The nitty-gritty politicking did not cease with the victory in the primary, but it was cut back dramatically, victory in November being more or less a foregone conclusion. The campaign offices in the district stayed open but with reduced hours, and most of the volunteers went back to their former lives.
Never one to stint on R&R, Jack took advantage of the summer lull to spend time in Hyannis Port and New York City, and to make another sojourn out west to Hollywood. On the set of the film Dragonwyck, he met screen star Gene Tierney, riding high from her Oscar-nominated role in Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and her title role in Laura (1944). Tierney fell hard for the congressional candidate, who was three years her senior. She recalled how, on the set, “I turned and found myself staring into the most perfect blue eyes I had ever seen on a man….He smiled at me. My reaction was right out of the ladies’ romance novel. Literally, my heart skipped….A coy thought flashed through my mind: I was glad I had worn a lavender gown for my scene that day. Lavender was my best color.” The young Kennedy was thin, she went on, and “had the kind of bantering, unforced Irish charm that women so often find fatal. He asked questions about my work, the kind that revealed how well he already knew the subject.”43
Jack also proved a sympathetic listener as Tierney described the trauma of institutionalizing her mentally disabled daughter, Daria. “He told me about his sister Rosemary, who had been born retarded, and how his family had loved and protected her. The subject was awkward for him. The Kennedys did not survive by dwelling on their imperfections. ‘Gene,’ he said, after a silence had passed between us, ‘in any large family you can always find something wrong with somebody.’ ”44
So enamored did Tierney become of Jack that she supposedly spurned the advances of Hollywood leading man Tyrone Power. But though she saw Jack in Hollywood and later in New York and on the Cape (“Jack met me at the station, wearing patched blue jeans. I thought he looked like Tom Sawyer”), the affair did not last. Jack was not about to commit to any divorcée or Hollywood starlet, not with his political career just getting launched.45 That summer the gossip pages in L.A. also linked him with Peggy Cummins, an aspiring Irish actress, but, according to Chuck Spalding’s wife, Betty, “it wasn’t a serious thing. She was just a girl to date.” And he lost interest, Spalding added, when Cummins (“a nice girl”) refused to go to bed with him.46
Betty Spalding found it interesting that Jack, though “amusing and bright and fascinating to listen to” and “marvelous company,” was no chivalrous gentleman, in the sense of opening doors for women or standing up when an older woman entered a room. “He was nice to people, but heedless of people, heedless about his clothes, and heedless about money. He never had any money with him.” Gene Tierney also remarked on this capricious aspect of Jack’s character: “I am not sure I can explain the nature of Jack’s charm, but he took life as it came. He never worried about making an impression. He made you feel very secure….He was good with people in a way that went beyond politics, thoughtful in more than a material way. Gifts and flowers were not his style. He gave you his time, his interest.”47
Yet the time and interest could be ephemeral, with male as well as female friends. Before embarking for California, Kennedy had promised Red Fay that he would make a stop in Woodside, near San Francisco, to see him and meet his parents and friends. He almost reneged on the vow, then showed up late and made a poor impression on all concerned, bailing early on a party in his honor in order to go to a movie with another friend and showing scant interest in ingratiating himself with his hosts. Characteristically short on cash, he borrowed $20 from Fay and paid him back only months later, and after Fay had written him twice about it. The nonchalance left Fay feeling bitter, especially after he had traveled all the way to Boston to help out in Jack’s primary campaign. To Fay it was a disconcerting sign that his friend might be undergoing a change as he donned his political mantle, and not for the better—a congressman to be, he suddenly seemed less dedicated to maintaining the attachments of old.*3, 48
Jack’s friend Henry James, whom he had known during his Stanford interlude, six years before, likewise detected a troubling change in him around this same time. “I didn’t see the whole evolution of the process,” James told a later interviewer, “but I did see certain signs, which made it very clear to me that I was losing him as a person and that perhaps the only way I could ever see him again was as a former friend, unimportant probably, for I wasn’t going to be his toady like Lem Billings—I put more value on myself than that….I envied people like Billings for their continuing close relationship to Jack, but I didn’t respect them for it.”49
The November election went more or less as expected, in the Massachusetts Eleventh as well as nationally. Jack Kennedy sauntered to victory in his race, winning 69,093 votes to Bowen’s 26,007. But he was a rare bright spot for his party that autumn. In Massachusetts the Democrats lost a U.S. Senate seat—Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. trounced the old stalwart incumbent David I. Walsh, who had helped smooth Jack’s passage to combat service in 1943—as well as the governorship. Nationally, they were brutalized, relinquishing control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1932 as the GOP gained twelve seats in the Senate and a whopping fifty-five in the House. In California’s Twelfth District, an ambitious Republican Navy veteran named Richard M. Nixon rode the anti-incumbent wave to victory, falsely accusing his Democratic opponent, Representative Jerry Voorhis, of being a Communist, or at least of working with a political action committee that was infiltrated by Communists. In Wisconsin, another Republican, ex-Marine Joseph R. McCarthy, won election to the U.S. Senate, partly by playing the anti-Communist card and partly by misrepresenting his military service. (He exaggerated the number of combat missions he had flown in the Pacific.) Overall, some forty veterans won election to the House, and eight more in the Senate.
For John F. Kennedy, age twenty-nine, an extraordinary moment had come. He was a United States congressman–elect. He had overcome his precarious health and political inexperience, as well as his father’s humiliating exit from public life, to win a seat in the Eightieth Congress. If his success stemmed in part from his family name and family wealth, it also had deeper roots. Say what one will about Joseph P. Kennedy, it’s not every multi-millionaire father who takes such broad interest in his children, who believes in them so fervently, and who, together with his wife, instills in them, from a young age, a firm commitment to public service. Joe Kennedy did. From his mother, meanwhile, Jack inherited a lasting interest in history and in books, and an abiding curiosity about the world.
Yet Jack’s victory was also very much his own. His war story from the Pacific resonated with voters, as did his quiet charm and dignified affability on the campaign trail. As aide after aide quickly saw, voters just liked him, plain and simple. He also campaigned hard, taking nothing for granted, and motivated people to want to work for him. In substantive terms, he had fashioned, through his writing and his speechmaking, a political philosophy that transcended the narrow, selfish vision of his father and elder brother, in the form of a pluralist, liberal internationalism—idealistic yet infused with pragmatic realism—that would in time resonate with a broad cross section of Americans. Already in his senior thesis in 1940, Jack Kennedy had depicted a more messy and congested world than did either his father or his older brother, and in the event-packed half dozen years that followed, he’d honed and expanded that worldview. All the while, he conveyed a dedication to ideals larger than self.
Thus was established the prototype for all future Jack Kennedy campaigns: a disciplined and efficient organization, energetic family support, a campaign war chest bulging with resources, and, most important of all, a talented, winsome, hardworking candidate, highly adept at using others to the extent they were helpful to him.
“You have my best wishes for success in the tough job with which you have been entrusted,” journalist Herbert Bayard Swope wrote to Kennedy the day after his victory. “My crystal ball reveals you as the center of a fascinating drama—one that carries you far and high. I hope I am a true prophet.”50
And so Swope was. In November 1946, it may be said, came the end of the remarkable early life of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. His even more extraordinary public life was about to begin.