An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

  Events affecting Jack’s sister Kathleen deepened his feelings about the tenuousness of life. Jack and Kathleen, as their letters to each other testify, had a warm, affectionate relationship. Jack was closer to her than to any of his other siblings. They shared an attraction to rebelliousness or at least to departing from the confining rules of their Church and mother. Jack had supported Kick in a decision to marry Billy Hartington, outside of her faith. Billy’s death in the war had brought her closer than ever to Jack. Each had a mutual sense of life’s precariousness, which made them both a little cynical and resistant to social mores. And so in the summer of 1947, during his visit to Lismore Castle in Ireland, Jack was pleased to learn that Kathleen had fallen deeply in love with Peter Fitzwilliam, another wealthy English aristocrat and much-decorated war hero. A breeder of racehorses and a man of exceptional charm, with a reputation for womanizing despite being married to a beautiful English heiress, Fitzwilliam reminded some people of Joe Kennedy—“older, sophisticated, quite the rogue male.” Jack saw Kathleen’s determination to marry Fitzwilliam—who would have to divorce his current wife first—despite Rose’s warnings that she and Joe would disown her, as a demonstration of independence and risk taking that he admired. Before any final decision was reached, however, a tragic accident burdened the Kennedys with a far greater trauma. In May 1948, while on an ill-advised flight in stormy weather to the south of France, Kathleen and Fitzwilliam were killed when their private plane crashed into the side of a mountain in the Rhône Valley.

  Jack found it impossible to make sense of Kathleen’s death. When it was confirmed by a phone call from Ted Reardon, Jack was at home listening to a recording of Ella Logan singing the lead song from Finian’s Rainbow, “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” She has a sweet voice, Jack said to Billy Sutton. Then he turned away and began to cry. “How can there possibly be any purpose in her death?” Jack repeatedly asked Lem Billings. He later told campaign biographer James MacGregor Burns, “The thing about Kathleen and Joe was their tremendous vitality. Everything was moving in their direction—that’s what made it so unfortunate. 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.”

  Kathleen’s death depressed Jack and made him more conscious than ever of his own mortality. He told the columnist Joseph Alsop that he did not expect to live more than another ten years, or beyond the age of forty-five, “but there was no use thinking about it . . . and he was going to do the best he could and enjoy himself as much as he could in the time that was given him.” He queried Ted Reardon and George Smathers about the best way to die: in war, freezing, drowning, getting shot, poisoning? (War and poisoning were his choices.) “The point is,” he said to Smathers, “that you’ve got to live every day like it’s your last day on earth. That’s what I’m doing.” Chuck Spalding remembered that “he always heard the footsteps. . . . Death was there. It had taken Joe and Kick and it was waiting for 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.”

  Spalding’s recollections are not a sentimental exaggeration about Kennedy or the influences that played on him. Kathleen’s death seemed to heighten not only his determination to live life to the fullest but also his ambition for a notable public career. It is clear that the initial shock of Kick’s death greatly distracted him. Billings said that “he was in terrible pain. . . . He couldn’t get through the days without thinking of Kathleen at the most inappropriate times. He’d be sitting at a congressional hearing and he’d find his mind drifting uncontrollably back to all the things he and Kathleen had done together and all the friends they had in common.” He had trouble sleeping through the night, repeatedly awakened by images of Kathleen and him sitting and talking together.

  AFTER KATHLEEN’S DEATH, stoicism about accepting the uncontrollable joined a healthy determination to go forward and build a successful political career. During his first year and a half in Congress, Jack had already considered running for a statewide office. He wanted to get to the Senate, but if he won the nomination in 1948, it would mean challenging incumbent Republican Leverett Saltonstall. Since early polls showed New York Republican governor Thomas Dewey taking the presidency from Truman that year, and since Saltonstall, a popular moderate, would be difficult to beat, Jack backed away from challenging him. He focused, instead, on the possibility of running for governor. As a prelude, he began spending three or four days a week in Massachusetts speaking before civic groups—less to make clear where he stood on public questions than to get himself known by as many attentive citizens as possible. He largely stuck to safe issues such as the communist danger, at home and abroad, veterans’ benefits, a balanced approach to labor unions, and the need to increase New England’s economic competitiveness.

  The most striking feature of his travels around the state is the energy it required and how forcefully it demonstrates his determination to advance to higher political office. The trips from Washington to Boston by plane and back to D.C. by train in an uncomfortable sleeping-car berth that left him bleary-eyed the next day were reason enough not to take on the job. Visits to the 39 cities and 312 towns in Massachusetts by car were an additional argument against launching a statewide campaign he might not win. He followed a grueling schedule, often attending twelve or more events a day, speaking at Communion breakfasts, church socials, Elks clubs, fraternal groups, Holy Name Societies, PTAs, VFW or American Legion chapters, volunteer fire departments, and women’s organizations. To reach as many towns as possible, Jack, his driver (an ex-prizefighter), and two or three of his supporters usually began the day at dawn and ended at midnight, eating cheeseburgers and drinking milkshakes along the way. John Galvin, who accompanied Kennedy on many of these weekends, remembered that with no state expressways and few nice motels, “we usually ended up sleeping in a crummy small-town hotel with a single electric lightbulb hanging from the ceiling over the bed and a questionable bathtub down at the far end of the hall.”

  Jack suffered almost constant lower back pain and spasms in spite of his 1944 surgery. And no wonder: X rays of his back showed that by 1950, the fourth lumbar vertebra had narrowed from 1.5 cm to 1.1 cm, indicating further collapse in the bones supporting his spinal column. By March 1951, there would be clear compression fractures in his lower spine. At his age, this may have been another indication of the price paid for his steroid therapy. At the end of each day on the road, Jack would climb into the backseat of the car, where, as his friend and expert on state politics Dave Powers recalled, “he would lean back . . . and close his eyes in pain.” At the hotel, he would use crutches to help himself up stairs and then soak in a hot bath for an hour before going to bed. “The pain,” Powers added, “often made him tense and irritable with his fellow travelers.”

  Like a general fighting a war, Powers had tacked a state map to the wall of Jack’s Boston apartment on Bowdoin Street and began using colored pins to show where they had been. Jack pressed Powers to fill the gaps with dates in the neglected cities and towns. “When we’ve got this map completely covered with pins,” Jack would say, “that’s when I’ll announce that I’m going to run for statewide office.”

  Jack was away from Washington so much that veteran Mississippi congressman John Rankin told him and Smathers, who was spending a lot of time in Florida preparing for a 1950 Senate campaign, “You young boys go home too much. . . . I’ve got my people convinced that the Congress of the United States can’t run without me. I don’t go home during the Session because I don’t want them to find out any different. . . . You fellows are home every week—you’re never around here. . . . And your people are finally going to realize the Congress can run just as good with
out you as with you. And then you’re in trouble.”

  By the fall of 1947, Massachusetts’ newspapers had begun speculating that Jack was a possible candidate for the Senate or governorship. And by 1948, Henry Wallace’s Progressive party backers in the state declared themselves ready to support him for governor. Since he seemed to be a strong labor advocate and his anticommunism would have little impact on foreign policy as governor, he was more acceptable to Progressives than his rivals for the nomination, traditional Democrats former governor Maurice Tobin and Paul Dever, the front-runner. Progressives also considered Kennedy much preferable to incumbent Republican governor Robert F. Bradford.

  But a private Roper poll in June 1948 persuaded Jack not to run. The survey showed Jack losing to Bradford, 43.3 to 39.8 percent. Neither this small margin nor a straw poll of Democrats that put Jack and Tobin in a dead heat and Jack ahead of Dever by almost two to one was enough to convince him otherwise. More important was evidence that only five months before the election, he had made little impression on Massachusetts voters as a potential governor and officeholder: 85 percent of the Roper survey said they knew too little about Kennedy to predict whether he would be a good governor, while 64 percent said they did not have enough information to cite anything about him or his policies that they particularly liked. So it was time to wait. In the meantime, reelection to the House was assured. With no challenger in the primary or the general election, Jack received 94,764 votes, over 25,000 more than in his first race.

  Jack had no illusions about winning higher office: As he knew from the history of Massachusetts politics, money and a winning strategy were essential for success. His father’s wealth relieved him of fund-raising concerns. And so in January 1949, he began focusing on the issues that he believed could carry him to the State House or the Senate in 1952.

  If Jack needed additional inducement to bear the burdens of a statewide campaign, he found it in the public response in 1950 to a family tragedy suffered by Mayor James Curley and the passing of his grandfather, Honey Fitz. Early in the year, the deaths of two of Curley’s four surviving children—five others and his wife had already passed away—stunned Boston. Curley’s forty-one-year-old daughter Mary died unexpectedly from a cerebral hemorrhage and her thirty-six-year-old brother succumbed the same day in the same way. Eight months later Honey Fitz, at age eighty-seven, died of old age. Curley’s tragedy had brought over 50,000 people from around the state to his home to pay their respects. Likewise, more than 3,500 people attended the church service to mark Honey Fitz’s passing. To Jack, it was more than a demonstration of affection for two legendary public figures; “it made him realize” more fully than before, Billings said, “the extraordinary impact a politician can have on the emotions of ordinary people”—indeed, on the substance of their lives. This was something good and powerful, and it stirred not only Jack’s heart but his ego.

  In laying the groundwork for a 1952 campaign, Jack could have chosen to emphasize domestic matters such as education, veterans’ housing, unemployment, union rights, rent control, health care and insurance, reduced government spending, and lower taxes—all of which he addressed repeatedly during his first two House terms. But he did not see these as stirring the kind of public passion that he hoped to summon in a statewide race. The key, he believed, to commanding broad and favorable attention was a focus on foreign policy, anticommunism in particular. As he would say in a speech in 1951, “Foreign policy today, irrespective of what we might wish, in its impact on our daily lives, overshadows everything else. Expenditures, taxation, domestic prosperity, the extent of social services—all hinge on the basic issue of war or peace.”

  IN CONSISTENTLY SEIZING upon foreign affairs and anticommunism as his campaign themes, Jack identified himself not with one party or the other but with the national interest. When it suited him, he could be highly partisan. During the 1948 presidential campaign, for example, he aggressively attacked the Grand Old Party for its support of special interests and “perpetual, unending war on all fronts against the rights and aspirations of American workers.” He called the Republicans “vicious” and complained that “they follow the Hitler line—no matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth.” Once he launched his own campaign in 1949, however, he aimed to win voter backing by espousing “Americanism.” (Jack may have remembered the observation of Pennsylvania Republican boss Boise Penrose in 1920 when asked for the meaning of “Americanism,” which Warren G. Harding was advocating in the presidential race. “Damned if I know,” Penrose disarmingly replied. “But you can be sure it will get a lot of votes.”)

  “Americanism” for Jack mostly meant anticommunism, and his political timing was astute. In January 1949, American anxiety over the communist threat was reaching fever pitch. Between 1946 and 1949, warnings of communist infiltration of U.S. government agencies—especially the State Department—had filled the air. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had said that no less than 100,000 communists were at work in America trying to overthrow the government. Cardinal Spellman of New York warned that America was in imminent danger of a communist takeover. Under what Secretary of State Dean Acheson later described as “the incendiary influence” of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Truman administration felt compelled to set up the Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program. In January 1949, 72 percent of Americans did not believe that Russia genuinely wanted peace. A like number later in the year said that Moscow wanted to rule the world.

  Events abroad gave resonance to these concerns. In 1948, a successful communist coup in Czechoslovakia had solidified Soviet control of Eastern Europe; Western Europe, despite the Marshall Plan, was still far from a postwar economic recovery and seemed vulnerable to communist political subversion and military attack; and the civil war in China between the nationalists and communists had just turned decisively in Mao’s favor with the planned retreat of Chiang’s forces to Formosa.

  Jack began using foreign policy issues for a statewide campaign as early as the fall of 1947. In an endorsement of a $227 million aid request to defend Italy from “the onslaught of the communist minority,” Jack depicted the country “as the initial battleground in the communist drive to capture western Europe.” Jack’s strongly worded appeal reflected his genuine concern about the Soviet threat to Europe and America, but he also knew that it was excellent politics in a state with a significant Italian voting bloc. Nor did he overlook the political advantage (from Massachusetts’ Jewish and Polish minorities) of urging an end to a Palestine arms embargo, which deprived Jews of “the opportunity to defend themselves and carve out their partition,” and the admission to the United States of eighteen thousand displaced Polish soldiers, which was a small atonement for “the betrayal of their native country” by FDR at the Yalta Conference. Jack made no mention of Roosevelt’s limited options in helping Poland as the war was ending or of his father’s readiness to sacrifice Poland to Hitler’s ambitions five years before.

  The common thread running through these pronouncements was the defense of the West against a communist advance. At times, however, overreaction to communist dangers and political cynicism skewed Jack’s judgment on international affairs. Chiang’s defeat in 1949, for example, provoked Kennedy into the least-astute foreign policy pronouncement of his young political career. “The failure of our foreign policy in the Far East,” he announced on the House floor and then in a speech in Salem, Massachusetts, “rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State.” America’s refusal to provide military aid unless there was a coalition government in China had crippled Chiang’s nationalists. “So concerned were our diplomats and their advisers, the [Owen] Lattimores and the [John K.] Fairbanks, with the imperfections of the democratic system in China after twenty years of war, and the tales of corruption in high places, that they lost sight of our tremendous stake in a non-communist China. . . . What our young men had saved [in World War II], our diplomats and our president ha
ve frittered away.” His conviction that American actions were more responsible for events in China than what the Chinese themselves did helped agitate unrealistic judgments on the power of the United States to shape political developments everywhere in the world. Kennedy’s comments also encouraged right-wing complaints that the Truman administration had “lost” China and helped destroy the credibility of the State Department’s experts on Asia.

  Coming so soon after Truman had won a stunning upset victory in the 1948 campaign, which made him a dominant political force, Jack’s attack on the White House indicates how strongly he felt about the communist danger. Yet he also knew that it was very good politics: What better way to command the attention of Massachusetts voters than to take issue with the head of his own party on a matter most people in the state saw as he did? In 1949, anticommunism was a surefire issue for any aspiring national politician: 83 percent of Americans favored registration of communists with the Justice Department; 87 percent thought it wise to remove communists from jobs in defense industries; and 80 percent supported the signing of loyalty oaths by union leaders.

  Playing this card meant sometimes playing rough, but Jack was getting more used to that, too. He admired George Smathers’s 1950 Senate nomination campaign against incumbent Democrat Claude Pepper, in which Smathers successfully exploited Pepper’s reputation as a doctrinaire New Dealer and forceful advocate of the welfare state, which opened him to attacks as a Soviet sympathizer and “Stalin’s mouthpiece in the Senate,” or “Red” Pepper, as unscrupulous opponents called him. Whimsically taking advantage of the climate of suspicion and the extraordinary ignorance of his audience, Smathers shamelessly described Pepper in a speech as an “extrovert,” who practiced “nepotism” with his sister-in-law and “celibacy” before his marriage, and had a sister who was a Greenwich Village “thespian.”