The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (42 page)

When, in April 1946, twenty-eight-year-old Jack declared that he would seek the Democratic nomination for Congress from his grandfather’s old eleventh congressional district, he was doing more than putting on clothes his father had laid out for him. Inga Arvad probably understood Jack more deeply than anyone. Even before the war she had prophesied that Jack would enter politics. During the war, he had joked to Red Fay that he could feel “Pappy’s eyes on the back of my neck,” and told his friend that “when the war is over I’ll be back here with Dad trying to parlay a lost PT-boat and a bad back into a political advantage.” That was the cynical posturing that was one part of Jack. Red rarely heard the more serious Jack who for hours discussed running for office with Lannan and Spalding. Jack scrutinized the prospect from many angles. He observed other politicians. He courted publicity in Massachusetts for months. He waffled back and forth in front of friends. Lem thought his closest friend would be entering law school. But Jack was no more interested in enduring the tedium of case law than he was in leading the outsider’s life of a journalist or entering a business world that he largely disdained.

Jack had grown up in Bronxville and prep schools and knew nothing about his prospective constituents and their ways. The district included middle- and upper-class people around Harvard and parts of Beacon Hill, but most of the residents were working class and poor. They were so solidly Democratic that the winner of the primary would inevitably win in the
general election. There were some new arrivals and many second- and third-generation Americans who had not been able to move away from their immigrant ghettos.

Whether they were Italian, Irish, Polish, Portuguese, or Chinese, these new Bostonians dreamed of the day when they would live somewhere else. But for now they lived among the shipping yards, freight depots, oil tanks, and factories, and close by the state prison. Jack’s deepest political interest was not these inner-city residents and their mundane problems, but the world far beyond. Jack’s biggest job, as
Time
phrased it, “was to convince the 37 different nationalities in some of Boston’s grimiest slums that he was not just the wealthy son of Joe Kennedy … but rather an attractive individual in his own right.”

In the triple-deckers that lined the long gray streets, the kitchen was the center of the home, especially in these cold winter days, for the flats did not have central heating. A knock on the front door was a stranger’s knock. Someone apprehensively hurried through the frigid, shut-off rooms to greet a visitor who as likely as not brought bad news, not good.

These days the door often opened on a pallid, rail-thin, tousle-haired young man standing there with a nervous smile, a faltering greeting, and a manner and dress that instantly signaled that he was not one of them. One of the flats Jack visited was that of Dave Powers, a navy veteran whom Jack hoped to enlist in his cause. He stayed in Powers’s cold living room for a half hour chatting away, asking the Charlestown man to accompany him to a speech for Gold Star mothers at the American Legion the following week.

Powers had a sense that Jack was “aggressively shy.” Any man of even modest sensitivity would be shy knocking on the doors of people he did not know and asking them to support him for reasons he was not even fully sure of himself. Jack’s was not the ham-handed, eyes-averting shyness of insecurity, but the shyness of a man thrust into a world in which he would be dependent upon the kindness of strangers, a world he did not know, and one in which he did not feel comfortable.

Jack half mumbled his prepared speech to the honored mothers in a virtual monotone, looking up only occasionally as if to be sure the audience was still there. “I think I know how all you mothers feel, because my mother is a Gold Star mother, too,” he droned. The audience knew that the speech had ended only because the young candidate stopped speaking. By any measure, the speech had been a disappointment, but the mothers rushed forward to greet Jack as if he had been the most stirring of speakers. To them, Jack was no longer a privileged outsider. He was a young man who needed them, and they responded not simply with their votes but by buttonholing their friends and relatives and telling them about this fine young Kennedy.

Powers sensed what was happening. Despite his pledge to work for a fellow
Charlestown man, John F. Cotter, Powers signed on with Jack. Powers led the candidate up the back staircases of his neighborhood where Jack was greeted not as a stranger but as a friend.

Jack may have impressed the Gold Star mothers, but he was far from a stellar candidate. His own campaign manager, Mark Dalton, would probably have made a better candidate. The thirty-one-year-old Harvard Law School graduate was a true son of Boston. One of his brothers was a priest; the other was the political editor of the
Boston Traveler.
Dalton had fought a war that few veterans had fought. He had been at D-Day in the sixth wave and landed on Okinawa in the last major land battle of the war.

Dalton had no money to run. Beyond that, he had a kind of moral rectitude that struck the hard-edged politicians around Jack as naivete. Dalton was a man who took the rhetoric of the campaign as literal truth. He was a passionate speaker when he believed in something, and the first time he introduced Jack, he delivered such a forceful speech that poor Jack’s speech sounded, by contrast, as thin and weak as his appearance.

After that address, Jack and Dalton drove over to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where Joe sat in the living room of his suite with Joe Timilty, the Boston police commissioner. The two older men had listened to the radio address, and by the time the candidate and his campaign manager arrived, they had had ample time to evaluate Jack’s pallid performance. They told Jack and Dalton that never again would they appear together on the same platform; the contrast was too great.

Joe had let his sons take their chances standing in the front lines with other young Americans. That was the last time he would play what he considered a fool’s game, abiding by the simple rules that guided others. Mark had the title “campaign manager,” but he was simply a handsome face on the platform and a name on a letterhead.

Joe ran the campaign, but he did it in such a surreptitious way that no one knew just which strings he had pulled and how hard he had pulled them. Even the fact that the congressional seat had suddenly opened up probably was the result of Joe’s manipulation. The incumbent congressman, James Michael Curley, was facing an indictment for mail fraud; Joe Kane, who was intimately involved with the campaign, later asserted that Joe had paid Curley twelve thousand dollars to retire and had promised more money when Curley decided to run for mayor of Boston.

Joe called Dalton every few days, spending hours seemingly going over every detail of the campaign. As the weeks went by, however, Dalton realized there was another secretive campaign about which he knew nothing. Many of the old politicians who had first opposed Jack now had smiles on their faces, a lilt to their walk, and the name “Kennedy” on their lips.

Joe spent an estimated three hundred thousand dollars on the campaign. That was enough to blanket the area with billboards, distribute one hundred thousand reprints of John Hersey’s PT-109 article, and place scores of radio and newspaper ads and placards on the trolleys. Joe believed that every man had his price, and he would pay that amount, but not a dollar more. He believed, moreover, that if you set your money in plain view people would steal it, your friends as easily as your enemies. Most campaigns had all sorts of unaccountable cash expenses. Joe had Eddie Moore set up an elaborate accounting system, detailing even the smallest expenditures on triplicate forms.

Those who hoped to work with the Kennedys learned that parsimoniousness was next to godliness. Dave Powers didn’t rent chairs for the campaign office; he borrowed them from a funeral parlor. When he took Jack around to the bars, he offered a round of drinks to the assembled. The patrons, who had been drinking beer all night, immediately developed a taste for liquor from the top shelf, ordering a gentleman’s drink, scotch or bourbon whiskey. When Powers offered them drinks again, he pointedly offered them a round of beers. That was the Kennedy way.

Joe was merciless in wresting out any possibility of failure. Joseph Russo was a minor candidate, hardly of concern to Jack. But Timilty and an associate visited another Joseph Russo, a janitor, and paid him to put his name on the ballot and split the Russo vote. “They gave me favors,” Russo recalled years later. “Whatever I wanted. I could have gone in the housing project if I wanted. If I wanted an apartment, I could have got the favor. You know?”

Jack had been brought up to think of such gambits as part of the colorful panoply of urban politics, fancied by such irascible players as his own grandfather, Honey Fitz. When the chuckles ended, though, the fact remained that his father had stolen candidate Russo’s votes as surely as if he had stood in the polling places tearing up ballots. If Jack did not know about it beforehand, he surely did when he learned that there would be two Russos on the primary ballot.

Jack was no innocent either in the way the campaign was exploiting his war career. He had never been comfortable when the newspapers called him a hero, and now his own people exaggerated even those exaggerations. “Naval hero of the South Pacific” he was called in one campaign news release, as if he had single-handedly defeated the Japanese.

Not only did Jack have his father masterminding the campaign, but the whole family, except for little Teddy, was out working the hustings. Rose was a Gold Star mother who could speak mother to mother about her beloved Jack. Eunice was a woman of fierce intelligence and energy who irritated Jack at times by standing on the platform soundlessly mouthing the very words
he was speaking. Nonetheless, Eunice, Pat, and Jean were a formidable trio, setting up teas and meetings, working as hard as any of the volunteers, heading out each morning from their suite at the Ritz-Carleton. Jack’s beloved sister Kathleen was missing only because she was living in London.

In the last weeks of the campaign, Bobby showed up too, still dressed in navy blue. Jack deputized Red Fay to take his brother to a movie and show. Red was a talker, and he found the taciturn, morose Bobby a formidable burden, even for a few hours. Red had a risqué wit and a devilish interest in good times. His charge was a self-righteous Puritan, who wrinkled up his nose at an off-color joke as if he smelled something foul.

Jack had seen that part of Bobby shortly after Joe Jr. died. Over Labor Day, Bobby had come upon Jack and his old PT-boat buddies and their wives sitting drinking forbidden booze in the kitchen in Hyannis Port. His father rationed family and visitors to one drink before dinner. When Bobby, a scrawny little Savanarola, lectured them, Kathleen laced into the would-be snitch, telling him to get lost and tossing him out of the room like a mongrel pup.

Bobby was attempting to don the clothes worn by his father and big brothers. Upon graduating from Milton, Bobby had entered the navy’s V-12 officer training program. He headed off to Harvard while most young men his age were drafted. Bobby was hardly a shirker. Even after Joe Jr.’s death, he fancied himself a navy aviator; he would honor his big brother by following in his oversized shoes. But he didn’t seem to know what he was, or what he should be, what was authentic and what was not.

“I am not sure, between you and me, just how much I go for flying but I guess that’s the best thing to do,” he mused to Dave Hackett. “There are so many complications and decisions to make and I am so mixed up.” He had a politician’s self-consciousness about what the world might think of him, and he wanted it on his resume that he had been a navy pilot. “I know that there will be a great deal more risk in this, but I think that it will be a lot more exciting, stimulating, and will do more good when I get out,” he wrote his father.

His father pulled no special strings to help Bobby in that quest, and when he failed the flying aptitude test, that particular dream came to an end. The fact that his two older brothers had made their own heroic contributions to the war effort did not diminish Bobby’s desire to stand within sight of the flash of combat. Like Joe Jr. and Jack, he had been instilled with the ideal that a true man rushed forward to the sound of strife, neither retreating nor pointing to his brothers’ wartime service as evidence that his family had done enough. His father, though, would risk no more calls from priests waking him from a fitful sleep. Instead, as the war ended, Joe saw to it that Bobby
was assigned to one of the nation’s newest destroyers, the
Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.,
on which he would win no combat ribbons.

For the rest of his life, Bobby would sail with his brothers’ legacy. On the destroyer, the sailors did not know that the scrawny young seaman was the younger brother of the hero for whom their ship was named.

It was fitful, unsatisfying duty, sailing down the Atlantic coast to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. The best part of it, as far as Bobby was concerned, was that he was meeting the kind of fellows he hadn’t met at Harvard. They were mainly uneducated southerners who had a strength that his fancy friends rarely had. That didn’t make his duty any more palatable. After six weeks he was transferred, rising, as he wrote, “from the lowest grade of chippers, painters & scrubbers, the 2nd Division, up into one of the highest grades of chippers, painters, & scrubbers, the 1st Division.”

When Bobby arrived in Boston late in Jack’s campaign, he was sailing on another ship with his brother’s name on it. Jack was eight years older than Bobby, a man who had experienced a world that Bobby had scarcely visited. Nevertheless, Bobby was not going to swab the deck, ordered around by the likes of Lem Billings and Red Fay.

Bobby insisted on taking over three of the toughest wards in East Cambridge, the lair of Jack’s strongest opponent. He worked with the residents in a way that Jack and his highborn friends never could. He ate spaghetti with the adults and played football with the kids, and maybe Jack didn’t win the majority of the East Cambridge votes, but he did far better there than he would have without Bobby’s efforts. Bobby’s own little entourage included his sister Jean and her friend and fellow Manhattanville student, Ethel Skakel.