An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (21 page)

Nor was his father completely confident that Jack was well suited for the job. As Joe said later, his eldest son “used to talk about being President some day, and a lot of smart people thought he would make it. He was altogether different from Jack—more dynamic, more sociable and easy going. Jack in those days back there when he was getting out of college was rather shy, withdrawn and quiet. His mother and I couldn’t picture him as a politician. We were sure he’d be a teacher or a writer.” Mark Dalton, a politician close to the Kennedys in 1945, remembered Jack as far from a natural. He did not seem “to be built for politics in the sense of being the easygoing affable person. He was extremely drawn and thin. . . . He was always shy. He drove himself into this. . . . It must have been a tremendous effort of will.” Nor was he comfortable with public speaking, impressing one of his navy friends as unpolished: “He spoke very fast, very rapidly, and seemed to be just a trifle embarrassed on stage.”

Yet not everyone agreed. Lem Billings thought that politics was Jack’s natural calling. “A lot of people say that if Joe hadn’t died, that Jack might never have gone into politics,” Lem said much later. ”I don’t believe this. Nothing could have kept Jack out of politics: I think this is what he had in him, and it just would have come out, no matter what.” Lem echoed the point in another interview: “Knowing his abilities, interests and background, I firmly believe that he would have entered politics even had he had three older brothers like Joe.” Barbara Ward, an English friend of Jack’s sister Kathleen, remembered meeting Jack during his visit to England in 1945. “He asked every sort of question of what were the pressures, what were the forces at work, who supported what . . . and you could see already that this young lieutenant [sic] was political to his fingertips. . . . He seemed so young—but with an extraordinarily . . . well-informed interest in the political situation he was seeing.”

Jack himself was not as sure as Billings about the direction his professional life would have taken had Joe lived. Political curiosity and “well-informed interest” don’t automatically translate into political ambition. But Jack did recall that his attraction to politics rested on much more than family pressure or faithfulness to his brother’s memory. He remembered that the responsibilities of power—“decisions of war and peace, prosperity and recession”—were a magnet. “Everything now depends upon what the government decides,” he said in 1960. “Therefore, if you are interested, if you want to participate, if you feel strongly about any public question, whether it’s labor, what happens in India, the future of American agriculture, whatever it may be, it seems to me that governmental service is the way to translate this interest into action.” If this sounds similar to what his father had said in 1930 about how “the people who run the government would be the biggest people in America,” it is not only because the son had been influenced by the father but because the father had been correct.

Comparisons with other professions made politics especially appealing to Jack. Alongside the drudgery of working in a law firm, writing “legislation on foreign policy or on the relationship between labor and management” seemed much more attractive. “How can you compare an interest in [fighting an antitrust suit] with a life in Congress where you are able to participate to some degree in determining which direction the nation will go?” Nor did he see journalism as a more interesting profession. “A reporter is
reporting
what happened. He is not
making
it happen. . . . It isn’t participating. . . . I saw how ideally politics filled the Greek definition of happiness—‘a full use of your powers along lines of excellence in a life-affording scope.’” Two of Jack’s closest aides later said that Jack “was drawn into politics by the same motive that drew Dwight Eisenhower and other World War II veterans, with somewhat the same reluctance, into the political arena—the realization that whether you really liked it or not, this was the place where you personally could do the most to prevent another war.” “Few other professions are so demanding,” Jack said later, “but few, I must add, are so satisfying to the heart and soul.” In 1960, he told an interviewer, “The price of politics is high, but think of all those people living normal average lives who never touch the excitement of it.”

A strong family interest, great family wealth, and a personal belief in the “necessity for adequate leadership in our political life, whether in the active field of politics or in the field of public service,” had all given him the incentive to seek elective office. Encouragement from professional politicians also persuaded him to run. He remembered how after he gave a public address in the fall of 1945 to help raise money for the Greater Boston Community Fund charity, “a politician came up to me and said that I should go into politics, that I might be governor of Massachusetts in ten years.” Joe Kane, a Kennedy cousin and highly regarded Boston pol, a man described as “smart and cunning, with the composure of a sphinx and ever present fedora pulled down over one eye in the manner of [then popular movie actor] Edward G. Robinson,” encouraged Jack by telling Joe, “There is something original about your young daredevil. He has poise, a fine Celtic map. A most engaging smile.” In a dinner speech, “he spoke with perfect ease and fluency but quietly, deliberately and with complete self-control, always on the happiest terms with his audience. He was the master, not the servant of his oratorical power. He received an ovation and endeared himself to all by his modesty and gentlemanly manner.” From what we know about Jack’s less-than-perfect public speaking abilities in 1945, Kane was ingratiating himself with Joe. Nevertheless, he was among the first to see the qualities that would ultimately make Jack such an attractive national public figure.

WHILE JACK WAS MAKING UP
his mind, Joe was setting the stage for Jack’s political career. Asked later what he did for Jack, Joe denied playing any part; he was eager to ensure that, as Rose wrote Kathleen, “whatever success there is will be due entirely to Jack and the younger group.” When pressed by the interviewer, who said, “But a father who loves his son as you so obviously do is bound to help his son,” Joe replied, “I just called people. I got in touch with people I knew. I have a lot of contacts. I’ve been in politics in Massachusetts since I was ten.” Two of JFK’s later aides, Kenneth P. O’Donnell, a college friend of Jack’s brother Bobby, and David F. Powers, a Boston Irish politician Jack recruited for his 1946 campaign, downplayed Joe’s part. They said that “his reputation as a prewar isolationist and his falling out with the New Deal might do Jack some harm,” so Joe stayed behind the scenes. But even there he confined himself to “fretting over small details, worrying whether Jack’s unpolitician-like style of campaigning was wrong for the Boston scene.” When JFK biographer Herbert Parmet interviewed O’Donnell in 1976 about Joe’s part in the events of 1945-46 that brought Jack into politics, he “became heated at suggestions that the Ambassador had played a prominent role. . . . He scoffed at stories about Joe Kennedy’s expertise and . . . pointed out that the Ambassador had been ‘out of touch’ with Boston politics for a long time. ‘He no longer knew a goddamn thing about what was going on in Massachusetts.’”

The record says otherwise. In the spring and summer of 1945, Joe made a special effort to renew the Kennedy presence in Massachusetts. If memories of his ambassadorship did not serve him in most parts of the country, his home state was more forgiving. In April, Joe made the front page of the
Boston Globe
when he lunched with Governor Maurice J. Tobin, gave a speech urging postwar reliance on the city’s air and sea ports to expand its economy, announced a half-million-dollar investment in the state, and agreed to become the chairman of a commission planning the state’s economic future. The chairmanship assignment allowed Joe to spend much of the summer crisscrossing Massachusetts to speak with business, labor, and government leaders. “When he took the economic survey job for Tobin,” a Boston politician stated, “it was to scout the state politically for Jack.” In July, Joe added to the family’s public visibility with a ship-launching ceremony for the USS
Joseph P. Kennedy,
which reminded people that two of his sons were war heroes. There were also discussions with Tobin about Jack’s becoming his running mate in 1946 as a candidate for lieutenant governor.

But Joe and Jack preferred a congressional campaign that could send Jack to Washington, where he could have national visibility. There was one problem, however: Which district? To this end, Joe secretly persuaded James Michael Curley to leave his Eleventh Congressional District seat for another run as Boston’s mayor. A fraud conviction and additional legal actions had put Curley in substantial debt, and he welcomed Joe’s hush-hush proposal to help him pay off what he owed and to finance his mayoral campaign.

The Eleventh District included Cambridge, with 30 percent of the registered voters, where former Cambridge mayor and state legislator Mike Neville was well entrenched; parts of Brighton, with 22,000 uncommitted Democrats; three Somerville wards, distinguished by warehouses, factories, and a large rail center that employed many of the area’s residents; one Charlestown ward populated by Irish Catholic stevedores who worked at the nearby docks and supported John Cotter, well known in the Eleventh as the long-serving secretary to the district’s congressmen; Boston’s North End, where Italian immigrants had largely replaced the Irish; and East Boston’s Ward One, another Italian American working-class enclave, which, like the North End, seemed warmly disposed to Joseph Russo, who had represented them on the Boston City Council for almost eight years. It was by no means a shoo-in for Jack.

Despite his father’s help—or perhaps because of it—Jack continued to have great doubts about whether he was making the right decision. He could not shake the feeling that he was essentially a stand-in for Joe Jr. When he spoke with
Look
magazine, which published an article about his campaign, he said that he was only doing “the job Joe would have done.” Privately he told friends, “I’m just filling Joe’s shoes. If he were alive, I’d never be in this.” He later told a reporter, “If Joe had lived, I probably would have gone to law school in 1946.” He disliked the inevitable comparisons between him and his brother, in which he seemed all too likely to come off second-best, but it seemed impossible to shake them.

Jack’s poor health also gave him pause. One returning war veteran who knew Jack in 1946 said, “I was as thin as I could be at that time, but Jack was even thinner. He was actually like a skeleton, thin and drawn.” Despite the steroids he was apparently taking, he continued to have abdominal pain and problems gaining weight. Backaches were a constant problem. Because hot baths gave him temporary relief, he spent some time every day soaking in a tub. But it was no cure-all, and considerable discomfort was the price of a physically demanding campaign. He also had occasional burning when urinating, which was the result of a nonspecific urethritis dating from 1940 and a possible sexual encounter in college, which when left untreated became a chronic condition. He was later diagnosed as having “a mild, chronic, non-specific prostatitis” that sulfa drugs temporarily suppressed. Moreover, a strenuous daily routine intensified the symptoms—fatigue, nausea, and vomiting—of the Addison’s disease that would not be diagnosed until 1947. A more sedate lifestyle must have seemed awfully attractive when compared with the long hours of walking and standing demanded of anyone trying to win the support of thousands of voters scattered across a large district.

Jack also felt temperamentally unsuited to an old-fashioned Boston-style campaign. False camaraderie was alien to his nature. He was a charmer but not an easygoing, affable character like his grandfather Honey Fitz, who loved mingling with people. Drinking in bars with strangers with whom he swapped stories and jokes was not a part of JFK’s disposition. “As far as backslapping with the politicians,” he said, “I think I’d rather go somewhere with my familiars or sit alone somewhere and read a book.”

One local pol who met Jack in 1946 “didn’t think he [Jack] had much on the ball at all. He was very retiring. You had to lead him by the hand. You had to push him into the pool rooms, taverns, clubs, and organizations.” He would give a speech at a luncheon and try to escape as quickly as possible afterward without trying to win over members of the audience. “He wasn’t a mingler,” one campaign volunteer recalled. “He didn’t mingle in the crowd and go up to people and say, ‘I’m Jack Kennedy.’” The volunteer remembered how Jack had snubbed him and his wife one afternoon when he saw them on the street walking their baby in a carriage. “Sometimes,” the volunteer said, “I used to feel that ice water rolled in his veins. . . . I don’t know if he was shy or a snob. All I’m getting at is that he was very unpolitical for a man who was going to run for Congress.” Jack himself said, “I think it’s more of a personal reserve than a coldness, although it may seem like coldness to some people.”

Jack also doubted that he could bring many voters to his side with his oratory. He accurately thought of himself as a pretty dull public speaker at the time.
Stiff
and
wooden
were the words most often used to describe his delivery. One observer said that Jack spoke “in a voice somewhat scratchy and tensely high-pitched,” projecting “a quality of grave seriousness that masked his discomfiture. No trace of humor leavened his talk. Hardly diverging from his prepared text, he stood as if before a blackboard, addressing a classroom full of pupils who could be expected at any moment to become unruly.”

Family members tried to help him become a more effective speaker. At one gathering, his sister Eunice noticeably mouthed his words as he spoke. Afterward, Jack told her, “Eunice, you made me very very nervous. Don’t ever do that to me again.” And Eunice said, “Jack, I thought you were going to forget your speech.”