An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

by Robert Dallek

  CHAPTER 6

  The Senator

  We have not fully recognized the difficulty facing a politician conscientiously desiring, in [Daniel] Webster’s words, “to push [his] skiff from the shore alone” into a hostile and turbulent sea.

  — John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (1956)

  AS ONE OF ONLY NINETY-SIX senators, Jack Kennedy hoped to have an impact on domestic and foreign affairs surpassing anything he possibly could have done in the Lower House. He knew that some of the country’s most memorable politicians—John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, the “fighting” Bob La Follettes, Sr. and Jr., George Norris, Charles Sumner, and Daniel Webster—had made their mark in the Senate. But he had no illusions that membership in America’s most exclusive club conferred automatic distinction; the great majority of senators—past and present—were unexceptional. In 1935, Senator J. Hamilton Lewis told Harry Truman after Truman became a Missouri senator that initially, “you will wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you will wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.” If Jack did not know this quote before his election, he certainly came to agree with it once he took up residence on the Senate floor. His fellow senators were cautious, self-serving, and unheroic, more often than not the captive of one special interest or another. Just three months into his term, Jack told a journalist, “I’ve often thought that the country might be better off if we Senators and Pages traded jobs.” In 1954, after a year in the Senate, when someone asked Jack, “What’s it like to be a United States senator?” he said after a moment, “It’s the most corrupting job in the world.” He saw senators as all too ready to cut deals and court campaign contributors to ensure their political futures. Jack also enjoyed the famous comment of Senate Chaplain Edward Everett Hale: “Do you pray for the senators, Dr. Hale?” “No,” he replied, “I look at the senators and I pray for the country.”

  First as a congressman and then, even more so, as a senator, Jack disliked the pressure to obscure and compromise strongly held beliefs in the service of political survival. During his first months as a senator, he received a number of letters chiding him for not being a “true liberal.” “I’d be very happy to tell them that I am not a liberal at all,” Jack told a reporter. “I’m a realist.”

  But as much as he disliked compromise, Jack was never indifferent to the vital role that accommodation played in a democracy: Politics, he said in 1956, was “the fine art of conciliating, balancing and interpreting the forces and factions of public opinion.” He did see limits to this process: Jack also believed that a man of conscience “realizes that once he begins to weigh each issue in terms of his chances for reelection, once he begins to compromise away his principles on one issue after another for fear that to do otherwise would halt his career and prevent future fights for principle, then he has lost the very freedom of conscience which justifies his continuance in office. But to decide at which point and on which issue he will risk his career is a difficult and soul-searching decision.” As his later actions demonstrated, Kennedy had an imperfect record in meeting his own standard; holding, and then moving beyond, his Senate seat took precedence over political principles more than once in the next eight years.

  In 1953, at the start of Jack’s Senate service, international perils made philosophical questions about a senator’s behavior abstractions of secondary concern. The Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in 1949, the U.S. explosion of a 150-times-more-powerful hydrogen bomb in October 1952, a Chinese communist regime since 1949 leading a chorus of Third World opposition to U.S. imperialism, and the continuing conflict in Korea made questions of war and peace central concerns of the new Eisenhower administration and the Eighty-third Congress. During Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s first six months in office, ending the Korean fighting and responding to a Soviet “peace offensive” after Stalin died in March were continually in the headlines. The question of how to rein in Joe McCarthy, whose incessant reckless accusations about communists in high places had undermined civil liberties and divided the nation, was another topic of constant discussion on Capitol Hill.

  Although these matters of state held Jack’s interest, they initially commanded less of his attention than practical questions about his Senate influence and even more mundane ones about organizing his Senate office. Republican control of the Upper House by a two-seat margin—49 to 47—meant that Kennedy, a freshman member of the minority, would be one of the least-influential members of the Senate. Like the House, the Senate placed greater value on membership in the majority and seniority than on a new senator’s abilities, however impressive they might be.

  But even if circumstances were different, Jack’s top priority had to be setting up an office that met the needs of his home state. He relied on the same devoted and effective assistants that had helped him in the House. Ted Reardon became his D.C. administrative assistant, and Frank Morrissey continued to head the Boston office. To meet his larger responsibilities as a senator, Jack hired two native Nebraskans, Evelyn Lincoln as his personal secretary and Theodore C. Sorensen as his number two legislative assistant.

  Mrs. Lincoln, as Jack always addressed her, was born Evelyn Maurine Norton in the hamlet of Polk, Nebraska. Her father, a farmer and devoted Democrat, served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives in the late 1920s and early 1930s. As a resident of the capital, Evelyn Norton earned a degree from George Washington University. After marrying Harold Lincoln, a political scientist, Mrs. Lincoln worked on Capitol Hill from 1950 to 1953, where she became acquainted with Congressman Kennedy and worked in his 1952 Senate campaign. “A pleasant brunet with a ready twinkle,” the forty-year-old Mrs. Lincoln impressed Jack as certain to be a devoted aide who would patiently meet every request. He was not disappointed. As he later told Sorensen, “If I had said just now, ‘Mrs. Lincoln, I have cut off Jackie’s head, would you please send over a box?’ she still would have replied, ‘That’s wonderful. I’ll send it right away. Did you get your nap?’”

  Sorensen was another exceptional find for a new ambitious senator. Jack hired him after two five-minute interviews; but he had ample information about the twenty-four-year-old lawyer from Lincoln, Nebraska, who had been “a lowly attorney” at the Federal Security Agency and then counsel to the Temporary Committee of the Congress on Railroad Retirement Legislation. Sorensen came from a progressive Republican family with a father who had been a crusading Nebraska attorney general and ally of Senator George W. Norris. Sorensen’s mother, Annis Chaikin, was the offspring of Russian Jews and, like her husband, a social activist committed to women’s suffrage and other progressive causes. Kennedy also knew that Sorensen was his parents’ child—a civil rights activist, an avowed pacifist, and an outspoken member of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), an organization supporting reform candidates and causes.

  Sorensen was an unlikely choice. In fact, before he went to his first interview, a knowledgeable D.C. attorney told him, “Jack Kennedy wouldn’t hire anyone Joe Kennedy wouldn’t tell him to hire—and, with the exception of Jim Landis [a former dean of the Harvard Law School and Kennedy family lawyer], Joe Kennedy hasn’t hired a non-Catholic in fifty years!” But Jack needed a stronger liberal voice in his circle than his own if he were to advance his political career, and Sorensen was the sort of cerebral, realistic liberal Jack felt comfortable with. Sorensen saw himself as someone moved more by “intellectual than emotional persuasion. I am personally convinced,” he said, “that the liberal who is rationally committed is more reliable than the liberal who is emotionally committed.” When Joe Kennedy first met Sorensen eight or nine months after Jack hired him, Joe told him, “You couldn’t write speeches for me. You’re too much of a liberal. But writing for Jack is different.”

  Despite agreeing to work for Kennedy, Sorensen had doubts about the senator’s willingness to fight the good fight. He wrote later that he immediately liked Kennedy, “impressed by his ‘ordinary’ demeanor. He spoke easily but almost shyly, without the customar
y 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 officeholders 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. 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.” But Sorensen felt that if he “were going to throw in with him, there were certain things [I] wanted to know. I didn’t want us to be too far apart on basic policy and so I asked the questions—about his father, Joe McCarthy, the Catholic Church.” Jack was self-effacing and ready to tell Sorensen what he wanted to hear. Blessed with the instincts of the politician who can read an audience or intuit how to put himself in line with a listener’s concerns, Kennedy described himself as more liberal than his House record suggested. “You’ve got to remember,” he said, “that I entered Congress just out of my father’s house,” that is, still partly under his conservative influence.

  Lincoln, Reardon, and Sorensen set to work in room 362, a four-room suite, in the Old Senate Office Building. In time, the middle room, where the door was always open during work hours, became a hive of activity, crowded with desks, filing cabinets, ringing telephones, clattering typewriters, and a constant stream of visitors. Mrs. Lincoln presided over this domain, while two small offices to the left housed Reardon and Sorensen, who in time were joined by several other aides providing expertise on domestic and foreign issues. To the right was Jack’s spacious inner office with a large glass-faced bookcase topped by models of World War II ships and a stuffed nine-foot sailfish Jack caught off Acapulco in 1953. The wall in the far right corner of the room displayed old prints and inscribed framed photos of political friends. The senator sat at a large desk set in the center of the room before a green marble fireplace. Books, reports, and souvenirs, including the coconut shell Kennedy had used to arrange the rescue of his PT 109 crew, covered his desk. “An air of intense informality hung over the office,” making it, at times, seem “like a five-ring circus, as Kennedy simultaneously performed as senator, committee member, Massachusetts politician, author, and presidential candidate.” Sorensen in particular unstintingly put his exceptional talent as an analyst and writer in the service of his new boss: He was “devoted, loyal, and dedicated to the Senator in every way possible,” Evelyn Lincoln would say later. “Time meant nothing to him—he gave it all to the Senator.”

  The first task Jack set himself and the staff was fulfilling the promise of his campaign to do more for Massachusetts than his predecessor. Asked on Meet the Press shortly after his election what accounted for his victory over Lodge, Jack pointed to the decline of the state’s economy “in the last six years with its competition with the South and its loss of industry. The feeling of the people of the state was that our interests had been neglected.”

  Sorensen, Harvard economist Seymour Harris, and three members of Joe’s New York staff developed forty proposals for New England economic expansion. Jack described them in three carefully crafted Senate speeches in the spring of 1953. “The Economic Problems of New England—A Program for Congressional Action” argued that what was good for New England was good for America. “This Nation’s challenge to meet the needs of defense mobilization and to achieve national and international economic stability and development,” Jack asserted, “cannot be fully met if any part of the country is unproductive and unstable economically.” The program urged help for various Massachusetts industries, including fishing, textiles, and shipbuilding, as well as for the Boston seaport. Kennedy’s suggestions for stimulating the region’s economy appealed to Democrats and Republicans alike by offering benefits to business and labor and promising to serve the national defense. The Congress would eventually enact most of the program, though slowly and with little fanfare.

  Congress’s tortoiselike pace meant that, as Ted Reardon told a supporter, “no great fireworks . . . resulted” from Jack’s initiative. Since the object of the exercise was not only to help New England but also to publicize Jack’s fulfillment of 1952 campaign promises, the office blitzed the media with publicity. Reardon distributed 30,000 copies of the program to special interest groups throughout New England, and Jack and Sorensen collaborated on articles about it in American Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, and the New York Times Magazine.

  The aggressive promotion of Jack’s achievements and reputation included blunting attacks on him in the state. When Elmer C. Nelson, the chairman of the Republican State Committee, “made some slurring remarks about Jack,” describing him as a “young Democratic fellow with a whirlygig in his hair” who went around serving tea to ladies to get elected, Jack sent word that if Nelson continued to refer to him that way, he would “take actions which he thinks are called for.” Nelson did not test Jack’s resolve.

  THE POSSIBILITY OF BECOMING the first Catholic president intrigued Jack from the start of his political career. To advance his national visibility, he staked out a controversial position on the St. Lawrence Seaway, a proposed river transit system between northern Canada and the Great Lakes. Although advocates of the project argued its value to the national economy in general and the Midwest in particular, concerns that it would crimp the economic life of Boston’s port had kept Massachusetts senators and representatives from casting a single vote for the project on the six occasions over the twenty years it had been before Congress. Jack wrestled with the issue for months before deciding to speak for the bill’s passage in January 1954.

  Few issues had troubled him as much during his years in Congress, he declared at the start of his speech. But several considerations had persuaded him to break with prevailing opinion in his state and support U.S. participation in building and managing the Seaway. First, if necessary, Canada would build the waterway without the United States. Second, a joint effort would give America part ownership and control of a vital strategic international artery, which would facilitate the shipment of high-grade iron ore the United States might need for national defense. Third, he believed there would ultimately be little, if any, damage to Boston’s port, where 75 percent of traffic was “coastwise, intraport and local, which no one has claimed would be affected by the Seaway.” Fourth, though he saw no reason to think that the city and state would benefit directly from the project, he believed that it would provide indirect economic gains. Finally, to oppose the Seaway would be to take “a narrow view of my functions as a U.S. Senator.” Quoting Daniel Webster, Kennedy concluded, “Our aim should not be ‘States dissevered, discordant [or] belligerent’; but ‘one country, one constitution, one destiny.’”

  Although the Boston Post asserted that he was “ruining New England,” Jack won more than he lost from what some described as a courageous stand for the national interest. At least one Massachusetts newspaper came to his defense and two members of the state’s congressional delegation, persuaded by Jack’s arguments, voted with him for the Seaway. More important from Jack’s perspective, his outspoken backing of the St. Lawrence project won him attention. In February 1954, when he appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, the host described him as only the third Democrat in Massachusetts history to win a U.S. Senate seat. “His sensational victory [had] created international interest. He is in the news again because of his position on the St. Lawrence Seaway.” His stand on the St. Lawrence project, Ted Sorensen said later, “certainly had the effect of making him a national figure.”

  So did his pronouncements on defense and foreign policy. Even after Eisenhower arranged a Korean truce in July, three of the four most worrisome issues to people were ousting communists from government, preventing another war, and formulating a clear foreign policy. In April 1954, 56 percent of Americans remained primarily concerned about threats of war, communist subversion, and national defense. By June, despite strong confidence in Eisenhower’s leadership, the number of citizens troubled by these issu
es had risen to 67 percent. When asked directly about the possibility of a war in the next five years, between 40 and 64 percent of Americans saw a conflict as likely. A majority of the country expected atomic and hydrogen bombs to be used against the United States.

  Kennedy’s readiness to speak out on such questions was partly a case of cynical showboating. He understood that, as a journalist friend told him, his pronouncements on foreign affairs put his “eager boyish puss and ingratiating tones . . . all over the place.” If he was going to run for president, establishing himself as a Senate leader on foreign affairs seemed like an essential prerequisite. But foreign policy was also his long-standing area of expertise, and joining a debate on vital matters of national security appealed to him as the highest duty of a senator.