An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (25 page)

Roosevelt’s New Deal had put in place Social Security, unemployment insurance, and public housing, which Jack saw as being sacrosanct among his constituents and impossible for an Eleventh District congressman to oppose without committing political suicide. But privately he had substantial concerns about some of them. “The scarlet thread that runs throughout the world—is one of resignation of major problems into the all absorbing hands of the great Leviathan—the state,” he declared in a poorly crafted 1950 speech at the University of Notre Dame. He warned against the “ever expanding power of the Federal government” and asserted that “control over local affairs was the essence of liberty.” His conservatism partly found expression in a vote with the Republican majority for the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution (limiting presidents to two terms). The act of revenge against Franklin Roosevelt, as it was known, had much appeal to Jack as an indirect way to retrospectively censure FDR for having fostered “socialist” measures, run for a fourth term as a sick and dying man, and “appeased” Stalin at Yalta.

At the same time, however, Jack had genuine compassion for the needs of the blue-collar workers dependent on government to ease their lives. The failure of Congress to act on some social welfare measures he considered transparently vital to the well-being of deserving citizens frustrated him and added to his discontent about serving in the House. In particular, Congress’s failure in 1945-46 to enact housing legislation impressed him as a dereliction of duty to veterans. Federal remedies for the country’s housing shortage, which affected thousands of returning veterans in Boston and around the country, commanded his full support. The absence of wartime construction and the rapid growth of postwar families made this a compelling concern. In February 1947, he told a Boston radio audience of his high hopes for passage of the Wagner-Ellender-Taft Bill, which he described as “desperately needed.”

But he was disappointed, despite outspoken demands on his part for congressional action. He could not understand why some members of the House would not rise above their political self-interest and false assumptions about free enterprise for the sake of larger national needs. “The only time that private enterprise alone anywhere near met the demand for houses was in 1925,” he told his colleagues in April. By July, his frustration at House inaction boiled over in an attack on the Republican majority, which, he said, was willing to help big-business interests, but the veterans’ “drastic” need of affordable dwellings would have to wait on “an investigation of the housing shortage.” Since the facts were already known, Jack declared on the House floor, “this gesture by the Republican party is a fraud. . . . They have always been receptive to the best interests of the real estate and building association, but when it came to spending money to secure homes for the people of this country, they just were not interested.”

Jack’s strong advocacy of federally financed housing won him warm praise in his district. One supporter sent a letter to all the Boston newspapers, lauding Jack’s “moral courage.” And although the personal political benefit of supporting veterans’ housing was not lost on Jack, the selfishness of the realty interests and the shortsightedness of conservative VFW and American Legion leaders (who had aligned themselves with those interests) legitimately upset him. Quoting a Catholic newspaper, Jack called the American Legion a “legislative drummer boy for the real estate lobby.” In response, a Legion spokesman belittled Jack as an uninformed “embryo” congressman. When the Legion then supported what Jack saw as a fiscally irresponsible bonus bill for veterans while continuing its opposition to the housing measure, Jack told the House that “the leadership of the American Legion had not had a constructive thought for the benefit of this country since 1918!” After this outburst, Jack, who believed it “terribly important” to his political future to be seen as “rational” and “thoughtful,” worried that he had gone too far. “Well, Ted,” he told Reardon when he got back to the office, “I guess we’re gone. That finishes us down here.” But his principled stand redounded to his benefit: public reaction was strongly in his favor, especially from veterans, whose letters backed him ten to one.

It was an important lesson. A humane government looking out for the powerless or less powerful was a necessary counter to business interests that thought primarily about the bottom line. In 1947, Jack did not think of himself as a New Deal liberal, but the housing fight was a first step in that direction. Additional steps were sometimes small, as the struggles over the power of labor unions, which became the major issue before Congress during 1947, reveal. As a representative of a working-class district, he felt duty-bound to speak and vote for the interests of the unions, which were under sharp attack for putting their own needs above the national good. Jack was mindful of the long struggle for labor rights stretching back into the nineteenth century and culminating in the victories of the 1930s that legalized collective bargaining and secured the right to strike. But he saw the unions as fiercely self-serving and no more ready than corporate America to put the needs of the country above their own interest. Communist infiltration of the unions, which allegedly made them vulnerable to manipulation by Soviet agents putting Moscow’s needs before those of the United States, especially troubled him. In subcommittee hearings in 1947 on communist subversion of the United Electrical Workers and the United Auto Workers, Jack hammered away at witnesses suspected of communist sympathies and, in the case of the UAW, of impeding American industrial mobilization in 1941 when Soviet Russia was allied with Nazi Germany. A motion to bring perjury charges against union leaders whom Jack believed part of a communist conspiracy gave him standing as a tough-minded anticommunist intent on ferreting out and prosecuting subversives.

Nevertheless, he opposed measures that would make labor again vulnerable to management’s arbitrary control over wages and working conditions. When the House considered the excessively harsh Hartley Bill in April 1947, which would have substantially reined in labor’s right to strike, Jack called instead for a balanced law as a way to head off labor-industry strife destructive to the nation. He acknowledged that the unions “in their irresponsibility have been guilty of excesses that have caused this country great discomfort and concern.” But while the bill before the House had attractive features, it would “so strangle collective bargaining with restraints and limitations as to make it ineffectual.” It would “bring not peace but labor war—a war bitter and dangerous. This bill in its present form plays into the hands of the radicals in our unions, who preach the doctrine of class struggle.” A vote for the Hartley Bill, he said, would be a vote for industrial warfare.

Jack’s dissent put him in company with 106 other House opponents of the bill, who were swamped by 308 Republicans and conservative Democrats ready to risk industrial strife. When the more moderate Taft-Hartley version emerged from a conference committee in June, Jack briefly considered voting for it. But the interests of his district, the conviction that such a vote would end his House career, and the defects in a bill he saw as still too draconian toward unions persuaded him to join 78 congressmen in opposing 320 supporters. After Truman vetoed Taft-Hartley, the House and Senate, with Jack voting to sustain the president, overrode the veto.

By the end of 1947, Jack’s voting record on supporting the unions received a perfect score from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO): eleven out of eleven correct votes. Given Jack’s district, the votes are not surprising, but they little reflect the ambivalence Jack felt on labor issues.

Jack was no more comfortable with battles over federal aid to education. As a Catholic representing a heavily Catholic district, he became an immediate exponent of helping parochial schools. The anti-Catholic bias on the issue angered and frustrated him. In 1947, a representative of the Freemasons testifying at a subcommittee hearing on educational aid sounded familiar clichés about Catholic loyalty to Church over country. “Now you don’t mean the Catholics in America are legal subjects of the Pope?” Kennedy sharply asked the witness. “I am not a legal subject of the Pope.” When the man cited canon law overriding all secular rules, Kennedy replied, “There is an old saying in Boston that we get our religion from Rome and our politics from home.”

The willingness of the committee to hear from such a witness speaks volumes about the outlook of many in the Congress and the country toward helping Catholic schools with public funds. In 1947, twenty-eight states had laws against “acting as a trustee for the disbursement of federal funds to non-public schools,” and the U.S. Senate Education and Labor Committee had reported out a bill that “would make it impossible for the states to use any of the federal funds for parochial schools.” A Gallup poll found that 49 percent of Americans favored giving federal aid entirely to public schools, while 41 percent wanted part of it to go to parochial institutions; the division between Protestants (against) and Catholics (for) on the issue seemed unbridgeable.

Jack shared the view of most American Catholics that legislation forbidding any aid to religious schools was discriminatory and unconstitutional. In this, he was in harmony with the Supreme Court, which had ruled in a 1947 New Jersey case,
Everson
v.
Board of Education,
that public monies could be used to reimburse private-school students for bus transportation. By its 5-4 decision, the Court had declared direct aid to pupils, regardless of where they attended school, no violation of First Amendment restrictions on making laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” Kennedy took this to mean that noneducational services such as bus rides, health examinations, and lunches could be freely provided to students in public and private, including religious, schools. But although Jack would consistently support this sort of federal aid, he was not without reservations about the whole idea of federal financing for schools, which states and counties had traditionally paid for. He was concerned that “present federal educational activities are tremendously costly” and might impose a “staggering” burden on taxpayers. To rein in what he feared could become runaway costs, he urged that such aid to education be given only when there was a demonstrable need. In addition, he called for federal requirements that states make greater efforts “through properly balanced taxation and efficiency of operation” to improve their own educational systems.

Jack was also unhappy with being identified as a Catholic congressman promoting parochial interests. It is true that public stands for equal federal treatment of public and parochial schools won him high praise from Catholic Church and lay leaders. (One Catholic newspaper called him “a white knight” committed to “courageous representation of his constituency.”) But he was uncomfortable with the perception that he was a spokesman of the Catholic Church and a captive of his Catholic constituents. He wished to be known as a public servant whose judgment rested not on narrow ideological or personal prejudices, and little mattered to him more during his term in the House than making clear that he operated primarily in the service of national rather than more limited group interests.

A controversy concerning Boston mayor Curley demonstrates Kennedy’s eagerness to create some distance between himself and the ruling Catholic clique in Boston. After his return to the mayor’s office in 1946, Curley had been indicted for fraudulent use of the mail to solicit war contracts for bogus companies. The following year he was convicted and sent to the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, to serve a six-to-eighteen-month term. Seventy-two years old, suffering from diabetes and high blood pressure, Curley asked the court for clemency, citing a physician’s prediction that his imprisonment would be a death sentence. When the judge refused his plea, 172,000 of Curley’s supporters, about a quarter of Boston’s population, petitioned President Truman to commute the sentence. John McCormack asked New England congressmen to support the request.

All the Massachusetts representatives followed McCormack’s lead except for Jack. When McCormack approached him about signing, Kennedy asked whether the president had been consulted. McCormack said no and, irritated with the young man’s implied defiance, declared, “If you don’t want to sign, don’t sign it.” Having learned from the surgeon general that Curley’s imprisonment was not life-threatening and that he would receive proper care in the prison hospital, Jack refused to sign. Because his district was a Curley stronghold, Jack worried that he might now be “politically dead, finished,” as he told Ted Reardon.

At the same time, however, Jack saw good political reasons to resist. He was not beholden to district party regulars; his election had been more the result of building a personal organization than of getting help from the traditional pols. Moreover, it defined Jack as a new kind of Boston politician, a member of a younger generation with broader experience and a wider view of the world. It also allowed Jack to please Honey Fitz, who despised Curley for having cut short his political career. More important to Jack, though, was the injustice of giving Curley something he had denied other constituents: backing for an undeserved pardon. When Curley was released after five months and returned to the mayor’s office with declarations that he felt better than he had in years, Jack gained in standing as a politician who thought for himself.

Though Jack was feeling his way on domestic issues, tacking between political expediency and moral conviction, he felt more comfortable in dealing with major foreign policy questions. His book, wartime experience, and newspaper articles about postwar peacemaking gave him a surer sense of what needed to be done.

In March 1947, after the president announced the Truman Doctrine proposing aid to Greece and Turkey as a deterrent to Soviet expansion in the Near East, Jack spoke at the University of North Carolina in support of the president’s plan. He believed it essential to national security to prevent Europe’s domination by any single power. To those who warned that aiding Greece and Turkey would provoke Moscow and possibly lead to another global conflict, he invoked the failure at Munich to stand up to Hitler as a miscalculation that had led to the Second World War. A firm policy now against Soviet imperialism would discourage Moscow from dangerous adventures in the future, he predicted. To those who believed that America should rely on the United Nations to preserve the independence of Greece and Turkey, Kennedy cautioned that it lacked the wherewithal to meet the challenge. America’s aim was “not to dominate by dollar imperialism the Governments of Greece and Turkey, but rather it is to assist them to live in freedom.” The president’s policy was “the only path by which we will reach security and peace.” Jack was equally enthusiastic and outspoken about the Marshall Plan to restore economic health and stability to Western Europe with loans and grants of up to $17 billion.