On the Senate floor in July 1957, Kennedy called boldly for revision of the Eisenhower administration’s Eurocentric foreign policy. America, he said, should end its automatic alliance with its colonialist World War II allies and recognize instead the rising aspirations of the developing world. “The most powerful single force in the world today is neither Communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile,” he began. “It is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent.” His criticism was aimed at French colonial rule in Algeria. Kennedy explained that France’s 1954 defeat at Dien Bien Phu had not resulted from a shortage of military power. France would have lost the war in Indochina, he argued, even if it “could afford to increase substantially the manpower already poured into the area.”
The speech, certainly prophetic for U.S. policy, stirred up the pot, just as he intended. “His words annoyed the French, embarrassed the American administration, and almost certainly would not satisfy Algerian nationalist leaders,” the London Observer tartly noted at the time. “But they did one thing: they introduced Kennedy the statesman.” This is precisely what he intended. Lou Harris, Kennedy’s new pollster, was to confess that the “Algeria speech” had, in fact, been customized to appeal to the wing of the party whose backing his client needed. It was meant to show the liberals just how far Joe Kennedy’s boy had come. The irony, Harris noted, like everyone else who knew Jack, was that his boss probably read more and was a good deal more informed than those on the Democratic Left into whose political bed he was trying to climb.
Kennedy had been careful to embed his argument in sound Cold War thinking; that is, that the fight in North Africa was weakening the far more important contest with the Soviet Union. “The war in Algeria, engaging more than 400,000 French soldiers, has stripped the continental forces of NATO to the bone,” he declared. “It has undermined our relations with Tunisia and Morocco.” And, more directly against U.S. interests: “It has endangered the continuation of some of our most strategic airbases, and threatened our geographical advantages over the Communist orbit.” Kennedy was still anti-Communist, but now he was connecting this great cause with America’s revolutionary roots. “The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism—and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism.”
Kennedy was remembering the compelling force of nationalism he’d seen firsthand on that trip to Indochina in 1951. He was being true to what he’d discovered himself.
The Algeria speech offered political benefit with little if any cost. It appealed to the Northern liberals, but not at the expense of the Democratic South. Algerian independence had no chance of angering those Southerners who had rallied to him in Chicago the previous summer.
Kennedy was still trying to have it both ways: he wanted to be the liberals’ candidate while not giving up those he’d won over in ’56. Even as he seduced the Democratic Left with urbane commentary on colonialism, he wanted to protect the popularity with Southerners that he’d demonstrated during his vice-presidential tug-of-war with Estes Kefauver. Whatever maneuvers he was slyly executing in order to win over the liberals, he wanted, at the same time, to keep himself positioned as the best hope of moderate and conservative Democrats. And this group included those Southerners still holding fast to segregation.
Such folks liked the fact he was a “moderate,” and he wanted to keep it that way. In the same year he gave the Algeria speech, Kennedy voted for the amendment to the 1957 Civil Rights Act that allowed jury trials for local officials charged in civil rights cases. While passage of this amendment was viewed as critical to avoiding a filibuster, it was also seen as a way for all-white Southern juries to continue, routinely, to acquit defendants in such cases. Kennedy’s position on the jury-trial question earned him a rebuke from the NAACP, but maintained the warm regard of his colleagues below the Mason-Dixon line.
The man himself was more complicated. Kennedy had an instinctive contempt toward discrimination. Speaking at the Somerset Club, a private men’s club in Boston, he suffered an introduction by a member who jokingly insinuated that the Democrats were the party of “the help.” After hearing this, Jack remarked to his friend Alistair Forbes: “Well, I wondered why more people weren’t blushing with shame. But can you believe that such people can still be around?”
Forbes recalled, “He was a man wholly devoid of rancor, and his personality was completely well integrated so that he had no worries of any kind at all. He could see everything with a sort of detached view.
“And yet he was aware of the interplay of snobbish forces in his life. In England he could see which English people basically didn’t like Americans, and he knew people who didn’t like Irish people. He was always amused and interested by this sort of sin, but absolutely unaffected by it because he was his own man and happy with his money in the bank—and damn good-looking.”
George Smathers agreed. He said his friend was “always greatly interested in civil rights.” Then he amended that: “Put it this way—not civil rights legislation so much, but civil rights because he was against discrimination. I think he felt that, as an Irishman, somewhere along the line he had been discriminated against. I don’t know, but I did get the feeling that he felt that other Irishmen had felt the sting of prejudice.”
At the same time, Kennedy operated at a distinct remove from certain realities, even as he crisscrossed the country broadening his reach. Forbes, for one, was struck by his lack of awareness about black America. “I remember very late, sometime in the fifties, he’d only just heard the phrase ‘Uncle Tom’ and was like a man who’d just made this extraordinary discovery. ‘Do you know that Clayton Powell’s got this marvelous expression?’ he asked me.” Powell, it seems, had been talking to Jack about a black colleague in Chicago, saying, “The trouble with him is he’s an Uncle Tom.” Learning this new expression from Harlem’s congressman delighted him.
Politically, he knew that if he wanted to make his way into liberal hearts and minds, he had to forge ties with those who cared about such issues as civil rights. He wanted very much to have the support of men such as Arthur Schlesinger, one of the co-founders of Americans for Democratic Action and a longtime Stevenson stalwart. Here’s an entry in Schlesinger’s journal from 1959. It displays just what kind of effort Jack Kennedy was mounting to win over a man whose support was critical.
July 19—Jack Kennedy called up around noon and asked us to come to dinner at Hyannis Port this evening. Marian could not go, so I went alone. The Kennedy place was less grand than I had imagined. I expected miles of ocean frontage with no alien houses in view; but it is a cluster of Kennedy houses, all large and comfortable but not palatial, in the midst of a settled community. Jackie Kennedy was the only other person present, and we all drank and talked about from 8 to 12:30. I only brought two cigars, one of which Jack took, having typically no cigars in the house. Jackie wanted for a moment to go and see A Nun’s Story, which was being screened in a projection room in one of the other houses; but, though somewhat encouraged by Jack to go, finally stayed the evening out with us. She was lovely but seemed excessively flighty on politics, asking with wide-eyed naivete questions like: “Jack, why don’t you just tell them that you won’t go into any of those old primaries?” Jack was in a benign frame of mind and did not blink; but clearly such remarks could, in another context, be irritating. This is all the more so since Jackie, on other subjects, is intelligent and articulate. She was reading Proust when I arrived; she talked very well about Nicolas Nabokov, Joe Alsop, and other personalities, and one feels that out of some perversity she pretends an ignorance about politics larger even than life.
As for Jack, he gave his usual sense of seeming candor. I write “seeming” without meaning to imply doubts; so far as I could tell, he was exceedingly open; and this was, indeed, the freest, as well as the longest, talk I have ever had with him. As usual, he was i
mpersonal in his remarks, quite prepared to see the views and interests of others. He showed more animation and humor than usual and, indeed, was rather funny in some of his assessments of people and situations. He seems fairly optimistic about his presidential chances. He thinks that Humphrey can’t win, that Johnson will take care of Symington, and that he will go into Los Angeles with a large delegate lead. He seems to regard Stevenson as the next most likely person to get the nomination.
Then an uncomfortable subject was broached. “We had considerable talk about McCarthy. Kennedy said he felt that it would be a good idea to admit frankly that he had been wrong in not taking a more forthright position. I said that he was paying the price of having written a book called Profiles in Courage. He replied ruefully, ‘Yes, but I didn’t have a chapter in it about myself.’ “
The conversation that night in July of 1959 is telling in so many ways. The invitation itself was a fine gesture, with the arranging of an intimate evening around one person, a figure Jack saw as powerfully influential. Well aware of the liberal rancor over his failure to oppose McCarthy, he now was working at being convincingly conciliatory. Schlesinger observed his efforts: “I think he genuinely thinks he was wrong about it; but says he was constrained for a long time because Bobby had joined the committee staff—over Jack’s opposition, he says. He also said that his father and Joe were great friends, and that his father would defend Joe as a person to this day.”
During the course of the evening, Jack showed contempt for President Eisenhower, saying he refused to hang around with his old comrades in arms from the war. “All his golfing pals are rich men he has met since 1945.” He also went after Ike’s willingness to drop Nixon from the ticket in ’56. “He won’t stand by anybody. He is terribly cold and terribly vain. In fact, he’s a shit.”
But he was less candid on other matters. When Schlesinger pushed him on his Addison’s disease, he said the problem with his adrenal glands was caused by his wartime malaria, it had cleared up, and he was okay. “No one who has Addison’s disease ought to run for President; but I do not have it and have never had it.” He then claimed he was no longer taking cortisone, that, in fact, he took nothing. It was a pattern of denial that he would continue as he now campaigned for the backing of a group—the liberals—whose approval he’d never sought in the past.
Over the period from ’57 to ’59, Kennedy also had to build bridges with another key power in the Democratic Party: labor. Kennedy had started his Capitol Hill career on the Education and Labor Committee and made a name for himself by being tough on suspected Communist sympathizers among the union leaders. Now Bobby and he were targeting the corrupt ones.
The Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, to be famously known as the “Senate Rackets Committee,” was formed in January 1957. Senator John McClellan initiated the temporary panel to investigate the rivalry between Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa for the presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Both men were accused of bribery and, in Hoffa’s case, fraud. McClellan brought Bobby Kennedy with him from the Government Operations Committee. He named him chief counsel and investigator. Bobby, in turn, named Ken O’Donnell, his administrative assistant, as his top aide.
Jack worried what this would do to him politically. Bobby’s new job now associated his brother with the Republicans and pro-management Democrats who dominated the committee. Any attacks on organized labor by Bobby Kennedy, a bulldog in pursuit of his goals, would be seen by labor and its political friends as an attack by Jack.
Bobby understood this. “If the investigation flops . . . it will hurt Jack in 1958 and in 1960, too. . . . A lot of people think he’s the Kennedy running the investigation, not me. As far as the public is concerned, one Kennedy is the same as another Kennedy.”
That mention of 1958 alluded to Jack’s reelection campaign. Seeing his weak opposition, Senator Kennedy begged Republican pals back home in the Commonwealth to put up a stronger candidate so he could at least prove something. What he ended up demonstrating was his overwhelming support among Massachusetts voters as he defeated the martyred Vincent J. Celeste, representing the Republicans, 1,362,926 to 488,318. The result of this rout was that Joe Kennedy at last saw great worth in Ken O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien. Not only had they delivered the goods; they’d done so without taking up much of Jack’s precious time. The efficiency of their performance had the effect of ensuring less interference from Joe, who now trusted the pair of them, in the big contest to come.
The Rackets Committee managed to strip Dave Beck of his title as president of the Teamsters Union and also to expose, by use of wiretaps, a plot set up by Hoffa and organized crime figures to establish phony locals to vote him in as president. This was new ground Bobby Kennedy was plowing. Over at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Director J. Edgar Hoover still refused even to recognize the existence of the Mafia.
That November a meeting of organized crime figures in Apalachin, New York, was discovered by local police. But when Bobby Kennedy asked the FBI for records on the bosses, he discovered it had none. So he opened up his own hearings. The star witness was Salvatore “Sam” Giancana, heir to Al Capone. Kennedy interrogated him about his operations, which included hanging his victims on meat hooks and stuffing them into trunks of cars.
Robert Kennedy:
Would you tell us anything about any of your operations, or will you just giggle every time I ask you a question?
Sam Giancana:
I decline to answer because I honestly believe my answer may tend to incriminate me.
Kennedy:
I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.
Bobby Kennedy was both fearless and relentless. On the wall of his office, buried in the basement of the Senate Office Building, was a quotation from Winston Churchill: “We shall not flag or fail. We shall never surrender.” It didn’t win him any friends in the labor world, or in those political fiefdoms where union leaders freely operated. A number of big-city mayors felt the heat and didn’t like it, didn’t like the paths Bobby Kennedy was heading down.
Meanwhile, Jack Kennedy’s performance on the Rackets Committee impressed one of Bobby’s assistants. Pierre Salinger, a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post who Bobby hired as an investigator, saw Senator Kennedy zero in on whatever relevant issue was at hand: “John F. Kennedy had clearly done his homework. . . . In what is essentially a nebulous area, he was very incisive in his questioning. He was able, with a question or two, to do what it seemed to me to take hours to get to from other people on the committee.” He was careful not to lump the clean labor executives in with the bad. “Senator Kennedy made a special effort not to join the Republicans and conservative Democrats on the committee when it came to dealing with honest union leaders like Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers.”
Yet even the UAW was held to account. In Ken O’Donnell’s words, Jack “was not only good in terms of defending the union, but several times, armed by Bobby, he went right after the union and was probably tougher on them than some of the Republicans. He criticized them for the use of violence against their own men and against the company. He was tough, but tough in an appropriate way. The intellectual ability of Senator Kennedy and Bob Kennedy was established with the UAW. Reuther and the UAW saw the Kennedy brothers as not only honest, keeping their word, but also that they were both smart as hell. It wasn’t an image that the union had held of either brother up until that point.”
The Democratic governor of Maine, Edmund Muskie, who would enter the Senate himself in 1959, said the hearings made Kennedy a heavyweight there. It was the facing down of the criminals that impressed them. “I think that his performance in the Senate added tremendously to his stature, and to the respect which all his Senate colleagues, even those with a different political philosophy, had for him. I know that it was performances like this that enlisted the support of people like Dick Russell and other giants of the Senate. They did respect him. It wasn’t ju
st because they liked him, because they were attracted by his charm, because he had a way with words. They respected his guts . . . respected him as a man.”
But Kennedy cited the struggle for labor reform as further proof that “the Presidency is the source of action . . . There is much less than meets the eye in the Senate.” Yet his service on the Rackets Committee gave Jack another memorable victory. He’d made himself a reputation, as had his brother. Both were seen now as tough, independent reformers, racket busters. The image remains suspended in the mind, in black and white, of the two of them staring insolently at the crude thug there in the witness seat. We see Bob, the hot-blooded Irish cop, asking questions close into the microphone; Jack, the cool brother, tapping his fingernails on his teeth, that old habit that betrayed his cunning.
Jack Kennedy made few new personal friends from the time he entered politics. But that was about to change. On a warm winter Sunday early in 1959, Ben Bradlee, a correspondent for Newsweek, and his second wife, Tony, were wheeling a baby carriage along N Street in Georgetown. In it was their baby boy, Dino. Another couple, Jack and Jackie Kennedy, were also enjoying the winter sunshine, with two-year-old Caroline. The couples, similar in background, quickly became friends.
Bradlee had been a young naval officer in World War II, and his experience had included being at the helm of his destroyer as it navigated Japanese waters. The bond with Kennedy was secured further by their prep school and Harvard backgrounds. Bradlee would say that he was, in fact, higher up in the social “stud book” than Jack Kennedy, having descended from an old New England family around a lot longer than the immigrant Kennedys. Ben was the sort of guy—smart, handsome, ironic, and seemingly fearless—that Jack liked on sight. A working journalist, Bradlee now counted as a close friend a man bent on achieving the presidency. “Nothing in my education or experience had led me to conceive of the possibility that someone I really knew would hold that exalted job.”
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