The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  A few days later Dalton sat at a meeting at the Bellevue Hotel with Joe and the eight or so top campaign aides. “The father wanted me out right from the start,” Dalton said. “It was as simple as that. And so he decided to get me out, and he started pushing me around. So between John’s ingratitude and the old man’s actions there, the thing came to an end pretty quickly.”

  Dalton recalls that at that meeting “Joe Kennedy blasted the living daylights out of me, absolutely blasted me in front of these people.” One of the other participants, John Galvin, recalls the day somewhat differently: “Mark didn’t like the old man’s style; he resented the old man, who was a son of a bitch…. He wasn’t laying into Mark. He was just saying, he was being kind of, oh, unreasonable, saying some unreasonable things about people and whatever.”

  Dalton’s pain amplified every slight and magnified every curt query into an assault on his very being. Everyone in the room that day saw how distressed the campaign manager had become. Dalton did not confront Joe or run raging from the room, but slunk away, leaving the Kennedys and their ambitions behind forever.

  Years later, Bobby spun his own mean version of this sad tale: “Mark Dalton was going to be the campaign manager, and then he had what amounted to, I guess, a nervous breakdown about it…. He wouldn’t come out of his room. I guess it was the pressure about it and everything. I was working in Brooklyn, so I came up.”

  There was at times a high selfishness to the Kennedys, a cold, impenetrable core that displayed itself to anyone who was expendable, and in the long run that was almost anyone outside the family. Those who got close to that core often found themselves pushed out a door that locked behind them. Now Dalton was gone. Billy Sutton had been shuttled aside too, his usefulness finished, a bit too much of the bottle perhaps, the same jokes told too many times.

  Those on the campaign referred to the days of Mark Dalton as “before the revolution” and the days of Bobby as “after the revolution.” And every revolution demands its blood. Jack was no good at firing, disciplining, or demoting, all the mundane nasty chores involved in running a political organization. Like most successful politicians, he had learned that when bad news is to be handed out, he should be elsewhere.

  Any political campaign, fueled as it is by the work of poorly paid and unpaid staffers, is full of jealousy and rude positioning. Kennedy campaigns were worse; the family seemed to set subordinates against each other in a race that had no clear rules and no obvious finish line. When Jack made his rare appearances in the campaign office, he was sure to be approached by staff members complaining about their peers. Jack learned to stay away from the office, or to come rushing through, as if on a campaign stop, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries, but leaving before anyone had a chance to take him aside.

  Bobby stayed, however, and Jack learned in the 1952 campaign that his younger brother was willing to take on these most onerous of chores, castigating those who didn’t measure up, pushing others with crude force. It was not Bobby’s style to preface his criticisms with a few nuggets of praise or to nestle his condemnation among platitudes and pleasantries. He got right to it with brutal efficiency and what to observers looked like pleasure. When Bobby asked Sam Adams to help on the campaign, and Sam responded that he was too busy, Sam felt “like he burned my bridges.” Bobby was doing a lot of bridge burning.

  Bobby had his father’s nearly maniacal sense of precision. Politics was a matter of inches, not feet; of ounces, not pounds. After one of the campaign tea parties, Joe asked O’Donnell, “How many people were at that tea in Springfield, Kenny?” O’Donnell said, “Oh, about five thousand.” And Joe said, “I know about how many people were there. I asked you how many people were there. Didn’t you have a checker there?” A chastened O’Donnell replied, “Yes, we did.” Joe wasn’t about to leave his little lesson at that. “When I ask you how many people the next time, I want to know exactly how many people.”

  15

  The Golden Fleece

  With Joe and Bobby at the helm, Jack ran a brilliant and prophetic campaign. “He was all things to all men,” recalled Massachusetts Congressman John McCormack, a powerful figure in national politics. The candidate was a putative liberal to the good professors of Harvard. He was a closet conservative to the more amenable Republicans. At dawn, as he shook hands outside factory gates, he was a friend of labor. In the evening, as he shared cigars and cognac with their bosses, he was the businessman’s Washington friend. He was an Irish-American, son of the sod of old Eire. He was an upper-class Catholic who sat comfortably in the great houses of Back Bay. Jack was a dream lover to the young girls who waved their handkerchiefs and God’s glory of a son to their mothers.

  As the campaign started, Jack read the extraordinary statistic that for the first time women voters outnumbered men. In Massachusetts, their numbers were the highest of any state, 52.6 percent. Jack was the prisoner of an upbringing that had taught him that women were for the most part giggling creatures uninterested in the manly business of politics. He did not attempt to solicit female voters by developing campaign issues that might appeal to their intellect. Instead, he developed a strategy that shrewdly exploited their social ambition and sexuality.

  “His theme was to hit the woman vote,” reflected Edward C. Berube, a Fall River bus driver who worked intimately with Jack. “He indicated this to me … that he was going to come out for the women, that he figured the woman was the one that was going to put him in. And he wanted coffee hours and tea hours and arranging coffee hours in homes.”

  Lodge had started the whole business of tea parties back in 1936 when he first won election to the Senate. The Kennedys democratized the stuffy, mannered tea party and turned it into a mass gathering more Barnum and Bailey than Brahmin. The Kennedys held these teas all over Massachusetts, thirty-five of them in all. Jack shook hands with as many as seventy thousand women.

  Jack moved around the teas, a handsome young gentleman, both a son of Irish immigrant culture and an aristocrat, a man of the people, a man above the people. Jack’s opponent was a debonair, elegantly dressed aristocrat who set the hearts aflutter among the good Republican matrons of the suburbs, but the difference between the two men was like the difference between a Broadway actor and a Hollywood star.

  Lodge might appeal to the elite ladies, but Jack had the masses, the bobby-soxers, the blue-haired immigrant ladies, the aspiring suburbanites, as well as the conservative matrons. As the lean, mildly disheveled, thirty-five-year-old candidate worked the room, he was playing brilliantly on the social aspirations of these women, bringing them into an ersatz version of the Kennedy social life. Though it was easy enough to satirize these women, their desire to be with a better class of people was no different from the desire that for three generations had dominated the Kennedys themselves.

  What none of the women knew, however, as they chatted amiably with Jack was that his smile was at times a grimace. In August he was sick enough with nonspecific prostatitis that he was urinating pus and had to be secretly hospitalized. Then, on a visit to a Springfield firehouse, Jack couldn’t resist a dare to slide down a fire pole. When he hit the cement from his third-floor perch, he grimaced, feeling once again the terrible back pain that plagued him. From then on, he was relegated to hobbling around on crutches. When he got to an auditorium or a hall, he would leave the crutches outside and stride into the room as if he were health and youth incarnate.

  The campaign was not all tea parties and handshaking. Indeed, when Lodge looked back dispassionately on the race, he realized that his largest problem was not what he called the “damn tea parties” but his endorsement of Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination; the offended Taft Republicans stayed home or voted for Jack in protest. The two candidates shared one common problem, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. When McCarthy got up before the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950 and said that he had a list of fifty-seven card-carrying Communists or fellow t
ravelers in the State Department, he set out on the most dangerous demagogic campaign in American political history. It was the rare specificity of McCarthy’s charges that made them so powerful. It would take several years before it became clear to many Americans that McCarthy was playing on the fears of his compatriots, destroying not Communists but legitimate anticommunism, wreaking havoc not on American enemies but on the American political system.

  McCarthy was so dangerous because he was not an aberration but rather the logical extreme of what Michael S. Sherry has called “a highly politicized form of postwar militarization.” The witch-hunt McCarthy initiated was precisely what Jack’s father had feared would happen. To defeat the Axis the United States had created a state apparatus of such magnitude and coercion that it risked destroying what once had been called liberty. It was not McCarthy, after all, but one of his enemies, President Harry S Truman, who in February 1947 instituted a loyalty program to fire “disloyal” employees. It was not McCarthy alone but a whole generation of postwar politicians—even including, in a small way, Jack himself—who helped create a climate of such fear that the owners of the Cincinnati Reds renamed the baseball team the “Redlegs” rather than risk being called Commies.

  These politicians had turned the Communist into a mythic anti-Christ, unseen but all-seeing, ready to betray the unwary and seduce the innocent. This figure resided in the bowels of the unions and in the highest counsels of government, in the pristine groves of academe and in the newsrooms of the nation’s newspapers. There were indeed Soviet spies ensconced in crucial positions in Washington, and Communist cadres in labor unions and various liberal political movements. These were for the most part Americans who in the 1930s had given their higher loyalty to what they considered a noble cause, not a mere nation. To destroy them, McCarthy and his kind called out political artillery of such magnitude and so carelessly aimed that the friendly fire ended up shooting hundreds of innocents for every true enemy of America it struck.

  Jack first gained notice in the House by attacking several union officials, including Dr. Russell Nixon, a former professor of his at Harvard. Jack was roundly praised, as if he had bested an evil giant in unequal combat. The jingoistic anticommunism had been a willing servant of these politicians, helping to elect them to office over candidates who did not shout so shrilly.

  During the campaign, Jack was not simply the brilliant observer of international affairs, as he had been when he returned from Asia speaking with a subtlety of mind and nuance rare in American political life. He also gave another kind of speech in which he set aside his complex and tragic world-view for florid, apocalyptic, anti-Communist rhetoric.

  In the spring of 1952, in an address to the graduating class of the Newton College of the Sacred Heart, Jack presented a vision of the world full of threat and terror, a vision and indeed a language that he used on several occasions that year. He saw the dark encroachment of the state, enveloping liberty: “The theme of today—the scarlet thread that runs throughout the thoughts and actions of people all over the world—is one of resignation of major problems into the all-absorbing hands of the great Leviathan—the state.”

  Despite what Jack said at Newton College and elsewhere, when he talked to elderly citizens whose Social Security checks allowed them to live in dignity, he did not bemoan the encroaching leviathan but celebrated one of the New Deal’s great achievements. And when he looked at the economy, he was a Keynesian who thought that government must at times intervene in the nation’s economic life.

  The truth has few friends, and Jack was not about to risk his political future by trying too often or too openly to elucidate the complexities of the political world. There were no easy votes to be garnered that way, as he could by shaking the tambourine of anticommunism. He took the easy way, though what appears the easy way is sometimes in the end the most difficult path of all.

  In November 1950, Jack had attended a seminar at Harvard given by Arthur Holcombe, one of his old professors. In an article published in The New Republic in the midst of the 1952 campaign, one of the participants reported on Jack’s candid statements. He had told the group that more had to be done to get rid of Communists in government and that he had a certain respect for McCarthy. He thought he “knew Joe pretty well, and he may have something.” He said, moreover, that “while he opposed what he supposed to be Communist influence at home, he refused to become emotionally aroused even on this issue.”

  Jack was not the sort of politician who took pleasure in attacking his enemies, and even if he had wanted to confront McCarthy, which he did not, he had his own special relationship with the Wisconsin senator. McCarthy was a close family friend who dated Pat, Jack’s own sister. Joe talked to him on the phone frequently and contributed liberally to his campaign. He was a guest in the Kennedy homes. On one trip to Hyannis Port, McCarthy was dragged behind a sailboat on a rope. The Kennedys considered that fun and games, but the landlubber from Wisconsin almost drowned. The two men were both Irish-Catholic politicians, and that too was a special, if unspoken, bond. Jack might seek to distance himself from that ethnic appellation, but the 750,000 Irish Catholics in Massachusetts were his bedrock support at election time; they were for the most part fiercely conservative Democrats and proud, if narrow, partisans who considered Joe McCarthy a great patriot, if not a secular saint.

  Jack’s one fervent moment over McCarthy during the campaign year came on February 9, 1952, at the one-hundredth-anniversary dinner of the founding of the Spee Club. An after-dinner speaker said that he was delighted that Alger Hiss was not a real Harvard man, even if he had gone to Harvard Law School. Hiss had been convicted of perjury for lying before a congressional committee and was serving forty-four months in prison. Up until his conviction, Hiss had seemed the perfect exemplar of the kind of man Jack admired above all others, a gentleman of wealth and privilege who had opted to become a public servant.

  Over the years, evidence would mount to prove almost indisputably that Hiss had been spying for the Soviets during the 1930s. At this point, however, equal evidence suggested that he was nothing more than the most publicized victim of the Red Scare. It was all maddeningly unclear and obscure, and Hiss had become what David Remnick has called “the Rashomon drama of the Cold War,” and a litmus test that had more to do with sentiment than fact.

  The speaker went on to say that as delighted as he was that Hiss had not gone to Harvard College, he was infinitely happy that his beloved alma mater had not turned out a Joe McCarthy.

  At that point Jack jumped up and shouted, “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” He was so angry that he left before hearing the rest of the speeches.

  The extremes of American politics had reached such a point that some of those present may have wondered just whom Jack was condemning. To those on the right, Hiss was the traitor and McCarthy the patriot. To those on the left, the opposite was true. On a visceral level, Jack knew where he stood, and it was not with the liberal intelligentsia of Harvard.

  Bobby had even stronger feelings about McCarthy. When he took time off to attend the Harvard-Yale football game in New Haven, he and his old football teammates spent Saturday evening in New York. As always, the subject turned to politics, and in the early 1950s, politics meant McCarthy pro or con. Except for Sam Adams, Bobby’s friends were all the same solid Democrats they had been when they had left Harvard. They despised McCarthy and what they thought he was doing to the America that had been so good to them. Bobby was his lone defender.

  “Oh, Bob, come on now,” O’Donnell fumed in exasperation. “McCarthy could prove your mother was a Communist by his way of reasoning.” Bobby could simply not understand that in the name of anticommunism McCarthy had created fear where there had been hope, and suspicion where there had been trust. “By using his methods of proof, the Pope could be a Communist,” Kenny shouted, his words not changing Bobby at all.

  For a centrist consensual politician like Jack, McCarthy p
resented a dilemma. If Jack stood too strongly against the Wisconsin senator, he would lose his hard-core Catholic constituency, the very bedrock of his power. If he supported McCarthy, he would lose the liberals, the intellectuals, most Jewish voters, many labor leaders, numerous teachers, and activists, people who voted with their effort and resources and deeply voiced concerns.

  Jack was a man of profound emotional disengagement, and he was no more comfortable with McCarthy’s rude outbursts than with the shrill replies of the liberals. Thanks probably to his father, Jack had the questionable honor of being one of the few Democrats who did not have to worry about McCarthy coming into their state to berate him. With no such problem, he set out to convince McCarthy’s detractors that he was worthy of their vote.

  No group worried longer or more over this than did the Massachusetts Jewish community. Not only had Jews suffered disproportionately from McCarthy’s assaults, but they were acutely aware of an anti-Semitic strain among Irish-American Catholics, especially in Jack’s own father. The Jewish groups implored Jack to come forward and condemn McCarthy.

  “I told you before, I am opposed to McCarthy,” Jack privately told Phil David Fine, his foremost liaison with the Jewish community. “I don’t like the way he does business, but I’m running for office here, and while I may be able to get x number of votes because I say I’m opposed to him, I am going to lose … two times x by saying that I am opposed. I am telling you, and you have to have faith in me, that at the proper time I’ll do the proper thing.”

  If what one man had done weighed heavier than what the other man promised, then Lodge deserved the bulk of the Jewish votes. Lodge had a stellar record on the issues, such as Israel and civil rights, that preoccupied the Massachusetts Jewish community. Beyond that, Jack carried the heavy burden of his father’s history.

  Jack’s campaign did not confront these issues but tried a more circular approach. One day in the kosher butcher shops, delicatessens, and grocery stores in heavily Jewish Dorchester there appeared blocks of free tickets for two movies that evening in the largest movie theater on Blue Hill Avenue. By the appointed hour there was not an empty seat in the entire theater, and people stood all around the back and the sides.