An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

  However, just how hard he worked is debatable. Arthur Krock described Jack in his room at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, “dressed for a black-tie evening, with the exception of his pumps and evening coat . . . lying on his bed, propped up by three pillows, a highball in one hand and the telephone receiver in the other. To the operator he said, ‘I want to speak to the 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.’”

  But however much of a social lion he may have been in San Francisco, Jack did manage to file seventeen 300-word stories between April 28 and May 28, principally reporting tensions with the Soviets and emphasizing a need for realism about what the new world organization could achieve. Jack explained that Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov had shocked and frustrated the American and British delegations by his overbearing manner and insistent demands to ensure his country’s national security. Jack warned against expecting good relations with the USSR: Twenty-five years of distrust between Russia and the West “cannot be overcome completely for a good many years,” he accurately predicted. Yet the fact that the Soviets were participating in the conference and were interested in creating a world organization was a hopeful sign.

  But in the end, the conference eroded Jack’s optimism. By the close of the meeting, he saw a war between Russia and the West as a distinct possibility and the U.N. as an ineffective peacemaker. He thought that the new world body would be little more than “a skeleton. Its powers will be limited. It will reflect the fact that there are deep disagreements among its members. . . . It is unfortunate that more cannot be accomplished here. It is unfortunate that unity for war against a common aggressor is far easier to obtain than unity for peace.” Jack feared 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 in 1919.”

  Privately, Jack expanded on his views in a letter to a PT boat shipmate. “Things cannot be forced from the top,” he said. “The international relinquishing of sovereignty would have to spring from the people,” but they were not yet ready for world government. “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.”

  With the close of the San Francisco Conference, Jack’s thoughts turned to political developments in Europe, where the British were about to hold an election and the victorious powers were planning a summit meeting in Potsdam, Germany. His U.N. articles persuaded the Hearst editors to send him to England and Germany to cover what they hoped would be the next big international stories.

  After a month in England following Churchill’s campaign around the country, Jack reluctantly concluded that despite his indomitable war leadership, Churchill and his Conservative party faced a left-wing tide that seemed likely to sweep them away. Perhaps blinded by admiration for the man he saw as the most extraordinary leader on the world scene, Jack could not bring himself to accept Churchill’s probable defeat, and as the campaign came to a close, he forecast a narrow Conservative victory, although he did not think it would last long. It was only “a question of time before Labor gets an opportunity to form the government,” Jack told American readers. Labour’s triumph came sooner than Jack anticipated: The July elections replaced Churchill and gave Labour a landslide majority.

  The conclusion of the British elections freed Jack to travel to the Continent as a guest of U.S. navy secretary James Forrestal. The secretary, who knew Joe well and was greatly impressed by his twenty-eight-year-old son, wanted Jack to join his staff in the Navy Department. But first he invited Jack to go with him to Potsdam and then around Germany for a look at the destruction of its cities and factories from five years of bombing, and assess the challenges posed by rehabilitating a country divided into Russian and Western sectors. In the course of their travels, Jack met or at least saw up close many of the most important leaders of the day: President Harry Truman; General Dwight D. Eisenhower; Britain’s new Labour leaders, Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin; and Soviet foreign minister Molotov and Ambassador Andrey Gromyko. When Forrestal’s plane landed in Frankfurt, a journalist recalled, “the plane doors opened, and out came Forrestal. Then, to my amazement, Jack Kennedy. Ike was meeting Forrestal. So Jack met Ike.”

  Watching all these influential but fallible men in action stirred feelings in Jack that he could do as well. His assumption came not from arrogance or a belief in his own infallibility or even a conviction that he could necessarily outdo the current crop of high government officials but from the sort of self-confidence that sometimes attaches itself to people reared among power brokers and encouraged to think of themselves as natural leaders. Aside from perhaps Churchill, he believed that his ideas were a match for the officials—East and West—he saw in action. The issue was to how make his voice heard.

  ENTERING POLITICS or taking on public obligations did not intimidate Jack. But it was nothing he had seriously thought to do as long as his brother Joe was alive. As he explained later, “I never thought at school or 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. 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. . . . My brother Joe was killed in Europe as a flier in August 1944 and that ended our hopes for him. But I didn’t even start to think about a political profession for more than a year later.”

  In fact, discussions with his father and others about a political career had begun earlier than Jack retrospectively claimed. There is evidence that Joe raised the matter of a political career with his son in December 1944, only a few months after Joe Jr.’s death, at Palm Beach. Paul “Red” Fay, a navy friend from the Pacific, who spent the Christmas holiday with Jack in Florida, recalled Jack telling him, “When the war is over and you are out there in sunny California . . . I’ll be back here with Dad trying to parlay a lost PT boat and a bad back into a political advantage.” In August 1957, Joe told a reporter, “I got Jack into politics. I was the one. I told him Joe was dead and that it was therefore his responsibility to run for Congress.” At the same time, Jack himself told another reporter, “It was like being drafted. My father wanted his eldest son in politics. ‘Wanted’ isn’t the right word. He demanded it. You know my father.”

  But nothing was settled that December. Jack still had not been released from the navy, and his health was too precarious for any firm planning. He was also reluctant to commit himself to a political career. As he told Fay, “Dad is ready right now and can’t understand why Johnny boy isn’t ‘all engines ahead full.’” One day in Palm Beach, as he watched his father cross the lawn, he said to Fay, “God! There goes the old man! There he goes figuring out the next step. I’m in it now, you know. It’s my turn. I’ve got to perform.” Arthur Krock was asked later whether he fully subscribed to the theory that Jack was filling Joe’s shoes when he entered politics. He answered, “Yes. In fact, I knew it. It was almost a physical event: now it’s your turn.” And Jack “wasn’t very happy. It wasn’t his preference.” Joe himself recalled in the 1957 interview that Jack “didn’t want to [do it]. He felt he didn’t have ability. . . . But I told him he had to.”

  Still, despite his father’s wishes, Jack hesitated throughout 1945. When Jack spoke to Lannan in Arizona about future plans early in 1945, “[he] said he thought he’d go into ‘public service.’ It was the first time I’d ever heard that term,” Lannan recalled
. “I said, ‘You mean politics?’ He wouldn’t say ‘politics’ to save his life. It was ‘public service.’” Such a phrase covered a multitude of possibilities. “I take it that you definitely have your hat in the ring for a political career,” Billings wrote him in January 1946. But in February, Jack told Lem, “I am returning to Law School at Harvard . . . in the fall—and then if something good turns up while I am there I will run for it. I have my eye on something pretty good now if it comes through.” Exactly what Jack had in mind remained unsaid, but it was clearly no more than a contingency.

  If Jack was a reluctant candidate, he found compelling reasons to try his hand at electoral politics. As his former headmaster George St. John perceptively wrote Rose that August: “I am certain he [Jack] never forgets he must live Joe’s life as well as his own.” Joe Sr. hoped St. John was right. “Jack arrived home,” Joe wrote an English friend on August 22, “and is very thin, but is becoming quite active in the political life of Massachusetts. It wouldn’t surprise me to see him go into public life to take Joe’s place.”

  For someone who prided himself on his independence—whose sense of self rested partly on questioning authority, on making up his own mind about public issues and private standards—taking on his elder brother’s identity was not Jack’s idea of coming into his own. Indeed, if a political career were strictly a case of satisfying his father’s ambitions and honoring his brother’s memory by fulfilling his life plan, it is more than doubtful that he would have taken on the assignment. To be sure, he felt, as he wrote Lem Billings, “terribly exposed and vulnerable” after his brother’s death. Joe’s passing burdened him with an “unnamed responsibility” to his whole family—to its desire to expand upon the public distinction established by Joe Sr. and to fulfill Joe Jr.’s intention to reach for the highest office.

  Nor was his father completely confident that Jack was well suited for the job. As Joe said later, his eldest son “used to talk about being President some day, and a lot of smart people thought he would make it. He was altogether different from Jack—more dynamic, more sociable and easy going. Jack in those days back there when he was getting out of college was rather shy, withdrawn and quiet. His mother and I couldn’t picture him as a politician. We were sure he’d be a teacher or a writer.” Mark Dalton, a politician close to the Kennedys in 1945, remembered Jack as far from a natural. He did not seem “to be built for politics in the sense of being the easygoing affable person. He was extremely drawn and thin. . . . He was always shy. He drove himself into this. . . . It must have been a tremendous effort of will.” Nor was he comfortable with public speaking, impressing one of his navy friends as unpolished: “He spoke very fast, very rapidly, and seemed to be just a trifle embarrassed on stage.”

  Yet not everyone agreed. Lem Billings thought that politics was Jack’s natural calling. “A lot of people say that if Joe hadn’t died, that Jack might never have gone into politics,” Lem said much later. ”I don’t believe this. Nothing could have kept Jack out of politics: I think this is what he had in him, and it just would have come out, no matter what.” Lem echoed the point in another interview: “Knowing his abilities, interests and background, I firmly believe that he would have entered politics even had he had three older brothers like Joe.” Barbara Ward, an English friend of Jack’s sister Kathleen, remembered meeting Jack during his visit to England in 1945. “He asked every sort of question of what were the pressures, what were the forces at work, who supported what . . . and you could see already that this young lieutenant [sic] was political to his fingertips. . . . He seemed so young—but with an extraordinarily . . . well-informed interest in the political situation he was seeing.”

  Jack himself was not as sure as Billings about the direction his professional life would have taken had Joe lived. Political curiosity and “well-informed interest” don’t automatically translate into political ambition. But Jack did recall that his attraction to politics rested on much more than family pressure or faithfulness to his brother’s memory. He remembered that the responsibilities of power—“decisions of war and peace, prosperity and recession”—were a magnet. “Everything now depends upon what the government decides,” he said in 1960. “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.” If this sounds similar to what his father had said in 1930 about how “the people who run the government would be the biggest people in America,” it is not only because the son had been influenced by the father but because the father had been correct.

  Comparisons with other professions made politics especially appealing to Jack. Alongside the drudgery of working in a law firm, writing “legislation on foreign policy or on the relationship between labor and management” seemed much more attractive. “How can you compare an interest in [fighting an antitrust suit] with a life in Congress where you are able to participate to some degree in determining which direction the nation will go?” Nor did he see journalism as a more interesting profession. “A reporter is reporting what happened. He is not making it happen. . . . It isn’t participating. . . . I saw how ideally politics filled the Greek definition of happiness—‘a full use of your powers along lines of excellence in a life-affording scope.’” Two of Jack’s closest aides later said that Jack “was drawn into politics by the same motive that drew Dwight Eisenhower and other World War II veterans, with somewhat the same reluctance, into the political arena—the realization that whether you really liked it or not, this was the place where you personally could do the most to prevent another war.” “Few other professions are so demanding,” Jack said later, “but few, I must add, are so satisfying to the heart and soul.” In 1960, he told an interviewer, “The price of politics is high, but think of all those people living normal average lives who never touch the excitement of it.”

  A strong family interest, great family wealth, and a personal belief in the “necessity for adequate leadership in our political life, whether in the active field of politics or in the field of public service,” had all given him the incentive to seek elective office. Encouragement from professional politicians also persuaded him to run. He remembered how after he gave a public address in the fall of 1945 to help raise money for the Greater Boston Community Fund charity, “a politician came up to me and said that I should go into politics, that I might be governor of Massachusetts in ten years.” Joe Kane, a Kennedy cousin and highly regarded Boston pol, a man described as “smart and cunning, with the composure of a sphinx and ever present fedora pulled down over one eye in the manner of [then popular movie actor] Edward G. Robinson,” encouraged Jack by telling Joe, “There is something original about your young daredevil. He has poise, a fine Celtic map. A most engaging smile.” In a dinner speech, “he spoke with perfect ease and fluency but quietly, deliberately and with complete self-control, always on the happiest terms with his audience. He was the master, not the servant of his oratorical power. He received an ovation and endeared himself to all by his modesty and gentlemanly manner.” From what we know about Jack’s less-than-perfect public speaking abilities in 1945, Kane was ingratiating himself with Joe. Nevertheless, he was among the first to see the qualities that would ultimately make Jack such an attractive national public figure.

  WHILE JACK WAS MAKING UP his mind, Joe was setting the stage for Jack’s political career. Asked later what he did for Jack, Joe denied playing any part; he was eager to ensure that, as Rose wrote Kathleen, “whatever success there is will be due entirely to Jack and the younger group.” When pressed by the interviewer, who said, “But a father who loves his son as you so obviously do is bound to help his son,” Joe replied, “I just called people. I got in touch with people I knew. I have a lot of contacts. I’ve been in politics in Massachusetts since I was ten.” Two of JFK’s later aides, Kenneth P. O’Donnell, a
college friend of Jack’s brother Bobby, and David F. Powers, a Boston Irish politician Jack recruited for his 1946 campaign, downplayed Joe’s part. They said that “his reputation as a prewar isolationist and his falling out with the New Deal might do Jack some harm,” so Joe stayed behind the scenes. But even there he confined himself to “fretting over small details, worrying whether Jack’s unpolitician-like style of campaigning was wrong for the Boston scene.” When JFK biographer Herbert Parmet interviewed O’Donnell in 1976 about Joe’s part in the events of 1945-46 that brought Jack into politics, he “became heated at suggestions that the Ambassador had played a prominent role. . . . He scoffed at stories about Joe Kennedy’s expertise and . . . pointed out that the Ambassador had been ‘out of touch’ with Boston politics for a long time. ‘He no longer knew a goddamn thing about what was going on in Massachusetts.’”

  The record says otherwise. In the spring and summer of 1945, Joe made a special effort to renew the Kennedy presence in Massachusetts. If memories of his ambassadorship did not serve him in most parts of the country, his home state was more forgiving. In April, Joe made the front page of the Boston Globe when he lunched with Governor Maurice J. Tobin, gave a speech urging postwar reliance on the city’s air and sea ports to expand its economy, announced a half-million-dollar investment in the state, and agreed to become the chairman of a commission planning the state’s economic future. The chairmanship assignment allowed Joe to spend much of the summer crisscrossing Massachusetts to speak with business, labor, and government leaders. “When he took the economic survey job for Tobin,” a Boston politician stated, “it was to scout the state politically for Jack.” In July, Joe added to the family’s public visibility with a ship-launching ceremony for the USS Joseph P. Kennedy, which reminded people that two of his sons were war heroes. There were also discussions with Tobin about Jack’s becoming his running mate in 1946 as a candidate for lieutenant governor.