by David Nasaw
“How terrifically pleased I am for you. Everyone says you were so good in the Election and that the outcome must have been a great source of satisfaction,” Kick wrote from England. “It’s nice to know you are as appreciated in the 11th district as you are among your brothers & sisters. Gee, aren’t you lucky.”21
Jack took a few days off in Hyannis Port, then flew to Hollywood to enjoy a last fling. “I saw in Jack Lait’s column,” Kennedy wrote Houghton on July 30, 1946, “that my congressman son was paying attention to Peggy Cummins [the glamorous British actress] and another columnist had him seeing Inga Arvard, Hitler’s Nordic. Well, I suppose youth must be served! We haven’t heard anything from him. Do you know when he is coming back?”22
Jack returned to Boston to give a few speeches before the general election. In mid-August, he presented Archbishop of Boston Richard Cushing, a family friend, with a $600,000 check to build a convalescent home and hospital for poor children in Brighton, which just happened to be in the eleventh district in which he was running for Congress. The funds came from the newly organized Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation, of which John F. Kennedy was the first president. The day after the ceremonies, photographs of the candidate handing the check to Bishop Cushing, with his mother, the daughter of a former mayor, at his side, appeared in all the Boston papers.
The publicity given the grant led to several requests for funding addressed to John F. Kennedy in Boston. His form letter responses thanked the writers for their letters and explained that there were no funds available as “the work that the foundation is planning to do has already been mapped out for the next three years.” A “Kennedy for Congress” flyer was stuffed into every envelope.23
In November, to no one’s surprise, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected to Congress. What was startling was the size of his victory. He polled 69,093 votes to his Republican opponent’s 26,007. Statewide, the Democrats took a beating. Senator Walsh was defeated in a landslide victory by Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Governor Maurice Tobin and his running mate for lieutenant governor, Paul Dever, were beaten almost as badly.
With John Fitzgerald Kennedy now elected to a seat it would be nearly impossible for him to lose, his father could speak out with impunity. And he did.
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In the year that had passed since Kennedy’s Life magazine article, the national debate over what would soon be known as the Cold War had intensified. Isolationist Republicans on the right, led by Senators Robert A. Taft and John Bricker of Ohio, and internationalists on the left, led by Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, argued, as Kennedy had, against government spending abroad to counter the so-called Communist threat. Within the White House, the debate was nearly over. A near consensus had been built around the “Long Telegram” written by George F. Kennan, counselor at the American embassy in Moscow. Kennan, asked to make sense of Stalin’s rhetoric and actions, had argued persuasively that Russia’s historic suspicion of the West and the Soviet Union’s ideological commitment to expansion and conquest posed a threat, though a containable one, to American interests in Europe. It was incumbent on the American government to “contain” that threat by the careful but persistent application of counterforce.
On March 12, 1947, President Truman went before a joint session of Congress to declare that, the British government having concluded it could no longer provide Greece and Turkey with political, economic, or military assistance to contain Soviet aggression, the American government had to step into the breach. “The very existence of the Greek state,” the president announced in his request for $400 million in aid, “is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists. . . . It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. . . . The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.”24
Kennedy was unalterably opposed to supplying military or financial assistance to Greece or Turkey. Instead of ratcheting up anti-Communist rhetoric and actions, he believed it advisable to try to negotiate with the Soviets. Anything was better than heightening tensions and pushing the world a step closer to another war.
In the late 1930s, the United States had, he had argued, no business going to war with Germany or assisting the British and the French in doing so, for the simple reason that Hitler posed no threat to American interests. The same was now true, a decade later, of the Soviet Union. Kennedy’s “consuming public concern” in the postwar period was, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., would later write in his biography of Robert Kennedy, “as it had been before the war: that the United States might be deluded into mounting a world crusade for democracy. He was perfectly consistent. He saw communism in the forties as he had seen Nazism in the thirties—as a detestable system but not as a mortal threat to American security.”25
Kennedy’s chief concern in the spring of 1947 was that he had no way of making his voice heard, no means of countering what was becoming a groundswell of bipartisan support for Truman’s foreign policy initiatives. Arthur Krock, who visited him in Palm Beach that spring, came to his rescue. Either because Krock was on retainer or believed Kennedy’s views still newsworthy or because, as a Jew who had been passed over for promotion, he sympathized with Kennedy’s struggle to cross over from outsider to insider, he made sure that his patron’s ideas got maximum coverage.
At Kennedy’s “instance,” Krock recalled in his Memoirs, the two “designed [an interview] for publication.” On March 12, 1947, the day of Truman’s speech to Congress calling for assistance to Greece and Turkey, Krock published his “interview” with Kennedy. He disguised the genesis of the column by claiming that while in Palm Beach on vacation, he had happened upon “an informal round table the other evening, the subject being our future economic foreign policy,” at which “the most emphatic view offered was that of Joseph P. Kennedy.” Ambassador Kennedy, he reported, was opposed to spending large sums of money overseas when the American economy was still in the doldrums. Given the task of reconverting the economy from wartime to peacetime and the need to keep taxes low to encourage investment, the United States could not “possibly finance resistance to other systems of government, to the extent and for the period proposed or required, without impoverishing this nation. . . . The wise policy is to keep the American way of life as strong as our resources can make it, and permit communism to have its trial outside the Soviet Union if that shall be the fate or will of certain peoples. In most of these countries a few years will demonstrate the inability of communism to achieve its promises.” The United States should, in other words, back off and “permit communism to have its trial.”26
Krock’s column thrust Kennedy into the center of the national debate. His recommendations were immediately and universally condemned in editorial pages across the country as “the new appeasement.” Ten days later, James Reston of the New York Times declared that while a small coalition of the Far Right and the Far Left was assembling to oppose financial assistance to Turkey and/or Greece, no one was “prepared to take the responsibility involved in adopting publicly the Joseph P. Kennedy thesis that we should take our chances with the spread of communism.” The only positive responses to Kennedy’s remarks were editorials in the Hearst papers and a letter to the editor of the New York Times from pacifist A. J. Muste of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.27
On April 22, the Senate took up and approved Truman’s proposal for assistance to Greece and Turkey by a vote of almost three to one, with Republican senators Arthur Vandenberg and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts not only enthusiastically supporting the measure, but gathering a large number of their party’s votes in support of it. On May 8, the House followed with an overwhelming bipartisan endorsement of the president, approving his bill by a vote of 287 in favor, only 107 opposed. Recorded in favor of the bill was the young congressman from the eleventh district of Massachus
etts, John F. Kennedy.
Joseph P. Kennedy had raised his boys to argue with him—and this was the result. It didn’t make him particularly happy, but he accepted that there was nothing he could do about it. Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, whom Kennedy had hired at the SEC, stayed close with, and promoted several times for national office, remembered a visit to Palm Beach in 1949. “I must be nuts,” Kennedy said to him. “The two men in public life that I love the most are Jack and you. And I disagree with you guys more than anyone else. What’s wrong with me?”28
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Years before, his son Jack had warned Kennedy to temper his language, to stay away from labels like “isolationist” and “appeaser.” And he had done so, for a time. Now, in 1947, with all hope gone of his returning to Washington—and with his son elected to a safe seat in Congress—there was no longer any incentive to hold his tongue or mind his manners. In late April, he spoke at length to Hearst New York Journal American columnist Frank Conniff on “the heavier problems which harass the world today” and declared he was ready “to admit from now on that the term ‘isolationist’ described my sentiments perfectly. We never gave ‘isolationism’ a chance. The ‘interventionists’ had their way and look what happened. I’m proud I warned against participation in a war which could only leave the world in a worse condition than before.” Communism would, he predicted, fall by itself. The people of Eastern Europe were fiercely patriotic. “You can’t tell me indifferent administrators like the Russians are going to have everything their way in such strongly nationalistic countries. It’s against the probabilities to expect it.”29
On May 18, the New York Times provided Kennedy with space, on the front page of the business section, in which he declared forcefully that Truman’s plan to spend millions on Greece and Turkey should be opposed on economic grounds alone. To pay for foreign assistance projects, the government was going to have to level exorbitant taxes at home, which would rob business of the capital it needed to expand, deprive Americans of well-paying jobs, and decrease the resources required to defend the homeland. “Personally, as I have said before, I believe our efforts to stem communism in Europe with dollars will eventually prove an overwhelming tax on our resources that will seriously affect the economic well-being of our country.”
He repeated himself the following week in an interview that was splashed across the front pages of the Hearst papers on May 25. “Approximately $10 billion is the staggering price we have already paid for the dubious privilege of taking up the ‘white man’s burden’ now that England has slipped from its prewar world stature.” And what would come of it? Neither peace nor prosperity nor any possibility that these dollars would buy reliable anti-Communist allies overseas. “I suggest that our statesmen read something of modern history before going all out for saving the world. . . . With nations as with individuals, the ALLY YOU HAVE TO BUY WILL NOT STAY BOUGHT.”
Again, the response to his broadsides was overwhelmingly negative. Again, Kennedy didn’t much care.
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The depression that he feared would result from escalating military spending overseas did not come to pass in his lifetime. The American economy would be transformed, as he predicted, but money spent abroad, much of it on military projects, would not destroy “economic well-being,” but rather stimulate growth and increase per capita income at home. Only over the long term would it become apparent that this Cold War spending spree might have had other, perhaps less positive impacts on American “economic well-being” by diverting capital from infrastructure, nonmilitary industrial modernization, and social welfare projects.
Thirty-two
FAMILY MATTERS
I have given up all my favorite sports—golf and kissing girls—and expect to devote my life to serious business,” he wrote Lucius Ordway, his millionaire friend from Palm Beach, in November 1950. He was joking, of course—about the golf and the girls and the serious business.
He played golf every day he could, which was every day of the week now that he’d retired from business. He had no trouble finding partners. His children all played golf, except for Rosemary, and visited Palm Beach during the holidays. When they weren’t around, he played with “the Commish,” Joe Timilty, who had virtually moved in after being denied reappointment as police commissioner; or with Arthur Houghton, who after his resignation from his position in Hollywood and the death of his wife was free to spend long periods with Kennedy in Palm Beach.
Nothing pleased Kennedy more than a day with his buddies golfing or at the baseball park or the racetrack (Hialeah in the winter and Saratoga in August). “That’s one thing about Houghton and me,” he joked with Lucius Ordway, “women have never had any effect on our lives—we’re men’s men!” And he meant it. As important as female companionship was to him, he had never let the women in his life, not Rose or Gloria Swanson or any of the others, take him away from his male friends.1
At age sixty, as at every stage of his life, his eye still wandered, though perhaps not the way it once had. Kick, in England, found it hysterically funny that her father had been identified in a Sunday Pictorial article about the Florida Gold Coast as “the playboy of Palm Beach. . . . I think it shows a lot of life left in that old man of ours if he can start being a playboy at his ripe old age!!! I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if they had named Grandpa, but I didn’t expect Daddy to have the title.” Even Rose, on occasion, made light of her husband’s flirtatious ways. From Hyannis Port on June 25, 1949, she wrote her daughters that Teddy had brought home with him “a girl called Nancy who was here last year, and she stayed here last night. She is really very pretty but looks about fifteen. Your Father made the startling announcement to her that when she was about eighteen he would be waiting for her. As she is already eighteen, she was really dumbfounded.”2
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In late 1946, Kennedy sold Somerset Importers. The liquor importing business had served the family well, but it was no longer the cash cow it had once been, and with Jack launched on a political career it had become a source of potential embarrassment. “In Jack’s campaign for Congress,” Kennedy wrote Sir James Calder after the primary victory in 1946, “they made the real issue my support of the British Loan and said the only reason for it was that I had a franchise from Haig & Haig. It occurs to me that from here in it is going to be necessary for me to take a great many positions for England as against Russia, and it is silly to have wrong interpretations put on my actions.” In the final analysis, it made no sense to remain in the liquor business now that Kennedy owned the Merchandise Mart, which generated more money than Somerset ever had, much of it tax-free.3
Kennedy had minimized tax liabilities by placing ownership of the Merchandise Mart—and its annual income—in a partnership: 12.5 percent for him, another 12.5 percent for Rose, 50 percent for the family trusts, and the remaining 25 percent for the newly incorporated Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation. Because the property was owned by a “partnership” rather than a corporation or an individual, he and Rose paid lower rates on their shares; the family trusts paid lower rates still; and the foundation paid nearly nothing. The Mart would continue to generate income for the Kennedy family until 1998, when it was sold for $625 million, fifty times what Kennedy had paid for it.4
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On the second anniversary of Joe Jr.’s death, Kennedy established a foundation in his name and in his honor. Having put away more than enough money to provide for three generations of Kennedys and earning sufficient income to cover current expenses for all of them, he was prepared now to increase his charitable giving. He would have been a fool to do so without taking advantage of the tax benefits offered family foundations.
“Although the philanthropic impulse, like human nature, is immutable,” Fortune magazine declared in August 1947 in an article titled “How to Have Your Own Foundation,” that impulse reacted “to external influences. These influences today happen to
be progressive surtaxes and fixed exemptions for charitable contributions.” With the top bracket in 1946–1947 fixed at 86.45 percent for taxable income over $200,000, estate taxes at 77 percent, and gift taxes at 58 percent, wealthy individuals had every incentive to make use of the charitable deductions afforded them by the tax code. The taxpayer who established a family foundation did not have to spend any of the money put into it to get a deduction. One hundred percent of the funds could sit, accumulating untaxed interest and dividends, until the directors chosen by the donor decided to spend it. Better yet, for individuals such as Kennedy with assets that appreciated over time—stocks, real estate, and, later, stakes in oil wells—the amount of the tax deduction was based not on the original cost of the asset, but on its present value. What this meant was that Kennedy could donate to the foundation a building he had bought for $100,000 that was now worth $1 million, deduct $1 million from his income taxes, and avoid whatever capital gains he would have had to pay if he cashed out.5
The mission statement of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation read much like those of Progressive-era settlement houses: its “purposes . . . are for the relief, shelter, support, education, protection and maintenance of the indigent, sick or infirm; to prevent pauperism and to promote by all lawful means social and sanitary reforms, habits of thrift, as well as savings and self-dependence among the poorer classes, without discrimination owing to race, color, or creed.” The fact was that none of the Kennedys truly knew how best to commemorate Joe Jr.’s life. He had been a good Catholic, a good student, a good athlete, a man-about-town, and a very good brother. But he had not lived long enough to demonstrate any commitments to philanthropic purposes.6