Kennedy (3 page)
Authors: Ted Sorensen
This book does not purport to be a full-scale biography of John Kennedy or a comprehensive history of his era. Yet it is more than a personal memoir. I have attempted to put into context and perspective my observations and association with an extraordinary man during an extraordinary period, relying primarily on what I know rather than on what others have written. I have not interviewed those whose memories may have been shaded by subsequent events, but have depended principally on my files and recollections—for which there can be no footnotes.
As a result, in addition to certain facts omitted for reasons of security or propriety, those episodes in John Kennedy’s life in which I did not participate—including all that took place before 1953 and many thereafter—are not reported here in intimate detail. I do not claim that those included were necessarily the most important, only that none has been deliberately excluded and that the real John Kennedy can be more clearly sketched through firsthand recollections.
Many lesser issues, events and personalities have also been omitted for reasons of space. In time, a painstaking scholarly study must systematically analyze each document and day of the Kennedy administration, but I am able to write here only of the peaks, and not of the tortuous paths which led up to them. This is a book, moreover, about one man—not his family, his friends or his foes, not Washington or the world he inhabited, and those in search or need of further facts on those subjects will find them here only as they pertain to John Kennedy.
If some passages seem politically partisan, it is because he was a Democrat and proud of it. My purpose is neither to condemn nor condone the actions of others, nor to substitute my judgment for my subject’s. My only obligation is to the truth about Kennedy.
Historical truths, to be sure, are rarely the object of unanimity. Recollections differ, opinions differ, even the same facts appear different to different people. John Kennedy’s own role will be recalled in wholly different fashion, I am certain, by those in different relationships with him. To the politicians, he was first and last a politician. To the intellectuals, his qualities of mind were most memorable. Differing traits and trade-marks are recalled by his friends and by his family.
Most regrettable, in my view, are those memorials and tributes which speak more of his style than of his substance. The Kennedy style
was
special—the grace, the wit, the elegance, the youthful looks will rightly long be remembered. But what mattered most to him, and what in my opinion will matter most to history, was the substance—the strength of his ideas and ideals, his courage and judgment. These were the pith and purpose of his Presidency, of which style was but an overtone. I would be the last to diminish the value of his speeches. But their significance lay not in the splendor of their rhetoric but in the principles and policies they conveyed.
During his days at the White House he became weary of hearing the cynics say that his personality was more popular than his program. In his view the two were mutually reinforcing and inseparable. Now the same people—unwilling or unable to perceive the changes he wrought—are writing that his legacy was more one of manner than of meaning.
For still others the tragedy of his death has obscured the reality of his achievements. In emphasizing the youthful promise left unfulfilled, they overlook the promises he kept. His death, to be sure—symbolic though senseless—should never be forgotten. But I think it more important that John Kennedy be remembered not for how he died but for how he lived.
THE MAN
T
HE TRULY EXTRAORDINARY MAN
,” it has been written, “is truly the ordinary man.” The first time I met John Kennedy I was immediately impressed by his “ordinary” demeanor—a quality that in itself is extraordinary among politicians. He spoke easily but almost shyly, without the customary verbosity and pomposity. The tailor-made suit that clothed a tall, lean frame was quietly stylish. A thatch of chestnut hair was not as bushy as cartoonists had portrayed it. He did not try to impress me, as office-holders so often do on first meetings, with the strength of his handshake, or with the importance of his office, or with the sound of his voice.
We talked briefly on that morning in early January, 1953, about my application for a job in his new Senate office. I had come to that meeting with more hope than expectation. A month earlier, when I had reviewed with a knowledgeable Washington attorney the list of new Senators for whom I might work, he had snorted at the name of Kennedy. “Jack Kennedy,” he said, “wouldn’t hire anyone Joe Kennedy wouldn’t tell him to hire—and, with the exception of Jim Landis, Joe Kennedy hasn’t hired a non-Catholic in fifty years!”
Both of these suppositions turned out to be false. But it was true that Congressman Kennedy’s election to the Senate from Massachusetts, after three elections to the House, had not inspired any predictions of greatness in the national press or in Democratic Party circles. The intellectual journals of opinion had doubts about his credentials as a liberal, about his religion and, above all, about his father. The more popular press emphasized the financial cost of his campaign, the participation of his
family, his new tea-party technique of electioneering and the sympathy evoked in female hearts by his tousled hair and boyish looks.
No one stopped to think that more than tea and sympathy must have been required for Kennedy, in the face of Eisenhower’s sweep of Massachusetts, to oust Eisenhower’s campaign manager, the well-known Henry Cabot Lodge, who had first been elected to the Senate when Kennedy was a freshman in college. Kennedy was, in fact, only the third Democrat elected to the Senate in the history of Massachusetts, but the solid significance of his narrow victory (51.5 percent of the vote) had largely been obscured by the glamour and glitter of his publicity.
Except for the Palm Beach tan on a handsome, youthful face, I saw few signs of glamour and glitter in the Senator-elect that winter morning. His Senate offices were not yet available—a new Congressman was moving into his old House suite—and it was in the latter’s outer office, sitting almost in the doorway amidst the clutter and confusion of two staffs, that we talked very briefly—about the salary, my experience and his needs in the office. He spoke with a clear and natural voice, listened attentively and promised an early decision. The occasional tapping of his fingers on his teeth and knee, I later learned, was a habitual sign of his restless energy, not impatient irritation.
A few days later we talked briefly again. This time I raised a few questions of my own to satisfy myself about his Convictions (he was not pro-McCarthy, he said, but he did doubt Owen Lattimore) and my role (I would report directly to him and could supplement my salary assisting him with published articles). Then, on the basis of these two hurried conversations of some five minutes each, he offered me the position of No. 2 Legislative Assistant in his Senate office, for a “trial” period of one year.
I accepted. The Temporary Committee of the Congress on Railroad Retirement Legislation, for which I had been working some eight months, had completed its report; and the Executive Branch, for which I had previously worked briefly as a lowly attorney, had imposed a job “freeze” in advance of the Eisenhower inauguration. Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, the committee chairman, aided by his Legislative Assistant Bob Wallace, had kindly recommended me to a host of Democratic Senators and Senators-elect; and among the latter was Jack Kennedy, who had worked with and admired Douglas. (Kennedy had, in fact, expressed an interest a year earlier in Senator Douglas for the Presidency.)
Another Senator-elect—with a more liberal image and a more sympathetic press—had also considered employing me, emphasizing his desire to secure an assistant to help get his name in the news. Kennedy, I felt, had offered a more challenging assignment. The textile mill towns and other depressed areas of Massachusetts had neither responded to the
growing competition of other regions and fibers nor made the most of postwar industrial development. Kennedy’s campaign slogan in 1952 had been “He can do more for Massachusetts,”
1
and he wanted a man to help him translate the slogan, the problems and the repeated studies made of those problems into a legislative program—a man who could meet that very month, he said, with Professor Seymour Harris of Harvard, John Harriman of the Boston
Globe
, Alfred Neal of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank and other experts on boosting the New England economy. Having never been to New England or studied much economics, but sharing his concern for the unemployed, I started to work.
I cannot single out any one day as the time I began to understand John Kennedy as a human being. Gradually I discovered that the simplicity of this man’s tastes and demeanor was, while genuine, deceptive as well as disarming. Although he possessed unusual empathy, and a remarkable sense of what was fitting and appropriate for every kind of occasion, he never “put on an act,” feigning anger or joy when he did not feel it. Nevertheless his hidden qualities outnumbered the apparent. The freshman Senator from Massachusetts, with all his “ordinary” ways, was an enormously complex and extraordinarily competent man.
I came to marvel at his ability to look at his own strengths and weaknesses with utter detachment, his candid and objective responses to public questions, and his insistence on cutting through prevailing bias and myths to the heart of a problem. He had a disciplined and analytical mind. Even his instincts, which were sound, came from his reason rather than his hunches. He hated no enemy, he wept at no adversity. He was neither willing nor able to be flamboyant or melodramatic.
But I also learned in time that this cool, analytical mind was stimulated by a warm, compassionate heart. Beneath the careful pragmatic approach lay increasingly deep convictions on basic goals and unusual determination to achieve them. “Once you say you’re going to settle for second,” he said in 1960 regarding the Vice Presidency, “that’s what happens to you in life, I find.” Jack Kennedy never settled for second if first was available.
Many who knew him only casually mistook his refusal to display emotion as a lack of concern or commitment. James McGregor Burns, whose pre-Presidential Kennedy biography and subsequent public statements made much of this same point, irritated the Senator (and his wife) considerably. “Burns seems to feel,” he told me, “that unless somebody overstates or shouts to the top of their voice they are not concerned about a matter.”
The more one knew John Kennedy, the more one liked him. And those of us who came to know him well—though we rarely heard him discuss his personal feelings—came to know the strength and warmth of his dedication as well as his logic. As John Buchan wrote of a friend in John Kennedy’s favorite book,
Pilgrim’s Way
, “He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly but because he felt deeply.” John Kennedy could always look at himself objectively and laugh at himself wholeheartedly—and those two rare gifts enabled him to talk lightly while feeling deeply. As he said himself about Robert Frost, “His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation.”
There were other qualities beneath the surface. Under that seemingly fortunate and gay exterior lay an acute awareness of the most sobering kinds of tragedy. He lived with the memory of a much admired older brother killed in the war and the memory of a sister killed in a plane crash overseas. Add to this a history of illness, pain and injury since childhood, and the fact that another sister was confined to a home for the mentally retarded, and one understands his human sensitivity. No mention was ever made of any of these subjects by the Senator. But his familiarity with tragedy had produced in him both a desire to enjoy the world and a desire to improve it; and these two desires, particularly in the years preceding 1953, had sometimes been in conflict.
His mental processes—so direct and clear-cut in conversation—were not uncomplicated either. He was at that time considered with some disdain to be an intellectual by most Massachusetts politicians and considered with equal disdain to be a politician by most Massachusetts intellectuals. As an undergraduate at Harvard, particularly during his early years, he was thought by one of his tutors (Professor, later Ambassador, Galbraith) to be “gay, charming, irreverent, good-looking and far from diligent.” Yet he graduated
cum laude
, and his Professor of Government, Arthur Holcombe, found him “a very promising pupil. An interest in ideas and in their practical uses…came naturally to him.”
At the age of twenty-three he had expanded his highly regarded senior thesis—representing, he wrote his father, “more
work
than I’ve ever done in my life”—into a distinguished book on
Why England Slept
, a well-reasoned and well-regarded analysis of that nation’s lack of preparedness for the Second World War. At the age of thirty-five he continued to be widely read in history, biography and politics. But he had little interest in abstract theories. He primarily sought truths upon which he could act and ideas he could use in his office.
His reasons for seeking political office were mixed. In subsequent years he would scoff at the magazine writers who explained his career in terms of some single psychological motivation—to prove himself to his father, or to outdo his late older brother, or to preserve an old family
custom, or to be the instrument of Irish revenge. He had, in fact, assumed as a youth that politics was barred to him so long as his older brother Joe—more robust and extroverted and nearer to the traditional image of a Massachusetts politician—aspired to that profession. (Perhaps young Jack foresaw the charge that he and his two younger brothers would later hear of “too many Kennedys.”) Early in our acquaintance he told me that he had considered careers as a lawyer, a journalist, a professor of history or political science, or an officer in the Foreign Service. (A brief try at Stanford Business School apparently persuaded him to seek more interesting fields.) But after Joe’s death, he entered the political arena—
not
to take Joe’s place, as is often alleged, not to compete subconsciously with him, but as an expression of his own ideals and interests in an arena thereby opened to him.
