III
For all the positive attributes Jack Kennedy brought to the table, he still faced the tall task of prevailing against a deep field of rivals on the Democratic side. All told, ten candidates made the ballot, including one woman. Several of them were better known in the district and more experienced in local politics than Kennedy. The most formidable of them was Mike Neville, of vote-rich Cambridge, the son of a blacksmith from Cork and an affable, experienced attorney. Neville had worked for the phone company and gone to law school at night, then had climbed the political pole to state legislator and mayor; he had the backing of Governor Tobin as well as many of the older lawmakers in Cambridge and Somerville. John F. Cotter, of Charlestown, also caused worry on the Kennedy side—as administrative assistant to two former congressmen, Jim Curley and John P. Higgins, Cotter had built close connections to numerous wards in the district, and he knew how to campaign.
Leaving nothing to chance, Jack’s team worked to spread his support across as much of the district as possible, the better to minimize the damage done by favorite-son candidates like Neville and Cotter. And they were not above bare-knuckle shenanigans: when a respected Boston city councilman named Joseph Russo declared his candidacy and looked likely to win broad support in the Italian North End and among Italian Americans elsewhere, Joe Kane scrounged up another Joseph Russo and got him on the ballot, in order to divide the councilman’s tally.21
Throughout, Joseph Kennedy made heavy use of his checkbook, though just how heavy remains unclear. He himself quipped that “with what I’m spending I could elect my chauffeur,” and many subsequent accounts give the impression of virtually unlimited outlays of money, much of it handed out in cash by Eddie Moore. But Mark Dalton, a key member of the campaign team, maintained otherwise: “The way congressional campaigns go, I would say it was not an extraordinarily expensive campaign. I would say certainly it was well financed and it was. We had many, many billboards, and we had the advertising material which was presented all through the community. There certainly was no shortage of funds, but on the other hand, I say this with all sincerity, it was not an exorbitant campaign.” Though the figures $300,000 and $250,000 were thrown around, another campaign insider estimated the amount spent to be in the neighborhood of $50,000. Whatever the ultimate sum, the Kennedys certainly outspent the competition, which led to no little grousing among other candidates, all of whom got precisely what Joe Kane meant when he said it takes three things to win an election: money, money, and money.22
The candidate at dinner with family and friends. Seated, from left: Francis X. Morrissey, Josie Fitzgerald, Eunice, Jack, Honey Fitz Fitzgerald, and Joseph F. Timilty. Lem Billings is standing behind Josie. Kenny O’Donnell—later to become a close aide—and Helen Sullivan (the future Mrs. O’Donnell) are standing behind Jack and Honey Fitz.
In the final weeks before the vote, the Kennedy family came out in force. Eunice, Pat, and Jean walked up and down streets, knocking on doors and holding out their brother’s campaign brochure, often to the startled delight of the person inside. Young Teddy, age fourteen, sometimes accompanied them and also served as general errand boy. Bobby, now twenty and out of the Navy, was assigned the job of running a campaign office deep in enemy territory, in East Cambridge, with the hope that he could trim the anticipated vote against Jack from five-to-one to four-to-one. Working three mostly Italian wards, and doing much of it on foot, Bobby shook hands and handed out literature, from early morning until late at night, occasionally pausing to eat spaghetti with a receptive family. Rose Kennedy, too, became a dedicated and effective campaigner, especially with women in the district—as a Gold Star Mother, she could speak mom to mom about her treasured Jack. She was, moreover, comfortable in this environment, having grown up accompanying her father, Honey Fitz, on the hustings. She not only knew how the game was played but enjoyed playing it.
Most of all, of course, it was the candidate’s father who made his presence felt, in ways large and small. Though officially Mark Dalton had the title of campaign manager, everyone knew (not least Dalton) that the job really belonged to Joe Kennedy. No decision of consequence was made without his involvement. He and his son would strategize continually, in person and on the phone, and he insisted on being in the know on every aspect of the campaign. “Mr. Kennedy called me many, many times, to know exactly what was happening,” Dalton said afterwards. “As a matter of fact that was one of my problems. He’d keep you on the phone for an hour and a half, two hours.”23 A master of media manipulation and PR, Joe spent hours on the phone with reporters and editors, seeking information, trading confidences, and cajoling them into publishing puff pieces on Jack, ones that invariably played up his war record in the Pacific. He oversaw a professional advertising campaign that ensured ads went up in just the right places—the campaign had a virtual monopoly on subway space, and on window stickers (“Kennedy for Congress”) for cars and homes—and was the force behind the mass mailing of Hersey’s PT 109 article.
To some observers, then and later, the old man was more than a de facto campaign manager; he was a puppet master, a Svengali who had decided before war’s end what he wanted—to get his oldest surviving son into political office—and then set about making it happen. He called all the shots, according to this view, and made every strategic decision of consequence. It’s not really true. Jack Kennedy, as we’ve seen, had his own attraction to politics as a career, had made his own decision to run in the Eleventh, and he was at all times central in his own campaign. When the two men disagreed on strategy or tactics, Jack’s view prevailed. (He admired his father’s business accomplishments no end, but doubted his political discernment.)24 Still more untenable is the opposite argument, made by some Jack loyalists, that the father’s role in 1946 was incidental.25 Joe’s bottomless finances and forceful personality ensured that he would loom large, as did his son’s deep devotion to him. He was a legendary figure in Massachusetts, one who was not shy about using his varied connections on his son’s behalf. He hadn’t built his empire by leaving things to chance, and he was not about to change his modus operandi now.
The elder Kennedy made only one public appearance with his son, but an extraordinary one it was. Having noted Jack’s appeal to female voters, the campaign conceived an event that would become a staple of his future races: a tea reception for women voters that allowed them to meet the candidate and members of his family. Eunice served as coordinator, supervising a team of twenty-five volunteer secretaries to hand-address thousands of engraved invitations requesting the pleasure of the recipient’s company at a formal reception at the Commander Hotel in Cambridge, just off Harvard Square. Seasoned pros scoffed at the notion—who had ever heard of voters getting dressed up just to meet a political candidate?—and the Kennedys themselves were unsure how it would go. But on an unseasonably hot Sunday evening in mid-June, some fifteen hundred mostly female voters showed up at the hotel, many in rented ball gowns. The queue snaked around the block. At the head of the receiving line stood Joe and Rose, he in white tie and tails, she in a stylish new dress from Paris.26
To Mike Neville’s campaign manager, the Commander Hotel event was the clincher, not only because of the large turnout but because of the media coverage it received. Photos and stories filled the local press, and one reporter called it “a demonstration unparalleled in the history of Congressional fights in this district.”27 How many votes it actually gained Kennedy is unknowable, but in the primary election, three days later, he coasted to victory, taking 22,183 votes to Neville’s 11,341, John Cotter’s 6,671, and (the original) Joe Russo’s 5,661. (The “Kennedy Russo” managed to siphon off 799.) In a ten-candidate race, his share of the vote, at 41 percent, was impressive, as was the fact that he almost bested Neville in Cambridge. Turnout fell below expectations, however, in part because of a steady rainfall; only 30 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. In the evening, Jack took in a movie—the Marx Brothers’ A Night in Casablanca—while the returns were coming in, then he visited each campaign office before returning to headquarters well after midnight to celebrate in the low-key style that would become his custom. Honey Fitz, however, did not hold back: the octogenarian danced a jig on a table and belted out his theme song, “Sweet Adeline.”28
“Of course I am a happy man tonight,” Honey Fitz declared. “John F. Kennedy has brains, industry, and above all, character. He will make a great representative of the 11th Congressional District.”29
Joseph Kennedy, on the other hand, was strangely subdued. “I couldn’t understand it,” Dalton recalled. “He wasn’t going around saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you for what you’ve done for my son.’ He wasn’t doing that at all.”30 Perhaps the patriarch was holding his enthusiasm in check pending the outcome of the general election, in November. Or perhaps he was haunted by what might have been. Joe Junior, after all, was the son he had envisioned in this role, the one carrying the Kennedy name to new and glorious political heights—not the frail and reticent second son. Perhaps it was both. And perhaps there was also this: to Joe Kennedy, a congressional seat was but a first step for Jack, and therefore not something to get too excited about.
The Boston Traveler, in accounting for the victory, downplayed the importance of Joe’s money: “If any of the other candidates had spent twice as much as the Kennedy campaign cost, Kennedy would still have won….Kennedy as a candidate had attributes which his opponents did not have and could not buy—a well-known name and family background and connections. He also had personality and a superior war record.” No less important, the paper went on, Kennedy had an asset that should have been “of the utmost concern to the older politicians”: a political machine that was “built overnight” and “based on voters under the age of 35,” many of them veterans full of enthusiasm and idealism. “Most of the workers who crowded into his seven headquarters nightly for two months, addressing envelopes and making telephone calls, also were youthful. They may have been amateurs, but they did the tiresome tasks which bring in votes, and they were worth more than all the ward ‘pols’ in the district combined.”31
Congratulatory notes flowed in from all over. Jack’s sister Kathleen, who had just purchased a house in London (long enamored of England, she had decided to make her home there), wrote “just to tell you how terrifically pleased I am for you. Everyone says you were so good in the election and the outcome must have been a great source of satisfaction. It’s nice to know you are as appreciated in the 11th Congressional District as you are among your brothers and sisters. Gee, aren’t you lucky?” Then she added, “The folks here think you are madly pro-British so don’t start destroying that illusion until I get my house fixed. The painters might just not like your attitude!”32
IV
With the hard-fought primary behind him, Jack Kennedy could look forward to a much easier contest in the general election. His party could not say the same, even though in theory 1946 should have been a good year for Democrats. World War II had ended in complete victory the year before, after all, and despite fears of a postwar recession or depression, the economy adjusted quite well, fueled by consumer spending. (Americans had taken home steady paychecks during the war but had had little to spend them on; now they were ready to buy.) Farm income rose to an all-time high. Unemployment stood at a mere 3 percent and, after a decade and a half of privation—the Depression followed by wartime rationing and shortages—consumer goods were again available, including new ones such as washing machines and televisions. Thanks to the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill of Rights, veterans could get home mortgages, embark on college educations, and set up small businesses. In comparative terms, meanwhile, the United States was ever more of a colossus: by war’s end, the nation had three-fourths of the world’s invested capital, and two-thirds of all gold reserves.
The transformation was stunning. In 1939, America’s gross national product—the total value of the services and goods produced by the nation’s residents—had been $91 billion. In 1945 it was $215 billion, a leap unlike any seen in the history of the world. At the start of the twentieth century, the United States had nearly a quarter of the world’s economy; by the end of World War II it had almost half. This, too, was unprecedented in human history.33
Yet the party of Harry Truman was in trouble as the fall campaign began. Though the reconversion to a peacetime economy had been relatively smooth, acute shortages remained, and the demand drove prices up. A dearth of flour, for example, created long lines in Chicago and other cities, while pent-up demand for beef drove the price up by 70 percent. Truman, struggling with the mountainous task of easing shortages while holding prices down, in mid-1946 imposed a price ceiling on meat. American cattlemen responded by keeping their animals from the market, causing butchers to go out of business and leading to “meat riots” in cities throughout the land. Car buyers likewise found themselves frustrated by the lack of supply, as did couples on the hunt for a washing machine. Women struggled to find nylons.34
Nor did the president prove adept at handling the labor unrest that erupted immediately after the end of the war, when management proved slow to respond to grievances and inflation ate away at workers’ real income. In late 1945, 200,000 General Motors workers walked off the job, and they did not return for 113 days. They were followed in early 1946 by meat-packers and steelworkers, then electrical workers and coal miners. All told, nearly five million workers walked off the job in 1946, resulting in 116 million man-days of labor being lost—three times the total of any previous year. Neither management nor government officials seemed to know how to deal with the problem, and a frustrated public gradually lost patience with the strikers and the Truman administration. When Truman wielded the power of the federal government to shut down a railroad workers’ strike, he alienated the important labor wing of his party.35
Many of Jack Kennedy’s fellow veterans, too, voiced frustration with their lot, notwithstanding the GI Bill’s provisions. For the most part their homecomings from the war had been joyful affairs, but when the celebrations died down, many realized that life had moved on for the people around them. The world they’d known had grown unfamiliar. And it all seemed deeply unfair: while they had answered the call and been yanked away for years, risking their lives and in some cases suffering grievous injuries, others had avoided service, stayed home, and prospered. Some veterans, including thousands who had married quickly before enlisting or while home on leave, never adjusted to matrimony, with the result that the divorce rate in 1945 shot up to double that of the prewar era, to thirty-one divorces for every hundred marriages—or more than half a million total. (In subsequent years the rate trickled down to prewar levels.)36 In 1946, moviegoers flocked to the ironically titled motion picture The Best Years of Our Lives, which took home nine Academy Awards for its powerful depiction of three veterans grappling with the difficulties of readjusting to life back home. The film was the highest-grossing picture of its time, and a close second in viewership to Gone with the Wind.
Candidate Kennedy addressed the readjustment problems experienced by some returning men. “Home was built up out of all proportion to reality when they were away,” he remarked on the stump. “This built-up conception served them well when the going was tough. It was the same as heaven—and made it easier for them to live amid suffering and boredom and desolation. But reality is a little different. There are no high salaries for inexperienced veterans….Homes are hard to find—jobs are frequently monotonous. Some men even feel a faint nostalgia for army life,” for the comradeship, for the feeling of mutual interdependence. And, he went on, there was nobility in this longing, for after all, “we are dependent on other people nearly every minute of our lives—for our food, for help when we are sick. Even when we drive a car we are depending on the skill and judgment of the other people on the road. In a larger sense, each one of us is dependent on all the people of this country—on their obedience to our laws, for their rejection of the siren calls of ambitious demagogues. In fact, if we only realized it, we are in time of peace as interdependent as soldiers were in the time of war. I think it is high time that we recognize this truth. If we did, how much easier would be our time ahead!”37
There was hope and power in this message, and it worked well for Kennedy in the Massachusetts Eleventh. Nationally, however, Republicans schemed to make the November election a referendum on Truman. Working with a top advertising firm, party leaders came up with a simple and powerful slogan: “Had Enough?” They used every opportunity to push the pun “To err is Truman.” More important, the GOP recruited a strong slate of congressional candidates—especially in those races that were legitimately winnable. The Massachusetts Eleventh was not one of these, so the party put up a sacrificial lamb, Somerville’s Lester W. Bowen. The outcome was all but preordained, which gave Kennedy the opportunity to focus in much of his speechmaking on his preferred turf: foreign policy and national security.
Here the picture had changed dramatically in the year since World War II’s end. Already at the Potsdam Conference, before the fighting in the Pacific even ended, American officials had grasped that Soviet leaders were determined to dominate the areas then under Red Army control. U.S. planners determined they would not try to thwart these Soviet designs, but would resist any effort by Stalin and his lieutenants to move farther west, to those parts of Europe that the Allied powers occupied. Likewise, the Soviets would not be allowed to interfere in Japan, or be permitted to take over Iran, where their troops had lingered in the north. After Stalin, in February 1946, delivered a speech that depicted a world threatened by rapacious capitalist expansion, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Moscow, George F. Kennan, sent a bleak “long telegram” to Washington that said Kremlin fanaticism made diplomatic engagement impossible. His report strengthened the sense among American policymakers that only firmness could yield results with Moscow. The following month, Winston Churchill delivered an electrifying speech in Fulton, Missouri. With Truman at his side, the former British prime minister proclaimed that an “iron curtain” had descended upon Europe, splitting East from West.*2, 38
With the Grand Alliance a rapidly fading memory, the Soviets and the Americans feuded across the board. When the United States gave a hefty reconstruction loan to Britain but withheld one from the Soviet Union, Stalin’s government admonished Washington for using its currency to control other countries. The two powers also squabbled over Iran, where the United States had helped secure the pro-West shah’s ascension to the throne and where the Soviets sponsored separatist groups and sought to gain access to oil reserves. Deeply split on the terms of German unification, the former allies developed their zones independently.
Not every American analyst backed the administration’s harsh anti-Soviet position. Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace, who had been FDR’s vice president before Truman, charged that Truman’s hard-line posture was wrongly exchanging military and economic pressure for diplomacy. In a speech at Madison Square Garden in September 1946, Wallace called for conciliation vis-à-vis Moscow and warned that “getting tough never brought anything real and lasting—whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world powers. The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.” Truman soon dismissed Wallace from the cabinet, berating him privately as “a real Commy and a dangerous man” and bragging that he had now “run the crackpots out of the Democratic Party.”39
Jack Kennedy, for his part, applauded the tough Truman-Churchill line. In a radio speech in Boston, he castigated Wallace for being naive and called for a firm U.S. policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. True, he said, people like Wallace maintained that “the Russian experiment is a good one, since the Russians are achieving economic security at a not too great cost in loss of personal freedom,” but these observers were wrong. “The truth is that the Russian people have neither economic security nor personal freedom,” Kennedy went on; they lacked the right to strike and were subject to arbitrary arrest and punishment, including being sent to Siberian labor camps. Kremlin leaders, meanwhile, had gobbled up the Baltic states, eastern Poland, and the Kuril Islands (seized from Japan immediately before the end of the Pacific War) and were looking to expand their reach, including into Greece, Turkey, and Iran. Washington therefore had no option but to adopt Secretary of State James Byrnes’s preferred policy: “get tough with Russia.” Anticipating what would soon come to be called the Cold War, Jack concluded, “The years ahead will be difficult and strained, the sacrifices great, but it is only by supporting with all our hearts the course we believe to be right, can we prove that that course is not only right but that it has strength and vigor.”40
The candidate and his political team must have liked what he said: the radio talk was converted into a speech he gave several times in the closing days of the fall campaign.
On occasion Kennedy turned more philosophical, as when he delivered the annual Boston Independence Day oration at historic Faneuil Hall, where Revolutionary Era colonists had met to plot and protest. Half a century before, Honey Fitz had been the featured speaker at the event, in this same locale, and Jack now took his turn, on the topic of “Some Elements of the American Character.” Pointing to the vital role played by religious and idealistic conviction in the nation’s history, including in the eradication of slavery and in the recent victory over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, he warned his audience that moral conviction alone was never enough; a healthy dose of pragmatic realism would be required as well. Thus, in World War I, “the idealism with which we had entered the battle made the subsequent disillusionment all the more bitter and revealed a dangerous facet to this element of the American character, for this bitterness, a direct result of our inflated hopes, brought a radical change in our foreign policy and a resulting withdrawal from Europe. We failed to make the adjustment between what we had hoped to win and what we actually could win. Our idealism was too strong. We would not compromise.”
He concluded with a ringing affirmation of his core philosophy:
Conceived in Grecian thought, strengthened by Christian morality, and stamped indelibly into American political philosophy, the right of the individual against the State is the keystone of our Constitution. Each man is free. He is free in thought. He is free in expression. He is free in worship. To us, who have been reared in the American tradition, these rights have become part of our very being. They have become so much a part of our being that most of us are prone to feel that they are rights universally recognized and universally exercised. But the sad fact is that this is not true. They were dearly won for us only a few short centuries ago and they were dearly preserved for us in the days just past. And there are large sections of the world today where these rights are denied as a matter of philosophy and as a matter of government.41
In several speeches, he quoted a line from Rousseau that he’d jotted down in a loose-leaf notebook the previous year: “As soon as any man says of the affairs of state, ‘What does it matter to me?’ the state may be given up as lost.” He used the line before an audience of young Democrats in Pennsylvania, for example, and again before students and faculty at his alma mater Choate, which was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary and had invited him to be the featured speaker. Kennedy told both groups to resist becoming cynical about politics and politicians, for the survival of American democracy ultimately depended on civic duty, on having an engaged and informed citizenry that embraced the call to public service. This claim would be central to his historic inaugural address of 1961; it’s remarkable to see it articulated already here, at the very outset of his political career, in speeches he wrote to a significant extent by himself. To the audience at Choate he added a corollary, one that would likewise become a bedrock principle in the years to come: namely, that effective politics must involve mutual give-and-take by people acting in good faith. “In America, politics are regarded with great contempt; and politicians themselves are looked down upon because of their free and easy compromises. It is well for us to understand that politicians are dealing with human beings, with all their varied ambitions, desires, and backgrounds; and many of these compromises cannot be avoided.”42