II
Jack Kennedy, it’s fair to say, was less interested in his work than his sister was in hers. And, true to form, when he was unengaged, he didn’t apply himself. “He wasn’t totally engrossed in what he was doing,” Eunice acknowledged. “He sort of drifted along. He wasn’t making any effort to be Speaker of the House. He did an ordinary probably performance.”13
Jack would not have claimed otherwise. Strange as it seemed, entering Congress was a letdown for him. The previous years had been exhilarating ones, befitting the son of Ambassador Kennedy, and had culminated in a thrilling campaign victory before adoring crowds in Boston. Now Jack saw what countless freshman House members had discovered before him: that he was but one of 435 lawmakers, and a junior one at that. What’s more, his Democrats had taken a drubbing in the election, and were suddenly the minority party in both houses, with an unpopular leader in the White House. The Massachusetts delegation in the House had fifteen members (ten Republicans, five Democrats), including Speaker Joseph Martin and Minority Whip John McCormack. It would be a long time, Jack could see, before he could gain real authority on key committees, let alone match the clout of the senior members of his party. His only role was one he did not relish: acting as the voice for the humdrum local needs of voters in the Eleventh District.
Whether he lost any sleep over his lowly status is questionable. He always understood that the House of Representatives provided scant opportunity for the kind of national leadership he craved, and he appears to have seen his post mostly as a launching pad for greater things. “I think from the time he was elected to Congress, he had no thought but to go to the Senate as fast as he could,” Arthur Krock remarked. “He wanted scope, which a freshman in the House cannot have, and very few actually of the seniors; so I think the House was just a way-station.” Of a fellow member of the Massachusetts delegation Kennedy revealingly remarked, “I never felt he did much in the Congress, but I never held that against him because I don’t think I did much. I mean you can’t do much as a Congressman.”14 Content to leave the running of his Washington office to aides Billy Sutton and Timothy “Ted” Reardon and secretary Mary Davis, Kennedy flew back to Boston as often as possible, taking an apartment directly across from the State House, at 122 Bowdoin Street, that would remain his main address for the remainder of his days (including on his driver’s license when he was president). Or he escaped to Palm Beach for a long weekend, or to New York City to meet a paramour.
The frequent absences left his poor staff scrambling to stay on top of the work that came into the office, much of it in the form of requests from people in his district. Lucky for him, they were up to the task. Davis in particular was known for her superhuman efficiency and all-around ability. A Washington native and a product of its parochial schools, she had worked for three congressmen prior to joining Kennedy’s staff, earning raves from each. According to Sutton, she could answer the phone, type a letter, and eat a candy bar all at once. “She was the complete political machine, knew everybody, how to get anything done.” Even so, Davis recalled working until seven or eight at night, taking work home, and coming in on weekends. And she despaired at Kennedy’s habit of leaving his possessions all over the place. “He was constantly replacing or trying to retrieve his coats,” she said. “He’d leave them, or his camera or radio, on a plane or on a pushcart someplace. He very rarely carried a briefcase in those days. Thank God! That would have been lost too.” But Davis also saw another side to her boss: “One thing that really surprised me were his formal speeches. He wrote his own. He appeared to be such a disinterested guy, couldn’t care less but then he’d say, ‘Mary, come on in.’ Then he would start dictating off the top of his head. The flow of language, his command of English was extraordinary. It would come out beautifully—exactly what he wanted to say. And I’d think, ‘This, coming from you?’ I surprised myself, but I came to the conclusion that he was brilliant—the brightest person I’ve ever known.”15
Congressman Kennedy was given two committee assignments: the Committee on Education and Labor and the lowly Committee on the District of Columbia. He focused a lot of his early attention on housing, especially for veterans. Since the end of the war, the armed services had demobilized rapidly, and the nation faced an acute residential shortage. Millions of people were forced to live in cramped quarters—attics, basements, even boxcars and chicken coops. Soon after taking office, Jack spoke fervently on the issue before the National Public Housing Conference, in Chicago. “Veterans need homes and they need them quickly,” he declared. “Any veteran who watched the American supplies pouring ashore on the Normandy beaches; who saw the Pacific Islands cleared and our air landing strips rolled out in four or five days; who saw the endless waste of war and the seemingly never ending productivity that replaced that waste; is it any wonder that the veteran cannot understand why he is not housed?”16 When the House GOP leadership blocked a bipartisan Senate bill to create 1.25 million new urban housing units per year for the next ten years, Jack went to the House floor and accused Republicans of being beholden to lobbyists. “I was sent to this Congress by the people of my district,” he proclaimed, “to help solve the most pressing problem facing this country—the housing crisis. I am going to have to go back to my district on Saturday, a district that probably sent more boys per family into this last war than any in the country, and when they ask me if I was able to get them any homes, I will have to answer, ‘Not a one—not a single one.’ ”17
On this and most other domestic legislation, Jack generally aligned with the Truman administration and liberal northern Democrats. He opposed a tax bill for favoring the rich over everyone else and a lowering of the appropriation for school lunches. He also voted against a weakening of rent control and tax relief for the oil industry. He backed more robust social security, stepped up minimum wage provisions, and offered support for expanded immigration and housing programs. In his committee votes, he aligned closely with the wishes of organized labor—according to the CIO News rating system, Jack voted “wrong” only twice during his time in the House.18
Yet he also showed an occasional willingness to cut an independent path. When, in 1947, Mayor James Curley was convicted of mail fraud and sent to Danbury penitentiary (the judge ignored Curley’s plea that he was suffering from nine separate maladies and likely did not have long to live), party leaders in Boston and Washington urged President Truman to pardon him, using a petition drawn up by House Majority Leader John McCormack and signed by Republican as well as Democratic representatives. But Kennedy refused to sign, even though Curley was immensely popular among Boston voters and even though it could be said that Jack owed Curley for having retired from the House and left his seat open. To Kennedy’s mind, signing the petition would show him to be just another hypocritical pol, no better than the man he had replaced, and he waved aside aides’ fears that by failing to sign he risked alienating party leaders as well as the voters of his district. (Later in the year, Truman did commute Curley’s sentence, and the mayor’s mystery ailments suddenly disappeared.)19
On other issues, too, Kennedy showed a marked disdain for dogmatism, whether from the left or the right. On labor legislation he took relatively nuanced positions, showing a greater openness to reforms than most Democrats while at the same time rejecting Republican claims of what constituted appropriate changes to labor law. A champion of New Deal policies, he privately worried about the expansion of government power that many of the programs necessitated. The guest list for his salons in Georgetown typically had as many Republican as Democratic names on it, and in his speeches he sometimes expounded on the importance in democratic politics of a spirit of compromise, of bargaining in good faith. He grew close to several conservative Democrats and often expressed admiration for Senator Robert A. Taft, the austere Republican from Ohio, whom he considered honorable and trenchant.20
Kennedy also got on well with Richard Nixon. Both served on the Education and Labor Committee and, given their freshman status in different parties, were seated at opposite ends of the table. “We were like a pair of unmatched bookends,” Nixon recalled. The thirty-four-year-old Californian admired Kennedy’s languid grace and ease of manner, and envied him his Harvard degree, while Jack found Nixon knowledgeable and respectful. (“Listen to this fellow,” Jack said to an aide early on. “He’s going places.”)21 In certain core respects their views also aligned—both sought to keep organized labor in check (Nixon went further, seeking to drive it back); both thought that Communism should not be allowed to drive union activity.
One evening in April 1947, as part of the committee’s road show, the two young lawmakers found themselves debating the proposed Taft-Hartley Act (which restricted the power and activities of labor) in the small steel town of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. Nixon, a champion undergrad debater at Whittier College, expressed full support for worker rights but warned the audience that big labor was growing “by leaps and bounds” and threatening economic growth. He listed the strikes that had roiled the nation since the war ended. Some hisses could be heard from the largely pro-labor crowd. Jack was more conciliatory, warmer, smoother in his delivery. He mostly ignored Nixon as he struck a moderate line, commending American workers while cautioning against policies that could lead to a “war” between management and labor.22
Someone could write a novel about what happened next (and indeed someone has). At midnight, after munching hamburgers and chatting about baseball in a local diner, the two congressmen boarded the Capitol Limited together for the long train ride back to Washington.23 They drew straws for the lower berth; Nixon won. They then stayed up for hours, talking mostly about foreign policy, each man’s preferred topic, and in particular the rising tensions with the Soviet Union. In the fullness of time, each would revise his opinion of the other, in a downward way, but on this night, with the train chugging through the quiet countryside, Nixon and Kennedy felt a mutual kinship. They had some things in common, they realized, beyond being Navy veterans who were new to Congress: both had lost a golden-child older brother, and both labored under heavy parental expectations. Moreover, Nixon later said, “We shared one quality which distinguished us from most of our fellow congressmen. Neither of us was a backslapper, and we were uncomfortable with boisterous displays of superficial camaraderie. He was shy, and that sometimes made him appear aloof. But it was a shyness born of an instinct that guarded privacy and concealed emotions. I understood these qualities because I shared them.”24
House freshmen participate in a radio broadcast in 1947. Kennedy is second from right in the rear; Richard Nixon is at the far right.
Some who observed Jack in this period took a less benign view, finding him too casual by half, and too aloof. “He never seemed to get into the midstream of any tremendous political thought, or political action,” remarked William O. Douglas, Supreme Court justice and Kennedy family friend. “He didn’t seem to be caught up in anything, and was sort of drifting.” And though in time he would develop a thicker skin than most politicians, in this period he brooded over slights, as longtime political ally Thomas “Tip” O’Neill noted. “If a group of politicians were talking and somebody said something mean about Jack and it got back to him, he’d be over to see me. ‘Why doesn’t so-and-so like me?’ he’d ask. Why can’t he and I sit down and straighten this thing out?…He hadn’t grown up in the school of hard knocks. Politically, he had lived an easy life and was used to people loving him.”25
And for the most part people did love him. Press treatment by the Boston dailies was generally favorable, and not infrequently laudatory, as reporters championed his support for veterans and his outspoken views on labor issues dear to the people of his district. Criticism of his decision on the Curley petition was muted and fleeting. One detects the hand of Joseph P. Kennedy in at least some of this coverage—the Ambassador had not ceased his relentless behind-the-scenes PR efforts to promote his son—but there was also a broadly felt sense that Representative Kennedy looked out for his constituents’ interests and, in general, acquitted himself well. Nor was it just Boston journalists who took this view. As Congress went into recess that first summer, national columnist Drew Pearson offered his take on the Eightieth Congress. The most promising thing about it, he told his readers, was the presence of several talented new lawmakers. John F. Kennedy was at the top of his list.26
III
It did not escape the attention of observers such as Pearson that Jack Kennedy was particularly comfortable in one policy area of growing salience: foreign affairs. Despite his tender age, he had abundant international experience to his credit, and a well-received book on foreign policy. He’d also won widespread acclaim for his service in the war and had covered the San Francisco Conference and the British election of 1945 as a journalist. It all gave Kennedy enhanced authority when he ventured into matters pertaining to overseas crises.
He had ample opportunities to do so, for in 1947 the East-West conflict was growing more serious by the week. Early in the year, the British government requested U.S. help in Greece to defend its conservative client government in a civil war against leftists. Truman responded in March by asking Congress, in a speech before the House, to allocate $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey. Lawmakers were skeptical, the president knew, so he talked up the danger, lacing his speech with alarmist language intended to stake out America’s role in stopping relentless Communist expansion in the postwar world. “If Greece should fall under the control of an armed minority,” he gravely proclaimed, in an early version of the domino theory, “the effect upon its neighbor, Turkey, would be immediate and serious. Confusion and disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East.” Such an outcome simply had to be prevented, he added, in articulating what became known as the Truman Doctrine: “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”27
Critics questioned the logic. They noted that the Soviet Union was barely involved in the Greek civil war, that many Communists in Greece were hardly enamored of Stalin, and that the resistance movement had many non-Communist members. Nor did the Kremlin appear to have designs on Turkey. Others argued that all assistance should be channeled through the United Nations. Still others, including Joseph P. Kennedy, maintained that Communism would fail on its own, and that the United States should leave the Greeks and the Turks to their own devices. In late April, the elder Kennedy told a columnist that he was ready “to admit from now on that the term ‘isolationist’ described my sentiments perfectly. We never gave ‘isolationism’ a chance….I’m proud I warned against participation in a war which could only leave the world in a worse condition than before.” Three weeks later, he told The New York Times that, on economic grounds alone, it was folly to spend millions on Greece and Turkey: “Personally, as I have said before, I believe our efforts to stem communism in Europe with dollars will eventually prove an overwhelming tax on our resources that will seriously affect the economic well-being of our country.”28
Jack rejected his father’s argument outright, and he showed scarcely more patience with the other opponents of Truman’s plan, such as columnist Walter Lippmann, who reminded his readers that the Soviets had genuine security fears and were motivated mostly by a defensive desire to prevent the reestablishment of German power. Though Jack, in his journalistic writings in 1945, had argued along similar lines, he now stressed Moscow’s offensive designs, and he rejected the calls by Lippmann and others for diplomatic overtures to the Kremlin. At the University of North Carolina in late March, Jack said the president was right to warn against allowing any one power to dominate either Europe or Asia. What had U.S. interventions in both of the world wars been about, after all, except denying such continental domination to hostile entities? That determination must not now slacken, the young lawmaker went on, and he expressed confidence that most Americans would staunchly oppose “the suffering people of Europe and Asia succumbing to the false, soporific ideology of Red totalitarianism.” The next month, Jack told reporters that if Greece and Turkey succumbed, “the road to the Near East is open. We have no alternative but to support the President’s policy.”29
It’s a fascinating thing that father and son would take such starkly opposing positions on the most pressing foreign policy issue of the day and, more, that the Ambassador would be so intent on proclaiming his own view loudly and for all to hear. In any event, Jack’s perspective carried the day, even if many legislators—in both parties—were more ambivalent than he was about the issues at stake: both houses approved by comfortable margins Truman’s proposal for aid to Greece and Turkey. When Secretary of State George C. Marshall, in a commencement speech at Harvard in June 1947, announced that the United States would finance a colossal European recovery program (subsequently known as the Marshall Plan), the Kennedys were again on opposite sides, with Joe firmly against and Jack strongly in favor.30 And they disagreed on the National Security Act of July of that year, which created the Office of the Secretary of Defense (which became the Department of Defense two years later), to oversee all branches of the armed services; the National Security Council (NSC), to advise the president; and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to conduct spy operations and information gathering overseas. Taken together, the components of the National Security Act gave the president enhanced powers with which to conduct foreign and defense policy, a condition that Jack accepted as necessary in the circumstances, with the Soviet threat looming large. His father did not.
There was a legitimate question here, both at the time and among historians afterwards, about whether the Cold War might have been averted before it really began, through imaginative diplomacy on areas of potential East-West agreement.31 But to freshman congressman John F. Kennedy the answer was clear: no such opportunity existed. He was, it may fairly be said, an original Cold Warrior.