Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [36]
At one candidates’ event, he listened patiently to each of his rivals describe their difficult lives. When his turn arrived, he, son of one of the world’s richest men, stood up and began, “I guess I’m the only one here who didn’t come up the hard way.”
He also did something else other candidates failed to think of, or were unable to imagine themselves doing, which was making a direct appeal to women. “Womanpower,” he would tell Tip, “the untapped resource.”
Red Fay reported that visiting junior colleges in the area with Jack back then was like traveling with the young, also very skinny Frank Sinatra. “They would scream and holler and touch him—absolutely, in 1946. I mean these girls were just crazy about him.”
Finally, there was the undeniable stamina Kennedy poured into the race, working hard at it until the very last day. Years later he would say it was mostly a matter of getting started early. “My chief opponents . . . followed the old practice of not starting until two months before the election. By then I was way ahead of them. I believe most aspirants for public office start much too late. When you think of the money that Coca-Cola and Lucky Strike put into advertising day after day though they have well-known brand names, you can realize how difficult it is to become an identifiable political figure. The idea that people can get to know you well enough to support you in two months or three months is wholly wrong. Most of us do not follow politics and politicians. We become interested only around election time. . . . In my opinion the principle for winning a war fight or a Congressional fight is really the same as winning a presidential fight. And the most important ingredient is a willingness to submit yourself to long, long, long labor.”
Ted Reardon, his older brother’s close friend from Harvard, was running the get-out-the-vote effort. “We were constantly going over the voting lists to find where the Democrats were. We had four or five telephones going all the time, with volunteer girls calling up and getting out the vote. We used to stay until three or four in the morning.”
Lem Billings, recalling the pace, said: “Remember, we were all amateurs and all very young. Everyone was either a young veteran or a young girl. We had people who’d lived in each district all their lives stationed at the polls. We tried to get as many volunteers with cars as we could, but we always had to hire an awful lot of taxis and these were all sent to addresses of Democrats who hadn’t voted.”
The big event each year in Charlestown, then a part of the 11th Congressional District, is the Bunker Hill Parade. The day before the primary, Jack marched in the parade. On this hot June day, the pressure and work of the campaign finally catching up with him, he collapsed before reaching the finish.
“I called his father,” said the man whose house he was taken to. “I was instructed to wait until a doctor came. He turned very yellow and blue. He appeared to me as a man who probably had a heart attack. Later on I found out it was a condition which he picked up, probably malaria or yellow fever.” In fact, it would take until the following year for Kennedy to find out the true, much more serious cause of his problem.
On the following day, Kennedy was up early and at the movies. It was a way for him to escape the early, misleading, mind-destroying tidbits of information about how the voting was going. That night, when the results were in, he’d beaten Neville by two to one. Joe Russo—the real one—finished fourth. The other Joe Russo, the one the Kennedy people had put up, managed to get nearly eight hundred votes. He finished fifth.
Jack Kennedy had started earliest and worked the hardest. He had done what was necessary, and more, and he had won. But