The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [194]
Jack first gained notice in the House by attacking several union officials, including Dr. Russell Nixon, a former professor of his at Harvard. Jack was roundly praised, as if he had bested an evil giant in unequal combat. The jingoistic anticommunism had been a willing servant of these politicians, helping to elect them to office over candidates who did not shout so shrilly.
During the campaign, Jack was not simply the brilliant observer of international affairs, as he had been when he returned from Asia speaking with a subtlety of mind and nuance rare in American political life. He also gave another kind of speech in which he set aside his complex and tragic world-view for florid, apocalyptic, anti-Communist rhetoric.
In the spring of 1952, in an address to the graduating class of the Newton College of the Sacred Heart, Jack presented a vision of the world full of threat and terror, a vision and indeed a language that he used on several occasions that year. He saw the dark encroachment of the state, enveloping liberty: “The theme of today—the scarlet thread that runs throughout the thoughts and actions of people all over the world—is one of resignation of major problems into the all-absorbing hands of the great Leviathan—the state.”
Despite what Jack said at Newton College and elsewhere, when he talked to elderly citizens whose Social Security checks allowed them to live in dignity, he did not bemoan the encroaching leviathan but celebrated one of the New Deal’s great achievements. And when he looked at the economy, he was a Keynesian who thought that government must at times intervene in the nation’s economic life.
The truth has few friends, and Jack was not about to risk his political future by trying too often or too openly to elucidate the complexities of the political world. There were no easy votes to be garnered that way, as he could by shaking the tambourine of anticommunism. He took the easy way, though what appears the easy way is sometimes in the end the most difficult path of all.
In November 1950, Jack had attended a seminar at Harvard given by Arthur Holcombe, one of his old professors. In an article published in The New Republic in the midst of the 1952 campaign, one of the participants reported on Jack’s candid statements. He had told the group that more had to be done to get rid of Communists in government and that he had a certain respect for McCarthy. He thought he “knew Joe pretty well, and he may have something.” He said, moreover, that “while he opposed what he supposed to be Communist influence at home, he refused to become emotionally aroused even on this issue.”
Jack was not the sort of politician who took pleasure in attacking his enemies, and even if he had wanted to confront McCarthy, which he did not, he had his own special relationship with the Wisconsin senator. McCarthy was a close family friend who dated Pat, Jack’s own sister. Joe talked to him on the phone frequently and contributed liberally to his campaign. He was a guest in the Kennedy homes. On one trip to Hyannis Port, McCarthy was dragged behind a sailboat on a rope. The Kennedys considered that fun and games, but the landlubber from Wisconsin almost drowned. The two men were both Irish-Catholic politicians, and that too was a special, if unspoken, bond. Jack might seek to distance himself from that ethnic appellation, but the 750,000 Irish Catholics