The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [190]
Jack spoke as a new kind of aggressive internationalist, offering not weapons and trade but ideas and aid. He favored a foreign policy not so allied with the imperial empires of Britain, France, and Holland. He envisioned Foreign Service officers whose lives ranged far beyond the diplomatic compounds and who spoke with a new voice of America in the languages of the peoples themselves, offering foreign aid larger in scope and directed toward the masses.
To another group in Massachusetts in December 1951, Jack talked of a new world in which “young college graduates would find a full life in bringing technical advice and assistance to the underprivileged and backward Middle East.” “In that calling,” he went on, “these men would follow the constructive work done by the religious missionaries in these countries over the past 100 years.” This was one of the earliest suggestions by a politician of the idea that became the Peace Corps. In his own mind, Jack was taking the rituals of true manhood that he had learned from his father and turning them away from the battlefield as the ultimate testing ground to a different field of challenge.
Jack’s internationalism may have borne the seed for a Peace Corps that would send thousands of young Americans to many of these same countries that he had visited and for foreign aid programs that were supposed to help the poor, not maintain the rich. His aggressive internationalism, however, carried another seed as well, one no larger than the first but of a far darker hue.
When Jack decided that it was time to announce his bid for higher office in Massachusetts, he called Mark Dalton and asked his 1946 campaign manager to return to run the new campaign. Since Jack had entered Congress, Dalton had been, in Dave Powers’s words, “the closest political adviser … a brilliant man.” Time and again in those years, Dalton had traveled down to Washington on the train, helping out with speeches and ideas, never asking a cent in expenses or even thinking of using his entree to advance himself economically or socially. He didn’t hang out with Jack, and he didn’t care to. If Dalton had an obvious fault, it was that he had something of the vanity of the idealist, believing at times that his words had more moment than they did. Surely Jack valued his counsel and drew on it often, but he never made a decision without asking a myriad of people. That was not a mark of Jack’s insecurity, but his technique of decision making.
As campaign manager, Dalton had access to Joe’s money in almost limitless quantities. There wouldn’t simply be paltry campaign circulars but tens of thousands of comic books celebrating Jack’s war efforts and reprints of John Hersey’s famous PT-109 article. There would be no smattering of billboard ads but Jack’s face and message blanketing the state, as well as on subway trains and stations of the MTA.
In one of the crucial campaign moves, Joe signed on Batton, Barton, Durstine and Osborn, the third largest advertising agency in America. BBD&O had such a strong Republican identification that the firm was handling the 1952 presidential campaign of General Dwight Eisenhower. Joe had signed on BBD&O in good part because of their expertise in the dramatic new medium of television. Governor Thomas E. Dewey had won reelection in New York in 1950 with the prophetic use of television advertising.
John Crosby, the TV critic, had written in the New York Herald Tribune that “no one will ever know how much TV helped Thomas E. Dewey win reelection as governor of New York State. But no one can dispute that Dewey is the first political candidate to understand how to use TV properly.”
BBD&O told Joe that if Dewey had been the first, Jack would be the second. There would be no static, poised campaign speeches on television but programs “marked by informality and action.” Television audiences get bored easily. Best to keep it short, no more than fifteen minutes. The BBD&O executives decided not to advertise these political programs or even to list them