The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

  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

  Working eighteen to twenty hours a day seven days a week, Bobby pulled the disparate pieces of the campaign staff together into a statewide organization whose allegiance was not to the Democratic Party, but to John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Along the way, he acquired the reputation as the “ruthless” Kennedy. Every adjective ever applied to his father was now visited upon the son: abrasive, driven, aggressive, and a screamer. But, like his father, he got things done—brilliantly.

  With Bobby in control, someone in whom he had confidence, the ambassador could back away from day-to-day operations. It was Bobby and Jack’s campaign now—and they would make the decisions. When Paul Dever tried to get the Kennedy camp to join forces with it in a Kennedy-Dever campaign, “Ambassador Kennedy called Bobby and told him to let the Dever organization work with us.” Bobby and his senior aides disagreed. They feared that Dever would drag Jack down, and the greater the distance and distinction between the two campaigns, the better it would be. In this instance—as in several others—it was Bobby who prevailed and his father who conceded.22

  Kennedy’s major contribution to the campaign in its final months was to brilliantly use television in a way few others had ever done to market John Fitzgerald Kennedy as a senatorial candidate. For more than two decades now, Kennedy had been a student of the arts and crafts of the newsreel. When the Roosevelt campaign arranged to film the candidate at Hyde Park in 1932, Kennedy oversaw the placement of the cameras and the editing of the film. Later, in Washington and in London, he perfected his own performance in front of the newsreel camera. He taught himself how and when to look serious, how to stride masterfully to the microphone, flash a full-toothed, eyes-twinkling, but never goofy smile, and look straight into the camera with a fearless gaze that betokened intelligence and honesty.

  He raised his children to be as comfortable on camera as he had become. He bought 8 mm home movie cameras for their nurses and nannies, who filmed the Kennedy boys and girls at home, at play, on vacation. As the children grew older, they were given their own cameras to film one another and their friends.

  Kennedy adapted what he had learned about the newsreel camera to the new medium of television. “Mr. Kennedy was a genius about how Jack should be handled on television,” Sargent Shriver recalled. “He was the guy who really understood the tube. How Jack should appear on it. . . . He figured that television was going to be the greatest thing in the history of politics and he set out studying it and how Jack could utilize it most effectively. . . . He knew how Jack should be dressed and how his hair should be.” On television, the congressman’s youthful glamour and experience as a man of the world could be combined into one persuasive image.

  “I remember one night,” Shriver recalled in an oral history, “eight of us were in Mr. Kennedy’s apartment watching Jack make a TV speech. There was the guy that wrote the speech and the guy from the advertising agency and all the yes men sitting there with Mr. Kennedy smack in front of the tube. After it was all over, Kennedy asked what they thought of it. They gave these mealy-mouthed answers and all of a sudden Mr. Kennedy got ferocious, just ferocious. He told them it was the worst speech he’d ever heard and they were destroying Jack and he never wanted to see his son have to get up on TV and make such a fool of himself again. The guy who wrote the speech said he couldn’t talk to him like that and Mr. Kennedy got red and furious and told him if he didn’t like it to get out. He told them they would have a meeting in the morning and come up with a whole new concept because they were ruining this precious commodity they had. . . . Then Jack called and Mr. Kennedy said, ‘Boy, Jack, you were great.’”23

  Kennedy exploited his standing as an administration opponent to reach out to Taft Republicans who could not forgive Senator Lodge, first for backing Truman’s foreign policy initiatives, then for throwing support behind President Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination. The leader of the Taft wing of the Republican Party in Massachusetts was Basil Brewer, the publisher of the New Bedford Standard-Times. “The 1952 campaign,” Charles J. Lewin, Brewer’s editor at the Standard-Times recalled, “began for us in 1951. Mr. Basil Brewer . . . and I worked closely with Mr. Kennedy. We had frequent communication with him.” Kennedy actively exploited this Taft-Lodge split by pointing out as often as he could that on foreign policy, his son was closer to Taft than to Lodge.24

  While Kennedy worked on the Republicans, he delegated James Landis, who was on good terms with Massachusetts liberals, to get in touch with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a founder of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), and arrange for Jack to appear before the executive committee. Schlesinger, writing Landis in July after the candidate’s appearance, reported that he had been “favorably impressed by Jack’s presentation as I have in general been by his voting record and his performance in Congress. . . . My own view is that Jack is better than Cabot on most domestic issues, they are about the same on foreign policy, and where Jack is weak (from my viewpoint) Cabot is equally weak. So I am inclined at this point to favor endorsement.” Still, Schlesinger wanted Landis to know that there was, among the ADA leadership in Massachusett
s, “some disappointment expressed about an occasional tendency to vote to reduce foreign aid appropriations . . . and Jack’s inclination to stay out of the civil liberties fight.”25

  The ADA would have found it easier to endorse Jack Kennedy had he ever criticized Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, but the congressman, like every other elected Massachusetts Democrat, had kept quiet, fearful of McCarthy’s popularity in the state, especially among Irish Catholic voters.

  Though his silence was dictated in large part by political considerations, Jack also refrained from criticizing Joe McCarthy because he had become a friend of the family—and of his father. He himself had spent time with McCarthy during his first years in Washington. The senator from Wisconsin was fun to be around and had dated first Eunice, then Pat, and visited the Kennedy family at Hyannis Port, where he had gotten along rather famously with Joe Kennedy. “He was always pleasant; he was never a crab,” Kennedy recalled in a 1960 interview, describing a Joe McCarthy very unlike the nasty, scowling politician the rest of the world had come to know. “He went out on my boat one day and he almost drowned swimming behind it, but he never complained. If somebody was against him, he never tried to cut his heart out. He never said that anybody was a stinker. He was a pleasant fellow.”26

  Joe Kennedy not only enjoyed McCarthy’s company, he admired him for his big mouth, his outspoken confrontations with the government establishment (especially the State Department), his take-no-prisoners attacks on the Truman administration, and his contempt for diplomacy and decorum. When McCarthy ran for reelection to the Senate in 1952, Kennedy, to express his friendship, loyalty, and provide another reason for the Republican senator not to campaign against his son, contributed to his campaign.27

  Kennedy the father was adamant, for political and personal reasons, that his son not be pushed into the position where he would have to say anything in public about the senator from Wisconsin. The CIO had, James MacGregor Burns wrote in his 1960 campaign biography, lent the Kennedy campaign the use of “Pat” Jackson, a staunch liberal who on his own prepared an anti-McCarthy statement for the candidate. When Jackson brought the statement to Jack’s apartment, a meeting was in progress with senior staff and Joseph Kennedy. Jackson was asked to read the statement aloud. “He had got through three sentences,” Burns wrote, “when Joseph Kennedy sprang to his feet with such force that he upset a small table in front of him. . . . ‘You and your friends are trying to ruin my son’s career!’ . . . Again and again he returned to the charge that liberals and union people were hurting his son. The Jews were against him, too.” When asked to explain his father’s tirade, Jack attributed it to “pride of family.”

  No anti-McCarthy ad was ever run, not because the Kennedys felt any great need to protect McCarthy, but because they were convinced that any attack on a popular Irish Catholic was bad politics. When Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for president in 1952, called Sargent Shriver to ask how he could be of use to the Kennedy campaign during his swing through Massachusetts, Shriver requested only that he refrain from attacking McCarthy. Jack, he told Stevenson, was hoping to position himself as the candidate who was strongest “on communism and domestic subversives. . . . Up here,” Shriver wrote Stevenson, “this anti-communist business is a good thing to emphasize.”28

  Up until the last minute, the campaign worried that McCarthy would succumb to party pressure, campaign for Lodge, and pull away a sizable number of Irish Catholic votes. We do not know whether, as has been claimed, Kennedy himself called McCarthy or had Westbrook Pegler call to ask him not to campaign for Lodge. In the end, Joseph McCarthy’s biographer David Oshinsky concluded, “The man most responsible for keeping McCarthy out of Massachusetts was not Joe Kennedy; it was Henry Cabot Lodge.” Lodge told Oshinsky that he had never asked McCarthy to campaign for him and only at the very last minute “asked him whether he would come into Massachusetts and campaign against Kennedy without mentioning me in any way. He told me that he couldn’t do this. He would endorse me but he would say nothing against the son of Joe Kennedy. I told McCarthy ‘thanks but no thanks.’ So he never did come into Massachusetts.”29

  —

  Every member of the Kennedy family except Rosemary, who was in Wisconsin, and Ted, who was stationed in Europe, campaigned in 1952. “Jean is, as you know, the Office Manager of Headquarters and is working from 9 in the morning until 10:30 at night,” Kennedy wrote Ted in June. “Pat and Mary Jo [Gargan, Rose’s niece] are on the Women’s Committees throughout the state and were in Worcester this week and Springfield next. Eunice appeared at a luncheon that Mayor Hynes gave for Jack on Bunker Hill Day, June 17th, but Jack was unable to attend. After lunch she wandered through the streets of Charlestown looking at the parade and made her usual big hit. Bobby has taken over the management of the whole campaign and is doing a great job. He works fifteen hours a day and is showing remarkable good sense and judgment. . . . Houghton and I spend three days a week in Boston on the campaign and this week we are going to New York. We will probably see the [Sugar Ray] Robinson-[Joey] Maxim fight Monday night and then line up the television procedure for Jack’s campaign. As busy as everybody is, Mother is the busiest. Her door is constantly open and whether I go out at 6:30 A.M. or get in at 12:30 at night she has three sheets of paper full of suggestions for me to get busy on. She is planning to fly on the 27th of July for Paris but I suggested to her she should leave tomorrow or I won’t be alive by the end of July.”30

  As in 1946, Kennedy supplied the campaign with an almost unlimited budget for receptions and “ladies teas,” telephones, posters, flyers, billboards, radio and TV, and almost one million copies of the “tabloid” campaign booklet that were distributed by mail and by hand throughout the state. That much was public. But there were other expenditures that also bought votes.

  Days before the election, the Boston Post, which had supported the Republican candidates for governor and senator, abruptly switched sides and endorsed Democrats Paul Dever and John Kennedy. Almost six years after the election, John Fox, the rabidly anti-Communist publisher of the newspaper, appearing before a congressional committee, claimed that the day before the Boston Post endorsed Congressman Kennedy, he had “talked to Joseph Patrick Kennedy . . . who agreed to lend” him $500,000. When the story surfaced in 1958, Kennedy’s New York office declared that the loan had not been discussed until after the election and was repaid in full within sixty days. Robert Kennedy, questioned years later, claimed that he had forgotten the details, but he did not deny that “there was a connection between the two events,” the loan and the endorsement.31

  Early on November 4, 1952, it became clear that it was going to be a Republican year in Massachusetts and almost everywhere else in the nation. Eisenhower carried Massachusetts by 208,800 votes, but John Kennedy defeated Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., by more than 70,000. His victory was made all the more remarkable by the defeat of the incumbent Democratic governor, Paul Dever. “God!” Kennedy half joked to Lucius Ordway in Palm Beach. “I suppose I’ll have you sucking around me all this winter trying to re-establish your social contacts by claiming that you know the former Ambassador and father of a United States Senator.”32

  As delighted as he was at Jack’s victory, Kennedy was disturbed that his son was not getting the recognition he deserved for knocking off an “unbeatable,” powerful, articulate, and wealthy Republican incumbent. “Sometimes in reading the papers,” he wrote a friend in mid-November, “I wonder whether they are not all mad at Jack for having had the temerity to lick this fair-haired Goliath. It seems to me that if there was ever an attempt to play down a real worth-while victory this was it. In an effort to save Lodge, Eisenhower and Nixon came into the city the night before election and paraded through the city and pleaded over the radio and television for his re-election. In spite of the fact that Eisenhower won by 200,000 votes, Jack licked Lodge by 70,000. Don’t make any mistake, this was a real desire on the people’s part to lick
the Democrats. Of course, we are all tickled to death and I am sure Jack will do a fine job in Washington.”33

  Thirty-five

  RETIREMENT

  Jack had been elected to the Senate, but there was work to be done.

  From Palm Beach, Kennedy contacted James Rowe, a Lyndon Johnson supporter and adviser, and had Jim Landis write him as well, to request “a good” committee assignment for the newly elected junior senator from Massachusetts. Kennedy also phoned Joseph McCarthy, who, with the Republicans now in the majority, would take over as chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, to recommend that he appoint Bobby as his chief counsel. McCarthy agreed to take Bobby on, but not as chief counsel. That position was going to Roy Cohn, the lawyer from New York who had distinguished himself as an anti-Communist crusader by helping to convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg of espionage.1

  Kennedy did not expect Bobby to remain long as assistant counsel on a Senate subcommittee. In managing his brother’s campaign, his third son had shown an aptitude for politics. Kennedy hoped he too would someday run for office. The question was where. “Confidentially, Bobby is considering taking up residence in Connecticut,” Kennedy wrote family friend and lawyer Bart Brickley in March. “It’s the same old story, he doesn’t want to interfere with Jack’s career by going into politics himself. We have looked into where the best place would be to establish residence in that state and have come to the conclusion that it probably is around Hartford. In that event, we will want to have him make a good legal connection and, if possible, buy some business that would keep him interested—a paper or television station, or something like that. Have you any ideas or connections in that part of the world?” A month later, the Connecticut idea having been discarded, Kennedy contacted Cornelius Fitzgerald in Boston for advice on Bobby’s running for office in Massachusetts. “After all, that is going to be his ambition, but the problem is whether Jack’s being in politics there would hurt him very much. He is giving very serious consideration to it and might move out of the state” if it wasn’t feasible to run for office there.2