Jack didn’t share his father’s enthusiasm for McCarthy, but he saw only pitfalls in publicly opposing him. In February 1952, well before he knew which statewide office he’d be seeking that autumn, Jack had attended a reunion of the Spee Club at Harvard. When a speaker congratulated the university for not producing either an Alger Hiss (though he was in fact a graduate of the law school) or a Joe McCarthy, Jack reportedly objected that only Hiss, a convicted traitor, deserved such opprobrium. Yet it’s clear that Jack’s views were changing that winter. His Far Eastern trip of the previous fall had made him skeptical of claims that Communist gains overseas somehow derived from the duplicity or incompetence of Americans; his subsequent interactions with his state’s influential academic community deepened these doubts while simultaneously impressing on him how widespread was the disdain on the campuses for what was coming to be called McCarthyism. Privately, Jack told friends that McCarthy was “just another shanty Irish” who would contaminate any politician who drew close to him. He resolved to keep his distance.61

The standoffish approach did not endear Kennedy to the state’s Jewish voters, deeply distrustful of McCarthy and already wary of Jack because of his father’s presumed anti-Semitism. (In July 1949, The Jewish Weekly Times, responding to the State Department’s release of papers delineating Ambassador Kennedy’s meetings with his Nazi German counterpart in London, Herbert Von Dirksen, in 1938, had placed the correspondence under the headline “German Documents Allege Kennedy Held Anti-Semitic Views.”) Jewish leaders implored Jack to denounce the Wisconsin senator, but he refused to budge. “I told you before, I am opposed to McCarthy,” he told Phil Fine, his chief liaison with the Jewish community. “I don’t like the way he does business, but I’m running for office here, and while I may be able to get x number of votes because I say I’m opposed to him, I am going to lose…two times x by saying that I am opposed. I am telling you, and you have to have faith in me, that at the proper time I’ll do the proper thing.”62 A series of meetings with community leaders followed, as well as campaign events in Jewish neighborhoods, and there emerged a “Friends Committee” to back Jack’s candidacy. At one dinner, sponsored by the committee and held at the Boston Club, Jack told the heavily Jewish audience of three hundred of his 1951 visit to Israel and his meeting with Ben-Gurion, and of his pro-Israel voting record in the House. Sensing lingering doubts in the room, he asked, “What more do you want? Remember, I’m running for the Senate, not my father.” It was the firm declaration his audience had been waiting for, and the room erupted in applause.63

Right up until Election Day, the Kennedy camp fretted that Lodge would get his miracle: he and McCarthy would magically surface together at a triumphant rally, arms raised in tandem, generating headlines and causing significant Irish Catholic defections from their man to the incumbent. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Joe Kennedy may have taken matters into his own hands, either by calling McCarthy personally and asking him not to campaign for Lodge or by having columnist Westbrook Pegler phone on his behalf. Joe may also have sent several thousand dollars to the Wisconsin senator, who had recently undergone a pricey medical operation and was supposedly almost broke. (Jack Kennedy later denied that his father sought assistance from McCarthy.)64 This intervention, if indeed it occurred, doesn’t appear to have been decisive, at least judging by the later testimony of Lodge, who insisted it was he and not Joe Kennedy who was most responsible for keeping McCarthy out of the state. Lodge told McCarthy biographer David Oshinsky that at the eleventh hour he had in fact asked him “whether he would come into Massachusetts and campaign against Kennedy without mentioning me in any way. He told me that he couldn’t do this. He would endorse me but he would say nothing against the son of Joe Kennedy. I told McCarthy ‘thanks but no thanks.’ So he never did come into Massachusetts.”^*3, 65

Lodge made this last-ditch appeal to McCarthy because of what the internal polling told him in the dying days of the campaign: he was behind. Eisenhower had opened a big lead over Stevenson among Massachusetts voters, and Christian Herter was closing fast on Paul Dever in the governor’s race, but he himself lagged behind his challenger. Every indicator said so. With the McCarthy option gone, he had to hope for two things: that some undecideds would “come home” to the incumbent and that he might yet ride Eisenhower’s coattails. The game was not lost. But he knew he had to keep up the pressure, and to focus his campaigning on Boston, where, if he could cut substantially into Kennedy’s all-but-certain plurality, he could give himself a chance, since the rest of the state should go Republican, if narrowly. (Three-quarters of the state’s 4.6 million inhabitants lived within a forty-mile radius of the city.)66 After Kennedy jabbed him for his voting record in Congress—an audacious claim, given the congressman’s own absenteeism—Lodge said he and Kennedy were “away from Washington in 1952, but with different purposes. One difference is that I was away working to put Eisenhower in the White House, whereas he was away campaigning for himself in Massachusetts.” The senator was puzzled, he remarked some days later, by the challenger’s slogan that he would do “More for Massachusetts”: “I wonder if he means he will do many of the things he should have done and failed to do in Congress.” Kennedy “had a magnificent opportunity to aid our state and failed miserably,” sitting “sheeplike” as he waited “for the Administration to tell him when and how to vote during the past six years, while I sponsored 91 legislative proposals—32 of which became law.”67

This line of attack seemed to resonate with voters, much to Team Kennedy’s chagrin. It raised the alarming prospect that Lodge was finding his footing for the sprint run. No less concerning was the growing evidence of trouble in Stevenson’s presidential campaign—if he got blown out nationally, he might take Jack down with him.

Stevenson had looked formidable early on, in the immediate aftermath of the party convention, impressing political insiders and ordinary voters with his probity, eloquence, and wit. (At one rally, a supporter hollered, “Governor Stevenson, you have the vote of all the thinking people,” to which he answered, “That’s not enough, madam. I need a majority.”) Balding and bug-eyed, he projected a warm, civilized, professorial air, and combined high-mindedness and self-deprecation in a powerfully appealing way. But he also possessed a lofty disdain for politics that, though initially part of his appeal, created problems as the campaign progressed. Glad-handing seemed to Stevenson crass and undignified—after one long day on the trail he complained to a friend, “Perhaps the saddest part of all this is that a candidate must reach into a sea of hands, grasp one, not knowing whose it is, and say, ‘I’m glad to meet you,’ realizing that he hasn’t and probably never will meet that man.”68 Even with a stable of formidable speechwriters such as Archibald MacLeish, John Hersey, Bernard DeVoto, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Stevenson thought nothing of personally reworking each text, agonizing over passages, keeping audiences waiting, even letting them disperse, until he felt ready. He could be querulous and indecisive and was disdainful of political advertising and of the new technologies—he hated television and shunned teleprompters. Worse, although Stevenson’s cultivated approach worked wonders with liberals and others who thrilled to his elegant, epigrammatic phrasemaking and his idealized picture of an America characterized by virtue and reason, he struggled to reach a sufficiently broad constellation of voters. By the end of October, only die-hard supporters gave their man a fighting chance of victory against the war hero turned politician.

Though neither man knew it in the fall of 1952, Jack Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson, fellow Choate graduates (Stevenson was Class of 1918), would become central characters in each other’s political careers for the rest of their days.