Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [84]
But, for Jack, Onions’s attack made his choice clear. Now he had to get down and dirty. He’d used the Massachusetts Democratic Party to win elections to office, but he’d never actually joined it, much less tried to lead it. He would now either prove himself a leader or be forever at the mercy of the locals. And that would be a problem, because, unlike him, they weren’t big thinkers. Nor did they regard themselves, of course, as national statesmen. Neither were they as liberal as the national party. The reputation that Massachusetts would gain for liberalism, never fully on the mark, was not the case even then. In 1956, it was Joe McCarthy country.
To get rid of Chairman Burke and the threat he presented, Kennedy needed to switch to a new brand of politics. He had to shift back from the wholesale politics of speeches and position-taking to the retail politics of the clubhouse. And he had to be tough. He needed to beat Burke in the back room, where the television cameras weren’t watching.
To this end, he ordered his staff to run a personal check on every member of the state Democratic committee. “Find out everything about them. Who do we know who knows them? What time do they get home from work at night? I’m going to ring their doorbells and talk to each one of them personally.” Armed with this intelligence, Kennedy began to travel the state, visiting a sizable percentage of the eighty committeemen.
The election for state chairman that year was held at the Bradford Hotel in downtown Boston. Larry O’Brien recalled the Kennedy hardball: “We argued that Onions shouldn’t be allowed to attend the meeting since he wasn’t a member of the committee. To back up our ruling, we had two tough Boston cops guarding the door, one of whom had reputedly killed a man in a barroom fight. Burke arrived with some tough guys of his own. Just as the meeting was about to begin, he and his men charged out of the elevator and broke past our guards. One of the leaders was ‘Knocko’ McCormack, the majority leader’s two-fisted three-hundred-pound younger brother. As shouting and shoving spread across the meeting room, I called the Boston police commissioner. He arrived minutes later.
“ ‘I’m O’Brien,’ I told him. ‘You’ve got to get those troublemakers out of here.’
“ ‘One more word out of you, O’Brien,’ the commissioner replied, ‘and I’ll lock you up.’ I hadn’t known the commissioner was a McCormack man. The whole thing was a scene out of The Last Hurrah. The two candidates for state chairman almost settled matters by a fistfight. There was shouting and confusion, and as the roll call began, one member who’d gotten drunk attempted to vote twice.”
The guy Kennedy had chosen as his candidate, Pat Lynch, wound up winning two to one. “He and his millions don’t know what honor and decency is,” Burke complained. Kennedy had risen to the occasion, done exactly what was necessary, changing his tactics to suit the situation, ambushing his complacent rival on his home turf. On the afternoon of victory, he made sure the press understood that the day marked a “new era” in Massachusetts politics.
The fact is, Jack Kennedy had no intention of staying involved in townie politics. He knew it was like quicksand: you got into the fray, picked sides, made enemies, and could never free yourself from it. He now needed to reengage himself in national politics.
As a Roman Catholic, Jack Kennedy would have been, until this moment, an unlikely candidate for national office. World War II had changed things, however, and it was obvious that now there were ways to position oneself favorably as an Irish Catholic, to take advantage of the changes. He needed to make the case that the number of Catholics