Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [43]
Hearing this, Healey pointed out it was going to be “a very politically unpopular thing to do.” Kennedy’s refusal to sign the Curley petition was of course infuriating to the local politicians back home. It turned out he was the only Massachusetts Democratic congressman to do so. “I guess I’m going to be a one-term congressman,” he told one back-home advisor.
Mark Dalton, who worked for Kennedy unpaid and picked up his own expenses, was disgusted with the Curley ploy. “My strong reaction was that he was a young man starting his political career, just on the threshold of it, and I thought that the older people who were putting the pressure on him to sign this petition had a terrible nerve.”
Jack had gone against his party and the state machine regarding something he knew in his bones was wrong. It was also an issue of pride; he didn’t want to be a hack. Add in the matter of style: refusing to sign showed class. But standing against the pardon was both a political and moral risk that Kennedy would sweat for weeks to come. Joe Healey never forgot the episode.
Curley, he recalled, “lived for some ten years after this event, but as a congressman, I heard Jack Kennedy say that, if anything had happened to Mr. Curley during his stay in prison, it would have been the end of his political career.” For his part, Jack would cite the Curley dilemma as a case study of how political fortunes turn on the unpredictable.
Years later, to put it in perspective, Tip O’Neill, once a Curley protégé, refused to defend him on moral grounds. In the midst of one of our long backroom conversations about the old days, he had put it bluntly and succinctly, how “Curly was crooked” even by the standard of those days. “Personally crooked?” I asked.
“Personally,” he said with the firmest possible pronunciation.
But Jack Kennedy’s independence on matters such as the Curley petition was unsettling to political observers. He had begun to build a reputation for standing alone, a two-edged sword. Edmund Muskie, who served as governor and later senator from Maine, recalled how Kennedy’s behavior scared the clubhouse types. “I don’t know whether the more foresighted of them saw in young Jack Kennedy a major political force or not, but they certainly recognized his political attractions and his political potential; and they were disturbed by his apparent determination to be independent of the ‘regular’ party organization.”
Mark Dalton remembered another moment when Kennedy stood out. “I’m going to debate Norman Thomas at the Harvard Law School,” said Jack one day, surprising Dalton, who had arrived at his friend’s Boston apartment to find the congressman hard at work. So now his young friend was going to take on the quadrennial candidate of the Socialist Party. “There was Kennedy sitting on the sofa. There were two or three books open there and six or seven books on the floor opened. Each one had been written by Norman Thomas. The next day I got reports from several people, and everyone was agreed that John Kennedy had won the debate with Thomas.”
Again, the old dichotomy. His colleagues saw the popular bachelor who lived the good life in Georgetown, the rich kid with such a great sense of humor. Few noticed the other Jack, the occasional Cold Warrior, the autodidact who crammed for off-campus debates, who quietly but steadily was preparing himself for something greater than labor law.
Like others, his secretary Mary Davis would come to learn that Jack Kennedy was not the fop he played so charmingly. For all the fun she saw him having, she could catch that spark of brilliance. “He didn’t make that many speeches, and we didn’t issue that many position papers when he was here in the House, but when he wanted to write a speech, he did it. I would say ninety-nine percent of that was done by JFK himself.
“I can remember the first time he ever called me in—I even forget what the speech was going to be on, but