by David Nasaw
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.8
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.
In early December, Kennedy flew south to Palm Beach for the winter. Jack had decided it was time to promote his own people to positions of authority in the campaign, but only those his father approved of. He asked navy veteran Mark Dalton, who had gone to Boston College and then Harvard Law School, to serve as campaign manager. All that winter, Joseph Kennedy and Dalton would confer by telephone. “He would talk at great length and wanted to know about every facet of the campaign,” Dalton recalled in an oral history. “As a matter of fact that was one of my problems. He’d keep you on the phone for an hour and a half, two hours.” Kennedy kept in touch as well with the old pols he had attached to his son’s campaign. In early February, he dropped a quick line to Joe Kane to report that although he knew Jack was “working like a beaver,” he had heard “from some other people up there that they think he should visit more Jewish organizations. Perhaps you should speak to him about that.”10
By now, there were half a dozen declared and almost declared contenders for Curley’s seat, including the mayor of Cambridge, candidates with roots and organizations in Somerville, Charlestown, Brighton, and the North End, and a man named Joe Russo, whose major appeal was the fact that he was the only Italian in the campaign—or at least he was until another Joe Russo declared his candidacy. Mark Dalton, who was mystified by the appearance of the second Joe Russo, was convinced that Joe Kennedy and his money had persuaded him to run for office.11
Jack Kennedy didn’t expect to sweep any of the wards in his district, but he hoped to come in at least second in each of them, perhaps first in East Boston. He established campaign offices in central Boston at the Bellevue Hotel, where he lived, and in Cambridge, Charlestown, East Boston, Somerville, and Brighton. This cost money. So did plastering the district with billboards and campaign literature, organizing bell-ringing, door-to-door operations, buying radio advertising, mailing copies of John Hersey’s PT 109 article to voters, and organizing the dozens of volunteers who had flocked to the campaign. Fortunately, money was never a problem in any Kennedy campaign. From Palm Beach, Kennedy made sure the funds flowed freely through trusted lieutenants such as Eddie Moore, who served as unofficial campaign cashier.
Through February and March, while Jack built his organization with an eye on Curley’s congressional seat, another possibility surfaced. Governor Maurice Tobin was up for reelection in 1946 and required a fresh face with lots of money, preferably a veteran, to run on his ticket as lieutenant governor. Kennedy, worried now that his son might be too young and inexperienced to prevail in a wide-open primary, was attracted to the idea of his running with Tobin and gaining the seasoning he needed for a later run for senator or governor. Honey Fitz was bitterly opposed to the idea, as was Jack. Kennedy was eventually won over to their side after commissioning a poll that showed that Jack had a much greater chance of being elected congressman in a safe district than lieutenant governor in a state that was leaning Republican.
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Almost fifteen hundred miles from Boston, Kennedy tried to stay quiet that winter and spring so as not to steal any thunder from or embarrass his candidate son up north. But, having made the round-trip from outsider to Washington insider and back to outsider, he craved the attention he had once enjoyed.
Congress was in the midst of debating whether to approve the $3.75 billion 2 percent loan to Great Britain that Truman had proposed in December. Kennedy, as former ambassador, had expected to be called upon to give his opinion on the loan, but had received no invitation to do so. Intent on inserting himself into the debate, nonetheless, he drafted a statement that he sent to Krock at the New York Times Washington bureau. “This is approximately what I think about the loan. It needs punch and polish. Will you look it over, shape it up, and then send me what you think
will do the most good for us?”
Krock edited the statement and gave it to John H. Crider, one of the reporters who worked under him in Washington. A few days later, on March 4, Crider published a front-page story headlined KENNEDY BACKS AID TO BRITAIN AS GIFT: FORMER AMBASSADOR CALLS IT IN OUR SELF-INTEREST AND A BAR TO COMMUNISM. Kennedy’s statement on the loan, edited by Krock, was inserted in the article. “The United Kingdom fought from 1939 to 1942 to save its own skin,” not to protect Western civilization or the United States. “So we owe the British nothing on that basis. . . . However, the British are in a bad economic situation, and they are a fine people. Also, it is to our interest to help them now to maintain the balance of world trade and world salvation lest otherwise they be driven into the arms of communism. But in so doing let us not practice deceit on the American people.” Kennedy favored giving the British the funds they required to stabilize their economy, but as a gift rather than a loan. Great Britain and the European nation had not paid back their old World War I debts and were certainly not going to pay back any new ones.12
Although it was doubtful that his position in favor of a multibillion-dollar gift to the British was going to help Jack with Irish voters in the eleventh district, he was sure, he wrote Joe Kane in Boston, that “with the exception of a few Coughlinites . . . the statement won’t hurt Jack in that district, and it certainly will help him with the Canadians and English in the state at some later time.” He then added, preparing Kane for another potential problem, that “this next issue of LIFE will have my big article on foreign policy. It can’t possibly hurt him, and I think you will like it very much.”13
There was too much going on in the world for Kennedy to remain in political exile forever. “Over the space of about five weeks in February and early March,” historians Craig Campbell and Fredrik Logevall would later write, “the political climate in Washington shifted dramatically toward the view . . . that the United States must confront the Soviet Union decisively as a serious enemy.” On his nationally broadcast radio program, Drew Pearson frightened listeners with the tale of an extensive Soviet atomic espionage network working out of Canada. Days later, Stalin gave a speech, more bellicose in tone than in substance, that affirmed the essential differences between communism and capitalism and predicted that only one would survive.14
“Well, last night on the radio,” Kennedy wrote Ralph Cropley at the Maritime Commission, on February 25, “I heard Pearson and Winchell both talk about incidents which mean World War No. III—and at once! Pearson prophesies that the Russians and the Turks will be fighting within three months. Winchell just sees a third World War right handy. As I look back to my speeches of five years ago, I can’t help but feel that I predicted chaos for the world, and if this isn’t it, I never saw chaos. . . . The Washington situation leaves me completely cold. All in all things don’t look very good.”15
For a second time in less than a decade, the United States, Kennedy worried, instead of retreating to its fortress America, building up its domestic economy, and constructing an impregnable military defense, was on the brink of launching a wasteful, quixotic, and potentially deadly quest “to establish liberal democracy throughout the world.” Determined to push back against the developing consensus that the Soviet Union was the enemy of the United States, and so fixated on world conquest that negotiations with it were not possible, Kennedy decided to offer his own policy recommendations in Life magazine.
The magazine accepted his article, cut it down in size, and published it on March 18. It also took the precaution, lest readers find Kennedy’s dismissive views on the Soviet threat too persuasive, of prefacing his article with a caustically dismissive front-of-the-book editorial. Kennedy, the Life editors declared, just didn’t understand the Communist threat. “In Mr. Kennedy’s political geography, the U.S. and Russia appear to be just a couple of nation-states trying to come to terms.” But Russia was not “just a nation-state,” it was the epicenter of an international Communist conspiracy that intended to spread its poison across the globe.16
Kennedy’s piece was fiercely out of touch with the saber-rattling, anti-Soviet speeches that had followed Pearson’s spy story and Stalin’s speech. On February 27, Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg, the former isolationist and now fierce anti-Soviet ideologue, had risen in the Senate to ask rhetorically, “What is Russia up to now?” The implied answer was world conquest. Secretary of State James Byrnes, pushed by Truman, declared only days later that the United States would not “stand aloof if force or the threat of force is used contrary to the purposes of the” United Nations Charter. On March 5, Winston Churchill, speaking with the president at his side, raised the rhetoric by declaring that an “iron curtain” had already descended across Europe.
Kennedy did not mention any of these speakers directly, but he countered them all by arguing that “the nationalistic policy of Russia . . . is much the same as that of any other nation: to maintain its territorial integrity and security and to advance its political, economic and social well-being.” Instead of attempting to reach a sustainable modus vivendi with the Soviets and withdrawing forces and funds from Europe, the administration appeared committed to meddling in the affairs of other nations and trying to force the rest of the world to “establish liberal democracy.” This was the path to a third world war. To safeguard peace abroad and reestablish prosperity at home, it was imperative, Kennedy argued, that the United States stop “minding other people’s business”: in Greece, Palestine, the Balkans, India, Spain, Asia, everywhere outside the western hemisphere.
Kennedy’s article, poorly written and organized, numbingly dull, and buried in the back of a magazine known more for its photos than its text, received little attention. Arthur Krock tried to remedy this by sending the unedited version to publisher Alfred Knopf with the suggestion that it be expanded into a full-length book. Knopf’s reader, Columbia professor Louis Hacker, a former student of Charles Beard’s who had traveled from Marxism in the 1930s to conservatism in the 1950s, recommended it be rejected. He suggested instead that Kennedy write a two-part book on domestic and foreign policy. Kennedy toyed with the idea, then dismissed it. He realized, as Hacker had, that he’d said all he had to say in the Life article.17
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In early April, Kennedy moved back to Boston, where he would remain through primary day, commuting back and forth on the weekends to Hyannis Port. Jack had officially declared his candidacy for the Curley seat in late April and was campaigning sixteen or more hours a day. He was joined in Boston by his mother, his sisters Eunice, Patricia, and Jean, Bobby in his sailor’s uniform, and Ted, who though just fourteen was big enough to run errands for the campaign.
Kennedy remained offstage. Except for a brief visit to introduce himself to the campaign workers and volunteers, he stayed away from headquarters and neighborhood storefronts, didn’t attend any “teas” or house parties or receptions, granted no interviews, gave no speeches, never even appeared in the same room or at the same rally or political forum with his son. When asked in May if he would address the Lincoln Public School in Lincoln, Massachusetts, he replied that he could not. “Unfortunately, my son is running for Congress in Boston, and because of that I am not making any speeches in Massachusetts, at least not for the summer. I think one Kennedy in the public eye is enough.”18
Kennedy kept his distance not simply because he was afraid he had too many enemies, but because Jack’s greatest handicaps were his age, his inexperience, and his tourist status in the district. Should he ever be seen as a daddy’s boy, a puppet whose strings were pulled by his father, his credibility as a new voice for a new generation would be destroyed. “Your father,” Rose wrote Kick in London on June 6, “has kept out of it and is only doing a little work behind the scenes so whatever success there is will be due entirely to Jack and the younger group.”19
Still, as John Droney, a navy veteran and attorney who ran the Cambridge office, re
called, “Even though he stayed out of it, he wasn’t out of it. He was very much in it. Anytime I ever had a problem, I’d call him and he’d help us.” Mark Dalton remained the “official” campaign manager, but as he too would later admit, “The campaigns were run by Joseph P. Kennedy. . . . There never indeed was any campaign manager except Joseph P. Kennedy.”20
From his suite at the Ritz-Carlton or from Hyannis Port, Kennedy watched over everything, consulted with the young men Jack had hired and the old pols he himself had enlisted, made suggestions on the content of billboards, advertisements, radio spots, and the candidate’s speeches, and set strategy with Jack and his senior advisers. He had learned how to spend money and sell a “star” in Hollywood and applied that knowledge in the Roosevelt campaigns in 1932 and 1936 and to promoting himself at the SEC and the Maritime Commission and in London. Now he focused those skills on branding his son as the fresh-faced, charming young war hero, with a bit of glamour and a wholesome down-to-earth quality; a Harvard man and a man of the people; a book-writing intellectual who was everyone’s friend.
Primary day was held early that year, in June rather than September, so there would be ample time to get the general election ballots printed and distributed to servicemen overseas. On Tuesday, June 18, 1946, Jack voted with his grandfather and grandmother, then toured the wards to thank his workers. That night, he escaped to see the Marx Brothers in A Night in Casablanca. He returned to his headquarters at the Bellevue, where he was joined by his father, Eunice, Bobby, and Jean to listen to the returns. He won five of the eleven wards in the district, polled 42 percent of the vote, and beat his nearest challenger, the mayor of Cambridge, by almost two to one. His opponents had tried hard to label him as an interloper, a rich idler, the spoiled son of a Palm Beach millionaire, but what voters saw instead was a thin, well-mannered, charming, humble, and very handsome young man who had risked his life to serve his country. It didn’t hurt that he was able to outspend his opponents by a large margin or that he had started earlier and campaigned harder than any of them.
