JFK

by Fredrik Logevall

  McCarthy made the cover of Time that October—the surest sign he had arrived. Editor in chief Henry Luce, a staunch Republican and member of the China lobby, bowed to no one in the depth of his anti-Communist fervor, but he had little regard for the kind of simplistic populism McCarthy represented and, moreover, found him coarse and crude. To Luce, the senator’s exaggerations and grandstanding threatened to discredit more authentic anti-Communist efforts. And he had an inkling that McCarthy’s popularity had peaked. So on this occasion Time did what the Luce publications had thus far generally refrained from doing: it hit McCarthy hard, accusing him of peddling in innuendo, of answering legitimate questions with savage attacks, of having little curiosity and little regard for common decency. “Joe, like all effective demagogues, found an area of emotion and exploited it. No regard for fair play, no scruple for exact truth hampers Joe’s political course. If his accusations destroy reputations, if they subvert the principle that a man is innocent until proved guilty, he is oblivious. Joe, immersed in the joy of battle, does not even seem to realize the gravity of his own charges.” Yet “ ‘McCarthyism’ is now part of the language,” the article acknowledged, and anyone choosing to take on McCarthy faced an immense challenge: “His burly figure casts its shadow over the coming presidential campaign. Thousands turn out to hear his speeches. Millions regard him as ‘a splendid American’ (a fellow Senator recently called him that).”73

  McCarthy, as always, hit back hard, blasting Time for “desperate lying” and sending letters to advertisers urging them to stop giving business to Time and its sister publications Life and Fortune. At Time Inc., executives worried that Luce, usually so astute in judging the public mood, had miscalculated—McCarthy, they believed, was not losing public support but gaining it. Luce backed off. His magazines returned to a safer position, occasionally chiding the senator, sometimes praising him, and generally holding to the line that he was a necessary counterweight to the Truman administration’s timidity on Communism.74

  Such was the tricky path Jack Kennedy would have to navigate should he seek statewide office the following autumn; he knew it, his aides and confidants knew it. McCarthy remained deeply popular among Catholics in Massachusetts, and he was, moreover, a friend of the family. He still enjoyed support among Republican leaders who, however objectionable they found him personally, believed he was winning votes for the party. (Robert Taft came to McCarthy’s defense when Harry Truman described him as “a Kremlin asset.”)75 Truman’s popularity, meanwhile, was low and going lower—in 1951 it never rose above 32 percent. Jack accordingly walked a middle path, boosting his anti-Communist credentials by voicing policy differences with the White House on specific matters, including China policy and military preparedness, while also noting near the end of the year that accusations of Communists in the Foreign Service were “irrational.”76

  It was a savvy strategy in the circumstances, but would it be enough in a tough battle to unseat the formidable Henry Cabot Lodge? For that matter, would Jack even get the opportunity to wage that fight? As the year turned, Paul Dever had yet to decide if he would seek another term in the governor’s mansion or take on Lodge for the Senate seat. Until he did, John F. Kennedy and his team could do nothing but continue their behind-the-scenes preparations. And wait.

  *1 Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison, of which he served three. To his dying day, in 1996, he maintained his innocence. Almost certainly he was guilty as charged, though the documents passed were of modest importance.

  *2 Never shy about talking up his war record, McCarthy claimed to have been known in the South Pacific as “Tail-Gunner Joe.” In 1951 he secured a Distinguished Flying Cross for supposedly flying close to thirty combat missions and being wounded. Contrary to later claims, he did see some action, but he spent the war mostly as a deskbound intelligence officer debriefing pilots after their missions. He was never wounded in action; most likely, he hurt his foot falling down the stairs at a party.

  *3 Given the Indochina struggle’s growing importance in world politics, and given what was to come for America in Vietnam, it’s stunning that Kennedy was either the first or among the first congressmen to pay a visit to the country. Meanwhile, a head count that same year showed that 189 House members had visited Italy since the end of World War II.

  EIGHTEEN

  TWO BRAHMINS

  Paul Dever didn’t even really want to run—for either office. He was tired, plain and simple. Tired of ruling the State House, tired of politics, tired of the endless demands, the internal party squabbles, the machinations that were always part and parcel of Massachusetts state politics. Heavyset and with an ailing heart, he also worried about his health. He knew, moreover, that either race would be tough—against Republican challenger Christian Herter to hold the governorship, or against Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. for the U.S. Senate. For all that, Governor Dever knew deep down that he couldn’t back away. Too many people depended on him and were counting on him to stay in the arena. He was a public servant, and a public servant he should remain.1

  But which office should he seek? He preferred going to Washington, truth be told, and felt certain he had the know-how and the temperament to be an effective senator, responsive to the needs of his state and his nation. But that looked to be the tougher of the two contests. Quietly, Dever commissioned a poll of western Massachusetts—a double poll: Dever versus Lodge and John F. Kennedy versus Lodge—and it showed that Lodge would likely beat Dever, while Lodge and Kennedy were dead even, fifty-fifty. Lodge, moreover, was a proven statewide vote-getter, having beaten James Michael Curley by 142,000 votes in 1936 and then demolished David I. Walsh in 1946 by a whopping 346,000 votes.

  On April 6, 1952, Palm Sunday, after weeks of agonized indecision, Dever made his choice. “Jack, I’m a candidate for reelection,” he said simply, in a brief one-on-one meeting at the Ritz-Carlton near the Boston Public Garden. “That’s fine,” Kennedy replied. “I’m a candidate for the Senate.” He had gotten the race he wanted.2

  It was also the race his father wanted. Once his son had defeated Lodge, Joseph P. Kennedy liked to say, a puckish smile lighting his face, he would have beaten the best—why try for anything less? It would be no harder to win the presidency, he then would add dramatically, than to beat Lodge in Massachusetts. To Joe it seemed clear that Jack’s push to gain statewide name recognition over the previous three years was paying dividends, with internal polling showing him running even with Lodge or slightly ahead. More important, Massachusetts was at root a Democratic state, one that had not voted for a Republican candidate for president since Calvin Coolidge, who was one of its own; if Jack secured his party’s voters and held his own among independents, he would win. “It’s ridiculous in this Democratic state that has been able to elect Curleys and Hurleys and even Dever that we should have Republican senators for almost twenty years,” the elder Kennedy wrote a friend. “Lodge is very weak with the Republicans, themselves, and he had always been elected because he was able to get the Democratic vote. Nobody has ever fought him…who was competent to take him on, but Jack can easily do that.”3

  Kennedy took further encouragement from his son’s visible maturation as a politician. If Jack’s health could hold, the Ambassador believed, there was no limit to what he could do and where he could go. His command of policy, his international experience, his winning personality, his telegenic looks—all of it came together in a formidable package. And there was something else, too, the Ambassador could see: his son’s general comfort in the glare of publicity, including in the new medium of television, which seemed destined to fundamentally change the practice of American politics. Here Jack’s smooth and engaging performance on Meet the Press in December, soon after his return from the Far East, had been a revelation, even to many who knew him to be an up-and-comer among Democrats. John F. Royal, NBC’s head of programming, was bowled over, telling Joe Kennedy immediately afterwards that Jack’s
showing reminded him of the song in the musical comedy Babes in Arms in which the children shout, “They say we’re babes in arms, but we are babes in armor.” “Jack certainly didn’t look away from the camera or the television audience. In his few appearances on television he has caught on to all the tricks, and he was very warm and confident. He will be a hell-cat with both young and old.” The elder Kennedy agreed. To Lawrence Spivak, the co-producer of the show and a frequent panelist, he wrote some weeks afterwards, “Meet the Press established Jack once and for all as a major personality, so there you are!”4

  Immediately after the April 6 meeting with Dever, the Kennedys checked with Archbishop Richard Cushing to be sure it would be appropriate for Jack to declare his candidacy during Holy Week. Cushing assured them it would be, and the campaign released an official statement that evening.5 “Other states have vigorous leaders in the United States Senate,” it read, “to defend the interests and the principles of their citizens—men who had definite goals based on constructive principles and who move toward these goals unswervingly. Massachusetts has need for such leadership.” The next day, every morning paper had the announcement: Kennedy Opposes Lodge for Senate.6

  No reader that morning could doubt the scale of the challenge Jack Kennedy had set for himself, especially in what looked to be a Republican year nationally. Harry Truman’s approval ratings were low and going lower, and both he and his party were burdened with a stalemated war in Korea; the levelheaded president, casting an eye on the treacherous political landscape in front of him, prudently decided not to seek reelection. In Lodge, moreover, Jack faced an incumbent respected far and wide for his probity and independence, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who spoke fluent French, stood six foot three, and bore one of the most iconic political names in America. His grandfather, the first Henry Cabot Lodge, had held sway in Massachusetts for two decades (he defeated Honey Fitz by a scant 33,000 votes in the Senate race of 1916) and had led the fight against Woodrow Wilson’s effort to get the United States into the League of Nations. Further back were other Lodges and Cabots who had built the wealth and the reputation on which the present Senator Lodge rested so squarely. (George Cabot, his great-great-great-grandfather, had attended Harvard and served as a U.S. senator in the Second Congress, from 1791 to 1796.) Prone at times to a quick irascibility that detractors chalked up to haughtiness, Lodge was a blue blood through and through, the paragon of the patrician New Englander. A Brahmin’s Brahmin, people called him. With his dignified bearing, handsome features, and impeccable manners, he was every movie casting agent’s idea of a Yankee establishment political figure, yet one who had shown an impressive ability in previous elections to win support among a broad cross section of voters.7

  Here it helped that Lodge’s war record was so exemplary. Initially opposed to U.S. intervention, he changed his mind with the Pearl Harbor attack. In 1942, while a senator, he joined the U.S. Army and fought courageously in North Africa. When President Roosevelt decreed that members of Congress serving in the armed forces must choose one path or the other, Lodge left the military, but only briefly: upon winning reelection in 1942, he gave up his seat and returned to combat duty, as a commissioned major with the American Sixth Army Group. “He was utterly without fear,” remembered one fellow officer, and he won accolades for his actions in battle. Notably, he single-handedly captured a four-man Wehrmacht patrol, a feat that gained him the French Croix de Guerre and Légion d’Honneur. Later he served as a translator and liaison officer to General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the prickly French commander John Kennedy would subsequently meet in Indochina. Massachusetts voters, including Irish Catholics, paid due attention, and Lodge returned from the fighting more popular than ever.8

  Small wonder that several of Jack Kennedy’s Capitol Hill colleagues had advised him against taking Lodge on. At a luncheon in the Cambridge home of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and his wife, Marion, in early 1952, Senator Paul H. Douglas of Illinois told Jack that Lodge would likely be unbeatable, especially if the Republicans nominated Dwight Eisenhower for president. Why not accumulate seniority in the House instead, or perhaps pursue the governorship? Kennedy listened politely but said little. He had heard the same message from Senator George Smathers of Florida, who had come into the House with him in 1947 and won a Senate seat in 1950, and was perhaps his closet friend in Washington. Smathers considered Jack a young man of immense political gifts, but, like Douglas, he urged him to stay in the House and bide his time, on the grounds that an unsuccessful Senate race could be political suicide. And odds were this one would be unsuccessful, Smathers said, in view of the nation’s Truman fatigue and Lodge’s absolute annihilation of David Walsh—supposedly unbeatable, and an Irish Catholic to boot—the last time around.9

  The senators’ arguments failed to carry the day. Within the Kennedy family, all the doubts were waved off. Instead, sister Eunice later said, there would be “only a mighty roar every time Jack came home….‘Jack run for the Senate. You’ll knock Lodge’s block off!’ ”10

  To add to the intrigue, the two candidates were in core respects remarkably similar. Both were tall, lean, and handsome. Both were graduates of Harvard who served with distinction in World War II. Both flirted with journalism before choosing a political career. Both had isolationist forebears but were themselves internationalists who supported foreign aid, and on domestic issues both men gravitated toward the political center. Both came across as thoughtful and sensible and gentlemanly; both were composed under pressure. Of the two, Lodge seemed the more polished and suave, and the better public speaker, while Kennedy looked more boyish and untested, but these differences were minor. Even the patrician label seemed interchangeable between the two men, at least to a degree: “Jack is the first Irish Brahmin,” Dever said.11

  Or, in James MacGregor Burns’s formulation, “Rarely in American politics have hunter and quarry so resembled each other.”12

  II

  The Kennedy campaign was poised for a fast start. Already in 1951, when Jack knew he would wage a statewide campaign but not yet which one, he hung on the wall in his Bowdoin Street apartment a map of Massachusetts. He and Dave Powers put pins on the communities, large and small, that he had visited, then plotted how to cover the blank areas. “He used to say, ‘Gosh, we don’t have anything up there,’ ” Powers remembered, “and he’d point up to the Western part of the state around Springfield, Chicopee, and Holyoke, and I said, ‘well, we’ll work on it.’ ” Calls would be made, and soon Congressman Kennedy would have pro bono speaking engagements in these locales. By the end of 1951 “we had every one of the [state’s] 39 cities covered” with pins, Powers said; by April 1952, when he announced, even the smaller towns in the western parts of the state had been pinned.13 Everywhere Jack went, moreover, aides would jot down the names and addresses of notable people he met. The information would be transferred onto three-by-five-inch index cards and added to an existing file of names from the House campaigns. The result: even before the campaign launched, Jack Kennedy had a contact in virtually every community in the state.

  To manage the campaign, Jack turned to attorney Mark Dalton, who had been with him since the first campaign in 1946. Powers, too, was a holdover, as were a trio of local operatives: Frank Morrissey, Joe DeGuglielmo, and Tony Galluccio. But the other principals were new, starting with the acerbic, sharp-featured Kenny O’Donnell, who was Robert Kennedy’s friend from Harvard (where he had captained the football team) and who had flown thirty missions over Germany as a bombardier during the war, once crash-landing between enemy and Allied lines; early in the year, Bobby had convinced him to quit his position with a paper firm to join the nascent campaign. Larry O’Brien, a burly and genial political junkie from Springfield who worked in advertising and public relations, signed on as well—Jack Kennedy, he told friends, was a new type of Irish politician, respectable and courteous—and in short order proved his worth with voter regi
stration and precinct organization. Together with Powers, the two men formed the core of what would become known as the Irish Mafia, or the Irish Brotherhood—a small group of loyal, extremely capable aides so in sync that they could communicate with mere snippets of words and subtle alterations in facial expression.14 In addition, Joe Kennedy tapped his own people, notably James Landis, a veteran New Dealer and longtime Kennedy family friend who had been dean of Harvard Law School and could serve as a liaison of sorts to the Cambridge intellectuals; John Harriman, a financial writer at the Boston Globe, who came on board to write speeches; J. Lynn Johnston, an attorney who had helped run the Ambassador’s Merchandise Mart, in Chicago, then the world’s largest building; and Sargent Shriver, who still sought Eunice’s hand in marriage and who took a leave from his job with Kennedy Enterprises in Chicago to join the campaign. Headquarters were set up at 44 Kilby Street, in the heart of Boston’s financial district.