by Ted Sorensen
2 Wilkins linked Kennedy’s vote with a supposed newspaper picture showing the Senator with his arm around the Governor of Georgia. Most gregarious politicians would assume such a picture existed. But the restrained Senator from Massachusetts knew that he had never posed, as he wrote Wilkins, with his “arm around the Governor or anyone else,” and Wilkins later admitted that he had intended only “a figure of speech.”
3 Presumably this meant that Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa considered himself a power in the Democratic Party, but once the investigation began, Hoffa, forgetting his 1953 claim that a Republican committee in the House was persecuting him because he was a Democrat, claimed that the Kennedys were out to get him because he was a Republican.
4 When he learned that a noted political analyst claimed his opposition to Kennedy’s Presidential candidacy was based on the latter’s statement that Western Europe “would be flushed down the drain,” the Senator could assert without hesitation that he had never used such a phrase in his life.
5 That particular “definition” exemplified the caution with which he approached any tinkering with the Constitution, leading him to oppose not only the Bricker Amendment and the Mundt-Daniel Electoral College Amendment but a reduction in the voting age as well. He favored the latter on its merits, he said, and would support it on the ballot in Massachusetts. But he felt that his stand against needless or hasty Congressional action on Constitutional amendments required him to oppose it in the absence of more widespread action by the states or further evidence of its necessity. Had the national voting age been eighteen in 1960, polls indicate that Kennedy’s margin would not have been so narrow.
6 Until his wife corrected him, he at first confused two poems by using instead of the first line quoted above the words “I’ll hitch my wagon to a star.”
CHAPTER III
THE POLITICIAN
IN 1956 HARVARD UNIVERSITY awarded John Kennedy an honorary degree with a citation as brief and balanced as the best of his speeches: “Brave officer, able Senator, son of Harvard; loyal to party, he remains steadfast to principle.”
The second clause was an admirable summary of the Senator’s politics. Loyal to party, he remained steadfast to principle. His votes in the Senate were independently determined but consistently with the progressives in his party. He had not always cast a straight Democratic ballot at the polls, but had long worked at speech-making and fund-raising for fellow Democrats both inside and outside Massachusetts. He did not conceal his party label, as many do, in his campaign media, but he also successfully appealed for independent and Republican votes. He was rarely personal about politics—even though in private he talked more about personalities than issues—and did not dislike those who opposed or even attacked him so long as they were open and impersonal in their stand.
In Profiles in Courage he wrote: “We cannot permit the pressures of party responsibility to submerge on every issue the call of personal responsibility.” But he was a partisan Democrat. He told me midway through his first Senate term that, had he arrived from outer space wholly ignorant of the issues, he would, “after listening a while to Mundt, Curtis and that group, gladly be a Democrat.” Democrats, he said, generally had more heart, more foresight and more energy. They were not satisfied with things as they were and believed they could make them better.
But his partisanship had not been sufficiently blind or bitter to endear him to some of the “professional” party leaders, “pols,” hacks and hangers-on in Massachusetts. He was of Irish descent, like most of them, but he was “Harvard Irish.” Despite the fact that he consistently ran ahead of other Democrats in the state, he did not, in their judgment, look or talk like the traditional Massachusetts politician. It was a judgment with which he might have agreed. “I hadn’t considered myself a political type,” he wrote in 1960, explaining why he had assumed in college that his older brother would be the family politician. Nevertheless this product of an unusually political family, representing the most political of cities, liked politics more each year, and became in time a far better practitioner of that profession than any of the so-called “professionals.”
The professionals thought he had shown his party unreliability early as a young Congressman. He had been the only member of the Massachusetts Democratic delegation in 1947 unwilling to sign a petition to President Truman seeking clemency for James Michael Curley. Curley, onetime Mayor of Boston, Congressman and Governor of Massachusetts, was regarded as the “elder statesman” of the old-style Democratic politics, with which Kennedy had no wish to be associated. More importantly, he later told me, Curley’s, term in prison for a mail fraud conviction had barely started, and a check with the authorities showed no grounds for a medical plea. Despite Curley’s popularity in his old district, despite a request from delegation leader John McCormack, the young Congressman could not be persuaded that the party image would be helped by the “Purple Shamrock’s” premature release.
The Senator enjoyed Edwin O’Connor’s novel of urban politics, The Last Hurrah, but he regretted the resulting reglorification of Curley, upon whose career it seemed to be based. When Curley died late in 1958, the Senator was reached in an Anchorage hotel room by a Massachusetts radio reporter who was apparently unaware that it was 5 A.M. in Alaska. After struggling briefly with a cautious, telephone-recorded statement about Curley’s “colorful” career which would surely be “missed,” Kennedy gave up with his own somewhat colorful—and presumably recorded—oath and went back to sleep.
The old-line politicians grumbled also that Kennedy had always relied on a personal organization instead of the party and on amateurs instead of “pros.” He used a self-proclaimed “pol” named Francis X. Morrissey as a political confidence man and buffer in Boston—but depended on his brothers and others of whom the “pros” had barely heard to run his Massachusetts campaigns. As a Senator, they complained, he voted too independently, spent too much time courting Republican voters and was not helping the party (i.e., themselves) sufficiently by dispensing patronage. They overlooked the fact that a freshman Democratic Senator under a Republican administration has very little Federal patronage to dispense; and that his influence on state government patronage was limited during his eight years in the Senate by the two occupants of the governor’s office—Republican Christian Herter, and then a Democrat, Foster Furcolo, who was not on friendly terms with the Senator.
In 1954, when Furcolo sought election to the Senate against the incumbent Republican Leverett Saltonstall, Kennedy agreed to make a major television appearance with the two state-wide Democratic candidates on October 7, the night before he entered the hospital. The Senator, resting at Hyannis Port, sent me to Boston in advance to help work out the script. On the afternoon of the broadcast, harmony prevailed. The three representatives agreed on the final script and their principals agreed by telephone to review it at the studio some ninety minutes before air time.
Senator Kennedy arrived at the studio that night in considerable pain. That pain increased as he waited with gubernatorial candidate Robert Murphy for over an hour without any sign of Furcolo. “Five minutes before we were to go on the air,” as Kennedy later described it, “he arrived—and asked that the script be changed.” He wanted a stronger endorsement. The Senator, who had encountered constant trouble with Furcolo in the 1952 campaign, was furious. For a moment the whole telecast was in doubt. When it proceeded, Kennedy’s closing endorsement pointedly refrained from mentioning Furcolo by name.
Afterward, in the car outside the studio, his fury remained. The Murphy camp had earlier asked him to lend them my speech-writing services. The Senator asked me to stay in Boston, living in his apartment at 122 Bowdoin Street while he was in the hospital. In addition to my completing some voter surveys for him, he gave me two assignments: (1) help Democrat Murphy; (2) help Republican Saltonstall.
I did what I could in this latter vein—primarily suggesting means of Saltonstall’s attracting Kennedy supporters and using Kennedy’s na
me. Nor was any friendly newspaper left in doubt about Kennedy’s failure to mention Furcolo in the telecast. Saltonstall won, and Kennedy, when asked on television two years later why he was supporting Furcolo as the then Democratic nominee for Governor, refused to go beyond a carefully worded reply:
Q: Why are you endorsing him this year when you failed to endorse him two years ago?
JFK: I think he is superior to his present opponent.
Q: Do you mean that he is a better man now?
JFK: I think he is superior to the man he is running against….
The Kennedy-Saltonstall cooperation continued, to the personal pleasure and political benefit of both men, as noted earlier. Another Republican for whom Kennedy publicly expressed respect if not agreement was the late Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio. Kennedy nominated him for “man of the year” in 1953—devoted a chapter to him in Profiles in Courage—and was chairman of a Special Senate Committee which selected Taft as one of five outstanding Senators of the past whose portraits were to hang in the Senate lobby.
The selection of these five was a fascinating exercise. After a poll by Kennedy of scholars and Senators, Webster, Clay and Calhoun had been obvious choices. The committee, operating under a self-imposed rule of unanimity, decided the other two slots should be divided between a liberal and a conservative. Taft was the “conservative” selection over an Ohio predecessor, John Sherman. Robert LaFollette, Sr., was the “liberal” choice after the leading candidate, Nebraska’s George Norris, was blocked by Republican committee member Styles Bridges (either because he had tangled with Norris many years earlier, as he admitted, or because he was acting for Nebraska’s conservative Senator Carl Curtis—whose earlier request that each state’s current Senators be permitted to block the selection of any previous Senator from their state had been politely rejected by Kennedy).
John Kennedy’s expressions of respect for Bob Taft pleased not only Joseph P. Kennedy but a key supporter and friend, Basil Brewer. Publisher of the influential New Bedford, Massachusetts, Standard Times, Brewer was a conservative Massachusetts Republican, an old friend of the senior Kennedy and an old foe of Henry Cabot Lodge. After Lodge had helped Eisenhower obtain the Republican nomination over Taft in 1952, the Standard Times endorsed Kennedy over Lodge for the Senate, and the 22,000 extra votes Kennedy piled up in the New Bedford area had helped provide his winning margin of only 70,000 votes.
RE-ELECTION TO THE SENATE
That margin was sufficiently narrow that “anybody in the state can come into this office,” Kennedy told me, “and claim credit for my winning.” With this margin in mind, his 1958 Senate campaign began the day after his 1952 campaign ended. 1 During the nearly six years that preceded the official opening of his re-election campaign, no preoccupation with other matters and no prediction of easy victory were permitted to interfere with five fundamental approaches to 1958:
1. Contact was maintained with the personal organization he had carefully nurtured in every corner of the state. The chief Kennedy men in each community were called “secretaries,” thus avoiding both offense to the local party “chairman” and a hierarchy of titles within the Kennedy camp.
2. Each year a comprehensive report was mailed throughout the state on what legislative and administrative actions he was seeking by way of doing “more for Massachusetts.” We justified the use of Congressional franking privileges for this document on the legislator’s historic responsibility to account for his stewardship to his constituents; and when we were unable to find a sufficiently brief quotation from an early American statesman to this effect, Lee White and I invented one and attributed it to “one of our founding fathers.”
3. The Senator spent an increasing number of weekends speaking throughout the state—to the Sons of Italy one night and an American Legion post the next—to the Massachusetts Farm Bureau and the United Polish Societies—to the Council of Catholic Nurses and a Bonds for Israel dinner—to chambers of commerce, labor unions, Rotary luncheons, and conventions, clubs and conferences of every imaginable kind. Most of his speeches, particularly in the small towns, were non-partisan and moderate in flavor.
4. The favor of the Massachusetts newspapers, largely Republican and almost entirely Lodge-oriented in 1952, was carefully cultivated. Reporters, editors and publishers were always welcome in the Senator’s office. Newspaper executives who needed a speaker, a guest editorial or a helping hand with some governmental problem found their Senator eager to be of service. As a result, in sharp contrast with 1952, not a single Massachusetts newspaper opposed Kennedy’s re-election in 1958, and nearly all of them, including such consistently Republican spokesmen as the Boston Herald, openly endorsed him (the Herald’s endorsement following right on the heels of a Kennedy endorsement by the Massachusetts ADA).
5. Never forgetting his supporters, the Senator constantly wooed his opponents. He was always willing to forget differences and forgive detractors. He bore no lasting grudges and thought politics no place for revenge. Republicans were frequently reminded of his cooperation with Senator Saltonstall, his support of Eisenhower foreign policy measures and his independent voting record. Businessmen were kept informed of his efforts to boost the state’s economy and to curb labor rackets. Budget-cutting advocates were told of his Senate leadership on behalf of the Second Hoover Commission Report, and given the reprints of a warm letter of appreciation from another old friend of his father’s, Herbert Hoover. Italo-Americans who were offended by his feud with Furcolo, longshoremen disgruntled by his support of the St. Lawrence Seaway, Teamsters and other union members upset by his efforts for labor reform, Negroes suspicious of his voting for the jury trial amendment—all these and other groups received material which emphasized his efforts on their behalf, his friendship for their causes and his endorsement by their leaders. In addition, of course, he made certain all mail was answered promptly, all visitors were greeted cordially and as many state problems as possible were handled by him personally.
The Kennedy approach to campaigning, which would later be applied to the Presidential primaries and then on a nationwide scale, was unique in many ways. While remembering to stir up the faithful, he concentrated on the uncommitted. Running even with his party in the urban Democratic strongholds, he won by running far ahead of his party in the suburbs and towns. Remaining deferential to local party organizations, he sought new and attractive faces for his “secretaries.” Soliciting support from wealthy contributors and prominent names, he knew that hard, routine, usually boring work by large numbers of lesser known, less busy and less opinionated adherents was more important to win elections. He sought to get a little work from a lot of people. An endless number of committees was formed, giving more and more voters an opportunity to feel a part of the Kennedy organization.
He turned for a campaign manager, not to an experienced professional (“Most of them are available,” he said, “only because they are experienced in losing”), but to one of his own brothers, enabling the Senator to trust completely the campaign manager’s loyalty and judgment.
In March of 1959 I summed up the Kennedy approach in a talk to the Midwest Democratic Conference by suggesting eight “modern clichés” to replace the standard campaign myths:
1. One devoted volunteer like Paul Revere is worth ten hired Hessians.
2. Personal letters count more than prestige letterheads.
3. Fifty $1 contributors are better than one $100 contributor.
4. A nonpolitical talk to the unconvinced is better than a political talk to the already convinced.
5. One session in a vote-filled poolroom is worth two sessions in a smoke-filled hotel room.
6. (Regarding issues) It is better to rock the boat than to sail it under false colors.
7. No one’s vote can be delivered with the possible exception of your mother’s—and make sure she’s registered.
8. One hour of work in 1957 is worth two hours of work in 1958.
This last “cliché” struck at t
he oldest and best-entrenched political myth that Kennedy challenged. “In every campaign I’ve ever been in,” he told me in 1959, “they’ve said I was starting too early—that I would peak too soon or get too much exposure or run out of gas or be too easy a target. I would never have won any race following that advice.”
Between 1952 and 1958 he did not follow it, and in 1958 the Massachusetts Republicans could not find a significant candidate willing to oppose him. Some Republican strategists counseled no opposition in order to keep down the Democratic turnout for Kennedy. One Boston Herald columnist even suggested that both parties endorse him. The Republicans “can’t possibly lick him,” wrote the late Bill Cunningham. “They couldn’t borrow a better man and they surely haven’t any like him…. Why not make it unanimous?”
It nearly was. In the end, his opponent was an unknown lawyer named Vincent Celeste. Vinnie, as his friends called him, was a fiery orator when making sweeping charges against the Kennedys in public. But he was more subdued in the one private conversation I had with him, after he had walked out on a League of Women Voters-sponsored public debate in which I had represented the Senator, shouting as he left a series of protests at the speech I had half-completed.
Understandably the Kennedy campaign workers at the outset had an air of overconfident lethargy. But we were shocked by a light primary turnout in which Furcolo received a larger Democratic vote seeking reelection as Governor than Kennedy did as Senator. “I’m glad it happened and got everyone off their backs,” said the Senator, and he launched an intensive handshaking, speech-making, nonstop automobile tour of the state of several weeks’ duration, which took him and Jacqueline within six miles of every Massachusetts voter. On occasion she would speak a few words in French or Italian to audiences of those extractions.
Every hand in sight was shaken; ever since 1946, when Dave Powers had spirited him up the back stairs of the “three-decker” apartments in Charlestown (“so we could catch them in the kitchen,” said Dave), he had known there was no substitute for personal contact. Aides marveled at his stopping the car on the fatigue-ridden last night of the campaign to shake one more hand, that of an elderly woman alone on the street.