Before long, however, the millionaire’s kid from Harvard proved himself to be an effective campaigner in the hardscrabble wards of the district. His very reticence and amateurishness worked with voters who found his sincerity and informality and seeming shyness a refreshing contrast with the cynical, voluble Irish office seekers of yesteryear. (He relished hearing stories about these larger-than-life figures and their baroque style of politics, but he didn’t want to be like them.) Jack didn’t condescend to these residents, didn’t take them for granted, didn’t resort to the forced familiarity of the how’s-your-mother-give-her-my-love variety. And he scored points by keeping his speeches short and leaving time for questions. “As you observed him in the course of his actions, you saw that he had a very good handshake, he knew how to smile at people, he remembered people’s names,” said Tony Galluccio, a Harvard friend who worked on the campaign. “Everybody that you introduced him to liked him as a person, liked him as an individual.” A local journalist who covered the campaign agreed: “To meet him was to vote for him, I think it’s that simple. If you start to look for complicated reasons [for his success], you won’t find any.”10

“There was a basic dignity in Jack Kennedy,” Dave Powers remarked, “a pride in his bearing that appealed to every Irishman who was beginning to feel a little embarrassed by the sentimental, corny style of the typical Irish politician. As the Irish themselves were becoming more middle-class, they wanted a leader to reflect their upward mobility.” Powers would until his dying day be an unstintingly loyal Jack Kennedy partisan, a keeper of the JFK flame, and his recollections must be considered in that light, but in this assessment he was far from alone. Given his candidate’s likability, Powers saw his main job as a simple one: “My goal then was to have Jack Kennedy meet as many people as he possibly could.”11

“People were subconsciously looking for a new type of a candidate,” Galluccio echoed, “and Jack fitted into this. He had the naive appearance, he had the shock of hair that fell over his forehead. He was a multi-millionaire who was very humble. As people would say, this fellow is not the kind of a fellow who would steal. This I think was the very beginning of this political revolution in Massachusetts. Jack Kennedy fitted into this pattern. The rest he did with money, with his ability to make friends, with his tremendous capacity for work. He didn’t have to earn a living, but he did utilize his time every minute of the day going where you wanted him to, getting out and meeting people.”12

The last point is key: Kennedy was tireless, driving himself forward, never resting for long. More than anything, this work ethic—common to many successful first-time candidates—is what campaign aides and other observers remembered of those critical weeks in the late winter and spring of 1946. War had been a toughening experience, and he showed it on the trail. From early morning until late at night he would chug along, day after day, using every ounce of the characteristic Kennedy energy, never mind his various ailments. Often he would get no more than four or five hours of sleep. “We had him out to the Catholic Order of Foresters Communion Breakfast one morning,” an aide said. “He walked in and he was limping. I knew his back was bothering him and we had to walk up three flights of stairs, and he had about six other places he had to go that day. When we came downstairs, I said, ‘You don’t feel good?’ And he said, ‘I feel great.’…That’s the way he was; he would come out and he would go, go, go. I don’t know when he stopped.” The aide recalled instances when Jack would be in his suite in the Bellevue, shaving with his coat on while someone downstairs waited to drive him to his next event. “And it would go on and on and on.”13

Often his only real meal of the day would be breakfast, and it was almost always the same: two four-and-a-half-minute boiled eggs, four strips of broiled bacon, toast, coffee, and orange juice. On a rare evening off, he liked to go to the movies. Upon entering the theater he would hunt for a seat behind an empty one—so that he could prop up his knees and thereby relieve the pain in his back. His favorites that year included The Lost Weekend and The Bells of St. Mary’s.14

Behind the scenes, the candidate also proved his worth. In the late evenings he would go down to the Ritz-Carlton and have a bowl of tomato bisque. Campaign aide Peter Cloherty would meet him there with a folder of letters that had been typed earlier that evening or afternoon. “He was very meticulous about every single letter,” Cloherty remembered. “It wasn’t just a question of signing them. If the letter was addressed to ‘Dear Mr. Stewart’ and it should have been ‘Dear John,’ he would change it, possibly have that one retyped, or add a personal footnote to it in his own hand. Then we’d bring them back up in the morning and put them in the mail.”15

George Taylor, Jack’s African American valet from Winthrop House days, marveled at the determination and the attention to detail. Since Jack’s graduation, the two men had kept in touch, Jack penning occasional letters to George from one of his naval postings. Now Taylor was back in his employ, as valet and chauffeur. The two enjoyed a casual, teasing relationship, smoking cigars together and chatting about their mutual interest in women. Occasionally, too, Taylor would be a political sounding board—after a campaign speech Kennedy would ask Taylor to offer his frank critique, which Taylor duly did. He also introduced Jack to leaders in Cambridge’s black community. And always, when motoring from one event to another, the candidate would urge his driver to step on it: “He’d say to me sometimes, ‘George, you’re driving too slow. Push over and let me take the wheel.’ And when he took the wheel, he was a fast driver.”16

The hard-charging approach resulted in part from a realization on the part of Jack and his aides that orthodox campaigning alone would not do the job. People who showed up at rallies were already committed to you, and handshaking on street corners, though not without worth, wouldn’t bring many new voters into the fold. Radio time and newspaper ads had their place, but their effectiveness was diluted by the fact that these media covered all of metropolitan Boston.17 So how to reach uncommitted or apathetic voters? The only way was to go where they lived—literally. For Jack Kennedy this meant trekking through neighborhoods, scaling the stairs of three-decker upon three-decker, and knocking on door after door, sore back be damned. (Often he wore a brace.) And it meant organizing house parties in all corners of the district, with refreshments and flowers provided by the campaign. With careful logistical planning, Jack’s team found that he could take in six or more of these parties in a single evening; at each one, aides would take attendees’ names and add them to a mailing list. On some evenings, sisters Eunice and Pat would join in.^*1 The candidate was, moreover, in his element in these more intimate settings, winningly shy at the outset but then flashing his high-voltage smile and his self-effacing humor as he laid out, as succinctly and clearly as he could, why he sought their votes. And he took the high road, refraining as a matter of course from discrediting or disparaging the other candidates.

One group of voters responded especially well to this approach, the campaign quickly realized: women. Joe DeGuglielmo, a councilman in Cambridge, saw a clear pattern in the house parties there.

Somehow or the other the minute he came into a room where there was one or more women, the females that were in the room forgot everything else. It didn’t make any difference what emergency there was. They gravitated towards him. And that would happen many times….The minute the women would see him they’d drop everything, and I know I’ve gone into those same homes in the past and since and, heck, I can go in and they’ll keep on doing what they were doing. It doesn’t make a particle of difference. But when he came in, at that time, there was some sort of—I don’t know what you’d call it—some sort of electricity or something, some indefinable electricity in the air that would make the women stop and come to him. And they didn’t want him to go.18

Powers saw the phenomenon, too, soon after he answered a knock on the door of his third-floor apartment in the Bunker Hill section of gritty Charlestown and found the young Kennedy standing there in the dimly lit hallway, out of breath and smiling. Though ostensibly committed to another as-yet-undeclared candidate in the race, Powers agreed to Kennedy’s plea to join him for an evening event with Gold Star Mothers (mothers who had lost a son in the war) at the local American Legion hall. As Kennedy concluded his prepared remarks, which ran ten minutes in length, he paused, then said softly, “I think I know how all you mothers feel because my mother is a Gold Star Mother, too.” In that instant, Powers remembered, the candidate established a kind of “magical link” with everyone in the room, made himself real, showed that he understood their grief. “Suddenly, swarms of women hurried up to the platform, crowding around him and wishing him luck. And I could hear them saying to each other, ‘Isn’t he a wonderful boy, he reminds me so much of my own John’ or ‘my Bob.’ It took a half hour for him to get away.” To Powers, a political junkie who’d been going to rallies since he was ten, “this reaction was unlike any I had ever seen. It wasn’t so much what he said but the way he reached into the emotions of everyone there.” He joined the campaign that evening.19

The anecdote speaks to another element in Jack Kennedy’s favor: his record of service in the war. Veterans, who numbered some sixteen million by conflict’s end (fewer than half saw combat), were a formidable political force in America in 1945–46. Their sheer number was one factor, but so was the fact that they came from every corner of the union and from all walks of life—from the most humble to the loftiest. Hollywood stars like Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, and Tyrone Power had donned uniforms, as had several hundred major league baseball players, including Ted Williams, Hank Greenberg, Bob Feller, and Joe DiMaggio. All four of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s sons served. At the unit level, the experience of having so many men from different backgrounds thrown together generated tensions (African Americans and Japanese Americans served in separate units, while Chinese Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics served in “white” units), but it also brought cohesion and, to a degree at least, a blurring of the lines between classes, a diminution of prejudice and provincialism. In time, that cohesion would dissipate, but in 1946 it remained potent, as reflected in the success of veterans all across the country who sought political office that fall.

Kennedy, moreover, had a particularly powerful personal story to tell. At stop after stop, he introduced himself to voters as a combat veteran returning to help lead the country for which he had fought. (“The New Generation Offers a Leader,” read the campaign slogan, coined by Joe Kane, who adapted it from Henry Luce’s foreword to Why England Slept: “If John Kennedy is characteristic of the younger generation, and I believe he is, many of us would be happy to have the destinies of the Republic turned over to his generation at once.”) He regularly referred to his older brother’s service and selfless courage, and organized a new Veterans of Foreign Wars post named for him. He sought invitations to speak at events honoring veterans.

About his own specific experiences in the South Pacific he was reluctant to say much. Then and later, he played down his PT 109 heroism with his famous quip “I had no choice. They sank my boat.” To an aide he remarked early in the campaign that he had no taste for “trying to parlay a lost PT boat and a bad back into political advantage.” But gradually Kennedy came to see that his story, already familiar to some voters, was too good not to use, and he crafted a concise and powerful speech that described the sinking of the 109, minimizing his own role in the rescue effort and lauding the perseverance of his men. At his father’s insistence, some 100,000 reprints of the condensed version of John Hersey’s “Survival” article (the one that appeared in Reader’s Digest) were distributed, at a cost of $1,319 (for the printing and the envelopes), plus postage, arriving in mailboxes mere days before the vote. Volunteers were recruited to address the envelopes and do the mailing. The effort paid off. One opposing candidate’s wife reportedly was so moved by the article that she said she might have to vote for Kennedy.20