Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [34]
What Jack Kennedy brought to the table, besides his sterling war record and those well-known Boston names—Kennedy and Fitzgerald—was his obvious affection for the old Irish world he now was entering. He loved hearing his grandfather’s stories, from “Honey Fitz” himself, the city’s long-ago mayor and congressman.
Not surprisingly, the daily slog of introducing himself to constituents was not quite compatible with a chronic back problem, not when it meant going up and down the stairs of multifamily houses day after day. Come early afternoon, Jack would take a nap, then continue the trudge of one-on-one campaigning on into the night. He did this for months, and not everyone liked to see him doing it. The local politicians viewed him for what he was, a carpetbagger.
His voting address, after all, was a hotel, and he’d registered just in time to vote in the primary. Tom O’Neill, a local state assemblyman known as “Tip,” wasn’t impressed by the newcomer, war record or not. He was backing Mike Neville, the former Cambridge mayor, and the one whose turn it now was to hold the seat. “I couldn’t believe this skinny, pasty-faced kid was a candidate for anything.” He recalled the first time he met Kennedy outside the Bellevue Hotel: “He was twenty-eight but looked younger, and he still hadn’t fully recovered from his war injuries. He also looked as if he had come down with malaria.”
Tip’s description tallies with that of other observers. To Billy Sutton, he “wasn’t looking healthy then.” To Mark Dalton, the young attorney who would become Kennedy’s formal campaign manager, he resembled that same “skeleton” to which we’ve often heard him compared. His father, too, worried about his son’s emaciation. “My father thought I was hopeless.” Why? “At the time I weighed about 120 pounds.”
Chuck Spalding suggested that Jack’s precarious health, and his determination to surmount it at any cost, only added to the campaign’s wild, even hectic, pace. “This impatience that he passed on to others . . . made everybody around him feel quicker.” The trouble was, it didn’t necessarily make for great organization.
One out-of-the-blue crisis almost derailed Jack’s first run for office before it even officially had started. It seems that while he was obsessively wearing himself out walking the neighborhoods, he’d somehow overlooked a giant detail. The one to discover it was his old navy pal Red Fay, who’d come east to help out, he said, “even though I was a Republican.” Arriving in Cambridge, Fay found the headquarters a shambles of unpaid bills and invitations to speak, and was soon put in charge of trying to run the campaign on a more “businesslike basis.”
One of the campaign workers casually asked Fay about the candidate’s filing of his nomination papers. The deadline was that very afternoon, and yet no one had thought to do it. Not only that, it was now after five o’clock, and thus, past the deadline. So there they were, with Kennedy’s petitions not in, and the Boston Globe’s late edition already reporting the fact. Yet, incredible as it seems, given today’s 24/7 news cycle and minute-by-minute reaction speeds, no one was besieging the headquarters. Or even paying any attention.
“My God,” Kennedy said when he heard the bad news. It was 6:30 in the evening. “A series of frantic phone calls were made,” Fay reports. “Then, very quietly, the candidate and some loyal public retainers went down, opened up the proper office and filed the papers. Another couple of hours, and all the thousands