Jack Kennedy was displaying an ability to regard an adversary’s situation without emotion. In one of the pieces that ran in the Herald-American under his byline, he offered his own take on how the Soviets thought, and he ended it by reminding his readers of “the heritage of 25 years of distrust between Russia and the rest of the world that cannot be overcome completely for a good many years.”
Also, true to his mission, he held the perspective of the fighting American home from the front.
When Victory in Europe Day came—on May 8, during the conference’s second week—Jack responded by writing eloquently in the Herald-American: “Any man who had risked his life for his country and seen his friends killed around him must inevitably wonder why this has happened to him and most important what good will it do. It is perhaps normal that they would be disappointed with what they have seen in San Francisco. I suppose that this is inevitable. Youth is a time for direct action and simplification. To come from battlefields where sacrifice is the order of the day—to come from there to here—it is not surprising that they should question the worth of their sacrifice and feel somewhat betrayed.”
In a letter to one of his war buddies, he phrased his message more bluntly: “We must face the truth that the people have not been horrified by war to a sufficient extent to force them to go to any extent rather than have another war.”
Chuck Spalding, keeping an eye on his friend as well as on the tone of his articles, was starting to draw his own conclusions. “Either wittingly or unwittingly, he began to write as a politician.” Just as in the South Pacific, he was acting more as a leader than as an observer. “The war makes less sense to me now,” Jack wrote, “than it ever made and that was little enough—and I would really like—as my life’s goal—in some way at home or at some time to do something to help prevent another.”
While still on the job in San Francisco, Jack learned his next assignment was to be London. There he’d be reporting on the fierce political struggle taking place as the British home-front coalition broke down. The opposition Labour Party was going all out to contest Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s Conservative government in the first postwar British general election. For Jack, it was a chance to see his most enduring hero fight for his political life, and yet he was stunned. How could Churchill, whose indomitable leadership had meant so much to his nation in wartime, now be in such serious trouble?
What Jack was about to learn is how quickly economic concerns replaced wartime loyalties. The war had been hard on the British working class and, suddenly, voters were remembering how the Conservatives had supported appeasement of the Germans before the war. The same Tories were now clinging to power with warnings of socialist dictatorship. But, more to the point in the postwar climate, the Tories were preaching belt-tightening. Just when the people were looking for a break from the depressed economy—the rationing, the empty cupboards—they were being promised more of the same.
Unfortunately, when the votes were counted, both Jack’s front-row position and his empathy didn’t help his critical judgment. Unable to imagine a Labour victory, he filed a wrap-up election piece predicting a close Tory win. He wasn’t alone; Churchill’s overwhelming defeat was a shock to many.
While in England, Jack took advantage of the opportunity to catch up with old friends. One of them, Alistair Forbes, registered this impression: “He struck me then that he was more intellectual than any other member of the family. He read more. He had a fantastically good instinct, once his attention was aroused to a problem, for getting the gist of it and coming to a mature judgment about it. He had a detachment which reminded me very much of Winston Churchill in the sense that his life had been protected by money.”
Another friend, Hugh Fraser, who was running for Parliament himself at the time, saw him similarly. “He was always a great questioner. He always asked an enormous number of questions. He was very interested in things. For every one question I asked him he asked two at least.” “Political to his fingertips” is how the British economist Barbara Ward recalled him. “He asked every sort of question of what were the pressures, what were the forces at work, who supported what.” Such curiosity, such a need to inform himself and to sift carefully through what he was learning, would always form part of his m.o.
During this period, when he was pounding out stories for afternoon newspaper readers in Chicago, Kennedy also kept a personal diary. The entries in it further reveal him as unable to move past the idea of war’s deadliness: “We have suffered the loss of nearly 8 hundred thousand young men—many of whom might become the leadership we will so desperately need.”
What’s more, he wrote presciently—somehow intuiting the existence of the atomic bomb, which wasn’t yet publicly known—of what he saw in the future. “The clash may be finally and indefinitely postponed by the eventual discovery of a weapon so horrible that it will truthfully mean the abolishment of all the nations employing it. Thus science, which has contributed to much of the horror of war, will still be the means of bringing it to an end.”
When it came to the ideological currents back home, he was critical of FDR. “Mr. Roosevelt has contributed greatly to the end of Capitalism in our own country, although he would probably argue the point at some point. He has done this, not through the laws which he sponsored or were passed during his Presidency, but rather through the emphasis he put on rights rather than responsibilities.”
In Europe, Kennedy saw the brutality of the Russians to the vanquished Germans. “People did not realize what was going on in the concentration camps. In many ways, the ‘SS’ were as bad as the Russians.” But he predicted the Red Army’s treatment of defeated Berlin, especially its women, would leave a lasting mark.
As he was returning home from Europe—stopping briefly in London—he became alarmingly sick. His traveling companion at the time reported that it had “scared the hell out” of him, and that he’d never before seen anyone run such a high fever. It lasted for several days. When it was over, Jack claimed it had just been his malaria acting up.
Around Thanksgiving, his health improved, and he was back with his family at Hyannis Port. Rip Horton remembers watching him as he practiced with a tape recorder. “He made me speak into it and then played back the tape . . . and your voice always sounds awful to you. That was the first indication as to where his inclinations were then leading him.”
Soon, though, Jack was being up front with his close friends about his intentions. “I’ve made up my mind,” he told Chuck Spalding. “I’m going into politics.”
“Geez, that’s terrific,” Spalding replied. “You can go all the way!”
Taken aback by such confidence from a close friend, Kennedy asked, “Really?”
“All the way!” Spalding recalls repeating.
Years later, Spalding explained that he’d believed Jack was one of those who’d come out of the war experience whole. “He was never pushed off this hard, sensible center of his being. I think he was beginning to get a kind of picture of himself. I think the picture of a public figure interested and capable in this area added to the dim outline of a successful politician.”
Lem Billings, who by then was in the navy—he had used new contact lenses to get past the physical—took a similar view. “A lot of stories have been written and said about it. I think a lot of people say that if Joe hadn’t died, Jack might never have gone into politics. I don’t believe this. Nothing could have kept Jack out of politics. I think this is what he had in him, and it just would have come out, no matter what. Somewhere along the line, he would have been in politics. Knowing his abilities, interests, and background, I firmly believe he would have entered politics even had he had three older brothers like Joe.”
When Jack asked Torby Macdonald what he thought of his running for Congress, his former college roommate—who’d grown up in a town near Boston—flatly stated that if his friend ran, he’d win.
Of all Jack’s best pals, Red Fay was the sharpest in seeing Jack’s inn
er directedness. When Jack told him of the pressure he was getting from his father—“I tell you, Dad is ready right now and can’t understand why his fine son Jack isn’t ready”—Fay understood that that wasn’t actually the whole story. “Although Jack shammed indifference to the whole idea of a political career, there was an underlying determination to get started on what he considered a very serious obligation. I wasn’t surprised early in 1946 when he made a very serious decision to run for Congress—and when he asked me to come east to campaign for him, I came.”
• • •
It was about this time that he met a new friend, Charlie Bartlett, down in Florida. “We were down there after the war, and, you know, gorgeous women were all getting divorces down there, and they were really good-looking girls. It was very upbeat, the whole thing, and I went to Palm Beach. My family lived in Hobe Sound. We drove down for the evening and went to this place called Taboo. And they had an orchestra and I was with a very, very pretty girl who was getting a divorce and it turned out she knew Jack and Jack came over and sat down and started telling me about his plans to go into politics. And I said, ‘Well, I’m getting ready to go into the newspaper business.’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, I’ve been there now and I haven’t been very deep but I have to tell you, you don’t get anything done. You can’t make changes. There’s no impact. I’m going to go into politics and see if you can really do anything.’ ”
Bartlett, a sixth-generation Yalie, would be Jack’s close friend from that day forward.
Jack knew the leap he was taking in running for Congress. “I had never lived very much in the district,” he admitted years later. “My roots were there, my family roots were there. But I had lived in New York for ten years and on top of that I had gone to Harvard, not a particularly popular institution at that time in the 11th Congressional District. But I started early, in my opinion the most important key to political success, in December before the primary election next June.”
Charlie Bartlett recalled the conversation they had. “He was very clear about his decision to go into Congress. Sometimes you read that he was a reluctant figure being dragooned into politics by his father. I really didn’t get that impression at all. I gathered that it was a wholesome, full-blown wish on his own part.”
Jack Kennedy’s own thoughts support his friend’s memory: “A reporter is reporting what happens, he’s not making it happen, even the good reporters, the ones that are really fascinated by what happens and who find real stimulus by putting their noses into the center of the action, even they in a sense are in a secondary profession. It’s reporting what happens, but it isn’t participating.”
By the time he made his decision, Jack, at the age of twenty-eight, possessed a level of intellectual preparation for public office uncommon even to seasoned career politicians. He had wrestled with the big-picture issues of war and peace in the 1930s, had survived the most extreme hazards of war, and been a firsthand observer of major international events. What he lacked was any practical grounding in the business of politics.
The fact that his father would take care of what the political types call the “wholesale”—the media, the press relations—hardly let him off the hook. The relentless workaday demands of a campaign lay ahead. He, the candidate, had to be the one to master the “retail,” which meant not just meeting voters one on one and winning them over, but inspiring them to join the effort. If you couldn’t connect with voters, then your other advantages, in the end, counted for little.
With the help of a local PR firm, Jack would soon be making the rounds of community groups: VFW and American Legion posts, Lions and Rotary Club meetings, communion breakfasts and Holy Name societies. This was a new world to him. But it was a necessary part of achieving his ambition, and he did it all. Writing his stump speech himself, he drew on his recent travels as a reporter in Great Britain and Germany, but always made sure to emphasize his recent stopover in Ireland.
Simultaneously, Jack decided to teach himself about being Irish. The diary he’d been keeping in Europe now contained a number of scribbled book titles accompanied by their Dewey decimal numbers. He’d always liked to connect to knowledge through reading, and, on that score, nothing had changed. Ireland and the President of the United States, Ireland in America, Ireland’s Contribution to the Law, and Irish American History of the US are some of the volumes he listed.
He was also soliciting the reactions of local political figures to his potential candidacy. But when he called on them, especially the Irish ones, he wasn’t just making the mandatory courtesy visits, he was brushing up against the city’s history. “For all Irish immigrants, the way in Boston was clearly charted,” he dictated in a memo years later. “The doors of business were shut; the way to rise above being a laborer was politics.”
His own path, he acknowledged, had been a privileged one. Being third-generation and not first makes a difference. “I had in politics, to begin with, the great advantage of having a well-known name and that served me in good stead. Beyond that I was a stranger to begin with and I still have a notebook which is filled page after page with the names of all the new people I met back there in that first campaign.”
One of the new acquaintances was a fellow by the name of Dan O’Brien, who was skeptical about the young man’s chances. After meeting him, Jack came away with these jotted-down impressions: “Says I’ll be murdered—No personal experience—A personal district—Says I don’t know 300 people personally. Says I should become Mike Neville’s secretary. O’Brien says the attack on me will be—1. Inexperience 2. Injury to me: me . . . father’s reputation. He is the first man to bet me that I can’t win! An honest Irishman but a mistaken one.”
The candidate also recorded maxims that applied to the situation. Among them:
• In politics you don’t have friends—you have confederates.
• One day they feed you honey—the next will find fish caught in your throat.
• You can buy brains but you can’t buy—loyalty.
• The best politician is the man who does not think too much of the political consequence of his every act.
He also noted: “The one great failure of American government is the government of critics.” Making the rounds and learning the ropes, he’d quickly recognized, as every politician must, the impossibility of pleasing everyone.
Now, for the first time in his life, Jack needed to make friends on a basis other than compatibility. Living on Beacon Hill, a young bachelor with no fixed address beyond rooms in the historic Bellevue Hotel, he lacked roots in the local community and needed to establish himself. The most important task was to enlist supporters who’d spent their lives in the district and would come on board, willing to stand up for him. While you could always hire a few professionals, the vast army needed for a win had to be made up of volunteers, those who helped him because they decided to.
The first hire was Billy Sutton, four years older than Jack and just discharged from the army. His description of the Jack of those days was a thin, bright-eyed figure with his hair cut close on the sides. Billy—whom I got to know well many years later—said that Jack had reminded him of the young Charles Lindbergh.
Before the war Billy had made himself useful in local politics as a result of his job checking gas meters, which naturally put him in touch with a wide variety of people. But he was the kind of guy who loved talking to anyone, and so, with Billy as his guide, Jack began trudging up and down the three-deckers of the old neighborhoods, introducing himself and asking for support. The person most surprised by this was his father. What Joseph Kennedy had yet to realize was the way the navy had changed his second son. The young man who returned from the Solomon Islands was not the one who’d left for there in early 1943, and a large part of the reason the experience so altered him was because it offered continual exposure to people unlike himself, from all over the country and from every walk of life.
The fact that he was a returning serviceman was a key factor fro
m the start. Working-class fellows like Sutton—and, later, Dave Powers, who’d served with the Flying Tigers—were ready to accept a young rich guy who’d been awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal with a citation for “extremely heroic conduct.” What convinced Powers was witnessing Jack’s appearance before a group of Gold Star Mothers, those women who’d lost sons fighting in the war. “I think I know how you feel,” he told them, “because my mother is a Gold Star Mother, too.” When Powers heard Kennedy say that and saw the reaction, he signed on and never would stop working for his new boss.
What Jack Kennedy brought to the table, besides his sterling war record and those well-known Boston names—Kennedy and Fitzgerald—was his obvious affection for the old Irish world he now was entering. He loved hearing his grandfather’s stories, from “Honey Fitz” himself, the city’s long-ago mayor and congressman.
Not surprisingly, the daily slog of introducing himself to constituents was not quite compatible with a chronic back problem, not when it meant going up and down the stairs of multifamily houses day after day. Come early afternoon, Jack would take a nap, then continue the trudge of one-on-one campaigning on into the night. He did this for months, and not everyone liked to see him doing it. The local politicians viewed him for what he was, a carpetbagger.
His voting address, after all, was a hotel, and he’d registered just in time to vote in the primary. Tom O’Neill, a local state assemblyman known as “Tip,” wasn’t impressed by the newcomer, war record or not. He was backing Mike Neville, the former Cambridge mayor, and the one whose turn it now was to hold the seat. “I couldn’t believe this skinny, pasty-faced kid was a candidate for anything.” He recalled the first time he met Kennedy outside the Bellevue Hotel: “He was twenty-eight but looked younger, and he still hadn’t fully recovered from his war injuries. He also looked as if he had come down with malaria.”
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 47