Kennedy liked what he saw in the application, especially a letter of reference that praised Sorensen’s “ability to write in clear and understandable language,” and also referred to him as a “sincere liberal, but not one that always carries a chip on his shoulder.” A strong liberal voice from the nation’s heartland could be useful to have around, Kennedy surmised, as he worked to establish a more national profile. There followed two interviews, the first a five-minute encounter outside the senator’s office during which Kennedy would offer the job, of which Sorensen would write, “In that brief exchange, I was struck by this unpretentious, even ordinary man with his extraordinary background, a wealthy family, a Harvard education, and a heroic war record. He did not try to impress me with his importance; he just seemed like a good guy.”34
But Sorensen had a nagging question, one he felt compelled to raise in the second meeting: Why had the senator to this point in his career been so elliptical about McCarthy and McCarthyism? If Jack was taken aback by the forthright query, he didn’t show it, calmly responding that while he didn’t accept Joe McCarthy’s tactics or find merit in all of his charges, he was in a tough spot, in view of McCarthy’s close ties with the Kennedy family and the widespread support he enjoyed among Irish Catholic voters in Massachusetts. Good enough, Sorensen decided. He also had an offer to join the staff of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, but he knew what he would do: he would hitch his wagon to the young Democratic star from New England.35
The result would be one of the most extraordinary partnerships in modern American political history. From the start, the two men simply clicked. Kennedy liked Sorensen’s cerebral approach; even more, he liked the pragmatic streak that ran through his liberalism. The young aide’s definition of himself as someone moved less by sentimental than intellectual persuasion could have come from the senator himself; ditto Sorensen’s corollary assertion that “the liberal who is rationally committed is more reliable than the liberal who is emotionally committed.” A tireless worker willing to put aside everything to advance Kennedy’s career (including the needs of his wife and children), Sorensen became a kind of alter ego to the senator, soon superseding in influence Ted Reardon, who had been tapped to run the Senate office just as he had the House operation.36 He was that rarest of creatures: an aide who could work on the nitty-gritty of policy and also articulate the details in speeches and articles—the latter all under the senator’s name alone—with simple fluency and grace. Soon it became hard to determine who had produced what, though one can think of them as the composer (Kennedy) and the lyricist (Sorensen). They were the Rodgers and Hart of politics. At twenty-four, and without the world exposure of his boss, Sorensen had neither the political experience nor the life experience to conceive the broad themes of speeches and articles—especially when they concerned foreign policy—but he was a quick study and a brilliant mimic, uncannily adept at finding just the historical allusion Kennedy wanted to express, the almost Churchillian cadences and spare language that embodied the senator’s view of exemplary political rhetoric.37
It wasn’t mimicry alone, though. From the moment Sorensen arrived, Jack Kennedy’s speeches took on a new flavor, combining greater range and power and concision. They became more lyrical, more memorable, less burdened with data and detail. The two men quickly settled on a basic pattern, in which the senator laid out—often by dictating to a secretary—what he wanted to get across in a speech (or an article) and Sorensen produced a draft that Kennedy would then edit. Sorensen would polish some more and Kennedy would tweak yet again, often right up until he stepped behind the lectern. Frequently he would make further changes on the fly, during the actual address. (He would, in time, become an expert improviser, able to speak in full paragraphs even when departing from his text.) Long fascinated with the art of rhetoric and the secrets of superior orators, Kennedy would listen to recordings of Churchill and study the speeches of Lincoln, then talk with Sorensen about what he’d learned. He read and recommended to others a book Sorensen gave him, A Treasury of the World’s Great Speeches. Often Sorensen would plant himself in the front row during a Kennedy address, making notes on the delivery and the audience reaction, seeing what worked and what didn’t, then offer his suggestions for improvement. Kennedy never seemed put off by even tough appraisals, Sorensen noticed; he later wrote of the senator’s “calm acceptance of criticism.”38
For all the close collaboration between the two men, theirs was a purely working relationship. They didn’t socialize; they never became pals as such. Sorensen learned immediately that here, as elsewhere, his boss was a champion compartmentalizer. Always deeply loyal in his friendships—from Choate, Harvard, the Navy—Kennedy saw his staff as employees. Reardon, who had been with Kennedy long enough to know how he worked, summed up the dynamic: “Jack had the ability to have guys around him whom, personally, he didn’t give a damn about as a buddy…but he was able to get what he needed from them.” Sorensen was okay with this arrangement—or at least claimed he was. “The times we were together socially over the eleven years we worked together were few enough that I can remember each one,” he wrote near the end of his life. But “I never wanted to be JFK’s drinking buddy; I wanted to be his trusted advisor. I felt lucky to have that role.” Not for several years did Sorensen feel comfortable enough to address him as “Jack” instead of “Senator.”39
Ruthless though he could be in “getting what he needed” from his staff, the senator also had a more forgiving side. As his personal secretary he brought on forty-year-old Evelyn Lincoln, another Nebraskan. “Mrs. Lincoln,” as Jack always addressed her, was the daughter of a two-term Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Like Sorensen, she had ventured east to Washington, earning her degree at GWU and marrying Harold “Abe” Lincoln, a political scientist. Seeing in Kennedy a star in the making, she volunteered in his congressional office in 1952 (while also holding down a full-time clerical position in the office of a Georgia representative); then, after his Senate win, he hired her.
The learning curve, she soon learned, was steep. She struggled to decipher Kennedy’s “dreadful handwriting” and to cope with his restlessness and carelessness. He couldn’t sit still while dictating but would pace back and forth or swing a golf club or wander from one room to another, without ever slowing down his torrent of words. Clothing articles and briefcases would be left in hotel rooms and train stations; Lincoln, like Mary Davis before her, would call around until the wayward item was found. The senator would jot down telephone numbers on tiny scraps of paper, then not be able to find the right one when he emptied his pockets on his desk and scratched around in the pile. He would call out, “ ‘Mrs. Lincoln, what’s Tom’s number?’ More often than not, I didn’t even know who Tom was, much less where I might find his number.”40
Lincoln impressed Jack with her devotion, patience, and capacity for hard work, but he questioned whether she had the capacity to manage the important phone calls and correspondence flooding the office. He talked to Sorensen about firing her, but each day Lincoln kept showing up at her desk, and she would continue to do so for the next decade, including in the White House. Her fidelity never wavered. Kennedy took notice and became devoted to her. He later told Sorensen, “If I had said just now, ‘Mrs. Lincoln, I have cut off Jackie’s head, would you please send over a box?’ she still would have replied, ‘That’s wonderful. I’ll send it right away. Did you get your nap?’ ”41
IV
The question for the new senator was how he might make his mark. As a member of the traditionally inactive freshman class, he had few outlets for influence, and it didn’t help that he was left off the five most prestigious committees—Foreign Relations, Armed Services, Appropriations, Judiciary, and Finance. Instead he had to make do with two others: Labor and Public Welfare as well as Government Operations (the latter now under the chairmanship of one Joseph R. McCarthy). In both entities, Kennedy
would be on the lowest rung of the ladder, as the junior member of the minority party. He resolved that his first effort would be directed at formulating an economic program for Massachusetts and the broader New England region, which made sense, given that the question of who could do more for Massachusetts had been a prime point of contention between him and Lodge. Sorensen, who knew little about the subject, flew to Boston to confer with a coterie of experts, among them Seymour Harris, a Harvard economist, and Jim Landis, the lean and laconic former Harvard Law School dean who now worked full-time for Joe Kennedy and who had contributed position papers to the Senate campaign.
There soon emerged an ambitious set of more than three dozen proposals for regional economic expansion, which Jack Kennedy laid out in three carefully crafted and extremely dry speeches—each lasting more than two hours—in the spring of 1953, under the collective title “The Economic Problems of New England: A Program for Congressional Action.” He painted a picture of a region rich in history and accomplishment, now facing challenges on various fronts, not least from industries moving to southern states in search of cheaper, nonunion labor. (In the past seven years in Massachusetts alone, he noted, seventy textile mills had either closed or moved south, with the attendant loss of 28,000 jobs.) Its fisheries and forests, meanwhile, were being depleted. Kennedy called for a concerted effort to diversify and expand commercial activity throughout New England and to prevent further business relocations through tax incentives; expanded opportunities for job retraining; a higher minimum wage (from seventy-five cents to one dollar per hour); and better housing programs for the middle class. The federal government’s role in the revitalization of the region was limited but crucial—Washington, he said, had to ensure “the preservation of fair competition in an expanding economy.”42
Sorensen proved his extraordinary worth in these Senate speeches, and also in drafting, under Kennedy’s name, several articles in leading publications—which got the senator’s name before a broad reading audience. Thus, “What’s the Matter with New England?” appeared in The New York Times Magazine, and “New England and the South” followed in The Atlantic Monthly. The latter piece denied any desire on the senator’s part to initiate a regional economic war but insisted on the need for policies promoting the “stability and integrity of our entire national economy.” Competition among parts of the United States should occur in the context of a “fair struggle based on natural advantages and natural resources, not exploiting conditions and circumstances that tend to depress rather than elevate the economic welfare of the nation.”43
In foreign policy, Kennedy’s junior status gave him fewer opportunities to enter the conversation, even though the first seven months of 1953 witnessed major developments overseas. First, in March, came shocking news out of Moscow: Joseph Stalin had died. His passing brought claims from various quarters—including Britain, where Winston Churchill had returned to power—that the opportunity existed for a less confrontational relationship with the new Kremlin leadership, whatever its makeup. Dwight Eisenhower and his secretary of state, the dour and seasoned John Foster Dulles, were unmoved. They saw little to be gained, in either international or domestic political terms, from seeking a grand Cold War compromise with the Soviets. At a meeting of Western leaders late in the year, Eisenhower generated nervous smiles from the Europeans with his coarse description of the new, post-Stalin Soviet Union: Russia, he declared, was “a woman of the streets, and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath.”44
At the same time, Eisenhower and Dulles understood that “liberating” Communist-held lands was a tough assignment now that the division of Europe seemed a largely settled affair. Campaign-trail calls for an outright Cold War victory would have to be scaled back. But the two men agreed that a new policy—or at least a new name—would be needed to replace Truman’s “Containment,” which was identified in their minds and the minds of voters with Truman’s ineffectual China policy and with the stalemated struggle in Korea. They called their strategy the New Look, and it emphasized airpower and nuclear weaponry over large-scale conventional forces, in part because of Eisenhower’s desire to trim the federal budget (“more bang for the buck,” as the saying went). Spurred by the successful test of the world’s first hydrogen bomb, in November 1952, Ike oversaw a massive stockpiling of nuclear weapons—from twelve hundred at the start of his presidency to 22,229 at the end.45
Stalin’s death had another important effect in world affairs: it breathed life into the stalled Korean War negotiations, leading to an armistice agreement in July 1953. The border between North and South was established near the thirty-eighth parallel, the prewar boundary, and a demilitarized zone was created between the two halves. Three years of bloody fighting came to an end. American casualties totaled 54,246 dead and 103,284 wounded. Close to five million Asians perished in the war—two million North Korean civilians and half a million soldiers; one million South Korean civilians and 100,000 soldiers; and at least one million Chinese troops—making it one of the bloodiest wars of the century.46
Domestically in the United States, Korea had large-scale consequences. The failure to win a swift victory and the public’s impatience with a stalemated struggle undoubtedly helped Eisenhower and hurt Stevenson in the 1952 campaign. The war also enhanced presidential power vis-à-vis Congress as lawmakers repeatedly deferred to the White House. (Truman never asked Congress for a declaration of war, believing that, as commander in chief, he had broad authority to commit troops wherever he wished. His successors would follow this precedent.)47 In addition, the war, which began in the throes of the “Who lost China?” controversy, inflamed American party politics. Republican legislators, including the party leadership, accused Truman and his aides of being “soft on communism” in failing first to head off the struggle and then to go full bore to win it; their rhetorical assault strengthened the Truman team’s determination to take an unyielding position in the talks.
The impact on foreign policy was greater still. The Sino-American hostility fueled by the fighting ensured that there would be no rapprochement between Beijing and Washington, and that South Korea and Taiwan would become recipients of large-scale U.S. assistance. The alliance with Japan strengthened, and Washington signed a mutual defense deal with Australia and New Zealand. The U.S. Army, which grew from a postwar low of 591,000 troops to more than 1.5 million troops, dispatched four divisions to Europe, and the Truman administration launched plans to rearm West Germany. Finally, the Korean War convinced the president to do what he had refused to do before the outbreak of hostilities: approve a vast increase in military spending. Indeed, the military budget shot up from $14 billion in 1949 to $52.8 billion in 1953; it went down after the Korean armistice, but never to its prewar levels; it stayed between $42 billion and $49 billion per year through the 1950s.48 Soviet leaders vowed to match this military buildup, and the result was a major arms race between the two nations. By the time John F. Kennedy entered the Senate, therefore, American foreign policy had been globalized and militarized in a way scarcely imaginable half a dozen years before, when he took his seat in the House.
Kennedy had no qualms with Eisenhower’s resolute Cold War policy. He had long since grasped what every savvy, enterprising politician in midcentury America understood: that staunch anti-Communism was the only viable posture in domestic political terms. Preaching the need for accommodation with Moscow or Beijing might make intellectual sense, might be shrewd geopolitics, but it posed grave risks for one’s career—why take the chance? Much better to vow eternal vigilance, to condemn any hint of compromise.49 What’s more, Kennedy genuinely believed in the existence of a Soviet threat, even after Stalin’s death; he needed no convincing that the Western powers must remain united and resolute, with Washington in the lead role. “We are in truth the last hope on earth,” he told the Boston College Varsity Club. “If we do not stand firm in the midst
of the conflicting tides of neutralism, resignation, isolation, and indifference, then all will be lost.” Yet Kennedy was no fire-breathing Cold Warrior—in the sense of seeing the struggle against the Soviets as primarily a military one—and he continued in 1953 to question, as he had over the previous two years, America’s approach to the burgeoning anticolonial struggles in Asia and Africa. Already now, in the early 1950s, he intuited the central importance of what would later be called “soft power”—the ability to attract and persuade, without force or coercion.50
The war in Indochina, which had made such an impression on him during his visit there in 1951, was of special interest. Kennedy followed press accounts of the fighting closely, and consulted occasionally with people such as Edmund Gullion, the former U.S. consular officer in Saigon whose dismal analysis had resonated with him during the visit. He even had Jackie translate some French-language reports for him.51 Since his visit, the war had continued to go badly for the French, even as the United States steadily raised the level of its material support, with bombers, cargo planes, tanks, naval craft, trucks, automatic weapons, small arms and ammunition, radios, and hospital and engineering equipment, as well as financial aid, which flowed heavily. (Graham Greene, who wintered in Saigon in the early 1950s and could see the growing U.S. presence with his own eyes, opens his classic novel The Quiet American, set in Indochina in 1952, with the narrator, Fowler, seeing “the lamps burning where they had disembarked the new American planes.”) By early 1953, with popular disenchantment rising at home, leaders in Paris began quietly considering a negotiated settlement to the war, only to be told by the Americans, in so many words: You must stay in.52
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