The Patriarch (84 page)

Thirty-four

T
HE
N
EXT
S
ENATOR FROM
M
ASSACHUSETTS

J
ack had been reelected without opposition in 1948. He had a Republican opponent in 1950 but crushed him with 82 percent of the vote. That same year, two of the young veterans he had entered Congress with, Richard Nixon of California and his good friend George Smathers of Florida, ran for and were elected to the Senate.

Jack had never much liked the House of Representatives and never been much of a congressman. He had sided with labor and voted for health care reform, housing relief, and every New Deal or Fair Deal welfare issue that came before him. But these were not “his” issues, not his specialty. His forte was foreign policy, which to a great extent was the purview of the Senate.

His seat from the eleventh district was as safe as any in Washington. He could have remained in the House, his mother remembered, “for the next thirty or forty years, rising by seniority . . . to become an extremely influential old man, perhaps Speaker of the House. The prospect of spending his life that way bored Jack intensely.”
¹

The only way up and out was to run for higher office. In 1952, he was faced with two possibilities. He could run against incumbent senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., or, if Democratic governor Paul Dever chose to campaign for the Senate, Jack could run for governor. In either case, he had to make himself better known to the voters of the state, as he had earlier to the men and women of the eleventh district.

He began his campaign for statewide office—he didn’t yet know which it would be—in the spring of 1949. For the next three years, he spent almost every weekend traveling the state, “driving to various civic, fraternal, political or veteran group meetings on Friday night and Saturday, appearing at Catholic communion breakfasts or Protestant church socials on Sunday and then hurrying back to Boston to catch the Federal at Back Bay station on Sunday night and crawling into a sleeping-car berth for the trip to Washington.” “No town was too small or too Republican for him,” recalled Dave Powers, his “booking agent” for these weekend campaign trips. “He was willing to go anywhere, and every group was glad to have him, not only because he was an interesting political figure and a well-known war hero, but because he never charged a dime for expenses.”
²

The congressman pushed himself and his aides relentlessly. They marveled at his stamina, his unflappable affability, his ability to connect with audiences, his willingness to shake as many hands as were extended to him. His back still bothered him—and would for the rest of his life—but it didn’t stop him or slow him down. Wherever he went that spring, he told his listeners that although he had no set plans for the future, if they would be so kind as to give him their names and addresses, he would contact them later if he needed them. Large numbers obliged. His list of contacts, some of them Democrats, some independents or Republicans, grew until it included hundreds of names from every part of the state.

His father supported him through it all, offering advice, solicited and unsolicited, and making sure he had all the money he needed. In August 1951, with statewide elections still fifteen months away, Kennedy wrote Tim McInerny, a former
Boston Post
editor whom he had known and worked with for years, about joining his son’s campaign as researcher and publicist. It would not, he cautioned McInerny, be a big job, at least for now. Much of the work would be done by Kennedy, James Landis, who had connections in Washington, and the staff at the New York office. “I know you will remember that we are not strangers in Washington, and I am not a stranger to the newspaper men or columnists, and when the campaign starts I, myself, will do all the things I think are necessary, and, therefore, it will not require very much of your time. . . . I wanted your services occasionally for digging up an item that might be of value in the state.” When McInerny asked for more money than Kennedy was willing to give him, Kennedy cautioned him that there would be “no occasion for entertainment and travel. . . . We are not exploiting somebody whom nobody has ever heard of, and we are not going to ask any favors from people that I have not done some favors for before or that I can do at some future time.”
³

—

T
o burnish his foreign policy credentials, Congressman Kennedy set off that fall of 1951 on a twenty-five-thousand-mile, seven-week tour of the Middle East and Asia. Accompanying him were his sister Patricia and his brother Bob, who left behind him his wife of sixteen months, Ethel Skakel, and the first Kennedy granddaughter, Kathleen, born in July 1951. The three Kennedys met with Generals Dwight Eisenhower and Matthew Ridgway in Paris; Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the French military commander, and Premier Bao Dai in Vietnam; Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Arab leaders in Israel; British officials and national leaders in Iran; Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in India; and Liaquat Ali Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, just hours before he was assassinated. Their final stop was Korea, where Jack was taken ill—a common occurrence on trips during which he pushed himself beyond his limits—and flown to Okinawa with a temperature of 106. After a course of penicillin and adrenal hormones for his Addison’s disease, he was judged well enough to fly home.

His father cheered him on and offered public relations assistance from the United States. “If possible,” he cabled him in New Delhi on October 13, 1951, at the start of his journey, “try and get some news service to report your activities each location. Good for build up here.” On November 2, he informed Jack of the media campaign he had set up for him on his return: “Radio program National hookup night November 14. Boston Chamber of Commerce Lunch Nov. 19. What about Kate Smith’s afternoon television hour? [At the time, Patricia was working for Kate Smith.] Have interview National Hookup probably night of 15th. Write me names important people you talked with for newspaper publicity and air talks. Telephone me upon arrival in Europe.”
⁴

Jack cabled that he would be returning to Boston “on the morning of the 12th or perhaps on the 11th for publicity—and then I could come to N.Y. on the same day to work on the speech.” He asked his father to get hold of recent articles by Justice Douglas on Iran, William Bullitt on India, and Gardner Cowles, the founder and publisher of
Look
magazine. He also wanted to look at the articles and speeches Governor Dewey had delivered when he returned from abroad and the “last 8 weeks copies of the
Economist.
”
⁵

After his last “fact-finding” trip in February, Jack had taken a position in direct opposition to that of his father. Now, nine months later and after weeks of extended discussions with diplomats, military officials, anticolonial leaders, and journalists in the field, his thinking had begun to move closer to his father’s on the need for the United States to reduce its presence overseas. With a specificity that was absent from his father’s broad-stroked attacks, but in line with his overall policy recommendations, Congressman Kennedy, in his half-hour radio address, broadcast nationwide on November 14, 1951, from New York at ten thirty
P.M.
, urged American withdrawal from the “desperate effort of a French regime to hang on to the remnants of empire. . . . These Indo-Chinese states are puppet states . . . as typical examples of empire and of colonialism as can be found anywhere.” In the Arab world as well, the United States appeared “too frequently . . . too ready to buttress an inequitable status quo.” He was opposed to the government’s unthinking, unwavering support for European colonial interests, to American “intervention in behalf of England’s oil investments in Iran . . . our avowed willingness to assume an almost imperial military responsibility for the safety of the Suez, our failure to deal effectively after these years with the terrible human tragedy of the more than 700,000 Arab refugees [from Palestine].”

The similarities between his father’s speeches of the year before and his radio address were remarkable. Joseph P. Kennedy had declared on December 12, 1950, “We have far fewer friends than we had in 1945!” Jack, nine months later: “It is tragic to report that not only have we made no new friends, but we have lost old ones.” Joseph Kennedy had, on February 3, 1951, asserted that the United States, because of its support of European imperialism, had come to “represent in Asia, as the French in Indo-China, the revival of the white man’s burden.” Jack now insisted that American support of British interests in Iran and French colonialism in Indo-China had “intensified the feeling of hostility towards us until today we are definitely classed with the imperialist powers of Western Europe.”
⁶

There were differences between the two men’s positions, differences that would be emphasized in the years to come. Unlike the ex-ambassador, Congressman Kennedy thought it was in the best interests of the United States to fight communism abroad, but by force of example, not force of arms, by celebrating and exporting the “American spirit,” supporting nationalist attempts to break free of colonial rule, combating poverty and want, and contributing to the building of “strong native non-Communist sentiment.” His father, on the other hand, believed the United States had no business fighting communism in any manner, anywhere outside the western hemisphere.

The New York
Daily News,
in the past one of the few and most dynamic supporters of the senior Kennedy’s views, saw at once the significance of the congressman’s decision to come over to his father’s side. John O’Donnell, the paper’s Washington correspondent, declared on November 20, 1951, that in his radio address, John Fitzgerald Kennedy had dropped “a couple of political blockbusters.” He was not only taking aim at the Truman administration’s foreign policy but had signaled his intentions to challenge Truman’s most loyal Republican champion, “Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., long a supporter of the Roosevelt-Truman foreign policy.” If, as now seemed to be the case, Congressman Kennedy decided to run for Lodge’s Senate seat, Massachusetts politics would be turned topsy-turvy with “a Democrat who challenges both Truman’s foreign policy and its Republican backer. The future will be lively.”

Though an unannounced candidate and unsure as to whether he would be running for senator or governor, the congressman was in full campaign mode now. “Jack,” his father wrote Arthur Poole on November 20, “was in pretty bad shape when he arrived and, with the radio broadcast that he made followed by a . . . speech before the Chamber of Commerce yesterday, and another television appearance that evening, and a half dozen speeches in the eastern part of the state, and three days in the hospital here, we expect him home tonight. His mental courage is so much superior to his physical strength that I sometimes wonder what the final result will be.”
⁷

Jack was facing a much more difficult campaign than in 1946. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., was as handsome as Jack Kennedy and a better speaker, paraded a family name as distinguished as any in Massachusetts (or the nation), had his own Harvard degree, a distinguished war record, a stellar record as an anti-Communist, and lots of money. George Smathers, perhaps Jack’s best friend in Congress, urged him not to oppose Lodge. So did almost everyone outside the family. There were whispers everywhere about whether Jack was making the right choice, Eunice Shriver recalled, but none “in our home about Lodge. Only a mighty roar every time Jack came home. . . . ‘Jack run for the Senate. You’ll knock Lodge’s block off.’ My father had analyzed the situation thoroughly, and decided that Jack could win. Jack made the decision on his own after campaigning in every town in Massachusetts and finding support. But the greatest influence on his decision was my father’s encouragement, and his belief that Jack could win.”
⁸

Joseph Kennedy’s reasoning, as he laid it out to Cornelius Fitzgerald in late October 1951, was simple. Massachusetts was a Democratic state; all Jack had to do was to hold the Democratic vote and add to it some Republicans and independents. “It’s ridiculous in this Democratic state that has been able to elect Curleys and Hurleys and even Dever that we should have Republican senators for almost twenty years. Lodge is very weak with the Republicans, themselves, and he had always been elected because he was able to get the Democratic vote. Nobody has ever fought him . . . who was competent to take him on, but Jack can easily do that. If Jack holds the Democratic vote in this state, he will get a substantial Republican vote and a very substantial independent vote.”
⁹

There was something daring, almost reckless, about Kennedy’s analysis. To everyone else, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., looked unbeatable in 1952. The last four statewide elections for senator had gone to Republicans. Lodge himself, first elected in 1936, had been reelected in 1942; after his stint in the military, he had run against and easily defeated Democrat incumbent David Walsh in 1946, with 60 percent of the vote. Leverett Saltonstall, another Republican, had been elected to Lodge’s seat by a landslide in 1944, then reelected in 1948 by a comfortable margin.

No matter what his father might say, Jack faced a difficult battle. “I am interesting myself in Jack’s candidacy which probably will be for the U.S. Senate,” Kennedy wrote Sir James Calder on November 24, 1951. “I have turned the conduct of most of my business over to an organization that I have gotten together in my office in New York and I am not paying too much attention to anything except in a very supervisory capacity.”
¹⁰

Kennedy canvassed friends, acquaintances, business associates, and former colleagues for help in getting his son’s name before the voting public. And he was successful.

The year before, in the wake of the uproar over his University of Virginia speech, Kennedy had been invited by Lawrence Spivak, the founder, permanent panelist, and producer
,
to appear on
Meet the Press
. Kennedy declined but remained in touch with Spivak, who, a year later, issued an invitation for December 2, 1951, to Jack Kennedy, one of the few congressmen ever granted a half-hour interview on what was the premier news program on radio or television.