The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [195]
Jack’s one fervent moment over McCarthy during the campaign year came on February 9, 1952, at the one-hundredth-anniversary dinner of the founding of the Spee Club. An after-dinner speaker said that he was delighted that Alger Hiss was not a real Harvard man, even if he had gone to Harvard Law School. Hiss had been convicted of perjury for lying before a congressional committee and was serving forty-four months in prison. Up until his conviction, Hiss had seemed the perfect exemplar of the kind of man Jack admired above all others, a gentleman of wealth and privilege who had opted to become a public servant.
Over the years, evidence would mount to prove almost indisputably that Hiss had been spying for the Soviets during the 1930s. At this point, however, equal evidence suggested that he was nothing more than the most publicized victim of the Red Scare. It was all maddeningly unclear and obscure, and Hiss had become what David Remnick has called “the Rashomon drama of the Cold War,” and a litmus test that had more to do with sentiment than fact.
The speaker went on to say that as delighted as he was that Hiss had not gone to Harvard College, he was infinitely happy that his beloved alma mater had not turned out a Joe McCarthy.
At that point Jack jumped up and shouted, “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” He was so angry that he left before hearing the rest of the speeches.
The extremes of American politics had reached such a point that some of those present may have wondered just whom Jack was condemning. To those on the right, Hiss was the traitor and McCarthy the patriot. To those on the left, the opposite was true. On a visceral level, Jack knew where he stood, and it was not with the liberal intelligentsia of Harvard.
Bobby had even stronger feelings about McCarthy. When he took time off to attend the Harvard-Yale football game in New Haven, he and his old football teammates spent Saturday evening in New York. As always, the subject turned to politics, and in the early 1950s, politics meant McCarthy pro or con. Except for Sam Adams, Bobby’s friends were all the same solid Democrats they had been when they had left Harvard. They despised McCarthy and what they thought he was doing to the America that had been so good to them. Bobby was his lone defender.
“Oh, Bob, come on now,” O’Donnell fumed in exasperation. “McCarthy could prove your mother was a Communist by his way of reasoning.” Bobby could simply not understand that in the name of anticommunism McCarthy had created fear where there had been hope, and suspicion where there had been trust. “By using his methods of proof, the Pope could be a Communist,” Kenny shouted, his words not changing Bobby at all.
For a centrist consensual politician like Jack, McCarthy presented a dilemma. If Jack stood too strongly against the Wisconsin senator, he would lose his hard-core Catholic constituency, the very bedrock of his power. If he supported McCarthy, he would lose the liberals, the intellectuals, most Jewish voters, many labor leaders, numerous teachers, and activists, people who voted with their effort and resources and deeply voiced concerns.
Jack was a man of profound emotional disengagement, and he was no more comfortable with McCarthy’s rude outbursts than with the shrill replies of the liberals. Thanks probably to his father, Jack had the questionable honor of being one of the few Democrats who did not have to worry about McCarthy coming into their state to berate him. With no such problem, he set out to convince McCarthy’s detractors that he was worthy of their vote.
No group worried longer or more over this than did the Massachusetts Jewish community. Not only had Jews suffered disproportionately from McCarthy’s assaults, but they were acutely aware of an anti-Semitic strain among Irish-American