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, Reardon 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.
Now Jack Kennedy had survived another brush with death. He was helped through the crisis by the one strong emotional reality of his life: old friendships. One name high on the list was Red Fay. “In January 1955, Bobby called to ask if I could come to Florida. The family was worried about Jack, and didn’t know whether he was going to live. The doctor felt that he was losing interest, and a visit from someone closely associated with happier times might help him regain his usual optimism and enjoyment of life. I flew to Palm Beach and spent ten days with him.”
It was an opportunity for someone who cared about him to realize what Jack was up against. Fay watched as his recuperating friend gave himself a shot as part of the treatment for his back. “ ‘Jack,’ I said, ‘the way you take that jab, it looks like it doesn’t even hurt.’ Before I had time to dodge, he reached over and jabbed the same needle into my leg. I screamed with the pain.”
Down in Palm Beach, with time on his hands, surrounded by Jackie and family members, he took up oil painting and spent hours playing Monopoly. His convalescence lasted for almost six months and was interrupted only by a trip back to New York for a second surgery. While in Florida he grew close to his new brother-in-law, the young Hollywood star Peter Lawford, who’d married Patricia Kennedy the year before. “I think we hit it off because he loved my business. He loved anything to do with the arts and motion pictures. It never ceased to amaze me.”
The British-born Lawford, who’d been in films since he was a young boy, observed Jack with an actor’s keen eye. He got as good a look at him as anybody. “I don’t think anybody ever made up John Kennedy’s mind for him. I don’t think anybody swayed him, including his father. I think he took what he wanted and then sifted it, you know, evaluated it. Then he did what he wanted to do with it.” Lawford was amazed at Kennedy’s self-discipline and his will to make the most of every day, the preciousness of time to him. “He was really ill with that back, but he fought his way through that, and, as you know, wrote the book while he was lying on his back.”
The book was Profiles in Courage. It was Kennedy’s tribute to eight U.S. senators who during their legislative careers had taken positions highly unpopular with their constituents. Though Kennedy dug up the stories and sketched out his intentions, Ted Sorensen did most of the actual writing. So it’s fair to call the project a collaboration. The bookish child had been father to the man. “He was enormously well read in American history and literature,” Hugh Fraser, the British politician and longtime friend, recalled. “I mean, to me, staggeringly so.” Charlie Bartlett saw the book as an obvious undertaking for Jack. “I think the whole concept of the really gutsy decisions made by men with seats in the Senate fascinated him. So when he had this time, I suppose it was natural for him to turn to it.” Bartlett, like all the others gathered around Jack in Palm Beach, would watch him, still unable to rise from bed, writing upside down on a board suspended above him.
In his memoirs, Sorensen explained that they worked on the book by letter and telephone. The reason was, he was in Washington helping hold down the fort in Kennedy’s office while his boss was on his back down in Florida. The way Sorensen explained the enterprise, Kennedy played an especially serious role composing the first and last chapters and that he, the aide, wrote the first draft of the rest.
The theme and the bulk of the content were pure Jack. As smart as Sorensen was, and even given his familiarity with politics—his Republican father had been the attorney general of Nebraska—he was nonetheless a twenty-seven-year-old. He’d arrived in Washington only four years earlier, armed with a law degree but no on-the-ground political experience. He would admit that he was nowhere as well read as Kennedy in American history.
The voice of John F. Kennedy seems to me to be noticeably audible in Profiles in Courage. For example, in the opening passages, you read, “Where else, in a non-totalitarian society, but in the political profession is the individual expected to sacrifice all—including his own career—for the national good?” It’s a quip that, I think, captures Jack Kennedy’s own ironic style. Another sentence, I believe, derives from his ability to see things from the inside out as well as the outside in: the prospect of forced retirement from “the most exclusive club in the world, the possibilities of giving up the interesting work, the fascinating trappings and the impressive prerogatives of Congressional office, can cause even the most courageous politician a serious loss of sleep.”
Here’s a story that comes clearly from the insider Jack: “One senator, since retired, said that he voted with the special interests on every issue, hoping that by election time all of them added together would constitute nearly a majority that would remember him favorably, while the other members of the public would never know about—much less remember—his vote against their welfare.” That senator was George Smathers, his pal who’d once said he didn’t “give a damn.” That business about the senator being “retired” was a cover.
David Ormsby-Gore, now a member of Parliament, stayed in touch with his friend as he recovered. “He must have been getting near the end of the book—but one of the lessons he had drawn from examining these moments in American history was that there were very much two sides to each problem. Now, this didn’t prevent him being capable of taking decisions, and knowing that somebody had to make decisions, but it did always prevent him saying, ‘I know that I have got nothing but right on my side, and the other side is entirely wrong,’ and he never would adopt that attitude.
“He said that one of the rather sad things about life, particularly if you were a politician, was that you discovered that the other side really had a good case. He was most unpartisan in that way. . . . He wondered whether he was really cut out to be a politician because he was often so impressed by
the other side’s arguments when he really examined them in detail. Where he thought that there was a valid case against his position, he was always rather impressed by the arguments advanced.”
At the end of May, with the help of physical therapy, a corset, and a rocking chair, Jack was set to proceed gingerly with a career that had hung, along with his life, in the balance. Pale and limping, he returned to Capitol Hill more sensitive than usual to imagery. When a Senate page, Martin Dowd, saw the long-absent senator approaching on crutches and opened the Senate chamber door for him, Kennedy tore into him. “Shut that door!” Kennedy yelled to the crushed seventeen-year-old. Unwilling to drop the matter, he confronted Dowd a moment later. “Don’t you touch that door until I tell you to!”
Sorensen could sense how his boss had grown tougher, not just on others but himself. The political columnist and Kennedy friend Joseph Alsop also recognized the transformation: “Something very important happened inside him, I think, when he had that illness, because he came out of it a very much more serious fellow than he was prior to it. He had gone through the valley of the shadow of death, and he had displayed immense courage, which he’d always had.”
That June, Kennedy gave a party in Hyannis, inviting to Cape Cod not just his own supporters, but also a sizable group of Democrats who’d never been active for him. Ken O’Donnell helped pull it together. “Larry and I got a call saying he was coming back to Massachusetts and the first thing he wanted to do was have a political reunion of the Kennedy secretaries.” Clearly, the purpose of the event was to prove to the faithful how healthy he was. It was to show others, coming out of morbid curiosity, that he remained formidable.
“The thing I remember most about the event was that he was physically able to move around. There were no crutches. They had softball games and so forth, and it was an excellent outing. A very successful political event—an all-day affair.” O’Donnell could see Jack’s appeal to the rank-and-file types hadn’t faded. “What struck me the most and to me was critical was that he still held the same old attraction for people. All our people loved him, but you knew there was no question about that. If he’d returned flat on his back or in a wheelchair, our people would have been there. But I was watching the others. The reaction from the professional politicians that were there: they loved him. Loved him, despite themselves.”
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