Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [33]
He was also soliciting the reactions of local political figures to his potential candidacy. But when he called on them, especially the Irish ones, he wasn’t just making the mandatory courtesy visits, he was brushing up against the city’s history. “For all Irish immigrants, the way in Boston was clearly charted,” he dictated in a memo years later. “The doors of business were shut; the way to rise above being a laborer was politics.”
His own path, he acknowledged, had been a privileged one. Being third-generation and not first makes a difference. “I had in politics, to begin with, the great advantage of having a well-known name and that served me in good stead. Beyond that I was a stranger to begin with and I still have a notebook which is filled page after page with the names of all the new people I met back there in that first campaign.”
One of the new acquaintances was a fellow by the name of Dan O’Brien, who was skeptical about the young man’s chances. After meeting him, Jack came away with these jotted-down impressions: “Says I’ll be murdered—No personal experience—A personal district—Says I don’t know 300 people personally. Says I should become Mike Neville’s secretary. O’Brien says the attack on me will be—1. Inexperience 2. Injury to me: me . . . father’s reputation. He is the first man to bet me that I can’t win! An honest Irishman but a mistaken one.”
The candidate also recorded maxims that applied to the situation. Among them:
• In politics you don’t have friends—you have confederates.
• One day they feed you honey—the next will find fish caught in your throat.
• You can buy brains but you can’t buy—loyalty.
• The best politician is the man who does not think too much of the political consequence of his every act.
He also noted: “The one great failure of American government is the government of critics.” Making the rounds and learning the ropes, he’d quickly recognized, as every politician must, the impossibility of pleasing everyone.
Now, for the first time in his life, Jack needed to make friends on a basis other than compatibility. Living on Beacon Hill, a young bachelor with no fixed address beyond rooms in the historic Bellevue Hotel, he lacked roots in the local community and needed to establish himself. The most important task was to enlist supporters who’d spent their lives in the district and would come on board, willing to stand up for him. While you could always hire a few professionals, the vast army needed for a win had to be made up of volunteers, those who helped him because they decided to.
The first hire was Billy Sutton, four years older than Jack and just discharged from the army. His description of the Jack of those days was a thin, bright-eyed figure with his hair cut close on the sides. Billy—whom I got to know well many years later—said that Jack had reminded him of the young Charles Lindbergh.
Before the war Billy had made himself useful in local politics as a result of his job checking gas meters, which naturally put him in touch with a wide variety of people. But he was the kind of guy who loved talking to anyone, and so, with Billy as his guide, Jack began trudging up and down the three-deckers of the old neighborhoods, introducing himself and asking for support. The person most surprised by this was his father. What Joseph Kennedy had yet to realize was the way the navy had changed his second son. The young man who returned from the Solomon Islands was not the one who’d left for there in early 1943, and a large part of the reason the experience so altered him was because it offered continual exposure to people unlike himself, from all over the country and from every walk of life.
The fact that he was a returning serviceman was a key factor from the start. Working-class