Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [59]
O’Donnell figured that Jack Kennedy could pull votes in small suburban communities where no other Democrat might. “We appreciated the fact that there were an awful lot of Democrats throughout the state, in those small towns, who’d moved out of Boston and out of the big cities into these small communities, had bought their own homes. They were Democrats, but ashamed of some of the antics that had been associated with the party.” He saw these as potential Kennedy people.
Here again, Kennedy had gotten traction from his early start in places off the standard grid for Democrats. “We’d be in those homes—in the homes with seven or eight people, who’d remember having coffee with Jack Kennedy in 1947 or ’48,” said O’Donnell.
The Second World War had changed a great deal in American life. In the Northeast, as elsewhere, the Irish and other ethnic groups were seeing beyond the old boundaries, and didn’t want to be the pawns of the big-city political bosses. They wanted the fresh air of the suburbs, the freedom of making up their own minds at election time. Many had gone to college under the GI Bill. They no longer felt confined by the politics of the old neighborhood. “Boston” meant a certain kind of old politics, and a sort they were only too happy to leave behind. This sense of the shifting times was definitely an idea the Kennedy campaign made skillful use of.
As election day approached, Tip O’Neill, facing no real opposition in the general election, got a call asking him to lend a hand. He was to be Jack’s stand-in at an election-eve radio broadcast. Tip’s script from Kennedy headquarters arrived just minutes before air-time. It “kicked the living hell out of Henry Cabot Lodge,” O’Neill would recall, to his chagrin. Senator Lodge, who spoke next, was outraged by what he regarded as an ambush, and told O’Neill’s wife, Millie, “The Kennedys would never give a speech like that for him. And I would never say the things about Jack Kennedy that he was saying about me.”
Lodge had a far bigger problem. Throughout the course of the campaign he’d been greatly distracted by his efforts, begun the year before, to promote Eisenhower. This had earned him the bitter hostility of Republican voters steadfastly loyal to Ike’s opponent for the nomination, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, “Mr. Republican.” Here Joe Kennedy saw his opportunity. He convinced the pro-Taft publisher of the New Bedford Standard-Times to reprint in full the glowing Reader’s Digest article on his son’s PT 109 exploits, then to break ranks and endorse the Democratic candidate, young Jack Kennedy, outright. When Jack went on the attack, criticizing Lodge’s absenteeism from the Senate, the newspaper dutifully repeated those charges in its editorials. Next, when Lodge countered by citing Kennedy’s own poor voting record, the Standard-Times refused to publish the information.
To gain the endorsement of the equally conservative Boston Post, Joseph P. Kennedy got out his checkbook to write its pliable publisher a loan for $500,000. About this episode, Jack would later joke that for him to win his Senate seat his father had to “buy a fuckin’ newspaper.”
To pound home Lodge’s weakness among Taft Republicans, Jack accused him of being a “100 percent” supporter of Truman’s appeasing administration policy in China and the Far East.
But if Lodge was overly committed to Eisenhower’s candidacy, Jack Kennedy was undercommitted to Adlai Stevenson’s. He simply could not disguise his lack of faith in the Democratic presidential nominee, and, after having breakfast with him at the 1952 Democratic National Convention, Kennedy complained about his encounter to a friend, “Well, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know why I allowed myself to be railroaded into