Even as Kennedy wrestled with strategy to build national strength and recognition before the 1956 Democratic convention, several of his wily associates pushed on him a less lofty project. They urged him to plunge into the rawest form of politics, to seize control of the Massachusetts state Democratic Party apparatus by overthrowing its chairman in a daring coup d’état.
The move would not only put Kennedy into open conflict with the venerable John W. McCormack, who controlled the party establishment in the state; it would also force Kennedy to engage in the sort of Pier Six brawl with cantankerous county chairmen and committeemen that he had been avoiding since he first became a congressional candidate ten years earlier. His target would ostensibly be the chairman of the party’s eighty-member executive committee, William H. Burke, an obscure tavern owner and farmer from western Massachusetts known as “Onions” for one of the crops he raised. But the public fight would be with Burke’s patron. And in the words of John E. Powers, a veteran of the Boston political scene, Burke “was controlled wholly by John McCormack. As chairman of the state committee, he operated that just as a subsidiary to John McCormack’s office.”
McCormack was a native of South Boston, a working-class, Irish Catholic neighborhood justly famous for its insularity and suspicion of outsiders that produced an inordinate number of successful politicians throughout the twentieth century. A generation older than Kennedy, McCormack enjoyed status and seniority on Capitol Hill. He had been a member of the state legislature before Kennedy was in kindergarten and won election to Congress in 1928. He had been the number two Democrat since 1940. As the chief lieutenant for Sam Rayburn of Texas, the speaker of the House, McCormack served as the New England half of the very first “Austin-Boston axis,” a reference to the marriages of convenience that were made in Washington between crafty leaders from Texas and Massachusetts.
Though they were fellow Democrats from Massachusetts, Kennedy and McCormack had never been close. In private conversations with friends the young senator spoke guardedly about the older man but made it clear that he did not consider McCormack a role model. At the same time Kennedy knew that seniority delivered authority and license in Congress, and it had been necessary to show deference to the House leader. By undertaking the challenge, Kennedy knew he risked antagonizing not only McCormack but also Rayburn, one of the most durable and influential figures in the capital.
Kennedy would be creating trouble back home as well. He would be battling McCormack loyalists in the party, a cast of characters that seemed to have spilled from the pages of The Last Hurrah, published that very year. The book was a colorful fictionalized account of the all-too-real career of James Michael Curley, a quintessential Boston politician whose corruption was as famous as the power he accumulated over the years as mayor, governor, and member of Congress—and as inmate at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. Curley had won a full pardon from President Truman in 1950. A few years earlier McCormack had circulated a petition to win Curley’s release from prison, and Kennedy had refused to sign it—the only member of the state’s delegation to Congress to do so. Kennedy was settling an ancient score. His mother, Rose, had passed on a bit of family history: it was Curley who undermined her father, John Fitzgerald, and helped drive him from office as mayor of Boston in 1913. So the grandson of Honey Fitz turned his back on Curley decades later, and Curley would not forget the slight. Now Curley was out of prison and had two years left to live. He too would be sure to fight Kennedy.
McCormack’s South Boston and other ethnic communities in the city were regular battlegrounds, their disputes often over petty issues of patronage; they seemed foreign to Kennedy. Though a descendant of Irish Catholic politicians himself, Kennedy was a son of Harvard and privilege. He did not grow up in “the neighborhoods”; he never lived in “the projects.”
Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, two early political allies of Kennedy’s, began encouraging him to take over the state party organization after he won his Senate seat in 1952. They argued that the committee was full of hacks, and being veteran Massachusetts Democrats by then, they were familiar with hacks.
O’Donnell had become a loyal member of the Kennedy team in 1946, when Robert Kennedy, his football teammate at Harvard, enlisted him in his brother’s first congressional campaign. Ten years later O’Donnell, by this time a corporate public relations man, had become one of Kennedy’s most valuable—and unpaid—political advisors in the state. Powers was more than a decade older, and though he lacked an Ivy League degree he was no less vigilant about Kennedy’s interests. The son of Irish immigrants in the gritty Boston neighborhood of Charlestown, he evolved into one of Kennedy’s closest friends.
Both O’Donnell and Powers studied local politics and fully understood that the tavern owner Burke was indebted to McCormack for his position as collector of the Port of Boston, and they knew that during Democratic administrations the state committee was filled with others who held patronage jobs that could be traced to McCormack. The senator’s advisors insisted that the committee was weak and ripe for picking by energetic activists tied to Kennedy. Originally he was not inclined to take that step. But by the spring of 1956 he saw that if he could take charge of the state party he would be in a position to control the state’s delegation to the national convention that summer. When his aides renewed their appeal, Kennedy showed interest.
It would require him again to ignore the advice of his father. According to O’Donnell, the elder Kennedy told his son, “Leave it alone and don’t get in the gutter with those bums up there in Boston.” The fight promised to be the Irish equivalent of a Tong war, and Joe Kennedy complained that O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien, another leader of his son’s Irish Mafia, were advocating action “to feather their own nest” in the seedy politics of Massachusetts, an especially ridiculous example of the elder Kennedy’s hyperbole habit.
O’Brien, for example, was an attorney with deep roots in the state Democratic Party. His father had been a player in Springfield politics; the son had labored for other Democratic officials before serving as director of Kennedy’s 1952 Senate campaign.
There were several subplots in the developing drama.
Kennedy supported Adlai Stevenson in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination and wanted to arrange for as many Stevenson votes as possible on the Massachusetts delegation. McCormack, on the other hand, was working with Rayburn and former president Truman—who favored New York’s governor and former prominent New Deal diplomat Averell Harriman—to deny Stevenson the nomination.
Kennedy was joined by an unlikely ally, former Massachusetts governor Paul Dever. Relations were cool between the two men. Kennedy was on the rise, while Dever had been out of office for four years, powerless and recovering from a heart attack. Onions Burke served as a mutual enemy. Dever was still annoyed that after his loss of the governor’s office in 1952 his own man had been replaced as committee chairman. Dever hoped that Burke’s overthrow might restore some of his influence while also serving as a measure of revenge. Besides, Dever, like Kennedy, supported Stevenson.
Without revealing that he planned to strip Burke of his chairmanship, Kennedy approached him and McCormack prior to the April primary, ostensibly in the interests of Stevenson’s presidential campaign. He told them he was prepared to run as a favorite son himself against McCormack unless they agreed to give him and Dever a hand in selecting convention delegates. If they made that concession, Kennedy said, McCormack could run unopposed as a favorite son—and Burke would be able to continue as chairman.
The deal was struck, and McCormack shared the selection of the delegate slate with Kennedy and Dever. But Kennedy betrayed the second part of the bargain when he set out to find enough fresh candidates to run for seats on the state Democratic committee in the primary in order to stack the organization with his own followers, who would then vote out Burke. Kennedy instructed his staff, “We can’t let Burke or McCormack know that we’re trying to get our people on the state committee. Keep working on it, but don’t let Burke know about it, and don’t mention my name to anybody.”
The brewing struggle also broke up a tenuous relationship between John Fox, the temperamental publisher of the Boston Post, and the equally headstrong Kennedy family.
In 1952 the elder Kennedy loaned Fox $500,000 that the publisher desperately needed to keep his newspaper afloat. The Post had been reliably Republican; now it endorsed young John F. Kennedy, who was opposing incumbent Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge that year. Though there were suspicions that the father had bought his son the Post’s support, the link between the loan and the endorsement did not become known for several years.
But Fox broke with the Kennedys in 1956, when his newspaper began championing McCormack’s favorite-son campaign in editorials that appeared almost daily. Fox’s broadsides were aimed at Stevenson, who was depicted as soft on communism; the editorials implied that Senator Kennedy’s colors too had turned pinkish. Fox, a Harvard man, had sought Kennedy’s support for an alumni committee that would discourage financial gifts to the school until it purged the faculty of leftists. Kennedy refused to participate and fell from Fox’s favor less than two years after the Post’s endorsement.
The skirmish over control of the state committee widened as liberals, who abhorred McCarthyism and Fox, rallied to Kennedy’s side. Stalwarts of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) such as Samuel Beer, a renowned Harvard professor who later became the national chairman of the liberal organization, joined in the putsch against Onions Burke. According to Joseph Rauh, a leading ADA figure who was constantly pushing the national Democratic Party to the left, Kennedy was suddenly perceived as “a young liberal against the machine.”
The morning after the primary Kennedy asked his aides for a head count. Of the eighty committee members who had been chosen, they figured that no more than thirty were loyal to Burke. Twenty were considered friendly to Kennedy. That meant the fight would be decided by the thirty committee members who had not pledged loyalty to either side. Kennedy asked for a list of their names and all the information that could be gathered about each one. He said he intended to visit personally with each of them.
The following day Kennedy drove to the western part of the state to begin canvassing the committee members; he astonished his aides by calling Burke and making an appointment to have breakfast with him in Northampton. The meeting did not go well. Kennedy told Burke he would be voted out of office and suggested that he resign gracefully to save face. Instead of surrendering, Burke warned Kennedy that he would suffer a humiliating defeat if he tried to unseat him. As soon as the breakfast was over, the normally diplomatic senator surprised a local reporter by vowing to remove Burke as chairman. A feud that had been mostly confined to Democratic politicians burst into a public donnybrook, dominating the front pages of newspapers across Massachusetts.
Burke provoked one story with the accusation that Kennedy had offered him Curley’s seat on the Democratic National Committee if Burke would step down from the state committee. Curley, an enemy of the Kennedys and a master at assuming the posture of a man unfairly wounded by political calumny, corroborated the story, claiming that Kennedy had tried to bribe him into retiring. “He hasn’t got enough money to buy me. I never took any money from him, or from his family, and I never will,” declared the legendary Bostonian, who had twice served time for fraud, in state prison in 1904 and in a federal penitentiary in the late 1940s.
The situation degenerated into just the kind of spectacle Joe Kennedy had predicted.
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Kennedy had been so preoccupied with dethroning Onions that he failed to tap an alternate candidate. When his aides reminded him to do so, he thought of two Irishmen with whom he felt comfortable: O’Donnell, his brother Robert’s roommate at Harvard, and an impressive young man named Dick Donahue, who had a Dartmouth degree and was beginning to attract notice in the party.
O’Donnell argued that the new committee members would reject either one of Kennedy’s well-educated friends. “They want an old familiar face,” he insisted. He suggested John M. “Pat” Lynch, an old-shoe Irish Democrat who for years had been mayor of Somerville, a Boston suburb. O’Donnell padded Lynch’s résumé by pointing out that he had played football at Holy Cross. But when he brought Lynch to meet the senator, Kennedy seemed appalled by Lynch’s appearance. He was small, bald, and fit the image of a Boston pol. O’Donnell reasoned that Kennedy “was probably expecting somebody tall and distinguished looking—like Henry Fonda. Instead, I had brought him a leprechaun.”
Mired in the ferocious culture of Boston politics, where practitioners joked about “Irish Alzheimer’s,” a mythical malady causing one to forget everything but a grudge, Kennedy agreed to settle on Lynch as his candidate.
The dispute headed for a showdown, but the two sides could not even agree upon a venue. Burke’s forces planned a committee meeting for Saturday, May 19, at a hotel in Springfield, close to Burke’s Connecticut Valley home. Lynch’s backers called for the meeting to be held at the Hotel Bradford in Boston. When Burke yielded, he said he did so to avoid “further disruption of the Democratic Party.”
The day before the gathering, the Boston Globe’s front-page headline was “McCormack Rebukes Kennedy, Dever.” The paper reported the majority leader saying “he [would] consider it a personal repudiation” if Burke was not reelected chairman. McCormack then implied that Kennedy’s failure to support a former Massachusetts congressman, Foster Furcolo, in his Senate race in 1954 had cost the Democratic candidate the election. He also complained that Kennedy seemed to have forgotten how McCormack came to his aid in his 1952 Senate race. (Republican senator Jacob Javits of New York campaigned for Henry Cabot Lodge in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Boston, reminding the audience that Kennedy, the Democratic candidate, was the son of a man many believed to be anti-Semitic. McCormack, who represented two of the Jewish wards and was so popular there that he was called “Rabbi,” came to Kennedy’s defense, ripping Javits in a speech on Blue Hill Avenue in the Roxbury section of Boston.)
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The Hotel Bradford, a traditional meeting place off Boston Common, was conducive to Kennedy’s interests, but the date was not. His sister Jean was being married that Saturday, and he was expected to be an usher with his brothers Robert and Ted at the ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown Manhattan. One of the most prominent Catholic clergymen in the land, Francis Cardinal Spellman, was to officiate.
Kennedy flew to New York for the wedding, then quickly caught a shuttle back to Boston. Because McCormack had chosen to stay in Washington, Kennedy’s advisors insisted that his presence was vital at the Hotel Bradford that afternoon as the committee members began arriving for the meeting. Kennedy disliked the ritual of glad-handing the small-time politicians, but he made the concession, standing in the lobby, smiling and greeting each committee member with a hearty handshake, a personal word, and an assurance that he stood behind Lynch.
The Kennedy team believed they had 47 votes lined up, enough to defeat Burke. But they were fighting rumors that Joe Kennedy was paying $500 for each one, and some of the Kennedy delegates who had not gotten $500 were left wondering if they had missed out on a deal. Meanwhile McCormack’s men were said to be dangling promises of lush patronage jobs before wavering committee members. One member was prepared to switch from Lynch to Burke after he was offered a job as bartender at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod. He tearfully switched back to Lynch after Kennedy confronted him.
While Kennedy worked the crowd, he drew glares and boos from Burke’s followers. He astonished everyone by approaching the majority leader’s brother, Edward “Knocko” McCormack, at three hundred pounds a menacing, intimidating figure. Each year at the rowdy St. Patrick’s Day Parade in South Boston, Knocko rode an enormous white horse down Broadway to drunken cheers. Like a pair of prizefighters at the start of a bout, Kennedy and Knocko shook hands. It would be the last gracious gesture of the afternoon.
Kennedy prudently retired to a private room, leaving his political fate in the hands of his aides, who had always been more enthusiastic about the enterprise than he. For their first maneuver, they hired two plainclothes policemen to keep everyone but committee members from the ballroom where the meeting would take place. Although Burke served as chairman of the state committee, he was not a formal member, so the policemen were prepared to stop him from entering. However, Burke was as big and brawny as the guards, and he was accompanied by three of his followers on the committee. Bellowing that Democrats, not the police, would determine who could attend the meeting, Burke and his crew pushed past the officers. Once the doorway was breached, dozens of reporters, photographers, and curious spectators poured into the room. There were cries to expel the press. Amid the commotion, a scuffle broke out between another pair of Irishmen, a pro-Burke committeeman named Cleary and a former Boston election commissioner allied with Kennedy named Connors. When Connors put his nose within an inch of Cleary’s face and demanded to know “What right has Burke or the press in here?,” Cleary responded by shoving him out the door and a dozen feet down the hallway.
Inside the ballroom the two candidates for chairman exchanged insults. Burke, a hundred pounds heavier than his adversary, told Lynch, “Paddy, I ought to knock you right on your ass.” Rising to his full height of five feet, six inches, Lynch the leprechaun replied, “Here’s my card, Bill. You know where you can find me.”
Meanwhile Knocko McCormack looked as ominous as an aggravated bull. Larry O’Brien, one of Kennedy’s top aides, thought it would help to reinforce the two plainclothesmen by calling Boston Police Commissioner Thomas F. Sullivan to the scene. But Sullivan turned out to be a disciple of John McCormack’s, and he threatened to arrest O’Brien.
The room teetered toward riot, with shouts and taunts and threats, until Ida Lyons, the committee secretary, called the meeting to order. Kennedy’s forces objected to her as an officer on the grounds that she was a member of the committee that was being replaced. There were also arguments over the credentials of new members and whether the chairman’s election should be held by secret ballot. But finally, a semblance of order was restored. Assured that the proceedings would remain public, Burke retreated to his private room to await the vote.
In the end it wasn’t close. Pat Lynch took 47 votes to 31 for Burke. Reporters found Burke huddled in his room with several of his supporters who had brought him news of his defeat. He was defiant, declaring that he would run against Kennedy in 1958 for the Senate seat. “The junior senator may be able to buy a majority of the members of the state committee at the last hour,” he snarled, “but I will face him on his record two years from now. . . . The multi-millionaire senator will be asked by me to place his record before the Democratic voters.”
Kennedy ignored Burke’s blast. In a statement he called the outcome “the beginning of a new era for Massachusetts Democrats” and insisted that the action was not directed at John McCormack. Then he rushed back to New York, where his sister’s wedding reception at the stately Plaza Hotel was still lively.
The next day the Boston Globe described the event at the Hotel Bradford: “The will of United States Senator John F. Kennedy prevailed last night as his choice for chairman of the Democratic State Committee won election at a stormy meeting marked by scuffles, name-calling and booing.”
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A month later Kennedy met with McCormack in Washington to settle the aftermath of their confrontation over the state committee. The senator was able to bargain from strength. McCormack conceded that it would be “satisfactory” for Kennedy to be elected chairman of the Massachusetts delegation to the Democratic National Convention. Kennedy acceded to McCormack’s request that the delegation support him unanimously as a favorite son on the first ballot, and McCormack agreed to release the delegates after one ballot. When McCormack asked for “some position” for Burke, Kennedy told him, “It would be difficult for me to accept Burke because of what he had said.”
The victory put Kennedy in a commanding position as the Massachusetts delegation prepared to go to Chicago for the convention. Although he privately held out the hope that he would be chosen as Stevenson’s running mate, he continued to deny that this had been the motivation for his move on McCormack and Onions Burke. “I was not fighting for the Massachusetts delegation in order to have ‘chips’ for the vice presidential race,” he wrote in a memo to Ted Sorensen. “I was fighting for it because I had publicly endorsed Stevenson and I wanted to make good on my commitment.”
One of the first phone calls Kennedy made after the riotous affair had ended and before he dashed back to New York was to James Finnegan, Stevenson’s campaign manager. Still involved in their own tussle with Kefauver, the Stevenson people were pleased.
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In retrospect Kennedy’s closest advisors were split in their judgment about the wisdom of his fighting for the state party chairmanship. Sorensen believed that Kennedy had “plunged into the fray” against his own instincts. O’Brien felt it had been a mistake, that the battle had not been necessary. But to Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, who had egged on Kennedy to seize control of the state committee, it was a “turning point in his career.” Sixteen years later they would write of the Kennedy years, “Those of us who were closely associated with Kennedy regard his fight with Burke and McCormack as his coming of age as a party politician. . . . Kennedy arrived in Chicago as a new figure of stature in the party because he had beaten the Old Guard’s John McCormack, a crony of Harry Truman and Sam Rayburn in a power struggle in McCormack’s own state.” Kennedy’s “rise to prominence at the 1956 convention,” they wrote, “was entirely due to his hard fight against an onion farmer back in Massachusetts a few months earlier.”