Common Ground (6 page)

As late as 1942, at age sixty-eight, Jim Curley was returned to Congress from the Eleventh District. Even his subsequent indictment by a federal grand jury for mail fraud didn’t dampen Charlestown’s enthusiasm for the old scoundrel. Reelected in 1944, he withdrew only after winning his fourth term as mayor. That left his congressional seat to be filled by special election in 1946. One of the candidates was Honey Fitz’s grandson—John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

At first, the notion seemed preposterous. Kennedy was virtually a stranger to Boston, having spent the best part of his twenty-nine years in New York, Hyannis Port, and the South Pacific. His “residence” in the district was the Bellevue Hotel on Beacon Hill. “You’re a carpetbagger,” one politician in the district told him bitterly. “You don’t belong here.” Moreover, his patrician gloss, the elegant ease acquired at Choate and Harvard and cultivated in London and Palm Beach, was not calculated to go down well in the waterfront saloons of Charlestown, the clammy tenements of the North End, or the bleak three-deckers of East Boston, Brighton, Somerville, and Cambridge. True, his family’s roots went deep in the district: not only had Honey Fitz represented it in Congress for six years, but Jack’s paternal grandfather, Patrick J. Kennedy, had been born and raised in East Boston and served as its Democratic ward leader for many years. But those roots could be as much a hindrance as an asset. Boston’s Irish were notoriously resentful of the “two toilet” Irish who had betrayed their heritage by moving to the suburbs and sending their sons to Harvard.

One who shared those feelings was Alice McGoff’s father, Bernie Kirk. A second-generation Irish-American, Bernie had worked for decades at a South End ink factory, where he served as a union shop steward. “The little man has to unite to get anyplace,” he would tell his daughter Alice, and that turn of mind was reflected in his stalwart Democratic politics, his unwavering support for Al Smith, David I. Walsh, and Franklin Roosevelt. But he had no use whatsoever for Joe Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, whom he regarded as a womanizer, a high liver, an incurable conniver. “That man’s forgotten where he came from,” he’d tell Alice, “he’s no longer one of us.” Moreover, Kennedy was simply too close to Richard Cardinal Cushing, Boston’s venerable archbishop. There was a touch of the anticlerical in Bernie; priests were okay when they stuck to the Church’s business, he thought, but their writ didn’t extend to public life. Cushing and Kennedy were both overreachers, too eager to steal a march on their countrymen. There was an old Charlestown saying, “Up to me, up to me, but never above me.” No son of Joe Kennedy’s was going to clamber over Bernie’s head.

Moreover, Bernie was committed to Charlestown’s own candidate for Congress.
John F. “Spring” Cotter, a popular figure who had served as secretary to Curley and before that to Congressman John P. Higgins. When Higgins resigned his congressional seat, Cotter had been appointed to fill out his unexpired term. During his years in Washington, he had dispensed countless favors to his fellow “Townies.” The Kirks had received more than a few of them, and now Bernie Kirk was determined to return the favor.

Among the Townies who had committed themselves to Spring Cotter was a young Air Force veteran named Dave Powers. One night in January 1946 there was a knock at the door of the three-decker that Dave shared with his widowed sister and her eight children. When he opened it, there stood a gangly fellow who stuck out his hand and said, “My name’s Jack Kennedy. I’m a candidate for Congress.” Sitting at the kitchen table, Powers explained that he was working for one of Kennedy’s opponents. But he liked his young visitor, and when Kennedy mentioned that he was speaking the next week to Gold Star Mothers at Charlestown’s American Legion Hall, Powers agreed to go with him.

The next Tuesday, Dave stood at the back of the hall as Kennedy gave what seemed like “the world’s worst speech”—halting, awkward, clumsily worded. But then the candidate looked out across the phalanx of women, all of whom had lost sons in the war, and said, “I think I know how you feel, because my mother is a Gold Star Mother too.” (Jack’s older brother, Joe, had been shot down over Germany.) In the back of the room, Powers could hear some women weeping and others turn to their neighbors and say, “He reminds me of my boy.” When the speech was over, the young aristocrat was mobbed by dozens of working-class women, ardently promising him their support. Powers was convinced.

A few denounced him for deserting Cotter, but working with other veteran operatives, Dave mounted a crisply efficient campaign. On a routine day in Charlestown, Kennedy started at 7:00 a.m., shaking hands outside the Navy Yard, then rang doorbells at every three-decker along Bunker Hill Street. In the afternoon he dropped into grocery stores and barbershops, ending up back at the Navy Yard, where he shook the hands he’d missed that morning. In the evening there’d be a rally at the American Legion Hall or a get-together in somebody’s parlor.

Meanwhile, Jack set out to acquire the more formal badges of Irish Catholic orthodoxy, starting with membership in the Knights of Columbus. Shrewdly, his aides directed him to the Bunker Hill Council, oldest in the state, much honored among Boston’s Celts. Appropriately enough, induction in the Third Degree took place on St. Patrick’s Day. The ceremony began with fifty “candidates” marching through Charlestown’s streets to the Knights Hall, each with a “relic”—an oversized key, cross, or candle—to lug along the three-mile route. Jack was assigned a special burden—a live, frisky billy goat which the future President hauled on a leash past hundreds of amused spectators. A powerful symbol in Knights ritual, the goat was intended to teach humility: the candidate might think he was leading it, but as would eventually
become clear, the goat was leading him. After the initiation, Jack adjourned with his fellow Knights to Sully’s Cafe on Union Street for the traditional hoisting of the brew. It was a moment that would remain sacred to all those who stood that night at Sully’s beer-stained bar.

But the climax of the Charlestown campaign was the annual Bunker Hill Day parade on June 17. The night before, Townies and their guests celebrated at a half dozen banquets and balls. Jack addressed no fewer than five, then went on with Powers to an after-hours joint called the Stork Club, where he stayed until 2:00 a.m.

Hours later, he was back in town for the traditional round of house calls before the afternoon parade. With the primary only hours away, each candidate sought to make a final splash. Seeking to exploit his image as a war hero, Kennedy marched that day under the glittering new banners of the Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy Post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, named after Jack’s late brother. Hatless, dressed in a dark gray flannel suit, he strode up Bunker Hill Street with more than a hundred supporters marching three abreast behind him. Every few steps, someone broke from the crowd to pump his hand or ask for an autograph.

The Kirks watched the parade from a friend’s stoop on Monument Square. As Kennedy went by, Bernie stood stonily with arms folded; he was sticking with Cotter. But his wife, Gertrude, and his three daughters had long since succumbed to Jack’s charms. Alice, then only nine, was desolate that she couldn’t cast a vote for the dashing young candidate.

The next day, Kennedy lost Charlestown to Cotter by only 337 votes, and elsewhere in the Eleventh District he outpolled his nearest competitor by nearly two to one. That night at a victory party, eighty-three-year-old Honey Fitz clambered up on a table and croaked out his famous rendition of “Sweet Adeline.”

Almost overnight Jack Kennedy had become an honorary Townie. Charlestown voted overwhelmingly for his return to Congress in 1948 and 1950, for his election to the Senate in 1952 and 1958, and to put him in the White House in 1960. And Kennedy returned the attention. He appointed Bob Morey, his Townie driver, to be U.S. Marshal for Massachusetts, and he brought Dave Powers into the White House as boon companion. Powers took pains to see that loyal Charlestown supporters received appropriate recognition. In April 1961, the President received some three hundred members of the Bunker Hill Council of the Knights of Columbus—
his
council. For nearly an hour, the proud Knights milled across the White House lawn, jawing with
their
President.

The substance of Kennedy’s policies did nothing to alienate Charlestown. In foreign policy, he was perceived as a tough guy, a battle-hardened veteran, not unlike the thousands of Charlestown men who had fought in the two world wars and Korea (there is a legend that Charlestown sent more boys into World War II than any community of its size in the country). Charlestown’s vets
thrilled to Kennedy’s rhetorical flourishes, applauded his firm resistance to international Communism, cheered the attempted invasion of Cuba and the brinksmanship of the Missile Crisis.

In domestic matters, Kennedy suited the Townies nearly as well. For although he came to be considered a liberal, he was deeply suspicious of the conventional pieties. One strain in him, to be sure, rang with lofty purpose, summoning the nation to live up to its highest aspirations (“No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings”). But another side was ironic, intensely aware of man’s limitations (“Life is unfair,” he liked to say). Something deep in Kennedy’s Irish soul bespoke a tragic view of life; the Kirks and their neighbors responded to that.

On civil rights, Kennedy’s stance was deliberate and intensely political. Convinced that he didn’t have the votes in Congress to enact significant rights legislation—and afraid that the attempt would cost him Southern support for the remainder of his legislative program—he was determined to move in this area only by executive order. Yet even here he was laggard, delaying more than two years in signing an order to ban discrimination in federal housing programs, something which, during the campaign, he had airily declared “the President could do by a stroke of his pen.” With this delay, Martin Luther King said, Kennedy had “undermined confidence in his intentions.” Summing up the President’s first year in office, King found it “essentially cautious and defensive”; Kennedy had the understanding and political skill, but “the moral passion is missing.” Even when Kennedy finally introduced a civil rights bill in February 1963, black leaders bemoaned its lack of teeth.

It took the Birmingham crisis of late spring 1963—with Bull Connor’s cops using nightsticks, dogs, and fire hoses on King’s marchers—to create a sense of national urgency to which the President could respond. And respond he did in a nationally televised address that June, in which he said the country confronted “a moral issue … as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.” That night, the President announced that he would bring in a new, stronger civil rights bill, embodying “the proposition that race has no place in American life and law.” To support the bill, a quarter million Americans marched on Washington on August 28. That evening, Kennedy received ten black leaders at the White House, greeting them with the very words King had used at the Lincoln Memorial just hours before—“I have a dream.” At last, it seemed, the dreams of Martin Luther King and the political exigencies of John F. Kennedy were about to converge. Less than three months later, the President was dead.

When Lyndon Johnson capitalized on the nation’s grief to push Kennedy’s civil rights bill through Congress, Alice McGoff and her neighbors concurred. But before long they detected a not so subtle shift in the rhetoric of civil rights. No longer were politicians, professors, and editorial writers talking merely about giving Negroes an equal shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By the mid-sixties, they were proposing to take real things—money, jobs, housing, and schools—away from whites and give them to blacks.

This notion of preferential treatment for blacks originated with a young Irish-American, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan. When Lyndon Johnson agreed to deliver the commencement address at Howard University on June 4, 1965, Moynihan drafted the text. “Freedom is not enough,” the President said that day. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity, not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

The more Alice McGoff heard about this doctrine, the less she liked it. The government picked several races and called them minorities, but the Irish, they weren’t a minority; the government was saying the Irish were well off, they’d never had a hard life. Sure, slavery had been a great injustice, but she didn’t see why whites who weren’t even alive during slave times should be penalized for it. How could you make slaves of the majority to free the minority? Was that justice?

Moreover, she knew full well which whites would pay the price for all of this. It wouldn’t be those who worked in the big corporate and law offices downtown, the ones who dined in those Back Bay clubs and lived in the comfortable, all-white suburbs. No, as usual it would be the working-class whites who shared the inner city with blacks, competed with them for schools and jobs and housing, and jostled with them on the street corners.

Before long, the issue of compensatory rights had helped to drive a wedge between the Townies and the remaining Kennedy brothers. Nobody proved a more impassioned advocate of the new doctrine than Robert Kennedy. And Bobby was among the first to point his finger at Northern cities like Boston. “In the North,” he told one reporter, “I think you have had
de facto
segregation which in some areas is as bad or even more extreme than in the South. Everybody in those communities, including my own state of Massachusetts, concentrated on what was happening in Birmingham, Alabama, or Jackson, Mississippi, and didn’t look at what needed to be done in our own home, our own town, our own city.”

For Alice McGoff, that was sheer political posturing, designed to curry favor with Martin Luther King and the “limousine liberals” at the expense of working-class whites. But Bobby was an increasingly remote figure in Massachusetts. To Alice, the Kennedy survivor who really mattered was Ted.