Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  “I think something ought to be done about it. I think there are a lot of young men interested in going into the Foreign Service. I don’t know where they get a lot of the ones I saw. I think we’re not getting the representative, well-rounded type of young man to go to the Foreign Service that we should as a rule. . . . I was up at a college in Massachusetts two days ago, speaking, and I asked, out of five hundred students how many would be interested in going into the Foreign Service, and a surprisingly large number raised their hand. What I think is that they’re not getting young men who are well-rounded, who are balanced, and who are what we like to think of as representative Americans.”

  This call to service for young Americans—especially as they might affect the developing world—marked the beginning of an idea that, a decade later, inspired the country. It was one of many emblematic ideas evolving in his mind even now.

  That trip to the Far East had been a confidence builder. Upon his return, Jack had shared what he learned with the voters. It was a repeat of his performance in 1946 as he’d entered the political arena. Back then he’d talked mainly of his experiences in the Pacific Theater, along with the need to prevent another war like the one just ended.

  Since then he’d grasped, both instinctively and intellectually, the central importance of nationalism in the new world order and how it would affect Great Power relationships, most crucially those between the United States and the emerging Communist monoliths of Russia and China. What he witnessed, and also deeply understood, was the way that people struggled to free themselves from foreign control. It was a fight that Kennedy, the Irishman and Mucker, could feel in his genes.

  He was discovering his ability to absorb complexity. In understanding the dangers facing his country, he saw, too, the role he might play. He had a mission now. To survive the Cold War, his country must grasp its nature. If he could get to the Senate, he might change history.

  Despite his resolve to move forward, come what may, Jack began 1952 still unsure which office he would now seek or who’d help him win it. He’d spent four years traveling the state, decorating the map with those pushpins, hitting small towns that statewide Democratic candidates rarely visited. But still he needed an organization that could deliver the vote. He needed people.

  The very first recruit to the cause was Lawrence F. O’Brien, with whom Jack had earlier been friendly down in Washington and now got in touch with to see if he’d come on board. When Jack met him, O’Brien was on the staff of another Massachusetts congressman, Foster Furcolo. Before taking that job, he’d worked in his family’s cafe and bar in Springfield. Well connected in Democratic politics in Springfield, he’d served as manager for three of Furcolo’s campaigns.

  One day on Capitol Hill, the two of them, Jack and Larry, had dinner, during the course of which O’Brien declared he’d had enough of Washington. Perhaps he’d also had enough of Furcolo. He was heading home.

  At a later meeting in Boston, Kennedy asked him to help out with his own effort in the Springfield area, and O’Brien agreed. But it took a strong-arm play by his former boss to complete O’Brien’s transition to Kennedy loyalist. O’Brien had agreed to set up a public meeting for Kennedy, only to have Jack get word from Furcolo that Springfield was his turf and he wanted it called off. Jack replied, too bad, he intended to go ahead as planned and Furcolo would just have to live with it.

  Larry O’Brien was impressed. The son of Irish immigrants whose dad was a local Democratic leader, he saw Jack Kennedy as a new kind of Irish politician, virtually the antithesis of the typical Democratic pol from Boston. “Republicans were respectable. Republicans didn’t get thrown in jail like Jim Curley,” O’Brien would write, describing the divide between the two parties as it had long been. The thing was, Jack Kennedy was “respectable” in a whole new style. And what O’Brien, a seasoned strategist, saw was how Jack Kennedy could win votes, especially in the Boston suburbs, that the Democrats had been losing because of the dishonesty of scoundrels like Curley.

  “But Jack Kennedy was different. If the Yankee politicians had their snob appeal, so did the Kennedys. Those suburban sons and daughters of immigrants might not say ‘I’m a Democrat,’ but I hoped they could be brought to say, ‘I’m for Jack Kennedy.’ “

  To O’Brien, his new ally, Jack made the extent of his ambition clear. Pointing at the Massachusetts State House from the window of his Bowdoin Street apartment, he put it this way: “Larry, I don’t look forward to sitting over there in the governor’s office and dealing out sewer contracts.”

  In aiming high and refusing to be satisfied with even the governor’s job—when what he wanted was to be a senator—Jack was showing how much his ambitions paralleled his father’s. Joe Kennedy refused to settle for what his fellow Boston Irish regarded as good enough achievement, an upper-middle-class level of success. Joe wanted more—and allowed nothing to stand in his way. In his own words: “For the Kennedys, it’s either the castle or the outhouse.”

  Besides O’Brien, the other key recruit joined the team as a result of Bobby Kennedy’s intervention. In February 1952, Bobby got in touch with his college roommate Ken O’Donnell, suggesting he join the campaign effort. “He called me and said Jack was going to run, had not decided for what, but he was going to run.”

  Ken O’Donnell was a hybrid—a middle-class Irish guy who’d gone to Harvard, but whose dad had been the legendary football coach at Holy Cross. Raised in Worcester, he was both town and gown. In World War II, he’d served in the Army Air Corps based in Britain and flown more than thirty missions over Germany as a bombardier, often in the lead plane. During the Battle of the Bulge he was forced to crash-land between German and Allied lines. But his most harrowing exploit came when he’d had to climb down and kick loose a bomb stuck in the doors. He’d ended up hanging on to the plane for dear life—certainly a strong memory to carry into one’s postwar career, and also a character-building one. His football career at Harvard only added to his appeal. On all counts, Ken O’Donnell was the kind of guy Jack Kennedy could admire and, eventually, trust.

  At their first meeting to discuss the job, just five days after the call had come from Bobby, Jack was put off by O’Donnell’s questioning of him. The problem was that Ken had asked him which office he actually wanted to run for, a reasonable enough question for a prospective campaign worker. Jack didn’t like it. One reason was that he didn’t know the answer. But Ken O’Donnell was just the kind of guy Jack needed to win, no matter his place on the ballot.

  At home in Harvard Yard and on Soldiers Field, O’Donnell was equally at ease with those “lace-curtain” Irish who’d gained wealth and social self-esteem. Yet he knew, too, the working class with all its awe of pedigreed Yankees like Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and its entrenched resentment of the lace-curtain types. He knew the be-grudgers, those Irish who made a specialty of hating those who either had a leg up on them or acted as if they did. Winning Ken O’Donnell’s steadfast loyalty, which he soon did, was one of Jack Kennedy’s crowning lifetime achievements.

  Ken recognized Jack’s voter appeal long before he went to work for him. “He started getting our attention because he made statements and did things that weren’t the norm for politicians in Massachusetts. When he didn’t sign Curley’s pardon petition, it didn’t mean much in terms of the position, but it meant something to my generation. We quietly watched . . . and here was a guy who bore some watching. Frankly, his money had something to do with it. He was wealthy, so he could be independent of the political machine. They can’t crush him the way they can somebody else, because he has both the money to stand up to them and the guts to tell them to go to hell. He was one of us. He is a veteran. He has had enough. He can afford to take them on.”

  “Them” was personified by the name Henry Cabot Lodge. And, to illustrate exactly the weight that name once carried in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, consider this famous bit of doggerel penned by a Holy Cross graduate:

  In the land of the bean and th
e cod,

  The Cabots speak only to the Lodges,

  And the Lodges only to God.

  The current Henry Cabot Lodge was the grandson of the first Henry Cabot Lodge, who’d beaten Jack Kennedy’s grandfather John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald for the U.S. Senate. He was the Republican who’d successfully crushed Woodrow Wilson’s struggle to establish the League of Nations following World War I.

  In 1936 his grandson, at the age of thirty-four, assumed the ancestral Lodge seat. Then, in 1942, the younger Lodge joined the U.S. Army and served gallantly in North Africa while remaining a senator. His outfit won the distinction of being the first American unit in World War II to make ground contact with the German army. When President Roosevelt ordered that men serving in both the military and the Congress make a choice between the two roles, Lodge left the army in 1942. But after winning reelection that year, he chose to give up his seat to rejoin the army, the first senator to do so since the Civil War.

  As a lieutenant colonel, Lodge distinguished himself in Europe by once single-handedly capturing a four-man German patrol. He was decorated with the French Légion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre. At the end of the war, he served as liaison officer and interpreter in the surrender negotiations with German forces. In 1946, he ran for the Senate again, now a handsome war hero come back to serve the people. As such, he drew extraordinary respect, especially among the Irish, who usually voted Democratic. He was viewed by them as a man of the people, a man’s man, a strong-jawed Yankee who was a regular enough guy to come have a beer at the local bar. Though times were changing, such condescension still went over well. Lodge was the kind of high-standing Brahmin the Irish looked up to.

  Ken O’Donnell understood that Senator Lodge was more than the well-born patrician, more than just his name or his family tree. He recognized the reality of Lodge’s very genuine accomplishment, returning from the war and in ’46 beating Senator David I. Walsh, a powerful Democratic fixture on the state’s political scene for nearly half a century. “Lodge, killing off Walsh, became the giant of Massachusetts politics. He had a good organization, excellent staff, and he was honest. Lodge was everything people wanted in a politician.”

  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.