by Ted Sorensen
That committee, under Senator Arthur Watkins of Utah, at first hoped to file its report in late summer before the Senate went home. When it did not, Senator Kennedy, desperate for relief from his back, hoped that he would be out of the hospital before the Senate reconvened to consider the report in November. Instead, he was near death’s door in November, remaining incommunicado even when carried by stretcher to Palm Beach in December. In constant pain, under heavy sedation, almost wholly immobile, he could not use the telephone, read the Congressional Record or consider serious memoranda; and it was not until mid-January, 1955, when we discussed the Formosa Resolution and then later his book, that he and I could be in touch.
The responsibility for recording or not recording him on the censure vote in November, 1954, thus fell on me. I knew, had he been present, that he would have voted for censure along with every other Democrat. (He subsequently stated his approval of the action taken.) I guessed that my failure to record him would plague him for years to come. But I had been trained in the discipline of due process and civil liberties. An absent juror, who had not been present for the trial or even heard the indictment (which in this case was amended in the course of debate), should not have his predetermined position recorded. In all conscience I could not ask the Secretary of the Senate to pair or record Kennedy for censure.
Without question, as the Senator himself later admitted, he could have been more outspoken against McCarthy and his methods before the censure vote, had he not felt inhibited by his family’s friendship; and he could have more clearly stated his position after he returned to the Senate, although that struck him as cheap and hypocritical inasmuch as McCarthyism, and not long thereafter McCarthy, were dead. But his failure to be recorded at the time of the vote, which was persistently raised against him in some quarters, was due to my adherence to basic principles of civil liberties and not to his indifference to them.
CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE SENATE
However, those who were seeking excuses to doubt John Kennedy’s liberalism found new grounds in 1957. Although civil rights had not been a major issue in Massachusetts, where righteous laws against discrimination and persistent acts of discrimination had coexisted comfortably for years, Kennedy as Congressman and Senator had identified himself with the small civil rights bloc in both houses. He had supported a strong FEPC, abolition of the poll tax, antilynching legislation and amendment of the rule on filibusters. He had been the first member of Congress from New England to appoint a Negro to his staff.
In 1957 he supported the administration’s mild but precedent-setting voting rights bill, endorsing the effort to extend under Title III the Attorney General’s injunctive powers to cases on schooling and other rights. He asked me, however, to examine whether there was any legal basis in Vice President Richard Nixon’s proposed ruling to by-pass committee consideration of the bill. When I reported that I could find no such basis in either the Senate’s rules and precedents or the Constitution, and that similar manipulation could be employed by conservative Senators on right-to-work and other House bills, he supported the unsuccessful Morse request that the civil rights bill proceed normally to committee, subject to discharge in one week.
Many of the civil rights Democrats privately agreed with Morse that the ill-feeling engendered by abandoning traditional procedures would make passage of a strong bill more difficult. But fearful of being outmaneuvered politically by Nixon and the Republicans, most of them voted to uphold the Vice President’s ruling; and Kennedy’s vote for orderly procedure was condemned by civil rights leaders as a bid for Southern Presidential support. At a convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in mail from Boston Negro leaders, in editorials and columns, Kennedy’s vote was assailed.
The full force of their fury, however, was yet to come. Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, whose own star had been rising on the national horizon, was determined to obtain passage of the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction. A careful counter of Senate heads, he knew that he did not have the votes to break a Southern filibuster, that adoption of the “jury trial amendment” might avoid a full-scale filibuster, and that the votes of Kennedy and his friend John Pastore were needed for the adoption of that amendment.
The question dealt with by this amendment was whether local voting officials who had defied court orders on the registration of Negroes could be tried for criminal as well as civil contempt of court without a jury trial. The amendment required a jury trial in both kinds of cases. Both sides exaggerated its importance, with some Northerners calling the bill meaningless with such an amendment and some Southerners calling the bill monstrous without it. Enforcement of the bill could not, in fact, depend upon criminal (as opposed to civil) contempt proceedings. But emotion and oversimplification made the amendment a symbol at the expense of the facts. And although some three dozen other non-Southern Senators supported it, Kennedy’s vote was regarded as crucial.
He turned for advice to two Harvard professors of law, both noted for their devotion to civil rights, Mark DeWolfe Howe and Paul Freund. Both answered that acceptance of the amendment to pass the bill involved no betrayal of principle. Kennedy, followed by Pastore, supported the “jury trial amendment.” It passed. The bill passed. “It would be a heavy blow,” the Senator said to his critics, to abandon “a bill of real merit for the doubtful satisfaction of standing dogmatically by a provision which does not…add significantly to the substantive effect of the measure.”
But his critics would not be stilled. His vote for broad injunctive powers under Title III was dismissed as “playing both sides.” His other votes and statements on behalf of the bill were ignored. NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins told New England members that Kennedy had not earned their support. 2
That storm eventually passed; Wilkins in fact praised Kennedy’s civil rights record during his 1958 Senate re-election campaign as “one of the best…of any Senator in Congress.” But the Senator would always marvel at the comparative public inattention paid, except by its enemies in the South, to his more important vote on Title III—which was later largely incorporated in the Kennedy Civil Rights Bill of 1963. In more than one speech he would quote, with understanding as well as amusement, a legendary verse said to have been found among the papers of a deceased legislator:
Among life’s dying embers
These are my regrets:
When I’m “right” no one remembers,
When I’m “wrong” no one forgets.
LABOR RACKETEERING AND REFORM
But Negroes and Southerners were not the only members of the traditional Democratic coalition whose disfavor he would risk in the Senate. Organized labor had long been a powerful Kennedy ally. Throughout his House and Senate tenures, he had served on the Labor Committees of each body. Labor leaders admired his opposition in the House to the Taft-Hartley Bill and his leadership in the Senate for higher minimum wages, improved Social Security with medical care, aid to depressed areas and nationwide unemployment compensation standards. His labor record was, in the inflated parlance of politics, “a thousand percent.” The Massachusetts Teamsters (who were never linked with the corrupt practices of their national leaders) had been consistent Kennedy supporters. But between 1957 and 1959 the relationship between Kennedy and his labor friends underwent a severe strain.
To pursue information on corrupt labor practices initially uncovered by the Permanent Investigations Subcommittee (then chaired by Senator John McClellan, with Robert Kennedy as Chief Counsel), the Senate in 1957 established a special investigating committee on labor rackets, with members from both the McClellan Subcommittee and the Senate Labor Committee. McClellan and Bob Kennedy carried over their roles; John Kennedy was asked to join.
He knew it meant risking his good relations with organized labor—and that at least two other Senators with national ambitions, Henry Jackson and Stuart Symington, had declined to serve. There had also been hints of National Teamster support for his Presidential
candidacy if only Bob Kennedy would “play smart.” 3
But whatever the political pitfalls, Kennedy was interested. Internal union safeguards had intrigued him since his Taft-Hartley studies in the House. As chairman of the Senate Labor Committee’s Subcommittee on Labor Legislation, he knew he could hardly avoid involvement in any legislative proposals growing out of the hearings (although he also declined an opportunity to leave the Labor Committee for a position on another committee). The well-known antilabor views of many of the Rackets Committee members already selected, and particularly those of South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, who would eagerly take his place if he declined, underlined both the difficulty and the necessity of his accepting.
He decided to join the committee. He sponsored the resulting labor reform legislation. For the first time in his Congressional career, he concentrated intensively and almost exclusively for a period of years on a single piece of legislation. He was, said the Christian Science Monitor, “burning his bridges” to labor support for the Presidency. And the Senator, in one of those subsequent moments of detached self-appraisal which reflected neither boasting nor complaining, noted that it was “certainly the toughest political job any Presidential candidate could ever take on.”
Labor leaders were coolly suspicious, then hotly opposed. AFL-CIO President George Meany, at a hearing called by Kennedy on his proposed reform bill, cried out, “God save us from our friends!”—to which Kennedy quietly replied: “I say that, too, Mr. Meany.” Machinists President Al Hayes compared Kennedy to Argentine dictator Perón. Others sought to have him denounced in their national conventions. But then Senate Republican Leader William Knowland unleashed and nearly passed a parcel of antilabor amendments to a welfare and pension fund bill. Gradually and somewhat grudgingly, Meany and most of the top union leaders realized that some legislation was unavoidable—and that the alternatives were a Kennedy labor-management reform bill to clean up rackets they could neither deny nor condone or a Knowland labor-management relations bill to curb their collective bargaining.
The ensuing struggle, in which most AFL-CIO leaders supported both a constructive bill and their own voluntary code, gave the Senator his most intimate glimpse into the quality of labor’s leadership. Men of the ilk of Beck, Hoffa and their hoodlum friends were quickly isolated from the rest. But not all the honest leaders, he found, could wield power as effectively as Hoffa. Some, he remarked to me on a trip, had grown flabby through long years in power and were out of touch or out of tune with their members. Some were sterile in their thinking and relied on subordinates and attorneys. Some were mere figureheads not effectively in control of their own unions. Some, such as the leaders of the building trades and Railroad Brotherhoods, were effective because they concentrated solely on issues affecting their members and rewarded their friends in both parties. Some were idealists and reformers who rallied to every liberal banner and were often taken for granted by the Democrats. Some were great talkers and some were great “doers”—and some, like Walter Reuther, were both.
At the same time that many labor backers were down on “the Kennedys” for their antiracketeering efforts, the labor baiters in business and Republican circles—many of whom had close ties with Beck or Hoffa—were charging the Kennedys with favoritism to Walter Reuther. When a thorough investigation showed no wrongdoing on Mr. Reuther’s part, they next charged the Senator with ignoring the real issue of labor’s “monopoly power,” and they pushed through the House of Representatives the Landrum-Griffin restrictions on boycotts and picketing.
Businessmen also resented the Kennedys for their exposure of management’s collusion with racketeers—through “fake unions and welfare funds [and] so-called sweetheart contracts to keep wages low and responsible unions out,” as the Senator described it to one business audience. The President of the American Bar Association resented the Senator’s statements of concern over the organized Bar’s “apparent indifference” to those members who participated with the racketeers in raiding union funds. A variety of Democratic politicians also brought pressure on both Kennedys. When Jake Arvey, famed as Illinois’ National Committeeman and a Stevenson confidant, asked him to intercede on behalf of a client, Senator Kennedy told him only Chief Counsel Kennedy could halt an investigation. When Arvey and his associate then left for the committee office, the Senator called Bob and told him he thought the request “smelled.”
As these opposing pressures grew, Kennedy’s determination grew. Aided by Ralph Dungan, Harvard labor law expert Archibald Cox and a panel of six other scholars, he drafted a labor reform bill, mastered the intricacies of labor law and, for the first time, truly mastered the legislative process. In 1958 the Kennedy-Ives bill passed the Senate by a vote of 88 to 1, only to be buried in the House. In 1959, after a long and difficult floor battle, the Kennedy-Ervin bill was passed by a vote of 90 to 1.
Interestingly enough, one crucial roll call in 1959 involved the political fortunes of most of the Presidential aspirants. Kennedy, with vigorous help from Johnson and the support of Symington, fought a high-sounding but harmful “Labor Bill of Rights” amendment offered by John McClellan. To his dismay, it passed by one vote, with Hubert Humphrey out of town. As Johnson maneuvered for reconsideration, a tie-breaking vote in its favor was cast by Vice President Nixon. Later Kennedy and Johnson succeeded in getting this decision modified, causing Barry Goldwater to cast the only vote against the bill, and causing Kennedy to remark that it was “obvious that Senator Goldwater would be satisfied with no bill that did not destroy the organized trade union movement in the United States.”
The bill went to conference with the House-passed Landrum-Griffin bill. Preferring a compromise to no bill at all, Kennedy was able to eliminate fifteen restrictions on normal union activity from the House bill while retaining his own curbs on racketeering. But although the final version was on balance closer to the Senate bill, he thought it politic that it not bear his name.
Throughout the long legislative effort the investigative probe continued. Some national and Massachusetts labor leaders were angered when he signed the McClellan Committee report. Not to have done so, he replied, would have cost him his credibility on the issue in the Senate. But there were political gains as well as losses. The television public was becoming increasingly familiar with the Kennedy brothers grilling dishonest union leaders or lecturing racketeers who had misused the funds of honest members. The committee, unlike McCarthy’s operation, gave all witnesses the right to offer prepared statements, to submit questions for cross-examination, to receive a transcript of the testimony, to refuse a one-man hearing and to exercise the full protection against self-incrimination. Although a large portion of the Senator’s mail was from those incensed by the refusal of many witnesses to give testimony, he understood both the fairness of the Fifth Amendment and the fairness of confronting all witnesses with the evidence against them, whether they desired to respond to it or not. (He could not, however, refrain from commenting to his banquet audiences on the racketeer, wholly fictional, “who took the First, Fifth, Sixth and Sixteenth Amendments—and deeply regretted the repeal of the Eighteenth.”)
HIS SENATE OFFICE
Meanwhile, in Room 362 in the Senate Office Building, where the door was always open, the Kennedy Senatorial operation was satisfying both the Senator and his Massachusetts constituents.
From the beginning, the pace was frantic and the hours were long. His staff worked hard because the Senator worked hard and because his vitality and enthusiasm were infectious. Barry Goldwater remarked to a friend that the only office still active when he left at night was inevitably the Kennedy office. Vice President Nixon’s office, directly across the hall, often worked in two secretarial shifts, but the girls in the Kennedy office, with no overtime or compensatory time off, consistently worked ten, twelve or more hours with surprisingly little turnover. (Nixon and Kennedy had entered Congress together and were friendly. Guests at a 1953 Kennedy cocktail party had included all his staff, inclu
ding stenographers, and the Richard Nixons. The Vice President would occasionally look in on our office and in 1955 sent a basket of fruit to welcome the Senator’s return from convalescence. Earlier, when the Democrats in the 1954 elections appeared to have regained control of the Senate by a one-vote margin, the Vice President called me in to say that he had no intention of permitting the Republicans to organize the Senate by taking advantage of Kennedy’s hospitalization.)
Official staff allowances were insufficient for a state with as many letter-writers as Massachusetts and a Senator with as many interests as Kennedy. He consequently supplemented the payroll out of his own pocket. His Administrative Assistant Ted Reardon, who had been with him since his first campaign for the House, oversaw the handling of constituent requests. The Senator would personally intervene in the most important problems, ranging from Agricultural Department funds for spraying gypsy moths to expediting the Marine Corps discharge of Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams (who, to Kennedy’s chagrin, endorsed Nixon in 1960). The always affable and thoughtful Reardon also administered, to the disappointment of some Massachusetts politicians, a merit system for the selection of Senatorial West Point and Annapolis appointees which made any prejudice or partisanship impossible.
The Senator’s personal secretary was my fellow Nebraskan, Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln, whose unfailing devotion and good nature more than compensated for a sometimes overly possessive attitude. (“Whatever I do or say,” President Kennedy said to me one afternoon in his White House bedroom, after an urgent telephone request to his secretary, “Mrs. Lincoln [in eleven years he never called her Evelyn] will be sweet and unsurprised. If I had said just now, ‘Mrs. Lincoln, I have cut off Jackie’s head, would you please send over a box?’ she still would have replied, ‘That’s wonderful, Mr. President, I’ll send it right away…. Did you get your nap?’”)