The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [148]
Jack had grown up in Bronxville and prep schools and knew nothing about his prospective constituents and their ways. The district included middle- and upper-class people around Harvard and parts of Beacon Hill, but most of the residents were working class and poor. They were so solidly Democratic that the winner of the primary would inevitably win in the general election. There were some new arrivals and many second- and third-generation Americans who had not been able to move away from their immigrant ghettos.
Whether they were Italian, Irish, Polish, Portuguese, or Chinese, these new Bostonians dreamed of the day when they would live somewhere else. But for now they lived among the shipping yards, freight depots, oil tanks, and factories, and close by the state prison. Jack’s deepest political interest was not these inner-city residents and their mundane problems, but the world far beyond. Jack’s biggest job, as Time phrased it, “was to convince the 37 different nationalities in some of Boston’s grimiest slums that he was not just the wealthy son of Joe Kennedy … but rather an attractive individual in his own right.”
In the triple-deckers that lined the long gray streets, the kitchen was the center of the home, especially in these cold winter days, for the flats did not have central heating. A knock on the front door was a stranger’s knock. Someone apprehensively hurried through the frigid, shut-off rooms to greet a visitor who as likely as not brought bad news, not good.
These days the door often opened on a pallid, rail-thin, tousle-haired young man standing there with a nervous smile, a faltering greeting, and a manner and dress that instantly signaled that he was not one of them. One of the flats Jack visited was that of Dave Powers, a navy veteran whom Jack hoped to enlist in his cause. He stayed in Powers’s cold living room for a half hour chatting away, asking the Charlestown man to accompany him to a speech for Gold Star mothers at the American Legion the following week.
Powers had a sense that Jack was “aggressively shy.” Any man of even modest sensitivity would be shy knocking on the doors of people he did not know and asking them to support him for reasons he was not even fully sure of himself. Jack’s was not the ham-handed, eyes-averting shyness of insecurity, but the shyness of a man thrust into a world in which he would be dependent upon the kindness of strangers, a world he did not know, and one in which he did not feel comfortable.
Jack half mumbled his prepared speech to the honored mothers in a virtual monotone, looking up only occasionally as if to be sure the audience was still there. “I think I know how all you mothers feel, because my mother is a Gold Star mother, too,” he droned. The audience knew that the speech had ended only because the young candidate stopped speaking. By any measure, the speech had been a disappointment, but the mothers rushed forward to greet Jack as if he had been the most stirring of speakers. To them, Jack was no longer a privileged outsider. He was a young man who needed them, and they responded not simply with their votes but by buttonholing their friends and relatives and telling them about this fine young Kennedy.
Powers sensed what was happening. Despite his pledge to work for a fellow Charlestown man, John F. Cotter, Powers signed on with