Rather than join his fellow Democrats in simply opposing the measure, he decided to put forth his own “dissenting opinion.” He had called Mark Dalton, the friend who’d managed his campaign, and asked him to join him in Washington. “John wanted to know what we—Billy Sutton was in the room—thought of the Hartley proposal and what he should do about it. We sat there and developed a position,” recalled Dalton, who wound up manning the typewriter.
To Dalton, it was a billboard screaming the new congressman’s ambitions. “People have always said to me, was John Kennedy running for the presidency from the start? Was he thinking of the future?” For Dalton, there was never any doubt—and certainly not from that moment forward.
But there was more still to learn about his boss, and it had to do with the way he kept his eye on the future competition. The morning Kennedy was scheduled to present his dissenting position to the Rules Committee, a congressman Dalton didn’t recognize was offering the official Republican support of what would be the Taft-Hartley Act. “Listen to this fellow,” Kennedy whispered as Dalton entered the cramped hearing room. “He’s going places.”
When the Republican member finished speaking and took the seat next to them, Kennedy introduced him. “I’d like you to meet Richard Nixon of California.” In the coming years Jack would be telling his family that Nixon was “brilliant,” the smartest of all his colleagues.
Kennedy, of course, was also trying to establish himself. “There were very few Democrats who would speak as strongly as he did to labor,” Dalton recalled. “The reaction was ‘Kennedy is courageous,’ just what Kennedy wanted it to be.”
Thus, when he rose on the House floor to give what would be his maiden speech in Congress, he was taking on the power of organized labor as well as big business. “I told him that day that he reminded me so much of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Billy Sutton remembered.
Still, not everyone in the chamber was so thrilled. “You can imagine the reaction of the congressmen who had been there for years and had worked on this problem,” said Dalton, “to be told that the new congressman from Massachusetts was filing a separate report.”
A few days later, Kennedy and Dick Nixon got their first chance to match talents in an arena beyond Capitol Hill. A local group had asked a freshman member from western Pennsylvania, Frank Buchanan, to pick the two standouts in his class, one from each party, and invite them home for a debate. The topic would be the new labor reform bill, to be known as Taft-Hartley. The audience would be a mixture of business and labor people.
The pair was greeted at the train station early that evening and taken to the Penn McKeesport hotel. There in the ballroom, they put on vastly dissimilar performances. Nixon was the aggressor, punching away like a hungry middleweight. Playing to the Republicans in the mixed crowd, he pummeled Big Labor. Brutally, he listed all the troubles that had been dominating the postwar headlines: the automobile strike, the steel strike, the coal strike, the railroad strike. He had picked his side in the fight and was quite willing to taunt his enemies on the other.
The younger speaker, the one with the quaint New England accent and the slight limp, offered a more nuanced performance. Watching Nixon antagonize the labor people in the McKeesport crowd, Jack worked to soften the hostility of the business folks. There was much to say for the labor reforms the Republicans were pushing, he allowed, particularly its banning of “wildcat” strikes. His concern was that the legislation might go too far and lead to more trouble between management and labor, not less.
It was Jack’s charm they witnessed that night. Nixon came into the room like a club fighter, eager to win the rivalry point by point. A champion debater at Whittier College, he focused on his rival, challenging whatever he said. Kennedy, his focus on the audience, ignored his rival on the stage and concentrated on winning over the room. Knowing he had labor on his side—Nixon made sure of that—he wanted to end the evening with the business people convinced that he shared their concern for an end to the country’s labor troubles.
What surprised those who greeted them and saw them off that night was the way these two partisans got along with each other personally. Before catching the Capitol Limited back to Washington, they grabbed hamburgers at the local Star Diner and talked over the new baseball season. Boarding at midnight, the two junior pols drew straws for the lower berth. Nixon won. Then, as the train rolled on toward Washington, they spent the early-morning hours discussing their true mutual interest, foreign policy, especially the rising standoff with the Soviets in Europe, which Bernard Baruch had just christened the “cold war.”
Kennedy was drawn to those who shared his big-picture view of the world, and Nixon was one who did. Their responses to the threat posed by Communism’s spread were similar, too. For both of them, it was a central issue of their generation.
In the morning-after press, it was Kennedy who scored highest. The next morning’s editions of the McKeesport Daily News ran a front-page photo of the smiling, handsome Kennedy, one that could easily have been of a popular local college grad. The shot of Nixon, on the other hand, caught him with his eyes darting sideways with a hunted look, his defiant chin displaying a beard well beyond the five o’clock mark. Even in black and white, the charisma gap was stark.
That March, President Truman called on Congress to stop the Red advance across Europe by approving U.S. military aid to help governments in Greece and Turkey resist Communist-backed insurgencies. Speaking to a joint session, he called this move crucial to American security. To those on the political left, the new “Truman Doctrine” was an unwelcome reversal from the pro-Russian policies of FDR. But for many of the young officers back from the war, the president was speaking the language they wanted to hear.
The day after Truman had addressed Congress, Russ Nixon—no relation to Richard—of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, a union known for its sizable Communist contingent, told the Education and Labor Committee that labor unions had as much right to be led by Communists as by Democrats or Republicans. That was a far from popular view in the halls of Washington.
When his own turn arrived to quiz the witness, Congressman Jack Kennedy said he’d been “impressed by the dexterity” the witness had shown in fielding the earlier questions. Nixon, a Ph.D. in economics, had been Kennedy’s Harvard instructor before joining the labor movement. Now the student to whom he’d given a B-minus his freshman year got to ask the questions.
Was Soviet Communism, he asked his former instructor, “a threat to the economic and political system of the United States?” No, Russ Nixon replied, the real threat to the country was its failure to meet the “basic economic problems of the people in a democratic way” as well as its failure to expand Americans’ civil rights and in that way meet “the problems of the Negro people.”
Kennedy then asked his instructor to defend what he said was the Communist Party’s willingness to “resort to all sorts of artifices, evasion, subterfuges, only so as to get into the trade unions and remain in them and to carry on Communist work in them, at all costs.”
Russ Nixon:
I didn’t teach you that at Harvard, did I?
Kennedy:
No, you did not. I am reading from Lenin, in which is described the procedure which should be adopted to get into trade unions and how they conduct themselves once they are in.
His clever questioning of the left-leaning witness won Kennedy positive notice from the press gallery. “A freshman House member with the coral dust of Pacific Islands still clinging to his heels,” UPI’s George Reedy said in a radio broadcast, “stole the show from his older colleagues yesterday.”
In May, Jack outdid that performance. He won a perjury citation against a Communist labor leader, Harold Christoffel, for his role in a wartime strike against a huge defense plant in Milwaukee.
He asked the witness why the union newspaper had strongly opposed war aid to Britain prior to the Nazi invasion of Russia, only to back it s
trongly thereafter. Why did it condemn “Roosevelt’s War Program” when Hitler was in league with Stalin, then call for “All Aid to Britain, Soviet Union” in a banner headline once the Hitler-Stalin alliance was broken?
Kennedy had harder evidence that the labor leaders were under Communist Party discipline from Moscow. A former party member had testified that the 1941 Milwaukee strike was part of a “snowballing” of such work stoppage aimed at crippling the U.S. defense buildup. The labor leaders had been lying and Kennedy had caught them.
“Would you call Russia a democracy?” Kennedy asked one. “I would not know. I do not think so,” he replied. “I think I would like to inform you on what I believe to be the main difference between socialism in England and socialism in Russia,” Kennedy said. “They have freedom of opposition which they do not have in Russia.” When his witness said he didn’t know if that was true or not, Jack went at him.
“Well, I do not think you are equipped to tell whether a member of your union is a Communist if you do not know any of the answers to any of the things that I have asked you.”
Deeply impressed by his young colleague’s work, the Republican chairman of the committee compared it to the opening shots at Lexington and Concord.
• • •
On June 5—two years to the day after the Allies had met in Berlin, affirming the total defeat of Germany—Secretary of State George C. Marshall was Harvard’s commencement speaker. He used the occasion to unveil a massive, complex plan for the economic reconstruction of war-torn Europe, funded by U.S. dollars. Though the Marshall Plan doesn’t seem controversial today in the aftermath of its great success—Time called it “surely one of the most momentous commencement day speeches ever made”—it had its detractors.
One of them was Joseph Kennedy, Sr., who regarded the European Recovery Plan—the Marshall Plan’s official name—as a terrible idea. A shrewder plan, he calculated, would be to let the Communists grab Europe, creating economic chaos that would lead to greater opportunities for businessmen like him down the road. His son disagreed. He believed that serious efforts to halt the Soviet advance in Europe were the only way to avoid repeating the mistake made at the Munich Conference of 1938, when Hitler was allowed free rein.
Had the Third Reich been confronted at a decisive moment, it was now believed, Germany might have retreated and never come to stage a deadly attack on Poland as it did the following year. The outcome of Munich, along with the thinking behind it, meant the Allies were thrown on the defensive. The World War II generation, having lived through the prewar appeasement and its consequences, had returned from the theaters of war in the South Pacific, Europe, and Africa determined to prevent a sequel to the tragedy that had interrupted and harrowed their lives—and erased so many more. This time, the dictator bent on encroachment and annexation must be stopped in his tracks.
To young men like Kennedy and Nixon, the Yalta Conference of February 1945, which had divided up postwar Europe, carried whiffs of another Munich. It represented a buckling under to a new enemy, but one even more subversive in its methods and more pervasive in its ambitions than the one who’d died in his Berlin bunker.
This firm resolve to defend Europe from Stalin was hardly a policy Jack’s father, the ruthless builder of wealth, could embrace. Joe Kennedy had gone back to the isolationism he’d preached throughout the 1930s; his son, meanwhile, was moving in his own direction. “So many people said that the ambassador was pulling the strings for Jack, and he certainly was not,” said Mary Davis, the congressman’s secretary at the time. “Jack was his own man.”
In fact, Jack Kennedy was starting to make it known, both privately and publicly, that he and his father disagreed on important issues.
“We were all at a cocktail party in the garden of Drew and Luvie Pearson,” the senior Kennedy’s friend Kay Halle recalled. “Suddenly, Joe said, ‘Kay, I wish you would tell Jack that he’s going to vote the wrong way.’ I can’t even remember what bill it was, but Joe said, ‘I think Jack is making a terrible mistake.’
“And then I remember Jack turning to his father and saying, ‘Now, look here, Dad, you have your political views and I have mine. I’m going to vote exactly the way I feel I must vote on this. I’ve great respect for you, but when it comes to voting, I’m voting my way.’ Then Joe looked at me with that big Irish smile, and said, ‘Well, Kay, that’s why I settled a million dollars on each of them, so they could spit in my eye if they wished.’ ”
Jack’s tough stand against the Soviets abroad and Communism at home made sense to his constituents up in Boston. Growing up, I saw this myself: Catholics as a group had it in our gut that Roosevelt had sold out the country’s interests at Yalta. To us, the growing threat from Moscow increasingly resembled Hitler’s prewar aggression. Supporters back home could see that Jack Kennedy, down in Washington, knew just how they felt, agreed with them, and was saying exactly what they were feeling.
Kennedy also knew he, the privileged son, was being watched back home for how he was handling the job. If he gave the cold shoulder to a single constituent, if a letter went unanswered, the word would get around. He’d be seen as having gotten too big for his britches. “He was very particular about people in his district and answering the mail,” Billy Sutton recalled. “He didn’t want anything to stay on your desk. If some poor soul or constituent needed help and he gave the assignment to you, you were liable to be riding home in the car and he’d say, ‘Well, what about John White? What did you do for him?’ And if you said, ‘Well, I was going to do that tomorrow,’ he’d almost tell you, you know, to get out of the car and go back to the office. He wanted you to do your job, and if you didn’t, then you were in trouble.”
Mary Davis understood the stakes. Her young boss wasn’t down in Washington only to be a dutiful congressman. He wanted those constituents of his to help elect him senator. That meant at least doing no harm. “I would say that was always in the back of Jack’s mind, and in the minds of the people who had supported him first for representative in the House. They always felt that this was a start and that he would go onward and upward.”
There quickly came a time in that first year that Kennedy had to decide between going along and getting along: at issue was the man whose seat he had taken in Congress. Reelected mayor in 1945, James Michael Curley had been convicted of mail fraud; he now sat, plotting, in Danbury federal prison. Curley’s daughter was passing around a petition to the Massachusetts members of Congress asking for his release on health grounds. It was feared, the petition argued, that he would die if not released. A hundred thousand Massachusetts voters had signed a citizens’ petition.
Kennedy friend Joe Healey was Jack’s tutor at Harvard and continued to be a trusted advisor and occasional speechwriter. “I got a call from Washington. It was Congressman Kennedy, and he said he wanted to talk with me about a petition that had been brought to his office. The person who had brought the petition to his office was Mary Curley, the daughter of the former governor.”
Healey was cautious in his advice. If Curley’s illness was truly fatal, he said, the old pol should be given some last time with his family. If he wasn’t as sick as he advertised, he shouldn’t be treated any differently than anyone else convicted of his crimes. Kennedy agreed this was exactly the way to look at it. In fact, army physicians had examined him and found his health as good as any man of his age reasonably could expect to have. Kennedy said he could not, knowing that, in good conscience sign the document.
Hearing this, Healey pointed out it was going to be “a very politically unpopular thing to do.” Kennedy’s refusal to sign the Curley petition was of course infuriating to the local politicians back home. It turned out he was the only Massachusetts Democratic congressman to do so. “I guess I’m going to be a one-term congressman,” he told one back-home advisor.
Mark Dalton, who worked for Kennedy unpaid and picked up his own expenses, was disgusted with the Curley ploy. “My strong reaction was that he was a young m
an starting his political career, just on the threshold of it, and I thought that the older people who were putting the pressure on him to sign this petition had a terrible nerve.”
Jack had gone against his party and the state machine regarding something he knew in his bones was wrong. It was also an issue of pride; he didn’t want to be a hack. Add in the matter of style: refusing to sign showed class. But standing against the pardon was both a political and moral risk that Kennedy would sweat for weeks to come. Joe Healey never forgot the episode.
Curley, he recalled, “lived for some ten years after this event, but as a congressman, I heard Jack Kennedy say that, if anything had happened to Mr. Curley during his stay in prison, it would have been the end of his political career.” For his part, Jack would cite the Curley dilemma as a case study of how political fortunes turn on the unpredictable.
Years later, to put it in perspective, Tip O’Neill, once a Curley protégé, refused to defend him on moral grounds. In the midst of one of our long backroom conversations about the old days, he had put it bluntly and succinctly, how “Curly was crooked” even by the standard of those days. “Personally crooked?” I asked.
“Personally,” he said with the firmest possible pronunciation.
But Jack Kennedy’s independence on matters such as the Curley petition was unsettling to political observers. He had begun to build a reputation for standing alone, a two-edged sword. Edmund Muskie, who served as governor and later senator from Maine, recalled how Kennedy’s behavior scared the clubhouse types. “I don’t know whether the more foresighted of them saw in young Jack Kennedy a major political force or not, but they certainly recognized his political attractions and his political potential; and they were disturbed by his apparent determination to be independent of the ‘regular’ party organization.”
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 49