Congratulatory notes flowed in from all over. Jack’s sister Kathleen, who had just purchased a house in London (long enamored of England, she had decided to make her home there), wrote “just to tell you how terrifically pleased I am for you. Everyone says you were so good in the election and the outcome must have been a great source of satisfaction. It’s nice to know you are as appreciated in the 11th Congressional District as you are among your brothers and sisters. Gee, aren’t you lucky?” Then she added, “The folks here think you are madly pro-British so don’t start destroying that illusion until I get my house fixed. The painters might just not like your attitude!”32
IV
With the hard-fought primary behind him, Jack Kennedy could look forward to a much easier contest in the general election. His party could not say the same, even though in theory 1946 should have been a good year for Democrats. World War II had ended in complete victory the year before, after all, and despite fears of a postwar recession or depression, the economy adjusted quite well, fueled by consumer spending. (Americans had taken home steady paychecks during the war but had had little to spend them on; now they were ready to buy.) Farm income rose to an all-time high. Unemployment stood at a mere 3 percent and, after a decade and a half of privation—the Depression followed by wartime rationing and shortages—consumer goods were again available, including new ones such as washing machines and televisions. Thanks to the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill of Rights, veterans could get home mortgages, embark on college educations, and set up small businesses. In comparative terms, meanwhile, the United States was ever more of a colossus: by war’s end, the nation had three-fourths of the world’s invested capital, and two-thirds of all gold reserves.
The transformation was stunning. In 1939, America’s gross national product—the total value of the services and goods produced by the nation’s residents—had been $91 billion. In 1945 it was $215 billion, a leap unlike any seen in the history of the world. At the start of the twentieth century, the United States had nearly a quarter of the world’s economy; by the end of World War II it had almost half. This, too, was unprecedented in human history.33
Yet the party of Harry Truman was in trouble as the fall campaign began. Though the reconversion to a peacetime economy had been relatively smooth, acute shortages remained, and the demand drove prices up. A dearth of flour, for example, created long lines in Chicago and other cities, while pent-up demand for beef drove the price up by 70 percent. Truman, struggling with the mountainous task of easing shortages while holding prices down, in mid-1946 imposed a price ceiling on meat. American cattlemen responded by keeping their animals from the market, causing butchers to go out of business and leading to “meat riots” in cities throughout the land. Car buyers likewise found themselves frustrated by the lack of supply, as did couples on the hunt for a washing machine. Women struggled to find nylons.34
Nor did the president prove adept at handling the labor unrest that erupted immediately after the end of the war, when management proved slow to respond to grievances and inflation ate away at workers’ real income. In late 1945, 200,000 General Motors workers walked off the job, and they did not return for 113 days. They were followed in early 1946 by meat-packers and steelworkers, then electrical workers and coal miners. All told, nearly five million workers walked off the job in 1946, resulting in 116 million man-days of labor being lost—three times the total of any previous year. Neither management nor government officials seemed to know how to deal with the problem, and a frustrated public gradually lost patience with the strikers and the Truman administration. When Truman wielded the power of the federal government to shut down a railroad workers’ strike, he alienated the important labor wing of his party.35
Many of Jack Kennedy’s fellow veterans, too, voiced frustration with their lot, notwithstanding the GI Bill’s provisions. For the most part their homecomings from the war had been joyful affairs, but when the celebrations died down, many realized that life had moved on for the people around them. The world they’d known had grown unfamiliar. And it all seemed deeply unfair: while they had answered the call and been yanked away for years, risking their lives and in some cases suffering grievous injuries, others had avoided service, stayed home, and prospered. Some veterans, including thousands who had married quickly before enlisting or while home on leave, never adjusted to matrimony, with the result that the divorce rate in 1945 shot up to double that of the prewar era, to thirty-one divorces for every hundred marriages—or more than half a million total. (In subsequent years the rate trickled down to prewar levels.)36 In 1946, moviegoers flocked to the ironically titled motion picture The Best Years of Our Lives, which took home nine Academy Awards for its powerful depiction of three veterans grappling with the difficulties of readjusting to life back home. The film was the highest-grossing picture of its time, and a close second in viewership to Gone with the Wind.
Candidate Kennedy addressed the readjustment problems experienced by some returning men. “Home was built up out of all proportion to reality when they were away,” he remarked on the stump. “This built-up conception served them well when the going was tough. It was the same as heaven—and made it easier for them to live amid suffering and boredom and desolation. But reality is a little different. There are no high salaries for inexperienced veterans….Homes are hard to find—jobs are frequently monotonous. Some men even feel a faint nostalgia for army life,” for the comradeship, for the feeling of mutual interdependence. And, he went on, there was nobility in this longing, for after all, “we are dependent on other people nearly every minute of our lives—for our food, for help when we are sick. Even when we drive a car we are depending on the skill and judgment of the other people on the road. In a larger sense, each one of us is dependent on all the people of this country—on their obedience to our laws, for their rejection of the siren calls of ambitious demagogues. In fact, if we only realized it, we are in time of peace as interdependent as soldiers were in the time of war. I think it is high time that we recognize this truth. If we did, how much easier would be our time ahead!”37
There was hope and power in this message, and it worked well for Kennedy in the Massachusetts Eleventh. Nationally, however, Republicans schemed to make the November election a referendum on Truman. Working with a top advertising firm, party leaders came up with a simple and powerful slogan: “Had Enough?” They used every opportunity to push the pun “To err is Truman.” More important, the GOP recruited a strong slate of congressional candidates—especially in those races that were legitimately winnable. The Massachusetts Eleventh was not one of these, so the party put up a sacrificial lamb, Somerville’s Lester W. Bowen. The outcome was all but preordained, which gave Kennedy the opportunity to focus in much of his speechmaking on his preferred turf: foreign policy and national security.
Here the picture had changed dramatically in the year since World War II’s end. Already at the Potsdam Conference, before the fighting in the Pacific even ended, American officials had grasped that Soviet leaders were determined to dominate the areas then under Red Army control. U.S. planners determined they would not try to thwart these Soviet designs, but would resist any effort by Stalin and his lieutenants to move farther west, to those parts of Europe that the Allied powers occupied. Likewise, the Soviets would not be allowed to interfere in Japan, or be permitted to take over Iran, where their troops had lingered in the north. After Stalin, in February 1946, delivered a speech that depicted a world threatened by rapacious capitalist expansion, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Moscow, George F. Kennan, sent a bleak “long telegram” to Washington that said Kremlin fanaticism made diplomatic engagement impossible. His report strengthened the sense among American policymakers that only firmness could yield results with Moscow. The following month, Winston Churchill delivered an electrifying speech in Fulton, Missouri. With Truman at his side, the former British prime minister proclaimed that an
“iron curtain” had descended upon Europe, splitting East from West.*2, 38
With the Grand Alliance a rapidly fading memory, the Soviets and the Americans feuded across the board. When the United States gave a hefty reconstruction loan to Britain but withheld one from the Soviet Union, Stalin’s government admonished Washington for using its currency to control other countries. The two powers also squabbled over Iran, where the United States had helped secure the pro-West shah’s ascension to the throne and where the Soviets sponsored separatist groups and sought to gain access to oil reserves. Deeply split on the terms of German unification, the former allies developed their zones independently.
Not every American analyst backed the administration’s harsh anti-Soviet position. Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace, who had been FDR’s vice president before Truman, charged that Truman’s hard-line posture was wrongly exchanging military and economic pressure for diplomacy. In a speech at Madison Square Garden in September 1946, Wallace called for conciliation vis-à-vis Moscow and warned that “getting tough never brought anything real and lasting—whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world powers. The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.” Truman soon dismissed Wallace from the cabinet, berating him privately as “a real Commy and a dangerous man” and bragging that he had now “run the crackpots out of the Democratic Party.”39
Jack Kennedy, for his part, applauded the tough Truman-Churchill line. In a radio speech in Boston, he castigated Wallace for being naive and called for a firm U.S. policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. True, he said, people like Wallace maintained that “the Russian experiment is a good one, since the Russians are achieving economic security at a not too great cost in loss of personal freedom,” but these observers were wrong. “The truth is that the Russian people have neither economic security nor personal freedom,” Kennedy went on; they lacked the right to strike and were subject to arbitrary arrest and punishment, including being sent to Siberian labor camps. Kremlin leaders, meanwhile, had gobbled up the Baltic states, eastern Poland, and the Kuril Islands (seized from Japan immediately before the end of the Pacific War) and were looking to expand their reach, including into Greece, Turkey, and Iran. Washington therefore had no option but to adopt Secretary of State James Byrnes’s preferred policy: “get tough with Russia.” Anticipating what would soon come to be called the Cold War, Jack concluded, “The years ahead will be difficult and strained, the sacrifices great, but it is only by supporting with all our hearts the course we believe to be right, can we prove that that course is not only right but that it has strength and vigor.”40
The candidate and his political team must have liked what he said: the radio talk was converted into a speech he gave several times in the closing days of the fall campaign.
On occasion Kennedy turned more philosophical, as when he delivered the annual Boston Independence Day oration at historic Faneuil Hall, where Revolutionary Era colonists had met to plot and protest. Half a century before, Honey Fitz had been the featured speaker at the event, in this same locale, and Jack now took his turn, on the topic of “Some Elements of the American Character.” Pointing to the vital role played by religious and idealistic conviction in the nation’s history, including in the eradication of slavery and in the recent victory over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, he warned his audience that moral conviction alone was never enough; a healthy dose of pragmatic realism would be required as well. Thus, in World War I, “the idealism with which we had entered the battle made the subsequent disillusionment all the more bitter and revealed a dangerous facet to this element of the American character, for this bitterness, a direct result of our inflated hopes, brought a radical change in our foreign policy and a resulting withdrawal from Europe. We failed to make the adjustment between what we had hoped to win and what we actually could win. Our idealism was too strong. We would not compromise.”
He concluded with a ringing affirmation of his core philosophy:
Conceived in Grecian thought, strengthened by Christian morality, and stamped indelibly into American political philosophy, the right of the individual against the State is the keystone of our Constitution. Each man is free. He is free in thought. He is free in expression. He is free in worship. To us, who have been reared in the American tradition, these rights have become part of our very being. They have become so much a part of our being that most of us are prone to feel that they are rights universally recognized and universally exercised. But the sad fact is that this is not true. They were dearly won for us only a few short centuries ago and they were dearly preserved for us in the days just past. And there are large sections of the world today where these rights are denied as a matter of philosophy and as a matter of government.41
In several speeches, he quoted a line from Rousseau that he’d jotted down in a loose-leaf notebook the previous year: “As soon as any man says of the affairs of state, ‘What does it matter to me?’ the state may be given up as lost.” He used the line before an audience of young Democrats in Pennsylvania, for example, and again before students and faculty at his alma mater Choate, which was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary and had invited him to be the featured speaker. Kennedy told both groups to resist becoming cynical about politics and politicians, for the survival of American democracy ultimately depended on civic duty, on having an engaged and informed citizenry that embraced the call to public service. This claim would be central to his historic inaugural address of 1961; it’s remarkable to see it articulated already here, at the very outset of his political career, in speeches he wrote to a significant extent by himself. To the audience at Choate he added a corollary, one that would likewise become a bedrock principle in the years to come: namely, that effective politics must involve mutual give-and-take by people acting in good faith. “In America, politics are regarded with great contempt; and politicians themselves are looked down upon because of their free and easy compromises. It is well for us to understand that politicians are dealing with human beings, with all their varied ambitions, desires, and backgrounds; and many of these compromises cannot be avoided.”42
V
The nitty-gritty politicking did not cease with the victory in the primary, but it was cut back dramatically, victory in November being more or less a foregone conclusion. The campaign offices in the district stayed open but with reduced hours, and most of the volunteers went back to their former lives.
Never one to stint on R&R, Jack took advantage of the summer lull to spend time in Hyannis Port and New York City, and to make another sojourn out west to Hollywood. On the set of the film Dragonwyck, he met screen star Gene Tierney, riding high from her Oscar-nominated role in Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and her title role in Laura (1944). Tierney fell hard for the congressional candidate, who was three years her senior. She recalled how, on the set, “I turned and found myself staring into the most perfect blue eyes I had ever seen on a man….He smiled at me. My reaction was right out of the ladies’ romance novel. Literally, my heart skipped….A coy thought flashed through my mind: I was glad I had worn a lavender gown for my scene that day. Lavender was my best color.” The young Kennedy was thin, she went on, and “had the kind of bantering, unforced Irish charm that women so often find fatal. He asked questions about my work, the kind that revealed how well he already knew the subject.”43
Jack also proved a sympathetic listener as Tierney described the trauma of institutionalizing her mentally disabled daughter, Daria. “He told me about his sister Rosemary, who had been born retarded, and how his family had loved and protected her. The subject was awkward for him. The Kennedys did not survive by dwelling on their imperfections. ‘Gene,’ he said, after a silence had passed between us, ‘in any large family you can always find something wrong with somebody.’ ”44
So enamored did Tierney become of Jack that she supposedly spurned the advances of Hollywood leading man Tyrone Power. But though she saw Jack in Hollywo
od and later in New York and on the Cape (“Jack met me at the station, wearing patched blue jeans. I thought he looked like Tom Sawyer”), the affair did not last. Jack was not about to commit to any divorcée or Hollywood starlet, not with his political career just getting launched.45 That summer the gossip pages in L.A. also linked him with Peggy Cummins, an aspiring Irish actress, but, according to Chuck Spalding’s wife, Betty, “it wasn’t a serious thing. She was just a girl to date.” And he lost interest, Spalding added, when Cummins (“a nice girl”) refused to go to bed with him.46
Betty Spalding found it interesting that Jack, though “amusing and bright and fascinating to listen to” and “marvelous company,” was no chivalrous gentleman, in the sense of opening doors for women or standing up when an older woman entered a room. “He was nice to people, but heedless of people, heedless about his clothes, and heedless about money. He never had any money with him.” Gene Tierney also remarked on this capricious aspect of Jack’s character: “I am not sure I can explain the nature of Jack’s charm, but he took life as it came. He never worried about making an impression. He made you feel very secure….He was good with people in a way that went beyond politics, thoughtful in more than a material way. Gifts and flowers were not his style. He gave you his time, his interest.”47
JFK Page 53