The Patriarch (85 page)

Jack looked remarkably young and almost painfully thin, with his ears sticking out on either side of his freshly trimmed haircut (thick on top, short on the sides). He answered questions from Spivak, James Reston, May Craig of the
Portland Press Herald,
and Ernest Lindley of
Newsweek
about whether Eisenhower was a Democrat or a Republican, whether Truman was the strongest candidate, what effect ongoing bribery and influence-peddling scandals would have on Democratic chances in 1952, and what he had learned on his recent trip abroad. His responses were dutiful and rather dull. On Korea, he tiptoed around, saying he agreed with General MacArthur on some points, but not on bombing Manchuria, that he supported the ongoing truce talks, and that he did not regard it as a sell-out of American troops that Truman had agreed with the enemy to establish a “truce line.” “We ought to take agreement where we can take it.” On most issues, he sounded like any other Democrat. Only when it came to questions about American intervention in the Middle East and Asia did he sound like his father. On Indo-China, he criticized the U.S. government for giving the French everything they had asked for. On Iran, he criticized it for taking the British side and turning its back on the nationalists. When asked what he would do differently, he responded that he would send more “technical assistance” to the Middle East and Asia, improve the Voice of America and other propaganda tools, and back off support for the French in Indo-China until they declared their intention to cede independence to the native peoples of the region.

It was a good—though not a great—entrance onto the national stage for the young congressman. He made no mistakes, appeared intelligent, answered all the questions, resisted the traps laid, and found several occasions to flash a bit of Kennedy charm. The fact that, while still a comparatively junior congressman with no real accomplishments to his name, Jack had appeared on
Meet the Press
was, in the final analysis, more important than anything he happened to say.

His father acknowledged as much in a letter to Spivak a month after the appearance. Spivak had sent Joseph Kennedy a pair of suspenders as a Christmas gift. “Is there any significance to the fact that you sent out suspenders?” Kennedy had responded. “Does that indicate that people could lose their pants on the program, or anything like that? From what I have seen of it, I can’t imagine trying to keep up with the brains of your panel. Maybe I could have done it in my younger days but I am sure I couldn’t today. On the other hand,
Meet the Press
established Jack once and for all as a major personality, so there you are! Anyway, my very deep appreciation for all your favors and kindnesses.”
¹¹

Two weeks after Congressman Kennedy’s appearance on national television, his father spoke on the Mutual Broadcasting System radio network from 10:35 to 11:00
P.M.
via a live hookup from Chicago. Written with James Landis and James Fayne, and reviewed and edited by Arthur Krock, his address to the Economic Club, titled “Our Foreign Policy—Its Casualties and Prospects,” was another direct assault on Cold War assumptions and policies. The amount the nation spent fighting so-called enemies abroad, Kennedy insisted, limited “how much we can and dare expend for social purposes.” Without firing a single shot, the Russians had succeeded in impoverishing America by forcing “upon us peacetime expenditures beyond what could have been their wildest hopes.” The Truman administration had been “wasting our resources in the pursuit of a dream [the defeat of communism everywhere] which, worthy though it might be, was impossible of accomplishment. . . . The Korean War becomes more ghastly, more utterly futile as each day follows the next. . . . In Indo-China, American arms, American military aid, and American dollars are going to support France’s desperate effort to keep her old colonial empire. In the Suez and on the Persian Gulf, we may soon become embroiled by the actions of the British. The Arab world, whose friendship had been ours, has turned against us. . . . America is no longer seen as a champion of democratic self-determination but as a nation indistinguishable from her imperial allies.”

His anti-imperialist, anticolonialist rhetoric sounded much like his son’s, but as he was not running for office, he had no need to moderate his positions, disguise his anger, or conceal his fears for the future. While the congressman could not distance himself from the ultimate Cold War objective—the destruction of communism—and remain a viable candidate for any office, his father could and did. Looking into the future, Kennedy underscored what he believed would be the ultimate consequence of an extended Cold War arms race. “Since armaments quickly become obsolescent and need replacement, this will mean the continuation of vast expenditures for the North Atlantic world. . . . Taxes will remain extravagantly high and life regimented to the austere needs of a war economy. It is not too difficult to predict that our democratic institutions cannot long survive such a strain.” He had made much the same case in arguing against American involvement in the war against Germany, Italy, and Japan. To fight a dictatorship, even in a “cold” war, democratic governments had to employ the tools of dictatorship. Political and economic freedoms would be curtailed, markets reined in, investments controlled, prices and profits regulated.

He had tried the year before to set in motion a “great debate” about the Cold War, and perhaps he had. But, aside from Senator Robert Taft, who would be seriously challenged that year for leadership of his party and the Republican nomination for president, there were fewer and fewer politicians who were actively dissenting from what appeared to be a growing bipartisan consensus. The Democrats supported Cold War spending because they believed that the country could afford both guns and butter and that enhanced military expenditures were not detracting from but driving economic recovery and growth. The Republicans did not publically disagree but argued only that they could fight communism more efficiently and effectively than Truman.
¹²

As the year before, reaction to Joseph Kennedy’s speech was largely negative. He was not one to make excuses, but he felt obliged to explain himself in a letter to Adlai Stevenson, the governor of Illinois and the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952. “I have no ax to grind in politics,” he explained, “but I am tremendously disturbed by the results of our foreign policy.” His “sincere doubt” that the nation could afford the current program of foreign aid and his “growing conviction” that overseas expenditures were not buying added security had led him “to what I set forth in my talk. I hope it will at least stimulate thought, for the burden of the solution must be borne by younger men like yourself.”
¹³

This was to be his “last hurrah.” With his son now a candidate for the Senate and, he hoped, in the foreseeable future, for the presidency, Joseph Kennedy recognized he would have to take a backseat. “As you may know,” he explained to Dave Powers, who had invited him to speak in Detroit, “I made a speech in Chicago on the 17th and that finishes my speech making for quite some time. I have a son who is a Congressman and who is active in public life. I have tried to retire more or less from making speeches and let him carry on, and I make only one speech about once a year.”
¹⁴

—

W
ith my boy Jack a probable candidate for the Senate against Lodge in Massachusetts,” he wrote Lord Beaverbrook on February 18, 1952, “I am finding myself with plenty to do.” During the Hialeah meet that winter, Rose remembered her husband spending at least three days a week working “in a political way, because a lot of people would come to Miami for the winter who were influential politically and he’d give them a sales talk.” In Palm Beach, he solicited support for Jack on the phone from his bullpen, where he sunbathed from about eleven thirty to lunchtime every day, naked, save for the hat on his head and the coconut butter he smeared all over his torso. “Joe used a telephone the way Heifetz played a fiddle,” his friend Morton Downey remembered. “He could do business on a telephone in a few minutes that took his supposed peers a day or a week to accomplish across a desk in an office and conference room.”
¹⁵

To court the Italian American vote, he sought Galeazzi’s assistance in arranging for Jack to be awarded “the Star of Solidarity” from the Italian government for his service to Americans of Italian descent. Lodge was so disturbed by the award that he petitioned for his own “Star of Solidarity,” as did Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island. It didn’t matter. As Kennedy gleefully wrote Galeazzi, the announcement that Jack was getting the award came out first. And, as his campaign literature noted, he was the only congressman to have ever been so honored.
¹⁶

In early April, Governor Dever finally called Jack to say that he intended to stand for reelection, leaving the path to the Senate nomination wide open. Mark Dalton, whom Jack had asked to return as campaign manager, drafted the announcement that Congressman Kennedy would be a candidate for Lodge’s seat and read it over the phone to Kennedy, Jim Landis, and Arthur Krock, who, though still Washington bureau chief for the
New York Times,
remained a Kennedy adviser. The statement was issued on Palm Sunday, which Archbishop Cushing thought augured well for the campaign.

The Palm Beach season at an end, Kennedy returned north to take residence at 84 Beacon Street in Boston, just around the corner from Jack’s residence at 122 Bowdoin. The apartment had three bedrooms, one for Sargent Shriver, whom Kennedy imported from Chicago to work on the campaign, another for Rose, the third for Kennedy. The campaign team, built with Kennedy’s money, included the motley crew of volunteers and “secretaries” whom Jack had recruited during his visits through the state; professionals from previous campaigns; new advisers and media consultants like Ralph Coghlan, formerly of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
and Larry O’Brien, who had been brought in because of his contacts in Springfield and western Massachusetts; and family retainers like Landis, Fayne, Krock, and Johnnie Ford.

The ambassador (his preferred title of address) approved every piece of campaign literature no matter where it originated; designed and oversaw radio and TV advertising; served as personal liaison with newspapers across the state, especially the Republican ones; and personally recruited Taft Republicans and independents who distrusted Lodge’s steadfast support for Truman’s foreign policy initiatives. He had spent the winter working on a position book with Elizabeth Walsh, a member of his New York staff, that referenced Jack’s record and public statements on every issue that might come up during the campaign, and on the “tabloid,” a glossy photo-and-text magazine that could be distributed door-to-door or through the mails. “He picked out the pictures and what stories went into it. He knew how to do that.” According to Sargent Shriver, Kennedy was also responsible for the campaign slogan “He will do
more
for Massachusetts,” with the “more” underlined.
¹⁷

Lodge was known as a foreign policy expert and the man who had engineered Eisenhower’s nomination for the presidency. But had he done enough for Massachusetts? Kennedy commissioned James Landis and James Fayne to take the materials he had accumulated during his “economic development” commission work in 1945 and produce a series of position papers and speeches that emphasized Congressman Kennedy’s commitment to bringing new capital, new industries, new jobs, and improved transportation links to the state’s depressed cities. Positioning his son as someone who cared about the Massachusetts economy would strengthen his standing not only with working-class Democrats, but, as Landis put it, “with many of the basic financial interests in New England who would normally be Republican and . . . felt that here was a man that was going to do more for them than Lodge had been able to do or was inclined to do.”
¹⁸

Sargent Shriver, who was not yet married to Eunice, was astounded at the way Kennedy took charge. “He was the campaign manager, no doubt about it.” “He was such a strong personality,” Kenneth O’Donnell, Bobby’s Harvard roommate who had been recruited to work on Jack’s 1946 congressional campaign and was called back to work on the Senate campaign, recalled, “that nobody could—nobody
dared
—fight back.” Campaign staff were frightened to death, never knowing when they visited headquarters or attended a meeting at Kennedy’s apartment whether they would find a kindly grandfatherly figure waiting for them or a tyrannical screamer “in the throes of the ‘itch,’ as he called his fits of nervous irritation.”
¹⁹

Kennedy’s constant and public carping at Mark Dalton, the nominal campaign manager, was such that it undermined his leadership. The campaign, which had begun with much enthusiasm, John Droney remembered, “bogged down early. . . . Nobody seemed to be the leader; we could get away with that in a congressional fight, but it was obvious to everyone that we couldn’t go on like that if [Congressman Kennedy] were going to beat Lodge.”
²⁰

“We were headed for disaster,” Kenny O’Donnell recalled. “The only time the campaign got any direction was when John Kennedy . . . was able to get up to Massachusetts to overrule his father. . . . The Congressman and I had a big argument one day, and I told him that the campaign could only be handled by somebody who could talk up to his father; nobody had the courage to, and
I
certainly didn’t have the qualifications, and it just wasn’t going to work unless Bobby came up.” Jack asked O’Donnell to get in touch with Bobby, which he did, but the younger brother, who had graduated from law school in 1951 and had just taken his first job at the Justice Department, was reluctant to drop everything, resign his post, leave his pregnant wife and first child behind, and move to a state he didn’t know and had never lived in to take over a campaign that was in trouble. A week later, Bobby called O’Donnell back. “I’m coming up; I’ve thought it all over, and I suppose I’ll have to do it.”
²¹