John Kennedy

by Burns, James MacGregor;

  “Lawyers, businessmen, teachers, doctors, all face difficult personal decisions involving their integrity—but few, if any, face them in the glare of the spotlight as do those in public office. Few, if any, face the same dread finality of decision that confronts a Senator facing an important call of the roll. He may want more time for his decision—he may believe there is something to be said for both sides—he may feel that a slight amendment could remove all difficulties—but when that roll is called, he cannot hide, he cannot equivocate, he cannot delay—and he senses that his constituency, like the Raven in Poe’s poem, is croaking ‘Nevermore’ as he casts the vote that stakes his political future.”

  The third and strongest pressure was the pressure of a politician’s constituency—the interest groups, organized letter writers, and voters as a whole. And the demands from these forces were complex and conflicting. Only recently, two groups had called him off the Senate floor, the Senator related—one a group of businessmen seeking to have a local federal installation closed as unfair competition for private enterprise; the other, a delegation from the employees in the installation who were worried about their jobs. Such spokesmen might represent only a small percentage of voters, but, still, they were the articulate few whose views could not be ignored and who comprised the greater part of a politician’s contacts with the whole electorate.

  It was easy enough for idealists to preach that politicians should ignore such pressures, the Senator went on, but it was not easy for practical men in office. And even if politicians could withstand such pressures, a crucial question arose—did they have any right to do so? Should not a senator speak for his state, especially in a chamber where other senators would work for their states? Was there not some responsibility to the political party that put him in office? Above all, should he not, in a democracy, respond to his constituents’ views, even if he personally differed with them?

  To these questions Kennedy had some interesting answers. Parties, to be successful, needed independence and variety in their leaders as well as loyalty and unity. Local and state interests should be served but not at the expense of the national interest. As for responsibility to constituents, this, Kennedy admitted, was a more difficult problem. But he would not accept the narrow conception of the role of a United States senator that was implied. Had the people of Massachusetts sent him to Washington to serve merely as “a seismograph to record shifts in popular opinion”? No—such a view of democracy actually put too little faith in the people, for it assumed that they wanted lawmakers to act in slavish obedience to public opinion (even if it could be measured, which it could not), whereas actually the people wanted their leaders to act with courage.

  “The voters selected us, in short, because they had confidence in our judgment and our ability to exercise that judgment from a position where we would determine what were their own interests, as a part of the nation’s interests,” Kennedy concluded. “This may mean that we must on occasion lead, inform, correct, and sometimes even ignore constituent opinion, if we are to exercise fully that judgment for which we were elected.…”

  It was an ingenious way of reconciling leadership and democracy. How usable was it? And what light, if any, did it throw on Kennedy’s own behavior as a politician?

  One difficulty is that voters rarely give much indication of choosing candidates on the basis of character or leadership potential. Personality, charm, friendliness—certainly these are winning qualities in politicians; probably, too, their “sincerity” and their training, possibly also their air of conviction and acquaintance with issues. But beyond this, character and leadership are rather intangible qualities. Moreover, men who later display striking leadership often give little indication at election time that they will behave this way. Probably it was hard to foresee in 1916 that Wilson would lead the country into war and then assume the moral leadership of the world in fighting for a League of Nations. Certainly few could have known in late 1932 that Franklin D. Roosevelt would display the courage and vigor that he did display only a few months later.

  Kennedy’s reconciliation of democracy and leadership, in short, was more an expression of faith than a statement of historical fact. But as an expression of faith it had its own importance, for he was saying that a courageous politician must act with the conviction that the people do want leadership, that they will re-elect politicians who vote according to inner conviction. Sometimes such faith would be crushed; the courage of some of Kennedy’s heroes, after all, had not been vindicated at the polls. But the courage of many others had.

  Everything turned, then, on the willingness of the people to support in fact—that is, at the polls—the courage and independence that they praised in theory. And this capacity to support courage in turn depended on certain qualities of the electorate. All about us, Kennedy said, politics was saturated with expensive public-relations operations and mechanized mass communications that threatened to stifle independence and unorthodoxy. “And our public life is becoming so increasingly centered upon that seemingly unending war to which we have given the curious epithet ‘cold’ that we tend to encourage rigid ideological unity and orthodox patterns of thought. And thus, in the days ahead, only the very courageous will be able to take the hard and unpopular decisions necessary for our survival in the struggle with a powerful enemy.…”

  There were some who said later that Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage as an act of contrition, even as unconscious self-indictment, because of his failure to take a position on the McCarthy censure. The book might give him some solace for not standing for McCarthy, a priest in Pennsylvania wrote the Senator, but he had lost the support of “the most effective Catholic group.” Others held that the key argument in Profiles was a damning indictment of the main tendency of McCarthyism—the stiffling of unorthodox thought. The ultimate source of political courage in a nation, Kennedy was saying in his book, lay in the extent that independence, unorthodoxy, and dissent were tolerated among the people as a whole. This conclusion was of particular importance, for he was arguing that the toleration of unorthodoxy is a matter not merely of democratic rectitude, but a matter of democratic survival. But each man has his own definition of nonconformity and of courage, and chooses the times to display it.

  Kennedy’s book was, perhaps, both of these things to a minor extent, but essentially it was simply a phase in his intellectual and political development. His work on courage helped emancipate him from a narrow conception of a politician’s responsibilities to his district. It opened up vistas of political leaders who were willing to defy public opinion in their states and districts because there was something much bigger—a moral principle or the welfare of the whole nation—for which they would fight and even face defeat.

  10VICE-PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

  Something like a hero’s welcome greeted Kennedy when he returned to Washington on May 23, 1955, after seven months’ leave. Family and friends crowded around him at National Airport, where he had flown in from Palm Beach with his wife and his sister Jean. Jubilantly, Reardon and Sorensen drove the couple to the Capitol, briefing Kennedy on the way about the latest political and legislative gossip. When the Senator posed for newsreel and television cameramen on the Capitol steps, tourists grabbed his hand, and a delegation of textile workers from the South that was passing by stopped to cheer him roundly.

  Secretaries rose to applaud when he entered Room 362 in the Senate Office Building later. His inner office he found full of reporters. Amid the letters and telegrams of greeting piled on his desk stood an enormous basket of fruit bearing the tag, “Welcome home” and signed “Dick Nixon.”

  Kennedy was in good form. He said he had tried to keep in touch with Congress by reading the Congressional Record. “An inspiring experience,” he added. Asked by a newsman whether Eisenhower’s popularity remained high, he flashed a broad smile. “It seems to be holding up pretty well—in Palm Beach, anyhow.” He went on to get a few licks in at the President. Eisenhower, he said, had “gues
sed short” on Russian military strength. The recent decisions to cut the Army and Air Force were wrong. He felt, though, that the Democratic party would have to present an effective and positive program in 1956 rather than follow Harry Truman’s advice of pin-pointing attacks directly on the President.

  “I threw my crutches away two days ago,” he told the reporters, who noted that he looked strong and fit under his dark golden tan and hair slightly bleached by the Florida sun. He had ignored a wheel chair and pair of crutches that were in readiness at the airport, and he insisted on walking from the Capitol to the Senate Office Building. Reporters noted also, though, that he had limped a bit in climbing the Capitol steps and seemed to favor his left leg as he strolled through the little Capitol park with Jacqueline. Kennedy indicated that he would take it easy for a while by living at the nearby Congressional Hotel and using an office only a few yards from the Senate chamber.

  When Kennedy entered the upper chamber the next day, the Senators rose in a body to applaud him. “We are glad to see you, Jack,” declared Democratic leader Lyndon Johnson. “Those of us who have gotten to know him have for him a very warm and high place in our affections,” Republican leader William Knowland added. In a few minutes, Kennedy was voting with his Democratic colleagues in an unsuccessful effort to override a presidential veto of an increase in pay for postal workers.

  Despite his plans to take it easy, Kennedy plunged back into a heavy schedule—appearances at Assumption College in Worcester and at a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Boston, dedication of a new home for the aged in East Boston, introduction of the Italian Ambassador at a Boston dinner, and attendance at his fifteenth reunion at Harvard. A presidential election year was coming up, and the political pot was beginning to boil.

  Fight for the Electoral College

  The year 1956 was to see Kennedy’s debut as a national politician. Shortly before that debut, there occurred an episode that was closely related to his national ventures of both 1956 and 1960, but it was a relation that few at the time—perhaps not even Kennedy—could perceive. The episode involved an attempt by conservative Democratic and Republican senators to change the method of electing the President and Vice-President, and Kennedy’s role in blocking the effort. Politicians usually cultivate their immediate political interests and rarely are asked to defend the constitutional system protecting those interests. It is even rarer for a politician to take a commanding role in such a defense.

  The legislative situation was as follows: for years a number of senators, including Henry Cabot Lodge, had been trying to overcome the failings of the Electoral College. The most popular proposal was to abolish the Electoral College as such and to give each presidential candidate the same proportion of the electoral votes of a state as he won of its popular vote. (For example, a candidate winning two thirds of New York’s popular vote would win two thirds, or thirty, of its forty-five electoral votes, rather than all the electoral votes, as at present.) The leading spokesman for this proposal in the 1956 session was Senator Price Daniel, a conservative Texas Democrat.

  This reform had never made much progress, however, and Daniel and his friends looked around for allies. They found support in another group backing a wholly different reform. This group would allow state legislatures to adopt a system giving one electoral vote to the leading presidential candidate in each congressional district (with the remaining two electoral votes going to the candidate winning the whole state). Champion of this proposal was Senator Karl Mundt, conservative South Dakota Republican. The way the two groups got together was simple: they jammed the two totally different bills into one ungainly package and presented the result to the Senate as a proposed constitutional amendment.

  The technicalities barely cloaked a power struggle of considerable importance. Conservative senators had long been concerned about the “winner-take-all” feature of the Electoral College, which gave all a state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate winning the most popular votes in the state. The result, they argued, was to compel candidates to strive mightily for the support of potent minority blocs and pressure groups—Catholics, Jews, Negroes, labor, nationality groups—that might swing the state’s whole bloc of votes either way. And since the big, populous, industrial states such as New York, California, and Illinois “teemed” with such blocs, the Daniel and Mundt groups in fact were hoping to make the President less responsive to liberal voting alignments.

  The issue was complex, involving a complicated feature of the world’s most complicated political system. But the Daniel-Mundt conservative coalition was able to dress up its proposal to lure a wide range of supporters. Northern Democrats were told that the proposal would give them permanent control of the White House, Southern Democrats that it would give them greater influence in their party, liberals that third parties would be treated more fairly, conservatives that liberal voting blocs would be curbed, Republicans that they would pick up more strength in the South. The proposal was also able to capitalize on widespread discontent over the failings of the Electoral College, which had been likened to the human appendix as useless, unpredictable, and a possible center of inflammation. By March, a bipartisan group of fifty-one senators had joined Daniel and Mundt in cosponsoring the measure. With such strong initial support, the bill seemed almost sure of gaining the two-thirds vote necessary for a constitutional amendment.

  The more that hardheaded liberals scrutinized the Daniel-Mundt measure, the more alarmed they became. It was clearly intended to erase the “winner-take-all” feature of the Electoral College, which, however strange in appearance, had the effect of forcing presidential candidates to appeal to the big states and their urban population. If the Senate, and even the House, overrepresented rural and conservative voters, why should not the President overrepresent the liberal groups? Liberals were even more concerned about the Mundt provisions, which allowed electors to be chosen in congressional districts. These districts were already gerrymandered to overrepresent rural, conservative voters, and they could be distorted even more by the state legislatures that drew congressional district lines and that were themselves products of gerrymanders by rural conservatives.

  Kennedy had disliked the Daniel measure when it previously had been sponsored by Lodge; the new plan seemed even worse. He was fortified in his suspicion by a letter from his old American government professor at Harvard, Arthur Holcombe. “Under present conditions the preponderant influence of the big close states on the executive branch of the government checks the disproportionate influence of the small and often more one-sidedly partisan states in the Senate,” Holcombe wrote. Lessening the influence of the big close states, he felt, would seriously upset the balance of our political system.

  Kennedy decided to spearhead the counterattack on Daniel-Mundt. The prospects were uninviting Not only had the proposal won wide support in Congress and the press, but it had the aroma of moderate, bipartisan reform. Too, the objections were hard to dramatize. Seemingly so technical and complex, the Electoral College could not easily be pictured as in reality an important part of what Kennedy called the whole solar system of governmental power.

  Kennedy’s tactic was simple—so simple that a more cynical politician could have overlooked its possibilities. He mastered the subject thoroughly, gained the Senate floor early and often, argued with his opponents at every opportunity, and finally outdebated and outvoted them. He had powerful support from Lehman and from Douglas, who produced statistics showing in devastating detail the extent to which congressional districts had been gerrymandered. But otherwise he fought the battle almost alone.

  With statistics, with a command of American history and constitutional precepts, with cold reasoning, even sometimes with little flashes of wit, Kennedy opened holes in his opponents’ arguments. Politely he interrupted them to correct their figures or their reasoning. He took the initiative from Daniel early in the debate and never lost it, largely by the simple device of holding the floor. He readily yielded the floor
for questions and took on the Senate’s best debaters. Since political machinery is a subject on which every politician feels expert, many senators took part. Like a boy fighting off a swarm of bees, he had to handle attacks from all directions, and from both sides of the aisle.

  Lehman and Douglas centered their objections on the danger of the Daniel-Mundt plan to the big cities. Kennedy used all the arguments available, and dwelt especially on the “shotgun wedding” that had brought Daniel and Mundt together and the “hybrid monstrosity” that had resulted. Kennedy had one great strategic advantage: defense of the status quo in this case was the liberal position, while it was the conservatives who wanted change. Hence, Kennedy could cite the Constitution, history, and the Founding Fathers in his own defense. He also divided the opposition by arguing that the Daniel-Mundt Bill was actually a threat to all the groups—conservative and liberal Republicans, Northern and Southern Democrats—that it was supposed to help.

  “Not a single sound argument,” he told the Senate, “has been put forth for adoption of this radical change which is demanded by no State, which had been discredited in the past and which promises only doubt and danger for the future.… I know of no other step which could be taken to disrupt more thoroughly and more dangerously the American constitutional system.”

  The Senate vote vindicated Kennedy’s leadership and tactics. Not only did the Daniel-Mundt Bill fail to muster the necessary two-thirds support, but no less than ten of the original sponsors—nine Republicans and one Democrat—deserted the bill to which they had once lent their names. Kennedy’s emphasis on the makeshift and ramshackle aspects of the bill, rather than on its conservative aspects, was justified by the fact that half the deserters represented smaller states and at least half were conservatives.