Listening In (12 page)

JFK:
No, the one we just saw, in the
Boston Globe
, Sunday.

BRADLEE:
Jack, long before I knew you, when I was covering the federal courts in the District of Columbia, you used to, in the contempt cases, you used to come down and testify, “Yes, there was a quorum present. Yes, I was there. Yes, me and one other guy was there, which made up a quorum.” And you looked like the wrath of God. I can see you there now. You weighed 120, and you were bright green. You really were.

JFK:
There’s a picture that the
Boston Globe
ran Sunday, which had the veterans rally in ’47, Franklin Roosevelt and I, and I looked like a cadaver.

BRADLEE:
But that color was just fantastic. You were really green …

JFK:
Adrenal deficiency.

BRADLEE:
This was 1948, it must have been, ’48 or ’49.

JFK:
Forty-seven or -eight, I guess. Well, the point of the matter is, that’s why my father thought that I was not equipped for political life. [unclear]

BRADLEE:
And you’d been a congressman for two years. Did you run for Congress with this greenness?

JFK:
Oh yeah. Greener.

TONY BRADLEE:
What was that? That was atabrine?

JFK:
It was atabrine, malaria, and probably some adrenal deficiency,

BRADLEE:
Addison’s? What is that damn disease?

JFK:
Addison’s Disease, they said I have. Jack [unclear] asked me today if I have it.

BRADLEE:
Who?

JFK:
Drew Pearson’s man. I said no, God, a guy with Addison’s Disease looks sort of brown and everything. [laughter] Christ! See, that’s the sun.

TONY BRADLEE:
But then your back was later on.

JFK:
No, my back was in ’45.

TONY BRADLEE:
But then you were operated on after.

JFK:
I was operated on in ’45 too. All these things came together. I was a wreck.

BRADLEE:
When was that big slice, just north of your behind there, when was that?

JFK:
That was ’45, then again in ’54, and again in ’56.

JACQUELINE KENNEDY:
Yeah, he was all better, his crutch broke, and he had to go back again.

CANNON:
Does it ever concern you that you have lost your sense of privacy? You obviously can’t have … since everybody knows you now.

JFK:
That’s the real pleasure about Jamaica in a way. You really can’t go anyplace particularly now without … But I don’t mind, I think that’s part of running, so I’m delighted, really. I used to walk down the streets in ’45 and nobody knew me. Now that’s fifteen years of effort has gone into getting known. I mean, it isn’t pleasant for the person, but as an investment of energy it represents some …

CANNON:
What’s your reaction when someone comes up and says, “I saw you on television”?

JFK:
They come from Massachusetts? [laughter] It’s all right. I don’t mind. I’m asking their support, so, you know.

CANNON:
Do you take any special efforts to maintain a sense of privacy? Do you have a private phone? Unlisted?

JFK:
I do. But everybody seems to have it.

[break]

JFK:
Have we covered everything?

BRADLEE:
I just would like two minutes on the magic of politics. [laughter] Because I go back to this guy who told me I ought to run against Styles Bridges.
¹¹
And for about two minutes, I just talked. And there was this whole marvelous sense of mission, that you’ve been thinking about. Somebody must have said that to you. “You can be … ,” never mind president, but you can go so high. It’s an adrenaline on a man.

JFK:
I agree. It’s stimulating. Because you’re dealing with … Life is a struggle and you’re struggling in a tremendous sort of arena. It’s like playing Yale every Saturday, in a sense.

BRADLEE:
But the drama of it. I don’t know, somehow …

JFK:
How could it be more interesting than this sort of checkerboard chess struggle of the next seven months?

BRADLEE:
Talk about that, because this is what appeals to me most about you.

JFK:
I mean, look at the cold decisions that have to be made that are really life or death. I mean, running in Wisconsin? And what do we do about Mike DiSalle?
¹²
And how can it be handled?

CANNON:
There are 175,999,995 people who aren’t interested in it. You say, “What could be more interesting?” Why are you this interested, and the rest of the millions aren’t?

JFK:
Well, if they were in it. I mean, their lives are interesting to them. I’m having the same struggle that they’re having in a different sphere, but in the most sort of dramatic way, for the great effort, the presidency of the United States, my checkerboard struggle is going on. As I say, what is sports, spectator sports, the same thing. Johnny Unitas,
¹³
he might find it interesting to play in a sandlot team, in front of four people, but he’s playing for the Colts, the best team in the United States, for the world championship. I mean, I must say, he must find that very absorbing. I’m not comparing the presidency with that, but I’m just saying that, how could it be more fascinating than to run for president under the obstacles and the hurdles that are before me.

DICTABELT RECORDING, CIRCA 1960

This recording, probably from early 1960, reveals Kennedy to be thinking deeply about his life and the reasons he went into politics, which he declares, with considerable understatement, to be “my present profession.” It includes a personal confession that he was “at loose ends” following the war and that his entry into politics was somewhat accidental. But as he also knew well, politics was in his DNA, and he accepted his destiny with good cheer and a willingness to work hard. Certain phrases are repeated from the January dinner party conversation, suggesting that it was recorded not long after. But this version shows him telling the story without interruption, and with a more polished ending. A similar version was submitted to James Cannon for inclusion in his book
Politics U.S.A.
This proto-memoir recounts some of the earliest circumstances of his entry into politics, and his constant desire to get near “the center of action.” In 1960, that is precisely where he found himself.

JFK:
Mrs. Lincoln, is this tape in? Is this plugged in? Is this plugged in? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. In a sense, it is important and desirable that people feel this way about politics and politicians in a free society. A politician’s power may be great, and with this power goes the necessity of checking it.

But the fact remains that politics has become one of our most abused and neglected professions … Yet it is this profession, it is these politicians who make the great decisions of war and peace, prosperity and recession, the decision whether we look to the future or the past. In a large sense everything now depends upon what the government decides.

Therefore, if you are interested, if you want to participate, if you feel strongly about any public question, whether it’s labor, what happens in India, the future of American agriculture, whatever it may be, it seems to me that governmental service is the way to translate this interest into action, that the natural place for the concerned citizen is to contribute part of his life to the national interest. Like many decisions in life, a combination of factors pressed on me, which directed me into my present profession.

I was at loose ends at the end of the war. I was reluctant to begin law school again. I was not very interested in following a business career. I was vitally interested in national and international life, and I was the descendant of three generations, on both sides of my family, of men who had followed the political profession. In my early life, conversation was nearly always about politics. My father, who had directed much of his energy into business, nevertheless, as the son of a Massachusetts state senator, was himself interested in politics. My mother, also, shared the interest. Her father had been mayor and a United States congressman, and both my great uncles were state senators and my father’s first cousin was mayor of Brockton, Massachusetts.
¹⁴

For all the Irish immigrants, the way up in Boston was clearly charted. The doors of business were shut. The way to rise above being a laborer was through politics. So they all went into it, everybody in the Kennedy or the Fitzgerald family. But I never thought at school and college that I would ever run for office myself. One politician was enough in the family and my brother Joe was obviously going to be that politician.
¹⁵
I hadn’t considered myself a political type and he filled all the requirements for political success. When he was twenty-four he was elected as a delegate to the Democratic convention in 1940, and I think his political success would have been assured. I [unclear] recall that I was a freshman at Harvard when Henry Cabot Lodge
¹⁶
was elected to the United States Senate. I don’t suppose I ever thought, in those days, that I would someday run against him and defeat him for the Senate. I suppose there’s some freshman in college, today, who isn’t aware that he’s probably going to end up by defeating me sometime.

My brother Joe was killed in Europe as a flyer in August 1944, and that ended our hopes for him. But I didn’t even start to think about a political profession until more than a year later. When the war came, I didn’t know what I was going to do … and I didn’t find it oppressive that I didn’t know. In ’44 and ’45 I had been in the hospital for about a year recovering from some injuries I received in the Pacific. Then I worked as a reporter covering the San Francisco conference, the British election, and the Potsdam meeting, all in 1945.
¹⁷

So there never was a moment of truth for me when I saw my whole political career unfold. I came back in the fall of ’55 [1945] after Potsdam, at loose ends, and the head of the Boston Community Fund asked me to help him during the drive. That was Mike Kelleher, who later became my finance chairman when I ran for the Senate in 1952.

[unclear] Kelleher or his assistant meant making speeches for the first time in my life, and they seemed to be acceptable. The first speech I ever gave was on “England, Ireland, and Germany: Victor, Neutral, and Vanquished.” It took me three weeks to write and was given at an American Legion Post. Now, the speech went rather well. A politician came up to me afterwards and said that I should go into politics, that I might be governor of Massachusetts in ten years. Then I began to think about a political career. I hadn’t even considered it up till then. Later in the fall, James M. Curley
¹⁸
was elected mayor of Boston and a congressional seat became vacant. This was the seat, this was the eleventh congressional district, which my grandfather had once represented in Congress fifty years before.