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 tide. 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

The final tally told the tale: Kennedy 1,211,984 (51.35 percent), Lodge, 1,141,247 (48.35 percent). Seventy-one thousand votes separated them, about the same number that attended the Kennedy teas. The challenger also racked up large majorities in Boston’s black wards. In the governor’s race, Dever lost narrowly to Herter, while in the presidential contest Eisenhower thumped Stevenson both nationally and in Massachusetts. (Ominously for Democrats, Eisenhower won three southern states that Republicans had claimed only once since Reconstruction: Texas, Florida, and Virginia.) The GOP also took control of both houses of Congress. On a grim night for Democrats nationally, one that brought their party’s twenty-year reign to a crashing end, Jack Kennedy stood out as a beacon of light.78

How had he done it? In such a close race, any number of things could be called decisive—Lodge’s late start; the Taft forces’ lack of assistance to him; the Ambassador’s money; the teas; the Coffee with the Kennedys programs; the Kennedy “ground game” (to use the later phrase) utilizing thousands of volunteers—but surely it mattered greatly that the candidate waged a determined “pre-campaign campaign,” working over a period of years to build up his name recognition throughout the state and visiting every one of its 351 towns (as well as 175 of its factories and firms). According to Kenny O’Donnell, the small communities were indeed the key, as Kennedy consistently ran four or five or six percentage points ahead of Stevenson and Dever there. “And the margin of victory really came right there. The little communities where we had spent all this time, and all this work and met personally all these people, was paying off right at this moment. He was resisting the Eisenhower tide throughout the rest of the Commonwealth.” Even in the senator’s own stomping grounds, Essex County, Kennedy fought him to a draw.79

Then there was Robert Kennedy, who came on board at a critical moment and proved his worth in spades. The brothers were different men—different in age, in disposition, in outlook. Jack was more secure, more independent; Bobby was tougher, more committed to the family. Jack saw the gray areas of life, partly on account of his experience in war; Bobby thought in absolutes, in the dualism of light and dark. Jack was smoother, calmer, more given to understatement; Bobby, more intense and aggressive—he had the louder bark of the two. Jack had gotten on better with their father, Bobby with their mother, and the result was, as so often, contradictory. “Bobby was more like his father,” said Justice William O. Douglas, who interacted a good deal with the brothers in this period, “and Jack was more like his mother….Bobby was more direct, dynamic, energizing; Jack was more thoughtful, more scholarly, more reflective.” Yet the bond between them, fully evident on their grand overseas journey the previous year, was unmistakable, and in the campaign they were beautifully in sync, as friends and campaign workers perceived from day one. Jack understood the vital importance of having a political partner on whom he could count completely, 100 percent of the time, for loyalty, hard work, and results; he got one in his brother.80

“The Kennedy campaign in 1952 was the most nearly perfect political campaign I’ve ever seen,” recalled Larry O’Brien, who saw more than a few. “It was a model campaign because it had to be. Jack Kennedy was the only man in Massachusetts who had the remotest chance of beating Henry Cabot Lodge that year and Kennedy couldn’t have won without an exceptional political effort.”81 It wasn’t just about the effort, of course, as O’Brien well knew—the candidate mattered, too. People who heard Kennedy speak, who took in the debates or the Coffee with the Kennedys specials, who knew of his wartime service and his famous family, were drawn to him; that’s clear from countless testimonials at the time and later, and from the crush of volunteers who descended on Kilby Street every day, asking how they could help. As reporter Paul Healy pointed out in The Saturday Evening Post a few months after the election, Lodge was skillful and respected, with an “impeccable Massachusetts name and an excellent combat war record,” but Kennedy had these things plus an additional quality: “He made people want to do something for him.” On the campaign trail, every woman wanted “either to mother him or marry him,” Healy wrote. One Boston woman, who was deemed illogical for voting for both Eisenhower and Kennedy, replied, “Ah, now, how could I vote against that nice lad?” A Republican observer grumbled, “What is there about Kennedy that makes every Catholic girl in Boston between eighteen and twenty-eight think it’s a holy crusade to get him elected?”82

Healy hinted at something else that may have played to Kennedy’s advantage: his natural diffidence, which saved him from appearing glib and which was deceptive, in that it hid his shrewdness and his limitless drive. Or, as O’Brien put it, “He could not be called a natural politician. He was too reserved, too private a person by nature. But he knew what he wanted and he would force himself to do whatever was necessary to achieve it.”83

There was yet one more thing that made the Lodge-Kennedy election of 1952 extraordinary, at the time and in hindsight: the degree to which the Kennedy campaign exemplified a new kind of personalized politics, carefully crafted to enhance the candidate’s image, relying on massive and varied uses of media, including television, and eschewing close collaboration with other campaigns (as Paul Dever learned to his frustration). Sophisticated advertising, targeting particular audiences at particular times, was a prime feature, as was internal polling conducted by professionals. If the Kennedys were not the first to utilize these elements, they strategized about them and honed them in ways few had done before. Which took resources. Though historians often exaggerate the role of money in the 1952 Massachusetts race—total expenditures were probably no greater than those of many other Senate contests around the country that year, in part because the Democratic campaign relied so heavily on volunteer labor and had relatively few paid positions—there’s no doubt that the Kennedy team exploited the Ambassador’s riches to undertake these pioneering efforts, and over many more months than was the norm at the time. (In 1952 political veterans scoffed at the Kennedys for opening a campaign headquarters so early, six months before the election; nobody ever sneered at such a move again.)84

The Sunday following the election, Kennedy appeared on Meet the Press, roughly a year after his much heralded debut on the show. Host Lawrence Spivak commended him on his “sensational victory,” which seemed especially astonishing in view of Eisenhower’s landslide presidential win. Spivak said the win had brought his guest to “national attention as the most important Democratic figure in New England,” and he asked him how he’d pulled it off. “I worked a lot harder in Massachusetts than did Senator Lodge,” Kennedy replied. “He was working for General Eisenhower and I think that he felt that would take care of his Massachusetts position.”85

He basked in his win, as well he might. He was on his way back to Capitol Hill, but in a new role, a bigger role. Great things were in store, he sensed, and maybe not just professionally: in the hurly-burly of the campaign he had begun dating a woman he first met at a dinner party the year before, and he was sufficiently smitten to ask aide Dave Powers if he thought a twelve-year age gap between a man and a woman was too much. On the contrary, Powers had replied, his own fiancée was twelve years his junior. Powers, knowing his man, suspected Jack Kennedy had the answer to his question before he posed it.86