John Kennedy

by Burns, James MacGregor;

  Was he, for example, under his father’s influence? Friends of the Kennedys talked often about the old man’s powerful personality, his strongly held views on public policy, his tendency to meddle in his children’s lives. During his son’s years as a congressman, moreover, the former Ambassador was speaking out on foreign policy with his old-time vigor, with most of the old-time attitudes, and even with some of the old-time phrases. “Our policy today is politically and morally a bankrupt policy,” he said in December 1950. And, “What have we gained by staying in Berlin? Everyone knows we can be pushed out the moment the Russians choose to push us out. Isn’t it better to get out now?” He criticized the British loan, aid to Greece and Turkey, reliance on the United Nations, American participation in Korea, and, by implication at least, the Marshall Plan—all on the grounds that American money had not won friends, after all. A Republican congressman, terming him neither “an isolationist nor an ostrich,” credited him with helping to bring Herbert Hoover back into active public life and with opening the “great debate” of 1951 on foreign policy.

  The son’s views on foreign policy coincided with his father’s at certain points and then went off at a tangent. They both opposed heavy spending abroad as Utopian. Representative Kennedy told the Boston Chamber of Commerce in November 1951: “We cannot reform the world.… Uncle Sugar is as dangerous a role for us to play as Uncle Shylock.” Certainly he showed some of his father’s misgivings about Asiatic policy and some of his father’s pessimism about the chances of holding Europe in the face of Russian power. They both wanted a strong defense at home.

  Otherwise, however, their views diverged sharply. The young Kennedy favored bill after bill—from the British loan to, in the end, Point Four—that his father would have flatly opposed. They were operating from wholly different premises: the father from the premise that the United States should not commit itself abroad but should withdraw into strong continental defenses; the son from the premise that it should make commitments abroad provided that its allies bore their share of the burden. On domestic matters they differed considerably; the Congressman was far more willing than his father to achieve reform and welfare through governmental action. There is little evidence of direct paternal influence on the son’s views; his files contain a number of letters from his father, but almost all relate to family and financial matters. His father states flatly today that he never asked his son to vote for or against any bill in Congress.

  Did the Congressman follow the Democratic party line? Decidedly not. Although he usually voted with administration Democrats on economic and social-welfare matters, he often refused to go along with the White House. He opposed bluntly some of its foreign policies, especially after Truman’s “miracle victory” of 1948, when the doughty President was at the height of his popularity and prestige. He departed from Democratic party policy in voting for cuts in Interior and Agriculture spending programs. He was not a “party man”; he did not think in terms of party loyalty. It is doubtful that Representative Kennedy ever delivered one of those fervent, extravagant addresses of the type rendered by keynote speakers at party conventions; temperamentally and intellectually, he was incapable of it. In his talks he preferred to discuss specific issues, and often he did so heedless of the official party position. He strongly supported most Democratic party doctrine but he was not an “organization” Democrat.

  Nor was he much influenced by the Democratic leaders back in Boston. The party as an organization hardly existed in his district. Like most candidates for the House, he had built his own personal organization, staffing it with young independent-minded supporters. With Democratic leaders in Boston he had pleasant but cautious and reserved relations. Especially was he reserved in his attitude toward House Democratic Leader McCormack, who was a potent figure both in Boston and on the floor of the House. McCormack ruled over federal patronage for Massachusetts, and Kennedy, like his fellow Democratic representatives in the House, complained that the Majority Leader kept too much for himself. And often he did not go along with McCormack in his voting.

  For his part, McCormack liked Kennedy but found him something of a trial. One time, he sat down with a group of congressmen considering housing legislation, looked around elaborately for the absent Kennedy, held aloft a Boston newspaper headlining a Kennedy demand for more housing, and asked: “Where’s Johnny? Where’s Johnny?”

  It was Jim Curley who put Kennedy’s independence from the Boston party and his courage to the acid test. In 1947, Jim was in trouble again. Convicted for using the mails to defraud in war contracts, he had just been sentenced to jail despite his plea to the judge that he was suffering from nine separate ailments, including an impending cerebral hemorrhage. Now, still mayor of Boston, he was in Danbury penitentiary and pulling all wires to get out. Party chieftains in Boston and Washington urged President Truman to pardon him. McCormack drew up a petition to the President and got the prompt signatures of Massachusetts representatives, Republican and Democratic alike. Spotting Kennedy on the floor of the House, McCormack handed him the petition. Would he sign? The two men eyed each other tensely.

  “Has anyone talked with the President or anything?” Kennedy asked.

  “No,” said McCormack. “If you don’t want to sign, don’t sign it.”

  “Well, I’m not going to sign it,” Kennedy said. And he did not. His decision was taken against the advice of close friends. McCormack was annoyed, and Curley was to seek political retribution the first chance he had. Kennedy’s rebuff of Curley, long a foe of the family, took considerable political courage, for the Mayor had a fanatically devoted following in Boston, especially in his old congressional district. It also reflected Kennedy’s distaste for the Curley element in the party.

  On other matters, however, Kennedy spoke and acted for his district. His votes against appropriations for Western projects reflected not only opposition to the “pork-barrel” aspects of this spending, but a Bostonian’s lack of interest in such matters. His vote against federal aid for rural libraries suggested that his perspective was still from Boston and not even from that of the whole state, for rural central and western Massachusetts would have certainly benefited from the bill. His sponsorship of federal aid to parochial schools from 1947 to 1950 also was popular in his heavily Catholic district.

  “All you have talked about since you have been here is New England,” a Midwestern representative remarked during debate on an appropriations bill.

  “Do you object to that?” Kennedy asked.

  It was not surprising that Kennedy could ignore the weak party leadership in his district. But how could he dare defy national party leaders like McCormack and Truman, who had the power to help or hurt a young man’s national career? “For one thing,” Kennedy says, “we were just worms over in the House—nobody pays much attention to us nationally. And I had come back from the Service not as a Democratic wheelhorse who came up through the ranks—I came in sort of sideways. It was never drilled into me that I was responsible to some political boss in the Eleventh District. I can go it the hard way against the politically active people. I never had the feeling I needed Truman.”

  What about the economic pressure groups congressmen are often pictured as submissive to, the potent organized interests of the nation? Kennedy not only defied them, but did so outspokenly and perhaps judged them overseverely. He battled the leadership of the Legion and the VFW in the housing fights and on a veterans’ bonus for World War II veterans and other special veterans’ measures. His strong position on economic austerity after Korea put him at odds with a host of groups seeking exemptions from the anti-inflation program. At one time or another, he took on real-estate interests, oil interests, processors of farm commodities, airlines (in a hard fight for separation of airlines’ subsidies from airmail payments), and various agricultural and other producer interests.

  Was Kennedy a liberal? Not by any current definitions of the word. Certainly he had no hankering for the label and perhaps went out of
his way to avoid it. In November 1950, when Kennedy addressed professors and students at a Harvard seminar on the legislative process, he specified that he was no follower of a “liberal line.”

  On voting tests of liberalism established by such publications as the New Republic and such organizations as Americans for Democratic Action, Kennedy usually scored 80 to 90 per cent. The main reason for this, however, was his solid support of market-basket liberalism. On noneconomic matters, like civil liberties, his record was highly ambivalent, many liberals decided. Most distressing to liberals was his refusal to become aroused against men like McCarran, whose record was clearly right wing, and McCarthy, who had aroused the country with his unsubstantiated charges of communism in government since February of 1950.

  But certainly Kennedy was no straight-out conservative, either, despite many conservative votes. He repudiated the central conservative idea (in America) that government is inherently incompetent, wasteful, and evil; on the contrary, he saw the enormous potential of an ably staffed public service. He consistently supported social-welfare programs, progressive taxation, business regulation; he strongly opposed stringent labor reform. Some issues, such as economy and efficiency in government, he discussed so persuasively and supported so strongly that he attracted many conservative businessmen, but they had to ignore other pages of his voting record.

  Was there, then, no pattern to the man? Was he completely outside the ordinary definitions of American politics? Certainly if Kennedy had had his choice, the answer would have been “yes.” He got quiet satisfaction apparently from shocking his liberal auditors at Harvard by what had seemed his conservative opinions, from telling an anticommunist audience in Boston that America had been negatively anticommunist and “pro-nothing,” from telling off the Truman administration on foreign policy, from steering clear of party leaders in Massachusetts.

  But no man is an island, entire of itself. The only pattern that fits Kennedy is, on the face of it, quite simple: he was very much a representative of his Boston constituency. But underneath, this was not simple at all, for his constituency was deeply divided. It was divided not only in the manner in which most districts are divided—between rich and poor, liberals and conservatives, businessmen and workers. It was deeply divided ideologically and culturally, and, most important of all, that division was deeply imprinted on Kennedy’s family background and his own development despite his family’s long sojourn outside Massachusetts during his boyhood.

  The political differences long ago between the immigrant Irish and non-Irish in Boston, Handlin says, testified to the barrier of diametrically opposed ideas. “Resting on basically different premises, developed in entirely different environments, two distinct cultures flourished in Boston with no more contact than if 3,000 miles of ocean rather than a wall of ideas stood between them.” A century after Pat Kennedy came from Ireland to this divided world, its differences were still deep in Boston and deep in Kennedy’s own personality. On one side was the great majority of his constitutents—immigrant Catholic, liberal on economic and social matters, conservative on issues of public education and civil liberties, rigidly anticommunist, somewhat isolationist. On the other hand was a small minority of Yankees, Jews, some Catholics—internationalists, libertarian, vehemently pro-public education. Some politicians might have settled the issue by counting heads, but Kennedy could not. Representing sheer numbers would have been distasteful to him temperamentally; politically it was unnecessary, for he had a tight grip on the district. His difficulty was that as a Choate and Harvard alumnus he had a vast respect for the Arthur Holcombes and Bruce Hoppers, the Conants and, in former days, the A. Lawrence Lowells and Eliots who had presided over the intellectual, reformist, and cosmopolitan life of Cambridge.

  Some politicians might have broken away from the immigrant world and embraced the more edifying, more sophisticated, and more exciting world of the liberal intellectuals. But for Kennedy this would have meant breaking away not just from a remote background but from a dominant family whose powerful way of life was still strong within him. And symbolizing that family—standing guard, as it were, over the links between him and the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys—was his father. The most potent forces on a legislator, a keen student of Congress has said, are not the pressures on him but the pressures in him; and this was the role of his father. Whatever influence Joseph Kennedy, Sr., exerted on his son to keep him responsive to the Boston Catholic conservative ways was by example—the example of a self-confident man of affairs who had succeeded as a Catholic and an immigrant’s grandson. A man has as many different social selves, William James said, as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinions he cares.

  Some friends of Kennedy have felt that his early independence stemmed from his detached attitude toward most burning issues; because he was neutral and dispassionate, they said, he rejected the ideologies and stereotypes of both conservatives and liberals, both isolationists and interventionists. But where did the detachment come from in the first place? It was both a product of and a cloak to cover the divisions within him. Committed to neither world, though related to both, he could sit back and regard each with a cool and judicial eye. Kennedy was committed only to non-commitment.

  Still, he was a politician. While the divergent forces operated within him, they also operated upon him, from the outside. One social scientist has pointed out that it was somewhat similar to the problem of the “inner-directed” versus the “outer-directed” man which David Riesman has described. The real test of the durability of Kennedy’s detachment and independence would come as he shifted his electoral base. The story of his next decade is of the expansion of that base to encompass a far greater range of interests and loyalties than the twofold division of the Eleventh Congressional District. The puzzle of that decade concerns the extent to which the pressures in Kennedy remained the same while the pressures on him changed so strikingly.

  6GREEN BLOOD VERSUS BLUE BLOOD

  Six years as a congressman did not seem to age Kennedy very much. Looking closely one could see faint lines in his face, but people noticed not these, but the picture-magazine profile and the quick, radiant smile. The Congressman often wore a deep tan, acquired in Florida or on Cape Cod or the Potomac, and this took a few more years off his appearance.

  Nor did legislative responsibilities give him a dignified mien. He had still not “settled down”; he liked long, energetic weekends, quick trips to Florida or Europe, madcap drives to get to an airplane or dinner on time. He read a great deal on these trips or at home sprawled in a chair; a reporter noted that Kennedy “never sits in a chair; he bivouacs in it.” Another described him as tall, frail, genteelly rumpled, with an air of boyish, well-bred emaciation that attracted mothers and daughters alike.

  By 1952, Kennedy had an assured future in the House. His district was safe indefinitely (unless a Republican legislature should regerrymander it), for the migration of families outward to the Boston suburbs was making it more, rather than less, Democratic. He now ranked fifth out of the fourteen Democrats on the Labor Committee. Although he had few close political friends, he was well liked by his colleagues in the House; and not only his fellow Democrats from New England, but many Southerners and Republicans as well felt that, despite his economic liberalism, he had special sympathy for them and their problems. It was quite likely that his youth, his safe seat, and his appeal to all Democratic factions would have made him a safe bet to be Democratic leader and perhaps speaker within two decades.

  But the Congressman did not want a House career. It is doubtful that he spent ten minutes considering the possibility of the speakership. In fact, the life of the House did not excite him. He was one of 435 members—and a not very important member. It was hard to win the spotlight to dramatize his position on an issue. House rules and customs were frustrating; to strike out on one’s own meant running up against barrier after barrier, while working with the leadership meant the watering down of a bill until it could satis
fy a host of Democratic factions and perhaps some Republicans.

  Where to go next? Since his early days in Washington, Kennedy had been weighing the possibility of a statewide run. In 1948, his second year in the House, he eyed the senatorial seat of Republican Leverett Saltonstall with longing. But Saltonstall had always been a strong campaigner. And 1948—the closer he got to it—did not look to Kennedy like a good year to run. Wallace Progressives were veering off on the left and the 1946 undertow against the Democrats still seemed to be running strong. Truman looked so unpopular that important Democrats were thinking of ditching him and nominating someone else, perhaps General Dwight D. Eisenhower himself.

  So Kennedy let 1948 go by. But he did not waste time. Clearly he must win a statewide name before he could win statewide office. So during his second term in Washington he began to campaign across the state. He still did not know what office he was seeking. Paul A. Dever had won the governorship in 1948 and could be expected to seek a second term in 1950. No Senate seat would open up until 1952.

  Surely this was a remarkable thing—a thirty-two-year-old congressman, still hardly more than a freshman, launching an intensive statewide campaign at a time when he did not know the office he was seeking, the year he would seek it, or the man he would run against. But Kennedy was in dead earnest. In 1946 he had snared a prize congressional seat by starting early, months before the regular campaign season had opened. Now he would use this proven weapon against bigger game.

  Kennedy’s lieutenants still talk of this period with amazement and exasperation. The Congressman would fly up to Boston late on Thursday for a long weekend on the hustings. On hand were Frank Morrissey, who now ran the Boston office, and Bob Morey, a talkative former prize fighter who, as chauffeur, could meet tough speaking schedules. Since invitations were sought and accepted in every corner of the state, the little party might crisscross the state several times in one weekend. Factories, schools, fishing boats, communion breakfasts, women’s clubs, veterans’ conclaves—Kennedy appeared anywhere he could wangle an invitation. Trying not to look like a candidate, he rarely talked politics or took a stand on an issue. He usually discussed local matters, economy in government, social-welfare legislation, or some other relatively safe subject. He was campaigning for one purpose—to put across the Kennedy name and the Kennedy record.