Kennedy (15 page)

2.
Personal letters count more than prestige letterheads.

3. Fifty $1 contributors are better than one $100 contributor.

4. A nonpolitical talk to the unconvinced is better than a political talk to the already convinced.

5. One session in a vote-filled poolroom is worth two sessions in a smoke-filled hotel room.

6. (Regarding issues) It is better to rock the boat than to sail it under false colors.

7. No one’s vote can be delivered with the possible exception of your mother’s—and make sure she’s registered.

8. One hour of work in 1957 is worth two hours of work in 1958.

This last “cliché” struck at the oldest and best-entrenched political myth that Kennedy challenged. “In every campaign I’ve ever been in,” he told me in 1959, “they’ve said I was starting too early—that I would peak too soon or get too much exposure or run out of gas or be too easy a target. I would never have won any race following that advice.”

Between 1952 and 1958 he did not follow it, and in 1958 the Massachusetts Republicans could not find a significant candidate willing to oppose him. Some Republican strategists counseled no opposition in order to keep down the Democratic turnout for Kennedy. One Boston
Herald
columnist even suggested that both parties endorse him. The Republicans “can’t possibly lick him,” wrote the late Bill Cunningham. “They couldn’t borrow a better man and they surely haven’t any like him…. Why not make it unanimous?”

It nearly was. In the end, his opponent was an unknown lawyer named Vincent Celeste. Vinnie, as his friends called him, was a fiery orator when making sweeping charges against the Kennedys in public. But he was more subdued in the one private conversation I had with him, after he had walked out on a League of Women Voters-sponsored public debate in which I had represented the Senator, shouting as he left a series of protests at the speech I had half-completed.

Understandably the Kennedy campaign workers at the outset had an air of overconfident lethargy. But we were shocked by a light primary turnout in which Furcolo received a larger Democratic vote seeking reelection as Governor than Kennedy did as Senator. “I’m glad it happened and got everyone off their backs,” said the Senator, and he launched an intensive handshaking, speech-making, nonstop automobile tour of the state of several weeks’ duration, which took him and Jacqueline within six miles of every Massachusetts voter. On occasion she would speak a few words in French or Italian to audiences of those extractions.

Every hand in sight was shaken; ever since 1946, when Dave Powers had spirited him up the back stairs of the “three-decker” apartments in Charlestown (“so we could catch them in the kitchen,” said Dave), he had known there was no substitute for personal contact. Aides marveled at his stopping the car on the fatigue-ridden last night of the campaign to shake one more hand, that of an elderly woman alone on the street.

John Kennedy rolled to his fifth straight political victory by a margin of more than 873,000 votes, a record three-to-one ratio. It was the largest margin and largest total vote ever accorded any candidate in the history of Massachusetts.

He carried in with him the entire state Democratic ticket and the state’s first Democratic legislature as well. With the 1960 Presidential election in mind, Kennedy had made the desired impression on politicians around the nation. He had won bigger than any other contested candidate for major office in the country.

He was also the first office-seeker in Massachusetts history to carry every city and county in the state regardless of its political, economic or ethnic complexion. Instead of losing ground among Negro voters, as predicted a year earlier, he ran ahead of Negro legislator Lincoln Pope in the latter’s own ward.

In Massachusetts Kennedy was no longer regarded by the professionals as a political amateur and upstart. No one in the state could match or fault his performance; no one could doubt or challenge his leadership; and no one remembered that two years earlier the former Democratic State Committee chairman had vowed to run against Kennedy in the 1958 primary.

Any explanation of the Senator’s involvement in that 1956 State Committee fight must revolve around three names: Adlai Stevenson, William H. Burke and John Fox.

Adlai Stevenson was not the most popular figure in Massachusetts in those days, and Democratic politicians in that state traditionally kept apart from other candidates. But Kennedy was a warm Stevenson supporter for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1956 as in 1952. Stevenson’s leading opponents were Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and Governor Averell Harriman of New York, and it was generally believed that House Majority Leader John McCormack was seeking a Massachusetts favorite-son designation to aid Harriman, block Stevenson and show the nation that he spoke for Massachusetts Democrats.

William H. “Onions” Burke was a rotund former tavern owner and onion fanner from the old Curley school of politics. The Eisenhower victory of 1952 having deprived him of his patronage plum as Collector of the Port of Boston, he had wrested control of the State Democratic Committee and was firmly allied with McCormack against Stevenson.

Publisher John Fox of the Boston Post was an erratic financier who had converted the once-respected Post into a shrill and bitter outlet for his extremist personal views. After giving Kennedy a backhanded endorsement in 1952, in order to justify the Post’s nominal Democratic affiliation at a time when he was endorsing Eisenhower, he turned on the Senator shortly thereafter for not standing by Joseph McCarthy and for not attacking Harvard’s President Pusey. McCarthy and Fox were angry that Pusey had failed to take stronger action against professors suspected of Communist tendencies, and Fox wanted Kennedy to join an alumni boycott of Harvard fund-raising in retaliation. When Kennedy refused, and his Senate votes continued to displease, Fox personally wrote one mean anti-Kennedy front-page editorial after another.

At the Senator’s instructions—the only time he ever requested such a dossier to my knowledge—I quietly began gathering material for a possible speech on Mr. Fox, on the eminent leaders of both parties he had maligned, on his difficulties with the law and on his curious financial arrangements. That file was never used, for the Post in later years went bankrupt under Fox and he largely disappeared from public view. But in 1956, desperate to salvage his paper’s solvency, he was hoping by his support of McCormack and Burke to further not only his dislike of Kennedy and Stevenson but also his ambition to be the most politically powerful publisher in the state of Massachusetts.

Matters came to a head in the early spring of 1956. Burke, increasingly cocky with the support of Fox, castigated all Stevenson supporters in general and the members of the ADA in particular. Senator Kennedy, though he knew his own seat was surely secure, foresaw destruction by Burke and Fox of all his efforts to make the Massachusetts Democratic Party a less shabby, more respected and more cohesive organization. Too many former Democratic followers, having acquired a little affluence and a home in the suburbs, were becoming Republicans in their search for respectability. They would never return to the party of the Burkes and the Curleys.

More importantly, Kennedy had announced for Stevenson. He had no objection to John McCormack as a token “favorite son” and made no effort to obtain write-in votes for Stevenson against McCormack in the state’s nonbinding Presidential primary. But he foresaw his own standing in the state and nation being discredited if his emphatic endorsement of Stevenson was largely ignored at the convention by a Massachusetts delegation looking to Burke, McCormack and Fox for leadership. Although some assumed that talk of his being nominated as Stevenson’s running mate also influenced his decision, he later wrote me in a memorandum with respect to this charge:

Already many members of Kennedy’s personal campaign organization, as well as other “reformers,” ADA members and Stevenson supporters, had battled with some success in the April, 1956, primary for seats on the State Committee. Now in May, contrary to his own strong preference to steer clear of state politics, and contrary to the counsel of those whose advice he respected, Senator Kennedy plunged into the fray. The election of a new State Committee chairman was the key objective.
Winning that election was important only because losing it would be harmful.

The eighty little-known members of the State Committee, an organization Kennedy had previously done well to ignore, suddenly found themselves important for the first time, the object of all kinds of political pressure and press inquiries. The Senator quietly rallied his forces, working principally through two key aides from his 1952 race, Lawrence O’Brien and Kenneth O’Donnell. He visited every uncommitted State Committee member and sought out Burke followers as well. At the same time the Burke forces were equally busy and far more noisy.

Kennedy dispatched me to Boston to help plan the statutory and parliamentary procedures by which control of the committee could be gained from a hostile chairman and secretary who claimed pledges from a majority of the members. The Burke forces called a State Committee meeting in Springfield for May 19 at 2
P.M.
The Kennedy forces then called an official meeting of the committee to be held in the Hotel Bradford in Boston on the same day at 3
P.M.
The Burke forces then rescinded their first call and said
they
were calling a meeting in the Hotel Bradford at 3
P.M.

After two intensive weeks, which concerned the Senator as much as any political fight in his career, the climax was a stormy meeting—complete with booing, shoving, name-calling, contests for the gavel and near fist fights. In the end, the Burke forces were ousted by exactly the vote Kennedy had predicted. The Senator, who had not attended the meeting, called for a new era of unity for Massachusetts Democrats.

It was not really a new era. But Kennedy, who was shortly thereafter elected chairman of the state’s convention delegation, and delivered four-fifths of its votes for Stevenson on the first ballot, was thus able to honor his pledge.

Earlier that year he had called me into his office with a mixed air of mystery and glee. “I’m considering,” he said, “running as a New England favorite son in the New Hampshire Presidential primary.” It was an appealing idea at first sight. Kefauver was otherwise certain to get a head start on Stevenson by winning in New Hampshire as he had in 1952. As a stalking horse for Stevenson, Kennedy thought he could carry New Hampshire and help unite the six New England states behind the Illinoisan. He had no illusions about himself as a serious Presidential possibility in 1956. He was not even motivated by a serious interest in the Vice Presidential nomination at that time. Nor did he think New Hampshire to be of critical importance. But he was a man of action; and, in a
remark which revealed much about his activist nature, he was contemplating running for President in New Hampshire, he said, “because that’s where the action is now.”

In the end, Stevenson campaign manager James Finnegan preferred a Kennedy endorsement of Stevenson immediately before the New Hampshire primary. There Kefauver won, but by the time the Massachusetts State Committee fight was over, Stevenson’s gains elsewhere had caused increased speculation on his choice of a running mate.

Kennedy’s name had often been mentioned as a Vice Presidential possibility. In a letter to the Senator on November 22, 1955, I referred to this talk in suggesting he dispel the rumors about his health. We first heard that Stevenson was considering Kennedy early in 1956 from Theodore H. White, then writing a feature article on the Democratic Party for a national magazine. Stevenson’s camp had told him, he said, that under consideration for the second spot were two Southerners (Gore and Clement, both of Tennessee) and two Catholics (Kennedy of Massachusetts and Wagner of New York). The other three names seemed obviously to have been mentioned as a means of undercutting Presidential candidates Kefauver in Tennessee and Harriman in New York, and we thus suspected that the whole item was a “plant.”

But the seed, once planted, grew steadily in the thinking of Kennedy fans if not in the Senator’s own mind. Governor Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut was the first to endorse him, followed by Governor Dennis Roberts of Rhode Island. Governor Luther Hodges of North Carolina said Kennedy would be acceptable to the South. While the Senator continued to view the whole subject with more curiosity than concern, a surprising flurry of newspaper and magazine stories and editorials pointed up his assets with enthusiasm.

Why was Kennedy mentioned at all? His best-selling book and growing number of speeches had made him more widely known than most Democratic office-holders. His youthful, clean-cut demeanor, his candid, low-key approach and his heroic war record gave him a special appeal to both new and uncommitted voters. His television appearances and Harvard commencement address drew national attention (although a few disgruntled Harvardites were certain that his use of the word “campus” instead of “Yard” proved he had not written his own speech). And his religion, it was said, would help defend the ticket against Republican “soft-on-Communism” charges and help counter the effects of Stevenson’s divorce.

But it became increasingly clear that his religion was not an asset in all eyes. Stevenson himself was said to be expressing some doubts on its effect (along with doubts about Kennedy’s health and devotion to civil liberties). The mail to Stevenson’s office on the Vice Presidency was
heavily anti-Catholic anti-Kennedy. Mayor David Lawrence of Pittsburgh told Stevenson that a Catholic on the ticket meant certain defeat. Speaker Sam Rayburn held a similar view, and it was widely reported that, among many others, former President Harry Truman and former National Chairman Frank McKinney (like Lawrence and several other opponents to the idea, a Catholic himself) were equally negative on this ground. A
Look Magazine
poll of thirty-one Democratic officials in thirteen Southern states found eighteen who thought a Catholic on the ticket would be a liability in their states, only three who thought he would be an asset.