His chance at the Senate would arrive the following year when Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a Republican, came up for reelection. The only problem was that Governor Paul Dever, having already served two terms himself, was also considering a job change. If Dever chose to take on Lodge and run for senator, Jack’s only option would be to declare for the State House. Whichever happened, he’d definitely decided he wasn’t going to stay put. Thus, in January 1951, he gave Tip O’Neill a heads-up.
“I’ve decided not to run for a fourth term in the House,” he told him. “I don’t yet know whether I’ll run for the Senate or governor, but you can be sure of one thing: my seat will be open. I won’t be making any announcements for at least another year, so don’t tell a soul. But in case you have any interest in running, I wanted to give you a head start.”
Getting ahead in politics generally requires solving a pair of equations, the first being the availability of an office that matches the politician’s ambitions. The other is finding the right person to run the campaign. While waiting for Paul Dever to make his decision, Jack got a lead on meeting the second challenge.
Here’s how it happened: In September, Kennedy set off on a seven-week fact-finding trip to the Far East. America was at war in Korea, Asia presented the premier foreign-policy front, and the issues presented by foreign policy continued to be his primary interest. The trip would have the added merit of establishing in voters’ minds his firsthand experience. However, as the trip was being planned, a family issue arose, casting a slight shadow over it. The problem was pressure from his father to take along his younger brother Bobby. Jack’s reaction was that his sibling, eight years his junior, would be nothing but a hindrance, a “pain in the ass.”
While Jack had been a warm, loving brother to both Joe Jr. and Kathleen, still missing them terribly, he had yet to form close ties with the younger members of the family. At the time, Bobby struck him as a very different sort from himself, a far more churchy guy, a straight arrow who spent most of his time trying to impress their father with his dutifulness. But rather than Bobby’s presence being an annoyance, the opposite turned out to be true. Spending their first ever quality time together, they managed to surprise each other.
As Jack traveled with his brother all the way from Israel to Japan—from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea, stopping in India and Indochina—what they found deepened his own long-standing fascination with foreign policy. But the circumstances they encountered also opened the eyes of both men to the sparks of postwar nationalism beginning to catch fire in each country they visited. While Jack admired the nobility of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the French military commander he met in Hanoi, for instance, he sensed the war he was fighting was “foredoomed.”
More important than any other knowledge Jack gained over the course of their journey was the strength of heart he discovered in Robert Francis Kennedy—and the extent of his brother’s love for him. The evidence came during a moment of mortal peril when Jack, thousands of miles from home, suffered a frightening new episode of his Addison’s disease. The younger brother more than rose to the occasion, showing his guts under pressure and also his resourcefulness. He got things done.
As Jack was flown from Tokyo to a U.S. military hospital in Okinawa, Bobby never left his side, keeping watch over him as his temperature rose to 106 degrees and he became first delirious, then comatose. It looked like he was dying, and for the second time he was given the last rites.
The upshot of this latest brush with death was a memory an older brother would be unlikely to forget. Where Jack had once seen only the puritan, he now recognized the protector.
• • •
Back home, Jack Kennedy once again focused on his quest to leave the U.S. House of Representatives behind. In his mind he was already out of there, and even began disparaging the 435 members as “worms.” He’d had it with the House. He’d already begun spending weekends campaigning statewide, and the map hanging on the wall of his Bowdoin Street apartment was starting to be thickly covered in pins. Those were Dave Powers’s markers indicating where a speech had been made or where his boss had shared a coffee with a significant political leader.
The time had come to face the big challenge. For him, running for governor in ’52 would only be a connecting flight to the next destination. Chuck Spalding could see his friend’s determination. Eventually, “if he was going to get anywhere, he’d always have to be able to beat somebody like Lodge . . . So, I think, he made the decision, ‘I’ve been long enough in the House. It’s time for me to move ahead. If I’m going to do it, I’ve got to take this much of a chance.’ ” Pitting himself against Henry Cabot Lodge—now and not later—had overwhelming appeal. Above all, it showed audacity, a quality that ranked high with Jack.
On December 2, 1951, Kennedy made the admission, rare for a politician, of personal ambition. He did it during an appearance—his first—on NBC’s Meet the Press. The moderator had wasted no time zeroing in on the hot political rumor buzzing through the Bay State.
Lawrence Spivak:
When I was in Boston last week, I heard a good deal of talk about you. There were many who thought that you would be the Democratic nominee for the senatorship against Henry Cabot Lodge. Are you going to run?
Jack Kennedy:
Well, uh, I’d like to go to the Senate. I’m definitely interested in it. I think most of us in the House who came in after the war—some of them have already gone to the Senate, like George Smathers and Nixon and others, and I’m definitely interested in going to the Senate, and I’m seriously considering running.
But, to anyone paying attention, it was obvious it wasn’t just the intramural rivalry of his ’46 House classmates driving him. His thinking about matters beyond the scope of the typical House member, his grander notions, were in every way a part of who he was, of who he had become.
The mind of Jack Kennedy, in fact, was already busy with the big picture. He’d been traveling the world since his teens. He’d witnessed Britain and Europe up close in the late ’30s, he’d fought in the war and come back to see the depressing events in postwar Europe and Asia. He’d honed a personal sense of what was wrong with U.S. influence abroad.
On his trip to the Far East, for instance, he’d had an eyewitness look at the predicament of France trying to hold on to its empire after World War II, against the local resistance to colonial power. What he saw was the overriding strength of the Vietnamese people’s desire for independence.
“You can never defeat the Communist movement in Indochina until you get the support of the natives,” he explained in a speech on his return, “and you won’t get the support of the natives as long as they feel that the French are fighting the Communists in order to hold their own power there. And I think we shouldn’t give the military assistance until the French clearly make an agreement with the natives that at the end of a certain time when the Communists are defeated that the French will pull out and give this country the right of self-determination and the right to govern themselves.”
He also articulated that Sunday morning a strong critique of the way America represented itself overseas. On that same Meet the Press, Spivak quoted back to Kennedy a remark he’d made about our diplomats being “unconscious of the fact that their role was not tennis and cocktails but the interpretation to the foreign country of the meaning of American life.” Is this something, he wanted to know, Kennedy had seen for himself?
“I think something ought to be done about it. I think there are a lot of young men interested in going into the Foreign Service. I don’t know where they get a lot of the ones I saw. I think we’re not getting the representative, well-rounded type of young man to go to the Foreign Service that we should as a rule. . . . I was up at a college in Massachusetts two days ago, speaking, and I asked, out of five hundred students how many would be interested in going into the Foreign Service, and a surprisingly large number raised their hand. What I think is that they’re not getting young men
who are well-rounded, who are balanced, and who are what we like to think of as representative Americans.”
This call to service for young Americans—especially as they might affect the developing world—marked the beginning of an idea that, a decade later, inspired the country. It was one of many emblematic ideas evolving in his mind even now.
That trip to the Far East had been a confidence builder. Upon his return, Jack had shared what he learned with the voters. It was a repeat of his performance in 1946 as he’d entered the political arena. Back then he’d talked mainly of his experiences in the Pacific Theater, along with the need to prevent another war like the one just ended.
Since then he’d grasped, both instinctively and intellectually, the central importance of nationalism in the new world order and how it would affect Great Power relationships, most crucially those between the United States and the emerging Communist monoliths of Russia and China. What he witnessed, and also deeply understood, was the way that people struggled to free themselves from foreign control. It was a fight that Kennedy, the Irishman and Mucker, could feel in his genes.
He was discovering his ability to absorb complexity. In understanding the dangers facing his country, he saw, too, the role he might play. He had a mission now. To survive the Cold War, his country must grasp its nature. If he could get to the Senate, he might change history.
• • •
Despite his resolve to move forward, come what may, Jack began 1952 still unsure which office he would now seek or who’d help him win it. He’d spent four years traveling the state, decorating the map with those pushpins, hitting small towns that statewide Democratic candidates rarely visited. But still he needed an organization that could deliver the vote. He needed people.
The very first recruit to the cause was Lawrence F. O’Brien, with whom Jack had earlier been friendly down in Washington and now got in touch with to see if he’d come on board. When Jack met him, O’Brien was on the staff of another Massachusetts congressman, Foster Furcolo. Before taking that job, he’d worked in his family’s cafe and bar in Springfield. Well connected in Democratic politics in Springfield, he’d served as manager for three of Furcolo’s campaigns.
One day on Capitol Hill, the two of them, Jack and Larry, had dinner, during the course of which O’Brien declared he’d had enough of Washington. Perhaps he’d also had enough of Furcolo. He was heading home.
At a later meeting in Boston, Kennedy asked him to help out with his own effort in the Springfield area, and O’Brien agreed. But it took a strong-arm play by his former boss to complete O’Brien’s transition to Kennedy loyalist. O’Brien had agreed to set up a public meeting for Kennedy, only to have Jack get word from Furcolo that Springfield was his turf and he wanted it called off. Jack replied, too bad, he intended to go ahead as planned and Furcolo would just have to live with it.
Larry O’Brien was impressed. The son of Irish immigrants whose dad was a local Democratic leader, he saw Jack Kennedy as a new kind of Irish politician, virtually the antithesis of the typical Democratic pol from Boston. “Republicans were respectable. Republicans didn’t get thrown in jail like Jim Curley,” O’Brien would write, describing the divide between the two parties as it had long been. The thing was, Jack Kennedy was “respectable” in a whole new style. And what O’Brien, a seasoned strategist, saw was how Jack Kennedy could win votes, especially in the Boston suburbs, that the Democrats had been losing because of the dishonesty of scoundrels like Curley.
“But Jack Kennedy was different. If the Yankee politicians had their snob appeal, so did the Kennedys. Those suburban sons and daughters of immigrants might not say ‘I’m a Democrat,’ but I hoped they could be brought to say, ‘I’m for Jack Kennedy.’ ”
To O’Brien, his new ally, Jack made the extent of his ambition clear. Pointing at the Massachusetts State House from the window of his Bowdoin Street apartment, he put it this way: “Larry, I don’t look forward to sitting over there in the governor’s office and dealing out sewer contracts.”
In aiming high and refusing to be satisfied with even the governor’s job—when what he wanted was to be a senator—Jack was showing how much his ambitions paralleled his father’s. Joe Kennedy refused to settle for what his fellow Boston Irish regarded as good enough achievement, an upper-middle-class level of success. Joe wanted more—and allowed nothing to stand in his way. In his own words: “For the Kennedys, it’s either the castle or the outhouse.”
Besides O’Brien, the other key recruit joined the team as a result of Bobby Kennedy’s intervention. In February 1952, Bobby got in touch with his college roommate Ken O’Donnell, suggesting he join the campaign effort. “He called me and said Jack was going to run, had not decided for what, but he was going to run.”
Ken O’Donnell was a hybrid—a middle-class Irish guy who’d gone to Harvard, but whose dad had been the legendary football coach at Holy Cross. Raised in Worcester, he was both town and gown. In World War II, he’d served in the Army Air Corps based in Britain and flown more than thirty missions over Germany as a bombardier, often in the lead plane. During the Battle of the Bulge he was forced to crash-land between German and Allied lines. But his most harrowing exploit came when he’d had to climb down and kick loose a bomb stuck in the doors. He’d ended up hanging on to the plane for dear life—certainly a strong memory to carry into one’s postwar career, and also a character-building one. His football career at Harvard only added to his appeal. On all counts, Ken O’Donnell was the kind of guy Jack Kennedy could admire and, eventually, trust.
At their first meeting to discuss the job, just five days after the call had come from Bobby, Jack was put off by O’Donnell’s questioning of him. The problem was that Ken had asked him which office he actually wanted to run for, a reasonable enough question for a prospective campaign worker. Jack didn’t like it. One reason was that he didn’t know the answer. But Ken O’Donnell was just the kind of guy Jack needed to win, no matter his place on the ballot.
At home in Harvard Yard and on Soldiers Field, O’Donnell was equally at ease with those “lace-curtain” Irish who’d gained wealth and social self-esteem. Yet he knew, too, the working class with all its awe of pedigreed Yankees like Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and its entrenched resentment of the lace-curtain types. He knew the begrudgers, those Irish who made a specialty of hating those who either had a leg up on them or acted as if they did. Winning Ken O’Donnell’s steadfast loyalty, which he soon did, was one of Jack Kennedy’s crowning lifetime achievements.
Ken recognized Jack’s voter appeal long before he went to work for him. “He started getting our attention because he made statements and did things that weren’t the norm for politicians in Massachusetts. When he didn’t sign Curley’s pardon petition, it didn’t mean much in terms of the position, but it meant something to my generation. We quietly watched . . . and here was a guy who bore some watching. Frankly, his money had something to do with it. He was wealthy, so he could be independent of the political machine. They can’t crush him the way they can somebody else, because he has both the money to stand up to them and the guts to tell them to go to hell. He was one of us. He is a veteran. He has had enough. He can afford to take them on.”
“Them” was personified by the name Henry Cabot Lodge. And, to illustrate exactly the weight that name once carried in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, consider this famous bit of doggerel penned by a Holy Cross graduate:
In the land of the bean and the cod,
The Cabots speak only to the Lodges,
And the Lodges only to God.
The current Henry Cabot Lodge was the grandson of the first Henry Cabot Lodge, who’d beaten Jack Kennedy’s grandfather John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald for the U.S. Senate. He was the Republican who’d successfully crushed Woodrow Wilson’s struggle to establish the League of Nations following World War I.
In 1936 his grandson, at the age of thirty-four, assumed the ancestral Lodge seat. Then, in 1942, the younger Lodge joined the
U.S. Army and served gallantly in North Africa while remaining a senator. His outfit won the distinction of being the first American unit in World War II to make ground contact with the German army. When President Roosevelt ordered that men serving in both the military and the Congress make a choice between the two roles, Lodge left the army in 1942. But after winning reelection that year, he chose to give up his seat to rejoin the army, the first senator to do so since the Civil War.
As a lieutenant colonel, Lodge distinguished himself in Europe by once single-handedly capturing a four-man German patrol. He was decorated with the French Légion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre. At the end of the war, he served as liaison officer and interpreter in the surrender negotiations with German forces. In 1946, he ran for the Senate again, now a handsome war hero come back to serve the people. As such, he drew extraordinary respect, especially among the Irish, who usually voted Democratic. He was viewed by them as a man of the people, a man’s man, a strong-jawed Yankee who was a regular enough guy to come have a beer at the local bar. Though times were changing, such condescension still went over well. Lodge was the kind of high-standing Brahmin the Irish looked up to.
Ken O’Donnell understood that Senator Lodge was more than the well-born patrician, more than just his name or his family tree. He recognized the reality of Lodge’s very genuine accomplishment, returning from the war and in ’46 beating Senator David I. Walsh, a powerful Democratic fixture on the state’s political scene for nearly half a century. “Lodge, killing off Walsh, became the giant of Massachusetts politics. He had a good organization, excellent staff, and he was honest. Lodge was everything people wanted in a politician.”
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 51
