To manage the campaign, Jack turned to attorney Mark Dalton, who had been with him since the first campaign in 1946. Powers, too, was a holdover, as were a trio of local operatives: Frank Morrissey, Joe DeGuglielmo, and Tony Galluccio. But the other principals were new, starting with the acerbic, sharp-featured Kenny O’Donnell, who was Robert Kennedy’s friend from Harvard (where he had captained the football team) and who had flown thirty missions over Germany as a bombardier during the war, once crash-landing between enemy and Allied lines; early in the year, Bobby had convinced him to quit his position with a paper firm to join the nascent campaign. Larry O’Brien, a burly and genial political junkie from Springfield who worked in advertising and public relations, signed on as well—Jack Kennedy, he told friends, was a new type of Irish politician, respectable and courteous—and in short order proved his worth with voter registration and precinct organization. Together with Powers, the two men formed the core of what would become known as the Irish Mafia, or the Irish Brotherhood—a small group of loyal, extremely capable aides so in sync that they could communicate with mere snippets of words and subtle alterations in facial expression.14 In addition, Joe Kennedy tapped his own people, notably James Landis, a veteran New Dealer and longtime Kennedy family friend who had been dean of Harvard Law School and could serve as a liaison of sorts to the Cambridge intellectuals; John Harriman, a financial writer at the Boston Globe, who came on board to write speeches; J. Lynn Johnston, an attorney who had helped run the Ambassador’s Merchandise Mart, in Chicago, then the world’s largest building; and Sargent Shriver, who still sought Eunice’s hand in marriage and who took a leave from his job with Kennedy Enterprises in Chicago to join the campaign. Headquarters were set up at 44 Kilby Street, in the heart of Boston’s financial district.

Joe Kennedy was omnipresent, if not quite the omnipotent force some historians would later suggest. He took an apartment at 84 Beacon Street, near Jack’s place on Bowdoin Street, so he could be close to the action.15 He called in old political debts, involved himself in tactical and strategic decisions, especially concerning advertising layouts, and kept his checkbook permanently open. According to terrified junior aides, he even told people where to sit in meetings. The candidate, feeling the need to assert his authority, announced in one early meeting that he was delegating to his father the task of forking out all the money (“We concede you that role,” he grandly announced, to chuckles around the room), while he preserved for himself primary responsibility for the core decisions regarding campaign strategy, messaging, and speechwriting.16

That the two Kennedys often agreed on these big-ticket items should not obscure the reality, which had already emerged well before 1952: John F. Kennedy, keen student of government and history, was always his own political boss. He trusted his own political judgments over those of his father, who was a whiz at making money but lacked a feel for what made people tick. The two of them saw the world and America’s role in it differently, saw U.S. democracy differently. Whenever, in an election campaign, these views clashed, Jack’s prevailed.

“The Ambassador worked around the clock,” one campaign speechwriter later remarked. “He was always consulting people, getting reports, looking into problems. Should Jack go on TV with this issue? What kind of ad should he run on something else? He’d call in experts, get opinions, have ideas worked up. He’d do all this from an office in his apartment on Beacon Street. But Jack would make the final decisions.”17

For all the advance work, however—the years of speeches around the state, many of them in tiny hamlets before tiny audiences; the internal polling; the cultivation of favorable press coverage; the assembling of a team—the campaign stumbled out of the gate. Mark Dalton, smart, friendly, and mild-mannered, with a tendency toward nervousness, was miscast in his role as manager of a large and complex statewide campaign, and moreover he had not been given clear marching orders on how to build his apparatus. Though Jack professed surprise and irritation at the lack of progress on the organizational front, he was being disingenuous—in O’Donnell’s later recollection, the candidate knew perfectly well that no organizing had been done because he had given no one authority to do it.18 Frequently in Washington to attend to his congressional duties, he left the initiative to his father, who tore into the hapless Dalton at every opportunity.

“We were headed for disaster,” O’Donnell remembered. “The only time the campaign got any direction was when John Kennedy…was able to get up to Massachusetts to overrule his father….The Congressman and I had a big argument one day, and I told him that the campaign could only be handled by somebody who could talk up to his father; nobody had the courage to, and I certainly didn’t have the qualifications, and it just wasn’t going to work unless Bobby came up.” Jack reluctantly agreed, and asked O’Donnell to reach out to Bobby, who, upon graduation from law school, had taken a job with the Justice Department. O’Donnell did as instructed, over dinner and in follow-up phone calls, but Bobby demurred. He had a new job, a child at home, and another on the way, and moreover he knew little about electoral campaigning. Nor did he possess his brother’s intrinsic interest in politics. “I’ll just screw it up,” he told O’Donnell. They hung up. The more Bobby pondered it, though, the more he saw he had no choice—loyalty to family came first. He called O’Donnell a few days later. “I’m coming up. I’ve thought it all over, and I suppose I’ll have to do it.”19

He was all of twenty-six years old when he arrived in Boston to seize control of the foundering operation. Tanned and wiry, with a toothy smile and a mop of unruly hair, he set the tone from the start, arriving at Kilby Street by eight thirty each morning and toiling until midnight, day after day after day. Often he was the person to unlock the door in the morning and lock it again at night. And he was not above taking on mundane tasks, such as licking envelopes and knocking on doors. One day, he determined there should be an enormous “Kennedy for Senate” poster on the side of a building adjacent to the heavily traveled bridge between Charlestown and the North End of Boston. “Drive me over there,” he instructed Dave Powers. “I’ll put up the sign myself.” To reach the height where he wanted the sign hung, Bobby had to balance himself on the top rung of the long ladder. “While I was holding the ladder,” Powers recalled, “I was wondering how I could explain it to the Ambassador and Jack when Bobby fell and broke his neck. I said to myself, if I had his money I would be sitting at home in a rocking chair instead of being up there on the top of that ladder.”20

Low-level aides learned that they had to keep busy at all times, lest Bobby thrust a pencil in their hand and tell them to get to work; soon they were referring to the pre-Bobby period as “before the revolution” and to the new reality as “after the revolution.”21 Those workers who expected him to be but a mouthpiece for the Ambassador were stunned to see that, on the contrary, the young man could and did stand up to his father, thus proving O’Donnell’s hunch to be right. Soon the old man moved back into the shadows, where everyone preferred him to be—still involved, still opinionated, still the overseer, but from behind the scenes. His cadre of old-time hangers-on, men like Frank Morrissey, a loyal aide who had expected to play a central campaign role, were assigned lesser tasks.