Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [79]
O’Donnell, who recalled the scene in all its drama years later, had no trouble recognizing the very real damage. Every politician in the state now knew what Jack Kennedy thought of Furcolo and how he’d undercut him in their one and only joint television appearance. “We’d been building up a solid residue of party regulars, and now they pointed to this and said, ‘We were right about him in ’52. He and his people are a bunch of Harvard bastards who take care of themselves. They don’t care about the party. Kennedy does not want Furcolo in there because he’ll compete with him. Kennedy doesn’t want two Democratic senators.’ “
A tribal war now loomed. Italians in Massachusetts had been voting for Irish candidates for generations. Now one of their own, Furcolo, was seen getting the bum’s rush by a prince of the Irish side. Needing both groups in order to win statewide, certainly to win big, the Kennedys recognized the cost of the screwup as well as anyone. Here, though, Jack had made himself vulnerable by allowing his feelings to get in the way of his political calculation.
On October 10, Jack checked into the Hospital for Special Surgery. The operation was postponed three times, finally taking place eleven days later, on the twenty-first. Only then, before he was taken into the operating room, did he finally address the Furcolo problem. O’Donnell recalls the effort it took. “I kept pushing and, through some process of negotiation and with Bobby’s help, we finally extracted a statement from him. It was unsatisfactory, but covered the problem. What we did was disavow Morrissey.”
At the same time, O’Donnell knew it wouldn’t fly. He would call the snubbing of Furcolo, who lost that November, “the only wrong political move Jack Kennedy ever made.”
The back operation did not go well. After more than three hours in the surgeons’ hands, Kennedy was left with a metal plate inserted in his spine. At that point he developed a urinary tract infection that failed to respond to antibiotics, sending him into a coma. The news spread around the political world that the handsome Massachusetts senator’s life was in jeopardy.
“The odds made by the political wise guys were that he wouldn’t live,” Ken O’Donnell recalled, “and that if he did live he’d be a cripple. It became ‘he might not make it.’ “
Evelyn Lincoln, the secretary in his Senate office, got the terrible news that “the doctors didn’t expect him to live until morning.” The Kennedy death watch even was reported on television. For the third time in his life, Jack was given the last rites of his church. Jacqueline Kennedy, never one to practice her religion openly, went down on her knees to pray. Richard Nixon, being driven home that night, was heard to moan: “That poor young man is going to die. Oh, God, don’t let him die.” His Secret Service agent never forgot it.
Rallying in the night, against the odds, Jack pulled through. “The doctors don’t understand where he gets his strength,” the hospital told Lincoln when she called to ask about the patient the following morning. But the ordeal left a darkness in Kennedy.
“The tenor of his voice was tinged with pain,” Ken O’Donnell said. “You could detect it in his voice even over the telephone. It was the first time in my experience with him—and I’d say, in his life—when he was, in fact, disinterested completely in politics. John Kennedy was at the lowest point of anytime I’d known him in his career, physically, mentally, and politically. He was at the bottom. It seemed over.”
Back in Washington, the two Teds, Reardon and Sorensen, had been left in charge. The trouble was, Jack