IN SEPTEMBER 1951, Jack asked his sister Pat, who was working in television in New York, to arrange a weekly “public service type” telecast of ten or fifteen minutes, “with me interviewing important people down in Washington about their jobs, etc., and about problems of the day.” The idea was to get it shown throughout Massachusetts.
More important than immediate efforts to expand Jack’s visibility in the state was the decision on whether to run for governor or senator. Jack much preferred to be a senator than be the chief executive of Massachusetts. He thought of the latter as a job “handing out sewer contracts.” The office had limited powers: The mayor of Boston had greater control over patronage than the governor, and any Democrat in the State House would likely have to deal with a Republican-controlled legislature, with all that meant for making much of a record as chief executive. To get anything done, Jack believed he would have “to be on the take,” as he put it, or bypass the legislature and the politicians in the State House by going to the people, and since he would have entered office with “no standing,” it seemed unlikely that he would accomplish much.
Jack’s interest in foreign affairs also made the Senate more attractive, as did his father’s unqualified preference for a Senate bid. Joe predicted that Jack “would murder [incumbent Henry Cabot] Lodge,” but because sophisticated political observers told Joe that the chances against Lodge were only fifty-fifty and Joe did not want anyone to be overconfident, he also declared that “the campaign against Lodge would be the toughest fight he could think of, but there was no question that Lodge could be beaten, and if that should come to pass Jack would be nominated and elected President of the United States.” Frank Morrissey, who ran Jack’s Boston office, remembered Joe, “in that clear and commanding voice of his,” saying to Jack, “‘I will work out the plans to elect you President. It will not be any more difficult for you to be elected President than it will be to win the Lodge fight.’” Chuck Spalding recalled that Jack saw the Senate race as a bigger challenge than the governor’s chair, but that “if he was going to get anywhere . . . he’d have to be able to beat somebody like Lodge. . . . So I think he made the decision, ‘I’ve been long enough in the House, it’s time for me to move ahead. If I’m going to do it I’ve got to take this much of a chance.’” Jack talked to Justice William O. Douglas, who encouraged him to run for the Senate seat. In December 1951, during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Jack said he was “definitely interested in going to the Senate” and was considering running next year.
Only incumbent governor Paul Dever stood in the way. After winning the State House twice in 1948 and 1950, Dever was interested in running for the Senate. But he was uncertain of beating Lodge, whose famous name and three terms in the Upper House made him something of a Massachusetts icon. For his part, Jack saw a fight with Dever as hurting his chances of defeating Lodge. Nevertheless, Jack was confident that Dever’s own assessments would discourage him from taking on Lodge, and thus Kennedy. Jack decided to wait on an announcement until Dever made up his mind. He also approached Dever with an offer. Jack told him early in 1952, “If you want to run for the United States Senate, I’ll run for governor. If you want to run for governor, then I’ll run for the United States Senate. Will you please make up your mind and let me know?” This may have been more than a bit of a ploy. William O. Douglas remembered that when he and Kennedy spoke, Jack only casually mentioned the governorship. “By the time that he was talking to me, I think he had discarded that [a run for governor] essentially and had decided to run for the Senate.” In any case, Dever was so slow in deciding that Jack prepared a statement announcing his Senate candidacy. Fortunately, before he acted on it, Dever called to say that he would seek reelection as governor. Jack was relieved and happy, telling an aide, “We got the race we wanted.”
According to daughter Eunice, Joe “had thought and questioned and planned for two years,” and he now made Jack’s election his full-time concern. One campaign insider said that Joe, as in 1946, “was the distinct boss in every way. He dominated everything.” He took a comfortable apartment at 84 Beacon Street, near Jack’s place on Bowdoin Street, where he supervised campaign expenditures, publicity, the preparation of speeches, and policy statements. “The Ambassador worked around the clock,” a speechwriter Joe brought up from New York said. “He was always consulting people, getting reports, looking into problems. Should Jack go on TV with this issue? What kind of an ad should he run on something else? He’d call in experts, get opinions, have ideas worked up.”
To make Lodge seem overconfident, Joe leaked the story to the press that Lodge had sent him word not to waste his money. In a race against Jack, he expected to win by 300,000 votes. Lodge later denied that he ever predicted an easy victory—to Joe or anyone else. On the contrary, he saw the contest as “much harder” than his three previous races. “All along,” he said, “I always knew if there came a man with an honest, clean record who was also of Irish descent, he’d be almost impossible to beat.”
Joe’s fierce commitment to winning sometimes made him abusive to campaign workers and ready to cut corners. During the campaign, Jack enlisted Gardner Jackson, a liberal with strong ties to Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and labor unions, to help him win support from liberal Democrats. Jackson persuaded the ADA to back Jack. But to solidify his hold on liberals, he wanted Kennedy to sign a newspaper ad declaring “Communism and McCarthyism: Both Wrong.” Since ninety-nine Notre Dame faculty members and John McCormack agreed to sign, Jack did, too, but he asked Jackson to read the statement to his father and some of his aides. Jack, who no doubt knew what his father’s reaction would be, left for early-morning campaign business before Jackson began. Almost immediately, Joe jumped up, tilting the card table they were sitting around against the others and began to shout, “You and your sheeny friends are trying to ruin Jack.” Joe’s tirade attacking liberals, labor unions, Jews, and Adlai Stevenson (the Democratic presidential nominee) concluded with the promise that the statement would never be published, which it was not. Though Jack rationalized his father’s behavior by telling Jackson that Joe was acting out of “love of his family,” he also conceded that “sometimes I think it’s really pride.” But whatever Joe’s motive, Jack was not averse to squelching the ad; it was poor politics. McCarthy remained very popular with the state’s 750,000 Irish Catholics. Indeed, before Adlai Stevenson made a September trip to Boston, he was advised by a member of Jack’s campaign staff not to attack McCarthy. “He is very popular with people of both parties.”
As in 1946, Joe supported Jack with large infusions of money. The campaign finance laws were an invitation to break the rules. Although the candidate himself could spend only $20,000 and individuals were limited to $1,000 contributions, there was no bar to indirectly using state party funds to boost a nominee; nor was there any limitation on giving $1,000 to any and all political committees that might be set up on a candidate’s behalf. Joe organized four thinly disguised committees—in addition to Citizens for Kennedy, there was a More Prosperous Massachusetts committee and three “improvement” committees, supposedly working to advance the shoe, fish, and textile industries. Joe may have put several million dollars into the campaign, which more than matched the $1 million the state Republican party spent to support Lodge. The Kennedy money paid for billboard, newspaper, radio, and television ads; financed Jack’s trips around the state; and paid for the many local campaign offices, postage for mailings, telephone banks, receptions, and famous Kennedy teas that attracted thousands of women. A person “could live the rest of [their] lives on [his] billboard budget alone,” one commentator asserted. “Cabot was simply overwhelmed by money,” Dwight Eisenhower later said. Lodge agreed, saying that he lacked the financial wherewithal to keep up with the Kennedy spending machine.
The single most telling expenditure Joe made in the campaign was a loan of $500,000 to John J. Fox, the owner of the Boston Post, who after he bought the paper for $4 million in June 1952
faced a financial crisis. The paper was losing half a million dollars a year and needed to replace an antiquated physical plant and introduce a home-delivery system to return to profitability. In the fall of 1952, Joe helped rescue the paper from bankruptcy with his loan. Although there is no hard evidence of a quid pro quo, Jack did get a Post endorsement on October 25, less than two weeks before the election. Because the Post’s backing was believed to be worth forty thousand votes and because five other newspapers with a combined circulation 20 percent greater than the Post’s were supporting Lodge, the Kennedys had been particularly eager for the Post’s endorsement. (The Globe, then the second-most-read paper in Boston, with half the Post’s circulation, held to its tradition of not endorsing candidates.) Lodge claimed that Fox had promised to back him. “I’ve never doubted for a moment that Joe Kennedy was the one who turned Fox around,” Lodge said later, “though I imagine he handled it pretty subtly, with all sorts of veiled promises and hints rather than an outright deal.” In 1960, when the journalist Fletcher Knebel asked Jack about the loan, he said, “‘Listen that was an absolutely straight business transaction; I think you ought to get my father’s side of the story.’” But as he got up to leave, Knebel said that Jack added, “‘You know we had to buy that fucking paper.’ As if he just had to level.” Knebel never published Jack’s last remark.
Joe also made his mark by driving out Mark Dalton as campaign manager. Jack asked Dalton, who had headed his congressional race in 1946, to run the 1952 Senate contest. Dalton put aside a thriving law practice to take on the assignment. But he quickly ran afoul of Joe, who did not think he was aggressive or savvy enough. Two months into the campaign, Joe humiliated Dalton by accusing him of spending funds with no good results. He also blocked an official announcement naming Dalton as campaign manager. Dalton, who took it as “a very grave blow” when Jack would not reverse his father’s decision, resigned.
Robert Kennedy, who was working as an attorney at the Justice Department, was reluctantly persuaded to take over managing the campaign. “I’ll just screw it up,” he told Kenneth O’Donnell, who was one of Jack’s inner-circle advisers, objecting that he knew nothing about electoral politics. But he agreed to take on the job when O’Donnell warned that without him the campaign was headed for “absolute catastrophic disaster.” Bobby worked eighteen-hour days, driving himself so hard that he lost twelve pounds off a spare frame. He put in place a Kennedy organization that reached into every part of the state and stirred teams of supporters to work almost as hard as he did. In addition, he took on difficult, unpleasant jobs Jack shunned. When he found professional politicians hanging around the Boston headquarters, he threw them out. “Politicians do nothing but hold meetings,” he complained. “You can’t get any work out of a politician.” When Paul Dever’s organization, which began to falter in the governor’s race, tried to join forces with Kennedy’s more effective campaign, Bobby shut them off. “Don’t give in to them,” Jack told his brother, “but don’t get me involved in it.” Bobby had a bitter exchange with Dever, who complained to Joe about his abrasive son, with whom he refused to deal in the future.
Journalists Ralph Martin and Ed Plaut later concluded that Bobby Kennedy gave the campaign “organization, organization, and more organization.” The result was “the most methodical, the most scientific, the most thoroughly detailed, the most intricate, the most disciplined and smoothly working state-wide campaign in Massachusetts history—and possibly anywhere else.” “In each community,” Dave Powers noted, the campaign set up “a political organization totally apart from the local party organization. . . . Kennedy volunteers delivered 1,200,000 brochures to every home in Massachusetts.” It was an unprecedented effort to reach voters.
With Bobby running the day-to-day operation, Jack was free to concentrate on the issues—anticommunism, Taft-Hartley and labor unions, the Massachusetts and New England economies, civil rights, government spending, and which of the two candidates had performed more effectively in addressing these matters. Ted Reardon prepared a “Black Book” of “Lodge’s Dodges,” emphasizing the extent to which Lodge had been on all sides of all issues. The campaign also put out comparative charts on what the candidates “Said and Did From 1947-1951” about major public policies of greatest concern to voters.
Yet in spite of the great energy the campaign—and Jack in particular—put into focusing on issues, they were of relatively little importance in determining the vote. On all major policy matters, the two candidates largely resembled each other. They were both internationalist supporters of containment as well as conservatives with occasional bows to liberalism; they both favored sustaining labor unions, less government intervention in domestic affairs, and balanced federal budgets. Lodge, who spearheaded Eisenhower’s drive for the presidency against the candidacy of Ohio senator Robert Taft, had his problems with conservative Republicans, some of whom turned to Kennedy as a more reliable anticommunist and some of whom voted for neither candidate, which cost Lodge more than it did Jack. At the same time, however, Jack could hardly trumpet his six years in the House as a model of legislative achievement. To be sure, his constituents had few complaints about his service to the district; but if he were asking voters to make him a senator because he had been an innovative legislator or a House leader, he would have been hard-pressed to make an effective case. If his political career had come to an end in 1952, he would have joined the ranks of the thousands of other nameless representatives who left no memorable mark on the country’s history.
Most observers—then and later—agreed that the election turned more on personality than on issues. Kennedy aides O’Donnell and Powers believed that “voters in that election were not interested in issues. Kennedy won on his personality—apparently he was the new kind of political figure that the people were looking for that year, dignified and gentlemanly and well-educated and intelligent, without the air of superior condescension that other cultured politicians, such as Lodge and Adlai Stevenson, too often displayed before audiences.” A former mayor of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, said in 1960, “There’s something about Jack—and I don’t know quite what it is—that makes people want to believe in him. Conservatives and liberals both tell you that he’s with them, because they want to believe that he is, and they want to be with him. They want to identify their views with him.”
Jack’s narrow margin of victory over Lodge—70,737 votes out of 2,353,231 cast, 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent—was impressive in light of a 208,800-vote advantage for Eisenhower over Stevenson in the state and Dever’s loss of the governorship to Christian Herter by 14,000 votes. The outcome surprised some people, including Lodge, who had an unbeaten string of electoral victories dating from 1932 and had the benefit of an Eisenhower visit to Massachusetts on the final day of the campaign. “I felt rather like a man who has just been hit by a truck,” Lodge said. The fact that only five other congressmen who served with Jack—Nixon and Smathers (the only other Democrat), Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating of New York, and Thurston Morton of Kentucky—made it to the Senate speaks forcefully about Kennedy’s achievement.
Electorally, he certainly had commanded the support of the Irish, Italians, Jews, French Canadians, Poles, Slovaks, Greeks, Albanians, Portuguese, Latvians, Finnish, Estonians, and Scandinavians. Torby Macdonald, who was now also a Massachusetts congressman, had it right when he told Jack on election night that he would win despite Ike’s certain victory in the state. When Jack asked him why, Macdonald replied, “I think that you represent the best of the new generation. Not generation in age but minorities, really. The newer arrived people. And Lodge represents the best of the old-line Yankees. I think there are more of the newly arrived people than there are of the old-line Yankees.” To this, Macdonald might have added women as a group that would help Jack get to the Senate.
Indeed, the campaign had made special efforts to attract ethnic and female voters. The evening teas for thirty to forty women at private homes ultimately attracted as many as
70,000 voters, most of whom cast their ballots for Jack. Jewish voters were also given special attention because Jack had to overcome allegations that his father had been anti-Semitic and even pro-Nazi and that he was less sympathetic to Israel than was Lodge. Several appearances before Jewish organizations and outspoken support from Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., and John W. McCormack, as well as several nationally prominent Jews such as Senator Herbert Lehman and current or former congressmen Emanuel Celler, Abraham Ribicoff, and Sidney Yates, brought the great majority of Jewish voters into Jack’s camp. Jack’s charm and his request to one Jewish audience, “Remember, I’m running for the Senate and not my father,” were indispensable in helping swing Jews to his side.
The statistics on ethnic voting for Jack are striking. In 1952, 91 percent of Massachusetts voters went to the polls, an increase of more than 17 percent from the Senate contest in 1946, with most of the greater voting occurring in ethnic districts. In the Catholic precincts of Boston, for example, where Lodge had won respectable backing in 1946 of between 41 and 45 percent, his support now dropped to between 19 and 25 percent. The shift was even more pronounced in Boston’s Jewish districts. Where Lodge had won between 60 and 66 percent of the vote against incumbent Catholic senator David I. Walsh in 1946, his support slipped to below 40 percent in 1952.
Jack’s success rested on something more than being the “First Irish Brahmin”; he was the first American Brahmin elevated from the ranks of the millions and millions of European immigrants who had flooded into the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The beneficiary of his father’s fabulous wealth, a Harvard education, and a heroic career in the military fighting to preserve American values, Jack Kennedy was a model of what every immigrant family aspired to for themselves and their children. And even if they could never literally match what the Kennedys had achieved in wealth and prominence, they took vicarious satisfaction from Jack’s identification as an accepted member of the American elite. Many of those voting for him could remember the 1920s and 1930s, when being a first- or second-generation minority made your standing as an American suspect. In voting for Jack, the minorities were not simply putting one of their own in the high reaches of government—they had been doing that for a number of years—but were saying that he and they had arrived at the center of American life and no longer had to feel self-conscious about their status as citizens of the Great Republic. Jack’s election to the Senate opened the way to a romance between Jack Kennedy and millions of Americans. It would be one of the great American love affairs, and in his election day grin, it was just possible to imagine that Jack himself knew the match had been made.