Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  In May, Jack outdid that performance. He won a perjury citation against a Communist labor leader, Harold Christoffel, for his role in a wartime strike against a huge defense plant in Milwaukee.

  He asked the witness why the union newspaper had strongly opposed war aid to Britain prior to the Nazi invasion of Russia, only to back it strongly thereafter. Why did it condemn “Roosevelt’s War Program” when Hitler was in league with Stalin, then call for “All Aid to Britain, Soviet Union” in a banner headline once the Hitler-Stalin alliance was broken?

  Kennedy had harder evidence that the labor leaders were under Communist Party discipline from Moscow. A former party member had testified that the 1941 Milwaukee strike was part of a “snowballing” of such work stoppage aimed at crippling the U.S. defense buildup. The labor leaders had been lying and Kennedy had caught them.

  “Would you call Russia a democracy?” Kennedy asked one. “I would not know. I do not think so,” he replied. “I think I would like to inform you on what I believe to be the main difference between socialism in England and socialism in Russia,” Kennedy said. “They have freedom of opposition which they do not have in Russia.” When his witness said he didn’t know if that was true or not, Jack went at him.

  “Well, I do not think you are equipped to tell whether a member of your union is a Communist if you do not know any of the answers to any of the things that I have asked you.”

  Deeply impressed by his young colleague’s work, the Republican chairman of the committee compared it to the opening shots at Lexington and Concord.

  On June 5—two years to the day after the Allies had met in Berlin, affirming the total defeat of Germany—Secretary of State George C. Marshall was Harvard’s commencement speaker. He used the occasion to unveil a massive, complex plan for the economic reconstruction of war-torn Europe, funded by U.S. dollars. Though the Marshall Plan doesn’t seem controversial today in the aftermath of its great success—Time called it “surely one of the most momentous commencement day speeches ever made”—it had its detractors.

  One of them was Joseph Kennedy, Sr., who regarded the European Recovery Plan—the Marshall Plan’s official name—as a terrible idea. A shrewder plan, he calculated, would be to let the Communists grab Europe, creating economic chaos that would lead to greater opportunities for businessmen like him down the road. His son disagreed. He believed that serious efforts to halt the Soviet advance in Europe were the only way to avoid repeating the mistake made at the Munich Conference of 1938, when Hitler was allowed free rein.

  Had the Third Reich been confronted at a decisive moment, it was now believed, Germany might have retreated and never come to stage a deadly attack on Poland as it did the following year. The outcome of Munich, along with the thinking behind it, meant the Allies were thrown on the defensive. The World War II generation, having lived through the prewar appeasement and its consequences, had returned from the theaters of war in the South Pacific, Europe, and Africa determined to prevent a sequel to the tragedy that had interrupted and harrowed their lives—and erased so many more. This time, the dictator bent on encroachment and annexation must be stopped in his tracks.

  To young men like Kennedy and Nixon, the Yalta Conference of February 1945, which had divided up postwar Europe, carried whiffs of another Munich. It represented a buckling under to a new enemy, but one even more subversive in its methods and more pervasive in its ambitions than the one who’d died in his Berlin bunker.

  This firm resolve to defend Europe from Stalin was hardly a policy Jack’s father, the ruthless builder of wealth, could embrace. Joe Kennedy had gone back to the isolationism he’d preached throughout the 1930s; his son, meanwhile, was moving in his own direction. “So many people said that the ambassador was pulling the strings for Jack, and he certainly was not,” said Mary Davis, the congressman’s secretary at the time. “Jack was his own man.”

  In fact, Jack Kennedy was starting to make it known, both privately and publicly, that he and his father disagreed on important issues.

  “We were all at a cocktail party in the garden of Drew and Luvie Pearson,” the senior Kennedy’s friend Kay Halle recalled. “Suddenly, Joe said, ‘Kay, I wish you would tell Jack that he’s going to vote the wrong way.’ I can’t even remember what bill it was, but Joe said, ‘I think Jack is making a terrible mistake.’

  “And then I remember Jack turning to his father and saying, ‘Now, look here, Dad, you have your political views and I have mine. I’m going to vote exactly the way I feel I must vote on this. I’ve great respect for you, but when it comes to voting, I’m voting my way.’ Then Joe looked at me with that big Irish smile, and said, ‘Well, Kay, that’s why I settled a million dollars on each of them, so they could spit in my eye if they wished.’ “

  Jack’s tough stand against the Soviets abroad and Communism at home made sense to his constituents up in Boston. Growing up, I saw this myself: Catholics as a group had it in our gut that Roosevelt had sold out the country’s interests at Yalta. To us, the growing threat from Moscow increasingly resembled Hitler’s prewar aggression. Supporters back home could see that Jack Kennedy, down in Washington, knew just how they felt, agreed with them, and was saying exactly what they were feeling.

  Kennedy also knew he, the privileged son, was being watched back home for how he was handling the job. If he gave the cold shoulder to a single constituent, if a letter went unanswered, the word would get around. He’d be seen as having gotten too big for his britches. “He was very particular about people in his district and answering the mail,” Billy Sutton recalled. “He didn’t want anything to stay on your desk. If some poor soul or constituent needed help and he gave the assignment to you, you were liable to be riding home in the car and he’d say, ‘Well, what about John White? What did you do for him?’ And if you said, ‘Well, I was going to do that tomorrow,’ he’d almost tell you, you know, to get out of the car and go back to the office. He wanted you to do your job, and if you didn’t, then you were in trouble.”

  Mary Davis understood the stakes. Her young boss wasn’t down in Washington only to be a dutiful congressman. He wanted those constituents of his to help elect him senator. That meant at least doing no harm. “I would say that was always in the back of Jack’s mind, and in the minds of the people who had supported him first for representative in the House. They always felt that this was a start and that he would go onward and upward.”

  There quickly came a time in that first year that Kennedy had to decide between going along and getting along: at issue was the man whose seat he had taken in Congress. Reelected mayor in 1945, James Michael Curley had been convicted of mail fraud; he now sat, plotting, in Danbury federal prison. Curley’s daughter was passing around a petition to the Massachusetts members of Congress asking for his release on health grounds. It was feared, the petition argued, that he would die if not released. A hundred thousand Massachusetts voters had signed a citizens’ petition.

  Kennedy friend Joe Healey was Jack’s tutor at Harvard and continued to be a trusted advisor and occasional speechwriter. “I got a call from Washington. It was Congressman Kennedy, and he said he wanted to talk with me about a petition that had been brought to his office. The person who had brought the petition to his office was Mary Curley, the daughter of the former governor.”

  Healey was cautious in his advice. If Curley’s illness was truly fatal, he said, the old pol should be given some last time with his family. If he wasn’t as sick as he advertised, he shouldn’t be treated any differently than anyone else convicted of his crimes. Kennedy agreed this was exactly the way to look at it. In fact, army physicians had examined him and found his health as good as any man of his age reasonably could expect to have. Kennedy said he could not, knowing that, in good conscience sign the document.

  Hearing this, Healey pointed out it was going to be “a very politically unpopular thing to do.” Kennedy’s refusal to sign the Curley petition was of course infuriating to the local politicians back home.
It turned out he was the only Massachusetts Democratic congressman to do so. “I guess I’m going to be a one-term congressman,” he told one back-home advisor.

  Mark Dalton, who worked for Kennedy unpaid and picked up his own expenses, was disgusted with the Curley ploy. “My strong reaction was that he was a young man starting his political career, just on the threshold of it, and I thought that the older people who were putting the pressure on him to sign this petition had a terrible nerve.”

  Jack had gone against his party and the state machine regarding something he knew in his bones was wrong. It was also an issue of pride; he didn’t want to be a hack. Add in the matter of style: refusing to sign showed class. But standing against the pardon was both a political and moral risk that Kennedy would sweat for weeks to come. Joe Healey never forgot the episode.

  Curley, he recalled, “lived for some ten years after this event, but as a congressman, I heard Jack Kennedy say that, if anything had happened to Mr. Curley during his stay in prison, it would have been the end of his political career.” For his part, Jack would cite the Curley dilemma as a case study of how political fortunes turn on the unpredictable.

  Years later, to put it in perspective, Tip O’Neill, once a Curley protégé, refused to defend him on moral grounds. In the midst of one of our long backroom conversations about the old days, he had put it bluntly and succinctly, how “Curly was crooked” even by the standard of those days. “Personally crooked?” I asked.

  “Personally,” he said with the firmest possible pronunciation.

  But Jack Kennedy’s independence on matters such as the Curley petition was unsettling to political observers. He had begun to build a reputation for standing alone, a two-edged sword. Edmund Muskie, who served as governor and later senator from Maine, recalled how Kennedy’s behavior scared the clubhouse types. “I don’t know whether the more foresighted of them saw in young Jack Kennedy a major political force or not, but they certainly recognized his political attractions and his political potential; and they were disturbed by his apparent determination to be independent of the ‘regular’ party organization.”

  Mark Dalton remembered another moment when Kennedy stood out. “I’m going to debate Norman Thomas at the Harvard Law School,” said Jack one day, surprising Dalton, who had arrived at his friend’s Boston apartment to find the congressman hard at work. So now his young friend was going to take on the quadrennial candidate of the Socialist Party. “There was Kennedy sitting on the sofa. There were two or three books open there and six or seven books on the floor opened. Each one had been written by Norman Thomas. The next day I got reports from several people, and everyone was agreed that John Kennedy had won the debate with Thomas.”

  Again, the old dichotomy. His colleagues saw the popular bachelor who lived the good life in Georgetown, the rich kid with such a great sense of humor. Few noticed the other Jack, the occasional Cold Warrior, the autodidact who crammed for off-campus debates, who quietly but steadily was preparing himself for something greater than labor law.

  Like others, his secretary Mary Davis would come to learn that Jack Kennedy was not the fop he played so charmingly. For all the fun she saw him having, she could catch that spark of brilliance. “He didn’t make that many speeches, and we didn’t issue that many position papers when he was here in the House, but when he wanted to write a speech, he did it. I would say ninety-nine percent of that was done by JFK himself.

  “I can remember the first time he ever called me in—I even forget what the speech was going to be on, but it was going to be a major speech, one of his first major speeches. And I thought, ‘Oh, oh, this young, green congressman. What’s he going to do?’ No preparation. He called me in and he says, ‘I think we’d better get to work on the speech.’ And I said, ‘Okay, fine.’ And I thought he was going to stumble around, and he’ll ’er, ah, um.’

  “I was never so startled in my life. He sat back in his chair, and it just flowed right out. He had such a grasp of what he was saying, and was able to put it in such beautiful language. I thought, ‘Wow. This guy has a brain.’ I mean, you didn’t get that impression when you first met him because he looked so young and casual and informal. But he knew what it was all about. He knew about everything.”

  Richard Nixon had a similar epiphany. Ted Reardon recalled the time that Jack became deeply focused on an issue before the Education and Labor Committee, so much so that he went himself to the National Archives to look something up. “At the hearing, the thing I remember is when Jack started to talk, Dicky Boy sort of looked at him . . . with a look between awe and respect and fear.”

  Jack’s greatest secret remained his bad health, the extent of which, until then, was unknown even to him. When Kennedy arrived in Washington that January, his problems had followed. “He was not feeling well,” Mary Davis noticed. “I mean, he still had his jaundice, he still had his back problems.”

  “Emaciated!” is how his fellow congressman George Smathers of Florida remembers his frail classmate. The Florida Democrat, who had been assigned to the same hallway as Kennedy, vividly recalls that “every time there was a roll call, he’d have to come over on his crutches.” Wanting to help, Smathers often would stop by Jack’s office to give him a hand as his new friend made the painful journey across Independence Avenue to the Capitol to vote.

  The various maladies from which he visibly suffered were being blamed on his war traumas, but that explanation, while infinitely useful spinwise, was only part of the story. For Jack the truth lay deeper, and he was about to discover it.

  During the summer recess of 1947, a group of congressmen, Dick Nixon included, headed to Europe to study the impact of the Marshall Plan, which was now being implemented. For a bon voyage gesture—one that was, apparently, ignored—Kennedy had sent his married California colleague the names of a few women he might look up while in Paris. For himself, Kennedy also set off across the Atlantic, first to Ireland with his sister Kick, then to the Continent along with a Republican colleague to look into the Communist influence on European labor unions.

  Arriving in London after falling ill on the first leg of his journey, he was rushed to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a serious disorder of the adrenal glands. Prior to Jack’s release, the attending physician offered this grim prognosis to Jack’s English traveling companion. “That American friend of yours, he hasn’t got a year to live.” Just as the Queen Mary docked in New York, a priest came aboard to administer to him the last rites.

  He had lost his older brother in 1944. The husband of his beloved Kick had died the following year. Yet, on the return voyage home from England and near death, he showed himself as politically curious as ever. Much of his time was spent quizzing a fellow passenger on the new British health service created by the Labour Party.

  Jack continued to keep tight the compartments of his life. Like the ship’s captain he still was, he knew he couldn’t sink if he kept each of them strongly secure from the other. In Georgetown, he basked in a princely life, attended by a housekeeper, Margaret Ambrose, and a valet, George Thomas, who delivered a home-cooked hot lunch to his Capitol office each day.

  Meanwhile, Billy Sutton was with him 24/7, since Jack still couldn’t stand to be alone. On those nights he didn’t have a date for the movies, his “firecracker” provided entertainment and company. Mary Davis explained the dynamic between the two men this way: “He was someone he could completely relax with, who would be available, and who would be on call, who could do a thousand and one things for Jack, just being there, knowing that he had a friend close by.”

  Referring to the townhouse they shared on Thirty-first Street NW as akin to a “Hollywood Hotel,” Billy cherished the memories of all the gorgeous women coming and going. “Thinking about girls is what kept Jack alive,” he said.

  Playing the field, rejecting any definite romantic attachments, gave him the freedom he craved. Refusing to give fealty to the Democratic leadership or to the liberal o
ld guard gave him the independence he treasured. Being able to enter each world without the baggage from the other gave him the breezy, debonair life he wanted. Anywhere he went he could simply be Jack Kennedy, the guy he wanted to be, the one he’d made himself.

  “He did have a lot of close associations,” Mary Davis recalled. But not “a lot of close personal friendships.” Charlie Bartlett recalls the detached way his friend regarded political colleagues, no matter their status. “He used to enjoy kidding about the personalities on the scene, and there used to be a lot of jokes about different personalities from Sam Rayburn down, and even some sort of gossiping about the foibles of some of the senior statesmen in Congress.” He liked to watch what they were up to, enjoyed charting their purposes and behavior—but at a distance.

  George Smathers was the rare social friend Jack made in the House of Representatives. A marine in World War II, and son of a federal judge in Florida, he’d gotten to know Jack’s father at the Hialeah Park Race Track in Miami. Smathers, not to put too fine a point on it, was a hack, knew it, and enjoyed it—and this gave him, for Jack, a special aura of honesty. Confiding that he voted whatever way would keep him in office, this made him, in a world of hypocrites, special indeed.

  Kennedy told Charlie Bartlett he liked Smathers “because he doesn’t give a damn.” If he judged Dick Nixon to be the “smartest” guy on the Hill in those days, his pal George was the most fun to hang out with.

  Smathers knew his role: he was Falstaff. Jack was still playing Hal, a prince whose fears, in those days, were not—or not yet—of coming kingship but of mortality. Smathers remembers his pal being “deeply preoccupied by death,” talking endlessly on a Florida fishing trip about the best ways to die. He remembered Kennedy deciding it had to be drowning, “but only if you lost consciousness.”