Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

Equally important to him was the reality he’d seen for himself during his trip to Indochina three years earlier. And that reality was the power of nationalism. On this issue Jack Kennedy found common ground with the newly elected Republican senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, who demanded, as the price for American aid, that the French promise Indochina its independence.

  But it was closer to home that Cold War issues were causing Senator Kennedy the greatest challenges. Since January 1950, Joseph R. McCarthy, the Republican junior senator from Wisconsin, had made himself into a force to be reckoned with. His relentless effort to unearth Communists within the government and the American establishment made “McCarthyism” the one-size-fits-all label pinned to the national Red hunt. With bullying zeal, McCarthy and his Senate subcommittee unjustly tarnished and in some cases ruined reputations.

  McCarthy was fueled by the temper of the times. In August 1945, the people of America had looked out upon a world dominated by the United States as by no other country in history. Within a year, the geopolitical shifts were so alarming that Winston Churchill spoke of an Iron Curtain being drawn down between free Western Europe and an Eastern Europe falling increasingly under the control of Moscow. Within two years, the victory in Europe had largely been undone. Czechoslovakia and Poland, the countries that had been the casus belli of World War II, were now under Soviet domination.

  Other news from around the globe added to the sense of disillusion and insecurity across America. In 1949, the same year Mao Tse-tung claimed all of mainland China, the Soviets exploded their first atom bomb, an event that occurred shockingly in advance of American predictions—or expectations.

  In 1950 came the conviction of the top American diplomat Alger Hiss, who’d presided at the United Nations Conference in San Francisco, which Jack Kennedy covered for Hearst, for his role in a Soviet espionage plot. The fear of Communism on the advance would spike violently with the coming of the Korean War. In July of that year, a thirty-two-year-old New Yorker, Julius Rosenberg, was arrested for helping to pass atomic secrets to Moscow; a month later, his wife, Ethel, was taken into custody.

  This was the national mood when Joseph McCarthy entered stage right. He’d begun his crusade in January of 1950 in a speech to a Republican women’s group in Wheeling, West Virginia. There he borrowed phrases from a speech Richard Nixon had just given on the Hiss conviction. McCarthy upped the ante by declaring that Hiss was only the iceberg’s tip, that the State Department actually, if unknowingly, harbored large numbers of dedicated Communists—and all committed to the sabotage of American interests in favor of those of the Soviet Union. Unchecked, he would ride high on the brazenness of such charges, reaching his zenith of popularity in January 1954. At that juncture, 50 percent of the American people held a favorable opinion of the Wisconsin senator, just 29 percent an unfavorable one.

  But his downhill slide was about to begin, precipitated by CBS’s Edward R. Murrow, a broadcaster who’d made his reputation reporting from London during the Blitz and who was revered for his integrity. In March 1954, Murrow aired a special entitled Point of Order! in which he attacked McCarthy, and dared him to present an on-air rebuttal. McCarthy’s response offers a classic example of how he strung together events to craft his outrageous indictments.

  “My good friends,” he said, “if there were no Communists in our government, would we have consented to and connived to turn over all of our Chinese friends to the Russians? If there were no Communists in our government, why did we delay for eighteen months, delay our research on the hydrogen bomb, even though our intelligence agencies were reporting day after day that the Russians were feverishly pushing their development of the H-Bomb? Our nation may well die because of that eighteen months’ deliberate delay. And I ask you, who caused it? Was it loyal Americans? Or was it traitors in our government?”

  There you have it, an absurd but compelling case against those in high places. It was the old charge of rot at the top. If the Chinese Communists took over China, it was the doing of Commies in our own government. If the Russians had sprinted forward and now had flaunted their H-bomb, it was because we’d slowed down to let them catch us. In short, if anything bad happened, the reason is we were stabbed in the back.

  McCarthy loved charging respected figures with bad faith, thus lending a catchy populism to his accusations of treason. In his view, it was the country’s best and brightest who were selling us out. “The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because the enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in government we can give.”

  To validate this belief system, he fixed in his sights on such lofty officials as President Truman himself, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and his predecessor, George Marshall, who’d been army chief of staff in World War II. He attacked them all, famously calling Marshall the perpetrator of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”

  Of course, no demagogue ever has a lifetime career, and Joe McCarthy’s own downfall was determined when he decided to focus his crusade on the presence of hidden Communists in the U.S. Army. The target he selected for attack was an army major, Dr. Irving Peress, a dentist who’d been a member of the American Labor Party, believed to be a Communist Party front. When Peress’s commanding officer at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, Brigadier General Ralph Zwicker—a Silver and Bronze Star recipient who’d been a hero of the Battle of the Bulge—appeared before his committee, the senator taunted him, saying he was “not fit to wear that uniform.”

  That encounter showed the extent to which McCarthy was beginning to spiral out of control. His absolute fall from grace came a month later in a moment of television history. The newly launched American Broadcasting Corporation, ABC, covered gavel to gavel the thirty-six days of hearings convened. The April 1954 broadcasts of the Army-McCarthy proceedings gave the audience sitting at home the chance to examine McCarthy’s own conduct as well as the wild charges he brought against army personnel.

  Thus, with the entire country watching—on some days, as many as 20 million people—he self-destructed, with the help of a righteous attorney, Joseph Nye Welch, the army’s chief counsel, who objected to the senator’s innuendo-filled attack on one of his staff lawyers for a past membership in a left-wing legal group. Voicing his distaste, he accused McCarthy of “reckless cruelty” and then asked whether he had “no decency.” It was a stunningly unexpected comeback, and one that marked McCarthy as a pure bully. For the first time, many Americans focused on Joe McCarthy’s tactics and didn’t like the looks of them.

  Not everyone turned on McCarthy. More than a third of the country remained loyal to him after the five weeks of legal spectacle. His fellow Irish-Americans were especially defiant, seeing him as a lonely challenger to the country’s political, diplomatic, and academic elites.

  Within days of the Army-McCarthy hearings, Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, a Republican, introduced a resolution to censure his colleague and remove him from the chairmanship of his committees. It read, in part, “Were the Wisconsin senator in the pay of the Communists, he could not have done a better job for them.” Now that public opinion had turned on him, the Democrats were free to cast Joe McCarthy as their ultimate archvillain.

  Jack Kennedy had a McCarthy problem and he knew it. Joining his fellow Democrats, who were now calling for McCarthy’s head on a pike, put him in a serious dilemma. For one thing, up until this moment he’d successfully managed to say nothing on the subject of Joe McCarthy’s harsh tactics. It was a silence he would, in the years to come, always have to answer for. Outside the Senate, moreover, he was actually known to be quite friendly with the man. The pair of them had hung around together during Jack’s early congressional days, and McCarthy, handsome in a Black Irish way, had been out on dates with
Jack’s sisters. A close friend of Bobby’s wife, Ethel, McCarthy was a kind of unofficial uncle to their two young children, especially the eldest, Kathleen. Because of his friendship with the Kennedys, McCarthy had refrained from endorsing his fellow Senate Republican Henry Cabot Lodge in the race he lost to Jack. The December before, Jack had been a guest at McCarthy’s wedding, as had many of the Kennedy family.

  Another problem for Jack was Bobby’s closeness to the senator. For half the previous year, he’d been a McCarthy staffer. Their father, a financial supporter of the Republican senator as well as a friend, had helped pave the way for the job. However, Bobby had quit, smarting under the fact that he was outranked by the senator’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, a fellow whom he despised. But his departure didn’t last long. The next January he switched sides, hired now by the investigating committee’s Democratic minority as its chief counsel.

  When the time came for the Democrats to move against McCarthy, it would fall to the twenty-eight-year-old Bobby, despite his continued personal loyalty, to write the draft of the Democratic members’ report on the senator’s out-of-control conduct. While it targeted Cohn’s behavior, it placed responsibilities on the committee’s chairman. “Senator McCarthy and Mr. Cohn merit severe criticism,” and “the Senator cannot escape responsibility for the misconduct of Cohn. Nor can he excuse the irresponsibility attaching to many of his charges. The Senate should take action to correct this situation.”

  Still, it was one thing to staff the committee report, as Bobby, acting in his official capacity, had done. It would be a very different matter to vote for the historic censure of a colleague—a man who was also a friend—as Jack would now be asked to do.

  There had actually been rumblings against McCarthy in the Senate for several years at this point, including a declaration made by his own party members that denounced smear tactics—in effect, McCarthyism—without mentioning the names of any specific lawmaker. In response, McCarthy contemptuously dubbed Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who originated the declaration, along with the six fellow Republicans who joined her, “Snow White and Her Six Dwarfs.” With the Army-McCarthy hearings having weakened McCarthy and made him at last vulnerable, Senator Flanders’s intention was now to deliver the coup de grâce.

  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, J
ackie, 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.