II

A few days after arriving in Espiritu Santo, Jack Kennedy boarded a transport vessel, LST 449, bound for Tulagi, a tiny island off Guadalcanal where his PT squadron would be based and where Halsey had ordered the erection of a giant billboard on a hillside, visible far and wide: “KILL JAPS. KILL JAPS. KILL MORE JAPS. You will help to kill the yellow bastards if you do your job well.”10

As the ship approached the northern coast of Guadalcanal, she suddenly came under attack. The Japanese had chosen this day, April 7, to launch a major aerial assault on U.S. shipping in the area, using 177 aircraft from bases in New Georgia and Bougainville. Jack, who was in his bunk reading when the action commenced soon after 3:00 P.M., scrambled onto the deck just in time to see nine enemy planes bearing down on the 449 and the nearby destroyer Aaron Ward. U.S. Grumman Wildcats were racing from Henderson Field, on Guadalcanal, to engage the Japanese aircraft but had not yet arrived. A five-hundred-pound bomb splashed into the water, knocking the boat into a twenty-degree list to starboard and lifting the stern out of the water. Another bomb hit fifty feet off the port bow, and yet another just off the bridge on the starboard side. Miraculously, the 449 avoided a direct hit—she was loaded with fuel and ammunition and, if struck, might have gone up in a giant fireball—but the Aaron Ward was not so lucky. “They dropped all around us—and sank a destroyer next to us, but we were OK,” Jack wrote coolly to Lem Billings.11

Jack’s concerns with his situation may have owed something to his dawning realization that the PT boats, however glamorous in the popular imagination, were of questionable military utility. Fast, nimble, and versatile, their prows riding high in the water, the boats could make hit-and-run attacks in narrow waters or close to land, and they were excellent for rescuing downed fliers and trapped Marines. But their torpedoes, designed in the 1920s, were outmoded and had to be launched through tubes that often caught fire. The torpedoes were also slow, traveling at a speed of only twenty-eight knots, insufficient to catch the faster-moving Japanese vessels. To compound the problem, the guns were inadequate and the radios frequently conked out. Worst of all, with their thin mahogany shells (two layers of one-inch planking) and heavy fuel loads, the PTs were, to say the least, combustible, prone to turning into floating infernos when hit. Both in Melville and on Tulagi, Kennedy was drilled on the importance of avoiding detection by enemy aircraft and ships, which meant, above all, operating under the cloak of darkness and moving stealthily. It took guts to make your close approach in this way—the enemy could obliterate you in an instant if his lookouts ever saw you.17

“The glamour of the PT’s just isn’t except to the outsider,” he wrote his sister Kick after reading a John Hersey Life magazine feature on the boats. “It’s just a matter of night after night patrols at low speed in rough water—two hours on—then sacking out and going on again for another two hours.” Even so, Jack continued, the position was “a hell of a lot better” than any other in the Navy. “As a matter of fact this job is somewhat like sailing, in that we spend most of our time trying to get the boat running faster.”18

James Michener offered a more unvarnished assessment in Tales of the South Pacific: “I have become damned sick and tired of the eyewash written about PT boats. I’m not going to add to that foolish legend….They shook the stomachs out of many men who rode them, made physical wrecks of others for other reasons. They had no defensive armor. In many instances they were suicide boats. In others they were like human torpedoes….Even for strong tough guys from Montana it was rugged living.”19

PT 109 had already seen considerable action by the time Kennedy assumed command. Produced by the Electric Launch Company (Elco) and plunked into the oily waters off Bayonne, New Jersey, the previous June, the boat had performed well in early testing runs and by September 1942 was en route to the South Pacific, where she soon saw heavy action north of Guadalcanal around the turn of the year. By April 1943 she was grimy and battle-scarred, infested with rats and roaches, and in need of an engine overhaul and a general sprucing up; mechanics at the Sasape port, on Tulagi, worked on the engines while Jack and his crew performed the cosmetic work of cleaning and painting. They were a varied lot, all but one chosen by Jack (Ensign Leonard “Lennie” Thom, the executive officer, a barrel-chested bear of a man who had played tackle at Ohio State, had only recently come on board under the previous commander and so stayed put), and they appreciated that he got right down to work with them, scraping and painting the bottom of the boat. Jack had learned that a good PT crew stuck together, enlisted men and officers alike.20

Action was sparse in the early weeks—a lull had set in after the Allied victory at Guadalcanal—which gave Jack time to arrange for flowers to be sent to his mother for Mother’s Day and to write letters home, all of them thoughtful, some of them vivid and evocative.21 “On good nights it’s beautiful,” he wrote his parents in mid-May. “The water is amazingly phosphorescent—flying fishes which shine like lights are zooming around and you usually get two or three porpoises who lodge right under the bow and no matter how fast the boat keep just about six inches ahead of the boat. It’s been good training. I have an entirely new crew and when the showdown comes I’d like to be confident they know the difference between firing a gun and winding their watch.”22

On land, the conditions were rougher, with heavy rains every day that caused his blue uniform to grow a quarter-inch-thick “green-mold,” and primitive living quarters featuring huts with no walls in which the rats and roaches roamed at will. Yet Jack kept his sense of esprit de corps and his quick humor, a fact much appreciated by his crew and, no doubt, by his family. To Kick he remarked wistfully that his vision of “lying on a cool Pacific island with a warm Pacific maiden hunting bananas for me is definitely a bubble that has burst.” Even swimming was a no-no: “There’s some sort of fungus in the water that grows out of your ears—which will be all I need. With pimples on my back, hair on my chest and fungus in my ears I ought to be a natural for the old sailors home in Chelsea, Mass.”23 Then again, he was an officer, which, he deadpanned to his parents, brought certain perks: “They have just opened up an Officer’s Club which consists of a tent. The liquor served is an alcoholic concoction which is drawn out of the torpedo tubes, known as torp juice. Every night at about 7:30 the tent bulges, about five men come crashing out, blow their lunch and stagger off to bed. This torp juice, which is the most expendable item on the island, makes the prohibition stuff look like Haig and Haig but probably won’t do any one any permanent harm as long as their eyes hold out.”24

Kennedy himself seldom touched alcohol, and he was not much for card playing, preferring instead to sit around and talk or write letters or read. (Among his companions: Tolstoy’s War and Peace.) With someone else, such seemingly “refined” preferences might have caused grousing among the men, but by all accounts—contemporaneous as well as retrospective—Kennedy was liked and respected for his sunny demeanor and his wit as well as his calm self-possession and unflappability. Lennie Thom, who, in addition to being Jack’s executive officer, roomed with him, wrote his fiancée that he liked Jack from the moment they met. A second roommate, Johnny Iles, felt the same, while a third appreciated that the young Kennedy wore his celebrity status lightly and did not act like the Ivy League son of an ambassador. “He just seemed like the ordinary young fellow—just like Lennie and Johnny.” Radioman John Maguire, for his part, recalled, “I knew just three things about him. The kid himself was a millionaire. His father was an ambassador. And once, when a ship’s carpenter bawled the hell out of him for accidentally splashing some water on him, the lieutenant just stood there in his skinny green shorts and said, ‘Excuse me,’ and let it go at that. The carpenter did a lot of gulping later when he found out the kid was PT 109’s skipper.”25

The squadron commander, too, evidently liked what he saw. He gave Jack a perfect 4.0 in “ship-handling” and a 3.9 for his ability to command.26

III

That ability to command would soon be tested. In June 1943, preparations began at the key staging bases in the South Pacific—at Guadalcanal and Tulagi and farther south at Nouméa, in New Caledonia—for a major Allied offensive designed to capture the New Georgia islands (where the Japanese had an important airfield at Munda Point) and then oust the Japanese from New Guinea. Suddenly the PT night patrols took on new significance, as the boats were to disrupt Japanese supply vessels, most of them destroyers escorting reinforcements through the New Georgia Sound, the sea lane running through the middle of the Solomon archipelago, which U.S. commanders referred to as “the Slot.” The supply ships they called the “Tokyo Express.”27

PT 109 was dispatched to the Russell Islands, southeast of New Georgia, and then, in July, to the epicenter of the war zone, west of New Georgia near Lumberi Island, in the mid-Solomons. Japanese aircraft struck frequently, seeking to destroy bases and ships and to regain the air superiority over the area that they had lost in recent months. On the night of August 1, Lieutenant Kennedy’s boat was one of fifteen PTs sent from Rendova Harbor into Blackett Strait, in four groups, in order to try to intercept a Rabaul-based Japanese transport convoy streaming southward to Vila, on the southern tip of Kolombangara, laden with supplies as well as nine hundred soldiers. One of the Japanese ships, the two-thousand-ton destroyer Amagiri, carried thirteen officers and 245 men under Lieutenant Commander Kohei Hanami, a compact, muscular thirty-four-year-old graduate of Etajima, the Japanese naval academy. Hanami’s superior, Captain Katsumori Yamashiro, commander of the 11th Destroyer Flotilla, was also aboard the Amagiri that night.

The fifteen PT boats were quite a sight—and sound—rumbling to life in the harbor, each with three engines of twelve cylinders each. Five hundred and forty cylinders drummed in unison. The sun had dipped below Lumberi Island, and the sleek boats looked menacing in the twilight, their guns pointed to the sky. Engines growling, the boats mustered by division, and Kennedy maneuvered through traffic to fall in behind PT 159, PT 157, and PT 162 in Lieutenant Henry J. Brantingham’s Division B. This division had the farthest to go, having been assigned the station on the Kolombangara coast off Vanga Vanga, about forty miles away, so it moved out first, followed by the other three groups. Off the starboard side, barely visible in the fading light, the crews could just make out the low-slung coastal hills of New Georgia. Behind them, cloaked in a thin cloud, was the top of Rendova Peak, rising 3,400 feet.^*1, 28

One wonders if Kennedy, as he steered his boat into the night, reflected on a comment he’d made in a letter to his family mere days before: “I myself am completely and thoroughly convinced that nothing is going to happen to me. I think this is probably the way everyone feels—someone else, yes—themselves no. Feeling that way makes me anxious to see as much of it as possible and then to get out of here and back home. The more you see [the war], the quicker you get out—or so they tell us.”29

By 9:30 P.M. the PT boats had reached their respective patrolling stations without incident. It was a moonless, starless night, so dark that it was hard to tell where the water ended and the sky began. At around midnight the Japanese destroyers passed through the strait, and some minor skirmishing occurred involving a few PTs, whereupon the destroyers continued on their way. Poor communication among the PTs meant that several of the boats without radar, including Kennedy’s 109, did not know what had occurred. The 159 and the 157, having fired their torpedoes, left the scene, leaving Kennedy’s boat as well as Lieutenant John Lowrey’s 162 behind. The two skippers stayed put, patrolling at idling speed and straining their eyes in the darkness looking for ships they didn’t know had already passed through. To conserve fuel and reduce the size of their wake so it wouldn’t be spotted by enemy boats or aircraft, Kennedy and Lowrey throttled down, operating on only one of three engines. A third boat, the 169, under the command of Lieutenant Phil Potter, emerged out of the blackness to join them. He, too, throttled down. The three boats now formed a picket line as they continued their slow patrol. Unbeknownst to them, the Japanese convoy had already discharged their cargoes and were now on the way back up the strait.30

At 2:27 A.M., a silhouette suddenly appeared out of the darkness off Kennedy’s starboard bow, some two to three hundred yards away. Must be another PT boat that will soon veer off, the men thought. So did the crews on the 162 and the 169, who spotted the vessel at about the same time. But it kept coming, and suddenly everyone on the 109 understood what was happening: a Japanese destroyer was bearing down on them, like some charging skyscraper. Kennedy turned the wheel, but it was too late—with only his center engine in gear, he had no hope of maneuvering out of harm’s way, or of firing his torpedoes. Maguire grabbed his Miraculous Medal and had just begun to say, “Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us,” when the Amagiri sliced into the starboard bow of the 109 at a twenty-degree angle, shearing off a portion of the boat, then moved on into the night.31

“This is how it feels to be killed,” Kennedy thought to himself as he was thrown onto the deck.32 Two of his men—Machinist’s Mate Harold Marney, who was in the forward turret, and Torpedoman Andrew Kirksey, who had had strong premonitions of death in the days prior—perished more or less instantly; their bodies were never found. But Jack and ten others on the boat miraculously survived, most of them floating amid the debris and burning fuel, some of them barely conscious. Fortunately for them, the Amagiri’s churning wake had sucked most of the flames away from the wreckage, even as it cast the entire scene in a phantasmagoric light. Half of the wrecked boat stayed afloat, and one by one the men made their way over to it and climbed aboard. Machinist’s Mate Patrick McMahon, however, who had been belowdecks at the time of the collision and then had been carried some distance under the destroyer’s propellers, was too burned to make it on his own, so Kennedy dove back in and towed him back to the boat, a laborious task that took the better part of an hour. He also hauled in Gunner’s Mate Bucky Harris, who’d badly hurt his leg and could barely swim. (“For a man from Boston, you’re certainly putting up a great exhibition out here, Harris,” Kennedy said. Harris told him to go to hell.) Maguire, meanwhile, rescued Machinist’s Mate Gerard Zinser, and Lennie Thom hauled in William Johnston, another machinist’s mate who had inhaled gasoline fumes and could hardly move.33

The cacophony subsided and stillness returned. With eleven of the thirteen men accounted for and on board, the men of the 109 set about waiting. They knew the wreckage would not stay afloat forever. Initially, they expected either an enemy vessel or the other PTs to happen upon them, but no boats appeared. In the seconds before the collision, Lowrey’s 162 had tried to attack the Amagiri, but the torpedoes didn’t fire and Lowrey turned away to the southwest. Immediately after the ramming, the 169 fired two torpedoes that missed their target, whereupon Potter moved out of the vicinity. The two skippers would later say they thought the crew of the 109 had been killed in the collision or the flames, so there would be no point in sticking around in these dangerous waters, with more enemy destroyers perhaps coming through.

Some hours passed. “As dawn came up,” one crewman recalled, “we found ourselves on the boat with the boat under water all the way up to the bow. There was about 15 feet of the boat, which was 80 feet long, still sticking out of the water at a 45 degree angle, right side up.”34 They were deep in hostile territory, with Kolombangara to the east, Vella Lavella to the northwest, and the Gizo anchorage to the west-southwest. All were enemy-held, and the airstrip on Gizo was close enough that Kennedy and his men could see Japanese Zekes and Zeros taking off and landing.

As the morning progressed, the PT took on more water and began to turn her keel; soon she would disappear altogether in the dark blue waters. Jack asked the men for their suggestions on what to do—“There’s nothing in the book about a situation like this,” he said—and they made clear that the decision was his. He determined that they would swim to a coral island that could just be made out on the horizon some miles away, east of Gizo. He guessed that the island was too small to be enemy-held, but he could not be sure. Nor could he know if sharks were lurking nearby. They would have to chance it. Kennedy ordered the most severely hurt crew members and the poorest swimmers to hold on to a two-by-eight-foot plank (which had been part of the 37-millimeter gun mount) from which they would paddle along while he towed the ailing McMahon, holding the strap of the engineer’s life jacket in his teeth.35

“Will we ever get out of this?” someone asked.

“It can be done,” Kennedy replied. “We’ll do it.”36

Thus began an epic swim across Blackett Strait—in broad daylight, with the enemy close at hand. Four hours it would last. Jack would do the breaststroke for ten or fifteen minutes, rest a little while, then resume swimming, all the while reassuring McMahon and the other men that they were getting closer to their destination. Near sundown they finally made it, reaching the sandy beach of their precious refuge, Plum Pudding Island (known to locals as Kasolo), which turned out to be not much bigger than a football field and was partly covered in brush. There were coconuts in a handful of trees, but none within reach. A quick scan confirmed Jack’s hunch: no Japanese in sight. Utterly exhausted, he lay panting, his feet in the water and his head in the sand. His back throbbed. When at last he stood up, he vomited, on account of all the salt water he had swallowed. Gradually, he and McMahon made their way up the beach and collapsed under a bush as the others neared the island on their plank.37

Back at Tulagi and Rendova, meanwhile, word had spread rapidly about the ramming of the 109. The boat had exploded and been totally consumed by fire, reports indicated, and all men aboard were assumed dead. Preparations were made for a memorial service. Paul “Red” Fay, a spry and convivial PT officer who had met Jack briefly at Melville and later became a good friend—and would serve as undersecretary of the Navy in the Kennedy administration—despaired at the news, especially as his close pal George “Barney” Ross was on board. Fay wrote his sister, “George Ross lost his life for a cause he believed in stronger than any one of us, because he was an idealist in the purest sense. Jack Kennedy, the Ambassador’s son, was on the same boat and also lost his life. The man that said the cream of a nation is lost in war can never be accused of making an overstatement of a very cruel fact.”38

On his tiny island, Kennedy now had to calculate the odds of being rescued by Allied forces versus being found by the enemy. A Japanese barge floated by close to the shoreline; the men hid as best they could and breathed a sigh of relief when the vessel continued gently on its way. Next time they might not be so lucky. Time was also a factor, with McMahon in bad shape and several of the others, notably William Johnston, also suffering. With friendly boats unlikely to come into this part of Blackett Strait, Kennedy determined that, come evening, he would swim alone into Ferguson Passage, one of the approaches into the strait, in the hope of signaling a PT boat out on patrol. His usual approach in his young life—letting events come to him, being the detached if often perspicacious observer—would not suffice here, he realized. He had to seize control, had to bend destiny to his will. It was a brave idea, and a long shot. Even if an Allied skipper somehow spotted the lone light flashing in the darkness, would he really take his craft over to investigate? And if he did, who’s to say he or an overeager crew member wouldn’t shoot first and ask questions later? Kennedy acknowledged the odds against him, but he had no better idea, and doing nothing was tantamount to suicide. The men agreed, or at least offered no resistance.39

As darkness fell, Kennedy stripped down to his underwear, grabbed the battle lantern, and went on his way. To protect his feet from the coral, he wore shoes. On a lanyard around his neck hung his .38 revolver.

The eeriness of that night would stay with him always. Exotic creatures flitted about near him in the water, and he worried about the presence of sharks and barracuda. Much of the time, not a sound could be heard other than his own breathing and swim strokes. He was alone in the world. For a time he could rest, standing in waist-deep water on the barrier reef. As the hours went by, Kennedy realized there would be no rescue that night—by the flares in the far distance he could see that the PTs were patrolling elsewhere. He turned to swim back to his men, making steady progress until suddenly the current began taking him sideways. He fought it as best he could, swimming harder and ditching his shoes, but fatigue overtook him and he surrendered to the tide, to the immensity, to the blackness. He drifted, clutching his lantern, not sure whether he would live or die, until in the predawn hours he found himself near the tiny islet of Leorava. He straggled onto the beach, his feet bleeding from the coral, his back aching, and promptly fell asleep. Upon waking shortly after dawn, he swam the half mile back to Plum Pudding Island, collapsing in exhaustion as soon as he laid eyes on Lennie Thom and Barney Ross.40

That evening Ross took his turn swimming out into the strait; again, no friendly boat appeared. Hunger was now a major concern, and thirst even more so, so Jack decided the group would take to the water again, bound for Olasana Island, a slightly larger atoll to the south. The journey, on the morning of August 4, took close to three hours against a strong current, Jack again towing McMahon by a strap between his teeth, and it proved a wise move: Olasana had coconuts, in the trees and on the ground, that provided crucial sustenance. But rescue seemed as far away as ever, so on the following day Kennedy and Ross set out once more, swimming to a still larger island, Naru (also known as Cross Island), directly on Ferguson Passage. Here they happened upon a damaged one-man canoe as well as small bags of Japanese candy and crackers and a drum of potable rainwater. They also spotted, some distance away, what appeared to be two native islanders in a canoe. Kennedy and Ross waved at them to stop, but the men, afraid that they were Japanese, paddled frantically away.41

When Kennedy returned to Olasana late that night (Ross had stayed behind on Naru), he was astonished to see the same two locals there, communing with the men of PT 109. Their names were Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, and they were teenage scouts working for the Allies. A new excitement gripped the Americans: could this be the break they needed? Kennedy persuaded Biuku to paddle him back to Naru for another attempt at flagging down a friendly boat in Ferguson Passage. The effort failed, but, at Biuku’s suggestion, Jack scrawled a now famous message on the husk of a coconut: NAURO ISL COMMANDER NATIVE KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY. Biuku and Eroni took the coconut, along with a handwritten note by Thom, and made for the Rendova base, some thirty-eight miles away, through dangerous waters. En route, the two men stopped off at a nearby island to inform a fellow scout of the news; he in turn informed an Australian coastwatcher (an intelligence operative who observed enemy ship and troop movements, and also helped rescue stranded Allied personnel), Lieutenant A. Reginald Evans, who promptly dispatched seven of his scouts to Olasana in a large canoe laden with food, drink, and cigarettes.42

The scouts carried a message for Kennedy: “I strongly advise that you come with these natives to me. Meanwhile, I shall be in radio communication with your authorities at Rendova and we can finalize plans to collect the balance of your party.”43 The following day, Saturday, August 7, the islanders brought Jack, who was hidden under ferns in the boat, to the Australian’s camp. From there, things moved rapidly. The brass at Rendova, fearing it could be a trap to lure American forces into an ambush, allotted only one boat to the rescue attempt, William “Bud” Liebenow’s PT 157, which got to the scene without incident.

“Where the hell you been?” Kennedy shouted when the boat picked him up en route to Olasana, shortly after 11 P.M.

“We got some food for you,” Liebenow called back.

“No, thanks,” Kennedy answered. “I just had a coconut.”44

Soon all eleven men were aboard PT 157 and on their way to Rendova for medical attention, arriving there at 5:30 A.M. on August 8. Their ordeal was over, seven days after it began.

IV

In due course, many questions would be raised about what happened to PT 109 on that moonless night of August 1–2, and why. Some questioned why John F. Kennedy’s boss, Lieutenant Commander Thomas G. Warfield, did not make a more determined effort to locate and rescue survivors after learning of the disaster. He could have done more, certainly, but given that he was assured by Potter and Lowrey that Kennedy’s boat had gone up in a ball of flames, with “nothing left,” one can see why he didn’t. U.S. planes did search the area on August 3, but not until dusk, by which point Kennedy and his men were hiding in the bushes on the island. But why didn’t Potter and Lowrey come to the rescue immediately after the fiery crash? The two commanders were clearly unnerved by the sight of the Japanese destroyer slicing through the 109, and they worried that other enemy vessels were nearby. If an understandable reaction, it was also a problematic one. Potter insisted in the face of questions that he spent thirty or more minutes crisscrossing the crash site looking for survivors but did not find any. Several of his crew members disavowed the claim, saying no serious effort at rescue was made.45

Kennedy’s own actions have been subjected to endless scrutiny over the years. To many journalists and historians he was a hero, particularly for his decisions and his leadership after the ramming. To these analysts his exploits showed his poise, tenacity, bravery, resourcefulness, and imperturbability under intense pressure. Critics, however, have wondered how a commander of a PT boat—a vessel whose great asset was its speed and agility—would ever allow himself to be rammed. In particular, they questioned why Kennedy was sitting in the middle of the strait with only one of his three engines in gear. It may have reduced the amount of churning that could be spotted by enemy boats and planes, but it also made it impossible for him to make a quick escape. Kennedy himself acknowledged afterwards that when he saw the destroyer, he had pushed the throttle forward, stalling his engines. He had neglected to open his flaps first.46

Overall, though, the principal failure that night lay not with the skipper of PT 109, his crew, or the other PT commanders but with the broader tactics and circumstances beyond their control. Only four of the fifteen torpedo boats in the operation had radar (Kennedy’s was not among them), a handicap under any circumstances but especially on a jet-black night. Was it really reasonable to expect the other eleven commanders, instructed to stay off their radios for the most part, to either follow the lead PTs or spot enemy vessels on their own, using nothing but their eyes to guide them? As it was, the radar-equipped boats in the squadron, having fired their torpedoes, hurried back to base, leaving the other boats to fend for themselves. “Abandoned by their leaders and enjoined to radio silence, the remaining PT boats had no real chance, in pitch dark, of ambushing the Japanese destroyers,” one of the skippers said later.47 For his part, the division leader, Brantingham, had done little before the mission to explain tactics and procedures to the other three commanders in his group, a problem made worse by the fact that the radios on the boats periodically lost their frequencies. As for Kennedy’s decision to operate with only the center engine engaged, that was good and sensible PT doctrine for night patrol—Lowrey and Potter were doing the same at the time of the collision. They knew what Kennedy knew: that a phosphorescent wake was a golden invitation to Japanese aircraft to attack.

The ramming of PT 109 was more a freak accident than anything else. From the moment the Amagiri loomed up out of the dark night, Kennedy had perhaps ten seconds to get clear before being hit—a tall order for anyone in his position. Nor did his Japanese counterpart have appreciably more time; Hanami spotted the American boat at about the same time Jack spotted his. There is some question as to whether Hanami tried to avoid ramming the 109 or did so on purpose. He would subsequently say he did it intentionally, the better to protect his own vessel, but Captain Yamashiro, his superior, insisted that he had ordered Hanami to avoid a collision—he worried that the PT would explode on impact and thereby damage or sink the destroyer—but that there was no time to act on the command.48

Critics would also fault Kennedy’s decision to swim alone into Ferguson Passage, calling it reckless and futile. Perhaps it was, but the solo effort nonetheless speaks to Kennedy’s courage, stamina, and refusal to be defeated. He was a strong swimmer, having competed in meets since boyhood and suited up for Harvard. It’s surely meaningful that his attempt, unsuccessful though it was, earned him the undying respect and devotion of his crew. None of them had a word of criticism about how their commander acted after the collision, either then or later.49

Squadron commander Al Cluster, writing home to his parents, said Kennedy was “one of the finest officers I have. He did commendable work in getting his crew out O.K. and we’re all very proud of him. Somehow, when we heard of his boat going down, I could not believe that he was lost. He’s just that type of fellow. You know that he can take care of himself and you can always depend on him.” Of Kennedy’s family and fame, Cluster went on, they “never enter into any of our thoughts here. I’ve only known him about six months but I am proud to serve with him in my outfit. Whatever he does, he earns solely by his capabilities and not by the prestige of his name. People like that make me realize what an American is, something you find nowhere else in this world—men and women achieving ends in spite of their background. In fact, I’d say it would be just as hard for a boy like Jack to make good as it is for a kid from the slums. Both have disadvantages to overcome. No one out here has done a better job than Jack.”50

Ultimately, Jack Kennedy deserves no accolades for losing the first boat he commanded in the war, but he does merit praise for his resourceful and, yes, heroic actions on behalf of his crew, and in particular Pat McMahon. The initial swim from the wreckage, in which Kennedy pulled the severely burned engineer along for close to four hours, was by any measure an extraordinary feat, as McMahon’s recollection makes clear: “I knew he was in no great shape himself; he had been bounced down bad by the ramming. And he never looked more than 140 pounds to me, even on a good day, and today was no good day. But he was swimming for both of us now and not counting the cost. He’d pull and rest, pull and rest, and say, ‘How are you, Mac?’ to keep my spirits up.”51

Author Garry Wills, hardly uncritical in his assessment of John F. Kennedy’s life and career, notes the Kennedys’ later willingness to embellish the PT 109 story to suit Jack’s political purposes, yet also concludes, “The heroism was real. Kennedy saved the life of Patrick McMahon. He undertook the most dangerous assignments in looking for rescuers. His physical courage can never be questioned.”52

The military evidently felt the same way. Some months after the incident, Kennedy would be awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, the Navy’s highest award for gallantry, for his actions. He also received a Purple Heart.53

V

In Hyannis Port, Joseph P. Kennedy had received confidential word soon after the initial disaster in Blackett Strait that Jack was missing. Precisely who told him is not known, but likely it was a contact in the Navy Department. Kennedy opted not to tell Rose, instead spending agonizing days wondering alone what had happened and fearing the worst. He had wanted desperately to keep his sons out of the war, but when they made clear their determination to serve and to see action, he had supported them to the hilt and, in Jack’s case, had even pulled strings to get him his PT assignment. Now the nightmare seemed to be coming true.

It says something about Joe Kennedy’s stoicism—and perhaps the nature of his marriage—that he would keep such devastating information from his wife. Rose, it seems, first learned of the rescue on August 19. “The Globe called me up about 8:20 in the morning,” she wrote her children in a round-robin letter, “when I was in your father’s room waiting to hear the morning radio news. Of course, I was very much surprised and excited and I told them I would contact your father, who had gone over to the farm for his early morning ride….Dad knew he was missing for two weeks, although he gave no sign—for which I am very thankful—as I know we should all have been terribly worried. He just complained about his arthritis and I said it was funny he was nervous now, little knowing what he had to be nervous about.”54

Her husband was driving back from his horseback ride that morning of the nineteenth when he, too, heard the happy news on the car radio. He was so overcome with joy, he later told his son Teddy and his nephew Joey Gargan, that he momentarily lost control of the car and drove into a field.55

A day or two later, there arrived at the Cape a letter that Joe and Rose read and reread, and then read again. “Dear Folks, This is just a short note to tell you that I am alive—and not kicking—in spite of any reports that you may happen to hear. It was believed otherwise for a few days—so reports or rumors may have gotten back to you. Fortunately they misjudged the durability of a Kennedy—am back at the base now—and am OK. As soon as possible I shall try to give you the whole story. Much love to you all Jack.”56

The news of Lieutenant Kennedy’s exploits hit the front pages on August 19, after clearing censors. By chance, two leading war correspondents, Frank Hewlett of United Press and Leif Erickson of the Associated Press, were at the Rendova base on the day of the rescue and hopped aboard the PT boat for the pickup. They promptly filed accounts that made headlines across the country. KENNEDY’S SON SAVES 10 IN PACIFIC; KENNEDY’S SON IS HERO IN THE PACIFIC, read one of them. The New York Times, in a story datelined “Aug 8 (delayed),” reported on page 1, KENNEDY’S SON IS HERO IN PACIFIC AS DESTROYER SPLITS HIS BOAT. “Former Ambassador and Mrs. Kennedy today shouted in joy when informed of the exploit of their son,” read a separate Times story by Arthur Krock, but also “expressed deep sorrow for the two crewmen who lost their lives.” Congratulatory telegrams and letters flowed into the family home from near and far, and Joe set about trying to answer each one.^*2 “I’ve been a little lax in writing you recently,” he wrote one London friend, “but Jack’s exploits in the South Pacific have kept me pretty well tied up. It is the consensus of the newspaper men here that there hasn’t been a better story since the war started than the one of young Jack. He really came through with flying colors.”57

Joe and Rose implored their son to ask to be sent home. He had more than fulfilled his obligations, they believed, and moreover they worried about his health. Jack refused. He spent a week in the hospital in Tulagi, looking more emaciated than ever and brooding about the lack of rescue attempts following the ramming and about the loss of two of his men. To his squadron commander, Cluster, Jack poured out his frustration that neither Potter nor Lowrey had come to his boat’s aid, even though they clearly knew something bad had happened. But his frustration only strengthened his desire to return to duty, and he felt as well a deeper connection to his men. “On the bright side of an otherwise completely black time,” he wrote his parents, “was the way everyone stood up to it.

“Previous to that I had been somewhat cynical about the American as a fighting man. I had seen too much bellyaching and laying off. But with the chips down, that all faded away. I can now believe—which I never would have before—the stories of Bataan and Wake. For an American it’s got to be awfully easy or awfully tough. When it’s in the middle, then there’s trouble. It was a terrible thing though, losing those two men. One [Andrew Kirksey] had ridden with me for as long as I had been out here….He had a wife and three kids. The other fellow [Harold Marney] had just come on board. He was only a kid himself. It certainly brought home how real the war is—and when I read the papers from home, how superficial is most of the talking and thinking about it.”58

But his overarching view of the war had not changed. Upon learning that his seventeen-year-old brother Bobby was clamoring to get into a PT boat, Jack insisted that he was “too young to be out here,” and that “the fun goes out of the war in a fairly short time and I don’t think that Bobby is ready yet to come out.”59 In September, he assumed command of a new boat, the former PT 59, which had been retrofitted—the torpedoes were removed and replaced with guns—to become Gunboat No. 1, making Jack the first gunboat commander in the Pacific. Later that month he remarked to Inga Arvad on how slowly the fighting was progressing.

This war here is a dirty business. It’s very easy to talk about the war and beating the Japs if it takes years and a million men, but anyone who talks like that should consider well his words. We get so used to talking about billions of dollars and millions of soldiers that thousands of casualties sounds like drops in the bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten that I saw, the people deciding the whys and wherefores had better make mighty sure that all this effort is headed for some definite goal and that when we reach that goal we may say it was worth it….

I received a letter from the wife of my engineer, who was so badly burnt that his face and hands and arms were just flesh and he was that way for six days. He couldn’t swim and I was able to help him and his wife thanked me, and in her letter she said, “I suppose to you it was just part of your job, but Mr. McMahon was part of my life and if he had died I don’t think I would have wanted to go on living.”

At the end he turned personal, and showed his depth: “I used to have the feeling that no matter what happened I’d get through….It’s a funny thing that as long as you have that feeling you seem to get through. I’ve lost that feeling lately, but as a matter of fact, I don’t feel badly about it. If anything happens to me, I have this knowledge that if I lived to be a hundred, I could only have improved the quantity of my life, not the quality. This sounds gloomy as hell, [but] you are the only person I’d say it to anyway. As a matter of fact knowing you has been the brightest point in an extremely bright twenty-six years.”60

He still had feelings for Inga, strong feelings, even though the relationship was over. He loved everything about her—her looks, her sexiness, her sophistication, her sense of humor, her warmth. She had awakened something in him he didn’t know he had, had believed in him, had encouraged him to reach for the stars and to cultivate his interests in a potential political career. Even before meeting her, he had begun to move out of his older brother’s shadow, but there’s little doubt that her bullish and indefatigable advocacy was further incentive for him to see himself as coequal—at least—with Joe. Now, with his wartime exploits capturing headlines at home, some part of him understood the process was complete.

Joe Junior sensed it, too. Testy and irritable that summer of 1943, he agitated to get into combat, and seemed to his fellow fliers to have a giant chip on his shoulder. In July he seized on the chance to volunteer for a highly dangerous mission patrolling the English Channel in order to hunt down German U-boats near where they lived, in the Bay of Biscay and along the French coast south of Brest. As he waited for the order to ship out, Joe learned to fly the new B-24 Liberator and soon found himself flying them across the country, from the factory in San Diego to Norfolk, Virginia. On one of the San Diego stops a family friend showed him a letter indicating that Jack was missing in action. “I read this about three hours before I saw the papers [indicating the rescue],” Joe wrote to his family, “and got quite a fright.” But it seems he did not call his parents at the time, because some days later his father wrote to say he and Rose “were considerably upset that during those few days after the news of Jack’s rescue we had no word from you. I thought that you would very likely call up to see whether we had any news as to how Jack was.”61

Young Joe’s reply bespoke his frustration about having a younger brother who had allowed his boat to be lost to the enemy and yet somehow still came out looking every bit the conqueror. “With the great quantity of reading material coming in on the actions of the Kennedys in the various parts of the world, and the countless number of paper clippings about our young hero, the battler of the wars of Banana River, San Juan, Virginia Beach, New Orleans, San Antonio, and San Diego, will now step to the microphone and give out a few words of his own activities,” the letter began. Only once did it mention his brother’s name.62

Granted a few days’ leave at the start of September, Joe returned to Cape Cod in time for his father’s fifty-fifth birthday celebration. During a festive dinner, Judge John J. Burns, a longtime acquaintance of Joe Senior’s, rose to offer a toast “to Ambassador Joe Kennedy, father of our hero, our own hero, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy of the United States Navy.” That was it. No mention of the older son, who was seated right next to his father and who in a few days would be heading to England to go against the thrust of the ferocious Nazi war machine. As the judge sat down, Joe Junior lifted his glass and smiled stiffly. But another guest, Boston police commissioner Joe Timilty, said that that night he could hear Young Joe sobbing in the bed next to his and muttering, “By God, I’ll show them.”63

Decades later, his mother would acknowledge the import of the PT 109 episode: “In their long brotherly, friendly rivalry, I expect this was the first time Jack had won such an ‘advantage’ by such a clear margin. And I daresay it cheered Jack and must have rankled Joe Jr.”64 This seems half-right: yes, Jack had indeed gained the “advantage” over his brother, but it rings false to suggest that the fraternal competition was a zero-sum game that still mattered equally to both of them. The drive to be supreme among the nine Kennedy children had always been an all-out obsession for Joe more than for Jack. And especially in recent years, as Jack scored impressive accomplishments of his own, he had become less mired in the rivalry than his brother was.

VI

On October 8, 1943, Jack received promotion to full lieutenant, and on the sixteenth his Gunboat No. 1, along with the rest of the squadron, moved to Lambu Lambu, the new forward base on the island of Vella Lavella, west of New Georgia. There followed numerous missions through the end of October and into November, many of them aimed at intercepting Japanese barges at the western and southern approaches to Choiseul Bay. On November 2, Jack rescued wounded Marines trapped on Choiseul Island, then endured seeing several of the men suffer on board his boat, including one who died in his own bunk. On the night of November 5–6, with his friend Byron “Whizzer” White on board, No. 1 opened fire and destroyed three Japanese barges at Moli Island.65

Jack volunteered for many of these missions, and seemed unfazed by risk. “He had guts,” said one crewman. “No matter how dangerous the mission was, he’d always volunteer.” At one point, senior commanders wanted to send a boat through Blackett Strait to draw enemy shell fire so that American aircraft could identify the guns. Jack offered to do it. “He said he’d go if they could find somebody else to go with him,” the crewman remembered. Since no one else came forward, the mission was scrapped. But through his leadership and calm friendliness in these autumn weeks, Jack won respect and affection. “He was a good officer in that he knew how to handle men,” related Chief Petty Officer Glen Christiansen.66

His health, however, was spiraling downward. His back troubles and stomach pains intensified in the weeks after the PT 109 ordeal, and his weight, already worryingly low, dropped still further. He suffered headaches and fever. The precise cause was not clear, but the long hours and lack of sleep didn’t help. On November 18, a doctor at the base in Lambu Lambu ordered Jack to shore and he returned to Tulagi. Additional tests there, including X-rays, identified an “early duodenal ulcer” and the presence of malaria.67 Barred from further duty, he bided his time in Tulagi, penning letters and waiting for his orders home. To brother Bobby, who had joined the Navy Reserve while in his final months at Milton Academy, he wrote:

The folks sent me a clipping of you taking the oath. The sight of you up there, just as a boy, was really moving, particularly as a close examination showed that you had my checked London coat on. I’d like to know what the hell I’m doing out here, while you go stroking around in my drape coat, but I suppose that what we are out here for—or so they tell us—is so that our sisters and younger brothers will be safe and secure. Frankly, I don’t see it quite that way—at least if you’re going to be safe and secure, that’s fine with me, but not in my coat, brother, not in my coat. In that picture you look as if you are going to step outside the room, grab your gun, and knock off several of the house-boys before lunch.68

Jack spent abundant time with Red Fay, who tried every method to get Jack interested in playing cards. Results were poor. Instead Fay and a few others would descend on Jack’s tent, where he would lead informal group discussions on the topics of the day—on wartime strategy, politics, military leadership, education, and, inevitably, girls. Ideas interested him, the others could see—he kept a loose-leaf notebook to record thoughts—and he was stimulated by debate. “There was no question in my mind or the minds of Barney Ross, Jim Reed, and Byron White that Jack Kennedy was an exceptional man,” Fay, an admitted devotee, later said. Making book on who among them could become president of the United States, Fay and Ross set Jack’s odds at ten thousand to one (“because he was still out in the war zone, his health was poor, he was young and unforeseen circumstances could make it impossible for him to reach the White House”), and their own odds at between one million and two million to one. “Jack Kennedy’s greatness was so apparent to me,” Fay added, “that I did something unusual for a man. I saved every letter or note that he ever sent to me, beginning during the war years.”69

The orders home came through on December 14, 1943. By then the great campaign of which he had been a part was well on the way to success, with Allied forces mopping up the central Solomons to claim Vella Lavella and Bougainville and put themselves in a position to cut off and neutralize Rabaul, key to the entire Japanese position in the South Pacific. By the end of the month they would capture Cape Gloucester, at the western end of New Britain. And days after that, a major air offensive would render Rabaul more or less useless to enemy aircraft and ships, leaving its 100,000-strong garrison bereft and strategically irrelevant.70

Jack was granted thirty days’ leave starting upon arrival in the United States, and he would then report to Melville for his next assignment. He left Tulagi on the twenty-first, bound first for Espiritu Santo and then—aboard the USS Breton—San Francisco. He arrived on U.S. soil on January 7 and the following day headed south to Los Angeles, where he met with Inga Arvad, who had relocated there some months prior to write a gossip column called “Hollywood Today” for a national newspaper syndicate. (The FBI, having found no evidence she was engaged in espionage activities, had ceased its surveillance of her.)

Any hopes Jack had of rekindling the romance were immediately dashed. Life had moved on, and so had Inga. In her son’s recollection, “she’d been through the thing about the old man’s violent objections and just didn’t want to go through it again.” She loved Jack, and when she saw his cadaverously thin frame in her doorway she felt a rush of maternal compassion; some part of her thought she would never feel the same way about any man ever again. But she knew that sooner or later Jack, if he had designs on a political career, would again conclude—as he had almost two years before—that he could not marry her. What’s more, Inga found she liked her new life as a Hollywood columnist and had no desire to give it up. To punctuate the new reality, she even introduced Jack to her new beau, William Cahan, a naval doctor. Jack got the message. At Inga’s apartment, he chatted amicably with Cahan about Harvard, football, and show business, but after a while it became clear that one of them would have to leave. Exit Jack.71

But Inga had one parting gift for her love, in the form of a high-profile newspaper article that did much to cement the legend of Jack’s heroics in the Solomons. Based on an interview they conducted during his visit, the article—a puff piece that would be ethically problematic today—appeared in dozens of papers, including on page 1 of The Boston Globe on January 11, 1944, under the heading JFK TELLS STORY OF PT EPIC: KENNEDY LAUDS MEN, DISDAINS HERO STUFF. “This is the story of the 13 American men on PT Boat 109 who got closer than any others to a Japanese destroyer and of the 11 men who lived to tell about it,” Inga began. She heaped praise on the skipper for swimming “long hours through shark-infested waters to rescue his men” and quoted his description of the moment of impact on the night of August 2: “I can best compare it to the onrushing trains in the old-time movies. They seemed to come right over you. Well, the feeling was the same, only the destroyer did not come over us, it went right through us.”

Inga emphasized Jack’s reluctance to talk about himself and his preference for heaping praise on his crew. But there was also acclaim for him. Inga wrote of meeting Patrick McMahon’s wife, a resident of Los Angeles who “with tears in her eyes and a shaky voice…said, ‘When my husband wrote home, he told me that Lieutenant Kennedy was wonderful, that he saved the lives of all the men and everybody at the base admired him greatly.’ ”72

Jack, however, rejected the hero label that Inga tried to pin on him. “None of that hero stuff about me,” the article quoted him as saying. “The real heroes are not the men who return, but those who stay out there, like plenty of them do—two of my men included.”73

On the evening of January 10, just a few hours before the story ran, Jack Kennedy boarded an airplane in L.A., bound for points east. He was only on a thirty-day leave, but in his mind he had already made his determination: if he never saw another day of combat in his life, it would be too soon.

II

Jack Kennedy, like most junior officers in America’s war, could see this transformational change in his nation’s global position. In Red Fay’s recollection, the issue was a frequent topic of conversation in the bull sessions held in Jack’s Tulagi tent in late 1943. “We felt the United States was now numero uno,” Fay said, “that we had taken that role, and the United States was leader of the free world—that the British and the French and the Allies really weren’t going to make it without us.” Isolationism, the young men knew, was dead back home, with only a small handful of senators still calling forlornly for America to go it alone. On the question “Should the Senate resolve its willingness to join in establishing international authority to preserve peace?” the tally was 85 yes, 5 no, 6 absent. The vote on a similar resolution in the House of Representatives was equally lopsided.11

And there would be no going back, Kennedy and his mates sensed. Already a quarter century earlier, Woodrow Wilson had deduced that the United States, secure in its domains, faced a world of qualitatively different threats, on account of the emerging technologies of mass destruction and the insatiable ambitions of great powers in Asia and Europe. Already then, Wilson had determined that Americans could not afford to remain insular, could not depend solely on their own military and the two oceans to protect them; they needed to actively engage with the rest of the world in an arduous but vital long-term project aimed at winning universal respect for the ideals of liberty and the rule of law. Wilson’s vision, which combined idealism and realism in a uniquely potent way, went unrealized through the 1920s and ’30s; now, however, in the midst of another world war, Franklin Roosevelt and his lieutenants were determined to create a new, Wilsonian world order—one led by the United States and serving U.S. interests but also benefiting other nations—based on free trade, stable currency exchange rates, and multilateralism.12

As the year turned, though, Kennedy’s principal focus was not on the grand political questions of war and peace, nor on the steady march of history, but on something more immediate: taking full advantage of his monthlong leave back home. With Inga Arvad summarily rejecting his attempt at rekindling their romance during his brief stopover in Los Angeles, he headed for the family home in Palm Beach, stopping en route at the Mayo Clinic, in Minnesota, to have his health evaluated. On the plane he penned a brief note of condolence to Clare Boothe Luce, whose daughter had just been killed in an auto accident. “I can’t tell you how shocked I was to hear about Ann,” he wrote. “I thought I had become hardened to losing people I like, but when I heard the news today, I couldn’t have been sadder. She was a wonderful girl—so completely unspoiled, and thoughtful—and so very fond of you—I can’t believe it.”13

In Florida, his mother registered, with uncharacteristic abandon, her joy at having him back. She wrote in her diary, “He is really at home—the boy for whom you prayed so hard—at the mention of whose name your eyes would become dimmed—the youngster who you would think dead some nights & you would wake up with sorrow clutching at your heart. What a sense of gratitude to God to have spared him. What joy to see him—to feel his coat & to press his arms (& know he’s here) to look at his bronze tired face which is thin and drawn.”14

Jack went clubbing the first night with his good friend Chuck Spalding. From the start, something felt off. He’d been to war, had seen death and dying up close, and the sight of young people in a bar living it up as though nothing had changed was too jarring. “It was a great shock,” Spalding said, “having got back from this thing he’d been through, and going to this place where he used to dance all the time, and seeing everybody and trying to fit in. The difference between the tensions of being at war and the pleasures of Palm Beach. It was kind of a tough night, even for him—and he could usually make those kinds of transfers easily.”15

Others, too, noticed that Jack had been changed by his firsthand experience with war. The stabbing memories of violence and death had left their mark. Inga Arvad could see it—both in his letters from the war zone and in person when he stopped by in Los Angeles—as could Spalding and (in letters) Lem Billings. To his mother he seemed tightly wound, like a highly geared racehorse. Al Cluster, Jack’s squadron commander in the Solomons, detected a newfound seriousness in him, and a cynicism that many of Cluster’s men developed as they saw the disconnect between the supposed glamour of PT operations and the dirty, mundane reality, as well as the often nonsensical decisions by woolly-headed superior officers.16 Jack had become jaded, in other words, even as he remained a patriot, even as he held firm to the conviction that the Axis powers must be defeated and the United States must assume the responsibilities of world leadership.

“Munda or many of these spots are just God damned hot stinking corners of small islands in a group of islands in a part of the ocean we all hope never to see again,” he had remarked bitterly to Inga in a letter not long before leaving the Solomons. “We are at a great disadvantage. The Russians could see their country invaded, the Chinese the same. The British were bombed. But we are fighting on some islands belonging to the Lever Company, a British concern making soap. I suppose if we were stockholders we would perhaps be doing better, but to see that by dying at Munda you are helping to insure peace in our time takes a larger imagination than most men possess.” A letter to his parents from around the same time maintained the antiheroic mood: “When I read that we will fight Japs for years if necessary and will sacrifice hundreds of thousands if we must—I always check from where’s he’s talking—it’s seldom from out here.”17

He emerged from his war experience hardened, wiser, more mature, and with self-confidence from having performed his duties and earned the esteem of his men. Thrown together with individuals from vastly different backgrounds and economic circumstances, he developed a greater appreciation for the diversity of the American national experience. He was glad he had served. But perhaps in part because, at twenty-six, he was older than a lot of servicemen, he didn’t find the war as thrilling on a personal level as some did. He didn’t share the perspective, for example, of newspaperman Ben Bradlee, who served on a destroyer in the Pacific and would in time become a close friend, and who wrote of his own service, “I just plain loved it. Loved the excitement, even loved being a little bit scared.” Kennedy’s view was closer to that of Norwegian resistance fighter Knut Lier-Hansen: “Though wars can bring adventures which stir the heart, the true nature of war is composed of innumerable personal tragedies, of grief, waste and sacrifice, wholly evil and not redeemed by glory.”18

After a couple of weeks of rest and relaxation in Florida, Jack flew to New York on February 5. He secured a date with Florence “Flo” Pritchett, a bright and peppy ex-model who was the fashion editor of the New York Journal-American and who had recently divorced her wealthy Catholic husband. The two went out with writer John Hersey and his wife (and former Jack Kennedy girlfriend), Frances Ann Cannon, seeing a play and then repairing to the Café Society nightclub, where they had the good fortune—as it turned out—to bump into William Shawn from The New Yorker. Inevitably, Jack’s PT 109 episode came up, and Hersey asked if he could write about it, in an article he’d try to place in Life magazine. Jack was reluctant but eventually agreed, though he insisted that Hersey first interview those crew members who were now back on U.S. soil. Hersey assented and was soon on the road to the PT base at Melville, Rhode Island, to speak at length with four of the men, first individually, then collectively.19

From New York, Jack went on to Boston for his grandfather Honey Fitz’s eighty-first birthday party, a luncheon with three hundred guests at the Parker House Hotel. Delayed in arriving on account of a snowstorm, Jack entered the hall to a rapturous welcome. Honey Fitz was thrilled, and The Boston Globe ran a photograph of the ex-mayor and his grandson the following day, February 12. That evening, Jack was the featured speaker at a Lincoln’s Birthday War Bond rally presided over by Governor Leverett Saltonstall and Mayor Maurice J. Tobin. More than nine hundred people heard him expound on the sobering theme that the Pacific war seemed likely to last a long time. “The boys [would] like to know they won’t have to pay for the war they have to fight,” he declared, and the message evidently hit home—the rally raised a remarkable half million dollars in war bond purchases.20

With Jack’s thirty-day leave about to expire, he now asked to delay reporting for duty until March 1, in order to undergo medical tests at New England Baptist Hospital. At issue were his continuing stomach troubles and back pain. X-rays were taken and the surgeons made a determination: if Jack wanted to walk properly again, he should undergo the surgery that had been recommended a year earlier while he was stationed in South Carolina.

While weighing whether to go under the knife, he sat for a long interview with Hersey. They talked in Jack’s small and nondescript hospital room, with him propped up on the bed. From press accounts and the interviews in Rhode Island, Hersey had pieced together the basic chronology of the harrowing episode in the Blackett Strait, which he now took Jack through, step by step. Gradually, a fuller picture emerged. At one point Jack drew a map of the area in Ferguson Passage where he got off the reef and was in the water throughout the night, carried off by the current. Mesmerized by the image of that night and its dreamlike quality, Hersey asked for details; Jack did his best to provide them. For hours they talked as the afternoon disappeared and twilight bathed the room. Hersey came away impressed. “He had a kind of diffidence about himself that seemed to be genuine,” he later said. “So in a joking way he wondered how he looked to [the crew]. They were wildly devoted to him, all of them. Absolutely clear devotion to him by the crew. No reservation about it. They really did like him.”21

Jack opted to hold off on the surgery and managed instead to be reassigned to the Submarine Chaser Training Center, in Miami, near the family home. The relocation allowed him to spend some time with little brother Teddy, now twelve. One night, he took the young boy to another nearby naval base and, under the cover of darkness, smuggled him onto a PT boat. He also introduced Teddy to some of his favorite writings, including Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem “John Brown’s Body,” which the two took turns reading aloud. Teddy, reveling in his brother’s presence, listened with rapt attention as Jack talked about the key developments in the Civil War. “Never be without a book in your hand,” Jack told him.22

The work requirements in Miami were not exactly arduous. “In regard to conditions here,” he wrote Hersey, who was now at work drafting the article, “may I say that I am playing it slow and deep—with no strain or pain. Once you get your feet up on the desk in the morning the heavy work of the day is done.”23 In fact, though, the strain and pain soon returned, more intense than before. By May he realized he could put the surgery off no longer and, having secured permission from the Navy, entered Chelsea Naval Hospital on June 11. The following day, in a simple service at the hospital, Jack received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for “extremely heroic conduct as Commanding Officer of Motor Torpedo Boat 109 following the collision and sinking of that vessel in the Pacific War Area on August 1–2, 1943.” On June 22 Jack was transferred to New England Baptist, and a team of surgeons performed the serious operation the following day. They found not a ruptured or herniated disk, as anticipated, but, perhaps more alarmingly, “abnormally soft” cartilage, which they removed. They also reported “fibrocartilage with degeneration.”24

III

As for Jack, he was happy for his sister, and not much impressed with his mother’s objections. “Your plaintive howl at not being let in on Kathleen’s nuptials reached me this morning,” he wrote to Lem Billings. “You might as well take it in stride and as sister Eunice from the depth of her Catholic wrath so truly said, ‘It’s a horrible thing—but it will be nice visiting her after the war, so we might as well face it.’ At family dinners at the Cape, when you don’t pass Hartington the muffins, we’ll know how you feel.”31

The newlyweds had only a month together before Billy joined his Coldstream Guards regiment for the long-awaited Allied invasion of Normandy, initiated on June 6 under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kick soon made preparations to return to the United States to ride out the rest of the war with her family. There would be tensions with her mother, she knew, but she delighted at the prospect of seeing her siblings, not least Jack, whom she knew to be in sorry shape. His surgery, it turned out, had failed—he experienced acute back spasms when he tried to get up and about, the pain also shooting down one leg; he suffered severe abdominal pain; he lost weight. (“The doc should have read one more book before picking up the saw,” Jack remarked.)32 Upon transfer back to Chelsea Naval Hospital, where he would remain until August, physicians predicted it would be at least six months before he could return to active duty.

On the flip side, Jack could take satisfaction in the appearance of John Hersey’s long article on PT 109. Life had rejected the piece—the editors had already published one Hersey article on the PT boats and moreover did not want to give so much space to a feature story that would limit their ability to cover fast-breaking military developments—but Hersey remembered that The New Yorker’s William Shawn had indicated interest in the story during their chance encounter at Café Society; he now pitched the article to him. Shawn and editor in chief Harold Ross responded quickly: they would publish.33 Jack had been shown an early draft and liked what he saw (“Even I was wondering how it would all end!”), though he offered two suggestions: that crew members Lennie Thom and Barney Ross be given more recognition; and that Hersey omit allusions to an unnamed crew member (in actuality Raymond Albert) who’d lost his nerve during the ordeal and had subsequently been killed in the war. “I feel…that our group was too small, that his fate is so well-known both to the men and in the boats and to his family and friends that the finger would be put too definitely on his memory—and after all he was in my crew.” Hersey agreed and omitted the mention.34

The article appeared on June 17, under the title “Survival.” That was indeed its principal theme: Hersey, writing in the vivid and evocative yet spare style for which he would become known—two years later, the same magazine would devote an entire issue to his gripping 31,000-word account of the Hiroshima bombing—sought to explore the nature of human endurance in conditions of extreme adversity.

“At about ten o’clock the hulk heaved a moist sigh and turned turtle,” Hersey wrote of the morning after the ramming, shortly before the epic four-hour swim. “McMahon and Johnston had to hang on as best they could. It was clear that the remains of the 109 would soon sink. When the sun had passed the meridian, Kennedy said, ‘We will swim to that small island,’ pointing to one of a group three miles to the southeast. ‘We have less chance of making it than some of these other islands here, but there’ll be less chance of Japs, too.’ ”35

But this theme of unyielding determination wasn’t what Joseph P. Kennedy was primarily interested in. Rather, he hoped to use the publication to exploit what he saw as his son’s unvarnished heroism, the better to advance Jack’s career and to reverse his own lingering reputation for cowardice. In this regard Kennedy was disappointed that Life, with its large circulation, had taken a pass, and he moved energetically to persuade The New Yorker’s Ross to allow a condensed version of the article to run in the massively popular Reader’s Digest. Ross, who hated the rival magazine, said no, but Kennedy persisted, convincing Digest publisher Paul Palmer to drop his customary stipulation that his magazine have the right to reprint the condensed version in perpetuity. Palmer agreed to purchase a single, one-time publication right. With the new terms, Ross relented. Hersey, for his part, agreed to donate his New Yorker author’s fee to Kloye Ann Kirksey, the widow of one of the two men who died on the boat.36

It’s hard to overestimate the long-term benefits of this masterstroke of public relations on Joe Kennedy’s part. Expert marketer that he was, he understood what few others did, namely, the crucial importance that the timely advertising of Jack’s performance could have going forward.37 In the years to come, Joe would ignore the contract and reprint the abridged version, without permission, in mass quantities to be distributed during Jack’s campaigns. The tale of wartime heroism played extremely well before these audiences—and, crucially, could be used to explain, and lionize, his various infirmities. Yes, voters would learn, the candidate suffered from ailments, but they could be attributed to the PT 109 ordeal or to the malaria he contracted while in the service. (Sometimes, for variation, the maladies were blamed on “old football injuries.”)

In the early months after publication, however, Jack himself was more hesitant. He wrote to Lem Billings, “What I said to you about the break I got when Hersey did the article is true I guess [but] it was such an accident that it rather makes me wonder if most success is merely a great deal of fortuitous accidents. I imagine I would agree with you that it was lucky the whole thing happened if the two fellows had not been killed which rather spoils the whole thing for me.”38

IV

Later, after the fighting had ceased, some would say Joe’s mission was nothing but foolish bravado, a senseless attempt to match Jack’s exploits in the Pacific and a desperate plea for fatherly approval. Perhaps, but what, then, of the other fliers who volunteered for Project Anvil? Did the same demons drive them? Would they have been held to the same unsparing scrutiny for their decision to step forward? Joe’s fellow officers at his base noted his gambler’s nature, his unrestrained eagerness to sign on to anything and everything, but they also respected him for his sense of commitment, his piloting skills, his bravery. They liked that he didn’t wear his virtue on his sleeve and that he refrained from indulging in the name-dropping that his family name and history afforded him. Nor did he pontificate about his postwar plans, being content merely to say that politics was likely in his future, partly on account of his father’s wishes, and to leave it at that.45

Still, one wonders about his brusque dismissal of warning signs in the days before his mission. The entire Anvil project seemed half-baked at best, with test flights that went awry and logistical and tactical uncertainties. Twice a fellow pilot cautioned Joe that the electronic circuitry was not functioning as it should, that the arming panel and so-called safety pin could blow up the aircraft. Joe waved him off both times, forgoing the sensible option of asking his commanding officer that the mission be put off until the plane was fully examined. On the morning of August 12, with the operation definitely on for that evening, he left a message at Kick’s flat, asking her to inform his current girlfriend, Pat Wilson, that he’d be a day late joining her in Yorkshire. “I’m about to go into my final act,” he said. “If I don’t come back, tell my dad—despite our differences [over Kick’s wedding, presumably]—that I love him very much.”46 No mention of Mom; just Dad.

Late that afternoon, Joe and his copilot, Wilford J. Willy, a thirty-five-year-old Navy regular and father of three from Fort Worth, Texas, slid behind the controls of the stripped-down Liberator, which was loaded with 23,562 pounds of explosives. They took off without a hitch from Fersfield Aerodrome. Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, flew behind them in a special Mosquito photoreconnaissance plane to take pictures of the mission and thereby memorialize it. (Which suggests another possible motivation for the mission: that Joe wanted to remove once and for all any lingering suspicion that the Kennedys were “yellow.”47) Some twenty minutes in, Joe switched over to remote guidance, and he and Willy prepared to bail. Suddenly, with Roosevelt snapping photos from behind, Joe Junior’s plane exploded in a giant yellow circle of flame. Pieces of wreckage were scattered over a mile-wide area in coastal Suffolk, and more than fifty homes were damaged. So immense was the blast that not a trace of either pilot was ever found.

In due course it would be determined that Kennedy and Willy’s act of ultimate self-sacrifice had been completely unnecessary. The specific target of their mission was Mimoyecques, a fortress in the Pas-de-Calais region where an underground military complex was being built to house Germany’s latest “V” weapon, the V-3 cannon, which would be aimed at London, one hundred miles away. Unbeknownst to Allied planners, work on the site had been suspended because of the disruptions caused by conventional British and U.S. bombers. Even had the work been completed, there would have been no V-3s to install, the weapon having proved to be thoroughly defective in trials. In a final irony, less than three weeks after Joe’s fateful flight, the empty site at Mimoyecques would be overrun by Canadian troops.48

V

In Ted Kennedy’s recollection of that awful Sunday on the Cape, Jack turned to him after the priests had left and said, “ ‘Joe wouldn’t want us to sit here crying. He would want us to go sailing. Let’s go sailing.’…And that’s what we did. We went sailing.” Afterwards, Jack wandered the beach alone before returning to his hospital bed in Boston. He had time now to think about his brother’s death and the strangeness of it all: Joe, with his robust good health, was gone, while he, laid up in a sick bed, got to live. Jack commented in writing a few months afterwards that “the best ones seem to go first,” and that there was “a completeness to Joe’s life, and that is the completeness of perfection.” Jack was proud of his actions in Blackett Strait one year before, but he knew there was a sharp distinction between his experience and the top-secret mission that led to his brother’s death. It surprised him not at all when Joe was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross “for extraordinary heroism and courage.”49

His father’s demeanor in the weeks following the tragedy only confirmed the sense that the best one had gone first. Joe Senior was bereft, his grief all-consuming. He withdrew inside himself, spending hours alone listening to classical musical and avoiding social interactions. Young Joe, his firstborn and namesake, had been the embodiment of his dreams and ambitions, of his determination to take the Kennedys to the pinnacle of American public life. He was the crown prince, and now he was dead. “It was as though Joe Kennedy had mounted,” one observer later said, “with painstaking attention to the smallest detail, a drama intended to be long and triumphant, only to see the curtain rung down with cruel finality after the prologue.” To a friend Kennedy confessed, “You know how much I had tied my whole life up to his and what great things I saw in the future for him. Now it’s all over.”50

An enveloping sense of guilt may have deepened the sorrow. Arthur Krock, who knew his man well, later confided that the fatherly despair at the death was among the most severe “that I’ve ever seen registered on a human being.” He speculated that there was a specific reason for Joe Kennedy’s extreme reaction: “Joe Jr. when he volunteered on this final mission which was beyond his duty, beyond everything, was seeking to prove by its very danger that the Kennedys were not yellow. That’s what killed that boy. That’s why he died. And his father realized it. He never admitted it, but he realized it.”51

For Rose, the early weeks after the tragedy were the darkest time she had ever known. Joe had always been her great joy, ever since he smiled up at her from his crib in the little house in Brookline three decades before. She couldn’t sleep at night as she pictured the terror he must have experienced in his final moments of life. She kept seeing him as a young boy, “running into my arms and snuggling into my lap,” and thought about the steady presence he had always been in the Kennedy household, as a kind of surrogate parent and consummate role model for his siblings. Then, as letters poured in from near and far, Rose’s anguish began, ever so slowly, to lift as she willed herself to acknowledge that Joe’s death was part of God’s mysterious plan, a plan she did not have to understand in order to accept it.52

On August 16, Jack was on hand at Boston’s Logan Airport as Kathleen arrived from England. She collapsed into his arms, weeping. From there the two siblings went to little St. Francis Xavier Church, in Hyannis Port, for some quiet time together. According to her biographer, Kick was shocked by Jack’s appearance: “He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty-five pounds. His cheek and jaw bones jutted out prominently, and his skin had a terrible yellow cast to it.”53 But she relished being with him, and he with her, and they saw each other frequently in the weeks that followed. Then, only a month later, on September 19, another stunning blow: news arrived that Kick’s husband, Billy Cavendish, had been killed in action in Belgium nine days earlier, shot through the heart by a German sniper. “So ends the story of Billy and Kick,” she wrote in her diary as she prepared to return to England for the memorial service. “Yesterday the final word came. I can’t believe that the one thing that I felt might happen should have happened. Billy is dead—killed in action in France Sept 10th. Life is so cruel.”54

Jack, reflecting on Joe’s and Billy’s deaths while laid up in the hospital that fall, filled a notebook with fragments about them—a letter from Kick about her husband’s passing, condolence notes from Billy’s fellow Coldstream officers, a Washington Post editorial about Joe as well as his posthumous citation. Jack’s thoughts went back to two accounts he had read of Raymond Asquith’s death in 1916, one in Buchan’s Pilgrim’s Way, the other in Churchill’s Great Contemporaries. He inserted both in the notebook:

Buchan: “He loved his youth, and his youth has become eternal. Debonair and brilliant and brave, he is now part of the immortal England which knows not age or weariness or defeat.”

Churchill: “The War which found the measure of many men never got to the bottom of him, and, when the Grenadiers strode into the crash and thunder of the Somme, he went to his fate, cool, poised, resolute, matter-of-fact, debonair.”55

An idea took root in Jack’s mind: he would honor his brother by putting together a memorial book, made up of recollections and reminiscences from family and friends. He would serve as editor and pen the introduction. The undertaking became bigger than he anticipated—“The book on Joe is going slower than I had hoped,” he wrote Lem Billings in early 1945, “but it should be out in another month or so and I think will be pretty good”—but he took it seriously, spending long hours, in sister Eunice’s recollection, making calls and writing letters and gathering the collected pieces that made up the finished work, a slim but moving book titled As We Remember Joe. Three hundred and sixty copies were printed and privately distributed, mostly to friends and relatives and service colleagues.56

“The book, I am afraid—may make you sad,” he wrote his parents upon publication. “I hope that the sadness will be mitigated by the realization—clearly brought out in the book—of what an extraordinarily full and varied life Joe had.” (Mr. Kennedy was not willing to take the chance; for the rest of his days he could never bring himself to read more than a few pages of the volume.57) In his introduction, Jack wrote of his brother’s early acquisition of a “sense of responsibility towards his brothers and sisters, and I do not think that he ever forgot it. Towards me who was nearly his own age, this responsibility consisted in setting a standard that was uniformly high.” Touching ever so lightly on Joe’s shortcomings—his short fuse, his unwillingness to suffer fools—Jack said he would be forever grateful for the way his brother always led by example, and he left no doubt that the ill-fated mission on August 12, 1944, cut short a life destined for greatness: “His worldly success was so assured and inevitable that his death seems to have cut into the natural order of things.”58

More than a few commentators would later say the same thing: that Joe was the Kennedy child marked for political stardom. These observers in effect embrace the narrative constructed with painstaking care by Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy, which put their eldest son above the others in the brood, not merely in God-given talent and worldly accomplishments but in future potential. The reality was different, as Joe Junior himself seemed to grasp near the end. Alongside his leading-man looks, his work ethic, his loyalty, his physical courage, and his ebullience stood other qualities. He was hot-tempered and domineering, and often socially aggressive. Relentlessly argumentative, he struggled to dial this tendency back in debates, his need to win all-consuming. His humor tilted to the belittling, sarcastic variety, and his writing lacked subtlety and grace.

Above all, Joe’s policy misjudgments, not a few of which flowed from his unshakable determination to do his father’s bidding, would have posed obstacles to any future hope of political prominence in the Democratic Party—here one thinks, for example, of the admiration for Hitler’s Germany, expressed at various points through the 1930s; the stubborn vote against FDR’s nomination at the 1940 party convention; the hard Lindbergh-like anti-interventionism, more extreme even than his father’s and held long past the time most of the country had moved away from it; and the founding role in the Harvard Committee Against Military Intervention. The pro-Franco sentiments in Joe’s senior thesis and in his post-graduation reports from Spain likewise would have elicited uncomfortable questions, particularly as the fascistic policies of Franco’s regime became more widely known. (All copies of the thesis seem to have vanished in the years following his graduation, suggesting the family perceived the problem.59)

Nor should we necessarily accept the corollary judgment, even more widely held, that John F. Kennedy chose politics for a career only because of his brother’s passing and because his father commanded him. Jack had ample time to ponder his options that fall and winter of 1944–45, and there can be no doubt that Joe’s death factored into his thinking. It’s even possible to endorse historian Herbert Parmet’s subsequent assertion that Jack’s political career began with “an explosion high over the English coast.” His father certainly wanted it to be so, and he began nudging Jack hard in that direction in Palm Beach as early as Christmas 1944. (“I can feel Pappy’s eyes on the back of my neck,” Jack confided to Red Fay that holiday season.60)

But Jack had his own reasons for selecting his path. His youth had been imbued by the political legend of his grandfather John F. Fitzgerald, and he had been reared in a household that revered public service and preached the obligation to do something worthwhile with one’s life. More than that, he had long been fascinated by politics, and his flirtation with law school was at least in part an expression of that interest. Professors and fellow students at Harvard who knew both brothers believed Jack had the greater interest in, and knowledge of, contemporary politics and political history.61 Already with Inga Arvad in early 1942, he had mused at length about running for office—the two of them even joked about the highest office in the land—and his subsequent war experience deepened his understanding of world affairs and of what made people tick. At the nightly bull sessions he conducted in the South Pacific, politics was a frequent topic of discussion. And in the late winter of 1944, several months before Joe’s death, Jack met with veteran Boston political operative Joe Kane to discuss potential political opportunities he might seek.62 Jack also had more publicized achievements than did his brother, meaning that in popular terms he, rather than Joe, had the advantage (as Joe himself sensed). The most that can be said is that his brother’s passing opened up an arena Jack might well have entered at some point anyway, not in order to take Joe’s place but in order to express his own ideals and aspirations. In the recollection of Theodore Sorensen, later a top aide, “His entry [into politics] was neither involuntary nor illogical.”63

In any event, nothing had been decided that December. Jack had not been released from the Navy, and his precarious health did not allow for firm planning. He also was not yet willing to commit himself to politics as a profession. He had other options. He liked writing, and moreover it was the only occupation for which he had some training and credentials. Plus his success with Why England Slept convinced him he could be good at it. To Chuck Spalding and others, he said he might make writing his career, perhaps as a journalist. Academia also held appeal for him, but not the years of additional study it would require. Business enticed him not at all.

VI

But first things first: he needed to get his health in order before committing to any particular path. In December 1944 he appeared before the Retirement Board in Washington, D.C., where it was determined that he would be transferred to the retired list at the rank of lieutenant, “by reason of physical disability,” bringing an end to John F. Kennedy’s military career. (His official release would be March 1, 1945.) In January 1945 he went to Arizona to try to recover his health in the warm sunshine, renting a room at the Castle Hot Springs Hotel, in the Bradshaw Mountains. On February 20 he reported to Billings that recovery was slow, and that he would return yet again to the Mayo Clinic if he did not feel improvements soon. Still, he was well enough to pay a visit to Phoenix: “Their [sic] was some pumping which interested me, and I did take [actress] Veronica Lake for a ride in my car….I don’t mean by all this that I pumped her or that if you should ever see her you should get a big hello. You would get the usual blank stare you get under similar circumstances.”64

In his cottage he also pecked out a draft article, “Let’s Try an Experiment in Peace,” which focused on rearmament and the prospects for postwar stability. Whereas previously Jack had championed military preparedness to counter the threat of German and Japanese aggression, he now warned that a postwar arms race could threaten great-power peace and undermine American democracy. (“Democracy sleeps fitfully in an armed camp.”) Instead, U.S. leaders should pursue the kind of “intelligent and imaginative statesmanship” required to prevent a renewed arms scramble after the Axis powers were defeated, lest a rival power—here he anticipated it would be the Soviet Union—should try to match America’s might, and lest weaker nations “bind together for security against us.” Reader’s Digest took a pass on the article, as did The Atlantic Monthly, its editor lamenting that Jack had tried to cover too much ground in too little space, “with the result that your argument does not clinch the reader as it ought.” It was a fair critique; the draft lacked spark, and Jack did not offer a particularly novel argument in the context of early 1945, when innumerable other observers were likewise preaching the importance of disarmament, arms limitation, and vigorous diplomatic engagement. Still, the piece provides insight into its author’s evolving views on the efficacy of military power, and on his concern—well founded, it would turn out—that postwar strife among world powers could put serious strains on American democratic institutions.65

Most notable of all was this farsighted passage: “Science will always overtake caution with new terrors against which defense cannot be anticipated. It is not an exaggeration to expect that missiles will be developed to a point where theoretically any spot on the globe can send to any community in the world, with pinpoint accuracy, a silent but frightful message of death and destruction.”66

Foreign affairs remained, as always, Jack’s principal policy interest, but he sought in Arizona to round himself out by learning a bit more about domestic issues. He befriended a wealthy Chicagoan named Pat Lannan who was likewise in the desert to gain back his health. Lannan impressed on Jack his belief that organized labor would be extremely influential in American politics going forward, and he urged him to learn all he could about the subject. Jack promptly got his father to ship a crate of books on labor unions and labor law, and he dove into them as soon as they arrived. Lannan recalled that Jack, with whom he shared a cottage, “sat up until one or two in the morning reading those books until he finished the whole crate.”67 The episode spoke to Jack’s curiosity and drive, and was a further clue that he saw elected office in his future.

Lannan, however, didn’t necessarily see presidential material in his new friend. “Certainly when I met Jack in 1945,” he later said, “never in my wildest imagination was there an idea that he would become a future president of the United States!” Rather, Jack struck him as a “thoroughly amusing guy,” but normal and pragmatic, not on the fast track to high office. What did come through, however, was Jack’s devil-may-care bravado, back problems notwithstanding, especially when the two went riding in the hills. “It was a wonderful place to ride horses, and we did that every day. He was a wild rider. He would charge his horse down a mountainside. He loved speed. He was a very daring fellow, but not that good a horseman. He was always taking chances. He always wanted a race—he was very competitive, but in a nice way.”68

As the two young men whiled away their days in the Arizona sunshine, they could sense that big changes were in the offing. War, it seemed, would soon give way to postwar, and to uncertainty over what that would mean for America, for the world, and for their own futures.

II

After the three leaders left the Crimea, the onslaught continued as the Allies enveloped the Ruhr and captured more than 300,000 German prisoners, then seized Mannheim and Frankfurt. The end was near. In early April, Paris once again became the City of Light as the blackout was lifted. Vast sections of major German cities—Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Essen, Nuremberg, Düsseldorf, and Frankfurt—had been reduced to rubble. On April 11, the U.S. Ninth Army reached the Elbe and was a mere fifty-seven miles from Berlin.

The following day, FDR died. His performance as president and commander in chief had its critics, then and later, but of his immense and lasting influence there can be no doubt. His New Deal fundamentally changed major facets of American life: labor relations, welfare, economic security, conservation, banking, infrastructure, and agriculture, to name but a few. Under Roosevelt, the federal government entered irreversibly into the economic life of the nation—even “small government” conservatives of later decades, while inveighing rhetorically against the welfare state, had no choice but to accept its parameters. In foreign policy, too, Roosevelt claimed enhanced presidential authority, especially after Congress passed Lend-Lease, in early 1941. Here he oscillated between an idealism verging on utopianism and a hardheaded pragmatism, between espousing a capacious global vision and contenting himself with narrow, piecemeal, short-term aims, taking care always to preserve his power in a world of shifting allegiances and constant intrigue. (Here indeed lay part of his strength: it was never easy to know which Roosevelt one was dealing with.) “The Juggler,” historian Warren Kimball called him, and the name fits. And certainly, Roosevelt’s role in the Allied war effort was colossal—more than anyone, he was the architect of the core strategic decisions that had, by the time of his death, brought victory within sight. To the American men and women engaged in the vast struggle, he was a brilliant commander in chief, superbly adept at articulating the ideals of freedom for which they and their nation were fighting.6

Small wonder that historian William E. Leuchtenburg titled his synthesis of the later twentieth-century presidencies, including John F. Kennedy’s, In the Shadow of FDR.7

FDR’s singular service to humankind, said Isaiah Berlin, who had served in the British embassies in Washington and Moscow during the war, was in showing that “it is possible to be politically effective and yet benevolent and human”; that the promotion of liberty and social justice need not mean the demise of effective government; and that “individual liberty—a loose texture of society”—could be reconciled with an “indispensable minimum” of organization and authority.8

Skeptics would note that Roosevelt could be temperamental and spiteful, and that he did not always exhibit grace under pressure. They would say he made contradictory promises, cynically and unabashedly, to groups and individuals and foreign governments. They would point to the black marks on his record—the forced internment during the war of 100,000 Japanese Americans, notably, and the inaction in the face of the Holocaust. (To critics he should have done more to disrupt the death camps; they were unmoved by his claim that the best way to rescue European Jewry was to win the war as fast as possible.9) To this one could add his undue caution, right up to the Pearl Harbor attack, in confronting isolationist strength in Congress.

Yet it remains that as the news of his death hit, that spring day in 1945, many Americans were left bereft, uncomprehending. It seemed impossible. Those in their teens and twenties had never really known another president—Jack Kennedy was fifteen when FDR first took the oath of office, sister Eunice was eleven, and brother Bobby was seven—and even older Americans, including many who opposed him, found it hard to imagine life without the thirty-second president. He had led the country through the depth of the Depression and the challenges of a two-front war. Even in the darkest days of 1942, when it seemed the Axis steamroller might be unstoppable, he had maintained his firm belief that victory would come in the end—made possible by America’s industrial and manpower might. Anne O’Hare McCormick, writing in The New York Times soon after his passing, said Roosevelt had “occupied a role so fused with his own personality after twelve years that people in other countries spoke of him simply as ‘The President,’ as if he were President of the World. He did not stoop and he did not climb. He was one of those completely poised persons who felt no need to play up or play down anybody. In his death this is the element of his greatness that comes out most clearly.” For GOP senator Robert A. Taft, the message was simple: “He dies a hero of the war, for he literally worked himself to death in the service of the American people.”10

And there was something else, something of particular interest to our story: Roosevelt’s extraordinary capacity to connect with voters, partly through his dauntless optimism and charismatic appeal and partly because of his expert exploitation of the newest technological innovation of the era, radio. His mastery of the medium proved a remarkable political asset. In particular, radio allowed him to make emotional connections with the electorate in a way previous U.S. politicians—remote figures, for the most part, visible only in grainy photographs on the front page of newspapers—had not. In this way Roosevelt was the first media president, the originator of what came to be called media politics, which a quarter century later, under John F. Kennedy, would produce a television presidency.11

Not all Americans grieved the great man’s passing. Joseph P. Kennedy, though he offered a tribute in the press, told daughter Kick that Roosevelt’s death was “a great thing for the country.” Still smarting over being bypassed for a cabinet position after resigning from the ambassadorship, Kennedy also in effect blamed FDR for causing Joe Junior’s death. By pushing Britain toward war, and in particular by pushing Neville Chamberlain to guarantee Polish sovereignty in the spring of 1939, Kennedy told former president Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt had steered Britain and ultimately the United States into an unnecessary conflagration. It was a dubious interpretation of events, especially coming from an up-close observer, but the Ambassador was adamant. According to Hoover’s notes, “Kennedy said that if it had not been for Roosevelt the British would not have made this, the most gigantic blunder in history.” Hitler, left to his own devices, would have turned his attention to the east, and Western Europe would have been spared. Roosevelt’s subsequent embrace, at Casablanca in 1943, of the doctrine of “unconditional surrender” was another foolhardy move, in Kennedy’s judgment: it foreclosed the possibility of a negotiated peace that might have shortened the war.12

Nor, in the Ambassador’s myopic view, had Roosevelt laid the basis for a sound postwar order. Where others saw the emergence of a new, U.S.-led framework for world politics, Kennedy saw just waste and anarchy. “It’s a horrible thing to contemplate,” he wrote to Kick, “with the death of all these boys and with the world economically and socially in chaos, that we haven’t anything to look forward to in the line of peace for the world as the pay-off for everyone’s sacrifices.”13

Absent was any acknowledgment of what the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps that spring had shown: the profound malevolence of a system of systematic terror, torture, and killing, one with a genocidal component at its core. The appalling film footage from Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald shocked even the most hardened of observers, as much for the neglect it showed as for the cruelty, with huge numbers of unburied dead who were the victims of starvation and unchecked disease. Suddenly, it seemed Winston Churchill had spoken the most basic of truths when he had told his compatriots, in the gloomy days of June 1940, “If we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”14 This dimension of the war as a moral struggle that saved liberal civilization never fully registered with Joe Kennedy.

Yet for all his ongoing bitterness, Kennedy knew he had to follow the line he had long preached to his brood: that life is for the living. Resigned to the reality that his own career in public life was in all likelihood over, he fastened his attention ever more firmly on his children. That meant, above all, Jack. It would be Jack, the father hoped, who would restore the Kennedy name to prominence, Jack who would live out the life plan Joe had imagined for Joe Junior. In April, accordingly, the Ambassador got the Hearst-owned Chicago Herald-American to hire Jack to cover the upcoming United Nations conference in San Francisco for the paper as well as for Hearst’s New York Journal-American. Jack jumped at the opportunity—the work would test his suitability for a journalistic career, and might also be a useful prelude to running for office. His beau ideal Churchill, after all, had at one point been a young correspondent in the Sudan and in the Second Boer War, before standing for Parliament.

III

By this time Jack had completed his period of rest and recovery in Arizona’s Bradshaw Mountains and had also paid a visit to Hollywood, in the company of Pat Lannan and Chuck Spalding. There they roomed at the fashionable Beverly Hills Hotel and sampled the nightlife, hobnobbing with film celebrities such as Gary Cooper, Walter Huston, Olivia de Havilland, and the ice skater Sonja Henie. Jack had a blast, even if Cooper’s lack of depth and conversational skill during dinner stunned him—“That’s about a three-word dinner we had,” Jack remarked to Spalding, who had penned a bestselling book, Love at First Flight, that Cooper was interested in adapting for the screen. “Nobody said anything, and if we did, Gary said zero!” An afternoon at de Havilland’s home ended in comical fashion as Jack, his eyes fixed firmly on the movie star, turned the wrong doorknob and opened a tightly packed hall closet, sending tennis rackets, balls, and shoes crashing down on him.15

The trio also met with Inga Arvad, and Spalding could immediately see why Jack had fallen for her, quite apart from her looks—she was warm and witty and enchantingly cosmopolitan. But the relationship was by now purely platonic, whatever faint hopes Jack may have had for more. (Some weeks earlier, he had told Billings that he planned to visit Southern California and “tangle tonsils with Inga Binga.”) Inga’s relationship with William Cahan held steady, and she liked her West Coast life. She feared (wrongly) that she was still under FBI surveillance, moreover, and had no interest in restarting the difficulties she and Jack had experienced in 1942, particularly given his possible pursuit of a political career.16

On April 25, 1945, after a brief stop at the Mayo Clinic for medical tests, Jack headed back west to cover the founding conference of the United Nations, in San Francisco, the greatest gathering of world statesmen since the Versailles Conference of 1919.17 Though the suggestion would subsequently be made that Hearst executives were doing the Kennedys a favor by employing him, it was really shrewd self-interest that drove them—for a modest fee of $750, they got sixteen informative and lucid articles from a war hero who had written a respected book on international affairs and had important family connections to senior U.S. and British officials. He might have still been shy of twenty-eight, but he had credibility.18

The young correspondent’s first story, filed on April 28, reflected his realist outlook, as he cautioned readers that the conference had been given too much of a buildup, with exaggerated hopes for what it could accomplish in a world still driven by core national interests. “There is an impression that this is the conference to end wars and introduce peace on earth and good-will toward nations—excluding of course, Germany and Japan. Well it’s not going to do that.” The leading powers would wish to preserve considerable latitude for themselves—one of them, the Soviet Union, seemed intent on raising a ruckus at the meeting and getting its way on several important issues. Jack then noted that the average GI on San Francisco’s streets had little inkling of the purpose of the conference. He quoted a decorated Marine: “I don’t know much about what’s going on—but if they just fix it so that we don’t have to fight anymore—they can count me in.” Jack added, “Me, too, Sarge.”19

A marked feature of the conference and a constant theme in Kennedy’s dispatches was the growing friction between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. The schism had been evident for months. Already the previous year, the Soviet leadership had distanced itself from the new World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), created at the Bretton Woods Conference, in New Hampshire, in July 1944 in order to stabilize finance and trade. The former was designed to provide developing nations with needed capital, the latter to monitor exchange rates and lend reserve currencies to nations with trade deficits. Stalin and his lieutenants held, correctly, that the United States dominated both institutions, and they anticipated that Washington would use them to promote private investment and open international commerce, which to Moscow smacked of capitalist exploitation. More to the point in Stalin’s eyes, it bespoke America’s hegemonic ambition, as did the fact that the conferees at Bretton Woods agreed to make the U.S. dollar the standard currency of world trade, replacing Britain’s pound sterling.20

“Winston Churchill once said that Russian policy was an enigma wrapped in a mystery,” Jack reported on April 30. “I’d like to report to Mr. Churchill that the Russians haven’t changed.” A quarter century of mutual distrust between Russia and the rest of the world could not be overcome easily or quickly, he went on, and history would place a heavy burden on all negotiations. And on May 2: “This conference from a distance may have appeared so far like an international football game with [Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav] Molotov carrying the ball while [the Western representatives] tried to tackle him all over the field.”21

To a degree, Kennedy suggested, the Soviets’ go-it-alone style in the proceedings was understandable, rooted as it was in genuine security concerns, and an absolute conviction that Mother Russia, having endured colossal hardship over the previous four years, must never be invaded again. The Red Army, moreover, had borne the brunt of the fighting against the German war machine, suffering huge casualties, while the Americans and the British dithered over launching the second front; why should the West be trusted now?22 Yet Kennedy cautioned American and British leaders against simply acquiescing to Moscow’s demands, and he anticipated the Cold War that was to come. “There is growing discouragement among people concerning our chances of winning any lasting peace from this war,” he wrote in the third week of the conference. “There is talk of fighting the Russians in the next ten or fifteen years. We have indeed gone a long way since those hopeful days early in the war when we talked of union now and one world.” The following day he was gloomier still, predicting that, in the absence of a meaningful settlement, Soviet-American relations would rapidly worsen. The political battle would go on in Europe and spread to Asia at the conclusion of the war with Japan.23

On May 7, the day of Germany’s surrender and a week after Hitler and his bride of thirty-six hours committed suicide in their Berlin bunker as the Soviets closed in, Jack articulated the American servicemen’s assessment of the conference. “It is natural that they should be most concerned for its result, because any man who has risked his life for his country and seen his friends killed around him must inevitably wonder why this has happened to him and most important, what good will it all do,” he wrote. “In their concern, and as a result of their interest, and because they wish above all else to spare their children and their brothers from going through the same hard times, it is perhaps natural that they should be disappointed with what they have seen in San Francisco. I suppose that this is inevitable. Youth is a time for direct action and simplification. To come from battlefields where sacrifice is the order of the day—to come from there to here—it is not surprising that they should question the worth of their sacrifice and feel somewhat betrayed.”24

A private letter to a wartime friend expanded the point, and spoke powerfully to Jack Kennedy’s overall worldview in that spring of 1945:

It would have been very easy to write a letter to you that was angry. When I think of how much this war has cost us, of the deaths of Cy and Peter and Orv and Gil and Demi and Joe and Billy and all those thousands and millions who have died with them—when I think of all those gallant acts that I have seen or anyone has seen who has been to war—it would be a very easy thing for me to feel disappointed and somewhat betrayed….

You have seen the battlefields where sacrifice was the order of the day and to compare that sacrifice to the timidity and selfishness of the nations gathered at San Francisco must inevitably be disillusioning….

Things cannot be forced from the top. The international relinquishing of sovereignty would have to spring from the people—it would have to be so strong that the elected delegates would be turned out of office if they failed to do it….We must face the truth that the people have not been horrified by war to a sufficient extent to force them to go to any extent rather than have another war….War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.25

At the midpoint of the conference, Jack gloomily predicted that “the world organization that will come out of San Francisco will be the product of the same passions and selfishness that produced the Treaty of Versailles.” The larger countries in particular were not about to cede their sovereignty to any supranational organization. And later, on May 23, he criticized the veto power being granted to the five major powers on the Security Council: “Thus, any of the Big Five can effectively veto assistance for an attacked nation. With this grave weakness in the new world organization, it is little wonder that the smaller countries have attempted to make treaties with the neighbors for protection against aggressors.”26

He jotted in his notebook, with respect to the UN:

Danger of too great a build-up.

Mustn’t expect too much.

A truly just solution will leave every nation somewhat disappointed.

There is no cure all.27

The young reporter worked diligently by day, but, true to form, he shifted gears in the evenings, taking full advantage of the social opportunities at the conference. On at least one occasion, the fun interfered with the job. Arthur Krock described the scene one evening at the Palace Hotel, with Jack propped up on his bed in his tuxedo, ready for the evening’s festivities, “a highball in one hand and the telephone receiver in the other. To the operator he said, ‘I want to speak to the Managing Editor of the Chicago Herald American.’ (After a long pause) ‘Not in? Well, put someone on to take a message.’ (Another pause) ‘Good. Will you see that the boss gets this message as soon as you can reach him? Thank you. Here’s the message: Kennedy will not be filing tonight.’ ”28

IV

Jack had secured a room at the hotel for Chuck Spalding and his wife, Betty, and saw them most every day. The Spaldings noted his bad back and overall lack of robustness, and his need to spend many mornings resting. “We used to go in and talk to him in the morning before he got out of bed,” Betty recalled. “He was his usual wry kind of humorous self, but not full of energy, not jumping around.” Jack also reconnected with another old acquaintance, Mary Meyer, née Pinchot (her father, Amos Pinchot, was a Progressive Era ally of Theodore Roosevelt), whom he had dated on occasion when he was at Harvard and she was a free-spirited Vassar student of extraordinary beauty. Immediately before the conference she had married Cord Meyer Jr., an intense, brainy veteran of the Pacific war who was in San Francisco as an aide to Commander Harold Stassen, former “boy governor” of Minnesota and now a member of the U.S. delegation. Cord Meyer and Jack sparred early and often at the conference, perhaps on account of their differing temperaments and world outlooks, or perhaps because Jack showed excessive interest in Meyer’s wife. (And indeed, Mary would in time come back into Jack’s life, shortly before his premature death—and her own.)29

Anita Marcus, later to become Red Fay’s wife, remembered meeting Jack at an evening party at the Presidio. “I went to the powder room. All the girls there were talking about Jack Kennedy.” When Marcus came out and sat down at a table, Jack joined her and introduced himself. She was bowled over. “I think the main thing was that when he talked to you, he looked you straight in the eye and his attention never wandered. He was interested in finding out what I was doing there—why I was there. It was a drawing-me-out thing. It was undivided attention. I was the most envied girl in the room. He had a way with women. There was no question about it.”30

In late May, with the conference still going (on June 26, fifty nations would sign the UN charter at the San Francisco Opera House), Jack Kennedy returned to the East Coast, spending a few days in New York and Boston and celebrating his birthday. He then continued eastward to England, in order to cover the British elections for Hearst. It was his first European visit since 1939, when he was in Germany immediately before the Polish invasion and then in the House of Commons when a grim-faced Chamberlain announced that Britain was at war. Now the struggle in Europe was over, and Europe’s leaders faced the task of responding to their restive populations.31 While still in San Francisco, Jack had speculated presciently that Winston Churchill and his Conservatives were vulnerable, even in the afterglow of victory, as many Britons struggled with privation—food rationing, fuel and housing shortages, and bombed-out public buildings. Few American observers then shared this view, and most in Britain likewise predicted a Tory win, but as the election neared it seemed increasingly likely that the great man would be removed.32 Jack followed him on the campaign trail, as full of admiration as ever, and told his readers that the Conservatives might eke out a narrow win. Still, “Churchill is fighting a tide that is surging through Europe, washing away monarchies and conservative governments everywhere, and that tide flows powerfully in England. England is moving towards some form of socialism—if not in this election, then surely at the next.”33 It would be this one: in July voters rejected Churchill and gave Labour, under Clement Attlee, a sweeping victory.

Kennedy had seen it coming, but even so, he was stunned. He’d always understood, in a way his father never did, that Churchill, whatever his flaws, whatever his strategic and tactical errors, was the wartime leader Britain needed, the one who’d assumed power in the darkest of hours in May 1940, and, through his extraordinary speechmaking, had brought out in his people qualities they had forgotten they possessed: resilience, steadfastness, unflappable determination. Thenceforth, observers everywhere understood, only defeat following a direct invasion would take Britain out of the struggle. In the grueling years thereafter, Churchill made his share of miscalculations and saw his influence within the Grand Alliance eclipsed by Roosevelt and Stalin, but he hung tight, firm in purpose and unhesitating in action, his fearless tenacity ultimately vindicated. Yet now he was ousted, just like that.

Pat Lannan, who had secured his own reporting gig and was with Jack in London, marveled at the number of Brits who now flocked to see his friend, often for late-afternoon drinks and political talk in the suite at the Grosvenor House Hotel that the two Americans shared. David Ormsby-Gore came, as did William Douglas-Home and Hugh Fraser, whom Jack had met through Kick. “Oftentimes in this little sitting room which wasn’t very large there could have been seven or eight of us at one time, and they would all have been his friends,” Lannan remembered. “I think Jack was very seriously excited about the election, about what was going to happen to Europe, what sort of Europe was going to emerge from the war.” Fraser agreed. It impressed him that Jack drove for much of the night in sister Kick’s cramped Austin to accompany him as he campaigned (successfully) as the Tory candidate in Stone, 130 miles northwest of London.34

Jack also covered the campaign of Alastair Forbes, a distant cousin of Franklin Roosevelt who was running (unsuccessfully) as the Liberal candidate in Hendon, north London. Kick had introduced the two men, and they hit it off immediately.35 Like Fraser, Forbes was struck by Kennedy’s interest in coming to routine campaign appearances and listening to the speeches, absorbing how it was done in Britain, taking mental notes, asking the right questions. He seemed to Forbes to be the most intellectual member of the Kennedy family, even if not an intellectual per se—that is, someone interested in ideas for ideas’ sake. “He had a fantastically good instinct,” Forbes recalled, “once his attention was aroused in a problem, for getting the gist of it and coming to a mature judgment about it.” But there was also in Jack a detachment of a type Forbes saw as well in Churchill, one he suspected grew out of both men’s privileged backgrounds: “Money was the great insulator. If you don’t sort of make your bed and get your own breakfast and have a certain amount of conversation with people who are doing all sorts of ordinary, simple jobs, it does rob you of a great deal of empathy. I mean, whole areas in which empathy should naturally play a part are closed to you.”36

The economist Barbara Ward, another friend of Kick’s, recalled meeting Jack on that same visit and finding him insatiably fascinated by the electoral process, down to the narrow particulars. “You could see already that this young lieutenant was political to his fingertips. So my chief memory is of a very young man, still hardly with the eggshell off his back, he seemed so young, but with an extraordinarily, I would say, well-informed interest in the political situation he was seeing.”37

This passion for politics comes through clearly in Jack’s articles and in his trip diary, as does his capacity for independent thought and tendency to seek out the pragmatic middle ground. He could see that the Conservative Party was, in the eyes of a great many voters, hidebound and reactionary, the defender of the rich and privileged, and that it needed to broaden its appeal in order to have any hope of winning future elections. The kind of conservatism that existed for an “unproductive few, quaffing port and oppressing the peasantry,” was “out,” he told Ormsby-Gore.38 Yet Kennedy also saw little to admire in Labour’s habit of promising everything to everyone, assuring farmers, shopkeepers, small business owners, and workers that glorious days were ahead. Holding actual power “may be Labour’s great crisis,” he predicted in an article on July 10. Of Harold Laski, his old teacher and now Labour’s chairman, he had little good to say: “He spoke with great venom and bitterness,” Jack recorded in his diary after attending an election rally featuring the famed economist. “Odd that this strain runs through these radicals of the Left. It’s that spirit which builds dictatorships, as has been shown in Russia….I think unquestionably, from my talk with Laski that he and others like him smart not so much from the economic inequality but from the social.”39

And this, from another diary entry: “Socialism is inefficient. I will never believe differently. But you can feed people in a socialistic state, and that may be what will ensure its eventual success.”40

A post-election diary entry on July 27 revealed Jack’s penchant for quantifying what he saw:

It is important in assaying this election to decide how much of the victory was due to a “time for change” vote which would have voted against any government in power, whether Right or Left, and how much was due to real Socialist strength. My own opinion is that it was about 40 per cent due to dissatisfaction with conditions over which the government had no great control but from which they must bear responsibility—20 per cent due to a belief in Socialism as the only solution to the multifarious problems England must face—and the remaining 40 per cent due to a class feeling—i.e., that it was time “the working man” had a chance.41

He could also show a lighter touch. On meeting Billy Cavendish’s father, the Duke of Devonshire, at Compton Place in Eastbourne, accompanied by Kick, Jack observed in the diary that he “is an eighteenth-century story book Duke in the beliefs—if not in the appearance. He believes in the Divine Right of Dukes, and in fairness, he is fully conscious of his obligations—most of which consist of furnishing the people of England with a statesman of mediocre ability but outstanding integrity.”42

From England Kennedy proceeded to pay his first visit to Ireland, whence his immigrant forefathers had come, penning a thoughtful article on the nation’s political situation, including vis-à-vis the Commonwealth.43 In his diary, meanwhile, he revealed little sentimental attachment but showed his reporter’s instincts, remarking that the people “are cheerful and there is none of the chronic fatigue that sharpens tempers in London. Food is plentiful, what rationing there is is applied with Irish tolerance and good humor, there are none of the queues of London.”

In Dublin there are few cars, petrol is difficult to get, but the people walk or ride their bicycles. The streets are scrupulously clean and the famous doors of Dublin are freshly painted and the brass is shining.

But the appearances are superficial. Ireland which has escaped the devastation and the bombing of Europe has had its casualties. More than 250,000 of its population crossed to England to serve in the armed forces or in the factories. How many of these went direct into the armed forces has not been disclosed, but the fact that residents of Southern Ireland received seven Victoria Cross[es] while people in the North received none has caused some satisfaction among the people in the South.44

He then pressed on to the Continent, at the invitation of Navy secretary James Forrestal, a former New York banker who knew Joseph Kennedy well. Short and trim and intensely driven, with a penchant for intellectual sparring, Forrestal had risen from humble roots in upstate New York to make a fortune on Wall Street, then had used his connections to gain a high position in Washington, first as special assistant to FDR, then as undersecretary of the Navy, then, starting in May 1944, as secretary.45 Long impressed by Jack, he hoped to recruit the younger Kennedy to a position in the Navy Department, and imagined that some travel together to the Berlin suburb of Potsdam (where an Allied leaders’ conference was under way) and through war-torn Germany might strengthen the bond between them and seal the deal. They met in Paris in late July and flew from there to the German capital, the utter destructiveness of the war easy to see from the air.

It looked still worse from the ground. Hotel Excelsior, Jack’s home on his previous visit to Berlin, in the days just before the outbreak of war in 1939, was literally a shell of its former grand self, on account of the bombing damage. But elsewhere, too, the devastation seemed complete.

“Unter der Linden [a major thoroughfare] and the streets are relatively clear, but there is not a single building which is not gutted,” he scribbled in the diary. “On some of the streets the stench—sweet and sickish—is overwhelming. The people all have completely colorless faces—a yellow tinge with pale tan lips. They are all carrying bundles. Where they are going, no one seems to know. I wonder whether they do. They sleep in cellars. The women will do anything for food. One or two of the women wore lipstick, but most seem to be trying to make themselves as unobtrusive as possible to escape the notice of the Russians”—who, he noted in another entry, routinely engaged in gang rape. With respect to Hitler, the room where he “was supposed to have met his death showed scorched walls and traces of fire. There is no complete evidence, however, that the body that was found was Hitler’s body. The Russians doubt that he is dead.”46

Forrestal and Kennedy drove the short distance to Potsdam, “through miles of Russian soldiers. They were stationed on both sides of the road at about 40 yard intervals—green-hatted and green-epauleted—Stalin’s personal and picked guard. They looked rugged and tough, unsmiling but with perfect discipline.”47 The following day, July 30, the two embarked on a three-day tour of war-ravaged German ports and cities, among them Bremen, Bremerhaven, and Frankfurt. They flew to Salzburg and visited the Führer’s bombed-out mountain chalet at Berchtesgaden and his mountaintop aerie, the Eagle’s Nest.

About the future, the diary was at times prescient. “One opinion here is that the Russians are never going to pull out of their zone of occupation but plan to make their part of Germany a Soviet Socialist Republic….If we [Americans] don’t withdraw and allow [the Germans] to administer their own affairs, we will be confronted with an extremely difficult administrative problem. Yet, if we pull out, we may leave a political vacuum that the Russians will be only too glad to fill.” Regarding the United Nations, Kennedy anticipated the common later view that, with “its elaborate mechanics,” the organization would prove ineffectual in resolving the great issues of war and peace, especially given that the larger countries would refuse to entrust it with sufficient decision-making power.48

At other times the diarist’s anticipatory powers fell short. He missed how strong a leader France’s Charles de Gaulle would prove to be, and was plainly wrong—if understandably, at the time—in thinking a divided Berlin would be a “ruined and unproductive city.” His prediction about Hitler’s posthumous reputation, jotted after seeing Berchtesgaden and the Eagle’s Nest, was perplexing: “After visiting these two places, you can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived.”49 (The argument seemed to be that if a leader were evaluated merely by how much he or she transformed the world, whether for good or ill, Hitler must be judged a colossal figure in history. But the phrasing was, to say the least, insensitive to the murderous ravages of the Third Reich.)

As with his six-month overseas sojourn in 1939, Jack Kennedy’s 1945 visit to Germany offered the young man some uncanny brushes with history as he suddenly found himself—thanks to his family connections—visiting the inner sanctums of Nazi power and rubbing elbows at Potsdam with top U.S. officials. (He and Forrestal even got to inspect the interior of Hitler’s bombed-out office in the Reich Chancellery.) Though not permitted into the Potsdam sessions, he met or saw up close the new president, Harry Truman, supreme Allied commander and future president Dwight D. Eisenhower, Army chief of staff General George C. Marshall, and a slew of senior State Department figures: Secretary of State James Byrnes as well as W. Averell Harriman, Charles Bohlen, John McCloy, Robert Murphy, and William Clayton, among others.

It was heady stuff for a twenty-eight-year-old, and the experience showed that he belonged, or was on his way to belonging, and that in due course he, too, might take his place on the international stage. Even now, Kennedy could legitimately claim to be as well versed on the issues as were many of the journalists who crowded into Potsdam, and arguably more informed than Truman, who had been in office only three months and before that had been kept out of almost all war-related planning during his brief time as vice president. Roosevelt had barely known Truman and—shockingly—had not even informed him of the atomic bomb project that was nearing completion in the New Mexico desert. (Stalin, on the other hand, through spies, knew a great deal about the Manhattan Project.^*) To Secretary of State Byrnes and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the two key cabinet members on foreign policy, the new president was a figure of mystery; they didn’t know him more than to say hello. Though Truman prided himself on being a well-read student of history, he had no background in foreign policy, and little international experience—this was his first visit to Europe since being an artilleryman in France in World War I.50

No one knew it, but present in Potsdam at the same time that summer was not only the thirty-third president of the United States, but the thirty-fourth and the thirty-fifth as well. About number 33 Jack has little to say in his diary, noting merely and without context or elaboration that “Truman is deader than Kelsey’s nuts.” (He would later come to see Truman as a courageous and decent man.) But number 34 is another matter. “Eisenhower talked with Forrestal for a few minutes,” reads an entry from August 1, “and it was obvious why he is an outstanding figure. He has an easy personality, immense self-assurance, and gave an excellent presentation of the situation in Germany.” An earlier entry, from June 30, remarks on Eisenhower’s hold over the British people: “He was heard to say after the Eighth [Army] had marched past, ‘To think that I, a boy from Abilene, Kansas, am the Commander of troops like those!’ He never lost that humble way and therefore easily won the hearts of those with whom he worked.”51

On at least one occasion in Germany, Jack got to meet the man, if only in passing. The scene was Frankfurt, and the witness was Seymour St. John, who in two years would take over from his father as headmaster at Choate. When Forrestal’s plane arrived on the tarmac, St. John, then a Navy lieutenant assisting with the logistics of the visit, recalled, “the plane doors opened, and out came Forrestal. Then, to my amazement, Jack Kennedy. Ike was meeting Forrestal, so Jack met Ike.” A surviving photograph shows Eisenhower greeting Forrestal on the tarmac, with Kennedy and St. John in the background.52

Truman was less patient with Stalin at this Big Three conference than Franklin Roosevelt had been at the previous ones, in part because he had learned, as the conference opened, that a test in New Mexico of the new atomic weapon had been successful, and in part because Japan now seemed an utterly spent force. At home, its cities were gutted by massive U.S. aerial attacks (with the loss of several hundred thousand Japanese lives), and its sea power, on which protection from invasion had rested, had been destroyed. The United States no longer needed the Soviet Union’s help in fighting the Pacific war. Even so, Potsdam was important in setting the details of the postwar occupation and treaty arrangements, in a sense finalizing the basic agreements reached at Tehran and Yalta. Stalin also gained a more formal acceptance by the Americans and the British of the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. The specifics concerning the occupation of Germany—and, within it, Berlin—were hashed out, and Stalin (anxious to get his share of the spoils in the east) reaffirmed his vow to join the war against Japan as soon as possible.53

Of the broader geopolitical reality there could be no dispute: this was now effectively a two-power world, whatever the fictions expressed in the makeup of the UN Security Council. Britain was drastically weakened and badly overstretched; France, struggling to emerge from the living death of Nazi occupation, was prostrate. Germany had been demolished. Japan, on the brink of defeat, faced the humiliation of occupation, while China, which had yet to emerge as the world power its population suggested it should be, was rent by divisions so deep it would soon spiral back into civil war. Only the United States and the Soviet Union were emerging stronger from the long and bitter struggle.

Yet they were not coequal, and the differences in their wartime experiences were profound. The Soviets had turned back the mighty Nazi war machine and secured the strategic power position in Eastern and Central Europe. Their battle-tested Red Army was by far the largest in the world. But the successes on the Eastern Front had come at unimaginable cost: in addition to twenty-five million dead—in a prewar population of 170 million, one out of seven people—the USSR had suffered the destruction of seventeen hundred cities and towns, seventy thousand villages and hamlets, six million buildings, forty thousand miles of railroad, and ninety thousand bridges. The Germans ransacked the countryside and stole and slaughtered seventeen million heads of cattle, twenty million hogs, and seven million horses. U.S. losses, meanwhile, at the start of the Potsdam Conference stood at roughly 400,000 men. In three and a half years of fighting, its homeland had never been seriously threatened; its citizens’ standard of living had actually grown. Overseas, the tentacles of American economic and military power now reached almost every corner of the globe, as exemplified by the creation of a gargantuan network of U.S. military installations and bases—in South America, throughout the Pacific, across the Middle East, in South Asia, even in Africa. By the middle of 1945, American bases were being built at the mind-boggling rate of more than one hundred per month; by year’s end, the total would be more than two thousand bases and thirty thousand military installations.54

It all made a deep impression on the young lieutenant turned reporter, as Ted Sorensen, an admitted partisan, would later write of Kennedy’s 1945 experiences in San Francisco and Europe: “All this had sharpened his interest in public affairs and public service….Jack Kennedy knew he wanted to be a participant, not an observer. He was, in many ways, an old-fashioned patriot—not in the narrow nationalistic sense but in his deep devotion to the national interest. He had compared firsthand the political and economic systems of many countries on several continents and he greatly preferred our own. He shared [John] Buchan’s belief that ‘democracy was primarily an attitude of mind, a spiritual testament’ and that ‘politics is still the greatest and most honorable adventure.’ ”55

This seems right. The journalistic stint in the spring and summer of 1945, however much pushed by the father, honed Kennedy’s already established interest in the pressing issues of international and domestic affairs, and sharpened his sense that politics might be a more stimulating career choice than either journalism or academia, the other options he was considering. He’d rather be in the inner sanctuary of power, in other words, than writing about it in the pressroom or in the ivory tower.

A letter to his former Choate teacher Harold Tinker early in the year hinted at his thinking. His experience in the South Pacific, he wrote, had made him disillusioned by the savagery of war. “I should really like—as my life’s goal—in some way and at some point to do something to help prevent another.”56

As Jack’s political persona began to take shape, his fallen brother’s life was commemorated. On July 26, a new 2,200-ton Gearing-class destroyer, the USS Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., was launched from the Bethlehem Steel Corporation’s Fore River Shipyard, in Quincy, Massachusetts—the same shipyard where Joe Senior had worked during World War I. The invitation list to the launch included countless political power players and media luminaries, and Jack’s friends, too, were out in force—Torby Macdonald, Lem Billings, Charlie Houghton, John Hersey and Frances Ann Cannon, Chuck Spalding, Red Fay, and Charlotte McDonnell Harris. Representing the family were Joe, Rose, Eunice, Pat, Bobby, Jean, and Teddy, as well as grandparents Honey Fitz and Mary. Young Jean, as the designated sponsor, swung the bottle of champagne to christen the vessel.

Jack’s return to America in early August coincided with the dawn of the atomic era and the end of World War II—on August 6 and 9, the United States dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, and on the eighth the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. On August 14, the government in Tokyo, under Emperor Hirohito, surrendered. An era had ended and a new one begun—for Jack Kennedy and for the world.

He had anticipated this moment. Already at the start of 1945, in his unpublished “Let’s Try an Experiment in Peace” article, he’d speculated that science would soon create weapons capable of delivering unimaginable destruction over vast distances. Later, he reiterated the point in his diary. Now, with two Japanese cities instantaneously laid to waste, Jack grasped the bomb’s transformative effect, understood how the splitting of the atom had split the century, creating a before and an after. In a little-noticed speech to the United War Fund on October 8, he mused aloud on the topic, articulating sentiments he would refine and espouse to the end of his days. “We have gone a long way from those trying days of ’42, ’43, and ’44 when victory lay in the balance,” he told his modest-size audience. “Now the guns have cooled, the men are returning home, the catastrophic days of war are over, the grueling days of peace are ahead—one chapter has ended, another has begun.” Atomic weapons would be central to this new era, he went on, and the Western democracies, with their righteous reluctance to wage war, could be at a colossal disadvantage in a military conflict that could be over in an hour.

Yet all was not lost. Perhaps the very destructiveness of the new weapon would compel nations to preserve the peace. “In the past years, we have heard much about the horrors of war, but we have always felt that war was preferable to certain alternatives. There are certain things for which we have always fought. War has never been the ultimate evil. Now, however, that may be changed.” Consequently, humanity “may be forced to make the sacrifices that will insure peace. We can only pray that man’s political skill can keep abreast of his scientific skill; if not, we may yet live to see Armageddon.”57

Would he himself contribute to that urgent work, and if so, how? A new international order was coming into being, one with his own country in a position of supreme power, in a kind of Pax Americana; perhaps he could find a place in the arena. Within a few weeks of his return from Europe, Jack heard from Forrestal. “Do you want to do any work here?” the Navy secretary wrote from Washington. “If so, why don’t you come down and see what there is at hand?”58 Jack, thankful for the offer, had other ideas. Opportunities loomed for him to experience that “greatest and most honorable adventure,” and he dared not miss them.

Politics, that is to say, beckoned.

II

To establish his legitimacy in the district and the state, Jack moved into a nondescript, sparsely furnished two-room suite at the Bellevue Hotel, on Beacon Hill, where his grandfather Honey Fitz, now eighty-two and as garrulous as ever, lived. A stone’s throw from the State House, the suite became the hub of the still nascent, still undeclared campaign, the place where the initial strategy and tactics were hashed out. Local campaign offices then sprouted up in various parts of the district, with a headquarters in a dingy suite on the second floor at 18 Tremont Street, in Boston. Rival candidates had yet to get started, or even in some cases to decide if they were running, and thus was established a phenomenon that would be a chief characteristic of all of John F. Kennedy’s political campaigns: he started earlier and worked harder than his competition. Months before his official entry into the race, on April 22, he was diligently stumping, spending money, and lining up his campaign team.

And it was a good thing he got going early, for his inexperience was glaringly obvious. He could be reasonably effective in speeches when he expounded on international affairs—an early lecture at an American Legion post, on the topic of postwar Europe, won accolades and more than a hundred requests for copies—but whenever he ventured into the stuff of municipal or state politics, he lacked confidence.5 His delivery turned wooden and stiff, and he spoke too fast, eyes glued to his text, in a high-pitched voice that seldom modulated. He lacked the seasoned politician’s ability to riff extemporaneously; instead, whenever he ad-libbed he fumbled for words, which only made him more diffident. Afterwards, he would be glum about his performance, and he and his father would go over the speech from start to finish in order to determine what needed to be done. “I can still see the two of them sitting together,” sister Eunice later said, “analyzing the entire speech and talking about the pace of delivery to see where it worked and where it had gone wrong.”6

Nor did Jack cut an imposing figure at these events. He was frail, almost skeletal, which made him look, in the words of one Rotarian, like “a little boy dressed up in his father’s clothes.” His skin had a yellow hue on account of ongoing periodic bouts of malaria. Especially early on, his demeanor betrayed shyness and embarrassment, and an instinct for privacy, and he showed scant interest in kissing babies or swapping stories with strangers in bars. “He wasn’t a mingler,” one campaign aide remembered. “He didn’t mingle in the crowd and go up to people and say, ‘I’m Jack Kennedy.’ ”7

But he also had a number of things going for him, starting with his family name. Joe Kennedy’s reputation might have plummeted outside of Massachusetts, but Boston voters still viewed him as the patriarch of a legendary family, a family they wanted to rub elbows with. He was an exceptionally wealthy patriarch, moreover, who made clear he would spend whatever Jack needed to prevail. Together father and son soon assembled a crack campaign team that included Joe’s cousin Joe Kane—they always addressed each other as “Cousin Joe”—a brusque, cynical, bald-headed veteran political operative and raconteur who operated out of a diner near city hall and who said politics hadn’t changed since the time of Julius Caesar; adman John Dowd, brought in to do advertising and public relations work; Joe Timilty, an ex–police commissioner now serving as an all-purpose Joe Kennedy aide; and Billy Sutton and Patsy Mulkern, both of whom were recommended by Honey Fitz and who, like Timilty, performed a variety of roles. Mark Dalton, a brainy law school graduate and former newspaperman who had served with distinction in naval intelligence during the war, assumed a key managerial role, and Dave Powers, a streetwise and affable young politico with a photographic memory and a deep understanding of Irish Boston, signed on as a top aide. Inevitably, the ever loyal Eddie Moore came out of retirement to run errands and disperse funds. Even some of Jack’s friends—Lem Billings, Torby Macdonald, and Red Fay—joined up to help out as their schedules permitted. (Fay flew all the way from California to do so. He stayed for two months, until a stern letter from his father ordered him back to his job in the family construction firm.)8

Mulkern, a foulmouthed political junkie who didn’t drink yet always managed to look sauced, anticipated a difficult road ahead. “The first day I met Kennedy he had sneakers on. I said, ‘For the love of Christ, take the sneakers off, Jack. You think you’re going to play golf?’ It was tough to sell the guy. We had a hell of a job with him. We took him to taverns, hotel lobbies, club rooms, street corners. Young Kennedy, young Kennedy, we kept saying. But they didn’t want him in the district. The Curley mob wouldn’t go for him right away. They called him the Miami candidate. ‘Take that guy and run him down in Miami…[or] Palm Beach…give him an address over in New York.’ We had a helluva fight.”9

Before long, however, the millionaire’s kid from Harvard proved himself to be an effective campaigner in the hardscrabble wards of the district. His very reticence and amateurishness worked with voters who found his sincerity and informality and seeming shyness a refreshing contrast with the cynical, voluble Irish office seekers of yesteryear. (He relished hearing stories about these larger-than-life figures and their baroque style of politics, but he didn’t want to be like them.) Jack didn’t condescend to these residents, didn’t take them for granted, didn’t resort to the forced familiarity of the how’s-your-mother-give-her-my-love variety. And he scored points by keeping his speeches short and leaving time for questions. “As you observed him in the course of his actions, you saw that he had a very good handshake, he knew how to smile at people, he remembered people’s names,” said Tony Galluccio, a Harvard friend who worked on the campaign. “Everybody that you introduced him to liked him as a person, liked him as an individual.” A local journalist who covered the campaign agreed: “To meet him was to vote for him, I think it’s that simple. If you start to look for complicated reasons [for his success], you won’t find any.”10

“There was a basic dignity in Jack Kennedy,” Dave Powers remarked, “a pride in his bearing that appealed to every Irishman who was beginning to feel a little embarrassed by the sentimental, corny style of the typical Irish politician. As the Irish themselves were becoming more middle-class, they wanted a leader to reflect their upward mobility.” Powers would until his dying day be an unstintingly loyal Jack Kennedy partisan, a keeper of the JFK flame, and his recollections must be considered in that light, but in this assessment he was far from alone. Given his candidate’s likability, Powers saw his main job as a simple one: “My goal then was to have Jack Kennedy meet as many people as he possibly could.”11

“People were subconsciously looking for a new type of a candidate,” Galluccio echoed, “and Jack fitted into this. He had the naive appearance, he had the shock of hair that fell over his forehead. He was a multi-millionaire who was very humble. As people would say, this fellow is not the kind of a fellow who would steal. This I think was the very beginning of this political revolution in Massachusetts. Jack Kennedy fitted into this pattern. The rest he did with money, with his ability to make friends, with his tremendous capacity for work. He didn’t have to earn a living, but he did utilize his time every minute of the day going where you wanted him to, getting out and meeting people.”12

The last point is key: Kennedy was tireless, driving himself forward, never resting for long. More than anything, this work ethic—common to many successful first-time candidates—is what campaign aides and other observers remembered of those critical weeks in the late winter and spring of 1946. War had been a toughening experience, and he showed it on the trail. From early morning until late at night he would chug along, day after day, using every ounce of the characteristic Kennedy energy, never mind his various ailments. Often he would get no more than four or five hours of sleep. “We had him out to the Catholic Order of Foresters Communion Breakfast one morning,” an aide said. “He walked in and he was limping. I knew his back was bothering him and we had to walk up three flights of stairs, and he had about six other places he had to go that day. When we came downstairs, I said, ‘You don’t feel good?’ And he said, ‘I feel great.’…That’s the way he was; he would come out and he would go, go, go. I don’t know when he stopped.” The aide recalled instances when Jack would be in his suite in the Bellevue, shaving with his coat on while someone downstairs waited to drive him to his next event. “And it would go on and on and on.”13

Often his only real meal of the day would be breakfast, and it was almost always the same: two four-and-a-half-minute boiled eggs, four strips of broiled bacon, toast, coffee, and orange juice. On a rare evening off, he liked to go to the movies. Upon entering the theater he would hunt for a seat behind an empty one—so that he could prop up his knees and thereby relieve the pain in his back. His favorites that year included The Lost Weekend and The Bells of St. Mary’s.14

Behind the scenes, the candidate also proved his worth. In the late evenings he would go down to the Ritz-Carlton and have a bowl of tomato bisque. Campaign aide Peter Cloherty would meet him there with a folder of letters that had been typed earlier that evening or afternoon. “He was very meticulous about every single letter,” Cloherty remembered. “It wasn’t just a question of signing them. If the letter was addressed to ‘Dear Mr. Stewart’ and it should have been ‘Dear John,’ he would change it, possibly have that one retyped, or add a personal footnote to it in his own hand. Then we’d bring them back up in the morning and put them in the mail.”15

George Taylor, Jack’s African American valet from Winthrop House days, marveled at the determination and the attention to detail. Since Jack’s graduation, the two men had kept in touch, Jack penning occasional letters to George from one of his naval postings. Now Taylor was back in his employ, as valet and chauffeur. The two enjoyed a casual, teasing relationship, smoking cigars together and chatting about their mutual interest in women. Occasionally, too, Taylor would be a political sounding board—after a campaign speech Kennedy would ask Taylor to offer his frank critique, which Taylor duly did. He also introduced Jack to leaders in Cambridge’s black community. And always, when motoring from one event to another, the candidate would urge his driver to step on it: “He’d say to me sometimes, ‘George, you’re driving too slow. Push over and let me take the wheel.’ And when he took the wheel, he was a fast driver.”16

The hard-charging approach resulted in part from a realization on the part of Jack and his aides that orthodox campaigning alone would not do the job. People who showed up at rallies were already committed to you, and handshaking on street corners, though not without worth, wouldn’t bring many new voters into the fold. Radio time and newspaper ads had their place, but their effectiveness was diluted by the fact that these media covered all of metropolitan Boston.17 So how to reach uncommitted or apathetic voters? The only way was to go where they lived—literally. For Jack Kennedy this meant trekking through neighborhoods, scaling the stairs of three-decker upon three-decker, and knocking on door after door, sore back be damned. (Often he wore a brace.) And it meant organizing house parties in all corners of the district, with refreshments and flowers provided by the campaign. With careful logistical planning, Jack’s team found that he could take in six or more of these parties in a single evening; at each one, aides would take attendees’ names and add them to a mailing list. On some evenings, sisters Eunice and Pat would join in.^*1 The candidate was, moreover, in his element in these more intimate settings, winningly shy at the outset but then flashing his high-voltage smile and his self-effacing humor as he laid out, as succinctly and clearly as he could, why he sought their votes. And he took the high road, refraining as a matter of course from discrediting or disparaging the other candidates.

One group of voters responded especially well to this approach, the campaign quickly realized: women. Joe DeGuglielmo, a councilman in Cambridge, saw a clear pattern in the house parties there.

Somehow or the other the minute he came into a room where there was one or more women, the females that were in the room forgot everything else. It didn’t make any difference what emergency there was. They gravitated towards him. And that would happen many times….The minute the women would see him they’d drop everything, and I know I’ve gone into those same homes in the past and since and, heck, I can go in and they’ll keep on doing what they were doing. It doesn’t make a particle of difference. But when he came in, at that time, there was some sort of—I don’t know what you’d call it—some sort of electricity or something, some indefinable electricity in the air that would make the women stop and come to him. And they didn’t want him to go.18

Powers saw the phenomenon, too, soon after he answered a knock on the door of his third-floor apartment in the Bunker Hill section of gritty Charlestown and found the young Kennedy standing there in the dimly lit hallway, out of breath and smiling. Though ostensibly committed to another as-yet-undeclared candidate in the race, Powers agreed to Kennedy’s plea to join him for an evening event with Gold Star Mothers (mothers who had lost a son in the war) at the local American Legion hall. As Kennedy concluded his prepared remarks, which ran ten minutes in length, he paused, then said softly, “I think I know how all you mothers feel because my mother is a Gold Star Mother, too.” In that instant, Powers remembered, the candidate established a kind of “magical link” with everyone in the room, made himself real, showed that he understood their grief. “Suddenly, swarms of women hurried up to the platform, crowding around him and wishing him luck. And I could hear them saying to each other, ‘Isn’t he a wonderful boy, he reminds me so much of my own John’ or ‘my Bob.’ It took a half hour for him to get away.” To Powers, a political junkie who’d been going to rallies since he was ten, “this reaction was unlike any I had ever seen. It wasn’t so much what he said but the way he reached into the emotions of everyone there.” He joined the campaign that evening.19

The anecdote speaks to another element in Jack Kennedy’s favor: his record of service in the war. Veterans, who numbered some sixteen million by conflict’s end (fewer than half saw combat), were a formidable political force in America in 1945–46. Their sheer number was one factor, but so was the fact that they came from every corner of the union and from all walks of life—from the most humble to the loftiest. Hollywood stars like Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, and Tyrone Power had donned uniforms, as had several hundred major league baseball players, including Ted Williams, Hank Greenberg, Bob Feller, and Joe DiMaggio. All four of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s sons served. At the unit level, the experience of having so many men from different backgrounds thrown together generated tensions (African Americans and Japanese Americans served in separate units, while Chinese Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics served in “white” units), but it also brought cohesion and, to a degree at least, a blurring of the lines between classes, a diminution of prejudice and provincialism. In time, that cohesion would dissipate, but in 1946 it remained potent, as reflected in the success of veterans all across the country who sought political office that fall.

Kennedy, moreover, had a particularly powerful personal story to tell. At stop after stop, he introduced himself to voters as a combat veteran returning to help lead the country for which he had fought. (“The New Generation Offers a Leader,” read the campaign slogan, coined by Joe Kane, who adapted it from Henry Luce’s foreword to Why England Slept: “If John Kennedy is characteristic of the younger generation, and I believe he is, many of us would be happy to have the destinies of the Republic turned over to his generation at once.”) He regularly referred to his older brother’s service and selfless courage, and organized a new Veterans of Foreign Wars post named for him. He sought invitations to speak at events honoring veterans.

About his own specific experiences in the South Pacific he was reluctant to say much. Then and later, he played down his PT 109 heroism with his famous quip “I had no choice. They sank my boat.” To an aide he remarked early in the campaign that he had no taste for “trying to parlay a lost PT boat and a bad back into political advantage.” But gradually Kennedy came to see that his story, already familiar to some voters, was too good not to use, and he crafted a concise and powerful speech that described the sinking of the 109, minimizing his own role in the rescue effort and lauding the perseverance of his men. At his father’s insistence, some 100,000 reprints of the condensed version of John Hersey’s “Survival” article (the one that appeared in Reader’s Digest) were distributed, at a cost of $1,319 (for the printing and the envelopes), plus postage, arriving in mailboxes mere days before the vote. Volunteers were recruited to address the envelopes and do the mailing. The effort paid off. One opposing candidate’s wife reportedly was so moved by the article that she said she might have to vote for Kennedy.20

III

For all the positive attributes Jack Kennedy brought to the table, he still faced the tall task of prevailing against a deep field of rivals on the Democratic side. All told, ten candidates made the ballot, including one woman. Several of them were better known in the district and more experienced in local politics than Kennedy. The most formidable of them was Mike Neville, of vote-rich Cambridge, the son of a blacksmith from Cork and an affable, experienced attorney. Neville had worked for the phone company and gone to law school at night, then had climbed the political pole to state legislator and mayor; he had the backing of Governor Tobin as well as many of the older lawmakers in Cambridge and Somerville. John F. Cotter, of Charlestown, also caused worry on the Kennedy side—as administrative assistant to two former congressmen, Jim Curley and John P. Higgins, Cotter had built close connections to numerous wards in the district, and he knew how to campaign.

Leaving nothing to chance, Jack’s team worked to spread his support across as much of the district as possible, the better to minimize the damage done by favorite-son candidates like Neville and Cotter. And they were not above bare-knuckle shenanigans: when a respected Boston city councilman named Joseph Russo declared his candidacy and looked likely to win broad support in the Italian North End and among Italian Americans elsewhere, Joe Kane scrounged up another Joseph Russo and got him on the ballot, in order to divide the councilman’s tally.21

Throughout, Joseph Kennedy made heavy use of his checkbook, though just how heavy remains unclear. He himself quipped that “with what I’m spending I could elect my chauffeur,” and many subsequent accounts give the impression of virtually unlimited outlays of money, much of it handed out in cash by Eddie Moore. But Mark Dalton, a key member of the campaign team, maintained otherwise: “The way congressional campaigns go, I would say it was not an extraordinarily expensive campaign. I would say certainly it was well financed and it was. We had many, many billboards, and we had the advertising material which was presented all through the community. There certainly was no shortage of funds, but on the other hand, I say this with all sincerity, it was not an exorbitant campaign.” Though the figures $300,000 and $250,000 were thrown around, another campaign insider estimated the amount spent to be in the neighborhood of $50,000. Whatever the ultimate sum, the Kennedys certainly outspent the competition, which led to no little grousing among other candidates, all of whom got precisely what Joe Kane meant when he said it takes three things to win an election: money, money, and money.22

In the final weeks before the vote, the Kennedy family came out in force. Eunice, Pat, and Jean walked up and down streets, knocking on doors and holding out their brother’s campaign brochure, often to the startled delight of the person inside. Young Teddy, age fourteen, sometimes accompanied them and also served as general errand boy. Bobby, now twenty and out of the Navy, was assigned the job of running a campaign office deep in enemy territory, in East Cambridge, with the hope that he could trim the anticipated vote against Jack from five-to-one to four-to-one. Working three mostly Italian wards, and doing much of it on foot, Bobby shook hands and handed out literature, from early morning until late at night, occasionally pausing to eat spaghetti with a receptive family. Rose Kennedy, too, became a dedicated and effective campaigner, especially with women in the district—as a Gold Star Mother, she could speak mom to mom about her treasured Jack. She was, moreover, comfortable in this environment, having grown up accompanying her father, Honey Fitz, on the hustings. She not only knew how the game was played but enjoyed playing it.

Most of all, of course, it was the candidate’s father who made his presence felt, in ways large and small. Though officially Mark Dalton had the title of campaign manager, everyone knew (not least Dalton) that the job really belonged to Joe Kennedy. No decision of consequence was made without his involvement. He and his son would strategize continually, in person and on the phone, and he insisted on being in the know on every aspect of the campaign. “Mr. Kennedy called me many, many times, to know exactly what was happening,” Dalton said afterwards. “As a matter of fact that was one of my problems. He’d keep you on the phone for an hour and a half, two hours.”23 A master of media manipulation and PR, Joe spent hours on the phone with reporters and editors, seeking information, trading confidences, and cajoling them into publishing puff pieces on Jack, ones that invariably played up his war record in the Pacific. He oversaw a professional advertising campaign that ensured ads went up in just the right places—the campaign had a virtual monopoly on subway space, and on window stickers (“Kennedy for Congress”) for cars and homes—and was the force behind the mass mailing of Hersey’s PT 109 article.

To some observers, then and later, the old man was more than a de facto campaign manager; he was a puppet master, a Svengali who had decided before war’s end what he wanted—to get his oldest surviving son into political office—and then set about making it happen. He called all the shots, according to this view, and made every strategic decision of consequence. It’s not really true. Jack Kennedy, as we’ve seen, had his own attraction to politics as a career, had made his own decision to run in the Eleventh, and he was at all times central in his own campaign. When the two men disagreed on strategy or tactics, Jack’s view prevailed. (He admired his father’s business accomplishments no end, but doubted his political discernment.)24 Still more untenable is the opposite argument, made by some Jack loyalists, that the father’s role in 1946 was incidental.25 Joe’s bottomless finances and forceful personality ensured that he would loom large, as did his son’s deep devotion to him. He was a legendary figure in Massachusetts, one who was not shy about using his varied connections on his son’s behalf. He hadn’t built his empire by leaving things to chance, and he was not about to change his modus operandi now.

The elder Kennedy made only one public appearance with his son, but an extraordinary one it was. Having noted Jack’s appeal to female voters, the campaign conceived an event that would become a staple of his future races: a tea reception for women voters that allowed them to meet the candidate and members of his family. Eunice served as coordinator, supervising a team of twenty-five volunteer secretaries to hand-address thousands of engraved invitations requesting the pleasure of the recipient’s company at a formal reception at the Commander Hotel in Cambridge, just off Harvard Square. Seasoned pros scoffed at the notion—who had ever heard of voters getting dressed up just to meet a political candidate?—and the Kennedys themselves were unsure how it would go. But on an unseasonably hot Sunday evening in mid-June, some fifteen hundred mostly female voters showed up at the hotel, many in rented ball gowns. The queue snaked around the block. At the head of the receiving line stood Joe and Rose, he in white tie and tails, she in a stylish new dress from Paris.26

To Mike Neville’s campaign manager, the Commander Hotel event was the clincher, not only because of the large turnout but because of the media coverage it received. Photos and stories filled the local press, and one reporter called it “a demonstration unparalleled in the history of Congressional fights in this district.”27 How many votes it actually gained Kennedy is unknowable, but in the primary election, three days later, he coasted to victory, taking 22,183 votes to Neville’s 11,341, John Cotter’s 6,671, and (the original) Joe Russo’s 5,661. (The “Kennedy Russo” managed to siphon off 799.) In a ten-candidate race, his share of the vote, at 41 percent, was impressive, as was the fact that he almost bested Neville in Cambridge. Turnout fell below expectations, however, in part because of a steady rainfall; only 30 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. In the evening, Jack took in a movie—the Marx Brothers’ A Night in Casablanca—while the returns were coming in, then he visited each campaign office before returning to headquarters well after midnight to celebrate in the low-key style that would become his custom. Honey Fitz, however, did not hold back: the octogenarian danced a jig on a table and belted out his theme song, “Sweet Adeline.”28

“Of course I am a happy man tonight,” Honey Fitz declared. “John F. Kennedy has brains, industry, and above all, character. He will make a great representative of the 11th Congressional District.”29

Joseph Kennedy, on the other hand, was strangely subdued. “I couldn’t understand it,” Dalton recalled. “He wasn’t going around saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you for what you’ve done for my son.’ He wasn’t doing that at all.”30 Perhaps the patriarch was holding his enthusiasm in check pending the outcome of the general election, in November. Or perhaps he was haunted by what might have been. Joe Junior, after all, was the son he had envisioned in this role, the one carrying the Kennedy name to new and glorious political heights—not the frail and reticent second son. Perhaps it was both. And perhaps there was also this: to Joe Kennedy, a congressional seat was but a first step for Jack, and therefore not something to get too excited about.

The Boston Traveler, in accounting for the victory, downplayed the importance of Joe’s money: “If any of the other candidates had spent twice as much as the Kennedy campaign cost, Kennedy would still have won….Kennedy as a candidate had attributes which his opponents did not have and could not buy—a well-known name and family background and connections. He also had personality and a superior war record.” No less important, the paper went on, Kennedy had an asset that should have been “of the utmost concern to the older politicians”: a political machine that was “built overnight” and “based on voters under the age of 35,” many of them veterans full of enthusiasm and idealism. “Most of the workers who crowded into his seven headquarters nightly for two months, addressing envelopes and making telephone calls, also were youthful. They may have been amateurs, but they did the tiresome tasks which bring in votes, and they were worth more than all the ward ‘pols’ in the district combined.”31

Congratulatory notes flowed in from all over. Jack’s sister Kathleen, who had just purchased a house in London (long enamored of England, she had decided to make her home there), wrote “just to tell you how terrifically pleased I am for you. Everyone says you were so good in the election and the outcome must have been a great source of satisfaction. It’s nice to know you are as appreciated in the 11th Congressional District as you are among your brothers and sisters. Gee, aren’t you lucky?” Then she added, “The folks here think you are madly pro-British so don’t start destroying that illusion until I get my house fixed. The painters might just not like your attitude!”32

IV

V

The nitty-gritty politicking did not cease with the victory in the primary, but it was cut back dramatically, victory in November being more or less a foregone conclusion. The campaign offices in the district stayed open but with reduced hours, and most of the volunteers went back to their former lives.

Never one to stint on R&R, Jack took advantage of the summer lull to spend time in Hyannis Port and New York City, and to make another sojourn out west to Hollywood. On the set of the film Dragonwyck, he met screen star Gene Tierney, riding high from her Oscar-nominated role in Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and her title role in Laura (1944). Tierney fell hard for the congressional candidate, who was three years her senior. She recalled how, on the set, “I turned and found myself staring into the most perfect blue eyes I had ever seen on a man….He smiled at me. My reaction was right out of the ladies’ romance novel. Literally, my heart skipped….A coy thought flashed through my mind: I was glad I had worn a lavender gown for my scene that day. Lavender was my best color.” The young Kennedy was thin, she went on, and “had the kind of bantering, unforced Irish charm that women so often find fatal. He asked questions about my work, the kind that revealed how well he already knew the subject.”43

Jack also proved a sympathetic listener as Tierney described the trauma of institutionalizing her mentally disabled daughter, Daria. “He told me about his sister Rosemary, who had been born retarded, and how his family had loved and protected her. The subject was awkward for him. The Kennedys did not survive by dwelling on their imperfections. ‘Gene,’ he said, after a silence had passed between us, ‘in any large family you can always find something wrong with somebody.’ ”44

So enamored did Tierney become of Jack that she supposedly spurned the advances of Hollywood leading man Tyrone Power. But though she saw Jack in Hollywood and later in New York and on the Cape (“Jack met me at the station, wearing patched blue jeans. I thought he looked like Tom Sawyer”), the affair did not last. Jack was not about to commit to any divorcée or Hollywood starlet, not with his political career just getting launched.45 That summer the gossip pages in L.A. also linked him with Peggy Cummins, an aspiring Irish actress, but, according to Chuck Spalding’s wife, Betty, “it wasn’t a serious thing. She was just a girl to date.” And he lost interest, Spalding added, when Cummins (“a nice girl”) refused to go to bed with him.46

Betty Spalding found it interesting that Jack, though “amusing and bright and fascinating to listen to” and “marvelous company,” was no chivalrous gentleman, in the sense of opening doors for women or standing up when an older woman entered a room. “He was nice to people, but heedless of people, heedless about his clothes, and heedless about money. He never had any money with him.” Gene Tierney also remarked on this capricious aspect of Jack’s character: “I am not sure I can explain the nature of Jack’s charm, but he took life as it came. He never worried about making an impression. He made you feel very secure….He was good with people in a way that went beyond politics, thoughtful in more than a material way. Gifts and flowers were not his style. He gave you his time, his interest.”47

Yet the time and interest could be ephemeral, with male as well as female friends. Before embarking for California, Kennedy had promised Red Fay that he would make a stop in Woodside, near San Francisco, to see him and meet his parents and friends. He almost reneged on the vow, then showed up late and made a poor impression on all concerned, bailing early on a party in his honor in order to go to a movie with another friend and showing scant interest in ingratiating himself with his hosts. Characteristically short on cash, he borrowed $20 from Fay and paid him back only months later, and after Fay had written him twice about it. The nonchalance left Fay feeling bitter, especially after he had traveled all the way to Boston to help out in Jack’s primary campaign. To Fay it was a disconcerting sign that his friend might be undergoing a change as he donned his political mantle, and not for the better—a congressman to be, he suddenly seemed less dedicated to maintaining the attachments of old.^*3, 48

Jack’s friend Henry James, whom he had known during his Stanford interlude, six years before, likewise detected a troubling change in him around this same time. “I didn’t see the whole evolution of the process,” James told a later interviewer, “but I did see certain signs, which made it very clear to me that I was losing him as a person and that perhaps the only way I could ever see him again was as a former friend, unimportant probably, for I wasn’t going to be his toady like Lem Billings—I put more value on myself than that….I envied people like Billings for their continuing close relationship to Jack, but I didn’t respect them for it.”49

VI

The November election went more or less as expected, in the Massachusetts Eleventh as well as nationally. Jack Kennedy sauntered to victory in his race, winning 69,093 votes to Bowen’s 26,007. But he was a rare bright spot for his party that autumn. In Massachusetts the Democrats lost a U.S. Senate seat—Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. trounced the old stalwart incumbent David I. Walsh, who had helped smooth Jack’s passage to combat service in 1943—as well as the governorship. Nationally, they were brutalized, relinquishing control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1932 as the GOP gained twelve seats in the Senate and a whopping fifty-five in the House. In California’s Twelfth District, an ambitious Republican Navy veteran named Richard M. Nixon rode the anti-incumbent wave to victory, falsely accusing his Democratic opponent, Representative Jerry Voorhis, of being a Communist, or at least of working with a political action committee that was infiltrated by Communists. In Wisconsin, another Republican, ex-Marine Joseph R. McCarthy, won election to the U.S. Senate, partly by playing the anti-Communist card and partly by misrepresenting his military service. (He exaggerated the number of combat missions he had flown in the Pacific.) Overall, some forty veterans won election to the House, and eight more in the Senate.

For John F. Kennedy, age twenty-nine, an extraordinary moment had come. He was a United States congressman–elect. He had overcome his precarious health and political inexperience, as well as his father’s humiliating exit from public life, to win a seat in the Eightieth Congress. If his success stemmed in part from his family name and family wealth, it also had deeper roots. Say what one will about Joseph P. Kennedy, it’s not every multi-millionaire father who takes such broad interest in his children, who believes in them so fervently, and who, together with his wife, instills in them, from a young age, a firm commitment to public service. Joe Kennedy did. From his mother, meanwhile, Jack inherited a lasting interest in history and in books, and an abiding curiosity about the world.

Yet Jack’s victory was also very much his own. His war story from the Pacific resonated with voters, as did his quiet charm and dignified affability on the campaign trail. As aide after aide quickly saw, voters just liked him, plain and simple. He also campaigned hard, taking nothing for granted, and motivated people to want to work for him. In substantive terms, he had fashioned, through his writing and his speechmaking, a political philosophy that transcended the narrow, selfish vision of his father and elder brother, in the form of a pluralist, liberal internationalism—idealistic yet infused with pragmatic realism—that would in time resonate with a broad cross section of Americans. Already in his senior thesis in 1940, Jack Kennedy had depicted a more messy and congested world than did either his father or his older brother, and in the event-packed half dozen years that followed, he’d honed and expanded that worldview. All the while, he conveyed a dedication to ideals larger than self.

Thus was established the prototype for all future Jack Kennedy campaigns: a disciplined and efficient organization, energetic family support, a campaign war chest bulging with resources, and, most important of all, a talented, winsome, hardworking candidate, highly adept at using others to the extent they were helpful to him.

“You have my best wishes for success in the tough job with which you have been entrusted,” journalist Herbert Bayard Swope wrote to Kennedy the day after his victory. “My crystal ball reveals you as the center of a fascinating drama—one that carries you far and high. I hope I am a true prophet.”50

And so Swope was. In November 1946, it may be said, came the end of the remarkable early life of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. His even more extraordinary public life was about to begin.

II

Jack Kennedy, it’s fair to say, was less interested in his work than his sister was in hers. And, true to form, when he was unengaged, he didn’t apply himself. “He wasn’t totally engrossed in what he was doing,” Eunice acknowledged. “He sort of drifted along. He wasn’t making any effort to be Speaker of the House. He did an ordinary probably performance.”13

Jack would not have claimed otherwise. Strange as it seemed, entering Congress was a letdown for him. The previous years had been exhilarating ones, befitting the son of Ambassador Kennedy, and had culminated in a thrilling campaign victory before adoring crowds in Boston. Now Jack saw what countless freshman House members had discovered before him: that he was but one of 435 lawmakers, and a junior one at that. What’s more, his Democrats had taken a drubbing in the election, and were suddenly the minority party in both houses, with an unpopular leader in the White House. The Massachusetts delegation in the House had fifteen members (ten Republicans, five Democrats), including Speaker Joseph Martin and Minority Whip John McCormack. It would be a long time, Jack could see, before he could gain real authority on key committees, let alone match the clout of the senior members of his party. His only role was one he did not relish: acting as the voice for the humdrum local needs of voters in the Eleventh District.

Whether he lost any sleep over his lowly status is questionable. He always understood that the House of Representatives provided scant opportunity for the kind of national leadership he craved, and he appears to have seen his post mostly as a launching pad for greater things. “I think from the time he was elected to Congress, he had no thought but to go to the Senate as fast as he could,” Arthur Krock remarked. “He wanted scope, which a freshman in the House cannot have, and very few actually of the seniors; so I think the House was just a way-station.” Of a fellow member of the Massachusetts delegation Kennedy revealingly remarked, “I never felt he did much in the Congress, but I never held that against him because I don’t think I did much. I mean you can’t do much as a Congressman.”14 Content to leave the running of his Washington office to aides Billy Sutton and Timothy “Ted” Reardon and secretary Mary Davis, Kennedy flew back to Boston as often as possible, taking an apartment directly across from the State House, at 122 Bowdoin Street, that would remain his main address for the remainder of his days (including on his driver’s license when he was president). Or he escaped to Palm Beach for a long weekend, or to New York City to meet a paramour.

The frequent absences left his poor staff scrambling to stay on top of the work that came into the office, much of it in the form of requests from people in his district. Lucky for him, they were up to the task. Davis in particular was known for her superhuman efficiency and all-around ability. A Washington native and a product of its parochial schools, she had worked for three congressmen prior to joining Kennedy’s staff, earning raves from each. According to Sutton, she could answer the phone, type a letter, and eat a candy bar all at once. “She was the complete political machine, knew everybody, how to get anything done.” Even so, Davis recalled working until seven or eight at night, taking work home, and coming in on weekends. And she despaired at Kennedy’s habit of leaving his possessions all over the place. “He was constantly replacing or trying to retrieve his coats,” she said. “He’d leave them, or his camera or radio, on a plane or on a pushcart someplace. He very rarely carried a briefcase in those days. Thank God! That would have been lost too.” But Davis also saw another side to her boss: “One thing that really surprised me were his formal speeches. He wrote his own. He appeared to be such a disinterested guy, couldn’t care less but then he’d say, ‘Mary, come on in.’ Then he would start dictating off the top of his head. The flow of language, his command of English was extraordinary. It would come out beautifully—exactly what he wanted to say. And I’d think, ‘This, coming from you?’ I surprised myself, but I came to the conclusion that he was brilliant—the brightest person I’ve ever known.”15

Congressman Kennedy was given two committee assignments: the Committee on Education and Labor and the lowly Committee on the District of Columbia. He focused a lot of his early attention on housing, especially for veterans. Since the end of the war, the armed services had demobilized rapidly, and the nation faced an acute residential shortage. Millions of people were forced to live in cramped quarters—attics, basements, even boxcars and chicken coops. Soon after taking office, Jack spoke fervently on the issue before the National Public Housing Conference, in Chicago. “Veterans need homes and they need them quickly,” he declared. “Any veteran who watched the American supplies pouring ashore on the Normandy beaches; who saw the Pacific Islands cleared and our air landing strips rolled out in four or five days; who saw the endless waste of war and the seemingly never ending productivity that replaced that waste; is it any wonder that the veteran cannot understand why he is not housed?”16 When the House GOP leadership blocked a bipartisan Senate bill to create 1.25 million new urban housing units per year for the next ten years, Jack went to the House floor and accused Republicans of being beholden to lobbyists. “I was sent to this Congress by the people of my district,” he proclaimed, “to help solve the most pressing problem facing this country—the housing crisis. I am going to have to go back to my district on Saturday, a district that probably sent more boys per family into this last war than any in the country, and when they ask me if I was able to get them any homes, I will have to answer, ‘Not a one—not a single one.’ ”17

On this and most other domestic legislation, Jack generally aligned with the Truman administration and liberal northern Democrats. He opposed a tax bill for favoring the rich over everyone else and a lowering of the appropriation for school lunches. He also voted against a weakening of rent control and tax relief for the oil industry. He backed more robust social security, stepped up minimum wage provisions, and offered support for expanded immigration and housing programs. In his committee votes, he aligned closely with the wishes of organized labor—according to the CIO News rating system, Jack voted “wrong” only twice during his time in the House.18

Yet he also showed an occasional willingness to cut an independent path. When, in 1947, Mayor James Curley was convicted of mail fraud and sent to Danbury penitentiary (the judge ignored Curley’s plea that he was suffering from nine separate maladies and likely did not have long to live), party leaders in Boston and Washington urged President Truman to pardon him, using a petition drawn up by House Majority Leader John McCormack and signed by Republican as well as Democratic representatives. But Kennedy refused to sign, even though Curley was immensely popular among Boston voters and even though it could be said that Jack owed Curley for having retired from the House and left his seat open. To Kennedy’s mind, signing the petition would show him to be just another hypocritical pol, no better than the man he had replaced, and he waved aside aides’ fears that by failing to sign he risked alienating party leaders as well as the voters of his district. (Later in the year, Truman did commute Curley’s sentence, and the mayor’s mystery ailments suddenly disappeared.)19

On other issues, too, Kennedy showed a marked disdain for dogmatism, whether from the left or the right. On labor legislation he took relatively nuanced positions, showing a greater openness to reforms than most Democrats while at the same time rejecting Republican claims of what constituted appropriate changes to labor law. A champion of New Deal policies, he privately worried about the expansion of government power that many of the programs necessitated. The guest list for his salons in Georgetown typically had as many Republican as Democratic names on it, and in his speeches he sometimes expounded on the importance in democratic politics of a spirit of compromise, of bargaining in good faith. He grew close to several conservative Democrats and often expressed admiration for Senator Robert A. Taft, the austere Republican from Ohio, whom he considered honorable and trenchant.20

Kennedy also got on well with Richard Nixon. Both served on the Education and Labor Committee and, given their freshman status in different parties, were seated at opposite ends of the table. “We were like a pair of unmatched bookends,” Nixon recalled. The thirty-four-year-old Californian admired Kennedy’s languid grace and ease of manner, and envied him his Harvard degree, while Jack found Nixon knowledgeable and respectful. (“Listen to this fellow,” Jack said to an aide early on. “He’s going places.”)21 In certain core respects their views also aligned—both sought to keep organized labor in check (Nixon went further, seeking to drive it back); both thought that Communism should not be allowed to drive union activity.

One evening in April 1947, as part of the committee’s road show, the two young lawmakers found themselves debating the proposed Taft-Hartley Act (which restricted the power and activities of labor) in the small steel town of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. Nixon, a champion undergrad debater at Whittier College, expressed full support for worker rights but warned the audience that big labor was growing “by leaps and bounds” and threatening economic growth. He listed the strikes that had roiled the nation since the war ended. Some hisses could be heard from the largely pro-labor crowd. Jack was more conciliatory, warmer, smoother in his delivery. He mostly ignored Nixon as he struck a moderate line, commending American workers while cautioning against policies that could lead to a “war” between management and labor.22

Someone could write a novel about what happened next (and indeed someone has). At midnight, after munching hamburgers and chatting about baseball in a local diner, the two congressmen boarded the Capitol Limited together for the long train ride back to Washington.23 They drew straws for the lower berth; Nixon won. They then stayed up for hours, talking mostly about foreign policy, each man’s preferred topic, and in particular the rising tensions with the Soviet Union. In the fullness of time, each would revise his opinion of the other, in a downward way, but on this night, with the train chugging through the quiet countryside, Nixon and Kennedy felt a mutual kinship. They had some things in common, they realized, beyond being Navy veterans who were new to Congress: both had lost a golden-child older brother, and both labored under heavy parental expectations. Moreover, Nixon later said, “We shared one quality which distinguished us from most of our fellow congressmen. Neither of us was a backslapper, and we were uncomfortable with boisterous displays of superficial camaraderie. He was shy, and that sometimes made him appear aloof. But it was a shyness born of an instinct that guarded privacy and concealed emotions. I understood these qualities because I shared them.”24

Some who observed Jack in this period took a less benign view, finding him too casual by half, and too aloof. “He never seemed to get into the midstream of any tremendous political thought, or political action,” remarked William O. Douglas, Supreme Court justice and Kennedy family friend. “He didn’t seem to be caught up in anything, and was sort of drifting.” And though in time he would develop a thicker skin than most politicians, in this period he brooded over slights, as longtime political ally Thomas “Tip” O’Neill noted. “If a group of politicians were talking and somebody said something mean about Jack and it got back to him, he’d be over to see me. ‘Why doesn’t so-and-so like me?’ he’d ask. Why can’t he and I sit down and straighten this thing out?…He hadn’t grown up in the school of hard knocks. Politically, he had lived an easy life and was used to people loving him.”25

And for the most part people did love him. Press treatment by the Boston dailies was generally favorable, and not infrequently laudatory, as reporters championed his support for veterans and his outspoken views on labor issues dear to the people of his district. Criticism of his decision on the Curley petition was muted and fleeting. One detects the hand of Joseph P. Kennedy in at least some of this coverage—the Ambassador had not ceased his relentless behind-the-scenes PR efforts to promote his son—but there was also a broadly felt sense that Representative Kennedy looked out for his constituents’ interests and, in general, acquitted himself well. Nor was it just Boston journalists who took this view. As Congress went into recess that first summer, national columnist Drew Pearson offered his take on the Eightieth Congress. The most promising thing about it, he told his readers, was the presence of several talented new lawmakers. John F. Kennedy was at the top of his list.26

III

IV

Or perhaps not. Perhaps, Kick hoped, her father’s silence meant she could yet bring him around. She was a favorite of his, and she’d often been able to get her way with him in the past. Upon her return to London she convinced Joe, who was visiting Paris, to at least meet Fitzwilliam. The couple planned a brief two-day holiday in Cannes before joining Mr. Kennedy for lunch in the French capital on Saturday, May 15. On May 13, their chartered plane landed at Le Bourget airfield, outside Paris, to refuel. They met friends for a meal and returned midafternoon to reports of inclement weather in the Rhône valley, to the south. Pilot Peter Townshend recommended that they wait out the storm, but Fitzwilliam insisted on flying right away, even after being told that all commercial flights had been grounded.

Flying at ten thousand feet, they entered the storm just north of the Ardèche Mountains. Townshend and his copilot tried desperately to steady the aircraft as violent crosscurrents tossed it from side to side. Visibility was zero. They lost radio contact, and the instruments spun uselessly. The pilots didn’t know if they were descending or climbing. Suddenly the plane emerged from a cloud and they saw a mountain ridge straight ahead. Townshend yanked the controls to avoid a crash, but it was too late. For several seconds all four people aboard would have realized they were going to crash.41

It was Eunice who answered when the phone rang at midnight in Georgetown. A Washington Post reporter introduced himself and said a report indicated that a Lady Hartington had been killed along with three others in a plane crash in France; might this be her sister? Eunice replied that she was not sure, as there was also a second Lady Hartington—Kick’s ex-sister-in-law Debo. To which the reporter offered a crushing detail: a passport found at the crash site, on a mountainside near the tiny village of Privas, showed the victim’s Christian name to be Kathleen. While Eunice spoke on the phone, Jack was on the couch, listening to a recording of Finian’s Rainbow, a musical that had opened on Broadway the previous year. Billy Sutton was there, too. Jack got on the phone and asked the reporter to read the dispatch to him, then hung up and immediately dialed his aide Ted Reardon and instructed him to check the story out; Reardon called back soon thereafter and confirmed the worst. As Jack put down the receiver, “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” was playing on the stereo. “She has a sweet voice,” he murmured of the vocalist Ella Logan. Then he turned away and wept.42

The following day, Reardon made arrangements for the two Kennedy siblings to fly to Hyannis Port. Once there, Jack hunkered in a back room, refusing to see anyone and having his meals delivered to him. He was disconsolate, unable to make sense of what had happened. Joe’s death had been awful, but at least it happened in wartime; he had given his life for his country, as had countless others. Kick’s was different. She had died on account of love, and the stifled romantic in Jack had always admired her refusal to repress her affections. More than that, she was his soulmate, the one he could confide in about anything, the one who completed his sentences, his thoughts, the one to whom he didn’t have to explain his feelings, his moods, for she intuited them. She had always believed in him, had always championed his prospects, even more than she had Joe Junior’s, had always prized him for who he was. And now she was gone.

With Kick to be buried in England, Jack sent word that he would come over for the May 20 service, arranged by Kick’s former in-laws, the Devonshires. He arrived in New York City on the eighteenth, with plans to fly across the Atlantic that evening. In his distressed state he had neglected to bring his passport. Hasty arrangements were made to try to secure an emergency replacement that would be rushed to him at the airport. His staff determined it could be done, if barely. Jack, however, suddenly called a halt, as though he could not bear the thought of attending his sister’s funeral. He instead returned to Washington. Among the Kennedys, only a grief-stricken father would be present for the requiem Mass. He cut a solitary figure, in light of his ignominious tenure as ambassador. “He stood there alone,” Alastair Forbes said, “unloved and despised.”43

For weeks Jack had insomnia, telling Lem Billings that when he drifted off he would be jolted awake “by the image of Kathleen sitting up with him late at night talking about their parents and dates. He would try to close his eyes again, but he couldn’t shake the image.” During congressional hearings, his mind would drift to all the things he and Kick had done together and all the friends they had shared, in England as well as at home. To make matters worse, Billings added, “there was no one in the family with whom he could share this loss.” He didn’t feel close enough to any of them. So he kept quiet, saying little that has been recorded, though years later he remarked to campaign biographer James MacGregor Burns that both Kick and Joe had perished just when “everything was moving in their direction.” That made losing them doubly hard to take. “If something happens to you or somebody in your family who is miserable anyway, whose health is bad, or who has a chronic disease or something, that’s one thing. But for someone who is living at their peak, then to get cut off—that’s the shock.”44

Kick’s death, coming so soon after his own severe health scare in London, made him acutely aware of his own mortality. Suddenly only he remained of the supposed golden trio of Kennedy children, and they had effectively also lost Rosemary, who was closest to him in age. Could he be far behind, especially considering his alarming recent diagnosis? He thought not, and told acquaintances flatly that he did not expect to live past forty-five. He began to obsess over the mind’s workings in the moments before death—would one think about all the joyous things that had occurred, or would one feel regrets about choices made, things not experienced? On a fishing trip with George Smathers he mused out loud on the topic, then leaned over to Smathers and said, “The point is that you’ve got to live every day like it’s your last day. That’s what I’m doing.”45

Although this fixation on mortality and his own premature death might have made Kennedy self-pitying and sullen, he was nothing of the kind. If anything, associates noted, his belief that his days were numbered, and that he had to live each one to the fullest, made him more convivial and expressive. Like Raymond Asquith and the other gallant World War I figures he so admired, he made a point of smiling at fate. In Chuck Spalding’s recollection, “There was something about time—special for him, obviously, because he always heard the footsteps, but also special for you when you were with him. So whenever he was in a situation, he tried to burn bright; he tried to wring as much out of things as he could. After a while he didn’t have to try. He had something nobody else did. It was just a heightened sense of being; there’s no other way to describe it.”46

V

Jack’s knowledge that only he remained of the charmed Kennedy trio, combined with his sense that his own days might be numbered, lent urgency to his political ambitions. If he had always considered the House of Representatives as but a stepping-stone to bigger and better things, this conviction grew stronger in the wake of the Addison’s diagnosis and Kick’s death. He became more restless on the job and ramped up his speaking schedule around Massachusetts, eagerly accepting invitations from any organization that would have him—in places like Worcester, Springfield, Chicopee, Fall River, and Holyoke. Aides later spoke nostalgically of dingy, poorly lit hotels, of wolfing down hamburgers and milkshakes on the go, of seeing the congressman shaving in the men’s room of a bowling alley between events. The pattern, Dave Powers recalled, was usually the same: “Jack would try to get up here every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to speak. Frank Morrissey or Bob Morey and I would go around with him. I remember he’d fly up on Friday. Then on Sunday he’d take a train, The Federal, a sleeper that left South Station at eleven at night. He’d get a bedroom. When the train got to Washington, it just sat in the station and they’d let the passengers sleep in until nine or ten o’clock. Then he’d get up and go back to work on the Hill.”47

The Boston press took notice of his frequent trips home, speculating about a possible Kennedy run for the Senate that fall against the craggy-faced, blue-blooded Republican incumbent Leverett Saltonstall, a descendant of Puritans and tenth-generation Harvard man. The notion had appeal, but Jack’s team worried it was too soon, opening him up to charges that he lacked sufficient experience, that he was driven by self-serving ambition rather than a commitment to public service. Saltonstall, moreover, would be no pushover, especially in a presidential election year in which the Democrat in the White House looked extremely vulnerable and the Republicans looked poised to add to their majorities in Congress. Jack also liked and admired Saltonstall personally and didn’t relish taking him on.

Another option was to challenge Governor Robert F. Bradford, who was up for reelection in 1948 and rumored to be in ill health. (It would be revealed that he had Parkinson’s.) Billy Sutton, for one, thought this race winnable for Jack, and that it would give him four years to build a statewide political machine before challenging Henry Cabot Lodge for the state’s other U.S. Senate seat in 1952.48 But this option, too, had drawbacks, not least that Jack would face serious rivals in the primary election, including potentially Maurice Tobin or Paul A. Dever, both popular vote-getters with political machines of their own. The Kennedy team opted to take a wait-and-see attitude while planning in the meantime to keep Jack where he was, in the House of Representatives. In 1948 he faced no opposition in either the primary or the general election, so victory was assured.

As always, Kennedy made sure to keep abreast of issues that were resonating most strongly among Massachusetts voters: veterans’ housing, labor rights, education, rent control, taxes, and healthcare. He also made a determined move in a new policy direction: civil rights. This effort was, to a degree, unexpected—though in personal terms Kennedy was largely free of racial prejudice, he’d shown little interest in the plight of African Americans. Except for the family’s chauffeurs, domestics, and valets, he hadn’t interacted much with blacks in Bronxville or Hyannis Port or Palm Beach, nor did he encounter many of them during his student days at Choate or Harvard. Apart from his naval stint in Charleston, South Carolina, in early 1942, he had spent little time in the Deep South. And though his wartime experience in the Pacific exposed him for the first time to Americans from many walks of life, few of them were African American. Racial segregation was enforced in the military, nearly as strictly as in the Jim Crow South. Black sailors serving alongside Kennedy in the South Pacific were usually mess attendants or cooks. There were no black crewmen on the PT boats.49

Still, many black Bostonians were struck, upon meeting the congressman, by his courtesy and his easy informality. “Northern pols were normally stand-offish,” said Harold Vaughan, a Boston lawyer who got to know Jack in 1948. “But Kennedy would just walk into a beauty salon in a black neighborhood, go right up to the woman below the hairdryer and say: ‘Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy.’ ” That same year, when a memorial was unveiled in Cambridge honoring two African American war heroes, Kennedy delivered a moving speech at the dedication ceremony. In Washington, he fought for new civil rights legislation. Notably, he lent firm support to bills calling for the abolition of the poll tax and a ban on lynching, and he publicly lauded the efforts of Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee, which had worked to prevent discrimination against African Americans in defense and government jobs. In 1948, Kennedy backed efforts to strengthen the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, and opposed funding for the Registered College Plan, which financed segregated educational institutions.50

On the District of Columbia Committee, meanwhile, Kennedy advocated for the city’s black residents, who, almost a century after the Civil War, lived each day with the burden of segregation. In many Washington restaurants, African Americans were denied service altogether, or restricted to the counter (where they often had to stand). If they boarded a southbound train at Union Station, they had to sit in “colored only” cars. As elsewhere in the country, movie theaters in the city excluded African Americans altogether or confined them to seats in the balcony. Swimming pools were segregated, and most downtown hotels would not rent rooms to blacks. Even on Capitol Hill, unwritten rules kept black employees from the pool, from the barbershop, and from various cafeterias and restaurants.51

To Kennedy and other advocates of change, Washington’s racial problems owed much to the fact that the city had no mayor or local council but was run by three commissioners, who in turn took orders from two congressional committees—one in the House (on which Kennedy served) and one in the Senate. Segregationists dominated the House committee in particular, but Kennedy was undaunted. He championed home rule for the city, arguing that its residents, a majority of whom were black, deserved a voice in their own affairs. The effort came to naught, but Kennedy won praise from liberal colleagues and black leaders for his work.52

He also came up short in a campaign to block a new 3 percent city sales tax, which he maintained would unfairly target African Americans. In a House speech on June 8, 1948, Kennedy used charts and diagrams to assert that the new tax “would put the main burden on the people who cannot afford to pay it.” When the issue reemerged the following year, with the tax now in place, Kennedy again argued in opposition, noting that the tax placed “the major burden on the people in the lowest income groups.” If the District needed more revenue, the affluent should carry the burden, he said. Ultimately, the House voted 177 to 176 to retain the tax, but Kennedy’s advocacy did not go unnoticed. “The congressman who did the most to save the District from the burden of a sales tax is a tousle-haired bachelor named ‘Jack,’ ” read an admiring profile in The Washington Daily News. “He looks like the Saturday Evening Post’s idea of the All-American Boy, and his vote-getting appeal to New England’s womenfolk must be terrific. He is also something of a political curiosity…born with a silver soup ladle in his mouth, but with the welfare of the humble in his heart.”53

VI

All the while, Kennedy maintained his passionate interest in foreign policy and international affairs. In late June 1948, five weeks after Kick’s funeral, he traveled to Europe, ostensibly on behalf of the House Education and Labor Committee to gather information on labor issues. His travel companion was his Harvard roommate Torbert Macdonald, who now worked for the National Labor Relations Board. For months, Cold War tensions had been ratcheting up, especially over the status of Germany. Earlier in June, U.S., British, and French officials resolved to merge their German zones, including their three sectors of Berlin, in order to better integrate West Germany into the Western European economy. On June 24, the same day Jack and Torby departed by sea for England, Stalin, fearing a resurgent Germany joined to the American Cold War camp, severed Western road and rail access to the jointly occupied city of Berlin, located well inside the Soviet zone. He hoped that West Berliners, starved of resources, would be compelled by economic necessity to reject their alliance with the United States and throw their lot in with East Germany and the USSR. It was a bold move, and it put the Western powers in the position of either giving in or attempting to overcome the blockade—a step that could lead to a war in which they would be drastically outmanned.

Harry Truman, after consulting with his advisers and with the British government, responded with a bold action of his own: he ordered a massive airlift of food, fuel, and other supplies to West Berlin, in order to forestall an economic collapse that would have driven residents into the arms of the Soviets. Stalin now faced the choice of shooting down the supply planes, an act that would surely trigger U.S. retaliation, or letting the airlift continue and hoping it would be insufficient. He opted for the latter course, but the situation remained tense as Kennedy arrived in London on June 29 and then proceeded from there to Paris.

He was determined to see the Berlin situation up close. He had no official reason for going, but then again, that had been equally true when he visited in the summer of 1939, on the eve of war, and when he returned in 1945, just as the struggle was ending. Whereas a decade before Jack had used his father’s connections to gain entrée to places where history was being made, this time he used his status as a U.S. congressman to arrange meetings with General Lucius Clay, who led the American occupying command in the city, and General Curtis LeMay, commander of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe and the head of operations for the airlift.54 Kennedy voiced full support for Truman’s airlift decision and his overall firmness in the showdown with the Soviets. Truman’s resolute action on Berlin stood in sharp contrast to Chamberlain’s appeasement at Munich in 1938, Jack believed, and it pleased him to see Winston Churchill—out of power for three years but slowly edging his way back to the center of things—make the same argument. It further pleased him that the first volume of Churchill’s grand narrative history of the Second World War, covering the origins of the struggle and published to great fanfare that summer, interpreted the development of British appeasement in the 1930s in ways broadly consistent with his own take in Why England Slept.55

Churchill remained a giant figure for him, a kind of intellectual and political lodestar on account of his historical sensibility and his authorial and oratorical acclaim, and he thrilled at the thought that the great man might yet return to power. Jack followed with keen interest the Conservative Party’s annual conference in Wales in October 1948, devouring newspaper reports and taking mental and written notes. Churchill’s speech to the gathering, a stem-winder heavy on fulminations against the menacing Soviet threat, resonated with him. “We support the foreign policy of His Majesty’s Government in taking a firm stand against the encroachments and aggressions of Soviet Russia, and in not being bullied, bulldozed, or blackmailed out of Berlin, whatever the consequences may be,” Churchill thundered. “Nothing stands between Europe today and complete subjugation to Communist tyranny but the atomic bomb in American possession.” He closed with a passage from Luke 23:31, in which Christ, shortly before his crucifixion, asks metaphorically, “If they do this when the wood is green, what will they do when it is dry?” Jack underlined the passage and would later use it in his own speeches.56

Ultimately, Truman would see his decision on the airlift vindicated. An unusually mild winter and a remarkably efficient aerial operation delivered a total of 2.3 million tons of food, medicine, and fuel. On a single day, April 16, 1949, some fourteen hundred aircraft brought in close to thirteen thousand tons within twenty-four hours—an average of one plane touching down every minute. Stalin, increasingly frustrated, dangled better rations before any West Berliner who registered with Communist authorities, but only a small minority took him up on it. In May 1949, he in effect gave up, lifting the blockade and authorizing negotiations with the Western governments about formalizing the status of Berlin.57

The successful airlift helped to salvage Truman’s political career: he surprised experts in November 1948 by narrowly beating Republican Thomas E. Dewey in the presidential election. Safely returned to office, Truman took the momentous step of formalizing what was already in essence a military alliance between the United States, Canada, and the countries of Western Europe. In April 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came into being, as twelve nations signed a mutual defense pact. An attack on any one of them would be viewed as an attack on all, the members agreed. Skeptics on Capitol Hill, led by the GOP’s Robert Taft, charged that NATO would only heighten the risk of general war, while others wondered if the alliance met a military threat that didn’t exist. U.S. officials conceded that a Soviet armed attack on Western Europe was unlikely, but they maintained that, should the Kremlin ever make threatening moves westward, NATO would constitute a “tripwire,” bringing the full weight of American power to bear on the USSR. The Truman team also hoped that NATO would keep Western Europeans from shifting toward Communism or neutralism in the Cold War. On July 21, the Senate ratified the treaty by a vote of 82 to 13.58

By then, Jack Kennedy was well into his second term in Congress. At age thirty-two, he continued to give the sense of a man in a hurry, looking for the next thing, hungry to make more of an impact. “We’re just worms,” he said of being a congressman. “Nobody pays much attention to us nationally.”59 His attendance record on the Hill improved, but only marginally, and he darted off from the capital most weekends, often to New York City and the Waldorf or the St. Regis and usually in the company of one woman or another. Yet Kennedy managed to keep his name before Massachusetts voters with well-timed policy pronouncements and legislative interventions. In 1949 the House at last approved a major housing bill of the type he had sought since he arrived on Capitol Hill; he declared it a triumph, even as he lamented that the delay had caused needless suffering, especially among veterans. He also exploited his experience in foreign affairs and military policy to get himself invited as an expert witness to Senate hearings on the defense structures of European allies. Recognizing that staunch anti-Communism was a surefire winner in U.S. political discourse in 1949, he talked up the threat, warning against domestic subversion and Soviet overseas adventurism.

More and more, Kennedy criticized the Truman administration for what he saw as its insufficiently vigilant foreign policy. When, in September 1949, the White House announced that a specially equipped U.S. weather plane had detected radioactivity in Soviet airspace above Siberia—a clear sign that the USSR had tested its own atomic bomb, thereby ending America’s monopoly—Jack criticized the president for implementing inadequate civil defense measures. On China he was even tougher, joining with the “China lobby” (the group of journalists, business leaders, and right-wing lawmakers who had become arch defenders of Chiang Kai-shek) to attack the White House for “allowing” Communist forces under Mao Zedong to make advance after advance against Chiang’s Nationalists in that nation’s long-running civil war. On January 25, 1949, after news arrived that the Nationalists had begun withdrawing from Beijing, Jack said on the floor of the House that “the responsibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State.”60

Five days later he returned to the theme in a speech in Salem, Massachusetts:

Our relationship with China since the end of the Second World War has been a tragic one, and it is of the utmost importance that we search out and spotlight those who bear the responsibility for our present predicament….Our policy in China has reaped the whirlwind. The continued insistence that aid would not be forthcoming unless a coalition government with the Communists was formed was a crippling blow to the national government. So concerned were our diplomats and their advisors…with the imperfections of the diplomatic system in China after 20 years of war, and the tales of corruption in high places, they lost sight of the tremendous stake in a non-Communist China. This is the tragic story of China whose freedom we once sought to preserve.61

When Mao completed his victory that autumn, compelling Chiang’s government to flee in humiliating fashion to the offshore island of Taiwan (then known as Formosa), Kennedy again pinned responsibility for the disaster on U.S. policy, even as he acknowledged Chiang’s weaknesses and missteps.

The “twin shocks” of 1949—the Soviet A-bomb and Mao’s victory in China—would continue to reverberate in world politics and U.S. domestic politics for years to come. Jack Kennedy anticipated as much, and although he worried about the implications for American security, he also saw advantages for himself. This was his turf, where he could stand out among his congressional peers, where he could make his mark, if not right away, then in due course, when he had a bigger platform. His fellow House freshmen in the Eightieth Congress, Richard Nixon and George Smathers, could contest (and win) Senate races already in 1950, but for Kennedy that opportunity was not available. He had to wait, confident in the expectation that his patience would be rewarded. In the meantime, he would bide his time and continue to do the work expected of him on behalf of the Eleventh District in Massachusetts.

Here he drew encouragement from the fact that his physical condition had improved markedly that fall of 1949, due chiefly to the finding that cortisone could dramatically improve the lives of Addison’s sufferers, whose adrenal glands do not produce enough of the hormones cortisol and aldosterone. Though it is likely Kennedy had begun taking corticosteroids periodically a number of years before, only now was the drug synthesized and declared to be broadly effective for people with Addison’s. The announcement, by researchers at the Mayo Clinic, set off a mad rush for cortisone, and the Kennedys scrambled to store away supplies of it in safe-deposit boxes around the country so that Jack would never go without.62 The drug boosted patients’ energy, muscular strength, and endurance, doctors found, and enhanced their overall sense of well-being. The mere fact of having a diagnosis also helped Jack, as he now had an explanation for at least some of the mystery illnesses he had suffered over the years—Addison’s sufferers, he learned, were particularly vulnerable to infection.

As a new year and a new decade dawned, his family and friends and associates could see it: John F. Kennedy was back, and ready to begin anew.

II

The Hiss verdict came on January 21, 1950. Truman announced his hydrogen bomb decision on January 31. The Fuchs arrest occurred on February 3. And on February 9, Joe McCarthy gave a speech that hit like a thunderclap and cemented his place in U.S. history textbooks forevermore. In a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, before the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club, McCarthy declared, “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” He had no evidence, either then or in the days that followed, when in his speeches the number dropped to fifty-seven, then rose to eighty-one, then became “a lot.” McCarthy in fact had no list, and almost certainly had no proof that anyone in the State Department actually belonged to the Communist Party.14

It’s not even clear that McCarthy had any real interest in either espionage or Communism. “Joe couldn’t find a Communist in Red Square—he didn’t know Karl Marx from Groucho Marx,” journalist George Reedy, who was later an aide to Lyndon Johnson, memorably remarked. Facing lagging popularity at home in Wisconsin and the prospect of a tough reelection battle two years away, McCarthy needed an issue with which to revive his political fortunes.15 He felt sure he’d found it. He was at bottom a salesman, an actor, someone for whom accuracy mattered far less than attention, and he had a talent for imagining subversion and conspiracy and for humiliating the scared and vulnerable. A lazy man unwilling to do the work required to back up his claims, he relied on allusion and inference. But he was also shrewd: he understood the resentments and fears that existed just below the surface in many people—resentment of the elites, fears of the other—and indeed felt them himself.16 Like all demagogues, he knew that people sought simple answers for why the world seemed not to be going their way, knew that he could captivate them by appealing to emotion rather than intellect. And he understood that merely by making bombastic claims he sent the message that there must be some truth to the claim that the government was teeming with traitors secretly taking orders from the Kremlin.17

McCarthy’s timing was right, moreover, for the national fever that had been building for years rose sharply with the twin shocks and the espionage cases. And indeed, McCarthy’s Wheeling remarks and those that immediately followed (in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Reno) gained him the headlines he craved—reporters knew both that he was a shameless fabulist and that sensational stories sell papers. (The wilder the charge, the bigger the headline.) Rarely did journalists press him to back up his claims with evidence. He moved copy; that was all that mattered.18

Still, the reporters who covered him could see what he was doing, could see that he always kept his claims deliberately vague, that he cared only about gaining publicity, which meant issuing a steady stream of new claims, new accusations. When caught in a lie, he never apologized or recanted; he attacked his accuser or simply moved on to another target. “Talking to Joe was like putting your hands in a bowl of mush,” said Reedy, who found the experience of covering McCarthy for the United Press so loathsome that he quit journalism.19 Insecure and eager to please, and saddled with a serious drinking problem (he liked nothing more than to pal around with reporters in bars in the evenings), McCarthy was perfectly willing to give the pressmen around him a story when they needed one, if necessary by conjuring up some new charges. If the reporters wanted to know what the party leadership was contemplating on this or that issue, McCarthy happily called up Senator Taft’s office and asked him questions while the journalists listened in silently on an open receiver.20

“McCarthyism” was the name later given to the senator’s antics, a term signifying a ruthless search for Communists, publicly and with little or no evidence, and in a manner that savaged the reputations of its targets. So ubiquitous did McCarthy become that it was easy to forget that the phenomenon had existed before him—since 1946–47 in its new incarnation, and in a different, lesser form since an initial “Red Scare” immediately after World War I. But undeniably, the Wisconsin senator gave this second Red Scare added fuel.

McCarthy’s position was further strengthened by the sudden outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula in late June 1950. Colonized by Japan in 1910, Korea had been divided in two by the Soviet Union and the United States after Japan’s defeat in 1945, with the Soviets in control of the land north of the thirty-eighth parallel and the Americans in charge in the south. The division was supposed to be temporary, but as Cold War tensions deepened, the split persisted. Both the North’s Communist leader, Kim Il Sung, and the South’s president, the U.S.-backed Syngman Rhee, sought to take control of a reunified Korea. Kim struck first; on June 25, after securing the reluctant approval of Stalin and Mao, he sent his troops across the parallel into the South. In short order they captured the southern capital of Seoul and appeared well positioned to march all the way down the peninsula and hand Kim control over the entire country.21

The invasion caught Washington by surprise, but Truman responded rapidly. He deployed U.S. forces to South Korea to repel the invasion, and got the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution condemning the North’s attack and summoning member states to send their own troops. (The Soviet representative was unable to veto the resolution because the Soviets were boycotting the UN in protest of its refusal to grant membership to the People’s Republic of China.) In this way the defense of South Korea became a UN operation, albeit one led and dominated by the United States. Truman called the military effort a “police action,” which allowed him to avoid going to Congress for a declaration of war. Following a brilliant amphibious landing at Inchon, on the west coast of Korea, more than a hundred miles behind North Korean lines, UN forces under General Douglas MacArthur reversed the tide of battle in the late summer and proceeded to march north, beyond the original demarcation line. In so doing, MacArthur went beyond the UN directive, which authorized only the defense of South Korea, but Truman gave his commander the go-ahead; the president sensed an opportunity to score a complete victory and rebut GOP charges that he had “lost China” the previous year. Onward MacArthur’s units drove, toward the Yalu River and the Chinese frontier, until Chinese troops suddenly attacked in massive force in November, driving UN and South Korean forces southward once again. Gradually, a stalemate set in near the original demarcation line at the thirty-eighth parallel.

As the fighting in Korea ramped up, so did McCarthy’s rhetorical blasts. With U.S. troops being shot at by North Korean and Chinese Communists, few observers in or out of government were brave enough to condemn him. Few registered any objection when he attributed the loss of China and the failure to win a swift victory in Korea to the “pretty boys” and “homos” in the State Department, “with their silver spoons in their mouths.” Many GOP lawmakers indeed welcomed his crusade, even if they privately thought it extreme, because he targeted almost solely Democrats and liberals and because they could see that his portrayal of these individuals as privileged and soft elites hit home with a lot of voters in Middle America. That year McCarthy received hundreds of invitations to speak on behalf of Republican candidates, more than all of his Senate colleagues combined.22

The rare colleague who tried to take him on did so at personal peril. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a freshman Republican from Maine and a moderate, learned this firsthand in early June 1950 when she condemned McCarthy’s methods in a speech titled “The Declaration of Conscience.” The American people “are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists’ by their opponents,” Smith proclaimed. “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America.”23 McCarthy hit back hard, mocking her and the Senate co-sponsors of her declaration as “Snow White and the Six Dwarves.” Millard Tydings, the conservative Maryland Democrat who had publicly opposed McCarthy after his subcommittee found that McCarthy’s first charges against the State Department were bogus, got labeled an “egg-sucking liberal” and a “Commiecrat.” Soon all the co-sponsors except Wayne Morse, an iconoclastic Republican from Oregon (he would later become an independent, and still later a Democrat), drifted away from Smith, and she herself eventually beat a quiet retreat. Tydings lost his bid for reelection that fall, after McCarthy loyalists smeared him by distributing a composite image depicting him as an ally of Earl Browder, leader of the American Communist Party.24

John F. Kennedy was not one of the six dwarves. Quite the contrary, in 1950 he offered his own criticisms of Truman’s and Acheson’s handling of the Chinese Civil War, and his own gripes that the administration had been insufficiently vigilant in combating espionage. He thought Hiss guilty as charged and believed that Truman’s fiscal prudence undermined military preparedness. Kennedy also voiced reservations about Truman’s decision to commit combat units to Korea—he feared that U.S troops were being spread too thin, threatening the nation’s ability to thwart Communist expansion in other, more vital areas, especially in Europe, where, he pointed out, the Red Army had eighty divisions to NATO’s twelve. When American forces suffered a string of early defeats in Korea, Kennedy saw it as proof of “the inadequate state of our defense preparations,” and he advocated raising taxes to pay for the war and the broader military buildup. That fall, in a seminar at the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration (later to be renamed the John F. Kennedy School of Government), he offered candid observations about U.S. foreign policy and the men behind it. He was critical of the leadership of Dean Acheson, he told the students, and said President Truman had been mistaken in vetoing the McCarran Act, which mandated the registration of Communists and Communist-front organizations and provided for their internment in the event of a national emergency. (Congress overrode the veto almost immediately.)25

More than that, Kennedy knew Joe McCarthy and got on well with him. He was a fellow Irish Catholic who, like Jack, had served in the South Pacific during the war (they may have first met in the Solomons) and who had come around for dinners at the Georgetown home in 1947, when both men were new on Capitol Hill.^*2 Jack got a kick out of McCarthy’s affability and energy on these evenings, and Eunice, too, welcomed his presence. McCarthy’s penchant for profanity didn’t bother Jack; he himself could curse like the sailor he had once been. In due course McCarthy would squire both Eunice and on occasion her sister Patricia to evening events in Washington and Boston, and would visit the Kennedys in Hyannis Port. He attended Robert Kennedy’s wedding to Ethel Skakel in Greenwich, Connecticut, in June 1950. At Eunice’s birthday party on the Cape the following month, the Kennedy siblings “gave [McCarthy] the boat treatment, i.e. throwing him out of the boat, and then Eunice, in her usual girlish glee pushed him under,” Rose reported in a letter to the newlyweds. “To everyone’s concern and astonishment, the senator came up with a ghastly look on his face, puffing and paddling. The wonder of it all was that he did not drown on the spot because, you see, coming from Wisconsin, he had never learned to swim.” On another Hyannis Port visit, McCarthy played shortstop for Team Kennedy in a softball game on the family lawn against a squad of neighbors, promptly committed four errors, and was retired to the porch. (Jack, too, ended up on the porch early in the game, his back problem flaring up.)26

Joseph P. Kennedy in particular took a shine to McCarthy, admiring the very things others found so unpleasant: the brashness, the no-holds-barred attacks on the political establishment, the contempt for genteel manners and diplomacy. He himself could be said to possess these attributes, albeit to a milder degree. The Ambassador also relished McCarthy’s rowdy amiability whenever they were together, and he shared his disdain for left-wingers and his love of gossip. “In case there’s any question in your mind,” Kennedy told an interviewer years later, in 1961, “I liked Joe McCarthy. I always liked him. I would see him when I went down to Washington, and when he was visiting Palm Beach he’d come around to my house for a drink. I invited him to Cape Cod.” On occasion the Ambassador even called McCarthy to offer advice on political tactics and strategy. At no point, it seems, did he indicate concern for the victims of the senator’s attacks.27

McCarthyite tactics were everywhere in the midterm elections in 1950. In Florida, George Smathers defeated his mentor, Senator Claude Pepper, in an ugly, bruising, red-baiting primary before coasting to victory in the general election. “Joe [Stalin] likes him and he likes Joe,” Smathers said of Pepper. In the Senate race in California, Richard Nixon, who had studied Smathers’s tactics, hammered his opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, as a fellow traveler who was hopelessly leftist. (She was “pink right down to her underwear,” he said, sexism as much a part of his tactics as red-baiting.) Nixon won handily. In Illinois, Republican Everett Dirksen beat Democratic incumbent senator Scott Lucas, vowing to clean house on Communists and their supporters. And in New York, in a losing race for the Senate, John Foster Dulles said of his opponent, Herbert Lehman, “I know he is no Communist, but I also know that the Communists are in his corner and that he and not I will get the 500,000 Communist votes that last year went to Henry Wallace in this state.”28

III

Jack Kennedy studied the national election results closely that fall as he cruised to another victory in the Eleventh District.29 More and more, speculation in the state turned to his plans for 1952, and in particular whether he would seek statewide office. His own thoughts had long since gone in that direction—three terms in the House would be quite enough, thank you—and he seemed to draw additional inspiration from the public response to two tragedies in the state in 1950. On February 11, Mary Curley, the daughter of ex-mayor James Michael Curley—who had already lost his wife and five of his nine children—collapsed and died of a cerebral hemorrhage while speaking on the telephone. That evening, in the same room and at the same phone, her brother Leo collapsed and succumbed in the same way. The double calamity brought a huge outpouring of people to the mayor’s home to pay their respects—some fifty thousand, according to press accounts, forming long lines in the freezing temperatures. One of them was Congressman John F. Kennedy, who, according to aide Dave Powers, was deeply moved by the experience, and by the sight of the ashen-faced Curley shaking hands with people and thanking them as they filed past the biers.30

Then, on October 2, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald died in Boston, at age eighty-seven. He had been ailing for months with a chronic circulatory problem, but his passing was nonetheless a blow to Jack. The two had always been close, ever since little Jack first accompanied his grandfather on his political rounds or to Fenway Park for a Red Sox game. They shared an amiable temperament, a quick wit, a romantic sense of history, a relish for politics, and a superhuman capacity for hard work. Jack indeed resembled his maternal grandfather in personality more than he did either of his parents, even as he became a different kind of politician—reticent, patrician, and urbane, words no one ever used to describe Honey Fitz. Rose, in Paris on vacation when her father died, did not make it back in time for the funeral, at which thirty-five hundred mourners jammed the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. Jack represented the family, along with Eunice, Pat, Jean, and Teddy.31 President Truman sent his sympathies, and the pallbearers included both of the state’s senators, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and Leverett Saltonstall; two future U.S. Speakers of the House, John McCormack and Tip O’Neill (then Speaker of the state legislature); and Mayor Curley. As Honey Fitz was carried to his final rest, from the cathedral to St. Joseph Cemetery, in West Roxbury, thousands gathered along the streets, some singing “Sweet Adeline” as the procession passed.

“All his life he had loved his city of Boston,” Jack later said of his grandfather, “and now Boston was returning that love.” From all walks of life they came, “the great, the near great, and the humble.” This outpouring of affection, first for Curley in his personal loss and then for Honey Fitz, left a deep impression on him, made him more inclined to seek higher office. In Lem Billings’s recollection, “There was something in the pageantry and the richness of those two occasions that really got to Jack. It made him realize the extraordinary impact a politician can have on the emotions of ordinary people, an impact often forgotten in the corridors of Capitol Hill.”32 Moreover, the immediacy of the public’s generosity in the face of back-to-back tragedies—their coming together as a community—inclined him to leave the House (which felt removed, desiccated) and seek an office that would serve a broader population than the precicints of his congressional district.

The path to a statewide run was not yet clear, however, as Jack waited for incumbent governor Paul Dever to make up his mind. If Dever opted to take on the widely respected Lodge in the Senate race, Jack would likely seek the governorship; if he didn’t, Jack would be free to challenge Lodge. The latter was his preference from the start—running the State House, he said, meant little more than “deciding on sewer contracts,” and offered scant chance to expound on the pressing issues in world affairs.33 There was always the option of going full tilt for the Senate and, if necessary, taking on Dever in the primary, but such a strategy carried immense risks, especially given Dever’s proven skills as a vote-getter and the inherent advantages he would bring to the primary race as a sitting governor.34

So the Kennedy team watched and waited, in the meantime exposing Jack to as many voters as possible across the state through an ambitious speaking schedule and manifold media appearances. The pattern he had tried out intermittently in previous months, that of spending Thursday through Sunday at home in Massachusetts, appearing before any audience that would have him—Moose clubs, Elks, Shriners, Kiwanis, Rotarians, VFWs, volunteer fire departments, church groups—became regularized; over the course of 1951, he spoke in nearly seventy communities, both large and small, often covering five or six hundred miles in a weekend. Typically in these addresses, he would touch on the pressing policy issues of the moment, but he also ranged broadly, urging his audience to be informed, to register to vote, to consider entering public service.

That summer, meanwhile, two aides, Joe DeGuglielmo and Tony Galluccio, made a multi-week canvassing trip through the state to test Kennedy’s favorability for both potential races. “At my suggestion Tony and I adopted a procedure that we would divide when we’d get into a town and we’d go get a shave whether we needed it or not, we’d go get a haircut, go in a restaurant, talk to waitresses and the rest,” DeGuglielmo recalled. “And what we were trying to do was evaluate the various strengths of Kennedy, Lodge, and Dever. And when we came back after two weeks, then we took a trip down around the New Bedford–Fall River area and then we took other trips around Lawrence and Lowell. And after we got through, Tony and I evolved the theory that Dever could not be reelected and Jack Kennedy would be a lead pipe cinch to knock him off as governor, that probably he could defeat Lodge, but it would be a much closer fight than the other fight.”35

Galluccio also did a lot of solo work, crisscrossing the state over a period of a year, ultimately visiting each one of its 351 cities and towns, avoiding politicians and seeking out respected local citizens—shopkeepers, teachers, lawyers, dentists—to gauge their views on a potential Kennedy candidacy. If they showed interest, Galluccio would ask if they could see themselves working for a potential campaign. Many said yes, some said maybe. He would take down names and addresses and ask if they could recommend anyone else he should contact.

Joseph Kennedy, relentless as always in promoting his son’s interests, worked to build up a statewide organization—needed for either race—and to buttonhole reporters to give Jack favorable newspaper coverage. Joe even reduced his involvement in his myriad business interests in order to involve himself more fully in the fledgling campaign. (After the war he’d moved aggressively into real estate and acquired several oil and gas ventures.) When private polls he commissioned and paid for showed that Jack had a legitimate if long-shot chance of defeating Lodge, father and son were strengthened in the conviction that this was the race they should seek. (The same polls showed that Saltonstall, not up for reelection until 1954, would be harder to beat.)

They were a curious pair, the two Kennedys: so close, so loving, so mutually respectful, yet so far apart in their views of human motivation and purpose, of diplomacy and statecraft, of America’s role in the world. With his son eyeing a run for statewide office, one might have thought Joe Kennedy would seek to avoid public controversy, but one would be wrong. In December 1950 he took on a starring role in an emerging “great debate” (in Life magazine’s words) that threatened to draw in Jack. Invited to give a speech before the University of Virginia Law School’s Student Legal Forum (whose president was none other than Robert F. Kennedy), Joe rejected the anodyne draft prepared by an aide—on lawyers and public service—to offer instead a robust articulation of his starkly isolationist foreign policy views. Communism was “neither monolithic nor eternal,” he told his audience, and would ultimately fail on its own, without external pressure. Thus Washington leaders could and should withdraw from all commitments abroad and instead focus their energies on strengthening the American economy. What exactly, after all, had the billions and billions spent overseas accomplished? Precious little. Truman’s policies indeed were “suicidal” and morally wrong. It followed, Kennedy said, that the United States should stop fighting in Korea—where the Chinese troops had recently entered the fray en masse—and withdraw from there and from the rest of Asia, then do the same thing in Europe. “What business is it of ours to support French colonial policies in Indo-China or to achieve Mr. Syngman Rhee’s concepts of democracy in Korea?…We can do well to mind our business and interfere only where somebody threatens our business and our homes.”36

The Ambassador ensured that he got wide press coverage by sending out advance copies of the speech to friends in the business world. The Hearst papers were enthusiastic, publishing long excerpts and glowing editorials. Arthur Krock, as always, lathered on the praise and noted that “a bipartisan group” was coming around to Kennedy’s position. Even the venerable Walter Lippmann, in a column titled “The Isolationist Tide,” which decried Kennedy’s hardcore Fortress America stance, acknowledged that it might resonate with a public increasingly wary of Harry Truman’s globalism. When former president Herbert Hoover echoed many of Joe’s themes in a nationally broadcast address a few days later, analysts began speaking of a “Hoover-Kennedy” position on world affairs. Supporters cheered, but criticism also followed, the two men being derided as reactionaries and appeasers, as naive dupes, as Kremlin sympathizers. The New York Times seemed to relish pointing out in an editorial that the official Soviet Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, had published the full text of both speeches.37

Joe Kennedy’s position was in fact a reasoned one, and he held it consistently. He viewed Communism in the forties as he had viewed Nazism in the thirties—as a wrongheaded system but not one that fundamentally threatened U.S. security. Such were America’s geographic and demographic advantages that it did not need to project its power globally in some kind of crusade for democratic capitalism. No urgency required it, and moreover any such crusade risked bankrupting the Treasury and spawning endless charges of imperialistic meddling. “Russia does not want a major war now or in the near future,” he wrote as early as March 1946, expressing a view that more than a few historians of the period would come to share. Stalin was a realist, flexible and cautious, and he would always subordinate Soviet Communist ambitions to Russian national ambitions, which were regional rather than global. Kennedy’s more thoughtful critics, among them his son, conceded him these points, even if they disagreed with them. Where they objected sharply was to his claim that the United States had no meaningful stake in preserving a balance of power in Europe or, later, East Asia. For them, Jefferson’s declaration from 1814 still held: “It cannot be to our interest that all Europe should be reduced to a single monarchy”; it would be preferable to wage war than to “see the whole force of Europe wielded by a single hand.”38

IV

When the “great debate” about foreign policy spilled into Congress in January 1951, Jack was happy to skip town for an extended European tour, again with Torby Macdonald along for the ride. Such was the luxury of being wealthy and occupying a safe House seat: one could zoom off for weeks without worry about the monetary or political costs involved. Always keen to spend time in the Old World, Jack also saw in the trip (which consumed a month and took him and Torby to England, France, West Germany, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Spain) an opportunity to bolster his foreign policy credentials in advance of a potential Senate run the following year. With luck, he could avoid embarrassing questions from journalists about the growing chasm between his father’s worldview and his own.

He kept a diary on the trip, which ran to 158 pages and which has been preserved for posterity. To read it today is to see, in addition to the characteristic sloppy handwriting and questionable spelling, that its author had a keen journalistic eye, and moreover that he carried on much like a diplomatic correspondent: that is, he liked to spend his days meeting with governmental leaders, U.S. and foreign diplomats, and journalists, and cared far less for communing with ordinary men and women. If he paid much attention to his physical surroundings, he didn’t think it important to make note of it, but he had considerable powers of observation when he decided to use them:

Yugoslavia—Belgrade—Stones cold and damp—no heating—windows bleach clothes of poor quality—the streets full of crowds—partly due to the fact that there are such few stores. The crowds seem young and energetic many soldiers among them. Tito guards with…machine guns over their shoulders—all with red stars on their vests. Though they look strong, they are not healthy—the disease rate particularly tuberculosis is the highest rate of any country in Europe.

While in Belgrade, Jack had an hourlong session with Marshal Josip Broz Tito at the Yugoslav leader’s luxurious villa on the outskirts of town. Tito had broken with Stalin two and a half years before and proclaimed an independent Communist state. The Truman administration, hopeful that his action could serve as a model to others within the Soviet orbit, sent him economic and military assistance. Tito, affable and charming and chain-smoking through the entire conversation, advised Jack to ignore rumors that several Warsaw Pact nations—Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania—intended in the spring to attack Yugoslavia on Stalin’s orders. Nor, he went on, did it seem remotely plausible that Stalin planned an onslaught on Western Europe; the Kremlin leader was having enough trouble holding what he already had. “My people are confident of the future,” Jack recorded his host as saying. “But I am not a prophet and we are preparing for any eventuality.” Tito added that the Americans were playing Moscow’s game, getting bogged down in an unwinnable war on the Korean Peninsula.39

To Jack’s suggestion that the 1938 Munich Conference and the political misjudgments that led up to it had caused grievous and lasting damage to the world, Tito was dismissive. If anyone blundered in 1938, he charged, dubiously, it was the Czechs. They were well armed and had strong defenses, and should have stood their ground. They lost their nerve, failed to think clearly, and thereby allowed Hitler to seize his opening. Yugoslavia would not make the same error; it would take on the Red Army if necessary. Jack was impressed by his host’s passion and obvious intelligence, but he held firm to his long-held view: Munich was the disastrous by-product of appeasement, the failure not of the Czechs but of Britain and France.40

Here and elsewhere in the diary, Jack was content mostly to record what others said rather than offer his own analysis. Still, it is clear on the pages that, as on his previous European sojourns, his interactions with people in other countries deepened his appreciation for the complexities of the modern age, and for the hard choices that leaders everywhere had to confront. The easy left-right verities that worked so well in American political discourse didn’t cut it so easily overseas, he realized anew. Thus, while the Italians should rightly have to contribute to their own defense, “the Italian economy is so precarious—so poor—with the necessity of paying for food 6% of which they must export, that they hate to give up economic recovery for rearmament.” The French, for their part, felt overwhelmed, beleaguered by the “overpowering” strength of Soviet power, causing Jack to “doubt if the French who are expected to provide the mass of land troops for the defense of Europe can do so.” From David Bruce, the charming and sagacious U.S. ambassador in Paris, Jack heard that NATO was Europe’s best hope.41

From Belgrade it was on to Rome, where Jack and Torby had a private audience with Pope Pius XII. They genuflected before him and kissed his hand, and the pope reminisced nostalgically about his past meetings with the Kennedy family. He gave the young men rosaries and Catholic medals and pronounced a blessing upon each of them. Thence to Spain, where Jack came away impressed by the staunch anti-Communism of the military officials he met. Their armaments were obsolete, however, and Jack found himself in full agreement with one of David Bruce’s claims to him in Paris: that Spain needed American military assistance and should be offered NATO membership.

On his return to America, Jack offered a nuanced assessment of the trip, first in a nationwide radio address carried on 540 stations of the Mutual Broadcasting Company on the evening of February 6, then in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees. The radio talk, a kind of public tutorial of the type American politicians no longer give, ran twenty-five hundred words in length and concerned “Issues in the Defense of Western Europe.” Utilizing parts of his diary, Jack offered a general survey of the countries he’d visited and made no effort to talk down to his audience: “The tax structure [in France], where only fifteen percent of the tax receipts come from direct taxation with the balance derived from hidden taxes, seems to slant away from bringing home to the public the burdens that a defense effort must entail. Wages are low and prices high and no adequate price control exists. A prevalent criticism of France’s government is that it is unable to get through to working people whereas the Communists succeed in doing so.”

Would America’s transatlantic partners make the commitments necessary to stand up to Soviet pressure? Kennedy left the answer disconcertingly open: “The firmness and quality of Europe’s will to resist is not an easy subject of analysis. Besides the war-weariness of her peoples, there are the conflicting political ambitions of her nations. There is the precariousness of her hard-won economic recovery that could be overthrown by the heavy drain of rearmament, while waiting for just such an opportunity are the millions of disloyal Communists within her own borders.”42

Yet this was no time for undue alarmism, Jack cautioned when he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 22. (Presiding during the session and calling Jack to the stand was his potential election foe Henry Cabot Lodge.) His conversations with European leaders as well as U.S. representatives had convinced him, he told the lawmakers, that the Soviets were not about to invade Western Europe. Why should they, “when the best that they could get would be a stalemate during which they would be subjected to atomic bombing?” And even if they could somehow succeed with such an invasion, how would they cope with ruling over the conquered peoples? Even feeding them would be an immense challenge. Jack saw no reason why the Soviets would take such a huge gamble when they didn’t need to—“especially when things are going well in the Far East. In addition, Stalin is an old man, and old men are traditionally cautious.” The congressman had no objection to adding four new U.S. divisions to the two already in Europe, but he stressed that the Europeans had to step up and contribute more to their defense.

Inevitably, the senators asked Kennedy to account for his father’s Virginia speech, in which the older man had urged withdrawal from Europe. He calmly replied that he and his father viewed the situation differently: whereas Ambassador Kennedy, like many other Americans, saw the creation of a viable European defense posture as a nearly hopeless endeavor, he himself felt certain that losing the “productive facilities” of Western Europe would be potentially catastrophic for U.S. security, which meant “we should do our utmost to save it….That is my position,” he said firmly. “I think you should ask my father directly as to his position.”43

It was the perfect ending to Jack Kennedy’s European expedition of 1951. He had indulged his love of visiting the Continent, whose culture and politics and history had so defined his early adulthood years. He had met interesting and important people in six countries and deepened his understanding of the issues facing the Western alliance at this fulcrum of the century. He had returned to an attentive and appreciative American audience and received a respectful hearing in the Senate, whose halls he hoped soon to walk himself. And he had demonstrated that he was no puppet of his controversial father. Small wonder that Boston’s Political Times ran a flattering front-page article headlined “Kennedy Acquiring Title, ‘America’s Younger Statesman.’ ”44

Encouraged by the burst of attention provided by the trip, Jack laid the groundwork for another overseas journey, this time starting in the Middle East and winding up in the Far East, to take place in the late summer or autumn. In his Senate testimony he had noted the growing danger of Soviet expansion in Asia, and he elaborated the point in remarks at a meeting of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation in Boston in April. He also sensed growing agitation throughout the colonial world, telling the Boston audience that “nationalistic passions” were stirring against the European imperial powers, with major implications for American security. Military techniques would not be enough to keep the Communists from taking control in these areas, Jack continued, which meant it would be vital for Washington and the West to stand for something that these oppressed peoples would find appealing. If Communism prevailed in Asia, it would be because the democracies failed to offer a compelling alternative. Yet U.S. policy seemed to consist mostly of rushing to support anyone and everyone who professed to be anti-Communist. “That puts us in partnership with the corrupt and reactionary groups whose policies breed the discontent on which Soviet Communism feeds and prospers—groups which might have long ago collapsed if it had not been for our assistance. In short, we even support and sustain corruption and tyranny to maintain a status-quo wherever we find existing regimes anti-communistic.”45

V

The fall trip would be a monster, covering twenty-five thousand miles over six-plus weeks, with stops in France, Israel, Iran, Pakistan, India, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, French Indochina, Malaya, Burma, Korea, and Japan. With his various aches and ailments, the congressman could have been forgiven for keeping the itinerary crisp and clean, flying into one capital city, having a meeting or two and a photo op, and then zipping off to the next country. That’s usually how it went on lawmakers’ “fact-finding” junkets, after all. But that wasn’t Jack Kennedy’s way, never had been. He wanted to see things for himself, get a feel for the place, talk with more people (if mostly of the well-placed variety). This required more time—and more planning. For weeks the congressman’s staff was kept busy arranging logistics, making reservations, scheduling meetings.

It would prove to be a highly consequential trip, and not only for substantive policy reasons but for personal ones as well. Accompanying Jack this time around were brother Bobby, age twenty-five, and sister Patricia, twenty-seven. For the two brothers in particular, the experience was a revelation. They had never spent this kind of extended time together, at least when they were old enough for it to be meaningful—the eight-and-a-half-year age difference was too great. Jack wondered how it would go, musing to Lem Billings about whether Bobby would be “a pain in the ass.” Bobby, for his part, had no such worries. Jack’s wit, his intelligence, his grace, his courage in war—Bobby revered it all. And now he would get to be side by side with him as they traversed much of the globe.46

In personality, Bobby was intense and combative, more akin to the departed Joe Junior than to Jack, though also more straitlaced than either.47 Always close to his mother, he shared her religiosity, but it was his father’s love and approval he especially craved. Following Milton Academy and a stint in the Navy Reserve (1944–46), Bobby scraped by at Harvard, graduating in the class of 1948, then set his sights on law school. His grades were too low for Harvard or Yale, his and his father’s preferred choices, but the University of Virginia took him, albeit with a warning that he would need to step up his academic game.48 While in Charlottesville, Bobby earned a reputation for rudeness and pugnacity, and he had few friends.49 But he showed promise in the classroom (if also a tendency toward absolutist, black-and-white judgments) and graduated in the middle of his class, in the spring of 1951, while serving in his final year as the president of the Student Legal Forum. By then he was married, to the former Ethel Skakel, an athletic, spirited, and devoutly Catholic extrovert who had volunteered on Jack’s 1946 campaign and was a close friend of sister Jean’s. Jack served as best man at the wedding, and younger brother Teddy was an usher.

In addition to inviting his father to speak to the forum, Bobby also brought in other luminaries, among them Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and former Harvard Law School dean James M. Landis, both Joe Kennedy cronies. Then, in the spring of 1951, shortly before graduation, Bobby welcomed Joe McCarthy, whose visit was notable less for his lecture than for the dinner afterwards, at Bobby and Ethel’s home. As the evening progressed, the senator consumed more and more alcohol and became less and less coherent, until embarrassed attendees began to slip out. At one point McCarthy groped a female guest. Bobby eventually had to help him into bed, but the incident did not sour him on the lawmaker. “I liked him almost immediately,” Bobby later said.50

At the start of October 1951 the siblings set off, with a brief initial stop in Paris, where Jack met with General Eisenhower at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe on October 3. Once again keeping a detailed travel diary, he jotted down the legendary commander’s take on the postwar situation:

Eisenhower looking very fit….Attacked those who [disavowed criticism of the] settlements made during the war. Said he was merely fighting a war. Had very little to do with them. States that he asked Truman at Potsdam not to beg Russians to come into war….He mentioned that only one conversation he had had of importance at Potsdam and Truman mentioned there about supporting him for Pres in 1945 and had done so several times since….Said $64 question was whether Kremlin leaders were fanatics—doctrinaires—or just ruthless men—determined to hold on to power—If first, chances of peace are much less than 2nd….He talked well—with a lot of God damns—completely different type than MacArthur, seems somewhat verbose as does Mac. Does not believe Russ[ia] can be frightened into aggressive war by the limited forces we are building up.51

In Israel, Jack was the same detached yet empathetic observer he had been on his visit in 1939. He was impressed by David Ben-Gurion’s leadership of the three-year-old nation, but also expressed understanding of the plight suffered by Arab refugees whom Israel refused to take back. Back in his hotel after the dinner, Jack—who had a love of poetry that he kept mostly hidden, perhaps for fear that it seemed unmanly—jotted down four lines from a poem by Shelley penned in 1819, after the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester that year, in which government forces fired on a gathering of unarmed protesters seeking Parliament reforms. The poem, harshly critical of government ministers Sidmouth and Castlereagh, has been called an early statement of the principle of nonviolent resistance, and one wonders why Jack excerpted it. Whatever his reason, one reads the lines today with foreboding:

 

I met Murder on the way—

He had a mask like Castlereagh—

Very smooth he look’d, yet grim;

Seven bloodhounds followed him.52

The Israel stay established the basic pattern that Jack followed throughout the trip: he would meet with high leaders of the country in question as well as top U.S. and foreign representatives, then some journalists or intellectuals. Sometimes Bobby joined him, and, more rarely, also Pat; often he went solo.53 And whereas a different politician might have been content with a handshake, a few minutes of desultory chitchat, and a photograph, Jack sought serious dialogues with his interlocutors. Thus, in Tehran, scene of the great Allied wartime conference eight years before, he met at length with U.S. ambassador Loy Henderson to discuss President Mohammad Mossadegh’s decision, only days before, to seize British-controlled oil fields. “The British have been extremely shortsighted here,” Henderson told him, in failing to give Iranians a large share of the spoils. “Almost stupid.” Yet the British officials Jack encountered seemed unfazed, assuring him that Mossadegh was a clown who wouldn’t last long. Jack doubted this assessment, and he sensed trouble ahead for the British in Iran—and, by extension, for the United States.

The tensions were no less great in Pakistan—four days after Jack and Bobby held a lengthy session with Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, one of the nation’s founders, he was gunned down by an assassin. In his diary, Jack noted that “assassinations have taken a heavy toll of leaders in the Middle and Far East,” and then listed some of the killings of the previous four years. The Khan murder reinforced the congressman’s sense of the precariousness of political power in newly emerging nations, and his belief that Asia would become an increasingly vital concern for U.S. foreign policy. Khan had stressed the importance of Kashmir, which both Pakistan and India claimed as theirs, and gave his guest no sense that the issue could be resolved peacefully anytime soon.

Next it was on to India, where Jawaharlal Nehru offered no more assurances on Kashmir and proved an indifferent yet inspiring host. Over a lunch at the presidential palace, attended also by Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi, he mostly ignored Jack and Bobby and focused his charm on Pat, but after the meal he and Jack met for an extended discussion. Suave and self-assured, the British-educated Nehru, who would soon turn sixty-two, eschewed specifics in favor of the big picture (he breezily professed to have no clue when Jack asked him how many divisions the Indian army could field), and he defended forcefully his nation’s neutrality in the Cold War. Aware that the Kennedy trio would soon be visiting Indochina, Nehru called the French war against Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist forces there an example of doomed colonialism. Communism, he stressed to Jack during a dinner conversation, offered the masses “something to die for,” whereas the West promised only the status quo. War of the type the French were attempting against Ho would never stop Communism; it would only strengthen it, “for the devastation of war breeds only more poverty and more want.”

Jack found power in this argument; indeed, he had argued similarly in his speech to the taxpayers’ group in Boston in April. And he could see the force of the Indian leader’s personality. Normally scornful of people who didn’t know their topics down to the specific details, Jack in this case gave the older man a pass, so taken was he with Nehru’s quiet eloquence. “He is interested only in subtler and higher questions,” Jack jotted approvingly in the diary. “Generally agreed Nehru is everything in India—the works. Tremendously popular with the masses.”54

In Thailand, the Kennedys toured the sites, including the Grand Palace and its Temple of the Emerald Buddha, and Jack got an audience with the prime minister. From there the Americans pressed on to Indonesia and Singapore and then Malaya and French Indochina. The Malaya stop was brief but gave the Kennedys a snapshot of the country’s protracted guerrilla struggle against British rule: on October 6, just days prior to their arrival, revolutionary forces had ambushed and assassinated the British high commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney. Tensions, already on the rise that fall, ratcheted up further, and British officials insisted on giving Jack heavy police protection as he traveled without his siblings to see a mining operation just a few miles outside Kuala Lumpur.55

But it was the ten days in Indochina that would be the most momentous stop of all during John F. Kennedy’s globe-trotting adventures of 1951. (“The most interesting place by far,” he wrote his father.56) Even before the aircraft touched down at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat airport on a sunny day in mid-October, Jack felt a special sense of anticipation, for he knew that the war had become a major skirmish in the broader East-West struggle, transformed from its initial status as a straightforward Franco-Vietnamese affair into something broader, something that took it into the epicenter of Asian Cold War politics. Over the previous year and a half, Washington had steadily stepped up U.S. aid to France and its Indochinese allies, while on the other side Mao Zedong’s Communist Chinese government provided growing (if still comparatively modest) assistance to the Ho Chi Minh–led Viet Minh. As such, Jack understood, the Indochina war could have major ramifications for American foreign relations and, by extension, for his own political future.^*3, 57

The next afternoon, keen to gain a deeper understanding of developments, Jack headed off alone to the apartment of Associated Press bureau chief Seymour Topping. The two talked for hours, and Topping laid out why the war was going badly for the French and likely wouldn’t get better: Ho Chi Minh’s support was too broad and too deep, plus he had the backing of Mao’s China, immediately to the north. Jack was struck by what he heard, and he got a similar downbeat assessment from Edmund Gullion, the young counselor at the U.S. legation, who told him American officials in Saigon were split in their views on French prospects in the war.60 In the days to come, Jack asked tough questions during briefings with the U.S. minister, Donald Heath, and the charismatic French military commander and high commissioner, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. De Lattre, who impressed Jack with his dynamism and self-assurance, insisted that France and its allies would see the challenge through and would prevail, but Jack was dubious. His doubts didn’t fade when de Lattre, after complaining to Heath about the congressman’s frank and questioning attitude, hosted the Kennedy siblings for a fancy dinner and arranged for them to travel north to see the fortifications guarding the Red River Delta approaches to Hanoi.61

“We flew over the paddies of the Delta where the French and the guerrillas were locked in a deadly struggle, and through which the Chinese must come if they seize Southeast Asia,” Jack related in a speech a few weeks later, when back on U.S. soil. “Marshal de Lattre pointed from the window of the plane with the cane he had carried since his only son’s death in the fighting of last summer. ‘As long as the Delta can be held,’ he said, ‘Indo China can be held, but if the Delta is lost, Indo China and all of Southeast Asia will be lost with all of its resources and all of its manpower.’ ” All well and good, Jack thought, but how could such an outcome be prevented? The key to victory, he told his audience, “is to get the Asians themselves to assume the burden of the struggle. As long as it’s a conflict between native communists and western imperialists, success will be impossible. This then must be the pattern for all of our future actions in the Far East. The support of the legitimate aspirations of the people of this area against all who seek to dominate them—from whatever quarter they may come.”62

In a diary entry from Vietnam, he spoke in similar terms: “We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people. Because everyone believes that we control the U.N. [and] because our wealth is supposedly inexhaustible, we will be damned if we don’t do what they [the emerging nations] want.” U.S. officials, he said, must avoid the path trodden by the declining European empires and instead demonstrate that the enemy is not just Communism but “poverty and want,” “sickness and disease,” and “injustice and inequality,” all of which were a feature of life for millions of Asians and Arabs.

Bobby saw things in much the same way. “It is generally agreed,” he wrote his father from Saigon, “that if a plebiscite were held now throughout the former Indochina the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh would receive at least 70% of the vote. Because of the great U.S. war aid to the French we are being closely identified with the French the result being that we have also become quite unpopular. Our mistake has been not to insist on definite political reforms by the French toward the natives as prerequisites to any aid. As it stands now we are becoming more & more involved in the war to a point where we can’t back out….It doesn’t seem to be a picture with a very bright future.”63

VI

Jack’s fears that Bobby would be a “pain in the ass” travel companion proved wholly unfounded. From day one to the end, he found he valued his little brother’s insights, his energy, his good cheer. They grew closer, bonded in a way they had never done before. Pat could see the change in their relationship, as could other family members after they returned home. They themselves sensed it. When Jack fell deathly ill in Tokyo—most likely from a flare-up of his Addison’s disease—and was rushed by military aircraft to a U.S. Navy hospital on Okinawa, Bobby never left his side.64 As Jack’s temperature soared past 106 degrees and the hospital staff feared they would lose him, his brother’s steadfastness calmed everyone’s nerves, including the patient’s.

Earlier in the trip, Jack had jotted down some lines from Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress,” which now seemed addressed specifically to him:

But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.

Later, Bobby related of the Okinawa scare that “everybody there just expected he’d die.”65 But he didn’t. Within a few days Jack regained his strength and the crisis passed, whereupon the trio continued on to Korea, where the war was stalemated around the thirty-eighth parallel, with no end in sight. The sheer difficulty of the rugged terrain surprised the brothers and helped them better understand why the fighting had proved so challenging for American troops. Jack further concluded that inadequate airpower had been instrumental: if MacArthur had been given a sufficient number of planes, he never would have been subjected to the massive counterattack the Chinese had launched against his units the previous fall.

Upon returning to the United States, Jack wasted few opportunities to talk up the expedition and to stress that Americans ignored world developments at their peril. Foreign policy mattered enormously, he told several audiences, indeed overshadowed all else. But the choices for statesmen were not easy, for the world was a complex place. Communism might mean one thing in country A and something else in country B and yet another thing in country C; U.S. policy had to respond accordingly.

“I cannot say that I have returned pleased by our achievements through these critical post-war years,” he told a nationwide radio audience over the Mutual Broadcasting Network in mid-November. “Certainly, I do not and one cannot blame America and her policies for all that has happened, for no matter what America might have done, nothing could have avoided nor will avoid the inevitable birth-pangs of Asia’s rising nationalism. But mindful of this turmoil I should have hoped that with our traditional concern for the independence of other peoples, our generosity, our desire to relieve poverty and inequality, we would—whatever else happened—have made friends throughout this world. It is tragic that not only have we made no new friends, but we have lost old ones.” More than anything, the experience of seeing the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Far East up close demonstrated for him that the Communist threat “cannot be met effectively by merely the force of arms. It is the peoples themselves that must be led to reject it, and it is to those peoples that our policies must be directed.”66

With respect to Indochina, Jack declared before the Boston Chamber of Commerce a few days later that France was “desperately trying to hang on to a rich portion of its former empire against a communist-dominated nationalist uprising.”

The so-called loyal native government is such only in name. It is a puppet government, manned frequently by puppeteers once subservient to the Japanese, now subservient to the French. A free election there, in the opinion of all the neutral observers I talked with, would go in favor of Ho and his Communists as against the French….We have now allied ourselves with the French in this struggle, allied ourselves against the Communists but also against the rising tide of nationalism. We have become the West, the proponents of empire—carriers of what we had traditionally disdained—the white man’s burden.67

On NBC’s nationally televised Meet the Press on December 2—a show on which no junior congressman had ever appeared—Jack stayed on the theme, telling the journalist panel that in Asia and the Middle East, the United States had “fallen heir to much of the hatred [the European imperial powers had] incurred by their policies,” and that it could never succeed if it sought merely to impose its will on other countries.68 To panelist May Craig’s suggestion that U.S. troops in Korea were not being permitted to fight to win, Jack gently pushed back; military victory might not be possible, he told her, and thus the administration was doing the right thing in pursuing a negotiated settlement. (“Yes, I do believe that we ought to take agreement where we can get it.”) And to Newsweek’s Ernest Lindley he said that in Indochina no success would be possible until the “natives” were promised the right of self-determination and the right to govern themselves—and by a specific date. “Otherwise this guerrilla war is just going to spread and grow and we’re going to finally get driven out of Southeast Asia.”69

Here we find the second reason why Jack Kennedy’s Asian tour of 1951 matters in historical terms (the first being that it caused him and Bobby to grow much closer): it altered his outlook on U.S. diplomacy in what would come to be called the Third World. Already in previous months he had moved away from the simplistic idea that the spread of Communism in Asia occurred only or mostly because of State Department bungling; the expedition reinforced this shift. More important, the trip convinced him that America must align itself with the newly emerging nations, that colonialism was a spent force, and that Communism could never be vanquished exclusively or even principally by military means. One had to meet colonized and recently independent peoples where they lived, had to speak to their needs, their aspirations. Did U.S. officials understand these essential truths? Jack was skeptical. Many of “our representatives abroad seem to be a breed of their own,” he told reporters in November, “moving mainly in their own limited circles not knowing too much of the people to whom they are accredited, unconscious of the fact that their role is not tennis and cocktails, but the interpretation to a foreign country of the meaning of American life and the interpretations to us of that country’s aspirations and aims.”70

In Robert Kennedy’s later assessment, the trip left “a very major impression” on his brother, for it showed “these countries from the Mediterranean to the South China sea all…searching for a future; what their relationship was going to be to the United States; what we were going to do in our relationship to them; the importance of the right kind of representation; the importance of associating ourselves with the people rather than just the governments, which might be transitional, transitory; the mistakes of the war in Indochina; the mistake of the French policy; the failure of the United States to back the people.”71

Jack’s problem, one he would wrestle with throughout the rest of the decade, was how to align this more subtle interpretation of Communism and Cold War dynamics with the increasingly Manichaean political debate at home in the United States. As an ambitious politician angling for higher office, he understood that many voters liked simple explanations and quick fixes, and moreover that Republicans in the forthcoming 1952 election would seek to discredit the Democrats at every turn, hammering hard on the theme that Truman’s party was weak-kneed and irresolute on combating Communist agitation at home and abroad.

He knew, moreover, that Joe McCarthy continued to ride high. Back in April, after Truman fired Douglas MacArthur for publicly airing his disagreements with the White House over the conduct of the Korean War, the Wisconsin senator condemned the action and called for the president’s impeachment. Two months after that, on the Senate floor, McCarthy had gone after none other than General George C. Marshall, who had been Army chief of staff during World War II and then had led the State and Defense departments. He was a national symbol, an icon, a man seemingly beyond reproach, yet McCarthy charged him with “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man; a conspiracy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.” Specifically, McCarthy proclaimed, Marshall had willfully allowed China to be lost and had squandered American prestige and power. Democrats were outraged and called on GOP leaders to condemn the speech, but McCarthy’s colleagues mostly stayed silent, while the right-wing press heaped praise on his assessment. That fall, while the Kennedy siblings journeyed through Asia, the Wisconsin man again claimed that the State Department harbored Communists.72

McCarthy made the cover of Time that October—the surest sign he had arrived. Editor in chief Henry Luce, a staunch Republican and member of the China lobby, bowed to no one in the depth of his anti-Communist fervor, but he had little regard for the kind of simplistic populism McCarthy represented and, moreover, found him coarse and crude. To Luce, the senator’s exaggerations and grandstanding threatened to discredit more authentic anti-Communist efforts. And he had an inkling that McCarthy’s popularity had peaked. So on this occasion Time did what the Luce publications had thus far generally refrained from doing: it hit McCarthy hard, accusing him of peddling in innuendo, of answering legitimate questions with savage attacks, of having little curiosity and little regard for common decency. “Joe, like all effective demagogues, found an area of emotion and exploited it. No regard for fair play, no scruple for exact truth hampers Joe’s political course. If his accusations destroy reputations, if they subvert the principle that a man is innocent until proved guilty, he is oblivious. Joe, immersed in the joy of battle, does not even seem to realize the gravity of his own charges.” Yet “ ‘McCarthyism’ is now part of the language,” the article acknowledged, and anyone choosing to take on McCarthy faced an immense challenge: “His burly figure casts its shadow over the coming presidential campaign. Thousands turn out to hear his speeches. Millions regard him as ‘a splendid American’ (a fellow Senator recently called him that).”73

McCarthy, as always, hit back hard, blasting Time for “desperate lying” and sending letters to advertisers urging them to stop giving business to Time and its sister publications Life and Fortune. At Time Inc., executives worried that Luce, usually so astute in judging the public mood, had miscalculated—McCarthy, they believed, was not losing public support but gaining it. Luce backed off. His magazines returned to a safer position, occasionally chiding the senator, sometimes praising him, and generally holding to the line that he was a necessary counterweight to the Truman administration’s timidity on Communism.74

Such was the tricky path Jack Kennedy would have to navigate should he seek statewide office the following autumn; he knew it, his aides and confidants knew it. McCarthy remained deeply popular among Catholics in Massachusetts, and he was, moreover, a friend of the family. He still enjoyed support among Republican leaders who, however objectionable they found him personally, believed he was winning votes for the party. (Robert Taft came to McCarthy’s defense when Harry Truman described him as “a Kremlin asset.”)75 Truman’s popularity, meanwhile, was low and going lower—in 1951 it never rose above 32 percent. Jack accordingly walked a middle path, boosting his anti-Communist credentials by voicing policy differences with the White House on specific matters, including China policy and military preparedness, while also noting near the end of the year that accusations of Communists in the Foreign Service were “irrational.”76

It was a savvy strategy in the circumstances, but would it be enough in a tough battle to unseat the formidable Henry Cabot Lodge? For that matter, would Jack even get the opportunity to wage that fight? As the year turned, Paul Dever had yet to decide if he would seek another term in the governor’s mansion or take on Lodge for the Senate seat. Until he did, John F. Kennedy and his team could do nothing but continue their behind-the-scenes preparations. And wait.

II

The Kennedy campaign was poised for a fast start. Already in 1951, when Jack knew he would wage a statewide campaign but not yet which one, he hung on the wall in his Bowdoin Street apartment a map of Massachusetts. He and Dave Powers put pins on the communities, large and small, that he had visited, then plotted how to cover the blank areas. “He used to say, ‘Gosh, we don’t have anything up there,’ ” Powers remembered, “and he’d point up to the Western part of the state around Springfield, Chicopee, and Holyoke, and I said, ‘well, we’ll work on it.’ ” Calls would be made, and soon Congressman Kennedy would have pro bono speaking engagements in these locales. By the end of 1951 “we had every one of the [state’s] 39 cities covered” with pins, Powers said; by April 1952, when he announced, even the smaller towns in the western parts of the state had been pinned.13 Everywhere Jack went, moreover, aides would jot down the names and addresses of notable people he met. The information would be transferred onto three-by-five-inch index cards and added to an existing file of names from the House campaigns. The result: even before the campaign launched, Jack Kennedy had a contact in virtually every community in the state.

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.

In one sense, ironically, Bobby was an extension of his father, for in short order he took on all the attributes ever given to the old man, which is to say he was deemed ruthless, caustic, relentless, defiant, and ferocious. (“I don’t care if anybody around here likes me, as long as they like Jack,” he would say.) Veterans of the state political establishment were appalled by his lack of tact and respect, by his insistence that he was running an organization whose allegiance was to Jack Kennedy, not to the Democratic Party and not to Governor Dever and his team. More than once, these encounters ended on the verge of fisticuffs. But even the naysayers had to concede that Bobby got things done; he was effective in his role. Or at least behind closed doors—whenever he had to make even brief public remarks on his brother’s behalf, he suffered stage fright and turned timid, if sometimes in an endearing sort of way. “My brother Jack couldn’t be here,” he murmured at one early event. “My mother couldn’t be here. My sister Eunice couldn’t be here. My sister Pat couldn’t be here. My sister Jean couldn’t be here. But if my brother Jack were here, he’d tell you Lodge has a very bad voting record. Thank you.”22

III

In May and June it was still too soon for campaign rallies, but not for more specialized events. Remembering the great success of the women’s tea reception at Cambridge’s Commander Hotel in the closing days of the 1946 primary campaign, the Kennedy team planned a series of similar “teas” throughout the state, to be held in hotel ballrooms or high school gymnasiums, usually on Sundays. “Reception in honor of Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy and her son, Congressman John F. Kennedy, Sunday afternoon,” the gilt-edged invitations, on sleek white cards, would read; encased in expensive, hand-addressed vellum envelopes, they would be put in boxes and driven to the town in question so they would bear a local postmark. Attendees would get to hear a few words from the candidate and his mother—and sometimes also from one or more of his sisters—and there would be a receiving line. Tea and cake or cookies would be served; often an orchestra would play. As with the 1946 event, the response was overwhelming. The first tea, at the Bancroft Hotel, in Worcester, on May 18, drew five thousand women; the second, in Springfield the following week, was almost as large. In Fall River, Dave Powers stood at the door with a clicker, counting the women as they entered; when he got to two thousand, he quit.30

Jack inserted himself into the early planning for the teas. In late April he asked Pauline “Polly” Fitzgerald, a second cousin by marriage, to meet him at his apartment to discuss how best to proceed. “I’d like to have a tea in Worcester to kind of open my campaign,” he told her, and “I’d like to have you set this up for me.” Fitzgerald said yes on the spot. Jack told her he thought there should be invitations, worded in such a way that nobody would feel excluded. Fitzgerald agreed, and the two determined that the bottom right corner of the card should read, “Guests invited,” meaning the recipient could bring along others. “So it would have a sort of dual purpose,” Fitzgerald later said, “in that a person who got it would feel that she was very lucky and it was personal, and yet people who didn’t get it would know that they could be invited.”31

“In the first place,” the congressman said in his brief remarks in Worcester, “for some strange reason, there are more women than men in Massachusetts, and they live longer. Secondly, my grandfather, the late John F. Fitzgerald, ran for the United States Senate thirty-six years ago against my opponent’s grandfather, Henry Cabot Lodge, and he lost by only 30,000 votes in an election where women were not allowed to vote. I hope that by impressing the female electorate that I can more than take up the slack.”32

Thrilled by the turnout in Worcester, Jack found Fitzgerald in a corridor of the hotel after the event. He had been shaking hands for hours and was exhausted, yet elated. This woman clearly knew what she was doing. “Now, come in to see me and let’s talk about doing more teas,” he told her. Soon Fitzgerald found herself appointed chief planner for the receptions, which would total three dozen throughout the state and be attended by more than seventy thousand women. The work was arduous for her and all involved, she later said, but wholly worth it, “because there was just something about him that communicated so to people. And as the women went through that line, he had an indefinable something that made every woman there feel that he needed her to work for him. It’s nothing that could be put on.”33

It was about sex appeal, no question, as it had been in the earlier campaigns—the smile, the tousled hair, the good looks and graceful bearing, the bachelor status. But there was more to it. John F. Kennedy’s public persona just drew people in. It had been evident in the house parties and halting early campaign speeches in 1946, and it was evident now, six years later. His opponent would subsequently acknowledge as much, telling an interviewer that Jack Kennedy “had a tremendous and well-deserved popularity and he was an extraordinarily likable man. In fact, I liked him. So often in a campaign, you look for a man’s faults and then campaign on them. Well, in this case you didn’t do that.” A former mayor of Pittsfield, reflecting back a few years later, said something similar: “There’s something about Jack—and I don’t know quite what it is—that makes people want to believe in him. Conservatives and liberals both tell you that he’s with them, because they want to believe that he is, and they want to be with him. They want to identify their views with him.”34

Of the Cambridge tea party, again held at the Commander Hotel, one reporter remarked:

For approximately two hours, an unbroken line of women filed slowly across the stage, shaking hands with each of the Kennedys, mumbling confused introductions and pleasantries, and pushed on through a side door into the lobby still packed with those waiting their turn to go through the receiving line. Along one side of the spacious room were long tables with harassed waitresses—pouring tea and coffee and serving cookies. (Total consumption was reported later at 8,600 cups.)…An air of pleasant, chattering amiability in spite of a few splattered dresses and two faintings. When the handshaking in the ballroom was finally completed around 10:30 [P.M.], the Kennedys, looking wilted but determined, came in for tea themselves.35

The reporter picked up on one of the defining features of the receptions: they were family affairs, and winningly so. Rose Kennedy in particular, modish and youthful at age sixty, won universal accolades for her role as hostess. Campaign aides would prepare written remarks for her, but they needn’t have bothered: invariably she followed her own script, usually without notes, describing her experiences raising nine children (often she brought a prop, in the form of the index card file she had used to keep track of illnesses and vaccinations and dental work) and dropping in artful and humorous references to her father, Honey Fitz. Though in one-on-one conversation Rose Kennedy could be frosty and remote, before a crowd she had an unerring social instinct, what Kenny O’Donnell called “a perfect knack for saying the right thing at the right time and always striking the right note.” She charmed Italians in the North End with a few words of Italian and told them about growing up in the neighborhood. In Dorchester she reminisced lightly about her experiences at Dorchester High School. She even adapted her wardrobe to the individual locales, jettisoning her preferred high-priced Parisian offerings for plainer, if still elegant, styles when she ventured to the less prosperous areas. On more than one occasion she changed outfits in the car on the way from one event to another.36

Her daughters, meanwhile, with the exception of Rosemary, were seemingly everywhere, going door to door, speaking to women’s clubs around the state, showing a short film of Jack’s career, hosting house parties in and around Boston, and appearing at the teas.^*1 Jean also doubled as office manager at the Kilby Street headquarters. Bobby’s wife, Ethel, also got into the act, even giving a campaign speech in Fall River on the same night she gave birth to Joseph P. Kennedy II. “I’m just crazy about Jack,” she enthused, “and I’m only an in-law.”37

IV

The great secret of the 1952 campaign, though common knowledge to those around the candidate, was that he was often in acute back pain. In a May appearance at a fire station in Springfield, he gamely agreed to slide down a fire pole for the cameras, from the third floor to the first. When he hit bottom he winced in agony. The succeeding days brought scant relief, and he was forced to use crutches to get around. Aides, worried it would become a campaign issue, explained away Jack’s absences from headquarters by pointing to a recurrence of an old war injury—a transparent effort to evoke sympathy for the military hero. They insisted the issue would soon pass and that his overall health was excellent. In truth, candidate Kennedy was in near-constant pain that summer and fall, finding relief only when he soaked in the bathtub at the end of a long day—or, when the schedule permitted, between events in midafternoon. The painkillers helped, but not enough. Before he entered an auditorium for a speech, Powers or another aide would usually take his crutches and discreetly hide them away so no one in the audience could see them. Jack would stride in, lean and sinewy, the seeming epitome of youthful good health. He would give his short speech and then stand for hour upon excruciating hour in the receiving line, never giving anything away but leaning subtly against a piano or a wall when possible. Only when no such aid was available and the pain got too great would the crutches come back out.38

He drove himself forward, relentlessly. He smelled victory, could almost taste it, but feared that any letdown could spell doom for his campaign—and thus for his political career. For six months he traversed the state, from Cape Cod to the Berkshires, hitting the larger cities eight or nine times and the small towns at least once, shaking hands and giving speeches, time after time, usually eating a cheeseburger on the fly. “Now we were starting literally—this is not exaggerated—at five or five-thirty in the morning,” recalled Frank Morrissey, whose task was to get the candidate up in the morning and put him to bed at night. “We were speaking at a very tight split-second schedule, going across this whole commonwealth, and we’d go until one or two until we put him to bed.” When the candidate proved hard to wake up, Morrissey resorted to a trick in which he picked up the phone and pretended to make a call. “I’d say, ‘Joe, I’m sorry we have to cancel this first one…’ And I’d no sooner get the word ‘cancel’ out, than Jack would let out a yell, get up, and away we’d start. We’d do that repeatedly.”39 It didn’t make Morrissey’s task easier that Kennedy much preferred to sleep each night at home on Bowdoin Street, where he had a mattress he knew, with a board under it, rather than get a hotel room locally; this meant longer days and more time on the road.

Sometimes the candidate and his aides would repair to Schrafft’s, in Charlestown, for late-night strategy sessions over milkshakes until the place closed, then move on to his apartment for still more scheming. Alcohol seldom factored in. A running gag in the campaign was that Kennedy, at the end of a bruising day, would exclaim, “Boy, do I need a drink,” his aides would eagerly agree, and he would take them to a drugstore for a chocolate shake.40

All the while, the team tried, with modest success, to manufacture campaign issues. One argument, laid out by Jim Landis and others, blamed the two Republican senators—Lodge and Leverett Saltonstall—for the state’s industrial decline and unemployment, an awkward assertion given Paul Dever’s simultaneous campaign boast that the economy was humming under his leadership. Another attacked Lodge for supposedly being inattentive to his Senate duties. An internal campaign document titled “Lodge’s Dodges” vilified the senator for supposed policy reversals, and during the summer months the campaign hit him from both the left and the right: from the left for opposing key aspects of the Truman administration’s Fair Deal legislation, including with respect to housing and labor; from the right for being too supportive of Truman on foreign policy, too reticent in opposing Communism. Lodge was accused of favoring the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Korea, and more generally of being timidly bipartisan, while by contrast Jack Kennedy had the courage to oppose numerous parts of the administration’s foreign policy. In this regard, a campaign document declared, Congressman Kennedy “has been much closer to the position of [Ohio Republican Robert] Taft than has Lodge.”41

The reference to Senator Taft was a shrewd suggestion by Joseph Kennedy, who saw a chance to pick up support for Jack among Massachusetts conservatives dismayed by what was happening within the GOP: the growing support for General Dwight D. Eisenhower in his battle with Taft for the party’s presidential nomination. By all rights the nomination should have belonged to Taft, a widely respected and highly intelligent lawmaker—he had graduated first in his class at Yale and then again at Harvard Law—who had waited twelve years for this moment and had been deeply loyal to his party throughout. (He was proud of his “Mr. Republican” nickname.)42 The eastern establishment wing of the party might have snagged the previous three nominations, but Taft felt certain that he was closer to the hearts of most rank-and-file party members than was Tom Dewey, twice the candidate and twice the loser. Perhaps he was, but he hadn’t counted on an Eisenhower candidacy. Into the fall of 1951, as both parties courted him, the five-star general stayed publicly coy about his plans, in part because he was uncertain about running. His competitive instincts, which ran deep behind his sunny disposition, inclined him toward jumping in. But he had already held a more important job—overseeing the invasion of Europe in 1944—and he did not relish subjecting himself to a potentially sordid and dehumanizing nomination battle.43

Gradually, however, Eisenhower edged toward seeking the Republican nomination, urged on by the eastern wing of the party and impelled by his own concern that a President Taft would take the country in a sharply isolationist direction, perhaps even pull the United States out of the Western alliance.^*2 In January 1952 he allowed his name to be entered in the New Hampshire primary; in April he asked to be relieved of his duty in Paris as commander of NATO so he could come home to contest the GOP nomination; the request was granted. Though in hindsight it is tempting to see the outcome of the ensuing battle as foreordained, with the renowned general and his military bearing and high-wattage smile cruising to victory over the stiff and colorless Taft, in fact their fight was a rancorous, closely contested affair—heading into the party convention, in Chicago that July, Taft indeed had a clear lead in delegate support. But Eisenhower’s forces were better organized and better on the convention floor, and he prevailed. Taft and many of his backers left Chicago deeply embittered.44

Eisenhower’s decisive first-ballot win obscured a deep split within the party. To secure his victory, he had accepted a party platform that contained isolationist elements and at the same time condemned Truman’s containment policy and called for the “liberation” of Eastern European nations. It denounced the 1945 Yalta agreement and accused the Democrats of harboring traitors in the government. As a further sop to conservatives, Eisenhower accepted the selection of Richard M. Nixon as his running mate.45 The California man soon made good on his selection, going after the “spineless” Truman and his party with gusto. Of the Democratic presidential nominee, the urbane and articulate Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, Nixon said he was an “appeaser,” with a “Ph.D. from Dean Acheson’s Cowardly College of Communist Containment.”46

None of this would have mattered much to the Senate race in Massachusetts had not Henry Cabot Lodge been one of the principal figures behind Eisenhower’s candidacy. As much as anyone, it was Lodge who had leaned on the general to leave his Paris post to return to America to contest the nomination; in January 1952 it was Lodge who entered the general’s name in the New Hampshire candidacy. In subsequent months he became Ike’s de facto campaign manager and a principal strategist in the convention struggle in Chicago.47 As a result, Lodge was distracted throughout the summer, paying little attention to his own campaign and seldom setting foot in Massachusetts. To make matters worse, his actions on Eisenhower’s behalf alienated Taft-supporting conservatives in the state, some of whom vowed to sit out the Senate race and others of whom went a step further, pledging their support to John Kennedy. Basil Brewer, Taft’s manager in Massachusetts and the publisher of the New Bedford Standard-Times, which had a wide readership in the southeastern part of the state, flipped his paper from acclaim of Lodge to condemnation, calling him a “Truman socialistic New Dealer.” After a meeting with Joe Kennedy, Brewer endorsed Jack’s candidacy.48

V

Only at the start of September, after a leisurely Caribbean vacation and with the election but two months away, did Lodge turn his full attention to his own campaign. By then Kennedy had been going full bore for more than four months and had made important inroads with key constituencies around the state, including labor and women. (On August 22 the Massachusetts Federation of Labor endorsed Kennedy at its annual meeting.)49 To aides Lodge expressed confidence that he would ultimately prevail, but it was a sign of his anxiety that he challenged his opponent to a series of debates—“anywhere and any place of his own choosing.”50 The Kennedy camp agreed to two, the first of which took place on September 16, before an overflow crowd at South Junior High School, in Waltham. Both men were respectful and substantive; both were content to shadowbox and say nice things about each other. But the challenger won plaudits for his calm, direct, and poised demeanor, and for his frank acknowledgment of Democratic mistakes over the past twenty years. At the same time, he stressed, his party’s policies should be judged against the complexity of the challenges involved with the Depression, the Nazi threat and World War II, and the reconversion to peacetime. “It is against this panorama that our actions must be judged—and not merely through the trick binoculars of hindsight, which makes all things easy, all men wise. To claim our successes were bipartisan, our failures Democratic, is good politics perhaps, but not good sense.” Jack reminded his audience that his party had been crucial in furthering the rights of labor, in stopping the exploitation of children and women, and in enacting a minimum wage law.51

Reporter Mary McGrory, covering the debate for The Washington Star, judged Kennedy the clear winner. “He was totally self-possessed, had all the facts at his command, and charmed everybody.” Jack himself, self-critical as always, felt he had only mustered a draw, but he conceded aides’ claims that a tie was as good as a win, given Lodge’s experience, stature, and popularity. Lodge didn’t disagree; he knew he had failed to knock his younger, greener opponent down a peg or two. The response of one Waltham resident who was in the audience played more to Kennedy’s advantage than to Lodge’s: “I liked ’em both.”52

The Waltham debate was carried only on radio, but, in a sign of the changing times, the scene for the second encounter shifted to a television studio in New York City. Hundreds of thousands tuned in to the broadcast, which was simulcast by a Boston station, and once again the challenger held his own on substance while seeming the more comfortable of the two men in the new medium.53 Joe Kennedy was thrilled. He had raised his children to be at ease in front of a camera, and his belief in the transcendent importance of the small, grainy black-and-white screens for the future of U.S. politics had only deepened over the summer. The Ambassador strategized constantly about how his son should be used on television, how he should be dressed, how he should speak, where he should fix his gaze. Jack needed no persuasion, and he worked diligently to hone his skills, even participating in a CBS “television school” in July. His early performances were mixed—he tended to lapse into a monotone when reading from a script—but he improved with practice. Talented at repartee and skillful in debate, he did better in unscripted settings in which he shared the stage and could let his natural charm come through.

In October the campaign aired two installments of a special thirty-minute TV program on Boston’s WNAC-TV, Coffee with the Kennedys, hosted by Rose and featuring appearances by the candidate and his sisters. Seated on a plain living room couch, the matriarch welcomed viewers and talked about her family, explaining why she believed her son’s qualities made him ideally suited to represent Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate. She spoke of his childhood accomplishments, his early interest in politics and history, and the invaluable experience he gained from his extensive travels across Europe while his father served as ambassador to Britain. Then the program shifted to the congressman’s campaign headquarters and shots of two or three of the Kennedy sisters at work. Viewers were invited to call in toll-free with questions for the candidate, and the show finished with Jack fielding the queries and asking those with cars to volunteer to drive fellow voters to the polls on Election Day. Not content to simply air the programs, the campaign organized five thousand viewing parties across the state, with each host—almost invariably a woman—encouraged to invite ten to fifteen friends over to watch the shows.54

Sensing trouble, Lodge redoubled his efforts in the final weeks, working sixteen-hour days and hitting every corner of the state, only to find that wherever he went, Jack Kennedy had been there before him, greeting workers at the factory gate, chatting with patrons at the diner, lining up volunteers.55 A later estimate suggested that Kennedy shook five hands for every one that Lodge shook. The incumbent nonetheless took encouragement from his own touring—from the mood at his events and from the size of the crowds. And, in truth, many voters liked both candidates, who seemed so alike in so many ways, including in their political centrism. “People, even Democrats, would say to you, ‘Gosh, isn’t it too bad he’s running against Lodge, because we need both of them,’ ” Dave Powers remembered. “Lodge had the same kind of reputation, he was the same type of man as Jack Kennedy. He was a Republican Jack Kennedy. Some people called Jack Kennedy a Democratic Henry Cabot Lodge. People in Massachusetts felt we need them both and it was a shame that one of them had to fall by the wayside.”56 Even seasoned journalists saw little daylight between the two men on core issues, especially in foreign policy, and there was no mistaking the broad similarity in their campaigning styles: a focus on the issues and on being quietly approachable, an avoidance of gutter politics or personal invective.

The candidates even shared a common problem: how to handle Joseph McCarthy. The firebrand senator remained a formidable if controversial figure in American politics as he cruised toward reelection in Wisconsin. Over the previous two years he had perfected what one reporter would call his “unique distortion technique”: stating as facts a set of fictitious claims, then doubling down on these “facts” when challenged.57 McCarthyite tactics were again commonplace that fall, with Republican candidates using the slogan K1C2—Korea, Communism, and Corruption—to pummel Democrats. Nixon took a leading role in the assault, and even Eisenhower dabbled in red-baiting. At the urging of aides, who feared offending McCarthy on his home turf, Eisenhower removed from a speech in Milwaukee a tribute to his mentor General George Marshall’s “profoundest patriotism” in “the service of America.” (McCarthy, it will be recalled, had accused Marshall of treason in a lengthy Senate speech the previous summer.) But Ike kept in the Milwaukee address passages that might well have come from the senator’s own mouth. Two decades of laxity about Communism reaching high levels in Washington, he exclaimed, had meant “contamination in some degree of virtually every department, every agency, every bureau, every section of our government. It meant a government by men whose very brains were confused by the opiate of this deceit,” causing the loss of China and the “surrender of whole nations” in Eastern Europe. At home, meanwhile, acceptance of Communism had allowed policy decisions to be made by “men who sneered and scoffed” at the threat, allowing “its most ugly triumph—treason itself.”58

Lodge, for his part, disliked McCarthy personally and loathed his demagogic tactics, but he knew full well that McCarthy had broad support among Massachusetts’s three-quarters of a million Irish Catholics, many of whom loved his brash style and brazen tactics. So, like Eisenhower, the senator moved carefully, avoiding overt criticism while keeping McCarthy at arm’s distance. When McCarthy offered to come to the Bay State to help the campaign in the interests of party unity, Lodge was inclined to accept, until he heard the condition: he himself must publicly ask McCarthy to come. “I cracked that one,” McCarthy crowed to conservative backer William F. Buckley Jr. “I told [the Lodge campaign] I’d go up to Boston to speak if Cabot publicly asked me. And he’ll never do that—he’d lose the Harvard vote.”59

But what if Lodge changed his mind? What if he determined that the Harvard vote mattered far less to him than the Irish vote? That was the Kennedy team’s consuming fear. For that matter, Jack faced his own delicate dilemma on the issue, even though McCarthy was from the opposing party and had virtually no history with Massachusetts. He was a friend of the family, for one thing; he got on well with Joe Kennedy in particular. For another, there were too many votes to be lost in going after him, especially in “Southie” (South Boston) but also in other urban areas of the state. Yet embracing the Wisconsin senator risked losing the support of liberals, intellectuals, and labor leaders. When Adlai Stevenson, soon to arrive for a campaign swing through Massachusetts, asked Sargent Shriver how he could best help Kennedy’s cause, Shriver requested three things: that Stevenson tell voters of Jack’s support for the liberal aspects of Truman’s Fair Deal; that he emphasize Jack’s willingness to stake out principled and courageous policy positions, including on behalf of the black residents of Washington, D.C.; and that he refrain from attacking Joe McCarthy. The stronger Jack appeared on Communism and subversion, Shriver said, the better his chances of peeling away support from Republicans upset with Lodge for undermining Robert Taft’s candidacy. And besides, McCarthy was very popular in the state, including among Democrats. “Up here this anticommunist business is a good thing to emphasize,” Shriver remarked.60

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.

II

Yet for all the political calculation that may have lurked in Jack’s mind, the evidence is powerful that he was genuinely taken with Jackie, if not quite as head-over-heels besotted as he had been with Inga Arvad a decade before. “I’ve never met anyone like her,” he told Dave Powers early on. “She’s different from any girl I know.”7 Not exuberant and noisy, like his sisters, or overtly sexy, like many of his girlfriends, Jackie was coolly reserved in a way he loved. She didn’t take herself too seriously yet was intelligent and tough, and she carried herself with assurance and elegance and refinement. She was gorgeous, too, in an enchantingly exotic way, with wide-set eyes and full lips, and she had an innate sense of style that he appreciated all the more for not having it himself (though it was probably no coincidence that, as his aides noticed, he began in the weeks after meeting Jackie to pay more attention to his appearance and his attire, to the cut of his suits and the fit of his shirts). Her sense of humor was similar to his, he thought, and she had a sense of irony that he found especially delightful. Plus she shared his love of gossip and his attraction to the Old World—her place was France, his Britain.8 Never good with foreign languages himself, it awed him that she spoke superb French and excellent Spanish, and could get by in German, too. To top it off, she shared his interest in books. “Jack appreciated her,” Chuck Spalding later said. “He really brightened when she appeared. You could see it in his eyes. He’d follow her around the room watching to see what she’d do next. Jackie interested him, which wasn’t true of many women.”9

For her part, Jackie loved Jack’s looks and, even more, his quick wit and keen intelligence, his sense of the absurd, his appreciation for history and the written word. It impressed her that someone so young could write a well-received book about the road to war in Europe, and her opinion rose further after Jack presented her with an inscribed copy of Why England Slept—she gobbled it up right away, then read it again. His emotional reserve, which might have turned off another woman, seems for Jackie to have been a source of comfort. She herself could be remote, and she might have been, as one biographer has suggested, “put off rather than swept away by an ardent, articulate lover who offered too much too enthusiastically and therefore deserved or demanded the same in return.”10 Though she didn’t share Jack’s interest in politics, she appreciated his willingness to poke fun at the hypocrisies and pretensions that were so much a part of his chosen profession, his skill at deflating the pomposities of the moment.

His innate curiosity captivated her. “The luckiest thing I used to think about him,” she remarked later, “was whatever you were interested in, Jack got interested in….When I was reading all this eighteenth century, he’d snatch a book from me and read and know all of Louis XV’s mistresses before I would.” People fascinated him, and he had an appreciation for excellence in human endeavor—for virtuosity in performance, whatever the field—that Jackie admired and shared. At dinner parties, she said, Jack asked lots of questions, unlike the other politicians present, who would generally talk only about themselves.11

Then again, it’s possible Jackie never would have given her suitor a second look if it hadn’t been for another element in the equation: his wealth. Even though she had grown up in relative privilege in New York—in a Park Avenue duplex and an East Hampton summer home—money was often tight in the Bouvier household. Even after her mother’s second marriage dramatically improved her financial position, Jackie was acutely conscious of the fact that she had no wealth of her own. Her mother reinforced this feeling. “He doesn’t have real money,” Janet Bouvier would sniff about this or that potential beau for Jackie, including John Husted. She could not say the same thing about Jack Kennedy. “Jack was exciting, there was that raw sexuality of his,” said reporter Nancy Dickerson, who dated him on occasion. “But you’ve got to remember that at the time nobody was thinking of him as presidential material. As handsome and attractive as he was, there were plenty of other attractive, powerful men in Washington. There just weren’t any with as much money as Jack.”12

Of course, with Jack came not only his money but also his close-knit and ebullient family. Jackie formed an early bond with the Ambassador—in time he would become her favorite in the family other than Jack—and maintained a polite but wary relationship with Rose, but she struggled to connect with the younger Kennedy women, including Robert’s wife, Ethel, who, with her rambunctious competitiveness, struck many as being “more Kennedy than the Kennedys.” Their boisterousness was of a type Jackie had never encountered before, and it didn’t help that they poked fun at her wispy, baby-doll voice and her demure and refined manners, or that they chuckled at her bringing pâté, quiche, and wine to an afternoon sail while they took peanut butter sandwiches. They called her “the deb,” as in debutante, and mimicked her behind her back, determined to poke fun at what they saw as her superior attitude; she reciprocated by referring to them as “the rah-rah girls.” Though physically stronger and more coordinated than is often suggested, Jackie puzzled over the intense family focus on sporting events (in the huddle of a touch football game on the family lawn, she said to one of Jack’s aides, “Just tell me one thing: when I get the ball, which way do I run?”), and she gave her sister Lee a stinging account of the Kennedys’ proclivity for games in which they “fell all over each other like gorillas.”^*1 Even at mealtimes, she noticed, the Kennedys seemed to be competing over who would say the most and talk the loudest. Jack, in a classic understatement, said his girlfriend was “sensitive by contrast to my sisters who are direct and energetic.”13

During the cacophonous family dinners, Jackie usually kept quiet. “A penny for your thoughts,” Jack once asked her, and the room fell silent with anticipation. “If I told them to you, they wouldn’t be mine, would they, Jack?”14

“Jackie was certainly very bored by politics and very bored by the very aggressive camaraderie of the Kennedy family, [which was] absolutely foreign to her nature,” said Alastair Forbes later. “Fortunately, I think, she also spotted that it was really foreign to Jack’s nature. He was loyal to his family…but he was of them and not of them.” He was more sensitive than they were, Jackie determined, and less extroverted.15

Mutual acquaintances spotted another thing they had in common: they were competitive, including with each other. Early in the relationship, they often played Monopoly or Chinese checkers or word games such as Categories, at which Jack often excelled. It burned him and intrigued him when she held her own and sometimes bested him in these contests. (In Scrabble, she proved almost unbeatable.) “From the beginning there was a playful element between them,” Lem Billings recalled. “Jackie gave him a good match: that’s one of the things Jack liked. But there was a serious element too. Who was going to win?”16

“He saw her as a kindred spirit,” Billings went on. “I think he understood that the two of them were alike. They had both taken circumstances that weren’t the best in the world when they were younger and learned how to make themselves up as they went along.”17 Their pasts, that is to say, affected them in complex ways. Jackie didn’t have Jack’s health problems growing up, but she and her younger sister, Lee, endured a trying childhood in a dysfunctional family environment. Their parents, John Vernou Bouvier III, a flamboyant New York Stock Exchange member who claimed to trace his lineage to French soldiers who fought in the American Revolutionary War, and Janet Bouvier (née Lee), the daughter of a self-made millionaire, engaged in frequent alcohol-fueled fights over his serial womanizing and chronic financial failings. Then each would badmouth the other in front of the girls. We can only speculate about the effect of this behavior on the daughters; to a degree, at least, Jackie seems to have responded by retreating from the world and from other people. She found escape and refuge in books and horses, competing from an early age in equestrian competitions and even winning two events in the junior ranks at the equestrian national championships at Madison Square Garden.

Jack Bouvier, whose French immigrant ancestors in Philadelphia had experienced anti-Catholic prejudice not unlike that endured by County Wexford’s Patrick Kennedy, was as charismatic as he was erratic. With the dark good looks and pencil-style mustache of Clark Gable, he was vain and self-absorbed. He exercised in the gym regularly and used a sunlamp to stay tan, and didn’t mind at all when he acquired nicknames that bespoke his playboy ways—the Black Orchid, the Black Sheik, and, most commonly, Black Jack. By all accounts he was terrific company, a raconteur and bon vivant whose lecherous ways had compensating qualities, at least in the eyes of some women. “Bouvier was unusual among the philanderers of his day,” one of his paramours said. “Women were not just collectibles for him. He actually liked their company, liked the feminine perspective and the social quality of women’s lives.” Both of his daughters felt closer to him than to their mother, even after Jack and Janet divorced and she married Hugh D. “Hughdie” Auchincloss, a kindly, serene Episcopalian and Standard Oil heir from Virginia. Janet, a social striver of the first order, had a fierce temper; she often took out her frustrations on her daughters, in particular Jackie, faulting her looks and clothing choices. Even Jackie’s studiousness and love of books came in for rebuke—like many women of her class and period, Janet lived by the philosophy that men frowned on women who had their own intellectual interests and professional goals; accordingly, her daughters should cultivate the skills required to make men feel comfortable and important, and direct their own ambitions toward being effective homemakers.18

“All the fighting had an impact on both girls, of course,” said Truman Capote, who got to know both Bouvier sisters and became especially close with Lee. “It made them both terribly cautious, a little afraid of people and relationships in general….Even at that age, I think [Jackie] could appreciate that her mother was this sort of hideous control freak, a cold fish with social ambitions, and her father was a naughty, naughty boy who kept getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Of course, both girls loved him more. Who wouldn’t, given the choice?”19

According to biographer Barbara Leaming, Jackie internalized many of her mother’s harshest judgments about her—she was too tall, at five foot seven, too dark, too flat-chested, too boyish in figure. “In view of what Janet insisted was her utter lack of physical allure, she cultivated seductive mannerisms such as a whispery, baby voice….She trained herself to behave in an extremely flirtatious manner and presented herself as a fragile airhead, the antithesis of the strong, clever, curious young woman she really was.”20

At fifteen, Jackie was enrolled at Miss Porter’s School, in Farmington, Connecticut, one of the most respected finishing schools in New England, which still operated by its founding philosophy of a century before, that the core purpose of a young woman’s education was to make her a more pleasing companion to her husband. Jackie chafed against this culture—in the school’s yearbook she listed her ambition in life as “Not to be a housewife”—but only to a degree: she did not appear to question, either then or in the years that followed, the notion that it should be a chief goal in life to “marry well,” or the corollary idea that a woman should live life through her man and make his successes her own.21 A strong student, Jackie maintained an A-minus average and also involved herself in the drama and riding clubs and helped edit the school newspaper. But she also treasured solitude: when the other girls socialized after evening study hall, her roommate remembered, “Jackie seldom joined in, happily staying in her room, reading, writing poetry or drawing…by nature she was a loner.”22

From Miss Porter’s she moved on to Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, but not before being presented to society in Newport, Rhode Island, where the Auchinclosses maintained an estate. (“Queen Deb of the Year,” wrote one New York society columnist, “is Jacqueline Bouvier, a regal brunette who has classic features and the daintiness of a Dresden porcelain. She has poise, is soft-spoken and intelligent, everything the leading debutante should be.”)23 At Vassar, Jackie, part of an entering class of approximately two hundred women, took courses in literature and history and joined the college newspaper staff, the drama group (as a costume designer), and the art club. Well liked by the other students, she could also be secretive, projecting a sense of apartness, even aloofness. “You never knew what she was thinking or what she was really feeling,” one classmate said.24

The sense of mystery may have added to her allure among college men, who came calling with regularity. “Young men were constantly trying every kind of trick to make her go out with them,” said Letitia Baldrige, who had been a year ahead of Jackie at Miss Porter’s and would continue to know her in the decades to come (including as White House social secretary). “Her classic good looks were complemented by her sense of style, which had been apparent from her early teens.” She would put on a simple skirt and shirt, add just the right belt, and, with her perfect posture and bearing, come off exquisite, Baldrige marveled. “Nothing ever looked wrong on her.” But though Jackie accepted a number of dates—she went to football games and dances at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard, among other places—she avoided committing herself. When returning from a date with a young man in a taxi, she would tell the driver, “Hold your meter.” Crestfallen escorts realized they would not get beyond the front door.25

Jackie didn’t take to Vassar—she thought it hidebound and provincial—but she loved her junior year in France, in 1949–50, most of which she spent in Paris, studying French history and art history at the Sorbonne. All the instruction was in French. It thrilled her, she reflected afterwards, that here she didn’t have to cloak her smarts or the fact that she had genuine intellectual interests, but she also led a full social life, venturing out on an almost nightly basis from her rented room on avenue Mozart, in the fashionable if slightly stuffy sixteenth arrondissement, sipping coffee or wine at the Ritz Bar or Café de Flore or La Coupole and hitting the nightspots on both banks of the Seine until all hours. She frequented the museums and galleries, the opera and the ballet. Her French, middling at the outset, became fluent. She also went on dates, seeing a French diplomat’s son as well as an aspiring young writer named Ormonde de Kay and, some accounts say, losing her virginity in an elevator to a dashing young American writer, John P. Marquand Jr., son of the novelist. (The elevator to his apartment supposedly “stalled” between floors, a trick Marquand had used with women before her.)26

Jackie did not return to Vassar for senior year. She sought a more urban environment and transferred to George Washington University, from which she graduated in 1951 with a degree in French literature. She then explored, intriguingly, a job with the CIA, but either she did not pursue it or she was not granted an interview. Instead, she entered and won Vogue magazine’s Prix de Paris contest for excellence in design and editorial ability, besting twelve hundred other entrants for the grand prize and the chance to live and work for the magazine in Paris.^*2, 27 She turned down the award—her mother and stepfather felt she had already spent too much time abroad, and she herself worried that if she went she might never come back—and instead took a position with the Washington Times-Herald (where Inga Arvad had also worked) as the “Inquiring Camera Girl” who asked people lighthearted questions and took their photograph. (“Winston Churchill once observed that marriages have a better chance of survival when the spouses don’t breakfast together. Do you agree?” “Should men wear wedding rings?” “If you had a date with Marilyn Monroe, what would you talk about?” “Would you like your son to grow up to be president?”) Her weekly starting salary was $42.50; within a few months the figure rose to $56.75. On one occasion, she made the newly elected senator from Massachusetts her subject, snapping his photo and posting his answer to a question concerning the role of pages (assistants) in the work of the Senate.28

III

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

IV

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

V

The courtship of Jack and Jackie, meanwhile, continued apace, and early that same summer of 1953 he proposed. Details are murky, but it seems he popped the question over the transatlantic telephone, while Jackie was in England covering the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and after he had received permission from Jack Bouvier. (Earlier he had sent her a telegram: ARTICLES EXCELLENT, BUT YOU ARE MISSED. LOVE, JACK.) She coyly replied that she would give him her answer soon. Upon her return, Jack met her plane and presented her with a 2.88-carat diamond engagement ring, set with a 2.84-carat emerald, from Van Cleef & Arpels. She said yes, but there are hints that she had hesitated, at least briefly. After the initial phone call, it seems she darted off to Paris from London to see John Marquand and to renew their dalliance for a few days. She wondered whether she could ever truly fit in with the Kennedy family, wondered what life as a politician’s wife would be like, with the exhausting campaigns, the intrusive press attention, the endless stream of dinners not with artists or writers or musicians or other interesting people but with politicians and their spouses.56

No doubt, too, she wondered about her man’s reputation as a womanizer. Already the previous year, soon after they began dating, she’d speculated in a letter, “He’s like my father in a way—loves the chase and is bored with the conquest—and once married needs proof he’s still attractive, so flirts with other women and resents you. I saw how that nearly killed Mummy.”57 Then, in January 1953, Lem Billings had taken her aside one evening to tell her what it seems she already knew. “I told her that night that I thought she ought to realize that Jack was thirty-five years old,” Lem later said, “had been around an awful lot all his life, had known many, many girls—this sounds like an awfully disloyal friend saying these things—that she was going to have to be very understanding at the beginning, that he had really never settled down with one girl before, and that a man of thirty-five is very difficult to live with. She was very understanding about it and accepted everything I said.” (One wonders: did the still-closeted Billings, who treasured his friendship with Jack above all else, who had been in love with him twenty years before and perhaps still was, see her as a rival for Jack’s time and affection?)58

Chuck Spalding went further. As he saw it, Jackie was not merely understanding about Jack’s ways; his peccadilloes “made her more interested in him,” made him more captivating, more like her father. “Dangerous men excited her. There was that element of danger in Jack Kennedy, without doubt.” In another interview, Spalding said Jackie “wasn’t sexually attracted to men unless they were dangerous like old Black Jack. It was one of those terribly obvious Freudian situations. We all talked about it—even Jack, who didn’t particularly go for Freud but said that Jackie had a ‘father crush.’ What was surprising was that Jackie, who was so intelligent in other things, didn’t seem to have a clue about this one.”59 For her, a recent biographer echoes, those attributes that some women would regard as deal breakers only made Jack more appealing: “She thought him excitingly unconventional and unpredictable, full of angles and surprises, in the way that her father had been. And if, like Black Jack Bouvier, Jack Kennedy was also a little dangerous, so much the better; at least he was not bland and boring like the fellow she had almost married.” Moreover, after enduring years of criticism from her mother about every aspect of her appearance, it was to Jackie only a plus that she was now being wooed by one of America’s most eligible bachelors, a reputed playboy who had been linked to screen stars, heiresses, and a host of other desirable women.60

If this seems overstated—is it really plausible that Jackie welcomed her suitor’s rakish ways?—it may at least be said that she accepted what lay in store. The chronic womanizing of the father she adored had conditioned her expectations of men, had led her to believe they were congenitally inclined to infidelity. They weren’t being consciously cruel in this cheating, to her mind; it was merely one of the fixed laws of nature. When, during her London visit, a male acquaintance cautioned her to beware of Jack Kennedy’s roving eye, she shrugged him off. “All men are like that,” she told him. “Just look at my father.” Or, she might have added, just look at Jack’s father, hardly a shining example of virtue. In her essay for the Vogue Prix de Paris competition, Jackie had quoted Oscar Wilde: “The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”61 Perhaps, too, some part of her thought she could change Jack, or that the mere fact of being betrothed would change him. Whatever the case, she expressed delight at her engagement, soon telling friends and relatives she couldn’t wait to wed her man.62

An early call was to her father’s sister. “Aunt Maudie, I just want you to know that I’m engaged to Jack Kennedy,” Jackie said. “But you can’t tell anyone for a while because it wouldn’t be fair to the Saturday Evening Post.” A puzzled Aunt Maudie asked why. “The Post is coming out tomorrow with an article on Jack,” she explained, “and the title is on the cover. It’s ‘Jack Kennedy—the Senate’s Gay Young Bachelor.’ ” Jack had known for weeks of the impending publication, but he was unhappy when he saw the piece, by Paul F. Healy, with its description of a swashbuckling lawmaker with a “bumper crop of lightly combed brown hair that shoots over his right eyebrow and always makes him look as though he just stepped out of the shower,” and who liked nothing more than to dash around Washington in “his long convertible, hatless and with the car’s top down,” a glamorous woman by his side. This was not exactly the statesmanlike image Jack wanted to convey, and it troubled him that Healy gave scant indication that his subject had another side—serious-minded, reflective, knowledgeable about policy matters, especially relating to international affairs. The article irritated Jack, and confirmed in him the wisdom of getting married without delay.63

Jackie, notwithstanding her guarded relations with her mother-in-law-to-be, penned a touching letter to Rose in her distinctive, stylish handwriting. “It seems to me that very few people have been able to create what you have—a family built on love and loyalty and gaiety. If I can even come close to that with Jack I will be very happy. If you ever see me going wrong I hope you will tell me—because I know you would never find fault unless fault was there.”64

The engagement was announced on June 24, 1953, and trumpeted in newspapers all across the country. SENATOR LOSES BACHELORHOOD TO CAMERA GAL, read the headline in the New York Daily News. “Come September, the Senate’s gay young bachelor will be no more,” began the accompanying article. “Hopeful debutantes from Washington to Boston, from Palm Beach to Hollywood, can begin unpacking their hope chests.” EXIT PRINCE CHARMING, echoed the Boston Herald. “Yesterday was a difficult time for American women…” The New York Times published photos of the couple to accompany its story, while in Time’s formulation, Senator Kennedy had become “engaged to sultry Socialite Jacqueline Bouvier, 23, onetime Washington Times-Herald Inquiring Photographer.”65 Engagement parties followed in Hyannis Port and at Hammersmith Farm, the Auchinclosses’ magnificent waterfront estate in Newport, with its vast gardens designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and a main house boasting a dozen full baths and an equal number of fireplaces.^*3 The wedding, to take place in Newport, was set for September 12.

Jack remarked perceptively to his friend Red Fay that he was both “too young and too old” to marry. He was too young because he did not yet feel ready to fully quit his bachelor ways. He was too old in that, at thirty-six, he was stuck in his ways, a creature of habit whose practices could not be fully altered merely because of a ceremony in a chapel. He knew, moreover, as he acknowledged to Fay, the degree to which his electoral successes depended on his appeal to women. “This means the end of a promising political career as it has been based up to now almost entirely on the old sex appeal.”66

Throughout the courtship, he kept on seeing other women. Often Evelyn Lincoln assisted with the arrangements. “He was a playboy, all right,” she remembered. “I never saw anything like it. Women were calling all the time, day and night. I more or less organized the ones he wanted to deal with. I’d call them up, tell them where they were to meet him for dinner, that sort of thing.” But Jack never asked her to call Jackie. “When he didn’t ask me to call her, I knew she had to be someone special.”67

When Jack and Torbert Macdonald headed to the French Riviera for a brief jaunt a few weeks before the wedding, his father—of all people—worried that Jack might get “restless” about his marriage and thereby land himself in trouble. “I am hoping that he will…be especially mindful of whom he sees,” Joe Kennedy wrote to Macdonald, who was married and had his own reasons to tread carefully. “Certainly one can’t take anything for granted since he became a United States Senator. That is a price he should be willing to pay and gladly.”68 Whether Macdonald passed on the message is not known, but the two men clearly partied hard on their rented yacht and on shore. In Cap d’Antibes one day, Jack ran into a British friend who introduced him to a pair of Swedish women in their early twenties. They double-dated that evening, Jack being paired with Gunilla von Post, a strikingly pretty, petite blonde from a moneyed family, who bore more than a passing resemblance to his former Nordic love Inga Arvad. They danced and talked, learning about each other’s families, whereupon Jack offered to drive von Post to Cap-Eden-Roc, where he had spent memorable time in his youth. In her own telling, there they sat together until deep into the night, looking out into the Mediterranean as a warm breeze blew. At one point they kissed and “my breath was taken away,” she said later. And it was easy to talk with him: “When he asked questions, he really seemed interested in the answers.”69

“I’m going back to the United States next week to get married,” Gunilla recalled Jack suddenly saying. In her memory, he then told her that if he had met her even a week earlier, he would have “canceled the whole thing.” If indeed he said this, it seems impossible to believe he truly meant it, given what scrapping the wedding could have meant for his life and career. But perhaps he was swept up in the moment, entranced by the woman next to him and acutely conscious that his bachelor days, his days of freedom in the pursuit of pleasure, were coming to an end. When he dropped her off, he asked if he could come in for a nightcap. She refused (“No, my dear Jack, I only want to wish you good luck, and that everything works out for you”), and he drove off.70

VI

In Janet Bouvier’s mind, her daughter’s wedding should be a sophisticated, sedate affair, away from the flash of cameras. The groom’s father had other ideas. This would be the social event of the season, Joseph Kennedy insisted, and his word went, for he was paying for the affair, not Hughdie Auchincloss and not Black Jack Bouvier. He wanted to extract maximum publicity out of the celebration, make it something like the big Hollywood productions he used to finance. As such, the guest list for the ceremony, set for St. Mary’s Church, a brownstone Gothic Revival structure dating to 1849, would include close to six hundred people (the chapel would seat no more); for the reception at Hammersmith Farm, it would top twelve hundred. Joe Kennedy, who flew to Newport on July 12 to finalize the arrangements with Janet, ordered six hundred bottles of champagne and a four-foot-high, five-tiered wedding cake, and had his press operation arrange for extensive coverage in major papers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The patriarch clearly remained a dominant presence in his children’s lives, even as they moved deep into adulthood. Just as Joe dictated major elements of the Newport extravaganza, leaving the bride and groom—and the bride’s parents—on the sidelines, so had he done with daughter Eunice’s wedding to Sargent Shriver, earlier in the year. (It took a decade of wooing, but Shriver at last won his bride.) Here, too, the Ambassador went all out, arranging for the ceremony to take place in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, with Francis Cardinal Spellman officiating, and for the reception for seventeen hundred guests to follow in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria. “I found a man who is as much like my father as possible,” Eunice revealingly told the wedding guests. Fittingly, the Boston Globe photograph of the event was not of the newlyweds but of the bride and her father.71

The Kennedy-Bouvier festivities in Newport began a few days before the wedding, with a cocktail party in honor of the bridal couple, followed the next evening by a black-tie bachelor party for eighteen given by Hughdie Auchincloss at the Clambake Club. All of Jack’s close pals attended—many would be ushers at the wedding, including Lem Billings, Torby Macdonald, Chuck Spalding, Charlie Bartlett, George Smathers, Ben Smith, and James Reed—and Red Fay was master of ceremonies. Robert Kennedy, the best man, diligently sweated out a memorized toast to the groom, whereupon Jack rose from his seat and offered a toast to his bride. Then he instructed, “Into the fireplace! We will not drink from these glasses again.” All the men tossed the expensive crystal glasses into the fire, in the manner of the Russian Imperial Guard. Auchincloss, looking suddenly pensive, summoned the waiter to replace the glasses. Jack rose again. “Maybe this isn’t the accepted custom,” he declared, “but I want to again express my love for this girl I’m going to marry. A toast to the bride.” Everyone joined in the toast again, and once more the crystal stemware flew into the fireplace. Hughdie had had enough: for the next round the waiter brought ordinary drinking glasses.72

Spalding remembered of that evening:

Jack was enjoying himself, and yet I had the strange feeling that Jack was watching everything with an extra eye, as if the eye was outside of himself, in a corner of the room, surveying the scene with a kind of detachment. It was a very eerie thing to see this, and feel it, but there it was. I remember I cut myself and Jack was immediately at my side, looking at the cut, suggesting I should go to the hospital. It was one of his qualities that bound people to him. Concerned. Sensitive. But the point is, he could be part of what was going on, and yet that extra eye saw me. I know it sounds strange. But I felt he always had an extra eye.73

The wedding day dawned clear and breezy. Like her mother, Jackie had wanted a different kind of wedding, smaller and more cozy, with attendees who knew the bridal couple and cared about them. What she got was something else: many hundreds of guests, most of whom she had never laid eyes on before, as well as hordes of reporters and photographers recording her every move. When she arrived at the church for the eleven o’clock ceremony, a crowd of three thousand onlookers broke through police lines and for a moment seemed set on smothering her. She kept her composure, smiling bashfully in her cream taffeta gown, with tight-fitting bodice and bouffant skirt. Then more disappointment: her father was too hungover from drinking by himself the night before to give her away. (Janet Bouvier Auchincloss had forbidden him from attending the pre-wedding dinner.) Her stepfather did the honors instead, while Black Jack slipped into the chapel at the last minute and sat inconspicuously near the back. When Jack and Bobby walked down the aisle and took their places near the altar, they looked, one observer said, “too tanned and handsome to be believed.”74 Archbishop Richard Cushing, a close friend of the Kennedys, performed the ceremony, celebrating the nuptial Mass and reading a special blessing from Pope Pius XII. To the accompaniment of “Panis Angelicus” and “Ave Maria,” the couple knelt at the flower-bedecked altar and recited their vows.

As Senator and Mrs. Kennedy stepped out of the church, the crowd surged forward again, the groom, according to The New York Times, smiling broadly “and the bride appearing a little startled.”75 Cars backed up for more than half a mile for the reception at Hammersmith Farm, and the couple spent more than two hours in the receiving line shaking hands. A buffet was served in the house and on the lawns outside overlooking Narragansett Bay, and the bride and groom distributed slices of the wedding cake as white-jacketed waiters fanned out with trays of champagne and an orchestra played. Among the guests were film star Marion Davies, singer Morton Downey, several U.S. senators and congressmen and state legislators (including Jack’s successor from the Eleventh District, Tip O’Neill), and a phalanx of industrialists and business-tycoon acquaintances of Joe Kennedy’s. Hughdie and Janet’s friends were fewer in number and more Waspy—more Republican—and they kept mostly to themselves during the reception, speculating sotto voce about what tragic fate might have befallen Jack Bouvier to keep him from giving his daughter away. Throughout the exhausting affair, bride and groom posed gamely for the photographers, Jackie balking only once, when she was asked to stand with her husband clinking champagne glasses. “Too corny,” she declared.76

When evening came and the last of the guests departed, Joe Kennedy had every reason to be pleased: this was indeed a spectacular social celebration, certain to get attention from coast to coast in the coming days, with photos of the couple in newspapers large and small. Even the normally staid New York Times got carried away, gushing in a front-page story that the event “far surpassed the Astor-French wedding of 1934 in public interest.”77

The newlyweds, for their part, were happy to be on their way, first to New York for a night at the Waldorf Astoria, then on to Acapulco and a pink stucco villa above the Pacific that Jackie had found enchanting on a previous visit with her mother and Hughdie.78 One of her first acts there was to pen an affectionate letter of forgiveness to her father, while Jack, for his part, wired his parents: “At last I know the true meaning of rapture. Jackie is enshrined forever in my heart. Thanks Mom and Dad for making me worthy of her.”79 After a few days the couple flew to California, where they spent time at San Ysidro Ranch near Santa Barbara before continuing north to the Monterey Peninsula and then to San Francisco and the home of Red Fay and his wife, Anita. (“God, she’s a fantastic-looking woman,” Red had told Jack upon meeting the soft-spoken Jackie at Hammersmith Farm before the wedding, “but if you ever get a little hard of hearing you’re going to have a little trouble picking up all the transmissions.”) On the final day in California, Jack joined Red for a 49ers football game and left Jackie behind with Anita, who showed her some of the Bay Area sights. “I’m sure this didn’t seem a particularly unusual arrangement to Jack,” Red wrote, acknowledging Jackie’s resentment. “The pressures of public life—not to mention those of an old shipmate and his wife—too often intruded on the kind of honeymoon any young bride anticipates.”80

The pressures did not end with their return to the East Coast. Having not lived together before the wedding, they were unprepared for the intricacies of married life. Each emotionally reticent, each self-centered, they struggled to open themselves up to each other. Then there was Jack’s busy work schedule, which left Jackie alone a great deal of the time, including on weekends. Even when he was around, she subsequently said, her husband seemed so preoccupied she “might as well be in Alaska.” Jack, looking to his parents’ example, didn’t fully realize how these absences—literal and figurative—harmed the relationship. It didn’t help that they resided initially not in their own home—a small, narrow rented nineteenth-century house at 3321 Dent Place, in Georgetown, that was not ready for occupancy—but in Hyannis Port, where Jackie put up with the compulsive athleticism of the Kennedys and chafed at the strict rules about punctuality at mealtimes, but where she also found a measure of calmness on the windswept Cape Cod seashore. She painted watercolors, several of which Joe Kennedy insisted on hanging on the walls of the house—one showed a crowd of young Kennedys on the beach, along with the caption “You can’t take it with you. Dad’s got it all.”81 She and her father-in-law found themselves kindred spirits, and spent hours talking. She liked him, trusted him; he felt the same about her.

She also penned a poem—an ode to her husband in the manner of Benét’s “John Brown’s Body”—the last part of which reads:

But now he was there with the wind and the sea

And all the things he was going to be.

He would build empires

And he would have sons

Others would fall

Where the current runs

He would find love

He would never find peace

For he must go seeking

The Golden Fleece

All of the things he was going to be

All of the things in the wind and the sea.82

Jack was so thrilled with the poem that he wanted to have it published, but Jackie refused. It was as private as a love letter, she told him, and must not be made public. He agreed, though not fully—he couldn’t resist sharing it with family members and one or two friends. He also read her Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” which she later recited with pleasure, including Jack’s favorite lines:

It may be he shall take my hand

And lead me into his dark land

And close my eyes and quench my breath…

But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town,

When Spring trips north again this year,

And I to my pledged word am true,

I shall not fail that rendezvous.

That first fall, Jackie also wrote and illustrated a book for her eight-year-old half sister. A Book for Janet: In Case You Are Ever Thinking of Getting Married This Is a Story to Tell You What It’s Like. It began with a drawing depicting Jackie seeing her husband off to work, and went on to describe their life together. One drawing showed the dome of the Capitol at night, wholly dark except for one single lit window. “If he isn’t home and that single light is on,” the caption read, at least “you know the country is safe.” The elder Janet Auchincloss, so often stingy with her praise where Jackie was concerned, called A Book for Janet “deeply touching in a beautiful way.”83

Though at Miss Porter’s School Jackie’s ambition had been “not to be a housewife,” in essence that’s now what she became. “I brought a certain amount of order to his life,” she later said about the first months of marriage. “We had good food in our house—not merely the bare staples that he used to have. He no longer went out in the morning with one brown shoe and one black shoe on. His clothes got pressed and he got to the airport without a mad rush because I packed for him.”84 She signed up for cooking classes, joined a bridge club, even tried to learn to play golf in order to get to spend more time with her husband. (After one interminable afternoon together on the links, he gently suggested she stick to horseback riding.)

Jackie got a sure sense of her role when the young couple was featured on Person to Person, Edward Murrow’s popular half-hour TV program on CBS, in October. While the chain-smoking host introduced the senator as one who, at age thirty-six, had already accomplished everything most American boys dreamed of doing, Jackie sat demurely by Jack’s side on the couch in his former “bachelor establishment” on Bowdoin Street in Boston, her elegant print dress harmonizing with his conservative business suit. The few questions Murrow directed her way she answered softly and quickly, highlighting her pride at what her husband had accomplished. Jack, prompted by Murrow, rose and displayed for the camera his wartime mementos—a model of PT 109, the famous coconut on which he had carved his rescue plea, and a photo of the destroyer named for Joe Junior. He then described the circumstances of his brother’s heroic death, whereupon Murrow tossed him softball questions on public policy and on his recommendations for “inspirational reading.” (Jack, clearly primed, reached for a nearby book and read to the camera an excerpt from a moving letter the poet Alan Seeger had written to his mother shortly before his death in World War I.)85

“The main thing for me was to do whatever my husband wanted,” Jackie later said. “He couldn’t—and wouldn’t—be married to a woman who tried to share the spotlight with him. I thought the best thing I could do was be a distraction. Jack lived and breathed politics all day long. If he came home to more table thumping, how could he ever relax?” To a reporter she insisted, with just a little too much emphasis—and no mention of the fact that she had household help from the start—that “housekeeping is a joy to me. When it all runs smoothly, when the food is good and the flowers look fresh, I have much satisfaction. I like cooking, but I’m not very good at it. I care terribly about food, but I’m not much of a cook.”86

As for Jack, the difference between a chic home and an unstylish one was mostly lost on him, as was the contrast between a bespoke suit and an off-the-rack model. He had little appreciation of good food or good wine, being perfectly content with a steak or a cheeseburger and some ice cream. Until, that is, his wife entered the picture. “She wouldn’t go along with the Kennedy atmosphere,” recalled Jack’s British friend David Ormsby-Gore, who also became close to Jackie. “She had certain standards of her own which she insisted on in her house. They were standards about the manners [of] children, about having good food, about having beautiful furniture, the house well done up.” Jack, impatient at first, adjusted, even came to share her sensibility, at least to a degree. Ormsby-Gore again: “I remember him saying when Jackie had gone off and bought some French eighteenth-century chairs or something, ‘I don’t know why, what’s the point of spending all this money—I mean, a chair is a chair and it’s a perfectly good chair I’m sitting in—what’s the point of all this fancy stuff.’ Well that was his first reaction but gradually he came to appreciate good taste in these other matters and really cared about it by the end.”87 Jackie broadened his taste in art and improved his manners. With her gentle guidance, Jack even turned himself into a minor fashion plate, with a preference for the single-breasted, two-button suit, often pinstriped and always perfectly pressed. For the first time, he learned which tie should go with which shirt and how the wrong shoes could kill a stylish ensemble.

He became so clothes conscious that he once told Chuck Spalding, “Your suit doesn’t make a statement.” When he realized what he’d said, they both broke out in laughter.88

In more substantive ways, too, Jackie soon proved her importance, even as she wondered if she’d ever be able to keep up with her husband intellectually. (“He has this curious, inquiring mind that is always at work; if I were drawing him, I would draw a tiny body and an enormous head.”89) She continued to translate for him from the French, including reports on the Indochina War and the writings of Talleyrand, Voltaire, and de Gaulle, bon mots from which Jack would then sprinkle into his speeches. And she helped transform him into a better public speaker, coaxing him to abandon his high, nasal twang in favor of deeper, more sonorous tones. (A vocal coach had given Jack the same advice, and for a time he spent some minutes each morning barking like a dog to deepen his voice.) With Ted Sorensen’s help, Jackie also got him to slow his delivery—his colleagues sometimes found his rapid-fire utterances hard to follow—and to modulate his pitch and use his hands to punctuate key points, to be less fidgety onstage. The changes were not evident overnight, but gradually, as Kennedy worked on his technique and as he and Sorensen fine-tuned their collaborative speechwriting efforts, he became notably more effective at the lectern—a self-composed, authentic communicator who employed the rhythms and language of powerful rhetoric.90

In January 1954, as he and his young wife settled into their Georgetown home, John F. Kennedy had reason to feel good about things. He had found his footing in the Senate, earning the respect of more senior colleagues, who appreciated his quiet manner, his studiousness, and his composed, good-humored, reasoned approach to policy issues. He had happened upon a once-in-a-generation political aide in Ted Sorensen, and enjoyed broad support in his home state. He had landed a bride in the beautiful, witty, sophisticated Jacqueline Bouvier, whose European sensibility he admired and shared. Their wedding had won wide coverage from coast to coast. If the patterns and demands of married life were proving a challenge in these early months, for him and for her, he felt lucky to have her, felt certain that she represented for him a political asset. Yet, as the year turned, all was not well. Jack Kennedy didn’t know it, but his annus mirabilis of 1953 would be succeeded by something very different.

II

On Indochina, too, Kennedy struck an independent line. As 1954 began, the outlook was grimmer than ever for French Union forces, but Paris leaders were staying in the fight. They felt the need to justify the deaths they had incurred (a sunk-cost dynamic the Americans would themselves encounter in Vietnam a dozen years later), and moreover their U.S. patrons, who were paying an ever greater share of the war-related costs, would countenance no thought of withdrawal. To Dwight Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, Indochina was a key theater in the broader Cold War struggle, which meant France had to remain in the fight. At every opportunity, they told their Paris counterparts that seven years of war had not been in vain, that the anti–Ho Chi Minh cause was both just and essential, and that negotiations should be avoided until the military picture had improved and France and the West could dictate the terms.6

“If Indochina goes,” Eisenhower warned in a Seattle speech in August 1953, in an early articulation of the domino theory, “several things happen right away. The Malayan peninsula, with its valuable tin and tungsten, would become indefensible, and India would be outflanked. Indonesia, with all its riches, would likely be lost too….So you see, somewhere along the line, this must be blocked. It must be blocked now. That is what the French are doing.” A few days later, the president told two British officials over lunch that Indochina was more crucial strategically than Korea. It was the neck of the bottle, and it was essential to keep the cork in, which meant Congress needed to support an “all-out” effort in Vietnam for a year or eighteen months, even if it required the allocation of large additional sums. Vice President Richard Nixon spoke in similar terms, as did Secretary Dulles, with the latter telling Congress that defeat in Indochina could trigger a “chain reaction throughout the Far East and Southeast Asia.”7

Senator Kennedy was not immune to this kind of thinking. In late January 1954, he used the occasion of a speech before the Cathedral Club of Brooklyn to warn that Ho Chi Minh’s long-standing campaign against French colonialism had given him broad support among the Vietnamese people. Almost certainly, he would win a free election. Yet the loss of Indochina, Kennedy went on, whether by military or electoral defeat, would constitute a serious blow to Western security—“undoubtedly within a short time, Burma, Thailand, Malaya, and Indonesia and other new independent states might fall under the control of the Communist bloc in a series of chain reactions.” Most alarmingly, the administration, with its emphasis on military means and the threat of atomic retaliation, seemed to have no plan for preventing this outcome: “Of what value would atomic retaliation be in opposing a Communist advance which rested not upon military invasion but upon local insurrection and political deterioration?”8

In March 1954, as it began to appear that France might soon lose the war, Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that such a result would inevitably cause the loss of the rest of Southeast Asia.9 Eisenhower, in a National Security Council meeting on April 6, endorsed this view, mixing his metaphors with aplomb. “Indochina was the first in a row of dominoes,” according to the notes of the meeting. “If it fell its neighbors would shortly thereafter fall with it, and where did the process end? If he was correct, said the president, it would end with the United States directly behind the 8-ball.”10 The next day, Eisenhower formally introduced his theory at a press conference: “Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.”11

It was a curious theory, really. In no previous case had the fall of a country to Communism triggered the rapid collapse of a whole string of other countries. Even in a weaker form, envisioning only a short row of dominoes, the theory seemingly bore little relation to reality. China, the most populous nation in the world, had gone Communist in 1949, but that event had not caused dominoes to fall (though many worried about what might have ensued in Korea had the U.S.-led forces not intervened). Yet the falling-domino notion would take hold of the American imagination for the rest of the decade and beyond, animating much of the public discourse about Vietnam and what needed to happen there.

Eisenhower’s immediate concern was a big battle under way at Dien Bien Phu, a remote outpost in northwestern Vietnam near the Laotian border. Contrary to expectations, Viet Minh commander Vo Nguyen Giap got his China-supplied heavy artillery up the hills and thereby trapped the French garrison on the valley floor. By the end of March the Viet Minh forces had destroyed the garrison’s airstrip and were closing in on the main base. Recognizing the symbolic importance of the battle—which had become a media sensation around the world—the White House considered direct U.S. military intervention, in the form of air strikes, to try to save the French position, under an operation code-named Vulture. (Some American analysts even contemplated the use of tactical nuclear weapons.12) Congress would be leery of any unilateral U.S. effort, administration officials knew, especially on the heels of a frustrating and bloody war in Korea, and thus Dulles introduced the concept of United Action, whereby a coalition of non-Communist nations would pledge collectively to defend Indochina and the rest of Southeast Asia against outside aggression.

Jack Kennedy was skeptical. In a powerful Senate speech on April 6, he blasted the administration for its lack of candor on the conflict. The time had come, he said, “for the American people to be told the truth about Indochina.” United Action had logic behind it, the senator went on, and he personally was prepared to back a limited multilateral military effort to prevent an all-out Viet Minh win, but he feared where such a policy would lead the nation: “To pour money, matériel, and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and destructive.” More to the point, would the United States ever be able to make much difference in that part of the world? “No amount of American military assistance can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.” Any satisfactory outcome, he stressed, depended on France according the Associated States full and complete independence; without it, adequate indigenous support would remain forever elusive. It followed that, absent such a French move, the United States should under no circumstances send its men and machines “into that hopeless internecine struggle.” Kennedy concluded by quoting Thomas Jefferson on the vital importance of enlightening the public rather than hiding the truth.13

His grudging and qualified support for United Action was shared by many colleagues in both parties, as was his conviction that securing greater indigenous support was a prerequisite for success. Some lawmakers went further, wondering if any U.S. military intervention could be kept limited. “Once you commit the flag,” Senator Richard Russell asserted, in words that would take on a haunting prescience a decade later, “you’ve committed the country. There’s no turning back. If you involve the American air force, why, you’ve involved the nation.” And if you involved the nation, ground forces would soon follow. Russell said he was “weary” of “seeing American soldiers being used as gladiators to be thrown into every arena around the world.”14 Kennedy agreed, and he reiterated his skepticism that the military measures, if undertaken, would yield significant results. Turning the discussion to the practical implications of United Action, Mike Mansfield, Democrat from Montana, asked Kennedy what he believed John Foster Dulles had in mind when he’d announced the concept in an address before the Overseas Press Club in New York the previous week.

“There is every indication,” Kennedy replied, “that what he meant was that the United States will take the ultimate step.”

“And that is what?”

“It is war.”15

Kennedy maintained this cautionary line in speech after speech that spring. At a Cook County Democratic Party dinner in Chicago, for example, he stressed that the United States “cannot save those who will not be saved,” and that Asian nations must do their part in regional and continental defense. “Indo-China should teach us,” he went on, “that in the long run our cause will be stronger if it is clearly just, if we remain true to our traditional policies of helping all oppressed people, even though it may require unpleasant pressures in our relations with colonial powers and friends.” In Los Angeles, he declared that the American people were being deceived about the true situation on the ground, while in Princeton, New Jersey, he bemoaned the seeming American inability to perceive the actual nature and significance of the Vietnamese independence movement. In a television interview, he in effect called Indochina a lost cause and warned that U.S. intervention with combat forces would fail, because Mao’s Chinese Communists would only widen the struggle.16

Ultimately, Congress refused to give its support for military action in Indochina unless Great Britain also joined the effort. Dwight Eisenhower, who was more militant on Vietnam in 1954 than sympathetic historians and biographers generally acknowledge—much more serious about intervening militarily, at least with aerial bombing—now undertook an intense and concerted administration effort to persuade British leaders to get on board, but it was to no avail: Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden were dubious that any multilateral military intervention had much hope of salvaging the French position, and they worried that it might precipitate a disastrous war with China, if not with the Soviet Union, too. Eisenhower refused to go in alone, and no U.S. military intervention occurred that spring.17

Instead, following France’s defeat and the (ostensibly temporary) division of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, Eisenhower committed the United States to building up and sustaining a non-Communist regime in the South, under Ngo Dinh Diem. It was, time would reveal, a hugely fateful decision, not merely for his presidency but for the three that came after.

III

Kennedy’s comments on Indochina that spring, even more than his bold vote on the St. Lawrence Seaway, touched informed observers and ordinary voters like nothing he had said before. Letters flooded his Senate office, the overwhelming majority of them lauding him for his skeptical stance regarding military intervention and for, as one constituent put it, “remember[ing] there are Asians in Asia to be considered.”18 Editorials from coast to coast noted his admonitory words and anointed him an emerging leader in his party in the complex arena of foreign policy. “Keep your eye on young Democratic Senator John Kennedy,” declared a columnist in the Brooklyn Eagle. “He’s been getting a buildup for a nationwide campaign such as a Vice Presidential candidate.” Hanson W. Baldwin, the respected military correspondent of The New York Times, said Kennedy’s assessment of the war situation in Indochina was more accurate than that offered by the White House; Walter Lippmann did the same in his syndicated column.19

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, 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.

V

Throughout the long postoperative ordeal, first in New York and then in Palm Beach, Jackie Kennedy was the picture of steadfast support, remaining at her husband’s bedside more or less continually, serving as de facto chief nurse. “Jackie was magnificent with him,” recalled journalist and friend Charlie Bartlett, who visited the hospital in November. “She had this almost uncanny ability to rise to the occasion. She sat with him for hours, held his hand, mopped his brow, fed him, helped him in and out of bed, put on his socks and slippers for him, entertained him by reading aloud and reciting poems she knew by heart, bought him silly little gadgets and toys to make him laugh, played checkers, Categories, and Twenty Questions with him.” Chuck Spalding agreed. “She stepped right in and did everything humanly possible to see that he’d pull through. People who thought she was some flighty society girl realized they’d made a big mistake. Jackie was far from helpless.” She plumped his pillows, brought him snippets of gossip about family and friends, and told him about the new movies generating the most buzz. She smuggled in his favorite candy. And she urged friends to come by the hospital as often as possible, knowing that such visits distracted him from the pain. “Jack is feeling lousy,” she’d say. “Come on down.”47

Even strangers were recruited to the cause. At an evening function in Manhattan that she attended with her sister, Lee, Jackie met the glamorous screen star Grace Kelly, who would soon win an Oscar for her role in George Seaton’s The Country Girl. The two sisters asked Kelly to come with them to the hospital to cheer Jack up. She agreed, slipping quietly into the room and—at the sisters’ suggestion—whispering in his ear, “I’m the new night nurse.” Depending on the account, Kelly either did or did not don a nurse’s outfit, and Kennedy either recognized her or stared blankly ahead, too drugged to comprehend anything. Kelly’s own recollection was that he “recognized me at once and couldn’t have been sweeter or more quick to put me at ease.”48

Sometimes Jackie showed a different side. Priscilla Johnson, who had been a research assistant for the senator the previous spring and whom he sporadically pursued, came to the hospital on a weekend afternoon in November. Jackie was there. “She looked absolutely stunning in a black suit,” Johnson remembered, “frolicking around the bed, smiling and laughing, eating Jack’s meal, before she was to venture out to meet her old beau, John Marquand, for dinner.” To the former assistant it seemed obvious that Jackie, so perfectly made up, so fetching and attractive, was baiting her husband, trying to make him a little jealous, and that it was working. “I realized then and there she was an actress, a really excellent actress. She loved him, and she wanted him to know what he had in her, to really feel it.”49

In Palm Beach she carried on in her role as lead caretaker. Years later she joked of that Christmas of 1954 that it was a “horrible” affair. “We spent the whole time hovering around the heir apparent.” Yet she was ever attentive, day after exhausting day, never complaining even as the hours grew long and her own sleep was cut short. Her husband remained frail, his weight below 130 pounds, and he suffered regular infections and spikes in his temperature. His wound, deep and suppurating, required constant attention, and it was Jackie who gave it, and without fuss. “Jackie cleaned the wound skillfully, gently, and calmly,” Rose Kennedy subsequently said, “and made no comment about it to anyone.” As she had done in New York, she bathed him and fed him, read to him and told him stories, and she now added a new activity: she got him to try oil painting, in the manner of his hero Churchill. Her efforts notwithstanding, he suffered bouts of enveloping gloom and bitterness. Friends such as Red Fay and Dave Powers and Lem Billings saw it when they visited him in Florida, and family members saw it up close. (It says something about the devotion Jack inspired in his friends that Fay stayed for ten days, and Billings for a month.) At times they feared he was losing the will to go on as he contemplated possibly having to give up his Senate seat.50

What rescued him, according to his wife, was the writing project he had first conceived the previous winter, on political courage and the true meaning of representative democracy. It was a natural fit for him: he was a student of history, for one thing, and moreover the phenomenon of courage in public affairs had fascinated him since his youth. At various points in 1954, acquaintances suggested nominees for a list of U.S. senators who had acted on principle even at the price of damage to their political careers. Arthur Krock suggested Robert Taft, while Ted Sorensen lobbied for the inclusion of fellow Nebraskan George Norris. In a book of orations, Kennedy read Daniel Webster’s Seventh of March speech and the abolitionists’ condemnation of it. Jackie’s Georgetown course with Jules Davids in the spring of 1954 likely also played a role—Davids lectured dramatically to the students on the nation’s political history, and in the evenings Jackie and Jack would discuss the themes and readings of the class. The senator’s reading of another Herbert Agar book—A Time for Greatness, with its clarion call to Americans to lead the drive to a better and more just world—may have provided further inspiration.51

Now, in early 1955, the project gained momentum. It should be more than a magazine article, Kennedy determined; it should be a book, featuring profiles of senators representing different regions and political persuasions. Fifteen years had passed since the publication of Why England Slept, which had been a turning point in its author’s young life; the new work would prove to be another milestone for him, not least for the deeper insight it would give him into his own political philosophy. As in the earlier book, Kennedy concerned himself here with the problem of the responsibilities of leadership in democratic society—in particular, what is a statesman to do if his constituents and his party advocate a course of action that he believes is dangerously mistaken?

Skeptics then and later wondered if the new book wasn’t mostly an effort to make amends for his non-vote on McCarthy’s censure. No doubt it was, in part, though it bears reiterating that he had conceived the study many months before the McCarthy crisis came to a head. At that time he had been too busy to give the project close attention; now, flat on his back on the Florida oceanfront, he had all the hours in the world. “Jack couldn’t sleep for more than an hour or two at a time because the pain was so bad,” his father remembered, “so he’d study to get his mind off the pain.” Patricia’s husband, Peter Lawford, not generally awed by the Kennedy men, was amazed by his brother-in-law’s self-discipline and drive. “He was really ill with that back, but he fought his way through that, and…wrote the book while he was lying on his back.”52

“This project saved his life,” Jackie said. “It helped him channel all his energies while distracting him from pain.”53

Her own role was critical, as the author would note in his preface: “This book would not have been possible without the encouragement, assistance and criticism offered from the very beginning by my wife Jacqueline, whose help during all the days of my convalescence, I cannot ever adequately acknowledge.” Jackie read aloud to him when he was too weary to hold a book, taking detailed notes along the way, and she successfully lobbied to have him seek input from Professor Davids on some of the chapters.54 She also coordinated on logistical matters with Ted Sorensen, who would be Kennedy’s principal collaborator in the writing. From the senator’s office in Washington, Sorensen worked with a coterie of clerical assistants who transcribed from Dictabelts, took dictation, and typed research materials and, later, sections of draft chapters. He also consulted with historians and other experts. Staff at the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress sent cartons of books, some to Palm Beach, some to Sorensen in the Senate office.

Kennedy made the final choices about which figures to feature in the book. And although Sorensen took the lead role in drafting the bulk of the chapters, with significant input on some of them from Davids and Jim Landis, the senator was responsible for the book’s architecture, themes, and arguments. Sorensen, gifted though he was in so many ways, didn’t have that capacity—at twenty-seven and with no personal political experience, he was too green, and moreover he knew far less about the details of U.S. history than did his boss. Kennedy was especially critical to the first and last chapters, as well as a big chunk of chapter 2, on John Quincy Adams—it was the Adams case that had first drawn him to the project, and he produced a lot of prose on Adams that never made it into the finished book. Often he worked while prone in bed, on heavy white paper in his loose, widely spaced hand; on better days, he was propped up on the patio or the porch. Some sections he dictated into a machine or to stenographers hired locally. On an almost daily basis, Sorensen recalled, Kennedy sent him instructions about “books to ship down, memoranda to prepare, sources to check, materials to assemble. More than two hundred books, journals, magazines, Congressional Records and old newspaper files were scanned, as well as my father’s correspondence with Norris and other sources.”55

“Politics is a jungle,” Kennedy wrote in his notes, “torn between doing the right thing and staying in office—between the local interest & the national interest—between the private good of the politician & the general good.” Moreover, “we have always insisted academically on an unusually high—even unattainable—standard in our political life. We consider it graft to make sure a park or a road, etc., be placed near property of friends—but what do we think of admitting friends to the favored list for securities about to be offered to the less favored at a higher price?…Private enterprise system…makes OK private action which would be considered dishonest if public action.”56

“Enclosed pleased find the drafts for two chapters,” Sorensen wrote to Kennedy on February 4. “These two chapters are of the approximate length intended; although undoubtedly you will want to introduce a more flowery style and greater historical detail (beyond that which was taught in Lincoln Central High School, the only American history I’ve ever had). I will say that this is the most gigantic undertaking we have ever gigantically undertaken; and I doubt whether Gibbon could have produced ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ in a proportionately brief time.” The same day, Sorensen also shipped to Palm Beach biographies of Mississippi’s Lucius Lamar and Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton. On February 14, he followed with draft chapters on John Tyler, who was a senator from Virginia before he became vice president and president, and Sam Houston of Texas (only the latter made the final cut) and, under separate cover, “reference texts for your use in expanding and rewriting these drafts.”57

The pace caused Kennedy to worry that they were moving too fast and risked producing a “second-rate” work; he wondered if they needed to take a step back and include more original research drawn from archival sources. But Sorensen pressed on, assuring his boss that the book would succeed or fail based on its broad interpretive claims and biographical richness, not on “whatever new, previously uncovered facts or facets we might include.” This was no academician’s work, after all, but a book by a statesman: “Even more important than the telling of these stories is the fact that a United States senator is telling them, telling them for their meaning and inspiration today, discerning the patterns in them and discussing in opening and concluding chapters the whole concept of political courage. No other Senator or author has done this.”58

Gradually, a manuscript began to take shape, the work barely interrupted by Kennedy’s return to New York in February 1955 for another operation. (Surgeons removed the metal plate as well as the screws that had been drilled into the bone to hold it in place. Then they replaced the shattered cartilage with a bone graft. The procedure seemed to work, but the patient was prescribed several more weeks of bed rest.) In April, Harper & Brothers, which had turned down Why England Slept in 1940 and which initially passed on this new work, offered a contract, with a $500 advance and with Evan Thomas II, the son of the socialist leader Norman Thomas, assigned as editor. In March and again in May, Sorensen traveled to Palm Beach, each time for ten days, to work with Kennedy on getting the draft chapters into shape.^* “The way Jack worked,” Sorensen later said, “was to take all the material, mine and his, pencil it, dictate the fresh copy in his own words, pencil it again, dictate it again—he never used a typewriter.” On Sorensen’s first visit, Kennedy was on his back throughout; by the second he was able to sit up and even take brief dips in the ocean.59

VI

The 266-page book that resulted features profiles of eight senators—John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton, Sam Houston, Edmund G. Ross, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, George Norris, and Robert A. Taft—who showed notable courage and risked their careers in taking political stances unpopular with their constituents, their parties, and in some cases their regions. Neither Kennedy nor Sorensen knew the historiography well enough to get much below the surface in any of the cases, and although they were helped in this regard by the counsel they received from Davids and Landis, some parts of the book have aged poorly.60 Although Kennedy wrote powerfully about Lamar, who served as an officer in the Confederate army during the Civil War but later championed reconciliation between North and South, he missed the Mississippian’s steadfast racism and white supremacist views. (In 1875, a year after eulogizing Northern abolitionist Charles Sumner, Lamar spoke of “the supremacy of the unconquered and unconquerable Saxon race.”) In the same vein, the book embraced the then-common rendering of Reconstruction as a bleak time in which the defeated and debilitated South was further beaten down by a sinister mix of Northern reconstructionists (or carpetbaggers, as they were called), scalawags (Southern whites who collaborated with the reconstructionists), and “uppity” former slaves. This depiction, which took a dim view of Radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens, was in line with prevailing scholarly accounts but would soon be undermined by a wave of studies providing a more nuanced assessment of the era.61

Profiles was hardly brilliant, in-depth history. Nor, given the cut-and-paste feel of some sections, could it be considered a stylistic triumph. Its principal contribution—both at the time of publication and today—lies in its broad interpretive claims, articulated most fully in the two chapters in which Kennedy’s own imprint was greatest, namely, the first and the last. The introduction, candid and engaging, contains humorous asides reminiscent, in tone and style, of the college-age Kennedy writing to Lem Billings two decades before (including a heavy use of dashes): “If we tell our constituents frankly that we can do nothing, they feel we are unsympathetic to inadequate. If we try and fail—usually meeting a counteraction from other Senators representing other interests—they say we are like all the rest of the politicians. All we can do is retreat into the Cloakroom and weep on the shoulder of a sympathetic colleague—or go home and snarl at our wives.” But the introduction’s core message is serious. Its title is “Courage and Politics,” but more than anything the chapter argues for the vital importance in a democracy of compromise, of having “the sense of things possible.” The absolutist’s condemnation of all compromise as immoral is shortsighted, Kennedy insists, for decisions of public policy often involve difficult choices, often mean choosing from a menu of lousy options.

The fanatics and extremists and even those conscientiously devoted to hard and fast principles are always disappointed at the failure of their Government to rush to implement all of their principles and to denounce those of their opponents….[But] some of my colleagues who are criticized today for lack of forthright principles—or who are looked upon with scornful eyes as compromising “politicians”—are simply engaged in the art of conciliating, balancing, and interpreting the forces and factions of public opinion, an art essential to keeping our nation united and enabling our Government to function. Their consciences may direct them from time to time to make a more rigid stand for principle—but their intellects tell them that a fair or poor bill is better than no bill at all, and that only through the give-and-take of compromise will any bill receive the successive approval of the Senate, the House, the President and the nation.62

For Kennedy, the compromise can be, should be, at the level of policy, not principle. “We can compromise our political positions,” he writes, “but not ourselves. We can resolve the clash of interests without conceding our ideals.” Idealists and reformers and dissenters in fact are crucial, because they prevent political situations from being about nothing but opportunism and expediency and careerism. Above all, “compromise need not mean cowardice. Indeed it is frequently the compromisers and conciliators who are faced with the severest tests of political courage as they oppose the extremist views of their constituents,” as their loyalty to the nation triumphs “over all personal and political considerations.”63

Not all of the eight men profiled in the remainder of the book were “compromisers and conciliators”; some were unyielding in their commitment to absolute principles. Nor, Kennedy informed his readers, did he agree with each historical stand. But all eight men had one thing in common, he insisted: they showed courage, in transcending narrow interests for what they saw as the greater good, in making the Senate “something more than a mere collection of robots dutifully recording the views of their constituents, or a gathering of time-servers skilled only in predicting and following the tides of public sentiment.”64

Thus did John Quincy Adams ignore the narrow interests of Massachusetts and New England to support the Louisiana Purchase and the Embargo Act; and thus did Daniel Webster, also from Kennedy’s home state, defy his constituents and his party in trumpeting nationalism over sectionalism in helping to broker the Compromise of 1850. Thomas Hart Benton, for his part, prevented Missouri from joining the seceding Southern states, while Sam Houston cast the lone vote among Southern Democrats against the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Edmund Ross of Kansas joined with six other Republicans to oppose the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, and Mississippi’s Lucius Lamar sought, in the wake of Reconstruction, to encourage national unity over sectional strife. George Norris won acclaim for standing against the despotic rule of House Speaker “Uncle Joe” Cannon of Illinois, and Robert Taft, recently deceased, was commended for daring to oppose the Nuremberg Trials because of his belief that the U.S. Constitution prohibited ex post facto laws. Not selected for inclusion, Kennedy noted, were those legislators whose battles, however determined and impressive, were waged “with the knowledge that they enjoyed the support of the voters back home.”65

The concluding chapter returns to the broader themes; it matters to us today for what it says about Kennedy’s views on politics and leadership, and for serving as a kind of timeless antidote to the cynicism about politics and politicians that periodically courses through the American body politic. Representative democracy is hard work, he tells his readers, for unlike in an authoritarian system, leaders in a democracy cannot impose their will on society. “We, the people, are the boss, and we will get the kind of political leadership, be it good or bad, that we demand and deserve.” Kennedy extols both compromise and courage (the courage he most favors tends to be that of moderates who resist extremists) and argues that it is on national issues—on matters of conscience that challenge party, regional, and constituent loyalties—“that the test of courage is presented.” At the same time, Kennedy says his book is not intended to laud independence for the sake of independence, or to imply that there is on every policy issue a right side and a wrong side. “On the contrary,” he writes, “I share the feelings expressed by Prime Minister Melbourne, who, when irritated by the criticism of the then youthful historian T. B. Macaulay, remarked that he would like to be as sure of anything as Macaulay seemed to be of everything.”66

Kennedy then quotes Lincoln: “There are few things wholly evil or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of Government policy, is an inseparable compound of the two, so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.”67

Here the senator may have been influenced by an extended conversation he had at about this time with longtime friend David Ormsby-Gore. From his reading of American history, Kennedy told the Englishman, he had drawn the lessons that there were usually two sides to every serious political problem. The zealots of the left and right, in their constant demand for simple solutions, didn’t grasp this fundamental point. “Now this didn’t prevent him being capable of taking decisions,” Ormsby-Gore said later of the conversation, “but it did always prevent him saying, ‘I know that I have got nothing but right on my side and the other side is entirely wrong,’ and he never would adopt that attitude. He said that one of the sad things in life, particularly if you were a politician, was that you discovered that the other side really had a very good case. He was most unpartisan in that way.” According to Ormsby-Gore, Kennedy even wondered whether “he was really cut out to be a politician because he was so often impressed by the other side’s arguments when he really examined them in detail. Of course, he thought nothing of them if they were just the usual sort of partisan speech attacking his position on something, but where he thought there was a valid case against his position, he was always rather impressed by the arguments advanced.”

“He knew that if you were President of the United States or indeed had any position in public life, for good or evil, somebody had to make decisions and you had the responsibility of making decisions,” Ormsby-Gore continued. “You did your best but you would be foolish to assume that you were omnipotent and all-seeing or that you were necessarily always right. The best you could hope for was that you were likely to be right more often than somebody else. It shows a considerable degree of humility in the conduct of human affairs. He felt that people who thought it was simple and that the answers were obvious were dangerous people.”68

In July 1955, with the manuscript almost complete, Jack asked his sister Eunice and others for input on the title. He told them he had four possibilities in mind: “Men of Courage,” “Eight Were Courageous,” “Call the Roll,” and “Profiles of Courage.” Responses varied, and Kennedy himself soon dropped “Men of Courage” from consideration. Other options considered and rejected included “The Patriots” and “Courage in the Senate.” Ultimately, Evan Thomas and his colleagues at the publishing house made the call: it would be Profiles in Courage.69

That summer, Kennedy and Sorensen worked to incorporate suggestions from a range of academics, notably James MacGregor Burns, Arthur Holcombe (who had taught Kennedy at Harvard), Allan Nevins (who would also contribute a foreword), and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who submitted four pages of single-spaced criticism in early July. (Kennedy had asked Schlesinger to be “ruthlessly frank in giving me your criticism, comments and suggestions, however major or however petty,” and the historian obliged, calling the Webster chapter problematic and the Taft chapter wholly unpersuasive. “If statesmanship implies a capacity to see the real issues,” he wrote with respect to the former, “then the architects of the Compromise [of 1850] were far from statesmen. Webster never saw either the political issue of Southern domination of the Union or the moral issue of slavery.” As for Taft, his condemnation of the Nuremberg Trials, however defensible, took place outside the Senate, and moreover it was “hard to recollect Taft’s doing anything else which required political courage.” Kennedy tweaked both chapters in response, though not to Schlesinger’s full satisfaction.) In early August, Kennedy informed Thomas that Sorensen would submit the finished version shortly, as soon as he received some final input from Nevins.70

VII

Sorensen would do the honors because by then Kennedy had decamped for a vacation in the South of France. Over the preceding months, his health had gradually improved. On March 1 he walked without crutches for the first time, and the next day he ventured to the beach, with Jackie and Dave Powers steadying him. There would be setbacks in the weeks thereafter, with long stints in bed, but the trend lines pointed in the right direction. He gained weight and grew steadily stronger. On May 23, 1955, after seven months away, he returned triumphantly to Washington. Family and friends were out in force at National Airport to greet his flight from Palm Beach, which also included Jackie and sister Jean. Later, on the Capitol steps, he posed for newsreel and TV cameramen, to the cheers of tourists and a delegation of southern textile workers who happened by. Inside the Senate Office Building, receptionists stood to applaud when the senator entered room 362, and he found his inner office crammed with waiting reporters. On his desk, among the letters and telegrams celebrating his return, was a giant fruit basket bearing a note that read “Welcome home,” signed “Dick Nixon.”71

One of the reporters asked about his upcoming thirty-eighth birthday. “I’m looking forward to it,” he replied with a chuckle. “I’ll certainly be glad to get out of my thirty-seventh year.”

Would Ike run again?

“I don’t know.”

Wasn’t the president’s strength as formidable everywhere as it had been when he entered the White House?

“Well, I’ve been in a pretty limited area. I’ll say that he seems to be standing up well in Palm Beach.” Laughter all around.72

If Jackie hoped her husband would proceed with care, easing gently back into his routines, she was soon disappointed. At his direction, his staff arranged an ambitious schedule, starting with a commencement address at Assumption College, in Worcester, on June 3, followed by another graduation address at Boston College on June 5 and the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner on June 9. On the sixteenth he attended the fifteenth reunion of his Harvard class.73

The big early event, though, occurred on June 10, when Kennedy hosted a picnic in Hyannis Port for close to three hundred state legislators and legislative assistants, including “secretaries” from the 1952 campaign but also many who had never been active for him. He greeted them in chinos, sweatshirt, and sneakers, looking youthful and energetic. It was a transparent attempt to show Massachusetts Democrats that he was back and healthier than ever, and it worked. “The thing I remember most about the event was that he was physically able to move around,” Kenny O’Donnell remembered. “There were no crutches. They had softball games and so forth, and it was an excellent outing.” Most important, to O’Donnell’s mind, the senator’s appeal to the rank and file hadn’t dissipated one iota.

Jack Kennedy’s magic was as solid as it ever had been. He was on his feet. He was healthy again, physically and mentally. The great attraction of the candidate was on display, and the fear that he might not return, that siding with Jack Kennedy was a risk, was finally put to rest. To many of these regular politicians who had eyed Jack with suspicion as an outsider, a rich kid, and a lightweight now saw something else. They saw their political future and the future of the party in Massachusetts. They knew now it was better to be on the winning side, and for the regulars that meant siding with Jack Kennedy.74

He was not, however, the same man. Close associates such as O’Donnell and Powers and Sorensen noticed that his long health ordeal had changed him, had made him more serious, more determined. Having long believed that he would not live past the age of forty-five, he felt enhanced pressure to achieve the goal, stated to his wife, of claiming his “place in history.” Said journalist Joseph Alsop some years later, “I’ve always thought he did not begin to take his own career truly seriously, I mean to have any long range and high aim in his own career, until he went through his very serious illness in 1955….Something very important happened inside him, I think, when he had that illness because he came out of it a very much more serious fellow than he was prior to it. He had gone through the valley of the shadow of death, and he had displayed immense courage, which he’d always had.”75

This isn’t quite right: Kennedy’s “long range and high aim” was evident well before the middle of 1955—indeed, arguably from the first House race in 1946. But the depiction of a more serious, more focused political figure coming out of the harrowing surgery and aftermath rings true, as does the suggestion that Kennedy emerged from the tribulations with his reputation for physical courage further enhanced. In this way the episode actually boosted his public profile. Newspaper and magazine editors found the story irresistible, and the fact that Kennedy’s misadventure came so soon after his high-profile society wedding made it all the more poignant. Photos of the senator entering the hospital, on crutches, while his devoted Jackie smiles bravely at his side played widely across the country, shaping the narrative of the handsome lawmaker and war hero who refused to give in to his ailments and ultimately vanquished them.76

To those who knew him well, the turnaround was stunning: eight months after almost dying in a New York hospital room and four months after it seemed he might never walk unaided again, his political career in all likelihood over, John F. Kennedy was back, by no means fully healthy but so much better than he had been, and on the cusp of becoming what he had not been up until now: a figure of national renown.

II

Even so, the speculations about a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket were as yet scattershot and fragmentary, more notable in hindsight than they were at the time. But they were significant enough to get the attention of the Kennedy family, as well as Jack’s senior aides. Already on September 12, eleven days before the president’s heart attack, Ted Sorensen had written the senator in Cap d’Antibes to alert him to rumors that the Stevenson camp considered him an attractive potential running mate.6 A few days before that, Joseph Kennedy, who was also in the South of France for his annual summer sojourn, sent a letter to son Teddy:

Last night we went to the Gala at Monte Carlo and Jack arrived early and dressed in my room. As usual, he arrived without his studs, with two different stockings and no underpants; so he walked off with a pair of brand new Sulka stockings of mine, a new pair of Sulka underpants of mine, and the last pair of evening studs I possessed….He is back on crutches after having tried to open a screen in his hotel room, but if he hasn’t any more brains than to try that, maybe he should stay on crutches. His general attitude towards life seems to be quite gay. He is very intrigued with the constant rumors that he is being considered for the Vice Presidency, which idea I think is one of the silliest I have heard in a long time for Jack.7

Jack was then in the second month of his European trip, begun immediately after Congress went into recess. Jackie had come, too, but in the early going the two were in separate locales. Over the previous months the marriage had shown renewed signs of strain as the closeness engendered by his illness and recovery wore off. Jack had resumed his long work hours and heavy speaking schedule, and Jackie spent much of her time house-hunting. In early July, while her husband was still stateside, she had set off for London, where her sister, Lee, and Lee’s husband, Michael Canfield, lived in a chic apartment in upscale Belgravia. (Michael, the adopted son of Harper & Brothers publisher Cass Canfield, who would soon bring out Jack’s book Profiles in Courage, served as private secretary to Winthrop W. Aldrich, the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.) The sisters were, as always, thick as thieves, delighting in each other’s company and hitting the London social scene, the ultra-stylish Lee turning as many heads as her sister. At the end of July, Jackie and Lee traveled to Paris and from there to the Riviera, where Canfield, having rented a flat for them in Antibes, joined them.8

Jack, meanwhile, accompanied by Torby Macdonald, boarded the SS United States in New York and made for Le Havre, in Normandy, arriving on August 10. From there the two continued on immediately to Båstad, a coastal resort town in southwestern Sweden, where Jack had arranged to rendezvous with Gunilla von Post at the Hotel Skånegården. Since their abortive get-together the previous summer, they had exchanged letters, including during Kennedy’s convalescence in Florida. He asked if she would come to the United States; she countered by saying he should visit her in Sweden. He relented, writing, “My plans are your plans.” In another letter he said that although the trip would be “a long way to Gunilla—it is worth it.” In July 1955, according to von Post, he called her and they firmed up their plan to meet in Båstad the following month. A confirmation letter soon followed, addressed to von Post at her parents’ home in Stockholm—Gunilla’s mother read it to her over the phone.9

“I rushed toward Jack, my heart pounding,” she later wrote of the moment she first saw him on August 11, “and fell into his arms. We held each other tightly. I was so happy to see him. No words could express my feelings.” She had an overpowering sense that he felt as strongly for her as she felt for him; why else would he travel all this way to be with her, at considerable risk to his health and his career? “I was relatively inexperienced,” she went on, “and Jack’s tenderness was a revelation. He said, ‘Gunilla, we’ve waited two years for this. It seems almost too good to be true, and I want to make you happy.’ For the first time, I could let go and luxuriate in the attentions of a man who not only respected and cared for me but clearly loved me. I fully trusted him.”10

Macdonald, for his part, met a Swedish woman soon after arriving, and the quartet spent an idyllic week together motoring by rental car around Skåne, the country’s southernmost province, which is dotted with old manor houses and churches, and which Kennedy thought reminiscent of Ireland and—along the coast—of Cape Cod. “What’s that?” he would exclaim excitedly from behind the wheel about this or that landmark, and they would get out and have a look, he often relying on crutches. Gunilla introduced him to her friends and family, who were dazzled by this charming and handsome politician (a “senator,” no less) from America. “He cast a spell on people that I’ve never quite seen before or since. And everyone—man, woman, child—was smitten, and happy to be near him.” Gunilla’s mother and father apparently approved of the adulterous romance, so long as marriage might be in the offing. At no point did Kennedy talk with Gunilla about his wife, but Macdonald did, murmuring to her that Jack was unhappy in his marriage and much freer and more himself around her than around Jackie. In Gunilla’s telling, the glorious week ended with a traditional Swedish crayfish party at a grand estate near Ystad, followed by a night of tender romance and her suitor telling her, repeatedly, “I love you, Gunilla. I adore you. I’m crazy about you and I’ll do everything I can to be with you.”11

From Sweden, Kennedy flew to Nice to meet up with Jackie and the Canfields at Cap d’Antibes. The last time he was here, two years before, he had been with Gunilla, cooing in her ear in the nighttime breeze at Cap-Eden-Roc. Now, while he waited for Jackie to arrive, he wrote to Gunilla to suggest another meeting soon. The reunion with his wife, he said, would be “complicated by the way I feel now—my Swedish flicka [girl]. All I have done is sit in the sun and look at the ocean and think of Gunilla….All love, Jack.” The Kennedys and the Canfields soon joined up with William Douglas-Home and his wife, Rachel, for numerous days of lazing in the sun followed by evenings on the town. The Douglas-Homes took to Jackie immediately, appreciating her quick wit and intelligence. Asked later by biographer Sarah Bradford how the Kennedys got on with each other, William said it was hard to tell, because the marriage was not demonstrative. “Nothing with Jack would have been like that. So you wouldn’t see them hugging and loving each other, holding hands, ever. There wasn’t that kind of thing.” Yet Jackie seemed happy with her husband, William Douglas-Home thought. “She wasn’t demonstrative but she did love him, and they had this relationship which was fun, you’d have fun in their company, there’d be a lot of jokes and she used to tease him. It was good being with them. It was fun. But as I’ve said, they weren’t a lovey-dovey couple.”12

Jack certainly got plenty of reminders on the trip of how valuable Jackie could be to him in his dealings with world leaders. She translated for him during a meeting with senior French officials and won accolades from them and others for her elegance and her obvious familiarity with the country’s history and art. “She had all the wit and the seductive charms of an eighteenth-century courtesan,” Clare Boothe Luce later commented of Jackie’s interactions with Old World luminaries. “Men just melted when she gazed at them with those gigantic eyes. The Europeans were not immune to this.”13

According to von Post, Kennedy called her a few weeks later from Poland and said he had spoken with his father about divorcing Jackie so he could marry her, to which the elder Kennedy, he said, had responded, “You’re out of your mind.”14 That Jack Kennedy might have said this to his Swedish lover on the phone is plausible; that he actually had such a conversation with his father is much less so. In the middle months of 1955 his political prospects were bright, brighter than they’d ever been before. The top rung of the ladder might even be within his reach at some point. Jack did not need his father to tell him that divorcing his young wife (of just two years, no less), especially after all the glowing press coverage their union had received, would almost certainly cause it all to fall apart. For a Catholic politician, whose church insisted on the inviolability of the marital vow, the risks were greater still. If father indeed spoke to son, he only stated what the son surely already knew.

Von Post’s parents, sensing their daughter would likely be consigned to permanent mistress status, now intervened and compelled her to end the relationship. Soon thereafter, Gunilla became engaged to a Swede and in short order married. As he had with Inga Arvad after that relationship ended, Kennedy continued to keep in touch. “I had a wonderful time last summer with you,” read one letter, penned on U.S. Senate stationery, in 1956. “It is a bright memory in my life—you are wonderful and I miss you.”15

III

In early October 1955, Jack and Jackie Kennedy set sail for home, arriving in New York on the twelfth. Immediately, Jack headed for the Manhattan office of Dr. Janet Travell, an expert on pain management he had first visited a few months before. The muscle spasms in his lower left back had been bad on the trip, he told her, radiating out to his left leg and making him unable to put weight on it; he had been compelled to use crutches much of the time. He often could not reach his left foot to pull on a sock or sit in a low chair. Travell, in their earlier meeting, had determined that the left side of Kennedy’s body was smaller than his right—the left side of his face was smaller, his left shoulder was lower, and his left leg significantly shorter. Astonishingly, in all the years of medical treatment, no previous doctor had ever detected the problem, which, with every step, caused a vacillating movement and generated strain in the spinal muscles. Upon initial diagnosis, Travell had prescribed lifts for Jack’s left shoes and a lowered heel for his right, while also injecting him with procaine, more commonly known as Novocain. She now increased the dosage and suggested new exercises, then sent the patient on his way.

Kennedy found he liked Travell a great deal, liked the combination of her gentle woman’s touch and her authoritative demeanor, backed by top credentials; in the weeks to come, he would regularly slip out of Washington for a day and fly up to have an appointment with her. She considered him a model patient—accepting of, or at least not resentful of, his condition, always game to try any regimen that seemed reasonable.16

Travell’s efforts seemed to pay off. By the end of the year her patient was up to 168 pounds, his most ever, and he felt better than he had in a long time. His features had filled out, matured, as had his voice; he no longer looked or sounded younger than his years.

Jackie, for her part, suffered a physical setback of her own. On a fall weekend in Hyannis Port, she gamely agreed to play in the family’s usual football scrimmage. Going out for a pass, she tripped and fell, crying out in pain. At New England Baptist Hospital, doctors confirmed an ankle fracture and kept her for five days, outfitting her with a cast below the knee. While recovering at her mother’s Merrywood estate, in Northern Virginia, Jackie carried on the house hunt she had begun in the late spring before departing for Europe. Something kept bringing her back to Hickory Hill, a large three-story brick Georgian Colonial home in McLean, with guest quarters, stables, and a pool. The Potomac River ran nearby. She loved the tall trees and the rolling hills and the stables (she still liked to ride when circumstances permitted), and Jack was tickled by the historical connections: during the Civil War it had been General George B. McClellan’s command post. They closed on the property for $125,000, and Jackie set about remodeling the main house extensively. Maybe, she thought, this could be the home that would make their marriage a happy one, where they could raise a family and live for the rest of their lives. Here, too, the close of 1955 brought happy news: Jackie found out she was pregnant.17

All the while that autumn, Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack and prognosis dominated the national headlines, with daily announcements marking his progress as he convalesced in Denver. On October 10 the president sat in the sun for a few minutes outside his Army hospital in Denver; on the fourteenth, his sixty-fifth birthday, he was photographed in a wheelchair on the hospital roof, looking relaxed and smiling. But the image belied the seriousness of his condition. Not until October 23 did he stand upright for the first time, and only on the twenty-sixth did he take unassisted steps—and then only a few feet across his bedroom. By November 11, forty-nine days after the heart attack, Eisenhower had improved sufficiently to be flown to Washington, where a large crowd greeted him at National Airport and others lined the streets en route to the White House. Even now he was weak, mostly screened from public view by his aides and doctors, and he spent the rest of 1955 at his home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Only on January 9, 1956, did he resume his official duties in Washington—five months after departing the capital for his fateful summer holiday.18

Would he run for reelection? Political handicappers were uncertain as the year turned, which added intrigue in particular to the race for the Democratic nomination. (Republicans remained in stand-by mode.) Adlai Stevenson announced his candidacy on November 15, and Estes Kefauver followed on December 17. Averell Harriman waited in the wings, and there were well-founded rumors that Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, the powerful Senate majority leader, looked to get in. This latter prospect intrigued Joe Kennedy. To his mind, Johnson would be a stronger candidate for the Democrats than any of the other possibilities, including Stevenson; though a healthy Eisenhower would likely best all of them, the margin would be narrower with Johnson at the top of the ticket. So the Ambassador devised a plan, one he laid out to Johnson ally and former FDR adviser Tommy Corcoran: if Johnson would declare his candidacy and promise to select Jack as his running mate, he, Joe Kennedy, would arrange financing for the ticket. Corcoran duly reported the offer to Johnson, who turned it down, claiming he wasn’t running.19

Jack, it seems, never embraced the scheme, and it didn’t surprise him that Johnson said no. To Jack’s way of thinking, if the Texan coveted the nomination (and Jack had no doubt that he did), it made little sense for him to tie his hands in the way Joe Kennedy’s offer demanded. For that matter, Lyndon Johnson was at best a long shot for the top spot—by Jack’s calculation Adlai Stevenson remained the clear front-runner. Anyone seeking the number-two spot should focus his attention on him.

This was sound thinking on Jack’s part. Stevenson may have lost in 1952, but he remained the titular head of the Democratic Party, deeply popular with many state leaders and rank-and-file members, and still the runaway favorite among the party’s intellectuals. His loss in 1952, though admittedly lopsided, seemed in hindsight foreordained: no Democrat, in this line of reasoning, would have had a prayer of besting the popular Eisenhower, especially with the malaise of twenty straight years of Democratic rule and with the nation mired in an unpopular war in Korea. Even then, Stevenson had performed better than many gave him credit for—he racked up three million more votes nationally than Harry Truman had mustered in 1948. Since the election, moreover, Stevenson had only solidified his power position, giving well-received speeches around the country and winning accolades for his fundamental decency, his disavowal of bombast and banality, and his steadfast appeal to virtue and reason. “When demagoguery and deceit become a national political movement,” he asserted in Miami Beach in early 1954, in pointed reference to Joseph McCarthy, “we Americans are in trouble; not just Democrats, but all of us.”20

Jack saw the appeal of Stevenson and his message and shared his fundamental philosophy—Jack’s own book, now deep in production, stressed the vital importance of rational, fact-based discourse in a democracy, and he shared the Illinoisan’s affinity for blending poetry with power. He and Stevenson were not close allies, but in this period they got on well with each other.21 And it mattered to him that Jackie admired Stevenson and wanted him for the top of the ticket, and that most of the friends the couple saw socially did, too. It intrigued Jack in this regard that the low-level buzz about a potential Stevenson-Kennedy ticket had not dissipated in the fall months; if anything, it had picked up.22 Accordingly, he asked Ted Sorensen to undertake a study of the possible electoral benefits of having a Catholic vice presidential pick on the Democratic side. Sorensen took up the task eagerly, gathering a wide range of materials, journalistic as well as academic. He also went further, suggesting on November 22 that Kennedy endorse Stevenson at a high-profile news conference in Washington. Sorensen’s rationale was twofold: an early public endorsement would bring Kennedy increased exposure and, “more important, provide an opportunity to clear up all doubts about your health, which is the one question I still hear frequently raised around here when your name is discussed as a possibility for the ticket.”23 (Jack’s endorsement of Stevenson would come on March 8, 1956. He delayed the move, he told journalists, in order to give Stevenson the “best possible assist” in advance of the upcoming New Hampshire primary.24)

Sorensen’s seventeen-page study, completed in the winter of 1956 and titled “The Catholic Vote in 1952 and 1956,” examined the results among Catholic voters in fourteen pivotal states in the North and the West, all of them previously Democratic, that had gone for Eisenhower over Stevenson in 1952 and, the report concluded, swung the election to the Republican. Using polling data, election returns, and academic research, Sorensen argued that the Catholic vote within those states had long been critical—without it, the Democrats would have lost the elections of 1940, 1944, and 1948. Moreover, Stevenson, in part because of his divorce and the perception of him as a liberal and an intellectual who was insufficiently strong on Communism, in 1952 had received lower percentages than Catholic Democratic candidates for the House and Senate in these states. For Sorensen, the conclusion was inescapable: if these traditionally Democratic voters could be brought back to the fold by means of a Catholic running mate for Stevenson, it could be decisive, combining with Democratic strengths in the South to bring the former Illinois governor success. Conversely, without these voters he had no realistic path to victory.

But what about Al Smith’s defeat in 1928? Didn’t that show the immense risk of having a Catholic on the ticket? Not remotely, the study said—1928 was a GOP year, a year for “dry” supporters of Prohibition. It wouldn’t have mattered who the Democrats ran—he would have been vanquished. Of the states Smith lost, only four, all in the South, had been solidly Democratic in the years prior. Since then the picture had changed, and the Catholic vote now loomed more important than ever. Indeed, Sorensen suggested, in an indirect comment on the other potential vice presidential picks, Democratic chances in 1956 depended less on the farm vote or the southern vote than on reclaiming broad backing among Catholics.25

“Catholic voting strength is currently at its peak,” Sorensen wrote, quoting pollster Samuel Lubell, “in view of the maturing of the offspring of the Italians, Czechs, and other former immigrant elements.” Moreover, Sorensen stressed, ample research indicated that Catholics turned out to vote in greater proportions than did non-Catholics, a key point under any circumstances but especially given the nation’s current population distribution: Catholics were particularly concentrated in fourteen crucial states with 261 votes in the electoral college (five fewer than were needed in 1956 to win the presidency).26

Even before Sorensen’s study was completed, he and Kennedy quietly pushed its findings on sympathetic journalists. Fletcher Knebel, a witty and acerbic Look columnist who wrote political novels (including Seven Days in May) on the side, came away impressed after a meeting with the two men in February in which he received a rundown of the report. Kennedy, he wrote, had “all the necessary Democratic assets” in a vice president: good looks, youth, an outstanding war record, liberal policy positions, and exceptional vote-getting ability. His religion, moreover, far from being a liability in a national race, would be a boon, Knebel suggested, generating big turnouts in northern and eastern states with large Catholic populations.27

IV

There the matter might have rested, were it not for two other developments in early 1956 that served to raise Kennedy’s stature. The first was the publication, in early January, of Profiles in Courage. In advance of the release, there had appeared a substantial excerpt in The New York Times Magazine, titled “The Challenge of Political Courage” and culled mostly from chapter 1, as well as shorter pieces in The Boston Globe, Harper’s, Reader’s Digest, and Collier’s.28 These prepublication efforts, vital in an age when glossy magazines were a hugely important source of information for the mass of Americans—Reader’s Digest and Collier’s had circulations of 10 million and 3.7 million, respectively—spurred advance orders of the book, and Kennedy received further encouragement from glowing reviews in prominent places. In a front-page assessment in The New York Times Book Review, political reporter Cabell Phillips gushed that it was “refreshing and enlightening to have a first-rate politician write a thoughtful and persuasive book about political integrity,” featuring senators each of whom “at some moment of crisis staked his principles against the massed furies of bigotry, sectionalism, and conformity.” An empathetic observer, the author was “no dilettante at his trade, but a solid journeyman full of ideals, but few illusions. His book is the sort to restore respect for a venerable and much abused profession.”29

In a similar vein, The Saturday Evening Post praised Kennedy for recognizing “the necessity of compromise, to make democratic government work at all,” and for understanding a senator’s need to “act according to his own conscience regardless of what his constituents may think.” According to the Chicago Tribune, it was “a remarkable book….He writes brilliantly about a handful of American statesmen who, at crucial times in history, have displayed a rare kind of greatness.”30 Erwin D. Canham, writing in The Christian Science Monitor, cautioned that the author had better watch his step going forward, “for he has set up high standards of political integrity for comparison.” But that, in its way, was a compliment to Kennedy, Canham went on: “That a U.S. senator, a young man of independent means with a gallant and thoughtful background, should have produced this study is as remarkable as it is helpful. It is a splendid flag that Senator Kennedy has nailed to his mast. May he keep it there.” And so it went, with praise coming from The Houston Chronicle (“wholly engrossing”), the Cleveland Plain Dealer (“as fine a book as we are likely to get all year”), The Wall Street Journal (“a heartening and extremely spirited book”), and other papers across the nation.

In Boston, the City Council passed a resolution mandating that the School Committee incorporate Profiles in Courage as a central part of its history curriculum, and council member Gabriel F. Piemonte praised the volume as a “great lesson in democracy.” In other cities, too, the book in short order became a staple on high school reading lists, in many places remaining there for years to come.31

A few dissonant voices could be heard. Charles Poore, in a review in The New York Times’s Books of the Times section, found it troubling that Kennedy lauded men who “showed their most conspicuous courage in defying the very forces that had chosen them for leadership.” In his eloquent defense of the actions of Edmund G. Ross, for example, whose lonely vote in 1868 saved President Andrew Johnson from impeachment and thereby also upheld the Constitution, Kennedy had not taken “sufficient account of the enduring good sense of the American people as a whole who, as in the past, always will preserve constitutional government, no matter what the demagogues advocate in any passing time.” Poore also wondered if it really was immaterial, as Kennedy claimed, whether another of his subjects, George Norris, was right or wrong on an issue, or only that Norris showed courage and was true to himself. Shouldn’t the purpose to which the courage was put matter, too? “It almost urges us to admire courage as courage, no matter where it appears. And this has its repugnant aspects….Our view of true courage, somehow, is inextricably woven into the fabric of the cause for which it is displayed.” Poore nonetheless praised Profiles in Courage as “splendidly readable” and deeply impressive for having such an “extraordinarily varied” cast of characters. Kennedy, he wrote approvingly, “is a practical man as well as a connoisseur of idealists,” a man who “appreciates Lord Melbourne’s saying that he would like to be sure of anything as Macaulay seemed to be of everything.”32

Sales were brisk from the start, and the book shot up the bestseller lists. It stayed there for many months. (Within three years it had sold 180,000 copies in hardback and half a million in paperback.) No longer could anyone consider John Kennedy just another freshman senator; now he was dubbed the unofficial historian of the upper chamber, and a respected champion of political integrity. With Soviet-led Communism posing a threat to the American way of life, the book affirmed for many readers the ability of democracy to triumph by producing leaders who put the national interest before selfish careerist ambition, who lived by the adage that no one has a monopoly on truth and therefore reasonable people can differ on the solutions to complex social and political problems. Foreign translations soon appeared, in languages from Hebrew to Japanese to Gujarati. On February 7, a month after publication, Kennedy was the featured speaker at the National Book Awards dinner in New York City, where he was photographed in the esteemed literary company of John O’Hara and W. H. Auden.33

Later, and especially after the book was awarded the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, critics would fault what they considered the deception of publishing a book under the name of a person who hadn’t actually written it. Some were still leveling the charge decades after Kennedy’s death.34 The objection was largely baseless. For one thing, Kennedy had a bigger role in the writing, and certainly in the conception and framing of the book, than many of these analysts suggested; the book’s broad themes and overarching structure were his. Friends who had visited in Florida attested to his hard work on the manuscript, as did secretaries who took his dictation, as did, with great vehemence, Jackie Kennedy.35 (Without Sorensen or Jules Davids, Kennedy likely would have produced a similar book, if less felicitous in its prose; without Kennedy, on the other hand, Profiles in Courage would not have existed.) For another, it was standard practice for American politicians in midcentury—and later—to get significant assistance on books that appeared under their name alone. Everyone in Congress knew, for example, that Crime in America, a recent bestseller by Estes Kefauver, had mostly been written for him by his staff.36

Certainly it never occurred to Kennedy or Sorensen or anyone else involved in the project that they might be acting unethically, then or afterwards. Sorensen contributed mightily to the senator’s speeches and articles; why should he not help write a book? Arguably, Kennedy should have refused the Pulitzer, but it’s hard to imagine him (or anyone else in his position) actually doing so—such a move would have amounted to a self-declaration of fraudulence and possibly done lasting damage to his reputation. More to the point, in core respects Kennedy was the book’s author. He himself never wavered from that conviction, and to the end of his days he would consider winning the Pulitzer perhaps the proudest moment of his life.37

V

Profiles in Courage paid immediate political dividends, elevating Kennedy’s standing within a party already enamored of its seemingly erudite nominal head, Adlai Stevenson.38 To Democratic leaders in Washington and to activists all across the nation, Profiles enhanced Kennedy’s status as a rising star and a force to be reckoned with. (His insistence on having regional breadth in the book, with southerners well represented, now proved its worth.) He was further helped in this regard by the second notable development that spring, namely, his bruising, behind-the-scenes fight to wrest control of the Democratic Party organization in Massachusetts, the better to improve his standing with Stevenson. Here Kennedy’s own long-term aloofness from the state party had left him on the outside looking in, which hardly mattered (the party as an organization had little actual power) except that its governing committee controlled the delegate selection process for the state’s representation at the Democratic National Convention, set for Chicago in August.

In early March, soon after Eisenhower announced that he would stand for reelection, Kennedy attended a meeting of the committee to ask for its support. His prospects, he knew, were uncertain at best. The committee’s chairman, a short, portly onion farmer and former tavern owner from central Massachusetts named William “Onions” Burke, was a protégé of James Michael Curley and a supporter of Joe McCarthy. More important, Onions was a close ally of House Majority Leader John W. McCormack, who hailed from working-class South Boston and had come to Washington in 1928 and worked his way up in the leadership. Only Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn of Texas ranked higher. Though they were fellow Democrats and Irish Catholics, McCormack and Kennedy had never been close—McCormack distrusted cosmopolitan Ivy Leaguers, while Kennedy, though respectful of the older man, made it clear he did not consider him a role model. In addition, McCormack opposed Stevenson’s presidential candidacy, seeking for himself a favorite-son designation in order to boost Averell Harriman and show the world that he, McCormack, spoke for the state’s Democrats.39

McCormack was aided in this effort by Burke and John Fox, the rabidly McCarthyite publisher of The Boston Post who had backed Kennedy for the Senate in 1952 but had then turned on him for not standing by McCarthy. Fox, a Harvard man, also faulted Kennedy for failing to attack Harvard president Nathan Pusey, a favorite McCarthy target, whom Fox accused of coddling professors suspected of Communist sympathies. (To McCarthy and his acolytes, Harvard was “the Kremlin on the Charles.”) When Kennedy refused Fox’s urgings to join an alumni boycott of Harvard fundraising in retaliation, Fox pumped out editorials that condemned Kennedy and praised Burke and McCormack.40

Liberals in the state responded by rallying to Kennedy’s side. The Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), in an action spearheaded by Harvard political scientist Samuel Beer (later to become president of the organization), joined in the campaign against Onions Burke, as did other progressive forces. According to Joseph Rauh, a founding member of the ADA and a tireless champion of civil rights, Jack Kennedy was now seen as “sort of a young liberal against the machine”—though probably, Rauh added, more anti-machine than liberal.41

The March meeting went poorly. Many of the party regulars, loyal to McCormack and resentful of the Kennedys for elbowing aside the state organization in the 1952 campaign, were disinclined to bend to the senator’s wishes. Irritated by the defiance but outwardly calm, Kennedy knew that his own credibility in the state and nationwide would suffer grievous damage if his support for Stevenson was largely ignored by a Massachusetts delegation marching in lockstep with McCormack, Burke, and Fox. Kennedy thus proposed a deal in which half the delegates to the Chicago convention would back Stevenson and the other half would support McCormack as the favorite-son candidate. Burke waved aside the proposal. He considered Kennedy a young upstart who should be put in his place. Then, in the state’s primary in April, Burke orchestrated a successful write-in campaign for McCormack, who bested Stevenson easily. With the battle lines drawn, and with Burke up for reelection in May, Kennedy and his lieutenants worked every angle to get him ousted, using the kind of backroom politicking the senator generally avoided. (Stay away from local politics, his father had always warned him. It was a morass from which extrication would be all but impossible.) Aides gathered information on every committee member, whereupon Kennedy paid individual visits to many of them around the state, urging them to vote for his chosen candidate, ex–Somerville mayor John “Pat” Lynch. Burke’s forces, meanwhile, worked to line up support for their man.42

The Burke team called a committee meeting in Springfield for Saturday, May 19, at 2:00 P.M. Kennedy’s operation then called an official meeting of the committee to be held in the Bradford Hotel, a traditional meeting place just off Boston Common, for 3:00 P.M. on the same day. Burke’s forces responded by rescinding their initial announcement and said they were calling a meeting for the Bradford at 3:00 P.M.

The Kennedy team perhaps should have taken a closer look at the calendar before setting the date: Jack’s youngest sister, Jean, was getting married to Stephen Smith, the low-key and intelligent son of a large New York tugboat-and-barge-operating family, that same day at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in Manhattan. The senator was expected to be there as an usher, alongside brothers Bobby and Teddy. He flew to New York for the ceremony, then immediately caught the shuttle back to Boston so that he could be at the Bradford to greet committee members as they filed in. He made it in the nick of time, shaking hands in the lobby and vowing his support for Lynch. He then withdrew, prudently avoiding the raucous session that followed.

“We argued that Onions shouldn’t be allowed to attend the meeting since he wasn’t a member of the committee,” recalled Larry O’Brien, a key player on Kennedy’s side.

To back up our ruling, we had two tough Boston cops guarding the door, one of whom had reportedly killed a man in a barroom fight. Burke arrived with some tough guys of his own. Just as the meeting was about to begin, he and his men charged out of the elevator and broke past our guards. One of the leaders was Ed “Knocko” McCormack, the majority leader’s two-fisted, three-hundred-pound younger brother. As shouting and shoving spread across the meeting room, I called the Boston police commissioner. He arrived minutes later.

“I’m O’Brien,” I told him. “You’ve got to get those troublemakers out of here.”

“One more word out of you, O’Brien,” the commissioner replied, “and I’ll lock you up.” I hadn’t known the commissioner was a McCormack man. The whole thing was a scene out of The Last Hurrah [a book and later a film depicting the no-holds-barred mayoral campaign of an unscrupulous politician modeled after James Michael Curley]. The two candidates for state chairman almost settled matters by a fistfight. There was shouting and confusion, and as the roll call began, one member who’d gotten drunk attempted to vote twice.43

When all the votes were counted, Kennedy’s man Lynch had prevailed by a vote of 47–31. The senator, who, according to both Jackie Kennedy and Ted Sorensen, cared as much about this political fight as any in his career, had gained undisputed control of the state party and could now deliver a majority of the state’s forty votes to Stevenson at the convention.44 The victorious Kennedy hopped a plane to New York, where his sister’s wedding reception at the Plaza Hotel was still going strong. Before departing Boston, he placed a call to Stevenson’s campaign manager, James Finnegan, who expressed his delight at the outcome.45

Yet Kennedy seemingly took little joy in his win—the mudslinging by both sides, he told aides, had been unseemly and depressing. In a magazine article in late May and in a commencement address at Harvard two weeks later, he tried to reclaim loftier ground.46 Drawing on arguments and examples developed in Profiles in Courage and echoing his remarks at the National Book Awards dinner, the Harvard address focused on what he described as the lamentable and seemingly deepening schism in the country between politicians and intellectuals.^* “Instead of synthesis,” he told the crowd of three thousand in Harvard Yard, a few feet from the dorm in which he lived freshman year, “clash and discord now characterize the relations between the two groups much of the time.”

The politician, whose authority rests upon the mandate of the popular will, is resentful of the scholar who can, with dexterity, slip from position to position without dragging the anchor of public opinion….The intellectual, on the other hand, finds it difficult to accept the differences between the laboratory and the legislature. In the former, the goal is truth, pure and simple, without regard to changing currents of public opinion; in the latter, compromises and majorities and procedural customs and rights affect the ultimate decision as to what is right or just or good. And even when they realize this difference, most intellectuals consider their chief functions that of the critic—and politicians are sensitive to critics—(possibly because we have so many of them). “Many intellectuals,” Sidney Hook has said, “would rather die than agree with the majority, even on the rare occasions when the majority is right.”

It would be imperative, Kennedy continued, for both sides to remember that American politicians and scholars claimed the same proud heritage. “Our Nation’s first great politicians were also among the Nation’s first great writers and scholars. The founders of the American Constitution were also the founders of American scholarship. The works of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Paine, and John Adams—to name but a few—influenced the literature of the world as well as its geography. Books were their tools, not their enemies.” Nor was this a temporary phenomenon, Kennedy added, for the link between the intellectual and the politician in the United States lasted for more than a century. Thus, in the presidential campaign a century before, in 1856, “the Republicans sent three brilliant orators around the campaign circuit: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Those were the carefree days when the eggheads were all Republicans.”

He closed by reminding his audience that politicians and intellectuals ultimately must commit to operating within a “common framework—a framework we call liberty. Freedom of expression is not divisible into political expression and intellectual expression.” And the payoff for such a common commitment could be great, he promised:

“ ‘Don’t teach my boy poetry,’ an English mother recently wrote the provost of Harrow. ‘Don’t teach my boy poetry; he is going to stand for Parliament.’ Well, perhaps she was right—but if more politicians knew poetry and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live on this commencement day of 1956.”47

II

When the Democratic convention opened at Chicago’s International Amphitheatre on August 13, analysts in the party and the press identified several leading candidates for the number-two slot: in addition to Kefauver and Kennedy, they included Senators Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, and Lyndon Johnson of Texas, as well as New York City mayor Robert Wagner (also a Catholic) and W. Averell Harriman, governor of New York. Kefauver was the odds-on favorite going in, with Humphrey also attracting a lot of attention. (Johnson, most politicos speculated, preferred to remain majority leader and to set his sights on 1960.)

But now Jack Kennedy got one of those lucky breaks that periodically defined his career. Party chairman Paul Butler had commissioned a film about the history of the Democratic Party, by Hollywood producer and delegate Dore Schary, that would introduce the first evening’s keynote address. Governor Edmund Muskie of Maine, a rising figure in the party, was asked to provide the narration but declined, whereupon Kennedy got the nod. He flew out to California in July to see a screening of the footage-only rough cut at the twenty-room Santa Monica beachfront home of his sister Patricia and her husband, Peter Lawford. (The house had been built in 1936 for film industry titan Louis B. Mayer.) Pleased by what he saw, Kennedy rehearsed the script, adding a few lines of his own, then went into a studio to record his voice-over. Schary was thrilled: “All of us who were in contact with [Kennedy] immediately fell in love with him because he was so quick and so charming and so cooperative, and obviously so bright and so skilled.”18

The film was a smashing success, the high point of the convention’s opening night. As the lights dimmed, the audience of eleven thousand heard Kennedy’s New England voice fill the auditorium. The effect was electric. Schary, seated with the California delegation, recalled that the senator’s personality “just came right out. It jumped at you on the screen. The narration was good, and the film was emotional. He was immediately a candidate. There was simply no doubt about that because he racked up the whole convention.”19 A press report said the film “sent the convention roaring for the first time.” After it ended, Kennedy strode to the platform to take a bow and the roars came anew. Members of the Massachusetts delegation waved “Kennedy for President” placards and staged a brief but noisy favorite-son parade, and The New York Times proclaimed that “Senator Kennedy came before the convention tonight as a photogenic movie star.”20 But it was among the other states’ delegates and, even more, the television viewing audience that the narration really mattered, in an instant raising his profile in a way nothing had ever done before—not his books, not his dramatic 1952 Senate win, not even his Pacific war heroics. He had reached a new level.

Stevenson, too, was impressed, but he remained uncertain at day’s end about which way he would go on a running mate. When, during a late-evening cab ride, Newt Minow made an impassioned plea for Kennedy as the best choice, Stevenson launched into a recitation of all the things he disliked about Joe Kennedy. “How can you blame the kid for his father?” Minow exclaimed. Stevenson fell silent for a moment, then murmured, “He’s too young.”21

The following day, Kennedy was the talk of the convention, mobbed wherever he went, on the streets and on the convention floor, an overnight sensation. Behind the scenes, though, all was not smooth. Eleanor Roosevelt, a formidable player in the party, had arrived in Chicago to proclaim her support of Stevenson’s candidacy and extol her late husband’s legacy; the Kennedy team, thinking she could boost Jack’s chances of being tapped for the second slot, arranged for a half-hour meeting between the two at the storied Blackstone Hotel. It didn’t go well. Mrs. Roosevelt was wary of Kennedy for what she saw as his father’s tolerance of Nazis during the war, as well as Jack’s failure to condemn Joseph McCarthy. Accounts of the meeting differ on the particulars, but all agree that the former First Lady placed the senator on the defensive over the McCarthy issue. When she pressed him on the matter, he reportedly said, “That was so long ago,” and offered a meandering comment on Senate procedure. The reply “just wasn’t enough of an answer for me, that’s all,” she reported afterwards, but Kennedy insisted “she must have misunderstood me because what I meant was that the bill of particulars against McCarthy was long before the censure movement. My position was that we couldn’t indict a man for what happened before he was seated [for his new term, in January 1953]. If he was guilty of those things, the time to stop him was before he was seated…it was hardly a place or a basis for judgment.”22

More likely, Roosevelt did not misunderstand Kennedy at all but merely saw his response for what it was: an evasive dodge on a matter he preferred not to confront.

III

On Wednesday, August 15, came more proof that Kennedy was having an outsize role in the convention. In a morning meeting, Adlai Stevenson asked him to deliver the main nominating speech before Thursday’s presidential balloting. The offer came with a caveat: if northerners succeeded in pushing through a stronger civil rights plank in the party platform later that day, Stevenson would instead need a southerner to nominate him. Kennedy felt honored to be asked—this would mean yet more national attention for him, and on a critical day of the convention—but also came away disappointed, in that it probably meant he would not be the running mate. By tradition, one did not invite to give the nominating speech someone also under consideration for the second slot on the ticket. When Stevenson told Kennedy he wanted him to give the speech, Kennedy later reflected, “I asked him if that meant I was thereby being disqualified for the vice-presidential nomination and he said, no, not necessarily. So when Arthur [Schlesinger Jr.] came to see me that day, I told him I felt I should know whether or not I was being eliminated before I made the nominating speech, or at least before it happened. And that’s when Arthur told me that nobody yet had been picked.”23

It was true: Stevenson had not decided on a running mate. Prone to indecision at the best of times, he felt conflicted about the top three contenders. Kefauver, the consensus front-runner, had delegate strength and good organization and arguably deserved the nod, having won primaries in the spring. He had also gained national recognition for his chairmanship of a Senate committee whose hearings on organized crime attracted broad television coverage. But Stevenson disliked Kefauver, who had a reputation for heavy drinking and chronic extramarital dalliances, and he knew that many of Kefauver’s Senate colleagues found him coarse and conniving, and too loquacious by half. Hubert Humphrey, a skilled orator and policy wonk with whom Stevenson had gotten on well in the past, represented the farm vote in the Midwest, which the ticket would need in the fall; he had arrived in Chicago expecting, on the basis of a conversation with Stevenson a few weeks prior, to get the nod.24 But both Kefauver and Humphrey were suspect among southerners for their progressive stances on civil rights. Jack Kennedy, for his part, was a proven vote-getter with a heroic war record and abundant charm, a man who represented an important region of the country and had a reputation for centrism on policy issues. But there were the questions about his health, his youth, and his Catholicism. Trailing behind these three men in Stevenson’s calculation were the other contenders: Johnson, Gore, Harriman, and Wagner.

That evening Ted Sorensen, still waiting for confirmation that Kennedy would give the nominating speech the following day, went over the draft Stevenson’s aides had produced. He thought it terrible—“a wordy, corny, lackluster committee product,” he subsequently said. He ran into Schlesinger, who would only say that the previous draft was worse. At one thirty in the morning, with the platform fight at last over and Kennedy authorized to give the speech, the senator and Sorensen met to discuss how to proceed. Kennedy would take the podium less than twelve hours later, at noon on August 16. He shared his aide’s low opinion of the draft and told him, “We’ll have to start over.” Kennedy dictated the opening sentences and outlined the broad points, and instructed Sorensen to have a draft ready by eight o’clock in the morning. Sorensen worked through the night, then had a secretary type up the new version, jumped in a car, and took the draft over to Kennedy’s hotel room. The senator “looked it over, rewrote some of it, cut out some things and added a few paragraphs, and by then it was so chopped up that we had to have it retyped because the TelePrompTer people were screaming for it. We gave them one copy and sent another copy to be mimeographed for the press.”25

En route to the Amphitheatre, as his taxi sped down Michigan Avenue, Jack saw to his horror that parts of the typescript were illegible. He let loose a string of profanities—he was due on the stage in half an hour. In that instant he spotted a familiar face trying to hail a taxi: Tom Winship, a reporter from the Boston Globe. Kennedy told his driver to stop and pick up the reporter, who promptly agreed to help. After reaching the convention hall, Winship raced to the pressroom and typed two clear pages. The senator got the refreshed copy to the teleprompter with minutes to spare. As it happened, the teleprompter failed and Jack had to read from his notes, but the speech, while faulted by The New York Times for relying on a “cliché dictionary,” was a hit with the delegates, especially a bit that slammed the GOP ticket of Eisenhower and Nixon as having one candidate who took the high road while the other traveled the low road. Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley came away deeply impressed, by both the content and the delivery: the young man from Massachusetts was a must for the ticket, he determined.26

Kennedy’s stirring performance increased the buzz on the convention floor about his chances for the slot. Perhaps it also increased the buzz in Stevenson’s head, for the candidate now shocked the political world by announcing, at 11:00 P.M., that he would throw the vice presidential nomination open to selection by the delegates, with the balloting to occur the following day, barely twelve hours later. Unbeknownst to all but a few insiders, he had in fact been chewing on this idea for some months—an open selection process, he reasoned, would be seen by the party activists and the public as an exciting, democratic move and an effective way to contrast his party’s meeting with the Republican convention, slated for San Francisco the following week and likely to be tightly controlled. But Stevenson also went this route because he was torn, especially about Kefauver versus Kennedy: if he named Kefauver in place of Kennedy, he opened himself up to accusations of being anti-Catholic, a charge he could hardly afford in the coming campaign; but if he selected Kennedy, he risked alienating Kefauver’s sizable number of delegates. Stevenson fully expected Kefauver to prevail in the open contest—his forces were better organized than were Kennedy’s or Humphrey’s—giving him the running mate he probably would have felt compelled to select anyway.

In an instant, the convention became a hive of frantic late-night activity as the contenders and their teams sprang into action. “No delegate could buy his own drink and no elderly lady could cross a Chicago street without help from an eager vice-presidential candidate,” Time pithily reported.27 Humphrey operatives were seen entering lakefront bars at 2:30 A.M. in search of delegates; Kefauver held a press conference at 4 A.M. The Kennedy operation, unprepared for this eventuality (notwithstanding fleeting back-channel rumors over the previous few days), had to decide how—and if—to respond. The senator, still ambivalent about the desirability of being on the ticket in the fall, chose quickly: he was in. His competitive spirit would not let him back away. “Call Dad and tell him I’m going for it,” he instructed his brother Robert, then wisely left the room. The Ambassador, reached in Cap d’Antibes, was livid upon hearing the news, his blue language easily audible to the aides around Bobby. “Jack’s a total fucking idiot, and you’re worse!” he roared. A golden political career was being risked, and for nothing. The connection broke while he was in mid-rant, and Bobby thought the better of trying to call back. “Whew!” he said as he hung up, a wan smile on his face. “Is he mad!”28

Working through the night and the next morning, the Kennedy forces tried by any means available to drum up support for their man. They found a printer who would toil until dawn producing banners, placards, and leaflets. Jack, always his own best campaigner, met with state leaders and visited several state caucuses. His siblings Robert and Eunice paid calls on other delegations, as did John Bailey. Jack also got his brother-in-law Peter Lawford out of bed to try to secure the Nevada delegation. Inevitably, the team’s lack of preparation showed. Powerful New York bosses Carmine DeSapio and Charlie Buckley, who controlled a fat heap of ninety-eight votes, were kept waiting in one of the Kennedy hotel rooms for half an hour without anyone knowing who they were. (When the candidate at last appeared, the two men told him they were pledged to Robert Wagner on the first ballot but might well switch to him on the second.) And when Kenny O’Donnell and Bobby Kennedy buttonholed Senator John L. McClellan of Arkansas to ask if he could help swing his state’s delegation to their man, he gave them a powerful lesson—one they would never forget—in how politics at this level worked. It was not to him but to the governor, Orval Faubus, that they should be speaking, McClellan said, for governors always called the shots and controlled the delegates. Senators mattered far less.

“In the future,” McClellan admonished them, “if one was interested in delegations and their votes, they better find out who has the power in the delegation and stop reading the newspapers. You can’t just arrive at the convention and expect people to switch sides because your fella is so wonderful. You gotta do your homework, talk to the governors, the state reps, the party leaders, these people have been sized up, lined up, and courted for months. Just because you know a few high-profile, important fellas, a few senators or judges is not going to change things. Next time you gotta have this all done before you step off the train.”29

And so it went, hour upon exhausting hour. Associated Press correspondent Jack Bell recalled, “At 5:00 A.M., I came across Kefauver doing a television recording in a corridor of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Kennedy, rushing to another meeting, tripped over the power wires and almost fell into his rival.” Sorensen, reflecting on the night, noted the total lack of sleep—and the frenzied confusion: “It was hectic, not very well organized, too many people packed into my bedroom who were just like me—green, completely green. I couldn’t have been greener. I didn’t talk to many people because I didn’t know too many people.” The candidate himself remembered the chaotic scene: “Everybody was running around. My sister Eunice worked on Delaware. I had breakfast with some of the California delegation. I went to a lot of caucuses. I got nothing from Ohio, of course, but I did talk to them. We got Virginia because Governor [John S.] Battle’s son was in the Navy with me. And we got Louisiana because their delegation sat right next to ours and they had a lot of bright young fellows with whom we got real friendly.”30

Bit by bit, Kennedy racked up support. He proved especially effective with southern delegates, many of whom viewed Kefauver as a turncoat on racial matters and liked what they saw as Kennedy’s centrism on civil rights and his stated concern about foreign textile competition. His war experience spoke to them as well, as did his dignified and youthful bearing.

Still, as the nominations closed and the balloting opened, no one knew how things would go. Kennedy had New England as well as Virginia, Louisiana, and Georgia, and on a second ballot he could count on New York and, it was hoped, Illinois. But that left a huge swath of the country still open, and he was weak in the West. Some high-placed Catholic party leaders continued to insist that the country was not yet ready for a Catholic on the ticket, and many northern liberals, suspicious of Kennedy for his failure to cast a censure vote against Joe McCarthy as well as his criticism of Truman for the “loss of China” in 1949, stuck with Humphrey or Kefauver or Wagner. The nominating and seconding speeches for Kennedy were neither a hindrance nor much of a help—Connecticut governor Abraham Ribicoff gave a ringing, largely off-the-cuff nominating speech (privately, he noted the irony of a Jew pushing a Catholic for the ticket), while Florida senator and Kennedy pal George Smathers and House Majority Leader John McCormack (the latter, in Sorensen’s words, “literally propelled toward the platform at the last minute by Bob Kennedy”) delivered hasty seconding speeches that failed to leave much of an impression.31

IV

On the first ballot, Kefauver jumped out to an early lead, running especially strong in the Midwest and the West. But Kennedy showed strength in Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana, and Nevada. “This thing is really worth winning now,” he told Sorensen as the two watched on television from Kennedy’s hotel room, the candidate flopping on the bed in his undershorts. They were further cheered when Illinois delivered 46 of its 64 votes to him, but disappointed when Maine split its 14 votes. Kennedy cursed out loud when power brokers Michael DiSalle of Ohio and David Lawrence of Pennsylvania, both nervous about having a fellow Catholic on the ticket, mustered more than 100 of their 132 combined votes for Kefauver. The other contenders struggled to gain traction, and by the end of the first ballot it looked like a two-man race: Kefauver stood at 483½, and Kennedy came next with 304, followed by Gore at 178, Wagner at 162½, and Humphrey at 134½. A total of 687 were needed to claim the nomination.32

Kennedy aide Kenny O’Donnell had repaired to a bar across the street to watch the voting on television. He sensed something important happening as Kennedy gained support—the thing might actually be within reach. “Even more amazing was the assembled crowd of Chicago truck drivers, policemen and stock yard workers around us, all of them cheering, pounding on the bar and waving their beer glasses when another Kennedy vote was announced.” O’Donnell hurried back to the convention floor.33

In round two, Kennedy picked up steam when Arkansas switched from Gore to him. By Illinois he led 155 to 82; by New Hampshire the margin stood at 271½ to 229½ in his favor. Then more good news: New Jersey and New York, both of which had backed Wagner in the first round, delivered 128 of their 134 combined votes to Kennedy. Suddenly the press scrum scrambled from Kefauver’s corridor to Kennedy’s, while on the convention floor there was bedlam as conventioneers marched up and down the aisles wearing placards and tooting horns, others standing on chairs, waving frantically for attention. Bobby Kennedy, John Bailey, and other Kennedy lieutenants roamed the Amphitheatre, shouting to delegations to come to their man. In his Stockyards Inn hotel room, however, the candidate was serene. “He bathed,” Sorensen would write, “then again reclined on the bed. Finally we moved, through a back exit, to a larger and more isolated room.”34

For a moment Kennedy surged way ahead, 402½ to 245½, only to see Kefauver pick up four state delegations and cut the margin to 416½ to 387. Oklahoma stayed with Gore (“He’s not our kind of folks,” the governor said of Kennedy), as did Tennessee, while Puerto Rico stuck with Wagner, even though he had withdrawn. The uncertainty in the hall increased. Then rose the imposing figure of Lyndon Johnson to announce that Texas proudly backed “the fighting Senator who wears the scars of battle, that fearless Senator…John Kennedy of Massachusetts!”35 Pandemonium in the Kennedy camp—it seemed a harbinger of victory. Sargent Shriver burst into his brother-in-law’s room and exclaimed, “Jack, you’ve got it!” Sorensen, too, reached out a hand of congratulation. The candidate waved them aside; he remained uncertain, even when the second round ended with him in the lead, 618 to 551½, which put him only 69 votes away from the magic 687.

His numbers grew still more when North Carolina cast half of its votes for Kennedy, and Kentucky switched its 30 votes from Gore to Kennedy. Only 39 votes separated Jack from a majority. Jackie, seated in the Kennedy box in the arena with other members of the family, started yelling enthusiastically, waving her “Stevenson for President” placard for all to see. In the hotel suite, her husband finished getting dressed and at last allowed that perhaps he should give thought to what he ought to say to the convention if nominated.

What happened next would be the subject of intense scrutiny and controversy. For suddenly the tide turned, as convention chairman Sam Rayburn recognized Tennessee. With the convention and the country hanging on every word, Albert Gore requested that his name be withdrawn as a candidate and his delegates released to “my colleague, Estes Kefauver.” Kefauver supporters erupted in cheers. Oklahoma then switched its twenty-eight votes from Gore to Kefauver, and Minnesota and Missouri changed from Humphrey to Kefauver. Illinois and South Carolina tried to stem the onslaught by moving a few votes to Kennedy, but it was for naught. The Kennedy surge was over. More Kefauver votes followed, and he took the lead. “Let’s go,” said Kennedy, and he pushed through the throng in his corridor and brushed aside supporters who wanted him to stick it out to the end. Once in the Amphitheater he headed straight for the rostrum and was recognized by Rayburn.

Kennedy spoke movingly and gallantly and without notes:

Ladies and gentlemen of this convention, I want to take this opportunity first to express my appreciation to Democrats from all parts of the country, north and south, east and west, who have been so generous and kind to me this afternoon. I think it proves, as nothing else can prove, what a strong and united party the Democratic party is.

Secondly, what has happened today bears out the good judgment of Governor Stevenson in deciding that this issue should be taken to the floor of the convention. Because I believe that the Democratic Party will go from this convention far stronger for what we have done here today. And therefore, ladies and gentlemen, recognizing that this convention has selected a man who has campaigned in all parts of the country, who was worked untiringly for the party, who will serve as an admirable running mate to Governor Stevenson, I hope that this convention will make Estes Kefauver’s nomination unanimous. Thank you.36

He backed away, the hall cheering wildly, only to have Rayburn whisper in his ear that he should make a motion. Kennedy returned to the rostrum and moved that the convention nominate Kefauver by acclimation. The crowd roared anew, as the band swung into the “Tennessee Waltz.”

Stevenson himself was effusive: “I had hoped to see you before you left Chicago, and left, may I say, a much bigger man than you arrived! If there was a hero, it was you, and if there has been a new gallantry on our horizon in recent years, it is yourself. I say with confidence that you couldn’t have been half as disappointed about the Vice Presidency as my children were, and I know that they reflect the view of many.”41

Kennedy would come to accept the view that the outcome in Chicago had served his purposes, but only later; in the initial hours after the tense battle in Chicago, he was morose. He had suffered his first major political reversal, and it stung. Back in his hotel suite, he grumbled to Jackie, Bobby, Eunice, and a few aides and friends about how close he had come and about friends who’d let him down. With cutting sarcasm he dictated an imaginary wire to fellow Catholic David Lawrence, Pittsburgh’s mayor, who had earlier invited him to that city but also had urged Stevenson not to choose a Catholic for the second spot.42

“What impressed me was that Jack really showed more emotion than I’d really seen him display up to that point,” George Smathers recalled of the scene, “and Jackie even shed some tears. I was just shocked that Jackie had taken it so seriously, felt so deeply about it. After all, the whole thing was only a twelve-hour operation.” Yet what Smathers had long considered Kennedy’s even-keeled nature soon reasserted itself: “He stood up on the corner of the bed and I kept wondering if he was going to fall and hurt himself. But he told everybody, ‘Look, it’s all over. We did great considering what time we had. I want to thank everybody.’ And then he made some joke about my speech being cut off. But I knew he was hurt, deeply hurt. The thing is, he came so close. These Kennedys, once they’re in something, they don’t like to lose. But it was great the way he could joke about it.”43

Robert Kennedy, who always felt things more deeply than did his older brother, took longer to cool down. “I sat right next to Bobby Kennedy [on the flight back to Boston],” said one delegate, “and he was bitter. He said they should have won and somebody had pulled something fishy and he wanted to know who did it.”44 Others wondered as well, then and afterwards, about the sudden shift to Kefauver just when Kennedy seemed to have the battle won, and whether shenanigans were involved.^* Bobby also groused that if a large electronic tote board at the back of the hall had not been dismantled the night before, after Stevenson’s nomination (no one thought it would be needed anymore), delegates would have seen how close Jack was to victory on the second ballot and put him over the top.

VI

Exhausted from a mostly sleepless week in Chicago, his back pain unrelenting, Jack Kennedy returned to New England with Jackie. But he didn’t stay: to her intense disappointment, he departed in short order for the South of France. Jackie was herself feeling spent after the hectic convention, and moreover she was eight months pregnant; she thought they should recuperate together, in anticipation of the coming baby. But Jack would not be deterred. Still smarting from his defeat, he reasoned that he could take his long-planned trip and still be back in time for the baby’s birth. Jackie, rather than be by herself in his absence, opted to stay with her mother and stepfather at Hammersmith Farm.

Jack flew first to Paris and thence to the Riviera to see his father. “Jack arrived here very tired but I think very happy because he came out of the convention so much better than anyone could have hoped,” the elder Kennedy wrote singer Morton Downey, a longtime friend and Cape Cod neighbor, on August 24. “As far as I am concerned, you know how I feel—if you’re going to get licked, get licked trying for the best, not the second best. His time is surely coming!”45 Father and son spent several days together, plotting—we can imagine—the next steps in Jack’s political career, after which the son left for a weeklong sailing trip with the ubiquitous—and equally married—Torby Macdonald. Teddy Kennedy, now twenty-four, joined them as well. Details are sketchy, but a subsequent newspaper report suggested several bikini-clad young women were aboard.46

On August 23, a few days after arriving at her mother’s Newport home, Jackie experienced severe cramps. She began to hemorrhage. Rushed to the Newport Hospital, she underwent an emergency cesarean. The baby was stillborn. Upon hearing of the emergency, Robert Kennedy went immediately to be with her, reaching her hospital bedside even before she had come to from her anesthetic. He made arrangements for the funeral of the baby, a girl the couple had intended to call Arabella. Bobby advised his parents not to tell Jack about what had occurred, on the theory that he would fly back immediately and find his wife so upset and angry at his absence that strains between them would become more severe. So Jack was initially told that Jackie felt poorly, with no mention of the stillbirth.47

Just how he responded when he was told this has never been made clear. The evidence is fragmentary. Some accounts claim that he packed his bags and made arrangements to return home as soon as possible; others say he hesitated, thinking he might continue his sail for a few more days.48 According to the latter version, it was only when George Smathers (also in the South of France but not on the boating trip) reached him by phone and stressed the seriousness of the situation that he reconsidered. “If you want to run for president, you’d better get your ass back to your wife’s bedside or every wife in the country will be against you,” Smathers allegedly lectured him.49 Whichever account is correct, the senator flew home, having learned of the stillbirth prior to departure. His anxiety deepened. Upon landing at Boston’s Logan Airport, he snapped at a reporter who dared ask him an election-related question, then immediately boarded a private plane to Newport, where he asked his driver, “Can you get me to Newport Hospital in ten minutes?” Only by violating traffic laws, came the answer. “He was nervous,” the driver said later, “and if the light would be yellow, he’d say, ‘Go through it. I’ll pay for all the tickets.’ ”50

Jack stayed by Jackie’s side for two weeks. She was incensed by his obtuse neglect of her needs in favor of his own, and the strains in the marriage were evident to friends who visited, such as Lem Billings. After the stillbirth, “Jackie worried about whether she’d be able to have a baby,” Billings told author Doris Kearns Goodwin, “and she blamed her problem on the crazy pace of politics and the constant demands to participate in the endless activities of the Kennedy family. The only answer, she decided, was to separate herself even more from the rest of the family, insisting even in the summer months that she and Jack have dinner by themselves instead of gathering at Joe Senior’s house as everyone else in the family did.” Of course, such action would not necessarily do anything to change Jack’s behavior, as Jackie surely understood. She had long since come to the grim realization that, however different his worldview was from his father’s, however different his politics, when it came to marital relations he was Joseph Kennedy’s true heir.51

In September, with Jackie recovering at home, Kennedy took to the road to campaign for Stevenson, hitting twenty-six states and making 140 public appearances. Only the candidate and his running mate campaigned harder. To the Stevenson team’s frustration, Kennedy insisted on setting his own itinerary, one that was national in scope rather than focused on the Northeast, as the campaign wanted. “Jack had his own invitations to speak around the country,” a Stevenson aide remembered. “He pretty much ran his own campaign. There was a lot of mumbling about that.”52 But when Kennedy subsequently offered to cancel a series of engagements in Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and Cleveland in order to concentrate on getting the vote out in Massachusetts, Stevenson himself demurred, telling aides it was important to have Kennedy speak before the party’s annual fundraising dinner in Philadelphia in late October. (The number of attendees was expected to top four thousand, which would make it the largest dinner ever held in the city.)53

Kennedy’s speeches extolled Stevenson and urged audiences to turn out in force for the Democratic ticket in November. But he also delved into policy issues, sometimes in unexpected ways, as he went beyond simple Cold War shibboleths. In Los Angeles, for example, he suggested that Americans’ fixation on Communism and the East-West struggle had caused them to lose sight of the “Asian-African revolution of nationalism” and the unshakable will of human beings everywhere to control their own destiny, free of colonial control. “In my opinion, the tragic failure of both Republican and Democratic administrations since World War II to comprehend the nature of this revolution, and its potentialities for good and evil, has reaped a bitter harvest today—and it is by rights and by necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has nothing to do with anti-Communism.”54

Everywhere the response to Kennedy was overwhelming, with often glowing local press coverage. (He drew much bigger crowds than Kefauver.) In Louisville on October 4, Kennedy caused a near riot after a speech at Ursuline College when the coeds surged forward as he tried to make his way to a waiting automobile. “We love you on TV!” the women screamed. “You’re better than Elvis Presley!” In San Francisco, a crowd of six hundred gave him repeated standing ovations. So it went, at stop after stop, Kennedy’s energy never flagging. Even bad weather didn’t faze him. After an event in Idaho, as a terrible storm fast approached, Kennedy learned that an overflow crowd awaited him in Reno. He refused to cancel, and found an intrepid pilot willing to take him and Ted Sorensen in a tiny single-engine aircraft. The trio took off in brutal conditions. The flight proved so harrowing that the pilot had to make five passes before he put the landing wheels on concrete, but the assembled audience got their speaker.55 All the while, hundreds of speaking invitations flooded Kennedy’s Senate office on a weekly basis, along with letters from all over the country—some in response to his Chicago performance, others to the baby’s death. “People wrote of how they cried and how their children cried and how they prayed for him,” Evelyn Lincoln remembered.56

Robert Kennedy, for his part, accepted Stevenson’s invitation to join the campaign. In Stevenson’s eyes, it would show Catholics and conservative Democrats that their views were represented at the upper level, while to Bobby it was a glorious chance to see how a presidential campaign should—or should not—be run. Schlesinger recalled seeing the young Kennedy always scribbling notes, sometimes in the rear of the plane or bus, sometimes sitting on a railroad track while Stevenson spoke from the back of a train. “Occasionally he revealed himself, but in a rather solitary way.”57 Always, he was watching, learning. Bobby was impressed by Stevenson’s sense of humor and his “sparkle” in small groups in which the discussion centered on things that interested him. But overall he thought the candidate and the campaign operation a disaster. Stevenson spent too much time polishing his speeches in private and too little time cultivating politicians. He dithered endlessly over details, taking hours to discuss tactical questions that should have been handled in minutes, while ignoring vital strategic matters—how to win the Midwest, how to secure favorable press coverage, how to maximize voter turnout on Election Day. Too often he failed to connect with his audience, in part because of his habit of reading specially prepared texts instead of speaking extemporaneously—even on brief whistle-stops. This gave the impression of insincerity, Bobby believed, a deadly attribute in a candidate. Most egregious of all, he thought, Stevenson utterly missed the new and game-changing impact of television.

“People around Stevenson lost confidence in him,” Bobby later wrote. “There was no sort of enthusiasm about Stevenson personally. In fact, to the contrary, many of the people around him were openly critical, which amazed me.” In an interview, Bobby recalled, “I came out of our first conversation with a very high opinion of him….Then I spent six weeks with him on the campaign and he destroyed it all.” Others, too, noticed the problems, noticed how the candidate seemed less engaged than the last time around, his speeches less humorous and eloquent, his energy level a notch lower. The crowds still showed up at events, but there was a dutiful quality to their applause and their cheering. The candidate, torn between his need to hit the Republicans hard and his desire to project a more high-minded, noble image, too often landed in the muddled middle, stepping on his applause lines and articulating his strongest lines without conviction.58

Nor was Stevenson helped by developments beyond his control, and beyond America’s shores. In October, tensions flared in Hungary, where a new revolutionary government, urged on by student protesters, announced the nation’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-led military alliance formed with Eastern European countries the year before. Soviet leaders rejected the action and, in early November, sent troops and tanks into Budapest and other locales, where they battled students and workers and ultimately put down the revolution. In Egypt, meanwhile, war erupted on October 29 when Israeli forces invaded the Sinai Peninsula, under a secret plan worked out with Britain and France. The operation was a reaction to Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s move, some months before, to nationalize the Suez Canal. As Israeli forces advanced, drawing closer to the canal, France and Britain, under the pretext of protecting the canal from the two belligerents, dispatched their own troops. American voters, preparing to go to the polls, wondered if their own leaders would feel compelled to join the fray, perhaps sparking a wider conflagration if the Soviets intervened as well.59

For a brief moment, Stevenson thought the twin global crises could play to his advantage. He’d always prided himself on his knowledge of foreign affairs and had been itching to refocus his speeches accordingly. (A few weeks before, the campaign had even made a five-minute film featuring him and Jack Kennedy conversing about the pressing issues of peace and security.60) Here was his eleventh-hour chance. Hardly had he cleared his throat, however, before it became obvious that voters were not inclined to take chances on a new commander in chief in the midst of international turmoil, especially when the incumbent was a military hero and the former supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe. Stevenson’s claim that the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket could not be trusted to maintain America’s alliance relationships or preserve its global credibility moved no one who was not already in the Democrat’s corner.61

On Election Day, Stevenson and Kefauver were trounced by a margin of ten million votes, double Eisenhower’s margin of four years before. The Democrat won only seven states—none in the North and only one (Missouri) outside of the old Confederacy. Among those who quietly cast a ballot for the incumbent: Robert F. Kennedy.62

VII

In later years, much speculation would swirl around the question of when John F. Kennedy made the decision—made his choice to seek the big prize four years later. No precise date can be given. Maybe he was inching toward it already in Chicago, in that electric moment on August 17 when he conceded to Kefauver. (“In this moment of triumphant defeat,” James MacGregor Burns would write, “his campaign for the presidency was born.”63) No doubt he and his father discussed the prospect at length in the South of France later that month. In early September, Sargent Shriver informed Evelyn Lincoln that Senator Kennedy had asked him to compile “a complete list of all the delegates and alternate delegates to the Democratic National Convention together with their home addresses,” the theory being that many of the 1956 delegates would also be delegates the next time around. In late September, Kennedy told aides Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers that he’d “learned that you don’t get far in politics until you become a total politician. That means you’ve got to deal with the party leaders as well as the voters. From now on, I’m going to be a total politician.” Barnstorming the country on Stevenson’s behalf—but not on his itinerary—suggested something as well, as did dispatching Bobby to observe the candidate’s operation up close and take detailed notes on what he found.64

Immediately following the convention, during a long sail off the Cape, Kennedy revealingly contrasted himself with his party’s standard-bearer: “The hell of it is, I love [the campaigning]. Not the fakery, but learning to talk to voters in their own language. Stevenson hates it. He’s dying to be President, but he hates campaigning. That’s the difference between us, and it’s important.”65

Two days after the election, Kennedy offered a further clue to his plans in humor-filled remarks before the Tavern Club, a venerable hangout for Boston Brahmins that had mostly barred Irish Catholics for years but would make him a member the following year. Poking gentle fun at his blue-blooded audience, Kennedy noted, “This is my first major speech in many months that has not begun with those stirring words, ‘Fellow Democrats.’ Those words would not only be inappropriate on this non-partisan occasion, they would also—I gather from looking around me—be as grossly inaccurate as any salutation could possibly be.” Still, the senator went on, despite any partisan differences, he would, “like a tourist returned from a visit to Europe or Yellowstone Park who insists on showing his slides,” offer the room his thoughts on the recent election. For, after all, “some of you may someday have the ill luck to participate in a national political campaign to the same extent that I did in this one. Indeed, there is always the danger that I may participate in another one myself.”66

The climactic moment, one that would live forever in Kennedy family lore, came at Thanksgiving in Hyannis Port, after Jack and Jackie returned from a brief holiday in the Caribbean. On the Cape, the autumn light glittered in the quiet stillness. The Kennedy clan walked along the beach, accompanied only by the gulls circling overhead, then returned home for their traditional holiday feast. Following the clearing of the dishes, the senator and his father moved to the little study off the living room to talk about the future. Jack went first, laying out all the reasons why he shouldn’t run: he was Catholic, he had yet to turn forty, he didn’t have the support of the party leadership, he should bide his time. Joe listened intently, then calmly countered each claim. Back and forth they went as the dusk fell outside, each one respecting the other, each one holding his ground, until finally the younger man began to give way. The father offered his summation: “Just remember, this country is not a private preserve for Protestants. There’s a whole new generation out there and it’s filled with the sons and daughters of immigrants from all over the world and those people are going to be mighty proud that one of their own is running for President. And that pride will be your spur, it will give your campaign an intensity we’ve never seen in public life.”

The son fell quiet, then looked up and smiled. “Well, Dad, I guess there’s only one question left. When do we start?”67

ABBREVIATIONS USED

1. Archives

2. Individuals

3. Newspapers

4. Oral Histories

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1: TWO FAMILIES

CHAPTER 4: JACK AND LEM

CHAPTER 6: OUR MAN IN LONDON

CHAPTER 8: THE OBSERVER

CHAPTER 10: INTERLUDES

CHAPTER 12: OVERBOARD

CHAPTER 14: “POLITICAL TO HIS FINGERTIPS”

CHAPTER 15: THE CANDIDATE

CHAPTER 16: THE GENTLEMAN FROM BOSTON

CHAPTER 18: TWO BRAHMINS

CHAPTER 20: DARK DAYS