Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [32]
It was about this time that he met a new friend, Charlie Bartlett, down in Florida. “We were down there after the war, and, you know, gorgeous women were all getting divorces down there, and they were really good-looking girls. It was very upbeat, the whole thing, and I went to Palm Beach. My family lived in Hobe Sound. We drove down for the evening and went to this place called Taboo. And they had an orchestra and I was with a very, very pretty girl who was getting a divorce and it turned out she knew Jack and Jack came over and sat down and started telling me about his plans to go into politics. And I said, ‘Well, I’m getting ready to go into the newspaper business.’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, I’ve been there now and I haven’t been very deep but I have to tell you, you don’t get anything done. You can’t make changes. There’s no impact. I’m going to go into politics and see if you can really do anything.’ “
Bartlett, a sixth-generation Yalie, would be Jack’s close friend from that day forward.
Jack knew the leap he was taking in running for Congress. “I had never lived very much in the district,” he admitted years later. “My roots were there, my family roots were there. But I had lived in New York for ten years and on top of that I had gone to Harvard, not a particularly popular institution at that time in the 11th Congressional District. But I started early, in my opinion the most important key to political success, in December before the primary election next June.”
Charlie Bartlett recalled the conversation they had. “He was very clear about his decision to go into Congress. Sometimes you read that he was a reluctant figure being dragooned into politics by his father. I really didn’t get that impression at all. I gathered that it was a wholesome, full-blown wish on his own part.”
Jack Kennedy’s own thoughts support his friend’s memory: “A reporter is reporting what happens, he’s not making it happen, even the good reporters, the ones that are really fascinated by what happens and who find real stimulus by putting their noses into the center of the action, even they in a sense are in a secondary profession. It’s reporting what happens, but it isn’t participating.”
By the time he made his decision, Jack, at the age of twenty-eight, possessed a level of intellectual preparation for public office uncommon even to seasoned career politicians. He had wrestled with the big-picture issues of war and peace in the 1930s, had survived the most extreme hazards of war, and been a firsthand observer of major international events. What he lacked was any practical grounding in the business of politics.
The fact that his father would take care of what the political types call the “wholesale”—the media, the press relations—hardly let him off the hook. The relentless workaday demands of a campaign lay ahead. He, the candidate, had to be the one to master the “retail,” which meant not just meeting voters one on one and winning them over, but inspiring them to join the effort. If you couldn’t connect with voters, then your other advantages, in the end, counted for little.
With the help of a local PR firm, Jack would soon be making the rounds of community groups: VFW and American Legion posts, Lions and Rotary Club meetings, communion breakfasts and Holy Name societies. This was a new world to him. But it was a necessary part of achieving his ambition, and he did it all. Writing his stump speech himself, he drew on his recent travels as a reporter in Great Britain and Germany, but always made sure to emphasize his recent stopover in Ireland.
Simultaneously, Jack decided to teach himself about being Irish. The diary he’d been keeping in Europe now contained a number of scribbled book titles accompanied by their