John Kennedy

by Burns, James MacGregor;

  After two years of a rather helter-skelter relationship, Jack finally proposed and Jacqueline accepted. They were married in St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Newport on September 12, 1953, a few weeks after Congress adjourned. A close friend of the Kennedy family, the Most Reverend Richard J. Cushing, then Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Boston, performed the ceremony, celebrating the nuptial mass and reading a special blessing from the Pope. Bob Kennedy was best man. More than 1,200 persons attended a reception at the three-hundred acre estate of the bride’s mother and stepfather overlooking Narragansett Bay. Despite the glamorous couple and guests, the affair had political undertones. All senators and many political leaders had been invited; Kennedy’s campaign aides were there in force; and the groom’s good congressional friend George Smathers, of Florida, was an usher. A crowd of 3,000 broke through police lines and nearly crushed the bride when she arrived for the wedding. They pressed forward again as the newlyweds left the church and posed for photographers. Jack, used to crowds, kept his big smile; Jacqueline, startled, recoiled a bit.

  Jacqueline was now officially part of the Kennedy family. It was a formidable experience. When working, the family seemed to infiltrate the whole country. Joe, Sr. still kept his hand in a variety of business and banking affairs. In Chicago, Eunice, former executive secretary of the Justice Department’s juvenile-delinquency section, supervised the rehabilitation work of the House of the Good Shepherd. In New York, Jean was an aide to Father James G. Keller, founder of the Christophers, an organization attempting to combat corruption and communism “by urging Christians to enter professions where Communists most often operate—in the fields of government, education, labor relations, literature and entertainment.” At St. Coletta, a Catholic school near Milwaukee, Rosemary helped care for mentally retarded children. In California, Patricia, wife of actor Peter Lawford, assisted in the Family Rosary Crusade, which urged families to pray together once a day. Bob was an attorney in Washington for Senator McCarthy’s Government Operations’ subcommittee; and Teddy, the youngest, and considered by many the handsomest and friendliest of the three boys, was headed for the University of Virginia Law School.

  Although Kennedy and the older of his sisters were now in their thirties, they still behaved like children out of school when they congregated together at Hyannisport. All in-laws, Jacqueline included, had to conform to the hard physical and mental pace. She was introduced to the family’s competitiveness and watched in amazement a five-year-old Kennedy push a four-year-old Kennedy, who promptly went over and pushed a three-year-old. She plunged into family sports—and soon broke an ankle playing touch football. She was forced back on genteel forms of sabotage. Once in a while, she confessed to a reporter, when the Kennedys were all playing Monopoly after a strenuous day of outdoor sports, she got so sleepy that she deliberately made a mistake to end the game.

  “Does Jack mind?” she was asked.

  A gleam crept into her dark eyes. “Not if I’m on the other side.” Like her husband’s mother, she may have felt that a little independence was the price of survival in the clamorous Kennedy family. Once when Jack saw her pensive and quiet and offered her a penny for her thoughts, she answered gravely, “But they’re my thoughts and they wouldn’t be my thoughts any more if I told them!”

  Guests were also subjected to the gruelling schedule. One of them later tabulated a terrifying set of “Rules for Visiting the Kennedys,” which read in part:

  “Prepare yourself by reading the Congressional Record, US News & World Report, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, The Nation, How to Play Sneaky Tennis and The Democratic Digest. Memorize at least three good jokes. Anticipate that each Kennedy will ask you what you think of another Kennedy’s a) dress, b) hairdo, c) backhand, d) latest public achievement. Be sure to answer ‘Terrific.’ This should get you through dinner. Now for the football field. It’s ‘touch’ but it’s murder. If you don’t want to play, don’t come. If you do come, play, or you’ll be fed in the kitchen and nobody will speak to you. Don’t let the girls fool you. Even pregnant, they can make you look silly. If Harvard played Touch, they’d be on the varsity. Above all, don’t suggest any plays, even if you played quarterback at school. The Kennedys have the signal-calling department sewed up, and all of them have A-pluses in leadership. If one of them makes a mistake, keep still.… But don’t stand still. Run madly on every play, and make a lot of noise. Don’t appear to be having too much fun though. They’ll accuse you of not taking the game seriously enough. Don’t criticize the other team, either. It’s bound to be full of Kennedys, too, and the Kennedys don’t like that sort of thing. To become really popular you must show raw guts. To show raw guts, fall on your face now and then. Smash into the house once in a while, going after a pass. Laugh off a twisted ankle, or a big hole torn in your best suit. They like this. It shows you take the game as seriously as they do.

  “But remember. Don’t be too good. Let Jack run around you now and then. He’s their boy.…”

  8McCARTHYISM: THE ISSUE THAT WOULD NOT DIE

  The year 1954 should have been the happiest in Kennedy’s life. He was newly married and he was coming into his own in the Senate. Actually, it was probbly the unhappiest.

  Although very much in love, the young couple found adjustment difficult under the trying circumstances of a politician’s life. Kennedy was often away in Massachusetts or elsewhere on political errands. Jacqueline confided to a reporter that sometimes when he was home he was so wrapped up in his work that she might “as well be in Alaska.” The couple bought a $125,000 house in Virginia, but Jacqueline at times felt rather lonely there.

  A more grievous situation was Kennedy’s health. Friends at the wedding had worried that he might not be able to kneel at the altar, but he had done so with aplomb and then had borne up well during three hours of shaking hands with hundreds of guests in the reception line. During 1954 the pain in his back became almost unbearable. He tried a number of recommended remedies but nothing seemed to work. To ease his pain, he installed a rocking chair in his office and a couch for lying flat, but still to little avail. By the summer of 1954, he was continuously on crutches. As if all this were not enough, there was always the prospect of malarial attacks; he had suffered from one only a few weeks before his marriage.

  The worst aspect of 1954, however, was the drift of things in the Senate. It was clear by mid-1954 that the upper chamber was headed for a showdown over McCarthy and his tactics. A showdown over McCarthy would also mean a showdown for Kennedy. He had evaded the McCarthy issue in his 1952 campaign and ever since. Now both friends and foes were waiting to see which way Kennedy would jump when forced off the fence. Market-basket liberalism had been enough to show his progressivism in the House; but not in the Senate. Now he would be tested on the grounds of ideological liberalism embracing individual freedom as well as social welfare. “Democracy,” Maury Maverick said, “equals groceries plus liberty.” There was no question where Kennedy stood on groceries; but where did he stand on civil liberty? Kennedy knew he was under the scrutiny of liberals to whom McCarthyism had become the most crucial of all issues.

  Kennedy and the Liberals

  By 1954, liberals in Massachusetts felt they had some justifiable suspicions about Kennedy. First of all, they were concerned about his family and friends. His father may have been a New Dealer under Roosevelt, but he had also made his millions through financial speculations, and he was close to Joe McCarthy, and to Herbert Hoover, Robert A. Taft, and other conservatives and isolationists. Brother Bob worked for McCarthy. Kennedy’s closest friends seemed to be mainly conservative. Some liberals assumed that because these people were close to Kennedy they necessarily determined his political viewpoint.

  Liberals were troubled also by some of Kennedy’s political allies. The New Bedford Standard-Times was still solidly in his corner, and there was the special case of the Boston Post. Published by John Fox, and avidly pro-McCarthy, the Post had supported Kennedy in 1952 and still said nice thin
gs about him occasionally. So did many respectable and reliable papers, but liberal distaste for the Post was so great that the other papers were overlooked. Then, too, Kennedy had re-published in the Congressional Record a series of articles by Fox on communism that were a veiled summons to preventive warfare against Russia.

  Some liberals also remembered unhappily Kennedy’s remarks about the Supreme Court decision in the Christoffel case. As a member of the House Labor Committee in 1947, Kennedy had called for perjury charges against Harold Christoffel, who was a leader of the notorious Communist-dominated strike against Allis-Chalmers early in 1941. Although Kennedy’s call for an indictment had been rather hasty, he was vindicated when Christoffel was convicted of perjury and sent to jail. Later, however, the Supreme Court, in a five-to-four decision, set the verdict aside on the grounds that the Labor Committee lacked a majority in attendance when Christoffel committed perjury. This decision was greeted by Kennedy, in a joint statement with a conservative Republican congressman, as “most regrettable” and a “travesty on justice.” Christoffel was subsequently retried and successfully jailed, but Kennedy’s remark about the Supreme Court disturbed those who saw in the courts the last bulwark against violations of due process.

  Kennedy, moreover, had not hidden his disesteem for liberals who seemed to follow what he considered a doctrinaire “line.” During the 1952 election, John P. Mallan, then a teaching fellow at Harvard, and more recently a Smith College professor and a Massachusetts government official, had reported in the New Republic on a seminar at the university that Kennedy had addressed two years before, in 1950. According to Mallan, the Congressman had said, among other things, that he could see no reason why we were fighting in Korea, that he felt not enough had been done about communists in government, that he rather respected Joe McCarthy and thought “he knew Joe pretty well, and he may have something,” and that he had no great respect for Dean Acheson or indeed almost any member of the Fair Deal Administration. Friends of Kennedy contended that Mallan had taken these points out of context, that some of them were exaggerated, and that Kennedy himself overemphasized them to arouse his academic audience, but enough truth remained in the report to put liberals even further on guard. One political scientist who was then in the seminar as a graduate student reports in retrospect that Kennedy at the meeting had struck him as “an ambitious and likable young poitico on the rise” who reacted to the McCarthy issue with “nonchalance and minimal concern.” “It appeared to me that he quite sincerely thought the problem of rent control was considerably more important (because of his constituency) and more worthy of his attention than was this rather abstruse and philosophical concern which was so exercising us intellectuals.… His pitch was not philosophical but mainly practical—he was out to serve his district and to get reelected on the basis of his record of service. He did not preclude the possibility that the constituency interest could be and should be reconciled with some conception of a broader national interest. Yet there was very little beyond ‘district’ which he appeared to have found attractive.

  “There was, in fact, little of what he said which could be used to identify him as a partisan Democrat. He appeared to be not very interested in the party as a vehicle through which broader political values could be realized; rather the party was a label which was the most expedient to run under in his district.…”

  Another member of the seminar remembers it the same way but from a different perspective. “Certainly Kennedy’s judgments on McCarthy were more personal and political than ideological. Indeed, one of the striking and refreshing things about Kennedy at that time was that he did not look at political issues through the stereotyped lenses which we young Harvard liberal intellectuals used. In this respect, and in retrospect, it seems to me that Kennedy may then have been ahead of his times. The language of politics which he was talking, as a still young representative, is common today but it was new then in an era still dominated by the political semantics of the New Deal–Fair Deal.”

  As if being burned by the Harvard incident was not enough, Kennedy was again indiscreet in an interview with Paul F. Healy of the Saturday Evening Post, soon after becoming Senator. Noting that Kennedy resisted any effort to tag him with an ideological label and that he was annoyed by letters that chided him for not being a “true liberal,” Healy quoted him as saying:

  “I’d be very happy to tell them that I’m not a liberal at all. I never joined the Americans for Democratic Action or the American Veterans Committee. I’m not comfortable with those people.”

  Organized liberalism in Massachusetts had long been beleaguered in state politics. The Republican Boston Herald flayed it for its economic and social policies; the Democratic Boston Post attacked it for its strong stand on civil liberties. Office seekers sought quiet liberal support but not open endorsements. Any time a statehouse legislator had nothing better to do, he baited the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union or the state chapter of Americans for Democratic Action. The crowning blow came late in 1953, when former Congressman Foster Furcolo, presented to an ADA convention as one who had achieved a fine liberal record in Congress with ADA support, proceeded to deliver a keynote address in which he told the state ADA that it was a hindrance to the liberal efforts of the Democratic party and should disband.

  Was Kennedy, liberals asked, just another state politician who saw liberalism as only a bread-and-butter proposition? The remark reported in the Saturday Evening Post seemed to give the answer. Indignant letters came to the Senator’s office.

  Answering an inquiry from the secretary of a local AVC chapter in Massachusetts, Kennedy wrote that he could not remember making such a comment about the veterans group. He had not joined AVC, Kennedy explained, because he felt after the war that progressive-minded World War II veterans would have more influence in politics if they joined established veterans’ groups and tried to direct them along lines beneficial both to the veterans and the public, instead of joining an exclusively World War II veterans’ group that could not develop a large-enough membership to make its influence felt. Kennedy added that he had discussed the matter as far back as 1945 with Charles Bolte, a founding father of AVC.

  An ADA housewife in a Boston suburb was outspoken. “You don’t have to join ADA or the AVC,” she wrote, “but why do you express your discomfort about associations which you not only accept, but which you court when they can do you any good? I don’t know whether you will ever develop a ‘political philosophy’; however, it would seem to be a good idea for a United States Senator to renounce opportunism for a certain degree of consistency. As one of the people with whom you ‘are not comfortable’ may I say that I have talked to many people who are uncomfortable about you.”

  He hoped, Kennedy replied, that ADA did not intend to base its attitude toward him on a statement appearing in a magazine. “We both have known that my record was not in accordance with the program of ADA on all occasions, but I never did believe that uniformity of opinion was what that organization required.” He noted that his correspondent had objected to getting form letters on his policy views. Did she prefer that he write different letters expressing different viewpoints to constituents who take the opposite view on a particular question?

  “I cannot hope to say anything in this letter which can make your friends or yourself more ‘comfortable’ about me, for that is a question that is wholly within your judgment; but I do appreciate the frankness with which you wrote.”

  Whatever his differences with ADA, Kennedy was ready to defend it, too. He wrote a Boston insurance man who was livid over the Senator’s “sponsorship” of an ADA function that he was not a sponsor of ADA but of an ADA dinner in memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt at which his colleague Senator Herbert Lehman was a guest.

  “I do not agree with many of the positions taken by ADA,” he said, but “I cannot find any evidence that would justify your assertion that the ADA has not always been a strongly anti-communist organization.…” It was wrong, he added, to blur
over specific matters with general charges.

  On the Fence

  When Kennedy first came to the Senate in January 1953, McCarthy was nearing the zenith of his career. For three years, he had bedeviled the Truman administration and the Democratic party with charges of laxness on security measures and even of procommunism. He had called General George C. Marshall “a man steeped in falsehood” and part of a “conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” He had made reckless charges against individuals and had failed notably to back them up.

  His Republican colleagues had looked on, half in loathing at the Senator’s dishonesty and vulgarity, half in sheepish admiration of the trouble he caused Democrats. A man of the apparent integrity of Robert Taft held that “the pro-communist policies of the State Department fully justified Joe McCarthy in his demand for an investigation.” On the other hand, several Republican Senators, including Margaret Chase Smith, of Maine, and George D. Aiken, of Vermont, had submitted an anti-McCarthy manifesto in the form of a “Declaration of Conscience,” but this had led to naught. By 1952, Republicans were scrambling all over one another to enlist McCarthy’s help in the election, and Dwight Eisenhower, campaigning in Wisconsin, had dropped a defense he had planned to make of George Marshall, his old comrade in arms, apparently to escape a clash with McCarthy.

  Some Republicans had predicted that a victory for their party would be the best way to deal with the Wisconsin Senator. “McCarthyism would disappear overnight if Eisenhower were elected,” asserted the independent Washington Post in March 1952. Such hopes were quickly dashed. Soon McCarthy, now chairman, and, in effect, dictator, of the Government Operations Committee and of its investigations subcommittee, was actually sharing with Eisenhower power over foreign policy and military administration. Few Americans—and certainly no senator—made Eisenhower so sick at heart as McCarthy, though the President avoided an open break. In the end, McCarthy was to deliver a formal apology to the American people for having endorsed Eisenhower for President.