Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [42]
In fact, Jack Kennedy was starting to make it known, both privately and publicly, that he and his father disagreed on important issues.
“We were all at a cocktail party in the garden of Drew and Luvie Pearson,” the senior Kennedy’s friend Kay Halle recalled. “Suddenly, Joe said, ‘Kay, I wish you would tell Jack that he’s going to vote the wrong way.’ I can’t even remember what bill it was, but Joe said, ‘I think Jack is making a terrible mistake.’
“And then I remember Jack turning to his father and saying, ‘Now, look here, Dad, you have your political views and I have mine. I’m going to vote exactly the way I feel I must vote on this. I’ve great respect for you, but when it comes to voting, I’m voting my way.’ Then Joe looked at me with that big Irish smile, and said, ‘Well, Kay, that’s why I settled a million dollars on each of them, so they could spit in my eye if they wished.’ “
Jack’s tough stand against the Soviets abroad and Communism at home made sense to his constituents up in Boston. Growing up, I saw this myself: Catholics as a group had it in our gut that Roosevelt had sold out the country’s interests at Yalta. To us, the growing threat from Moscow increasingly resembled Hitler’s prewar aggression. Supporters back home could see that Jack Kennedy, down in Washington, knew just how they felt, agreed with them, and was saying exactly what they were feeling.
Kennedy also knew he, the privileged son, was being watched back home for how he was handling the job. If he gave the cold shoulder to a single constituent, if a letter went unanswered, the word would get around. He’d be seen as having gotten too big for his britches. “He was very particular about people in his district and answering the mail,” Billy Sutton recalled. “He didn’t want anything to stay on your desk. If some poor soul or constituent needed help and he gave the assignment to you, you were liable to be riding home in the car and he’d say, ‘Well, what about John White? What did you do for him?’ And if you said, ‘Well, I was going to do that tomorrow,’ he’d almost tell you, you know, to get out of the car and go back to the office. He wanted you to do your job, and if you didn’t, then you were in trouble.”
Mary Davis understood the stakes. Her young boss wasn’t down in Washington only to be a dutiful congressman. He wanted those constituents of his to help elect him senator. That meant at least doing no harm. “I would say that was always in the back of Jack’s mind, and in the minds of the people who had supported him first for representative in the House. They always felt that this was a start and that he would go onward and upward.”
There quickly came a time in that first year that Kennedy had to decide between going along and getting along: at issue was the man whose seat he had taken in Congress. Reelected mayor in 1945, James Michael Curley had been convicted of mail fraud; he now sat, plotting, in Danbury federal prison. Curley’s daughter was passing around a petition to the Massachusetts members of Congress asking for his release on health grounds. It was feared, the petition argued, that he would die if not released. A hundred thousand Massachusetts voters had signed a citizens’ petition.
Kennedy friend Joe Healey was Jack’s tutor at Harvard and continued to be a trusted advisor and occasional speechwriter. “I got a call from Washington. It was Congressman Kennedy, and he said he wanted to talk with me about a petition that had been brought to his office. The person who had brought the petition to his office was Mary Curley, the daughter of the former governor.”
Healey was cautious in his advice. If Curley’s illness was truly fatal, he said, the old pol should be given some last time with his family. If he wasn’t as sick as he advertised, he shouldn’t be treated any differently than anyone else convicted of his crimes. Kennedy agreed this was exactly the way to look at it. In fact, army physicians had examined him and found his