by Thomas Maier
LEAVING HIS daughter’s body behind, Joe Kennedy flew back to America a shattered man. Once home, he finally thanked Billy’s parents for all their kindness in arranging Kick’s funeral.“The only thing that helped me retain my sanity was your understanding manner in the whole sad affair,” he wrote to the Duchess of Devonshire at summer’s end. Billy’s family put together the service at the graveside, presided over by a Catholic priest. Joe could not bear to acknowledge those around him. The duchess composed the epitaph on her gravestone: “JOY SHE GAVE JOY SHE HAS FOUND.” In this hallowed ground of the Cavendish family, there were several reminders of the contradictions in Kick’s life, including a wreath from Joe’s old nemesis, Winston Churchill. In some of his letters, Joe tried to make sense of these conflicts.
“I realize that people say,‘You have so many other children, you can’t be too depressed by Kick’s death,’ and I think that, to all intents and purposes, no one knows that I am depressed,” he confessed to the duchess.“In fact, I have never acknowledged it even to Rose who, by the way, is 10,000 percent better than I am. Her terrifically strong faith has been a great help to her, along with her very strong will and determination not to give way.”
Joe admired his wife’s faith, something he knew he didn’t possess, certainly not to the same extent, no matter how many times he attended Mass. In these tragic moments, Rose was tougher than he; the church more of a rock for her than for him. Joe found himself adrift in grief and melancholia. From the very outset, he struggled to make sense of his daughter’s death. “We know so little about the next world we must think that they wanted just such a wonderful girl for themselves,” he scribbled less than an hour after hearing the news of her death.“We must not feel sorry for her but for ourselves.”
Because of who they were in politics, the Kennedys received numerous calls of sympathy and letters of condolences from the powerful, in Boston and around the nation. Because of who they were, Irish Catholics striving in a world of bigotry and resistance, Joe would be well aware of the clash of religion and cultures inherent in his daughter’s death, and be perceptive enough to note at least some of the ironies. “If Kathleen had lived, I’d be the father of the Duchess of Devonshire, and father-in-law of the head of all the Masons in the world,” he’d later say. Because of who they were within the church, Joe Kennedy received a letter from Rome saying that the Pope was praying for the Kennedys in their bereavement, “so terribly tried by the inscrutable God’s Providence.” In a letter to his old friend, Count Galeazzi, Joe made sure the Pope accurately understood his daughter’s status within the church at the time of her death. He pointed out, as if talking to God’s intermediary, that though his daughter had married the future Duke of Devonshire, a Protestant, he had been killed in the war.“So for the last three years Kathleen has been a widow and a devoted child of the church,” he noted.
To Galeazzi, who knew that his friend’s pride and love for his children was its own religion, the eldest Kennedy could acknowledge the depth of his own grief. The deaths of his son, daughter and son-in-law Billy seemed at times more than he could bear.“I know I have never recovered from the shock of Joe’s death, and yet, it was in the war when so many other people were sharing equally devastating losses,” Joe wrote. “However, the loss of Kathleen leaves me almost without spirit. . . . The sudden death of these three children has, as you can well imagine, left its mark on me and my hopes for the future.”
Part III
Rise to the Presidency
“I have heard the statement that there will never be a Catholic President, this is all nonsense. When the right man is presented, the United States will choose him and not discriminate because of his religion.”
—ARCHBISHOP JOHN IRELAND, 1917
Chapter Seventeen
The Irish Brahmin
HENRY CABOT LODGE JR. , heir to one of the most patrician names in Massachusetts, looked unbeatable in 1952.With his slick clipped hair, modulated voice and chiseled chin, the dapper fifty-year-old legislator was “almost the archetype of the cultured, well-born and well-to-do New Englander,” the New York Times observed, his very presence a reminder of where power still resided. The Irish might dominate Boston’s inner-city wards, but statewide victories remained few and far between. Like some family heirloom, Lodge seemed destined to keep his seat in the United States Senate, the ultimate club, for a long time.
During early 1952, Lodge served as a campaign coordinator for Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential effort; he was a respected figure on the national scene and virtually ignored his own situation back home. Six years earlier, he easily won election to the Senate and he felt no compelling need in this race to campaign before necessary. Lodge’s political image so dominated the Massachusetts landscape that incumbent Governor Paul A. Dever, after carefully weighing his options, chose not to run against him. Only then did an opportunity open for another Democratic challenger, the young Congressman John F. Kennedy, who didn’t seem to have any chance of winning.
Lodge’s name was legend, as much for the deeds of his forebears as for his own. His family’s history boasted, ever so discreetly, of six U.S. senators, including his grandfather, Henry Cabot Lodge, who held the same seat continuously from 1893 to 1924. Lodge’s other ancestors included George Cabot, the nation’s first secretary of the navy, appointed by President John Adams; John Davis, who’d been both the state’s governor and a U.S. senator; and a roster of distinguished relatives that included a brigadier general in the Civil War, secretary of state and even a candidate for vice president of the United States. When his father died at an early age, Lodge’s grandfather oversaw his training and education. Lodge went to Harvard (where he captained the school’s crew team) and worked for a time as a journalist (filing dispatches for the New York Herald Tribune). As the boy wonder of Massachusetts politics in 1936, he managed to grab the Republican nomination and then beat James Michael Curley in a surprise victory for the Senate (underlying the differences in their backgrounds, the Purple Shamrock referred to Lodge as “Little Boy Blue,” but Curley’s support among the Irish was undermined by a third-party candidate put up by Father Coughlin’s Union Party). Lodge won reelection in 1942, but resigned from the Senate two years later to serve in World War II.When he returned, he ran again for the Senate, overwhelming a second Irish Catholic opponent, David Walsh, in 1946. Politically, Lodge adopted a decidedly more moderate and internationalist view than his grandfather. Nevertheless, his name stirred up visions of the retrenched Brahmin power, the kind that Jack Kennedy’s family remembered all too well.
AS A CONGRESSMAN in the 1890s, Honey Fitz had battled the “Old Senator” Lodge’s attempts to pass legislation calling for literacy tests and other anti-immigrant measures. Years later, the former mayor lost a close race with Lodge for his U.S. Senate seat in a campaign that reprised their old fight over immigrants and Lodge’s nativist views. Joe Kennedy harbored his own resentments against the Lodges.“All I ever heard when I was growing up,” he later recalled,“was how Lodge’s grandfather had helped put the stained glass windows into the Gate of Heaven Church in South Boston, and they were still talking about those stained glass windows in 1952.” Joe Kennedy’s objection seemed strictly territorial: the only ones to buy their way into the hearts of Boston’s Irish Catholics would be his family, not the Lodges.
Differences in ethnicity and religion were underlined subtly by Lodge’s 1952 campaign, but they were mentioned overtly and repeatedly by the press. In a profile of the two candidates, Time magazine identified Lodge’s opponent as “Catholic Jack Kennedy,” but made no similar reference to the senator’s religion. In the same article affirming Senator Lodge’s Brahmin background (“whose family tree is rooted in the neighborhood of Plymouth Rock”), the New York Times reported that “Representative Kennedy is Irish Catholic to the core, but strictly of the ‘lace curtain’ variety, in view of the wealth and distinction of two or three generations of forebearers in this country.”The national media, contr
ary to their later view of him, portrayed Jack Kennedy as a young Irishman, well educated and buoyed by his father’s millions, but essentially just a new edition of the same old machine that had produced his grandfather and so many other Irish pols in Boston. Kennedy’s personal proximity to the immigrant experience was presumed to be a major part of his appeal. As the Times concluded:
A factor adding unusual zest to this struggle is that, in a purely local sense, it boils down essentially to a tug of war between two antithetical religious and ethnic groups—the predominantly Catholic immigrant group on the one hand, made up of people of comparatively recent Irish, Italian, French, Polish and other European ancestries, and the largely Protestant Yankee group on the other, mainly Anglo-Saxon in origin or so long in this country as to have submerged its Celtic or Latin affinities. . . . If not all the Irish, Italians and Poles in industrial Massachusetts today are [economically] “depressed,” most of their immigrant parents and grandparents were, and they have taken their politics from them.
THESE DESCRIPTIONS of Jack Kennedy’s 1952 campaign were understandable. His previous elections had been local efforts that still relied heavily on the Joe Kanes, Patsy Mulkerns and Francis X. Morrisseys of Irish machine politics. Aides such as Billy Sutton and Dave Powers were part of the trusted inner circle who shared the same ethnicity and cultural background as Kennedy (much as his father had assembled a similar coterie of Irish-Americans in his private business enterprises), though their usefulness was questionable.“He amused my brother,” Bobby said of Sutton, “but he didn’t contribute very much.” The Senate campaign proved different and would change Jack Kennedy as a candidate. Step by step, his organization separated from the traditional Democratic Party in Boston, the vehicle used by an earlier generation of Irish Catholic politicians to get ahead. Instead, Jack relied on his father’s huge fortune to finance his own organization— in effect, creating the Kennedy Party of Massachusetts, his younger brother being its tactical boss and “ruthless” enforcer. Even if he was “Irish Catholic to the core,” as the Times put it, Jack’s public veneer would be increasingly WASPish. He became an “Irish Brahmin,” as one of his fellow Democrats said, only a bit admiringly. To realize his father’s ambition,Kennedy kept his distance from the stereotypes of his Irish heritage and hoped that the prejudices of the past might not cloud their dream.
YEARS LATER, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., a local politician known to the world as “Tip,” remembered his original impression of Jack Kennedy. The bushy-haired young man with the gleaming smile seemed only a slightly updated version of a familiar big-city Irish pol. In a way that would make his grandfather proud, Kennedy showed “a real yen for patronage,” recalled O’Neill, describing how Kennedy had prodded President Truman for his share of federal plum jobs to give out like some neighborhood chieftain. “He wanted to take care of this one; take care of that one.”The 1952 campaign demanded something different, however, far more than a local approach to politics, and the Kennedy camp responded in a way that amazed even a hand as seasoned as O’Neill.
Propelled by innovative tactics and sophisticated mass media, Jack Kennedy pushed beyond the limits of any Irish Catholic politician from Boston before him. He wasn’t some timeworn candidate who had worked his way up through the Democratic Party, beholden to the paybacks and favors of every hack on the greasy pole of politics. The family set up independent committees “in every city and town in the Commonwealth which was known as the Kennedy organization,” recalled O’Neill. “And believe me, they were resented, for the most part, by the regular Democratic organization. But they were effective. You’ve got to admit, they were effective.” Joe Kennedy hired top pollsters and publicity people for his son’s challenge, and made sure local Kennedy groups received enough funds to project his message to the electorate. Rather than the “Irish switch” of old, the candidate was trained in such new political skills as looking earnestly into the eye of a television camera. Key strategists and organizers, such as Kenny O’Donnell, Bobby’s long-time friend who became a top aide to JFK, were rewarded not with political jobs but with offers of plum jobs in the private sector arranged through Joe Kennedy’s network of contacts. Different from the traditional political machine, those who worked for Kennedy were loyal only to him.
The Irish reliance on politics as a means of social ascendancy in Massachusetts reached its epitome in Jack Kennedy’s 1952 campaign. Understanding the Irish need for acceptability and status, the Kennedys held a series of social teas around the state—large events in hotels and catering halls attended by hundreds, often thousands, of voters. Rose and her daughters—Eunice, Pat and Jean—acted as hostesses, capped off with a few words by the candidate himself. These teas were aimed at women voters, satisfying the same kind of social aspiration the Ace of Clubs fulfilled in Rose’s youth. Each voter received an engraved invitation and was treated to a grand afternoon of high and lofty pretensions. It was the kind of affair many Irish imagined they would never attend, or even learn of, in a Brahmin world. Lodge’s dismissive comments about the teas only reinforced this impression of social barriers. “Many of the attendees were working-class women of Irish immigrant descent who sought the social prestige of hobnobbing with a representative of arguably the most prestigious Irish-American family in the country,”wrote Thomas J.Whalen in his history of this campaign.
During this campaign, Jack Kennedy’s sexual attractiveness—the undercurrent of excitement that ran throughout his political life—became abundantly clear. No longer a scraggly 145 pounds, Kennedy was invigorated; the cortisone shots, prescribed for his various illnesses, had added about 15 pounds to his frame and a glow of health to his demeanor. (“Jack really looks like a tackle for Notre Dame in that picture you sent me,” Joe marveled in a letter to Dave Powers.“You fellows must be taking good care of him.”) At the various teas around the state, the response by swarms of women who almost swooned while in the receiving lines were noted by many observers.“Unmarried,wealthy, Harvardishly casual in dress, and with a distinguished war record in addition to his other attainment, he just about bracketed the full range of emotional interests of such an all-feminine group—maternal at one end and romantic at the other—irrespective of what it may have thought of his politics,” wrote journalist Cabell Phillips. Not typical of his kind, this young Irishman named Kennedy was more than acceptable, the Times underscored in its cultural shorthand, he was downright “Harvardishly.”
Unlike those brutal contests endured by his grandfather, when the Irish were still a distinct minority, Jack Kennedy stood to benefit from the tide of immigration of more than a hundred years in Massachusetts; it had slowly, inexorably transformed the state’s electorate, and, by 1952, more than half of the state’s voters were decently educated middle-class Irish Catholics. To these voters, old-style Irish candidates like Curley were a sentimental embarrassment, thieves who would rally Celtic pride on their way to jail. But Jack Kennedy was more of an aspirant than a candidate. He embodied their ambitions and how many Irish Catholics wanted to be perceived in a society still not completely accessible to them. Kennedy appealed to their better instincts, a cerebral candidate better suited for debate on television than for ranting on a soapbox. Jack Kennedy, like some historical imperative, marked the high-water crest of Irish Catholic power in Massachusetts. Lodge, who nurtured good relations with the Irish Catholic community in Boston and took pains to reject the anti-immigrant measures of his grandfather, understood that it was only a matter of time until the Irish politicians of old gave way to a new generation. As Lodge later said,“All along, I always knew if there came a man with an honest, clean record who was also of Irish descent, he’d be almost impossible to beat.”
ROBERT KENNEDY, a twenty-six-year-old Justice Department lawyer, didn’t expect to get involved in his brother’s campaign. He was more interested in setting out on his own course. When the campaign manager resigned in a huff, Bobby was summoned to take the position, almost as a family obligation. “The campaign beg
an as an absolute catastrophic disaster,” remembered Kenneth O’Donnell, one of Bobby’s friends from Harvard recruited for the effort. Joe Kennedy, hell-bent on seeing Jack elected to the Senate, became unbearable, prompting campaign manager Mark Dalton to quit. “He was such a strong personality that nobody could—nobody dared—fight back,” O’Donnell said. “The only time the campaign got any direction was when John Kennedy, who was then a Congressman in Washington,was able to get up to Massachusetts to overrule his father.” O’Donnell convinced Jack that the only one to oversee the campaign was Bobby, who could work with his father’s complete trust.
Although Jack assumed the political life his father had envisioned for Joe Jr., the Kennedy patriarch always felt that Bobby resembled him “much more” than any of his children. “Bobby is like me,” he boasted. “Bobby’s hard as nails.” He once was quoted as saying that Bobby resembled him “because he hates like me,” though he later denied it. Both were high-strung, intense men with coldly calculating heads, but their hearts could spill out with emotion when provoked or inspired. Bobby’s political skills were recognized by more than his father. In February 1952, long before the fall campaign against Lodge was under way, Joe Kennedy received a note from a friend. Attached to it was a newspaper clipping mentioning that Robert Kennedy might run for political office. Joe’s friend suggested that the source of the reporter’s article was a Kennedy cousin, Joe Kane, who had orchestrated Jack’s first campaign six years earlier. The elder Kennedy quickly squelched the rumor about Bobby. It wasn’t his turn yet.“Joe Kane is very enthusiastic about him and definitely wants to get him into the political arena, but I think we have one good contest coming up this year,” the senior Kennedy insisted.