An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
The mainstay of the Washington office was Mary Davis. A year younger than Jack, she joined his staff after eight years as a secretary to other congressmen. She was a pro who managed everything. “Mary Davis was unbelievable,” Billy Sutton said. “She could answer the phone, type a letter, and eat a chocolate bar all at once. She was the complete political machine, knew everybody, how to get anything done. . . . When Mary came in, you could have let twelve people go.” Jack “never did involve himself in the workings of the office,” Mary herself said. “He wasn’t a methodical person. Everything that came into the office was handed to me. I took care of everything. If I had any questions, I’d take them in to him at a specific time and say, ‘Here, what do you want me to say about that?’ Nothing would land on his desk. I’d pin him down on the spot, get his decision, then do it.” Davis was paid sixty dollars a week, but wanted more, citing her experience, background, and talent, and mindful of the family wealth—$40 million, if Fortune magazine was to be believed. Jack would not budge, promising only to “talk about it one of these days.”
The Boston office served Jack equally well. Frank Morrissey, an attorney who was Joe’s eyes and ears, oversaw the staff, which worked on the seventeenth floor of the federal building downtown. Morrissey, who spent most of his time practicing law or taking care of errands for Joe, left the daily work in the hands of Joe Rosetti, a war veteran attending night classes on hotel management at Northeastern University. Rosetti worked hard but did not like politics. “No matter how many good things you did for Jack’s constituents, the only thing they remembered is what you couldn’t do for them. That irritated me a great deal,” Rosetti recalled.
The principal work of the Boston office fell to Grace Burke, an unmarried fifty-year-old lady who, like Mary Davis, was the soul of efficiency and devoted to serving Jack. “She was very dedicated,” Rosetti said. “She would not allow anything to take place in that office that was going to be detrimental to Jack. She kept her three-by-five cards, her filing system, had her own personal contacts at City Hall and the State House. She was on top of everything.”
The effectiveness of Jack’s two offices rested partly on Joe’s commitment to pay the costs of hiring more staff than any other congressman. Mary Davis said that “in those days Congressmen made twelve thousand dollars a year, plus a small expense allowance and they didn’t have as many fringe benefits. So I was told that any expenses for Jack or the office were to be sent to Paul Murphy in New York. He had full charge of issuing checks and, of course, seldom questioned anything. Jack wasn’t an extravagant guy.”
Joe also put his money and influence to work crafting Jack’s public reputation. In January 1947, the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce named Jack one of the ten outstanding young men of 1946. Joe helped arrange the selection through Steve Hannagan, a prominent New York publicist (or “press agent,” as such operators were then known). Hannagan enlisted the backing of the nationally famous singer Morton Downey and Union Pacific Railroad president William M. Jeffers, a selection committee judge, to promote Jack’s candidacy. Joe was “more than delighted” at Jack’s number one ranking among the ten, with the boxer Joe Louis number seven, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. ninth, and Bill Mauldin, the creator of the famous wartime “Willie and Joe” cartoons on life in the U.S. Army, tenth.
In subsequent months, a stream of favorable newspaper and radio stories Joe helped generate in the New York Times,Boston Globe, and other outlets served Jack’s image as a rising political star. “GALAHAD IN THE HOUSE,” Paul F. Healy, a Jack booster, declared in a Massachusetts Catholic paper. “In a poll of the Congressional Press Gallery he would be picked as one of the five young congressmen most likely to succeed,” Healy wrote in July 1950. “As a former author, newspaperman, embassy attaché, and war hero, Kennedy takes his legislative responsibilities extremely seriously. He is one of a small group of World War II veterans who have done much to raise the moral and intellectual tone of the House. Lacking the seniority that wields so much power in Congress, these men have exerted influence by sheer intelligence and integrity.”
JOE’S HELP CAME at a price: Jack often felt compromised or too much under his father’s control. In February 1947, when he gave an interview to a Washington journalist who said “that it was nice to meet Kathleen’s brother,” Jack replied, “For a long time I was Joseph P. Kennedy’s son, then I was Kathleen’s brother, then Eunice’s brother. Some day I hope to be able to stand on my own feet.”
No sophisticated psychological understanding is required to see that a largely unspoken but omnipresent concern for Jack as he turned thirty was to separate himself from Joe and establish a more autonomous sense of self. At a cocktail party shortly after Jack entered the House, Joe turned to Kay Halle, a family friend, and said, “I wish you would tell Jack that he’s going to vote the wrong way. . . . I think Jack is making a terrible mistake.” Jack bristled: “Now, look here, Dad, you have your political views and I have mine. I’m going to vote exactly the way I feel I must vote on this. I’ve got great respect for you but when it comes to voting, I’m voting my way.” Joe smiled and said, “Well, Kay, that’s why I settled a million dollars on each of them, so they could spit in my eye if they wished.” “I guess Dad has decided that he’s going to be the ventriloquist,” Jack told Lem, “so I guess that leaves me the role of dummy.”
Joe’s intrusiveness was nothing the Kennedys wished to advertise; indeed, Joe and Jack may have staged the exchange in front of Halle as a way to publicize Jack’s independence. Their intense concern with public image, especially now that Jack was a congressman, certainly makes it conceivable. His father’s reputation as an appeaser, isolationist, and anti-Semite—or at least someone ready to accommodate himself to Nazi domination of Europe—seemed certain to hurt Jack’s political standing if it were known that Joe had a big part in what Jack did. And so the objective was to keep as quiet as possible about Joe’s behind-the-scenes political machinations.
Jack, however, appreciated that Joe’s assertiveness and connections gave him considerable advantages. For example, his father was instrumental in arranging Jack’s appointment to the House Education and Labor Committee, where he could have a say in major battles that were looming over labor unions and federal aid to education. Jack said later that he did not remember how he came by the selection, but it seems transparent that John McCormack, in response to Kennedy pressure, agreed to give Jack the assignment. (The Republican leadership bestowed the same award on Richard Nixon, a promising California freshman they wanted to help after he had won an upset victory over prominent liberal Democrat Jerry Voorhis.) Jack also gained appointment to the Veterans’ Affairs Committee and membership on a special subcommittee on veterans’ housing, another issue certain to command national attention in the coming session.
Jack was grateful for his father’s and McCormack’s help in giving him a part in public discussions about education, housing, and labor. But he was also eager to demonstrate his independence from them. Billy Sutton remembered Jack’s arrival at Washington’s Statler Hilton on the morning of January 3, 1947: “His hair was tousled, he was completely tanned [from a vacation in West Palm Beach]; black cashmere coat and a grey suit over his arm.” Sutton and Ted Reardon reported several calls from McCormack’s office asking for Jack’s attendance at a Democratic caucus. “We should be in a hurry now, Jack, make it snappy. . . . You have a caucus meeting. You’ve got two pretty good committees: Labor and Education, District of Columbia.” “Well,” Jack replied, “I’d like a couple of eggs.” As Jack ate breakfast, Billy and Ted kept pressuring him to get a move on: “Mr. McCormack is quite anxious that you get up there,” Billy said. Jack asked, “How long would you say Mr. McCormack was here?” When Billy answered twenty-six years, Jack responded, “Well, I don’t think Mr. McCormack would mind waiting another ten minutes.”
COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENTS and self-education or not, Jack’s congressional work was a source of constant frustratio
He was never happy with having to slavishly support constituent demands, but he understood that accommodating himself to this political reality was essential if he hoped to be reelected. In the first two months of his term, he considered proposing that the 1948 Democratic National Convention be held in Boston. “An excellent political manoeuvre [sic],” one adviser told him. It seemed certain to impress local businessmen, who would profit from such a development, and would create feelings of pride among Eleventh District voters that Jack was establishing himself as a party leader. But he seemed less in tune with the eagerness of his many relatively poor, working-class constituents for expanded government programs or more New Deal “liberalism.” “In 1946 I really knew nothing about these things,” Jack said ten years later. “I had no background particularly; in my family we were interested not so much in the ideas of politics as in the mechanics of the whole process. Then I found myself in Congress representing the poorest district in Massachusetts. Naturally, the interests of my constituents led me to take the liberal line; all the pressures converged toward that end.”
Jack’s fiscal conservatism could be seen in his antagonism to unbalanced budgets, which he believed a threat to the national economy. In 1947, he openly opposed a Republican proposed tax cut, which he attacked as not only unfair to lower-income citizens but also a menace to economic stability. In 1950, he spoke out against Democratic-sponsored spending plans on social programs that could lead to a “dangerous” $6 billion deficit; he instead suggested a 10 percent across-the-board cut in appropriations. “I do not see how we can go on carrying a deficit every year,” he declared on the House floor. “Does not the gentleman think that a very important item in the cold war is the economic stability of the country so that we have resources in case of war?”
Roosevelt’s New Deal had put in place Social Security, unemployment insurance, and public housing, which Jack saw as being sacrosanct among his constituents and impossible for an Eleventh District congressman to oppose without committing political suicide. But privately he had substantial concerns about some of them. “The scarlet thread that runs throughout the world—is one of resignation of major problems into the all absorbing hands of the great Leviathan—the state,” he declared in a poorly crafted 1950 speech at the University of Notre Dame. He warned against the “ever expanding power of the Federal government” and asserted that “control over local affairs was the essence of liberty.” His conservatism partly found expression in a vote with the Republican majority for the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution (limiting presidents to two terms). The act of revenge against Franklin Roosevelt, as it was known, had much appeal to Jack as an indirect way to retrospectively censure FDR for having fostered “socialist” measures, run for a fourth term as a sick and dying man, and “appeased” Stalin at Yalta.
At the same time, however, Jack had genuine compassion for the needs of the blue-collar workers dependent on government to ease their lives. The failure of Congress to act on some social welfare measures he considered transparently vital to the well-being of deserving citizens frustrated him and added to his discontent about serving in the House. In particular, Congress’s failure in 1945-46 to enact housing legislation impressed him as a dereliction of duty to veterans. Federal remedies for the country’s housing shortage, which affected thousands of returning veterans in Boston and around the country, commanded his full support. The absence of wartime construction and the rapid growth of postwar families made this a compelling concern. In February 1947, he told a Boston radio audience of his high hopes for passage of the Wagner-Ellender-Taft Bill, which he described as “desperately needed.”
But he was disappointed, despite outspoken demands on his part for congressional action. He could not understand why some members of the House would not rise above their political self-interest and false assumptions about free enterprise for the sake of larger national needs. “The only time that private enterprise alone anywhere near met the demand for houses was in 1925,” he told his colleagues in April. By July, his frustration at House inaction boiled over in an attack on the Republican majority, which, he said, was willing to help big-business interests, but the veterans’ “drastic” need of affordable dwellings would have to wait on “an investigation of the housing shortage.” Since the facts were already known, Jack declared on the House floor, “this gesture by the Republican party is a fraud. . . . They have always been receptive to the best interests of the real estate and building association, but when it came to spending money to secure homes for the people of this country, they just were not interested.”
Jack’s strong advocacy of federally financed housing won him warm praise in his district. One supporter sent a letter to all the Boston newspapers, lauding Jack’s “moral courage.” And although the personal political benefit of supporting veterans’ housing was not lost on Jack, the selfishness of the realty interests and the shortsightedness of conservative VFW and American Legion leaders (who had aligned themselves with those interests) legitimately upset him. Quoting a Catholic newspaper, Jack called the American Legion a “legislative drummer boy for the real estate lobby.” In response, a Legion spokesman belittled Jack as an uninformed “embryo” congressman. When the Legion then supported what Jack saw as a fiscally irresponsible bonus bill for veterans while continuing its opposition to the housing measure, Jack told the House that “the leadership of the American Legion had not had a constructive thought for the benefit of this country since 1918!” After this outburst, Jack, who believed it “terribly important” to his political future to be seen as “rational” and “thoughtful,” worried that he had gone too far. “Well, Ted,” he told Reardon when he got back to the office, “I guess we’re gone. That finishes us down here.” But his principled stand redounded to his benefit: public reaction was strongly in his favor, especially from veterans, whose letters backed him ten to one.
It was an important lesson. A humane government looking out for the powerless or less powerful was a necessary counter to business interests that thought primarily about the bottom line. In 1947, Jack did not think of himself as a New Deal liberal, but the housing fight was a first step in that direction. Additional steps were sometimes small, as the struggles over the power of labor unions, which became the major issue before Congress during 1947, reveal. As a representative of a working-class district, he felt duty-bound to speak and vote for the interests of the unions, which were under sharp attack for putting their own needs above the national good. Jack was mindful of the long struggle for labor rights stretching back into the nineteenth century and culminating in the victories of the 1930s that legalized collective bargaining and secured the right to strike. But he saw the unions as fiercely self-serving and no more ready than corporate America to put the needs of the country above their own interest. Communist infiltration of the unions, which allegedly made them vulnerable to manipulation by Soviet agents putting Moscow’s needs before those of the United States, especially troubled him. In subcommittee hearings in 1947 on communist subversion of the United Electrical Workers and the United Auto Workers, Jack hammered away at witnesses suspected of communist sympathies and, in the case of the UAW, of impeding American industrial mobilization in 1941 when Soviet Russia was allied with Nazi Germany. A motion to bring perjury charges against union leaders whom Jack believed part of a communist conspiracy gave him standing as a tough-minded anticommunist intent on ferreting out and prosecuting subversives.
Nevertheless, he opposed measures that would make labor again vulnerable to manageme
Jack’s dissent put him in company with 106 other House opponents of the bill, who were swamped by 308 Republicans and conservative Democrats ready to risk industrial strife. When the more moderate Taft-Hartley version emerged from a conference committee in June, Jack briefly considered voting for it. But the interests of his district, the conviction that such a vote would end his House career, and the defects in a bill he saw as still too draconian toward unions persuaded him to join 78 congressmen in opposing 320 supporters. After Truman vetoed Taft-Hartley, the House and Senate, with Jack voting to sustain the president, overrode the veto.