An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (24 page)

Jack’s advance had to be carefully orchestrated. Running too soon for the governorship or a Senate seat could work against him, his reach for higher office taking on the appearance of self-serving ambition devoid of serious interest in public service. And that would have been misleading, because genuine idealism and a core concern with the national well-being were central to his eagerness for political advancement. He also needed to learn some things before taking the next step. “I wasn’t equipped for the job. I didn’t plan to get into it, and when I started out as a Congressman, there were lots of things I didn’t know, a lot of mistakes I made, maybe some votes that should have been different,” he recalled. One of them was supporting Republican attacks on Roosevelt, particularly his “concessions” to Stalin at Yalta, which became synonymous with wartime appeasement of Russia.

Since so few congressmen ever end up with memorable legislative records, election to higher office can be a useful yardstick of performance in the Lower House. For most, however, the House is as high as they get. Indeed, of the thousands and thousands of men and women who served in the House between 1789 and 1952, when Jack would try for the Senate, only 544 won seats in the Upper House. But being a Kennedy was about changing the odds.

BECAUSE NO ONE
could be sure when Jack would undertake a statewide campaign, first he had to secure a hold on his congressional district. To this end, he and Joe hired reliable aides to staff Washington and Boston offices that could respond effectively to constituent demands. At the same time, convinced that it was never too soon to begin reaching for higher office, Joe began using his money and connections to build Jack’s public image, both in Massachusetts and beyond. The objective was to identify Jack with as many major national issues as possible: It would help make him less cynical about being a junior congressman with no influence and would make it more likely that voters would see him as a worthy representative trying to do right by both the Eleventh District and the national interest.

In Washington, Jack occupied room 322 in the Old House Office Building, a two-room suite in “freshman row,” where all the newcomers were housed. It was “about as far from the Capitol . . . as you could get,” one of Jack’s aides said. Ted Reardon headed the staff. Though bright, talented, handsome, and athletic, Reardon was a passive character who was content to be a man Friday. He “had a brain but unfortunately he didn’t use it that much,” one of his office mates recalled. “I used to get annoyed with him. He just wouldn’t apply himself. Much of the time, he wasn’t in the office.”

The other Washington staffer who came down from Boston was Billy Sutton, “the court jester,” as Jack and the rest of the staff called him. Sutton was Mr. Personality, buzzing around the Capitol, quickly getting to know everybody who was anyone. “It was good,” the office secretary said, “because if you needed anything, Billy always knew somebody.” Jack saw Sutton’s gift for mimicry and affinity for practical jokes as a valuable asset, especially when set alongside daily office chores. Billy was a perfect intermediary. Jack once encouraged him to get on the phone and imitate radical congressman Vito Marcantonio of the American Labor party. At Jack’s urging, Billy called fashion designer Oleg Cassini’s wife and in a heavily accented voice asked her to speak at a rally for Progressive party candidate Henry Wallace. Jack dined out for days afterward on her “speechless indignation.” More important, Jack did not like greeting constituents—pressing the flesh, as his fellow congressman from Texas Lyndon Johnson described it—and was especially put off by tales of woe from constituents looking for help. “I can’t do it,” he told his Boston staff after listening to just a few of the many favor seekers scheduled to see him. “You’ll have to call them off.” Sutton, with his gift of gab, was able to satisfy most constituent complaints on his own.

The mainstay of the Washington office was Mary Davis. A year younger than Jack, she joined his staff after eight years as a secretary to other congressmen. She was a pro who managed everything. “Mary Davis was unbelievable,” Billy Sutton said. “She could answer the phone, type a letter, and eat a chocolate bar all at once. She was the complete political machine, knew everybody, how to get anything done. . . . When Mary came in, you could have let twelve people go.” Jack “never did involve himself in the workings of the office,” Mary herself said. “He wasn’t a methodical person. Everything that came into the office was handed to me. I took care of everything. If I had any questions, I’d take them in to him at a specific time and say, ‘Here, what do you want me to say about that?’ Nothing would land on his desk. I’d pin him down on the spot, get his decision, then do it.” Davis was paid sixty dollars a week, but wanted more, citing her experience, background, and talent, and mindful of the family wealth—$40 million, if
Fortune
magazine was to be believed. Jack would not budge, promising only to “talk about it one of these days.”

The Boston office served Jack equally well. Frank Morrissey, an attorney who was Joe’s eyes and ears, oversaw the staff, which worked on the seventeenth floor of the federal building downtown. Morrissey, who spent most of his time practicing law or taking care of errands for Joe, left the daily work in the hands of Joe Rosetti, a war veteran attending night classes on hotel management at Northeastern University. Rosetti worked hard but did not like politics. “No matter how many good things you did for Jack’s constituents, the only thing they remembered is what you
couldn’t
do for them. That irritated me a great deal,” Rosetti recalled.

The principal work of the Boston office fell to Grace Burke, an unmarried fifty-year-old lady who, like Mary Davis, was the soul of efficiency and devoted to serving Jack. “She was very dedicated,” Rosetti said. “She would not allow anything to take place in that office that was going to be detrimental to Jack. She kept her three-by-five cards, her filing system, had her own personal contacts at City Hall and the State House. She was on top of everything.”

The effectiveness of Jack’s two offices rested partly on Joe’s commitment to pay the costs of hiring more staff than any other congressman. Mary Davis said that “in those days Congressmen made twelve thousand dollars a year, plus a small expense allowance and they didn’t have as many fringe benefits. So I was told that any expenses for Jack or the office were to be sent to Paul Murphy in New York. He had full charge of issuing checks and, of course, seldom questioned anything. Jack wasn’t an extravagant guy.”

Joe also put his money and influence to work crafting Jack’s public reputation. In January 1947, the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce named Jack one of the ten outstanding young men of 1946. Joe helped arrange the selection through Steve Hannagan, a prominent New York publicist (or “press agent,” as such operators were then known). Hannagan enlisted the backing of the nationally famous singer Morton Downey and Union Pacific Railroad president William M. Jeffers, a selection committee judge, to promote Jack’s candidacy. Joe was “more than delighted” at Jack’s number one ranking among the ten, with the boxer Joe Louis number seven, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. ninth, and Bill Mauldin, the creator of the famous wartime “Willie and Joe” cartoons on life in the U.S. Army, tenth.

In subsequent months, a stream of favorable newspaper and radio stories Joe helped generate in the
New York Times,
Boston Globe,
and other outlets served Jack’s image as a rising political star. “
GALAHAD IN THE HOUSE
,” Paul F. Healy, a Jack booster, declared in a Massachusetts Catholic paper. “In a poll of the Congressional Press Gallery he would be picked as one of the five young congressmen most likely to succeed,” Healy wrote in July 1950. “As a former author, newspaperman, embassy attaché, and war hero, Kennedy takes his legislative responsibilities extremely seriously. He is one of a small group of World War II veterans who have done much to raise the moral and intellectual tone of the House. Lacking the seniority that wields so much power in Congress, these men have exerted influence by sheer intelligence and integrity.”

JOE’S HELP CAME
at a price: Jack often felt compromised or too much under his father’s control. In February 1947, when he gave an interview to a Washington journalist who said “that it was nice to meet Kathleen’s brother,” Jack replied, “For a long time I was Joseph P. Kennedy’s son, then I was Kathleen’s brother, then Eunice’s brother. Some day I hope to be able to stand on my own feet.”

No sophisticated psychological understanding is required to see that a largely unspoken but omnipresent concern for Jack as he turned thirty was to separate himself from Joe and establish a more autonomous sense of self. At a cocktail party shortly after Jack entered the House, Joe turned to Kay Halle, a family friend, and said, “I wish you would tell Jack that he’s going to vote the wrong way. . . . I think Jack is making a terrible mistake.” Jack bristled: “Now, look here, Dad, you have your political views and I have mine. I’m going to vote exactly the way I feel I must vote on this. I’ve got great respect for you but when it comes to voting, I’m voting my way.” Joe smiled and said, “Well, Kay, that’s why I settled a million dollars on each of them, so they could spit in my eye if they wished.” “I guess Dad has decided that he’s going to be the ventriloquist,” Jack told Lem, “so I guess that leaves me the role of dummy.”

Joe’s intrusiveness was nothing the Kennedys wished to advertise; indeed, Joe and Jack may have staged the exchange in front of Halle as a way to publicize Jack’s independence. Their intense concern with public image, especially now that Jack was a congressman, certainly makes it conceivable. His father’s reputation as an appeaser, isolationist, and anti-Semite—or at least someone ready to accommodate himself to Nazi domination of Europe—seemed certain to hurt Jack’s political standing if it were known that Joe had a big part in what Jack did. And so the objective was to keep as quiet as possible about Joe’s behind-the-scenes political machinations.

Jack, however, appreciated that Joe’s assertiveness and connections gave him considerable advantages. For example, his father was instrumental in arranging Jack’s appointment to the House Education and Labor Committee, where he could have a say in major battles that were looming over labor unions and federal aid to education. Jack said later that he did not remember how he came by the selection, but it seems transparent that John McCormack, in response to Kennedy pressure, agreed to give Jack the assignment. (The Republican leadership bestowed the same award on Richard Nixon, a promising California freshman they wanted to help after he had won an upset victory over prominent liberal Democrat Jerry Voorhis.) Jack also gained appointment to the Veterans’ Affairs Committee and membership on a special subcommittee on veterans’ housing, another issue certain to command national attention in the coming session.

Jack was grateful for his father’s and McCormack’s help in giving him a part in public discussions about education, housing, and labor. But he was also eager to demonstrate his independence from them. Billy Sutton remembered Jack’s arrival at Washington’s Statler Hilton on the morning of January 3, 1947: “His hair was tousled, he was completely tanned [from a vacation in West Palm Beach]; black cashmere coat and a grey suit over his arm.” Sutton and Ted Reardon reported several calls from McCormack’s office asking for Jack’s attendance at a Democratic caucus. “We should be in a hurry now, Jack, make it snappy. . . . You have a caucus meeting. You’ve got two pretty good committees: Labor and Education, District of Columbia.” “Well,” Jack replied, “I’d like a couple of eggs.” As Jack ate breakfast, Billy and Ted kept pressuring him to get a move on: “Mr. McCormack is quite anxious that you get up there,” Billy said. Jack asked, “How long would you say Mr. McCormack was here?” When Billy answered twenty-six years, Jack responded, “Well, I don’t think Mr. McCormack would mind waiting another ten minutes.”

COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENTS
and self-education or not, Jack’s congressional work was a source of constant frustration to him. He was a fiscal conservative who often felt out of sync with the demands of constituents eager for federal largesse. He also had little patience with the resistance to legislation he saw as essential to the national well-being; it reminded him of the adage “with what little wisdom the world is governed.” Nor did he have much, if any, regard for doctrinaire politicians on the left and the right—congressmen who seemed to put wrongheaded principles above compromise and good sense.

He was never happy with having to slavishly support constituent demands, but he understood that accommodating himself to this political reality was essential if he hoped to be reelected. In the first two months of his term, he considered proposing that the 1948 Democratic National Convention be held in Boston. “An excellent political manoeuvre [sic],” one adviser told him. It seemed certain to impress local businessmen, who would profit from such a development, and would create feelings of pride among Eleventh District voters that Jack was establishing himself as a party leader. But he seemed less in tune with the eagerness of his many relatively poor, working-class constituents for expanded government programs or more New Deal “liberalism.” “In 1946 I really knew nothing about these things,” Jack said ten years later. “I had no background particularly; in my family we were interested not so much in the ideas of politics as in the mechanics of the whole process. Then I found myself in Congress representing the poorest district in Massachusetts. Naturally, the interests of my constituents led me to take the liberal line; all the pressures converged toward that end.”

Jack’s fiscal conservatism could be seen in his antagonism to unbalanced budgets, which he believed a threat to the national economy. In 1947, he openly opposed a Republican proposed tax cut, which he attacked as not only unfair to lower-income citizens but also a menace to economic stability. In 1950, he spoke out against Democratic-sponsored spending plans on social programs that could lead to a “dangerous” $6 billion deficit; he instead suggested a 10 percent across-the-board cut in appropriations. “I do not see how we can go on carrying a deficit every year,” he declared on the House floor. “Does not the gentleman think that a very important item in the cold war is the economic stability of the country so that we have resources in case of war?”