The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (64 page)

Jack saw courage among his colleagues, even if others did not recognize it. And just as he primarily blamed the self-interested British populace, not their leaders, for the country’s belated rearmament before World War II, now he found fault with the American people more than with his fellow politicians. He bemoaned what he considered the misguided perception that his fellow senators were midget imposters dancing around controversial issues where great men had once bravely stood. As Jack saw it, the fault lay not with his fellow senators but more with a decline in “the public’s appreciation of the art of politics, of the nature and necessity for compromise and balance, and of the nature of the Senate as a legislative chamber.” This man who had once been so disdainful of elected officials that he talked of becoming a “public servant” now proudly called himself by the term he once found so distasteful: politician.

Acts of political courage had become more difficult now. Jack saw that “our everyday life is becoming so saturated with the tremendous power of mass communication that any unpopular or unorthodox course arouses a storm of protests,” a reaction that his political predecessors could not have envisioned. “Our political life is becoming so expensive, so mechanized and so dominated by professional politicians and public relations men that the idealist who dreams of independent statesmanship is rudely awakened by the necessities of election and accomplishment.”

Jack had prophesied that one day an American president would be confronted with the immediate prospect of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Now he saw a danger of equal but subtler form—a time when the very concept of political courage would be endangered. “And only the very courageous will be able to keep alive the spirit of individualism and dissent which gave birth to this nation,” he wrote.

Jack was writing when his own political courage was as suspect as his
health. He had this book idea long before his failure to vote on the McCarthy censure, but as he wrote, he may have reflected on where that lack of action lay on the spectrum from cowardice to courage.

Courage was the highest virtue, and he aspired to a moment when he would be tested and found not wanting. The last sentences of the book are an exhortation to the American people, but also surely to Jack himself: “The stories of past courage can define that ingredient—they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his soul.”

The themes in
Profiles in Courage
resonated with the American psyche, and the book became a major best-seller. Jack used the royalties to buy more advertising, getting a double whammy for his money, a higher spot on the best-seller list, and his name linked time and again with the word “courage.”

This was not enough for Joe, who wanted his son to win the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious literary award in America. Anyone else would have considered the game up when the modest inspiring book of portraits was not even nominated for the prize. For Joe, that was not the end but the beginning.

“One of his slogans which Joe often quoted was ‘Things don’t happen, they are made to happen,’” Rose reflected. “As for instance when Jack got the Pulitzer Prize for his book or when he or Bob were chosen as outstanding young man of the year. All of this was a result of their own ability plus careful spadework on their father’s part as to who was on the committee and how to reach such and such a person through such and such a friend. However, Joe was lucky because his sons were good material to work with. They behaved well, they were intelligent, and best of all they always had confidence in their father’s judgment, because it had been vindicated so many times.”

Joe asked his friend Krock to be of service in getting the award for Jack. The
New York Times
columnist had for years been on the Pulitzer board. He considered himself “sort of the Mark Hanna of the board, a very ruthless politician.” Krock was delighted to see whether he could help make the book of profiles the winner of the biography prize. If Jack’s book did not deserve the prize for its literary quality, it surely might deserve it for the best politicking. After all, in past years the award had not always gone to the most deserving book but to the best job of what Krock called “logrolling.” He called the board members who would be voting, members who for the most part sat there because of Krock’s efforts.

In a world in which honor was more highly valued than power, the board members would have told Krock that they had not nominated the book for good reasons, and that his “logrolling” was not only inappropriate but futile.

That did not happen, though the members may well have been moved by the inspirational tone of the modest book more than by any lobbying.

A book that was not even on the screening committee’s list of nominees received the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography. In a world in which truth was valued more than appearance, Jack would have gracefully shared the award with his collaborators. But that did not happen either.

17
The Pursuit of Power

O
n the first evening of the 1956 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Jack narrated a film on the history of the Democratic Party titled
The Pursuit of Happiness.
His great audience lay not in the eleven thousand delegates in the sweltering confines of the arena but in the more than one hundred million Americans who watched at least part of the convention on the new medium of television.

“I am Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts,” Jack said as he appeared live introducing the film. Most Americans were seeing and hearing the thirty-nine-year-old politician for the first time. He was cool but conveyed a hint of passion. His Boston accent sounded slightly exotic and aristocratic. He was a youthful politician standing shoulder to shoulder with Jefferson and Roosevelt and the other great men of the Democratic past whose names he evoked. The film ended with a close-up of Roosevelt and Jack’s resonant tones. “For the proud past of the Democratic Party is but a prelude to its future,” he said, as if he were willing to step forward into these giant shoes “to the leadership it offers the nation, to the faith by which we all abide.”

When the applause died down, Governor Frank Clement of Tennessee came to the podium to give the keynote address. The thirty-six-year-old politician had a fleshy, handsome countenance and a reputation as a spellbinding orator. This evening Clement sounded overwrought, his emotive manner more appropriate to a nineteenth-century evangelist’s tent than a mid-twentieth-century political arena, his ponderous words heavily bejeweled with metaphors.

When Clement ended his lengthy speech, demonstrators rushed forward carrying the banners boldly emblazoned “Kennedy for President.” In politics
there is nothing more calculated than the illusion of spontaneity, and these Massachusetts delegates had been primed for their moment in the television spotlight. Jack was a candidate for the vice presidency, not the presidency, but in this one evening he had become a major presence in national politics. The star of the evening was the man whose cool voice exemplified the future of politics as much as the florid Clement represented the past. “Kennedy came before the convention tonight as a movie star,” wrote the
New York Times.

Jack’s fascination with Hollywood was not a dilettantish indulgence, but a formidable weapon in his rise to national power. The millions of Americans watching their television screens bestowed celebrity on those they chose to anoint. Celebrity was becoming the most desired new currency, readily cashed in for money or power, and by the time the convention was over no one in the vast hall had received more freshly minted celebrity than John F. Kennedy.

Jack had another unique element in his panoply of power, and that was his beautiful wife. Seven months pregnant, Jackie was suffering in all the heat and turmoil of the convention. Only once, however, did she confess her discomfort. As she looked out the window of their tenth-floor suite, a reporter asked how she liked the convention. “Not much,” she sighed. But for the most part, she sat dutifully in a box, and during the week the television audience saw a tableau of marital happiness, a star married to a star.

In his three and a half years in the Senate, Jack had been sick and absent so much that he had had no major impact. By all appearances, he had neither the record, the energy, nor the ambition to attempt to win such a prize as the vice presidential nomination. The reality was that the calendar of Jack’s life might have only a few pages that had not yet been turned over. If he aspired to national political office, he could not wait to be noticed. For the first months of 1956, he had coyly refused to proclaim his interest in the nomination while allowing Sorensen and others to work on his behalf.

Jack spent his time promoting Adlai Stevenson, the putative Democratic presidential nominee. Stevenson’s strongest advocate within Jack’s family was his own wife, who for the first time took a strong interest in politics. Jackie was one of a myriad of educated women devoted to the former Illinois governor, applauding what she considered “his intelligence, farsightedness, and reasonableness.” She did not limit her words to whispered asides to her husband but used them in drafting in her own hand the very words spoken by the senator from Massachusetts in announcing his support for Stevenson’s candidacy.

Ambition is often a wondrous tonic, and in advancing his candidacy Jack showed an energy and sheer pleasure in the high deviousness of politics that
he had rarely shown before. For instance, in seeking to remove an anti-Stevenson man, William H. Burke Jr., from the chairmanship of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, Jack spread gossip accusing Burke of “spend[ing] the whole day with Carmine DeSapio,” the New York boss and Stevenson foe.

Most politicians would have sought to replace Burke with a new chairman who would do his bidding. Jack realized that doing that would exchange new enemies for the old one. In a letter marked “Personal and Confidential,” Jack told one supporter, attorney Walter T. Burke (no relationship to William H. Burke Jr.) that “if someone who is as close to me as you is named, the feeling will generally be that this whole fight has been one for personal gain rather than a clear-cut attempt to establish an entirely new, impartial, and clean organization.” Instead, Jack proposed former Mayor Pat Lynch of Somerville. “While he is not overly close to me, the fact that he is acceptable to most of those who are on our side … makes him, I think, an ideal new face for the job.”

When Stan Karson, a Stevenson campaign executive, talked to Jack soon after William Burke Jr. had been deposed, Karson left feeling “that for the first time since I have known him over the past few years, he appears to be in control of a political situation, knows it, and likes it.” Karson presumably believed that Jack’s interest was in masterminding the Stevenson campaign in Massachusetts, not positioning himself for the vice presidency by ingratiating himself with the former Illinois governor.

Jack’s daunting problem was his Catholicism. Ever since Al Smith’s disastrous run for the presidency in 1928, it had become part of political catechism that a Catholic could not be elected to national office. Jack was not about to confront this issue directly. The shrewdest partisanship masks itself in a bland cloak of neutrality. Sorensen prepared a seemingly impartial report on voting records suggesting that a Catholic on the ticket would bring votes to Stevenson, not lose them, and then leaked it to the media. The Kennedy people also did another pseudo-neutral report winnowing down the possible vice presidential choices by criteria that included marital status (“Should be married, and with no previous divorces”). Jack’s picture-book marriage stood in stark conquest to the domestic lives of five other divorced candidates. When the sorting out was finished, Jack turned out to be the perfect candidate.

Jack wanted Bobby beside him at the Chicago convention in July. With Sorensen and the others there was always the niggling doubt that they would put their own interests ahead of his, that they might prefer flattery to truth. With Bobby there was none of that. Bobby saw no greater honor, no higher goal, than to advance Jack. The younger Kennedy cut through all the cant and self-promotion and grasped the nubs of truth, no matter how unpleasant they might be.

Jack called Congressman Tip O’Neill who had taken his old congressional seat, to try to get a delegate seat for Bobby. “Tip,” he said, “I’d like to have you name my brother Bob as a delegate to the convention. My brother Bob is the smartest politician I have ever met in my life. Tip, he is absolutely brilliant. You know you never can tell, lightning may strike at this convention out there, I could wind up as vice president. And I’d like my brother with credentials so he could be on the floor to really work for me.”

O’Neill was a politician with a consummate understanding of politics as a game of endless exchanges. “As long as you feel that way about it, Senator, okay,” O’Neill said, taking his own name off as a delegate and letting Bobby go in his stead.

Delegate credentials were not like ducats to a prizefight that could be sold, exchanged, or traded. One citizen, Robert P. Donovan of East Boston, was outraged that Bobby gave his home address as 122 Bowdoin Street, where he supposedly resided with his pregnant wife and four children along with Jack and his wife in a two-room apartment. Donovan protested to the state ballot law commission, whose commissioners were hardly going to cast out the favorite brother of their favorite son.

At the convention, Jack had Bobby on the floor and Jackie in her seat, but he had one irreconcilable problem—his relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt. The late president’s widow was the moral center of American liberalism. Mrs. Roosevelt found Jack’s silence on McCarthy a coward’s lament.

“She had seen me on a program a week or so before, and had not felt that I had been vigorous enough on McCarthy,” Jack recalled three years later. “So I went up [to see her], and my explanation was under the most adverse conditions, because she was in her room, she was hurrying to go downstairs…. It was like eighteen people in a telephone booth, and she was giving it just half attention—not listening really.”