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

by Matthews, Chris

  Kennedy set his people digging for weak spots in Lodge’s record. “Lodge was always on the popular side of every issue, which didn’t necessarily make him an awfully good statesman, but might make him a satisfactory politician,” Jack told Rip Horton. To prepare for the planned bombardment of Lodge, Ted Reardon, who’d been Jack’s top aide on the Hill, began assembling an inventory of his voting on the issues. This carefully documented loose-leaf binder, each page covered in sheer plastic, was soon dubbed “Lodge’s Dodges”—or, more irreverently, the “Bible”—and it provided the ammunition for the coming all-out assault.

  Joe Healey, Kennedy’s speechwriter, found himself impressed by Reardon’s attention to Lodge’s every word, tracking down every discrepancy. “The major credit belongs to Ted Reardon for certainly one of the most thorough jobs in this area I have ever seen.”

  From this point on, the campaign’s operating structure quickly fell into line. Bobby, as the campaign manager, decided where the money went. This is always the supreme power that comes with that title. “Any decision you wanted, Bobby made,” O’Donnell recalled. “If you were talking about spending two hundred bucks to do such and such, Bobby would say, yes, go ahead, and that was it.”

  The Kennedy Party, as it continued to grow, was the perfect model of a volunteer operation. Those who came to work for Jack found themselves making a personal investment in the candidate’s future, resulting in a campaign of relationship rather than transaction. In this sense, it wasn’t about political payoffs, at least not in the business-as-usual way. Anyone who walked into a Kennedy headquarters was, right off the bat, given a task to do. His people knew the best method of earning and toughening loyalty was by quickly getting a newly interested citizen onto the team. Before you knew it, you were a “Kennedy person.”

  What happened, as in 1946, was that word would start to spread that a member of this family or that friend or neighbor was “working for Jack Kennedy.” It made the campaign a kind of cement, ever expanding its hold. You pretty much wanted to take part. It was as simple as that for many people. And so the organization built on itself.

  To enforce this, Bobby Kennedy repeatedly made it clear to one and all that there were to be no paid campaign workers. No exceptions. One local political veteran who’d supported Jack’s campaign in ’46 would learn the hard way that the campaign manager this time around wasn’t about to be messed with. Here’s Ken O’Donnell’s account of what happened when that fellow failed to take the hint:

  “ ‘How much money is the candidate going to give us to spend in our district?’ this guy called out at a meeting. When Bob Kennedy ignored him and kept to the order of business, the man then stood up and cut Bobby off. ‘Listen, kid, we’ve been around a long time, we know politics. You’re wet behind the ears and you’d be better off in Washington than here, where you don’t know what you are doing. You’ve got to pay these people; you want campaign people out working for you, you got to pay them, and you can afford it. The Kennedys are rich.’ Bobby just stared at him. Then he got up, grabbed him by his collar, and showed him the door—and, as he was throwing him out in the street, he told him, ‘Would you mind getting lost . . . and keeping yourself lost.’ ”

  When the troublemaker appealed his case to Jack, Bobby didn’t like it one bit. “Look, you get one guy like that crying, then you have to pay him and his volunteers to work. Then other people hear about it, and then they want to be paid to volunteer, and then we’ll end up spending a million dollars in Boston alone. I’m not going to have him around. You asked me to run this campaign. I didn’t want to, but now I’m here, so I will run it my way.”

  Jack was actually tougher than his younger brother. When Governor Dever began to worry that he was going to lose his race and saw Kennedy gaining strength, he offered to combine forces. Joseph Kennedy liked the idea; O’Brien and O’Donnell didn’t. Jack agreed with his people, refusing to be Dever’s life preserver. He gave Bobby the job of delivering the decision to his father and Dever both. “Don’t give in to them, but don’t get me involved with it,” were the instructions. The older brother was becoming a hard-nosed, unsentimental politician. Bobby’s role was to play the part of one.

  From the beginning, the teas that started it all proved to be an excellent recruiting platform. As O’Donnell was to explain, “Nobody went to one who didn’t fill out a card. We had them in every community, and . . . they allowed our organization to get going and to get our secretary in action.” They became competitive events. “When Lowell had four thousand, Lawrence had to have five thousand. So the secretary had a great incentive.”

  Hugh Fraser, one of Jack’s British friends visiting at the time, was impressed by the novelty of these occasions, referring to them as “shenanigans.” “The ‘tea party’ technique amazed me,” said Fraser, who’d never seen anything of its kind.

  Anyone who organized a tea was required to provide a quota of signatures for Kennedy’s nomination papers. Only 2,500 signatures statewide were required for a candidate in the Senate primary, but Dave Powers and Larry O’Brien had decided that they’d ask the regional organizers to produce a grand total of 250,000. The reason, according to O’Donnell, was not just “psychological”; it was also a way to have a quarter-million voters not only committed but actively participating in the early stages, before the real fight started up in the general election campaign. Too, it was a gauge to help them figure how the organizers were performing and which ones were particularly effective.

  The teas were aimed at winning the hearts of the working class, and also as a means of identifying and organizing the Democratic voter base. But equally crucial was the need to go after those Irish and other traditional Democratic voters who’d drifted away and might very likely stay drifted with the popular Ike as the Republican candidate.

  It had been customary for statewide Democratic candidates in Massachusetts to expend their major effort in the larger cities, where most of their voters lived. In other words, they counted heavily on Boston. Jack Kennedy, instead, went out and methodically hit every neighborhood, including the largely Republican suburbs, ignoring the toll this relentless, unsparing, but extraordinarily effective effort to reach voters took on his physical well-being.

  O’Donnell figured that Jack Kennedy could pull votes in small suburban communities where no other Democrat might. “We appreciated the fact that there were an awful lot of Democrats throughout the state, in those small towns, who’d moved out of Boston and out of the big cities into these small communities, had bought their own homes. They were Democrats, but ashamed of some of the antics that had been associated with the party.” He saw these as potential Kennedy people.

  Here again, Kennedy had gotten traction from his early start in places off the standard grid for Democrats. “We’d be in those homes—in the homes with seven or eight people, who’d remember having coffee with Jack Kennedy in 1947 or ’48,” said O’Donnell.

  The Second World War had changed a great deal in American life. In the Northeast, as elsewhere, the Irish and other ethnic groups were seeing beyond the old boundaries, and didn’t want to be the pawns of the big-city political bosses. They wanted the fresh air of the suburbs, the freedom of making up their own minds at election time. Many had gone to college under the GI Bill. They no longer felt confined by the politics of the old neighborhood. “Boston” meant a certain kind of old politics, and a sort they were only too happy to leave behind. This sense of the shifting times was definitely an idea the Kennedy campaign made skillful use of.

  As election day approached, Tip O’Neill, facing no real opposition in the general election, got a call asking him to lend a hand. He was to be Jack’s stand-in at an election-eve radio broadcast. Tip’s script from Kennedy headquarters arrived just minutes before airtime. It “kicked the living hell out of Henry Cabot Lodge,” O’Neill would recall, to his chagrin. Senator Lodge, who spoke next, was outraged by what he regarded as an ambush, and told O’Neill’s wife, Millie, “The Kennedys
would never give a speech like that for him. And I would never say the things about Jack Kennedy that he was saying about me.”

  Lodge had a far bigger problem. Throughout the course of the campaign he’d been greatly distracted by his efforts, begun the year before, to promote Eisenhower. This had earned him the bitter hostility of Republican voters steadfastly loyal to Ike’s opponent for the nomination, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, “Mr. Republican.” Here Joe Kennedy saw his opportunity. He convinced the pro-Taft publisher of the New Bedford Standard-Times to reprint in full the glowing Reader’s Digest article on his son’s PT 109 exploits, then to break ranks and endorse the Democratic candidate, young Jack Kennedy, outright. When Jack went on the attack, criticizing Lodge’s absenteeism from the Senate, the newspaper dutifully repeated those charges in its editorials. Next, when Lodge countered by citing Kennedy’s own poor voting record, the Standard-Times refused to publish the information.

  To gain the endorsement of the equally conservative Boston Post, Joseph P. Kennedy got out his checkbook to write its pliable publisher a loan for $500,000. About this episode, Jack would later joke that for him to win his Senate seat his father had to “buy a fuckin’ newspaper.”

  To pound home Lodge’s weakness among Taft Republicans, Jack accused him of being a “100 percent” supporter of Truman’s appeasing administration policy in China and the Far East.

  But if Lodge was overly committed to Eisenhower’s candidacy, Jack Kennedy was undercommitted to Adlai Stevenson’s. He simply could not disguise his lack of faith in the Democratic presidential nominee, and, after having breakfast with him at the 1952 Democratic National Convention, Kennedy complained about his encounter to a friend, “Well, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know why I allowed myself to be railroaded into that. That was an absolutely catastrophic breakfast.”

  “What happened?” asked his listener.

  “Well,” Jack explained, “practically nothing happened. As I saw it, he was looking at me and he knew that I didn’t really think he was the best candidate. He knew that I knew that he knew.”

  The one man who might possibly have saved Lodge’s bid for reelection refused to help. When an S.O.S. came from Lodge’s campaign asking Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy to come to Boston and make a speech on behalf of the incumbent senator, McCarthy demurred. He told the conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., in whose Connecticut home he was staying at the time, that Lodge had always opposed him. Young Jack Kennedy, on the other hand, he counted as a covert supporter. McCarthy even told Buckley he’d made the Lodge people a counteroffer he knew would surely be refused. “I told them I’d go up to Boston to speak if Cabot publicly asked me to. And he’ll never do that; he’d lose the Harvard vote!”

  Richard Nixon, meanwhile, had been put on the ballot as the Republican nominee for vice president, Ike’s running mate. It was a skyrocketing leap for a congressman who’d gone to Washington the same year as Jack. The latter was gracious in a handwritten note. “Dear Dick: I was tremendously pleased that the convention selected you for V.P. I was always convinced that you would move ahead to the top—but I never thought it would come this quickly. You were the ideal selection and will bring to the ticket a great deal of strength. Please give my best to your wife and all kinds of good luck to you.”

  The Kennedy campaign, meanwhile, presented its own man as every inch an anti-Communist crusader as any Republican. When Adlai Stevenson made a campaign stop in Springfield, Massachusetts, Sargent Shriver—who was an employee of Joe’s in Chicago and would marry Eunice Kennedy the following year—sent him a very pointed note. “Up there, this anti-Communist business is a good thing to emphasize.”

  Sarge Shriver also let it be known, in a briefing paper, exactly what the Kennedy people wanted the Democratic presidential candidate to say about the local boy when speaking on his behalf. Stevenson should say it was Kennedy, not his Republican colleague from California, Richard M. Nixon, who’d been the first to expose Communists in organized labor. He “was the man . . . that got Christoffel . . . not Nixon.”

  The pitch was legitimate. Earlier in the year, Jack had attended an anniversary dinner of the Spee, his Harvard club. There, one of the speakers told the gathering how proud he was that their college had never produced “a Joseph McCarthy or an Alger Hiss.” Kennedy jumped from his chair. “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” he exclaimed, and left the dinner early.

  The Kennedy family’s close association with Joe McCarthy wasn’t an asset everywhere in the Commonwealth. In fact, it hurt him badly with one particular community. Jewish voters had reason enough to question the younger Kennedy’s attitudes, given his father’s record of unveiled anti-Semitic comments and sentiment. Now the senior Kennedy once more expressed himself outrageously and stirred up the problem anew. When a campaign aide passed around a proposed statement attacking McCarthyism, Joe Kennedy went wild. “You and your . . . sheeny friends . . . are trying to ruin my son’s career.” Although Jack tried to assure the campaign worker, who was not himself Jewish, about his father, the episode became notorious.

  Senator Lodge saw an opening. His campaign began distributing literature spotlighting a report by Herbert von Dirksen, who’d been the last German ambassador to Great Britain before World War II. In it the author recounted Joseph Kennedy’s support for Hitler’s prewar actions against the Jews. Lodge then recruited Congressman Jacob Javits of New York, a Jewish Republican, to come and speak to a large Jewish gathering in Mattapan. In his talk, Javits stressed repeatedly that Jack was “the son of his father.” As Tip O’Neill remembered the event, “He didn’t have to be any more explicit.”

  But Javits, one of the smartest national legislators of his era, also had an indictment of Jack personally. Publicly critical of President Truman’s spending policies, Kennedy had voted for a House amendment to cut back foreign aid. While the measure dealt with the overall Middle East spending package, the reduction affected Israel, too. Despite Kennedy’s out-front backing for the creation of the Jewish state and his recent visit to the country, Javits’s attack stung. As O’Neill told the story, it took Majority Leader John McCormack himself to damp down the fire by spinning it that Kennedy had voted a “token” reduction of U.S. aid to Israel in order to save it from a larger cut. It was a simple case of a respected politician—McCormack was known as “the Rabbi” for his strong support of Jewish concerns—looking out for a fellow Democrat.

  The father’s reputation, nastily earned as it was, would always be a problem for Jack. As Ken O’Donnell himself noted, “You can’t stop a whispering campaign if it’s true.” If Jack could never adequately defend his father’s attitudes, he certainly didn’t share them. He knew that Jewish fears were legitimate. “They have problems you don’t know anything about,” he’d remind O’Donnell.

  His health, too, continued to be an issue he could never ignore. In October he made the mistake of sliding down a fireman’s pole in Everett, Massachusetts, an impulsive act that worsened the state of his already weakened back. “He was in intense pain towards the end of the campaign,” his aide John Galvin recalled. “I’m convinced that there were times when he was walking around almost unconscious.”

  Despite such all too real medical handicaps, which couldn’t be disguised, the boyish Jack continued to win fans. That summer of 1952, three hundred Capitol Hill news correspondents had voted Congressman Kennedy of Massachusetts the “handsomest” member of the House. In order to capitalize on this perception, Jack proceeded to sign up for a special course offered by the CBS network on how to use the new medium of television to best advantage; it was a savvy move, since, by then, about half the households in the country owned a set. This habit of self-improvement was a pattern he continued, going on to take other courses in subjects ranging from speed-reading to public speaking.

  On November 3—the eve of Election Day—General Eisenhower, the Republican candidate for president, ended his national campaign in B
oston. Ahead in the polls, he was completing his march to the American presidency bearing tribute to the man who’d led him to the fight, the noble Henry Cabot Lodge.

  “ ‘It looks like Eisenhower’s going to win easily,’ ” Torby Macdonald recalled telling Jack as the ballots were being counted the next night, “ ‘but I don’t think that necessarily means it’s going to affect you in Massachusetts.’ He said, ‘Why not?’ I said, ‘Well, I think you represent the best of the new generation, really, the newly arrived people. And Lodge represents the best of the old-line Yankees. I think there are more of the newly arrived people than there are of the old-line Yankees.’ ”

  Macdonald never forgot what came next. “Then, out of the clear blue sky, he asked me a question. ‘I wonder what sort of job Ike will give Cabot?’ I just thought to myself that if I were in Jack’s position, listening to these returns . . . Where do you get that kind of serenity?

  “By twelve o’clock that night, there was a definite conclusion that Eisenhower had carried the state by 200,000 votes. John Barry, a well-known writer for the Globe, went on TV and said authoritatively: ‘On the basis of the returns now received by the Boston Globe, it is definite that Governor Dever has been defeated for Governor of Massachusetts, that Congressman Kennedy has been defeated, and Senator Lodge has been reelected to the United States Senate.’ ”

  “Well, all hell broke loose,” O’Donnell recalled the moment. “The congressman called Bobby, furious—and Bobby cut him off and said, ‘Look, on the basis of our numbers and our chart and the basis of what we have and our computations, we are winning the race. And if the trend continues with little drop-off, we will defeat Lodge. The television and newspaper predictions are wrong.’ ”

  O’Donnell, O’Brien, and Bobby remained optimistic. Based on their calculations, the Kennedy vote was doing what it had to even as the candidate kept calling the headquarters and arguing.