Chapter 5
It was an important lesson. A humane government looking out for the powerless or less powerful was a necessary counter to business interests that thought primarily about the bottom line. In 1947, Jack did not think of himself as a New Deal liberal, but the housing fight was a first step in that direction. Additional steps were sometimes small, as the struggles over the power of labor unions, which became the major issue before Congress during 1947, reveal. As a representative of a working-cla.s.s district, he felt duty-bound to speak and vote for the interests of the unions, which were under sharp attack for putting their own needs above the national good. Jack was mindful of the long struggle for labor rights stretching back into the nineteenth century and culminating in the victories of the 1930s that legalized collective bargaining and secured the right to strike. But he saw the unions as fiercely self-serving and no more ready than corporate America to put the needs of the country above their own interest. Communist infiltration of the unions, which allegedly made them vulnerable to manipulation by Soviet agents putting Moscow's needs before those of the United States, especially troubled him. In subcommittee hearings in 1947 on communist subversion of the United Electrical Workers and the United Auto Workers, Jack hammered away at witnesses suspected of communist sympathies and, in the case of the UAW, of impeding American industrial mobilization in 1941 when Soviet Russia was allied with n.a.z.i Germany. A motion to bring perjury charges against union leaders whom Jack believed part of a communist conspiracy gave him standing as a tough-minded anticommunist intent on ferreting out and prosecuting subversives.
Nevertheless, he opposed measures that would make labor again vulnerable to management's arbitrary control over wages and working conditions. When the House considered the excessively harsh Hartley Bill in April 1947, which would have substantially reined in labor's right to strike, Jack called instead for a balanced law as a way to head off labor-industry strife destructive to the nation. He acknowledged that the unions "in their irresponsibility have been guilty of excesses that have caused this country great discomfort and concern." But while the bill before the House had attractive features, it would "so strangle collective bargaining with restraints and limitations as to make it ineffectual." It would "bring not peace but labor war-a war bitter and dangerous. This bill in its present form plays into the hands of the radicals in our unions, who preach the doctrine of cla.s.s struggle." A vote for the Hartley Bill, he said, would be a vote for industrial warfare.
Jack's dissent put him in company with 106 other House opponents of the bill, who were swamped by 308 Republicans and conservative Democrats ready to risk industrial strife. When the more moderate Taft-Hartley version emerged from a conference committee in June, Jack briefly considered voting for it. But the interests of his district, the conviction that such a vote would end his House career, and the defects in a bill he saw as still too draconian toward unions persuaded him to join 78 congressmen in opposing 320 supporters. After Truman vetoed Taft-Hartley, the House and Senate, with Jack voting to sustain the president, overrode the veto.
By the end of 1947, Jack's voting record on supporting the unions received a perfect score from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO): eleven out of eleven correct votes. Given Jack's district, the votes are not surprising, but they little reflect the ambivalence Jack felt on labor issues.
Jack was no more comfortable with battles over federal aid to education. As a Catholic representing a heavily Catholic district, he became an immediate exponent of helping parochial schools. The anti-Catholic bias on the issue angered and frustrated him. In 1947, a representative of the Freemasons testifying at a subcommittee hearing on educational aid sounded familiar cliches about Catholic loyalty to Church over country. "Now you don't mean the Catholics in America are legal subjects of the Pope?" Kennedy sharply asked the witness. "I am not a legal subject of the Pope." When the man cited canon law overriding all secular rules, Kennedy replied, "There is an old saying in Boston that we get our religion from Rome and our politics from home."
The willingness of the committee to hear from such a witness speaks volumes about the outlook of many in the Congress and the country toward helping Catholic schools with public funds. In 1947, twenty-eight states had laws against "acting as a trustee for the disburs.e.m.e.nt of federal funds to non-public schools," and the U.S. Senate Education and Labor Committee had reported out a bill that "would make it impossible for the states to use any of the federal funds for parochial schools." A Gallup poll found that 49 percent of Americans favored giving federal aid entirely to public schools, while 41 percent wanted part of it to go to parochial inst.i.tutions; the division between Protestants (against) and Catholics (for) on the issue seemed unbridgeable.
Jack shared the view of most American Catholics that legislation forbidding any aid to religious schools was discriminatory and unconst.i.tutional. In this, he was in harmony with the Supreme Court, which had ruled in a 1947 New Jersey case, Everson Everson v. v. Board of Education, Board of Education, that public monies could be used to reimburse private-school students for bus transportation. By its 5-4 decision, the Court had declared direct aid to pupils, regardless of where they attended school, no violation of First Amendment restrictions on making laws "respecting an establishment of religion." Kennedy took this to mean that noneducational services such as bus rides, health examinations, and lunches could be freely provided to students in public and private, including religious, schools. But although Jack would consistently support this sort of federal aid, he was not without reservations about the whole idea of federal financing for schools, which states and counties had traditionally paid for. He was concerned that "present federal educational activities are tremendously costly" and might impose a "staggering" burden on taxpayers. To rein in what he feared could become runaway costs, he urged that such aid to education be given only when there was a demonstrable need. In addition, he called for federal requirements that states make greater efforts "through properly balanced taxation and efficiency of operation" to improve their own educational systems. that public monies could be used to reimburse private-school students for bus transportation. By its 5-4 decision, the Court had declared direct aid to pupils, regardless of where they attended school, no violation of First Amendment restrictions on making laws "respecting an establishment of religion." Kennedy took this to mean that noneducational services such as bus rides, health examinations, and lunches could be freely provided to students in public and private, including religious, schools. But although Jack would consistently support this sort of federal aid, he was not without reservations about the whole idea of federal financing for schools, which states and counties had traditionally paid for. He was concerned that "present federal educational activities are tremendously costly" and might impose a "staggering" burden on taxpayers. To rein in what he feared could become runaway costs, he urged that such aid to education be given only when there was a demonstrable need. In addition, he called for federal requirements that states make greater efforts "through properly balanced taxation and efficiency of operation" to improve their own educational systems.
Jack was also unhappy with being identified as a Catholic congressman promoting parochial interests. It is true that public stands for equal federal treatment of public and parochial schools won him high praise from Catholic Church and lay leaders. (One Catholic newspaper called him "a white knight" committed to "courageous representation of his const.i.tuency.") But he was uncomfortable with the perception that he was a spokesman of the Catholic Church and a captive of his Catholic const.i.tuents. He wished to be known as a public servant whose judgment rested not on narrow ideological or personal prejudices, and little mattered to him more during his term in the House than making clear that he operated primarily in the service of national rather than more limited group interests.
A controversy concerning Boston mayor Curley demonstrates Kennedy's eagerness to create some distance between himself and the ruling Catholic clique in Boston. After his return to the mayor's office in 1946, Curley had been indicted for fraudulent use of the mail to solicit war contracts for bogus companies. The following year he was convicted and sent to the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, to serve a six-to-eighteen-month term. Seventy-two years old, suffering from diabetes and high blood pressure, Curley asked the court for clemency, citing a physician's prediction that his imprisonment would be a death sentence. When the judge refused his plea, 172,000 of Curley's supporters, about a quarter of Boston's population, pet.i.tioned President Truman to commute the sentence. John McCormack asked New England congressmen to support the request.
All the Ma.s.sachusetts representatives followed McCormack's lead except for Jack. When McCormack approached him about signing, Kennedy asked whether the president had been consulted. McCormack said no and, irritated with the young man's implied defiance, declared, "If you don't want to sign, don't sign it." Having learned from the surgeon general that Curley's imprisonment was not life-threatening and that he would receive proper care in the prison hospital, Jack refused to sign. Because his district was a Curley stronghold, Jack worried that he might now be "politically dead, finished," as he told Ted Reardon.
At the same time, however, Jack saw good political reasons to resist. He was not beholden to district party regulars; his election had been more the result of building a personal organization than of getting help from the traditional pols. Moreover, it defined Jack as a new kind of Boston politician, a member of a younger generation with broader experience and a wider view of the world. It also allowed Jack to please Honey Fitz, who despised Curley for having cut short his political career. More important to Jack, though, was the injustice of giving Curley something he had denied other const.i.tuents: backing for an undeserved pardon. When Curley was released after five months and returned to the mayor's office with declarations that he felt better than he had in years, Jack gained in standing as a politician who thought for himself.
Though Jack was feeling his way on domestic issues, tacking between political expediency and moral conviction, he felt more comfortable in dealing with major foreign policy questions. His book, wartime experience, and newspaper articles about postwar peacemaking gave him a surer sense of what needed to be done.
In March 1947, after the president announced the Truman Doctrine proposing aid to Greece and Turkey as a deterrent to Soviet expansion in the Near East, Jack spoke at the University of North Carolina in support of the president's plan. He believed it essential to national security to prevent Europe's domination by any single power. To those who warned that aiding Greece and Turkey would provoke Moscow and possibly lead to another global conflict, he invoked the failure at Munich to stand up to Hitler as a miscalculation that had led to the Second World War. A firm policy now against Soviet imperialism would discourage Moscow from dangerous adventures in the future, he predicted. To those who believed that America should rely on the United Nations to preserve the independence of Greece and Turkey, Kennedy cautioned that it lacked the wherewithal to meet the challenge. America's aim was "not to dominate by dollar imperialism the Governments of Greece and Turkey, but rather it is to a.s.sist them to live in freedom." The president's policy was "the only path by which we will reach security and peace." Jack was equally enthusiastic and outspoken about the Marshall Plan to restore economic health and stability to Western Europe with loans and grants of up to $17 billion.
Of course, while Kennedy's stand for an internationalist policy rested on the belief that Truman was right, it also sprang from a concern to separate himself from his father. Recently, Joe had publicly complained that the United States lacked the financial means to meet its obligations at home and send hundreds of millions of dollars abroad to combat communism. His solution was to let the communists take over Greece and Turkey and other nations, predicting that these communist regimes would collapse after proving to be unworkable. An isolationist, prosperous United States would then become a model for both industrial and emerging nations, in which we could comfortably invest. Joe's shortsightedness was evident to foreign policy realists, who warned that allowing Soviet expansion to go unchecked would be a disaster for all the democracies, including the United States. Joe's bad judgment irritated Jack, who understood that it was more the product of personal concerns about family losses than reasoned a.n.a.lysis of the national interest. But Joe's misjudgments made Jack more confident about a public career: On foreign affairs, he correctly believed that he was much more realistic than his "old man."
NO ONE IN 1947 would have described Jack as ready for a leading role in national affairs. His first term in the House was a kind of half-life in which he divided his time between the public and the private. He was never indifferent about the major issues besetting the country; housing, labor unions, education, and particularly the communist challenge to U.S. national security received close attention between 1947 and 1949. But he was a quick study, and as only one of 435 voices in the House-and a junior one in the minority party at that-he found himself with ample time to enjoy a social life, especially since his large, able office staff took care of const.i.tuent demands. An English friend who lived around the corner from him in Georgetown remembered Jack as "a mixture of gaiety and thought.... He seemed quite serious, and then suddenly, he'd break away from reading and start to make jokes, and sing a song. But I think he did appear to be quite a serious thinker and always probing into things-literature, politics, etc." 1947 would have described Jack as ready for a leading role in national affairs. His first term in the House was a kind of half-life in which he divided his time between the public and the private. He was never indifferent about the major issues besetting the country; housing, labor unions, education, and particularly the communist challenge to U.S. national security received close attention between 1947 and 1949. But he was a quick study, and as only one of 435 voices in the House-and a junior one in the minority party at that-he found himself with ample time to enjoy a social life, especially since his large, able office staff took care of const.i.tuent demands. An English friend who lived around the corner from him in Georgetown remembered Jack as "a mixture of gaiety and thought.... He seemed quite serious, and then suddenly, he'd break away from reading and start to make jokes, and sing a song. But I think he did appear to be quite a serious thinker and always probing into things-literature, politics, etc."
Though having turned thirty in May 1947, his boyish good looks and demeanor bespoke not ambition and seriousness of purpose but casualness, ease, and enjoyment. Rumpled jackets, wrinkled s.h.i.+rts, spotted ties, khaki pants, loose-fitting sweaters, and sneakers were his clothes of choice; the expensive tailored suits he wore only out of deference to the customs of the House-and even then, perhaps not as often as he should have.
A rented three-story town house at 1528 Thirty-first Street in Georgetown, which Jack shared with Billy Sutton; his twenty-six-year-old sister Eunice, who worked at the Justice Department for a juvenile delinquency committee; and Margaret Ambrose, a family cook, had the feel of a noisy, busy fraternity that reflected casual living. Despite the presence of George Thomas, a black valet, who struggled to keep a rein on Jack's sloppiness, clothes were draped over chairs and sofas, with remnants of half-eaten meals left in unlikely places. Billy Sutton recalled how people were always "coming and going, like a Hollywood hotel. The Amba.s.sador, Rose, Lem Billings, Torby, anybody who came to Was.h.i.+ngton. You never knew who the h.e.l.l was going to be there but you got used to it."
Jack's idea of a good time was an unplanned evening with a friend. One young woman, who resisted any romantic involvement, recalled how "he would come by, in typical fas.h.i.+on, honk his horn underneath my garage window and call out, 'Can you go to the movies?' or 'Can you come down to dinner?' He was not much for planning ahead. Sometimes I'd go down for dinner and he'd be having dinner on a tray in his bedroom and I'd have my dinner on a tray in his bedroom. He was resting, you see? The back brace and different things would be hanging around. Then he'd find out what was at the movies and he'd get dressed and we'd go to the movies. And I'd pay for it because he never had any money." When he stayed home, he could be found sprawled in a chair, reading. Or as a reporter said, "Kennedy never sits in a chair; he bivouacs in it."
Jack still took special pleasure in athletics, reportedly making a habit of pickup football, basketball, or softball games with local teenagers. An a.s.sociated Press reporter described Jack in full uniform at a high school football practice. The team's star halfback, who thought Jack was a new recruit, gave him a workout, catching and throwing pa.s.ses, running down punts, and tackling. "How's the Congressman doing?" the coach asked the unsuspecting halfback. "Is that what they call him?" he replied. "He needs a lot of work, Coach." (Given Jack's health problems, was the A.P. story a puff piece?) For all Jack's devotion to his social life, he had few close friends. Not that he couldn't have drawn other congressmen, journalists, and Was.h.i.+ngton celebrities into close ties. His charm, intelligence, and wit made him highly attractive to almost everyone he met. But he felt little need for what current parlance would describe as male bonding. His strong family connections and frenetic womanizing gave him all the companions.h.i.+p he seemed to need.
He quickly developed a reputation as quite a ladies' man. "Jack liked girls," recalled fellow congressman George Smathers. Smathers, thirty-three and the son of a prominent Miami attorney and judge, shared a privileged background and affinity for self-indulgence that made him one of Jack's few good friends. "He came by it naturally. His daddy liked girls. He was a great chaser. Jack liked girls and girls liked him. He had just a great way with women. He was such a warm, lovable guy himself. He was a sweet fella, a really sweet fella." A contemporary gossip columnist for a New York newspaper supported Smathers's recollections. "Palm Beach's cottage colony wants to give the son of Joseph P. Kennedy its annual Oscar for achievement in the field of romance. The committee says that young Mister Kennedy splashed through a sea of flaming early season divorcees to rescue its sinking faith in the romantic powers of Florida." Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas remembered Jack as a "playboy," and New Jersey congressman Frank Thompson Jr., another of Jack's friends in the 1950s, said that "the girls just went crazy about him"; he had "a smorgasbord of women" to choose from.
Most of these women were one-night stands-airline stewardesses and secretaries. "He was not a cozy, touching sort of man," one woman said. Another woman described Jack as "nice-considerate in his own way, witty and fun. But he gave off light instead of heat. s.e.x was something to have done, not to be doing have done, not to be doing. He wasn't in it for the cuddling."
He wanted no part of marriage at this time. His friend Rip Horton remembered going to his Georgetown house for dinner. "A lovely-looking blonde from West Palm Beach joined us to go to a movie. After the movie we went back to the house and I remember Jack saying something like 'Well, I want to shake this one. She has ideas.' Shortly thereafter, another girl walked in. Ted Reardon was there, so he went home and I went to bed figuring this was the girl for the night. The next morning a completely
Several of Jack's contemporaries and biographers have concluded that he was a neurotic womanizer fulfilling some unconscious need for unlimited conquests. Priscilla Johnson, an attractive young woman who worked on political and foreign issues for Jack in the fifties, concluded that "he was a very naughty boy." (She rejected invitations from him to go to his hotel suite at the Waldorf-Astoria when they were in New York.) Kennedy family biographers Peter Collier and David Horowitz have described his affairs as "less a self-a.s.sertion than a search for self-an existential pinch on the arm to prove that he was there." This is shorthand for the view that Jack was a narcissist whose s.e.xual escapades combated feelings of emptiness bred by a cold, detached mother and a self-absorbed, largely absent father. They quote Johnson: "I was one of the few he could really talk to. Like Freud, he wanted to know what women really wanted, that sort of thing; but he also wanted to know the more mundane details-what gave a woman pleasure, what women hoped for in marriage, how they liked to be courted. During one of these conversations I once asked him why he was doing it-why he was acting like his father, why he was avoiding real relations.h.i.+ps, why he was taking a chance on getting caught in a scandal at the same time he was trying to make his career take off. He took a while trying to formulate an answer. Finally he shrugged and said, 'I don't know really. I guess I just can't help it.' He had this sad expression on his face. He looked like a little boy about to cry."
Johnson and others thought it was as much the chase as anything that excited Jack. "The whole thing with him was pursuit," she said. "I think he was secretly disappointed when a woman gave in. It meant that the low esteem in which he held women was once again validated. It meant also that he'd have to start chasing someone else." Like Johnson, Doris Kearns Goodwin sees more at work here than simply "a liking for women. So driven was the pace of his s.e.x life, and so discardable his conquests, that they suggest a deep difficulty with intimacy."
A sense of his mortality may also have continued to drive Jack's incessant skirt-chasing. The discovery of his Addison's disease, his adrenal insufficiency, in the fall of 1947 put a punctuation point on the medical problems that had afflicted him since childhood. Although the availability of DOCA made his problems treatable by the late 1940s, no one could be certain that the disease would not cut short Jack's life. His English physician, who diagnosed the Addison's disease during Jack's 1947 trip to Ireland, told Pamela Churchill, "That young American friend of yours, he hasn't got a year to live." Jack was not told this, but his c.u.mulative experience with doctors had made him skeptical about their ability to mend his ills. Moreover, when he came home from London in September 1947, he was so ill that a priest came aboard the Queen Mary Queen Mary to give him extreme unction (last rites) before he was carried off the s.h.i.+p on a stretcher. In the following year, when bad weather made a plane trip "iffy," he told Ted Reardon, "It's okay for someone with my life expectancy," but he suggested that his sister Kathleen and Reardon go by train. "His continual, almost heroic s.e.xual performance," Garry Wills said, was a "cackling at the G.o.ds of bodily disability who plagued him." Charles Spalding believed that Jack identified with Lord Byron, about whom Jack read everything he could find. Byron also had physical disabilities, saw himself dying young, and hungered for women. Jack loved-perhaps too much-Lady Caroline Lamb's description of Byron as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." to give him extreme unction (last rites) before he was carried off the s.h.i.+p on a stretcher. In the following year, when bad weather made a plane trip "iffy," he told Ted Reardon, "It's okay for someone with my life expectancy," but he suggested that his sister Kathleen and Reardon go by train. "His continual, almost heroic s.e.xual performance," Garry Wills said, was a "cackling at the G.o.ds of bodily disability who plagued him." Charles Spalding believed that Jack identified with Lord Byron, about whom Jack read everything he could find. Byron also had physical disabilities, saw himself dying young, and hungered for women. Jack loved-perhaps too much-Lady Caroline Lamb's description of Byron as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know."
Events affecting Jack's sister Kathleen deepened his feelings about the tenuousness of life. Jack and Kathleen, as their letters to each other testify, had a warm, affectionate relations.h.i.+p. Jack was closer to her than to any of his other siblings. They shared an attraction to rebelliousness or at least to departing from the confining rules of their Church and mother. Jack had supported Kick in a decision to marry Billy Hartington, outside of her faith. Billy's death in the war had brought her closer than ever to Jack. Each had a mutual sense of life's precariousness, which made them both a little cynical and resistant to social mores. And so in the summer of 1947, during his visit to Lismore Castle in Ireland, Jack was pleased to learn that Kathleen had fallen deeply in love with Peter Fitzwilliam, another wealthy English aristocrat and much-decorated war hero. A breeder of racehorses and a man of exceptional charm, with a reputation for womanizing despite being married to a beautiful English heiress, Fitzwilliam reminded some people of Joe Kennedy-"older, sophisticated, quite the rogue male." Jack saw Kathleen's determination to marry Fitzwilliam-who would have to divorce his current wife first-despite Rose's warnings that she and Joe would disown her, as a demonstration of independence and risk taking that he admired. Before any final decision was reached, however, a tragic accident burdened the Kennedys with a far greater trauma. In May 1948, while on an ill-advised flight in stormy weather to the south of France, Kathleen and Fitzwilliam were killed when their private plane crashed into the side of a mountain in the Rhone Valley.
Jack found it impossible to make sense of Kathleen's death. When it was confirmed by a phone call from Ted Reardon, Jack was at home listening to a recording of Ella Logan singing the lead song from Finian's Rainbow, Finian's Rainbow, "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" She has a sweet voice, Jack said to Billy Sutton. Then he turned away and began to cry. "How can there possibly be any purpose in her death?" Jack repeatedly asked Lem Billings. He later told campaign biographer James MacGregor Burns, "The thing about Kathleen and Joe was their tremendous vitality. Everything was moving in their direction-that's what made it so unfortunate. If something happens to you or somebody in your family who is miserable anyway, whose health is bad, or who has a chronic disease or something, that's one thing. But, for someone who is living at their peak, then to get cut off-that's the shock." "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" She has a sweet voice, Jack said to Billy Sutton. Then he turned away and began to cry. "How can there possibly be any purpose in her death?" Jack repeatedly asked Lem Billings. He later told campaign biographer James MacGregor Burns, "The thing about Kathleen and Joe was their tremendous vitality. Everything was moving in their direction-that's what made it so unfortunate. If something happens to you or somebody in your family who is miserable anyway, whose health is bad, or who has a chronic disease or something, that's one thing. But, for someone who is living at their peak, then to get cut off-that's the shock."
Kathleen's death depressed Jack and made him more conscious than ever of his own mortality. He told the columnist Joseph Alsop that he did not expect to live more than another ten years, or beyond the age of forty-five, "but there was no use thinking about it... and he was going to do the best he could and enjoy himself as much as he could in the time that was given him." He queried Ted Reardon and George Smathers about the best way to die: in war, freezing, drowning, getting shot, poisoning? (War and poisoning were his choices.) "The point is," he said to Smathers, "that you've got to live every day like it's your last day on earth. That's what I'm doing." Chuck Spalding remembered that "he always heard the footsteps.... Death was there. It had taken Joe and Kick and it was waiting for him. So, whenever he was in a situation, he tried to burn bright; he tried to wring as much out of things as he could. After a while he didn't have to try. He had something n.o.body else did. It was just a heightened sense of being; there's no other way to describe it."
Spalding's recollections are not a sentimental exaggeration about Kennedy or the influences that played on him. Kathleen's death seemed to heighten not only his determination to live life to the fullest but also his ambition for a notable public career. It is clear that the initial shock of Kick's death greatly distracted him. Billings said that "he was in terrible pain.... He couldn't get through the days without thinking of Kathleen at the most inappropriate times. He'd be sitting at a congressional hearing and he'd find his mind drifting uncontrollably back to all the things he and Kathleen had done together and all the friends they had in common." He had trouble sleeping through the night, repeatedly awakened by images of Kathleen and him sitting and talking together.
AFTER KATHLEEN'S DEATH, stoicism about accepting the uncontrollable joined a healthy determination to go forward and build a successful political career. During his first year and a half in Congress, Jack had already considered running for a statewide office. He wanted to get to the Senate, but if he won the nomination in 1948, it would mean challenging inc.u.mbent Republican Leverett Saltonstall. Since early polls showed New York Republican governor Thomas Dewey taking the presidency from Truman that year, and since Saltonstall, a popular moderate, would be difficult to beat, Jack backed away from challenging him. He focused, instead, on the possibility of running for governor. As a prelude, he began spending three or four days a week in Ma.s.sachusetts speaking before civic groups-less to make clear where he stood on public questions than to get himself known by as many attentive citizens as possible. He largely stuck to safe issues such as the communist danger, at home and abroad, veterans' benefits, a balanced approach to labor unions, and the need to increase New England's economic compet.i.tiveness.
The most striking feature of his travels around the state is the energy it required and how forcefully it demonstrates his determination to advance to higher political office. The trips from Was.h.i.+ngton to Boston by plane and back to D.C. by train in an uncomfortable sleeping-car berth that left him bleary-eyed the next day were reason enough not to take on the job. Visits to the 39 cities and 312 towns in Ma.s.sachusetts by car were an additional argument against launching a statewide campaign he might not win. He followed a grueling schedule, often attending twelve or more events a day, speaking at Communion breakfasts, church socials, Elks clubs, fraternal groups, Holy Name Societies, PTAs, VFW or American Legion chapters, volunteer fire departments, and women's organizations. To reach as many towns as possible, Jack, his driver (an ex-prizefighter), and two or three of his supporters usually began the day at dawn and ended at midnight, eating cheeseburgers and drinking milkshakes along the way. John Galvin, who accompanied Kennedy on many of these weekends, remembered that with no state expressways and few nice motels, "we usually ended up sleeping in a crummy small-town hotel with a single electric lightbulb hanging from the ceiling over the bed and a questionable bathtub down at the far end of the hall."
Jack suffered almost constant lower back pain and spasms in spite of his 1944 surgery. And no wonder: X rays of his back showed that by 1950, the fourth lumbar vertebra had narrowed from 1.5 cm to 1.1 cm, indicating further collapse in the bones supporting his spinal column. By March 1951, there would be clear compression fractures in his lower spine. At his age, this may have been another indication of the price paid for his steroid therapy. At the end of each day on the road, Jack would climb into the backseat of the car, where, as his friend and expert on state politics Dave Powers recalled, "he would lean back... and close his eyes in pain." At the hotel, he would use crutches to help himself up stairs and then soak in a hot bath for an hour before going to bed. "The pain," Powers added, "often made him tense and irritable with his fellow travelers."
Like a general fighting a war, Powers had tacked a state map to the wall of Jack's Boston apartment on Bowdoin Street and began using colored pins to show where they had been. Jack pressed Powers to fill the gaps with dates in the neglected cities and towns. "When we've got this map completely covered with pins," Jack would say, "that's when I'll announce that I'm going to run for statewide office."
Jack was away from Was.h.i.+ngton so much that veteran Mississippi congressman John Rankin told him and Smathers, who was spending a lot of time in Florida preparing for a 1950 Senate campaign, "You young boys go home too much.... I've got my people convinced that the Congress of the United States can't run without me. I don't go home during the Session because I don't want them to find out any different.... You fellows are home every week-you're never around here.... And your people are finally going to realize the Congress can run just as good without you as with you. And then you're in trouble."
By the fall of 1947, Ma.s.sachusetts' newspapers had begun speculating that Jack was a possible candidate for the Senate or governors.h.i.+p. And by 1948, Henry Wallace's Progressive party backers in the state declared themselves ready to support him for governor. Since he seemed to be a strong labor advocate and his anticommunism would have little impact on foreign policy as governor, he was more acceptable to Progressives than his rivals for the nomination, traditional Democrats former governor Maurice Tobin and Paul Dever, the front-runner. Progressives also considered Kennedy much preferable to inc.u.mbent Republican governor Robert F. Bradford.
But a private Roper poll in June 1948 persuaded Jack not to run. The survey showed Jack losing to Bradford, 43.3 to 39.8 percent. Neither this small margin nor a straw poll of Democrats that put Jack and Tobin in a dead heat and Jack ahead of Dever by almost two to one was enough to convince him otherwise. More important was evidence that only five months before the election, he had made little impression on Ma.s.sachusetts voters as a potential governor and officeholder: 85 percent of the Roper survey said they knew too little about Kennedy to predict whether he would be a good governor, while 64 percent said they did not have enough information to cite anything about him or his policies that they particularly liked. So it was time to wait. In the meantime, reelection to the House was a.s.sured. With no challenger in the primary or the general election, Jack received 94,764 votes, over 25,000 more than in his first race.
Jack had no illusions about winning higher office: As he knew from the history of Ma.s.sachusetts politics, money and a winning strategy were essential for success. His father's wealth relieved him of fund-raising concerns. And so in January 1949, he began focusing on the issues that he believed could carry him to the State House or the Senate in 1952.
If Jack needed additional inducement to bear the burdens of a statewide campaign, he found it in the public response in 1950 to a family tragedy suffered by Mayor James Curley and the pa.s.sing of his grandfather, Honey Fitz. Early in the year, the deaths of two of Curley's four surviving children-five others and his wife had already pa.s.sed away-stunned Boston. Curley's forty-one-year-old daughter Mary died unexpectedly from a cerebral hemorrhage and her thirty-six-year-old brother succ.u.mbed the same day in the same way. Eight months later Honey Fitz, at age eighty-seven, died of old age. Curley's tragedy had brought over 50,000 people from around the state to his home to pay their respects. Likewise, more than 3,500 people attended the church service to mark Honey Fitz's pa.s.sing. To Jack, it was more than a demonstration of affection for two legendary public figures; "it made him realize" more fully than before, Billings said, "the extraordinary impact a politician can have on the emotions of ordinary people"-indeed, on the substance of their lives. This was something good and powerful, and it stirred not only Jack's heart but his ego.
In laying the groundwork for a 1952 campaign, Jack could have chosen to emphasize domestic matters such as education, veterans' housing, unemployment, union rights, rent control, health care and insurance, reduced government spending, and lower taxes-all of which he addressed repeatedly during his first two House terms. But he did not see these as stirring the kind of public pa.s.sion that he hoped to summon in a statewide race. The key, he believed, to commanding broad and favorable attention was a focus on foreign policy, anticommunism in particular. As he would say in a speech in 1951, "Foreign policy today, irrespective of what we might wish, in its impact on our daily lives, overshadows everything else. Expenditures, taxation, domestic prosperity, the extent of social services-all hinge on the basic issue of war or peace."
IN CONSISTENTLY SEIZING upon foreign affairs and anticommunism as his campaign themes, Jack identified himself not with one party or the other but with the national interest. When it suited him, he could be highly partisan. During the 1948 presidential campaign, for example, he aggressively attacked the Grand Old Party for its support of special interests and "perpetual, unending war on all fronts against the rights and aspirations of American workers." He called the Republicans "vicious" and complained that "they follow the Hitler line-no matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the ma.s.ses will regard it as truth." Once he launched his own campaign in 1949, however, he aimed to win voter backing by espousing "Americanism." (Jack may have remembered the observation of Pennsylvania Republican boss Boise Penrose in 1920 when asked for the meaning of "Americanism," which Warren G. Harding was advocating in the presidential race. "d.a.m.ned if I know," Penrose disarmingly replied. "But you can be sure it will get a lot of votes.") upon foreign affairs and anticommunism as his campaign themes, Jack identified himself not with one party or the other but with the national interest. When it suited him, he could be highly partisan. During the 1948 presidential campaign, for example, he aggressively attacked the Grand Old Party for its support of special interests and "perpetual, unending war on all fronts against the rights and aspirations of American workers." He called the Republicans "vicious" and complained that "they follow the Hitler line-no matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the ma.s.ses will regard it as truth." Once he launched his own campaign in 1949, however, he aimed to win voter backing by espousing "Americanism." (Jack may have remembered the observation of Pennsylvania Republican boss Boise Penrose in 1920 when asked for the meaning of "Americanism," which Warren G. Harding was advocating in the presidential race. "d.a.m.ned if I know," Penrose disarmingly replied. "But you can be sure it will get a lot of votes.") "Americanism" for Jack mostly meant anticommunism, and his political timing was astute. In January 1949, American anxiety over the communist threat was reaching fever pitch. Between 1946 and 1949, warnings of communist infiltration of U.S. government agencies-especially the State Department-had filled the air. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had said that no less than 100,000 communists were at work in America trying to overthrow the government. Cardinal Spellman of New York warned that America was in imminent danger of a communist takeover. Under what Secretary of State Dean Acheson later described as "the incendiary influence" of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Truman administration felt compelled to set up the Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program. In January 1949, 72 percent of Americans did not believe that Russia genuinely wanted peace. A like number later in the year said that Moscow wanted to rule the world.
Events abroad gave resonance to these concerns. In 1948, a successful communist coup in Czechoslovakia had solidified Soviet control of Eastern Europe; Western Europe, despite the Marshall Plan, was still far from a postwar economic recovery and seemed vulnerable to communist political subversion and military attack; and the civil war in China between the nationalists and communists had just turned decisively in Mao's favor with the planned retreat of Chiang's forces to Formosa.
Jack began using foreign policy issues for a statewide campaign as early as the fall of 1947. In an endors.e.m.e.nt of a $227 million aid request to defend Italy from "the onslaught of the communist minority," Jack depicted the country "as the initial battleground in the communist drive to capture western Europe." Jack's strongly worded appeal reflected his genuine concern about the Soviet threat to Europe and America, but he also knew that it was excellent politics in a state with a significant Italian voting bloc. Nor did he overlook the political advantage (from Ma.s.sachusetts' Jewish and Polish minorities) of urging an end to a Palestine arms embargo, which deprived Jews of "the opportunity to defend themselves and carve out their part.i.tion," and the admission to the United States of eighteen thousand displaced Polish soldiers, which was a small atonement for "the betrayal of their native country" by FDR at the Yalta Conference. Jack made no mention of Roosevelt's limited options in helping Poland as the war was ending or of his father's readiness to sacrifice Poland to Hitler's ambitions five years before.
The common thread running through these p.r.o.nouncements was the defense of the West against a communist advance. At times, however, overreaction to communist dangers and political cynicism skewed Jack's judgment on international affairs. Chiang's defeat in 1949, for example, provoked Kennedy into the least-astute foreign policy p.r.o.nouncement of his young political career. "The failure of our foreign policy in the Far East," he announced on the House floor and then in a speech in Salem, Ma.s.sachusetts, "rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State." America's refusal to provide military aid unless there was a coalition government in China had crippled Chiang's nationalists. "So concerned were our diplomats and their advisers, the [Owen] Lattimores and the [John K.] Fairbanks, with the imperfections of the democratic system in China after twenty years of war, and the tales of corruption in high places, that they lost sight of our tremendous stake in a non-communist China.... What our young men had saved [in World War II], our diplomats and our president have frittered away." His conviction that American actions were more responsible for events in China than what the Chinese themselves did helped agitate unrealistic judgments on the power of the United States to shape political developments everywhere in the world. Kennedy's comments also encouraged right-wing complaints that the Truman administration had "lost" China and helped destroy the credibility of the State Department's experts on Asia.
Coming so soon after Truman had won a stunning upset victory in the 1948 campaign, which made him a dominant political force, Jack's attack on the White House indicates how strongly he felt about the communist danger. Yet he also knew that it was very good politics: What better way to command the attention of Ma.s.sachusetts voters than to take issue with the head of his own party on a matter most people in the state saw as he did? In 1949, anticommunism was a surefire issue for any aspiring national politician: 83 percent of Americans favored registration of communists with the Justice Department; 87 percent thought it wise to remove communists from jobs in defense industries; and 80 percent supported the signing of loyalty oaths by union leaders.
Playing this card meant sometimes playing rough, but Jack was getting more used to that, too. He admired George Smathers's 1950 Senate nomination campaign against inc.u.mbent Democrat Claude Pepper, in which Smathers successfully exploited Pepper's reputation as a doctrinaire New Dealer and forceful advocate of the welfare state, which opened him to attacks as a Soviet sympathizer and "Stalin's mouthpiece in the Senate," or "Red" Pepper, as unscrupulous opponents called him. Whimsically taking advantage of the climate of suspicion and the extraordinary ignorance of his audience, Smathers shamelessly described Pepper in a speech as an "extrovert," who practiced "nepotism" with his sister-in-law and "celibacy" before his marriage, and had a sister who was a Greenwich Village "thespian."
Nevertheless, in 1949-50, despite his hyperbole about China and uncritical support of Smathers, Jack was relatively restrained in his attacks on Truman's national security and foreign policies. He did focus on "the lack of adequate national planning for civil defense in case of a national emergency," complaining that only one man was working full-time on the matter of "wartime civil disaster relief.... It is amazing to learn, particularly in view of the President's recent disclosure of Russia's Atomic Bomb, that at this late date no further progress has been made in setting up an adequate and organized system of Civil Defense." Jack's office informed forty-five newspaper editors in Ma.s.sachusetts about a letter he had sent to Truman regarding the problem. Kennedy worried that in case of an atomic attack no one would have a clear idea of how to respond. By July, with the United States now fighting in Korea and the administration giving little heed to Jack's warnings, he decried the "inexcusable delay" in the failure to set up an adequate program to cope with a surprise attack. When ten thousand copies of a government manual on how to protect oneself from atomic radiation "sold like hot cakes," Jack saw it as a kind of vindication.
But nothing provoked Jack's criticism of the administration more than initial U.S. defeats in Korea. He said that the reverses in the fighting in the summer of 1950 forcefully demonstrated "the inadequate state of our defense preparations. Our military arms and our military manpower have been proven by the Korean incident to have been dangerously below par." He had already taken the administration to task on preparedness in February, when he had inserted a column by Joseph and Stewart Alsop in the Congressional Record Congressional Record attacking Defense Secretary Louis A. Johnson for failing to tell the public about U.S. military weakness. Jack now also attacked Truman for failing to prepare the country to defend its interests in Europe as well as in Asia. He believed that the United States had insufficient forces to fight in Korea and hold the line in Western Europe, where he said the Soviets had eighty divisions to the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization's twelve. attacking Defense Secretary Louis A. Johnson for failing to tell the public about U.S. military weakness. Jack now also attacked Truman for failing to prepare the country to defend its interests in Europe as well as in Asia. He believed that the United States had insufficient forces to fight in Korea and hold the line in Western Europe, where he said the Soviets had eighty divisions to the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization's twelve.
Jack's criticism reflected popular feeling: Whereas a majority of Americans consistently approved of Truman's leaders.h.i.+p in 1949 and initially rallied around him after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, only 37 to 43 percent thought he was doing a good job after that. By November 1950, Americans were more critical than approving of the administration's Korean policy. After driving North Korean forces back above the Thirty-eighth Parallel in September and then crossing into North Korea in hopes of unifying the peninsula under a pro-Western government in Seoul, the United States found itself in a wider war with China, which had entered the fighting in November. A Chinese offensive that pushed U.S. forces back below the Thirty-eighth Parallel-arousing fears of an extended, costly war-convinced 71 percent of Americans that the administration's management of the conflict was only fair or poor.
In November 1950, in a seminar at the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration, Jack spoke candidly about many of the key issues and personalities of the times. In contrast with Truman, who had vetoed the McCarran Act, which required the registration of communists and communist-front organizations and provided for their internment during a national emergency, Jack said that he had voted for it and complained that not enough was being done to combat communists in the U.S. government. He also said that he had little regard for the foreign policy leaders.h.i.+p of the president or Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
As for Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who early in 1950 had begun stirring sharp debate with unproved accusations about widespread subversion among government officials under FDR and Truman, Jack had little quarrel with him, saying, "He may have something." It was not simply that his father, sister Eunice, and he were personally acquainted with McCarthy; Jack valued his anticommunism, even if it were overdrawn, as well as his "energy, intelligence, and political skill in abundant qualities." At a Harvard Spee Club dinner in February 1952, when a speaker praised the university for never having produced an Alger Hiss, a former State Department official under suspicion of spying for Moscow, or a Joe McCarthy, Jack uncharacteristically made a public scene, angrily saying, "How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!" Jack was just as sympathetic to Richard Nixon, with whom he had established a measure of personal rapport during their service in the House. He openly declared himself pleased that Nixon, a tough anticommunist, had beaten liberal Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas in a 1950 California Senate race, and he had no complaints about Nixon's depiction of Douglas as a "fellow traveler" or the "Pink Lady."
Like so many others in the country, Jack was partly blind to the political misjudgments and moral failings generated by the anticommunism of the time. Fearful that America was losing the Cold War, supposedly because of disloyal U.S. officials, and that McCarthy was correct in trying to root out government subversives, millions of Americans uncritically accepted unproved allegations that abused the civil liberties of loyal citizens. Unlike Truman, who in March 1950 called McCarthy "a ballyhoo artist" making "wild charges," Jack was all too ready to take McCarthy's accusations about government spies at face value. Overreacting to the events of 1949-50, Jack saw the dangers of communist success compelling the sacrifice of some traditional freedoms. He was ready to place limits on dissent as a way to give it freer rein at some future time. Less than two years later and forever thereafter, Jack tried to deny the generally accurate portrayal in a New Republic New Republic article of what he had said at the Harvard seminar. article of what he had said at the Harvard seminar.
Unlike Joe McCarthy, Kennedy never engaged in systematic red-baiting or the repeated use of innuendo to destroy anyone's reputation. And by the end of 1951, he publicly declared that the issue of communists in the executive branch was no longer of importance and that accusations of communists in the Foreign Service were "irrational." Yet there is no question that he had taken advantage of the anticommunist mood to advance his political standing in Ma.s.sachusetts by voicing policy differences with Truman and his administration, though, unlike McCarthy, Kennedy's opposition rested princ.i.p.ally on matters of substantive concern that had some merit.
The issue of how to defend Western Europe with limited resources in the midst of the Korean fighting is a case in point. Jack believed that Europe was America's first and most important line of defense against a Soviet advance in the Cold War. To better inform himself about European defense needs, he spent five weeks in January and February 1951 traveling from England to Yugoslavia. On his return, Jack gave a nationwide radio talk carried by 540 stations of the Mutual Broadcasting Company on "Issues in the Defense of Western Europe." Sixteen days later he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees. His balanced, sensible a.n.a.lysis of European dangers was in striking contrast to some of his earlier overdrawn rhetoric about foreign affairs and won bipartisan approval. His conversations with U.S. representatives and high government officials in England, France, Italy, West Germany, Yugoslavia, and Spain, he said, made clear that the Soviets would not invade Western Europe in the coming year. Since "the Russians had not attacked before, why should they now when the bomb is still as much a deterrent as it was before?" An additional restraint on Soviet aggression was the "tremendous" problem Moscow would face of feeding Western Europe following any conquest. More important, Jack wondered why they would "take the risk of starting a war, when the best that they could get would be a stalemate, during which they would be subjected to atomic bombing? Why should they throw everything into the game, why should they take risks that they don't have to-especially when things are going well in the Far East? In addition, Stalin is an old man, and old men are traditionally cautious."
Because "a series of chain events as in the first war" might produce a conflict anyway, Kennedy continued to urge a military buildup. He was against strict reliance on U.S. forces, however, instead encouraging a ratio system in which the Europeans would match each American division with six of their own, warning that without such a commitment from its allies, the United States would find itself burdened with a disproportionate responsibility for Europe's defense. Because the White House opposed a ratio system and seemed unlikely to enforce it, Jack also urged that the Congress monitor any commitments the Europeans made to the buildup. This was not a backhanded proposal for pulling out of Europe; rather, he wanted to protect the American economy from excessive burdens by getting the Europeans to do their share.
In his testimony, Jack had the added satisfaction of directly separating himself from his father's continuing advocacy of isolationism. Georgia senator Walter George asked him to comment on a speech Joe gave in December 1950 urging withdrawal from Europe. Joe's speech was another demonstration of his inability to translate his realistic prognostications on the domestic economy into wise a.s.sessments of international affairs. "The truth," Joe said, "is that our only real hope is to keep Russia, if she chooses to march, on the other side of the Atlantic. It may be that Europe for a decade or a generation or more will turn communistic." In contrast, Jack testified that losing the "productive facilities" of Western Europe would make matters much more difficult for the United States in the Cold War and thought "we should do our utmost within reason to save it." Jack's differences with his father on foreign affairs were no bar to the great family enterprise of advancing Jack's political career: Joe promptly paid for the printing and distribution of ten thousand copies of Jack's testimony.
Jack's conviction about the importance of foreign affairs to the nation's future and, more narrowly, to his 1952 political campaign moved him to focus his attention on more than Western Europe. In April 1951, he spoke to a Ma.s.sachusetts Taxpayers Foundation meeting in Boston about Middle Eastern and Asian problems susceptible to Soviet exploitation. In Morocco, Iran, Egypt, Indochina, Malaya, Burma, India, and Pakistan, Jack said, the "nationalistic pa.s.sions... directed primarily against the Colonial policies of the West" were of great consequence to America. To combat Soviet efforts to take control in these countries, Kennedy wanted the United States to develop nonmilitary techniques of resistance that would not create suspicions of neo-imperialism or add to the country's financial burden. The problem, as Jack saw it, was not simply to be anticommunist but to stand for something that these emerging nations would find appealing. Communism was spreading because the democracies had failed, especially in Asia, to explain themselves effectively to the ma.s.ses or to make the potential ameliorating effects of democracy on their lives apparent. Too many subjects of Western colonial rule remembered the cruelty of their masters to accept their systems of self-government as transparently superior to communism.
To learn more, Jack-accompanied by his brother Robert and sister Pat-made a seven-week, 25,000-mile trip that fall to Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, Singapore, Thailand, French Indochina, Korea, and j.a.pan. "I was anxious to get some first-hand knowledge of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of our policies in the Middle East and in the Far East," he told a nationwide radio audience on his return. He had wanted to learn "how those peoples regarded us and our policies, and what you and I might do in our respective capacities to further the cause of peace." Along the way he met with U.S. and foreign military chiefs as well as prime ministers, amba.s.sadors, ministers, consuls, businessmen, and ordinary citizens willing to speak spontaneously about current and future international relations.
The journey became a chance for Jack not only to educate himself about regions, countries, and peoples with which he had small acquaintance but also to get to know his twenty-six-year-old younger brother, Robert, better. The eight-year gap in their ages had made them almost distant relatives, separated by the different rhythms of their lives. Robert, who had briefly worked in Jack's 1946 campaign after returning from navy service, had graduated from Harvard in 1948, where he had majored in "football" and earned poor grades. He was reluctantly accepted by the University of Virginia's law school, where his diligence carried him through to an L.L.B. and a respectable grade point average that placed him in the upper half of his cla.s.s.
Unlike Jack, who found much attraction in iconoclasm, Robert was a conformist who courted Rose and Joe by being as devout as his mother and a faithful reflector of his father's views and wishes. Bobby, as his siblings and friends called him, was the first of the Kennedy children to have a profession, get married, and have children. In 1950, at the age of twenty-five, he wed Ethel Skakel, the next-to-youngest of seven children of a wealthy Chicago Catholic family that shared the Kennedys' conservative values.
Only after prodding from Joe had Jack taken Bobby with him on his Middle Eastern and Asian trip. Jack feared that his often moody, taciturn, brusque, and combative brother would be "a pain in the a.s.s." But Bobby's lighter, less apparent side as a relentless teaser endeared him to Jack. There was more at work than shared humor. Because both brothers, as historian Ronald Steel believes, "shunned open displays of emotion as a sign of weakness, the preferred mode of discourse was kidding. This permitted familiarity without the danger of vulnerability or sentiment." As important, Bobby's determined efforts to make objective sense of what they were finding and his unblinking realism deepened Jack's respect for him. Bobby's emphasis on "the importance of a.s.sociating ourselves with the people rather than just the governments, which might be transitional, transitory; the mistake o