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Those on the campaign referred to the days of Mark Dalton as “before the revolution” and the days of Bobby as “after the revolution.” And every revolution demands its blood. Jack was no good at firing, disciplining, or demoting, all the mundane nasty chores involved in running a political organization. Like most successful politicians, he had learned that when bad news is to be handed out, he should be elsewhere.

Any political campaign, fueled as it is by the work of poorly paid and unpaid staffers, is full of jealousy and rude positioning. Kennedy campaigns were worse; the family seemed to set subordinates against each other in a race that had no clear rules and no obvious finish line. When Jack made his rare appearances in the campaign office, he was sure to be approached by staff members complaining about their peers. Jack learned to stay away from the office, or to come rushing through, as if on a campaign stop, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries, but leaving before anyone had a chance to take him aside.

Bobby stayed, however, and Jack learned in the 1952 campaign that his younger brother was willing to take on these most onerous of chores, castigating those who didn’t measure up, pushing others with crude force. It was not Bobby’s style to preface his criticisms with a few nuggets of praise or to nestle his condemnation among platitudes and pleasantries. He got right to it with brutal efficiency and what to observers looked like pleasure. When Bobby asked Sam Adams to help on the campaign, and Sam responded that he was too busy, Sam felt “like he burned my bridges.” Bobby was doing a lot of bridge burning.

Bobby had his father’s nearly maniacal sense of precision. Politics was a matter of inches, not feet; of ounces, not pounds. After one of the campaign tea parties, Joe asked O’Donnell, “How many people were at that tea in Springfield, Kenny?” O’Donnell said, “Oh, about five thousand.” And Joe said, “I know about how many people were there. I asked you how many people were there. Didn’t you have a checker there?” A chastened O’Donnell replied, “Yes, we did.” Joe wasn’t about to leave his little lesson at that. “When I ask you how many people the next time, I want to know exactly how many people.”

15

The Golden Fleece

With Joe and Bobby at the helm, Jack ran a brilliant and prophetic campaign. “He was all things to all men,” recalled Massachusetts Congressman John McCormack, a powerful figure in national politics. The candidate was a putative liberal to the good professors of Harvard. He was a closet conservative to the more amenable Republicans. At dawn, as he shook hands outside factory gates, he was a friend of labor. In the evening, as he shared cigars and cognac with their bosses, he was the businessman’s Washington friend. He was an Irish-American, son of the sod of old Eire. He was an upper-class Catholic who sat comfortably in the great houses of Back Bay. Jack was a dream lover to the young girls who waved their handkerchiefs and God’s glory of a son to their mothers.

As the campaign started, Jack read the extraordinary statistic that for the first time women voters outnumbered men. In Massachusetts, their numbers were the highest of any state, 52.6 percent. Jack was the prisoner of an upbringing that had taught him that women were for the most part giggling creatures uninterested in the manly business of politics. He did not attempt to solicit female voters by developing campaign issues that might appeal to their intellect. Instead, he developed a strategy that shrewdly exploited their social ambition and sexuality.

“His theme was to hit the woman vote,” reflected Edward C. Berube, a Fall River bus driver who worked intimately with Jack. “He indicated this to me … that he was going to come out for the women, that he figured the woman was the one that was going to put him in. And he wanted coffee hours and tea hours and arranging coffee hours in homes.”

Lodge had started the whole business