Tip’s description tallies with that of other observers. To Billy Sutton, he “wasn’t looking healthy then.” To Mark Dalton, the young attorney who would become Kennedy’s formal campaign manager, he resembled that same “skeleton” to which we’ve often heard him compared. His father, too, worried about his son’s emaciation. “My father thought I was hopeless.” Why? “At the time I weighed about 120 pounds.”
Chuck Spalding suggested that Jack’s precarious health, and his determination to surmount it at any cost, only added to the campaign’s wild, even hectic, pace. “This impatience that he passed on to others . . . made everybody around him feel quicker.” The trouble was, it didn’t necessarily make for great organization.
One out-of-the-blue crisis almost derailed Jack’s first run for office before it even officially had started. It seems that while he was obsessively wearing himself out walking the neighborhoods, he’d somehow overlooked a giant detail. The one to discover it was his old navy pal Red Fay, who’d come east to help out, he said, “even though I was a Republican.” Arriving in Cambridge, Fay found the headquarters a shambles of unpaid bills and invitations to speak, and was soon put in charge of trying to run the campaign on a more “businesslike basis.”
One of the campaign workers casually asked Fay about the candidate’s filing of his nomination papers. The deadline was that very afternoon, and yet no one had thought to do it. Not only that, it was now after five o’clock, and thus, past the deadline. So there they were, with Kennedy’s petitions not in, and the Boston Globe’s late edition already reporting the fact. Yet, incredible as it seems, given today’s 24/7 news cycle and minute-by-minute reaction speeds, no one was besieging the headquarters. Or even paying any attention.
“My God,” Kennedy said when he heard the bad news. It was 6:30 in the evening. “A series of frantic phone calls were made,” Fay reports. “Then, very quietly, the candidate and some loyal public retainers went down, opened up the proper office and filed the papers. Another couple of hours, and all the thousands of hours of work by the candidate and his supporters would have been completely wasted.”
This is a loyalist’s account of an after-hours escapade that had to have been blatantly illegal. But what’s remarkable is that Jack himself went into the municipal building that night and did what had to be done, putting those petitions in the right pile as if they’d been there by the deadline.
Kennedy pulled off other escapades. Early in the race, a rival candidate, Joe Russo, had run this newspaper ad: “Congress Seat for Sale. No Experience Necessary. Applicant Must Live in New York or Florida. Only Millionaires Need Apply.” The Kennedy campaign didn’t get mad, it got even.
Locating another Joe Russo, they paid him a few bucks to file as a candidate. The effect would be to confuse voters and skim off some of the politician Joe Russo’s votes. There was an Italian vote in the district and, this way, it would be divided.
But there were other sources of resentment. A popular newspaper column authored by a “Dante O’Shaughnessy” mocked Kennedy for being “oh, so British” and for having a valet who looked after him. Tip O’Neill recalled a far more daunting, more relevant advantage. Joe Kennedy had gotten Reader’s Digest to publish a condensed version of the John Hersey PT 109 piece that had run in the New Yorker, and now the campaign was mailing out 100,000 copies of it to voters. Tip couldn’t even remember a candidate before Jack Kennedy who’d had the money to pay for first-class postage.
What you did was rely on campaign workers to deliver literature.
And, even more astoundingly, Joe Kennedy, who’d made money owning chains of movie houses, had gotten local theaters to show a special newsreel recounting the story of Jack’s wartime heroism. No Boston pol, or voter, had ever before seen the like in a local congressional race. Or any race, for that matter.
An important—and brilliant—clincher came just days before the primary: Jack’s father and mother hosted a tony afternoon reception, a formal tea party, at the Hotel Commander in Cambridge. Women from throughout the district were invited, and all were flattered and thrilled. They’d always read about such fancy society events in the papers, but neither they nor anyone they knew had ever been to one.
Kennedy was starting to create what Tip O’Neill called the “Kennedy Party,” one separate from the regular Democratic organizations. He was making it happen by asking citizens who’d never been involved before to come on board. He, the millionaire’s son, was seeking the help of regular folk, not just the predictable party faithful or the machine hacks. Anyone stopping by Kennedy’s storefront head-quarters would be asked to volunteer, and, in agreeing, they’d become, on the spot, “Kennedy” people. Thus, as word began to get around that someone’s son or niece was “working for young Jack Kennedy,” the popular appeal of the campaign grew, along with its strength.
Meanwhile, Jack himself continued acting in a way that was deeply impressive for someone of his wealth and name. He was out there going door to door on foot, and it was not simply a choice but rather a necessity. While his rivals could count on their associations with other politicians to further their candidacies, he was a newcomer who, despite his hard-core Boston bloodlines, didn’t have those established connections. His only means of getting to know voters was to meet them himself.
With either Billy Sutton or Dave Powers by his side, he went everywhere. “He met city workers, he met letter carriers, cabbies, waitresses, and dock workers,” Billy recalled. “He was probably the first of the pols around here to go into the firehouses, police stations, post offices, and saloons and poolrooms, as well as the homes, and it was probably the first Jack ever knew that the gas stove and the toilet could be in the same room.” Having the gabby, comical Sutton—a gifted mimic of character high and low—with him provided great company.
He deliberately made the rounds of the Cambridge city councilmen, putting up with their silent responses or sometimes outright abuse. He was showing that he had the guts to do it, gaining respect, if not for this election, for the next time. He was honoring the political rule of keeping his enemies in front of him, showing them he wasn’t afraid and letting them know he had what it took to look them in the face.
At one candidates’ event, he listened patiently to each of his rivals describe their difficult lives. When his turn arrived, he, son of one of the world’s richest men, stood up and began, “I guess I’m the only one here who didn’t come up the hard way.”
He also did something else other candidates failed to think of, or were unable to imagine themselves doing, which was making a direct appeal to women. “Womanpower,” he would tell Tip, “the untapped resource.”
Red Fay reported that visiting junior colleges in the area with Jack back then was like traveling with the young, also very skinny Frank Sinatra. “They would scream and holler and touch him—absolutely, in 1946. I mean these girls were just crazy about him.”
Finally, there was the undeniable stamina Kennedy poured into the race, working hard at it until the very last day. Years later he would say it was mostly a matter of getting started early. “My chief opponents . . . followed the old practice of not starting until two months before the election. By then I was way ahead of them. I believe most aspirants for public office start much too late. When you think of the money that Coca-Cola and Lucky Strike put into advertising day after day though they have well-known brand names, you can realize how difficult it is to become an identifiable political figure. The idea that people can get to know you well enough to support you in two months or three months is wholly wrong. Most of us do not follow politics and politicians. We become interested only around election time. . . . In my opinion the principle for winning a war fight or a Congressional fight is really the same as winning a presidential fight. And the most important ingredient is a willingness to submit yourself to long, long, long labor.”
Ted Reardon, his older brother’s close friend from Harvard, was running the get-out-the-vote effort. “We were constantly g
oing over the voting lists to find where the Democrats were. We had four or five telephones going all the time, with volunteer girls calling up and getting out the vote. We used to stay until three or four in the morning.”
Lem Billings, recalling the pace, said: “Remember, we were all amateurs and all very young. Everyone was either a young veteran or a young girl. We had people who’d lived in each district all their lives stationed at the polls. We tried to get as many volunteers with cars as we could, but we always had to hire an awful lot of taxis and these were all sent to addresses of Democrats who hadn’t voted.”
The big event each year in Charlestown, then a part of the 11th Congressional District, is the Bunker Hill Parade. The day before the primary, Jack marched in the parade. On this hot June day, the pressure and work of the campaign finally catching up with him, he collapsed before reaching the finish.
“I called his father,” said the man whose house he was taken to. “I was instructed to wait until a doctor came. He turned very yellow and blue. He appeared to me as a man who probably had a heart attack. Later on I found out it was a condition which he picked up, probably malaria or yellow fever.” In fact, it would take until the following year for Kennedy to find out the true, much more serious cause of his problem.
On the following day, Kennedy was up early and at the movies. It was a way for him to escape the early, misleading, mind-destroying tidbits of information about how the voting was going. That night, when the results were in, he’d beaten Neville by two to one. Joe Russo—the real one—finished fourth. The other Joe Russo, the one the Kennedy people had put up, managed to get nearly eight hundred votes. He finished fifth.
Jack Kennedy had started earliest and worked the hardest. He had done what was necessary, and more, and he had won. But what did he believe? And what were his loyalties? He had championed the concerns of his primarily working-class district: wages, unemployment benefits, the need for a national health care system. In deep ways, he was as Irish as his constituents. He’d run, after all, as a “fighting conservative,” fearing in his heart the dark specter of Moscow, angered still by the ailing Roosevelt’s giveaway at Yalta.
“What about Communism?” he asked a lawyer he knew who’d been supporting Mike Neville in the race. That fall he was already calling the Soviet Union, our wartime ally, a “slave state,” clearly drawing a line between himself and his party’s liberal wing.
This fighting conservative was already fighting a war that had not yet gotten its name.
16. The Daily News, McKeesport
17. The House class of 1946
CHAPTER FIVE
COLD WARRIOR
While the hand of fate made Jack and me political opponents, I always cherish the fact that we were personal friends from the time we came to the Congress together in 1947.
—Richard M. Nixon, from a letter written to
Jacqueline Kennedy, November 22, 1963
Jack Kennedy knew well before going to the House of Representatives that he didn’t intend to stay there. He was headed for statewide office, either the governorship or the U.S. Senate. Even if he opted for the governorship first, it was only to be a stepping-stone. His goal was the Senate, since what he really wanted was to join the big national debates, especially those on foreign policy. That was where he intended to make his mark.
There were no near-term options for reaching his goal. If he ran against Senator Leverett Saltonstall in two years—in ’48—he would look impetuous. Besides, he’d formed an affection for the older man. But if he waited to run against the other senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the august Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., in 1952, it might be a suicide mission.
Lodge had sacrificed his first seat in the Senate to go off and fight in the war. Now, in ’46, he’d won the second Massachusetts seat, with a smashing victory over Senator David I. Walsh, a four-term Democrat. So Jack would have to wait. Whatever and whenever he decided on for his next step he needed to prove himself with the job he’d won.
From the start, when he walked into his office on Capitol Hill, Jack Kennedy made it clear he was his own man. Arriving with a high profile, built first on his best-selling, prewar book and then on his news-making exploits in the South Pacific, he had no intention of compromising his hero’s image by becoming just another Massachusetts Democrat. Out there in the Solomon Islands, he’d engineered the saving of ten men’s lives; he was not about to sign on to someone else’s crew. And that included the number two Democrat in the House, John McCormack, who, because he was the senior congressman from Massachusetts, expected a certain deference from his fellow Bay Staters.
He would not be getting it from young Kennedy. On the morning the about-to-be congressman was to take his oath, Billy Sutton met him at the Statler Hilton on Sixteenth Street, a few blocks north of the White House. Jack had just flown in from Palm Beach.
“You should be in a hurry,” Sutton warned his boss, who showed up tanned and carrying his black cashmere overcoat. “You have a caucus meeting.” In other words, McCormack was waiting for him up on Capitol Hill. “Well, I’d like a couple of eggs,” Kennedy said, continuing to ignore the suggestion to get a move on. “How long would you say Mr. McCormack has been here? Don’t you think Mr. McCormack wouldn’t mind waiting another ten minutes?”
The Mucker wasn’t about to let a new headmaster intimidate him. At that, he went into the hotel’s drugstore lunch counter to join his new top aide, Ted Reardon, for breakfast.
Kennedy’s little-concealed disdain for the John McCormacks of the world was not a trait he was ready to hide. He’d made it his business to win his seat free of the entangling alliances that tied up other new lawmakers before they could even get started. Establishing his independence was his purpose from the very first day. Since he didn’t plan to spend the rest of his career as one of 435 members of the House of Representatives, he wasn’t going to get hitched to McCormack, for the simple reason that he intended to pass him by.
Years later, when he was headed to the Senate, Jack Kennedy would advise his successor in Congress, Tip O’Neill, to “marry John McCormack.” Such different behavior from his own, he said, was the better path for a man who by then had been Speaker of the Massachusetts legislature and who, he correctly assumed, would one day want to join the House leadership ladder.
The world Jack Kennedy found in Washington that winter of 1947 was a jamboree of Republican triumphalism. On both sides of the Capitol, committees were cooking up public hearings on the two hot-stove issues Republicans had championed in the previous election: the evils of Big Labor and the threat of Communism at home and abroad. Republicans had won both houses, the first time since before the Great Depression, with a simple slogan that was more a question than an answer, more a taunt than a promise: “Had Enough?”
Its meaning was clear. It summed up two decades of Democratic rule that had comprised an era of government activism or overreach, depending on the voter’s degree of resentment. And during the ’46 campaign it meant everything voters didn’t like after V-J day, from rationing to the recent rash of labor strikes.
The new Republican majority came with a mission. Harry Truman could sit there in the White House and veto its bills, but he couldn’t stop the new Eightieth Congress from investigating him, and that meant the whole twenty-year Democratic era. They were, in the words of one Republican congressman, going to “open every session with a prayer and end it with a probe.” Almost forty investigative panels were setting up schedules to dig up corruption any way they could find it, with the entire Roosevelt-Truman record as their quarry.
Congress was looking for bad guys, especially those who were seen as soft on the Communist threat. Someone had to pay for the giveaway at Yalta, and FDR, who’d agreed to it, wasn’t around to take the punishment.
Jack Kennedy had brought Billy Sutton to Washington as his press secretary and jack-of-all-trades—housemate included. Being from the Boston neighborhoods, he took a street-corner guy’s view of t
hings. So much was happening so fast that the spectacle on Capitol Hill seemed to him like a “Stop ’n’ Shop, a supermarket of hearings.”
The very day he arrived on Capitol Hill, Jack Kennedy met the fellow member of the House freshman class of 1946 whose destiny would wind up twinned with his own. Richard Nixon had just beaten a much-admired New Dealer and five-term Democratic incumbent in the battle for California’s 12th District. It had been an upset victory tinged by telephoned whispers that Nixon’s opponent was a “Communist.”
Kennedy, however, was impressed by the drama of the triumph itself. “So you’re the guy who beat Jerry Voorhis,” Kennedy exclaimed on meeting Nixon at a National Press Club reception for freshman congressmen who’d fought in the war. “That’s like beating John McCormack up in Massachusetts!”
At Harvard, Jack had gravitated to Torby Macdonald, hotshot of the freshman football team. Now it was the star of the House class of 1946—this thirty-four-year-old Californian, like himself a navy man, who’d just pulled off the biggest political upset of the season.
“How’s it feel?” Jack asked him. Here was the son of one of the richest men in the world showing Dick Nixon, the poor boy, true admiration. “I guess I’m elated,” the Californian answered, plainly taken by the attention. In fact, Nixon’s loyal presidential aide H. R. Haldeman told me decades later and just days before his own death that he’d always found Nixon’s feelings toward Jack Kennedy “strange and inexplicable.” It had been so from the start.
The two ex–naval officers from the South Pacific theater—Nixon had been a supply officer there—were both assigned to the Committee on Education and Labor. Now both were being thrown into the most intense battle of the season: the effort by the reenergized Republicans to rein in the power of organized labor. In those early months of 1947, it would offer Jack Kennedy his first chance for distinction.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 48