An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (30 page)

Joe also made his mark by driving out Mark Dalton as campaign manager. Jack asked Dalton, who had headed his congressional race in 1946, to run the 1952 Senate contest. Dalton put aside a thriving law practice to take on the assignment. But he quickly ran afoul of Joe, who did not think he was aggressive or savvy enough. Two months into the campaign, Joe humiliated Dalton by accusing him of spending funds with no good results. He also blocked an official announcement naming Dalton as campaign manager. Dalton, who took it as “a very grave blow” when Jack would not reverse his father’s decision, resigned.

Robert Kennedy, who was working as an attorney at the Justice Department, was reluctantly persuaded to take over managing the campaign. “I’ll just screw it up,” he told Kenneth O’Donnell, who was one of Jack’s inner-circle advisers, objecting that he knew nothing about electoral politics. But he agreed to take on the job when O’Donnell warned that without him the campaign was headed for “absolute catastrophic disaster.” Bobby worked eighteen-hour days, driving himself so hard that he lost twelve pounds off a spare frame. He put in place a Kennedy organization that reached into every part of the state and stirred teams of supporters to work almost as hard as he did. In addition, he took on difficult, unpleasant jobs Jack shunned. When he found professional politicians hanging around the Boston headquarters, he threw them out. “Politicians do nothing but hold meetings,” he complained. “You can’t get any work out of a politician.” When Paul Dever’s organization, which began to falter in the governor’s race, tried to join forces with Kennedy’s more effective campaign, Bobby shut them off. “Don’t give in to them,” Jack told his brother, “but don’t get me involved in it.” Bobby had a bitter exchange with Dever, who complained to Joe about his abrasive son, with whom he refused to deal in the future.

Journalists Ralph Martin and Ed Plaut later concluded that Bobby Kennedy gave the campaign “organization, organization, and more organization.” The result was “the most methodical, the most scientific, the most thoroughly detailed, the most intricate, the most disciplined and smoothly working state-wide campaign in Massachusetts history—and possibly anywhere else.” “In each community,” Dave Powers noted, the campaign set up “a political organization totally apart from the local party organization. . . . Kennedy volunteers delivered 1,200,000 brochures to every home in Massachusetts.” It was an unprecedented effort to reach voters.

With Bobby running the day-to-day operation, Jack was free to concentrate on the issues—anticommunism, Taft-Hartley and labor unions, the Massachusetts and New England economies, civil rights, government spending, and which of the two candidates had performed more effectively in addressing these matters. Ted Reardon prepared a “Black Book” of “Lodge’s Dodges,” emphasizing the extent to which Lodge had been on all sides of all issues. The campaign also put out comparative charts on what the candidates “Said and Did From 1947-1951” about major public policies of greatest concern to voters.

Yet in spite of the great energy the campaign—and Jack in particular—put into focusing on issues, they were of relatively little importance in determining the vote. On all major policy matters, the two candidates largely resembled each other. They were both internationalist supporters of containment as well as conservatives with occasional bows to liberalism; they both favored sustaining labor unions, less government intervention in domestic affairs, and balanced federal budgets. Lodge, who spearheaded Eisenhower’s drive for the presidency against the candidacy of Ohio senator Robert Taft, had his problems with conservative Republicans, some of whom turned to Kennedy as a more reliable anticommunist and some of whom voted for neither candidate, which cost Lodge more than it did Jack. At the same time, however, Jack could hardly trumpet his six years in the House as a model of legislative achievement. To be sure, his constituents had few complaints about his service to the district; but if he were asking voters to make him a senator because he had been an innovative legislator or a House leader, he would have been hard-pressed to make an effective case. If his political career had come to an end in 1952, he would have joined the ranks of the thousands of other nameless representatives who left no memorable mark on the country’s history.

Most observers—then and later—agreed that the election turned more on personality than on issues. Kennedy aides O’Donnell and Powers believed that “voters in that election were not interested in issues. Kennedy won on his personality—apparently he was the new kind of political figure that the people were looking for that year, dignified and gentlemanly and well-educated and intelligent, without the air of superior condescension that other cultured politicians, such as Lodge and Adlai Stevenson, too often displayed before audiences.” A former mayor of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, said in 1960, “There’s something about Jack—and I don’t know quite what it is—that makes people want to believe in him. Conservatives and liberals both tell you that he’s with them, because they want to believe that he is, and they want to be with him. They want to identify their views with him.”

Jack’s narrow margin of victory over Lodge—70,737 votes out of 2,353,231 cast, 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent—was impressive in light of a 208,800-vote advantage for Eisenhower over Stevenson in the state and Dever’s loss of the governorship to Christian Herter by 14,000 votes. The outcome surprised some people, including Lodge, who had an unbeaten string of electoral victories dating from 1932 and had the benefit of an Eisenhower visit to Massachusetts on the final day of the campaign. “I felt rather like a man who has just been hit by a truck,” Lodge said. The fact that only five other congressmen who served with Jack—Nixon and Smathers (the only other Democrat), Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating of New York, and Thurston Morton of Kentucky—made it to the Senate speaks forcefully about Kennedy’s achievement.

Electorally, he certainly had commanded the support of the Irish, Italians, Jews, French Canadians, Poles, Slovaks, Greeks, Albanians, Portuguese, Latvians, Finnish, Estonians, and Scandinavians. Torby Macdonald, who was now also a Massachusetts congressman, had it right when he told Jack on election night that he would win despite Ike’s certain victory in the state. When Jack asked him why, Macdonald replied, “I think that you represent the best of the new generation. Not generation in age but minorities, really. The newer arrived people. And Lodge represents the best of the old-line Yankees. I think there are more of the newly arrived people than there are of the old-line Yankees.” To this, Macdonald might have added women as a group that would help Jack get to the Senate.

Indeed, the campaign had made special efforts to attract ethnic and female voters. The evening teas for thirty to forty women at private homes ultimately attracted as many as 70,000 voters, most of whom cast their ballots for Jack. Jewish voters were also given special attention because Jack had to overcome allegations that his father had been anti-Semitic and even pro-Nazi and that he was less sympathetic to Israel than was Lodge. Several appearances before Jewish organizations and outspoken support from Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., and John W. McCormack, as well as several nationally prominent Jews such as Senator Herbert Lehman and current or former congressmen Emanuel Celler, Abraham Ribicoff, and Sidney Yates, brought the great majority of Jewish voters into Jack’s camp. Jack’s charm and his request to one Jewish audience, “Remember, I’m running for the Senate and not my father,” were indispensable in helping swing Jews to his side.

The statistics on ethnic voting for Jack are striking. In 1952, 91 percent of Massachusetts voters went to the polls, an increase of more than 17 percent from the Senate contest in 1946, with most of the greater voting occurring in ethnic districts. In the Catholic precincts of Boston, for example, where Lodge had won respectable backing in 1946 of between 41 and 45 percent, his support now dropped to between 19 and 25 percent. The shift was even more pronounced in Boston’s Jewish districts. Where Lodge had won between 60 and 66 percent of the vote against incumbent Catholic senator David I. Walsh in 1946, his support slipped to below 40 percent in 1952.

Jack’s success rested on something more than being the “First Irish Brahmin”; he was the first American Brahmin elevated from the ranks of the millions and millions of European immigrants who had flooded into the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The beneficiary of his father’s fabulous wealth, a Harvard education, and a heroic career in the military fighting to preserve American values, Jack Kennedy was a model of what every immigrant family aspired to for themselves and their children. And even if they could never literally match what the Kennedys had achieved in wealth and prominence, they took vicarious satisfaction from Jack’s identification as an accepted member of the American elite. Many of those voting for him could remember the 1920s and 1930s, when being a first- or second-generation minority made your standing as an American suspect. In voting for Jack, the minorities were not simply putting one of their own in the high reaches of government—they had been doing that for a number of years—but were saying that he and they had arrived at the center of American life and no longer had to feel self-conscious about their status as citizens of the Great Republic. Jack’s election to the Senate opened the way to a romance between Jack Kennedy and millions of Americans. It would be one of the great American love affairs, and in his election day grin, it was just possible to imagine that Jack himself knew the match had been made.

CHAPTER 6

The Senator

We have not fully recognized the difficulty facing a politician conscientiously desiring, in [Daniel] Webster’s words, “to push [his] skiff from the shore alone” into a hostile and turbulent sea.

— John F. Kennedy,
Profiles in Courage
(1956)

AS ONE OF ONLY NINETY-SIX
senators, Jack Kennedy hoped to have an impact on domestic and foreign affairs surpassing anything he possibly could have done in the Lower House. He knew that some of the country’s most memorable politicians—John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, the “fighting” Bob La Follettes, Sr. and Jr., George Norris, Charles Sumner, and Daniel Webster—had made their mark in the Senate. But he had no illusions that membership in America’s most exclusive club conferred automatic distinction; the great majority of senators—past and present—were unexceptional. In 1935, Senator J. Hamilton Lewis told Harry Truman after Truman became a Missouri senator that initially, “you will wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you will wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.” If Jack did not know this quote before his election, he certainly came to agree with it once he took up residence on the Senate floor. His fellow senators were cautious, self-serving, and unheroic, more often than not the captive of one special interest or another. Just three months into his term, Jack told a journalist, “I’ve often thought that the country might be better off if we Senators and Pages traded jobs.” In 1954, after a year in the Senate, when someone asked Jack, “What’s it like to be a United States senator?” he said after a moment, “It’s the most corrupting job in the world.” He saw senators as all too ready to cut deals and court campaign contributors to ensure their political futures. Jack also enjoyed the famous comment of Senate Chaplain Edward Everett Hale: “Do you pray for the senators, Dr. Hale?” “No,” he replied, “I look at the senators and I pray for the country.”

First as a congressman and then, even more so, as a senator, Jack disliked the pressure to obscure and compromise strongly held beliefs in the service of political survival. During his first months as a senator, he received a number of letters chiding him for not being a “true liberal.” “I’d be very happy to tell them that I am not a liberal at all,” Jack told a reporter. “I’m a realist.”

But as much as he disliked compromise, Jack was never indifferent to the vital role that accommodation played in a democracy: Politics, he said in 1956, was “the fine art of conciliating, balancing and interpreting the forces and factions of public opinion.” He did see limits to this process: Jack also believed that a man of conscience “realizes that once he begins to weigh each issue in terms of his chances for reelection, once he begins to compromise away his principles on one issue after another for fear that to do otherwise would halt his career and prevent future fights for principle, then he has lost the very freedom of conscience which justifies his continuance in office. But to decide at which point and on which issue he will risk his career is a difficult and soul-searching decision.” As his later actions demonstrated, Kennedy had an imperfect record in meeting his own standard; holding, and then moving beyond, his Senate seat took precedence over political principles more than once in the next eight years.

In 1953, at the start of Jack’s Senate service, international perils made philosophical questions about a senator’s behavior abstractions of secondary concern. The Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in 1949, the U.S. explosion of a 150-times-more-powerful hydrogen bomb in October 1952, a Chinese communist regime since 1949 leading a chorus of Third World opposition to U.S. imperialism, and the continuing conflict in Korea made questions of war and peace central concerns of the new Eisenhower administration and the Eighty-third Congress. During Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s first six months in office, ending the Korean fighting and responding to a Soviet “peace offensive” after Stalin died in March were continually in the headlines. The question of how to rein in Joe McCarthy, whose incessant reckless accusations about communists in high places had undermined civil liberties and divided the nation, was another topic of constant discussion on Capitol Hill.