Yet all was not lost. Perhaps the very destructiveness of the new weapon would compel nations to preserve the peace. “In the past years, we have heard much about the horrors of war, but we have always felt that war was preferable to certain alternatives. There are certain things for which we have always fought. War has never been the ultimate evil. Now, however, that may be changed.” Consequently, humanity “may be forced to make the sacrifices that will insure peace. We can only pray that man’s political skill can keep abreast of his scientific skill; if not, we may yet live to see Armageddon.”57
Would he himself contribute to that urgent work, and if so, how? A new international order was coming into being, one with his own country in a position of supreme power, in a kind of Pax Americana; perhaps he could find a place in the arena. Within a few weeks of his return from Europe, Jack heard from Forrestal. “Do you want to do any work here?” the Navy secretary wrote from Washington. “If so, why don’t you come down and see what there is at hand?”58 Jack, thankful for the offer, had other ideas. Opportunities loomed for him to experience that “greatest and most honorable adventure,” and he dared not miss them.
Politics, that is to say, beckoned.
* Almost certainly, Kennedy did not at this point know any specifics of the Manhattan Project, but his diary entry for July 10, continuing a theme he articulated in his unpublished article from Arizona early in the year, suggests he may have had an inkling something big was under way: “The clash [between Russia and the West] may be indefinitely postponed by the eventual discovery of a weapon so horrible that it will truthfully mean the abolishment of all the nations employing it. Thus Science, which has contributed so much to the horrors of war, will be the means of bringing it to an end.”
PART
III
POLITICS
A focused senator in his office, October 1955.
FIFTEEN
THE CANDIDATE
It looked like a giant half shell tucked up against the coastline. Misshapen by gerrymandering and stretching out in various directions, the Eleventh Congressional District took in East Boston and the North and West End as well as the northern tip of Brighton, then crossed the Charles River into Cambridge and a large chunk of Somerville. Charlestown, with its wooden “three-deckers” and its heavy concentration of Irish, was also within its confines. Predominantly working class and overwhelmingly Democratic and Roman Catholic, the district was among the poorest in the state, but it also included the middle-class Ward Twenty-two, in Brighton, and the elegant, tree-lined streets of West Cambridge, home to Harvard and Radcliffe professors, old Brahmin families, and business executives commuting to the city. Historic events in the nation’s early years unfolded here—in the North End stood the Old North Church, made famous by Paul Revere on the evening of April 18, 1775, when he made his midnight ride, while Charlestown was the setting for the Battle of Bunker Hill, two months later. Two weeks after that, on July 3, 1775, George Washington took command of the Continental Army on the north end of Cambridge Common.
The Kennedys had deep roots in the Eleventh. P. J. Kennedy, Jack’s grandfather, owned saloons in East Boston and represented the area in the state legislature; his son Joseph Patrick was born, came of age, and attended Harvard here, as did his sons after him. Jack’s maternal grandfather, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, hailed from the North End, in due course became its political overlord, and saw his daughter Rose born here. At the turn of the century, Fitzgerald represented this district (then the Ninth) in the U.S. House of Representatives. And the eastern edge of the district’s Ward Twenty-two in Brighton was only seven or eight blocks from Jack’s birthplace on Beals Street, in neighboring Brookline.
In 1945 the seat was held by James Michael Curley, a legendary, roguish figure in Boston and archnemesis of Honey Fitz. (It was Curley who in 1913 floated the rumor about Honey Fitz’s dalliance with cigarette girl “Toodles” Ryan and thereby forced him to withdraw from the mayor’s race.) The epitome of the crooked urban pol, Curley, now seventy years old, had fallen on hard times after a fraud conviction in 1937, only to bounce back and win election to Congress five years later, taking the seat from Thomas H. Eliot, a New Dealer who had helped write the Social Security Act. Soon, however, Curley found that he hated life as an obscure lawmaker in Washington; he longed to be back in the hubbub of the Boston mayoralty. In November 1945 he got his chance, and voters returned him to his former throne in city hall. What few appreciated at the time—including, it seems, Jack Kennedy—was that Joe Kennedy may have helped Curley pay off a considerable debt burden arising from his legal problems in exchange for his leaving his congressional seat to run for mayor, thereby creating a convenient opening for an enterprising new candidate.1
Whatever Joe’s role in the affair, a vacancy in the Eleventh District now opened up, to be filled in the fall 1946 midterm election. It was perfect timing for Jack, yet he hesitated. Always his own most exacting critic, he questioned whether voters in the district, accustomed to the ebullient, glad-handing breed of politician, would take to a wealthy, reserved young newcomer who had no political experience—and who, moreover, could be seen as a carpetbagger, having never lived in the district except during his time in college.2 In addition, the false (or at least fleeting) camaraderie required in this kind of politicking, perfected by that champion backslapper Honey Fitz, was alien to his nature. And what about his world of prep schools, Harvard, international travel, and debutante parties—might it not seem off-putting to the working-class residents he’d be wooing, many of them living in squalid conditions in crowded tenements? Nor did the district have cohesion in political terms; instead, it consisted of warring Irish and Italian factions, which meant that the Democratic primary in June 1946—the real election, since the victor would certainly crush whoever the Republicans put up in the fall campaign—would be a wild and unpredictable free-for-all in which any number of things could happen.
Even Joe Kennedy began to doubt that his emaciated, still-ailing son could prevail in such a tough race, even with the matchless family resources. When Maurice Tobin, the state’s tall and wavy-haired governor (he was the son of an Irish-born carpenter), hinted that he might wish to have Jack on his ticket in 1946 as the candidate for lieutenant governor, Joe expressed interest, especially after Tobin assured him that Jack would face no competition for the slot in the Democratic primary. Indeed, this particular post had long intrigued the Ambassador—in earlier years, while scheming about Joe Junior’s postwar entry into politics, he had put the lieutenant governorship high on the list of possibilities. It would be an ideal perch from which Jack could begin molding a statewide political machine and then, a few years down the road, launch a bid for the governorship. Jack, however, never warmed to the idea. Neither local nor state politics much interested him, for one thing. For another, he worried that the ticket might go down to crushing defeat in what was shaping up to be a year for Republican gains nationally, as Harry Truman and the Democrats struggled to respond to the demands of peacetime. Honey Fitz, for his part, pushed hard for the congressional race, for sentimental reasons.
By the end of 1945, Jack’s mind was made up: he would seek the House seat. In view of the common claim that his father called the shots in this period, it’s important to note that the decision was Jack’s alone—Joe Kennedy continued well into the new year to prefer the lieutenant governor’s race, but his son held firm. The journalist Charles Bartlett, a Navy veteran who met Jack in a Palm Beach nightclub soon after the Christmas holiday and would in time become a friend (and matchmaker), detected no hesitation on the young man’s part, though he did see a good dose of self-deprecating humor: “Some of the Palm Beach figures would come by and pat him on the back and say, ‘Jack, I’m so glad you’re running for Congress.’ I remember his saying, ‘In only a year or so they’ll be saying I’m the worst son of a bitch that ever lived.’ ”3
And there were skept
ics. After chatting with one knowledgeable acquaintance, Dan O’Brien, about his chances, Jack jotted down the key points in his diary: “Says I’ll be murdered—No personal experience—A personal district—Says I don’t know 300 people personally….O’Brien says the attack on me will be—1. Inexperience 2….father’s reputation. He is the first man to bet me that I can’t win! An honest Irishman but a mistaken one.”
The candidate also scribbled some axioms he thought pertained to his endeavor. Among them:
In politics you don’t have friends—you have confederates.
One day they feed you honey—the next you will find fish caught in your throat.
You can buy brains but you can’t pay—loyalty.
The best politician is the man who does not think too much of the political consequences of his every act.4
II
To establish his legitimacy in the district and the state, Jack moved into a nondescript, sparsely furnished two-room suite at the Bellevue Hotel, on Beacon Hill, where his grandfather Honey Fitz, now eighty-two and as garrulous as ever, lived. A stone’s throw from the State House, the suite became the hub of the still nascent, still undeclared campaign, the place where the initial strategy and tactics were hashed out. Local campaign offices then sprouted up in various parts of the district, with a headquarters in a dingy suite on the second floor at 18 Tremont Street, in Boston. Rival candidates had yet to get started, or even in some cases to decide if they were running, and thus was established a phenomenon that would be a chief characteristic of all of John F. Kennedy’s political campaigns: he started earlier and worked harder than his competition. Months before his official entry into the race, on April 22, he was diligently stumping, spending money, and lining up his campaign team.
And it was a good thing he got going early, for his inexperience was glaringly obvious. He could be reasonably effective in speeches when he expounded on international affairs—an early lecture at an American Legion post, on the topic of postwar Europe, won accolades and more than a hundred requests for copies—but whenever he ventured into the stuff of municipal or state politics, he lacked confidence.5 His delivery turned wooden and stiff, and he spoke too fast, eyes glued to his text, in a high-pitched voice that seldom modulated. He lacked the seasoned politician’s ability to riff extemporaneously; instead, whenever he ad-libbed he fumbled for words, which only made him more diffident. Afterwards, he would be glum about his performance, and he and his father would go over the speech from start to finish in order to determine what needed to be done. “I can still see the two of them sitting together,” sister Eunice later said, “analyzing the entire speech and talking about the pace of delivery to see where it worked and where it had gone wrong.”6
Jack files his first nomination papers with Election Commissioner Joseph Langone at Boston City Hall, April 23, 1946.
Nor did Jack cut an imposing figure at these events. He was frail, almost skeletal, which made him look, in the words of one Rotarian, like “a little boy dressed up in his father’s clothes.” His skin had a yellow hue on account of ongoing periodic bouts of malaria. Especially early on, his demeanor betrayed shyness and embarrassment, and an instinct for privacy, and he showed scant interest in kissing babies or swapping stories with strangers in bars. “He wasn’t a mingler,” one campaign aide remembered. “He didn’t mingle in the crowd and go up to people and say, ‘I’m Jack Kennedy.’ ”7
But he also had a number of things going for him, starting with his family name. Joe Kennedy’s reputation might have plummeted outside of Massachusetts, but Boston voters still viewed him as the patriarch of a legendary family, a family they wanted to rub elbows with. He was an exceptionally wealthy patriarch, moreover, who made clear he would spend whatever Jack needed to prevail. Together father and son soon assembled a crack campaign team that included Joe’s cousin Joe Kane—they always addressed each other as “Cousin Joe”—a brusque, cynical, bald-headed veteran political operative and raconteur who operated out of a diner near city hall and who said politics hadn’t changed since the time of Julius Caesar; adman John Dowd, brought in to do advertising and public relations work; Joe Timilty, an ex–police commissioner now serving as an all-purpose Joe Kennedy aide; and Billy Sutton and Patsy Mulkern, both of whom were recommended by Honey Fitz and who, like Timilty, performed a variety of roles. Mark Dalton, a brainy law school graduate and former newspaperman who had served with distinction in naval intelligence during the war, assumed a key managerial role, and Dave Powers, a streetwise and affable young politico with a photographic memory and a deep understanding of Irish Boston, signed on as a top aide. Inevitably, the ever loyal Eddie Moore came out of retirement to run errands and disperse funds. Even some of Jack’s friends—Lem Billings, Torby Macdonald, and Red Fay—joined up to help out as their schedules permitted. (Fay flew all the way from California to do so. He stayed for two months, until a stern letter from his father ordered him back to his job in the family construction firm.)8
Mulkern, a foulmouthed political junkie who didn’t drink yet always managed to look sauced, anticipated a difficult road ahead. “The first day I met Kennedy he had sneakers on. I said, ‘For the love of Christ, take the sneakers off, Jack. You think you’re going to play golf?’ It was tough to sell the guy. We had a hell of a job with him. We took him to taverns, hotel lobbies, club rooms, street corners. Young Kennedy, young Kennedy, we kept saying. But they didn’t want him in the district. The Curley mob wouldn’t go for him right away. They called him the Miami candidate. ‘Take that guy and run him down in Miami…[or] Palm Beach…give him an address over in New York.’ We had a helluva fight.”9
Before long, however, the millionaire’s kid from Harvard proved himself to be an effective campaigner in the hardscrabble wards of the district. His very reticence and amateurishness worked with voters who found his sincerity and informality and seeming shyness a refreshing contrast with the cynical, voluble Irish office seekers of yesteryear. (He relished hearing stories about these larger-than-life figures and their baroque style of politics, but he didn’t want to be like them.) Jack didn’t condescend to these residents, didn’t take them for granted, didn’t resort to the forced familiarity of the how’s-your-mother-give-her-my-love variety. And he scored points by keeping his speeches short and leaving time for questions. “As you observed him in the course of his actions, you saw that he had a very good handshake, he knew how to smile at people, he remembered people’s names,” said Tony Galluccio, a Harvard friend who worked on the campaign. “Everybody that you introduced him to liked him as a person, liked him as an individual.” A local journalist who covered the campaign agreed: “To meet him was to vote for him, I think it’s that simple. If you start to look for complicated reasons [for his success], you won’t find any.”10
“There was a basic dignity in Jack Kennedy,” Dave Powers remarked, “a pride in his bearing that appealed to every Irishman who was beginning to feel a little embarrassed by the sentimental, corny style of the typical Irish politician. As the Irish themselves were becoming more middle-class, they wanted a leader to reflect their upward mobility.” Powers would until his dying day be an unstintingly loyal Jack Kennedy partisan, a keeper of the JFK flame, and his recollections must be considered in that light, but in this assessment he was far from alone. Given his candidate’s likability, Powers saw his main job as a simple one: “My goal then was to have Jack Kennedy meet as many people as he possibly could.”11
“People were subconsciously looking for a new type of a candidate,” Galluccio echoed, “and Jack fitted into this. He had the naive appearance, he had the shock of hair that fell over his forehead. He was a multi-millionaire who was very humble. As people would say, this fellow is not the kind of a fellow who would steal. This I think was the very beginning of this political revolution in Massachusetts. Jack Kennedy fitted into this pattern. The rest he did with money, with his ability to make fri
ends, with his tremendous capacity for work. He didn’t have to earn a living, but he did utilize his time every minute of the day going where you wanted him to, getting out and meeting people.”12
The last point is key: Kennedy was tireless, driving himself forward, never resting for long. More than anything, this work ethic—common to many successful first-time candidates—is what campaign aides and other observers remembered of those critical weeks in the late winter and spring of 1946. War had been a toughening experience, and he showed it on the trail. From early morning until late at night he would chug along, day after day, using every ounce of the characteristic Kennedy energy, never mind his various ailments. Often he would get no more than four or five hours of sleep. “We had him out to the Catholic Order of Foresters Communion Breakfast one morning,” an aide said. “He walked in and he was limping. I knew his back was bothering him and we had to walk up three flights of stairs, and he had about six other places he had to go that day. When we came downstairs, I said, ‘You don’t feel good?’ And he said, ‘I feel great.’…That’s the way he was; he would come out and he would go, go, go. I don’t know when he stopped.” The aide recalled instances when Jack would be in his suite in the Bellevue, shaving with his coat on while someone downstairs waited to drive him to his next event. “And it would go on and on and on.”13
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