynicism skewed Jack’s judgment on international affairs. Chiang’s defeat in 1949, for example, provoked Kennedy into the least-astute foreign policy pronouncement of his young political career. “The failure of our foreign policy in the Far East,” he announced on the House floor and then in a speech in Salem, Massachusetts, “rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State.” America’s refusal to provide military aid unless there was a coalition government in China had crippled Chiang’s nationalists. “So concerned were our diplomats and their advisers, the [Owen] Lattimores and the [John K.] Fairbanks, with the imperfections of the democratic system in China after twenty years of war, and the tales of corruption in high places, that they lost sight of our tremendous stake in a non-communist China…. What our young men had saved [in World War II], our diplomats and our president have frittered away.” His conviction that American actions were more responsible for events in China than what the Chinese themselves did helped agitate unrealistic judgments on the power of the United States to shape political developments everywhere in the world. Kennedy’s comments also encouraged right-wing complaints that the Truman administration had “lost” China and helped destroy the credibility of the State Department’s experts on Asia.
Coming so soon after Truman had won a stunning upset victory in the 1948 campaign, which made him a dominant political force, Jack’s attack on the White House indicates how strongly he felt about the communist danger. Yet he also knew that it was very good politics: What better way to command the attention of Massachusetts voters than to take issue with the head of his own party on a matter most people in the state saw as he did? In 1949, anticommunism was a surefire issue for any aspiring national politician: 83 percent of Americans favored registration of communists with the Justice Department; 87 percent thought it wise to remove communists from jobs in defense industries; and 80 percent supported the signing of loyalty oaths by union leaders.
Playing this card meant sometimes playing rough, but Jack was getting more used to that, too. He admired George Smathers’s 1950 Senate nomination campaign against incumbent Democrat Claude Pepper, in which Smathers successfully exploited Pepper’s reputation as a doctrinaire New Dealer and forceful advocate of the welfare state, which opened him to attacks as a Soviet sympathizer and “Stalin’s mouthpiece in the Senate,” or “Red” Pepper, as unscrupulous opponents called him. Whimsically taking advantage of the climate of suspicion and the extraordinary ignorance of his audience, Smathers shamelessly described Pepper in a speech as an “extrovert,” who practiced “nepotism” with his sister-in-law and “celibacy” before his marriage, and had a sister who was a Greenwich Village “thespian.”
Nevertheless, in 1949–50, despite his hyperbole about China and uncritical support of Smathers, Jack was relatively restrained in his attacks on Truman’s national security and foreign policies. He did focus on “the lack of adequate national planning for civil defense in case of a national emergency,” complaining that only one man was working full-time on the matter of “wartime civil disaster relief…. It is amazing to learn, particularly in view of the President’s recent disclosure of Russia’s Atomic Bomb, that at this late date no further progress has been made in setting up an adequate and organized system of Civil Defense.” Jack’s office informed forty-five newspaper editors in Massachusetts about a letter he had sent to Truman regarding the problem. Kennedy worried that in case of an atomic attack no one would have a clear idea of how to respond. By July, with the United States now fighting in Korea and the administration giving little heed to Jack’s warnings, he decried the “inexcusable delay” in the failure to set up an adequate program to cope with a surprise attack. When ten thousand copies of a government manual on how to protect oneself from atomic radiation “sold like hot cakes,” Jack saw it as a kind of vindication.
But nothing provoked Jack’s criticism of the administration more than initial U.S. defeats in Korea. He said that the reverses in the fighting in the summer of 1950 forcefully demonstrated “the inadequate state of our defense preparations. Our military arms and our military manpower have been proven by the Korean incident to have been dangerously below par.” He had already taken the administration to task on preparedness in February, when he had inserted a column by Joseph and Stewart Alsop in the Congressional Record attacking Defense Secretary Louis A. Johnson for failing to tell the public about U.S. military weakness. Jack now also attacked Truman for failing to prepare the country to defend its interests in Europe as well as in Asia. He believed that the United States had insufficient forces to fight in Korea and hold the line in Western Europe, where he said the Soviets had eighty divisions to the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s twelve.
Jack’s criticism reflected popular feeling: Whereas a majority of Americans consistently approved of Truman’s leadership in 1949 and initially rallied around him after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, only 37 to 43 percent thought he was doing a good job after that. By November 1950, Americans were more critical than approving of the administration’s Korean policy. After driving North Korean forces back above the Thirty-eighth Parallel in September and then crossing into North Korea in hopes of unifying the peninsula under a pro-Western government in Seoul, the United States found itself in a wider war with China, which had entered the fighting in November. A Chinese offensive that pushed U.S. forces back below the Thirty-eighth Parallel—arousing fears of an extended, costly war—convinced 71 percent of Americans that the administration’s management of the conflict was only fair or poor.
In November 1950, in a seminar at the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration, Jack spoke candidly about many of the key issues and personalities of the times. In contrast with Truman, who had vetoed the McCarran Act, which required the registration of communists and communist-front organizations and provided for their internment during a national emergency, Jack said that he had voted for it and complained that not enough was being done to combat communists in the U.S. government. He also said that he had little regard for the foreign policy leadership of the president or Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
As for Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who early in 1950 had begun stirring sharp debate with unproved accusations about widespread subversion among government officials under FDR and Truman, Jack had little quarrel with him, saying, “He may have something.” It was not simply that his father, sister Eunice, and he were personally acquainted with McCarthy; Jack valued his anticommunism, even if it were overdrawn, as well as his “energy, intelligence, and political skill in abundant qualities.” At a Harvard Spee Club dinner in February 1952, when a speaker praised the university for never having produced an Alger Hiss, a former State Department official under suspicion of spying for Moscow, or a Joe McCarthy, Jack uncharacteristically made a public scene, angrily saying, “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” Jack was just as sympathetic to Richard Nixon, with whom he had established a measure of personal rapport during their service in the House. He openly declared himself pleased that Nixon, a tough anticommunist, had beaten liberal Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas in a 1950 California Senate race, and he had no complaints about Nixon’s depiction of Douglas as a “fellow traveler” or the “Pink Lady.”
Like so many others in the country, Jack was partly blind to the political misjudgments and moral failings generated by the anticommunism of the time. Fearful that America was losing the Cold War, supposedly because of disloyal U.S. officials, and that McCarthy was correct in trying to root out government subversives, millions of Americans uncritically accepted unproved allegations that abused the civil liberties of loyal citizens. Unlike Truman, who in March 1950 called McCarthy “a ballyhoo artist” making “wild charges,” Jack was all too ready to take McCarthy’s accusations about government spies at face value. Overreacting to the events of 1949–50, Jack saw the dangers of communist success compelling the sacrifice of some traditional freedoms. He was ready to place limits on dissent as a way to give it freer rein at some future time. Less than two years later and forever thereafter, Jack tried to deny the generally accurate portrayal in a New Republic article of what he had said at the Harvard seminar.
Unlike Joe McCarthy, Kennedy never engaged in systematic red-baiting or the repeated use of innuendo to destroy anyone’s reputation. And by the end of 1951, he publicly declared that the issue of communists in the executive branch was no longer of importance and that accusations of communists in the Foreign Service were “irrational.” Yet there is no question that he had taken advantage of the anticommunist mood to advance his political standing in Massachusetts by voicing policy differences with Truman and his administration, though, unlike McCarthy, Kennedy’s opposition rested principally on matters of substantive concern that had some merit.
The issue of how to defend Western Europe with limited resources in the midst of the Korean fighting is a case in point. Jack believed that Europe was America’s first and most important line of defense against a Soviet advance in the Cold War. To better inform himself about European defense needs, he spent five weeks in January and February 1951 traveling from England to Yugoslavia. On his return, Jack gave a nationwide radio talk carried by 540 stations of the Mutual Broadcasting Company on “Issues in the Defense of Western Europe.” Sixteen days later he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees. His balanced, sensible analysis of European dangers was in striking contrast to some of his earlier overdrawn rhetoric about foreign affairs and won bipartisan approval. His conversations with U.S. representatives and high government officials in England, France, Italy, West Germany, Yugoslavia, and Spain, he said, made clear that the Soviets would not invade Western Europe in the coming year. Since “the Russians had not attacked before, why should they now when the bomb is still as much a deterrent as it was before?” An additional restraint on Soviet aggression was the “tremendous” problem Moscow would face of feeding Western Europe following any conquest. More important, Jack wondered why they would “take the risk of starting a war, when the best that they could get would be a stalemate, during which they would be subjected to atomic bombing? Why should they throw everything into the game, why should they take risks that they don’t have to—especially when things are going well in the Far East? In addition, Stalin is an old man, and old men are traditionally cautious.”
Because “a series of chain events as in the first war” might produce a conflict anyway, Kennedy continued to urge a military buildup. He was against strict reliance on U.S. forces, however, instead encouraging a ratio system in which the Europeans would match each American division with six of their own, warning that without such a commitment from its allies, the United States would find itself burdened with a disproportionate responsibility for Europe’s defense. Because the White House opposed a ratio system and seemed unlikely to enforce it, Jack also urged that the Congress monitor any commitments the Europeans made to the buildup. This was not a backhanded proposal for pulling out of Europe; rather, he wanted to protect the American economy from excessive burdens by getting the Europeans to do their share.
In his testimony, Jack had the added satisfaction of directly separating himself from his father’s continuing advocacy of isolationism. Georgia senator Walter George asked him to comment on a speech Joe gave in December 1950 urging withdrawal from Europe. Joe’s speech was another demonstration of his inability to translate his realistic prognostications on the domestic economy into wise assessments of international affairs. “The truth,” Joe said, “is that our only real hope is to keep Russia, if she chooses to march, on the other side of the Atlantic. It may be that Europe for a decade or a generation or more will turn communistic.” In contrast, Jack testified that losing the “productive facilities” of Western Europe would make matters much more difficult for the United States in the Cold War and thought “we should do our utmost within reason to save it.” Jack’s differences with his father on foreign affairs were no bar to the great family enterprise of advancing Jack’s political career: Joe promptly paid for the printing and distribution of ten thousand copies of Jack’s testimony.
Jack’s conviction about the importance of foreign affairs to the nation’s future and, more narrowly, to his 1952 political campaign moved him to focus his attention on more than Western Europe. In April 1951, he spoke to a Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation meeting in Boston about Middle Eastern and Asian problems susceptible to Soviet exploitation. In Morocco, Iran, Egypt, Indochina, Malaya, Burma, India, and Pakistan, Jack said, the “nationalistic passions… directed primarily against the Colonial policies of the West” were of great consequence to America. To combat Soviet efforts to take control in these countries, Kennedy wanted the United States to develop nonmilitary techniques of resistance that would not create suspicions of neo-imperialism or add to the country’s financial burden. The problem, as Jack saw it, was not simply to be anticommunist but to stand for something that these emerging nations would find appealing. Communism was spreading because the democracies had failed, especially in Asia, to explain themselves effectively to the masses or to make the potential ameliorating effects of democracy on their lives apparent. Too many subjects of Western colonial rule remembered the cruelty of their masters to accept their systems of self-government as transparently superior to communism.
To learn more, Jack—accompanied by his brother Robert and sister Pat—made a seven-week, 25,000-mile trip that fall to Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, Singapore, Thailand, French Indochina, Korea, and Japan. “I was anxious to get some first-hand knowledge of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of our policies in the Middle East and in the Far East,” he told a nationwide radio audience on his return. He had wanted to learn “how those peoples regarded us and our policies, and what you and I might do in our respective capacities to further the cause of peace.” Along the way he met with U.S. and foreign military chiefs as well as prime ministers, ambassadors, ministers, consuls, businessmen, and ordinary citizens willing to speak spontaneously about current and future international relations.
The journey became a chance for Jack not only to educate himself about regions, countries, and peoples with which he had small acquaintance but also to get to know his twenty-six-year-old younger brother, Robert, better. The eight-year gap in their ages had made them almost distant relatives, separated by the different rhythms of their lives. Robert, who had briefly worked in Jack’s 1946 campaign after returning from navy service, had graduated from Harvard in 1948, where he had majored in “football” and earned poor grades. He was reluctantly accepted by the University of Virginia’s law school, where his diligence carried him through to an L.L.B. and a respectable grade point average that placed him in the upper half of his class.
Unlike Jack, who found much attraction in iconoclasm, Robert was a conformist who courted Rose and Joe by being as devout as his mother and a faithful reflector of his father’s views and wishes. Bobby, as his siblings and friends called him, was the first of the Kennedy children to have a profession, get married, and have children. In 1950, at the age of twenty-five, he wed Ethel Skakel, the next-to-youngest of seven children of a wealthy Chicago Catholic family that shared the Kennedys’ conservative values.
Only after prodding from Joe had Jack taken Bobby with him on his Middle Eastern and Asian trip. Jack feared that his often moody, taciturn, brusque, and combative brother would be “a pain in the ass.” But Bobby’s lighter, less apparent side as a relentless teaser endeared him to Jack. There was more at work than shared humor. Because both brothers, as historian Ronald Steel believes, “shunned open displays of emotion as a sign of weakness, the preferred mode of discourse was kidding. This permitted familiarity without the danger of vulnerability or sentiment.” As important, Bobby’s determined efforts to make objective sense of what they were finding and his unblinking realism deepened Jack’s respect for him. Bobby’s emphasis on “the importance of associating ourselves with the people rather than just the governments, which might be transitional, transitory; the mistake of the [French] war in Indochina;… [and] the failure of the United States to back the people” echoed Jack’s thinking. He began to see Bobby as an asset in future political contests and challenges.
Kennedy believed it imperative for the United States to align itself with the emerging nations. But he acknowledged this as no easy task. Because of its wartime and post-1945 policies, America was “definitely classed with the imperialist powers of Western Europe.” “We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people,” he noted in a trip diary. “Because everyone believes that we control the U.N.—because our wealth is supposedly inexhaustible, we will be damned if we don’t do what they [the emerging nations] want done.” America needed to throw off the image of a great Western power filling the vacuum left by British and French decline and to demonstrate that its enemy was not just communism but “poverty and want,” “sickness and disease,” “injustice and inequality,” which were the daily fare of millions of Arabs and Asians. “It is tragic to report,” he said in his radio address, “that not only have we made no new friends, but we have lost old ones.” U.S. military strength was only part of the equation. “If one thing was bored into me as a result of my experience in the Middle as well as the Far East,” he said, “it is that Communism cannot be met effectively by merely the force of arms. The central core of our Middle Eastern policy,” Jack asserted, “is [or should be] not the export of arms or the show of armed might but the export of ideas, of techniques, and the rebirth of our traditional sympathy for and understanding of the desires of men to be free.”
The U.S. dilemma was most pronounced in Indochina, where America had “allied ourselves to the desperate effort of a French regime to hang on to the remnants of empire…. To check the southern drive of Communism makes sense,” Jack also said prophetically, “but not only through reliance on the force of arms. The task is rather to build strong native non-Communist sentiment within these areas and rely on that as a spearhead of defense rather than upon the [French] legions…. And to do this apart from and in defiance of innately nationalistic aims spells foredoomed failure.”
For Jack and Bobby the trip evoked a mutual affinity for noblesse oblige—the family’s moral imperative, bound up with Rosemary’s disability, to emphasize the obligations of the advantaged to the disadvantaged, the need of the rich and powerful few to help the less fortunate many. Joe had always had an evangelical streak that made him such an outspoken isolationist, and he had clearly instilled in his children an affinity for crusading fervor. Now his sons had together found a cause worth fighting for.
Yet Jack’s enthusiasm was largely self-generated; back home and among Americans abroad, his journey of discovery evoked more indifference and hostility than encouragement or praise. In the Middle East, he crossed paths with Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., who told an Arab leader urging U.S. sympathy for nationalistic revolutions that the really important issue was the U.S.-Soviet struggle. FDR Jr. had “simply, completely missed the whole point of the nationalist revolution that is sweeping Asia,” Bobby wrote his father. Bobby personally did not think there was a chance of changing anything unless the whole State Department crowd was swept aside.
In India, where they dined with Nehru, the prime minister seemed bored, looking at the ceiling and speaking only occasionally to Pat Kennedy, Bobby and Jack’s attractive twenty-seven-year-old sister. When Jack asked Nehru about Vietnam, he condescendingly dismissed the French war as an example of doomed colonialism with U.S. aid being poured down a “bottomless hole.” Like a schoolmaster lecturing mediocre students, Nehru explained that communism had offered “something to die for” and the West proposed nothing but the status quo. French officials in Saigon, who were more in need of Nehru’s lecture than Jack and Bobby, complained to the State Department that the Kennedys were trying to undermine their policy. Nor did most U.S. diplomats see Jack’s criticism as helpful.
Jack’s call for a change in perspective and policy did not alter his father’s thinking, either. He followed Jack’s radio address with one of his own, urging not an effort to align ourselves with the struggling masses but to shun additional alliances that could further undermine our autonomy in dealing with international affairs. “Perhaps our next effort will be to ally to ourselves the Eskimos of the North Pole and the Penguins of the Antarctic,” he sarcastically announced.
IN SEPTEMBER 1951, Jack asked his sister Pat, who was working in television in New York, to arrange a weekly “public service type” telecast of ten or fifteen minutes, “with me interviewing important people down in Washington about their jobs, etc., and about problems of the day.” The idea was to get it shown throughout Massachusetts.
More important than immediate efforts to expand Jack’s visibility in the state was the decision on whether to run for governor or senator. Jack much preferred to be a senator than be the chief executive of Massachusetts. He thought of the latter as a job “handing out sewer contracts.” The office had limited powers: The mayor of Boston had greater control over patronage than the governor, and any Democrat in the State House would likely have to deal with a Republican-controlled legislature, with all that meant for making much of a record as chief executive. To get anything done, Jack believed he would have “to be on the take,” as he put it, or bypass the legislature and the politicians in the State House by going to the people, and since he would have entered office with “no standing,” it seemed unlikely that he would accomplish much.
Jack’s interest in foreign affairs also made the Senate more attractive, as did his father’s unqualified preference for a Senate bid. Joe predicted that Jack “would murder [incumbent Henry Cabot] Lodge,” but because sophisticated political observers told Joe that the chances against Lodge were only fifty-fifty and Joe did not want anyone to be overconfident, he also declared that “the campaign against Lodge would be the toughest fight he could think of, but there was no question that Lodge could be beaten, and if that should come to pass Jack would be nominated and elected President of the United States.” Frank Morrissey, who ran Jack’s Boston office, remembered Joe, “in that clear and commanding voice of his,” saying to Jack, “ ‘I will work out the plans to elect you President. It will not be any more difficult for you to be elected President than it will be to win the Lodge fight.’ ” Chuck Spalding recalled that Jack saw the Senate race as a bigger challenge than the governor’s chair, but that “if he was going to get anywhere… he’d have to be able to beat somebody like Lodge…. So I think he made the decision, ‘I’ve been long enough in the House, it’s time for me to move ahead. If I’m going to do it I’ve got to take this much of a chance.’ ” Jack talked to Justice William O. Douglas, who encouraged him to run for the Senate seat. In December 1951, during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Jack said he was “definitely interested in going to the Senate” and was considering running next year.
Only incumbent governor Paul Dever stood in the way. After winning the State House twice in 1948 and 1950, Dever was interested in running for the Senate. But he was uncertain of beating Lodge, whose famous name and three terms in the Upper House made him something of a Massachusetts icon. For his part, Jack saw a fight with Dever as hurting his chances of defeating Lodge. Nevertheless, Jack was confident that Dever’s own assessments would discourage him from taking on Lodge, and thus Kennedy. Jack decided to wait on an announcement until Dever made up his mind. He also approached Dever with an offer. Jack told him early in 1952, “If you want to run for the United States Senate, I’ll run for governor. If you want to run for governor, then I’ll run for the United States Senate. Will you please make up your mind and let me know?” This may have been more than a bit of a ploy. William O. Douglas remembered that when he and Kennedy spoke, Jack only casually mentioned the governorship. “By the time that he was talking to me, I think he had discarded that [a run for governor] essentially and had decided to run for the Senate.” In any case, Dever was so slow in deciding that Jack prepared a statement announcing his Senate candidacy. Fortunately, before he acted on it, Dever called to say that he would seek reelection as governor. Jack was relieved and happy, telling an aide, “We got the race we wanted.”
According to daughter Eunice, Joe “had thought and questioned and planned for two years,” and he now made Jack’s election his full-time concern. One campaign insider said that Joe, as in 1946, “was the distinct boss in every way. He dominated everything.” He took a comfortable apartment at 84 Beacon Street, near Jack’s place on Bowdoin Street, where he supervised campaign expenditures, publicity, the preparation of speeches, and policy statements. “The Ambassador worked around the clock,” a speechwriter Joe brought up from New York said. “He was always consulting people, getting reports, looking into problems. Should Jack go on TV with this issue? What kind of an ad should he run on something else? He’d call in experts, get opinions, have ideas worked up.”
To make Lodge seem overconfident, Joe leaked the story to the press that Lodge had sent him word not to waste his money. In a race against Jack, he expected to win by 300,000 votes. Lodge later denied that he ever predicted an easy victory—to Joe or anyone else. On the contrary, he saw the contest as “much harder” than his three previous races. “All along,” he said, “I always knew if there came a man with an honest, clean record who was also of Irish descent, he’d be almost impossible to beat.”
Joe’s fierce commitment to winning sometimes made him abusive to campaign workers and ready to cut corners. During the campaign, Jack enlisted Gardner Jackson, a liberal with strong ties to Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and labor unions, to help him win support from liberal Democrats. Jackson persuaded the ADA to back Jack. But to solidify his hold on liberals, he wanted Kennedy to sign a newspaper ad declaring “Communism and McCarthyism: Both Wrong.” Since ninety-nine Notre Dame faculty members and John McCormack agreed to sign, Jack did, too, but he asked Jackson to read the statement to his father and some of his aides. Jack, who no doubt knew what his father’s reaction would be, left for early-morning campaign business before Jackson began. Almost immediately, Joe jumped up, tilting the card table they were sitting around against the others and began to shout, “You and your sheeny friends are trying to ruin Jack.” Joe’s tirade attacking liberals, labor unions, Jews, and Adlai Stevenson (the Democratic presidential nominee) concluded with the promise that the statement would never be published, which it was not. Though Jack rationalized his father’s behavior by telling Jackson that Joe was acting out of “love of his family,” he also conceded that “sometimes I think it’s really pride.” But whatever Joe’s motive, Jack was not averse to squelching the ad; it was poor politics. McCarthy remained very popular with the state’s 750,000 Irish Catholics. Indeed, before Adlai Stevenson made a September trip to Boston, he was advised by a member of Jack’s campaign staff not to attack McCarthy. “He is very popular with people of both parties.”
As in 1946, Joe supported Jack with large infusions of money. The campaign finance laws were an invitation to break the rules. Although the candidate himself could spend only $20,000 and individuals were limited to $1,000 contributions, there was no bar to indirectly using state party funds to boost a nominee; nor was there any limitation on giving $1,000 to any and all political committees that might be set up on a candidate’s behalf. Joe organized four thinly disguised committees—in addition to Citizens for Kennedy, there was a More Prosperous Massachusetts committee and three “improvement” committees, supposedly working to advance the shoe, fish, and textile industries. Joe may have put several million dollars into the campaign, which more than matched the $1 million the state Republican party spent to support Lodge. The Kennedy money paid for billboard, newspaper, radio, and television ads; financed Jack’s trips around the state; and paid for the many local campaign offices, postage for mailings, telephone banks, receptions, and famous Kennedy teas that attracted thousands of women. A person “could live the rest of [their] lives on [his] billboard budget alone,” one commentator asserted. “Cabot was simply overwhelmed by money,” Dwight Eisenhower later said. Lodge agreed, saying that he lacked the financial wherewithal to keep up with the Kennedy spending machine.
The single most telling expenditure Joe made in the campaign was a loan of $500,000 to John J. Fox, the owner of the Boston Post, who after he bought the paper for $4 million in June 1952 faced a financial crisis. The paper was losing half a million dollars a year and needed to replace an antiquated physical plant and introduce a home-delivery system to return to profitability. In the fall of 1952, Joe helped rescue the paper from bankruptcy with his loan. Although there is no hard evidence of a quid pro quo, Jack did get a Post endorsement on October 25, less than two weeks before the election. Because the Post’s backing was believed to be worth forty thousand votes and because five other newspapers with a combined circulation 20 percent greater than the Post’s were supporting Lodge, the Kennedys had been particularly eager for the Post’s endorsement. (The Globe, then the second-most-read paper in Boston, with half the Post’s circulation, held to its tradition of not endorsing candidates.) Lodge claimed that Fox had promised to back him. “I’ve never doubted for a moment that Joe Kennedy was the one who turned Fox around,” Lodge said later, “though I imagine he handled it pretty subtly, with all sorts of veiled promises and hints rather than an outright deal.” In 1960, when the journalist Fletcher Knebel asked Jack about the loan, he said, “ ‘Listen that was an absolutely straight business transaction; I think you ought to get my father’s side of the story.’ ” But as he got up to leave, Knebel said that Jack added, “ ‘You know we had to buy that fucking paper.’ As if he just had to level.” Knebel never published Jack’s last remark.
Joe also made his mark by driving out Mark Dalton as campaign manager. Jack asked Dalton, who had headed his congressional race in 1946, to run the 1952 Senate contest. Dalton put aside a thriving law practice to take on the assignment. But he quickly ran afoul of Joe, who did not think he was aggressive or savvy enough. Two months into the campaign, Joe humiliated Dalton by accusing him of spending funds with no good results. He also blocked an official announcement naming Dalton as campaign manager. Dalton, who took it as “a very grave blow” when Jack would not reverse his father’s decision, resigned.
Robert Kennedy, who was working as an attorney at the Justice Department, was reluctantly persuaded to take over managing the campaign. “I’ll just screw it up,” he told Kenneth O’Donnell, who was one of Jack’s inner-circle advisers, objecting that he knew nothing about electoral politics. But he agreed to take on the job when O’Donnell warned that without him the campaign was headed for “absolute catastrophic disaster.” Bobby worked eighteen-hour days, driving himself so hard that he lost twelve pounds off a spare frame. He put in place a Kennedy organization that reached into every part of the state and stirred teams of supporters to work almost as hard as he did. In addition, he took on difficult, unpleasant jobs Jack shunned. When he found professional politicians hanging around the Boston headquarters, he threw them out. “Politicians do nothing but hold meetings,” he complained. “You can’t get any work out of a politician.” When Paul Dever’s organization, which began to falter in the governor’s race, tried to join forces with Kennedy’s more effective campaign, Bobby shut them off. “Don’t give in to them,” Jack told his brother, “but don’t get me involved in it.” Bobby had a bitter exchange with Dever, who complained to Joe about his abrasive son, with whom he refused to deal in the future.
Journalists Ralph Martin and Ed Plaut later concluded that Bobby Kennedy gave the campaign “organization, organization, and more organization.” The result was “the most methodical, the most scientific, the most thoroughly detailed, the most intricate, the most disciplined and smoothly working state-wide campaign in Massachusetts history—and possibly anywhere else.” “In each community,” Dave Powers noted, the campaign set up “a political organization totally apart from the local party organization…. Kennedy volunteers delivered 1,200,000 brochures to every home in Massachusetts.” It was an unprecedented effort to reach voters.
With Bobby running the day-to-day operation, Jack was free to concentrate on the issues—anticommunism, Taft-Hartley and labor unions, the Massachusetts and New England economies, civil rights, government spending, and which of the two candidates had performed more effectively in addressing these matters. Ted Reardon prepared a “Black Book” of “Lodge’s Dodges,” emphasizing the extent to which Lodge had been on all sides of all issues. The campaign also put out comparative charts on what the candidates “Said and Did From 1947–1951” about major public policies of greatest concern to voters.
Yet in spite of the great energy the campaign—and Jack in particular—put into focusing on issues, they were of relatively little importance in determining the vote. On all major policy matters, the two candidates largely resembled each other. They were both internationalist supporters of containment as well as conservatives with occasional bows to liberalism; they both favored sustaining labor unions, less government intervention in domestic affairs, and balanced federal budgets. Lodge, who spearheaded Eisenhower’s drive for the presidency against the candidacy of Ohio senator Robert Taft, had his problems with conservative Republicans, some of whom turned to Kennedy as a more reliable anticommunist and some of whom voted for neither candidate, which cost Lodge more than it did Jack. At the same time, however, Jack could hardly trumpet his six years in the House as a model of legislative achievement. To be sure, his constituents had few complaints about his service to the district; but if he were asking voters to make him a senator because he had been an innovative legislator or a House leader, he would have been hard-pressed to make an effective case. If his political career had come to an end in 1952, he would have joined the ranks of the thousands of other nameless representatives who left no memorable mark on the country’s history.
Most observers—then and later—agreed that the election turned more on personality than on issues. Kennedy aides O’Donnell and Powers believed that “voters in that election were not interested in issues. Kennedy won on his personality—apparently he was the new kind of political figure that the people were looking for that year, dignified and gentlemanly and well-educated and intelligent, without the air of superior condescension that other cultured politicians, such as Lodge and Adlai Stevenson, too often displayed before audiences.” A former mayor of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, said in 1960, “There’s something about Jack—and I don’t know quite what it is—that makes people want to believe in him. Conservatives and liberals both tell you that he’s with them, because they want to believe that he is, and they want to be with him. They want to identify their views with him.”
Jack’s narrow margin of victory over Lodge—70,737 votes out of 2,353,231 cast, 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent—was impressive in light of a 208,800-vote advantage for Eisenhower over Stevenson in the state and Dever’s loss of the governorship to Christian Herter by 14,000 votes. The outcome surprised some people, including Lodge, who had an unbeaten string of electoral victories dating from 1932 and had the benefit of an Eisenhower visit to Massachusetts on the final day of the campaign. “I felt rather like a man who has just been hit by a truck,” Lodge said. The fact that only six other congressmen who served with Jack—Nixon, Smathers and LBJ (the only two Democrats), Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating of New York, and Thruston Morton of Kentucky—made it to the Senate speaks forcefully about Kennedy’s achievement.
Electorally, he certainly had commanded the support of the Irish, Italians, Jews, French Canadians, Poles, Slovaks, Greeks, Albanians, Portuguese, Latvians, Finnish, Estonians, and Scandinavians. Torby Macdonald, who was now also a Massachusetts congressman, had it right when he told Jack on election night that he would win despite Ike’s certain victory in the state. When Jack asked him why, Macdonald replied, “I think that you represent the best of the new generation. Not generation in age but minorities, really. The newer arrived people. And Lodge represents the best of the old-line Yankees. I think there are more of the newly arrived people than there are of the old-line Yankees.” To this, Macdonald might have added women as a group that would help Jack get to the Senate.
Indeed, the campaign had made special efforts to attract ethnic and female voters. The evening teas for thirty to forty women at private homes ultimately attracted as many as 70,000 voters, most of whom cast their ballots for Jack. Jewish voters were also given special attention because Jack had to overcome allegations that his father had been anti-Semitic and even pro-Nazi and that he was less sympathetic to Israel than was Lodge. Several appearances before Jewish organizations and outspoken support from Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., and John W. McCormack, as well as several nationally prominent Jews such as Senator Herbert Lehman and current or former congressmen Emanuel Celler, Abraham Ribicoff, and Sidney Yates, brought the great majority of Jewish voters into Jack’s camp. Jack’s charm and his request to one Jewish audience, “Remember, I’m running for the Senate and not my father,” were indispensable in helping swing Jews to his side.
The statistics on ethnic voting for Jack are striking. In 1952, 91 percent of Massachusetts voters went to the polls, an increase of more than 17 percent from the Senate contest in 1946, with most of the greater voting occurring in ethnic districts. In the Catholic precincts of Boston, for example, where Lodge had won respectable backing in 1946 of between 41 and 45 percent, his support now dropped to between 19 and 25 percent. The shift was even more pronounced in Boston’s Jewish districts. Where Lodge had won between 60 and 66 percent of the vote against incumbent Catholic senator David I. Walsh in 1946, his support slipped to below 40 percent in 1952.
Jack’s success rested on something more than being the “First Irish Brahmin”; he was the first American Brahmin elevated from the ranks of the millions and millions of European immigrants who had flooded into the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The beneficiary of his father’s fabulous wealth, a Harvard education, and a heroic career in the military fighting to preserve American values, Jack Kennedy was a model of what every immigrant family aspired to for themselves and their children. And even if they could never literally match what the Kennedys had achieved in wealth and prominence, they took vicarious satisfaction from Jack’s identification as an accepted member of the American elite. Many of those voting for him could remember the 1920s and 1930s, when being a first- or second-generation minority made your standing as an American suspect. In voting for Jack, the minorities were not simply putting one of their own in the high reaches of government—they had been doing that for a number of years—but were saying that he and they had arrived at the center of American life and no longer had to feel self-conscious about their status as citizens of the Great Republic. Jack’s election to the Senate opened the way to a romance between Jack Kennedy and millions of Americans. It would be one of the great American love affairs, and in his election day grin, it was just possible to imagine that Jack himself knew the match had been made.