And so it was that John F. Kennedy appeared at Dwight Eisenhower’s inaugural ball, on January 20, 1953, with Jacqueline Bouvier on his arm. It was a heady time to be in the nation’s capital, and the new senator relished every minute. From the start, he found the clubby, collegial atmosphere of the Senate preferable to the rowdier, more plebeian spirit of the House of Representatives. The emphasis in the upper chamber on decorum, on tradition, on gentility appealed to his temperament and his historical sensibility. Here had walked the legislative giants he’d read about since boyhood—Clay, Webster, La Follette, and all the rest. Here had been hammered out many of the key policy decisions in the nation’s history, especially during the long era when Congress held greater sway over policy than did the executive branch. That era of congressional supremacy had long since waned, yet even now Kennedy could expect to have much more visibility as a senator than he ever could have hoped to achieve in the House, especially in the realm of foreign affairs.29 If sporadically in the past he had been able to rub elbows with the highest-placed people in government, in the judiciary, and in the press, now he would be doing so on a regular basis, no longer as the Ambassador’s son who had used his family’s riches to acquire a House seat but as his own man—the intrepid wonder candidate who had stood against the Republican wave of 1952 and taken down the mighty Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.
His star, to be sure, had dimmed somewhat in the weeks since his monster win. He was still seen as a standout in an otherwise lackluster roster of new Democrats on the Hill, but the contemporaneous record shows few predictions of greatness either from within the party establishment or from the national press. Observers of an intellectual stripe questioned Kennedy’s liberal credentials and his silence on McCarthyism, while others wondered about his Catholicism and how much it could shackle his ambitions. Skeptics in the mainstream press asked about the extent of his father’s influence, mused about the role that his family wealth had played in his victory, and wondered what it said about him that he seemingly relied so heavily on female voters drawn by his youthful look and radiant smile.30
On his first day in the Senate, as he took his seat in the last row of the Democratic phalanx, Kennedy could see to his right the articulate and fiery Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, now starting his fifth year in office, and, directly in front, the widely respected liberal Paul H. Douglas of Illinois, also beginning his fifth year. Not far away was yet another member of that class of 1948, the hulking and fleshy-faced new minority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, and two courtly southerners, Richard Russell of Georgia, first elected in 1932, and J. William Fulbright, from the class of 1944. And in the distance, over the heads of the Democratic caucus, Jack could spot the dark jowls of his fellow House freshman from 1947, Richard M. Nixon, who, as the new vice president, served in the role of president of the Senate. As he gazed around the room, Jack knew he was a peon next to these men, a minnow among whales. He knew that the Senate’s hierarchical structure, based on seniority and committee chairmanships and reputation, sharply limited his capacity for influence in the early going and perhaps beyond. But no matter: he was here, in the chamber, with a seat of his own.31
Some Kennedy associates who hoped to move up with him were disappointed. They learned what others before them had come to know: that with the Kennedys, loyalty went only so far. Tony Galluccio, a friend from Harvard days who had trekked all over Massachusetts for a year and a half on Jack’s behalf, doing yeoman’s work to help set up the statewide campaign apparatus and enduring endless bus rides and lousy restaurant meals in the process, expected now to have the chance to serve in the Washington office; it seemed a just reward for all he had done in the campaign. Weeks went by with no word. Finally Jack called him, but not with the hoped-for news. “I’ve got no money,” the senator told him.32
Kennedy’s secretary, Mary Davis, who’d been with him since he arrived in Congress six years before and regularly worked seven days a week, including from home on Sundays, found him unexpectedly resistant when she asked for a pay increase commensurate with a shift to a larger office in which she would have increased responsibilities. Currently, she reminded him, she was being paid $4,000 a year, and a freshman congressman from New York was offering her $6,000; would he match it? No, Kennedy replied, he would only go to $4,800. Nor would he agree to pay the new team of junior secretaries Davis had recruited to assist her in the office more than $60 a week.
She couldn’t believe her ears. “Sixty dollars a week! You’ve got to be joking. Nobody I’ve lined up would be willing to accept a job at that salary. I have to have competent, capable staff who can back me up. If I don’t, I won’t have a life to call my own.”
“Mary, you can get candy dippers in Charlestown for fifty dollars a week.”
“Yes, and you’d have candy dippers on your senatorial staff who wouldn’t know beans. If that’s what you want, I’m not taking charge of it.”
Back and forth they went, neither willing to budge. Davis thought it only right that she and the rest of the staff be paid the going rate for Senate office employees; Kennedy, having been urged by his father to keep a tight lid on office expenditures, disagreed. For him, as for the Ambassador, staffers were ultimately employees who could be replaced. Those who pressed to be compensated according to market rates were insufficiently loyal and should go. Mary Davis went.33
One of the hopefuls for a position in the office that January was a twenty-four-year-old attorney from Nebraska named Theodore Sorensen. Tall and intense, with a square face and horn-rimmed glasses, Sorensen hailed from a progressive, politically active family in Lincoln—his Danish American father, a close ally of U.S. Senator George Norris, had served two terms as a crusading state attorney general and made an unsuccessful bid for governor; his mother, a descendant of Russian Jews, was a suffragist deeply involved with progressive causes and the League of Women Voters. Young Ted, who was named for Theodore Roosevelt and shared a birthday with Harry Truman, starred on his high school debate team, made Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Nebraska, and then graduated first in his class from the university’s law school, where he also edited the law review. Having come, as a friend commented, “campaigning from the womb,” he worked in local Democratic campaigns and was active in the civil rights movement, even helping to found a chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Nebraska. He also got married, to a woman named Camilla Palmer, who in short order bore him the first of three sons. But America’s political mecca beckoned, and Sorensen soon relocated his young family to Washington and set about making his mark. Initially a lawyer with the Federal Security Agency, he gravitated to Capitol Hill and took a job as counsel to a minor congressional committee. From there he followed the 1952 election with rapt attention. The Democrats’ poor showing dismayed him, but he was intrigued and impressed by the young victor in Massachusetts, and as the year turned he made his approach.
Kennedy liked what he saw in the application, especially a letter of reference that praised Sorensen’s “ability to write in clear and understandable language,” and also referred to him as a “sincere liberal, but not one that always carries a chip on his shoulder.” A strong liberal voice from the nation’s heartland could be useful to have around, Kennedy surmised, as he worked to establish a more national profile. There followed two interviews, the first a five-minute encounter outside the senator’s office during which Kennedy would offer the job, of which Sorensen would write, “In that brief exchange, I was struck by this unpretentious, even ordinary man with his extraordinary background, a wealthy family, a Harvard education, and a heroic war record. He did not try to impress me with his importance; he just seemed like a good guy.”34
But Sorensen had a nagging question, one he felt compelled to raise in the second meeting: Why had the senator to this point in his career been so elliptical about McCarthy and McCarthyism? If Jack was taken aback by the forthright query, he didn’t show it, calmly responding that while he didn’t accept Joe McCarthy’s tactics or find merit in all of his charges, he was in a tough spot, in view of McCarthy’s close ties with the Kennedy family and the widespread support he enjoyed among Irish Catholic voters in Massachusetts. Good enough, Sorensen decided. He also had an offer to join the staff of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, but he knew what he would do: he would hitch his wagon to the young Democratic star from New England.35
The result would be one of the most extraordinary partnerships in modern American political history. From the start, the two men simply clicked. Kennedy liked Sorensen’s cerebral approach; even more, he liked the pragmatic streak that ran through his liberalism. The young aide’s definition of himself as someone moved less by sentimental than intellectual persuasion could have come from the senator himself; ditto Sorensen’s corollary assertion that “the liberal who is rationally committed is more reliable than the liberal who is emotionally committed.” A tireless worker willing to put aside everything to advance Kennedy’s career (including the needs of his wife and children), Sorensen became a kind of alter ego to the senator, soon superseding in influence Ted Reardon, who had been tapped to run the Senate office just as he had the House operation.36 He was that rarest of creatures: an aide who could work on the nitty-gritty of policy and also articulate the details in speeches and articles—the latter all under the senator’s name alone—with simple fluency and grace. Soon it became hard to determine who had produced what, though one can think of them as the composer (Kennedy) and the lyricist (Sorensen). They were the Rodgers and Hart of politics. At twenty-four, and without the world exposure of his boss, Sorensen had neither the political experience nor the life experience to conceive the broad themes of speeches and articles—especially when they concerned foreign policy—but he was a quick study and a brilliant mimic, uncannily adept at finding just the historical allusion Kennedy wanted to express, the almost Churchillian cadences and spare language that embodied the senator’s view of exemplary political rhetoric.37
It wasn’t mimicry alone, though. From the moment Sorensen arrived, Jack Kennedy’s speeches took on a new flavor, combining greater range and power and concision. They became more lyrical, more memorable, less burdened with data and detail. The two men quickly settled on a basic pattern, in which the senator laid out—often by dictating to a secretary—what he wanted to get across in a speech (or an article) and Sorensen produced a draft that Kennedy would then edit. Sorensen would polish some more and Kennedy would tweak yet again, often right up until he stepped behind the lectern. Frequently he would make further changes on the fly, during the actual address. (He would, in time, become an expert improviser, able to speak in full paragraphs even when departing from his text.) Long fascinated with the art of rhetoric and the secrets of superior orators, Kennedy would listen to recordings of Churchill and study the speeches of Lincoln, then talk with Sorensen about what he’d learned. He read and recommended to others a book Sorensen gave him, A Treasury of the World’s Great Speeches. Often Sorensen would plant himself in the front row during a Kennedy address, making notes on the delivery and the audience reaction, seeing what worked and what didn’t, then offer his suggestions for improvement. Kennedy never seemed put off by even tough appraisals, Sorensen noticed; he later wrote of the senator’s “calm acceptance of criticism.”38
For all the close collaboration between the two men, theirs was a purely working relationship. They didn’t socialize; they never became pals as such. Sorensen learned immediately that here, as elsewhere, his boss was a champion compartmentalizer. Always deeply loyal in his friendships—from Choate, Harvard, the Navy—Kennedy saw his staff as employees. Reardon, who had been with Kennedy long enough to know how he worked, summed up the dynamic: “Jack had the ability to have guys around him whom, personally, he didn’t give a damn about as a buddy…but he was able to get what he needed from them.” Sorensen was okay with this arrangement—or at least claimed he was. “The times we were together socially over the eleven years we worked together were few enough that I can remember each one,” he wrote near the end of his life. But “I never wanted to be JFK’s drinking buddy; I wanted to be his trusted advisor. I felt lucky to have that role.” Not for several years did Sorensen feel comfortable enough to address him as “Jack” instead of “Senator.”39
Ruthless though he could be in “getting what he needed” from his staff, the senator also had a more forgiving side. As his personal secretary he brought on forty-year-old Evelyn Lincoln, another Nebraskan. “Mrs. Lincoln,” as Jack always addressed her, was the daughter of a two-term Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Like Sorensen, she had ventured east to Washington, earning her degree at GWU and marrying Harold “Abe” Lincoln, a political scientist. Seeing in Kennedy a star in the making, she volunteered in his congressional office in 1952 (while also holding down a full-time clerical position in the office of a Georgia representative); then, after his Senate win, he hired her.
The learning curve, she soon learned, was steep. She struggled to decipher Kennedy’s “dreadful handwriting” and to cope with his restlessness and carelessness. He couldn’t sit still while dictating but would pace back and forth or swing a golf club or wander from one room to another, without ever slowing down his torrent of words. Clothing articles and briefcases would be left in hotel rooms and train stations; Lincoln, like Mary Davis before her, would call around until the wayward item was found. The senator would jot down telephone numbers on tiny scraps of paper, then not be able to find the right one when he emptied his pockets on his desk and scratched around in the pile. He would call out, “ ‘Mrs. Lincoln, what’s Tom’s number?’ More often than not, I didn’t even know who Tom was, much less where I might find his number.”40
Lincoln impressed Jack with her devotion, patience, and capacity for hard work, but he questioned whether she had the capacity to manage the important phone calls and correspondence flooding the office. He talked to Sorensen about firing her, but each day Lincoln kept showing up at her desk, and she would continue to do so for the next decade, including in the White House. Her fidelity never wavered. Kennedy took notice and became devoted to her. He later told Sorensen, “If I had said just now, ‘Mrs. Lincoln, I have cut off Jackie’s head, would you please send over a box?’ she still would have replied, ‘That’s wonderful. I’ll send it right away. Did you get your nap?’ ”41
The question for the new senator was how he might make his mark. As a member of the traditionally inactive freshman class, he had few outlets for influence, and it didn’t help that he was left off the five most prestigious committees—Foreign Relations, Armed Services, Appropriations, Judiciary, and Finance. Instead he had to make do with two others: Labor and Public Welfare as well as Government Operations (the latter now under the chairmanship of one Joseph R. McCarthy). In both entities, Kennedy would be on the lowest rung of the ladder, as the junior member of the minority party. He resolved that his first effort would be directed at formulating an economic program for Massachusetts and the broader New England region, which made sense, given that the question of who could do more for Massachusetts had been a prime point of contention between him and Lodge. Sorensen, who knew little about the subject, flew to Boston to confer with a coterie of experts, among them Seymour Harris, a Harvard economist, and Jim Landis, the lean and laconic former Harvard Law School dean who now worked full-time for Joe Kennedy and who had contributed position papers to the Senate campaign.
There soon emerged an ambitious set of more than three dozen proposals for regional economic expansion, which Jack Kennedy laid out in three carefully crafted and extremely dry speeches—each lasting more than two hours—in the spring of 1953, under the collective title “The Economic Problems of New England: A Program for Congressional Action.” He painted a picture of a region rich in history and accomplishment, now facing challenges on various fronts, not least from industries moving to southern states in search of cheaper, nonunion labor. (In the past seven years in Massachusetts alone, he noted, seventy textile mills had either closed or moved south, with the attendant loss of 28,000 jobs.) Its fisheries and forests, meanwhile, were being depleted. Kennedy called for a concerted effort to diversify and expand commercial activity throughout New England and to prevent further business relocations through tax incentives; expanded opportunities for job retraining; a higher minimum wage (from seventy-five cents to one dollar per hour); and better housing programs for the middle class. The federal government’s role in the revitalization of the region was limited but crucial—Washington, he said, had to ensure “the preservation of fair competition in an expanding economy.”42
Sorensen proved his extraordinary worth in these Senate speeches, and also in drafting, under Kennedy’s name, several articles in leading publications—which got the senator’s name before a broad reading audience. Thus, “What’s the Matter with New England?” appeared in The New York Times Magazine, and “New England and the South” followed in The Atlantic Monthly. The latter piece denied any desire on the senator’s part to initiate a regional economic war but insisted on the need for policies promoting the “stability and integrity of our entire national economy.” Competition among parts of the United States should occur in the context of a “fair struggle based on natural advantages and natural resources, not exploiting conditions and circumstances that tend to depress rather than elevate the economic welfare of the nation.”43
In foreign policy, Kennedy’s junior status gave him fewer opportunities to enter the conversation, even though the first seven months of 1953 witnessed major developments overseas. First, in March, came shocking news out of Moscow: Joseph Stalin had died. His passing brought claims from various quarters—including Britain, where Winston Churchill had returned to power—that the opportunity existed for a less confrontational relationship with the new Kremlin leadership, whatever its makeup. Dwight Eisenhower and his secretary of state, the dour and seasoned John Foster Dulles, were unmoved. They saw little to be gained, in either international or domestic political terms, from seeking a grand Cold War compromise with the Soviets. At a meeting of Western leaders late in the year, Eisenhower generated nervous smiles from the Europeans with his coarse description of the new, post-Stalin Soviet Union: Russia, he declared, was “a woman of the streets, and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched, it was certainly the same whore underneath.”44
At the same time, Eisenhower and Dulles understood that “liberating” Communist-held lands was a tough assignment now that the division of Europe seemed a largely settled affair. Campaign-trail calls for an outright Cold War victory would have to be scaled back. But the two men agreed that a new policy—or at least a new name—would be needed to replace Truman’s “Containment,” which was identified in their minds and the minds of voters with Truman’s ineffectual China policy and with the stalemated struggle in Korea. They called their strategy the New Look, and it emphasized airpower and nuclear weaponry over large-scale conventional forces, in part because of Eisenhower’s desire to trim the federal budget (“more bang for the buck,” as the saying went). Spurred by the successful test of the world’s first hydrogen bomb, in November 1952, Ike oversaw a massive stockpiling of nuclear weapons—from twelve hundred at the start of his presidency to 22,229 at the end.45
Stalin’s death had another important effect in world affairs: it breathed life into the stalled Korean War negotiations, leading to an armistice agreement in July 1953. The border between North and South was established near the thirty-eighth parallel, the prewar boundary, and a demilitarized zone was created between the two halves. Three years of bloody fighting came to an end. American casualties totaled 54,246 dead and 103,284 wounded. Close to five million Asians perished in the war—two million North Korean civilians and half a million soldiers; one million South Korean civilians and 100,000 soldiers; and at least one million Chinese troops—making it one of the bloodiest wars of the century.46