But Joe and Jack preferred a congressional campaign that could send Jack to Washington, where he could have national visibility. There was one problem, however: Which district? To this end, Joe secretly persuaded James Michael Curley to leave his Eleventh Congressional District seat for another run as Boston’s mayor. A fraud conviction and additional legal actions had put Curley in substantial debt, and he welcomed Joe’s hush-hush proposal to help him pay off what he owed and to finance his mayoral campaign.
The Eleventh District included Cambridge, with 30 percent of the registered voters, where former Cambridge mayor and state legislator Mike Neville was well entrenched; parts of Brighton, with 22,000 uncommitted Democrats; three Somerville wards, distinguished by warehouses, factories, and a large rail center that employed many of the area’s residents; one Charlestown ward populated by Irish Catholic stevedores who worked at the nearby docks and supported John Cotter, well known in the Eleventh as the long-serving secretary to the district’s congressmen; Boston’s North End, where Italian immigrants had largely replaced the Irish; and East Boston’s Ward One, another Italian American working-class enclave, which, like the North End, seemed warmly disposed to Joseph Russo, who had represented them on the Boston City Council for almost eight years. It was by no means a shoo-in for Jack.
Despite his father’s help—or perhaps because of it—Jack continued to have great doubts about whether he was making the right decision. He could not shake the feeling that he was essentially a stand-in for Joe Jr. When he spoke with Look magazine, which published an article about his campaign, he said that he was only doing “the job Joe would have done.” Privately he told friends, “I’m just filling Joe’s shoes. If he were alive, I’d never be in this.” He later told a reporter, “If Joe had lived, I probably would have gone to law school in 1946.” He disliked the inevitable comparisons between him and his brother, in which he seemed all too likely to come off second-best, but it seemed impossible to shake them.
Jack’s poor health also gave him pause. One returning war veteran who knew Jack in 1946 said, “I was as thin as I could be at that time, but Jack was even thinner. He was actually like a skeleton, thin and drawn.” Despite the steroids he was apparently taking, he continued to have abdominal pain and problems gaining weight. Backaches were a constant problem. Because hot baths gave him temporary relief, he spent some time every day soaking in a tub. But it was no cure-all, and considerable discomfort was the price of a physically demanding campaign. He also had occasional burning when urinating, which was the result of a nonspecific urethritis dating from 1940 and a possible sexual encounter in college, which when left untreated became a chronic condition. He was later diagnosed as having “a mild, chronic, non-specific prostatitis” that sulfa drugs temporarily suppressed. Moreover, a strenuous daily routine intensified the symptoms—fatigue, nausea, and vomiting—of the Addison’s disease that would not be diagnosed until 1947. A more sedate lifestyle must have seemed awfully attractive when compared with the long hours of walking and standing demanded of anyone trying to win the support of thousands of voters scattered across a large district.
Jack also felt temperamentally unsuited to an old-fashioned Boston-style campaign. False camaraderie was alien to his nature. He was a charmer but not an easygoing, affable character like his grandfather Honey Fitz, who loved mingling with people. Drinking in bars with strangers with whom he swapped stories and jokes was not a part of JFK’s disposition. “As far as backslapping with the politicians,” he said, “I think I’d rather go somewhere with my familiars or sit alone somewhere and read a book.”
One local pol who met Jack in 1946 “didn’t think he [Jack] had much on the ball at all. He was very retiring. You had to lead him by the hand. You had to push him into the pool rooms, taverns, clubs, and organizations.” He would give a speech at a luncheon and try to escape as quickly as possible afterward without trying to win over members of the audience. “He wasn’t a mingler,” one campaign volunteer recalled. “He didn’t mingle in the crowd and go up to people and say, ‘I’m Jack Kennedy.’” The volunteer remembered how Jack had snubbed him and his wife one afternoon when he saw them on the street walking their baby in a carriage. “Sometimes,” the volunteer said, “I used to feel that ice water rolled in his veins. . . . I don’t know if he was shy or a snob. All I’m getting at is that he was very unpolitical for a man who was going to run for Congress.” Jack himself said, “I think it’s more of a personal reserve than a coldness, although it may seem like coldness to some people.”
Jack also doubted that he could bring many voters to his side with his oratory. He accurately thought of himself as a pretty dull public speaker at the time. Stiff and wooden were the words most often used to describe his delivery. One observer said that Jack spoke “in a voice somewhat scratchy and tensely high-pitched,” projecting “a quality of grave seriousness that masked his discomfiture. No trace of humor leavened his talk. Hardly diverging from his prepared text, he stood as if before a blackboard, addressing a classroom full of pupils who could be expected at any moment to become unruly.”
Family members tried to help him become a more effective speaker. At one gathering, his sister Eunice noticeably mouthed his words as he spoke. Afterward, Jack told her, “Eunice, you made me very very nervous. Don’t ever do that to me again.” And Eunice said, “Jack, I thought you were going to forget your speech.”
Joe was more subtle and successful in boosting him. Eunice recalled that “many a night when he’d come over to see Daddy after a speech, he’d be feeling rather down, admitting that the speech hadn’t really gone very well or believing that his delivery had put people in the front row fast asleep. ‘What do you mean,’ Father would immediately ask. ‘Why, I talked to Mr. X and Mrs. Y on the phone right after they got home and they told me they were sitting right in the front row and that it was a fine speech. And then I talked with so-and-so and he said last year’s speaker at the same event had forty in the audience while you had ninety.’ And then, and this was the key, Father would go on to elicit from Jack what he thought he could change to make it better the next time. I can still see the two of them sitting together, analyzing the entire speech and talking about the pace of delivery to see where it worked and where it had gone wrong.”
Jack also had to worry about disciplining himself sufficiently to keep to a schedule. Even before he announced his candidacy, a friendly critic warned him that he needed to rein himself in. “You must organize yourself first and your campaign second,” Drew Porter, a bank official, wrote him. “You cannot run a campaign for Congress on a Fraternity brotherhood basis. It must be on a strict, hard boiled, cut throat, business basis. I was shocked this A.M. when you answered the phone. Our original meeting was for 10 o’clock and you moved it up to 11 o’clock. OK. At 11:45, I called you. In business and politics, we have to break many dates, but we always promptly call and say we cannot be on time or we cannot keep the appointment. In this case, it was not important, but in others, you will lose contact and friends.”
The advice only partly registered on Jack. Dave Powers, who became a principal aide in the campaign and a friend with whom Kennedy could find welcome relaxation from the daily political grind, remembered that “Jack had a funny sense of time and distance. . . . I’ve been with him in his apartment in the middle of Boston and he’s soaking in the tub at quarter of eight, and we’re due in Worcester at eight, and he’d say, ‘Dave, how far is it to Worcester?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, if we’re driving, we’re late already.’ It would go like that.”
Jack also justifiably worried that political opponents would attack him as an outsider with no real roots in the Eleventh Congressional District. In fact, newspaper stories and private speculation that he would run brought out just such antagonism. Before he entered the race, an encounter with Dan O’Brien, a Cambridge undertaker with political clout and a Neville supporter, confirmed Jack’s worst fears. In a meeting at O’Brien’s funeral parlor on a snowy night in
January, Jack looked to O’Brien “like a boy just out of school who had no experience politically, and . . . I don’t think he even knew where the district was.” O’Brien told him scornfully, “You’re not going to win this fight. You’re a carpetbagger. You don’t belong here. I’ll tell you what I’ll do—if you pull out of the fight and let Neville go to Washington, I guarantee you I’ll get you the job down there as Neville’s secretary.” As Jack left, he vented his annoyance with the sort of wry humor that became a trademark of his political career, mentioning that he “would rather not have O’Brien handle his funeral arrangements.” O’Brien and Neville went to see Joe before Jack announced his candidacy: They said that if Jack did not run, they would give him “a shot later on. And he [Joe] coldly sat back in his chair and he said, ‘Why[,] you fellows are crazy. My son will be President in 1960.’”
The private show of antagonism to Jack’s candidacy became a drumbeat in the speeches and newspaper columns of opponents. One of Jack’s competitors for the congressional seat said in a radio talk, “We have a very young boy, a college graduate, whose family boasts of great wealth. It is said they are worth thirty million dollars. This candidate has never held public office.” He did not even have a residence in the district. “He is registered at the Hotel Bellevue in Boston, and I daresay that he has never slept there. He comes from New York. His father is a resident of Florida and because of his money is favored by the newspapers of Boston. . . . Insofar as certain responsibilities are concerned, this candidate does not live in the district . . . and knows nothing about the problems of its people.”
One newspaper, the East Boston Leader, was furious at Jack’s “unmerited” candidacy. They parodied his campaign by announcing: “Congress seat for sale—No experience necessary—Applicant must live in New York or Florida—Only millionaires need apply.” A Leader columnist belittled Jack as “Jawn” Kennedy, the rich kid who was “[ever] so British. . . . In my opinion, Kennedy’s candidacy is the nerviest thing ever pulled in local politics. He moves in and establishes a phoney residence in a hotel and solely on the strength of his family connections announces that he is undecided whether to become lieutenant governor or a congressman. . . . What has he, himself, ever done to merit your vote?”
Personal limitations and the prospect of ad hominem attacks certainly discouraged Jack, but the challenge of mastering a demanding political campaign was more an inducement to run than to back away. Nor did he see harsh personal attacks as a reason to stand aside; he did not need to be a politician to understand that politics was a tough game in which competitors went all-out to win. For him, on one level politics was another form of the competitive sports like football or boat racing that excited his lifelong drive to be the best. Indeed, the fight was the fun. “The fascination about politics,” he told a reporter in 1960, “is that it’s so competitive. There’s always that exciting challenge of competition.”
Of greater concern to him were practical questions about how to defeat better-known local rivals for the Eleventh District seat by winning enough blue-collar ethnic—mainly Irish and Italian—votes in an area that extended across Boston and some of its suburbs. It was no small challenge. When Dave Powers first met Jack, he privately echoed Jack’s own concerns. “Here’s a millionaire’s son from Harvard trying to come into an area that is longshoremen, waitresses, truck drivers, and so forth,” Powers remembered. “I said, ‘To start with, I’d get somebody on the waterfront for sure, somebody tied up with the labor unions and all that.’ And he’s writing this stuff down, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘It won’t do him any good. A millionaire’s son from Harvard, they’re going to laugh at him down there.’”
The challenge as Jack saw it was not only to create some sort of connection to the working-class folks living in the district but also to overcome the apathy that marked a primary campaign in which no more than 20 to 25 percent of voters usually went to the polls. How could he convince people that a vote for Jack Kennedy might make a difference in their lives? He had every confidence that his war record and seriousness of purpose would make voters see him as a deserving young man. But would that be enough?
Curley, whose well-funded mayoral campaign was successful, said, “With those two names, Kennedy and Fitzgerald, how could he lose?” Jack, too, understood that his family ties would give him visibility in the campaign from the moment he announced his candidacy. He also appreciated that his background made him “a new kind of Democrat in town, a sort of aristocrat of the masses, at once engagingly modest yet quick of mind, well-read and self-confident.” One of Jack’s backers said, “Compared to the Boston Irish politicians we grew up with, Jack Kennedy was like a breath of spring. He never said to anybody, ‘How’s Mother? Tell her I said hello.’ He never even went to a wake unless he knew the deceased personally.” Seeing Jack’s amateur status as a distinct asset, especially after a poll Joe commissioned revealed greater interest in Jack as a war hero than as a politician, the campaign gave high visibility to returning veterans working on Jack’s behalf, men such as Ted Reardon, Joe Jr.’s Harvard classmate, and Tony Galluccio, Jack’s college friend. The emphasis was on public-spirited young men who had done their war service and now intended to set things right at home.
Yet none of these advantages would be sufficient to win an election. Jack needed to get out on the hustings and impress himself on voters as someone who understood their needs and problems. Despite his misgivings, he began going into saloons and barbershops and pool halls and restaurants to talk to the men and women who controlled his fate: the letter carriers, cabdrivers, waitresses, and stevedores. He went to factories and the docks, where he stood on street corners introducing himself and asking for votes. One day when Joe saw Jack across a street shaking hands with longshoremen, he said to his companion, “I would have given odds of five thousand to one that this thing we [are] seeing could never have happened. I never thought Jack had it in him.”
Gradually, he learned to give expression to his natural charm and sincerity. At a forum with several other candidates, all of whom made much of their humble backgrounds, Jack disarmingly declared, “I seem to be the only person here tonight who didn’t come up the hard way.” The audience loved his candor. At an American Legion hall, where he spoke to gold star mothers (women who had lost a son in the war), Jack honored the memories of the fallen men by discussing the sacrifices in war that promised a better, more peaceful future, adding, “I think I know how all you mothers feel because my mother is a Gold Star mother, too.” The reaction to his talk, Dave Powers recalled, was unlike anything he had ever seen: an outpouring of warmth and affection that seemed to ensure the support of everyone in the audience.
And there was the hard work of campaigning. Out of bed by 6:15-6:30 in the morning, Jack would be on the street by 7:00—in time to stand at the factory gates and docks for an hour or more to shake hands with arriving workers. After a quick breakfast, he would start pounding the pavement, knocking on every door in neighborhoods with triple-decker houses. It made a strong impression on startled housewives, who had never had that sort of contact with a political candidate before. After lunch, he and his aides would “hit the barber shops, the neighborhood candy or variety stores and the taverns, the fire stations and the police stations. At four o’clock, back at the Navy Yard, catching the workers coming out of a different gate from the one where we worked that morning,” Dave Powers recalled. They would ride the trolley cars from Park Street to Harvard Square, with Jack walking the aisles, shaking hands, and introducing himself, “Hello, I’m Jack Kennedy.”
In the evenings, Jack would make the rounds of three to six house parties organized by his sisters Eunice and Pat. They included anywhere from fifteen to seventy-five young women—schoolteachers, nurses, telephone operators—who would be served tea or coffee with cookies and would listen to an introductory spiel, more an entertainment than a political appeal, followed by Jack’s arrival, a brief comment from him, and a question-and-answer session. Ja
ck was at his best with these small groups, flashing his disarming smile, answering questions with a leg draped over an armchair, combining serious discussion with boyish informality. Within days, the campaign would issue invitations to all the young women to become volunteers for Kennedy. The technique created a corps of workers who expanded Jack’s ability to reach out to hundreds and possibly thousands of other voters.
Jack paid a heavy price in physical exhaustion. The people around him noticed his bulging eyes, jaundiced complexion, and a limp caused by unremitting back pain. They marveled at his stamina and refusal to complain. But he saw no alternative: The demanding schedule was indispensable not just in making contacts but in destroying the claims by his opponents that he was simply a spoiled rich man’s son who never had to work for a living.
But all the hard work would not have paid off in votes if he did not have something meaningful to say, something that made ordinary people feel he was a worthy young man who understood their personal concerns. In a stroke of genius, Joe Kane captured Jack’s appeal as a new kind of Irish politician who reflected the past and the future by coining a compelling campaign slogan: “The New Generation Offers a Leader.”
Kane and Jack’s other advisers did not have to talk Jack into emphasizing his war record as a way to reach voters. Patriotism remained a strong suit in 1945-46 and a war hero commanded unqualified public approval. Although Jack was not comfortable selling himself in this role, he accepted it as an essential starting point of his campaign. Thus, in January 1946, he helped set up the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Veterans of Foreign Wars post in the Eleventh District with himself as post commander; agreed to preside over a national VFW convention; and joined the American Legion. He also crafted a speech that described the sinking of PT 109, downplaying his part in the rescue operation while praising the heroism of his men. The speech also recounted the special camaraderie among combat troops and called on his audiences to work together in a similar fashion to secure the country’s future. His father financed the distribution throughout the district of 100,000 copies of “Survival,” a Reader’s Digest summary of John Hersey’s New Yorker article about PT 109.