Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [37]
“What about Communism?” he asked a lawyer he knew who’d been supporting Mike Neville in the race. That fall he was already calling the Soviet Union, our wartime ally, a “slave state,” clearly drawing a line between himself and his party’s liberal wing.
This fighting conservative was already fighting a war that had not yet gotten its name.
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The Daily News, McKeesport
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The House class of 1946
CHAPTER FIVE
COLD WARRIOR
While the hand of fate made Jack and me political opponents, I always cherish the fact that we were personal friends from the time we came to the Congress together in 1947.
—Richard M. Nixon, from a letter written to
Jacqueline Kennedy, November 22, 1963
Jack Kennedy knew well before going to the House of Representatives that he didn’t intend to stay there. He was headed for statewide office, either the governorship or the U.S. Senate. Even if he opted for the governorship first, it was only to be a stepping-stone. His goal was the Senate, since what he really wanted was to join the big national debates, especially those on foreign policy. That was where he intended to make his mark.
There were no near-term options for reaching his goal. If he ran against Senator Leverett Saltonstall in two years—in ’48—he would look impetuous. Besides, he’d formed an affection for the older man. But if he waited to run against the other senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the august Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., in 1952, it might be a suicide mission.
Lodge had sacrificed his first seat in the Senate to go off and fight in the war. Now, in ’46, he’d won the second Massachusetts seat, with a smashing victory over Senator David I. Walsh, a four-term Democrat. So Jack would have to wait. Whatever and whenever he decided on for his next step he needed to prove himself with the job he’d won.
From the start, when he walked into his office on Capitol Hill, Jack Kennedy made it clear he was his own man. Arriving with a high profile, built first on his best-selling, prewar book and then on his news-making exploits in the South Pacific, he had no intention of compromising his hero’s image by becoming just another Massachusetts Democrat. Out there in the Solomon Islands, he’d engineered the saving of ten men’s lives; he was not about to sign on to someone else’s crew. And that included the number two Democrat in the House, John McCormack, who, because he was the senior congressman from Massachusetts, expected a certain deference from his fellow Bay Staters.
He would not be getting it from young Kennedy. On the morning the about-to-be congressman was to take his oath, Billy Sutton met him at the Statler Hilton on Sixteenth Street, a few blocks north of the White House. Jack had just flown in from Palm Beach.
“You should be in a hurry,” Sutton warned his boss, who showed up tanned and carrying his black cashmere overcoat. “You have a caucus meeting.” In other words, McCormack was waiting for him up on Capitol Hill. “Well, I’d like a couple of eggs,” Kennedy said, continuing to ignore the suggestion to get a move on. “How long would you say Mr. McCormack has been here? Don’t you think Mr. McCormack wouldn’t mind waiting another ten minutes?”
The Mucker wasn’t about to let a new headmaster intimidate him. At that, he went into the hotel’s drugstore lunch counter to join his new top aide, Ted Reardon, for breakfast.
Kennedy’s little-concealed disdain for the John McCormacks of the world was not a trait he was ready to hide. He’d made it his business to win his seat free of the entangling alliances that tied up other new lawmakers before they could even get started. Establishing his independence