The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (55 page)

I
n November 1950, Jack had attended a seminar at Harvard given by Arthur Holcombe, one of his old professors. In an article published in
The New Republic
in the midst of the 1952 campaign, one of the participants reported on Jack’s candid statements. He had told the group that more had to be done to get rid of Communists in government and that he had a certain respect for McCarthy. He thought he “knew Joe pretty well, and he may have something.” He said, moreover, that “while he opposed what he supposed to be Communist influence at home, he refused to become emotionally aroused even on this issue.”

Jack was not the sort of politician who took pleasure in attacking his enemies, and even if he had wanted to confront McCarthy, which he did not, he had his own special relationship with the Wisconsin senator. McCarthy was a close family friend who dated Pat, Jack’s own sister. Joe talked to him on the phone frequently and contributed liberally to his campaign. He was a guest in the Kennedy homes. On one trip to Hyannis Port, McCarthy was dragged behind a sailboat on a rope. The Kennedys considered that fun and games, but the landlubber from Wisconsin almost drowned. The two men were both Irish-Catholic politicians, and that too was a special, if unspoken, bond. Jack might seek to distance himself from that ethnic appellation, but the 750,000 Irish Catholics in Massachusetts were his bedrock support at election time; they were for the most part fiercely conservative Democrats and proud, if narrow, partisans who considered Joe McCarthy a great patriot, if not a secular saint.

Jack’s one fervent moment over McCarthy during the campaign year came on February 9, 1952, at the one-hundredth-anniversary dinner of the founding of the Spee Club. An after-dinner speaker said that he was delighted that Alger Hiss was not a real Harvard man, even if he had gone to Harvard Law School. Hiss had been convicted of perjury for lying before a congressional committee and was serving forty-four months in prison. Up until his conviction, Hiss had seemed the perfect exemplar of the kind of man Jack admired above all others, a gentleman of wealth and privilege who had opted to become a public servant.

Over the years, evidence would mount to prove almost indisputably that Hiss had been spying for the Soviets during the 1930s. At this point, however, equal evidence suggested that he was nothing more than the most publicized victim of the Red Scare. It was all maddeningly unclear and obscure, and Hiss had become what David Remnick has called “the
Rashomon
drama of the Cold War,” and a litmus test that had more to do with sentiment than fact.

The speaker went on to say that as delighted as he was that Hiss had not gone to Harvard College, he was infinitely happy that his beloved alma mater had not turned out a Joe McCarthy.

At that point Jack jumped up and shouted, “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” He was so angry that he left before hearing the rest of the speeches.

The extremes of American politics had reached such a point that some of those present may have wondered just whom Jack was condemning. To those on the right, Hiss was the traitor and McCarthy the patriot. To those on the left, the opposite was true. On a visceral level, Jack knew where he stood, and it was not with the liberal intelligentsia of Harvard.

Bobby had even stronger feelings about McCarthy. When he took time off to attend the Harvard-Yale football game in New Haven, he and his old football teammates spent Saturday evening in New York. As always, the subject turned to politics, and in the early 1950s, politics meant McCarthy pro or con. Except for Sam Adams, Bobby’s friends were all the same solid Democrats they had been when they had left Harvard. They despised McCarthy and what they thought he was doing to the America that had been so good to them. Bobby was his lone defender.

“Oh, Bob, come on now,” O’Donnell fumed in exasperation. “McCarthy could prove your mother was a Communist by his way of reasoning.” Bobby could simply not understand that in the name of anticommunism McCarthy had created fear where there had been hope, and suspicion where there had been trust. “By using his methods of proof, the
Pope could be a Communist,” Kenny shouted, his words not changing Bobby at all.

For a centrist consensual politician like Jack, McCarthy presented a dilemma. If Jack stood too strongly against the Wisconsin senator, he would lose his hard-core Catholic constituency, the very bedrock of his power. If he supported McCarthy, he would lose the liberals, the intellectuals, most Jewish voters, many labor leaders, numerous teachers, and activists, people who voted with their effort and resources and deeply voiced concerns.

Jack was a man of profound emotional disengagement, and he was no more comfortable with McCarthy’s rude outbursts than with the shrill replies of the liberals. Thanks probably to his father, Jack had the questionable honor of being one of the few Democrats who did not have to worry about McCarthy coming into their state to berate him. With no such problem, he set out to convince McCarthy’s detractors that he was worthy of their vote.

No group worried longer or more over this than did the Massachusetts Jewish community. Not only had Jews suffered disproportionately from McCarthy’s assaults, but they were acutely aware of an anti-Semitic strain among Irish-American Catholics, especially in Jack’s own father. The Jewish groups implored Jack to come forward and condemn McCarthy.

“I told you before, I am opposed to McCarthy,” Jack privately told Phil David Fine, his foremost liaison with the Jewish community. “I don’t like the way he does business, but I’m running for office here, and while I may be able to get x number of votes because I say I’m opposed to him, I am going to lose … two times x by saying that I am opposed. I am telling you, and you have to have faith in me, that at the proper time I’ll do the proper thing.”

If what one man had done weighed heavier than what the other man promised, then Lodge deserved the bulk of the Jewish votes. Lodge had a stellar record on the issues, such as Israel and civil rights, that preoccupied the Massachusetts Jewish community. Beyond that, Jack carried the heavy burden of his father’s history.

Jack’s campaign did not confront these issues but tried a more circular approach. One day in the kosher butcher shops, delicatessens, and grocery stores in heavily Jewish Dorchester there appeared blocks of free tickets for two movies that evening in the largest movie theater on Blue Hill Avenue. By the appointed hour there was not an empty seat in the entire theater, and people stood all around the back and the sides.

By the time the first movie ended—an American film about the heroic birth of Israel—the audience was full of deep emotion and a passionate sense of their relationship with Israel. As the lights went up, there stood Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., an apparition who moved the audience only
slightly less than if Ben-Gurion himself had walked up the aisle. Then Congressman John McCormack, a man nicknamed “Rabbi John,” appeared, to another thunderous round of applause.

And finally, when the two speakers had made their remarks, Congressman Kennedy strode onto the stage. When he finished his talk and walked off to more applause, a travelogue on Israel played on the screen. It was a glorious evening, especially if you were working for Jack. The campaign replicated the same approach in other heavily Jewish areas.

While they attempted to manipulate the various ethnic groups and constituencies, the Kennedys maintained a well-earned cynicism toward much of the press. Jack was forever flattering journalism and journalists, but flattery is to respect what copper is to gold, the cheapest kind of currency. Jack applied it to those journalists inordinately attracted to its coinage.

The Kennedys’ scorn for some members of the press was honestly won, and it presented a number of moral conundrums. When did generosity become a bribe? And who was guiltier, the supplicant with the outstretched hand or the patron who greased his palm with a few coins?

Jack had observed for years the family’s relationship with Arthur Krock. His father would not think of issuing significant campaign statements without running them past Krock. The reporter was not a conniving hack seeking to supplement his miserable wages with handouts from Joe. He was the premier political columnist for the
New York Times,
the most important newspaper in America, and he was available at all times and all hours, for advice, help with speeches, or whatever sundry duty the family demanded. In the 1930s, Joe had offered to pay the journalist five thousand dollars for his work on Joe’s book supporting Roosevelt, and that may have been the least of it. It was whispered around the Kennedy camp that he was on the old man’s payroll. Better if he was, for if he was being paid only in access, deference, and the illusion of importance, he was a man who was bought cheaply indeed.

If a man of Krock’s stature was so amenable, then certain lesser journalists and newspapers were even more so. In October, Lodge met with John Fox, the new owner of the
Boston Post.
The
Post
was a Democratic standard-bearer, at least it had been before Fox bought the troubled daily. Fox planned to endorse Lodge, however, support that Lodge thought easily worth forty thousand votes, enough to ensure his reelection.

Lodge told the good news to one of his top aides, who mentioned the extraordinary endorsement to Joseph Timilty, Joe’s closest political associate. Joe went to see Fox. Joe knew that the paper was in financial trouble, and after the apparent application of a half-million-dollar loan, the next day the
Post
endorsed Jack.

“I don’t know whether he arranged for him to get a loan or got him a loan or what,” Bobby recalled. “I don’t remember the details, but the
Boston Post
supported John Kennedy—and there was a connection between the two events. I don’t know … specifically what was involved, but I know he was an unsavory figure.” Jack was more blunt in speaking to the journalist Fletcher Knebel: “You know, we had to buy that fucking paper or I’d have been licked.”

Boston’s thriving ethnic press was for the most part just as mercenary as the publisher of the
Boston Post.
These papers viewed the election not as a subject for vigorous reporting but as an enviable opportunity for political advertising. When one of Jack’s aides, Ralph Coghlan, went around Boston meeting the various editors, he reported that every paper, from the Armenian
Hairenik
and the Italian
Gazzetta Del Massachusetts
to the black
Chronicle,
expected ads in return for its support. In the inner world of the campaign it was all tit-for-tat, my favor for yours, a series of exchanges that had little to do with principles or ideas.

For the Kennedy men, this was not only a campaign for the Senate but a testing ground, and they were perfecting techniques and strategy that they intended one day to employ to elevate Jack to the White House.

After one particularly tough day on the campaign trail, an exhausted Jack sat in his father’s apartment on Beacon Street talking with his father and Morrissey about the campaign. As difficult as this Senate campaign was proving, Joe said that Jack must think further ahead. If he won in November, he would win the presidential nomination and election to the White House.

“I will work our the plans to elect you president,” he told his son, in a voice brimming with assurance. “It will not be more difficult for you to be elected president than it will be to win the Lodge fight.”

When Jack won the election by seventy thousand votes, or 51.5 percent, the candidate was not the only noble victor that evening; his father, brother, and mother had triumphed as well. Joe and Rose remembered so vividly how Honey Fitz had run against Lodge’s grandfather for the Senate in 1916, and how painful it had been when he lost. “At last the Fitzgeralds have evened the score with the Lodges,” Rose said.

What more exquisite revenge for a century of slights than to best the senator bearing the greatest old Boston political name of them all. As he had promised he would do if he won, Jack sang “Sweet Adeline” that evening. This was not his own tune, however, but his grandfather’s political theme song, and he would no more look back at his immigrant past than would the shrewd young politicos who surrounded him.

Joe had done what had to be done, and if this meant buying the
Boston Post’s
endorsement as one would buy billboard space, so be it. He had made
at least one other crucial move. The man who ran for Jack’s seat that year, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr., insisted years later that Joe had pushed Governor Paul Dever to run for reelection when the man wanted to retire. Dever was a party politician who had built a machine across the Commonwealth dedicated to the advancement of the Democratic Party and its candidates and agenda. A man with high blood pressure and a heart condition, the governor had been advised by his doctors not to run.

On this election evening there was only one dour face in Jack’s headquarters. That was his own father. Joe spent much of the time on the phone talking to the governor, hoping to hear that Dever had finally pulled ahead. The governor’s organization had helped Jack more than Dever. At four in the morning Joe gave up. “Paul is not going to make it. I guess I’ll go to bed.” Joe got up from his chair and turned back once more before he left. “I wonder if Jack Kennedy will ever realize what Paul Dever did for him in this election.”

Dever had lost not only the election and possibly his health but the political organization that was much of his life’s work. During the campaign, Anthony Gallucio and others had traversed the state, bringing a myriad of new people into politics, the natural constituents for a Kennedy Democratic machine, similar to the Dever Democratic machine. Gallucio pleaded with Jack to keep the organization intact that they had so laboriously put together to further the Democratic Party. Jack replied curtly: “I’m going to run my own boat.” Jack did not see the Democratic Party as a sea that raised all boats or none. To him, politics was more like a series of locks that his ship would work its way through while other boats waited far behind. It was of little concern to him whether or not the other boats continued up the canal.