The Patriarch (76 page)

At the time Kennedy purchased the Mart, 40 percent of the space was rented by government agencies that paid submarket prices for their leases. Ollman wanted to replace these tenants with corporations that would pay full market price, but he knew he would be taking a considerable risk, politically and fiscally, if he did so. Kennedy listened carefully to his presentation, then told him to go ahead. To make the property more attractive, Ollman suggested putting in air-conditioning, still comparatively rare in office buildings, at a cost of over $5 million. Kennedy agreed that air-conditioning was needed, then came up with a plan for raising the capital required by levying additional charges on Mart leases. The tenants agreed—and the Merchandise Mart became “the first and . . . still [as late as 1965] the largest property to supply this much-needed facility.”
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F
rom the outside, Kennedy appeared to be the same man. He did not talk about his losses: one son dead, another nearly an invalid; one daughter nearly destroyed by a botched lobotomy, the other a childless widow at twenty-five. He could still light up any room he entered, dominate the conversation no matter who was in that room. Though now retired from private business and public service, he dressed immaculately in bespoke dark suits up north, white ones in Palm Beach, but never brown (which he abhorred). His white tailored shirts from Sulka were always crisply laundered; his ties were still those of the conservative Boston banker; his black shoes were always polished to a perfect shine. His cook, Mathilda Heddal, on seeing him for the first time in 1940 when he was fifty-two, had remarked that “he was handsomest man I had ever seen.” And he was still, at fifty-seven, a strikingly handsome man. His sandy brown hair was graying and thinning, brushed back now, not a strand out of place. His posture was military perfect. He wore spectacles, but only occasionally. With or without them, his eyes still shone the same piercing blue; his smile, when he chose to flash it, was as broad as ever.
⁴¹

But inside, he had been changed forever by the death of his firstborn son.

Thirty-one

T
HE
C
ANDIDATE’S
F
ATHER

E
very man in this room, because of the position he occupies, owes something to our state.” It was April 17, 1945, a week after Roosevelt’s death. Joseph P. Kennedy, on the invitation of Massachusetts governor Maurice Tobin, was lecturing Boston’s business and political leaders on what they had to do to rebuild their city and state economy.

He had come home because there was nowhere else that he felt as comfortable, as beloved and respected. He had come home because nowhere else did he enjoy the same degree of political power. And he had come home to establish a power base for his son Jack, should he decide to enter politics. Two days earlier, he had marked his return with an almost ritual offering of $10,000 to the Guild of Saint Apollonia, the organization of Catholic dentists he had given money to when Jack recovered from scarlet fever twenty-five years earlier.

“Your future is in your hands,” he exhorted the businessmen in the main ballroom of the Copley Plaza. History, he warned them, was “not made by inaction, indifference and timidity.” Thousands of young men and women were about to return to New England, and they required jobs, good jobs consonant with their training and ambition. “If they do not find an opportunity to apply their skills here at home they will go elsewhere. . . . It is not a pleasant thing for a young man born and reared and educated in Boston to have to pull up his stakes and seek opportunities elsewhere. I know, for I had to do it.”
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Less than two weeks after his homecoming speech, Kennedy was invited by Governor Tobin to become chairman of a special commission to determine whether the state should establish a department of commerce.

As he toured the state that summer, giving speeches, granting interviews, and meeting with local bankers and businessmen, he attacked the “proper Bostonian” bankers and businessmen who refused to invest in the state’s future. His blunt talk disturbed some but charmed the newspapermen who followed him from town to town. He made for good copy wherever he was.

“I’m willing to come back to live because this is where my heart is. But I don’t expect to come back to stay until I think there has been a change for the better. For the past 25 years Massachusetts has consistently been losing business—in that time 2,300 industries have left the state. . . . We haven’t done a blessed thing to find out why they are leaving or to keep them here. During the next five years Massachusetts will have its last chance to keep itself out of the grave.” When he was asked why, if he was so concerned about his home city and state, he had spent millions of dollars buying the Chicago Merchandise Mart, he “shot back, ‘Because the condition of real estate is scandalous [in Massachusetts] and that of politics is worse.’”
²

“Joseph Patrick Kennedy, now 57 and with red hair graying, came out of self-imposed political exile last week and went back to work for his native state of Massachusetts,” reported
Time
magazine on September 24, 1945. “Last week Joe Kennedy seemed to have his old zest again. In a midnight blue Chrysler, he rode like a Paul Revere through the textile, shoe and machinery-producing towns in Middlesex, Essex, and Berkshire counties. All the way from Greenfield to Salem, in some 30 speeches within ten days, he spread the alarm.”

Giving speeches, granting interviews, and grabbing headlines distracted him from his grief and relieved him of his boredom. It also gave him the opportunity to raise high again the Kennedy banner and extend it across the state, preparing the way for his son Jack, should he ever fully recover his health, to run for elective office.

In a game of political musical chairs that would have been inconceivable anywhere else, Boston’s politicians were changing places. James Michael Curley, after losing elections for mayor to Maurice Tobin in 1937 and 1941, had in 1942 run for and been elected to Congress. In November 1944, when Tobin ran for and was elected governor, replacing Leverett Saltonstall, who had run for and been elected to the Senate, Congressman Curley announced that he would be returning to Boston to run for Tobin’s seat the following year. (John Kerrigan, Boston City Council president, would preside as acting mayor in the interim.)

In declaring his candidacy, Curley made no mention of either his federal indictment for fraud or the six-year-old court order to pay back $37,000 plus interest he had “improperly received” from a city contractor. Six weeks later, on December 26, 1944, he announced that he had paid off all his debts. The funds, it has been whispered from that day to this had to have come from Joseph P. Kennedy, who had a very good reason to smooth Curley’s return to Boston. Should Curley be elected mayor in 1945, he would have to vacate the congressional seat in the eleventh district, once held by Honey Fitz.

If ever a district was made for a Kennedy candidacy, it was this one: the eleventh district included Cambridge, where Jack had gone to school; East Boston, the Kennedys’ ancestral home; the North End, the Fitzgerald bailiwick; and predominantly Irish wards in Brighton, Somerville, and Charlestown.

Before Jack could even consider running for office, however, he had to get his health back. “Jack told me . . . something about his plans” to spend the winter recuperating at a resort in Arizona, John Burns wrote Kennedy in Palm Beach on December 29, 1944. “I think he is very wise in taking a Boston residence now and when he returns from the West he ought to be off to a flying start for whatever objective he should determine upon. . . .  He certainly has real stuff.”
³

By that spring, after several months in Arizona, Jack was feeling well enough to relocate to San Francisco, where with the help of his father he was hired by Hearst’s
Chicago Herald-American
to cover the founding conference of the United Nations. That June, he relocated across the Atlantic to report on postwar British elections and Ireland, again for the Hearst papers.

Though Jack was good at his job—his articles were informative, nicely crafted, and rather persuasive—no one believed that he had any real desire to become a full-time journalist. Reporting for the Hearst papers was a temporary diversion, one that allowed him to improve his writing skills, add to his already extensive knowledge of European affairs, and visit his sister Kick in England. His father, hoping to find a temporary resting place for his decorated war hero son in the Department of the Navy, arranged for James Forrestal (whom Truman had retained as secretary of the navy) to meet with Jack in Paris during the secretary’s post-surrender tour of the continent. Jack traveled with Forrestal to Berlin for the Potsdam Conference, continued on to Bremen, and then flew back on the secretary’s plane to Washington following an emergency stopover in London, where he was hospitalized with severe abdominal pains, nausea, and fever—debilitating and frightening symptoms that, as in past episodes, vanished undiagnosed.
⁴

Secretary Forrestal was sufficiently impressed with young Kennedy to invite him to visit Washington in mid-September to “see what there is in hand.” Jack did not follow up on the offer. Other options, more attractive than sitting at a desk at the Navy Department, had presented themselves.
⁵

“Jack arrived home,” Kennedy wrote Sir James Calder on August 22, 1945, “and is very thin but he is becoming quite active in the political life in Massachusetts. It wouldn’t surprise me to see him go into public life to take Joe’s place.”
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In 1945, when he made the decision to run for Curley’s seat in Congress should Curley be elected mayor, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was twenty-eight and old enough to represent the eleventh district in Congress, though he looked five to ten years younger. He was frighteningly frail-looking and skeletally thin. No matter how well tailored his suit jacket and shirt collar, he looked like a child in his father’s clothes. He had never lived in the eleventh district—or, for that matter, anywhere else in Boston. (Brookline was outside the city lines.) And he had no political experience of any sort; he had never been to a precinct meeting or a ward hall, never stumped for a candidate or rung a doorbell, never shaken a stranger’s hand and asked for a vote.

That fall, Jack Kennedy moved into a two-room suite at Boston’s Bellevue Hotel, where his grandfather lived. Honey Fitz, though white-haired and stouter, was the same garrulous firebrand at eighty that he had been at twenty-eight when he was elected to the Boston Common Council. He intended to act as his grandson’s chief adviser and counselor, to give speeches for him. His excitement was such that he had to be restrained from taking over the campaign.

Election day was more than a year away, but there was an enormous amount of work to be done for a candidate who was unknown in the district and unschooled in politics. Father and son put together a campaign team, with advice from Honey Fitz; cousin Joe Kane, a skilled local political operative who had always thought Jack Kennedy a golden boy and candidate; “the Commish,” Joe Timilty, former police commissioner and now Kennedy retainer, errand boy, and golf partner; and Eddie Moore, who had retired briefly after London but was now called back into Kennedy service. John Dowd, who ran the agency that handled the Somerset advertising, was brought in to do the initial public relations and advertising work. Billy Sutton and Patsy Mulkern, whom Honey Fitz knew and trusted, and a few other young streetwise politicos such as Dave Powers were put on the payroll. Jack, who understood the need to surround himself with men whose first loyalty was to him, not his father or grandfather, recruited his old friends Lem Billings, Torb Macdonald from Harvard, and Paul (“Red”) Fay, whom he had met in the South Pacific.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy had many assets as a candidate, but none more valuable than his record as a war hero. No one knew if, how, or for whom the returning veterans were going to vote in 1946, but it was expected that they would go to the polls in large numbers.

In New York, where the Democrats hoped to defeat Thomas Dewey for governor, they had organized a special “Democratic Veterans Association” to get as large a share as possible of the one-million veteran vote. In California, in the twelfth congressional district, Republican Party leaders recruited navy veteran Richard M. Nixon to run against incumbent Jerry Voorhis. In Wisconsin, ex-marine Joseph McCarthy challenged Bob La Follette, Jr., for the Republican senatorial primary. In Florida, another ex-marine, George Smathers, ran for a House seat against another long-term, fully entrenched incumbent. Nixon, McCarthy, and Smathers would all win their elections. Overall, some forty veterans would be elected to the House and eight more to the Senate in November 1946.
⁷

Jack Kennedy introduced himself to the district as a veteran returning to help guide the nation he had fought for. He did not run from his family history but refocused it to concentrate on his and his brother’s service and heroism. In December 1945, he organized a new Veterans of Foreign Wars post named for his brother. He loaded his staff with veterans, referred to his mother as a “Gold Star Mother” (one who had lost a son in the war), and sought invitations to speak at every American Legion hall and VFW post in the district.
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His first major speech was to an American Legion post in Boston on September 10. His father arranged to have it broadcast on the radio. He would spend the next year on the campaign trail. He shook thousands of hands and spoke to hundreds of gatherings, formal and informal, of veterans associations, church groups, charitable organizations, fraternal orders, and social clubs, at firehouses, in front of post offices, at factories and shops, and at teas, receptions, and house parties in every part of his district.

Most every evening, after the day’s events were finished, he called his father or visited him at the Ritz-Carlton when he was in town. “Many a night when he’d come over to see Daddy after a speech,” Eunice Kennedy Shriver recounted to Doris Kearns Goodwin, “he’d be feeling rather down, admitting that the speech hadn’t really gone very well or believing that his delivery had put people in the front row fast asleep. ‘What do you mean?’ Father would immediately ask. ‘Why, I talked to Mr. X and Mrs. Y on the phone right after they got home and they told me they were sitting right in the front row and that it was a fine speech.’ . . . Father would go on to elicit from Jack what he thought he could change to make it better the next time. I can still see the two of them sitting together, analyzing the entire speech and talking about the pace of delivery to see where it had worked and where it had gone wrong.”
⁹

His father’s enthusiasm was contagious, as was that of grandfather Honey Fitz, cousin Joe Kane, and the young men who accompanied Jack on his speaking engagements and campaign stops. It didn’t take long for them to recognize, and for Jack to realize, that strange as it might have seemed, he had a talent for campaigning—and the stamina to keep at it all day and night long. He learned to control his voice, which was a bit high-pitched, and to slow down his rapid-fire, staccato diction; to make eye contact with his audiences; to blend enthusiasm with earnestness; to be (or at least appear to be) at ease with strangers; and to harness his irrepressible charm to win friends and disarm potential enemies.

Boston’s voters were worried, as were voters across the country in 1945 and 1946, about shortages of housing and jobs and the specter of a returning depression. Jack’s message was much like his father’s. He was in favor of government funding for economic development, jobs creation, and a strong military. Where he differed from his father was in his emphasis on the bread-and-butter concerns of his mostly working-class constituency: affordable housing (which his father ignored), the continuation of price controls (his father wasn’t sure), and a national health care system (about which his father had nothing to say).

In November 1945, James Michael Curley was elected mayor. Jack Kennedy accelerated his campaigning, though he held off formally declaring for Curley’s seat.