by Thomas Maier
THE KENNEDY FAMILY’S affinity for Joe McCarthy was inexplicable unless viewed in the religious and ethnic complexity of its time. McCarthy’s “rough-hewn Irishness, his unsophisticated Catholicism, and his resentment of the establishment,” as a writer for the New Yorker later put it, appealed greatly to young Bobby Kennedy. As a University of Virginia law student, Bobby proudly arranged for his appearance at a school forum. McCarthy embodied the cultural conservativeness of many Catholic voters who were enrolled in the Democratic Party of their immigrant ancestors, but increasingly agreed with the concerns of Republicans. Joe Kennedy developed a personal friendship with McCarthy, inviting him on vacation to the Cape. McCarthy genially took part in the family’s softball games and boat outings, and even dated Kennedy’s daughter, Pat. The two Joes were birds of the same feather. “In case there is any question in your mind, I liked Joe McCarthy—I always liked him,” Kennedy told an interviewer years later when his son was president. “I thought he’d be a sensation. He was smart. But he went off the deep end.”
Even though McCarthy was a Republican, Joe Kennedy contributed generously to his political coffers. This investment of money and friendship paid dividends for the Kennedys in the 1952 Senate race. Several Republicans urged McCarthy, by far the most influential national figure at the time, to campaign for the party’s candidate in the close Massachusetts race. An appearance by McCarthy would undoubtedly boost Henry Cabot Lodge’s reelection chances in the Boston area, cutting into Jack Kennedy’s crucial core support among Catholics. But out of deference to old man Kennedy and his clan, McCarthy never showed for Lodge. “I told [the Lodge campaign] I’d go up to Boston to speak if Cabot publicly asked me,” McCarthy later boasted to fellow conservative,William F. Buckley Jr.“And he’ll never do that—he’d lose the Harvard vote.”
Jack’s relationship with McCarthy was amiable enough. During their early days in Washington, McCarthy occasionally socialized with Jack and his sister, Eunice, and the friendliness lasted for several years. As young congressmen elected after the war, both were ardent anti-Communists. As Catholics, both senators made certain they found time in their Sunday schedules to attend Mass each week, though neither practiced their religion in a showy way. The Kennedys viewed Joe McCarthy as one of their own. Bobby and Ethel even considered asking McCarthy to stand as godfather for their first child, Kathleen. At a centennial celebration for Harvard’s Spee Club in 1952, when a speaker likened McCarthy to Alger Hiss, Jack uncharacteristically became upset. “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” he bellowed, storming out before he could finish dessert. Early in McCarthy’s campaign against Communist subversion, Jack shared his father’s view that the senator “may well have something.” During Jack’s 1952 campaign, when a liberal aide, Gardner “Pat” Jackson, unveiled a potential announcement attacking McCarthyism, the candidate’s father erupted in fury, knocking over a table as he sprang to his feet. “You and your friends are trying to ruin my son’s career!” he shouted. The elder Kennedy railed against Jackson and “your sheeny friends,” who included unionists, liberals and Jews on his son’s staff. The next day, when Jack attempted a consoling comment to his shaken aide, Jackson asked him to explain his father’s behavior.“Just love of family,” Jack replied, pausing to add,“No—pride of family.”
For the rest of that campaign, Jack tried to steer a fine dividing line, careful not to bring up McCarthy’s name for fear of pitting one portion of his constituency against the next. His campaign literature promised to fight against “atheistic communism” and yet promised his liberal supporters that he wouldn’t do so at the expense of civil liberties. He mastered the art of balancing himself on a very thin line.
SOON AFTER THE 1952 election, Joe Kennedy implored McCarthy to find a place on his staff for his son Bobby, fresh from his triumph as Jack’s campaign manager. McCarthy already had a chief counsel for his Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations—Roy Cohn, a wiry and crafty aide-de-camp who shared his boss’s taste for savaging reputations with baseless lies. The senator offered Bobby a job as deputy counsel. Cohn later recalled watching McCarthy nod his head dutifully during a prolonged telephone conversation and wondering who was on the other end. “Joe Kennedy,” McCarthy mouthed to his aide, as if being held captive. Every minute or so, McCarthy would reply,“Sure, Joe . . . I see. . . .That’s a good point.” Exasperated, McCarthy finally waived over his aide and, while still on the telephone,wrote out a note to Cohn:“Remind me to check the size of his campaign contribution. I’m not sure it’s worth it.”
The Kennedys were major backers of the senator’s anti-Red jihad. As the national controversy around him mounted, McCarthy’s support remained firm among Catholics, his words carrying the political imprimatur of New York’s powerful cardinal.“Congressional inquiries into Communist activities in the United States are not the result of any mad legislative whim,” insisted Spellman. “There are strong reasons for these inquiries and we thank God we have begun while there is still time to do something about it.” One Spellman aide told a Catholic war veterans’ Communion breakfast that a $5 million anti-McCarthy war chest had been raised “to kick Joe out” and that “the reason is solely because of his Catholic ideals.” Firefighters in New York were instructed by their Knights of Columbus affiliate to come to Washington for a McCarthy rally. Some clergy suggested that an attack on McCarthy smacked of anti-Catholic bigotry. “Protestants know that in some Catholic circles being pro-McCarthy is somehow considered a test, if not of faith, at least of loyalty to the Church,” warned Commonweal. “We do not want to see the Church forced into a shotgun wedding with the far right-wing of the Republican Party.”
AS A PRACTICAL political matter, however, Jack expressed dismay when his brother joined McCarthy’s staff. He recommended Bobby not do it, as did other friends.“McCarthy could prove your mother was a Communist by his way of reasoning,” Kenny O’Donnell argued with Bobby.“By using his methods of proof, the Pope could be a Communist.” Nevertheless, Bobby jumped at the chance with the same enthusiasm as he had his earlier work. Joe Kennedy, who sometimes acted as a behind-the-scenes intermediary between Spellman and McCarthy, also gave his blessings. Soon, all three Kennedys rued this decision.
Bobby’s first major assignment produced a well-received report that showed American allies were trading with the Chinese at the same time the mainland Communists were fueling the war in Korea against American soldiers. Within a few months, however, Bobby realized that McCarthy’s sloppy recklessness would cost the committee all shreds of its remaining credibility. In one fiasco, McCarthy’s director of investigation wrote a magazine article that declared “the largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States today is composed of Protestant clergymen.” Howls of outrage by President Eisenhower and many distinguished religious leaders led to the aide’s swift dismissal. After his own feud with Cohn,Kennedy quit, only to return a few months later, in early 1954, as the Democratic counsel to McCarthy’s committee.
The televised 1954 hearings into alleged Communist infiltration of the U.S.Army turned into a watershed disaster. McCarthy unraveled before the nation’s eyes with an endless stream of unfounded and blatantly false accusations. Kennedy’s anger focused on Cohn, rather than McCarthy, for whom he still retained some fondness. But both Joe and Bobby Kennedy concluded McCarthy’s power was declining. The most prominent Irish Catholic on the national scene in years was bound for disgrace. Personally, the Kennedys remained loyal and defensive. “All this poppycock about McCarthy having any effect on America’s standing in Europe is the biggest lot of dribble,” Joe wrote to a rather dubious Jack.“The masses haven’t the slightest idea of what McCarthy stands for, what he does and what’s wrong with him.”
The army hearing debacle resulted in a censure vote in the Senate. In October 1954, this thumbs up or down on McCarthy’s fate created a complicated moral dilemma for Jack Kennedy, already in the throes of a great perso
nal crisis. His chronic back problem, traceable to the PT-109 accident and other injuries, had left him hobbling on crutches most of the time. Hoping to cure his aching spine and regain some degree of normalcy, the young newlywed senator agreed to a risky operation that his doctors promised would make him better if successful. Three days after surgery, a severe staph infection in his body, already weakened from his undisclosed Addison’s disease, forced him into a coma and nearly killed him. “Jack’s dying,” Joe Kennedy moaned aloud to his newspaper confidant, New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, his vibrant blue eyes reddened with tears. A priest gave Jack the last rites of the church.
A more cautious person might not have accepted the odds of such a dangerous operation, but Kennedy’s intimacy with death and his hunger for the pleasures of life compelled his choice. Slowly, he recovered and faced weeks in a hospital bed trying to regain his strength. He even sent messages to girlfriends involved in his extramarital escapades to assure them that he’d soon be back in business. During this period, the Senate moved toward a censure vote against McCarthy, but Kennedy ducked it by saying he was too ill to cast a vote. He later conceded that a public rebuke of McCarthy was just too difficult, both personally and politically. By coming out against the most prominent Irish Catholic in national politics, Kennedy would alienate a large proportion of voters back home. “I was rather in ill grace personally to be around hollering about what McCarthy had done in 1952 or 1951 when my brother was on the staff in 1953—that’s really the guts of the matters,” Jack later told biographer James MacGregor Burns. Critics suggested that Kennedy lacked the courage to stand up to McCarthy and used his illness as a shield to avoid public rebuke from his pro-McCarthy constituents. When he had refused to sign a petition for Curley’s release from jail a few years earlier, he thought he had committed political suicide. He certainly wasn’t going to take a second risk again in Massachusetts by criticizing McCarthy. In both cases, family considerations—Curley perceived as an enemy of the clan and McCarthy as a friend—were crucial to understanding Jack’s decisions. Many liberal Democrats, Eleanor Roosevelt among them, had little sympathy for Kennedy’s predicament. Mrs. Roosevelt suggested that Jack placed political expediency before moral principle with the McCarthy vote.“I think McCarthyism is a question on which public officials must stand up and be counted,” said the former first lady when asked specifically about Kennedy.“I cannot be sure of the political future of anyone who does not willingly state where he stands on the issue.”
But the Kennedys never really gave up their emotional ties to Joe McCarthy. Though they were appalled by his blunders and excesses, they believed McCarthy understood the worldwide threat of communism and that he was the only American doing something about it. Long after he left the committee, Bobby visited the senator’s office to reaffirm his abiding friendship. At a 1955 Junior Chamber of Commerce dinner honoring him as one of the ten most outstanding young men of the year, Bobby walked out because one of the speakers was Ed Murrow, the television commentator whose documentary exposed McCarthy’s reckless ways. “His Irish conception of loyalty,” as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. later characterized it, “turned him against some he felt had treated McCarthy unfairly.” When McCarthy collapsed into alcoholism and eventually died in 1957, Bobby genuinely grieved, so upset that he dismissed his staff for the day. In his journal, he scribbled: “It was all very difficult for me as I feel that I have lost an important part of my life—even though it is in the past.” Joe Kennedy viewed McCarthy as a fallen comrade-in-arms in the fight against communism. “Shocked and deeply grieved to hear of Joe’s passing,” the senior Kennedy wrote to McCarthy’s widow, Jean Kerr McCarthy.“His indomitable courage in adhering to the cause in which he believed evoked my warm admiration. His friendship was deeply appreciated and reciprocated.”
McCarthy’s fall from grace confirmed the stereotype of Catholics held by so many Americans. In particular, Irish Catholics seemed all too willing to follow such demagogic figures as McCarthy and Father Coughlin before him. For Jack Kennedy, the McCarthy connections could only hurt his chances for the White House.
Chapter Twenty
A Nation of Immigrants
DUBLIN, WITH ITS ANCESTRAL HISTORY and fond personal memories, proved just the tonic for Jackie Kennedy and her husband. In late September 1955, the senator and his wife stopped for a week’s vacation in Ireland, the last leg on their journey home from a fact-finding trip to Poland. Their marriage had suffered terribly in its first years—not only with Jack’s near fatal back surgery, his long absences and the whispers of infidelity, but also with the miscarriage of their anticipated first child. Ireland beckoned as the perfect place for a respite together.
During this visit, Jack and Jackie stayed at the Shelbourne Hotel, perhaps the grandest address in Dublin. As part of its storied past, the hotel played host in the 1920s when the Irish Free State’s leaders composed their new constitution inside a first-floor suite. Jack could barely get around without help, but he insisted on visiting the city’s pubs and exploring its nightlife. The public events of their unheralded stay were arranged by an old friend of Jackie’s, a priest who had given her so much spiritual comfort in the past.
Father Joseph Leonard of All Hallows College in Dublin invited Jack to give a rousing, extemporaneous address about the suffering of Catholics at the hands of Poland’s Communist state. During his talk at All Hallows—a training school for Irish priests, many of whom were sent abroad to America—Kennedy echoed the church’s concern about the dismantling of religion in that Soviet bloc nation. On his way to Poland, Kennedy’s commitment to the church’s struggle against communism was underlined by his brief stop in Rome for an audience with Pope Pius XII. Several years earlier, Jacqueline Kennedy had met Father Leonard during a trip to Ireland. A relative had known the priest since the 1920s and urged Jackie to look him up when she visited Eire with her stepbrother, Hugh D. Auchincloss Jr. Since their meeting, she’d kept a regular correspondence with Leonard, who sometimes sent books of prayers and religious meditations to inspire her.
While in Dublin, Jack attended a luncheon in his honor given by Liam Cosgrave, the minister for external affairs. The Irish-American from Boston peppered everyone with questions about Irish history and politics.“At that time [Kennedy was] moving around on crutches, and instead of giving him the lunch anywhere else, we arranged that it be given in the Shelbourne,” Cosgrave recalled. Father Leonard sat near Jackie at the front table. Cosgrave and their other Irish hosts impressed upon Kennedy their concerns about a divided Ireland and the need to end the partition of the north. Kennedy exhibited a keen interest in Irish affairs. For example, he expressed interest in Roger Casement, a hero of the Irish Rebellion in 1916, hanged as a traitor in England for his part in smuggling German arms to the Irish rebels—a controversy still debated today.
Jackie renewed her friendship with Father Leonard, a clergyman whose faith didn’t seem cloistered or ethereal but rooted in everyday reality. “Father Leonard’s spirituality was not merely unobtrusive, it was wholly sane,” wrote an observer.“He had no use for mere pietism, or for the ‘dangerously devout.’” Like Cushing in Boston, Father Leonard possessed an approachable manner that helped him make fast friends with Jackie’s husband as well. (When their first son was born a few years later, Jackie would ask Father Leonard to come to America to baptize him—a request the Irish priest couldn’t honor because of failing health. When Cosgrave later came to the United States, he spotted Kennedy at a reception; the senator smiled with recognition and said,“Father Leonard,” then inquiring about his wife’s friend.)
Before the Kennedys left Ireland, Father Leonard inscribed a recently published book he had translated from the French, a biography of St. Vincent de Paul, the patron saint of the hopelessly sick and downtrodden. “To Jack and Jacqueline with love and admiration,” he wrote inside the cover. Leonard gave Jackie another book, a biography of the English Catholic writer, Maurice Baring. “For Jacqueline,” he penne
d. “Dublin: September 29–October 2.” Over the years of their friendship, Father Leonard sent Jackie other books, including Baring’s biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the works of another contemporary English Catholic writer, Ronald Knox. These titles sent by Father Leonard included Layman and HisConscience and Retreat for Lay People. In her own quiet undemonstrable way, Jackie seemed to have adopted some of her mother-in-law’s Catholic spirituality, and she developed her own counselors in faith. A decade earlier, Jack had finished his privately published tribute to his dead brother, As We Remember Joe, with a poem from Baring.
BOOKS HELD a special meaning for these Kennedys. During his seven-month convalescence, Jack lay flat on his back and read stacks of volumes taken from the Library of Congress, and also put together the manuscript for a best-selling history, Profiles in Courage. Joe Kennedy always impressed upon his son that his reputation would be burnished, the public’s esteem for him enhanced, by publishing a book under his own name. For Profiles in Courage, Joe Kennedy acted as agent, producer and promoter even more so than he had with his son’s earlier effort as a young Harvard graduate. Profiles in Courage was published in early 1956 and won the Pulitzer Prize after intense lobbying by his father’s journalism fixer,Arthur Krock, a long-time member of the Pulitzer board. ( Joe Kennedy’s private papers are replete with ethical compromises made by the Times man. “It needs punch and polish,” Kennedy once directed Krock about a rough draft of a speech he planned to give.“Will you look it over, shape it up, and then send me what you think will do the most good for us.”) Despite the family’s angry denials, a succession of journalists and authors would claim, with considerable evidence, that a coterie of staffers and advisers had done the heavy lifting for young Kennedy.