Kennedy’s physical condition had improved somewhat since the surgeries of 1954 and early ’55, but his suffering continued. The pain in his back, attributed to loss of bone mass, was being alleviated with numbing injections. In September of ’57, an abscess was removed from his back at New York Hospital, where he remained a patient for three weeks. Not long after that, a bout of flu sent him back into a hospital bed.
For everything that ailed him he was taking a daily smorgasbord of prescription medications, hardly the usual diet for a man of forty. Yet they all proved nothing more than stopgaps when it came to putting an end to his ongoing health troubles. The cortisone he took for the Addison’s, however, had the positive side effect of filling out his face, and he didn’t mind that at all. As perilous as his health remained, he looked better than he ever had.
Ted Sorensen could do little to alleviate the strains of the road on Kennedy. “In the late 1950’s when we traveled the country together, I would ask each hotel to provide him with a hard mattress or bed board. When that failed, sometimes we moved his mattress onto the floor of his hotel room.” It was a replay of what had taken place in 1943 as young Lieutenant Kennedy was seen placing a piece of plywood under his mattress when he was training for PT-boat duty. “In retrospect, it is amazing that, in all those years, he never complained about his ailments,” Sorensen recalled. “Occasionally, he winced when his back was stiff or pained as he eased himself into or out of the bathtub.
“On the political circuit I assumed that his practice of eating in the hotel room before a Democratic party luncheon was intended to avoid the bad food and constant interruptions that characterized his time at the head table. But now I realize after reading an analysis of his medical file, that his many stomach, intestinal, and digestive problems required a more selective diet.” Jack, it turns out, was a man typical of his World War II generation. He didn’t complain.
As Sorensen noted, he’d committed himself to a year-upon-year commitment “best suited to fanatics, egomaniacs, and superbly fit athletes.” Jack Kennedy, well-rounded, pleasure-loving, was none of these.
• • •
As a candidate, Kennedy quickly had begun to give off the glow of celebrity. No politician had ever gotten the kind of star treatment he was accorded. It had begun at the Democratic Convention in Chicago: his debut in the public eye there threw the spotlight on him and his wife as well. In April 1957, he’d been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Profiles in Courage, the book he’d dedicated to Jackie. Their first child, Caroline Bouvier Kennedy, was born in November 1957.
Whenever Senator Kennedy showed up at a local Democratic dinner in some small city where there were more hands to shake, it was if a Hollywood star had come to town. It was still the age of the glossy magazines, many of them pictorials. Look, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, all weeklies back then, did spreads on Jack and Jackie, as did McCall’s and Redbook.
“Senator Kennedy, do you have an in with Life?” a high school newspaper writer once asked the roving candidate. “No,” he shot back, “I just have a beautiful wife.” There was a professional’s assessment if ever there was one. But the fuss didn’t stop with the romantic-couple angle. The TV series Navy Log did an episode on PT 109. The Knights of Columbus magazine Columbia offered a salute to a brother knight. And at the end of 1957, in the issue of December 2, he was Time magazine’s cover boy, painted looking thoughtful by Henry Koerner, whose unmistakable celebrity portraits were often featured there.
This ongoing stream of media attention continued into the 1960 primaries. “You could go to the A&P store,” his rival Hubert Humphrey would later say, revealing his exasperation, “you could go to any grocery store. You’d pick up a women’s magazine—there would be a wonderful article. He had the publicity. He had the attraction. He had the it.”
The Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy Show had a powerful effect even on people who normally paid little attention to politics but now could not take their eyes away. Eventually, the “it” to which Humphrey referred would achieve a name: charisma, not a word much in popular use until the Kennedys made it so.
While the stillbirth in 1956 and Jack’s absence from the country at the time caused Jackie much pain, she and her husband had made their peace with it. Celebrating their new small family, they moved into a town house in Georgetown. Again, all the public saw were the pictures. Photos of infant Caroline with her splendid-looking parents captivated the American public.
Nonetheless, the audience with which Jack most needed to make inroads wasn’t falling for it. Not yet, anyway. The liberals, given life by Franklin Roosevelt and still in love with Adlai Stevenson, were looking for gravitas. Here, again, Jack Kennedy went to work, with the help of his most trusted and productive lieutenant. For several years now, Ted Sorensen had been turning out all kinds of articles under Kennedy’s name. They appeared in such journals as the General Electric Defense Quarterly, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the National Parent-Teacher. Their purpose, Sorensen conceded, was “to promote Senator John F. Kennedy as a man of intensive progressive thought, balancing the flood of superficial articles about his looks and his romance with Jackie.”
There remained the challenge of winning over the Stevenson people. “I’m not a liberal at all,” the Saturday Evening Post had quoted him just after his election to the senate. “I never joined Americans for Democratic Action or the American Veterans Committee. I’m not comfortable with those people.”
Still, his pursuit of the intellectuals who persisted in carrying a torch for Adlai was soon to begin in full earnest. The winning of the Pulitzer for Profiles, in fact, had been no happy accident. Rather, it was the result of energetic lobbying by Jack’s dad. Through the good offices of Arthur Krock, a New York Times columnist and Kennedy friend, Joe was able to approach the members of the Pulitzer screening board, one by one. Even Rose Kennedy, for a change, was clued in. “Careful spadework,” she said, was the key. Joe learned “who was on the committee and how to reach such and such a person through such and such a friend.”
In this way, Kennedy senior and the influential Krock were able to get the job done. Rose, not always happy with her husband’s backroom activities, loved this bit of work. “Things don’t happen,” she said with untroubled pride, “they are made to happen.” That May, no doubt in recognition of the Pulitzer honor, Jack was named to chair the panel to select the five greatest senators in history, their portraits to be hung in the Capitol’s Senate Reception Room. The quintet chosen were Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, Robert Taft of Ohio, and Robert La Follette, Sr., of Wisconsin.
The fact that Kennedy now was being taken seriously as a historian exerted its appeal over the Stevenson crowd, as it was meant to. Meanwhile, Kennedy won another distinction, one that would carry him nearer to the goal of influencing international affairs that had motivated him since first entering politics. He found himself appointed to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Now came his first curtsy to the Democratic Left, which needed to be a clear sign that he’d departed from his rigid orthodoxies of the early postwar years, a semaphore signaling that he shared the liberals’ more sophisticated attitudes.
On the Senate floor in July 1957, Kennedy called boldly for revision of the Eisenhower administration’s Eurocentric foreign policy. America, he said, should end its automatic alliance with its colonialist World War II allies and recognize instead the rising aspirations of the developing world. “The most powerful single force in the world today is neither Communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile,” he began. “It is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent.” His criticism was aimed at French colonial rule in Algeria. Kennedy explained that France’s 1954 defeat at Dien Bien Phu had not resulted from a shortage of military power. France would have lost the war in Indochina, he argued, even if it “could afford to increase substantially the manpower already poured into the area.”
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The speech, certainly prophetic for U.S. policy, stirred up the pot, just as he intended. “His words annoyed the French, embarrassed the American administration, and almost certainly would not satisfy Algerian nationalist leaders,” the London Observer tartly noted at the time. “But they did one thing: they introduced Kennedy the statesman.” This is precisely what he intended. Lou Harris, Kennedy’s new pollster, was to confess that the “Algeria speech” had, in fact, been customized to appeal to the wing of the party whose backing his client needed. It was meant to show the liberals just how far Joe Kennedy’s boy had come. The irony, Harris noted, like everyone else who knew Jack, was that his boss probably read more and was a good deal more informed than those on the Democratic Left into whose political bed he was trying to climb.
Kennedy had been careful to embed his argument in sound Cold War thinking; that is, that the fight in North Africa was weakening the far more important contest with the Soviet Union. “The war in Algeria, engaging more than 400,000 French soldiers, has stripped the continental forces of NATO to the bone,” he declared. “It has undermined our relations with Tunisia and Morocco.” And, more directly against U.S. interests: “It has endangered the continuation of some of our most strategic airbases, and threatened our geographical advantages over the Communist orbit.” Kennedy was still anti-Communist, but now he was connecting this great cause with America’s revolutionary roots. “The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism—and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism.”
Kennedy was remembering the compelling force of nationalism he’d seen firsthand on that trip to Indochina in 1951. He was being true to what he’d discovered himself.
The Algeria speech offered political benefit with little if any cost. It appealed to the Northern liberals, but not at the expense of the Democratic South. Algerian independence had no chance of angering those Southerners who had rallied to him in Chicago the previous summer.
Kennedy was still trying to have it both ways: he wanted to be the liberals’ candidate while not giving up those he’d won over in ’56. Even as he seduced the Democratic Left with urbane commentary on colonialism, he wanted to protect the popularity with Southerners that he’d demonstrated during his vice-presidential tug-of-war with Estes Kefauver. Whatever maneuvers he was slyly executing in order to win over the liberals, he wanted, at the same time, to keep himself positioned as the best hope of moderate and conservative Democrats. And this group included those Southerners still holding fast to segregation.
Such folks liked the fact he was a “moderate,” and he wanted to keep it that way. In the same year he gave the Algeria speech, Kennedy voted for the amendment to the 1957 Civil Rights Act that allowed jury trials for local officials charged in civil rights cases. While passage of this amendment was viewed as critical to avoiding a filibuster, it was also seen as a way for all-white Southern juries to continue, routinely, to acquit defendants in such cases. Kennedy’s position on the jury-trial question earned him a rebuke from the NAACP, but maintained the warm regard of his colleagues below the Mason-Dixon line.
The man himself was more complicated. Kennedy had an instinctive contempt toward discrimination. Speaking at the Somerset Club, a private men’s club in Boston, he suffered an introduction by a member who jokingly insinuated that the Democrats were the party of “the help.” After hearing this, Jack remarked to his friend Alistair Forbes: “Well, I wondered why more people weren’t blushing with shame. But can you believe that such people can still be around?”
Forbes recalled, “He was a man wholly devoid of rancor, and his personality was completely well integrated so that he had no worries of any kind at all. He could see everything with a sort of detached view.
“And yet he was aware of the interplay of snobbish forces in his life. In England he could see which English people basically didn’t like Americans, and he knew people who didn’t like Irish people. He was always amused and interested by this sort of sin, but absolutely unaffected by it because he was his own man and happy with his money in the bank—and damn good-looking.”
George Smathers agreed. He said his friend was “always greatly interested in civil rights.” Then he amended that: “Put it this way—not civil rights legislation so much, but civil rights because he was against discrimination. I think he felt that, as an Irishman, somewhere along the line he had been discriminated against. I don’t know, but I did get the feeling that he felt that other Irishmen had felt the sting of prejudice.”
At the same time, Kennedy operated at a distinct remove from certain realities, even as he crisscrossed the country broadening his reach. Forbes, for one, was struck by his lack of awareness about black America. “I remember very late, sometime in the fifties, he’d only just heard the phrase ‘Uncle Tom’ and was like a man who’d just made this extraordinary discovery. ‘Do you know that Clayton Powell’s got this marvelous expression?’ he asked me.” Powell, it seems, had been talking to Jack about a black colleague in Chicago, saying, “The trouble with him is he’s an Uncle Tom.” Learning this new expression from Harlem’s congressman delighted him.
Politically, he knew that if he wanted to make his way into liberal hearts and minds, he had to forge ties with those who cared about such issues as civil rights. He wanted very much to have the support of men such as Arthur Schlesinger, one of the co-founders of Americans for Democratic Action and a longtime Stevenson stalwart. Here’s an entry in Schlesinger’s journal from 1959. It displays just what kind of effort Jack Kennedy was mounting to win over a man whose support was critical.
July 19—Jack Kennedy called up around noon and asked us to come to dinner at Hyannis Port this evening. Marian could not go, so I went alone. The Kennedy place was less grand than I had imagined. I expected miles of ocean frontage with no alien houses in view; but it is a cluster of Kennedy houses, all large and comfortable but not palatial, in the midst of a settled community. Jackie Kennedy was the only other person present, and we all drank and talked about from 8 to 12:30. I only brought two cigars, one of which Jack took, having typically no cigars in the house. Jackie wanted for a moment to go and see A Nun’s Story, which was being screened in a projection room in one of the other houses; but, though somewhat encouraged by Jack to go, finally stayed the evening out with us. She was lovely but seemed excessively flighty on politics, asking with wide-eyed naivete questions like: “Jack, why don’t you just tell them that you won’t go into any of those old primaries?” Jack was in a benign frame of mind and did not blink; but clearly such remarks could, in another context, be irritating. This is all the more so since Jackie, on other subjects, is intelligent and articulate. She was reading Proust when I arrived; she talked very well about Nicolas Nabokov, Joe Alsop, and other personalities, and one feels that out of some perversity she pretends an ignorance about politics larger even than life.
As for Jack, he gave his usual sense of seeming candor. I write “seeming” without meaning to imply doubts; so far as I could tell, he was exceedingly open; and this was, indeed, the freest, as well as the longest, talk I have ever had with him. As usual, he was impersonal in his remarks, quite prepared to see the views and interests of others. He showed more animation and humor than usual and, indeed, was rather funny in some of his assessments of people and situations. He seems fairly optimistic about his presidential chances. He thinks that Humphrey can’t win, that Johnson will take care of Symington, and that he will go into Los Angeles with a large delegate lead. He seems to regard Stevenson as the next most likely person to get the nomination.
Then an uncomfortable subject was broached. “We had considerable talk about McCarthy. Kennedy said he felt that it would be a good idea to admit frankly that he had been wrong in not taking a more forthright position. I said that he was paying the price of having written a book called Profiles in Courage. He replied ruefully, ‘Yes, but I
didn’t have a chapter in it about myself.’ ”
The conversation that night in July of 1959 is telling in so many ways. The invitation itself was a fine gesture, with the arranging of an intimate evening around one person, a figure Jack saw as powerfully influential. Well aware of the liberal rancor over his failure to oppose McCarthy, he now was working at being convincingly conciliatory. Schlesinger observed his efforts: “I think he genuinely thinks he was wrong about it; but says he was constrained for a long time because Bobby had joined the committee staff—over Jack’s opposition, he says. He also said that his father and Joe were great friends, and that his father would defend Joe as a person to this day.”
During the course of the evening, Jack showed contempt for President Eisenhower, saying he refused to hang around with his old comrades in arms from the war. “All his golfing pals are rich men he has met since 1945.” He also went after Ike’s willingness to drop Nixon from the ticket in ’56. “He won’t stand by anybody. He is terribly cold and terribly vain. In fact, he’s a shit.”
But he was less candid on other matters. When Schlesinger pushed him on his Addison’s disease, he said the problem with his adrenal glands was caused by his wartime malaria, it had cleared up, and he was okay. “No one who has Addison’s disease ought to run for President; but I do not have it and have never had it.” He then claimed he was no longer taking cortisone, that, in fact, he took nothing. It was a pattern of denial that he would continue as he now campaigned for the backing of a group—the liberals—whose approval he’d never sought in the past.
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 61