Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [76]
How was he going to handle it? Personal connections aside, there were other factors affecting his ultimate decision when it came to the McCarthy censure vote. An important one, of course, was how it played back home. The same people of Massachusetts who’d supported Jack on the basis of the old loyalties were largely—and vehemently—in McCarthy’s corner. These men and women saw the battle as one pitting the Ivy League establishment against the working-class Irishman. For such Americans, here was a contest between those who seemed far too dainty, if not neutral, on exposing Communists in government and regular people who were willing to play rough.
It was bad enough Jack had gone to Harvard, but here he would be taking sides against one of his own—a fellow who happened to be the best-known Irishman in the country. It would be an act of betrayal, nothing less. Whatever Joe McCarthy’s faults, most Irish-Americans viewed his motives as right, while those of his enemies were, at best, suspect.
In Jack Kennedy’s own office, the enormous tribal significance of the McCarthy issue was brought home by Ken O’Donnell, whose brother Warren was then a student at Holy Cross. After Warren had delivered a strong classroom attack on McCarthy and his methods, his older brother recalled, “He was told to sit down, and the rejoinder from the priest, quite coldly, was: ‘I guess I shouldn’t expect anything less from someone whose brother went to Harvard and is friends with Jack Kennedy.’ “
O’Donnell, who was running the Kennedy office in Boston, keeping watch on the constituents and their concerns, insisted that Jack’s voting against McCarthy would be “political suicide.” He never changed his mind. “The feeling was that strong. If he’d voted for censure, there’s no question it would have ended the career of Jack Kennedy in Massachusetts.”
He believed that the only course was for Jack “to avoid the vote. McCarthy was deteriorating to nothing more than the subject of barroom brawls. In time, he would fade. These haters always do, and, if you argued against him, you were a Communist. My view was that we needed to stand back and allow him to self-destruct.”
The passions of that historic moment created strange alliances. O’Donnell could never forget what he’d seen one night at a favorite political hangout. “I was in the Bellevue bar, having a drink, and we were watching the hearings. Bobby Kennedy had this altercation with Roy Cohn right on television. Remember, it was a group there, watching, of Boston Irish politicians, some truck drivers, and hardworking guys, most tinged with anti-Semitism. So Cohn wasn’t the type of fellow you’d think they’d like. Yet every single person in that bar cheered and yelled and hoped he’d belt Bobby one.”
Jack got this. Despite his seeming golden-boy status, he felt the lure of the underdog throughout his life; once a Mucker, always a Mucker. For this reason, he got Richard Nixon, his early congressional buddy, in ways that others in his circle never did. A part of him, the stubborn part—the part still dominant—cheered just about anyone liberals loved to hate.
Two years earlier he’d walked out of that Spee event after another attendee had dared compare McCarthy with Alger Hiss. Jack, after all, had run for Congress as a “fighting conservative.” His identity as a Cold Warrior was well known. Besides the all-politics-is-local aspect, there was the issue of Communism itself and what it actually meant in the context of American life and American security. There were those who took its threat seriously and those who pooh-poohed it, with Jack squarely in the vigilant camp, a position he’d arrived at long before.
He’d criticized FDR’s compromises at Yalta, and blamed Truman for the losses in Asia. “I’m very happy to tell them I’m not a liberal,” he’d declared in a Saturday Evening Post interview the year before.
Even years later, when he’d begun to identify himself as a “liberal,” he would confess to having little sympathy for the people McCarthy had persecuted. “I had not known the sort of people