By early 1952, Lodge was a major figure in national Republican politics. He would soon be an even greater pillar of the party. It was he who, sticking his neck out, asked General Dwight David Eisenhower, formerly supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and now supreme commander of NATO, to run for president. When Ike rebuffed his proposal, Lodge went on Meet the Press and promoted the idea publicly. With the general’s quiet support, he soon accepted the job of Eisenhower’s campaign manager, entering him in the New Hampshire primary. When his candidate beat the Ohio senator known as “Mr. Republican,” Robert A. Taft, in that momentous contest, Lodge had not only pulled off a considerable coup, but was now the closest advisor to a five-star hero headed for the White House.
Mark Dalton, a good friend to Jack whose speechwriting ability was his greatest asset, had been the official “campaign manager” for that first congressional run in 1946. More a pipe-smoking intellectual than a tough, savvy strategist, Dalton was once again nominally in charge of what was happening, but with no title and no real power. Unfortunately, he possessed none of the organization-building or tactical skills necessary to get up and running the sort of statewide campaign now called for. Besides that, he was absolutely incapable of mustering the strength to withstand the meddling of Jack’s father, the nature of whose influence—he was paying the bills—could never for an instant not be dealt with. And this was a job that needed doing.
For all his wily self-made rich man’s shrewdness, the estimable Joseph P. Kennedy lacked political sense. Good at making money, he had little or no gift for democracy. He thought you got your way in this world by cozying up to people at the top, and bossing everyone else. His notion of putting together an effective campaign team was to get a squad of old political hands together and then start barking orders. That was no playbook for winning elections, certainly not the one against Henry Cabot Lodge.
Therefore, the first thing O’Donnell—whose political grasp was instinctive—looked to accomplish once he signed on to Jack’s effort was to get the old man’s hands out of the pudding. And not just that, but from the instant he arrived on the scene, he recognized an even bigger issue, which was that nothing had been done, throughout those early months of 1952, to build a statewide organization that could ever hope to come together to unseat the formidable incumbent. What was deadly clear to O’Donnell was the extent to which the two problems were intertwined.
No one had the nerve to stand up to Joe Kennedy when it came to naming Kennedy “secretaries” across the state. O’Donnell recalled: “I said to Dalton, ‘Look, we need to name a secretary or leader in each community to be a Kennedy man, and then that person can form committees and set up events, but we can’t be sitting in this office.’ ” Soon, Ken would conclude that Dalton simply was “too nice to be in politics.” But that wasn’t the same as solving the problem.
Jack himself could not make up his mind. He wouldn’t fire Dalton, but at the same time he wouldn’t give him the authority to do the job, not even the title. If Dalton was too weak, and he, O’Donnell, too much the newcomer, then who was there around who’d be able to short-circuit Joe Kennedy’s meddling, to talk back to him and keep him on the sidelines? Only one man seemed to fill the bill, O’Donnell concluded: his old roommate, Bobby.
Bobby, O’Donnell knew, understood how to gain his father’s approval, for the simple reason that he’d spent his young life doing it. It was a task that Jack, who kept his distance from his father and was always wary of him, couldn’t manage. By being the good son, Bobby had earned and could now cash in on his father’s trust. If Jack was to win this election, the question of bringing in Bobby would have to be answered. And soon.
The date for Jack’s big decision was April 6. That’s because Governor Paul Dever had scheduled that date to announce which job he was running for. Would the governor think he might be able to beat Lodge, or would he decide to play it safe and seek a third term?
Joe Healey, Jack’s Harvard tutor, went with Kennedy when he was summoned to the meeting with Dever, which took place at the grand old Ritz-Carlton across from the Boston Public Garden. “We arrived at the Ritz about three o’clock, went to a room, and waited. Governor Dever had a topcoat on, and he said—and I think these were his exact words—‘Jack, I’m a candidate for reelection.’ And Jack said, ‘Well, that’s fine. I’m a candidate for the Senate.’ ”
• • •
There were many factors joining together to favor Jack Kennedy’s Senate run in 1952.
A keen observer, Jack saw it was now the case that, whatever they’d felt previously, Irish voters could now express pride, and not resentment, when called upon to identify with their most socially and financially successful family. His own personal charm had a great deal to do with how the Kennedy name resounded. So did all the countless hours he’d put into meeting voters and making them feel that a connection had been made and that he was, really, one of them.
The Kennedy “teas” were a smart combination of old and new. A novel concept, they served to boost awareness of Jack’s senatorial campaign, and at the same time create followers who would then, they hoped, turn into volunteers. The official hosts at the kickoff tea would be the former ambassador to the Court of St. James, the Honorable Joseph P. Kennedy, and his wife, Rose. After all, everyone knew the pair of them had spent time in London among the English. Why wouldn’t they want to hold a “tea” to meet and greet the people of Massachusetts?
Thus, Kennedy’s background, rather than his party, became the major element in his attractiveness to voters. What worked splendidly was the way the teas bridged the obvious gap. The invitees were excited and pleased to be there—working-class and middle-class women alike. It proved a brilliant strategy for claiming the majority of voters.
Across the state, Jack’s attractive sisters Eunice, Pat, and Jean hit the hustings for him as they had in Cambridge six years earlier. Everywhere these events took place, Jack Kennedy came off as the kind of aristocratic Irishman that the public enjoying the cakes and cookies hadn’t seen before—one of theirs, and yet the perfect challenger, well matched against the elegant Henry Cabot Lodge.
As David Powers would note, one basic truth about these receptions was that here was an invitation turning up in mailboxes amid envelopes normally filled only with bills. Finding themselves requested to come have tea with the Kennedys left many of the recipients astonished—and pleased. For the first tea held in his gritty hometown of Worcester, Ken O’Donnell made certain the invitations went out—specifically—to regular Catholics, rather than “lace-curtain” ones.
Here’s his description of that afternoon: “It was a beautiful day. He was on crutches. He walked in and the room came to a halt. Everyone stared. He walked in and took over, and every one of those people just had hands on him, wanted to shake his hand and touch him. This little Italian lady was wearing a new dress and hat and gloves she paid $100 for and she could not get to him fast enough. They weren’t the hoity-toity rich, they were the hardworking poor of Worcester, but today, this day, they all looked hoity-toity, all dressed to shake the hands of that young congressman and his family. The place was packed, lines out the door. You could not move. Packed. I knew then, ‘We’ve got something going here. This guy, he’s got it.’
“He spoke, shook every single person’s hand in the room. He was on crutches, and, by the end, it was clear his hand was swollen—and it was evident to me he was in pain, real pain. I remember being concerned about him. It was the first time I realized he had substantial health issues. I hate to say it, but I was concerned, also, from a political standpoint. I realized there was something more to his health problems and I was wondering what it was. I also was wondering whether you can elect a candidate who has to be on crutches all the time.
“He wasn’t well known in Worcester. He hadn’t spent a lot of time in Worcester, and hadn’t gotten any good press in Worcester. It was something different. I wouldn’t have gone, myself, and I didn’t think my moth
er would go, but she was there. I was shocked to see her and all her friends. Shocked. I had never known them to bother with politicians. Then, I just knew.
“You’re talking two or three thousand people on a Sunday who came out to meet him. They went through the line once and they’d go back again, then shake his hand again, then just stop and watch him, just watch him. They would not leave. Nobody would leave until he left, and even after he left they all just stood there in awe. It was just that I had never seen anything like it. I just felt this guy could go all the way.”
In fact, the very visible strains of his physical infirmities caused Jack Kennedy—greeting voters as he stood there on crutches—to resemble distantly, and despite his wealth, a character like Dickens’s Tiny Tim. His simple fortitude compelled people to root for him. When X-rays taken of Jack’s spine in 1951 showed the collapse of support bones in his spinal column, it could hardly have been surprising to anyone who spent time with him, especially out on the road. Charlie Bartlett, who joined him on some of these trips, remembered Jack keeping a stiff upper lip through it all. “I must say, he always had a sort of stoic, sociable quality about it. He’d drive all over that damn state. With that back it must have hurt like hell, and he’d sit there with the coat collar up and drive through those cold Massachusetts evenings.”
But even though Ken O’Donnell was now convinced Jack might actually have a very good shot at winning against the formidable Lodge, what was still needed was someone to run the show. “The whole operation had degenerated into a three-ring circus, with Joe Kennedy coming in once in a while disrupting things, Jack showing up only rarely, and nothing getting done the minute he left.” Somebody had to play middleman.
“I knew the Kennedys well enough by then to know the only one who can talk to the Kennedys is a Kennedy. It took a Kennedy to take on a Kennedy. I knew Bobby was the only one with enough sense, who was tough enough and a regular enough guy to run the campaign. He’d be the only one able to turn to the father and say, ‘No, Jack won’t do it.’ ”
At this point Ken made his move. He phoned Bobby and laid it on the line, all but demanding he drop everything and get up to Massachusetts to run his brother’s campaign. Otherwise, Jack was going to have his butt handed to him. Bobby hated what he was hearing, for the understandable reason that he wanted to build his own career as a Justice Department lawyer and thus his own life. But he could hear his friend’s argument, knew it, probably, even before he heard it. Someone had to broker matters between his dad and Jack. He was the one—the only one—to do it, and do it right.
Now that Bobby seemingly was willing to leave his job and come run the campaign, there was the problem of selling Jack on the idea. O’Donnell recalled the scene in the car when he and his boss went head to head on it. The truth was, Jack didn’t like hearing Ken had talked to Bobby without going through him first, but, at the same time, and despite his irritation, he saw the point.
First, Jack sounded off. He, above all, seemed stunned to learn that there’d been any lack of action on the part of his people. As O’Donnell remembers the tongue-lashing, Kennedy couldn’t believe they hadn’t begun naming local secretaries across the state. “As far as I’m concerned, this moment you can go ahead and begin. I’m not interested in the nuts and bolts of who’s going to run what. That’s the job of the organization and not the candidate.”
But, after he’d finished giving O’Donnell a taste of his anger, he’d also obviously talked his way into a decision. Ken O’Donnell had won. “That was the day that Bobby decided he would move to Massachusetts. Bobby, as I recall, went back to get his own personal affairs in order, and then he came up.”
Mark Dalton had seen it coming. Though he had his own law practice, he’d been volunteering time for Jack’s political career, mainly writing speeches, ever since the victorious ’46 race. He’d now given up his practice and come to work full-time for the congressman. It was a change in status, from friend and unofficial counselor to paid aide, and it would matter.
For him, the decisive incident occurred at a meeting at a social club in Fall River. As he made to leave, Kennedy had to pass the bar, where was parked a convivial trio “feeling no pain.” The men garrulously corralled Kennedy. Dalton, ignoring the candidate’s plight, had continued alone to the parking lot.
It was the wrong move. Jack wasn’t happy. “He got in the car, turned around, and stuck his finger in my belly,” Dalton recalled a half century later. “ ‘Don’t you ever let that happen to me again.’ ” Now he got the picture. “I was to take care of him with drunks. I was his caretaker, his bodyguard. That son of a bitch! Right in the belly! ‘Don’t you ever’!”
Jack’s rough treatment of his old pal was a sign of something off-kilter in the relationship. For him, the problem with Dalton wasn’t about getting waylaid by the Fall River drunks; rather, it was about the campaign, his father, and the way things felt stalled. The final moment for Dalton came at a meeting where Joe Kennedy tore into him for leasing a new campaign headquarters without his permission. “He didn’t like the building,” O’Donnell remembered. “He thought we’d paid too much for it. He didn’t like the owner. He thought the location was bad, and they had a great brawl about it.”
When Jack refused to stand up for his campaign manager, Dalton had no choice except to quit. Bobby made the gesture of trying to soften the blow by asking him to stay on as speechwriter, but Dalton left the office that day with his belongings and never returned. “I decided that I could no longer play a role in the Kennedy campaign in view of the feeling which had developed. I wrote John a little note saying I was through and then I told him that I was through.” Listening to him so many years later, it was obvious that Dalton never got over the way he’d been discarded.
• • •
Once Bobby arrived, he began working eighteen-hour days to get the campaign workers focused and up to full speed. “I didn’t become involved in what words should go in a speech, what should be said on a poster or billboard, what should be done on television. I was so busy with my part of it that I didn’t see any of that.” Most important, when he moved in, their father moved out.
This was, just for the record, not Bobby Kennedy’s first involvement in a Jack Kennedy campaign. He had a talent for organization. In the ’46 race, as a twenty-year-old, he’d asked for the toughest area, East Cambridge, territory loyal to the former Cambridge mayor Mike Neville, Jack’s strongest opponent, Tip O’Neill’s candidate. But Bobby took it slowly, laying the groundwork, spending time playing softball with the kids of the neighborhood, killing the notion that the Kennedys thought themselves superior. His brother ended up doing better in that community than anyone had expected.
Bobby enjoyed one advantage over Jack, and it had to do with their attitude toward Joe. While his brother was stubborn in his dealings with their father, Bobby was respectful and needy for love. This created a smooth relationship, even if one layered with guile. He proved to be the essential cog in the Kennedy machine. No one else could have done what he was now doing. There he was, having left his job in Washington, working all out in the campaign, using his father’s resources—money and public-relations clout—to produce the maximum impact where it counted, on the hearts and minds of the Massachusetts voters. Charlie Bartlett remembers listening to Bobby on the phone with the senior Kennedy. “Yes, Dad,” Bobby kept repeating, “Yes, Dad.” However, he wasn’t taking orders; rather, he was pacifying. Where Jack always took their dad with a grain of salt and didn’t mind letting him know it, the younger Kennedy boy never treated him as less than the paterfamilias.
It was now May and the election was six months away. Out in the field, Larry O’Brien was helping the cause by building the organization from the ground up, one Kennedy “secretary” at a time. What this meant, at a very basic, very significant level, was the creation of a totally different political network from that of the regular Massachusetts Democrats. “Our secretaries were making weekly reports to me, and they
were growing more sophisticated from week to week. . . . For a long time neither Lodge nor the Democratic regulars realized what we were doing.”
At their April 6 meeting at the Ritz-Carlton, Governor Dever had made it clear that Jack was going to have to build his own organization. Meaning, if he chose to go up against Lodge, it was his show, for he wouldn’t be getting any help from Dever, who had his own race to run. But such a challenge also suited the Kennedy people. They wanted solid loyalty from their people, no confusion about which candidate mattered most.
For me, Ken O’Donnell personified the old brand of politics, which the Kennedys were customizing on a family basis. From the moment he signed on, he had one vocation: helping and protecting John F. Kennedy. And right now, in the summer of 1952, his value lay in his ability to grasp and use the reality of post–World War II Massachusetts, the world he knew. As a man who’d lived between Worcester and Cambridge, between Holy Cross and Harvard, he had a natural understanding of those voters Jack Kennedy needed to pry away from Lodge. They were folks whose parents were loyal Democrats, while they, this new generation, reserved the right to cast their ballot candidate by candidate.
What Jack Kennedy was trying to do, helped by O’Donnell and others, wasn’t going to be easy. They were trying to outflank Lodge, a moderate Republican, from the right and the left. In other words, Kennedy had to come off as both a tough Cold Warrior and a work-and-wages Democrat—which is precisely what he’d spent six years being. This allowed him to strike at his rival from the right for not being aggressive enough on foreign policy and from the left for not being sufficiently on the side of the average family struggling to make ends meet; that is, for not being a Democrat. It was a pincer move that was to work well again in a later Kennedy campaign. The strategy is to bash an opponent on both sides until you force him to go both ways to avoid the very charges you’re making against him. The voter sees the targeted rival being pulled apart by his own hands.
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 52