Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [61]
But Javits, one of the smartest national legislators of his era, also had an indictment of Jack personally. Publicly critical of President Truman’s spending policies, Kennedy had voted for a House amendment to cut back foreign aid. While the measure dealt with the overall Middle East spending package, the reduction affected Israel, too. Despite Kennedy’s out-front backing for the creation of the Jewish state and his recent visit to the country, Javits’s attack stung. As O’Neill told the story, it took Majority Leader John McCormack himself to damp down the fire by spinning it that Kennedy had voted a “token” reduction of U.S. aid to Israel in order to save it from a larger cut. It was a simple case of a respected politician—McCormack was known as “the Rabbi” for his strong support of Jewish concerns—looking out for a fellow Democrat.
The father’s reputation, nastily earned as it was, would always be a problem for Jack. As Ken O’Donnell himself noted, “You can’t stop a whispering campaign if it’s true.” If Jack could never adequately defend his father’s attitudes, he certainly didn’t share them. He knew that Jewish fears were legitimate. “They have problems you don’t know anything about,” he’d remind O’Donnell.
His health, too, continued to be an issue he could never ignore. In October he made the mistake of sliding down a fireman’s pole in Everett, Massachusetts, an impulsive act that worsened the state of his already weakened back. “He was in intense pain towards the end of the campaign,” his aide John Galvin recalled. “I’m convinced that there were times when he was walking around almost unconscious.”
Despite such all too real medical handicaps, which couldn’t be disguised, the boyish Jack continued to win fans. That summer of 1952, three hundred Capitol Hill news correspondents had voted Congressman Kennedy of Massachusetts the “handsomest” member of the House. In order to capitalize on this perception, Jack proceeded to sign up for a special course offered by the CBS network on how to use the new medium of television to best advantage; it was a savvy move, since, by then, about half the households in the country owned a set. This habit of self-improvement was a pattern he continued, going on to take other courses in subjects ranging from speed-reading to public speaking.
On November 3—the eve of Election Day—General Eisenhower, the Republican candidate for president, ended his national campaign in Boston. Ahead in the polls, he was completing his march to the American presidency bearing tribute to the man who’d led him to the fight, the noble Henry Cabot Lodge.
“ ‘It looks like Eisenhower’s going to win easily,’ “ Torby Macdonald recalled telling Jack as the ballots were being counted the next night, “ ‘but I don’t think that necessarily means it’s going to affect you in Massachusetts.’ He said, ‘Why not?’ I said, ‘Well, I think you represent the best of the new generation, really, the newly arrived people. And Lodge represents the best of the old-line Yankees. I think there are more of the newly arrived people than there are of the old-line Yankees.’ “
Macdonald never forgot what came next. “ Then, out of the clear blue sky, he asked me a question. ‘I wonder what sort of job Ike will give Cabot?’ I just thought to myself that if I were in Jack’s position, listening to these returns . . . Where do you get that kind of serenity?
“By twelve o’clock that night, there was a definite conclusion that Eisenhower had carried the state by 200,000 votes. John Barry, a well-known writer for the Globe, went on TV and said authoritatively: ‘On the basis of the returns now received by the Boston Globe, it is definite that Governor Dever has been defeated for Governor of Massachusetts, that Congressman Kennedy has been defeated, and Senator Lodge has been reelected to the United States Senate.’ “
“Well, all hell broke loose,” O’Donnell recalled the moment. “The congressman called Bobby, furious—and Bobby cut him off and said, ‘Look, on the basis of our numbers and our chart and the basis of