Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [49]
As Jack was flown from Tokyo to a U.S. military hospital in Okinawa, Bobby never left his side, keeping watch over him as his temperature rose to 106 degrees and he became first delirious, then comatose. It looked like he was dying, and for the second time he was given the last rites.
The upshot of this latest brush with death was a memory an older brother would be unlikely to forget. Where Jack had once seen only the puritan, he now recognized the protector.
Back home, Jack Kennedy once again focused on his quest to leave the U.S. House of Representatives behind. In his mind he was already out of there, and even began disparaging the 435 members as “worms.” He’d had it with the House. He’d already begun spending weekends campaigning statewide, and the map hanging on the wall of his Bowdoin Street apartment was starting to be thickly covered in pins. Those were Dave Powers’s markers indicating where a speech had been made or where his boss had shared a coffee with a significant political leader.
The time had come to face the big challenge. For him, running for governor in ’52 would only be a connecting flight to the next destination. Chuck Spalding could see his friend’s determination. Eventually, “if he was going to get anywhere, he’d always have to be able to beat somebody like Lodge . . . So, I think, he made the decision, ‘I’ve been long enough in the House. It’s time for me to move ahead. If I’m going to do it, I’ve got to take this much of a chance.’ “ Pitting himself against Henry Cabot Lodge—now and not later—had overwhelming appeal. Above all, it showed audacity, a quality that ranked high with Jack.
On December 2, 1951, Kennedy made the admission, rare for a politician, of personal ambition. He did it during an appearance—his first—on NBC’s Meet the Press. The moderator had wasted no time zeroing in on the hot political rumor buzzing through the Bay State.
Lawrence Spivak:
When I was in Boston last week, I heard a good deal of talk about you. There were many who thought that you would be the Democratic nominee for the senatorship against Henry Cabot Lodge. Are you going to run?
Jack Kennedy:
Well, uh, I’d like to go to the Senate. I’m definitely interested in it. I think most of us in the House who came in after the war—some of them have already gone to the Senate, like George Smathers and Nixon and others, and I’m definitely interested in going to the Senate, and I’m seriously considering running.
But, to anyone paying attention, it was obvious it wasn’t just the intramural rivalry of his ’46 House classmates driving him. His thinking about matters beyond the scope of the typical House member, his grander notions, were in every way a part of who he was, of who he had become.
The mind of Jack Kennedy, in fact, was already busy with the big picture. He’d been traveling the world since his teens. He’d witnessed Britain and Europe up close in the late ’30s, he’d fought in the war and come back to see the depressing events in postwar Europe and Asia. He’d honed a personal sense of what was wrong with U.S. influence abroad.
On his trip to the Far East, for instance, he’d had an eyewitness look at the predicament of France trying to hold on to its empire after World War II, against the local resistance to colonial power. What he saw was the overriding strength of the Vietnamese people’s desire for independence.
“You can never defeat the Communist movement in Indochina until you get the support of the natives,” he explained in a speech on his return, “and you won’t get the support of the natives as long as they feel that the French