“He wasn’t well known in Worcester. He hadn’t spent a lot of time in Worcester, and hadn’t gotten any good press in Worcester. It was something different. I wouldn’t have gone, myself, and I didn’t think my mother would go, but she was there. I was shocked to see her and all her friends. Shocked. I had never known them to bother with politicians. Then, I just knew.
“You’re talking two or three thousand people on a Sunday who came out to meet him. They went through the line once and they’d go back again, then shake his hand again, then just stop and watch him, just watch him. They would not leave. Nobody would leave until he left, and even after he left they all just stood there in awe. It was just that I had never seen anything like it. I just felt this guy could go all the way.”
In fact, the very visible strains of his physical infirmities caused Jack Kennedy—greeting voters as he stood there on crutches—to resemble distantly, and despite his wealth, a character like Dickens’s Tiny Tim. His simple fortitude compelled people to root for him. When X-rays taken of Jack’s spine in 1951 showed the collapse of support bones in his spinal column, it could hardly have been surprising to anyone who spent time with him, especially out on the road. Charlie Bartlett, who joined him on some of these trips, remembered Jack keeping a stiff upper lip through it all. “I must say, he always had a sort of stoic, sociable quality about it. He’d drive all over that damn state. With that back it must have hurt like hell, and he’d sit there with the coat collar up and drive through those cold Massachusetts evenings.”
But even though Ken O’Donnell was now convinced Jack might actually have a very good shot at winning against the formidable Lodge, what was still needed was someone to run the show. “The whole operation had degenerated into a three-ring circus, with Joe Kennedy coming in once in a while disrupting things, Jack showing up only rarely, and nothing getting done the minute he left.” Somebody had to play middleman.
“I knew the Kennedys well enough by then to know the only one who can talk to the Kennedys is a Kennedy. It took a Kennedy to take on a Kennedy. I knew Bobby was the only one with enough sense, who was tough enough and a regular enough guy to run the campaign. He’d be the only one able to turn to the father and say, ‘No, Jack won’t do it.’ “
At this point Ken made his move. He phoned Bobby and laid it on the line, all but demanding he drop everything and get up to Massachusetts to run his brother’s campaign. Otherwise, Jack was going to have his butt handed to him. Bobby hated what he was hearing, for the understandable reason that he wanted to build his own career as a Justice Department lawyer and thus his own life. But he could hear his friend’s argument, knew it, probably, even before he heard it. Someone had to broker matters between his dad and Jack. He was the one—the only one—to do it, and do it right.
Now that Bobby seemingly was willing to leave his job and come run the campaign, there was the problem of selling Jack on the idea. O’Donnell recalled the scene in the car when he and his boss went head to head on it. The truth was, Jack didn’t like hearing Ken had talked to Bobby without going through him first, but, at the same time, and despite his irritation, he saw the point.
First, Jack sounded off. He, above all, seemed stunned to learn that there’d been any lack of action on the part of his people. As O’Donnell remembers the tongue-lashing, Kennedy couldn’t believe they hadn’t begun naming local secretaries across the state. “As far as I’m concerned, this moment you can go ahead and begin. I’m not interested in the nuts and bolts of who’s going to run what. That’s the job of the organization and not the candidate.”
But, after he’d finished giving O’Donnell a taste of his anger, he’d also obviously talked his way into a decision. Ken O’Donnell had won. “That was the day that Bobby decided he would move to Massachusetts. Bobby, as I recall, went back to get his own personal affairs in order, and then he came up.”
Mark Dalton had seen it coming. Though he had his own law practice, he’d been volunteering time for Jack’s political career, mainly writing speeches, ever since the victorious ’46 race. He’d now given up his practice and come to work full-time for the congressman. It was a change in status, from friend and unofficial counselor to paid aide, and it would matter.
For him, the decisive incident occurred at a meeting at a social club in Fall River. As he made to leave, Kennedy had to pass the bar, where was parked a convivial trio “feeling no pain.” The men garrulously corralled Kennedy. Dalton, ignoring the candidate’s plight, had continued alone to the parking lot.
It was the wrong move. Jack wasn’t happy. “He got in the car, turned around, and stuck his finger in my belly,” Dalton recalled a half century later. “ ‘Don’t you ever let that happen to me again.’ ” Now he got the picture. “I was to take care of him with drunks. I was his caretaker, his bodyguard. That son of a bitch! Right in the belly! ‘Don’t you ever’!”
Jack’s rough treatment of his old pal was a sign of something off-kilter in the relationship. For him, the problem with Dalton wasn’t about getting waylaid by the Fall River drunks; rather, it was about the campaign, his father, and the way things felt stalled. The final moment for Dalton came at a meeting where Joe Kennedy tore into him for leasing a new campaign headquarters without his permission. “He didn’t like the building,” O’Donnell remembered. “He thought we’d paid too much for it. He didn’t like the owner. He thought the location was bad, and they had a great brawl about it.”
When Jack refused to stand up for his campaign manager, Dalton had no choice except to quit. Bobby made the gesture of trying to soften the blow by asking him to stay on as speechwriter, but Dalton left the office that day with his belongings and never returned. “I decided that I could no longer play a role in the Kennedy campaign in view of the feeling which had developed. I wrote John a little note saying I was through and then I told him that I was through.” Listening to him so many years later, it was obvious that Dalton never got over the way he’d been discarded.
Once Bobby arrived, he began working eighteen-hour days to get the campaign workers focused and up to full speed. “I didn’t become involved in what words should go in a speech, what should be said on a poster or billboard, what should be done on television. I was so busy with my part of it that I didn’t see any of that.” Most important, when he moved in, their father moved out.
This was, just for the record, not Bobby Kennedy’s first involvement in a Jack Kennedy campaign. He had a talent for organization. In the ’46 race, as a twenty-year-old, he’d asked for the toughest area, East Cambridge, territory loyal to the former Cambridge mayor Mike Neville, Jack’s strongest opponent, Tip O’Neill’s candidate. But Bobby took it slowly, laying the groundwork, spending time playing softball with the kids of the neighborhood, killing the notion that the Kennedys thought themselves superior. His brother ended up doing better in that community than anyone had expected.
Bobby enjoyed one advantage over Jack, and it had to do with their attitude toward Joe. While his brother was stubborn in his dealings with their father, Bobby was respectful and needy for love. This created a smooth relationship, even if one layered with guile. He proved to be the essential cog in the Kennedy machine. No one else could have done what he was now doing. There he was, having left his job in Washington, working all out in the campaign, using his father’s resources—money and public-relations clout—to produce the maximum impact where it counted, on the hearts and minds of the Massachusetts voters. Charlie Bartlett remembers listening to Bobby on the phone with the senior Kennedy. “Yes, Dad,” Bobby kept repeating, “Yes, Dad.” However, he wasn’t taking orders; rather, he was pacifying. Where Jack always took their dad with a grain of salt and didn’t mind letting him know it, the younger Kennedy boy never treated him as less than the paterfamilias.
It was now May and the election was six months away. Out in the field, Larry O’Brien was helping the cause by building the organization from the ground up, one Kennedy “secretary” at a time. What this meant,
at a very basic, very significant level, was the creation of a totally different political network from that of the regular Massachusetts Democrats. “Our secretaries were making weekly reports to me, and they were growing more sophisticated from week to week. . . . For a long time neither Lodge nor the Democratic regulars realized what we were doing.”
At their April 6 meeting at the Ritz-Carlton, Governor Dever had made it clear that Jack was going to have to build his own organization. Meaning, if he chose to go up against Lodge, it was his show, for he wouldn’t be getting any help from Dever, who had his own race to run. But such a challenge also suited the Kennedy people. They wanted solid loyalty from their people, no confusion about which candidate mattered most.
For me, Ken O’Donnell personified the old brand of politics, which the Kennedys were customizing on a family basis. From the moment he signed on, he had one vocation: helping and protecting John F. Kennedy. And right now, in the summer of 1952, his value lay in his ability to grasp and use the reality of post–World War II Massachusetts, the world he knew. As a man who’d lived between Worcester and Cambridge, between Holy Cross and Harvard, he had a natural understanding of those voters Jack Kennedy needed to pry away from Lodge. They were folks whose parents were loyal Democrats, while they, this new generation, reserved the right to cast their ballot candidate by candidate.
What Jack Kennedy was trying to do, helped by O’Donnell and others, wasn’t going to be easy. They were trying to outflank Lodge, a moderate Republican, from the right and the left. In other words, Kennedy had to come off as both a tough Cold Warrior and a work-and-wages Democrat—which is precisely what he’d spent six years being. This allowed him to strike at his rival from the right for not being aggressive enough on foreign policy and from the left for not being sufficiently on the side of the average family struggling to make ends meet; that is, for not being a Democrat. It was a pincer move that was to work well again in a later Kennedy campaign. The strategy is to bash an opponent on both sides until you force him to go both ways to avoid the very charges you’re making against him. The voter sees the targeted rival being pulled apart by his own hands.
Kennedy set his people digging for weak spots in Lodge’s record. “Lodge was always on the popular side of every issue, which didn’t necessarily make him an awfully good statesman, but might make him a satisfactory politician,” Jack told Rip Horton. To prepare for the planned bombardment of Lodge, Ted Reardon, who’d been Jack’s top aide on the Hill, began assembling an inventory of his voting on the issues. This carefully documented loose-leaf binder, each page covered in sheer plastic, was soon dubbed “Lodge’s Dodges”—or, more irreverently, the “Bible”—and it provided the ammunition for the coming all-out assault.
Joe Healey, Kennedy’s speechwriter, found himself impressed by Reardon’s attention to Lodge’s every word, tracking down every discrepancy. “The major credit belongs to Ted Reardon for certainly one of the most thorough jobs in this area I have ever seen.”
From this point on, the campaign’s operating structure quickly fell into line. Bobby, as the campaign manager, decided where the money went. This is always the supreme power that comes with that title. “Any decision you wanted, Bobby made,” O’Donnell recalled. “If you were talking about spending two hundred bucks to do such and such, Bobby would say, yes, go ahead, and that was it.”
The Kennedy Party, as it continued to grow, was the perfect model of a volunteer operation. Those who came to work for Jack found themselves making a personal investment in the candidate’s future, resulting in a campaign of relationship rather than transaction. In this sense, it wasn’t about political payoffs, at least not in the business-as-usual way. Anyone who walked into a Kennedy headquarters was, right off the bat, given a task to do. His people knew the best method of earning and toughening loyalty was by quickly getting a newly interested citizen onto the team. Before you knew it, you were a “Kennedy person.”
What happened, as in 1946, was that word would start to spread that a member of this family or that friend or neighbor was “working for Jack Kennedy.” It made the campaign a kind of cement, ever expanding its hold. You pretty much wanted to take part. It was as simple as that for many people. And so the organization built on itself.
To enforce this, Bobby Kennedy repeatedly made it clear to one and all that there were to be no paid campaign workers. No exceptions. One local political veteran who’d supported Jack’s campaign in ’46 would learn the hard way that the campaign manager this time around wasn’t about to be messed with. Here’s Ken O’Donnell’s account of what happened when that fellow failed to take the hint:
“ ‘How much money is the candidate going to give us to spend in our district?’ this guy called out at a meeting. When Bob Kennedy ignored him and kept to the order of business, the man then stood up and cut Bobby off. ‘Listen, kid, we’ve been around a long time, we know politics. You’re wet behind the ears and you’d be better off in Washington than here, where you don’t know what you are doing. You’ve got to pay these people; you want campaign people out working for you, you got to pay them, and you can afford it. The Kennedys are rich.’ Bobby just stared at him. Then he got up, grabbed him by his collar, and showed him the door—and, as he was throwing him out in the street, he told him, ‘Would you mind getting lost . . . and keeping yourself lost.’ “
When the troublemaker appealed his case to Jack, Bobby didn’t like it one bit. “Look, you get one guy like that crying, then you have to pay him and his volunteers to work. Then other people hear about it, and then they want to be paid to volunteer, and then we’ll end up spending a million dollars in Boston alone. I’m not going to have him around. You asked me to run this campaign. I didn’t want to, but now I’m here, so I will run it my way.”
Jack was actually tougher than his younger brother. When Governor Dever began to worry that he was going to lose his race and saw Kennedy gaining strength, he offered to combine forces. Joseph Kennedy liked the idea; O’Brien and O’Donnell didn’t. Jack agreed with his people, refusing to be Dever’s life preserver. He gave Bobby the job of delivering the decision to his father and Dever both. “Don’t give in to them, but don’t get me involved with it,” were the instructions. The older brother was becoming a hard-nosed, un-sentimental politician. Bobby’s role was to play the part of one.
From the beginning, the teas that started it all proved to be an excellent recruiting platform. As O’Donnell was to explain, “Nobody went to one who didn’t fill out a card. We had them in every community, and . . . they allowed our organization to get going and to get our secretary in action.” They became competitive events. “When Lowell had four thousand, Lawrence had to have five thousand. So the secretary had a great incentive.”
Hugh Fraser, one of Jack’s British friends visiting at the time, was impressed by the novelty of these occasions, referring to them as “shenanigans.”
“The ‘tea party’ technique amazed me,” said Fraser, who’d never seen anything of its kind.
Anyone who organized a tea was required to provide a quota of signatures for Kennedy’s nomination papers. Only 2,500 signatures statewide were required for a candidate in the Senate primary, but Dave Powers and Larry O’Brien had decided that they’d ask the regional organizers to produce a grand total of 250,000. The reason, according to O’Donnell, was not just “psychological”; it was also a way to have a quarter-million voters not only committed but actively participating in the early stages, before the real fight started up in the general election campaign. Too, it was a gauge to help them figure how the organizers were performing and which ones were particularly effective.
The teas were aimed at winning the hearts of the working class, and also as a means of identifying and organizing the Democratic voter base. But equally crucial was the need to go after those Irish and other traditional Democratic voters who’d drifted away and might very likely stay drifted with the popular Ike as the Republican candidate.
It had be
en customary for statewide Democratic candidates in Massachusetts to expend their major effort in the larger cities, where most of their voters lived. In other words, they counted heavily on Boston. Jack Kennedy, instead, went out and methodically hit every neighborhood, including the largely Republican suburbs, ignoring the toll this relentless, unsparing, but extraordinarily effective effort to reach voters took on his physical well-being.
O’Donnell figured that Jack Kennedy could pull votes in small suburban communities where no other Democrat might. “We appreciated the fact that there were an awful lot of Democrats throughout the state, in those small towns, who’d moved out of Boston and out of the big cities into these small communities, had bought their own homes. They were Democrats, but ashamed of some of the antics that had been associated with the party.” He saw these as potential Kennedy people.
Here again, Kennedy had gotten traction from his early start in places off the standard grid for Democrats. “We’d be in those homes—in the homes with seven or eight people, who’d remember having coffee with Jack Kennedy in 1947 or ’48,” said O’Donnell.
The Second World War had changed a great deal in American life. In the Northeast, as elsewhere, the Irish and other ethnic groups were seeing beyond the old boundaries, and didn’t want to be the pawns of the big-city political bosses. They wanted the fresh air of the suburbs, the freedom of making up their own minds at election time. Many had gone to college under the GI Bill. They no longer felt confined by the politics of the old neighborhood. “Boston” meant a certain kind of old politics, and a sort they were only too happy to leave behind. This sense of the shifting times was definitely an idea the Kennedy campaign made skillful use of.
As election day approached, Tip O’Neill, facing no real opposition in the general election, got a call asking him to lend a hand. He was to be Jack’s stand-in at an election-eve radio broadcast. Tip’s script from Kennedy headquarters arrived just minutes before air-time. It “kicked the living hell out of Henry Cabot Lodge,” O’Neill would recall, to his chagrin. Senator Lodge, who spoke next, was outraged by what he regarded as an ambush, and told O’Neill’s wife, Millie, “The Kennedys would never give a speech like that for him. And I would never say the things about Jack Kennedy that he was saying about me.”
Jack Kennedy Page 13
