But how could he campaign for the party nationally while building up a massive margin in Massachusetts? As usual, Kennedy decided to try to do both.
The Republicans had dug up an obscure blue blood to run against Kennedy, but a scrappy Italo-American from East Boston fired the Republican party convention with an impassioned speech pledging a fighting campaign. It was none other than Kennedy’s old congressional foe of 1950, Vincent J. Celeste.
Nominated by acclamation, Celeste started on the warpath. “I’m running against that millionaire, Jack Kennedy,” he would say on his handshaking tours. He charged that Kennedy had given aid and comfort to the Faubuses and the Eastlands by his civil-rights votes, that he had destroyed the Port of Boston by voting for the Seaway, that he had supported a labor bill dictated by Walter Reuther. But Celeste always came back to the Kennedy family and their money.
“What right do Kennedy and his brother Bobby have to sit in judgment on labor without ever doing a day’s work in their whole lives?” demanded Celeste, who still lived on the top floor of a three-decker tenement. “Look how my opponent voted for the St. Lawrence Seaway—it starts right at the front door of the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, which is owned by old Joe Kennedy.” The Senator’s father, he added, was calling the signals.
Celeste, it was felt in the Kennedy camp, was about the weakest man the Republicans could have nominated. Still, he was worrisome in two ways. His pitch about the Kennedy money hit a sensitive chord; some people were still accusing Kennedy or his father of having “bought” the 1952 election. To counter this, Kennedy decided on a minimum-expense campaign, especially in regard to television and other media. Celeste also had an obvious appeal to the large Italo-American population in the state, and to Furcolo Democrats who felt that Kennedy had snubbed the Governor, who was running for re-election. Arrangements were made for the Senator to receive the “Man of the Year” award from the Sons of Italy, testimonials were obtained from Italo-American notables such as former heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, of Brockton, and Kennedy and Furcolo presented a more or less united front during the campaign.
The netwwork of Kennedy secretaries did the campaign spadework. Old-fashioned campaign methods came to the fore again because of the diminished TV budget. Kennedy decided not to go in for big tea parties again because this campaign gimmick, it was felt, had been “used up.” Making use of thousands of volunteers, the secretaries stressed house-to-house canvassing, distribution of a Kennedy newspaper, and gathering signatures—ultimately over 300,000—on cards pledging the signer to vote for Kennedy.
As usual, the Senator ran solo. On the stump he called for the election of his running mates but he kept his political operations as separate as possible from the other campaigns. He had his own elaborate campaign headquarters in Boston, with a window display of copies of Profiles in Courage and photostats of the handwritten manuscript. Every candidate in the state grabbed for the Kennedy coattails, but in most cases the Senator maintained his distance. He could be tough, too. When one politician proposed to put out a bumper sticker linking his name with Kennedy’s, the Senator instructed an aide to tell him not to do so for either or both of two reasons: “We have refused Furcolo and several other candidates; we don’t like———[the name of the beseeching politician] and don’t want to be associated with him.” Billboards suddenly appeared with Kennedy and Furcolo standing shoulder to shoulder, but this was the work of the Governor and was viewed as sheer political gamesmanship by the Kennedy people.
Kennedy campaigned with his usual skill and with greater presence than ever before. He toured the state on a tight campaign schedule that still allowed a few minutes for unplanned appearances at an Elks’ picnic or a union convention. At times, he even played to the gallery. At a rally in Athol, he abruptly left the stage, strode over to the large high-school band that was blaring out a march, took the baton from the bandmaster’s hand, and led the group through the rest of the piece, ending with a flourish—and on the beat.
Even during the last few weeks of the campaign, Kennedy took time out to stump for candidates in other states. Early in October, he spoke for Democrats in Delaware, New Jersey, West Virginia, and Maryland; a week later, he flew out to Des Moines. These forays had to be conducted unostentatiously, because Celeste was hitting the theme of Kennedy’s interest in the presidency rather than in Massachusetts.
By the end of October, some Kennedy enthusiasts were predicting a margin of 500,000 or even 600,000. The Senator had tried to discourage this optimism. “In looking over past records,” Sorensen had written a campaign aide, “he is sincerely convinced that it will be tough to beat Dever’s old record of 250,000 in an off year. Can you see that everyone gets the word?” The highest margin in the state’s history had been Saltonstall’s victory of 1944 by 561,668 over a Democratic unknown.
The day before election, Kennedy campaigned for hours through factories and precincts in Boston. Finally, he and his party climbed wearily back into their car, sank into their seats, and started back to headquarters. The car slowed for an old woman plodding across the street.
“Stop the car,” Kennedy ordered. He climbed out, shook hands with the woman, asked her for her vote, and climbed back in. Next day, the old woman, it can be assumed, and 1,362,925 others voted for Kennedy. His margin was 874,608—the largest margin ever accorded a candidate for any office in either party in the state, the largest margin received by any senatorial candidate in the United States in 1958, and the largest percentage of the vote received in 1958 in any major senatorial contest in the country.
Kennedy had swung for the bleachers—and connected for a homer.
The Senate as Testing Ground?
When does a man decide to run for President? Usually there is no one climactic moment when he makes a clear irrevocable decision. Rather, he plays with the notion, pushes it away, ponders, temporizes, beckons toward it again, until time and circumstance help make the decision. But in Kennedy’s case, if there was one moment when he decided to go for the big prize, it was the moment when he got the election returns late in the evening of November 4, 1958, in his father’s hotel room.
Kennedy now had six more years in the Senate. As a student of American history, however, he knew that the upper chamber was not a good springboard to the presidency. Only Warren G. Harding had gone directly from the Senate to the White House, and he was not a very good advertisement for this kind of recruitment. As the spotlight again swung to Kennedy after his triumphal re-election, pundits were quick to explain why being a senator handicapped a candidate for the presidency. The main difficulty was that he had to take specific positions on a multitude of controversial issues at awkward times. Too, he was surrounded by several score politicians of both parties, including sharp-eyed rival presidential hopefuls who had him constantly under surveillance and who could unite against him at will. If he took the initiative on any bill and made it his project, his success or lack of it would become a test of his presidential quality, even though the fate of the bill might be largely outside his control. If he did nothing, he would be written off as a cipher.
Kennedy had good reason to coast on his Senate record and duck the tough assignments. On the other hand, one of his main problems, he realized, was a widespread feeling that he was a political playboy, bright but superficial, energetic but incapable of following through, a compromiser who avoided the tough issues. He had been compared to one of his PT boats, darting around, moving in to let loose a torpedo, taking evasive action, and disappearing in the night. He had to build a reputation on the strength of managing the prickly problems that had wrecked the presidential hopes of some senators; indeed, he had to show in the Senate the tactical judgment, political finesse, and bulldog determination expected of Presidents as chief legislators.
And waiting for him as the 1959 session opened was precisely the kind of issue that could make or break an ambitious young senator: labor legislation. Kennedy had good reason to know the pitfalls of an effecti
ve labor measure, for, in partnership with Republican Irving Ives of New York, he had piloted such a bill through the Senate in 1958. Drawn from recommendations by a group of labor experts headed by Professor Archibald Cox, of the Harvard Law School, the bill would have required union officials to file financial reports and union rules with the Secretary of Labor; to report financial transactions with employers or others that might involve conflicts of interest; and to report on union trusteeships. The bill also required regular elections by secret ballot and tried to control “shake down” picketing. Employers were compelled to report money spent to influence employees, and labor-relations consultants had to submit financial reports. The bill was pulled into the vortex of controversy over Taft-Hartley by proposed amendments to that act which would allow strikers who had been replaced to vote in representation elections; would permit prehire contracts, without a representation election, in the building trades; and would require the non-Communist affidavit of employers proposing to use the services of the National Labor Relations Board. Kennedy opposed this last amendment; indeed, he wanted no such affidavit requirement for either employer or employee.
It was one of those bills that, as a package, appealed to the vast majority of voters but whose provisions separately repelled a variety of business and labor groups. At a private meeting with George Meany early in 1958, Kennedy found the president of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations unexpectedly hostile to even moderate legislation, and the labor leader was strongly backed by leaders of the old craft unions in the AFL-CIO. Other union leaders, such as Walter Reuther, of the Auto Workers, and David Dubinsky, of the Garment Workers, were less adamant. Hearings on the bill, presided over by Kennedy as chairman of the subcommittee on Labor, produced clashes between the Senator and Meany. At one point, after Kennedy had argued that his bill was not antilabor because the Cox Advisory Committee was made up of experts friendly to labor, Meany burst out, “God save us from our friends!”
Later on, however, Meany became more amenable to the Kennedy-Ives Bill when Knowland, campaigning for governor of California, began talking about sweeping labor legislation that would tighten the Taft-Hartley Act. On June 17, 1958, the Senate passed Kennedy’s bill by the top-heavy vote of 88 to 1. But this near-unanimity was deceptive, for two months later, the bill was done to death in the House by an “unholy coalition” of labor and business groups, as Ives called it, and by “sabotage” on the part of Labor Secretary James P. Mitchell, as Kennedy put it. In a bitter statement, Kennedy charged that “only the Jimmy Hoffas and the Nathan Sheffermans can find satisfaction” in the bill’s defeat.
“Constructive labor reform legislation will be brought forward again next year,” Kennedy promised, and by New Year 1959 he was hard at work on a new measure and still busily picking the brains of the experts on the Cox Committee. Once again Kennedy decided on a bipartisan labor bill, because he felt that a straight Democratic bill could not pass. He even sent an emissary to Mitchell to find a basis of agreement, but the Labor Secretary rejected the overture—his views and Kennedy’s, he said, were too far apart.
So once again Kennedy had to guide his bill through the labyrinthine legislative channels. He and Mitchell clashed repeatedly in subcommittee hearings as Kennedy sought to bring out the weaknesses in the administration’s position and warned that an attempt to attach sweeping changes in the Taft-Hartley Act to the reform measure would kill it. But the main threat to Kennedy’s bill came not from Republicans, but from a member of his own party, Senator McClellan, who had great prestige in the Senate as chairman of the Labor Rackets Committee, of which Kennedy was a member and Bob chief counsel. During a Senate debate on the labor-reform bill in April 1959, McClellan suddenly brought in an amendment to write in a strong “bill of rights” for union members. Anathema to almost all labor leaders, the amendment would have brought down in one stroke the extensive labor acceptance of his bill that Kennedy had built up during the past two years.
Even worse for Kennedy, at this point he stood almost alone. Ives had retired from the Senate; an effort to find another Republican cosponsor of the bill had failed; and Sam J. Ervin, Jr., a North Carolina Democrat who had agreed to cosponsor the reform bill, was deserting Kennedy on critical amendments. Two able liberals, Douglas and Humphrey, were out of town. With him on the floor, as he managed his bill, were Cox and Ralph Dungan of the Labor Committee, but these experts, confronted by scores of proposed amendments, were not especially well briefed on the McClellan proposal, and at this critical moment they could not supply much assistance.
So, all alone, except for occasional help from Morse, Kennedy stood up to senator after senator who pounded him with questions as to why the “bill of rights” was not a logical extension of his own reform measure. Many of his antagonists were lawyers who liked to cite legal chapter and verse. Kennedy was bone-tired, he was disconcerted by the quick turn of events, and most of his recent homework on labor reform had been sandwiched between exhausting campaign trips and legislative duties. Still, he had done that homework, and this, along with his twelve years of work on labor bills, enabled him to hold his own in the debate. His most telling argument was one that he, of all liberal Democrats, was in the best position to offer—that the “bill of rights” would involve a vast intrusion of federal regulation into areas reserved to state control. He threw the old jury-trial argument back into the faces of the Southerners.
But in the tense roll call that followed, the Southerners and Republicans beat Kennedy’s forces by one vote; the deciding vote was cast by Vice-President Nixon to break a tie. Things were going badly for Kennedy, and the newspapers were making the labor bill a test of his presidential chances. It was a “grave defeat” for the Democratic hopeful, the New York Times correspondent reported. A night and a day of frantic conferring, redrafting, and maneuvering followed. Cox and Kennedy managed to come up with a less stringent bill of rights proposal that won strong support on the floor. Humphrey flew back from California, where he had been campaigning, to help gain reconsideration. On issue after issue, Kennedy was able to mobilize backing to outvote the McClellan and administration forces. He was even able to muster a strong majority for the amended bill of rights. By the week’s end, he had regained control of the legislative situation, largely through his arguments on the floor and also with the help of Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. Finally, the Kennedy Bill passed the Senate, 90 to 1.
But the battle was not over for Kennedy. The House of Representatives, under pressure from the administration, passed the Landrum-Griffin Bill, which was much stiffer than Kennedy’s Senate bill. The conference committee, set up to reconcile the two bills, numbered seven men from each chamber, including Kennedy. Many doubted that the committee would come up with a compromise that would pass both houses. Both prolabor and conservative legislators preferred no bill at all to a weak bill, for then they—each of them—would have the “big issue” for 1960.
For two and a half weeks, the men labored over the multitudinous provisions of the two bills. Kennedy’s aides had never seen him work so hard on a legislative matter. The focus was on Kennedy; would he compromise in order to get a bill out or would he cling to his Senate stand for a mild, internal labor reform and hence hang on to his labor support? He chose to compromise. There were some difficult moments. At one point, conferee Barden turned on Cox, who had advised Kennedy throughout the sessions, and said that he was tired of “these intellectual outsiders nitpicking and scratching for little holes.” Kennedy replied: “And I’m sick and tired of sitting here and having to defend my aide time and again from your attacks.” The conferees sat in stunned silence for a moment, and then the discussion went on. The final version was much closer to the House bill than to Kennedy’s in its boycott and picketing provisions, but most of the internal union reform provisions came from Kennedy’s original bill.
“Compromises are never happy experiences,” Kennedy told reporters. “I think it’s the best bill we can
get—and get a bill.” The measure easily cleared both chambers. How would its passage—with Kennedy’s name taken off by his own request—affect his presidential chances? A few union chiefs felt that he had precipitated the whole problem by pressing for internal union reform and then losing control of the situation. A New York Times editorial the next day praised the work of the joint conference committee, which, it said, “has done a conspicuous service to the public—and to honest, democratic unionism—in sweating out a labor reform bill.” The committee’s work, it went on, called for “utmost skill in the art of compromise—which the committee Chairman, Senator Kennedy, outstandingly provided.” Though some union leaders condemned the bill as worse than Taft-Hartley, Kennedy won a standing ovation on September 11—in his first speech after the vote on the bill—from the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO at its annual convention (the building-trades unions fared better than others in the final bill). Cabell Phillips, of the New York Times, described Kennedy’s presidential campaign position as “equivocal” after his sponsorship of labor reform and his work on the Labor Rackets Committee. Something had happened to Kennedy’s standing with organized labor, said Phillips, but nobody seemed to know what it was. “… There is no reliable consensus on the matter.…”
The whole affair had been a tight squeeze, and once again observers raised the question why Kennedy had pitted his presidential hopes on guiding a controversial bill through a Senate dominated by conservatives and presidential rivals. Kennedy was well aware of the traps, but he felt he had to take the chance. While he knew he could have ducked the floor leadership of the bill, he knew also that his experience made him the logical man for the job. Then, too, the senator who sponsored the bill would be acting for the vast majority of the people, despite what some union leaders said. Labor reform would also give him a key issue for the campaign and would keep his name before the public.
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