by Thomas Maier
JOHN F. KENNEDY’S appearance before this American Legion post was a remarkable way for a future American president to begin his political career. Though the National Archives records this talk as JFK’s first public address, few historians have examined it in any great detail, even though Kennedy’s comments were exceptional. To be sure, De Valera’s positions were hardly acceptable to most American politicians after the war; nor were they acceptable to the press:“No act of Prime Minister Eamon De Valera’s public life had evoked more world-wide criticism comment than his call upon the German Minister in Dublin to express his condolences upon the reported death of Adolf Hitler,” observed the New York Times. “In many places it was decried as a first-class blunder.” The newspaper also sharply criticized De Valera’s courtesy call in an editorial:“Considering the character and the record of the man for whose death he was expressing grief, there is obviously something wrong with the protocol, the neutrality or Mr. De Valera.”Three months after his son’s speech, Joe Kennedy received a letter from an old friend at the U.S. embassy in Dublin that urged him to separate from De Valera’s decisions “placing this country on record as a protector and an apologist for the Nazi regime. If I were an American of Irish descent, I would very much resent such a policy.”
But neither Joe Kennedy nor his eldest surviving son had any plans to disassociate themselves from the Irish leader, even after De Valera’s questionable call on Hitler’s death. For the predominantly Irish Catholic crowd gathered that day at the American Legion post, Jack Kennedy’s comments were not considered particularly controversial or politically adventurous. Many were Irish immigrants or descendants strongly allied with the Irish cause who viewed De Valera as a folk hero. Though Jack Kennedy carefully crafted a moderate image on financial and domestic matters in the United States, this speech proved that when it came to Irish freedom, he was no middle-of-the-roader. Somehow, it seemed fitting that, in his first public address as a soon-to-be candidate, Jack Kennedy underlined his natural affinity with the Irish.
ALTHOUGH JOE KENNEDY had left Boston behind in disgust nearly two decades earlier and moved his large, ambitious family to New York, the Kennedys, in a sense, never left Boston. Both the Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds were too engrained in the fabric of Boston’s political life not to recognize the electoral advantage for Joe’s sons. Joe Jr.’s selection as a 1940 Democratic Party delegate from Boston and Honey Fitz’s own last hurrah as a 1942 Senate candidate in Massachusetts were preludes to Joe Kennedy’s grand political scheme. After Joe Jr.’s death, the senior Kennedy pursued a relentless campaign of speeches for the Massachusetts Commerce Department, ostensibly reviewing business conditions around the state, but, in effect, extending the public’s awareness of the Kennedy name; indeed, publicity about the Kennedys often made it appear as though they had never left Boston. Yet Joe Kennedy, still nursing the slights of yesteryear, never denied his ambivalence. “That’s exactly why I left Boston,” he admitted in the late 1950s, when asked about the anti-Catholic prejudice in the city of his birth. Only as a postscript did he add,“They tell me it’s better now.”
During the ensuing years, Joe Kennedy had learned a hard lesson in politics— even with millions of dollars at his disposal, the path was too difficult alone. To the Roosevelt administration, he was just an Irish Catholic with his own portfolio, a man lacking any real political organization or geographic base behind him to compel action. After the 1942 election, Kennedy met with FDR and “point[ed] out to him that he had failed to appoint an Irish Catholic or a Catholic to an important war position since 1940,” an omission, he emphasized, that was “not conducive to strengthening the Democratic Party.” Yet, without a well-organized constituency of his own, Kennedy could be ignored. Early that year, his father-in-law, Honey Fitz (“John F,” as Joe called him), urged Boston Congressman John W. McCormack to speak to Roosevelt about appointing Kennedy to a post in the Defense Department. When McCormack brought up the subject at the White House, Roosevelt “at once replied that as far as he was concerned personally, he had great affection for me, but I was of course a tough Irishman and very stubborn,” as Kennedy recorded in his diary. Roosevelt claimed that Kennedy was one of the few who didn’t offer his services when America jumped into the war. Kennedy had indeed offered to help, but he didn’t see the point now of arguing with the White House. Certainly by the mid–1940s, Kennedy realized that to achieve political success for his sons—the heirs to his political ambitions—he’d have to rely on a different approach.
Money would become the lubricant of politics in postwar America, though politics in Boston in 1946 still depended very much on ward healers and fixers. Patronage and graft were often the only means to get ahead at City Hall. The Kennedys realized that their plans to return to Boston would depend in part on the clannishness of the Irish and an organization of men and women, most of them Catholics, who were very familiar with the city’s parochial politics. Starting with this first campaign for Congress, each campaign for Jack Kennedy would envelope two distinct camps—the Irish and the non-Irish. There were Jack’s navy buddies, Harvard roommates and intellectual-minded liberals in Cambridge who reflected part of Kennedy’s psyche, as if it were one side of the brain. And then there was the Irish crowd—generally more practical, more socially conservative, more politically intuitive, and, in a real sense, more loyal personally. They might not be asked into the strategy sessions, or become congressional staffers, but they could be counted on to share a joke or accept a particularly odious task. They could take a buck from the old man’s payroll, but they also shared his dream to elect Jack the first Irish Catholic president of the United States, as if it were some ancient quest to crown a king.
Given Jack’s degree of education and worldliness, what was perhaps most remarkable was his ability to relate to the old-school pols who remembered the days when Irish immigrants were fresh off the wharf. As historian James MacGregor Burns observed: “Some politicians might have broken away from the immigrant world and embraced the more edifying, more sophisticated, and more exciting world of liberal intellectuals. But for Kennedy this would have meant breaking away not just from a remote background but from a dominant family whose powerful way of life was still strong within him. And symbolizing that family—standing guard, as it were, over the links between him and the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys—was his father . . . the example of a self-confident man of affairs who had succeeded as a Catholic and an immigrant’s grandson.” Dave Powers, a young man recruited by Jack from the Charleston neighborhood who became perhaps the closest of the “Irish Mafia” around him, agreed that the skinny rich kid with the charming manner was a hybrid. “It was a strange thing,” Powers said later, “while Jack Kennedy was a completely new type of Irish politician himself, having come from such a different background, he was, at bottom, very Irish and he could never hear enough of the old Irish stories.”
THE MASTER STORYTELLER of the 1946 campaign was also its tactical mastermind—Joseph L. Kane, Joe Kennedy’s sixty-six-year-old cousin, the son of P. J.Kennedy’s sister from a considerably less affluent side of the family. Curt and easily agitated, Kane had toiled in the grimy vineyard of Massachusetts politics for forty years. He knew everybody and every favor. Usually seen wearing a fedora and chomping a cigar between his false teeth, Kane provided a tutorial on Boston politics for Joe Kennedy’s son in the same way that Jack earlier had attended the London School of Economics for lessons in political economy. An obituary years later described Kane as “one of Boston’s most colorful political figures,” and “a familiar figure in the cafeterias around City Hall.” In her memoir, Rose Kennedy admitted that “Cousin Joe was quite a rough diamond, with an abrasive style of thought and speech. My husband wasn’t sure how he and Jack would get along, but they hit if off quite well. Jack was surprised, entertained and informed.”
Joe Kane had seen it all. In 1937, he served as a campaign manager for another Irish-American, Maurice Tobin, elected to City Hall, and helped run th
e 1942 Senate bid for Honey Fitz. Back in 1918, while working for Peter Tague, a bitter Fitzgerald opponent, Kane contested the congressional race in which Honey Fitz seemed to squeak by with 238 votes but was removed from his seat because of voting irregularities. Somewhat to Joe Kennedy’s secret delight, his cousin and his father-in-law remained political enemies for years. To the public in 1946, Honey Fitz appeared the éminence grise behind his grandson’s candidacy, even sharing the same address at the Bellevue Hotel in downtown Boston. But in reality, Kane was the relative providing the best advice.“He was quite old, but he was a very wise, wiley figure,” Bobby Kennedy recalled of Kane.“My grandfather, of course, felt very strongly about it, and he felt very close to my brother. But I think that his effectiveness, in some of these areas, was not overwhelming.”
At an early strategy session, the octogenarian Honey Fitz unexpectedly showed up, ready for action, as if breathing in new life from a room filled with smoke. Kane immediately turned to a gofer.
“Get that son of a bitch out of here,” he demanded, in the direction of the former mayor.
Overhearing it, the candidate was shocked.
“Who?” Jack asked.“Grampa?”
Kane nodded, insisting the old man leave the room. When Jack later relayed the story, Joe Kennedy agreed with his cousin’s decision. Kane also convinced him that Jack should run for Congress rather than as lieutenant governor—a wise choice in a year when the Democrats would wind up losing the statewide races to the Republicans.
As tough-talking as he seemed, Kane’s nimble mind immediately assessed the political chances of the young candidate. “Your Jack is worth a king’s ransom,” Kane told the candidate’s father.“He has poise, a fine Celtic map. A most engaging smile.” Joe Kennedy was amazed by his son’s political transformation, his willingness to shake hands for hours. “I never thought Jack had it in him,” he marveled. Kane advised his cousin that he should “buy him in” and fork over the money for a first-class campaign. “It takes three things to win,” Kane taught his pupils. “The first is money and the second is money and third is money.”
Along with the neighborhood galoots and the professional pols enticed by cash, the Kennedy campaign employed sophisticated advertising and one of the nation’s top election polling firms to gauge the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. Despite his old-school manner, Kane thought up the campaign’s forward-looking slogan:“A New Generation Offers a Leader.” It exquisitely matched Jack Kennedy and the image they wanted to project. In a crowded Democratic field of ten candidates, cash helped eliminate the competition. One candidate served as a stalking horse, given $7,500 by Kane to “stay in or get out” of the race, depending on how he was needed. When long-time city council member Joseph Russo jumped into the race, Kane found another Joseph Russo and convinced him to put his name on the ballot to confuse the electorate and siphon off votes from the real thing—a ploy that Honey Fitz remembered from the old days. (Faced with a similar situation in 1907, Fitzgerald issued campaign ads that warned:“Vote for the original John F. Beware of substitutes!”) Kennedy’s campaign wasn’t the only one employing underhanded tactics. In some predominantly Irish districts, one candidate charged erroneously that Jack’s sister, Kathleen, had married a relative of Oliver Cromwell, the hated British foe, and brought up the Massacre at Drogheda and memories of Cromwell’s Irish victims.
Not to be outdone, Joe Kennedy enlisted an old Irish pol, Michael J. Ward, who years earlier as Boston’s School Committee chairman had proposed half seriously that Eamon De Valera be imported as the city’s new superintendent of schools. At the tea parties and other affairs sponsored by the campaign, another Irishman, Joseph F. Leahy, sang Irish songs, and Jack in particular enjoyed hearing renditions of “Danny Boy.”The Harvard boy, never distant or haughty, reveled in the company of these old Irish pols and their tales. Patsy Mulkern, a crusty pol brought in by Kane, showed Jack how to work a crowd in taverns, hotel lobbies and street corners. On their first day of campaigning together in East Boston, Mulkern upbraided the millionaire’s son on his appearance.“For the love of Christ, take the sneakers off, Jack,” exclaimed Mulkern, who wasn’t too fond of Jack’s pink Oxford shirt, either. “Are you going to play golf, or are you a candidate?” Mulkern was “one of the Damon Runyon characters that you’d get from the South End,” recalled Frank Morrissey, another Kennedy aide. “A real Irish talker, or whisperer or wailer, but he could really talk and he would be in an out with Jack to give him an understanding of how the rougher element in the particular Congressional district worked.”
BY 1946, THE BOSTON of Kennedy’s youth was rapidly changing. Within two years, the city’s two most familiar Irish Catholic figures had faded from their positions of authority.
James Michael Curley, the nemesis of Honey Fitz during his own career at City Hall, was old and broke, forced to pay a huge sum of money after being convicted of fraud. He’d spent several years in the political wilderness, but managed to win the 11th Congressional District seat in 1942. His need for cash convinced him not to stay long in Washington. Joe Kennedy, mainly through Kane’s intervention, offered to pay off Curley’s debts, estimated at around $40,000. He’d also finance an upcoming mayoral campaign to the tune of $100,000, if Curley would relinquish the congressional seat being eyed for his son. Curley took the money. He predicted the young man taking his place possessed a “double-barreled name” sure to win the election. As he assessed,“With those two names, Fitzgerald and Kennedy, how can he miss?” Though Curley won his last hurrah for City Hall in 1945 (the thinly veiled novel of Curley’s life, The Last Hurrah, was eventually made into a movie starring Spencer Tracy), the Purple Shamrock was convicted for mail fraud and sent to federal prison. The man of a thousand comebacks would never recover.
Another constant in the lives of Boston’s Irish Catholics—Cardinal William Henry O’Connell—died in his bed at age eighty-four. A stalwart of orthodoxy and ethnocentricity, O’Connell’s devotion to the cause of Irish freedom was nearly as great as it was to the church. Both a confessor and a protector of the Kennedys, O’Connell was succeeded by his top aide, Bishop Richard Cushing, a son of South Boston Irish immigrants, who would become even more of a family intimate. At first glance, Cushing, with his lantern-jaw, gravelly voice and rugged appearance, seemed every bit as conservative as his predecessor. Like O’Connell, Cushing warned Catholics early in his career about the dangers of secularism, preferring the faithful to remain in parochial school rather than attend public institutions. Cushing, educated at the Jesuit-run Boston College, also portrayed Harvard as a citadel of anti-Catholicism and shared similar views as Joe Kennedy about the treatment of Irish Catholics in Boston. “The only place for an Irishman in Boston was in the church or in politics,” Cushing recalled of his options as a young man. “As far as banking was concerned, the ‘Irish need not apply.’”
As Cushing exerted his influence over Boston, however, his views and policies parted significantly from those of his predecessor. He spoke out strongly against incidents of violence and bigotry directed against Jews and other minorities, crimes perpetrated mainly by Catholic youths. Eventually, he helped create a Catholic-Jewish committee to foster dialogue and work for the city’s benefit. “Cushing was more than a new man in town with a different way of doing things,” wrote Thomas O’Connor in his history of the Boston Irish. “He helped define a new level of human relations in an archdiocese theretofore noted for bitter sometimes violent conflicts among people of different religious, ethnic and racial backgrounds.” From the pulpit and in public sessions, Cushing promised to refrain from “all arguments with our non-Catholic neighbors and from all purely defensive talk about Catholicism.” But Cushing’s emerging liberal views did not sit well with church conservatives such as Cardinal Spellman, an old rival from the time when they had worked together as auxiliary bishops for O’Connell in Boston. From his powerful position in New York, Spellman used his close ties with the Pope in Rome for more than a decade to
keep Cushing from being named cardinal. Cushing would overcome that obstacle with the help of the Kennedys.
DURING THE 1946 CAMPAIGN, Cushing often introduced Jack Kennedy during appearances at parochial schools, Knights of Columbus gatherings and in church meeting halls. The prelate first met Jack and his brother, Joe, during their college years. Not one to show his religious convictions openly, Jack admired the down-to-earth manner of Cushing, whose faith appeared rooted in good works rather than in ceremony or dogma. Like Kennedy himself, Cushing came to represent the intentions of many post–World War II Catholics, generations removed from the immigrant experience, who wanted to avoid the class and ethnic divisions of the past. “The Archbishop had a great feeling of affection for Jack because he represented integrity and capacity and the best that we had as far as the Irish Catholics were concerned; that he was a credit to his faith; he was a credit to his people,” recalled Morrissey, who often served as a conduit between the two. For the next decade, the major connections between Cushing and the Kennedy political organization were handled by this short, fast-talking firecracker of a man. Morrissey had gotten to know Cushing, the diocese’s chief fundraiser and head of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, and enlisted the churchman in Kennedy’s cause. “I brought Jack over and we developed, through the father, a tremendous affection that started right before the Congressional fight, that maintained itself all through the years, down to the time that Jack became President,” Morrissey recalled years later.
Although Rose and Joe Kennedy knew many priests and bishops, including the Pope himself, Cushing was different. Though tending to their family’s spiritual needs, O’Connell and Spellman were almost too diplomatic, always keeping up a barrier of protocol and decorum. Cushing had no such reserve toward the Kennedys in his manner, which was genuine and sincere. He became the spiritual counselor “for all the family,” Morrissey said. “He had a simpleness and a deep compassion and understanding, so at every crisis that they sought spiritual comfort, the Cardinal was always there—always.”