Ted Reardon, his older brother’s close friend from Harvard, was running the get-out-the-vote effort. “We were constantly going over the voting lists to find where the Democrats were. We had four or five telephones going all the time, with volunteer girls calling up and getting out the vote. We used to stay until three or four in the morning.”
Lem Billings, recalling the pace, said: “Remember, we were all amateurs and all very young. Everyone was either a young veteran or a young girl. We had people who’d lived in each district all their lives stationed at the polls. We tried to get as many volunteers with cars as we could, but we always had to hire an awful lot of taxis and these were all sent to addresses of Democrats who hadn’t voted.”
The big event each year in Charlestown, then a part of the 11th Congressional District, is the Bunker Hill Parade. The day before the primary, Jack marched in the parade. On this hot June day, the pressure and work of the campaign finally catching up with him, he collapsed before reaching the finish.
“I called his father,” said the man whose house he was taken to. “I was instructed to wait until a doctor came. He turned very yellow and blue. He appeared to me as a man who probably had a heart attack. Later on I found out it was a condition which he picked up, probably malaria or yellow fever.” In fact, it would take until the following year for Kennedy to find out the true, much more serious cause of his problem.
On the following day, Kennedy was up early and at the movies. It was a way for him to escape the early, misleading, mind-destroying tidbits of information about how the voting was going. That night, when the results were in, he’d beaten Neville by two to one. Joe Russo—the real one—finished fourth. The other Joe Russo, the one the Kennedy people had put up, managed to get nearly eight hundred votes. He finished fifth.
Jack Kennedy had started earliest and worked the hardest. He had done what was necessary, and more, and he had won. But what did he believe? And what were his loyalties? He had championed the concerns of his primarily working-class district: wages, unemployment benefits, the need for a national health care system. In deep ways, he was as Irish as his constituents. He’d run, after all, as a “fighting conservative,” fearing in his heart the dark specter of Moscow, angered still by the ailing Roosevelt’s giveaway at Yalta.
“What about Communism?” he asked a lawyer he knew who’d been supporting Mike Neville in the race. That fall he was already calling the Soviet Union, our wartime ally, a “slave state,” clearly drawing a line between himself and his party’s liberal wing.
This fighting conservative was already fighting a war that had not yet gotten its name.
16
The Daily News, McKeesport
17
The House class of 1946
CHAPTER FIVE
COLD WARRIOR
While the hand of fate made Jack and me political opponents, I always cherish the fact that we were personal friends from the time we came to the Congress together in 1947.
—Richard M. Nixon, from a letter written to
Jacqueline Kennedy, November 22, 1963
Jack Kennedy knew well before going to the House of Representatives that he didn’t intend to stay there. He was headed for statewide office, either the governorship or the U.S. Senate. Even if he opted for the governorship first, it was only to be a stepping-stone. His goal was the Senate, since what he really wanted was to join the big national debates, especially those on foreign policy. That was where he intended to make his mark.
There were no near-term options for reaching his goal. If he ran against Senator Leverett Saltonstall in two years—in ’48—he would look impetuous. Besides, he’d formed an affection for the older man. But if he waited to run against the other senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the august Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., in 1952, it might be a suicide mission.
Lodge had sacrificed his first seat in the Senate to go off and fight in the war. Now, in ’46, he’d won the second Massachusetts seat, with a smashing victory over Senator David I. Walsh, a four-term Democrat. So Jack would have to wait. Whatever and whenever he decided on for his next step he needed to prove himself with the job he’d won.
From the start, when he walked into his office on Capitol Hill, Jack Kennedy made it clear he was his own man. Arriving with a high profile, built first on his best-selling, prewar book and then on his news-making exploits in the South Pacific, he had no intention of compromising his hero’s image by becoming just another Massachusetts Democrat. Out there in the Solomon Islands, he’d engineered the saving of ten men’s lives; he was not about to sign on to someone else’s crew. And that included the number two Democrat in the House, John McCormack, who, because he was the senior congressman from Massachusetts, expected a certain deference from his fellow Bay Staters.
He would not be getting it from young Kennedy. On the morning the about-to-be congressman was to take his oath, Billy Sutton met him at the Statler Hilton on Sixteenth Street, a few blocks north of the White House. Jack had just flown in from Palm Beach.
“You should be in a hurry,” Sutton warned his boss, who showed up tanned and carrying his black cashmere overcoat. “You have a caucus meeting.” In other words, McCormack was waiting for him up on Capitol Hill. “Well, I’d like a couple of eggs,” Kennedy said, continuing to ignore the suggestion to get a move on. “How long would you say Mr. McCormack has been here? Don’t you think Mr. McCormack wouldn’t mind waiting another ten minutes?”
The Mucker wasn’t about to let a new headmaster intimidate him. At that, he went into the hotel’s drugstore lunch counter to join his new top aide, Ted Reardon, for breakfast.
Kennedy’s little-concealed disdain for the John McCormacks of the world was not a trait he was ready to hide. He’d made it his business to win his seat free of the entangling alliances that tied up other new lawmakers before they could even get started. Establishing his independence was his purpose from the very first day. Since he didn’t plan to spend the rest of his career as one of 435 members of the House of Representatives, he wasn’t going to get hitched to McCormack, for the simple reason that he intended to pass him by.
Years later, when he was headed to the Senate, Jack Kennedy would advise his successor in Congress, Tip O’Neill, to “marry John McCormack.” Such different behavior from his own, he said, was the better path for a man who by then had been Speaker of the Massachusetts legislature and who, he correctly assumed, would one day want to join the House leadership ladder.
The world Jack Kennedy found in Washington that winter of 1947 was a jamboree of Republican triumphalism. On both sides of the Capitol, committees were cooking up public hearings on the two hot-stove issues Republicans had championed in the previous election: the evils of Big Labor and the threat of Communism at home and abroad. Republicans had won both houses, the first time since before the Great Depression, with a simple slogan that was more a question than an answer, more a taunt than a promise: “Had Enough?”
Its meaning was clear. It summed up two decades of Democratic rule that had comprised an era of government activism or overreach, depending on the voter’s degree of resentment. And during the ’46 campaign it meant everything voters didn’t like after V-J day, from rationing to the recent rash of labor strikes.
The new Republican majority came with a mission. Harry Truman could sit there in the White House and veto its bills, but he couldn’t stop the new Eightieth Congress from investigating him, and that meant the whole twenty-year Democratic era. They were, in the words of one Republican congressman, going to “open every session with a prayer and end it with a probe.” Almost forty investigative panels were setting up schedules to dig up corruption any way they could find it, with the entire Roosevelt-Truman record as their quarry.
Congress was looking for bad guys, especially those who were seen as soft on the Communist threat. Someone had to pay for the giveaway at Yalta, and FDR, who’d agreed to it, wasn’t around to take the punishment.
Jack Kennedy had
brought Billy Sutton to Washington as his press secretary and jack-of-all-trades—housemate included. Being from the Boston neighborhoods, he took a street-corner guy’s view of things. So much was happening so fast that the spectacle on Capitol Hill seemed to him like a “Stop ’n’ Shop, a supermarket of hearings.”
The very day he arrived on Capitol Hill, Jack Kennedy met the fellow member of the House freshman class of 1946 whose destiny would wind up twinned with his own. Richard Nixon had just beaten a much-admired New Dealer and five-term Democratic incumbent in the battle for California’s 12th District. It had been an upset victory tinged by telephoned whispers that Nixon’s opponent was a “Communist.”
Kennedy, however, was impressed by the drama of the triumph itself. “So you’re the guy who beat Jerry Voorhis,” Kennedy exclaimed on meeting Nixon at a National Press Club reception for freshman congressmen who’d fought in the war. “That’s like beating John McCormack up in Massachusetts!”
At Harvard, Jack had gravitated to Torby Macdonald, hotshot of the freshman football team. Now it was the star of the House class of 1946—this thirty-four-year-old Californian, like himself a navy man, who’d just pulled off the biggest political upset of the season.
“How’s it feel?” Jack asked him. Here was the son of one of the richest men in the world showing Dick Nixon, the poor boy, true admiration. “I guess I’m elated,” the Californian answered, plainly taken by the attention. In fact, Nixon’s loyal presidential aide H. R. Haldeman told me decades later and just days before his own death that he’d always found Nixon’s feelings toward Jack Kennedy “strange and inexplicable.” It had been so from the start.
The two ex–naval officers from the South Pacific theater—Nixon had been a supply officer there—were both assigned to the Committee on Education and Labor. Now both were being thrown into the most intense battle of the season: the effort by the reenergized Republicans to rein in the power of organized labor. In those early months of 1947, it would offer Jack Kennedy his first chance for distinction.
Rather than join his fellow Democrats in simply opposing the measure, he decided to put forth his own “dissenting opinion.” He had called Mark Dalton, the friend who’d managed his campaign, and asked him to join him in Washington. “John wanted to know what we—Billy Sutton was in the room—thought of the Hartley proposal and what he should do about it. We sat there and developed a position,” recalled Dalton, who wound up manning the typewriter.
To Dalton, it was a billboard screaming the new congressman’s ambitions. “People have always said to me, was John Kennedy running for the presidency from the start? Was he thinking of the future?” For Dalton, there was never any doubt—and certainly not from that moment forward.
But there was more still to learn about his boss, and it had to do with the way he kept his eye on the future competition. The morning Kennedy was scheduled to present his dissenting position to the Rules Committee, a congressman Dalton didn’t recognize was offering the official Republican support of what would be the Taft-Hartley Act. “Listen to this fellow,” Kennedy whispered as Dalton entered the cramped hearing room. “He’s going places.”
When the Republican member finished speaking and took the seat next to them, Kennedy introduced him. “I’d like you to meet Richard Nixon of California.” In the coming years Jack would be telling his family that Nixon was “brilliant,” the smartest of all his colleagues.
Kennedy, of course, was also trying to establish himself. “There were very few Democrats who would speak as strongly as he did to labor,” Dalton recalled. “The reaction was ‘Kennedy is courageous,’ just what Kennedy wanted it to be.”
Thus, when he rose on the House floor to give what would be his maiden speech in Congress, he was taking on the power of organized labor as well as big business. “I told him that day that he reminded me so much of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Billy Sutton remembered.
Still, not everyone in the chamber was so thrilled. “You can imagine the reaction of the congressmen who had been there for years and had worked on this problem,” said Dalton, “to be told that the new congressman from Massachusetts was filing a separate report.”
A few days later, Kennedy and Dick Nixon got their first chance to match talents in an arena beyond Capitol Hill. A local group had asked a freshman member from western Pennsylvania, Frank Buchanan, to pick the two standouts in his class, one from each party, and invite them home for a debate. The topic would be the new labor reform bill, to be known as Taft-Hartley. The audience would be a mixture of business and labor people.
The pair was greeted at the train station early that evening and taken to the Penn McKeesport hotel. There in the ballroom, they put on vastly dissimilar performances. Nixon was the aggressor, punching away like a hungry middleweight. Playing to the Republicans in the mixed crowd, he pummeled Big Labor. Brutally, he listed all the troubles that had been dominating the postwar headlines: the automobile strike, the steel strike, the coal strike, the railroad strike. He had picked his side in the fight and was quite willing to taunt his enemies on the other.
The younger speaker, the one with the quaint New England accent and the slight limp, offered a more nuanced performance. Watching Nixon antagonize the labor people in the McKeesport crowd, Jack worked to soften the hostility of the business folks. There was much to say for the labor reforms the Republicans were pushing, he allowed, particularly its banning of “wildcat” strikes. His concern was that the legislation might go too far and lead to more trouble between management and labor, not less.
It was Jack’s charm they witnessed that night. Nixon came into the room like a club fighter, eager to win the rivalry point by point. A champion debater at Whittier College, he focused on his rival, challenging whatever he said. Kennedy, his focus on the audience, ignored his rival on the stage and concentrated on winning over the room. Knowing he had labor on his side—Nixon made sure of that—he wanted to end the evening with the business people convinced that he shared their concern for an end to the country’s labor troubles.
What surprised those who greeted them and saw them off that night was the way these two partisans got along with each other personally. Before catching the Capitol Limited back to Washington, they grabbed hamburgers at the local Star Diner and talked over the new baseball season. Boarding at midnight, the two junior pols drew straws for the lower berth. Nixon won. Then, as the train rolled on toward Washington, they spent the early-morning hours discussing their true mutual interest, foreign policy, especially the rising standoff with the Soviets in Europe, which Bernard Baruch had just christened the “cold war.”
Kennedy was drawn to those who shared his big-picture view of the world, and Nixon was one who did. Their responses to the threat posed by Communism’s spread were similar, too. For both of them, it was a central issue of their generation.
In the morning-after press, it was Kennedy who scored highest. The next morning’s editions of the McKeesport Daily News ran a front-page photo of the smiling, handsome Kennedy, one that could easily have been of a popular local college grad. The shot of Nixon, on the other hand, caught him with his eyes darting sideways with a hunted look, his defiant chin displaying a beard well beyond the five o’clock mark. Even in black and white, the charisma gap was stark.
That March, President Truman called on Congress to stop the Red advance across Europe by approving U.S. military aid to help governments in Greece and Turkey resist Communist-backed insurgencies. Speaking to a joint session, he called this move crucial to American security. To those on the political left, the new “Truman Doctrine” was an unwelcome reversal from the pro-Russian policies of FDR. But for many of the young officers back from the war, the president was speaking the language they wanted to hear.
The day after Truman had addressed Congress, Russ Nixon—no relation to Richard—of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, a union known for its sizable Communist contingent, told the Education and La
bor Committee that labor unions had as much right to be led by Communists as by Democrats or Republicans. That was a far from popular view in the halls of Washington.
When his own turn arrived to quiz the witness, Congressman Jack Kennedy said he’d been “impressed by the dexterity” the witness had shown in fielding the earlier questions. Nixon, a Ph.D. in economics, had been Kennedy’s Harvard instructor before joining the labor movement. Now the student to whom he’d given a B-minus his freshman year got to ask the questions.
Was Soviet Communism, he asked his former instructor, “a threat to the economic and political system of the United States?” No, Russ Nixon replied, the real threat to the country was its failure to meet the “basic economic problems of the people in a democratic way” as well as its failure to expand Americans’ civil rights and in that way meet “the problems of the Negro people.”
Kennedy then asked his instructor to defend what he said was the Communist Party’s willingness to “resort to all sorts of artifices, evasion, subterfuges, only so as to get into the trade unions and remain in them and to carry on Communist work in them, at all costs.”
Russ Nixon:
I didn’t teach you that at Harvard, did I?
Kennedy:
No, you did not. I am reading from Lenin, in which is described the procedure which should be adopted to get into trade unions and how they conduct themselves once they are in.
His clever questioning of the left-leaning witness won Kennedy positive notice from the press gallery. “A freshman House member with the coral dust of Pacific Islands still clinging to his heels,” UPI’s George Reedy said in a radio broadcast, “stole the show from his older colleagues yesterday.”
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