John Kennedy

by Burns, James MacGregor;

  For the Bible tells me so;

  Little ones to him belong,

  They are weak, but He is strong.

  Yes, Jesus loves me; yes, Jesus loves me.…”

  War’s End

  Kennedy’s mates welcomed him noisily at the base. Both officers and enlisted men liked him; they thought he lacked the airs a millionaire ambassador’s son might have been expected to have. The survivors’ stories of their experiences and of Kennedy’s tenacity spread through the base. The Navy bestowed official recognition when it awarded to him, in addition to the Purple Heart, the Navy and Marine Corps Medal. Admiral William F. Halsey signed the citation, which read in part: “His courage, endurance and excellent leadership contributed to the saving of several lives and was [in] keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”

  The rest of the war for Kennedy was anticlimactic and studded with frustration and tragedy. He contracted malaria and dropped down to 125 pounds. His flip-flop on his back after the PT boat explosion had aggravated his old back injury, and this caused him a good deal of pain. In December 1943, he left his MTB squadron and was rotated back to the States. For a time he was an instructor in a PT training program at Miami; a pleasant life, with plenty of time on the sea and plenty of recreation, too. One day Kennedy visited James Cox, the Democratic presidential candidate of 1920, who lived nearby, and discussed war and politics. His Navy superiors found Kennedy pleasant, quiet, conscientious, and intelligent; they gave him a low rating only in “military bearing and neatness.”

  Kennedy hoped for more overseas duty, preferably in the Mediterranean. But he was not well, and, in the late spring of 1944, entered Chelsea Naval Hospital, near Boston. It was not far to Hyannisport, and he could spend weekends with his family. It was there one weekend—the date was August 2, the anniversary of the PT-boat crash—that word came in to the family that two priests had asked to see Mr. Joseph Kennedy. He left the room and came back a few moments later, his face gray. Joe, Jr. had been reported missing. The family held out hope for a time—perhaps the miracle of the previous year would be repeated—but Joe had never really been missing. He had been killed instantly during a desperate mission, for which he had volunteered, to destroy the seemingly invulnerable submarine pens on the Belgian oast. Under the plan, Joe’s plane, heavily packed with explosives, was to fly close to the pens; at the last minute, the crew would bail out and other planes, by remote control, would crash the ammuniton plane into the pens. But before reaching the bail-out point, the plane, for unknown reasons, suddenly blew up.

  Jack could not believe that Joe was dead. Only when, back at the hospital, he saw the headlines and Joe’s picture on the front page did the terrible finality come home to him.

  A month later, came news that Kathleen’s husband, the Marquess of Hartington, then a captain in the Coldstream Guards, had been killed in action in France. The couple had been married only four months, and their decision to marry had been difficult, for Hartington was a Protestant. The first Duke of Devonshire, indeed, had withdrawn from the Privy Council of King Charles II in the seventeenth century in protest against Roman Catholic influence. But Joe, Jr., then in England, had characteristically backed up his sister, and she and the Marquess had been married in a civil ceremony in the Chelsea Registry Office. They had had only a few days together—and now he, too, was gone.

  Jack’s heart ached for his beloved Kick—but not nearly so much as it would several years later when Kathleen herself was killed in a plane crash on a vacation trip to the Riviera.

  “The thing about Kathleen and Joe was their tremendous vitality,” Kennedy said many years later. “Everything was moving in their direction—that’s what made it so unfortunate. If something happens to you or somebody in your family who is miserable anyway, whose health is bad, or who has a chronic disease or something, that’s one thing. But, for someone who is living at their peak, then to get cut off—that’s the shock.”

  After a long stay at Chelsea, where a disc operation was performed on his back, Kennedy, still thin and ailing, appeared before a Navy board in Washington and retired from service. He returned to civilian life at the beginning of 1945. The outcome of the war was no longer seriously in doubt. Men’s thoughts turned toward plans for keeping the peace. In February, Kennedy produced a short paper, “Let’s Try an Experiment in Peace,” arguing that an arms race would mean heavy taxes and hence the stifling of private enterprise and full employment, and proposing an agreement among the postwar Big Three—Britain, Russia, and the United States—for limiting postwar rearmament plans. It was a curious position for the author of Why England Slept, but he contended that Germany and Japan could and should be rendered impotent after World War II. But how could unity among the Big Three be maintained? Here Kennedy was lamentably vague and unconvincing. He called for “workable, practical machinery for settling disputes” and better understanding between Russia and America, but how all this was to be achieved he did not say.

  Just how elusive unity would be, Kennedy was to see at first-hand a few weeks later. As Allied troops speared into Germany and American forces seized Okinawa, emissaries from the united nations gathered in San Francisco to lay plans for a permanent world organization. Kennedy was there covering the conference “from a GI viewpoint” for the New York Journal American and other Hearst newspapers.

  From the start, he took a sympathetic but realistic view of the proceedings. His first dispatch complained that the conference had been given too much of a build-up, that the best to be hoped for was the strengthening of the voting procedure in the new security council and the yielding of the Russians’ “stiff-necked attitude” toward the Polish question. In subsequent dispatches, he reported at length on the “belligerent Russian attitude.” After a week at the conference he had concluded that the Russians could not forget their years of being treated as a second-class nation and it would be a long time before Russia would entrust her safety to any organization other than the Red Army. Hence, “any organization drawn up here will be merely a skeleton. Its powers will be limited. It will reflect the fact that there are deep disagreements among its members.”

  Kennedy’s pessimism deepened as the conference proceeded. “The world organization that will come out of San Francisco will be the product of the same passions and selfishness that produced the Treaty of Versailles.” The only ray of light he could see was realization that humanity could not afford another war. But soon he was reporting “talk of fighting the Russians in the next ten or fifteen years.” At the parley’s end, Kennedy approved the new United Nations Organization, provided that it did not interfere with the Monroe Doctrine, but thought the only hope was unity among the Big Three and in this he believed no progress had been made.

  He tried his hand at journalism once again by reporting the British election from London in the summer, also for the Hearst papers. After that, he had had enough of reporting. The war was coming to an end in the Pacific, too. Tens of thousands of demobilized soldiers and sailors were streaming back home. Most of them had formed definite plans for civilian life—plans lovingly shaped and solidified in long months of waiting. But not Jack Kennedy. By the age of twenty-eight he had earned a B.A. degree, learned how to swim and to sail and to golf; he had written a successful book, traveled extensively and learned courage and endurance in the years of war. But the man and the political leader of a dozen years later was unformed; his political views and his personality were still in the making.

  4THE POOR LITTLE RICH KID

  According to a Boston legend, Kennedy’s decision to enter politics took place on a particular evening a few weeks after Joe, Jr.’s death. Jack, still recovering from his Navy injury, was summoned to his father’s presence. In a dramatic scene, the Ambassador was supposed to have said that with Joe gone Jack must now carry on the family tradition of public service. He must be the champion of the Kennedy clan in politics. The whole family would unite to help him. And Kennedy, then and there, answere
d the family call.

  Unhappily, things are always tidier and more dramatic in legend than in fact. To be sure, the Ambassador wanted his son to enter political life and made his views known on many occasions. But Jack was undecided. He still toyed with the notion of making a career of journalism; and he was attracted also to academic life and intellectual pursuits. On the other hand, newspaper work was an undependable trade for a beginner, and he had no graduate degree for teaching. Business lured him not at all.

  He had mixed feelings about a political career. He liked the idea of being part of the top circles of government—making decisions, working on legislation, handling the affairs of state. But he was not at all sure that he would like politics at the level where he would have to start. He was still shy with people outside his social circle, a bit withdrawn and unassertive. He disliked the blarney, the exuberant backslapping and handshaking, the exaggerated claims and denunciations that went with politics, especially Boston politics. Nor was he convinced of his own talents as a speaker, or as a “mixer.”

  Then, too, for what office would be run—and where? If he had lived in England, Kennedy could have made a national name for himself and then asked his party for a good seat where he could run for Parliament. But this was not England, nor even America, but provincial Massachusetts. And here lay the cream of the irony. Kennedy had no roots in Massachusetts, no place that he could call home. He had lived briefly as a child in several parts of Boston, then in New York, then in Connecticut as a schoolboy, then at Harvard (which was never considered a Massachusetts voting precinct), then in England and in the Navy. A politician must have a home base. Kennedy had none.

  Finally, Boston politics had changed since his grandfathers Fitzgerald and Kennedy had entered politics. This change was important, for it would deeply influence Kennedy’s future.

  In his grandfather’s day, the Irish had won control of Democratic politics and seized power from the Yankees. For a time that power was undisputed; the Yankees were increasingly outnumbered, and the newer immigrants were politically helpless and docile. But after the turn of the century, Italians, Slavs, and Poles began to rise from the ditch and the dock to semiskilled jobs, just as the Irish had done; some went to college, entered law, medicine, and other professions, and in turn became the respected “prominenti” of their ethnic group. Following closest on the heels of the Irish were the immigrants from Italy, and soon the Italian counterparts of the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds were welding their groups into political organizations that rivaled the Irish.

  For a while the newer immigrants worked with the Irish as junior partners, but as their numbers and their competence grew they demanded higher status. Some Irish leaders, including Fitzgerald, shared a few political plums with the Italians, but many Irish reacted to the newcomers as the Yankees had to them. Of course, the newer immigrants were Catholics, too, but they had brought from Europe a different strain of Catholicism, and the Italian Catholic, French Catholic, and Polish Catholic churches often chafed under the dominance in Boston of the Irish Catholic hierarchy led by Cardinal O’Connell.

  Partly for this reason, partly because Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policies alienated immigrant groups, partly because Republican Yankees began to cater to the Italians and Jews, the loose Democratic coalition of Irish, Italians, and other immigrants fell to pieces in 1920. Chastened by their loss of office, the Irish during the following decade grudgingly shared power with other ethnic leaders and even with Yankees, such as Joseph B. Ely, as the only way of winning elections during a Republican era. Al Smith’s nomination in 1928, however, and the Great Depression brought such a powerful Democratic tide in Massachusetts that the Irish could go it alone. The Democratic leaders during the ’30’s were all Irish and virtually all from the Boston area: Jim Curley, Maurice Tobin, John McCormack, the rising Paul A. Dever, and others.

  The Democratic party had become, more than ever before, less a unified organization than a holding company for personal organizations that often warred with one another more fiercely than with the Republicans. Italians and other groups, denied recognition by the Democrats, turned to the Yankee Republicans, who often made room for them. These and other forces also cut the Massachusetts Democratic party off from the national party; the Bay State Democrats were mainly concerned with patronage and bread-and-butter liberalism, while the national party, under Roosevelt, had taken over the broader liberal, internationalist, and “good government” traditions personified by Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.

  Such matters, if he recognized them at all, might have seemed highly academic to Jack Kennedy in 1945. But they were not. He was Irish and hence a member of the dominant force in the Democratic party, but Boston politics was mightily affected by the feuds between the Irish and the Italians. Then, too, the provincial and separatist ways of the Bay State Democracy would have important implications for a man hoping to build a base in Massachusetts for a national political career. And the chaotic condition of the Democratic party meant that he would have to build a personal machine to win office.

  Still, these were problems of the future. During the summer of 1945, as the war drew to an end in Japan, Kennedy restlessly pondered his prospects.

  Political Baptism

  The issue was decided by, of all people, Jim Curley. In recent years the “Purple Shamrock” had been down on his luck. Vigorous young men had beaten him for the United States Senate, for governor, and even for mayor of Boston. Old and broke, under court orders to pay back to the city $42,000 as a result of a judgment of fraud, Curley had partly recouped his political fortunes in 1942 by winning a seat in Congress. But Washington was not his political forte. He hungered for one more crack at being mayor of Boston, one more chance to pay off political friends, to pay back political foes, and to refurbish the fading Curley legend. In the spring of 1945, he announced his candidacy for mayor in the fall election. If he won—and his chances looked good—the Eleventh Massachusetts Congressional District would be open. Kennedy eyed it with interest.

  The Eleventh District was not an attractive one to a genteel political fledgling. Sprawling across East Boston, the North End and West End, and then over the Charles River into Charlestown, Cambridge, and part of Somerville, it enclosed a patchwork of some of the ugliest blighted areas in America. Irish, Italians, and a score of other immigrant groups were packed into grimy red-brick tenements sandwiched between smoking factories, oil tanks, elevated railways, dumps, and freight yards. In these tenements lived the thousands of longshoremen, teamsters, warehousemen, crane operators, and others who worked in or out of the docks and grain elevators of Boston Harbor that bounded the district on the east. Landmarks in the district were Bunker Hill monument and the grisly old State Prison, Boston’s cesspool, some called the worst part of the area. The crime rate in sections of the district was among the highest in the country.

  Tacked together by gerrymanders, the Eleventh had no resemblance to the “compact and contiguous” districts that the law enjoins. Quite the contrary, it fell into several distinct parts. East Boston—Pat Kennedy’s old bailiwick—was now mainly Italian and dominated by street-corner politicians who promised to deliver their blocks for a consideration. Charlestown was peopled by varied groups, but all Catholic, who fought among themselves but united against outsiders, including those from across the Charles River. Cambridge and Somerville were more pleasant, lower-middle-class areas; the highest aspiration of many in East Boston or the North End was to move out of their slums into one of the huge frame “three-deckers” in these parts of the district.

  Tucked into a corner of this district was a very different area—Harvard University and nearby precincts peopled by academics, old Yankee families, and executives commuting to the city. For many years, the “Harvard” part of Cambridge had been part of another congressional district, the Ninth, represented in Washington by Republican Robert Luce, a dignified Harvard alumnus and authority on Congress. Luce had been beaten in 1940 by another Harva
rd man, Thomas H. Eliot, grandson of a Harvard president and son of a prominent Unitarian minister, and a New Dealer who had helped write the Social Security Act. Two years later, after elaborate tinkering with district boundaries by the state legislature, the “Harvard” area—and along with it Eliot’s own residence—was torn out of the suburban, middle-class Ninth District and stuck into the immigrant, proletarian Eleventh. Eliot found himself on Curley’s own home grounds, and Curley had easily beaten him in the next Democratic primary.

  Surely this was not a very inviting constituency for young Kennedy. But what else could he do? Some of his friends, knowing that he was looking around, urged him to run for statewide office—lieutenant governor, for example. Kennedy was cool to the idea. A host of politicians had their eye on the statehouse, men who had built up what Kennedy so painfully lacked—a political base of operations. Moreover, he far preferred office in Washington to Boston. So when Curley won the mayoralty early in November 1945, Kennedy decided to make the run for the Democratic nomination for Congress. In this district the Democratic nomination was equivalent to election.

  He still, however, had not sunk political roots. After the war he had taken a suite at the Bellevue, a hotel that teemed with politicians from the statehouse nearby. Grandfather Fitz still lived there, grumpily offering advice to political neophytes, and Jack’s rooms were usually filled with a motley group of former Navy officers, self-appointed political advisers, veterans still in uniform, old school chums, and family friends. To get away from the hubbub, Kennedy would hold political discussions in the corridor or the lobby downstairs. He lived in the Bellevue throughout the campaign; many a business has been run from a hotel room but Kennedy’s was perhaps the first congressional campaign so conducted. The parochial politicians of the Eleventh were not happy about it. When a friend took Kennedy around to pay his respects to party leaders, one of them looked at him scornfully.