Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  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 Boston. Ahead in the polls, he was completing his march to the American presidency bearing tribute to the man who’d led him to t
he 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.

  “Finally, he got so frustrated he came down around midnight or so,” O’Donnell said, “and began to run the slide rule himself. He went town by town, and we walked him through it. But it became confusing to him, and he just kept telling us that the reports we were getting on the television and those we gave to him simply did not square at all.”

  Governor Dever then telephoned and told Kennedy that, on the basis of the returns, they were both defeated and should concede together. O’Donnell recalled the dramatic response. “The congressman, who by now had learned our system—in fact, had made some improvements to it, typically, and knew it better than we did—said to the governor . . . that on the basis of our computations we were not defeated—and that, in fact, on the basis of our figures he was about to win by a narrow margin.”

  At this point, there remained a general sense Kennedy had lost. Looking beyond their headquarters, they could see what appeared to be the electoral reality. Outside there were rowdies—“Irish bums,” O’Donnell called them, local fellows with various bones to pick—shouting drunkenly, “Jack Kennedy, you’re a loser and a faker! You’re in the shithouse with your old man!” Mainly, they were giving it to Bobby, who’d been the tough guy in the campaign.

  By then, according to O’Donnell, “it was just us sitting around drinking coffee. Even most of the girls had left. It was a very disheartening moment.

  “At about three or probably closer to four in the morning, only the major cities were still out . . . Worcester . . . Springfield . . . and I remember Bobby and the congressman began to give me some grief, because I’d dismissed the hand-picked Kennedy secretary the congressman had selected in Worcester—he was a faker and I’d replaced him with someone I knew and trusted. Now Bobby was saying to me, ‘Everything rides on Worcester and your judgment. If we lose, it’s your fault.’

  “Well, it was beautiful: he hadn’t completed the sentence, literally not gotten the words out of his mouth, when I got a call from our man in Worcester saying we’d carried it by five thousand votes. And that, we all knew, was the final clincher. The congressman and Bobby looked at me in astonishment. Then the congressman said to me, ‘You’re either the brightest or the luckiest SOB on the planet!’ “

  After the votes were tallied in the big cities, with Worcester and Springfield now in the Kennedy column, the candidate continued strongly, surpassing other Democrats. “Even in these little towns, we were running four, five, or six percentage points ahead of any Democrat and ahead of Dever. The margin of victory can really be found in all those small communities where he’d spent all that time and done all that work in for the past six, seven years. It was now paying off. Every weekend he could, he’d been out there meeting people, having coffee with them, handshaking—and it was now paying off as it was intended to.” The Kennedy Party strategy had worked.

  The proud incumbent, there in his headquarters across the street, refused to accept defeat. “We could see him sitting there in his suit coat, looking very calm, watching the returns. What’s he waiting for? Why won’t he concede? What does he know that we don’t? The senator-elect kept asking me, ‘Are you sure?’ Yes, we were sure, but we were worried. At one point, he even joked, ‘Is this what victory looks like?’ We were sitting at the card table—the congressman, Dave, Bobby, Larry, myself, and just a few of the girls. The fair-weather types had all gone home.

  “Finally, about six or six thirty, Lodge conceded. He walked across, looking dapper, and the congressman, now the senator-elect, said what a bunch of bums we all looked like. ‘Put a tie on, for God’s sake,’ he told Bobby. Lodge came over and shook the newly elected senator’s hand. He seemed very disconnected, as if he still could not comprehend that this young fellow had somehow bucked the tidal wave called Eisenhower.

  “We ended up winning by seventy thousand votes in a very tight contest; I mean, we knew we were winning, but we also recognized it was very tight. The governor had lost by fourteen thousand votes at this time.”

  Lyndon Johnson telephoned immediately after the results were in, causing Jack to remark, “That guy must never sleep.” O’Brien, though, saw the cunning: “Johnson wasn’t wasting any time in courting Kennedy’s support.” The Senate’s democratic leader had just been defeated and Johnson was gunning for the job.

  The next night there was a celebration, and all the Democratic hacks and coat holders and meal tickets shamelessly showed up, driving O’Donnell and O’Brien crazy. Unfazed by the strange faces in the room, the victor performed in classic fashion. “The senator-elect got up on a table and sang a song in that famous Kennedy off-tune manner. It was pretty awful. Then it was he and Bobby singing together, in a duet. It was just awful, too.”

  The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket carried the country by 7 million votes. In Massachusetts, Adlai Stevenson suffered a crushing defeat. Jack Kennedy, meanwhile, had carried the state against Ike’s number one man.

  He’d taken on the best and beaten the best. He walked out of the race with a solid organization. He had shown his ability to cut people loose—Mark Dalton, after all, had been a close, deeply devoted champion—who failed to meet his needs. All the while, he let his younger brother take the heat for such acts and thus gain the reputation for being the ruthless one. Bobby, Kenny O’Donnell, and Larry O’Brien were now a rare combination of ice-cold efficiency and die-hard loyalty. The skipper had a new crew, a great one. They’d been blooded by a tough battle fought against the odds and won.

  Jack and Bobby—and Kenny, too—would be together for the duration, and they would stand together in the worst crisis of the Cold War, when the stakes were much higher than a Senate seat.

  19

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MAGIC

  She could be amusing in a direct, caustic way; and she understood the art of getting on with men completely . . . never asked an awkward question.

  —David Cecil, writing about

  Lady Melbourne in Young Melbourne

  In Washington, Tip O’Neill was moving into his new office in the House of Representatives. By coincidence, his predecessor was packing up right across the hall. As he stepped into Jack Kennedy’s outer office, Tip could hear him engaged in a heated backroom ar
gument with his secretary, Mary Davis.

  “Mary, now don’t be silly. You’re coming to the Senate with me.”

  “No, Senator, I’m not. I’m going to be working for Congressman Lester Holtzman of New York.”

  “Now, Mary, you know you’re coming with me.”

  “I am not, Senator, and that’s all there is to it.”

  O’Neill could hear the dispute going back and forth. Finally, he heard Mary say, “And the reason I’m not going with you is that Congressman Holtzman has offered me six thousand dollars.”

  “Tip, can you believe this?” Jack said when he walked out and saw O’Neill.

  “I’m paying her four thousand dollars, and I’ve just offered her forty-eight hundred. That’s a twenty percent raise. But this guy wants to give her six grand the first day he’s here. There’s not a broad in the world worth six thousand a year.”

  Mary Davis had similar memories of the standoff. When Kennedy won the Senate race, she accepted the mission of building a clerical staff. To this end, she recruited a team of secretaries to assist her with managing the mail and other constituent work.

  “They were all experienced, knew exactly how to do things, what to do, where to go, and they really could have been an invaluable asset to the functioning of his Senate office. But he called me one day from Palm Beach and said that he’d been discussing the situation with his father, who wanted to know: ‘Did you find out exactly who they are, what they are, what the salaries are going to be?’ “