JFK

by Fredrik Logevall

  Liberals in the state responded by rallying to Kennedy’s side. The Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), in an action spearheaded by Harvard political scientist Samuel Beer (later to become president of the organization), joined in the campaign against Onions Burke, as did other progressive forces. According to Joseph Rauh, a founding member of the ADA and a tireless champion of civil rights, Jack Kennedy was now seen as “sort of a young liberal against the machine”—though probably, Rauh added, more anti-machine than liberal.41

  The March meeting went poorly. Many of the party regulars, loyal to McCormack and resentful of the Kennedys for elbowing aside the state organization in the 1952 campaign, were disinclined to bend to the senator’s wishes. Irritated by the defiance but outwardly calm, Kennedy knew that his own credibility in the state and nationwide would suffer grievous damage if his support for Stevenson was largely ignored by a Massachusetts delegation marching in lockstep with McCormack, Burke, and Fox. Kennedy thus proposed a deal in which half the delegates to the Chicago convention would back Stevenson and the other half would support McCormack as the favorite-son candidate. Burke waved aside the proposal. He considered Kennedy a young upstart who should be put in his place. Then, in the state’s primary in April, Burke orchestrated a successful write-in campaign for McCormack, who bested Stevenson easily. With the battle lines drawn, and with Burke up for reelection in May, Kennedy and his lieutenants worked every angle to get him ousted, using the kind of backroom politicking the senator generally avoided. (Stay away from local politics, his father had always warned him. It was a morass from which extrication would be all but impossible.) Aides gathered information on every committee member, whereupon Kennedy paid individual visits to many of them around the state, urging them to vote for his chosen candidate, ex–Somerville mayor John “Pat” Lynch. Burke’s forces, meanwhile, worked to line up support for their man.42

  The Burke team called a committee meeting in Springfield for Saturday, May 19, at 2:00 P.M. Kennedy’s operation then called an official meeting of the committee to be held in the Bradford Hotel, a traditional meeting place just off Boston Common, for 3:00 P.M. on the same day. Burke’s forces responded by rescinding their initial announcement and said they were calling a meeting for the Bradford at 3:00 P.M.

  The Kennedy team perhaps should have taken a closer look at the calendar before setting the date: Jack’s youngest sister, Jean, was getting married to Stephen Smith, the low-key and intelligent son of a large New York tugboat-and-barge-operating family, that same day at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in Manhattan. The senator was expected to be there as an usher, alongside brothers Bobby and Teddy. He flew to New York for the ceremony, then immediately caught the shuttle back to Boston so that he could be at the Bradford to greet committee members as they filed in. He made it in the nick of time, shaking hands in the lobby and vowing his support for Lynch. He then withdrew, prudently avoiding the raucous session that followed.

  “We argued that Onions shouldn’t be allowed to attend the meeting since he wasn’t a member of the committee,” recalled Larry O’Brien, a key player on Kennedy’s side.

  To back up our ruling, we had two tough Boston cops guarding the door, one of whom had reportedly killed a man in a barroom fight. Burke arrived with some tough guys of his own. Just as the meeting was about to begin, he and his men charged out of the elevator and broke past our guards. One of the leaders was Ed “Knocko” McCormack, the majority leader’s two-fisted, three-hundred-pound younger brother. As shouting and shoving spread across the meeting room, I called the Boston police commissioner. He arrived minutes later.

  “I’m O’Brien,” I told him. “You’ve got to get those troublemakers out of here.”

  “One more word out of you, O’Brien,” the commissioner replied, “and I’ll lock you up.” I hadn’t known the commissioner was a McCormack man. The whole thing was a scene out of The Last Hurrah [a book and later a film depicting the no-holds-barred mayoral campaign of an unscrupulous politician modeled after James Michael Curley]. The two candidates for state chairman almost settled matters by a fistfight. There was shouting and confusion, and as the roll call began, one member who’d gotten drunk attempted to vote twice.43

  When all the votes were counted, Kennedy’s man Lynch had prevailed by a vote of 47–31. The senator, who, according to both Jackie Kennedy and Ted Sorensen, cared as much about this political fight as any in his career, had gained undisputed control of the state party and could now deliver a majority of the state’s forty votes to Stevenson at the convention.44 The victorious Kennedy hopped a plane to New York, where his sister’s wedding reception at the Plaza Hotel was still going strong. Before departing Boston, he placed a call to Stevenson’s campaign manager, James Finnegan, who expressed his delight at the outcome.45

  Yet Kennedy seemingly took little joy in his win—the mudslinging by both sides, he told aides, had been unseemly and depressing. In a magazine article in late May and in a commencement address at Harvard two weeks later, he tried to reclaim loftier ground.46 Drawing on arguments and examples developed in Profiles in Courage and echoing his remarks at the National Book Awards dinner, the Harvard address focused on what he described as the lamentable and seemingly deepening schism in the country between politicians and intellectuals.* “Instead of synthesis,” he told the crowd of three thousand in Harvard Yard, a few feet from the dorm in which he lived freshman year, “clash and discord now characterize the relations between the two groups much of the time.”

  The politician, whose authority rests upon the mandate of the popular will, is resentful of the scholar who can, with dexterity, slip from position to position without dragging the anchor of public opinion….The intellectual, on the other hand, finds it difficult to accept the differences between the laboratory and the legislature. In the former, the goal is truth, pure and simple, without regard to changing currents of public opinion; in the latter, compromises and majorities and procedural customs and rights affect the ultimate decision as to what is right or just or good. And even when they realize this difference, most intellectuals consider their chief functions that of the critic—and politicians are sensitive to critics—(possibly because we have so many of them). “Many intellectuals,” Sidney Hook has said, “would rather die than agree with the majority, even on the rare occasions when the majority is right.”

  It would be imperative, Kennedy continued, for both sides to remember that American politicians and scholars claimed the same proud heritage. “Our Nation’s first great politicians were also among the Nation’s first great writers and scholars. The founders of the American Constitution were also the founders of American scholarship. The works of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Paine, and John Adams—to name but a few—influenced the literature of the world as well as its geography. Books were their tools, not their enemies.” Nor was this a temporary phenomenon, Kennedy added, for the link between the intellectual and the politician in the United States lasted for more than a century. Thus, in the presidential campaign a century before, in 1856, “the Republicans sent three brilliant orators around the campaign circuit: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Those were the carefree days when the eggheads were all Republicans.”

  He closed by reminding his audience that politicians and intellectuals ultimately must commit to operating within a “common framework—a framework we call liberty. Freedom of expression is not divisible into political expression and intellectual expression.” And the payoff for such a common commitment could be great, he promised:

  “ ‘Don’t teach my boy poetry,’ an English mother recently wrote the provost of Harrow. ‘Don’t teach my boy poetry; he is going to stand for Parliament.’ Well, perhaps she was right—but if more politicians knew poetry and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live on this commencement day of 1956.”4
7

  * The speech was substantially drafted for him, most likely by Sorensen. The best proof of that: in his handwritten edits, Kennedy crossed out a reference to the Harvard “campus” (which no Harvard man would have called it) and inserted “Yard.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  A VERY NEAR THING

  John F. Kennedy’s 1956 Harvard commencement speech received wide attention, inside and outside the press. The New York Times gave it prominent coverage, as did other papers. Fellow Democrats in Washington offered praise, none more extravagantly than Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, who called it “the most eloquent defense of politics and politicians that it has ever been my pleasure to read” and had it inserted into the Congressional Record.1

  Political insiders speculating about the likely Democratic ticket for the fall election paid due attention. With two months to go until the Chicago convention, Adlai Stevenson was widely presumed to be the nominee, having gotten the better of Estes Kefauver in the key primaries and enjoying broader support among party leaders than any other potential standard-bearer. The former Illinois governor was increasingly intrigued by the prospect of Kennedy as his running mate, having seen the favorable publicity the Massachusetts man had garnered in recent months. And not merely from journalists—Connecticut governor Abraham Ribicoff led an effort by New England political leaders to get Kennedy on the ticket, a move supported also by Dennis J. Roberts, governor of Rhode Island, and others. Governor Luther Hodges of North Carolina, a moderate, had earlier indicated that having Kennedy on the ticket would be acceptable in the South. Several Stevenson advisers, among them Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., also liked Kennedy for the second slot.2 True, questions swirled about Kennedy’s health and his youth. But he had two highly successful books to his credit and had shown himself to be an effective public speaker. He excelled on television. He projected a handsome, clean-cut, moderate image, was charmingly low-key and witty in his approach, and had a heroic war record to boot. His epic win against Henry Cabot Lodge in 1952 showed that he knew how to campaign and how to win. Even Kennedy’s Catholicism could be an asset, blunting the effects of Stevenson’s divorce and boosting vote totals in key states in the Midwest and the Northeast.3

  Newton Minow, a friend and law associate of Stevenson’s, had been in the audience for Kennedy’s speech before the National Conference of Christians and Jews earlier in the year and had been mesmerized:

  I fell in love with Jack Kennedy immediately. I’d always admired him, but I was really taken with him. I was taken with his whole attitude, his whole appearance, his whole—He really sent me. I left that night and I said to [wife] Jo in the car, “You know, this would be the ideal candidate for Vice-President, with Adlai. This is a perfect match. He has what Adlai lacks. He has appeal to the Catholics. He will help on the divorce issue. He has appeal to young people, because of his youth. He has an appeal to a segment of the population that Adlai did very badly with in ’52, the conservative Irish Catholic Democrats afraid of the soft-on-communism issue. He’s perfect!”4

  The religion issue cut both ways, however, and many seasoned observers urged Stevenson to be wary. Three-term Pittsburgh mayor David Lawrence, a power within the party and a Catholic, warned Stevenson that having a Catholic running mate would spell inevitable defeat in November. Speaker Sam Rayburn was similarly negative, as was, reportedly, Harry Truman. Small wonder that when Ted Sorensen’s memorandum from earlier in the year began making the rounds among party insiders, Stevenson’s people asked for copies. They wanted hard data. Sorensen, after feigning ignorance, made sure to comply with the request, though circumspectly, as the memo was no longer officially his own product—Kennedy, leery of having his aide perceived as promoting the issue, arranged for the party chairman of Connecticut, John Bailey, a strong backer, to assume responsibility for the document. The camouflage effort worked: thenceforth it would be known as the Bailey Memorandum.5

  Did Jack Kennedy really want the vice presidential nomination? Early in the year he had disavowed the idea to Sorensen, calling it a nothing job that gave no role on policy, or on anything else of substance.6 But the idea was growing on him, less out of a pining for the office than out of a sense of competition. All of the buzz that spring and summer was about the presidential ticket, and he wanted in on the action. Accordingly, at regular intervals he and Sorensen supplied Stevenson’s office with updates on how the presidential nomination fight looked in Massachusetts and New England, and offered ideas on how best to turn back the Kefauver challenge nationally. On March 30, Sorensen called Minow at Kennedy’s request to suggest that Stevenson use Kefauver’s absentee record in “a vigorous way” in his speeches. On April 16, Kennedy wrote Minow to warn that Wyoming was in danger of slipping out of Stevenson’s grasp. In May, as we’ve seen, after his successful battle to oust Onions Burke and gain control of the state party, Kennedy wasted no time in informing Stevenson of the fact. And in early June, after Stevenson thumped Kefauver in the California primary and effectively sewed up the nomination, Kennedy fired off a congratulatory telegram: “You have proven what many of us knew from the beginning and pointed the way to victory in August and November.”7

  Even the heartfelt opposition of his wife and his father did not deter Jack. Jackie wanted her husband to continue his convalescence in a less stressful mode, while Joseph Kennedy felt certain that a Stevenson-led ticket was doomed to lopsided defeat. Eisenhower was simply too strong. Polls showed him with a healthy lead over Stevenson, and moreover he had already defeated Stevenson once before. Thus, even if Jack won the vice presidential nomination (itself no sure thing), it would be no real victory; on the contrary, Joe believed, any Democratic rout would be blamed on Jack’s Catholicism, which might scuttle his prospects for the presidency four or eight years down the road. “If you are chosen,” he wrote his son, quoting Clare Boothe Luce approvingly, “it will be because you are a Catholic and not because you are big enough to do a good job. She feels that a defeat would be a devastating blow to your prestige.”8

  Jack was undaunted. Or at least he saw the merits in, as he put it to his father in a letter in late June, having “all of this churning up.”9 The vice presidential speculation kept his name before the national electorate, and that was all to the good. Plus he always relished a fight. A few weeks thereafter, Eunice, whose husband, Sargent Shriver, had just urged Jack’s candidacy on Stevenson directly while flying with him from Cape Cod to Chicago, wrote her father that, absent the vice presidential nod and the name recognition it would generate, Jack didn’t believe the Democrats would “select him as a presidential candidate any…time in the future.” The Ambassador, ensconced in the South of France, had begun to soften in his opposition, especially after reports emerged that Dwight Eisenhower was experiencing new health problems. (In June the president had contracted ileitis and gone in for surgery, then remained in Walter Reed Army Medical Center for three full weeks.) If Ike couldn’t run for reelection, that changed the equation dramatically, Joe believed, and he told friends he might have to return to America for the Democratic convention.10

  The president’s health was key. Joe continued to believe Eisenhower would coast to victory against Stevenson, and perhaps against any Democratic ticket. “I think Eisenhower is the most popular man that we have seen in our time and to make attacks on him in the coming campaign is to me a sure way to commit suicide,” Joe wrote to Sargent Shriver from Èze-sur-Mer. “Oddly enough, as in Jack’s case, when a man is ill and is putting up a good fight, it is almost impossible to generate a feeling against him….Remember, Sarge, that you are going into an atmosphere where over 65 million persons are working and getting better pay than ever before….So you have an economic condition that is excellent; you can’t offer anything to anybody from laborer to capitalist that can persuade him that he can do better by [a Democrat].” In sum, the elder Kennedy told his son-in-law, “I believe that while Stevenson and Jack would certainly do bet
ter than last time, they will not win.”11

  To his son the Ambassador was more elliptical but still left his feelings clear. “I came to a couple of conclusions,” he wrote to Jack in July:

  1) Stevenson is going to nominate his own Vice President when he gets the nomination. 2) He’s definitely worried about your health, and…that will be his excuse, if he wants it. 3) When you see what he wants the Vice President to do, you can decide how attractive it is….If you make up your mind that you either don’t want it or that you are not going to get it, before either of these things happen, you should get out a statement to the effect that representing Mass. is one of the greatest jobs in the world, and there is lots to be done for your state and her people, and while you are most grateful for the national support offered you for the Vice Presidency, your heart belongs to Massachusetts.12

  By the start of August, Eisenhower’s condition had stabilized and he seemed set for the campaign. To Joe Kennedy that settled the matter, and the old man was perhaps fortunate that, on account of being overseas, he didn’t have to read the new issue of Time, which put Jack at the top of the list of Democratic vice presidential candidates. “Trademarked by his boyishly unruly shock of brown hair, slim Jack Kennedy, 39, has looks, brains, personality, an attractive wife (who is expecting her first baby in October),” the magazine enthused. Kennedy’s war record, as well as his “vote-getting ability in a pivotal state” and his “reputation as an able, independent-thinking, middle-of-the-road member of both the House…and the Senate,” made him a top contender. On the debit side were Kennedy’s Catholicism and his decision earlier in the year to side with the Eisenhower administration over his party in voting against full subsidization of American farmers by the federal government. Overall, the article said, Kennedy looked better positioned than ostensible front-runner Kefauver, who, with his overbearing approach, had “made too many enemies along the campaign trail.”13