An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (34 page)

Because his absence from Washington over so long a period could not be hidden, the Kennedys had no choice but to acknowledge his illness. Public knowledge of Jack’s surgery and slow recovery, however, benefited rather than undermined his image. Jack came through this medical ordeal looking courageous—not weak and possibly unfit for higher office, as his family had feared. Nevertheless, the Kennedys did not trust that coming clean about Jack’s health problems in the future would generate a similar result.

Throughout it all, Jack worried that his non-vote on McCarthy’s censure had been politically unwise and morally indefensible. In December, as he was about to be carried on a stretcher from the hospital for his trip to Florida, Chuck Spalding, who was in his room, recalls him saying, “‘You know, when I get downstairs I know exactly what’s going to happen. Those reporters are going to lean over my stretcher. There’s going to be about ninety-five faces bent over me with great concern, and every one of those guys is going to say, ‘Now, Senator, what about McCarthy?’” And he said, “‘Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to reach back for my back and I’m just going to yell, Oow, and then I’m going to pull the sheet over my head and hope we can get out of there.’”

INCREASINGLY FASCINATED
with the issue of moral and political courage—“at which point and on which issue he [a politician] will risk his career”—Kennedy now began thinking about writing a book on the subject. This was partly a retrospective coming to terms with his moral lapse on McCarthy, but it was also more: He had been interested in the subject for a long time, going back to at least the failure of British political leaders in the thirties to oppose popular resistance to rearming. And his election to the House and the Senate gave him added reason to think about the proper role of an elected legislator in dealing with conflicting pressures every time he had to vote. Where is the line between satisfying local demands and sometimes defying them for the sake of larger national needs? Early in 1954, after reading in Herbert Agar’s
Price of Union
about the independence demonstrated by John Quincy Adams, Kennedy asked Ted Sorensen to find other examples of senators “defying constituent pressures.” Feelings about conforming to his father’s wishes and acting on his own judgment were surely also part of the interest that drew Kennedy to the problem.

Kennedy understood that there were varieties of courage. He had firsthand knowledge of the bravery men showed in war and competitive sports. There was also self-mastery of the sort Franklin Roosevelt had shown in overcoming private suffering to pursue a successful public career. Jack quoted Eleanor Roosevelt’s description of her husband’s polio attack as a “turning point” that “proved a blessing in disguise; for it gave him strength and courage he had not had before.” Jack’s colitis, Addison’s disease, and back miseries had provided him with a similar, if not as large, challenge. In a 1956 magazine article about his back surgery, “What My Illness Taught Me,” Jack described a letter he had received from a ninety-year-old lady when he was flat on his back in the hospital and feeling glum. Though she was bedridden, she was “full of hope and good humor.” She had never voted for a Democrat and wanted the chance to vote for at least one before she died. She thought it “might stand me in good stead up above. So I want you to be up to running in 1958. Don’t waste away feeling sorry for yourself,” she advised. “Keep busy. Do all the things you never had time to do.” Jack said the letter was “a tonic for my spirits,” and if he had not received it, he might “never have got around to writing my book.” Whether the lady’s advice was quite as important as Jack represented it to be is beside the point; his illness gave him additional inspiration to write what would eventually be called
Profiles in Courage
.

The book recounts the careers of eight senators—John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton, Sam Houston, Edmund G. Ross, Lucius Lamar, George W. Norris, and Robert Taft—all of whom had shown uncommon courage in risking their political careers by taking unpopular stands that put them at odds with majorities in their parties, states, and regions. It was a celebration in a time of uncertain prospects for democracy in its competition with communism, and a healthy antidote to the periodic cynicism that besets Americans about politicians and the country’s system of self-rule.

Published in 1956, the book became a national bestseller and added to Jack’s prominence, but it also raised questions. Where did a busy U.S. senator sidelined by serious medical problems find the wherewithal to write so successful a book? According to one earlier biographer, interviews and research into contemporary papers, including those of Ted Sorensen, who helped Jack with the book, prove “Jack Kennedy’s involvement: from start to finish, the responsibility was clearly his. . . . Personalities to be included were suggested by several people; the Preface acknowledges many debts, but the choices, message, and tone of the volume are unmistakably Kennedy’s.” Sorensen and Professor Jules Davids of Georgetown University, with whom Jackie had taken courses, gathered materials for the book and drafted chapters, but the final product was essentially Jack’s. He edited what Sorensen and Davids gave him and then dictated final chapter drafts for a secretary to type. The tapes of these dictations, which are available at the John F. Kennedy Library, provide conclusive evidence of Jack’s involvement. Jack did more on the book than some later critics believed, but less than the term
author
normally connotes.
Profiles in Courage
was more the work of a “committee” than of any one person.

As interesting as the debate about Jack’s authorship were his private and public reactions to questions that were raised about it. Suggestions that the book was not his idea or the product of his work incensed him. In 1956, when a Harvard classmate and radio journalist ribbed Jack about the allegations, he became furious. Jack normally loved that kind of repartee with old friends, but questions about his authorship were different; they touched something in him that left no room for humor. When
New York Times
editor John Oakes privately passed along the rumor that Jack was not the author, Jack confronted him with “evidence” to the contrary. (“I sure wasn’t convinced by this,” Oakes said. “Undoubtedly Ted [Sorensen] or someone else wrote it.”) When columnist Drew Pearson asserted in a television interview that the book was “ghostwritten,” Jack asked prominent Washington attorney Clark Clifford to compel a retraction, which Pearson reluctantly gave.

Jack certainly hoped that
Profiles
would identify him with uncompromising political responses to national dangers. He yearned for a challenge that would give him an opportunity to act like a political hero. The best he could find was a congressional proposal to reform the electoral system. Jack took up the cudgels against what he described as “one of the most far-reaching—and I believe mistaken—schemes ever proposed to alter the American constitutional system. No one knows with any certainty what will happen if our electoral system is totally revamped as proposed.” Jack emphasized how well the existing electoral system had worked to ensure the influence of the popular vote, the two-party system, and “the large-State-small-State checks-and-balances system.” The proposed amendment, which he feared could destabilize American politics at a time of grave foreign challenges, was nothing voters had demanded or even knew about. Although Jack gave a lengthy, authoritative Senate speech that contributed to the defeat of the amendment, his opposition hardly registered on the press or the public; reform of the electoral college was an invisible controversy.

OTHER THAN THE MCCARTHY CONTROVERSY
, the most significant political challenges Kennedy faced between 1954 and 1956 centered on the Massachusetts Democratic party—a venue not for heroics but for self-serving, brass-knuckle politics disconnected from any larger public good. In 1954, Kennedy found himself in a battle with Foster Furcolo, a Yale-trained Italian American attorney who had served as a Massachusetts congressman and state treasurer and was a Democratic candidate for Republican Leverett Saltonstall’s U.S. Senate seat. In 1952, Furcolo, looking ahead to a Senate race and the need for independent and Republican votes, gave Jack cautious support against Lodge. In response to this tepid endorsement, Jack, who had an excellent working relationship with Saltonstall and a high personal regard for him, was reluctant to back Furcolo. And like Furcolo two years before, Jack did not want to antagonize non-Democrats who had supported him and might vote for him again in 1958. Nor was Jack eager to help someone he saw as an ambitious rival for statewide influence and possible national power.

Jack’s tensions with Furcolo came to a head in October 1954, just before he entered the hospital for surgery. In a joint television appearance with Robert Murphy, the party’s gubernatorial candidate, and Furcolo, Jack showed himself to be visibly more sympathetic to Murphy than to Furcolo. He also ignored Furcolo’s demand that he directly attack Saltonstall. At one point, before the program began, Jack, who was on crutches and in a great deal of pain, stormed out of the studio, saying to Frank Morrissey, “That goddamn guinea.” After Morrissey told a journalist that Jack did not want Furcolo elected, Kennedy’s office refused further comment on the clash. But it was an open secret, and in the view of Kennedy aides Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers, “the only wrong political move Jack Kennedy ever made.”

More constructive was an eighteen-month battle for statewide control of the Democratic party. Jack had initially been reluctant to get into an intraparty conflict he associated with traditional Boston politics, and his father urged against it as well: “Leave it alone and don’t get into the gutter with those bums up there in Boston,” Joe told him. But O’Donnell and another Kennedy aide, Larry O’Brien, advised otherwise. Speculation that Jack might be Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in 1956 convinced them that Jack’s selection and political future now turned on delivering the Massachusetts delegation to Stevenson at the party’s nominating convention. Consequently, they urged Jack to wrest control of the state party committee from John McCormack and his ally William H. (“Onions”) Burke, the chairman of the Democratic State Committee, who intended to back New York governor Averell Harriman for the presidential nomination. Massachusetts congressman Philip Philbin also urged Jack to take on McCormack and Burke. “There is a great ‘hassle’ going on in the erudite Massachusetts Democracy,” he sarcastically told Jack in March 1955. “Various learned ‘savants’ and ‘intellectuals’ who shape the upper crust of our party organization are conducting a campaign for control, perhaps I should say a campaign to insure our defeat at the next election.” Kennedy and his team needed, Philbin said, to clean “up this deplorable situation.”

With Jack still recuperating from his surgery in Florida, he was not ready to act. He praised O’Brien and O’Donnell for their analysis of the situation but deferred a decision until he could return to Massachusetts for discussions. In the meantime, he asked them “to study proposed courses of action.” They began doing more than that, pressuring Democratic state bosses to accept Jack as their leader. And Jack, who shared their conviction that a fight for party control, however unpalatable, was vital to his future, soon threw himself into the battle with characteristic determination. Pointing to polls demonstrating his popularity and threatening to put himself forward as a favorite-son presidential candidate, Jack persuaded McCormack and Burke to give him an equal say in choosing the party’s 1956 delegation to the national convention. At the same time, however, he instructed O’Brien and O’Donnell to work secretly to oust Burke and his allies from the state committee. “So we can’t let Burke or McCormack know that we’re trying to get our people on the state committee,” he told his aides. “At least, not for the time being. Keep working on it, but don’t let Burke know about it, and don’t mention my name to anybody.”

Since Jack’s opposition to Burke was well known, Burke took precautions to counter Kennedy’s attack. In March and April 1956, while Jack helped organize a write-in vote for Stevenson in the state’s Democratic presidential primary, Burke countered with a favorite-son campaign for John McCormack. With support from
Boston Post
publisher John Fox, a staunch McCarthy backer and all-out opponent of Stevenson, the Burke forces gave McCormack a 10,000-vote victory over Adlai.

Jack now saw no alternative to an open fight with Burke. Although the Burke machine had the advantage of incumbency in a May 19 election for the party’s eighty committee seats, Jack moved quickly to exploit Burke’s unsavory image and unpopularity around the state. A short, rotund, balding onion farmer from the Berkshires, Burke had limited appeal to Boston Democrats. More important, a propensity for riding roughshod over opponents had created many enemies, who were all too happy to join Jack’s campaign. Sensing Burke’s vulnerability when contrasted with himself, Jack let it be known that he had given Burke an ultimatum—resign or be ousted. He issued a judicious statement of intent that further contrasted him favorably with Burke. “I do not relish being involved in this dispute,” he said, but he saw no other way “to restore our party to dignity and respect.” When Burke associated Stevenson supporters with communist sympathizers and falsely accused Jack of trying to bribe him with a promise of appointment as Democratic national committeeman, it incensed Democrats and added to the feeling that Burke was unworthy of high public influence.

The struggle turned into a no-holds-barred contest. Jack wrote, called, and met with committee candidates to ask for their support in overthrowing Burke. Needing to suggest a replacement, he reluctantly picked John “Pat” Lynch, the longtime mayor of Somerville. Lynch was a surprising choice; he was one of the old pols Jack seemed determined to defeat. Indeed, when O’Donnell brought Lynch in to see Jack, he “saw the shock on Jack’s face.” The small, bald-headed fifty-five-year-old “leprechaun,” as O’Donnell described him, dressed in a wide-brimmed hat and velvet-collared coat typical of Boston’s Irish politicians was no one Jack wanted to identify with. But when the Dever Democrats made clear that it would be Lynch or Burke, Jack endorsed Lynch. Even then, threatened fistfights and mayhem marked a three-hour committee meeting that produced a 47-31 vote for Lynch and Jack’s undisputed control of the state party.