JFK

by Fredrik Logevall

  Joe Kennedy was omnipresent, if not quite the omnipotent force some historians would later suggest. He took an apartment at 84 Beacon Street, near Jack’s place on Bowdoin Street, so he could be close to the action.15 He called in old political debts, involved himself in tactical and strategic decisions, especially concerning advertising layouts, and kept his checkbook permanently open. According to terrified junior aides, he even told people where to sit in meetings. The candidate, feeling the need to assert his authority, announced in one early meeting that he was delegating to his father the task of forking out all the money (“We concede you that role,” he grandly announced, to chuckles around the room), while he preserved for himself primary responsibility for the core decisions regarding campaign strategy, messaging, and speechwriting.16

  That the two Kennedys often agreed on these big-ticket items should not obscure the reality, which had already emerged well before 1952: John F. Kennedy, keen student of government and history, was always his own political boss. He trusted his own political judgments over those of his father, who was a whiz at making money but lacked a feel for what made people tick. The two of them saw the world and America’s role in it differently, saw U.S. democracy differently. Whenever, in an election campaign, these views clashed, Jack’s prevailed.

  “The Ambassador worked around the clock,” one campaign speechwriter later remarked. “He was always consulting people, getting reports, looking into problems. Should Jack go on TV with this issue? What kind of ad should he run on something else? He’d call in experts, get opinions, have ideas worked up. He’d do all this from an office in his apartment on Beacon Street. But Jack would make the final decisions.”17

  For all the advance work, however—the years of speeches around the state, many of them in tiny hamlets before tiny audiences; the internal polling; the cultivation of favorable press coverage; the assembling of a team—the campaign stumbled out of the gate. Mark Dalton, smart, friendly, and mild-mannered, with a tendency toward nervousness, was miscast in his role as manager of a large and complex statewide campaign, and moreover he had not been given clear marching orders on how to build his apparatus. Though Jack professed surprise and irritation at the lack of progress on the organizational front, he was being disingenuous—in O’Donnell’s later recollection, the candidate knew perfectly well that no organizing had been done because he had given no one authority to do it.18 Frequently in Washington to attend to his congressional duties, he left the initiative to his father, who tore into the hapless Dalton at every opportunity.

  “We were headed for disaster,” O’Donnell remembered. “The only time the campaign got any direction was when John Kennedy…was able to get up to Massachusetts to overrule his father….The Congressman and I had a big argument one day, and I told him that the campaign could only be handled by somebody who could talk up to his father; nobody had the courage to, and I certainly didn’t have the qualifications, and it just wasn’t going to work unless Bobby came up.” Jack reluctantly agreed, and asked O’Donnell to reach out to Bobby, who, upon graduation from law school, had taken a job with the Justice Department. O’Donnell did as instructed, over dinner and in follow-up phone calls, but Bobby demurred. He had a new job, a child at home, and another on the way, and moreover he knew little about electoral campaigning. Nor did he possess his brother’s intrinsic interest in politics. “I’ll just screw it up,” he told O’Donnell. They hung up. The more Bobby pondered it, though, the more he saw he had no choice—loyalty to family came first. He called O’Donnell a few days later. “I’m coming up. I’ve thought it all over, and I suppose I’ll have to do it.”19

  He was all of twenty-six years old when he arrived in Boston to seize control of the foundering operation. Tanned and wiry, with a toothy smile and a mop of unruly hair, he set the tone from the start, arriving at Kilby Street by eight thirty each morning and toiling until midnight, day after day after day. Often he was the person to unlock the door in the morning and lock it again at night. And he was not above taking on mundane tasks, such as licking envelopes and knocking on doors. One day, he determined there should be an enormous “Kennedy for Senate” poster on the side of a building adjacent to the heavily traveled bridge between Charlestown and the North End of Boston. “Drive me over there,” he instructed Dave Powers. “I’ll put up the sign myself.” To reach the height where he wanted the sign hung, Bobby had to balance himself on the top rung of the long ladder. “While I was holding the ladder,” Powers recalled, “I was wondering how I could explain it to the Ambassador and Jack when Bobby fell and broke his neck. I said to myself, if I had his money I would be sitting at home in a rocking chair instead of being up there on the top of that ladder.”20

  Low-level aides learned that they had to keep busy at all times, lest Bobby thrust a pencil in their hand and tell them to get to work; soon they were referring to the pre-Bobby period as “before the revolution” and to the new reality as “after the revolution.”21 Those workers who expected him to be but a mouthpiece for the Ambassador were stunned to see that, on the contrary, the young man could and did stand up to his father, thus proving O’Donnell’s hunch to be right. Soon the old man moved back into the shadows, where everyone preferred him to be—still involved, still opinionated, still the overseer, but from behind the scenes. His cadre of old-time hangers-on, men like Frank Morrissey, a loyal aide who had expected to play a central campaign role, were assigned lesser tasks.

  One for all: the candidate at his campaign headquarters with, from left, siblings Eunice, Pat, Bobby, and Jean.

  In one sense, ironically, Bobby was an extension of his father, for in short order he took on all the attributes ever given to the old man, which is to say he was deemed ruthless, caustic, relentless, defiant, and ferocious. (“I don’t care if anybody around here likes me, as long as they like Jack,” he would say.) Veterans of the state political establishment were appalled by his lack of tact and respect, by his insistence that he was running an organization whose allegiance was to Jack Kennedy, not to the Democratic Party and not to Governor Dever and his team. More than once, these encounters ended on the verge of fisticuffs. But even the naysayers had to concede that Bobby got things done; he was effective in his role. Or at least behind closed doors—whenever he had to make even brief public remarks on his brother’s behalf, he suffered stage fright and turned timid, if sometimes in an endearing sort of way. “My brother Jack couldn’t be here,” he murmured at one early event. “My mother couldn’t be here. My sister Eunice couldn’t be here. My sister Pat couldn’t be here. My sister Jean couldn’t be here. But if my brother Jack were here, he’d tell you Lodge has a very bad voting record. Thank you.”22

  Together with Larry O’Brien, Bobby devised an organizational structure in which campaign “secretaries” around the state would function as shadow units to the regular Democratic Party machinery, in a kind of supra-party system. For this role the campaign sought people who had little or no prior involvement in campaigns, who were either nonpolitical or apolitical and had no allegiances to the state party. Tony Galluccio’s ready-made list of such folks, compiled during his excursions over the previous year, now came in wonderfully handy.23 Ultimately, 286 of these “Kennedy Secretaries” would toil on the candidate’s behalf, backed by an army of more than twenty thousand volunteers. (Thus was followed O’Brien’s First Law of Politics: the more campaigners, the better.) The offers to help were indeed so constant as to be burdensome, which may help account for a pair of ingenious decisions by Dave Powers. First, although Jack Kennedy did not face a contested primary, he was obligated to secure at least twenty-five hundred signatures on his nomination papers. The thought occurred to Powers: Why stop at that number? Why not blow past it and get as many names as possible by the deadline? The candidate agreed, and over several weeks workers duly collected more than a hundred times the required number of signatories—262,324—which they submitted on ten thousand sheets
.24

  Second, Powers, reflecting back on a fellow who told him he had signed nomination papers for twenty-five years and never received a thanks, hit upon the idea of having volunteers type up thank-you letters to every one of the quarter-million-plus signatories. The recipients would be touched by the gesture, Powers reasoned, and the volunteers—the overwhelming majority of them female—would be kept busy. “These girls would come pouring in on their lunch hour and want to do something and every day we had to have a project,” Powers recalled. “And in the evening they’d come in after work and stay something like 5 to 7 and 6 to 8 and want to type. We’d have as many as 200 girls in there.” To save on postage and use up more volunteer hours, the thank-you letters were in most cases hand-delivered, often by crews of female students from colleges such as Smith and Wellesley—which only strengthened the impression on the recipient.25

  Other volunteers, numbering in the several hundreds, were put to work making evening telephone calls. The callers each got a list of names and numbers of Democrats and independents in a given neighborhood and a prepared message to recite, plus a list containing John F. Kennedy’s stances on key policy issues. If they received a question they couldn’t answer, they were to make a note that someone from the Kilby Street headquarters should call the person back with the missing information. In the lead-up to Election Day, the volunteers would again call the same people they’d contacted before, urging them to vote and asking if they needed a ride to the polls.

  The close attention to detail became a hallmark of the campaign. At Joe Kennedy’s direction, carefully produced ads were placed in newspapers around the state on pages and at times likely to garner the highest readership. A glossy eight-page tabloid extolling Jack’s heroics in the South Pacific went out to households across the state, along with the Reader’s Digest reprint of John Hersey’s PT 109 story in The New Yorker. (Some 1.2 million of the tabloids were ultimately printed.) For French-speaking communities in the hills of Worcester County the campaign made a recording narrated in French by the candidate’s mother, and there were efforts targeted at specific ethnic groups in and around Boston. There were even campaign committees for specific professions—there were Doctors for Kennedy, Dentists for Kennedy, Teachers for Kennedy. Seasoned politicos were impressed, however grudgingly, by what they saw. When Boston mayor John B. Hynes appeared with Jack at a rally in Copley Square in June, he was surprised to see not one but two teleprompters set up and ready to go. He wondered why—until one broke down and campaign aides switched smoothly to the second. Hynes understood he was in the presence of perfectionists.26

  The campaign also made a determined effort to woo the state’s African American voters, who numbered between fifty thousand and seventy thousand and lived mostly in the Roxbury and Dorchester areas of Boston. Mailings went out to them citing Kennedy’s long-standing support for civil rights, and black journalists were kept abreast of the candidate’s votes and speeches on the issue. (In January 1952, in a speech on the House floor, Kennedy called for President Truman to launch an immediate federal investigation into the Miami murder of NAACP official Harry T. Moore and his wife, Harriet, who had been killed on Christmas night by a bomb planted by segregationists. Kennedy kept on drawing attention to the case in the months thereafter, receiving favorable notice in the black press.) In addition, staffers laid plans to have Kennedy spend significant time come August and September speaking in Boston’s six predominantly black wards. Sensing Lodge’s vulnerability on the topic—in 1946, the senator had won only one of these wards—the campaign hit the Republican hard, warning African American voters that he could not be trusted to champion black advancement.27

  A fascinating document uncovered by journalist Nick Bryant offers insights into Kennedy’s thinking on race in this period. In handwritten notes for a campaign speech he may or may not have delivered, the candidate issued a strong declarative opening: “There is nothing worse in life than racial bigotry.” He then crossed out “bigotry” and replaced it with “prejudice,” and inserted the discarded word into the next sentence: “There is nothing lower than bigotry.” From there Kennedy linked the cause of civil rights with the battle against Communism: “Those who view fellow Americans—regardless of race, color, or national origin—as anything other than fellow Americans are fostering the very climate in which the seeds of Communism flourish.” Lest his listeners miss the point, the next sentence underscored it: “A strong civil rights program—one that guarantees every American a fairly-earned share of those opportunities to better oneself and his family which only our country can offer—is vital to the continued strength and progress of the United States.” There followed an examination of Lodge’s weak civil rights record as compared with his own, followed by a brief peroration: “I want to go to the Senate to continue my fight for Civil Rights legislation.”28

  At no point in the draft did Kennedy touch on the daily indignities suffered by blacks, or offer specific ideas for ending entrenched segregation practices in the South—a sign, perhaps, of his limited imagination on the topic of race (neither here nor elsewhere in the Senate campaign did he appear to show deep interest in the political sources of black discontent) or perhaps simply a reflection of his belief that, since he was campaigning in Massachusetts, not Mississippi, he need not dwell on southern practices. Whatever the case, he was content here to merely call for the “good treatment” of all Americans—in schools, in courts, and in the armed services.29

  III

  In May and June it was still too soon for campaign rallies, but not for more specialized events. Remembering the great success of the women’s tea reception at Cambridge’s Commander Hotel in the closing days of the 1946 primary campaign, the Kennedy team planned a series of similar “teas” throughout the state, to be held in hotel ballrooms or high school gymnasiums, usually on Sundays. “Reception in honor of Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy and her son, Congressman John F. Kennedy, Sunday afternoon,” the gilt-edged invitations, on sleek white cards, would read; encased in expensive, hand-addressed vellum envelopes, they would be put in boxes and driven to the town in question so they would bear a local postmark. Attendees would get to hear a few words from the candidate and his mother—and sometimes also from one or more of his sisters—and there would be a receiving line. Tea and cake or cookies would be served; often an orchestra would play. As with the 1946 event, the response was overwhelming. The first tea, at the Bancroft Hotel, in Worcester, on May 18, drew five thousand women; the second, in Springfield the following week, was almost as large. In Fall River, Dave Powers stood at the door with a clicker, counting the women as they entered; when he got to two thousand, he quit.30

  Jack inserted himself into the early planning for the teas. In late April he asked Pauline “Polly” Fitzgerald, a second cousin by marriage, to meet him at his apartment to discuss how best to proceed. “I’d like to have a tea in Worcester to kind of open my campaign,” he told her, and “I’d like to have you set this up for me.” Fitzgerald said yes on the spot. Jack told her he thought there should be invitations, worded in such a way that nobody would feel excluded. Fitzgerald agreed, and the two determined that the bottom right corner of the card should read, “Guests invited,” meaning the recipient could bring along others. “So it would have a sort of dual purpose,” Fitzgerald later said, “in that a person who got it would feel that she was very lucky and it was personal, and yet people who didn’t get it would know that they could be invited.”31

  “In the first place,” the congressman said in his brief remarks in Worcester, “for some strange reason, there are more women than men in Massachusetts, and they live longer. Secondly, my grandfather, the late John F. Fitzgerald, ran for the United States Senate thirty-six years ago against my opponent’s grandfather, Henry Cabot Lodge, and he lost by only 30,000 votes in an election where women were not allowed to vote. I hope that by impressing the female electorate that I can more than take up the slack.�
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  Thrilled by the turnout in Worcester, Jack found Fitzgerald in a corridor of the hotel after the event. He had been shaking hands for hours and was exhausted, yet elated. This woman clearly knew what she was doing. “Now, come in to see me and let’s talk about doing more teas,” he told her. Soon Fitzgerald found herself appointed chief planner for the receptions, which would total three dozen throughout the state and be attended by more than seventy thousand women. The work was arduous for her and all involved, she later said, but wholly worth it, “because there was just something about him that communicated so to people. And as the women went through that line, he had an indefinable something that made every woman there feel that he needed her to work for him. It’s nothing that could be put on.”33

  It was about sex appeal, no question, as it had been in the earlier campaigns—the smile, the tousled hair, the good looks and graceful bearing, the bachelor status. But there was more to it. John F. Kennedy’s public persona just drew people in. It had been evident in the house parties and halting early campaign speeches in 1946, and it was evident now, six years later. His opponent would subsequently acknowledge as much, telling an interviewer that Jack Kennedy “had a tremendous and well-deserved popularity and he was an extraordinarily likable man. In fact, I liked him. So often in a campaign, you look for a man’s faults and then campaign on them. Well, in this case you didn’t do that.” A former mayor of Pittsfield, reflecting back a few years later, said something similar: “There’s something about Jack—and I don’t know quite what it is—that makes people want to believe in him. Conservatives and liberals both tell you that he’s with them, because they want to believe that he is, and they want to be with him. They want to identify their views with him.”34