IV

Kennedy on the Eve

MY FIRST KNOWLEDGE OF John F. Kennedy went back to undergraduate days at Harvard twenty-five years before. His older brother, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., was one of my classmates, a confident, gregarious young man with a rollicking personality that swept all before it. He seemed destined to be a man of power, though one did not feel in him the inward and reflective quality one later found in his brothers John and Robert. But I never knew him well. He was a brave man and died in the war.

His younger brother John arrived in Cambridge as a freshman when Joe and I were in our third year. In those days the freshman class put on a smoker each spring; and the Freshman Smoker of 1937 shamed the older classes with its prodigies of talent imported from Broadway and Hollywood. One learned that young Jack Kennedy was responsible for this triumph. Even upper-classmen were impressed. I saw him from time to time in the Yard but do not recall that I ever exchanged a word with him. Joe and I finished Harvard in 1938, Jack two years later.

My next memory of Jack Kennedy goes back to London in the summer of 1944 when, as buzz-bombs roared overhead, I read one day in The New Yorker John Hersey’s quiet account of his adventures in the Pacific. In 1946 I heard that he had returned to Boston to run for Congress. In due course he won the Democratic nomination for the House of Representatives in the 11th district, which included Cambridge, and was elected to the seat vacated by James M. Curley, who had once again become mayor of Boston. Kennedy and I renewed, or began, our acquaintance the following winter in Washington. I saw him from time to time in these years before the Presidency, with increasing frequency toward the end of the fifties, though I was not one of his intimates, if indeed he had real intimates outside his family.

In these years I began to understand better the complexity of mind and emotion which underlay that contained and ironic exterior, but only a little better. Kennedy had to an exceptional degree the gift of friendship and, in consequence, a great diversity of friends; part of his gift was to give each the sense that he alone had a clue to the mystery. The friends came in layers—the Choate and Harvard friends, the friends from the Navy, the social friends from Palm Beach and Newport, the Irish friends, the senatorial friends, the intellectual friends—and each layer considered itself closest to the center. But Kennedy kept the layers apart and included and baffled them all. The ultimate reserve was a source of his fascination and his power.

1. THE KENNEDY FAMILY

How had it all come about? Part of the answer, of course, lay in his upbringing. He was born into a family that was large, warm and spirited. There is no point in idealizing the Kennedys. Like any family, it had its share of tensions. Young Joe Kennedy, the oldest son, was bigger and stronger than the others; he was the leader of the children and occasionally, in discharging his role, something of a bully. No doubt Jack Kennedy was shoved around a good deal by his older brother. But, more than most families, the Kennedys were bound together by a love which gave all the children a fundamental confidence. With its subtle and disparate solidarity, the family nourished a capacity for competition, for individuality and for loyalty.

Moreover, it was an Irish family. Little is more dangerous than to try to explain a man in terms of supposed ethnic traits. In most respects, Kennedy departed considerably from the Irish-American stereotype. He was reticent, patrician, bookish, urbane—much closer, indeed, to a young Lord Salisbury than to a young Al Smith or, for that matter, to a young John F. Fitzgerald. Yet the Irishness remained a vital element in his constitution. It came out in so many ways—in the quizzical wit, the eruptions of boisterous humor, the relish for politics, the love of language, the romantic sense of history, the admiration for physical daring, the toughness, the joy in living, the view of life as comedy and as tragedy.

And it gave him a particular slant on American society. Though the Kennedy family was well established politically and financially—Jack’s grandfather had twice been mayor of Boston; his father was a Harvard graduate and a successful businessman—it was still marginal socially in Brahmin Boston; and its folk memories were those of a time, not too far distant, when to be Irish was to be poor and have gates slammed in one’s face. Joseph P. Kennedy, a man of driving ambition, was determined to reverse all that. His passion was to break down the barriers and win full acceptance for himself and his family. Business success helped; he soon discovered that money encouraged people to forgive an Irish name, though this was less true in Boston than elsewhere. Money also enabled him to offer his sons the protective coloration of schooling at places like Choate, Milton and Harvard; it enabled him to open doors for them all their lives. But what was more important than money was the training he gave his children—a regimen of discipline tempered and transformed by affection.

Regarding money as a means and not as an end, Joe Kennedy forbade its discussion at the dinner table. Conversation turned, not on business, but on public affairs; no child could doubt the order of priority. “I can hardly remember a mealtime,” Robert Kennedy said later, “when the conversation was not dominated by what Franklin D. Roosevelt was doing or what was happening around the world. . . . Since public affairs had dominated so much of our actions and discussions, public life seemed really an extension of family life.” The father confronted the children with large questions, encouraged them to have opinions of their own, demanded that their opinions make sense, wrote them endless letters when he was away (which was often), told them they had an obligation to take part in public life and instilled convictions of purpose and possibility. As John Kennedy put it one night at the White House: “My father wasn’t around as much as some fathers when I was young; but, whether he was there or not, he made his children feel that they were the most important things in the world to him. He was so terribly interested in everything we were doing. He held up standards for us, and he was very tough when we failed to meet those standards. The toughness was important. If it hadn’t been for that, Teddy might be just a playboy today. But my father cracked down on him at a crucial time in his life, and this brought out in Teddy the discipline and seriousness which will make him an important political figure.”

Young Jack kept up his side in the competitive world of the Kennedys. But for all his vitality he had both a frailness and a sensitivity which set him somewhat apart from the extroverted and gregarious family. He may even have been a little lonely at times. He passed a surprising amount of his childhood sick in bed—with diphtheria, scarlet fever, acute appendicitis and chronic stomach trouble. He was the only one in the family who liked to read; loneliness and sickness made him read all the more. He spent hours in his room at Riverdale or Hyannis Port absorbed in history and biography—King Arthur, Scottish Chiefs, The White Company, Cooper, and later Churchill’s Marlborough when he was in his teens. History was full of heroes for him, and he reveled in the stately cadences of historical prose. His memory of what he read was photographic. Situations, scenes and quotations stuck in his mind for the rest of his life.

The interior life was a source of identity and of power. Already he was moving beyond his brother Joe, moving beyond his father, and developing distinctive standards and goals. The Kennedys were supposed never to finish second; but Jack could present a favorite quotation from Alan Seeger: “Whether I am on the winning or losing side is not the point with me. It is being on the side where my sympathies lie that matters.” (He still, however, preferred to win.) Professor William G. Carleton of the University of Florida recalls an evening of discussion with the Kennedys at Palm Beach in April 1941: “It was clear to me that John had a far better historical and political mind than his father or his elder brother; indeed, that John’s capacity for seeing current events in historical perspective and for projecting historical trends into the future was unusual.”^* It used to be said that the older Kennedy ‘made’ his son Jack President and, if Joe, Jr., had only lived, would have ‘made’ him President first. I do not believe either of these things for a moment. I doubt whether young Joe, for all his charms and gifts, would have been President. And it was Jack Kennedy who, in the existential sense, first made himself and then made himself President. Out of some fierce, cool inner passion, he became a man in his own right who grew from but beyond the family in which he was born, which loved him so much and which he loved so much.

It is hard to judge how much his formal education mattered. He spent only one year at a Catholic school, Canterbury in Connecticut. He then went on to Choate, which he disliked heartily. During his Presidency his old school unveiled his portrait as Choate’s most distinguished alumnus. He observed of the ceremony, “This is the most ironic celebration of which I have ever heard.” He asked what use schools like Choate were and answered his own question in a message to his fellow alumni. “Those of us who have gone to Choate and comparable schools,” he began, “represent really a very tiny minority.” Private preparatory schools, he went on, would merit a place in American education only as they took in people of all classes and races; and those fortunate enough to go to such schools had to justify their special opportunities, preferably by entering the service of the nation. He named the Roosevelts, Harriman, Acheson, Douglas Dillon, Charles Bohlen and, among Choate alumni, Stevenson and Bowles, and suggested a trifle acidly that the careers of such men had done more than anything else to persuade the American democracy to accept the preparatory school “even when, or perhaps because, the men themselves do things which appear on occasion to disappoint a good many of their classmates.”

Choate provided no intellectual excitement, and he finished only slightly above the middle of his class. His father sent him that summer to the London School of Economics, hoping to expose him to Harold Laski. Instead Kennedy exposed himself to jaundice and had to delay his entry into Princeton in the fall. Then a recurrence of jaundice knocked out the rest of his freshman year. With his Princeton friends advancing into the sophomore class, he yielded to his father’s preference and shifted the next autumn to Harvard.

2. THE ENGLISH EXPERIENCE

For a time Kennedy continued in his prep-school mood. He organized the Freshman Smoker, ruptured a disk in his back playing football, made the swimming squad and the Crimson, kept apart from the greaseballs in the Harvard Student Union and concentrated desultorily in the field of government.

In the meantime, a summer in Europe between his first and second Harvard years exposed him to wider horizons. With Lemoyne Billings, who had been his roommate at Choate and was now at Princeton, he spent a carefree two months wandering around the continent. His diary of the summer records a growing interest in public affairs. “The general impression,’’ he noted after a few days in France, “seems to be that while they all like Roosevelt, his type of government would not succeed in a country like France which seems to lack the ability of seeing a problem as a whole. They don’t like Blum as he takes away their money and gives it to someone else. That to a Frenchman is tres mauvais.” He concluded the entry: “Looked around and finally got a fairly cheap room for the night (35 francs).”

A visit to St.-Jean-de-Luz on the Spanish border led him to reflect on the Spanish Civil War. He registered his own view as “rather governmental after reading Gunther [Inside Europe] even though St. Jean is rebel stronghold.” However, a day of rebel atrocity stories, as he noted the next evening, “turns me a bit from government,” and an afternoon at a bullfight “made me believe all the atrocity stories now as these southerners . . . are happiest at scenes of cruelty. They thought funniest sight was when horse ran out of the ring with his guts trailing.”

On to Lourdes—“very interesting but things seemed to become reversed as Billings became quite ill after leaving.” Carcassonne two days later: “an old medieval town in perfect condition—which is more than can be said for Billings.” Then Milan: “Finished Gunther and have come to the decision that Facism [sic] is the thing for Germany and Italy, Communism for Russia and Democracy for America and England.” In Rome he set down a list of questions:

 

If the belligerent foreign troops were withdrawn, how much chance would Franco have?

 

If Franco wins, what will be the extent of Mussolini’s control. Hitler’s? . . .

 

Isn’t the chance of war less as Britain gets stronger—or is a country like Italy liable to go to war when economic discontent is rife? . . .

 

Gunther says “Facism, momentarily powerful, may be the convulsive last agonies of the capitalist cycle, in which case Facism will have been merely the prelude of Communism.” Is this true?

 

These were still the thoughts of a sophomore; but later in the year his father became ambassador to Britain and Jack began spending his holidays whenever possible in London. This speeded his intellectual awakening. He was fascinated by English political society, with its casual combination of wit, knowledge and unconcern. The intelligent young Englishmen of his own age, like David Ormsby Gore, seemed more confident and sophisticated than his Harvard friends. He enjoyed the leisured weekends in the great country houses. It was history come alive for him, and it had a careless elegance he had not previously encountered.

This love of England found its expression later in the delight with which he read books like David Cecil’s The Young Melbourne. It was especially a love for the Whig England of the early nineteenth century, rational and urbane. But it is too simple to suggest that Kennedy was no more than an American Melbourne. The manner captivated him a good deal more than the matter. Kennedy was enchanted by the Whig zest, versatility and nonchalance; he liked the idea of a society where politics invigorated but did not monopolize life. But Whiggism was a posture, not a purpose. It was too passive for a Kennedy. Where Melbourne was willing to yield to the popular voice, Kennedy hoped to guide and anticipate it. Melbourne was an accommodator; Kennedy wanted to be a leader. He infused the Whig style with Rooseveltian activism. He was socially a Whig but politically something else—probably, if a British analogue is required, a Tory Democrat. He liked the notion of aristocrats and commoners united against the selfishness of laissez faire. His mood in later years was often that of Coningsby: “I would make these slum-landlords skip.” He had read Winston Churchill’s life of his father and found as much historical sustenance, I believe, in Lord Randolph Churchill as in Lord Melbourne. (He did not meet Winston Churchill for another twenty years. He and Jacqueline had a house at Cannes in the late fifties with William Douglas-Home, the playwright, and his wife. One evening they dined with Churchill on the Onassis yacht. It was not altogether a success; Churchill, now an old man, had a little difficulty in distinguishing which of the group that came aboard the yacht was Jack Kennedy, and, when this was finally sorted out, the conversation was hard going. He had met his hero too late. But Churchill remained his greatest admiration.)

All this was still an inchoate stirring in between afternoons at Lady Cunard’s, balls in Belgravia and weekends in the country. But London did give him a sense of the tone in which politics might be approached. It also gave him a rather appalling look at the way democracy responded to crisis. Kennedy was in and out of England in the months when Churchill was calling on his fellow countrymen with such slight effect to rouse themselves against the menace of Nazism. Harvard allowed him to spend the second term of the academic year of 1938–39 abroad, and he traveled through Eastern Europe to Russia, the Middle East and the Balkans, stopping in Berlin and Paris on his way back to Grosvenor Square. When he returned to Harvard in the fall of 1939, the question of British somnambulism before Hitler perplexed him more than ever. Professor Arthur Holcombe of the government department had already aroused an interest in the study of politics; and now, under the guidance of Professors Payson Wild and Bruce Hopper, he set to work on an honors essay analyzing British rearmament policy. After his graduation in 1940, the thesis was published.

Remembering that Churchill had called his collection of speeches While England Slept, Kennedy brashly called his own book Why England Slept. In retrospect, Why England Slept presents several points of interest. One is its tone—so aloof and clinical, so different from the Churchillian history he loved, so skeptical of the notion that the individual could affect events (“personalities,” he wrote with regret about the American attitude toward history, “have always been more interesting to us than facts”). This detachment was all the more remarkable midst the flaring emotions of 1940. Though ostensibly writing to prepare America for its own crisis (“in studying the reasons why England slept, let us try to profit by them and save ourselves her anguish”), he remained agnostic about the choices confronting the American President. Kennedy did make the quiet suggestion that “a defeat of the Allies may simply be one more step towards the ultimate achievement—Germany over the world”; but, beyond this, and doubtless out of deference to his father’s and older brother’s isolationism, he stood aside in the book from the great debate between the isolationists and the interventionists. (At Harvard, however, he wrote to the Crimson criticizing the isolationist views of his fellow editors.)

His purpose was to discover how much British unpreparedness could be attributed to the personal defects of British politicians and how much to “the more general weakness of democracy and capitalism”; and he found his answer not with the leaders, but with the system. He declined to pursue guilty men: “Leaders are responsible for their failures only in the governing sector and cannot be held responsible for the nation as a whole. . . . I believe it is one of democracy’s failings that it seeks to make scapegoats for its own weaknesses.” As long as Britain was a democracy, the people could have turned the leaders out if they disagreed with them. Nor did he put much stock in the notion that a leader could change the mind of the nation; after all, he remarked, Roosevelt had been trying to awaken America since 1937 but Congress was still cutting naval appropriations. The basic causes of the British paralysis in his view were impersonal and institutional. “In regard to capitalism, we observe first that it was obedience to its principles that contributed so largely to England’s failure.” Democracy, moreover, was “essentially peace-loving” and therefore hostile to rearmament. Both capitalism and democracy were geared for a world at peace; totalitarianism was geared for a world at war. A strong sense of the competition between democracy and totalitarianism pervaded the book—a competition in which, Kennedy believed, totalitarianism had significant short-run advantages, even though democracy was superior “for the long run.”

3. THE WAR

As war came closer to America, Kennedy, having been rejected by the Army because of his back, succeeded in 1941 in persuading the Navy to let him in. After Pearl Harbor, he pulled every possible string to get sea duty, finally enrolling his father in the cause. In due course there followed the Pacific, PT-109, the Solomon Islands campaign, Talagi and Rendova, and the incredible few days in August 1943 when the Japanese destroyer Amagiri sliced his boat in half and plunged Kennedy and his crew into the waters of Ferguson Passage, now suddenly aflame with burning gasoline. Kennedy’s calm bravery, his extraordinary feat in towing one of his crew to refuge by gripping the end of the life jacket belt in his teeth, his leadership, resourcefulness and cheer until rescue came—this was one of the authentic passages of heroism in the war, so well described in later accounts by John Hersey and Robert Donovan and so seldom mentioned by Kennedy himself. (In a Person to Person program with Edward R. Murrow in the late fifties, Kennedy called it “an interesting experience.” Murrow responded: “Interesting. I should think that would be one of the great understatements.” When during the Presidency Donovan proposed doing a book on PT-109, Kennedy tried his best to discourage him, saying that there was no story and that it would be a waste of his time. Donovan went ahead nevertheless and eventually decided that he would have to go out to the Solomons and reswim Kennedy’s course. Kennedy, who thought this utter madness, could not get over the idea of anyone’s going to such trouble and expense.)

The incident in the Solomons embodied two of Kennedy’s deeper preoccupations—with courage and with death. He hated discussing these matters in the abstract, but they were nonetheless enduring themes of his life. Robert Kennedy tells us that courage was the virtue his brother most admired. In the first instance, this meant physical courage—the courage of men under enemy fire, of men silently suffering pain, the courage of the sailor and the mountain climber and of men who stared down mobs or soared into outer space. And, when he entered politics, it came to mean moral courage—the courage to which he later dedicated his Profiles, the courage of “a man who does what he must—in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures,” the courage which, he said, “is the basis of all human morality.”

Courage—and death. The two are related, because courage, if it is more than reckless bravado, involves the exquisite understanding that death may be its price. “The education of the average American child of the upper middle class,” Norbert Wiener has written, “is such as to guard him solicitously against the awareness of death and doom.” But this is less true of children brought up in an orthodox faith. Kennedy’s religious upbringing, his illness, his reading about the death of kings—all must have joined to give him an early sense of human mortality. Then death became his intimate during the long hours in the black, streaming waters of Ferguson Passage. Exactly a year later, he was notified that his brother Joe had been killed on an air mission against Nazi submarine bases in western Europe. In another month his English brother-in-law, the Marquis of Hartington, the husband of his sister Kathleen, was killed in France.

In a looseleaf notebook of 1945, filled with fragments about Joe and Billy Hartington—Joe’s posthumous citation, a Washington Post editorial on his death, Kathleen’s letter about her husband’s death and letters from Billy Hartington’s fellow officers in the Coldstream Guards—he inserted two quotations describing the death of Raymond Asquith in France in 1915—one from Churchill’s Great Contemporaries:

 

The War which found the measure of so many men never got to the bottom of him, and, when the Grenadiers strode into the crash and thunder of the Somme, he went to his fate, cool, poised, resolute, matter-of-fact, debonair.

 

and another from a favorite book, John Buchan’s Pilgrim’s Way:

 

He loved his youth, and his youth has become eternal. Debonair and brilliant and brave, he is now part of that immortal England which knows not age or weariness or defeat.

 

His wife later said, “The poignancy of men dying young haunted him.”

4. IN SEARCH OF SELF

Along with a deep sorrow over the battalions of wasted lives, the war left him with an intense concern about the prevention of such waste in the future. He went to San Francisco in June 1945 as a special writer for the Hearst press to watch the founding of the United Nations. For a young veteran, with stabbing memories of violence and death, it was in a way a disenchanting experience. But for a student of politics it was an indispensable education.

“It would be very easy to write a letter to you that was angry,” he observed afterward to a PT-boat friend who had sought his opinion of the conference. “When I think of how much this war has cost us, of the deaths of Cy and Peter and Orv and Gil and Demi and Joe and Billy and all of those thousands and millions who have died with them—when I think of all those gallant acts that I have seen or anyone has seen who has been to the war—it would be a very easy thing to feel disappointed and somewhat betrayed.” The conference, he continued, lacked moral force; not idealism but self-interest brought the nations together. “You have seen battlefields where sacrifice was the order of the day and to compare that sacrifice to the timidity and selfishness of the nations gathered at San Francisco must inevitably be disillusioning.”

Yet could the conference have achieved more? The hard fact was that nations were not prepared to yield their sovereignty to an international organization. He listened in the corridors to the world government arguments of another young veteran, Cord Meyer, about to start the World Federalists. “Admittedly world organization with common obedience to law would be solution,” Kennedy scribbled in a notebook. “Not that easy. If there is not the feeling that war is the ultimate evil, a feeling strong enough to drive them together, then you can’t work out this internationalist plan.” “Things cannot be forced from the top,” he told his PT-boat friend.

 

The international relinquishing of sovereignty would have to spring from the people—it would have to be so strong that the elected delegates would be turned out of office if they failed to do it. . . . We must face the truth that the people have not been horrified by war to a sufficient extent to force them to go to any extent rather than have another war. . . . War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

 

These were the things to be considered “when you consider that Conference in San Francisco. You must measure its accomplishments against its possibilities. What [the] Conference accomplished is that it made war more difficult.” He summed up his feelings about the UN in his notebook:

 

Danger of too great a build-up.

Mustn’t expect too much.

A truly just solution will leave every nation somewhat disappointed.

There is no cure all.

 

This was his mood immediately after the war: don’t expect too much: no cure-alls. The next year he wrote succinctly in the six-year report of the Harvard Class of 1940, “I joined the Navy in 1941, served in P.T. Boats in the Pacific and was retired in April, 1945, because of injuries.” (The Class Secretary added a footnote: “Kennedy received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal.”) Concluding a brief paragraph, Kennedy replied to a question asked all members of the class, “I am pessimistic about the future of the country.”

He had expected to become a writer; but the San Francisco experience may have helped persuade him that it was better to sit at the conference table than to wait outside with the press. His brother’s death also changed things. The family assumption had been that Joe, who had made his political debut as a delegate at the 1940 Democratic convention (where he cast his vote, as pledged, against Franklin Roosevelt), would be the Kennedy to enter politics. Though Ambassador Kennedy did not, as myth later had it, automatically promote his second son into the slot now so sadly vacant, Jack, like many young veterans, felt the need of doing something to help the world for which so many friends had died. Politics perhaps attracted him less as a means of saving this world than of keeping it from getting worse. In 1946 he returned to Boston to test the political air.

The return to Boston must have involved a form of what anthropologists call ‘culture shock.’ While born a Boston Irishman, he had never been a member of the Boston Irish community; and his life had carried him far away from his roots. Now, in the 11th Congressional District, he was back among his own people, yet not quite of them. He liked their toughness and their loyalty, but regretted their anti-intellectualism. Campaigning through the three-deckers of Charlestown and the North End, he fraternized for the first time with the men and women from whom the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds had sprung. In the dimly lit hall of one Charlestown tenement he encountered David Powers, a man of exceptional sweetness and fidelity, who beguiled him with his flow of stories, his knowledge of Irish Boston, and his capacity for affable relaxation. Kennedy, at first a little stiff and shy, soon began to relax himself, though, as the old Boston politician and raconteur Clem Norton (the model for Hennessy in Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah) put it, he never quite acquired ‘a street personality.’

In the fall of 1947 I returned to Massachusetts myself to teach history at Harvard. A note from Kennedy in January 1948 started “Dear Arthur” (and continued: “I have your letter of January 2nd, relative to your interest in conditions at the Harvard Square Post Office”); but my first distinct recollection is of a political meeting in Harvard Yard during the presidential election that October, where we sat together and chatted while he waited his turn to go to the platform. Thomas H. Eliot, who had represented Cambridge with distinction in the House until he was redistricted and beaten by Curley in the Democratic primary, was speaking. The position of the Yankee Democrat in Massachusetts was not easy; and Eliot appeared to be overcompensating for his suspicious origins by the warmth of his advocacy of Paul A. Dever, the Irish Catholic candidate for governor. Kennedy leaned over and said, “How can a man like Tom Eliot say such things about a man like Paul Dever?” Later my opinion of Dever was higher, and so too, I think, was Kennedy’s. Eliot, who is now Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, may not have been so wrong as we thought. But at the time I was surprised and impressed by Kennedy’s unorthodox reaction.

I should not have been so surprised. He had already shown his independence by his refusal to join his Massachusetts Democratic colleagues in the House in petitioning President Truman to pardon Curley, who, though still mayor of Boston, was by 1948 in Danbury prison for using the mails to defraud. (He was, it used to be said, the only mayor of Boston to serve two terms at once.) Occasional meetings with Kennedy in the next years strengthened the impression of a skeptical mind, a laconic tongue, enormous personal charm, an agreeable disdain for the rituals of Massachusetts politics and a detachment from the pieties of American liberalism. He still looked exceedingly young (actually he was six months older than I), but he was plainly purposeful and his own master.

In 1949, for some reason which now escapes me, perhaps because it might be a first step toward the governorship, I urged him to run for mayor of Boston. He replied, “I am interested in my work here in the House, and feel that there is much good that I can do from here.” He was right, of course, to avoid the mayoralty trap; but it was soon evident that he was considering possibilities beyond the House. By 1950 he was making regular weekend visits to Massachusetts, speaking in places remote from his own district. He was plainly preparing to run for senator or governor in 1952. Which it would be depended on whether Paul Dever, now governor, chose to seek re-election or to challenge the incumbent Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Kennedy’s preference for the Senate was clear. As he said one day, gesturing at the State House, “I hate to think of myself up in that corner office deciding on sewer contracts.”

Early in 1952 Senator Paul H. Douglas of Illinois delivered the Godkin Lectures at Harvard. The Douglases came for luncheon one winter Sunday along with Bernard De Voto, Joseph Alsop, the McGeorge Bundys and Kennedy. Douglas, who seemed to regard the young Congressman with paternal fondness, warned him sternly against trying for the Senate, especially if the Republicans should nominate Eisenhower. Why not accumulate seniority in the House? or would not the governorship be less risky? Kennedy listened quietly and said little. Doubtless he received much advice of this sort. But, almost as if he felt he had little time to lose, he had long since resolved to push ahead. When Dever announced in April that he planned to run again for the governorship, Kennedy promptly declared his candidacy for the Senate.

I was away from the state most of the fall, working on Adlai Stevenson’s staff in Springfield, Illinois. When the Stevenson party was campaigning through Massachusetts in October, we were much impressed by the cool efficiency of the Kennedy operation and by Kennedy himself, slim, careless and purposeful against the sodden background of the old-time Boston politicians. He beat Lodge by 70,000 votes. In the gloom of Stevenson’s defeat, his success was a consolation. Victory now sent him back to Washington as a junior member of the Democratic minority in the Senate.

War had been a hardening experience, and politics hardened him more. Massachusetts Democrats did not exist as a party in the usual sense of the word. They formed rather a collection of rival tongs, controlled by local chieftains and presided over by an impotent state committee. Kennedy carved out his own domain and pursued his own goals. He showed himself determined, unrelenting and profane, able to beat the pols on their own ground and in their own language.

With his instinct for compartmentalization, he did not often display this part of his life to friends in other layers. His closest associate in these enterprises was his brother Robert, who managed his campaign for the Senate in 1952. Though Robert Kennedy was also a Harvard man, the Cambridge liberals regarded him with marked distrust because of his association with the McCarthy Committee; nor were his expressed views on public policy reassuring. Early in 1954 he sent a letter to the New York Times which, among other things, seemed to argue the Republican thesis about the iniquity of the Yalta conference. I was moved to write a forceful but perhaps condescending answer denouncing the letter as “an astonishing mixture of distortion and error.” Robert Kennedy came back with a lively rejoinder. The last sentence suggests the tone: “I do not wish to appear critical of Mr. Schlesinger’s scholarship for his polemics cover such a wide variety of subjects that it is understandable that he is not always able to read all of the documents he so vigorously discusses.” He sent me a copy along with a note to the effect that he hoped his response would “clarify the record sufficiently for you to make the necessary public apology.” I replied in like spirit; but the Times, bored with the argument, did not bother to print the rebuttals and surrebuttals. This exchange only amused Jack Kennedy, who later said, “My sisters are very mad at you because of the letter you wrote about Bobby.”

In the 1956 campaign, Robert Kennedy joined the Stevenson party and accompanied the candidate in his trips around the country. He said very little, and no one quite knew what he was doing. (Actually he was learning how a national campaign should—or should not—be run.) His presence was, to my mind, a bit ominous; and I imagine he regarded mine with equal enthusiasm. One day in October Stevenson addressed a meeting in West Virginia. He was due that night in New York; but fog and rain set in, and only one plane was available to fly the candidate north. Arrangements were made to send the rest of the party on to Pittsburgh by bus. When the buses finally appeared, we all tumbled in and groped for seats in the darkness. In a minute I turned to look at my seatmate and, to our joint annoyance, found Robert Kennedy. For the next several hours, we rode through the storm to Pittsburgh. Having no alternative, we fell into reluctant conversation. To my surprise he was pleasant, reasonable and amusing. Thereafter our relations were amiable and uncomplicated.

Next to his brother, Kennedy’s chief lieutenant in Massachusetts was a Springfield public relations man who had once worked for Foster Furcolo, Lawrence O’Brien. O’Brien played a large role in organizing the 1952 campaign for the Senate and subsequently joined the senatorial staff. In 1956 the Kennedys engaged in a bitter fight with John McCormack for control of the Democratic State Committee. For that fracas Bobby added to the group a Harvard classmate and former football captain, Kenneth O’Donnell; in 1960 O’Donnell became John Kennedy’s appointments secretary and a key figure in the campaign. O’Brien and O’Donnell were both astute, unruffled, soft-spoken and terse. Both had great humor: Larry’s was friendly and genial, while Ken, who looked like one of the young IRA men in trenchcoats in John Ford’s film of The Informer, had a grim, cryptic wit which could be devastating. Both were liberals in the New Deal tradition—more so at this time than the Kennedys. O’Brien had been an early Massachusetts member of Americans for Democratic Action. Once when Robert Kennedy brought O’Donnell home to dinner in their college days, O’Donnell defended Franklin Roosevelt with such vigor that Ambassador Kennedy, deeply angered, left the table. Nevertheless, both were realistic organization politicians slightly contemptuous of reformers and reform groups. They worked in perfect unison with the Kennedys, shared that common understanding which abbreviates communication to swift phrases and imperceptible changes in facial expression, and filled in a vital part of Kennedy’s life. Dave Powers, less involved in politics, kept the whole group happy.

But the Irish Mafia did not possess Kennedy any more than anyone else did. They were his instruments in politics, as Ted Sorensen was his instrument on issues. He admired them all because he admired virtuosity in performance—“the ability,” as he once put it, “to do things well, and to do them with precision and with modesty.” The techniques by which people did things fascinated him, whether in politics or statecraft, writing or painting, sailing or touch football. He had an instinctive appreciation of excellence. He liked to cite Aristotle’s definition of happiness: “The good of man is in the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or, if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect of them.”

But, if there were several human excellences, faith in virtuosity per se could not be enough. Which would take precedence over the others? Profiles in Courage celebrated “grace under pressure” without regard to purpose; obviously Webster, Benton and Houston could not all have been right about the Compromise of 1850. The Kennedy of these years was still undefined. He was a Harvard man, a naval hero, an Irishman, a politician, a bon vivant, a man of unusual intelligence, charm, wit and ambition, “debonair and brilliant and brave,” but his deeper meaning was still in process of crystallization.

5. MARRIAGE

Then he met Jacqueline Bouvier and leaned across the asparagus at Charles Bartlett’s house in Washington to ask her for a date. She was a girl of great beauty, at once wistful and luminous, and also of acute intelligence and exacting expectation. In an essay which won Vogue’s Prix de Paris in 1951, she wrote that the three men she would most like to have known were Baudelaire, Wilde and Diaghilev. Her natural habitat was the international world of society and art, though Bernard Berenson admonished her in 1952, “American girls should marry American boys. They wear better.” She was a Catholic, but from a securely established French-American family; childhood on Park Avenue and in East Hampton had exposed her to none of the social discrimination visited on the Boston Irish. Her father and mother were divorced, and she had grown up in a rather lonely way. Her loneliness and teachers she had encountered at Miss Porter’s and Vassar had given her the capacity to care deeply about life, as the rest of her upbringing had given her the skill to disguise her caring. Her response to life was aesthetic rather than intellectual or moralistic. The intensity of this response attracted Kennedy and perhaps alarmed him; their courtship, Jacqueline said later, was “spasmodic.” But they shared the gospel of excellence, and this, as well as more youthful emotions, bound them together.

Kennedy was a new experience for Jacqueline Bouvier. He pursued her with penetrating questions of a sort she had not heard before and, in self-defense, she began to ask questions back. One day she inquired how he would define himself. He said, “An idealist without illusions.” And the week before they were married in September 1953 she asked him what he considered his best and worst qualities. He thought his best quality was curiosity, and his worst quality irritability. By irritability he meant impatience with the boring, the commonplace and the mediocre. And by curiosity he meant a good deal more than the purely intellectual trait; he meant that hunger for experience which caused him to demand that life be concentrated, vivid and full. “He lived at such a pace,” Jacqueline Kennedy said later, “because he wished to know it all.” It was all somehow connected with the precariousness of his health: this seemed to give his life its peculiar intensity, its determination to savor everything, its urgent sense that there was no time to waste.

The shadow had never left him. The shock of the collision with the Japanese destroyer in the Solomon Islands had torn his back, already weakened by the football injury at Harvard half a dozen years before. In his exhaustion after the rescue he came down with malaria. When he returned to the United States, he weighed 127 pounds and was in agony from sciatica. He had a lumbar disc operation at the Chelsea Naval Hospital, relieving the pressure on the nerve fibers. But his spine did not cease to torment him. “At least one half of the days that he spent on this earth,” his brother has written, “were days of intense physical pain.”

Then he was told that he had Addison’s disease—a degeneration of the adrenal glands—and between 1946 and 1949 he went on a regimen of cortisone. One day when Joseph Alsop asked about the occasional greenness of his complexion, Kennedy replied matter-of-factly, ‘‘The doctors say I’ve got a sort of slow-motion leukemia, but they tell me I’ll probably last until I’m forty-five. So I seldom think about it except when I have the shots.” It developed later that he did not have Addison’s disease in the classic sense—that is, as caused by tuberculosis of the adrenal glands—that he had not had tuberculosis in any form and that, with modern methods of treatment, his adrenal insufficiency, evidently induced by the physical strain of the long night of swimming and the subsequent malaria, presented no serious problem. He stopped the cortisone shots, though he continued to take corticosteroid tablets from time to time to assure the best possible protection against excessive physical stress or exertion. During these years, except when his back stopped him, he lived, between politics and athletics, a life of marked and exuberant physical activity.

Still the shadow did not leave him. In 1948 his beloved sister Kathleen was killed in a plane crash. In 1951, traveling in the Far East, he came down with a fever in Japan and was rushed to the military hospital in Okinawa. His temperature rose to more than 106 degrees, and they did not think he would live. He recovered, but then his back troubled him again. Jacqueline remembers him in their courtship as on crutches more often than not. By 1954 the pain became so incessant that he decided to try another operation—this time a lumbar fusion with a steel plate inserted in his spine. The surgeons were not sure it would help and warned it would be risky, but Kennedy, drained by the unceasing torment, said, “I don’t care, I can’t go on like this.” If there were a reasonable chance, he was going to take it. The winter after the surgery was torture. The steel plate led to a staphylococcus infection. His condition grew worse. Last rites were pronounced, and death brushed him again. Finally a second operation removed the plate. He continued weak and in pain, lying miserably in bed, turned by nurses at regular intervals from one side to the other. After a time, he started to walk, but, just as he was beginning, one of his crutches broke, he fell and was back in bed again.

The operations did not help. They left his back weaker than ever, and Kennedy later concluded without recrimination that they had been unnecessary. In the spring of 1955 he heard about Janet Travell, a New York physician who treated certain painful muscular conditions with Novocaine. He came to her deeply skeptical about doctors but more ready than ever to try anything. His infection had not healed; he now had anemia; and the pain was constant. Dr. Travell decided that what was causing the pain was not the spine itself or the discs but the old weakness in the back muscles leading to chronic spasm. Now her Novocaine relaxed the cramps in his spinal muscles and brought quick relief. But, when daily mechanical strain was a factor in spasm, Novocaine might have only a temporary effect. Then Dr. Travell discovered that his left leg was three-quarters of an inch shorter than his right—an obvious mechanical aggravation of the weakness along his spine, but, amazingly, unnoticed by doctors up to this point. Every step he had taken for years had caused a seesaw movement in his back and increased the strain on his spinal muscles. He procured shoes with a lift on the left foot and a lowered heel on the right. He also wore a small ‘brace’ or belt, and, finding relief in a rocking chair in Dr. Travell’s office, acquired one for himself. Various nutritional supplements ended his anemia. Dr. Travell’s treatment and gentle counsel changed his life. In a surprisingly short time, he regained his old vitality and strength.

Kennedy endured all this with total stoicism. Dr. Travell found him a model patient—never resentful of his condition, always ready to follow any course which seemed reasonable to him. He once quoted Somerset Maugham—“suffering does not ennoble, it embitters”—but, if he had been embittered, he hid it absolutely. He never liked anyone to ask how he was feeling. When he was in pain, others could tell only as his manner grew a little brusque and his face white and drawn. When the pain became intolerable, he would try to get his mind off it by having friends for dinner or going to a movie—anything not to let himself just sit there suffering. Soon he began to distract himself with a larger project. He had been interested for some time in Edmund G. Ross, the Senator whose vote saved Andrew Johnson at the risk of his own career, and he now started an article on political courage which turned in the next few months into a book.

Some have compared Kennedy’s illness of 1954–55 with Franklin Roosevelt’s polio and suggested that these crises made them President. This is doubtful. After all, Roosevelt had helped run the Navy during a considerable war and had been a candidate for Vice-President before he came down with polio; and John Kennedy had been elected to House and Senate before he nearly died in 1955. In each case, the will and the ability were always there, and the evolution had been sure and steady. Yet Kennedy’s ordeal no doubt accelerated his private crisis of identity. Like Roosevelt, he emerged better focused, more purposeful, more formidable. He conveyed a growing impression of weight and power.

It also increased a certain sense of fatalism about himself. Early in 1959 someone wrote an article—“Will the Spell Be Broken?”—pointing out that since 1840 no President elected in a year ending in zero had left the White House alive and sent a copy to everyone mentioned for the nomination the next year. Kennedy replied that he had never reflected on this bit of Americana; but if everyone took the phenomenon to heart 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would probably have a “for rent” sign from 1960 to 1964. As for the effect this numerological revelation might have on his own plans, Kennedy wrote, “I feel that the future will have to necessarily answer this for itself—both as to my aspirations and my fate should I have the privilege of occupying the White House.” On Cape Cod, in October 1953, when he returned from his wedding trip, he had read his young wife what he said was his favorite poem. She learned it for him by heart, and he used to love to have her say it. It was Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.”

 

It may be he shall take my hand

And lead me into his dark land

And close my eyes and quench my breath . . .

 

But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town,

When Spring trips north again this year,

And I to my pledged word am true,

I shall not fail that rendezvous.

6. POLITICS AND PRIVACY

“No congressional leader of the very first rank save James Madison has been elected Pres.,” Kennedy wrote in a notebook he kept during his sickness, “—and apart from Polk, Garfield, McKinley & Truman no parliamentarians of the 2nd rank.”

Being a Senator was another obstacle, like being a Catholic, but I suppose that for a man who had survived the Ferguson Passage form sheets were made to be ignored. In any case, he was not investing energy in the laborious process of infiltrating the inner ring of the Senate leadership. He preserved affable relations with the club, but he was not of them. He discharged his party duties with efficiency, indulged his own interests in matters like Indochina, Algeria and the electoral college, and wondered how to pursue larger goals. He had discussed the Vice-Presidency with his father as early as 1953; and after 1956 the Presidency itself no longer seemed so far away. When Joseph Alsop suggested to him in the summer of 1958 that the vice-presidential nomination was now his for the asking, Kennedy quickly replied, “Let’s not talk so much about vice. I’m against vice, in all forms.”

On issues he showed himself a practical and moderate liberal, who made quiet progress on questions of labor and social welfare without trying to force the pace faster than he thought the times permitted. During the first Eisenhower term there was much discussion within the Stevenson group about national policy. I circulated a memorandum suggesting that our inherited liberalism was dominated by the special experience of the depression, that prosperity raised problems of its own and that, where the New Deal had been necessarily concerned with the stark issues of subsistence and employment, the new period called for not a ‘quantitative’ but a ‘qualitative’ liberalism, dedicated to enriching the lives people lived. The problems of qualitative liberalism, the memorandum argued, “have to do with education, medical care, civil rights, housing, civil liberties, city planning . . . with the issues which make the difference between opportunity and defeat, between frustration and fulfillment, in the everyday life of the average person.” Our country, the memorandum said, “is richer than ever before, and is getting even richer every moment—but is devoting a decreasing share of its wealth to the common welfare.”

When I sent the memorandum to Kennedy, he replied a little pessimistically that “any attempts to put forward a very advanced program of social legislation would meet with the opposition of the [Democratic] leadership.” This was partly because “many members of the Democratic party in the House and Senate are in agreement on the general lines of Eisenhower’s middle-of-the-road program” and partly because of “the desire of the leadership to maintain a unified party on the assumption that the Democratic Party is the stronger political party of the two and that if Eisenhower does not run then victory will be almost assured for us.”

He then moved on to the question of the Lodge-Gossett amendment, which proposed that in a presidential election each state’s electoral votes be divided in the proportion of the popular vote. While this proposal had a democratic ring, its effect, Kennedy thought, would be to reduce the influence of the large, urbanized states and “increase the influence of the one party states in both Democratic and Republican ranks.” Kennedy was far more perceptive than most historians and political scientists in seeing the defects of this amendment; his successful fight against it the next year marked his emergence as a significant figure in the Senate. He concluded his letter by mentioning “an article I am now working on in my spare time. It is on political courage. . . .”

These were his years of concentration on politics, and he soon showed the toughness, adroitness and intuition of a master. Yet while he considered politics—in another phrase he cherished from Pilgrim’s Way—“the greatest and most honorable adventure,” took pride in his political skills, delighted in political maneuver and combat and never forgot political effects for a single second, he stood apart, in some fundamental sense, from the political game. When David Ormsby Gore visited him in the hospital, Kennedy remarked that he was not sure he was cut out to be a politician; he saw the strength of opposing arguments too well; it would be easier if he had divine certitude that he was right. In his preliminary notes for Profiles in Courage, he wrote of Robert A. Taft, “He was partisan in the sense that Harry Truman was—they both had the happy gift of seeing things in bright shades. It is the politicians who see things in similar shades that have a depressing and worrisome time of it.”

The total politician instinctively assumed a continuum between means and ends. But it was the tension between means and ends which fascinated and bothered Kennedy. His sickness provided an unaccustomed chance to reflect on such questions; and Profiles in Courage represented his most sustained attempt to penetrate the moral dilemmas of the political life. “Politics is a jungle,” he wrote in his notes, “—torn between doing right thing & staying in office—between the local interest & the national interest—between the private good of the politician & the general good.” In addition, “we have always insisted academically on an unusually high—even unattainable—standard in our political life. We consider it graft to make sure a park or road, etc., be placed near property of friends—but what do we think of admitting friends to the favored list for securities about to be offered to the less favored at a higher price? . . . Private enterprise system . . . makes OK private action which would be considered dishonest if public action.”

How could people survive in the jungle? He thought the answer had something to do with that combination of toughness of fiber and courage which constituted character. In the cases of Taft and Walter George, for example, “it is not so much that they voted in a certain way that caused their influence because others voted the same way—or because of length of service—or because of areas of origin—though all had something to do with it. But mostly it was character—& the impression they gave—which all great and successful Pari, leaders have given—that they had something in their minds besides the next election. They were not cynical.” He concluded: “Everyone admires courage & the greenest garlands are for those who possess it.”

Gradually there evolved a sense of his own identity as a political man, compounded of his growing mastery of the political arts and, even more, of his growing understanding that, for better or worse, his public self had to be faithful to his private self. This second point may sound like something less than a blinding revelation. But it takes many politicians a long time to acquire it. Some never do, always hoping to persuade the voters that they are different from what they are. “No man, for any considerable period,” Hawthorne once wrote, “can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” Kennedy was prepared to settle for his own face—and no doubt was encouraged to do so by his own cool evaluation of the alternatives. One day his father asked him why he wanted to take on the appalling burden of the Presidency. “These things have always been done by men,” Kennedy said, “and they can be done by men now.” As he looked around him, the others who yearned to assume the burden did not seem to him conspicuously better qualified than himself.

The process of internal definition went on in other ways, and Jacqueline Kennedy made her own contribution to it. She must at first have been overwhelmed by the life into which marriage plunged her. Politics had been for her corny old men shouting on the Fourth of July, at least until the advent of Stevenson; his was the first political voice to whom she listened. And, once in this new world, she found it hard to get used to the ground rules. Her husband sometimes came home irritated by the action of a fellow politician. Jacqueline, concluding that this man was an enemy, would glare across the room when she met him. Then Jack would speak agreeably about him, and she would exclaim, “Are you saying nice things about X? I’ve been hating him for three weeks.” Her husband would reply, “No, no, that was three weeks ago. Now he has done Y.” He would tell her that in politics you rarely had friends or foes, only colleagues, and that you should never get in so deep a quarrel as to lose all chance of conciliation; you might need to work with the other fellow later.

The teeming world of the Kennedys was another problem. Jacqueline had to fight to preserve her own identity in this family of active parents-in-law, athletic, teasing brothers-in-law, energetic, competent sisters-in-law. There often seemed no point in trying to compete in politics, any more than in touch football; and she sometimes carried her self-defense to inordinate extremes, as when she would pretend a total ignorance about politics or impose a social ban on politicians. Like all marriages, this one may have had its early strains. Their life together was almost nomadic, shuttling back and forth from Washington to Boston, from Newport to Palm Beach, living often with parents-in-law. They did not really have a house of their own until they had been married four years and their first child was born. Jacqueline often feared that she was a political liability and that everyone considered her a snob from Newport who had bouffant hair and French clothes and hated politics. Some of Kennedy’s supporters did feel this way in 1960, but he never mentioned it to her and never asked her to change. He was never worried; he loved her as she was. More and more she embodied something of increasing value for him—a surcease from daily business, a standard of excellence, a symbol of privacy, a style of life.

This was partly because she proved able to extend his knowledge and sensibility. Before they were married, he had her translate and summarize ten or a dozen French books about Indochina; she was then living in the Auchincloss house in Virginia and labored late into hot summer nights to finish the assignment. When she read aloud passages from de Gaulle’s Memoires, especially the introductory evocation of his image of France, he seized the idea for his own speeches about America. Whatever concerned her interested him, and often he would soon know more about it than she did. But perhaps her greatest influence was to confirm his feelings about the importance of living his life according to the values he honored most. He was determined not to let his public role stunt or stifle his inner existence. At Hyannis Port in August 1960, after the succession of party leaders had paid their respects to their new candidate for President, Kennedy drew one day at lunch a distinction between the totally absorbed professional, for whom politics was the whole of life, and those who enjoyed the game and art of politics but preserved a measure of detachment from it. Jacqueline remarked of some of their visitors that their private faces were completely suppressed by the public face. She had asked one political wife, “What have you been doing since the convention?” expecting her to say, “Oh dear, I’ve just been resting up since that madhouse” or something of the sort. Instead the reply came: “I’ve been writing letters to all those good people who were so helpful to my husband.” “It was,” Jackie said, “as if they were on television all the time.”

Kennedy’s determination to defend his privacy was crucial; for it permitted the inner self, so voracious for experience and for knowledge, so intent on reason and result, so admiring of grace and elegance, to ripen into free and confident maturity—and to renew and replenish the public self. By holding part of himself back from politics, he opened himself to fresh ideas and purpose. I do not mean to imply that he ever condescended to politics. His highest hope was to inspire the young with a lofty sense of the political mission. But politics was not the be-all and end-all; and because, with his wife’s complicity, he declined to yield himself entirely to it, he was able to charge it with creativity.

7. THE KENNEDY MIND: I

Kennedy was called an intellectual very seldom before 1960 and very often thereafter—a phenomenon which deserves explanation.

One cannot be sure what an intellectual is; but let us define it as a person whose primary habitat is the realm of ideas. In this sense, exceedingly few political leaders are authentic intellectuals, because the primary habitat of the political leader is the world of power. Yet the world of power itself has its intellectual and anti-intellectual sides. Some political leaders find exhilaration in ideas and in the company of those whose trade it is to deal with them. Others are rendered uneasy by ideas and uncomfortable by intellectuals.

Kennedy belonged supremely to the first class. He was a man of action who could pass easily over to the realm of ideas and confront intellectuals with perfect confidence in his capacity to hold his own. His mind was not prophetic, impassioned, mystical, ontological, utopian or ideological. It was less exuberant than Theodore Roosevelt’s, less scholarly than Wilson’s, less adventurous than Franklin Roosevelt’s. But it had its own salient qualities—it was objective, practical, ironic, skeptical, unfettered and insatiable.

It was marked first of all, as he had noted to Jacqueline, by inexhaustible curiosity. Kennedy always wanted to know how things worked. Vague answers never contented him. This curiosity was fed by conversation but even more by reading. His childhood consolation had become an adult compulsion. He was now a fanatical reader, 1200 words a minute, not only at the normal times and places but at meals, in the bathtub, sometimes even when walking. Dressing in the morning, he would prop open a book on his bureau and read while he put on his shirt and tied his necktie. He read mostly history and biography, American and English. The first book he ever gave Jacqueline was the life of a Texan, Marquis James’s biography of Sam Houston, The Raven. In addition to Pilgrim’s Way, Marlborough and Melbourne, he particularly liked Herbert Agar’s The Price of Union, Samuel Flagg Bemis’s John Quincy Adams, Allan Nevins’s The Emergence of Lincoln, Margaret Coit’s Calhoun and Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand. He read poetry only occasionally—Shakespeare and Byron are quoted in the looseleaf notebook he kept in 1945–46—and by this time fiction hardly at all. His wife does not remember him reading novels except for two or three Ian Fleming thrillers, though Kennedy himself listed The Red and the Black among his favorite books and, at some point in his life, had read most of Hemingway and a smattering of contemporary fiction—at least The Deer Park, The Fires of Spring and The Ninth Wave. His supposed addiction to James Bond was partly a publicity gag, like Franklin Roosevelt’s supposed affection for “Home on the Range.” Kennedy seldom read for distraction. He did not want to waste a single second.

He read partly for information, partly for comparison, partly for insight, partly for the sheer joy of felicitous statement. He delighted particularly in quotations which distilled the essence of an argument. He is, so far as I know, the only politician who ever quoted Madame de Stael on Meet the Press. Some quotations he carried verbatim in his mind. Others he noted down. The loose-leaf notebook of 1945–46 contained propositions from Aeschylus (“In war, truth is the first casualty”), Isocrates (“Where there are a number of laws drawn up with great exactitude, it is a proof that the city is badly administered; for the inhabitants are compelled to frame laws in great numbers as a barrier against offenses”), Dante (“The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality”), Falkland (“When it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change”), Burke (“Our patience will achieve more than our force”), Jefferson (“Widespread poverty and concentrated wealth cannot long endure side by side in a democracy”), de Maistre (“In all political systems there are relationships which it is wiser to leave undefined”), Jackson (“Individuals must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest”), Webster (“A general equality of condition is the true basis, most certainly, of democracy”), Mill (“One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interest”), Lincoln (“Public opinion is everything. With it nothing can fail, without it nothing can succeed”), Huck Finn on Pilgrim’s Progress (“The statements are interesting—but steep”), Chesterton (“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up”), Brandeis (“Unless our financial leaders are capable of progress, the institutions which they are trying to conserve will lose their foundation”), Colonel House (“The best politics is to do the right thing”), Churchill (“The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are often no longer strong. . . . Let us have this blessed union of power and justice”), Lippmann (“The political art deals with matters peculiar to politics, with a complex of material circumstances, of historic deposit, of human passion, for which the problems of business or engineering do not provide an analogy”), Hindu proverbs (“I had no shoes—and I murmured until I met a man who had no feet”), Joseph P. Kennedy (“More men die of jealousy than cancer”) and even John F. Kennedy:

 

To be a positive force for the public good in politics one must have three things; a solid moral code governing his public actions, a broad knowledge of our institutions and traditions and a specific background in the technical problems of government, and lastly he must have political appeal—the gift of winning public confidence and support.

 

There emerges from such quotations the impression of a moderate and dispassionate mind, committed to the arts of government, persuaded of the inevitability of change but distrustful of comprehensive plans and grandiose abstractions, skeptical of excess but admiring of purpose, determined above all to be effective.

His intelligence was fundamentally secular, or so it seemed to me. Of course, this was not entirely true. As Mary McCarthy wrote in her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, “If you are born and brought up a Catholic, you have absorbed a great deal of world history and the history of ideas before you are twelve, and it is like learning a language early; the effect is indelible.” Though Kennedy spent only one year of his life in a Catholic school, he assimilated a good deal of the structure of the faith, encouraged probably by his mother and sisters. He often adopted the Catholic side in historical controversy, as in the case of Mary Queen of Scots; and he showed a certain weakness for Catholic words of art, like ‘prudence,’ and a certain aversion toward bad words for Catholics, like ‘liberal.’ Nor could one doubt his devotion to his Church or the occasional solace he found in mass.

Yet he remains, as John Cogley has suggested, the first President who was a Roman Catholic rather than the first Roman Catholic President. Intellectual Catholicism in American politics has ordinarily taken two divergent forms, of which Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut and Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota were contemporary representatives. Kennedy was different from either. Unlike Dodd, he lived far away from the world of the Holy Name Societies, Knights of Columbus and communion breakfasts. He discussed the princes of the American Church with the same irreverent candor with which he discussed the bosses of the Democratic party. When a dispatch from Rome during the 1960 campaign suggested Vatican doubts about his views of the proper relationship between church and state, Kennedy said, “Now I understand why Henry VIII set up his own church.” His attitude toward life showed no traces of the black-and-white moralism, the pietistic rhetoric, the clericalism, the anti-intellectualism, the prudery, the fear of Protestant society, which had historically characterized parts of the Irish Catholic community in America. On the other hand, he did not, like Eugene McCarthy, seek to rescue Catholic doctrine from fundamentalism and demonstrate its relevance to the modern world. Catholic intellectuals recognized his indifference to the scholastic tradition, and some disdained him for it.

Kennedy’s religion was humane rather than doctrinal. He was a Catholic as Franklin Roosevelt was an Episcopalian—because he was born into the faith, lived in it and expected to die in it. One evening at the White House he argued with considerable particularity that nine of the ten commandments were derived from nature and almost seemed to imply that all religion was so derived. He had little knowledge of or interest in the Catholic dogmatic tradition. He once wrote Cogley, “It is hard for a Harvard man to answer questions in theology. I imagine my answers will cause heartburn at Fordham and B. C. [Boston College].” One can find little organic intellectual connection between his faith and his politics. His social thought hardly resulted from a determination to apply the principles of Rerum Novarum to American life. He felt an immense sense of fellowship with Pope John XXIII, but this was based more on the Pope’s practical character and policies than on theological considerations. Some of his Protestant advisers probably knew the encyclicals better than he did. Once during the 1960 campaign I handed him a speech draft with the comment that it was perhaps too Catholic. He said with a smile, “You Unitarians”—meaning Sorensen and myself—“keep writing Catholic speeches. I guess I am the only Protestant around here.”

Still, his basic attitude was wholly compatible with the sophisticated theology of Jesuits like Father John Courtney Murray, whom he greatly admired. In the notebook he kept during his sickness, he wrote down some lines from Barbara Ward: “What disturbs the Communist rulers is not the phraseology of religion, the lip-service that may be paid to it, or the speeches and declarations made in its favor. . . . Religion which is a mere adjunct of individual purpose is a religion that even the Soviets can tolerate. What they fear is a religion that transcends frontiers and can challenge the purpose and performance of the nation-state.” This was not in the mid-fifties the typical attitude of American Catholics; but, if Kennedy was not a typical American Catholic, his example helped create the progressive and questing American Catholicism of the sixties. Above all, he showed that there need be no conflict between Catholicism and modernity, no bar to full Catholic participation in American society.

His detachment from traditional American Catholicism was part of the set of detachments—detachment from middle-class parochialism, detachment from the business ethos, detachment from ritualistic liberalism—which gave his perceptions their peculiar coolness, freshness and freedom, and which also led those expecting commitments of a more familiar sort to condemn him as uncommitted. In fact, he was intensely committed to a vision of America and the world, and committed with equal intensity to the use of reason and power to achieve that vision. This became apparent after he was President; and this accounts in part for the sudden realization that, far from being just a young man in a hurry, a hustler for personal authority, a Processed Politician, he was, as politicians go, an intellectual and one so peculiarly modern that it took orthodox intellectuals a little time before they began to understand him.

Another reason for the change in the intellectuals’ theory of Kennedy was their gradual recognition of his desire to bring the world of power and the world of ideas together in alliance—or rather, as he himself saw it, to restore the collaboration between the two worlds which had marked the early republic. He was fascinated by the Founding Fathers and liked to harass historians by demanding that they explain how a small and underdeveloped nation could have produced men of such genius. He was particularly fascinated by the way the generation of the Founders united the instinct for ideas and the instinct for responsibility. “Our nation’s first great politicians,” he wrote, “—those who presided at its birth in 1776 and at its christening in 1787—included among their ranks most of the nation’s first great writers and scholars.” But today

 

the gap between the intellectual and politician seems to be growing. . . . today this link is all but gone. Where are the scholar-statesmen? The American politician of today is fearful, if not scornful, of entering the literary world with the courage of a Beveridge. And the American author and scholar of today is reluctant, if not disdainful, about entering the political world with the enthusiasm of a Woodrow Wilson.

 

His summons to the scholar-statesman went largely unnoticed by the intellectual community in the fifties, perhaps because he chose such improbable forums as Vogue and a Harvard Commencement. Only when he began as President to put his proposition into practice did the intellectual community take a fresh look at him.

8. THE KENNEDY MIND: II

The character of his reading and quoting emphasizes, I think, the historical grain of his intelligence. Kennedy was in many respects an historian manqué. The historical mind can be analytical, or it can be romantic. The best historians are both, Kennedy among them. Why England Slept, with its emphasis on impersonal forces, expressed one side; Profiles in Courage, with its emphasis on heroes, expressed the other. But, even in his most romantic mood, Kennedy never adopted a good-guys vs. bad-guys theory of history. He may have been a Whig,^* but he was not a Whig historian. He had both the imagination and the objectivity which enabled him to see the point in lost causes, even in enemy fanaticisms. In a review of Liddell Hart’s Deterrent or Defense in 1960, he praised the author’s credo: “Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes—so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil—nothing is so self-blinding.” Liddell Hart was addressing these remarks to statesmen; they work just as well for historians.

Kennedy rarely lost sight of other people’s motives and problems. For all the presumed coolness on the surface, he had an instinctive tendency to put himself into the skins of others. Once during the 1960 campaign, Kennedy, returning to New York City on a Sunday night from a visit with Mrs. Roosevelt in Hyde Park, dropped in at Voisin’s for dinner with a couple of friends. At a neighboring table, a man obviously drunk, began in a low but penetrating voice to direct a stream of unprintable comment at him. Kennedy’s companions raised their own voices in the hope that he would not hear, but to no avail. Finally one made a motion to call the headwaiter. Kennedy laid a hand on his sleeve and said, “No, don’t bother. Think how the fellow’s wife must be feeling.” His friend looked and saw her flushed with embarrassment. He later reacted with comparable dispassion to de Gaulle and Khrushchev.

He liked to quote Lincoln: “There are few things wholly evil or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of Government policy, is an inseparable compound of the two, so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.” When something had enough steam behind it to move people and make an impression on history, it must have some rational explanation, and Kennedy wanted to know what that rational explanation was. The response of the fifties that it was all a struggle between good and evil never satisfied him.

But it was not a case of tout comprendre, tout pardonner. Though he saw the human struggle, not as a moralist, but as an historian, even as an ironist, irony was never permitted to sever the nerve of action. His mind was forever critical; but his thinking always retained the cutting edge of decision. When he was told something, he wanted to know what he could do about it. He was pragmatic in the sense that he tested the meaning of a proposition by its consequences; he was also pragmatic in the sense of being free from metaphysics. In his response, too, to the notion of a pluralist universe, Kennedy was a pragmatist—if one may make sensible use of this word, which came into political vogue in the first years of the Kennedy administration and then was oddly revived in the first years of the Johnson administration with the implication that the Kennedy years had not, after all, been pragmatic but were somehow ideological. They were not ideological, though they could perhaps be termed intellectual.

The historical mind is rarely ideological—and, when it becomes so, it is at the expense of history. Whether analytical or romantic, it is committed to existence, not to essence. Kennedy was bored by abstractions. He never took ideology very seriously, certainly not as a means of interpreting history and even not as part of the material of history. If he did not go the distance with de Gaulle in reducing everything to national tradition and national interest, he tended to give greater weight in thinking about world affairs to national than to ideological motives. Like de Gaulle, but unlike the ideological interpreters of the cold war, he was not surprised by the split between Russia and China.

If historic conflicts infrequently pitted total good against total evil, then they infrequently concluded in total victory or total defeat. Seeing the past with an historian’s eyes, Kennedy knew that ideals and institutions were stubborn, and that change took place more often by accommodation than by annihilation. His cult of courage was in this sense ethical rather than political; he saw the courage of “unyielding devotion to absolute principle” as the moral fulfillment of the individual rather than as necessarily the best way of running a government. Indeed, he took pains to emphasize in Profiles that politicians could also demonstrate courage “through their acceptance of compromise, through their advocacy of conciliation, through their willingness to replace conflict with co-operation.” Senators who go down to defeat in vain defense of a single principle “will not be on hand to fight for that or any other principle in the future.” One felt here an echo of St. Thomas: “Prudence applies principles to particular issues; consequently it does not establish moral purpose, but contrives the means thereto.”

The application of principle requires both moral and intellectual insight. Kennedy had an unusual capacity to weigh the complexities of judgment—in part because of the complexities of his own perceptions. The contrast in Profiles between the courage of compromise and the courage of principle expressed, for example, a tension deep within Kennedy—a tension between the circumspection of his political instinct and the radicalism of his intellectual impulse; so too the contrast between the historical determinism, the deprecation of the individual and the passive view of leadership implied in Why England Slept and the demand in Profiles that the politician be prepared, on the great occasions, to “meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience.” All this expressed the interior strain between Kennedy’s sense of human limitation and his sense of hope, between his skepticism about man and his readiness to say, “Man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.”

All these things, coexisting within him, enabled others to find in him what qualities they wanted. They could choose one side of him or the other and claim him, according to taste, as a conservative, because of his sober sense of the frailty of man, the power of institutions and the frustrations of history, or as a progressive, because of his vigorous confidence in reason, action and the future. Yet within Kennedy himself these tensions achieved reunion and reconciliation. He saw history in its massive movements as shaped by forces beyond man’s control. But he felt that there were still problems which man could resolve; and in any case, whether man could resolve these problems or not, the obligation was to carry on the struggle of existence. It was in essence, Richard Goodwin later suggested, the Greek view where the hero must poise himself against the gods and, even with knowledge of the futility of the fight, press on to the end of his life until he meets his tragic fate.

9. THE CONTEMPORARY MAN

After Kennedy’s death, Adlai Stevenson called him the “contemporary man.” His youth, his vitality, his profound modernity—these were final elements in his power and potentiality as he stood on the brink of the Presidency. For Kennedy was not only the first President to be born in the twentieth century. More than that, he was the first representative in the White House of a distinctive generation, the generation which was born during the First World War, came of age during the depression, fought in the Second World War and began its public career in the atomic age.

This was the first generation to grow up as the age of American innocence was coming to an end. To have been born nearly a decade earlier, like Lyndon Johnson, or nearly two decades earlier, like Adlai Stevenson, was to be rooted in another and simpler America. Scott Fitzgerald had written that his contemporaries grew up “to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” But the generation which came back from the Second World War found that gods, wars and faiths in man had, after all, survived, if in queer and somber ways. The realities of the twentieth century which had shocked their fathers now wove the fabric of their own lives. Instead of reveling in being a lost generation, they set out in one mood or another to find, if not themselves, a still point in the turning world. The predicament was even worse for the generation which had been too young to fight the war, too young to recall the age of innocence, the generation which had experienced nothing but turbulence. So in the fifties some sought security at the expense of identity and became organization men. Others sought identity at the expense of security and became beatniks. Each course created only a partial man. There was need for a way of life, a way of autonomy, between past and present, the organization man and the anarchist, the square and the beat.

It was autonomy which this humane and self-sufficient man seemed to embody. Kennedy simply could not be reduced to the usual complex of sociological generalizations. He was Irish, Catholic, New England, Harvard, Navy, Palm Beach, Democrat and so on; but no classification contained him. He had wrought an individuality which carried him beyond the definitions of class and race, region and religion. He was a free man, not just in the sense of the cold-war cliché, but in the sense that he was, as much as man can be, self-determined and not the servant of forces outside him.

This sense of wholeness and freedom gave him an extraordinary appeal not only to his own generation but even more to those who came after, the children of turbulence. Recent history had washed away the easy consolations and the old formulas. Only a few things remained on which contemporary man could rely, and most were part of himself—family, friendship, courage, reason, jokes, power, patriotism. Kennedy demonstrated the possibility of the new self-reliance. As he had liberated himself from the past, so he had liberated himself from the need to rebel against the past. He could insist on standards, admire physical courage, attend his church, love his father while disagreeing with him, love his country without self-doubt or self-consciousness. Yet, while absorbing so much of the traditional code, his sensibility was acutely contemporaneous. He voiced the disquietude of the postwar generation—the mistrust of rhetoric, the disdain for pomposity, the impatience with the postures and pieties of other days, the resignation to disappointment. And he also voiced the new generation’s longings—for fulfillment in experience, for the subordination of selfish impulses to higher ideals, for a link between past and future, for adventure and valor and honor. What was forbidden were poses, histrionics, the heart on the sleeve and the tongue on the cliché. What was required was a tough, nonchalant acceptance of the harsh present and an open mind toward the unknown future.

This was Kennedy, with his deflationary wartime understatement (when asked how be became a hero, he said, “It was involuntary. They sank my boat”); his contempt for demagoguery (once during the campaign, after Kennedy had disappointed a Texas crowd by his New England restraint, Bill Attwood suggested that next time he wave his arms in the air like other politicians; Kennedy shook his head and wrote—he was saving his voice—“I always swore one thing I’d never do is—” and drew a picture of a man waving his arms in the air); his freedom from dogma, his appetite for responsibility, his instinct for novelty, his awareness and irony and control; his imperturbable sureness in his own powers, not because he considered himself infallible, but because, given the fallibility of all men, he supposed he could do the job as well as anyone else; his love of America and pride in its traditions and ideals.

Of course there was an element of legerdemain in all this. Every politician has to fake a little, and Kennedy was a politician determined to become President. He was prepared to do many things, to cut corners, to exploit people and situations, to “go go go,” even to merchandise himself. But many things he would not do, phrases he would not use, people he would not exploit (never a “Jackie and I”). Even his faking had to stay within character. This sense of a personality under control, this insistence on distancing himself from displays of emotion, led some to think him indifferent or unfeeling. But only the unwary could really suppose that his ‘coolness’ was because he felt too little. It was because he felt too much and had to compose himself for an existence filled with disorder and despair. During his Presidency, when asked about the demobilization of the reserves after the Berlin crisis, he said, “There is always an inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country. . . . Life is unfair.” He said this, not with bitterness, but with the delicate knowledge of one who lives in a bitter time—a knowledge which stamped him as a son of that time. His charm and grace were not an uncovenanted gift. The Kennedy style was the triumph, hard-bought and well-earned, of a gallant and collected human being over the anguish of life.

His ‘coolness’ was itself a new frontier. It meant freedom from the stereotyped responses of the past. It promised the deliverance of American idealism, buried deep in the national character but imprisoned by the knowingness and calculation of American society in the fifties. It held out to the young the possibility that they could become more than satisfied stockholders in a satisfied nation. It offered hope for spontaneity in a country drowning in its own passivity—passive because it had come to “accept the theory of its own impotence. This was what Norman Mailer caught at Los Angeles in 1960—Kennedy’s existential quality, the sense that he was in some way beyond conventional politics, that he could touch emotions and hopes thwarted by the bland and mechanized society. Unlike the other candidates, Mailer wrote that Kennedy was “mysterious.” He had “the wisdom of a man who senses death within him and gambles that he can cure it by risking his life.” Even his youth, his handsomeness, the beauty of his wife—these were not accidental details but necessary means of inciting the American imagination. With Kennedy, Mailer thought, there was a chance that “we as a nation would finally be loose again in the historic seas of a national psyche which was willy-nilly and at last, again, adventurous.” The only question was whether the nation would be “brave enough to enlist the romantic dream of itself . . . vote for the image of the mirror of its unconscious.” This was the question, I believe, which frightened the nation when it began to fall away from Kennedy in the last days before the election.

Mailer soon repudiated his portrait when, as he later complained at interminable length, Kennedy personally let him down by declining to become the hipster as President. Yet there can be no doubt that Kennedy’s magic was not alone that of wealth and youth and good looks, or even of these things joined to intelligence and will. It was, more than this, the hope that he could redeem American politics by releasing American life from its various bondages to orthodoxy.

No man could have fulfilled this hope, and Kennedy certainly did not. He himself regarded the Mailer essay with skeptical appreciation.^* He knew that as a President of the United States he had no choice but to work within the structure of government and politics—though he did not yet know how beautifully that structure was organized to prevent anything from happening. What Mailer left out was the paradox of power—that the exercise of power is necessary to fulfill purpose, yet the world of power dooms many purposes to frustration. Nonetheless the Mailer rhapsody conveys something of the exhilaration which accompanied the start of the Kennedy Presidency. The Presidency itself would show how national vitality could in fact be released—not in an existential orgasm but in the halting progression of ideas and actions which make up the fabric of history.