But there was to be no showdown in the Senate that day on Flanders’ resolution of censure. Senate Majority Leader, Republican William Knowland, hotly opposed to the resolution, moved the establishment of a select committee to consider the charges. The idea was a godsend to Saltonstall, for it would probably postpone the need for a stand on his part until after his coming election contest with Foster Furcolo. A liberal group opposed the move because it feared that the psychological moment to chastise McCarthy would be lost. Kennedy and Saltonstall were among the seventy-five senators who favored Knowland’s postponement measure, which would also mean a postponement of Kennedy’s own speech. Some liberals, like Wayne Morse, who voted with the majority did so partly on the grounds that McCarthy had the right to answer charges with aid of counsel before an investigating committee. A liberal bloc of twelve senators opposed postponement, arguing that McCarthy’s rights could be fully protected in censure deliberations in the whole chamber. Among this group of twelve were Lehman and Fulbright, who had over the years done battle with McCarthy, and Douglas and Humphrey. Both Douglas and Humphrey favored an immediate showdown, although they had to face election contests in the fall.
“A Reasonable Indictment”?
There would be a showdown—but Kennedy was not to be part of it. He had sat through the debate on McCarthy in increasing physical distress. As soon as the Senate recessed, he went to Hyannisport for rest; still he felt no better. He could stand the pain no longer. For some time, drastic surgery had been considered, but doctors were reluctant to undertake a perilous operation unless it was imperative.
Before Kennedy could go to the hospital, however, there was one more unpleasant incident to conclude the general unpleasantness of the politics of 1954. During the fall, Saltonstall and Furcolo were going at each other with hammer and tongs in the race for the Senate. Kennedy’s loyalties were sharply divided. He had worked closely with Saltonstall in the Senate on the New England program and help for Massachusetts, and he liked the old blue blood personally. With Furcolo, an aggressive, attractive Yale man and now state treasurer, Kennedy’s relations had long been on rather distant terms. Furcolo was a Democrat and headed the state’s campaign ticket, but Kennedy felt that Furcolo had refused to help him in 1952 because of fear of alienating Lodge supporters. Now Furcolo felt that Kennedy refused to help him because of the risk of alienating Saltonstall. The Furcolo forces were edgy because Kennedy had long played up his bipartisan co-operation with Saltonstall. Indeed, in September, just at the point when Furcolo was denouncing his opponent for doing too little for Massachusetts, Kennedy and Saltonstall issued a joint communiqué listing the achievements of the New England bloc and playing up their own co-operation.
So the stage was set for an open breach. It came one night after Kennedy had been persuaded to endorse the whole Democratic ticket, including Furcolo, in a joint television appearance in Boston. Kennedy flew up from Hyannisport despite a fever. A few minutes before the two men were to go on the air, along with Robert Murphy, candidate for governor, Furcolo looked over the script and complained to Kennedy that his endorsement was not strong enough. Kennedy’s nerves were already stretched taut because he had been sitting in the studio over an hour waiting for Furcolo to arrive.
“Foster, you have a hell of a nerve coming in here and asking for these last-minute changes,” Kennedy said heatedly.
“Jack, it’s not an outright endorsement,” Furcolo protested.
After a short altercation, Kennedy reached for his crutches and hobbled out of the studio and into a men’s room. The studio was in an uproar. Murphy went out and pleaded with Kennedy to return, and at the last minute he did so, but he omitted any specific reference to Furcolo. He gave his endorsement simply to Murphy and the Democratic ticket. Banner headlines a few days later proclaimed a split between the two Democrats. Many in Massachusetts considered the rivalry in part a sign of the mutual suspicion between the Irish and the Italians.
The next day, Kennedy entered the hospital for surgery on his back. He remained there several months. He was still in the hospital when the censure motion finally came to a vote, on December 2. He was listed as “absent by leave of the Senate because of illness.” The verdict went against McCarthy, 67 to 22, with only a small band of Republicans, and not a single Democrat, staying with him. The main basis of the censure had been changed, however, from the long-standing charges against McCarthy for general misconduct to a list of specific statements he had made about members of the censuring committee.
The verdict was in on McCarthy, and he never again would be a power in the Senate. But, in later years, some brought in a verdict against Kennedy. It was charged that he had been weak and evasive about McCarthy and about McCarthyism and should have officially notified the Senate as to his stand on censure even though he could not leave the hospital to vote, or he could have had his vote “paired” with that of another absent senator planning to vote the other way, as did all the rest of the absent senators.
What are the facts on the verdict against Kennedy?
On the one hand:
1. On motions involving McCarthy’s own perquisites, such as funds for investigation committees, Kennedy voted for McCarthy, as did almost every other senator.
2. On issues that seemed to Kennedy to involve the drawing of a fine line between the claims of individual liberty and the claims of national security, Kennedy gave priority to the latter.
On the other hand:
1. On clear issues of civil liberties, Kennedy voted against McCarthy.
2. On appointments McCarthy favored, Kennedy voted against him.
On the one hand and the other hand:
1. In blocking the Flanders motion, Kennedy voted against the liberal anti-McCarthy bloc and in favor of setting up a censure committee. According to Washington observers, the Flanders motion might well have failed; the committee did censure McCarthy, and the censure stuck in the Senate, with heavy cost to the Wisconsin Senator. But a majority vote against McCarthy in August, if it could have been mustered, might have been at least as damaging.
2. If censure had come to a vote in August, Kennedy would have spoken and voted for it, on the narrow basis of the “honor and dignity of the Senate.”
3. Kennedy was ill and did not, and physically could not, vote on the final censure, nor did he give any indication of his views. It is almost certain that if present he would have voted for censure, on the same narrow grounds as he had planned to do in August. However, he did not take a public stand from 1950, when McCarthy first made McCarthyism a public issue, to 1954, when the Senate finally voted censure, or, indeed, for a long time thereafter.
So much for the record. The fact remains that nothing has caused Kennedy more trouble in recent years than his failure to vote on the final censure. During his quest for the vice-presidency and later the presidency, a sharp question from the audience on the McCarthy issue was the one thing that could ruffle his ordinarily immaculate composure. His mixed record on McCarthyism was the number-one issue for most liberals, and some of these had influence in national conventions. McCarthyism, in short, years after McCarthy’s death, was the “issue that would not die.” The whole eposide raises three important questions:
Why did Kennedy take the censure stand that he did? How does he feel about his stand now, and about the liberals’ criticism of it? How has he dealt with the issue in the years since?
The first question is the most crucial of the three—and its answer the most difficult. Anti-McCarthy senators followed, in general, two different lines of attack on McCarthy. Flanders, a mild-mannered Vermont Republican who was slow to boil but could boil hard, felt that McCarthy posed a supreme moral issue. His censure resolution was no legal document, but an expression of outrage. The liberal bloc supported him on these grounds, as well, of course, as on other grounds.
The other anti-McCarthy line, finally taken by the censure committee itself, was a more legalistic and technical one. McCarthy had violated the pr
oprieties and written and unwritten rules of the Senate. He should be curbed as a lawbreaker, but only after all due procedures were followed. Giving McCarthy the benefit of the doubt, the censure committee rejected charge after charge brought in by Flanders and the liberals. They could not ignore, however, McCarthy’s dishonorable treatment of senators and Senate committees.
Of the two approaches, Kennedy preferred the second. Always a bit detached and emotionally uncommitted, he tended to view McCarthy more as a procedural problem than a moral one.
In a way, this is curious, because McCarthy symbolized everything Kennedy personally detested. Vulgar, bullying, crude, cynical, dishonest, McCarthy represented the mucker element in politics that Kennedy had fought in Massachusetts. McCarthy sneered at the traditions, orderly procedures, and senatorial good manners that Kennedy valued so highly. The Senator from Wisconsin was, indeed, a rule breaker and hence a subversive. But nonetheless Kennedy never spoke up for or against McCarthy; he voted his conviction on issues of McCarthyism and let it go at that.
Why, then, did Kennedy take such a narrow position on a matter that to many Americans—Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals—was the transcendent moral issue of their time?
One reason was his view that since the main indictment of McCarthy turned on his contempt for due process and fair play, any counterattack on McCarthy must scrupulously conform to proper procedures. “We had all voted to seat McCarthy,” Kennedy says today. “We had voted him funds. Any question up to January 1953 should have been fought over when he came in. There is an old doctrine in equity law that ‘he who doesn’t speak when he should speak therefore loses the right to speak.’ McCarthy, after all, had been elected by the people of Wisconsin in the fall of 1952—he was their choice to represent them in the Senate. The Senate had acquiesced by seating him, making him chairman of the committee, giving him funds. If there was any objection to his conduct prior to 1953, the fight should have been made in January 1953 when he was seated.” As for the Flanders approach, Kennedy felt that McCarthy was entitled to a specific indictment, not just disapproval. “Hell, if you get into the question of just disapproving of Senators, you’re going to be in some difficulty.… We have never exercised our judgment on our peers very vigorously, and it’s probably just as well.”
This view of Kennedy’s, that the McCarthy situation required due process, also was behind his failure to make his position known at the time of the final censure. The Senate was acting like a jury, and no juror, Kennedy feels, can cast his ballot from a hospital sickbed—especially when the charges were not the original Flanders indictment or the Cohn-Schine affair but McCarthy’s treatment of a committee that was sitting while Kennedy was in the hospital.
Another reason, however—perhaps a more important reason for Kennedy’s mixed stand on McCarthy—was much more personal. His brother Bob was a member of the McCarthy staff; his father was a friend of McCarthy. The Senator had opposed Bob’s going to work for the committee, but his father, then serving on the Hoover Commission, wanted Bob to get into government and had no objections. “So I was rather in ill grace personally to be around hollering about what McCarthy had done in 1952 or 1951 when my brother had been on the staff in 1953,” Kennedy says. “That is really the guts of the matter.”
But what Kennedy sees as a decisive reason for his stand may still not be the basic one. Was it political expedience? Certainly to some extent. While not unduly concerned about his prospects in 1958, he could never forget the intensity of the pro-McCarthy feeling back home, nor would his McCarthyite correspondents allow him to. But again, his stand reflected the pressures in him more than those on him. The civil-liberties creed was not part of his family tradition or his early environment. It was something he had met in later years, mainly at Harvard, and even then the great questions of the time were not civil liberties, but economic and social reform at home and intervention abroad.
Kennedy’s judgment today on his McCarthy stand illustrates the fundamental attitudes that separated him from the libertarians for whom McCarthyism was the supreme issue: “The whole McCarthy episode must be judged in the perspective of the atmosphere which has always prevailed in the Senate, where most members are reluctant to judge personally the conduct of another. Perhaps that was wrong in McCarthy’s case—perhaps we were not as sensitive as some and should have acted sooner. That is a reasonable indictment that falls on me as well, although I was completely out of sympathy with McCarthy and had no close relationship with him, particularly after I voted against him on several occasions.”
Such was Kennedy’s “reasonable indictment” of his McCarthy position from the perspective of five years. How has he dealt with the issue in the intervening years?
He could not ignore it—for the liberals would not let him, nor would the journalists. It was a rare press interview or television panel on which the question was not asked. He evaded an answer when he returned to the Senate in the spring of 1955. A few weeks before the 1956 convention, he indicated approval for the censure action of the Senate. But it still seemed a straddle to some, and, following publication of Profiles in Courage, reporters passed around the remark that Kennedy should have shown less profile and more courage. Mrs. Roosevelt, in particular, was critical of his position. White House decisions, she has said, should not be in the hands of “someone who understands what courage is and admires it, but has not quite the independence to have it.” Why had he not gone on record when he returned to the Senate? she demanded of friends of Kennedy who interceded for him. “I think McCarthyism is a question on which public officials must stand up and be counted,” she told them. “I cannot be sure of the political future of anyone who does not willingly state where he stands on the issue.” It was not enough, she said, to uphold the vote of the Senate. “I believe that a public servant must clearly indicate that he understands the harm that McCarthyism did to our country and that he opposes it actively, so that one would feel sure he would always do so in the future.”
It is questionable whether Kennedy at this time truly understood the intensity of the liberals’ commitment to civil liberties. To them, freedom of speech and of conscience were not simply worthy policies to be placed on a par with other desirable principles of government. They occupied the very summit of the liberals’ hierarchy of values. And they held a fixed position there. It was all right to experiment on social and economic matters, liberals felt, but impermissible to tamper with the basic liberties of the Bill of Rights, for only if those liberties remained secure could the free processes of government remain open for the detection and correction of error. The American civil-liberties heritage was a faith, renewed through time by Socrates and Milton, John Stuart Mill and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; indeed, it was a fighting faith for which many a man would die if necessary. And rarely had civil liberties in America been so threatened, liberals felt, as by the ruthless thrust of McCarthyism.
The question was still bobbing up when Kennedy made a campaign tour of McCarthy’s home state of Wisconsin in April 1959. At a Press Club Gridiron dinner for Kennedy, costumed reporters sang, to the tune of “Clementine”:
“Where were you, John—where were you, John,
When the Senate censored Joe?”
At McCarthy’s home town of Appleton, where there is now a memorial to the late Senator, who died in 1957, a questioner in the audience asked Kennedy to comment on Mrs. Roosevelt’s judgment that he had been soft on McCarthyism. With some irritation he said that his civil-liberties record was clear and “I am not ready to accept any indictment from you or Mrs. Roosevelt on that score.” Later that year, in writing a newspaper review of Richard Rovere’s Senator Joe McCarthy, he mentioned that the nation had “recovered its health” from the “McCarthy contagion” and that Rovere could expect the “usual stream of abusive, venomous letters from the still-vibrant cult of McCarthy admirers.” (Kennedy himself received such a letter on his review from a St. Louis man who said that in praising the book he
had become a discredit to the Catholic Church. It must be pointed out, however, that the attitude of American Catholics was by no means always pro-McCarthy; indeed, the liberal Catholic magazines Commonweal and America had early taken a strong anti-McCarthy stand, as had many individual Catholics, in particular, leading Catholic intellectuals.) Still, Kennedy had not made the flat denunciation of McCarthy that liberals demanded.
Why not? Partly out of sheer pride or stubbornness; he does not want to give the impression of taking flight from a position that he feels was a considered one. Partly out of a sense of futility; he, too, is aware now that the issue will not die. Partly out of political expediency; he has chosen to occupy a place on the liberal side of center in American politics and has left the more adventurous civil-liberties frontiers to Humphrey and Stevenson, who have staked out the territory. But mainly because the old pressures within him are still operative to some extent, even though on concrete civil-liberties issues, such as the loyalty oath required of students requesting federal loans, he has taken a strong civil-libertarian position.
The central clue to Kennedy’s position on the question is this: He was shaping his liberalism by fits and starts, out of his experience with concrete problems. He had been willed the heritage of economic liberalism, “the groceries,” but not the heritage of liberty. He had never found a ready-made philosophy of liberalism that encompassed the vital combination. Kennedy recognizes this today.
“Some people have their liberalism ‘made’ by the time they reach their late 20’s,” he said almost wistfully. “I didn’t. I was caught in cross currents and eddies. It was only later that I got into the stream of things.” The McCarthy era, in the long run, may have contributed to the maturing and deepening of Kennedy’s own liberalism. But if so, neither he nor the liberals would admit it.
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