Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [50]
He also articulated that Sunday morning a strong critique of the way America represented itself overseas. On that same Meet the Press, Spivak quoted back to Kennedy a remark he’d made about our diplomats being “unconscious of the fact that their role was not tennis and cocktails but the interpretation to the foreign country of the meaning of American life.” Is this something, he wanted to know, Kennedy had seen for himself?
“I think something ought to be done about it. I think there are a lot of young men interested in going into the Foreign Service. I don’t know where they get a lot of the ones I saw. I think we’re not getting the representative, well-rounded type of young man to go to the Foreign Service that we should as a rule. . . . I was up at a college in Massachusetts two days ago, speaking, and I asked, out of five hundred students how many would be interested in going into the Foreign Service, and a surprisingly large number raised their hand. What I think is that they’re not getting young men who are well-rounded, who are balanced, and who are what we like to think of as representative Americans.”
This call to service for young Americans—especially as they might affect the developing world—marked the beginning of an idea that, a decade later, inspired the country. It was one of many emblematic ideas evolving in his mind even now.
That trip to the Far East had been a confidence builder. Upon his return, Jack had shared what he learned with the voters. It was a repeat of his performance in 1946 as he’d entered the political arena. Back then he’d talked mainly of his experiences in the Pacific Theater, along with the need to prevent another war like the one just ended.
Since then he’d grasped, both instinctively and intellectually, the central importance of nationalism in the new world order and how it would affect Great Power relationships, most crucially those between the United States and the emerging Communist monoliths of Russia and China. What he witnessed, and also deeply understood, was the way that people struggled to free themselves from foreign control. It was a fight that Kennedy, the Irishman and Mucker, could feel in his genes.
He was discovering his ability to absorb complexity. In understanding the dangers facing his country, he saw, too, the role he might play. He had a mission now. To survive the Cold War, his country must grasp its nature. If he could get to the Senate, he might change history.
Despite his resolve to move forward, come what may, Jack began 1952 still unsure which office he would now seek or who’d help him win it. He’d spent four years traveling the state, decorating the map with those pushpins, hitting small towns that statewide Democratic candidates rarely visited. But still he needed an organization that could deliver the vote. He needed people.
The very first recruit to the cause was Lawrence F. O’Brien, with whom Jack had earlier been friendly down in Washington and now got in touch with to see if he’d come on board. When Jack met him, O’Brien was on the staff of another Massachusetts congressman, Foster Furcolo. Before taking that job, he’d worked in his family’s cafe and bar in Springfield. Well connected in Democratic politics in Springfield, he’d served as manager for three of Furcolo’s campaigns.
One day on Capitol Hill, the two of them, Jack and Larry, had dinner, during the course of which O’Brien declared he’d had enough of Washington. Perhaps he’d also had enough of Furcolo. He was heading home.
At a later meeting in Boston, Kennedy asked him to help out with his own effort in the Springfield area, and O’Brien agreed. But it took a strong-arm play by his former boss to complete O’Brien’s transition