JFK

by Fredrik Logevall

  The final tally told the tale: Kennedy 1,211,984 (51.35 percent), Lodge, 1,141,247 (48.35 percent). Seventy-one thousand votes separated them, about the same number that attended the Kennedy teas. The challenger also racked up large majorities in Boston’s black wards. In the governor’s race, Dever lost narrowly to Herter, while in the presidential contest Eisenhower thumped Stevenson both nationally and in Massachusetts. (Ominously for Democrats, Eisenhower won three southern states that Republicans had claimed only once since Reconstruction: Texas, Florida, and Virginia.) The GOP also took control of both houses of Congress. On a grim night for Democrats nationally, one that brought their party’s twenty-year reign to a crashing end, Jack Kennedy stood out as a beacon of light.78

  How had he done it? In such a close race, any number of things could be called decisive—Lodge’s late start; the Taft forces’ lack of assistance to him; the Ambassador’s money; the teas; the Coffee with the Kennedys programs; the Kennedy “ground game” (to use the later phrase) utilizing thousands of volunteers—but surely it mattered greatly that the candidate waged a determined “pre-campaign campaign,” working over a period of years to build up his name recognition throughout the state and visiting every one of its 351 towns (as well as 175 of its factories and firms). According to Kenny O’Donnell, the small communities were indeed the key, as Kennedy consistently ran four or five or six percentage points ahead of Stevenson and Dever there. “And the margin of victory really came right there. The little communities where we had spent all this time, and all this work and met personally all these people, was paying off right at this moment. He was resisting the Eisenhower tide throughout the rest of the Commonwealth.” Even in the senator’s own stomping grounds, Essex County, Kennedy fought him to a draw.79

  Then there was Robert Kennedy, who came on board at a critical moment and proved his worth in spades. The brothers were different men—different in age, in disposition, in outlook. Jack was more secure, more independent; Bobby was tougher, more committed to the family. Jack saw the gray areas of life, partly on account of his experience in war; Bobby thought in absolutes, in the dualism of light and dark. Jack was smoother, calmer, more given to understatement; Bobby, more intense and aggressive—he had the louder bark of the two. Jack had gotten on better with their father, Bobby with their mother, and the result was, as so often, contradictory. “Bobby was more like his father,” said Justice William O. Douglas, who interacted a good deal with the brothers in this period, “and Jack was more like his mother….Bobby was more direct, dynamic, energizing; Jack was more thoughtful, more scholarly, more reflective.” Yet the bond between them, fully evident on their grand overseas journey the previous year, was unmistakable, and in the campaign they were beautifully in sync, as friends and campaign workers perceived from day one. Jack understood the vital importance of having a political partner on whom he could count completely, 100 percent of the time, for loyalty, hard work, and results; he got one in his brother.80

  “The Kennedy campaign in 1952 was the most nearly perfect political campaign I’ve ever seen,” recalled Larry O’Brien, who saw more than a few. “It was a model campaign because it had to be. Jack Kennedy was the only man in Massachusetts who had the remotest chance of beating Henry Cabot Lodge that year and Kennedy couldn’t have won without an exceptional political effort.”81 It wasn’t just about the effort, of course, as O’Brien well knew—the candidate mattered, too. People who heard Kennedy speak, who took in the debates or the Coffee with the Kennedys specials, who knew of his wartime service and his famous family, were drawn to him; that’s clear from countless testimonials at the time and later, and from the crush of volunteers who descended on Kilby Street every day, asking how they could help. As reporter Paul Healy pointed out in The Saturday Evening Post a few months after the election, Lodge was skillful and respected, with an “impeccable Massachusetts name and an excellent combat war record,” but Kennedy had these things plus an additional quality: “He made people want to do something for him.” On the campaign trail, every woman wanted “either to mother him or marry him,” Healy wrote. One Boston woman, who was deemed illogical for voting for both Eisenhower and Kennedy, replied, “Ah, now, how could I vote against that nice lad?” A Republican observer grumbled, “What is there about Kennedy that makes every Catholic girl in Boston between eighteen and twenty-eight think it’s a holy crusade to get him elected?”82

  Healy hinted at something else that may have played to Kennedy’s advantage: his natural diffidence, which saved him from appearing glib and which was deceptive, in that it hid his shrewdness and his limitless drive. Or, as O’Brien put it, “He could not be called a natural politician. He was too reserved, too private a person by nature. But he knew what he wanted and he would force himself to do whatever was necessary to achieve it.”83

  There was yet one more thing that made the Lodge-Kennedy election of 1952 extraordinary, at the time and in hindsight: the degree to which the Kennedy campaign exemplified a new kind of personalized politics, carefully crafted to enhance the candidate’s image, relying on massive and varied uses of media, including television, and eschewing close collaboration with other campaigns (as Paul Dever learned to his frustration). Sophisticated advertising, targeting particular audiences at particular times, was a prime feature, as was internal polling conducted by professionals. If the Kennedys were not the first to utilize these elements, they strategized about them and honed them in ways few had done before. Which took resources. Though historians often exaggerate the role of money in the 1952 Massachusetts race—total expenditures were probably no greater than those of many other Senate contests around the country that year, in part because the Democratic campaign relied so heavily on volunteer labor and had relatively few paid positions—there’s no doubt that the Kennedy team exploited the Ambassador’s riches to undertake these pioneering efforts, and over many more months than was the norm at the time. (In 1952 political veterans scoffed at the Kennedys for opening a campaign headquarters so early, six months before the election; nobody ever sneered at such a move again.)84

  The Sunday following the election, Kennedy appeared on Meet the Press, roughly a year after his much heralded debut on the show. Host Lawrence Spivak commended him on his “sensational victory,” which seemed especially astonishing in view of Eisenhower’s landslide presidential win. Spivak said the win had brought his guest to “national attention as the most important Democratic figure in New England,” and he asked him how he’d pulled it off. “I worked a lot harder in Massachusetts than did Senator Lodge,” Kennedy replied. “He was working for General Eisenhower and I think that he felt that would take care of his Massachusetts position.”85

  He basked in his win, as well he might. He was on his way back to Capitol Hill, but in a new role, a bigger role. Great things were in store, he sensed, and maybe not just professionally: in the hurly-burly of the campaign he had begun dating a woman he first met at a dinner party the year before, and he was sufficiently smitten to ask aide Dave Powers if he thought a twelve-year age gap between a man and a woman was too much. On the contrary, Powers had replied, his own fiancée was twelve years his junior. Powers, knowing his man, suspected Jack Kennedy had the answer to his question before he posed it.86

  *1 When asked about Rosemary, the campaign said she was a “schoolteacher in Wisconsin.” Also absent was Teddy, now twenty, who had cheated on an exam in his freshman year at Harvard and been expelled. He enrolled in the Army and spent most of his brother’s 1952 race stationed in Europe. In the fall of 1953 he applied successfully for readmission to Harvard.

  *2 Democratic Party hopes that Eisenhower might agree to be their standard-bearer were in vain: he was a Republican through and through, always more comfortable consorting with powerful businessmen than with their liberal opponents. He voted for FDR only once, in 1944, and only because the war was on. In 1948 he backed Dewey over Truman.

  *3 The campaign h
ad even drafted a speech for the Wisconsin man to deliver, stressing Lodge’s anti-Communist credentials. “Lodge has never sought publicity for himself,” read one passage, “but I want you people of Massachusetts to know whenever anything came up having to do with the communist menace, he was one man we could turn to with complete confidence who would not only say he was opposed to communism but would actually take off his coat and go to work.” (Reel 18, Henry Cabot Lodge Papers II.)

  NINETEEN

  JACKIE

  Her name was Jacqueline Lee Bouvier. He first met her in the spring of 1951, at a dinner party in Georgetown. She was a freshly minted college graduate just shy of her twenty-second birthday, he a third-term congressman who would soon turn thirty-four. Charles Bartlett, their host for the evening along with his wife, Martha, had tried to introduce them even before that, at his brother’s Long Island wedding in 1948; that effort had failed, as Kennedy left the reception early.1 This time the encounter came off. Details of the dinner are lost to history, but at the end of the evening, as they stood by Jackie’s car, the congressman asked shyly, “Shall we go somewhere for a drink?” Before she could answer, they both spotted, lurking in the back seat of the automobile, a handsome young Wall Street broker named John Husted, whom Jackie had been dating. Evidently he had come to surprise her and drive her home. Jack immediately withdrew, and that seemed the end of that.2

  The Bartletts, however, were nothing if not persistent. (They were “shameless in their matchmaking,” Jackie would recall.) Later that year, at Christmas, they concocted another meeting, this time in Palm Beach, where the Bartletts were visiting the Kennedys and where Jackie and her mother and stepfather were vacationing; if a rendezvous occurred, it was fleeting. Then, in the spring of 1952, upon learning that Jackie had broken off an engagement to Husted, they again invited her and Jack to a dinner party in their home, to take place on the evening of May 8. It would be the key date in their relationship. Jackie would subsequently say that she sensed immediately that Jack “would have a profound, perhaps disturbing” influence on her life. She also got the strong impression that “here was a man who did not want to marry.” Jackie told a friend she was frightened, envisioning heartbreak for herself, but swiftly determined that such a heartbreak would be worth it. Kennedy’s recollection was plainer: “I leaned across the asparagus and asked for a date.”3

  Kennedy family lore has it that Jack was enamored from the start. “My brother really was smitten with her right from the very beginning when he first met her at dinner,” youngest sibling Ted remarked. “Members of the family knew right away that she was very special to him, and saw the developing of their relationship. I remember her coming up to Cape Cod at that time and involving herself in the life of the family. He was fascinated by her intelligence; they read together, painted together, enjoyed good conversation together and walks together.” Lem Billings, who over the years had probably met more of Jack’s girlfriends than anyone and who became a kind of connoisseur of the relationship, said he “knew right away that Jackie was different from the other girls Jack had been dating. She was more intelligent, more literary, more substantial.”4

  Still, the two saw little of each other in the early going, on account of his all-consuming Senate race. She paid a visit or two to Hyannis Port and tagged along on a couple of his campaign events (in Fall River and Quincy), and they caught an occasional movie on his brief trips to Washington for legislative business. That was it for the six months or so after the May 8 Bartlett dinner, though they compensated with phone calls—aides recalled seeing the candidate, after a long day on the hustings, disappear into a phone booth to dial her number. “He’d call me from some oyster bar up there, with a great clinking of coins, to ask me out to the movies the following Wednesday in Washington,” Jackie said. Though she preferred French films, she catered to his preferences. “He loved Westerns and Civil War pictures. He was not the flowers-and-candy type, so every now and then he gave me a book—The Raven, which is the life of Sam Houston, and also Pilgrim’s Way, by John Buchan.” She reciprocated with books on French history or poetry.5

  With Jack’s election victory in early November, the pair rapidly made up for lost time, enough so that by mid-December the society columns could report that “rich dunkers who drop in for a dip at Joseph P. Kennedy’s Palm Beach swimming pool will be surprised if they don’t see Jacqueline Bouvier’s shapely form at poolside this winter.” There was speculation that a wedding of the dashing senator-elect and the luminous Miss Bouvier could well be in the offing.6

  One wonders if Joseph Kennedy—never shy about using his extensive press contacts to spread advantageous news—was behind these stories, which appeared suspiciously fast after the election. The Ambassador had long believed his son’s political future depended on his settling down and getting married. To remain single beyond one’s mid-thirties was to invite questions about one’s seriousness and maturity, and about one’s sexuality. Given Jack’s established reputation as a ladies’ man, it’s hard to imagine anyone believing he stayed unattached because he was homosexual, but Joe didn’t want to take any chances. More to the point, in his mind—and, it seems, his son’s as well—American voters expected their prominent politicians to have wives, to show a personal commitment to the nuclear family, to uphold, or at least appear to uphold, the traditional values of Middle America. On the stump in 1952, Jack murmured to aides that if he won the race he would seek to get married in relatively short order. Jackie Bouvier, beautiful and genteel and educated, and Catholic to boot, met the criteria. Plus Joe Kennedy approved of her.

  Jack and Jackie in Washington, D.C., during their courtship. Ethel Kennedy, Bobby’s wife, is in front.

  II

  Yet for all the political calculation that may have lurked in Jack’s mind, the evidence is powerful that he was genuinely taken with Jackie, if not quite as head-over-heels besotted as he had been with Inga Arvad a decade before. “I’ve never met anyone like her,” he told Dave Powers early on. “She’s different from any girl I know.”7 Not exuberant and noisy, like his sisters, or overtly sexy, like many of his girlfriends, Jackie was coolly reserved in a way he loved. She didn’t take herself too seriously yet was intelligent and tough, and she carried herself with assurance and elegance and refinement. She was gorgeous, too, in an enchantingly exotic way, with wide-set eyes and full lips, and she had an innate sense of style that he appreciated all the more for not having it himself (though it was probably no coincidence that, as his aides noticed, he began in the weeks after meeting Jackie to pay more attention to his appearance and his attire, to the cut of his suits and the fit of his shirts). Her sense of humor was similar to his, he thought, and she had a sense of irony that he found especially delightful. Plus she shared his love of gossip and his attraction to the Old World—her place was France, his Britain.8 Never good with foreign languages himself, it awed him that she spoke superb French and excellent Spanish, and could get by in German, too. To top it off, she shared his interest in books. “Jack appreciated her,” Chuck Spalding later said. “He really brightened when she appeared. You could see it in his eyes. He’d follow her around the room watching to see what she’d do next. Jackie interested him, which wasn’t true of many women.”9

  For her part, Jackie loved Jack’s looks and, even more, his quick wit and keen intelligence, his sense of the absurd, his appreciation for history and the written word. It impressed her that someone so young could write a well-received book about the road to war in Europe, and her opinion rose further after Jack presented her with an inscribed copy of Why England Slept—she gobbled it up right away, then read it again. His emotional reserve, which might have turned off another woman, seems for Jackie to have been a source of comfort. She herself could be remote, and she might have been, as one biographer has suggested, “put off rather than swept away by an ardent, articulate lover who offered too much too enthusiastically and therefore deserved or demanded the
same in return.”10 Though she didn’t share Jack’s interest in politics, she appreciated his willingness to poke fun at the hypocrisies and pretensions that were so much a part of his chosen profession, his skill at deflating the pomposities of the moment.

  His innate curiosity captivated her. “The luckiest thing I used to think about him,” she remarked later, “was whatever you were interested in, Jack got interested in….When I was reading all this eighteenth century, he’d snatch a book from me and read and know all of Louis XV’s mistresses before I would.” People fascinated him, and he had an appreciation for excellence in human endeavor—for virtuosity in performance, whatever the field—that Jackie admired and shared. At dinner parties, she said, Jack asked lots of questions, unlike the other politicians present, who would generally talk only about themselves.11

  Then again, it’s possible Jackie never would have given her suitor a second look if it hadn’t been for another element in the equation: his wealth. Even though she had grown up in relative privilege in New York—in a Park Avenue duplex and an East Hampton summer home—money was often tight in the Bouvier household. Even after her mother’s second marriage dramatically improved her financial position, Jackie was acutely conscious of the fact that she had no wealth of her own. Her mother reinforced this feeling. “He doesn’t have real money,” Janet Bouvier would sniff about this or that potential beau for Jackie, including John Husted. She could not say the same thing about Jack Kennedy. “Jack was exciting, there was that raw sexuality of his,” said reporter Nancy Dickerson, who dated him on occasion. “But you’ve got to remember that at the time nobody was thinking of him as presidential material. As handsome and attractive as he was, there were plenty of other attractive, powerful men in Washington. There just weren’t any with as much money as Jack.”12