Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [63]
“We ended up winning by seventy thousand votes in a very tight contest; I mean, we knew we were winning, but we also recognized it was very tight. The governor had lost by fourteen thousand votes at this time.”
Lyndon Johnson telephoned immediately after the results were in, causing Jack to remark, “That guy must never sleep.” O’Brien, though, saw the cunning: “Johnson wasn’t wasting any time in courting Kennedy’s support.” The Senate’s democratic leader had just been defeated and Johnson was gunning for the job.
The next night there was a celebration, and all the Democratic hacks and coat holders and meal tickets shamelessly showed up, driving O’Donnell and O’Brien crazy. Unfazed by the strange faces in the room, the victor performed in classic fashion. “The senator-elect got up on a table and sang a song in that famous Kennedy off-tune manner. It was pretty awful. Then it was he and Bobby singing together, in a duet. It was just awful, too.”
The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket carried the country by 7 million votes. In Massachusetts, Adlai Stevenson suffered a crushing defeat. Jack Kennedy, meanwhile, had carried the state against Ike’s number one man.
He’d taken on the best and beaten the best. He walked out of the race with a solid organization. He had shown his ability to cut people loose—Mark Dalton, after all, had been a close, deeply devoted champion—who failed to meet his needs. All the while, he let his younger brother take the heat for such acts and thus gain the reputation for being the ruthless one. Bobby, Kenny O’Donnell, and Larry O’Brien were now a rare combination of ice-cold efficiency and die-hard loyalty. The skipper had a new crew, a great one. They’d been blooded by a tough battle fought against the odds and won.
Jack and Bobby—and Kenny, too—would be together for the duration, and they would stand together in the worst crisis of the Cold War, when the stakes were much higher than a Senate seat.
19
CHAPTER SEVEN
MAGIC
She could be amusing in a direct, caustic way; and she understood the art of getting on with men completely . . . never asked an awkward question.
—David Cecil, writing about
Lady Melbourne in Young Melbourne
In Washington, Tip O’Neill was moving into his new office in the House of Representatives. By coincidence, his predecessor was packing up right across the hall. As he stepped into Jack Kennedy’s outer office, Tip could hear him engaged in a heated backroom argument with his secretary, Mary Davis.
“Mary, now don’t be silly. You’re coming to the Senate with me.”
“No, Senator, I’m not. I’m going to be working for Congressman Lester Holtzman of New York.”
“Now, Mary, you know you’re coming with me.”
“I am not, Senator, and that’s all there is to it.”
O’Neill could hear the dispute going back and forth. Finally, he heard Mary say, “And the reason I’m not going with you is that Congressman Holtzman has offered me six thousand dollars.”
“Tip, can you believe this?” Jack said when he walked out and saw O’Neill.
“I’m paying her four thousand dollars, and I’ve just offered her forty-eight hundred. That’s a twenty percent raise. But this guy wants to give her six grand the first day he’s here. There’s not a broad in the world worth six thousand a year.”
Mary Davis had similar memories of the standoff. When Kennedy won the Senate race, she accepted the mission of building a clerical staff. To this end, she recruited a team of secretaries to assist her with managing the mail and other constituent work.
“They were all experienced, knew exactly how to do things, what to do, where to go, and they really could have been an invaluable asset to the functioning of his Senate office. But he called me one day from Palm Beach and said that he’d been discussing the situation with his father, who wanted to know: ‘Did you find out