The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (54 page)

Dalton would have been appalled if the Kennedys had proposed handing out ten-dollar bills at the polls, but he had no complaints about the higher duplicities of the emerging media age. Dalton had a wife and family now, and a legal practice to support them. Running a campaign was more than a full-time job, and for the first time in his dealings with Jack, he became a paid employee. Dalton was under the considerable illusion that being paid changed nothing, but he was now expected to couch his words in an inferior’s deferential phrasing.

At a meeting with a group of Democratic politicians at the swank Fall River Social Club, Dalton made what he thought was a good solid point when he realized that Jack was glaring at him, apparently angry that he was being upstaged. As they hurried out of the club, a group of men at the bar spotted Jack. “Oh, there’s Kennedy!” one of them shouted. The men jumped off their bar stools and went to embrace the candidate they thought of as a hero.

Dalton fancied himself the campaign manager, not a bodyguard or a coat-handling lackey, and he left Jack to extricate himself alone from his cloying followers. When Jack finally got back to the car, he turned toward Dalton, sticking his finger at him. “Don’t you ever let that happen to me again! Do you hear me?”

Dalton was already sick of being pushed around by Jack’s father, second-guessed on everything he did, receiving never a thank-you, never a note of grace, nothing but push, push, push. And now Jack was treating his campaign manager as if he owned him.

“Ball game over!” Dalton recalled. “Ball game over! The shock of recognition was complete. I knew what I was dealing with, and I was dealing with a really bad man, an absolute ingrate. And also I was insulted because he thought I was a patsy. If I had misestimated him, then he—with all the adulation and sycophants around him—had misestimated me. I was stunned. I had almost an emotional physical reaction.”

A few days later Dalton sat at a meeting at the Bellevue Hotel with Joe and the eight or so top campaign aides. “The father wanted me out right from the start,” Dalton said. “It was as simple as that. And so he decided to get me out, and he started pushing me around. So between John’s ingratitude and the old man’s actions there, the thing came to an end pretty quickly.”

Dalton recalls that at that meeting “Joe Kennedy blasted the living daylights out of me, absolutely blasted me in front of these people.” One of the other participants, John Galvin, recalls the day somewhat differently: “Mark didn’t like the old man’s style; he resented the old man, who was a son of a bitch…. He wasn’t laying into Mark. He was just saying, he was being kind of, oh, unreasonable, saying some unreasonable things about people and whatever.”

Dalton’s pain amplified every slight and magnified every curt query into an assault on his very being. Everyone in the room that day saw how distressed the campaign manager had become. Dalton did not confront Joe or run raging from the room, but slunk away, leaving the Kennedys and their ambitions behind forever.

Years later, Bobby spun his own mean version of this sad tale: “Mark Dalton was going to be the campaign manager, and then he had what amounted to, I guess, a nervous breakdown about it…. He wouldn’t come out of his room. I guess it was the pressure about it and everything. I was working in Brooklyn, so I came up.”

There was at times a high selfishness to the Kennedys, a cold, impenetrable core that displayed itself to anyone who was expendable, and in the long run that was almost anyone outside the family. Those who got close to that core often found themselves pushed out a door that locked behind them. Now Dalton was gone. Billy Sutton had been shuttled aside too, his usefulness finished, a bit too much of the bottle perhaps, the same jokes told too many times.

Those on the campaign referred to the days of Mark Dalton as “before the revolution” and the days of Bobby as “after the revolution.” And every revolution demands its blood. Jack was no good at firing, disciplining, or demoting, all the mundane nasty chores involved in running a political organization. Like most successful politicians, he had learned that when bad news is to be handed out, he should be elsewhere.

Any political campaign, fueled as it is by the work of poorly paid and unpaid staffers, is full of jealousy and rude positioning. Kennedy campaigns were worse; the family seemed to set subordinates against each other in a race that had no clear rules and no obvious finish line. When Jack made his rare appearances in the campaign office, he was sure to be approached by staff members complaining about their peers. Jack learned to stay away from the office, or to come rushing through, as if on a campaign stop, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries, but leaving before anyone had a chance to take him aside.

Bobby stayed, however, and Jack learned in the 1952 campaign that his younger brother was willing to take on these most onerous of chores, castigating those who didn’t measure up, pushing others with crude force. It was not Bobby’s style to preface his criticisms with a few nuggets of praise or to nestle his condemnation among platitudes and pleasantries. He got right to it with brutal efficiency and what to observers looked like pleasure. When Bobby asked Sam Adams to help on the campaign, and Sam responded that he was too busy, Sam felt “like he burned my bridges.” Bobby was doing a lot of bridge burning.

Bobby had his father’s nearly maniacal sense of precision. Politics was a matter of inches, not feet; of ounces, not pounds. After one of the campaign tea parties, Joe asked O’Donnell, “How many people were at that tea in Springfield, Kenny?” O’Donnell said, “Oh, about five thousand.” And Joe
said, “I know
about
how many people were there. I asked you
how
many people were there. Didn’t you have a checker there?” A chastened O’Donnell replied, “Yes, we did.” Joe wasn’t about to leave his little lesson at that. “When I ask you how many people the next time, I want to know
exactly
how many people.”

15
The Golden Fleece

W
ith Joe and Bobby at the helm, Jack ran a brilliant and prophetic campaign. “He was all things to all men,” recalled Massachusetts Congressman John McCormack, a powerful figure in national politics. The candidate was a putative liberal to the good professors of Harvard. He was a closet conservative to the more amenable Republicans. At dawn, as he shook hands outside factory gates, he was a friend of labor. In the evening, as he shared cigars and cognac with their bosses, he was the businessman’s Washington friend. He was an Irish-American, son of the sod of old Eire. He was an upper-class Catholic who sat comfortably in the great houses of Back Bay. Jack was a dream lover to the young girls who waved their handkerchiefs and God’s glory of a son to their mothers.

As the campaign started, Jack read the extraordinary statistic that for the first time women voters outnumbered men. In Massachusetts, their numbers were the highest of any state, 52.6 percent. Jack was the prisoner of an upbringing that had taught him that women were for the most part giggling creatures uninterested in the manly business of politics. He did not attempt to solicit female voters by developing campaign issues that might appeal to their intellect. Instead, he developed a strategy that shrewdly exploited their social ambition and sexuality.

“His theme was to hit the woman vote,” reflected Edward C. Berube, a Fall River bus driver who worked intimately with Jack. “He indicated this to me … that he was going to come out for the women, that he figured the woman was the one that was going to put him in. And he wanted coffee hours and tea hours and arranging coffee hours in homes.”

Lodge had started the whole business of tea parties back in 1936 when he first won election to the Senate. The Kennedys democratized the stuffy,
mannered tea party and turned it into a mass gathering more Barnum and Bailey than Brahmin. The Kennedys held these teas all over Massachusetts, thirty-five of them in all. Jack shook hands with as many as seventy thousand women.

Jack moved around the teas, a handsome young gentleman, both a son of Irish immigrant culture and an aristocrat, a man of the people, a man above the people. Jack’s opponent was a debonair, elegantly dressed aristocrat who set the hearts aflutter among the good Republican matrons of the suburbs, but the difference between the two men was like the difference between a Broadway actor and a Hollywood star.

Lodge might appeal to the elite ladies, but Jack had the masses, the bobby-soxers, the blue-haired immigrant ladies, the aspiring suburbanites, as well as the conservative matrons. As the lean, mildly disheveled, thirty-five-year-old candidate worked the room, he was playing brilliantly on the social aspirations of these women, bringing them into an ersatz version of the Kennedy social life. Though it was easy enough to satirize these women, their desire to be with a better class of people was no different from the desire that for three generations had dominated the Kennedys themselves.

What none of the women knew, however, as they chatted amiably with Jack was that his smile was at times a grimace. In August he was sick enough with nonspecific prostatitis that he was urinating pus and had to be secretly hospitalized. Then, on a visit to a Springfield firehouse, Jack couldn’t resist a dare to slide down a fire pole. When he hit the cement from his third-floor perch, he grimaced, feeling once again the terrible back pain that plagued him. From then on, he was relegated to hobbling around on crutches. When he got to an auditorium or a hall, he would leave the crutches outside and stride into the room as if he were health and youth incarnate.

T
he campaign was not all tea parties and handshaking. Indeed, when Lodge looked back dispassionately on the race, he realized that his largest problem was not what he called the “damn tea parties” but his endorsement of Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination; the offended Taft Republicans stayed home or voted for Jack in protest. The two candidates shared one common problem, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. When McCarthy got up before the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950 and said that he had a list of fifty-seven card-carrying Communists or fellow travelers in the State Department, he set out on the most dangerous demagogic campaign in American political history. It was the rare specificity of McCarthy’s charges that made them so powerful. It would take several years before it became clear to many Americans that
McCarthy was playing on the fears of his compatriots, destroying not Communists but legitimate anticommunism, wreaking havoc not on American enemies but on the American political system.

McCarthy was so dangerous because he was not an aberration but rather the logical extreme of what Michael S. Sherry has called “a highly politicized form of postwar militarization.” The witch-hunt McCarthy initiated was precisely what Jack’s father had feared would happen. To defeat the Axis the United States had created a state apparatus of such magnitude and coercion that it risked destroying what once had been called liberty. It was not McCarthy, after all, but one of his enemies, President Harry S Truman, who in February 1947 instituted a loyalty program to fire “disloyal” employees. It was not McCarthy alone but a whole generation of postwar politicians—even including, in a small way, Jack himself—who helped create a climate of such fear that the owners of the Cincinnati Reds renamed the baseball team the “Redlegs” rather than risk being called Commies.

These politicians had turned the Communist into a mythic anti-Christ, unseen but all-seeing, ready to betray the unwary and seduce the innocent. This figure resided in the bowels of the unions and in the highest counsels of government, in the pristine groves of academe and in the newsrooms of the nation’s newspapers. There were indeed Soviet spies ensconced in crucial positions in Washington, and Communist cadres in labor unions and various liberal political movements. These were for the most part Americans who in the 1930s had given their higher loyalty to what they considered a noble cause, not a mere nation. To destroy them, McCarthy and his kind called out political artillery of such magnitude and so carelessly aimed that the friendly fire ended up shooting hundreds of innocents for every true enemy of America it struck.

Jack first gained notice in the House by attacking several union officials, including Dr. Russell Nixon, a former professor of his at Harvard. Jack was roundly praised, as if he had bested an evil giant in unequal combat. The jingoistic anticommunism had been a willing servant of these politicians, helping to elect them to office over candidates who did not shout so shrilly.

During the campaign, Jack was not simply the brilliant observer of international affairs, as he had been when he returned from Asia speaking with a subtlety of mind and nuance rare in American political life. He also gave another kind of speech in which he set aside his complex and tragic world-view for florid, apocalyptic, anti-Communist rhetoric.

In the spring of 1952, in an address to the graduating class of the Newton College of the Sacred Heart, Jack presented a vision of the world full of threat and terror, a vision and indeed a language that he used on several occasions that year. He saw the dark encroachment of the state, enveloping liberty:
“The theme of today—the scarlet thread that runs throughout the thoughts and actions of people all over the world—is one of resignation of major problems into the all-absorbing hands of the great Leviathan—the state.”

Despite what Jack said at Newton College and elsewhere, when he talked to elderly citizens whose Social Security checks allowed them to live in dignity, he did not bemoan the encroaching leviathan but celebrated one of the New Deal’s great achievements. And when he looked at the economy, he was a Keynesian who thought that government must at times intervene in the nation’s economic life.

The truth has few friends, and Jack was not about to risk his political future by trying too often or too openly to elucidate the complexities of the political world. There were no easy votes to be garnered that way, as he could by shaking the tambourine of anticommunism. He took the easy way, though what appears the easy way is sometimes in the end the most difficult path of all.