“I’ll bet he talked to at least a million people and shook hands with seven hundred and fifty thousand,” Morrissey said later, without much exaggeration.
The pace was hard—and so was the candidate. Kennedy drove himself and his aides almost ruthlessly. Rising before dawn, driving for hours in the fog or rain or snow, racing to be on time, sleeping in motels or dingy hotels or in the car, wading through muck to greet hip-booted tannery workers, autographing the books of pushing, chirruping schoolgirls—this was the endlessly repeated cycle, growing in intensity as 1952 neared. Unenchanted by food, Kennedy allowed the party ten minutes to eat. Meal after meal might consist of cheeseburgers or hamburgers and milk shakes. The Congressman was often late, and he hated to be late. A stop for a train, an unnecessary delay, a buttonholing admirer would tauten Kennedy’s face and send him into short tirades back in the car. Other times, the threesome, returning home early in the morning, would remember some funny incident and burst into tired, ironic laughter.
No man could stay healthy under such a schedule for so long a time, and Kennedy did not. Soon his back was throbbing painfully. He eased it by tearing his clothes off and settling into a brimming tub of hot water at every hotel stop, and by putting a stiff board under his mattress or sleeping on the mattress on the floor, but he grew worse. He could climb upstairs only by dragging his leg, when he thought people were looking the other way. By 1952, he was on crutches again.
The Battle Joined
By early 1952, Kennedy had stumped in almost all the 351 cities and towns of Massachusetts. But what was he running for?
It was certain that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s term expired in 1952. It was almost as certain that Lodge would run again. What would the Democrats do? Everything turned on the plans of Governor Dever, a sure-footed graduate of the political school of hard knocks, now midway through his second term in the statehouse. Dever had a problem of his own. Like most American governors, submerged in executive detail and local politics, he looked forward to a gracious senatorial career and a chance to parade on the national stage. But could he beat. Lodge? For months, Dever hesitated while his aides sniffed the political wind.
Meanwhile, Kennedy fidgeted. He had to wait for the Governor to decide. Many of his friends hoped that Dever would choose the Senate race so that Kennedy could run for governor. In the statehouse he could make a name for himself as an executive, and after one term he could go after Saltonstall’s senatorial chair. But Kennedy felt differently. The Massachusetts governorship had been hard on political fortunes, especially those of Democrats. The 280 senators and representatives were notoriously independent, the governor’s powers limited, and the legislature tended to stay stubbornly Republican even when the state as a whole went Democratic. Besides, Kennedy had become more and more excited by national affairs.
The national political scene was equally murky. Since Truman would not run again, the race in each party seemed wide open. A sharp struggle between Eisenhower and Taft was splitting the Republican forces; a dozen Democrats were behaving like possible candidates for their party’s presidential nomination.
Finally, Dever took one last look at the redoubtable Lodge and decided that he was too tough to beat. On an early April night in 1952, he called Kennedy in and told him that the Senate race was open. Kennedy did not hesitate. He announced publicly: “… There is not only a crisis abroad, but there is a crisis here at home in Massachusetts.… For entirely too long the representatives of Massachusetts in the United States Senate have stood by helplessly while our industries and jobs disappear.…” He concluded by drawing a bead squarely on his target.
“I, therefore, am opposing Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., for the office of United States Senator from Massachusetts.”
Some friends of Kennedy were aghast at his decision. Lodge had a mighty record as a campaigner. He had first gained his Senate seat by beating Jim Curley by 142,000 votes in 1936, the year of the high-water mark of New Deal voting power. He won re-election six years later, resigned from the Senate in 1944 for combat service, and returned after the war to defeat the “unbeatable” isolationist David I. Walsh. He was a hard campaigner who for years had been shaking hands throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, from the Berkshire hills to his estate in Beverly on the North Shore. If Kennedy was a household name in Boston, Lodge was a potent political trade-mark throughout the state.
Rarely in American politics have hunter and quarry so resembled each other. Not only were they both tall, young, handsome, and winning, each a Brahmin in his own way, but their careers were remarkably parallel. Like Kennedy, Lodge was a Harvard man who had had a fling at newspaper work before entering politics at an early age. Both possessed noted isolationist forebears; Lodge’s grandfather, of the same name, had led the effort to spike Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to bring America into the League of Nations. Both Kennedy and Lodge could boast of their war records. Both had a reputation for appealing to the “women’s vote.” Of the two, Lodge was more suave, polished, and mature, Kennedy more tense, detached, and boyish, but each could be cool and stiff under pressure.
The astute Paul Dever summed up the situation in six words: “Jack is the first Irish Brahmin.”
Ironically, the two men differed little over public issues. Lodge had a mixed record on issues of bread-and-butter liberalism; he had, for example, voted for the Taft-Hartley Act. But on other matters the records of the two men criss-crossed. Forsaking his grandfather’s isolationism, Lodge had supported the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty, and the sending of troops to Europe. A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he had carried on the Vandenberg policy of nonpartisanship in foreign policy, and he had, in fact, been less critical of Truman’s foreign policy than Kennedy had been. Like Kennedy, too, he had been silent on McCarthyism.
Events in early 1952, moreover, dramatized Lodge’s right to the liberal Republican tag. While Eisenhower stayed in Europe stating that “under no circumstances” would he ask for relief from his NATO command to seek political office, Lodge led the pro-Eisenhower forces back home. This put the Massachusetts Senator directly at odds with Taft and his conservative and isolationist followers. By 1952, indeed, Lodge was becoming something of a liberal hero; at a convention of a CIO union in Boston, for example, he was given an ovation.
Lodge’s politicking for Eisenhower made him miss some key votes in the Senate and opened him up to the charge of absenteeism. But by a final ironic twist, Kennedy was even more vulnerable on this score, as a result of illness, trips abroad, and campaigning for the Senate. It seemed that fate had conspired in every way to balance the political scales between the two young politicians.
How could David conquer David? The more Kennedy’s advisers studied Lodge and his record, the more they despaired of finding the vulnerable point. He was an internationalist with an isolationist heritage, a “liberal conservative” who had veered back and forth on domestic issues.
Faced with this dilemma, Kennedy’s advisers began to split into two camps. On the left were some labor leaders and Fair Deal Democrats who urged him to go down the line for more welfare programs, civil liberties, civil rights, and continued economic and military commitments abroad. It was a presidential year, they argued; he would have to campaign on national issues. His record was essentially a Democratic record; how could he campaign as anything but a Fair Deal Democrat?
The other camp held far different views. Kennedy, they argued, was in a perfect position to conduct an elaborate flank attack on Lodge from the right. The Congressman’s own record would lend itself to this tactic; he had sounded off against some of Truman’s foreign policies, favored cuts in certain foreign-appropriations bills, spoken and voted for governmental economy, scolded Europe for not carrying its share of the load. Indeed, these advisers went on, Kennedy’s position was not too far from that of the Republican nationalists, who believed that Europe was worn out, that the Democrats had “lost” China, that Korea was “Truman�
��s war.” Elaborate studies were prepared to prove that on foreign policy Kennedy stood closer to Taft’s position than did Lodge.
“Kennedy has been an outspoken critic of many elements of the Administration’s Foreign Policy,” one such study began. “In this respect, he has been much closer to the position of Taft than has Lodge. Indeed, the latter has been riding at the head of the so-called bi-partisan foreign policy parade since 1947.…”
The strategy, then, was apparent to this group: attack Lodge as a Republican who had deserted his party, a political adventurer clinging to Eisenhower’s coattails, an internationalist who had repudiated his own grandfather. Leader of the “Keep Right” group was the Congressman’s own father. During 1952, Joseph P. Kennedy was in and out of Boston, seeing publishers and politicians, conferring with speech writers and researchers, discussing public-relations programs with advertising agencies. As spry, vocal, and aggressive as ever, the old man had no formal position in the campaign setup, nor did he need any. Of course, as a friend of Taft and other Republican nationalists, he had good reason to dislike Lodge. But politics was the least of it. Here at last was the supreme opportunity for his son. Joseph P. enlisted for the duration.
Young Kennedy listened dutifully to both camps. He was not yet ready to decide between the two strategies, if, indeed, a decision ever would be necessary at all. He had his own plans.
By the Left—or Right?
The national spotlight shone on Chicago in July 1952. Early in the month, Eisenhower and Taft forces locked in mighty battle at the Amphitheatre. Charging Taft’s men with attempts to “steal” delegates, the Eisenhower forces outvoted the Ohioan’s delegates in the early contests and then beat them in the first roll call. Despite Ike’s quick visit to the Senator at his headquarters to present a united front, Taft’s diehard supporters went home from the convention sore and vengeful.
Two weeks later, the Democrats convened in the same arena. Governor Adlai E, Stevenson, of Illinois, captivated the convention within an hour of its start in his welcoming speech as governor of Illinois. “For almost a week,” Stevenson said of the Republicans, “pompous phrases marched over this landscape in search of an idea, and the only idea they found was that the two great decades of progress in peace, victory in war, and bold leadership in this anxious hour, were the misbegotten spawn of bungling, corruption, socialism, mismanagement, waste and worse. They captured, tied and dragged that idea in here and furiously beat it to death.” The delegates roared. “But we Democrats were not the only victims here. First they slaughtered each other, and then they went after us.…”
Kennedy was active for Stevenson, contributing money to help maintain his volunteer headquarters and organizing a group of Democratic candidates for the Senate to endorse Stevenson at the beginning of the convention. He was not conspicuous in the Massachusetts delegation, however, for Dever headed it, and old Jim Curley attracted the most attention as he strode down the center aisle to his seat in the delegation. Kennedy was pleased with Stevenson’s quick nomination. Stevenson was the type of Democrat he liked—moderately liberal, polished, articulate, a foe of banal phrases and stereotyped thinking.
After the delegates enthusiastically nominated Stevenson on the third ballot, Kennedy immediately flew home to tune up his own campaign organization. In his months of campaigning, he had quietly looked over in each area of the state men and women who might organize his local campaigns. By now he had a network of 286 “secretaries,” backed by several thousand workers. It was an odd mixture of local civic leaders, professional people, housewives, heads of fraternal groups, mayors, businessmen. Many of these secretaries were independents or independent Democrats; some even had Republican leanings. This was not accidental. Kennedy was trying to win votes from the hosts of independents who usually hold the balance of power in Massachusetts elections, and, in any event, most of the Democratic committee-men were interested mainly in Dever or in local candidates.
The first test of this amateurish-looking organization made the professionals sit up and take notice. Kennedy had no opposition in the primary, partly because of his head start, partly because no other Democrat wanted to take on Lodge. This was a help—and also a problem. Without a primary fight it would be hard to give his organization a workout. It was necessary, however, to get 2,500 signatures on his nomination papers. Why not get ten times, a hundred times, as many? The 262,324 signatures finally amassed were a record total. And all the names were filed also in headquarters to be approached again in the fall.
Kennedy wanted to avoid the usual campaign situation of too many generals and too few privates. He needed people who would go out and ring doorbells instead of gossiping at headquarters. Who better to start with than the energetic Kennedy sisters? Soon the clan was gathering: from Chicago came Jean, who had been assisting her father at the Merchandise Mart, and Eunice, a social-service worker for the House of the Good Shepherd; from New York came Patricia, who was working in television. Perhaps on the theory that only a Kennedy could slave-drive Kennedys, the candidate also summoned young Bobby and made him campaign director. This was a shock to the old pros, who could not imagine this twenty-seven-year-old managing a statewide campaign. It was even more of a shock to the girls, who would return to their Boston apartment footsore after a long day, only to be called back to headquarters by the imperious Robert for some new emergency task.
The family also put a good deal of money into the campaign. Seven Kennedys gave $1,000 each to each of the five committees set up to help finance the campaign—committees for “Improvement of Massachusetts Fish Industry,” for “Improvement of the Shoe Industry,” for “Improvement of the Textile Industry,” along with the “Build Massachusetts Committee” and “Citizens for Kennedy and a More Prosperous Massachusetts.” Such multiple giving was necessary, since $1,000 was the maximum under state law that one person could give one committee. Through additional donations, the family gave a total of $70,000. Kennedy received over two hundred other $1,000 contributions.
Headquarters in Boston was now a ceaseless bustle of activity. Girls at typewriters spent hours making up lists of special groups to be circularized: Albanian-Americans, insurance men, Independent Greek-Americans, college professors, railway mail clerks, taxi drivers. A stream of instructions and exhortations, including even fund-raising requests, went out to area secretaries. Area workers carted off thousands of copies of the Reader’s Digest reprint of “Survival” on Kennedy’s P-T boat experience to be left, as nonpolitical reading matter, in barbershops and hairdressers’ salons. Advertising men planned an intensive television campaign. Reardon prepared a huge campaign book detailing Kennedy’s votes, excerpts from his speeches, and Lodge’s record. Publicity men worked up several press releases a day; the more important were hand-carried to the newspaper offices. Hardly a detail was overlooked. A Kennedy message concerning the Jewish New Year was prepared weeks ahead for Jewish newspapers.
The tactics were fine—but what about strategy? Campaign advisers, including the self-appointed, still argued whether their candidate should attack Lodge from the left or the right, as an isolationist or internationalist.
The issue was sharpened when the Taft delegates from Massachusetts returned home after their rout at Chicago. Still bruised over the tactics of Ike’s men, they turned their aim toward the convenient target of Lodge. Kennedy, after all, was not so bad, they told one another; he might be a Fair Dealer on domestic matters, but hadn’t he been more critical of the Truman foreign policy than Lodge? And Kennedy’s father was a close friend and admirer of Taft. Many of these unreconstructed Taft men worked quietly for Kennedy. A few spoke out publicly. Basil Brewer, publisher of a New Bedford paper and a Taft die-hard, scored Lodge in his editorials and kept in close touch with men in the Kennedy campaign. A retired wholesaler and former Taft lieutenant set up the “Independents for Kennedy” at the request, he told friends privately, of Ambassador Kennedy himself.
Then there was the thorny problem of Joe McC
arthy. The Wisconsin Senator created a dilemma for both Lodge and Kennedy. Lodge disliked McCarthy and opposed his tactics. But coming from Massachusetts, where McCarthy sentiment, especially among the Irish Catholics, was strong, Lodge had steered a cautious course. His main hope was that McCarthy would stay away from Massachusetts. But what if he came anyway? Kennedy asked the same question. Lodge was being attacked in Boston for his coolness toward McCarthy. What if McCarthy came and endorsed Lodge? What if he endorsed Kennedy? There was no way of knowing what the wild man from Wisconsin would do. Both candidates pretended he did not exist.
But events made evasion difficult. Any group—a Legion Post or “Americanism” committee—might get the notion of inviting McCarthy to town. Indeed, McCarthy had sent word to Kennedy, Sr. that if Lodge asked him to come to Massachusetts, he would do so. Was this a warning to his son? The father preferred to wait and let Lodge jump first—“if you have to make a tough choice,” he argued, “let the other man make it.” But Kennedy’s anti-McCarthy advisers urged him to take a bold position—to denounce, if not McCarthy, at least McCarthyism. One night, Gardner (“Pat”) Jackson, a down-the-line liberal, veteran of the Sacco-Vanzetti case and of the New Deal wars, and then on loan to the Kennedy campaign from the CIO, prepared a ringing statement against McCarthyism for Kennedy to endorse and publicize. The next morning he took it around to the Bowdoin Street apartment.
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