The Open Door
Duly sworn a United States senator, Kennedy returned to the suite of four rooms that had been assigned to him on the third floor of the Senate Office Building. This office, which would be his official home for at least eight years and from which he would launch his presidential campaign, was already beginning to reflect the Kennedy personality. The middle room, where visitors entered, was jam-packed with desks, filing cabinets, and three chairs for visitors. The room led on the left to two small offices, one occupied by Ted Reardon, now the Senator’s administrative assistant; on the right was the Senator’s own roomy office.
From the beginning, Kennedy ordered that the door to the middle room always be kept open. The open door was symbolic. The young Senator knew well that American legislators are tested more on the basis of their diligence in doing a host of little favors than for the part they play in actual lawmaking. In any case, the role of a freshman senator in legislating for the whole nation is sharply limited. Kennedy drew one good committee assignment—Labor and Public Welfare—but, despite his six years on the House Labor Committee, he now had to start all over again at the bottom of the ladder behind five other Democrats and seven Republicans. His other committee assignment—Government Operations—for a time would have little to do with legislation, since its chairman was Joseph R. McCarthy, of Wisconsin, the Senate’s investigator in chief.
So Kennedy concentrated at first on making his office a businesslike service agency for the folks back home. He had ample help. By law, a senator from a state the size of Massachusetts was allowed a maximum of $36,900 for secretaries, and Kennedy could supplement this with extra hire out of his own pocket. In time, his office staff overflowed into a basement room in the Senate Office Building. Supplementing the Washington office under Reardon was an enlarged office in Boston, under Frank Morrissey, which supplied many services on the spot.
The Senator’s office soon gained a reputation for prompt action on constituents’ requests. And as the reputation grew, so did the volume of favors sought. Some were routine: requests for copies of government documents, for help on application for veterans’ benefits, for information on passports, and the like. Some were more troublesome: a professor’s request for study space in the Library of Congress, a small businessman needing guidance through Washington’s bureaucratic maze, a disappointed father anxious to know why his son was turned down at Harvard or Georgetown. Could the Senator do anything about it? In an amazing number of cases, the Senator—usually meaning Reardon or Morrissey—did.
Legislatively, the new Senator devoted himself in the first two years mainly to the special needs of Massachusetts. He had no real choice, since the question “Who could do more for Massachusetts?” had come to be the main issue between Lodge and himself. With imagination and skill, Kennedy and his aides applied themselves to the needs of every organized interest in Massachusetts; and sometimes, when the interest groups exerted no pressure, the office alerted them to their opportunities.
At the end of his first two years in the Senate, Kennedy could boast in a memorandum to his constituents of the results of his labors. His efforts are worth listing in part (with Kennedy’s own evaluation of his success in parentheses), because they show the range and variety of special-interest activity of a resourceful representative:
For the Massachusetts Fishing Industry: Kennedy Fishing Research and Market Development Bill (passed); Kennedy Fish Sticks Tariff Bill (passed); Kennedy et al Fishing Boat Protection Bill (passed); requested import relief from Tariff Commission and President (denied); urged federal purchases of surplus fish (pending); testified in 1953 for increase in Fish and Wildlife Budget (passed).
For the Massachusetts Textile Industry: Kennedy Bill to prevent excessive speculation in raw wool (passed); urged bill in 1953 permitting price of wool to fall to normal market level, lowering cost to mills (adopted in Administration Farm Bill, passed); requested Senate Committee, Tariff Commission, and President to adopt policy of low tariffs on raw wool imports (adopted); testified at Labor Department hearing favoring new Walsh-Healey woolen minimum wage to prevent substandard competition (adopted); requested Treasury in 1953 to adopt countervailing duties on subsidized wool top imports (adopted); urged passage of amendment to Flammable Fabrics Act to save several New England mills (passed); requested Bureau of Labor Statistics to continue at least sample wage studies of Southern textiles (agreed to); Kennedy Bill to prevent move of Army Quartermaster’s Texile Office (defeated).
For the Massachusetts Shipbuilding Industry: Kennedy-Butler et al. Bill for modernization of reserve-fleet merchant vessels in private yards (passed); urged award of Forrestal carriers and other contracts to Quincy Fore River Shipyard (no carriers; some awards).
For the Massachusetts Watch Industry: Urged President and Senate Committee to adopt appropriate watch tariff protection (adopted).
For the Port of Boston and Massachusetts Transportation Industry: Kennedy-Saltonstall-McCormack Bill for federal $10-million rehabilitation of Boston Army Base Pier (passed); Kennedy Longshoremen Safety Bill (pending); urged I.C.C. to reopen case denying Port of Boston and New England Railroads opportunity to receive iron-ore shipments (agreed to); joined other New England senators in urging C.A.B. to grant early hearings on extension of Northeast Airlines routes (granted).
“Parliament,” Edmund Burke declared in 1774, “is not a congress of ambassadors from different interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent, and advocate … but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole.…” Kennedy did not subscribe to Burke’s thesis for America; as a member of the Senate, representing areas, he would fight for local advantage against the agents of other states. Besides, Edmund Burke had lost his seat in the next election.
What’s the Matter with New England?
Late in the afternoon of May 18, 1953, Kennedy gained the floor of the Senate by previous arrangement. Looking up at the presiding officer from a thick manuscript, he started out:
“Mr. President, I wish to address the Senate today in the first of a series of speeches concerning the economic problems of New England and the role of the Federal Government in the solution of such problems.…”
He stood in the well of the Senate, lean and erect, with his heavy brown hair dropping down over one eye, and somehow managing to look serious and informal, grave and youthful, all at the same time. For well over two hours he spoke, almost without interruption. He was no prophet of gloom, he said. New Englanders had every reason to be optimistic and little reason to complain. They had, indeed, one of the more prosperous areas of the country. “But, Mr. President, I believe we must speak frankly with respect to the very real problems which threaten that prosperity.”
This was in fact, Kennedy’s maiden speech in the Senate. He had spoken briefly on the educational crisis and several other matters, but this represented his first major effort. He had good reason to take the New England approach. Economically, the problems of Massachusetts were inseparable from those of the rest of the region. Politically, this approach enabled the young politician to widen his political base.
Kennedy had prepared his program with the utmost care. As his main researcher and writing assistant, he had hired a young lawyer, Theodore Sorensen. Son of a pro-Roosevelt, insurgent Republican attorney general in Nebraska, Sorensen had joined Kennedy only after deciding that the Senator was a durable liberal. Astute, solid, and resourceful, he soon made himself an expert on a region he had hardly seen. He and Kennedy in turn picked the brains of regional experts, most notably a hardheaded professor of economics at Harvard, Seymour Harris, who had recently written an analysis of the New England economy. Kennedy himself had become something of an expert on key New England problems as a result of the complaints and problems that flowed into his congressional offices, talks with labor, business, and
civic leaders during campaign tours, and legislative matters he had worked on in the House.
In his first speech, Kennedy gently chided those who thought nothing could be done, or should be done, about New England’s problems, or who denied that such problems existed. He argued that he was really dealing with a national situation, since so many of his region’s difficulties were to be found in other depressed areas. He denied that federal help was a panacea. Then he got down to business. Industrial expansion and diversification, tax amortization, incentives, job retraining, aids to small business, resource development, power, flood control, water-pollution control, subsidies for the fishing industry—one by one he carefully dissected the problems and proposed federal action.
Loaded with facts and specific proposals, the speech sounded very much like an economics lecture at Harvard Business School. Kennedy spurned rhetoric and oratorical eloquence. He carefully set the regional problem in the wider and more complex national context. He did not bother with any stories, jokes, or even illustrative references for “human interest.” He simply drove straight along his course. His second speech, two days later—equally analytical and again well over two hours in the delivering—dealt with national legislation, such as Taft-Hartley and minimum-wage laws, that should be strengthened for New England’s advantage. In his third talk, he discussed general federal policies, such as fair competition and economy in government, that related to New England, and concluded with a thirty-six-point program for the diversification and expansion of commercial and industrial activity, the prevention of further decline and dislocation of business, elimination of tax privileges, the reduction of hardships caused by recession or dislocation.
It was an impressive performance. The Senators who congratulated Kennedy on the floor—mainly liberals like Humphrey and Lehman—could do so with more than the usual enthusiasm for a freshman’s first major effort. There was a scattering of applause in New England’s newspapers; Kennedy’s conservative friend Basil Brewer, for example, commended him for his “remarkably keen penetration.”
Still, the speech failed as a springboard to national attention. The New York Times did not mention it; leaders of national opinion dismissed it as just another push in the endless scuffle for local or regional advantage. This anticlimax was unfortunate for several reasons. For one thing, by almost any test except eloquence, the speech was a cut far above even the better senatorial performances. For another, Kennedy showed a good deal of follow-through. One of his proposals was that New England senators organize themselves more thoroughly to fight for their goals as a solid bloc, regardless of party ties. By no means a new idea, such a project turned mainly on getting an able person to do the job of co-ordinating the senators’ efforts. Sorensen took over this task, and by working with the other legislative aides he was able to turn the New England bloc into one of the strongest regional groupings on the Hill. Kennedy and Sorensen also publicized the program through articles by the Senator in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and the New Republic. Within the next few years, Kennedy could claim substantial progress on the New England program, especially his proposals involving specific regional needs.
The heart of his program, and probably the most realistic part of it, called for liberalization of New Deal–Fair Deal measures such as minimum wages, social security, public housing, natural-resource development, and the like, for the excellent reason that such action would be bound to help New England if only by raising standards in the South and thus reducing its “unfair” competition. More than this, Kennedy made a brilliant case for regional-development corporations, he attacked discrimination against Negroes and other minority groups in government employment, and he even gave a distinctly favorable nod toward the controversial Brannan farm plan. Still, the dressing up of all these positions in the garments of regional advantage left Kennedy more in the posture of a delegate from New England than of a spokesman for American liberalism.
Within a year of his “New England program,” there was to reach the Senate floor an issue that would subject that commitment to a harsh test. This was the St. Lawrence Seaway.
It was symptomatic of American political processes that the Seaway was still an issue in 1953. Advocated by President after President, strongly pushed by Canada, endorsed by engineering and transport experts, the project had been thwarted repeatedly by an alliance of domestic interests that felt imperiled by the low rates that the Seaway would permit. No section had opposed the scheme more vigorously than had Massachusetts. As Kennedy himself pointed out, on six different occasions over a period of twenty years not one Massachusetts senator or representative had ever voted for the Seaway.
Other forces put Kennedy under heavy pressure on this issue. The loudest of all the Seaway’s foes was the Port of Boston, and thousands of dock workers lived in the Senator’s old congressional district. His own grandfather John F. Fitzgerald had stumped American and European cities giving speeches on the port’s advantages. His senior colleague, Leverett Saltonstall, was outspoken in opposition to the Seaway and would vote against it. And Kennedy could never forget that he himself had lined up against it in the 1952 campaign as part of his pledge to do MORE for Massachusetts. Reardon had never seen his boss so torn over a decision.
There was more than ordinary interest in the Senate when Kennedy arose to speak on the Seaway bill early in the 1954 session. He admitted that few issues had troubled him as much as this. But he came out emphatically for the bill. Briskly running through a dozen arguments for the Seaway, he based his position mainly on the point that Canada would go ahead with the project anyway—a point he had denied a year and a half earlier in the campaign. He also went to some pains to show that the Port of Boston would be only slightly hurt by the Seaway and indeed would gain ultimately from its benefits to the whole economy.
A “fine and very thoughtful speech,” Senator Lehman said. Yet once again Kennedy seemed almost deliberately to drain any element of drama out of his action. His speech was one of his typically dry and logical efforts. He avoided the temptation to say that the Seaway would be of direct and immediate benefit to his state; he coolly admitted that it would not. He openly admitted that one reason he supported the bill was that he wanted the Midwestern senators to help him on New England’s needs.
The Seaway was not the only occasion when the young spokesman for New England took a national stand. In the 1954 session he also voted for an amendment to clarify and extend the President’s power under the reciprocal-trade program. He was the only New England senator to support the measure. This was Kennedy’s general position, however; when it came to specific tariff problems, few senators surpassed him in his zeal for guarding local interests. During the Eighty-third Congress, for example, he asked the administration for higher duties for the watch, fishing, and textile industries against foreign competition. On the other hand, he opposed the old system of legislating tariffs on behalf of particular interests in Congress or its committees; instead, he believed that the interests should present their case to the Tariff Commission under the reciprocal-trade-agreements program.
But his first year as senator was not all work.
The Girl from Newport
At thirty-six, Kennedy was still a bachelor—to the delight of society columnists, who made glittering forecasts out of even his more casual dates. “Many women have hopefully concluded that Kennedy needs looking after,” according to an article in the Saturday Evening Post. “In their opinion, he is, as a young millionaire senator, just about the most eligible bachelor in the United States—and the least justifiable one.”
But the “gay young bachelor,” as the Post called him, was already courting his future wife. In 1951, while still a congressman, he had met at a dinner party a lovely young student from George Washington University. Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was then twenty-one years old. She was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John V. Bouvier, III; her parents had been divorced, and her mother had married Hugh D. Auchincloss. She grew up in New Yo
rk and Washington, and attended Vassar and the Sorbonne before returning to the Capital. A Catholic of wealthy background, widely traveled, she came from somewhat the same social environment as her future husband.
Jacqueline’s exquisite features and lovely hair, her soft, shy charm and beautifully modulated voice almost instantly attracted the Senator. “I leaned across the asparagus,” he later remembered, “and asked for a date.” Kennedy grew increasingly attached to her, but he was in no hurry. The fight against Lodge was coming up, and a serious decision must wait. At least one good friend doubts that Kennedy would be married today if he had lost his Senate battle.
“It was a very spasmodic courtship,” Jacqueline said later. “We didn’t see each other for six months, because I went to Europe again and Jack began his summer and fall campaigning in Massachusetts. Then came six months when we were both back. Jack was in Congress and I was in my last year of George Washington University. But it was still spasmodic because he spent half of each week in Massachusetts.
“He’d call me from some oyster bar up there, with a great clinking of coins, to ask me out to the movies the following Wednesday in Washington.” Jack, she found, loved Westerns and Civil War pictures.
Kennedy campaigned so hard for the Senate that Jacqueline did not hear from him for six months. But when he came back to Washington as a senator, he resumed his courtship more seriously. Jacqueline was now inquiring photographer for the Washington Times-Herald. Developing her pictures she found a dismaying experience, but fellow photographers helped her out, and nobody approached for an interview on the streets of Washington could resist this charming young lady. She found Kennedy disconcertingly intellectual in his approach. Instead of candy and flowers, he presented her with history books such as The Raven, Marquis James’s biography of Sam Houston, and one of his favorites, John Buchan’s autobiographical Pilgrim’s Way. But Jacqueline was not to be outdone; adept at drawing and sketching, she gave him two books she had illustrated herself.
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