Although this fixation on mortality and his own premature death might have made Kennedy self-pitying and sullen, he was nothing of the kind. If anything, associates noted, his belief that his days were numbered, and that he had to live each one to the fullest, made him more convivial and expressive. Like Raymond Asquith and the other gallant World War I figures he so admired, he made a point of smiling at fate. In Chuck Spalding’s recollection, “There was something about time—special for him, obviously, because he always heard the footsteps, but also special for you when you were with him. So whenever he was in a situation, he tried to burn bright; he tried to wring as much out of things as he could. After a while he didn’t have to try. He had something nobody else did. It was just a heightened sense of being; there’s no other way to describe it.”46
V
Jack’s knowledge that only he remained of the charmed Kennedy trio, combined with his sense that his own days might be numbered, lent urgency to his political ambitions. If he had always considered the House of Representatives as but a stepping-stone to bigger and better things, this conviction grew stronger in the wake of the Addison’s diagnosis and Kick’s death. He became more restless on the job and ramped up his speaking schedule around Massachusetts, eagerly accepting invitations from any organization that would have him—in places like Worcester, Springfield, Chicopee, Fall River, and Holyoke. Aides later spoke nostalgically of dingy, poorly lit hotels, of wolfing down hamburgers and milkshakes on the go, of seeing the congressman shaving in the men’s room of a bowling alley between events. The pattern, Dave Powers recalled, was usually the same: “Jack would try to get up here every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to speak. Frank Morrissey or Bob Morey and I would go around with him. I remember he’d fly up on Friday. Then on Sunday he’d take a train, The Federal, a sleeper that left South Station at eleven at night. He’d get a bedroom. When the train got to Washington, it just sat in the station and they’d let the passengers sleep in until nine or ten o’clock. Then he’d get up and go back to work on the Hill.”47
The Boston press took notice of his frequent trips home, speculating about a possible Kennedy run for the Senate that fall against the craggy-faced, blue-blooded Republican incumbent Leverett Saltonstall, a descendant of Puritans and tenth-generation Harvard man. The notion had appeal, but Jack’s team worried it was too soon, opening him up to charges that he lacked sufficient experience, that he was driven by self-serving ambition rather than a commitment to public service. Saltonstall, moreover, would be no pushover, especially in a presidential election year in which the Democrat in the White House looked extremely vulnerable and the Republicans looked poised to add to their majorities in Congress. Jack also liked and admired Saltonstall personally and didn’t relish taking him on.
Another option was to challenge Governor Robert F. Bradford, who was up for reelection in 1948 and rumored to be in ill health. (It would be revealed that he had Parkinson’s.) Billy Sutton, for one, thought this race winnable for Jack, and that it would give him four years to build a statewide political machine before challenging Henry Cabot Lodge for the state’s other U.S. Senate seat in 1952.48 But this option, too, had drawbacks, not least that Jack would face serious rivals in the primary election, including potentially Maurice Tobin or Paul A. Dever, both popular vote-getters with political machines of their own. The Kennedy team opted to take a wait-and-see attitude while planning in the meantime to keep Jack where he was, in the House of Representatives. In 1948 he faced no opposition in either the primary or the general election, so victory was assured.
As always, Kennedy made sure to keep abreast of issues that were resonating most strongly among Massachusetts voters: veterans’ housing, labor rights, education, rent control, taxes, and healthcare. He also made a determined move in a new policy direction: civil rights. This effort was, to a degree, unexpected—though in personal terms Kennedy was largely free of racial prejudice, he’d shown little interest in the plight of African Americans. Except for the family’s chauffeurs, domestics, and valets, he hadn’t interacted much with blacks in Bronxville or Hyannis Port or Palm Beach, nor did he encounter many of them during his student days at Choate or Harvard. Apart from his naval stint in Charleston, South Carolina, in early 1942, he had spent little time in the Deep South. And though his wartime experience in the Pacific exposed him for the first time to Americans from many walks of life, few of them were African American. Racial segregation was enforced in the military, nearly as strictly as in the Jim Crow South. Black sailors serving alongside Kennedy in the South Pacific were usually mess attendants or cooks. There were no black crewmen on the PT boats.49
Still, many black Bostonians were struck, upon meeting the congressman, by his courtesy and his easy informality. “Northern pols were normally stand-offish,” said Harold Vaughan, a Boston lawyer who got to know Jack in 1948. “But Kennedy would just walk into a beauty salon in a black neighborhood, go right up to the woman below the hairdryer and say: ‘Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy.’ ” That same year, when a memorial was unveiled in Cambridge honoring two African American war heroes, Kennedy delivered a moving speech at the dedication ceremony. In Washington, he fought for new civil rights legislation. Notably, he lent firm support to bills calling for the abolition of the poll tax and a ban on lynching, and he publicly lauded the efforts of Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee, which had worked to prevent discrimination against African Americans in defense and government jobs. In 1948, Kennedy backed efforts to strengthen the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, and opposed funding for the Registered College Plan, which financed segregated educational institutions.50
On the District of Columbia Committee, meanwhile, Kennedy advocated for the city’s black residents, who, almost a century after the Civil War, lived each day with the burden of segregation. In many Washington restaurants, African Americans were denied service altogether, or restricted to the counter (where they often had to stand). If they boarded a southbound train at Union Station, they had to sit in “colored only” cars. As elsewhere in the country, movie theaters in the city excluded African Americans altogether or confined them to seats in the balcony. Swimming pools were segregated, and most downtown hotels would not rent rooms to blacks. Even on Capitol Hill, unwritten rules kept black employees from the pool, from the barbershop, and from various cafeterias and restaurants.51
To Kennedy and other advocates of change, Washington’s racial problems owed much to the fact that the city had no mayor or local council but was run by three commissioners, who in turn took orders from two congressional committees—one in the House (on which Kennedy served) and one in the Senate. Segregationists dominated the House committee in particular, but Kennedy was undaunted. He championed home rule for the city, arguing that its residents, a majority of whom were black, deserved a voice in their own affairs. The effort came to naught, but Kennedy won praise from liberal colleagues and black leaders for his work.52
He also came up short in a campaign to block a new 3 percent city sales tax, which he maintained would unfairly target African Americans. In a House speech on June 8, 1948, Kennedy used charts and diagrams to assert that the new tax “would put the main burden on the people who cannot afford to pay it.” When the issue reemerged the following year, with the tax now in place, Kennedy again argued in opposition, noting that the tax placed “the major burden on the people in the lowest income groups.” If the District needed more revenue, the affluent should carry the burden, he said. Ultimately, the House voted 177 to 176 to retain the tax, but Kennedy’s advocacy did not go unnoticed. “The congressman who did the most to save the District from the burden of a sales tax is a tousle-haired bachelor named ‘Jack,’ ” read an admiring profile in The Washington Daily News. “He looks like the Saturday Evening Post’s idea of the All-American Boy, and his vote-getting appeal to New England’s womenfolk must be terrific. He is also something of a political curi
osity…born with a silver soup ladle in his mouth, but with the welfare of the humble in his heart.”53
VI
All the while, Kennedy maintained his passionate interest in foreign policy and international affairs. In late June 1948, five weeks after Kick’s funeral, he traveled to Europe, ostensibly on behalf of the House Education and Labor Committee to gather information on labor issues. His travel companion was his Harvard roommate Torbert Macdonald, who now worked for the National Labor Relations Board. For months, Cold War tensions had been ratcheting up, especially over the status of Germany. Earlier in June, U.S., British, and French officials resolved to merge their German zones, including their three sectors of Berlin, in order to better integrate West Germany into the Western European economy. On June 24, the same day Jack and Torby departed by sea for England, Stalin, fearing a resurgent Germany joined to the American Cold War camp, severed Western road and rail access to the jointly occupied city of Berlin, located well inside the Soviet zone. He hoped that West Berliners, starved of resources, would be compelled by economic necessity to reject their alliance with the United States and throw their lot in with East Germany and the USSR. It was a bold move, and it put the Western powers in the position of either giving in or attempting to overcome the blockade—a step that could lead to a war in which they would be drastically outmanned.
Harry Truman, after consulting with his advisers and with the British government, responded with a bold action of his own: he ordered a massive airlift of food, fuel, and other supplies to West Berlin, in order to forestall an economic collapse that would have driven residents into the arms of the Soviets. Stalin now faced the choice of shooting down the supply planes, an act that would surely trigger U.S. retaliation, or letting the airlift continue and hoping it would be insufficient. He opted for the latter course, but the situation remained tense as Kennedy arrived in London on June 29 and then proceeded from there to Paris.
He was determined to see the Berlin situation up close. He had no official reason for going, but then again, that had been equally true when he visited in the summer of 1939, on the eve of war, and when he returned in 1945, just as the struggle was ending. Whereas a decade before Jack had used his father’s connections to gain entrée to places where history was being made, this time he used his status as a U.S. congressman to arrange meetings with General Lucius Clay, who led the American occupying command in the city, and General Curtis LeMay, commander of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe and the head of operations for the airlift.54 Kennedy voiced full support for Truman’s airlift decision and his overall firmness in the showdown with the Soviets. Truman’s resolute action on Berlin stood in sharp contrast to Chamberlain’s appeasement at Munich in 1938, Jack believed, and it pleased him to see Winston Churchill—out of power for three years but slowly edging his way back to the center of things—make the same argument. It further pleased him that the first volume of Churchill’s grand narrative history of the Second World War, covering the origins of the struggle and published to great fanfare that summer, interpreted the development of British appeasement in the 1930s in ways broadly consistent with his own take in Why England Slept.55
Churchill remained a giant figure for him, a kind of intellectual and political lodestar on account of his historical sensibility and his authorial and oratorical acclaim, and he thrilled at the thought that the great man might yet return to power. Jack followed with keen interest the Conservative Party’s annual conference in Wales in October 1948, devouring newspaper reports and taking mental and written notes. Churchill’s speech to the gathering, a stem-winder heavy on fulminations against the menacing Soviet threat, resonated with him. “We support the foreign policy of His Majesty’s Government in taking a firm stand against the encroachments and aggressions of Soviet Russia, and in not being bullied, bulldozed, or blackmailed out of Berlin, whatever the consequences may be,” Churchill thundered. “Nothing stands between Europe today and complete subjugation to Communist tyranny but the atomic bomb in American possession.” He closed with a passage from Luke 23:31, in which Christ, shortly before his crucifixion, asks metaphorically, “If they do this when the wood is green, what will they do when it is dry?” Jack underlined the passage and would later use it in his own speeches.56
Ultimately, Truman would see his decision on the airlift vindicated. An unusually mild winter and a remarkably efficient aerial operation delivered a total of 2.3 million tons of food, medicine, and fuel. On a single day, April 16, 1949, some fourteen hundred aircraft brought in close to thirteen thousand tons within twenty-four hours—an average of one plane touching down every minute. Stalin, increasingly frustrated, dangled better rations before any West Berliner who registered with Communist authorities, but only a small minority took him up on it. In May 1949, he in effect gave up, lifting the blockade and authorizing negotiations with the Western governments about formalizing the status of Berlin.57
The successful airlift helped to salvage Truman’s political career: he surprised experts in November 1948 by narrowly beating Republican Thomas E. Dewey in the presidential election. Safely returned to office, Truman took the momentous step of formalizing what was already in essence a military alliance between the United States, Canada, and the countries of Western Europe. In April 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came into being, as twelve nations signed a mutual defense pact. An attack on any one of them would be viewed as an attack on all, the members agreed. Skeptics on Capitol Hill, led by the GOP’s Robert Taft, charged that NATO would only heighten the risk of general war, while others wondered if the alliance met a military threat that didn’t exist. U.S. officials conceded that a Soviet armed attack on Western Europe was unlikely, but they maintained that, should the Kremlin ever make threatening moves westward, NATO would constitute a “tripwire,” bringing the full weight of American power to bear on the USSR. The Truman team also hoped that NATO would keep Western Europeans from shifting toward Communism or neutralism in the Cold War. On July 21, the Senate ratified the treaty by a vote of 82 to 13.58
By then, Jack Kennedy was well into his second term in Congress. At age thirty-two, he continued to give the sense of a man in a hurry, looking for the next thing, hungry to make more of an impact. “We’re just worms,” he said of being a congressman. “Nobody pays much attention to us nationally.”59 His attendance record on the Hill improved, but only marginally, and he darted off from the capital most weekends, often to New York City and the Waldorf or the St. Regis and usually in the company of one woman or another. Yet Kennedy managed to keep his name before Massachusetts voters with well-timed policy pronouncements and legislative interventions. In 1949 the House at last approved a major housing bill of the type he had sought since he arrived on Capitol Hill; he declared it a triumph, even as he lamented that the delay had caused needless suffering, especially among veterans. He also exploited his experience in foreign affairs and military policy to get himself invited as an expert witness to Senate hearings on the defense structures of European allies. Recognizing that staunch anti-Communism was a surefire winner in U.S. political discourse in 1949, he talked up the threat, warning against domestic subversion and Soviet overseas adventurism.
More and more, Kennedy criticized the Truman administration for what he saw as its insufficiently vigilant foreign policy. When, in September 1949, the White House announced that a specially equipped U.S. weather plane had detected radioactivity in Soviet airspace above Siberia—a clear sign that the USSR had tested its own atomic bomb, thereby ending America’s monopoly—Jack criticized the president for implementing inadequate civil defense measures. On China he was even tougher, joining with the “China lobby” (the group of journalists, business leaders, and right-wing lawmakers who had become arch defenders of Chiang Kai-shek) to attack the White House for “allowing” Communist forces under Mao Zedong to make advance after advance against Chiang’s Nationalists in that nation’s long-running civil war. On Januar
y 25, 1949, after news arrived that the Nationalists had begun withdrawing from Beijing, Jack said on the floor of the House that “the responsibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State.”60
Five days later he returned to the theme in a speech in Salem, Massachusetts:
Our relationship with China since the end of the Second World War has been a tragic one, and it is of the utmost importance that we search out and spotlight those who bear the responsibility for our present predicament….Our policy in China has reaped the whirlwind. The continued insistence that aid would not be forthcoming unless a coalition government with the Communists was formed was a crippling blow to the national government. So concerned were our diplomats and their advisors…with the imperfections of the diplomatic system in China after 20 years of war, and the tales of corruption in high places, they lost sight of the tremendous stake in a non-Communist China. This is the tragic story of China whose freedom we once sought to preserve.61
When Mao completed his victory that autumn, compelling Chiang’s government to flee in humiliating fashion to the offshore island of Taiwan (then known as Formosa), Kennedy again pinned responsibility for the disaster on U.S. policy, even as he acknowledged Chiang’s weaknesses and missteps.
The “twin shocks” of 1949—the Soviet A-bomb and Mao’s victory in China—would continue to reverberate in world politics and U.S. domestic politics for years to come. Jack Kennedy anticipated as much, and although he worried about the implications for American security, he also saw advantages for himself. This was his turf, where he could stand out among his congressional peers, where he could make his mark, if not right away, then in due course, when he had a bigger platform. His fellow House freshmen in the Eightieth Congress, Richard Nixon and George Smathers, could contest (and win) Senate races already in 1950, but for Kennedy that opportunity was not available. He had to wait, confident in the expectation that his patience would be rewarded. In the meantime, he would bide his time and continue to do the work expected of him on behalf of the Eleventh District in Massachusetts.
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