Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [57]
For me, Ken O’Donnell personified the old brand of politics, which the Kennedys were customizing on a family basis. From the moment he signed on, he had one vocation: helping and protecting John F. Kennedy. And right now, in the summer of 1952, his value lay in his ability to grasp and use the reality of post–World War II Massachusetts, the world he knew. As a man who’d lived between Worcester and Cambridge, between Holy Cross and Harvard, he had a natural understanding of those voters Jack Kennedy needed to pry away from Lodge. They were folks whose parents were loyal Democrats, while they, this new generation, reserved the right to cast their ballot candidate by candidate.
What Jack Kennedy was trying to do, helped by O’Donnell and others, wasn’t going to be easy. They were trying to outflank Lodge, a moderate Republican, from the right and the left. In other words, Kennedy had to come off as both a tough Cold Warrior and a work-and-wages Democrat—which is precisely what he’d spent six years being. This allowed him to strike at his rival from the right for not being aggressive enough on foreign policy and from the left for not being sufficiently on the side of the average family struggling to make ends meet; that is, for not being a Democrat. It was a pincer move that was to work well again in a later Kennedy campaign. The strategy is to bash an opponent on both sides until you force him to go both ways to avoid the very charges you’re making against him. The voter sees the targeted rival being pulled apart by his own hands.
Kennedy set his people digging for weak spots in Lodge’s record. “Lodge was always on the popular side of every issue, which didn’t necessarily make him an awfully good statesman, but might make him a satisfactory politician,” Jack told Rip Horton. To prepare for the planned bombardment of Lodge, Ted Reardon, who’d been Jack’s top aide on the Hill, began assembling an inventory of his voting on the issues. This carefully documented loose-leaf binder, each page covered in sheer plastic, was soon dubbed “Lodge’s Dodges”—or, more irreverently, the “Bible”—and it provided the ammunition for the coming all-out assault.
Joe Healey, Kennedy’s speechwriter, found himself impressed by Reardon’s attention to Lodge’s every word, tracking down every discrepancy. “The major credit belongs to Ted Reardon for certainly one of the most thorough jobs in this area I have ever seen.”
From this point on, the campaign’s operating structure quickly fell into line. Bobby, as the campaign manager, decided where the money went. This is always the supreme power that comes with that title. “Any decision you wanted, Bobby made,” O’Donnell recalled. “If you were talking about spending two hundred bucks to do such and such, Bobby would say, yes, go ahead, and that was it.”
The Kennedy Party, as it continued to grow, was the perfect model of a volunteer operation. Those who came to work for Jack found themselves making a personal investment in the candidate’s future, resulting in a campaign of relationship rather than transaction. In this sense, it wasn’t about political payoffs, at least not in the business-as-usual way. Anyone who walked into a Kennedy headquarters was, right off the bat, given a task to do. His people knew the best method of earning and toughening loyalty was by quickly getting a newly interested citizen onto the team. Before you knew it, you were a “Kennedy person.”
What happened, as in 1946, was that word would start to spread that a member of this family or that friend or neighbor was “working for Jack Kennedy.” It made the campaign a kind of cement, ever expanding its hold. You pretty much wanted to take part.