“Finally, he got so frustrated he came down around midnight or so,” O’Donnell said, “and began to run the slide rule himself. He went town by town, and we walked him through it. But it became confusing to him, and he just kept telling us that the reports we were getting on the television and those we gave to him simply did not square at all.”
Governor Dever then telephoned and told Kennedy that, on the basis of the returns, they were both defeated and should concede together. O’Donnell recalled the dramatic response. “The congressman, who by now had learned our system—in fact, had made some improvements to it, typically, and knew it better than we did—said to the governor . . . that on the basis of our computations we were not defeated—and that, in fact, on the basis of our figures he was about to win by a narrow margin.”
At this point, there remained a general sense Kennedy had lost. Looking beyond their headquarters, they could see what appeared to be the electoral reality. Outside there were rowdies—“Irish bums,” O’Donnell called them, local fellows with various bones to pick—shouting drunkenly, “Jack Kennedy, you’re a loser and a faker! You’re in the shithouse with your old man!” Mainly, they were giving it to Bobby, who’d been the tough guy in the campaign.
By then, according to O’Donnell, “it was just us sitting around drinking coffee. Even most of the girls had left. It was a very disheartening moment.
“At about three or probably closer to four in the morning, only the major cities were still out . . . Worcester . . . Springfield . . . and I remember Bobby and the congressman began to give me some grief, because I’d dismissed the hand-picked Kennedy secretary the congressman had selected in Worcester—he was a faker and I’d replaced him with someone I knew and trusted. Now Bobby was saying to me, ‘Everything rides on Worcester and your judgment. If we lose, it’s your fault.’
“Well, it was beautiful: he hadn’t completed the sentence, literally not gotten the words out of his mouth, when I got a call from our man in Worcester saying we’d carried it by five thousand votes. And that, we all knew, was the final clincher. The congressman and Bobby looked at me in astonishment. Then the congressman said to me, ‘You’re either the brightest or the luckiest SOB on the planet!’ ”
After the votes were tallied in the big cities, with Worcester and Springfield now in the Kennedy column, the candidate continued strongly, surpassing other Democrats. “Even in these little towns, we were running four, five, or six percentage points ahead of any Democrat and ahead of Dever. The margin of victory can really be found in all those small communities where he’d spent all that time and done all that work in for the past six, seven years. It was now paying off. Every weekend he could, he’d been out there meeting people, having coffee with them, handshaking—and it was now paying off as it was intended to.” The Kennedy Party strategy had worked.
The proud incumbent, there in his headquarters across the street, refused to accept defeat. “We could see him sitting there in his suit coat, looking very calm, watching the returns. What’s he waiting for? Why won’t he concede? What does he know that we don’t? The senator-elect kept asking me, ‘Are you sure?’ Yes, we were sure, but we were worried. At one point, he even joked, ‘Is this what victory looks like?’ We were sitting at the card table—the congressman, Dave, Bobby, Larry, myself, and just a few of the girls. The fair-weather types had all gone home.
“Finally, about six or six thirty, Lodge conceded. He walked across, looking dapper, and the congressman, now the senator-elect, said what a bunch of bums we all looked like. ‘Put a tie on, for God’s sake,’ he told Bobby. Lodge came over and shook the newly elected senator’s hand. He seemed very disconnected, as if he still could not comprehend that this young fellow had somehow bucked the tidal wave called Eisenhower.
“We ended up winning by seventy thousand votes in a very tight contest; I mean, we knew we were winning, but we also recognized it was very tight. The governor had lost by fourteen thousand votes at this time.”
Lyndon Johnson telephoned immediately after the results were in, causing Jack to remark, “That guy must never sleep.” O’Brien, though, saw the cunning: “Johnson wasn’t wasting any time in courting Kennedy’s support.” The Senate’s democratic leader had just been defeated and Johnson was gunning for the job.
The next night there was a celebration, and all the Democratic hacks and coat holders and meal tickets shamelessly showed up, driving O’Donnell and O’Brien crazy. Unfazed by the strange faces in the room, the victor performed in classic fashion. “The senator-elect got up on a table and sang a song in that famous Kennedy off-tune manner. It was pretty awful. Then it was he and Bobby singing together, in a duet. It was just awful, too.”
• • •
The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket carried the country by 7 million votes. In Massachusetts, Adlai Stevenson suffered a crushing defeat. Jack Kennedy, meanwhile, had carried the state against Ike’s number one man.
He’d taken on the best and beaten the best. He walked out of the race with a solid organization. He had shown his ability to cut people loose—Mark Dalton, after all, had been a close, deeply devoted champion—who failed to meet his needs. All the while, he let his younger brother take the heat for such acts and thus gain the reputation for being the ruthless one. Bobby, Kenny O’Donnell, and Larry O’Brien were now a rare combination of ice-cold efficiency and die-hard loyalty. The skipper had a new crew, a great one. They’d been blooded by a tough battle fought against the odds and won.
Jack and Bobby—and Kenny, too—would be together for the duration, and they would stand together in the worst crisis of the Cold War, when the stakes were much higher than a Senate seat.
19
CHAPTER SEVEN
MAGIC
She could be amusing in a direct, caustic way; and she understood the art of getting on with men completely . . . never asked an awkward question.
—David Cecil, writing about
Lady Melbourne in Young Melbourne
In Washington, Tip O’Neill was moving into his new office in the House of Representatives. By coincidence, his predecessor was packing up right across the hall. As he stepped into Jack Kennedy’s outer office, Tip could hear him engaged in a heated backroom argument with his secretary, Mary Davis.
“Mary, now don’t be silly. You’re coming to the Senate with me.”
“No, Senator, I’m not. I’m going to be working for Congressman Lester Holtzman of New York.”
“Now, Mary, you know you’re coming with me.”
“I am not, Senator, and that’s all there is to it.”
O’Neill could hear the dispute going back and forth. Finally, he heard Mary say, “And the reason I’m not going with you is that Congressman Holtzman has offered me six thousand dollars.”
“Tip, can you believe this?” Jack said when he walked out and saw O’Neill.
“I’m paying her four thousand dollars, and I’ve just offered her forty-eight hundred. That’s a twenty percent raise. But this guy wants to give her six grand the first day he’s here. There’s not a broad in the world worth six thousand a year.”
Mary Davis had similar memories of the standoff. When Kennedy won the Senate race, she accepted the mission of building a clerical staff. To this end, she recruited a team of secretaries to assist her with managing the mail and other constituent work.
“They were all experienced, knew exactly how to do things, what to do, where to go, and they really could have been an invaluable asset to the functioning of his Senate office. But he called me one day from Palm Beach and said that he’d been discussing the situation with his father, who wanted to know: ‘Did you find out exactly who they are, what they are, what the salaries are going to be?’ ”
Joe Kennedy, still watching the purse strings, wasn’t above keeping his eye even on the funds the Senate provides its members for hiring staff. “I told him,” Davis said, “what I thought the salaries should be, in line with the money we were being allocated. I thought he wa
s going to go through the ceiling!”
She was surprised because she’d set the pay levels for the skilled staff members she’d picked based on the standard allocations from the Senate. But while this might seem routine practice, and wholly acceptable, her focus on the reality of the office’s likely day-to-day needs was, in fact, shortsighted. Her eye to office management and not political strategy, she was failing to consider the larger picture. It simply wouldn’t have occurred to her that the Kennedys, father and son both, intended to start right away building a wider constituency, one that would extend far beyond the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The money, therefore, had to stretch further.
For this reason, Jack rejected both the top-drawer hires and the top-of-the-line pay scale. According to Davis: “He said, ‘Well, I don’t think we’re going to be able to work that out.’ And I said, ‘Well, why not?’ He said, ‘Well, number one, I have to have a Polish girl on the staff, I have to have an Italian on the staff, I have to have an Irish girl on the staff, I have to have, you know, these different ethnic groups.’ And I said, ‘That’s ridiculous! You know, a staff member is a staff member.’ He said, ‘No, you don’t understand. I’ve got to have these ethnic groups.’ ”
Rejecting the pay levels she’d determined appropriate for the newcomers, Kennedy figured sixty dollars a week about right as an upper limit. He believed Mary herself was asking for too high a weekly check.
Hearing this, she was having none of it. “Sixty dollars a week! You’ve got to be joking. Nobody I’ve lined up would be willing to accept a job at that salary. I have to have competent, capable staff who can back me up. If I don’t, I won’t have a life to call my own.”
She remembered only too clearly what came next: “His famous reply to me was, ‘Mary, you can get candy dippers in Charlestown for fifty dollars a week.’ And I said, ‘Yes, and you’d have candy dippers on your senatorial staff who wouldn’t know beans. If that’s what you want, I’m not taking charge of it.’
“He didn’t believe me. And that’s when I said, ‘Uh-unh. Not me.’ ”
So Tip O’Neill’s memory was on the button. She’d continued to stand up to Kennedy despite numerous attempts on his part to win her over. He’d simply pushed her past the breaking point, and his cajoling was to no avail. After six years of working for him, Davis knew the man too well. The issue, for her, anyway, wasn’t the money in and of itself. It was a question of whether Jack Kennedy, born to great wealth, was going to give her, Mary Davis, what she knew the U.S. Senate had decided was owed to anyone taking the supervisor job Jack was offering her.
In the end, he didn’t budge.
What can be seen here is how the financier Joseph Kennedy exerted enduring control over anything in his son’s life having to do with money. Well able to maintain his independence on the matters that counted most with him—policy, politics, his personal associations—Jack was faced with the fact that his father still could tell him what to do if there were dollar signs involved.
There was another rule in play here: when you worked for the Kennedys, you quickly learned that a staffer is a staffer. You needed to understand the limits of the relationship, and also the borders. Mark Dalton had learned that the hard way. As he would tell me, all those years of dedicated volunteering for Jack were forgotten the day he went on the Kennedy family payroll. Before him, the beloved Billy Sutton—the onetime press secretary, entertainer, and live-in buddy—had suffered the same fate. It seemed that he’d asked his salary to be upped from sixty-five dollars a week, a request Jack didn’t take well.
Larry O’Brien, shrewder politically than the others, understood the problem and avoided it. “If you work for a politician, he tells you what to do, but if you maintain your independence, you can now and then tell him what to do.” Seeing the lay of the land, he decided to return to Springfield after helping Jack win the Senate race.
O’Brien had the situation nailed. He’d worked hard to achieve a balance of mutual respect in his relationship with Jack, and he intended not to let it get out of balance. Even as his loyalty grew, so did his awareness of the senator-elect’s nature. The man so steadfast in his friendships, carrying along pals from prep school, college, the navy, and his social world, looked upon staff as employees. He had his needs; they had their tasks. Each was obliged to understand his place as well as his task, to honor the bounds of his role and its tenure. The Kennedys believed that anyone could be replaced. So it was, even with a onetime boon companion like Billy Sutton.
Cut loose from the role he’d so cherished and filled so well, Billy still, years later, loved revisiting spots where once he’d hung out with Jack: the diner downstairs from 122 Bowdoin, Jack’s apartment, the federal buildings where Jack’s offices had been, and political hangouts such as the Parker House hotel. He was like a toy soldier waiting for its young owner to come back.
There’s a measure of defense to Kennedy’s cutthroat approach to personnel. In Washington, a city packed with people who kiss up and kick down, Jack never kissed up. Although it may not perfectly justify the harshness of his discarding people like Dalton and Davis and Sutton, each of whom had been powerfully loyal to him for a decent number of years, it does put it in the context of the place and its morality. Isn’t the definition of a just man one who treats all the same? Jack Kennedy was equally his own man in both directions, caring no more for the feelings of those of higher authority than he was of those who served—or ceased to serve—at his pleasure.
His cheapness, though imposed by his father, came at some cost. George Smathers caught sight of the chaos left in Mary Davis’s wake: “I’d go down to his office and it would always seem as in so much pandemonium, such a disarray . . . Everyone in his back office was very friendly, but it didn’t seem to me as though there was any organization to it, and I used to tell him so.” Jack couldn’t believe he was hearing this from a colleague whose own operation was hardly a model of professionalism.
Smathers, to his credit, actually saw past the seeming daily disorder to what lay behind. “His mind was on bigger things. I never did feel that he was a well-organized man either in his personal life or in just the mundane matters of running an office. If the work got done, that was all that really concerned him.”
His victory over Henry Cabot Lodge had placed him on a career pedestal sufficient for most men. Yet in Jack’s own mind he was merely at the foot of the mountain he now contemplated climbing. To reach the top he would need to further share his vision and also himself, to let a lot more people know who Jack Kennedy was. Even more important, he’d have to successfully signal the country he was ready to lead it.
It was simply a matter of random placement, but Jack Kennedy’s new Capitol Hill office was directly across the hall from that of the new vice president. Richard Nixon was in Room 362, Kennedy in 361. Already, both their futures, at least on the surface, seemed mapped out.
The inhabitant of 362, many figured already, was tagged to be his party’s nominee for president once the incoming Ike finished his two terms. Opposite him, the senator assigned to 361 was marked to spend—and end—his political career as a New England Democratic moderate, a rich man’s son with a celebrated war record who’d shown himself to be a tough Cold Warrior. Being a Roman Catholic, the limitations to Senator Kennedy’s political future were clear to any observer. Hadn’t the country been electing Protestants to the White House since the first peal of the Liberty Bell?
Even before Kennedy moved into Room 361, he was interviewing people to sit at its desks. One of the hopefuls was a twenty-four-year-old lawyer from Nebraska. Ted Sorensen had grown up a world apart from the Ivy League, from Cape Cod, from the Stork Club, and from the U.S. Navy. He came from Scandinavian and Jewish parents, had been a conscientious objector and a dedicated supporter of Adlai Stevenson. What grabbed Jack about him, perhaps, was a reference he presented that praised his “ability to write in clear and understandable language” and, more important, called him “a sincere lib
eral, but not the kind that always carries a chip on his shoulder.” Jack liked him already.
The result was a five-minute meeting in the hallway outside the office of the Massachusetts senator. Of the encounter, Sorensen would write, “In that brief exchange, I was struck by this unpretentious, even ordinary man with his extraordinary background, a wealthy family, a Harvard education, and a heroic war record. He did not try to impress me with his importance; he just seemed like a good guy.”
Sorensen was surprised even to have been summoned for an interview. He’d sent in his application despite hearing that Jack hired only staffers his father himself might choose. Meaning Irish Catholics, and with few exceptions to this rule. Yet it took only five minutes for Kennedy to make the decision to hire the young stranger. It was another example, one of the most important in its consequence, of Jack not being his father’s son.
Ted Reardon, tapped to run the Kennedy senate office just as he had the House operation, understood what was happening. Jack was starting to reach beyond his old regulars and past the Massachusetts Irish. He was upgrading his team. He wasn’t picking new pals; he had different criteria now. “Jack had the ability to have guys around him whom, personally, he didn’t give a damn about as a buddy . . . but he was able to get what he needed from them.”
Ted Sorensen was the ideal Kennedy staffer. Not only would he go on to help draft some of Kennedy’s most glorious words, ones that stirred the world and resonated down through the decades, but he knew his role. In time it became hard for either man to say who had written what. Ted offered many of the lyrics, but it was always Jack’s music. If they were never social intimates, theirs was a collaboration of the heart. Indispensable as he was, Ted Sorensen would write extraordinary prose under the spell of Jack Kennedy.
However, there were issues Sorensen wanted to resolve before coming on board. Although anti-Communist, he was also anti-McCarthy, and so requested a second interview with the senator-elect. It was then he voiced to him his concerns that “he was soft on Senator Joe McCarthy and his witch-hunting tactics. JFK must have thought I was a bit odd, as well as headstrong and presumptuous, a new job applicant asking questions about his political positions. But he did not resent it, calmly explaining that McCarthy was a friend of his father and family, as well as enormously popular among the Irish Catholics of Massachusetts.”
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 54
