Unhappily, consistently strong Presidential leadership is precisely what our system of government is designed to thwart. It is one thing to utter golden words and to pressure a momentous bill through Congress while the nation watches. It is something else to steer a continuous flow of legislation, especially fiscal measures, through congressional committees, around potent congressional leaders, against aroused interests, amid popular apathy. Even outside of Congress our fiscal machinery is not organized for fast and concerted action. Yet President Kennedy will have to provide economic leadership throughout his years in office, for fiscal policy is framed largely on an annual basis.
But this is only part of the problem. The biggest task facing Kennedy, if, as he has promised, he wants to provide a “thousand days of action” instead of just a hundred, will be to strengthen the whole machinery of government. Some governmental reforms have long been urged and are widely accepted today: curbing the filibuster and other obstructionist devices in Congress, reinforcing the President’s executive power over his administration, recruiting and holding on to the ablest men in government. Others are less known but coming into greater prominence; among them, reconstruction of the regulatory agencies and unifying the Pentagon. Still others are both formidable and controversial; for example, strengthening and perhaps realigning the two national parties.
Whatever the precise nature of the changes, it seems inevitable that the machinery of government must be strengthened if Presidential leadership is to result in sustained action. What can we expect from President Kennedy on this score?
In recent weeks, beset by a hundred pressing problems, he has had little time to think about long-term needs. On structural and Constitutional aspects of government, moreover, he has always been something of a traditionalist; for example, he has been cool to proposals for changing the seniority rule in Congress, and he seems wary of intervening to alter the filibuster rule.
But the main reason Kennedy will go slow in initiating basic governmental changes is his success in operating the present machinery. Like Roosevelt, he is likely to extract the last ounce of energy from it by hard bargaining, and this may little dispose him to junk it. Then, too, the greater his use of the present machinery, the greater becomes his commitment to it. For example, the more he bargains with the senior members of Congress, the more he must offer them political advantages—such as patronage—that they can use to bolster their own independent positions. The more he recognizes existing party leaders and organizations, the more he alienates the reform element that might serve as the basis for a stronger Democratic party.
On the other hand, the new President is history-minded and, as a historian, he knows that in the long run the bargaining power of even the strongest and ablest President has run out. Presidential authority is not limitless—and the claims on it in the years ahead will be extraordinary. This was the experience of all the strong Presidents and most of the others. Wilson managed the machinery of government brilliantly during his first term, only to be thwarted by it during his second. Roosevelt had the same experience; then he made a desperate effort to reform his party, and the executive branch, and the judiciary, and he failed.
Kennedy may, of course, use the Rooseveltian technique of exploiting crisis in order to replenish his reservoir of political and moral authority. But another cardinal difference between the 1930s and the 1960s may be this: It was enough for Roosevelt to cope with crises, but it will be essential for Kennedy to head them off. And to head them off he must act early, systematically, and continuously through the whole machinery of government.
Viewed in these terms, the Presidency in the 1960s will demand as a minimum that Kennedy act with skill and craft. It will doubtless demand much more. Whether the new President must simply rise above the vast give and take that represents the machinery of government, or whether he will have to go much farther and reconstruct the machinery even while he manipulates it, it is certain that he must act with valor and even audacity. Daring in the face of great odds is the single quality that John F. Kennedy has always most admired. Does he still? He must, for the nation will settle for no less than a glowing new profile in courage.
—JAMES MACGREGOR BURNS
WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS., 1961
PREFACE
As a venture in contemporary biography in a year of controversy, this book raises problems that I can best present by describing the background of the book.
In 1958, I was the Democratic candidate for Congress in the westernmost district of Massachusetts. During the campaign I maintained a friendly working relationship with Senator Kennedy, who was a candidate for re-election, as I had done personally and politically for some years before. Following his re-election and my defeat, Senator Kennedy offered me a responsible position his office, which I declined because I felt that, despite my affection and admiration for him, I did not know enough about his presidential qualifications to make the complete commitment that such a job required.
When Harcourt, Brace subsequently suggested that I write a biography of the Senator, I was responsive for two reasons: doing so would satisfy my own curiosity about his presidential potential; and, more important, it would give me a chance to write about a man before the voters might have to pass judgment on him. It has always seemed to me unfortunate that we learn most about our politicians after they have died and become statesmen. I was also impressed by a remark of James Reston of the New York Times that “it was of immense importance that the press in its widest sense, by which I mean magazines, books, and all the rest of the newspapers, concentrate upon digging into the pasts of these men, not in the sense of trying to do an improper personal exposé, but in terms of trying to find out ahead of time what the qualities of these men are.”
But attempting such a biography raised an urgent question: Could I get full and authentic information on a candidate running for high office? I put this question to Senator Kennedy late in 1958. I said that I would like to do as honest a study of his life as I would try to do if he were indeed a dead statesman. Such an attempt would require his and his family’s willingness to be interviewed extensively, assistance from his office and aides, and complete and unrestricted access to his official and personal files. I made it clear that I was not interested simply in documents and letters that he would make available; I wanted independent access to the records. To all this he agreed, and with such an understanding, I wrote this book.
Senator Kennedy has fully honored this understanding. I have talked extensively with him, recording our conversations on tape, I have interviewed his wife and parents and others members of his family, his teachers, assistants, political supporters and political opponents, and many others; and I have traveled with him during his campaigning. Most important, I have had full access to past and current files of correspondence, legislative records, family records, and the like, as the bibliographical notes explain in greater detail. This book is based largely on these records.
Then a second problem arose. The more I accumulated information on Kennedy’s career, especially his later years, the more it became clear to me that he must be taken with the utmost seriousness as a presidential candidate, that he has displayed impressive legislative competence and political judgment as a national leader, and that he has far more intellectual depth and steadfastness than many supposed. I had some misgivings—the most important is raised in the last pages of this book—but I came to feel that Senator Kennedy was of high presidential quality and promise.
Some advised me that this was all very well, but that if I wanted this book to be taken seriously as an independent study, I should have to enter a neutral judgment—four or five pro-Kennedy conclusions balanced neatly against an equal number of conclusions against him. Otherwise, I was told, the book would be taken simply as another campaign biography. But this course seemed to me the most dishonest of all, because it would entail coming to an artificial neutrality for appearance’s sake—as though objectivity always required neutrality. So I hav
e decided against that kind of neutrality. Since others may look at the same set of facts and come to different conclusions, however, I have felt that my first responsibility was to present as full a factual account of Senator Kennedy’s career as time and space permitted. This I have tried to do.
The book, in short, is neither an authorized biography nor a campaign biography, but an attempt to supply needed information, a measure of analysis, and a few judgments on one of the best-known and least-understood of American political leaders at a crucial point in his country’s, and his own, history.
My debts are numerous. I wish to thank Mildred C. Baxter and Winthrop F. Sheerin, Jr., for indispensable help in conducting research; Professor Kermit Gordon, of Williams College, and Dr. Alexander Preston for valued counsel on a number of matters; Senator Kennedy, Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln, Timothy J. Reardon, Theodore Sorensen, and other members of the Senator’s staff for many courtesies graciously extended despite the press of affairs in the office; Duane and Linda Lockhart for helpful comments on the manuscript; the staff of the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, Widener Library, the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, the Williams College library, and the Roper Public Opinion Center at Williams College for assistance in acquiring information; and the many persons who consented to be interviewed. Especially, I express my deep appreciation to my wife, Janet Thompson Burns, who helped with the usual editorial chores and who made suggestions on the basis of her own wide observations in Massachusetts politics.
J. M. B.
November 1959
1ROOM AT THE TOP
On a magnificent height rising steeply from the Blackwater River in southern Ireland stands Lismore Castle, built eight centuries ago by King John. Here in 1185 the archbishops and bishops of Ireland paid allegiance to the English invaders. Three centuries later, the castle passed into the hands of Sir Walter Raleigh, and, more recently, surviving fire and siege, came into the possession of the Dukes of Devonshire.
One August morning in 1947, a wealthy and engaging young American congressman, son of the former Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, drove off from Lismore Castle on an exploration back into time. He carried with him a letter from an aunt in America giving directions to the old family home in New Ross, fifty miles east of Lismore. At his side in his American station wagon sat an English lady from the company at the castle. Through the soft green countryside along the southeastern coast of Ireland and across the bottom tip of Kilkenny County they motored on to the market town of New Ross, settled on the banks of the Barrow River.
An Irishman standing on the road into town knew where the Kennedys lived—“just up the way a hundred yards and turn to the right.” And there it was—an ordinary farm cottage with thatch roof, whitewashed walls, and dirt floor. They found a farmer and his wife and their half-dozen bright, towheaded children.
“I’m John Kennedy from Boston,” the young congressman said, sticking out his hand. “I believe this is the old Kennedy homestead.” The farmer and his wife greeted him cordially while the children stared at the gleaming station wagon. The New Ross Kennedys knew little, it seemed, about their American cousins. But they remembered a Patrick Kennedy from Boston—John Kennedy’s grandfather—who had visited them some thirty-five years before.
“It sounded from their conversation as if all the Kennedys had emigrated,” Kennedy said later. “I spent about an hour there surrounded by chickens and pigs, and left in a flow of nostalgia and sentiment. This was not punctured by the English lady turning to me as we drove off and saying, ‘That was just like Tobacco Road!’ She had not understood at all the magic of the afternoon.…”
They drove back to the castle where Kennedy and his sister, the widowed Marchioness of Hartington, daughter-in-law of the Duke of Devonshire, were host and hostess to an aristocratic company that included Anthony Eden, later prime minister, Mrs. Randolph Churchill, the Earl of Roselyn, and various political and literary figures.
For Kennedy, the trip back to Lismore Castle that day took hardly two hours. For his family, that trip had taken a hundred years. First there had been a long journey across the Atlantic. Then had come the hardest and longest move of all—inching up the rungs of the American class ladder until the Kennedys stood near the top and could look as equals on the dukes and earls whose ancestors had ruled their native land.
To the Land of the Shanties
A century before, New Ross had been a place of troubles. During the early 1840’s, the Irish were depending more than ever on their potato crop, which at best barely tided the cottiers’ families from one year to another. But something was wrong with the all-important potato—a blight that rotted the tubers in the ground and even seemed to reach them in the storehouse. In 1845 Ireland lost almost half its potato crop. “If the next crop fails us,” a peasant said, “it will be the end of the world for us.” The crop did fail. The blight rotted the potatoes with terrifying speed—in a single night, some said. A priest traveling from Cork to Dublin one day rejoiced at the rich harvest in the making; returning a week later he saw “one wide waste of putrefying vegetation.”
Misery lay on the land like a pall. Some families took to the road, wandering from blighted field to blighted field, leaving the old and the young dying in the ditches. Others waited quietly in their cottages to die. Some survived near-starvation to perish of typhus, which was spreading through the drifting population. Others had only one dream—to leave this land on which God seemed to have laid a curse and escape to another country, to America, land of gold and milk and honey. Men fished their last sovereigns from the secret places in the thatch; women pawned their pewter and plate; families loaded their belongings into carts and trundled down to crowded quays to wait for the next steamer. Even their priests were urging them to go. Some farmers had no choice; the landlords’ bailiffs, encouraged by the harsh Poor Law, evicted them and knocked down their cottages with crowbars so they could not creep back.
When the flight from famine was at its peak, young Patrick Kennedy deserted his thatch-roofed home in New Ross and joined the great migration of the hungry and the helpless. Doubtless he boarded a Cunarder at Cork or Liverpool and crossed the Atlantic in the crowded steerage. He was lucky to be able to raise the fare—$20, including provisions—and lucky, too, to avoid the epidemics that sometimes decimated the shiploads of immigrants on the long passage.
Years before, the Cunard Line had fixed its western terminus at Noddle’s Island in East Boston, lying across a narrow arm of Boston Harbor. On this island Pat Kennedy settled about 1850. It was a busy, noisy place; Cunard was building piers and warehouses; Irish laborers and stevedores were flocking in to look for work; a steam ferry plowed across the bay every five minutes and brought ten or more thousand passengers a day for a two-cent fare. Soon Pat had found a job as a cooper.
Pat Kennedy was in Boston to stay, but many an Irishman took one look at the city and wanted to catch the next Cunarder back to the old sod. Immigrant Boston was a forbidding land. If they could find a place to lay their heads at all, the newcomers were crowded in with the old; often they lived in cellars flooded from backed-up drains, or in garrets only three feet high. About the time Pat Kennedy came to Boston, hundreds of basements housed five to fifteen persons each, with at least one holding thirty-nine every night. One sink might serve a house, one privy a neighborhood. Filth spread through courts and alleys, and with it tuberculosis, cholera, and smallpox, which thrived most in the poorest districts where the Irish lived.
To be sure, by working on the docks or elevators or freight yards, a man could make a quicker dollar here than back home. But prices were high, too, and families could not keep a pig or cow or garden in tenement Boston. And work was hard—usually fifteen hours a day seven days a week, with no Sabbath and none of the pastoral pleasures of farm life.
The Irish were the lowest of the low, lower than the Germans or Scandinavians or Jews, or even the Negroes, who had come earlier and edged a bit up the economic ladder. Irishmen wer
e lucky if they could find part-time work on the dock or in the ditch; Irish girls hoped at best to get work as maids in hotels or in big houses on Beacon Hill. Around 1850, Irish transient paupers outnumbered the sum of all other nationalities. The people from Ireland were a proletariat without machine skills or capital. Their sections of Boston were the land of the shanty Irish.
The only defense the Irish had was the classic weapon of oppressed people—solidarity. Tighter and tighter they bound themselves with the thongs of their national identity. Thrown back on their families and neighborhoods, on their priests and wakes and churches, on their memories of life in Ireland, they grew fiercely independent of the Yankees and the others around them. “Unable to participate in the normal associational affairs of the community,” says Oscar Handlin, the foremost historian of Boston’s immigrants, “the Irish felt obliged to erect a society within a society, to act together in their own way. In every contact therefore the group … became intensely aware of its peculiar and exclusive identity.” Everything conspired to make this process easy—the brogue, the church, oppression in Ireland, and shared hardships in the migration and in the congested alleys of Boston.
As the newcomers solidified their loyal ranks, so did the other blocs. Tension deepened between the Irish and the skilled workmen of older national groups, as Germans, Scots, Englishmen, and Canadians saw their own wages cut by the new proletarians. John Kennedy was to say many years later: “Each wave disliked and distrusted the next. The English said the Irish ‘kept the Sabbath and everything else they could lay their hands on’. The English and the Irish distrusted the Germans who ‘worked too hard’. The English and the Irish and the Germans disliked the Italians; and the Italians joined their predecessors in disparaging the Slavs.…”
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