Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [83]
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Filing petition for senate reeletion, 1958
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Adlai Stevenson
CHAPTER NINE
DEBUT
Politics is essentially a learning profession.
—Arthur M. Schlesinger
When 1956 began, Jack Kennedy was far from a household name. By year’s end, he’d managed to step into the ring as the most exciting Democratic challenger for the American presidency. He’d gotten there by sheer audacity.
President Eisenhower, having enjoyed a successful first term, was continuing to reap the prestige earned by his wartime victory. Despite the fact he’d suffered a heart attack the previous year, he was still expected to seek and win reelection. Offering himself to the task of opposing him was Governor Adlai Stevenson. The real question was who would be the Illinois Democrat’s running mate.
That was the brass ring on which Jack Kennedy, now thirty-nine, began to focus. He’d gotten the heads-up from Theodore H. White, then reporting for Collier’s magazine, that he was on Adlai’s shortlist. Though possibly no more than a signal to Catholic voters in Massachusetts that Stevenson understood their importance, the result was to get Kennedy thinking.
Why not make a move in ’56?
But if he were to do so, Jack saw how critical it was for him to arrive at the national convention and give the right impression. As an attractive war-hero-turned-thoughtful-politico, he could easily come across as the perfect complement to Adlai: youthful, active, eastern, Catholic, well-rounded. The prospective negatives of his candidacy—his religion and his relative conservatism—could even be regarded as ticket balancers.
Such boldness is in itself a selling point. But before he could turn his attention to this exciting notion of competing on the national stage, Jack Kennedy first had to face up to serious trouble back home. The problem was a central-Massachusetts farmer whose nickname derived from his cash crop: William “Onions” Burke, chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party.
Onions was a John McCormack guy, and an especially tribal Irishman. He hated the academic elite, Ivy Leaguers, and liberals. He couldn’t stand Adlai Stevenson. His idea of a Democratic leader was McCormack, a devoutly Catholic congressman from South Boston, who’d come to Washington in 1928 and risen to House majority leader. So Onions was a problem. For Jack to woo Stevenson, he needed to convince him he could deliver New England. Initially, he and Onions agreed to split the Massachusetts delegates going to the national convention. Burke then pulled a double cross, and organized a quiet write-in campaign for McCormack in the April primary that ended up beating Stevenson, whose name was on the ballot. McCormack won big: 26,128 votes to 19,024. It made Kennedy look like a political eunuch, a pretty boy who couldn’t control his people.
If Jack Kennedy couldn’t deliver his state in the primary, how could he be counted on at the convention? And if he couldn’t deliver votes, why should Stevenson even consider him as a running mate? Onions had put Jack, who now wanted badly to be on the Stevenson ticket, in an embarrassing situation.
Onions now added insult to the injury. “Anybody who’s for Stevenson,” he declared to the press, “ought to be down at Princeton listening to Alger Hiss.” The accused Soviet agent had just been released from federal prison. Invited to speak at his alma mater, he’d been celebrated as a returning hero. Translation: being for Adlai was the same as being for Alger. Joe McCarthy couldn’t have phrased it better.
Burke’s slur was unmistakable, intentional, and uttered with impunity, by a guy who figured he could get away with it. He’d put Kennedy in a position where he had no choice but to destroy the man who’d said what he had.
Kennedy knew he couldn’t let the charge go unchallenged. Until now, he’d been content using the political