Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [60]
“What happened?” asked his listener.
“Well,” Jack explained, “practically nothing happened. As I saw it, he was looking at me and he knew that I didn’t really think he was the best candidate. He knew that I knew that he knew.”
The one man who might possibly have saved Lodge’s bid for reelection refused to help. When an S.O.S. came from Lodge’s campaign asking Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy to come to Boston and make a speech on behalf of the incumbent senator, McCarthy demurred. He told the conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., in whose Connecticut home he was staying at the time, that Lodge had always opposed him. Young Jack Kennedy, on the other hand, he counted as a covert supporter. McCarthy even told Buckley he’d made the Lodge people a counteroffer he knew would surely be refused. “I told them I’d go up to Boston to speak if Cabot publicly asked me to. And he’ll never do that; he’d lose the Harvard vote!”
Richard Nixon, meanwhile, had been put on the ballot as the Republican nominee for vice president, Ike’s running mate. It was a skyrocketing leap for a congressman who’d gone to Washington the same year as Jack. The latter was gracious in a handwritten note. “Dear Dick: I was tremendously pleased that the convention selected you for V.P. I was always convinced that you would move ahead to the top—but I never thought it would come this quickly. You were the ideal selection and will bring to the ticket a great deal of strength. Please give my best to your wife and all kinds of good luck to you.”
The Kennedy campaign, meanwhile, presented its own man as every inch an anti-Communist crusader as any Republican. When Adlai Stevenson made a campaign stop in Springfield, Massachusetts, Sargent Shriver—who was an employee of Joe’s in Chicago and would marry Eunice Kennedy the following year—sent him a very pointed note. “Up there, this anti-Communist business is a good thing to emphasize.”
Sarge Shriver also let it be known, in a briefing paper, exactly what the Kennedy people wanted the Democratic presidential candidate to say about the local boy when speaking on his behalf. Stevenson should say it was Kennedy, not his Republican colleague from California, Richard M. Nixon, who’d been the first to expose Communists in organized labor. He “was the man . . . that got Christoffel . . . not Nixon.”
The pitch was legitimate. Earlier in the year, Jack had attended an anniversary dinner of the Spee, his Harvard club. There, one of the speakers told the gathering how proud he was that their college had never produced “a Joseph McCarthy or an Alger Hiss.” Kennedy jumped from his chair. “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” he exclaimed, and left the dinner early.
The Kennedy family’s close association with Joe McCarthy wasn’t an asset everywhere in the Commonwealth. In fact, it hurt him badly with one particular community. Jewish voters had reason enough to question the younger Kennedy’s attitudes, given his father’s record of unveiled anti-Semitic comments and sentiment. Now the senior Kennedy once more expressed himself outrageously and stirred up the problem anew. When a campaign aide passed around a proposed statement attacking McCarthyism, Joe Kennedy went wild. “You and your . . . sheeny friends . . . are trying to ruin my son’s career.” Although Jack tried to assure the campaign worker, who was not himself Jewish, about his father, the episode became notorious.
Senator Lodge saw an opening. His campaign began distributing literature spotlighting a report by Herbert von Dirksen, who’d been the last German ambassador to Great Britain before World War II. In it the author recounted Joseph Kennedy’s support for Hitler’s prewar actions against the Jews. Lodge then recruited Congressman Jacob Javits of New York, a Jewish Republican, to come and speak to a large Jewish gathering in Mattapan. In his talk, Javits stressed repeatedly that Jack was “the son of his father.” As Tip O’Neill remembered the event, “He didn