Yet, even given the rising swell of condemnation, Jack Kennedy remained resistant when it came to voting to censure a man whose wedding he’d attended, for whom his brother had worked, and to whom his father had provided sizable contributions. Had Jack joined the vote against McCarthy, it would have meant a dramatic, even traitorous break with his father and brother, who’d devoted themselves so totally to his career and were not ready to abandon a fellow anti-Communist and close friend.
How was he going to handle it? Personal connections aside, there were other factors affecting his ultimate decision when it came to the McCarthy censure vote. An important one, of course, was how it played back home. The same people of Massachusetts who’d supported Jack on the basis of the old loyalties were largely—and vehemently—in McCarthy’s corner. These men and women saw the battle as one pitting the Ivy League establishment against the working-class Irishman. For such Americans, here was a contest between those who seemed far too dainty, if not neutral, on exposing Communists in government and regular people who were willing to play rough.
It was bad enough Jack had gone to Harvard, but here he would be taking sides against one of his own—a fellow who happened to be the best-known Irishman in the country. It would be an act of betrayal, nothing less. Whatever Joe McCarthy’s faults, most Irish-Americans viewed his motives as right, while those of his enemies were, at best, suspect.
In Jack Kennedy’s own office, the enormous tribal significance of the McCarthy issue was brought home by Ken O’Donnell, whose brother Warren was then a student at Holy Cross. After Warren had delivered a strong classroom attack on McCarthy and his methods, his older brother recalled, “He was told to sit down, and the rejoinder from the priest, quite coldly, was: ‘I guess I shouldn’t expect anything less from someone whose brother went to Harvard and is friends with Jack Kennedy.’ ”
O’Donnell, who was running the Kennedy office in Boston, keeping watch on the constituents and their concerns, insisted that Jack’s voting against McCarthy would be “political suicide.” He never changed his mind. “The feeling was that strong. If he’d voted for censure, there’s no question it would have ended the career of Jack Kennedy in Massachusetts.”
He believed that the only course was for Jack “to avoid the vote. McCarthy was deteriorating to nothing more than the subject of barroom brawls. In time, he would fade. These haters always do, and, if you argued against him, you were a Communist. My view was that we needed to stand back and allow him to self-destruct.”
The passions of that historic moment created strange alliances. O’Donnell could never forget what he’d seen one night at a favorite political hangout. “I was in the Bellevue bar, having a drink, and we were watching the hearings. Bobby Kennedy had this altercation with Roy Cohn right on television. Remember, it was a group there, watching, of Boston Irish politicians, some truck drivers, and hardworking guys, most tinged with anti-Semitism. So Cohn wasn’t the type of fellow you’d think they’d like. Yet every single person in that bar cheered and yelled and hoped he’d belt Bobby one.”
Jack got this. Despite his seeming golden-boy status, he felt the lure of the underdog throughout his life; once a Mucker, always a Mucker. For this reason, he got Richard Nixon, his early congressional buddy, in ways that others in his circle never did. A part of him, the stubborn part—the part still dominant—cheered just about anyone liberals loved to hate.
Two years earlier he’d walked out of that Spee event after another attendee had dared compare McCarthy with Alger Hiss. Jack, after all, had run for Congress as a “fighting conservative.” His identity as a Cold Warrior was well known. Besides the all-politics-is-local aspect, there was the issue of Communism itself and what it actually meant in the context of American life and American security. There were those who took its threat seriously and those who pooh-poohed it, with Jack squarely in the vigilant camp, a position he’d arrived at long before.
He’d criticized FDR’s compromises at Yalta, and blamed Truman for the losses in Asia. “I’m very happy to tell them I’m not a liberal,” he’d declared in a Saturday Evening Post interview the year before.
Even years later, when he’d begun to identify himself as a “liberal,” he would confess to having little sympathy for the people McCarthy had persecuted. “I had not known the sort of people who were called before the McCarthy committee. I agree that many of them were seriously manhandled, but they represented a different world to me. What I mean is, I did not identify with them, and so I did not get as worked up as other liberals did.”
The decision would come down to the coldest calculation. Sorensen, in his memoir, summed up the situation: “JFK knew that if he voted with his fellow Democrats and anti-McCarthy Republicans on a motion to censure McCarthy, he would be defying many in his home state and family, but if he voted against such a motion, he would be denounced by the leading members of his party, by the leading liberals and intellectuals in the country and his alma mater, by the leaders of the Senate, and by the major national newspapers.”
• • •
That spring of 1954, as he looked to both past and future—his entangling ties to McCarthy and what they would cost him later—Jack Kennedy found himself staring into the face of mortal danger. In April, the back pain from which he’d long suffered turned unbearable. X-rays taken showed that the fifth lumbar vertebra had collapsed, a result believed by some to be a result of steroids prescribed over the years for his Addison’s disease. According to the historian Robert Dallek, he couldn’t even bend down to pull a sock onto his left foot; only by walking sideways could he get up and down stairs.
Yet Kennedy managed to keep any awareness of these ever-encroaching medical setbacks from the public. Snapshots taken that May show Jack, Jackie, and Bobby Kennedy enjoying the Washington spring, playing touch football in the park behind Dumbarton Oaks. Wearing a T-shirt, Jack looks sunny and healthy. Jacqueline, still in her preregal stage, appears joyously youthful and untroubled.
The photographs reveal nothing of either’s pain. You can see in these pictures neither the dire reality of Jack’s health nor the sadness his infidelities were already causing the twenty-four-year-old he’d married just the autumn before. “I’ve often wondered if I’d do it again,” Charlie Bartlett would say of the two he’d brought together after seeing the one hurt the other so. “I don’t understand Jack’s promiscuity at all.” Yet all that’s apparent in the images of those halcyon days are the skills the pair shared in their concealment.
As bad as his condition was, however, it was about to get worse. By August his weight had dropped from 180 pounds to 140. So bad was the back pain that Jack needed to remain on the Senate floor between votes rather than attempt the commute from his office across Constitution Avenue. As the days passed, with little to stimulate him except agony, he arrived at a point of existential decision: the choice was between living a life of increasingly limited mobility—ending up in a wheelchair was inevitable—or else taking an enormous risk by submitting to spinal surgery.
In describing to Larry O’Brien the operation he chose now to endure, he minced no words. “This is the one that kills you or cures you.”
To John Galvin, he explained that he was going to New York, to the Hospital for Special Surgery there, because his Boston doctors had advised against the procedure. “They said the best thing to do would be to stay with the crutches and live, rather than take the chance on the operation and die. He told me then, ‘I’d rather die than be on crutches the rest of my life.’ ”
What intensified the danger was his Addison’s disease. It meant his body could not produce the adrenaline needed to deal with the shock of surgery. The steroids he was taking complicated matters still further by reducing his ability to stave off infection. Jack knew that he faced the possibility of dying on the operating table. None of this was foreign territory to him.
• • •
With this high-risk surgery now on his calendar, Kennedy had to take on two political
crises. One was the McCarthy censure, the other even nastier.
The midterm elections were coming in November, and Jack’s Massachusetts colleague Foster Furcolo was running for the Senate. Jack didn’t like the man’s ambitions, which happened to be the same as his own. In fact, he didn’t like the man, marking him as an “empty suit,” a politician with no other reason to seek public office than the status it accorded the winner. It didn’t help that Furcolo, whose base was Springfield, hadn’t endorsed Jack in ’52.
The antagonism between them was at once tribal and personal. Ever since Larry O’Brien, once a Furcolo staffer, had joined up with Jack in 1950, there’d been bad blood. Six years apart in age, the two legislators were both Harvard grads, both focused on getting ahead politically. Beyond that, they were simply rivals for the same turf: one Italian, the other Irish. As far as Jack was concerned, the Commonwealth wasn’t big enough for both of them.
In the summer of 1954, their simmering feud came to a boil. Furcolo was the Democratic candidate for Senate, the same job Jack already had—if Furcolo won, it would make him the junior senator—and he looked to Jack for his backing. But there was no way Jack wanted Furcolo to become his political equal either in Washington or in Massachusetts. Complicating matters even more, Jack felt affection for the incumbent Furcolo wanted to run against, the Republican Leverett Saltonstall, a Brahmin of the same stripe as the man Jack had vanquished, Henry Cabot Lodge. As the Commonwealth’s pair of senators, Jack and “Salty” had built a good working relationship.
“This was the circumstance for Kennedy’s oft-quoted remark that ‘sometimes party asks too much,’ ” Ted Sorensen recalled. In fact, Jack engaged him in a secret plan to undercut Furcolo’s chances. “When I had been with him barely eighteen months,” the aide recalled, “JFK took me to Boston, where he decided to oppose quietly the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Senate against Leverett Saltonstall, JFK’s Republican Senate colleague, in the 1954 election.” It was another caper, like sneaking into the Massachusetts State House after hours to file his ’46 nominating petitions. It was willful deception. Kennedy needed to make it look like he was being the loyal party man all while his bright young brain truster would be using his skills as a researcher-writer to provide ammo for the enemy.
Lending Sorensen to Saltonstall was only part of the plan. Late that summer, Kennedy met with Ken O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and instructed them to get on board to assist the Democratic candidate Robert Murphy, who was running for governor. The scheme called for Jack to endorse Murphy for governor and Furcolo for the Senate on the same live TV program. This being the era before videotape, Furcolo would have Jack’s backing but would be unable to keep showing it in TV ads.
Kennedy’s mistake was his failure to keep his dislike for Furcolo as secret as he kept his plotting. When the night of the live appearance arrived, Furcolo got a prebroadcast copy of Kennedy’s intended remarks and blew up.
“Furcolo told him he wouldn’t go on the show unless he received a more forthright and direct endorsement,” O’Donnell recalled. “The senator then gave him that famous line, ‘You’ve got a hell of a nerve, Foster. You’re lucky you’re here.’ The senator next, quite coldly, went on to remind Furcolo of the time he had refused to endorse him. The exchange was quite heated.” The actual telecast, however, went off smoothly enough. As they were leaving, Furcolo even wished Jack well with his coming surgery—“The main thing is, take care of your back”—a gesture of goodwill that Jack saw as entirely insincere.
Then hell broke loose. Even if the papers failed to notice that Senator Kennedy neglected to offer a personal endorsement of Furcolo, one radio station—albeit with a bit of help—got it cold. “I was riding into town that next morning,” said O’Donnell, “and I heard on the radio that Senator Kennedy’s not naming Foster Furcolo had been a direct affront. That he’d done it on purpose and, in fact, was not endorsing Foster Furcolo. The report quoted Frank Morrissey.”
Morrissey was Joe Kennedy’s man, the one he’d assigned to hang around his son’s political operation and report back anything his boss wanted to know. Here’s O’Donnell’s account of that morning-after: “I called Frank and asked him to come over immediately. When he got there, I put it right to him and asked, ‘What happened here?’ He told me he thought it was off the record. I just stared at him. Couldn’t believe it. All our preparation out of the window. I remember my exact words. I walked over and opened the window and said, ‘Frank, jump.’ He looked around and then looked like he would cry.”
O’Donnell, who recalled the scene in all its drama years later, had no trouble recognizing the very real damage. Every politician in the state now knew what Jack Kennedy thought of Furcolo and how he’d undercut him in their one and only joint television appearance. “We’d been building up a solid residue of party regulars, and now they pointed to this and said, ‘We were right about him in ’52. He and his people are a bunch of Harvard bastards who take care of themselves. They don’t care about the party. Kennedy does not want Furcolo in there because he’ll compete with him. Kennedy doesn’t want two Democratic senators.’ ”
A tribal war now loomed. Italians in Massachusetts had been voting for Irish candidates for generations. Now one of their own, Furcolo, was seen getting the bum’s rush by a prince of the Irish side. Needing both groups in order to win statewide, certainly to win big, the Kennedys recognized the cost of the screwup as well as anyone. Here, though, Jack had made himself vulnerable by allowing his feelings to get in the way of his political calculation.
On October 10, Jack checked into the Hospital for Special Surgery. The operation was postponed three times, finally taking place eleven days later, on the twenty-first. Only then, before he was taken into the operating room, did he finally address the Furcolo problem. O’Donnell recalls the effort it took. “I kept pushing and, through some process of negotiation and with Bobby’s help, we finally extracted a statement from him. It was unsatisfactory, but covered the problem. What we did was disavow Morrissey.”
At the same time, O’Donnell knew it wouldn’t fly. He would call the snubbing of Furcolo, who lost that November, “the only wrong political move Jack Kennedy ever made.”
• • •
The back operation did not go well. After more than three hours in the surgeons’ hands, Kennedy was left with a metal plate inserted in his spine. At that point he developed a urinary tract infection that failed to respond to antibiotics, sending him into a coma. The news spread around the political world that the handsome Massachusetts senator’s life was in jeopardy.
“The odds made by the political wise guys were that he wouldn’t live,” Ken O’Donnell recalled, “and that if he did live he’d be a cripple. It became ‘he might not make it.’ ”
Evelyn Lincoln, the secretary in his Senate office, got the terrible news that “the doctors didn’t expect him to live until morning.” The Kennedy death watch even was reported on television. For the third time in his life, Jack was given the last rites of his church. Jacqueline Kennedy, never one to practice her religion openly, went down on her knees to pray. Richard Nixon, being driven home that night, was heard to moan: “That poor young man is going to die. Oh, God, don’t let him die.” His Secret Service agent never forgot it.
Rallying in the night, against the odds, Jack pulled through. “The doctors don’t understand where he gets his strength,” the hospital told Lincoln when she called to ask about the patient the following morning. But the ordeal left a darkness in Kennedy.
“The tenor of his voice was tinged with pain,” Ken O’Donnell said. “You could detect it in his voice even over the telephone. It was the first time in my experience with him—and I’d say, in his life—when he was, in fact, disinterested completely in politics. John Kennedy was at the lowest point of anytime I’d known him in his career, physically, mentally, and politically. He was at the bottom. It seemed over.”
Back in Washington, the two Teds, Re
ardon and Sorensen, had been left in charge. The trouble was, Jack had given Sorensen, his young legislative assistant, no guidance on what he wanted to do about the upcoming vote to censure Joseph McCarthy. Sorensen, for his part, never called his boss’s hospital room to ask how he wanted to be counted on the issue. Perhaps, it was simply preferable not to ask. He said he “feared the wrath of the senator’s brother and father more than the senator’s” if he declared Jack in favor of the McCarthy censure. In the end, Sorensen concluded, “I . . . suspected—correctly—that there was no point in my trying to reach him on an issue he wanted to duck.”
On December 2, 1954, the Senate at last brought down the curtain on the peculiar political spectacle starring Senator Joseph McCarthy. Except for the absent Kennedy, every Democrat, joined by half the Republicans, voted for the condemnation. The controversial senator would live just two and half years longer, dying of acute hepatitis brought on by alcoholism. By that time, his anti-Communist crusade and his political significance both were long over.
The man in the New York hospital bed had missed the vote.
Kennedy tried to make light of it. “You know, when I get downstairs, I know exactly what’s going to happen,” he told Chuck Spalding upon leaving the hospital a few days before Christmas. “Those reporters are going to lean over me with great concern, and every one of those guys is going to say, ‘Now, Senator, what about McCarthy?’ Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to reach for my back and I’m going to yell ‘Oow!’ and then I’m going to pull the sheet over my head and hope we can get out of there.”
Jack left it to Bobby to carry the family’s continuing respect for their fallen Irish-American ally. In January, while Jack was recuperating in Palm Beach, his younger brother was honored at a Junior Chamber of Commerce dinner as one of the country’s “Ten Outstanding Young Men.” When the evening’s speaker, Edward R. Murrow, rose to address those in attendance, Bobby walked out of the room, a silent protest against a man who’d played a significant role in bringing down McCarthy. When the senator died in 1956, Bobby Kennedy flew to Appleton, Wisconsin, for the funeral and stayed with the mourners’ procession all the way to the gravesite.
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 57
