And he was on Capitol Hill much less than he was supposed to be. During his first year in Congress, he took an active role on the Housing Committee, giving a series of speeches on the postwar housing crisis, and when the Taft-Hartley Act was introduced, he opposed it on the House floor. But that fall, while he was vacationing in England after Congress had adjourned, he fell ill, and although when Congress convened in 1948, he was back on Capitol Hill, announcing that his attack of “malaria” was over, he was no longer active at all, and thereafter his rate of absenteeism was one of the highest in the House. “He had few close political friends,” one of his biographers puts it, and even those few could not pretend he was an effective congressman. His closest friend—“about his only real friend on Capitol Hill”—Florida congressman (later a senator) George Smathers, recalls that “he told me he didn’t like being a politician. He wanted to be a writer.… Politics wasn’t his bag at all.” And, Smathers recalls, “He was so shy … one of the shyest fellows I’d ever seen. If you had to pick a member of that [1947] freshman class who would probably wind up as President, Kennedy was probably the least likely.” The House bored him, said his father’s friend Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. “He never seemed to get into … political action, or any idea of promoting this or reforming that—nothing. He was sort of drifting.… He became more of a playboy.” The men who ran the House agreed. Sam Rayburn called him “a good boy” but “one of the laziest men I ever talked to.”
In 1952, he ran for the Senate, against the widely respected incumbent from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.
Favored when the campaign began, Lodge was overwhelmed by the Kennedy organization, directed for the first time by the candidate’s younger brother Robert, and by Kennedy innovation. Tens of thousands of women voters were invited—by hand-addressed, handsomely engraved invitations—to meet the candidate and what one writer called “his large and fabulous family,” including “his comely mother and three attractive, long-legged sisters.” He was overwhelmed as well by Joe’s money—some people “could live the rest of [their] lives on [the campaign’s] billboard budget alone,” one observer remarked; among the ambassador’s outlays was a $500,000 loan that rescued from bankruptcy the publisher of the Boston Post, which shortly thereafter endorsed his son—and by Jack’s charm: the attraction of his “boyish, well-bred emaciation” for women of all ages (“every woman who met Kennedy wanted either to mother him or marry him,” the Saturday Evening Post reported) was so intense it might have been humorous were it not later to become a central fact of American political life, and indeed to play a role in altering America’s political landscape. During the campaign Jack Kennedy showed a new side of himself: from Monday to Thursday, he still seemed, in Washington, merely the Georgetown playboy; from Thursday night through Sunday, he raced over Massachusetts from one end to the other; “no town was too small or too Republican for him,” an aide was to recall. By the end of the campaign, the Saturday Evening Post reported, “Jack was being spoken of as the hardest campaigner Massachusetts has ever produced.” But once he was in the Senate the House pattern was repeated (even down to elevator operators misled by his boyish looks; one of the Senate operators told him to “stand back and let the senators go first”).
During his first year in the Senate, 1953, he not only made major social news, with his spectacular marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier, but also, during the 1953 and 1954 sessions, developed proposals for New England economic expansion and took at least one stand that lifted him above the role of a senator from just a single state or region, supporting the St. Lawrence Seaway, a project long opposed by Massachusetts and New England due to apprehension over its impact on Boston’s seaport. But even during this period, he seemed to be sick quite a bit, first with one illness, then with another, although he always made light of his ailments; in July, he was hospitalized with another attack of “malaria.” And his bad back was getting worse; the marble floors of the Senate Office Building and the Capitol were hard on him; by the spring of 1954, he was on crutches; he tried to hide them before visitors entered his office, but sometimes when he went to committee meetings, there was no place to put them, and he would have to lean them against the wall behind him, in full view. He tried to play down the seriousness of his back condition, and it didn’t seem all that serious, because he was so insouciant about it. Trying to spare himself the walk through the long corridors, he requested a suite nearer the Senate floor, but he didn’t want to draw attention to the situation by emphasizing it too strongly to his party’s Senate Leader, Lyndon Johnson, and his low seniority meant that he kept the office he had. He finally stopped going back to his office between quorum calls, staying in the cloakroom or in his seat on the floor instead. Senate rules require a senator to be standing when he addresses the Chamber; his Massachusetts colleague, Leverett Saltonstall, obtained permission from the presiding officer for him to speak while sitting on the arm of his chair.
And then, in October, 1954, there was an operation on his back. Like so many of his medical procedures, this was performed while Congress was in recess for the year: most senators weren’t around, and the press wasn’t focusing on Capitol Hill. His staff made it seem as if the operation were just a run-of-the-mill back operation. When the Senate reconvened in January, 1955, he was still in the hospital, and when it was learned that he had had a second operation, on February 15, 1955, it was obvious that there were complications. Ambassador Kennedy reportedly broke into tears in a friend’s Washington office, and said Jack was going to die. But the ambassador’s friend, the publisher William Randolph Hearst Jr., quieted the rumors by saying that he had visited the ambassador’s Palm Beach residence, where Jack was convalescing, and found him “looking tanned and fit again”; for the next few weeks there were continuing reports of his imminent return to Washington, and he gave interviews in Palm Beach, after which the reporters commented on his tan. Although, in an interview at Palm Beach on May 20 with a journalist from the Standard-Times, he did make one remark out of character—“I’ll certainly be glad to get out of my 37th year”—he quickly caught himself and assured her that everything was going well, and that his situation had never been serious. “If the Senate hadn’t kept such long hours, I could have taken it easy—perhaps I mightn’t have gone to the hospital last fall. But … there’s so much walking to do at the Capitol.” And when a few days later, he finally returned to the Senate, he did so with a quip, saying that during his time away, he had read the Congressional Record every day; “that was an inspiring experience.” Acknowledging that there had been rumors that he wouldn’t return, the New York Herald Tribune said that nonetheless, “young Jack Kennedy comes from a bold and sturdy breed, and he’s back on the job again.” His concept of the job continued to differ from that of harder-working senators, however. Although upon his return, he had been “applauded by colleagues, they nevertheless found it hard to take him seriously,” says one of his biographers. “He was still young, inexperienced, ill, and, despite his marriage, a playboy with pretensions.”
Then, in Chicago in 1956, after Stevenson had startled the convention by throwing open the vice presidential nomination, suddenly Kennedy was running for it. “ ‘Old pal, you’ve got to do me a favor,’ ” George Smathers said Kennedy told him, telephoning at 1 a.m. “ ‘You’ve got to nominate me for vice president.’ I said, ‘For vice president? You’re running for vice president? … You’ve got to be kidding.’ ” Kennedy explained that he wanted the nominating speech to be made by House Majority Leader John McCormack of Massachusetts, but that McCormack wasn’t answering his phone: thirty minutes had been allotted for the speeches of each nominee, Kennedy said, “and you may have to take all the thirty minutes.” Delivering the speech the next morning, Smathers was having difficulty filling the time—“I couldn’t really think of anything he had done except he was very strongly for education”—but as it turned out he didn’t have to fill it all. “All of a sudden I had this very sharp pain in my
back,” he was to recall—and then another one, and another. “I thought, ‘I’m having a heart attack.’ ” But looking over his shoulder, he saw that the pain was being caused by the handle of the convention chairman’s large gavel, which was being jabbed vigorously into his spine. “McCormack is here! McCormack is here!” the chairman rasped. “Sam Rayburn [was] sticking me in the back … to get me to shut up … so that McCormack” could speak.
DESPITE HIS DEARTH of accomplishment, Kennedy had two things going for him at the 1956 convention: his effective star turn as the on-screen narrator of a filmed tribute to the Democratic Party that had been shown at the convention’s opening night; and the determination of party professionals to deny the vice presidential nomination to the other man trying for it: Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, anathema to the South because of his support for civil rights and to the party’s northern big-city bosses because of his sensational, nationally televised, investigations that had too often hinted at links between big-city machines and organized crime. (Johnson disliked him for a personal reason—Kefauver’s refusal to accord him the deference he demanded: after maneuvering secretly for years to deny Kefauver committee assignments to which he was entitled by seniority, in 1955 the Leader had told him openly that he wouldn’t put him on the Foreign Relations Committee because he had a “team,” of which he was captain, and Kefauver wasn’t on it; the price of Senate advancement, Johnson told him, was “to want to be” on that team.) Although at one point on the second ballot Kennedy was just thirty-eight votes short of the nomination—Johnson had taken Texas into his camp—Kefauver had enough devoted rank-and-file supporters to win. (The nomination of course was meaningless, given the Eisenhower landslide.) And in 1956 and 1957, Kennedy’s record in the Senate was little better than before. “In the terms that mattered to Johnson—which senators got things done in the Senate—Kennedy didn’t measure up,” Kennedy’s aide Ted Sorensen was to say. “So Johnson underestimated him; he, who had done everything, felt that he didn’t have to take him seriously.”
When, in January, 1957, another vacancy opened on Foreign Relations, Joe Kennedy importuned Lyndon Johnson to fill it with his son instead of Kefauver, “telling me that if I did, he’d never forget the favor for the rest of his life,” and Johnson agreed. Later, he would say that he had done so because “I kept picturing old Joe Kennedy sitting there with all that power and wealth feeling indebted to me for the rest of his life, and I sure liked that picture.” But the real reason was 1960: although as it would turn out, Kefauver would not be able to make a serious bid for the 1960 Democratic nomination, in 1957 it seemed that he would be able to—he had, after all, won all those primaries in 1952 and had won some in 1956 before bowing out of the race in Stevenson’s favor—and at that time Johnson regarded him as a serious threat for the nomination. Lyndon Johnson did not regard John Kennedy as a threat; in fact, he felt he might be a useful asset: a southern presidential candidate—a candidate from Texas, for example—would need a running mate from the Northeast; it wouldn’t be a bad idea to build one up, particularly one who had a father as powerful as Jack Kennedy’s.
Before the 1957 session ended, Kennedy rose on the Senate floor to deliver a speech on foreign relations: on the Algerian struggle for independence, criticizing not only the French refusal to allow it, but the American government’s support of the French policy. Although the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote that in Europe the speech identified Kennedy “for the first time as a fresh and independent voice of American foreign policy,” and the editorial page of the New York Times applauded it, it aroused anger in the foreign policy establishment; “even Democrats drew back.” And aside from that speech, his career in the Senate continued on a course that, in Capitol Hill terms, was charted toward mediocrity. Anecdotes—possibly exaggerated but certainly striking—abounded about his absenteeism and his irresponsibility. When he was asked to chair a new Foreign Relations subcommittee on Africa, it was recounted, Kennedy replied, “Well, if I take it, will it ever have to meet?” and accepted only when he was assured it wouldn’t. (Actually, it seems to have met at least once.) The fact that, due to his father’s fame, his speeches attracted more attention than those of other senators did not lead to more respect for him among his colleagues, but to the opposite: senators liked to categorize their colleagues as either “work horses,” men who studied hearing transcripts and department reports, did the donkey work on committees behind closed doors, and really made the Senate work, and “show horses,” men in the Senate only for the publicity it could bring them. Kennedy was, in the opinion of the “Old Bulls” who ran the Senate, a prime example of the latter breed. Looking back on Jack Kennedy’s Senate career decades after it had ended, Smathers had the same opinion of it that he had had in 1956: “not in the top echelon at all.… While he did from time to time make some brilliant speech about something or other … he was not what you would call a really effective senator.… He had a couple of pretty good ideas that he talked about, but I don’t know that anything he ever really passed … was of great significance.”
As for Lyndon Johnson, his opinion was that the young senator from Massachusetts was a “playboy” and basically lazy. “He’s smart enough,” he told Bobby Baker at the time, “but he doesn’t like the grunt work.”
“Kennedy was pathetic as a congressman and as a senator,” Johnson was to say. “He didn’t know how to address the Chair.” He was, he said on another occasion, “a young whippersnapper, malaria-ridden and yellow, sickly, sickly. He never said a word of importance in the Senate, and he never did a thing.” During his retirement, describing Kennedy as a senator, in phrases that he knew were being recorded for posterity, Johnson used similar adjectives—and added to them four final words that were, in the lexicon of Lyndon Johnson, the most damning words of all: as a senator, Lyndon Johnson said, Jack Kennedy was “weak and pallid—a scrawny man with a bad back, a weak and indecisive politician, a nice man, a gentle man, but not a man’s man.”
THERE WERE, HOWEVER, ASPECTS of the life of Jack Kennedy of which Lyndon Johnson was unaware—and which, had he known about them, might have led him to a more nuanced reading. He might have read him differently had he known what Kennedy had gone through to get to Capitol Hill—and why he hadn’t accomplished more once he was there.
Behind that easy, charming, carefree smile on the face of the ambassador’s second son was a life filled with pain—and with refusal to give in to that pain, or even, except on very rare occasions (and never in public), to acknowledge its existence.
Born on May 29, 1917, Jack Kennedy, even as a boy, seemed always to be falling ill—and doctors were never able to determine what was wrong with him. At the age of fourteen, already strikingly thin, he began to lose weight and said he was “pretty tired” all the time, and one day he collapsed with abdominal pain. The undiagnosed illness forced him to withdraw from boarding school. At Choate, where he enrolled the next year, he was frequently in the infirmary with severe stomach cramps, high fever and vomiting, and then, in January, 1934, when he was sixteen, he had to be rushed by ambulance to a hospital in New Haven, where he was kept for almost two months of humiliating and painful tests. “We are still puzzled as to the cause of Jack’s trouble,” the wife of headmaster George St. John wrote Jack’s mother, Rose. “I hope with all my heart that the doctors will find out … what is making the trouble.” But they didn’t. For a while, the diagnosis—an incorrect one—was leukemia; prayers were said for him in chapel; later the diagnosis was changed to hepatitis, also incorrect. In March, doctors released him without having been able to determine what he had suffered from; some of the symptoms had cleared up, but he still vomited frequently, and had periodic high fevers and severe cramping pain in his stomach, and almost constant fatigue, and no matter what he tried, he couldn’t gain weight.
In June, ill again, he was sent to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and then to a hospital there. “The Goddamnest hole I’ve ever seen,” he wrote
his friend Lem Billings. “I wish I was back at school.” The tests lasted for a month. “I now have a gut ache all the time.” “Shit!!” he wrote eight days later. “I’ve got something wrong with my intestines. In other words I shit blood.” There were constant tests. “I’ve had 18 enemas in three days!!! … Yesterday, I went through the most harassing experience of my life.… They put me in a thing like a barber’s chair. Instead of sitting in the chair I kneeled … with my head where the seat is.… The doctor first stuck his finger up my ass.… Then he withdrew his finger and then, the schmuck, stuck an iron tube 12 inches long and 1 inch in diameter up my ass.… Then they blew a lot of air in me to pump up my bowels. I was certainly feeling great.… I was a bit glad when they had their fill of that.… The reason I’m here is that they may have to cut out my stomach—the latest news.” For a while the tentative diagnosis was that he had chronic inflammation of the colon and small intestine, so severe that it could become life-threatening, but at the end of the tests, as Joseph Kennedy wrote Dr. St. John, “they were unable to find out what had caused Jack’s illness.” And because of the fears about the leukemia and hepatitis, he had to live with frequent blood counts: “7,000—Very Good,” he reported to a friend once. But when Mrs. St. John visited him in the hospital, he never stopped kidding with her—“Jack’s sense of humor hasn’t left him for a minute, even when he felt most miserable,” she wrote Rose. In the Mayo Clinic and the Rochester hospital, he charmed his nurses and doctors. And at Choate, when he wasn’t in the infirmary, he was the center of a circle of friends, some of whom, like the loyal Billings, he kept for life. “I’ve never known anyone in my life with such a wonderful humor—the ability to make one laugh and have a good time,” Billings was to recall. “Jack was always up to pranks and mischief,” says another friend. “Witty, unpredictable—you never knew what he was going to do.” And except for the occasional letter to Billings, “He wouldn’t ever talk about his sickness,” another friend says. “We used to joke about the fact that if I ever wrote a biography, I would call it ‘John F. Kennedy: A Medical History.’ [Yet] I seldom ever heard him complain.” And thin as he was, he never stopped trying to make the Choate football team.
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