An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (23 page)

As important as what he advocated was the means he used to get his name, war record, and message before the public. And here he had the advantage of Joe’s wealth. Joe may have spent between $250,000 and $300,000 on the campaign, though the precise amount will never be known since so much of it was handed out in cash by Eddie Moore, Joe’s principal aide. (A frequent location for Kennedy campaign financial exchanges was in pay toilets. “You can never be too careful in politics about handing over money,” Moore said.) It was “a staggering sum” for a congressional race in 1946, Joe Kane remembered. “It was the equivalent of an elephant squashing a peanut,” two political journalists wrote later. Joe himself is supposed to have said, “With what I’m spending I could elect my chauffeur.” It was, for example, six times the amount Tip O’Neill would spend six years later to win Jack’s open seat. As Kane told the two reporters, “[Everything Joe] got, he bought and paid for. And politics is like war. It takes three things to win. The first is money and the second is money and the third is money.” Jesse Unruh, Speaker of the California State Assembly in the 1960s, echoed the point: “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.”

Joe’s money allowed the campaign to hire a public relations firm, which then saturated the district with billboard, subway, newspaper, and radio ads and direct mailings. The visual displays were headed “Kennedy for Congress” and contained a picture of Jack with a war vet’s father pointing at Jack and saying, “There’s our man, son.” Joe’s spending also paid for polls that persuaded the campaign to stress Jack’s war service and for locally managed campaign headquarters in every section of the district. With only a single office in their home neighborhoods, Jack’s opponents could not match the aggressive promotion of his candidacy. Mike Neville, Jack’s principal opponent, complained to a companion as they walked past a craps game, “Only way I’ll break into the newspapers will be if I join that game and get pinched by the cops.”

The money also permitted the campaign to stage an elaborate event at the Hotel Commander in Cambridge, a fancy establishment to which most of the invited guests had never been. The mainly Irish ladies who received engraved, hand-addressed invitations to attend a reception to meet the entire Kennedy family turned out in formal gowns—many of them rented—to shake hands with these new Boston Brahmins and bask in the glow of their success. Joe, in white tie and tails, and Rose, dressed in the latest Paris fashion, greeted almost 1,500 delighted guests. The event created a traffic jam in Harvard Square, and the newspapers carried prominently placed stories about the “tea.” One reporter said it was “a demonstration unparalleled in the history of Congressional fights in this district.” Coming three days before the primary, one old Boston pol predicted, “This kid will walk in.”

The evening house parties and hotel reception also allowed Jack to reconnect with his sisters Eunice, Pat, and Jean, four, seven, and eleven years, respectively, his junior. Away at Choate, Harvard, and then the navy while they were growing up, Jack was not as close to them as he had been to Joe Jr. and Kathleen. The same was true of the twenty-year-old Bobby and the fourteen-year-old Ted. The campaign became an exercise in family togetherness that pleased Joe and Rose and deepened Jack’s affection for his siblings.

All the hard work and family commitment to the campaign paid off in a decisive primary victory. Jack won 22,183 votes to Mike Neville’s 11,341, John Cotter’s 6,671, and Joe Russo’s 5,661. Two other candidates split 5,000 votes, another came in below 2,000, and four others scored in the hundreds. Jack’s share of the ballots was a solid 40.5 percent, but the turnout of only 30 percent of potential voters meant that Jack had won the nomination with only 12 percent of the district’s Democratic voters. It was hardly a ringing endorsement or a demonstration that a compelling young politician with a golden future had come on the scene. One of Jack’s backers recalled that “it was very, very quiet at campaign headquarters. . . . We were happy that Jack had won, but there certainly was no tremendous victory celebration that night.”

There was never any question about Jack’s defeating a Republican who commanded only 30 percent of the district’s registered voters. But a weak showing in November would not bode well for Jack’s future as a Democrat in a largely Democratic state and country. Nor was it reassuring that the Republicans seemed likely to score impressive gains in Congress and recapture control of the House and Senate for the first time since 1930. Jack’s frustration at the low voter turnout in his district found expression in a talk at Choate in September: “In Brookline, a very well-to-do community, only twenty percent of the people voted in the primary,” he said. “We must recognize that if we do not take an interest in our political life we can easily lose at home what so many young men so bloodily won abroad.”

To meet the task of establishing himself more strongly in the district as a good party man, Jack gave a speech titled “Why I Am a Democrat.” It sounded the Roosevelt/New Deal themes that had made the Democrats the majority party in the country. He was not a Democrat simply because his family was tied to the party, he said. Rather it was because the Democrats for decades, and especially under FDR’s leadership after 1932, had met the test of seeing to the national well-being at home and abroad. In the spirit of the New Deal, Jack urged delegates to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in September to pass a resolution approving the Wagner-Ellender-Taft Bill providing for low-cost public housing to help veterans find affordable places to live.

However, with inflation, strikes by union labor, postwar scarcity of consumer goods, and fears of communist aggression abroad and subversion at home dogging Harry Truman’s administration and congressional Democrats, Jack saw party identity as insufficient. The Republican refrain carried a compelling message: “Had enough shortages? Had enough inflation? Had enough strikes? Had enough Communism?” Jack joined in. “The time has come when we must speak plainly on the great issue facing the world today. The issue is Soviet Russia,” which he described as “a slave state of the worst sort.” Moreover, it had “embarked upon a program of world aggression” and unless the “freedom-loving countries of the world” stopped Russia now, they would “be destroyed.” The Soviet threat represented both a “moral and physical” crisis. This speech, delivered over the radio in Boston in October and repeated several times in the closing days of the campaign, struck a resonant chord with thousands of Jack’s constituents.

The November 5 vote produced a national and statewide Republican tidal wave. In Massachusetts, the Democrats lost a U.S. Senate seat and the governorship; nationally, the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1930. Jack, however, did just fine. Lester Bowen, his Republican opponent, managed only 26,007 votes to Jack’s 69,093. It was a decisive victory for a twenty-nine-year-old political novice and launched a House career that held out promise of greater future victories.

CHAPTER 5

The Congressman

Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens—and then everybody disagrees.

— Senator Alexander Wiley quoting a Russian observer (1947)

JACK’S ARRIVAL
in Washington in January 1947 coincided with a dramatic turnabout in Democratic party fortunes and mounting national concern about the communist threat. With numerous labor walkouts over insufficient wage hikes to meet a 6.5 percent inflation rate in 1946 and growing fears of communist subversion and expansion, the country had rewarded the Republicans with a fifty-eight-seat majority in the House and a four-seat advantage in the Senate.

Harry Truman took the brunt of the public beating. In his twenty-one months in office his approval ratings had fallen a staggering 55 points, from 87 percent to 32 percent. Republicans joked that the president woke up feeling stiff most mornings because of trying to put his foot in his mouth. They wondered how Roosevelt would have handled the country’s problems, and asked, “I wonder what Truman would do if he were alive.” Members of Truman’s party offered little comfort. Arkansas congressman J. William Fulbright suggested that the president appoint Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg secretary of state and then resign so that, in the absence of a vice president, Vandenberg could replace him. Truman privately responded that Fulbright should be known as “Halfbright.”

Rising Soviet-American tensions over Eastern Europe, Greece, Turkey, and Iran—all of which Moscow seemed intent on dominating—aroused fears of another war. And though an American monopoly of atomic weapons gave the United States a considerable advantage, the American public shuddered at the possibility of killing millions of Soviet citizens. A civil war in China between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and Mao Tse-tung’s communists aroused additional fears that U.S. armed forces might have to intervene in Asia. Columnist Walter Lippmann wondered how a president who had lost the support of the country could possibly deal effectively with these foreign threats. As troubling, alleged communist infiltration of the government seemed to threaten the country’s traditional way of life. In 1946, news of a Soviet spy ring in Canada and accusations of “communist sympathizers,” or even party members, in the government agitated the public. Massachusetts’ own Joseph Martin, the new House Speaker, declared that there was “no room in the government of the United States for any who prefer the Communistic system.”

NO SPECIAL CEREMONY
among the Kennedys marked Jack’s entrance into Congress. The family, especially Joe, saw it as little more than a first step. John Galvin, the 1946 campaign’s public relations director, recalled that the Kennedys were “
always
running for the next job.” (Years later Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Jack and Bobby’s friend and associate, was asked whether Maryland lieutenant governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Bobby’s eldest child, was interested in a higher office. “Is she a Kennedy?” he replied.)

For freshman House Democrats eager to make their mark, the next two years under Republican control promised little personal gain. A system that favored the most senior members of the majority party meant that newcomers such as Jack would do well to establish themselves as strong voices for local constituents and temporarily give up any idea of leading significant legislation through Congress. But Jack’s agenda did not include some major legislative triumph. He was less interested in what he could accomplish in the House, which he never saw as providing much opportunity for significant national leadership, than in using the office as a political launching pad.

“I think from the time he was elected to Congress, he had no thought but to go to the Senate as fast as he could,” Arthur Krock said. “He wanted scope, which a freshman in the House cannot have, and very few actually of the seniors; so that I think the House was just a way-station.” Kennedy campaign biographer James MacGregor Burns agreed: “The life of the House did not excite him. It is doubtful that he spent ten minutes considering the possibility of the speakership.”

This is not to suggest that Jack had little regard for the leadersof the Eightieth Congress. Speaker Martin and majority leader Charles A. Halleck of Indiana commanded his respect, as did veteran Democrats Sam Rayburn of Texas, whose service in the House dated from 1912 and included fourteen years as Speaker, and John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, the party’s second-most-powerful House member. But most of the leadership (the Republican chairmen and ranking minority members of the chamber’s principal committees) impressed the twenty-nine-year-old Jack Kennedy as being gray and stodgy—as indeed they were. Ranging in age from sixty-eight to eighty-three, the dominant figures on the Appropriations, Ways and Means, Rules, Banking and Currency, and Foreign Affairs Committees were all conservative men who worshiped at the altar of party regularity and, in the words of one observer, looked like legislators—“industrious, important, responsible, high-minded, and—however deceptively in certain cases—sober.” As for many other members of the House, Jack seemed to share Mark Twain’s view: “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

Though in theory Jack liked the idea of being one of only 435 congressmen in a country of 150 million people, he had certainly felt a greater sense of accomplishment and satisfaction from the publication of his book and the wartime heroics that had given him national attention. His friend Chuck Spalding said that “the job as a congressman after he had it for a little while began to look like a [Triple A] League job to a major-league player.” One House colleague watched Jack saunter into the chamber with his hands in his pockets and an attitude that said “Well, I guess if you don’t want to work for a living, this is as good a job as any.” Jack said of another Massachusetts representative, “I never felt he did much in the Congress, but I never held that against him because I don’t think I did much. I mean you can’t do much as a Congressman.” Jack was often so downcast about the day’s work in the office or on the House floor that he practiced swinging a golf club in his inner office to relieve the tedium.

“We were just worms in the House—nobody paid much attention to us nationally,” Jack said. “Congressmen get built up in their districts as if they were extraordinary,” he declared in 1959. “Most other Congressmen and most other people outside the district don’t know them.” Lem Billings recalled that Jack “found most of his fellow congressmen boring, preoccupied as they all seemed to be with their narrow political concerns. And then, too, he had terrible problems with all the arcane rules and customs which prevented you from moving legislation quickly and forced you to jump a thousand hurdles before you could accomplish anything. All his life he had had troubles with rules externally imposed and now here he was, back once again in an institutional setting.”