Others remarked that his growing visibility meant he would be utilized heavily as a Democratic warhorse for the coming midterm elections. And indeed, in the spring and early summer he crossed the country to champion party candidates for the House and Senate—he gave dinner speeches in Boise, in Chicago, in Pasadena, in Hartford, and elsewhere, delighting the attendees with his zingers aimed at the GOP in general and the Eisenhower White House in particular. In Malden, Massachusetts, in mid-May, a few weeks after attending his sister Pat’s New York wedding to the British actor Peter Lawford, he spoke on behalf of none other than Torby Macdonald, running for Congress as a Democrat in the heavily Republican Eighth District. (Macdonald would win the election and go on to have a long and estimable House career, serving for more than two decades.)
The heavy travel schedule wreaked havoc on his fragile body and did nothing for his young marriage. Newspaper and magazine editors, eager to cover the handsome couple, ran feature stories depicting a model marriage, in which husband and wife worked, studied, and socialized together. The reality was different. Jack’s dalliances with women continued. Jackie, like her mother-in-law early in her marriage, found herself alone for long stretches, and with few ways to nourish her interests in the arts. At Jack’s suggestion, she took an American history class at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service (the only part of the university that admitted women) with Professor Jules Davids, earning B’s on her papers and an 89 on her final exam. When Jack signed up for a speed-reading class in Baltimore, with brother Bobby and Lem Billings, in order to keep up with the mass of Senate work, she found one for herself to take locally. (Both of them became amazingly fast readers, and with their superb recall scored high on retention. Jack, in particular, would regularly astonish associates with his ability to quickly absorb the contents of books and memos and then recapitulate entire sections with ease.) But they bickered over what he considered her profligate spending habits, and she chafed at his long hours and at the frequent work-related phone calls when he was home. “It was like being married to a whirlwind,” she later told a reporter. “Politics was sort of my enemy as far as seeing Jack was concerned.”20
She did what she could to create a home life, even enlisting Jack’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, to plead with him to knock off work early enough to be home in time for supper. For a time it worked, but soon he was back to his old ways, toiling until eight o’clock or later, night after night. To make sure he ate a proper lunch each day, Jackie brought him a home-cooked meal or had his driver deliver it in covered china dishes. She took a French cooking class, though cooking was never her strength. She gathered their wedding photos into a pair of very attractive albums. Jack was touched by her efforts, but apparently not touched enough to change his habits. Tensions remained. Though in time he would come to appreciate her sense of separation from politics and public life and from the customs and mores of Washington, here in the early going he found it discomfiting and unnatural, so different from the attitude of his sisters, who lived and breathed politics.
Jackie, seeking to brush up on her American history, heads off to class at Georgetown.
Jackie, for her part, struggled with what she termed his “violent” independence—that is, his love of hanging out with his male friends and his promiscuity. To friends she continued to rationalize his unfaithfulness, insisting that all men cheat on their wives, that her father had done so, as had his father before him. She loved being married, she said.21 But the cheating hurt all the same, especially coming so soon after their wedding. (Her earlier illusion that his womanizing was part of his appeal seems to have disappeared as soon as they took their vows.) And if most of the time he tried to follow his father’s example and be discreet in his liaisons, she sensed what was going on. On at least one occasion, he was—also like his father—anything but discreet, as Jackie found herself humiliatingly stranded at a party after he suddenly disappeared with a beautiful woman who caught his eye.22
Her instinct was to blame herself. All her life, her mother had faulted her appearance, her clothing choices, her physique, suggesting that no man worthy of the name would be satisfied with her; maybe this just proved that Mother always knew best. Jackie responded by changing her appearance—cutting her hair short, Audrey Hepburn style, and sprucing up her wardrobe with the latest Paris offerings, all in an effort to make herself more alluring to her husband. He liked the new look, but the infidelity continued. At no point in this early period, it seems, did Jackie consider that it might be something within Jack, something not shared by all men everywhere, that caused him to behave as he did.23
Adding to Jackie’s frustration was her inability to follow the expected pattern of a Kennedy wife and bear a child in the first year of marriage. The reason for the difficulties are not clear, but they may have had something to do with the venereal disease Jack had contracted as a senior at Harvard in 1940. In the years thereafter, he complained periodically of a burning sensation upon urination and of what one medical report, in 1952, called “varying degrees of urinary distress.” If, as a result of her husband’s gonorrhea, Jackie contracted chlamydia, that could help explain her childbearing problems. (In 1954 the couple did in fact succeed in conceiving, but Jackie soon miscarried.) Her biographer Sarah Bradford is surely right to speculate that Jack likely told Jackie nothing about his venereal condition, and, moreover, that “if she had succeeded in bearing a child that first year, or even the next, it would have saved her from some of the heartbreak and marital difficulty she experienced over the next few years.”24
Some part of Kennedy pined for his former unattached life. When circumstances permitted, he mingled with New York’s social set, hitting nightspots such as the Stork Club and El Morocco and the parties of the well-to-do, often in the company of an elegant woman. According to Gunilla von Post, the young Swedish woman he’d met in the South of France on his pre-wedding jaunt the previous summer, he wrote her on his Senate stationery in early March 1954, indicating that he planned to return to the French Riviera in September and would love to see her there. He then tried to reach her by phone in Stockholm, without leaving his number. In the summer he called again, asking to see her in France in early September. No rendezvous occurred, as the senator indicated in a cable from Hyannis Port: “Trip postponed.”25
In truth, matters political as well as physical demanded that he remain stateside that summer. It was clear by the late spring that the Senate was headed for a showdown over McCarthy and his methods, and that Jack Kennedy’s political future hinged in part on his handling of the issue. The Wisconsin senator had begun to overreach in the middle months of 1953, his sloppy habits and impulsive style finally catching up with him. But he remained a formidable force—as late as January 1954, half of the American electorate held a favorable opinion of him (as against 29 percent who viewed him unfavorably). In heavily Irish Catholic Massachusetts his support ran higher still, as the mail flowing into Senator Kennedy’s office showed. But the letters also revealed deep rifts among his constituents, with some condemning McCarthy’s fact-free demagoguery and others pledging undying support for him. Kennedy walked the narrow middle path in his responses. “I appreciate knowing of your support for Senator McCarthy,” he wrote a woman from Fitchburg. “I have always believed that we must be alert to the menace of Communism within our country as well as its advances on the international front. In so doing, however, we must be careful we maintain our traditional concern that in punishing the guilty we protect the innocent.”26
He could take such a compromise position in letters to constituents, but how would he vote on the Senate floor? He was too rational and moderate to remain indifferent to McCarthyite extremism, and in 1953 he joined with Democratic liberals in supporting the confirmation of his former Harvard president, James B. Conant, as high commissioner to West Germany, rejecting the claim of McCarthy and his supporters that Conant held views contrary to “the prevailing philosophy of the American people.”27 Kennedy also defied McCarthy in backing Charles “Chip” Bohlen to be ambassador to the Soviet Union, and in voting against the appointment of McCarthy’s friend Robert Lee to the Federal Communications Commission (on the grounds that Lee was not qualified). When Jack joined a Senate Democratic effort to bar political speeches by McCarthy crony Scott McLeod—then security chief at the State Department—the rabidly McCarthyite Boston Post accused him in an editorial of sabotaging McLeod’s laudable campaign to get “communist coddlers” out of Foggy Bottom. “Senator Kennedy hasn’t discovered that cleaning communists out of government is not a party matter,” the paper proclaimed. “If he wants to maintain his political viability he ought to consult a few solid and loyal Democrats in Massachusetts who are every bit as determined to clean communism out of government as is Senator McCarthy.” If Jack took notice of the editorial, he hid it well: a short time later he led the fight in the Government Operations Committee, which McCarthy chaired, against another McCarthy friend, Owen Brewster, to be chief counsel of the committee.28
Still, Kennedy moved carefully, unwilling to denounce McCarthy directly, even after a great many Americans had determined that the Wisconsin senator should be condemned in every way possible, his name having become more and more symbolic of a mood of intimidation against civil servants, teachers, writers, and others deemed to hold unorthodox views. Kennedy’s reticence was not unusual—his fellow Bay State senator, Leverett Saltonstall, for one, had even less to say on the matter, despite his lack of family ties to McCarthy. (Saltonstall was up for reelection and did not wish to offend Irish Catholic voters sympathetic to McCarthy; he kept silent through the first half of 1954, as did his Democratic opponent, Foster Furcolo.) Many other legislators, including virtually all Senate Democrats, were similarly tight-lipped, lest their constituents take umbrage. Even Dwight Eisenhower, though privately disdainful of McCarthy and his antics, acted cautiously and spoke elliptically, bemoaning the effects of McCarthyism without criticizing the senator by name.29
But a reckoning was coming in the Senate, as a result of McCarthy’s disastrous decision to turn his crusade to the alleged presence of Communists in the U.S. Army. The origins of this gambit were complex, but when, in March 1954, the Army accused McCarthy and his chief aide, Roy Cohn, of seeking preferential treatment for G. David Schine, a member of the senator’s staff who had been drafted, McCarthy countered that Army leaders were merely attempting to derail his investigation of Communistic influences in that branch of the service and that Schine was being held hostage to stop the investigation altogether. For the proud general in the White House, this attack on the Army was too much; his administration now launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to isolate McCarthy.30 The Senate, for its part, established a committee to weigh the charges, and Minority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, sensing an opportunity to deliver a crushing blow to McCarthy’s popular appeal, arranged for the subsequent hearings to be televised.
It was a watershed moment. Though the nation’s airwaves were not as saturated with the Army-McCarthy hearings as broadcast lore would have it (only the fledgling American Broadcasting Corporation and the soon-to-die DuMont network provided gavel-to-gavel coverage of all 180 hours), millions of Americans got to see McCarthy’s rude and bullying conduct and to examine for themselves his wild charges against Army personnel. To many he came across as a ruthless charlatan, and his polling numbers, already sagging in the prior months, declined still more. Television, which had carried Joe McCarthy to the top, now brought him down. The nation’s five million television sets in 1950, when he first made his mark, had mushroomed to thirty million by 1954.
Not everyone abandoned him. His core supporters, constituting about a third of the populace, doubled down and hung tight with him through the end of the hearings and afterwards. Many Irish Americans, among them Joe and Bobby Kennedy, were particularly stubborn—in their eyes he was one of them, a steadfast, courageous battler against the patronizing elites.31
Thus the quiet grumblings of concern by some lawmakers when Senator Ralph Flanders, a spirited Yankee Republican from Vermont, introduced a motion to curb McCarthy by stripping him of his committee chairmanships. Such an action lacked precedent and had little support, so in late July Flanders proposed instead that the upper chamber censure McCarthy for behavior unbecoming of a senator. McCarthy was a child, Flanders said, a kind of overgrown Dennis the Menace, for he displayed the “colossal innocence” of children “who blunder…into the most appalling situations as they ramble through the world of adults.” Many on Capitol Hill nodded in quiet agreement. But with the fall campaign about to begin in earnest, those legislators up for reelection were reluctant to alienate McCarthy’s die-hard backers, and journalists could see why: “If Senator Saltonstall were to make his position on McCarthy clear now,” opined the Southbridge Evening News in early October, “he might well be committing political suicide.” While Kennedy watched Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson for a signal as to which way the party would go, Saltonstall watched Kennedy.32
Kennedy opted in favor of the censure resolution, but on narrow grounds. In a carefully written speech he planned to give in support of the action, he said the issue involved “neither the motives nor the sincerity of the Junior Senator from Wisconsin,” and he cautioned against overriding “our basic concepts of due process by censuring an individual without reference to any single act deserving of censure.” Long-ago misdeeds were not grounds for censure, he went on, since neither Flanders nor most others had publicly objected at the time; instead, the task would be to identify specific censurable practices that had occurred since the start of McCarthy’s current term, that is, since January 1953. For Kennedy the outstanding case was the Army-McCarthy hearings, which, he argued, showed in graphic detail how the Wisconsin senator had besmirched the honor and dignity of the Senate—whether personally or by approving the insulting language and threats of retaliation used against the Army by Roy Cohn.
On the evening of July 31, 1954, Ted Sorensen stood at the back of a packed Senate chamber holding a stack of copies of his boss’s speech, ready for distribution. But there would be no Kennedy speech given or released that night. GOP majority leader William Knowland of California, adamantly opposed to the resolution, moved for the establishment of a select committee to consider the issue, effectively delaying any kind of vote until after the election. The sense of relief from all corners of the room was palpable. Although a bloc of twelve liberals opposed the postponement, among them Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Paul Douglas of Illinois, both of whom faced reelection contests in the fall, sixty-nine others, including Kennedy and Saltonstall, voted in favor of Knowland’s motion.
IV
When the Senate showdown over McCarthy finally came, in December, Jack Kennedy would not be in the mix. Throughout the 1954 session of Congress he was in agonizing pain, and by early summer he could move around only with the use of crutches. X-rays showed that his fifth lumbar vertebra had collapsed, probably on account of the corticosteroids he was taking for his Addison’s disease. He asked to get a new office closer to the Senate chamber, to spare himself the lengthy walk on hard marble floors, but the seniority system thwarted the plan. Often he resorted to simply remaining in the chamber between quorum calls rather than return to his office. A short stay in the Bethesda Naval Hospital in July brought scant relief, and as soon as the Senate recessed he went to Hyannis Port for rest. His condition did not improve. Doctors in New York suggested the possibility of spinal fusion surgery, but Sara Jordon, Jack’s longtime physician at Boston’s Lahey Clinic, advised against going ahead—the procedure could easily kill him, she said on the porch in Hyannis Port that summer, because his Addison’s disease and his treatments for it greatly increased the chance of a fatal infection. (Steroids are immunosuppressives that can make infection more likely and more serious.) Her Lahey colleagues agreed, but the senator was undaunted.33
“Jack was determined to have the operation,” Rose Kennedy said later. “He told his father that even if the risks were fifty-fifty, he would rather be dead than spend the rest of his life hobbling on crutches and paralyzed by pain.” The Ambassador, having already in essence lost one child—Rosemary—to an operation that went horribly awry, pleaded with his son not to do it. “Joe first tried to convince Jack that even confined to a wheelchair he could lead a full and rich life,” Rose recalled. “After all, he argued, one need only look at the incredible life FDR had managed to lead despite his physical incapacity.”34
“Don’t worry, Dad,” Jack assured him. “I’ll make it through.”35
Before Kennedy could enter New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery (at the time still known colloquially by its former name, the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled), however, he had one more distasteful task to complete in that generally distasteful political year of 1954. With the Senate race in Massachusetts heating up by the day, he felt pressure to come out strongly for Foster Furcolo, his fellow Democrat. But he was torn. He liked “Salty” Saltonstall personally, worked well with him, and shared his pragmatic sensibility; in fact, he felt less kindly toward Furcolo, an ambitious Springfield-based attorney who served as state treasurer and had offered Jack only tepid support in his 1952 race against Henry Cabot Lodge. Intelligent and bookish, Furcolo was a sometime playwright who had graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School, but Jack, seeing in him a rival for statewide power and perhaps national influence, dismissed him as an empty suit.36
Their simmering feud boiled over in early October 1954, just before Kennedy went in for his surgery. With Jack having agreed to endorse the entire Democratic ticket, including Furcolo and gubernatorial candidate Robert Murphy, on a television program in Boston, he flew up from the Cape, arriving at the studio in pain and with a fever. Furcolo showed up almost an hour late, right before the show was to start, and complained that the draft of Kennedy’s endorsement that he’d read was weak. Jack, already irritated by Furcolo’s tardiness, shot back, “Foster, you have a hell of a nerve coming in here and asking for these last-minute changes.” He icily added that he had not forgotten Furcolo’s standoffish posture in the Senate race in 1952. For a moment it seemed the telecast might not happen, but order was restored and it went off smoothly, even though Jack omitted any direct mention of Furcolo or criticism of Saltonstall. The press spoke of an open breach between the two Democrats, and even close Kennedy aides acknowledged that he had allowed his personal feelings to affect his political judgment. Kenny O’Donnell would call the shunning of Furcolo, who went on to lose the election, “the only wrong political move Jack Kennedy ever made.”37
On October 10, Jack entered the hospital. The day before, over lunch at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston with once and future aide Larry O’Brien, he cheerfully declared, “This is it, Larry. This is the one that cures you or kills you.” The team of surgeons, writing the following year in the Archives of Surgery, described their patient as “a thirty-seven-year-old man” with Addison’s disease, whose condition presented unique complications:
Orthopedic consultation suggested that he might be helped by a lumbosacral fusion together with a sacroiliac fusion. Because of the severe degree of trauma involved in these operations and because of the patient’s adrenocortical insufficiency due to Addison’s disease, it was deemed dangerous to proceed with these operations. However, since this man would become incapacitated without surgical intervention, it was decided, reluctantly, to perform the operations by doing two different procedures at different times if necessary and by having a team versed in endocrinology and surgical physiology help in the management of this patient before, during, and after the operation.38
This would be an experimental surgery, the team knew, with a low chance of success. (In time, they would also determine that it had been unwarranted, in view of the likely effects and risks involved.) Three times they postponed the operation. Finally, on October 21, they went ahead, led by Dr. Philip D. Wilson, who used screws to bolt a metal plate into bone in order to stabilize the lumbar spine. In Hyannis Port, Joe Kennedy was beside himself with worry, unable to sleep at all that night. As Rose recalled, “His mind kept wandering back to the last letter he received from Joe Junior, the letter written right before his death, assuring his father that there was no danger involved and that he would be sure to return. The memory was so painful that Joe actually cried out in the darkness with a sound so loud that I was awakened from sleep.”39
Joe was right to fret. Three days after the surgery, his son developed an infection that failed to respond to antibiotics. Jack’s temperature rose alarmingly and he slipped into a coma. His family was summoned at midnight to come to the hospital immediately, and a priest arrived to administer the last rites of the Church—the second time this had happened to him. Jackie Kennedy, chain-smoking throughout, clung to her father-in-law for support and, for the first time in her life, she said afterwards, “really prayed.” The next day, the Ambassador wept before journalist Arthur Krock. “He told me he thought Jack was dying and he wept sitting in the chair opposite me in the office.”40 On Capitol Hill, rumors were floated that the end was nigh, and Evelyn Lincoln received word that her boss might have mere hours to live.
Having cheated death once again, the senator leaves the hospital with Jackie by his side, on December 22, 1954, in order to begin recuperation in Palm Beach.