The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [193]
Jack moved around the teas, a handsome young gentleman, both a son of Irish immigrant culture and an aristocrat, a man of the people, a man above the people. Jack’s opponent was a debonair, elegantly dressed aristocrat who set the hearts aflutter among the good Republican matrons of the suburbs, but the difference between the two men was like the difference between a Broadway actor and a Hollywood star.
Lodge might appeal to the elite ladies, but Jack had the masses, the bobby-soxers, the blue-haired immigrant ladies, the aspiring suburbanites, as well as the conservative matrons. As the lean, mildly disheveled, thirty-five-year-old candidate worked the room, he was playing brilliantly on the social aspirations of these women, bringing them into an ersatz version of the Kennedy social life. Though it was easy enough to satirize these women, their desire to be with a better class of people was no different from the desire that for three generations had dominated the Kennedys themselves.
What none of the women knew, however, as they chatted amiably with Jack was that his smile was at times a grimace. In August he was sick enough with nonspecific prostatitis that he was urinating pus and had to be secretly hospitalized. Then, on a visit to a Springfield firehouse, Jack couldn’t resist a dare to slide down a fire pole. When he hit the cement from his third-floor perch, he grimaced, feeling once again the terrible back pain that plagued him. From then on, he was relegated to hobbling around on crutches. When he got to an auditorium or a hall, he would leave the crutches outside and stride into the room as if he were health and youth incarnate.
The campaign was not all tea parties and handshaking. Indeed, when Lodge looked back dispassionately on the race, he realized that his largest problem was not what he called the “damn tea parties” but his endorsement of Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination; the offended Taft Republicans stayed home or voted for Jack in protest. The two candidates shared one common problem, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. When McCarthy got up before the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950 and said that he had a list of fifty-seven card-carrying Communists or fellow travelers in the State Department, he set out on the most dangerous demagogic campaign in American political history. It was the rare specificity of McCarthy’s charges that made them so powerful. It would take several years before it became clear to many Americans that McCarthy was playing on the fears of his compatriots, destroying not Communists but legitimate anticommunism, wreaking havoc not on American enemies but on the American political system.
McCarthy was so dangerous because he was not an aberration but rather the logical extreme of what Michael S. Sherry has called “a highly politicized form of postwar militarization.” The witch-hunt McCarthy initiated was precisely what Jack’s father had feared would happen. To defeat the Axis the United States had created a state apparatus of such magnitude and coercion that it risked destroying what once had been called liberty. It was not McCarthy, after all, but one of his enemies, President Harry S Truman, who in February 1947 instituted a loyalty program to fire “disloyal” employees. It was not McCarthy alone but a whole generation of postwar politicians—even including, in a small way, Jack himself—who helped create a climate of such fear that the owners of the Cincinnati Reds renamed the baseball team the “Redlegs” rather than risk being called Commies.
These politicians had turned the Communist into a mythic anti-Christ, unseen but all-seeing, ready to betray the unwary and seduce the innocent.