by Ted Sorensen
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received.
Jack Kennedy loved Boston and Boston loved Jack Kennedy, but he was always more than a Bostonian. Like many lovers they rarely lived together. He was born in the Boston suburb of Brookline. He was brought up in his more formative years in Bronxville, New York, where his father had moved the entire family in the belief that an Irish Catholic businessman and his children would have less opportunity in Boston. The Senator’s parents had voted in Florida since he was a child. He spent his summers at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod. When he launched his first campaign in 1946 as a shy, skinny, twenty-eight-year-old candidate for Congress in Boston’s hard-boiled Eleventh District, from which James Michael Curley was retiring, he knew almost no one in the city except his grandfather; and he relied on friends from his student and Navy days, whether residents of Massachusetts or not, to supplement the efforts of his family and their political contacts. Except for two very brief stints as a newspaperman, his entire working career was centered largely in Washington, D.C.
Even during those years in the House and Senate when he was concentrating on service to Massachusetts, he was more of a national figure. He never owned a house in Boston as he did in Washington. Although as a Congressman and Senator he maintained a voting residence in a somewhat plain and faded apartment building at 122 Bowdoin Street across from the Massachusetts State House, he was rarely there when not campaigning. The fact that several other Kennedys—and their families—for a time claimed the same three-room apartment (No. 36) as their voting address was a source of some amusement and sometimes irritation to local politicians. “If he’s elected President,” one was reported to have said, “he’ll be the first carpetbagger voter to get to the White House.” From time to time, prior to his 1958 re-election, the Senator considered buying a house in Boston, but since his winters were spent in Washington, New York and Palm Beach, he settled instead for a summer home on Cape Cod.
As a Senator from Massachusetts, he did not insist that his professional staff members come from the state they would be serving and studying. In fact, he preferred that they did not. “That way,” he told me, “if they don’t work out, I’m under no political pressure or obligation to retain them.” He was, however, amused that his assistant on New England’s economic problems came from Nebraska; and he once suggested, when I was to represent him at a Massachusetts businessmen’s dinner, that I tell anyone who asked that I came “from West Hyannis Port. No one at the dinner will be from there.”
We had different ideological backgrounds, and most of the professional liberals were slow to warm to him. But I found that he was the truest and oldest kind of liberal: the free man with the free mind. He entered Congress, he freely admitted, with little or no political philosophy The aggressive attitudes of many “professional liberals” made him “uncomfortable.” But he was not opposed, as he wrote me in the fall of 1959,
to the liberal credo as it is generally assumed. You are certainly regarded as a liberal and I hope I am in the general sense, but we both speak disparagingly of those doctrinaire “liberals” …who are so opposed to me…. The word “conservative” has many implications with which I do not want to be identified. “Restrained” is more exact. I know too many conservatives in politics with whom I have nothing in common.
Kennedy had seen that many devotees of the left as well as the right could be rigid and dogmatic in their views, parroting the opinions of their respective political and intellectual leaders without reflection or re-examination. His own vote, in contrast, was not tied to the vote of any other Senator or group of Senators or to the wishes of any private individual or group.
The most formal statement of his political credo was in his 1960 address to the Liberal Party of New York:
I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas…. Liberalism…faith in man’s ability…reason and judgment…is our best and our only hope in the world today.
He said this and he believed it. But he had not written it and did not naturally speak of his philosophical outlook in such grandiloquent terms. He usually summed up his place on the political spectrum in simpler ways:
A Northern Democrat with some sense of restraint.
A moderate Democrat who seeks to follow the national interest as his conscience directs him to see it.
A practical liberal…a pragmatic liberal.
When asked which kind of President he hoped to be, liberal or conservative, he replied, “I hope to be responsible.” Perhaps his wife summed him up best as “an idealist without illusions.”
As Senator, candidate and President, his tests were: Can it work? Can it help? And, often but not always: Can it pass? He could grasp the essence of a complex subject with amazing speed, and his natural instincts were almost always on the progressive side of an issue. But his natural caution required him to test those instincts against evidence and experience. This realistic emphasis on the possible induced critics and commentators to describe him as a pragmatist, which for the most part he was. But he had a strong streak of idealism and optimism as well. To be reminded by daily disappointments that he lived in an imperfect world did not surprise or depress him, but he cared enough about the future of that world never to be satisfied with the present. Indeed, in his campaign and in the White House, his analyses of conditions in his country and planet consistently began with those four words: “I am not satisfied…”
HIS GROWTH
For the most part, all the foregoing would serve to describe him in 1963 as well as 1953. But he was not the same man. For no attribute he possessed in 1953 was more pronounced or more important than his capacity for growth, his willingness to learn, his determination to explore and to inquire and to profit by experience. He was always interested in a new challenge or competition. He had a limitless curiosity about nearly everything—people, places, the past, the future. Those who had nothing to say made him impatient. He hated to bore or be bored. But he enjoyed listening at length to anyone with new information or ideas on almost any subject, and he never forgot what he heard. He read constantly and rapidly—magazines, newspapers, biography and history (as well as fiction both good and bad). At times, on a plane or by a pool, he would read aloud to me a paragraph he found particularly forceful. After taking the time while a Senator to enroll in a speed-reading course in Baltimore with his friend Lem Billings and brother Bob, he could read twelve hundred words a minute. More amazing was the accuracy with which he remembered and applied what he read.
Consequently he was always learning and growing. When one of his grammar school teachers retired in 1963, he sent her a wire stating that he had thought of returning for a refresher course in mathematics, “but the rigors of self-education in Washington” made it impossible. In my daily contacts with him, the many changes which this growth and self-education produced rarely seemed pronounced; but looking back over the little less than eleven years in which we worked together, I can see that he changed in many ways—and that he was more than eleven years older.
Least important were the outward changes. He became handsomer as he grew grayer, the full face and broad shoulders of maturity providing a more striking and appealing presence than the earlier, more slender boyishness. He looked much older in person than he did on television or in photographs, but that was always true. He still looked younger than his years. His face became more lined, but the ready smile, the thoughtful eyes and the lack of affectation all remained. He had his hair cut (by the same House Office Building barber, whatever his office) a little less fully in later years, but it was always thicker than anyone else’s. In fact, when chided by staff members on the regular scalp massages a succession of secretaries were trai
ned to give him—a habit acquired from his father—he observed that he was the only one in the room who received such special hair treatment “and the only one with all his hair.”
His clothes continued to be expensive but always conservative and—once he became a Senator and a married man—always neat. In his office he rarely worked in his shirt sleeves and never with his tie loosened, though he would sometimes jerk out the tail of his monogrammed shirt to clean the glasses he occasionally wore for reading. From time to time he would try wearing a hat or a vest to lessen talk about his youth, but it never lasted. And he never tried to appear more “folksy” by wearing, in either work or play, an informal bow tie, a gaudy shirt, a light-colored or odd-colored suit or a multicolored handkerchief in his breast pocket. He changed clothes frequently and knew his large wardrobe intimately. When I needed a necktie in the midst of the campaign, Dave Powers handed me one he was sure the Senator never wore. But the candidate’s first words on entering the room were: “Is that my tie you’re wearing?”
His speaking changed. Except for an occasional “Cubar” and “vigah,” his Boston-Harvard accent became less pronounced, though still noticeable. His self-confidence on the platform grew, and his ability to read—and, at the right time, to discard—a prepared text increased. The Congressman and freshman Senator whose private conversations were always informed and articulate but whose public speeches were rarely inspired or inspiring became the candidate and President whose addresses stirred the hearts of the world. While his spelling also improved, his handwriting became even worse.
These outward changes over the years were pale in comparison to the more profound changes in his personality and philosophy.
He became less shy and more poised in his public appearances. The youthful aspirant for Congress who had reluctantly toured taverns and textile mills in search of Massachusetts voters—who even as a Presidential hopeful felt he might impose upon, or be rejected by, each new group of voters—became in time the President who welcomed every opportunity to get away from his desk and get back to the people. While most of the shyness in public disappeared, a well-bred deference in private did not. No one was ever addressed as “fellow,” “son,” “old man” or “old boy.” The wives of his associates were always addressed as “Mrs.,” and most office-holders, particularly his elders, by their titles, or as “Mr.” He became, if not less demanding of his staff, at least more apologetic about disrupting their lives and schedules, and the same was true of the general public. In 1953, as he parked his car in front of a “No Parking” sign in downtown Washington, he smilingly told me, “This is what Hamlet means by‘the insolence of office.’” But little more than ten years later, in November, 1963, he insisted in New York on dismissing the usual Presidential police escort on his ride from the airport to the city, accepting the delays of traffic and traffic lights because of the inconvenience his rush-hour arrival would otherwise create for New Yorkers.
Though his mind had more and more with which to be preoccupied, he became less absent-minded and better organized, with an amazing ability to compartmentalize different dates and duties. Even as his schedule tightened and his burdens grew, he acquired more respect for punctuality. He was still always in a hurry and often behind in his appointments, but he less often kept other officials waiting unnecessarily, or asked airlines to hold their flights, or drove dangerously fast on public highways. In his last-minute dashes to the airport during the early Senate days, he would take me along to talk business as he drove, and an aide, “Muggsy” O’Leary, to handle parking and luggage. Muggsy refused the front seat on these high-speed trips, calling it the “death seat,” and I acceded to Muggsy’s preference only for fear that, if I were in the back seat, the Senator would turn around as he drove.
He also grew more accustomed to disappointment in his plans and to criticism in print. In 1954 he was deeply disturbed by Boston Post editorials accusing him of “sacrificing the best interests of the people who elected him.” But in 1963 when right-wing author Victor Lasky printed out of context every unfavorable rumor or report that could be collected about the Kennedys under the title of JFK: The Man and the Myth,JFK dismissed both book and author as more pitifully ridiculous than dangerous.
The fact that Lasky and other critics could discover inconsistencies between his Congressional, Senatorial and Presidential positions did not surprise or dismay him. “We all learn,” he observed in 1960, “from the time you are born to the time you die…. Events change…conditions change, and…you would be extremely unwise…to pursue policies that are unsuccessful.”
He did not feel bound for life by his views as a Boston Congressman on the promotion of farm Income, for example, or the expansion of world trade. When a Republican Congressman in 1961 quoted against him a fiery speech of 1949 in which Congressman Kennedy had criticized the Truman China policy, President Kennedy, though not retreating from the thrust of his earlier policy view, had no hesitation in stating to questioning newsmen, “In my speech in 1949 I placed more emphasis on personalities than I would today….I would say that my view today is more in accordance with the facts than my view in 1949.”
Clearly in later years he was more liberal than he had been as a young Congressman who had, in his words, “just come out of my father’s house.” He still refused to think with accepted stereotypes or to talk with sweeping generalities or to act with dogmatic solutions. He still refused to embrace change for the sake of change or to oppose compromise when compromise was required. But he cared more about ideas and ideals where once he had cared chiefly about winning. He had talked to me with concern but calm in our first meeting about the statistics of unemployment in Lawrence, Massachusetts. But as we drove through West Virginia in 1960, he climbed back into the car after a visit to a jobless miner’s shack visibly moved. He shook his head in dismay and said nothing. Unlike those liberals who start out with all the answers, he had started out asking questions. And more than most “self-made” men, the deep convictions he had developed were not inherited from his parents or imposed by his environment but were instead the product of his own reasoning and learning.
In the early stages of his public career his foreign policy speeches had a militant ring. Defense, in his view, was the bulk of diplomacy and disarmament was only a dream. But with increased perspective and responsibility came a renewed commitment to peace. Nothing gave him greater satisfaction in the White House than signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
The Senator who in 1954 paid little attention to the historic Supreme Court desegregation decision became less than a decade later the first President in history to invoke all the executive, legislative and moral powers of his office on behalf of equal rights.
The young Congressman who voted for the McCarran Internal Security Act, and who was—by his own admission—insufficiently sensitive to the ruin of reputations by McCarthyism, became the President who awarded the Enrico Fermi prize to the much abused J. Robert Oppen-heimer, pardoned Communist leader Junius Scales, halted the postal interception of Communist propaganda, welcomed the controversial Linus Pauling into the White House, and appointed to his administration several of McCarthy’s favorite targets.
In 1953 he knew little and cared less about agriculture, conservation and natural resources. His views on basic economic, fiscal and monetary policies were either unformed or uninformed. He had seen comparatively little of his own country, its land and its inhabitants. He had never toured a mining town or viewed a cotton field or visited a national forest. He had never, as he later admitted in a Farm Belt speech, “plowed a furrow, straight or crooked.”
But by 1961 it could be said that no President had ever seen so often and known so well the people and the problems of every part of the country. During the preconvention campaign days, after a rainy day inspection of a farm near Columbus, Nebraska, he told his luncheon audience that the town banker had informed him of the bank’s basic rule: Lend no money to a man who’s never had mud on his face and manure on h
is shoes. “Today,” said the Senator from Boston, “I can qualify for a loan.”
He was fully aware of his own growth and evolution. He was, in fact, disappointed that the Burns biography of 1959 had not emphasized “a far greater evolution than he suggests. He could contrast my indifferent record at school with my present intensity.” The Senator candidly compared his political development with his scholastic performance. “The fact of the matter is,” he told me, “that I fiddled around at Choate and really didn’t become interested until the end of my sophomore year at Harvard.”
Some might say that he fiddled around as a Congressman and really didn’t become interested until his sophomore year in the Senate. It seemed to me in 1953 that an inner struggle was being waged for the spirit of John Kennedy—a struggle between the political dilettante and the statesman, between the lure of luxury and lawmaking. His performance in the House of Representatives had been considered by most observers to be largely undistinguished—except for a record of absenteeism which had been heightened by indifference as well as ill health and by unofficial as well as official travels.
Having won a Senate seat and a satisfactory measure of glory, he had proved his worth in his chosen profession of politics. It was six years until re-election, and the responsibilities of a freshman Democratic Senator under a Republican Congress and administration were neither weighty nor exciting. Having borne more pain and gloom than he liked to remember, he enjoyed in his bachelor days carefree parties and companions on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. There was a natural temptation to spend the limited number of days in which he could count on enjoying full health in pursuit of pleasure as well as duty.