An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek
By the end of 1947, Jack’s voting record on supporting the unions received a perfect score from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO): eleven out of eleven correct votes. Given Jack’s district, the votes are not surprising, but they little reflect the ambivalence Jack felt on labor issues.
Jack was no more comfortable with battles over federal aid to education. As a Catholic representing a heavily Catholic district, he became an immediate exponent of helping parochial schools. The anti-Catholic bias on the issue angered and frustrated him. In 1947, a representative of the Freemasons testifying at a subcommittee hearing on educational aid sounded familiar clichés about Catholic loyalty to Church over country. “Now you don’t mean the Catholics in America are legal subjects of the Pope?” Kennedy sharply asked the witness. “I am not a legal subject of the Pope.” When the man cited canon law overriding all secular rules, Kennedy replied, “There is an old saying in Boston that we get our religion from Rome and our politics from home.”
The willingness of the committee to hear from such a witness speaks volumes about the outlook of many in the Congress and the country toward helping Catholic schools with public funds. In 1947, twenty-eight states had laws against “acting as a trustee for the disbursement of federal funds to non-public schools,” and the U.S. Senate Education and Labor Committee had reported out a bill that “would make it impossible for the states to use any of the federal funds for parochial schools.” A Gallup poll found that 49 percent of Americans favored giving federal aid entirely to public schools, while 41 percent wanted part of it to go to parochial institutions; the division between Protestants (against) and Catholics (for) on the issue seemed unbridgeable.
Jack shared the view of most American Catholics that legislation forbidding any aid to religious schools was discriminatory and unconstitutional. In this, he was in harmony with the Supreme Court, which had ruled in a 1947 New Jersey case, Everson v. Board of Education, that public monies could be used to reimburse private-school students for bus transportation. By its 5-4 decision, the Court had declared direct aid to pupils, regardless of where they attended school, no violation of First Amendment restrictions on making laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” Kennedy took this to mean that noneducational services such as bus rides, health examinations, and lunches could be freely provided to students in public and private, including religious, schools. But although Jack would consistently support this sort of federal aid, he was not without reservations about the whole idea of federal financing for schools, which states and counties had traditionally paid for. He was concerned that “present federal educational activities are tremendously costly” and might impose a “staggering” burden on taxpayers. To rein in what he feared could become runaway costs, he urged that such aid to education be given only when there was a demonstrable need. In addition, he called for federal requirements that states make greater efforts “through properly balanced taxation and efficiency of operation” to improve their own educational systems.
Jack was also unhappy with being identified as a Catholic congressman promoting parochial interests. It is true that public stands for equal federal treatment of public and parochial schools won him high praise from Catholic Church and lay leaders. (One Catholic newspaper called him “a white knight” committed to “courageous representation of his constituency.”) But he was uncomfortable with the perception that he was a spokesman of the Catholic Church and a captive of his Catholic constituents. He wished to be known as a public servant whose judgment rested not on narrow ideological or personal prejudices, and little mattered to him more during his term in the House than making clear that he operated primarily in the service of national rather than more limited group interests.
A controversy concerning Boston mayor Curley demonstrates Kennedy’s eagerness to create some distance between himself and the ruling Catholic clique in Boston. After his return to the mayor’s office in 1946, Curley had been indicted for fraudulent use of the mail to solicit war contracts for bogus companies. The following year he was convicted and sent to the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, to serve a six-to-eighteen-month term. Seventy-two years old, suffering from diabetes and high blood pressure, Curley asked the court for clemency, citing a physician’s prediction that his imprisonment would be a death sentence. When the judge refused his plea, 172,000 of Curley’s supporters, about a quarter of Boston’s population, petitioned President Truman to commute the sentence. John McCormack asked New England congressmen to support the request.
All the Massachusetts representatives followed McCormack’s lead except for Jack. When McCormack approached him about signing, Kennedy asked whether the president had been consulted. McCormack said no and, irritated with the young man’s implied defiance, declared, “If you don’t want to sign, don’t sign it.” Having learned from the surgeon general that Curley’s imprisonment was not life-threatening and that he would receive proper care in the prison hospital, Jack refused to sign. Because his district was a Curley stronghold, Jack worried that he might now be “politically dead, finished,” as he told Ted Reardon.
At the same time, however, Jack saw good political reasons to resist. He was not beholden to district party regulars; his election had been more the result of building a personal organization than of getting help from the traditional pols. Moreover, it defined Jack as a new kind of Boston politician, a member of a younger generation with broader experience and a wider view of the world. It also allowed Jack to please Honey Fitz, who despised Curley for having cut short his political career. More important to Jack, though, was the injustice of giving Curley something he had denied other constituents: backing for an undeserved pardon. When Curley was released after five months and returned to the mayor’s office with declarations that he felt better than he had in years, Jack gained in standing as a politician who thought for himself.
Though Jack was feeling his way on domestic issues, tacking between political expediency and moral conviction, he felt more comfortable in dealing with major foreign policy questions. His book, wartime experience, and newspaper articles about postwar peacemaking gave him a surer sense of what needed to be done.
In March 1947, after the president announced the Truman Doctrine proposing aid to Greece and Turkey as a deterrent to Soviet expansion in the Near East, Jack spoke at the University of North Carolina in support of the president’s plan. He believed it essential to national security to prevent Europe’s domination by any single power. To those who warned that aiding Greece and Turkey would provoke Moscow and possibly lead to another global conflict, he invoked the failure at Munich to stand up to Hitler as a miscalculation that had led to the Second World War. A firm policy now against Soviet imperialism would discourage Moscow from dangerous adventures in the future, he predicted. To those who believed that America should rely on the United Nations to preserve the independence of Greece and Turkey, Kennedy cautioned that it lacked the wherewithal to meet the challenge. America’s aim was “not to dominate by dollar imperialism the Governments of Greece and Turkey, but rather it is to assist them to live in freedom.” The president’s policy was “the only path by which we will reach security and peace.” Jack was equally enthusiastic and outspoken about the Marshall Plan to restore economic health and stability to Western Europe with loans and grants of up to $17 billion.
Of course, while Kennedy’s stand for an internationalist policy rested on the belief that Truman was right, it also sprang from a concern to separate himself from his father. Recently, Joe had publicly complained that the United States lacked the financial means to meet its obligations at home and send hundreds of millions of dollars abroad to combat communism. His solution was to let the communists take over Greece and Turkey and other nations, predicting that these communist regimes would collapse after proving to be unworkable. An isolationist, prosperous United States would then become a model for both industrial and emerging nations, in which we could comfortably invest. Joe’s shortsightedness wa
NO ONE IN 1947 would have described Jack as ready for a leading role in national affairs. His first term in the House was a kind of half-life in which he divided his time between the public and the private. He was never indifferent about the major issues besetting the country; housing, labor unions, education, and particularly the communist challenge to U.S. national security received close attention between 1947 and 1949. But he was a quick study, and as only one of 435 voices in the House—and a junior one in the minority party at that—he found himself with ample time to enjoy a social life, especially since his large, able office staff took care of constituent demands. An English friend who lived around the corner from him in Georgetown remembered Jack as “a mixture of gaiety and thought. . . . He seemed quite serious, and then suddenly, he’d break away from reading and start to make jokes, and sing a song. But I think he did appear to be quite a serious thinker and always probing into things—literature, politics, etc.”
Though having turned thirty in May 1947, his boyish good looks and demeanor bespoke not ambition and seriousness of purpose but casualness, ease, and enjoyment. Rumpled jackets, wrinkled shirts, spotted ties, khaki pants, loose-fitting sweaters, and sneakers were his clothes of choice; the expensive tailored suits he wore only out of deference to the customs of the House—and even then, perhaps not as often as he should have.
A rented three-story town house at 1528 Thirty-first Street in Georgetown, which Jack shared with Billy Sutton; his twenty-six-year-old sister Eunice, who worked at the Justice Department for a juvenile delinquency committee; and Margaret Ambrose, a family cook, had the feel of a noisy, busy fraternity that reflected casual living. Despite the presence of George Thomas, a black valet, who struggled to keep a rein on Jack’s sloppiness, clothes were draped over chairs and sofas, with remnants of half-eaten meals left in unlikely places. Billy Sutton recalled how people were always “coming and going, like a Hollywood hotel. The Ambassador, Rose, Lem Billings, Torby, anybody who came to Washington. You never knew who the hell was going to be there but you got used to it.”
Jack’s idea of a good time was an unplanned evening with a friend. One young woman, who resisted any romantic involvement, recalled how “he would come by, in typical fashion, honk his horn underneath my garage window and call out, ‘Can you go to the movies?’ or ‘Can you come down to dinner?’ He was not much for planning ahead. Sometimes I’d go down for dinner and he’d be having dinner on a tray in his bedroom and I’d have my dinner on a tray in his bedroom. He was resting, you see? The back brace and different things would be hanging around. Then he’d find out what was at the movies and he’d get dressed and we’d go to the movies. And I’d pay for it because he never had any money.” When he stayed home, he could be found sprawled in a chair, reading. Or as a reporter said, “Kennedy never sits in a chair; he bivouacs in it.”
Jack still took special pleasure in athletics, reportedly making a habit of pickup football, basketball, or softball games with local teenagers. An Associated Press reporter described Jack in full uniform at a high school football practice. The team’s star halfback, who thought Jack was a new recruit, gave him a workout, catching and throwing passes, running down punts, and tackling. “How’s the Congressman doing?” the coach asked the unsuspecting halfback. “Is that what they call him?” he replied. “He needs a lot of work, Coach.” (Given Jack’s health problems, was the A.P. story a puff piece?)
For all Jack’s devotion to his social life, he had few close friends. Not that he couldn’t have drawn other congressmen, journalists, and Washington celebrities into close ties. His charm, intelligence, and wit made him highly attractive to almost everyone he met. But he felt little need for what current parlance would describe as male bonding. His strong family connections and frenetic womanizing gave him all the companionship he seemed to need.
He quickly developed a reputation as quite a ladies’ man. “Jack liked girls,” recalled fellow congressman George Smathers. Smathers, thirty-three and the son of a prominent Miami attorney and judge, shared a privileged background and affinity for self-indulgence that made him one of Jack’s few good friends. “He came by it naturally. His daddy liked girls. He was a great chaser. Jack liked girls and girls liked him. He had just a great way with women. He was such a warm, lovable guy himself. He was a sweet fella, a really sweet fella.” A contemporary gossip columnist for a New York newspaper supported Smathers’s recollections. “Palm Beach’s cottage colony wants to give the son of Joseph P. Kennedy its annual Oscar for achievement in the field of romance. The committee says that young Mister Kennedy splashed through a sea of flaming early season divorcees to rescue its sinking faith in the romantic powers of Florida.” Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas remembered Jack as a “playboy,” and New Jersey congressman Frank Thompson Jr., another of Jack’s friends in the 1950s, said that “the girls just went crazy about him”; he had “a smorgasbord of women” to choose from.
Most of these women were one-night stands—airline stewardesses and secretaries. “He was not a cozy, touching sort of man,” one woman said. Another woman described Jack as “nice—considerate in his own way, witty and fun. But he gave off light instead of heat. Sex was something to have done, not to be doing. He wasn’t in it for the cuddling.”
He wanted no part of marriage at this time. His friend Rip Horton remembered going to his Georgetown house for dinner. “A lovely-looking blonde from West Palm Beach joined us to go to a movie. After the movie we went back to the house and I remember Jack saying something like ‘Well, I want to shake this one. She has ideas.’ Shortly thereafter, another girl walked in. Ted Reardon was there, so he went home and I went to bed figuring this was the girl for the night. The next morning a completely different girl came wandering down for breakfast. They were a dime a dozen.”
Several of Jack’s contemporaries and biographers have concluded that he was a neurotic womanizer fulfilling some unconscious need for unlimited conquests. Priscilla Johnson, an attractive young woman who worked on political and foreign issues for Jack in the fifties, concluded that “he was a very naughty boy.” (She rejected invitations from him to go to his hotel suite at the Waldorf-Astoria when they were in New York.) Kennedy family biographers Peter Collier and David Horowitz have described his affairs as “less a self-assertion than a search for self—an existential pinch on the arm to prove that he was there.” This is shorthand for the view that Jack was a narcissist whose sexual escapades combated feelings of emptiness bred by a cold, detached mother and a self-absorbed, largely absent father. They quote Johnson: “I was one of the few he could really talk to. Like Freud, he wanted to know what women really wanted, that sort of thing; but he also wanted to know the more mundane details—what gave a woman pleasure, what women hoped for in marriage, how they liked to be courted. During one of these conversations I once asked him why he was doing it—why he was acting like his father, why he was avoiding real relationships, why he was taking a chance on getting caught in a scandal at the same time he was trying to make his career take off. He took a while trying to formulate an answer. Finally he shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know really. I guess I just can’t help it.’ He had this sad expression on his face. He looked like a little boy about to cry.”
Johnson and others thought it was as much the chase as anything that excited Jack. “The whole thing with him was pursuit,” she said. “I think he was secretly disappointed when a woman gave in. It meant that the low esteem in which he held women was once again validated. It meant also that he’d have to
A sense of his mortality may also have continued to drive Jack’s incessant skirt-chasing. The discovery of his Addison’s disease, his adrenal insufficiency, in the fall of 1947 put a punctuation point on the medical problems that had afflicted him since childhood. Although the availability of DOCA made his problems treatable by the late 1940s, no one could be certain that the disease would not cut short Jack’s life. His English physician, who diagnosed the Addison’s disease during Jack’s 1947 trip to Ireland, told Pamela Churchill, “That young American friend of yours, he hasn’t got a year to live.” Jack was not told this, but his cumulative experience with doctors had made him skeptical about their ability to mend his ills. Moreover, when he came home from London in September 1947, he was so ill that a priest came aboard the Queen Mary to give him extreme unction (last rites) before he was carried off the ship on a stretcher. In the following year, when bad weather made a plane trip “iffy,” he told Ted Reardon, “It’s okay for someone with my life expectancy,” but he suggested that his sister Kathleen and Reardon go by train. “His continual, almost heroic sexual performance,” Garry Wills said, was a “cackling at the gods of bodily disability who plagued him.” Charles Spalding believed that Jack identified with Lord Byron, about whom Jack read everything he could find. Byron also had physical disabilities, saw himself dying young, and hungered for women. Jack loved—perhaps too much—Lady Caroline Lamb’s description of Byron as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”