by David Nasaw
Kennedy’s preemptive strike was not enough. The Luce publications would endorse Nixon, but tepidly.
—
On Monday morning, July 18, three days after his son accepted the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States, Kennedy flew to France. In early August, Newsweek dispatched a reporter to Cap d’Antibes to interview him. The reporter, having discovered that Kennedy swam in the hotel pool every day “‘regular as a clock’ from noon to 1 and 5 to 6 . . . followed him into the water.” While the two treaded water, he asked why Kennedy “hadn’t appeared with his son at the Democratic convention.
“‘I wasn’t on the stand with Jack because I wasn’t in Los Angeles at the time,’ he answered. ‘I cannot think of a better reason than that. I was in New York on business and had left Los Angeles Friday morning.’
“‘Can you explain why you’ve been staying in the background?’ I asked.
“‘I’ve been in this for 25 years now and never denied newsmen’s questions,’ Kennedy said, ‘but I’m keeping out of it now because it’s better that way. There’ll be no questions about whether Jack is doing things himself if nobody else is around. Jack has already proved he is doing a fantastically good job.’
“‘Isn’t it a fact that you’re something of a controversial figure?’ I asked.
“Kennedy started a slow breast stroke toward shore while he thought about the question.
“‘They’ve been saying those things about me for years,’ he finally said. ‘I’m used to it. . . . There is such a thing as staying in politics too long. . . . It’s time for young men to step in. It’s going to be their world.’
“Then, turning to climb up the concrete path to his cabin, Kennedy grinned. ‘But Jack, Bobby, Ted, they’re the ones to interview. They’re the ones making the copy.’”35
The Newsweek reporter was followed by one from U.S. News & World Report. “I stood up and took them and batted them out for 25 years,” Kennedy told him. “Now it’s somebody else’s turn. I called them as I saw them at the time, even when it got me in trouble, which is more than some people did.” The only person who would talk to the reporter was Kennedy’s caddy, “an attractive French girl named Françoise, about 21 years old. . . . The blonde Françoise says [Kennedy’s] fairway shots are ‘short’ but very straight. . . . Mr. Kennedy speaks no French, but has been teaching Françoise English during the golf rounds.”36
—
Kennedy hid out, an ocean away from the campaign, because he feared becoming a campaign issue. It was too late. He already was.
On July 11, the day the Democratic convention had been gaveled to order, Drew Pearson reported that “Republican researchers have been doing a job on the prospective Democratic candidates, especially on Jack Kennedy [and] have dug up some ammunition which they think will make the young Massachusetts Senator a sitting duck next November.” The first two pieces of “ammunition”—namely, that the Kennedys had bought votes in West Virginia and were pals and admirers of Joe McCarthy—were old and stale. But the third, “Joe Kennedy on Hitlerism,” was not. According to Pearson, Republican researchers had “dug up . . . the correspondence between the Nazi ambassador in London and the German foreign office shortly before Pearl Harbor [which] show Jack’s father, then ambassador to London, having intimate talks with the German ambassador in order to keep the United States out of war. Young Kennedy, who had a great war record, is in no way involved. Nevertheless, because of the closeness between father and son, Republican strategists believe the Nazi letters will be effective.”37
The letters Pearson was referring to were the memorandums Ambassador Herbert von Dirksen had sent to the German Foreign Office after his conversations with Kennedy in 1938. They had been among the thousands of documents discovered by units of the United States First Army in the Harz mountain range and Thuringia in April 1945 and published in the summer of 1949. Kennedy had dismissed the reports as “poppycock” when they were released, and the public at large appeared to have agreed with him. When Jack ran against Lodge for the Senate in 1952, he polled remarkably well in the Jewish districts of Boston. Now, twenty-two years after the conversations took place and eleven years after they had been placed into the public record, Republican operatives planned to use them again.
On September 1, as the campaign heated up after the summer recess, the New York Times, in a front-page story, PARTIES WORRIED BY “JEWISH VOTE,” reported on what it characterized as Jewish voters’ “active dislike of . . . Joseph P. Kennedy. . . . A Democratic worker in a heavily Jewish Brooklyn district called the elder Kennedy ‘the number one bogy’ of the campaign. . . . Asked why they felt so strongly about Mr. Kennedy’s father, some Jewish voters said they had heard of the existence of a letter in which Joseph P. Kennedy had indicated approval of the Hitler regime.” Democratic leaders in the state were agreed that “something had to be done to neutralize the whispering campaign.”38
Kennedy asked James Landis to review the documents. Landis did so, then declared to the press that they proved nothing other than that Dirksen was trying to make a good impression on officials in Berlin by reporting what they wanted to hear.
As the campaign wound into higher gear after Labor Day, the Republicans doubled their efforts to smear the father to get at the son. “The Dirksen dispatches,” Newsweek reported on September 12, “have been circulated among Jewish voters and they have been given wide credence.” Flyers distributed by the New York Young Republicans for Nixon and Lodge and by ad hoc groups like the Committee for Human Dignity, with a Fort Washington Avenue address, flooded the city.39
There would be no public defense of Kennedy by his son or his family or anyone on the campaign team. Well aware that the easiest way to keep allegations alive in an endless news loop was to defend against them, the campaign and the Kennedys held their silence. “As I told you over the phone,” Justin Feldman, Landis’s law partner, wrote him on October 11, “we all agree it would be a mistake to try to counter it publicly.” Instead, Feldman prepared a memorandum, with instructions that it should be “put in the hands of the five county leaders of New York City and . . . given to about a dozen of their district leaders with strict instructions not to distribute it or to reproduce it but to use it for their own information and to furnish answers to their workers.”40
—
I came home,” Kennedy wrote Lord Beaverbrook on September 9, “to find the campaign not between a Democrat and a Republican, but between a Catholic and a Protestant. How effectively we can work against it, I do not know. Jack gave it a bad licking in West Virginia and we are confident that we can lick it now. But with the Baptist ministers working in the pulpit every Sunday, it is going to be tough. All I can say is that they have a hell of a nerve to be talking about freedom for the world when we have this kind of a condition right here in our own country. It seems to me that it is more important than ever to fight this thing with everything we have. And that is what we are going to do.”41
On September 7, Norman Vincent Peale, whom the New York Times identified as “an avowed supporter of Vice President Nixon,” announced the organization of the National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom, comprising 150 leading clergymen “more or less representative of the evangelical, conservative Protestants,” including the Reverend Dr. Billy Graham. They were united in their belief that Protestants had “legitimate grounds for concern about having a Catholic in the White House.”42
Senator Kennedy was forced to confront head-on the subject he had hoped, after his win in the Democratic primaries, might be laid to rest. He did so by accepting an invitation to speak to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a gathering of Protestant leaders, many of them evangelicals. He began his address by declaring that while he was going to speak on the “so-called religious issue,” he believed that there were “far more critical issues in the 1960 election.” Still, “because I am a Catholic
, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues . . . have been obscured—perhaps deliberately.” He proceeded to say what he had been saying for almost two years: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. . . . I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish . . . and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.” He reminded his audience that no one had asked him or his brother whether they “might have a ‘divided loyalty’” when they fought—and his brother died—in the Second World War and that at the Battle of the Alamo, “side by side with Bowie and Crockett died Fuentes and McCafferty and Bailey and Bedillio and Carey—but no one knows whether they were Catholic or not. For there was no religious test there.” Knowing that this might be his best and perhaps last chance to put to rest the religious issue, he arranged to have the speech—and question period—broadcast nationwide.43
Though Jack did brilliantly in Houston, it was almost taken for granted now that he was going to lose Protestant votes that usually went Democratic and would have to compensate by polling a larger than usual big-city Catholic vote. Unfortunately, it appeared as late as six weeks before the election that Catholic voters might not be solidly behind the Democratic candidate. CITY’S CATHOLICS SPLIT ON ELECTION, the New York Times reported in a page-one headline on September 20, confirming Joseph Kennedy’s worst nightmares. “If Jack Kennedy thinks he has the Catholic vote in his back pocket, he’s wrong,” an Irish Catholic party official was quoted as telling the Times reporter. Neither of the two major Catholic papers—the Catholic News, the New York diocesan newspaper, and The Tablet, the Brooklyn diocesan paper—“has ever been suspected of favoring either the Democrats or Senator Kennedy.” The Catholic News had put a photograph of Nixon visiting with a group of nuns on its cover but had never so honored Senator Kennedy. The Tablet had denounced the Democratic Party platform in an editorial in July and had had nothing positive of any sort to say about Jack Kennedy. When both candidates appeared at the Al Smith dinner at the Waldorf on October 19, 1960, an event organized and presided over by Cardinal Spellman, Nixon received far greater applause. It was becoming abundantly clear that he was the cardinal’s favored candidate.
—
On September 26, two weeks after the Houston speech, Senator Kennedy met Vice President Nixon in Chicago for their (and the nation’s) first live televised debate. Since 1952, Joe Kennedy had preached the importance of television as a campaign vehicle and prepared his son well for this moment before the cameras. In this and the succeeding four televised debates, John Fitzgerald Kennedy did his father proud. He spoke directly to the camera and looked relaxed, comfortable, “calm and nerveless,” as author Theodore White later described him.44
On his way out of the television studio, Senator Kennedy, seeing a pay phone on the wall, asked Ted Sorensen for change (he never carried any money with him) to call his father.
“‘Dad, what did you think?’ were his first words,” Sorensen recalled in his memoirs. “A long period of listening ensued, while I stepped a few feet away. ‘Thanks, Dad, I’ve got to go to Ohio,’ he concluded, and hung up the phone. ‘I still don’t know how I did,’ he said, turning to me. ‘If just now I had slipped and fallen flat on the floor, my dad would have said: “The way you picked yourself up was terrific!”’”45
The second debate was held on October 8 and focused on foreign policy. From this point on, questions about missile gaps, the defense of Quemoy and Matsu, two islands off the shore of China, and the loss of Cuba would occupy the candidates. Although Senator Kennedy had always insisted that his ideas on foreign policy were very different from his father’s, a reading of his statements counterpoised with those of his father’s reveals remarkable similarities. It would be wrong to say that Jack simply parroted his father’s positions. On the contrary, Jack’s analyses in his Harvard thesis of the conditions that led Great Britain to Munich and on to World War II had had a significant effect in sharpening his father’s thinking on these issues. The “Kennedy” position on foreign policy was as much a joint effort as one imposed on father by son.
In his warnings about missile gaps and the Eisenhower administration’s failure to keep the military strong, as in his calls for increased military spending, John Kennedy had been updating the argument that his father had made in the 1930s and 1940s about the Nazis and, more recently, about the Soviets and that he had made in Why England Slept. The best defense against aggression was a mighty military. The stronger that military, the more likely one’s enemy would be forced to negotiate—and on favorable terms. For father and son, negotiations with the enemy were always preferable to confrontations. Joseph Kennedy had been criticized for suggesting in 1950 that the United States open negotiations with the Soviets. Ten years later, when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev pulled out of the Paris four-power summit, angrily denouncing President Eisenhower for allowing a U-2 spy plane to penetrate Soviet territory, Senator Kennedy declared that Eisenhower should express his regrets over the incident, if this was what it took to get the talks restarted. He later issued his own call “for an early summit meeting between the next President and Premier Khrushchev” and declared that he would, as president, suspend all spy flights. His position on the paramount need to lay the groundwork for reopening negotiations had been promptly criticized by Lyndon Johnson, at the time his undeclared rival for the nomination, who made it clear to a cheering audience that he would neither apologize nor “send regrets to Mr. Khrushchev.”46
Like his father, Jack Kennedy espoused an approach to foreign policy that he considered realistic, pragmatic, and nonideological. Just as his father had criticized President Truman for pouring “arms and men into the Quixotic military adventure” to defend Berlin and for entering into alliances that, under the guise of collective security, guaranteed nations across the globe that America would defend them, with arms if necessary, from potential Communist aggression, so did Senator Kennedy criticize Republican efforts to defend Quemoy and Matsu from Communist China.
In the second debate, Edward P. Morgan of ABC asked Senator Kennedy to elaborate on his statement “that Quemoy and Matsu were unwise places to draw our defense line in the Far East. . . . Couldn’t a pull-back from those islands be interpreted as appeasement?” Senator Kennedy, ignoring the accusation of appeasement, echoed what his father had said ten years earlier. He declared that it was pure folly for the United States to allow itself to be drawn into a war over the defense of two indefensible islands four or five miles from Communist China’s shores. Nixon disagreed. “These two islands are in the area of freedom. . . . We should not force our Nationalist allies to get off of them and give them to the Communists. If we do that we start a chain reaction.”47
That Senator Kennedy should take a position on Cuba opposite that on Quemoy and Matsu was also consistent with the “realistic” approach to the Cold War his father had outlined in earlier articles and speeches. It might be impossible, Joseph P. Kennedy had argued in 1950, to contain the spread of communism in Asia and Europe, but it was possible—and necessary—to “keep Russia, if she chooses to march, on the other sides of the Atlantic and Pacific.” The Republicans, Jack Kennedy argued in 1960, had done the opposite. They had poured resources into fighting communism abroad, while leaving the western hemisphere vulnerable to Communist influence. “Their short-sighted policies in recent years have helped make communism’s first island base, the island of Cuba.” Senator Kennedy insisted that the priority for American foreign policy should be the defense of the Americas and that unless something was done in that regard, “the same grievances, the same poverty, the same discontent, the same distrust of America, on which Castro rode to power,” would spread through the rest of the western hemisphere.48
There is always a distance, of course, between what a candidate promises and the policies he pursues once elected. This would be the case w
ith President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Under the pressure of events, he would move in directions he had not envisioned during the campaign. It is important, nonetheless, to note that his starting point in foreign policy was much closer to his father’s than we had previously recognized.
—
Joseph Kennedy spent the fall sequestered at Hyannis Port. He did not grant interviews or answer questions or allow himself to be photographed. He went out less than usual but kept working the telephones on behalf of his son. Frank Stanton, at the time the president of CBS, recalled in his oral history getting a call from Hyannis Port. “I had just come into the house around noon and the phone was ringing and I picked it up and it was Joe Kennedy: he was very abusive because we had the practice, which I didn’t initiate but which I certainly supported, of switching our correspondents in the middle of a campaign. . . . That turnover took place when Jack Kennedy was campaigning in Minnesota. . . . He was demanding that we keep the correspondents that we had with Jack Kennedy with Jack Kennedy. And I explained the policy and the reason for it. It made no difference to him. He wanted what he wanted and that’s all there was to it. And threatened me. Threatened my job.”49