The invasion caught Washington by surprise, but Truman responded rapidly. He deployed U.S. forces to South Korea to repel the invasion, and got the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution condemning the North’s attack and summoning member states to send their own troops. (The Soviet representative was unable to veto the resolution because the Soviets were boycotting the UN in protest of its refusal to grant membership to the People’s Republic of China.) In this way the defense of South Korea became a UN operation, albeit one led and dominated by the United States. Truman called the military effort a “police action,” which allowed him to avoid going to Congress for a declaration of war. Following a brilliant amphibious landing at Inchon, on the west coast of Korea, more than a hundred miles behind North Korean lines, UN forces under General Douglas MacArthur reversed the tide of battle in the late summer and proceeded to march north, beyond the original demarcation line. In so doing, MacArthur went beyond the UN directive, which authorized only the defense of South Korea, but Truman gave his commander the go-ahead; the president sensed an opportunity to score a complete victory and rebut GOP charges that he had “lost China” the previous year. Onward MacArthur’s units drove, toward the Yalu River and the Chinese frontier, until Chinese troops suddenly attacked in massive force in November, driving UN and South Korean forces southward once again. Gradually, a stalemate set in near the original demarcation line at the thirty-eighth parallel.
As the fighting in Korea ramped up, so did McCarthy’s rhetorical blasts. With U.S. troops being shot at by North Korean and Chinese Communists, few observers in or out of government were brave enough to condemn him. Few registered any objection when he attributed the loss of China and the failure to win a swift victory in Korea to the “pretty boys” and “homos” in the State Department, “with their silver spoons in their mouths.” Many GOP lawmakers indeed welcomed his crusade, even if they privately thought it extreme, because he targeted almost solely Democrats and liberals and because they could see that his portrayal of these individuals as privileged and soft elites hit home with a lot of voters in Middle America. That year McCarthy received hundreds of invitations to speak on behalf of Republican candidates, more than all of his Senate colleagues combined.22
The rare colleague who tried to take him on did so at personal peril. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a freshman Republican from Maine and a moderate, learned this firsthand in early June 1950 when she condemned McCarthy’s methods in a speech titled “The Declaration of Conscience.” The American people “are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists’ by their opponents,” Smith proclaimed. “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America.”23 McCarthy hit back hard, mocking her and the Senate co-sponsors of her declaration as “Snow White and the Six Dwarves.” Millard Tydings, the conservative Maryland Democrat who had publicly opposed McCarthy after his subcommittee found that McCarthy’s first charges against the State Department were bogus, got labeled an “egg-sucking liberal” and a “Commiecrat.” Soon all the co-sponsors except Wayne Morse, an iconoclastic Republican from Oregon (he would later become an independent, and still later a Democrat), drifted away from Smith, and she herself eventually beat a quiet retreat. Tydings lost his bid for reelection that fall, after McCarthy loyalists smeared him by distributing a composite image depicting him as an ally of Earl Browder, leader of the American Communist Party.24
John F. Kennedy was not one of the six dwarves. Quite the contrary, in 1950 he offered his own criticisms of Truman’s and Acheson’s handling of the Chinese Civil War, and his own gripes that the administration had been insufficiently vigilant in combating espionage. He thought Hiss guilty as charged and believed that Truman’s fiscal prudence undermined military preparedness. Kennedy also voiced reservations about Truman’s decision to commit combat units to Korea—he feared that U.S troops were being spread too thin, threatening the nation’s ability to thwart Communist expansion in other, more vital areas, especially in Europe, where, he pointed out, the Red Army had eighty divisions to NATO’s twelve. When American forces suffered a string of early defeats in Korea, Kennedy saw it as proof of “the inadequate state of our defense preparations,” and he advocated raising taxes to pay for the war and the broader military buildup. That fall, in a seminar at the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration (later to be renamed the John F. Kennedy School of Government), he offered candid observations about U.S. foreign policy and the men behind it. He was critical of the leadership of Dean Acheson, he told the students, and said President Truman had been mistaken in vetoing the McCarran Act, which mandated the registration of Communists and Communist-front organizations and provided for their internment in the event of a national emergency. (Congress overrode the veto almost immediately.)25
More than that, Kennedy knew Joe McCarthy and got on well with him. He was a fellow Irish Catholic who, like Jack, had served in the South Pacific during the war (they may have first met in the Solomons) and who had come around for dinners at the Georgetown home in 1947, when both men were new on Capitol Hill.*2 Jack got a kick out of McCarthy’s affability and energy on these evenings, and Eunice, too, welcomed his presence. McCarthy’s penchant for profanity didn’t bother Jack; he himself could curse like the sailor he had once been. In due course McCarthy would squire both Eunice and on occasion her sister Patricia to evening events in Washington and Boston, and would visit the Kennedys in Hyannis Port. He attended Robert Kennedy’s wedding to Ethel Skakel in Greenwich, Connecticut, in June 1950. At Eunice’s birthday party on the Cape the following month, the Kennedy siblings “gave [McCarthy] the boat treatment, i.e. throwing him out of the boat, and then Eunice, in her usual girlish glee pushed him under,” Rose reported in a letter to the newlyweds. “To everyone’s concern and astonishment, the senator came up with a ghastly look on his face, puffing and paddling. The wonder of it all was that he did not drown on the spot because, you see, coming from Wisconsin, he had never learned to swim.” On another Hyannis Port visit, McCarthy played shortstop for Team Kennedy in a softball game on the family lawn against a squad of neighbors, promptly committed four errors, and was retired to the porch. (Jack, too, ended up on the porch early in the game, his back problem flaring up.)26
Joseph P. Kennedy in particular took a shine to McCarthy, admiring the very things others found so unpleasant: the brashness, the no-holds-barred attacks on the political establishment, the contempt for genteel manners and diplomacy. He himself could be said to possess these attributes, albeit to a milder degree. The Ambassador also relished McCarthy’s rowdy amiability whenever they were together, and he shared his disdain for left-wingers and his love of gossip. “In case there’s any question in your mind,” Kennedy told an interviewer years later, in 1961, “I liked Joe McCarthy. I always liked him. I would see him when I went down to Washington, and when he was visiting Palm Beach he’d come around to my house for a drink. I invited him to Cape Cod.” On occasion the Ambassador even called McCarthy to offer advice on political tactics and strategy. At no point, it seems, did he indicate concern for the victims of the senator’s attacks.27
McCarthyite tactics were everywhere in the midterm elections in 1950. In Florida, George Smathers defeated his mentor, Senator Claude Pepper, in an ugly, bruising, red-baiting primary before coasting to victory in the general election. “Joe [Stalin] likes him and he likes Joe,” Smathers said of Pepper. In the Senate race in California, Richard Nixon, who had studied Smathers’s tactics, hammered his opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, as a fellow traveler who was hopelessly leftist. (She was “pink right down to her underwear,” he said, sexism as much a part of his tactics as red-baiting.) Nixon won handily. In Illinois, Republican Everett Dirksen beat Democratic incumbent senator Scott Lucas, vowing to clean house on Communists and their supporters. And in New York, in a losing race for the Senate, John Foster Dulles said of his opponent, Herbert Lehman, “I kn
ow he is no Communist, but I also know that the Communists are in his corner and that he and not I will get the 500,000 Communist votes that last year went to Henry Wallace in this state.”28
III
Jack Kennedy studied the national election results closely that fall as he cruised to another victory in the Eleventh District.29 More and more, speculation in the state turned to his plans for 1952, and in particular whether he would seek statewide office. His own thoughts had long since gone in that direction—three terms in the House would be quite enough, thank you—and he seemed to draw additional inspiration from the public response to two tragedies in the state in 1950. On February 11, Mary Curley, the daughter of ex-mayor James Michael Curley—who had already lost his wife and five of his nine children—collapsed and died of a cerebral hemorrhage while speaking on the telephone. That evening, in the same room and at the same phone, her brother Leo collapsed and succumbed in the same way. The double calamity brought a huge outpouring of people to the mayor’s home to pay their respects—some fifty thousand, according to press accounts, forming long lines in the freezing temperatures. One of them was Congressman John F. Kennedy, who, according to aide Dave Powers, was deeply moved by the experience, and by the sight of the ashen-faced Curley shaking hands with people and thanking them as they filed past the biers.30
Then, on October 2, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald died in Boston, at age eighty-seven. He had been ailing for months with a chronic circulatory problem, but his passing was nonetheless a blow to Jack. The two had always been close, ever since little Jack first accompanied his grandfather on his political rounds or to Fenway Park for a Red Sox game. They shared an amiable temperament, a quick wit, a romantic sense of history, a relish for politics, and a superhuman capacity for hard work. Jack indeed resembled his maternal grandfather in personality more than he did either of his parents, even as he became a different kind of politician—reticent, patrician, and urbane, words no one ever used to describe Honey Fitz. Rose, in Paris on vacation when her father died, did not make it back in time for the funeral, at which thirty-five hundred mourners jammed the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. Jack represented the family, along with Eunice, Pat, Jean, and Teddy.31 President Truman sent his sympathies, and the pallbearers included both of the state’s senators, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and Leverett Saltonstall; two future U.S. Speakers of the House, John McCormack and Tip O’Neill (then Speaker of the state legislature); and Mayor Curley. As Honey Fitz was carried to his final rest, from the cathedral to St. Joseph Cemetery, in West Roxbury, thousands gathered along the streets, some singing “Sweet Adeline” as the procession passed.
“All his life he had loved his city of Boston,” Jack later said of his grandfather, “and now Boston was returning that love.” From all walks of life they came, “the great, the near great, and the humble.” This outpouring of affection, first for Curley in his personal loss and then for Honey Fitz, left a deep impression on him, made him more inclined to seek higher office. In Lem Billings’s recollection, “There was something in the pageantry and the richness of those two occasions that really got to Jack. It made him realize the extraordinary impact a politician can have on the emotions of ordinary people, an impact often forgotten in the corridors of Capitol Hill.”32 Moreover, the immediacy of the public’s generosity in the face of back-to-back tragedies—their coming together as a community—inclined him to leave the House (which felt removed, desiccated) and seek an office that would serve a broader population than the precicints of his congressional district.
The path to a statewide run was not yet clear, however, as Jack waited for incumbent governor Paul Dever to make up his mind. If Dever opted to take on the widely respected Lodge in the Senate race, Jack would likely seek the governorship; if he didn’t, Jack would be free to challenge Lodge. The latter was his preference from the start—running the State House, he said, meant little more than “deciding on sewer contracts,” and offered scant chance to expound on the pressing issues in world affairs.33 There was always the option of going full tilt for the Senate and, if necessary, taking on Dever in the primary, but such a strategy carried immense risks, especially given Dever’s proven skills as a vote-getter and the inherent advantages he would bring to the primary race as a sitting governor.34
So the Kennedy team watched and waited, in the meantime exposing Jack to as many voters as possible across the state through an ambitious speaking schedule and manifold media appearances. The pattern he had tried out intermittently in previous months, that of spending Thursday through Sunday at home in Massachusetts, appearing before any audience that would have him—Moose clubs, Elks, Shriners, Kiwanis, Rotarians, VFWs, volunteer fire departments, church groups—became regularized; over the course of 1951, he spoke in nearly seventy communities, both large and small, often covering five or six hundred miles in a weekend. Typically in these addresses, he would touch on the pressing policy issues of the moment, but he also ranged broadly, urging his audience to be informed, to register to vote, to consider entering public service.
That summer, meanwhile, two aides, Joe DeGuglielmo and Tony Galluccio, made a multi-week canvassing trip through the state to test Kennedy’s favorability for both potential races. “At my suggestion Tony and I adopted a procedure that we would divide when we’d get into a town and we’d go get a shave whether we needed it or not, we’d go get a haircut, go in a restaurant, talk to waitresses and the rest,” DeGuglielmo recalled. “And what we were trying to do was evaluate the various strengths of Kennedy, Lodge, and Dever. And when we came back after two weeks, then we took a trip down around the New Bedford–Fall River area and then we took other trips around Lawrence and Lowell. And after we got through, Tony and I evolved the theory that Dever could not be reelected and Jack Kennedy would be a lead pipe cinch to knock him off as governor, that probably he could defeat Lodge, but it would be a much closer fight than the other fight.”35
Galluccio also did a lot of solo work, crisscrossing the state over a period of a year, ultimately visiting each one of its 351 cities and towns, avoiding politicians and seeking out respected local citizens—shopkeepers, teachers, lawyers, dentists—to gauge their views on a potential Kennedy candidacy. If they showed interest, Galluccio would ask if they could see themselves working for a potential campaign. Many said yes, some said maybe. He would take down names and addresses and ask if they could recommend anyone else he should contact.
Joseph Kennedy, relentless as always in promoting his son’s interests, worked to build up a statewide organization—needed for either race—and to buttonhole reporters to give Jack favorable newspaper coverage. Joe even reduced his involvement in his myriad business interests in order to involve himself more fully in the fledgling campaign. (After the war he’d moved aggressively into real estate and acquired several oil and gas ventures.) When private polls he commissioned and paid for showed that Jack had a legitimate if long-shot chance of defeating Lodge, father and son were strengthened in the conviction that this was the race they should seek. (The same polls showed that Saltonstall, not up for reelection until 1954, would be harder to beat.)
They were a curious pair, the two Kennedys: so close, so loving, so mutually respectful, yet so far apart in their views of human motivation and purpose, of diplomacy and statecraft, of America’s role in the world. With his son eyeing a run for statewide office, one might have thought Joe Kennedy would seek to avoid public controversy, but one would be wrong. In December 1950 he took on a starring role in an emerging “great debate” (in Life magazine’s words) that threatened to draw in Jack. Invited to give a speech before the University of Virginia Law School’s Student Legal Forum (whose president was none other than Robert F. Kennedy), Joe rejected the anodyne draft prepared by an aide—on lawyers and public service—to offer instead a robust articulation of his starkly isolationist foreign policy views. Communism was “neither monolithic nor eternal,” he told his audience, and would ultimately
fail on its own, without external pressure. Thus Washington leaders could and should withdraw from all commitments abroad and instead focus their energies on strengthening the American economy. What exactly, after all, had the billions and billions spent overseas accomplished? Precious little. Truman’s policies indeed were “suicidal” and morally wrong. It followed, Kennedy said, that the United States should stop fighting in Korea—where the Chinese troops had recently entered the fray en masse—and withdraw from there and from the rest of Asia, then do the same thing in Europe. “What business is it of ours to support French colonial policies in Indo-China or to achieve Mr. Syngman Rhee’s concepts of democracy in Korea?…We can do well to mind our business and interfere only where somebody threatens our business and our homes.”36
The Ambassador ensured that he got wide press coverage by sending out advance copies of the speech to friends in the business world. The Hearst papers were enthusiastic, publishing long excerpts and glowing editorials. Arthur Krock, as always, lathered on the praise and noted that “a bipartisan group” was coming around to Kennedy’s position. Even the venerable Walter Lippmann, in a column titled “The Isolationist Tide,” which decried Kennedy’s hardcore Fortress America stance, acknowledged that it might resonate with a public increasingly wary of Harry Truman’s globalism. When former president Herbert Hoover echoed many of Joe’s themes in a nationally broadcast address a few days later, analysts began speaking of a “Hoover-Kennedy” position on world affairs. Supporters cheered, but criticism also followed, the two men being derided as reactionaries and appeasers, as naive dupes, as Kremlin sympathizers. The New York Times seemed to relish pointing out in an editorial that the official Soviet Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, had published the full text of both speeches.37
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