JFK

by Fredrik Logevall

  Lodge, for his part, disliked McCarthy personally and loathed his demagogic tactics, but he knew full well that McCarthy had broad support among Massachusetts’s three-quarters of a million Irish Catholics, many of whom loved his brash style and brazen tactics. So, like Eisenhower, the senator moved carefully, avoiding overt criticism while keeping McCarthy at arm’s distance. When McCarthy offered to come to the Bay State to help the campaign in the interests of party unity, Lodge was inclined to accept, until he heard the condition: he himself must publicly ask McCarthy to come. “I cracked that one,” McCarthy crowed to conservative backer William F. Buckley Jr. “I told [the Lodge campaign] I’d go up to Boston to speak if Cabot publicly asked me. And he’ll never do that—he’d lose the Harvard vote.”59

  But what if Lodge changed his mind? What if he determined that the Harvard vote mattered far less to him than the Irish vote? That was the Kennedy team’s consuming fear. For that matter, Jack faced his own delicate dilemma on the issue, even though McCarthy was from the opposing party and had virtually no history with Massachusetts. He was a friend of the family, for one thing; he got on well with Joe Kennedy in particular. For another, there were too many votes to be lost in going after him, especially in “Southie” (South Boston) but also in other urban areas of the state. Yet embracing the Wisconsin senator risked losing the support of liberals, intellectuals, and labor leaders. When Adlai Stevenson, soon to arrive for a campaign swing through Massachusetts, asked Sargent Shriver how he could best help Kennedy’s cause, Shriver requested three things: that Stevenson tell voters of Jack’s support for the liberal aspects of Truman’s Fair Deal; that he emphasize Jack’s willingness to stake out principled and courageous policy positions, including on behalf of the black residents of Washington, D.C.; and that he refrain from attacking Joe McCarthy. The stronger Jack appeared on Communism and subversion, Shriver said, the better his chances of peeling away support from Republicans upset with Lodge for undermining Robert Taft’s candidacy. And besides, McCarthy was very popular in the state, including among Democrats. “Up here this anticommunist business is a good thing to emphasize,” Shriver remarked.60

  Kennedy with Adlai Stevenson in the final days of the campaign. Seated behind them is Governor Dever.

  Jack didn’t share his father’s enthusiasm for McCarthy, but he saw only pitfalls in publicly opposing him. In February 1952, well before he knew which statewide office he’d be seeking that autumn, Jack had attended a reunion of the Spee Club at Harvard. When a speaker congratulated the university for not producing either an Alger Hiss (though he was in fact a graduate of the law school) or a Joe McCarthy, Jack reportedly objected that only Hiss, a convicted traitor, deserved such opprobrium. Yet it’s clear that Jack’s views were changing that winter. His Far Eastern trip of the previous fall had made him skeptical of claims that Communist gains overseas somehow derived from the duplicity or incompetence of Americans; his subsequent interactions with his state’s influential academic community deepened these doubts while simultaneously impressing on him how widespread was the disdain on the campuses for what was coming to be called McCarthyism. Privately, Jack told friends that McCarthy was “just another shanty Irish” who would contaminate any politician who drew close to him. He resolved to keep his distance.61

  The standoffish approach did not endear Kennedy to the state’s Jewish voters, deeply distrustful of McCarthy and already wary of Jack because of his father’s presumed anti-Semitism. (In July 1949, The Jewish Weekly Times, responding to the State Department’s release of papers delineating Ambassador Kennedy’s meetings with his Nazi German counterpart in London, Herbert Von Dirksen, in 1938, had placed the correspondence under the headline “German Documents Allege Kennedy Held Anti-Semitic Views.”) Jewish leaders implored Jack to denounce the Wisconsin senator, but he refused to budge. “I told you before, I am opposed to McCarthy,” he told Phil Fine, his chief liaison with the Jewish community. “I don’t like the way he does business, but I’m running for office here, and while I may be able to get x number of votes because I say I’m opposed to him, I am going to lose…two times x by saying that I am opposed. I am telling you, and you have to have faith in me, that at the proper time I’ll do the proper thing.”62 A series of meetings with community leaders followed, as well as campaign events in Jewish neighborhoods, and there emerged a “Friends Committee” to back Jack’s candidacy. At one dinner, sponsored by the committee and held at the Boston Club, Jack told the heavily Jewish audience of three hundred of his 1951 visit to Israel and his meeting with Ben-Gurion, and of his pro-Israel voting record in the House. Sensing lingering doubts in the room, he asked, “What more do you want? Remember, I’m running for the Senate, not my father.” It was the firm declaration his audience had been waiting for, and the room erupted in applause.63

  Right up until Election Day, the Kennedy camp fretted that Lodge would get his miracle: he and McCarthy would magically surface together at a triumphant rally, arms raised in tandem, generating headlines and causing significant Irish Catholic defections from their man to the incumbent. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Joe Kennedy may have taken matters into his own hands, either by calling McCarthy personally and asking him not to campaign for Lodge or by having columnist Westbrook Pegler phone on his behalf. Joe may also have sent several thousand dollars to the Wisconsin senator, who had recently undergone a pricey medical operation and was supposedly almost broke. (Jack Kennedy later denied that his father sought assistance from McCarthy.)64 This intervention, if indeed it occurred, doesn’t appear to have been decisive, at least judging by the later testimony of Lodge, who insisted it was he and not Joe Kennedy who was most responsible for keeping McCarthy out of the state. Lodge told McCarthy biographer David Oshinsky that at the eleventh hour he had in fact asked him “whether he would come into Massachusetts and campaign against Kennedy without mentioning me in any way. He told me that he couldn’t do this. He would endorse me but he would say nothing against the son of Joe Kennedy. I told McCarthy ‘thanks but no thanks.’ So he never did come into Massachusetts.”*3, 65

  Lodge made this last-ditch appeal to McCarthy because of what the internal polling told him in the dying days of the campaign: he was behind. Eisenhower had opened a big lead over Stevenson among Massachusetts voters, and Christian Herter was closing fast on Paul Dever in the governor’s race, but he himself lagged behind his challenger. Every indicator said so. With the McCarthy option gone, he had to hope for two things: that some undecideds would “come home” to the incumbent and that he might yet ride Eisenhower’s coattails. The game was not lost. But he knew he had to keep up the pressure, and to focus his campaigning on Boston, where, if he could cut substantially into Kennedy’s all-but-certain plurality, he could give himself a chance, since the rest of the state should go Republican, if narrowly. (Three-quarters of the state’s 4.6 million inhabitants lived within a forty-mile radius of the city.)66 After Kennedy jabbed him for his voting record in Congress—an audacious claim, given the congressman’s own absenteeism—Lodge said he and Kennedy were “away from Washington in 1952, but with different purposes. One difference is that I was away working to put Eisenhower in the White House, whereas he was away campaigning for himself in Massachusetts.” The senator was puzzled, he remarked some days later, by the challenger’s slogan that he would do “More for Massachusetts”: “I wonder if he means he will do many of the things he should have done and failed to do in Congress.” Kennedy “had a magnificent opportunity to aid our state and failed miserably,” sitting “sheeplike” as he waited “for the Administration to tell him when and how to vote during the past six years, while I sponsored 91 legislative proposals—32 of which became law.”67

  This line of attack seemed to resonate with voters, much to Team Kennedy’s chagrin. It raised the alarming prospect that Lodge was finding his footing for the sprint run. No less concerning was the growing evidence of trouble in Stevenson’s president
ial campaign—if he got blown out nationally, he might take Jack down with him.

  Stevenson had looked formidable early on, in the immediate aftermath of the party convention, impressing political insiders and ordinary voters with his probity, eloquence, and wit. (At one rally, a supporter hollered, “Governor Stevenson, you have the vote of all the thinking people,” to which he answered, “That’s not enough, madam. I need a majority.”) Balding and bug-eyed, he projected a warm, civilized, professorial air, and combined high-mindedness and self-deprecation in a powerfully appealing way. But he also possessed a lofty disdain for politics that, though initially part of his appeal, created problems as the campaign progressed. Glad-handing seemed to Stevenson crass and undignified—after one long day on the trail he complained to a friend, “Perhaps the saddest part of all this is that a candidate must reach into a sea of hands, grasp one, not knowing whose it is, and say, ‘I’m glad to meet you,’ realizing that he hasn’t and probably never will meet that man.”68 Even with a stable of formidable speechwriters such as Archibald MacLeish, John Hersey, Bernard DeVoto, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Stevenson thought nothing of personally reworking each text, agonizing over passages, keeping audiences waiting, even letting them disperse, until he felt ready. He could be querulous and indecisive and was disdainful of political advertising and of the new technologies—he hated television and shunned teleprompters. Worse, although Stevenson’s cultivated approach worked wonders with liberals and others who thrilled to his elegant, epigrammatic phrasemaking and his idealized picture of an America characterized by virtue and reason, he struggled to reach a sufficiently broad constellation of voters. By the end of October, only die-hard supporters gave their man a fighting chance of victory against the war hero turned politician.

  Though neither man knew it in the fall of 1952, Jack Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson, fellow Choate graduates (Stevenson was Class of 1918), would become central characters in each other’s political careers for the rest of their days.

  VI

  With Kennedy and Lodge trading blows in a final grassroots blitz—they visited residential neighborhoods and local shopping centers, even rang doorbells, in a desperate effort to gain the edge—the conservative Boston Post, which everyone believed would back the GOP candidates for statewide office, stunned the chattering classes by endorsing Jack Kennedy and Paul Dever in a front-page editorial. Publisher John Fox, a flamboyant self-made millionaire who had bought the struggling paper the year before and taken it in a sharp rightward direction editorially, cited Jack’s firm anti-Communism as a principal reason for the endorsement, but he was also annoyed by Lodge’s failure to reach out to him, and by the refusal of either Robert Taft or Joe McCarthy to publicly support the senator. After drafting the endorsement, Fox tried without success to reach Jack Kennedy. He got ahold of the candidate’s father and they met for a drink on the eve of publication. Joe was overcome with joy upon hearing the news, Fox recalled, and asked if there was anything he could do in return. Fox explained the Post’s financial woes and—it emerged years afterwards—received a half-million-dollar loan from the Kennedy patriarch right then and there. In later years, both men vigorously denied the suggestion of a quid pro quo. It was a purely commercial transaction, Joe Kennedy insisted, repaid with interest in sixty days.69

  Then, suddenly, a Lodge lifeline: Eisenhower’s headquarters announced that the general would wind up his national campaign in Massachusetts, with a glittering all-star extravaganza at the Boston Garden on election eve. The news caused acute distress among Kennedy staffers—a rousing rally featuring the GOP standard-bearer would surely swing many undecided voters over to Lodge’s side, especially as Eisenhower seemed set to sweep the state in the presidential vote. Lodge was thrilled, but the event, though a raucous and energizing affair, did not go quite as he’d hoped. Slated to introduce Eisenhower, he spent hours polishing his remarks, but so rapturous and lengthy was the ovation for the supreme Allied commander when he arrived onstage that it forced cancellation of Lodge’s introduction for fear of running overtime with the networks. Lodge was left to smile stoically on the stage and to ponder what might have been. “We couldn’t understand what happened to you, that you didn’t introduce the General at the most important time,” one dejected Lodge backer told him afterwards.70

  On Election Day, November 4, Kennedy projected quiet confidence, even joking with his friend Torby Macdonald about which job the defeated Lodge might be offered in Eisenhower’s administration. Inside, though, his stomach churned—his mother wrote in her memoirs that one of the few times she could recall seeing her son “really nervous was on election night ’52.” He kept pacing from room to room, kept taking his jacket on and off, she recalled. Still, the candidate told aides that they had run the best race they could and were in a strong position to take down the supposedly invincible Lodge. “I can’t think of anything we could have done that we haven’t,” he said.71

  With nothing left to do but wait and hope, the aides wondered among themselves about the unknowns. How much of a difference had Eisenhower’s grand Garden party the previous night made? Would the dramatic Boston Post announcement shift a lot of votes their way, or were people’s minds already made up? How much would the spadework done on Jack’s behalf in the rural areas of the state matter? Would he rack up a big enough plurality in metropolitan Boston to overcome Lodge’s margins elsewhere? Would Dever’s evident weakening since the summer be a drag on Jack’s candidacy?

  The early Boston returns that evening looked good for the challenger, but when reports came in showing Eisenhower running up high margins in Lynn and Brockton, the Kennedy team grew apprehensive. “Whatever initial optimism had existed disappeared immediately,” Kenny O’Donnell recalled.72 By 11:00 P.M. it was clear that Eisenhower would sweep the state by at least 200,000 votes, a figure that placed the entire Democratic ticket in jeopardy. Jack, getting pessimistic reports in his Bowdoin Street apartment from his father and his father’s cronies, called Bobby. It looked worryingly close, Bobby agreed, but he urged his brother to focus on the campaign’s own chief internal metric: Jack’s vote totals as compared with Truman’s in 1948. Here the numbers remained promising, Bobby said—they showed Jack running even or ahead of where Truman was then, including in the rural areas, whereas both Dever and Stevenson ran behind the president’s 1948 numbers. Still, Bobby conceded, the outlook was uncertain. Around midnight, Boston Globe reporter John Barry appeared on television to announce that, on the basis of current projections, it was “definite” that Dever had been defeated for governor and Kennedy had also lost.73

  The candidate grabbed his coat and walked the short distance to headquarters. He wanted to see the internal data for himself. “There we stood,” O’Donnell recalled of the moment when Kennedy strode in, “resplendent in our shirts: smelly, sweaty, ties pulled down or off, sleeves rolled up; the air replete with stale coffee, even staler donuts; cigarette and cigar smoke.” Jack, surveying the scene, deadpanned, “If this is what victory looks like, I’d hate to see defeat.” He sat down on a metal chair and began to run the numbers, silently and determinedly. His brother, he soon could see, hadn’t been lying: they might yet pull this off.74

  At three o’clock in the morning, Dever’s campaign called to say that on the basis of their computations, both men had lost. The Kennedy team replied that their calculations showed Jack winning narrowly. But it was the most disheartening moment of the evening, O’Donnell remembered, “because Dever was not the type of fellow that threw things off lightheartedly.”75 To compound the worry, media reports were agreeing with the governor, though in circumspect language that left wiggle room. Little by little, Bobby remembered, campaign staff began shuffling out of headquarters; by 4:00 A.M. only a handful remained. Then, when the Worcester returns came in, showing Jack with a small but clear win there (by five thousand votes), shouts of jubilation rang out, for it meant Lodge was running out of places to turn the t
ide. Not many votes remained to be counted. Staffers began trickling back in, their mood expectant. As dawn approached, the Kennedy forces no longer had a doubt: their man had prevailed.76

  Lodge, however, seemed in no hurry to concede, which caused renewed consternation: Did he know something they didn’t know? Did he have some additional returns up his sleeve? Was there a mistake in the count?

  At seven thirty, some Kennedy staffers stationed at the windows at Kilby Street spotted the tall, straight-backed patrician exiting his nearby headquarters. “Everyone be polite to him,” Jack Kennedy instructed. “Give him a hand when he comes in.” The Republican never arrived; he got into a waiting limousine and sped right past the Kennedy command post. Jack fumed in disgust at the perceived slight (“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, “can you believe it?”), but only momentarily. Lodge’s concession arrived via telegram at 7:34, removing all doubt. Victory had come. John F. Kennedy had won a seat in the United States Senate.77