The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [149]
Jack may have impressed the Gold Star mothers, but he was far from a stellar candidate. His own campaign manager, Mark Dalton, would probably have made a better candidate. The thirty-one-year-old Harvard Law School graduate was a true son of Boston. One of his brothers was a priest; the other was the political editor of the Boston Traveler. Dalton had fought a war that few veterans had fought. He had been at D-Day in the sixth wave and landed on Okinawa in the last major land battle of the war.
Dalton had no money to run. Beyond that, he had a kind of moral rectitude that struck the hard-edged politicians around Jack as naivete. Dalton was a man who took the rhetoric of the campaign as literal truth. He was a passionate speaker when he believed in something, and the first time he introduced Jack, he delivered such a forceful speech that poor Jack’s speech sounded, by contrast, as thin and weak as his appearance.
After that address, Jack and Dalton drove over to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where Joe sat in the living room of his suite with Joe Timilty, the Boston police commissioner. The two older men had listened to the radio address, and by the time the candidate and his campaign manager arrived, they had had ample time to evaluate Jack’s pallid performance. They told Jack and Dalton that never again would they appear together on the same platform; the contrast was too great.
Joe had let his sons take their chances standing in the front lines with other young Americans. That was the last time he would play what he considered a fool’s game, abiding by the simple rules that guided others. Mark had the title “campaign manager,” but he was simply a handsome face on the platform and a name on a letterhead.
Joe ran the campaign, but he did it in such a surreptitious way that no one knew just which strings he had pulled and how hard he had pulled them. Even the fact that the congressional seat had suddenly opened up probably was the result of Joe’s manipulation. The incumbent congressman, James Michael Curley, was facing an indictment for mail fraud; Joe Kane, who was intimately involved with the campaign, later asserted that Joe had paid Curley twelve thousand dollars to retire and had promised more money when Curley decided to run for mayor of Boston.
Joe called Dalton every few days, spending hours seemingly going over every detail of the campaign. As the weeks went by, however, Dalton realized there was another secretive campaign about which he knew nothing. Many of the old politicians who had first opposed Jack now had smiles on their faces, a lilt to their walk, and the name “Kennedy” on their lips.
Joe spent an estimated three hundred thousand dollars on the campaign. That was enough to blanket the area with billboards, distribute one hundred thousand reprints of John Hersey’s PT-109 article, and place scores of radio and newspaper ads and placards on the trolleys. Joe believed that every man had his price, and he would pay that amount, but not a dollar more. He believed, moreover, that if you set your money in plain view people would steal it, your friends as easily as your enemies. Most campaigns had all sorts of unaccountable cash expenses. Joe had Eddie Moore set up an elaborate accounting system, detailing even the smallest expenditures on triplicate forms.
Those who hoped to work with the Kennedys learned that parsimoniousness was next to godliness. Dave Powers didn’t rent chairs for the campaign office; he borrowed them from a funeral parlor. When he took Jack around to the bars, he offered a round of drinks to the assembled. The patrons, who had been drinking beer all night, immediately developed a taste for liquor from the top shelf, ordering a gentleman’s drink, scotch or bourbon whiskey. When Powers offered them drinks again, he pointedly offered them a round of beers. That was the Kennedy way.
Joe was merciless in wresting out any possibility of failure. Joseph Russo was a