At first, business in the office was light, until people in the district—and outside of it—found that they could get quick service on favors and problems. Routine affairs were handled by Reardon and by a secretary, Mary Davis, who had had experience on the Hill. Sometimes the young Congressman read in his inner office, feet up on the desk; occasionally a secretary found him staring out his office window into space. Kennedy enjoyed legislative work more than the political glad-handing. Sometimes he returned from the House to find a waiting delegation; he would greet them pleasantly, retire to his inner office, buzz for Ted or Mary, find out the names, and return to the delegation with cheery, first-name greetings. He maintained an office in Boston, too, and an apartment at 122 Bowdoin Street. When he came to the office, politicians, job-seekers, and hangers-on would begin to crowd the outer room, until Kennedy, feeling overwhelmed by the endless demands, might escape by a side door.
One day, after watching a high-school football practice, he borrowed a uniform from the coach and joined the workout. He was just a new boy to halfback Freddy Greenleaf, who shouted: “Hey, kid, come on over here and snag some passes.” Kennedy snagged, then passed and punted.
“How’s the Congressman doing?” the coach asked.
“Is that what they call him?” Freddy asked. “He needs a lot of work, coach. What year’s he in?”
Bread-and-Butter Liberal
Kennedy did not arrive in Washington with a full and rounded set of principles. On some issues he was ill-informed; on others he was unsure of his position and would allow events to rule. But on one type of issue he had definite notions—the economic problems of wages, working conditions, social security, housing, prices, rents, and aid to veterans and the aged. By every test—the needs of his urban constituents, the promises he had made in the campaign, the social-welfare tradition in the Kennedy-Fitzgerald family, and his own Democratic views on economic matters—he had reason to fight for social-welfare programs.
The problem was not what but how. The 80th Congress was not a hopeful arena for any kind of liberalism. The small band of liberals were hard put even to salvage New Deal welfare programs from Republican and Southern Democratic attacks, much less to extend them. But in many fields the need for broader programs had grown more acute, especially because of the postponement of action during the war. In no field of welfare was the need greater than in public, low-cost housing. And nothing was closer to Kennedy’s heart. Believing in the home as the citadel of the family, he had seen at first hand during his campaign for Congress the drab and noisome tenements in Charlestown and East Boston, places that drove men into the bars and children into delinquency.
Kennedy’s fight for housing legislation propelled him into one of the high-pressure areas of American politics, and the pressure was never higher than in the postwar period. Building had almost stopped during the war, returning veterans were getting married, and married veterans were fathering babies. The political support for housing legislation was so strong that even conservative Senator Taft had cosponsored a comprehensive, long-range housing bill with Democratic Senators Robert F. Wagner and Allen Ellender.
Fiercely opposed to the “TEW” bill was an array of conservative interests, headed by realtors’ groups, with powerful support in Congress. The TEW backers reasoned that they could broaden their appeal by working through veterans’ groups. In the summer of 1946, following his nomination for Congress, members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars asked Kennedy to serve as chairman of their forty-seventh national encampment in Boston in September. Kennedy not only chaired the convention, but offered from the floor a resolution endorsing TEW, which passed. But the anti-TEW forces also had friends in the VFW leadership. One of these was the new national commander, who told the press in Washington that the VFW had taken this action in a moment of confusion, because the acoustics were bad. Kennedy, now in office, tartly replied that in that event the commander had not been legally elected, since the acoustics must have been poor during the balloting, too.
Working from the inside, Kennedy and his cohorts managed to neutralize the VFW in the housing struggle, only to face a more formidable foe in the American Legion, which boycotted a Massachusetts Veterans’ Housing Rally in Boston designed to set up a united veterans front for the housing bill. The freshman Congressman publicly attacked the Legion, of which he was also a member, for opposing TEW, and quoted the Jesuit weekly America’s description of the Legion’s housing committee as a “legislative drummer boy for the real estate lobby.” When the Legion dismissed him as an “embryo” congressman, Kennedy called for an “avalanche of mail” on Capitol Hill from TEW supporters. He spoke vehemently for the bill on the House floor. But the housing measure simply did not have the votes, and Congress adjourned without acting on it.
With veterans still living in garages and basements, the housing issue flared up again in the 1948 session of Congress. At a huge veterans’ housing conference in Washington, Kennedy spoke for the VFW, now converted to his side, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., for the American Veterans Committee, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., for the Catholic War Veterans, and Jacob K. Javits for the Jewish War Veterans. Kennedy urged the delegates to turn the heat on Congress and, above all, not to weaken their impact by becoming sidetracked away from TEW to any other issue. In Congress he denounced the “sell-out to the real estate and building lobbies that have swarmed over the Hill for the past two years.” He heatedly debated the issue over a coast-to-coast radio hookup with a young, unknown senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy. But once again, despite all the oratory, the housing measure was stopped by Republicans and Southern Democrats in the House.
A year later, Kennedy introduced a housing bill to provide federal funds for slum clearance and for low-rent public-housing projects initiated by local agencies. Once again high Legion officials opposed him. Kennedy was incensed, as he said later, “at the way Legion leaders were wrapping the flag around the poor old veteran” on the wrong issues, such as a veterans’ bonus. One day during debate on a bonus bill, Kennedy’s indignation boiled over.
“I am a member of the American Legion,” Kennedy told the House. “I was never consulted about this plan. Who in the American Legion was consulted?” A congressman said that the national convention of the Legion had endorsed it. Only a handful of World War II veterans had been present at the American Legion convention, Kennedy replied. Then he blurted out: “The leadership of the American Legion has not had a constructive thought for the benefit of this country since 1918!”
Members looked up, startled. No congressman had ever made such statements in the House—certainly no stripling like this. Member after member rose to dissociate himself from such lese majesty. The Legion was one of the greatest American organizations the country had ever had, said John Rankin, of Mississippi. Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers, of Massachusetts, after carefully paying homage to the Legion, asked members to remember that Kennedy and his family had made great sacrifices in the war. Friendly congressmen rushed over to Kennedy and urged him to retract. Do it right away, they said, to correct the record. Kennedy asked for the floor—not to retract, but again to denounce the Legion leaders for opposing a “good housing bill.”
“Well, Ted, we’re gone!” Kennedy told Reardon laughingly back in the office. Reardon asked him whether he had attacked just the leadership or the Legion in general; Kennedy could not remember, so Reardon checked the record and felt better when he found that his boss was not attacking the whole three-million membership. But Kennedy was never really worried. The mail was in favor of his action, and the next state Legion convention was friendly. Late in the session, Congress, now under Democratic leadership, finally passed an effective housing bill. The short-run effects of defying the Legion were negligible; in the long run, Kennedy’s action showed that political daring might have more advantages than disadvantages. Kennedy looks at such affairs dispassionately. “The rockets go up and last for three or four weeks, then people forget because they have so many
problems of their own,” he says.
The sharpest issue in Congress during Kennedy’s first year there was labor policy. The Wagner Act—probably the New Deal’s most radical measure—had bolstered organized labor’s economic and political power. For years, Republicans and Southern Democrats had sought to change the act and shift the balance of power back toward business. Now at last they had the votes. They had a skilled parliamentary leader, too, in Senator Taft.
Here was another political high-pressure area—but it seemed unlikely that Kennedy would be affected by it. Although a member of the House Labor Committee, he had little experience in the labor field. Labor reform had not been an issue in his campaign. During hearings on a labor measure the month after he entered Congress, he rarely spoke up, appropriately for a freshman member, and when he did speak up his questions were none too impressive. Hence it was all the more surprising that he took such an active part in House consideration of the key labor-reform measure, the Hartley Bill.
Kennedy plunged into the fray not only by signing the Labor Committee minority report opposing the Hartley Bill, but by filing a one-man report of his own. He was clearly unhappy over the extreme positions of both sides, over the charges by Taft’s supporters that the Wagner Act had made unions into a “despotic tyranny” and over the charges by laborites that labor reform would mean the destruction of free unionism. His remarks, which were the opening gun in what turned out to be a thirteen-year, and, ultimately, successful, effort to gain moderate labor reform, reflected Kennedy’s middle-of-the-road approach to the problem.
“Management has been selfish. Labor has been selfish,” he stated in his report. He accused the Labor Committee majority of succumbing to old and deeply rooted antilabor prejudices. He warned the conservatives that repressive and vindictive labor legislation would set off “a tide of left-wing reaction” that might well destroy our existing business system. “Equally fundamental,” on the other hand, was “the right of each individual union member to a square deal from his union.” Kennedy favored democratizing union elections by use of the secret ballot for electing union officers and calling strikes; free speech for union members; no arbritary or excessive initiation fees and dues; due process for members threatened with expulsion from their unions. Then, almost as if he had tilted the balance too far against labor, he attacked the Hartley Bill for its blanket approach in condemning all forms of jurisdictional and sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts and for failing to see that some such strikes and boycotts were wholly proper.
Kennedy’s one-man report was but a firefly’s flicker in the supercharged atmosphere of Washington. The Hartley Bill came to the House floor in mid-April 1947, at a time when the nation was swept by strikes. The young legislator took the floor to admit the irresponsibilities of some unions, but also to plead that the House reject a bill that would “strike down in one devastating blow the union shop, industry-wide bargaining, and so strangle collective bargaining with restraints and limitations as to make it ineffectual.” Passage of the bill, he warned, would bring labor war, bitter and dangerous, and would play into the hands of union radicals who preached the doctrine of the class struggle. Few were listening; the opposition’s mind had long been made up. The House passed the Hartley Bill by a top-heavy majority.
From a labor standpoint, Kennedy went down the line against the labor bill. He was one of a small band of forty-seven representatives to vote against consideration of the bill in the first place; he tried to soften the bill’s restrictive union-shop provisions through an amendment, which failed; he voted to recommit the Hartley Bill, and then voted against its passage. Although the Taft-Hartley Bill, as it emerged from conference committee, was a much more moderate bill from labor’s standpoint, the Congressman maintained his opposition. He was one of seventy-nine to vote against the Taft-Hartley Bill, and one of eighty-three to uphold President Truman’s unsuccessful veto of the measure.
When the new labor policy was securely on the books, however, Kennedy changed his tactics. Most labor leaders were cool to efforts to modify the legislation; dubbing it a “slave-labor act,” they preferred to keep it intact as a hateful device against which to rally their battalions of union voters. When the Democrats, with labor’s help, re-elected Truman and regained congressional majorities in 1948, union leaders demanded repeal of the act. But Kennedy would not go along. While still opposed to Taft-Hartley as a whole, he did not consider it a slave-labor act, and he did not think it could be repealed. Nor did he simply want a symbol against which labor leaders and liberals could rally their forces in subsequent elections. He supported a bill to soften several antiunion features of the legislation; when it became clear that the Republican-Southern Democratic coalition could defeat this amendment, Kennedy reluctantly fell back to the next line of defense, a more modest effort to moderate Taft-Hartley. But this effort failed, too. In the end, Kennedy’s differences with organized labor over the legislation chiefly concerned methods rather than goals, but some union leaders interpreted his tactical flexibility as an effort to compromise on the legislation itself.
On other labor and social-welfare measures Kennedy fol lowed a straight labor-liberal line during his six years in the House. He opposed reduction in the appropriation for school lunches, a tax relief bill because it favored the rich rather than the poor, a sales tax in the District of Columbia, weakening of rent control, and tax relief for the oil industry. He favored broadened social security, higher minimum wage provisions, more immigration, and, always, expanded housing programs.
On all such bread-and-butter matters, the young Congressman hewed close to the Truman Fair Deal policies. But on other matters he failed to follow the White House lead.
Defying the White House
During his first two years in Congress, Kennedy seldom spoke up on foreign policy. To be sure, he strongly backed the Truman Doctrine for aid to Greece and Turkey, in a speech at the University of North Carolina, and he also supported the Marshall Plan bill authorizing aid to Western Europe. And, of course, he showed special interest in nations whose sons and daughters had emigrated to Massachusetts, calling for interim aid to Italy and for admission of former Polish soldiers to the United States as atonement for the “betrayal” of Poland at Yalta. Still, he seemed mainly concerned with domestic matters.
During his first term of office, however, violent shifts took place in the world situation. Czechoslovakia fell to the Communists, America began large-scale foreign aid, the airlift saved Berlin, and Congress authorized a peacetime draft. By the end of 1948, the situation in Europe seemed stabilized. In China, however, the situation was anything but stable. By late 1948, the Communist armies of former library assistant at Peking University, Mao Tse-tung, were overwhelming Nationalist forces in a long sweep southward. Chiang Kai-shek’s American-trained divisions were melting away. Affairs came to a climax in January 1949, when Chiang gave up the fight and prepared his retreat to Formosa.
In the House of Representatives on January 25, the invocation had hardly ended when Kennedy was on his feet, requesting unanimous consent to address the chamber for one minute. Nobody objected; nobody knew what was to come. The Congressman did not exhibit his usual calm, detached manner.
“Mr. Speaker, over this weekend we have learned the extent of the disaster that has befallen China and the United States. The responsibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State.
“The continued insistence that aid would not be forthcoming, unless a coalition government with the Communists were formed, was a crippling blow to the National Government.
“So concerned were our diplomats and their advisers, the Lattimores and the Fairbanks, with the imperfection of the democratic system in China after 20 years of war and the tales of corruption in high places that they lost sight of our tremendous stake in a non-Communist China.…
“This House must now assume the responsibility of preventing the onrushing tide of
communism from engulfing all of Asia.”
By now, Speaker Rayburn was pounding his gavel to signify that time was up, somewhat more heavily than usual, thought Reardon, watching from the gallery.
The House, its mind on more immediate affairs, went on to routine business without comment. A few days later, Kennedy repeated his remarks in a speech at Salem, Massachusetts, and elaborated on them. Those responsible for the tragedy, he proclaimed, must be searched out and spotlighted. Once—during the war—America had fought for China’s freedom. But at Yalta a “sick” Roosevelt, with the advice of General Marshall and other chiefs of staff, “gave” the Kurils and other strategic points to the Soviet Union. The administration had tried to force Chiang to bring the Communists into a coalition. President Truman had even treated Madame Chiang with “indifference” if not “contempt.” “This is the tragic story of China,” Kennedy concluded, “whose freedom we once fought to preserve. What our young men had saved, our diplomats and our President had frittered away.”
Strong words for this boyish, tousled Congressman hardly past his freshman days on the Hill. Far stronger, indeed, than the words he had used about Chamberlain and Daladier in Why England Slept, ten years before. His friends speculated about his motives in challenging his President and party leader and so august a figure as Marshall.
Kennedy’s sudden show of revolt against the White House and the Democratic-party foreign-policy makers was no flash in the pan. The following month—February 1949—he voted to recommit the Trade Agreements Extension Act. (When recommittal failed, 151-241, Kennedy, along with several score other representatives, reversed himself and voted for final passage.) His opposition to a three-year extension of the Trade Agreements Act was an attack on one of the programs most sacred to the Democratic party—the reciprocal-trade policies sired by the revered Cordell Hull and backed by both Roosevelt and Truman. He complained publicly about inadequacies in civil defense, and just in case the White House failed to hear him, he sent his complaints direct to Mr. Truman by mail. During 1948 and 1949, Kennedy also attacked the administration for its economy program in the defense establishment; for example, he favored a seventy-group air force rather than the fifty-five groups requested by Defense Secretary Louis Johnson. In February 1950, he inserted an article by Joseph and Stewart Alsop into the Congressional Record as a warning of the “effect that economies are having in our defense structure.”
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