The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [196]
“I told you before, I am opposed to McCarthy,” Jack privately told Phil David Fine, his foremost liaison with the Jewish community. “I don’t like the way he does business, but I’m running for office here, and while I may be able to get x number of votes because I say I’m opposed to him, I am going to lose … two times x by saying that I am opposed. I am telling you, and you have to have faith in me, that at the proper time I’ll do the proper thing.”
If what one man had done weighed heavier than what the other man promised, then Lodge deserved the bulk of the Jewish votes. Lodge had a stellar record on the issues, such as Israel and civil rights, that preoccupied the Massachusetts Jewish community. Beyond that, Jack carried the heavy burden of his father’s history.
Jack’s campaign did not confront these issues but tried a more circular approach. One day in the kosher butcher shops, delicatessens, and grocery stores in heavily Jewish Dorchester there appeared blocks of free tickets for two movies that evening in the largest movie theater on Blue Hill Avenue. By the appointed hour there was not an empty seat in the entire theater, and people stood all around the back and the sides.
By the time the first movie ended—an American film about the heroic birth of Israel—the audience was full of deep emotion and a passionate sense of their relationship with Israel. As the lights went up, there stood Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., an apparition who moved the audience only slightly less than if Ben-Gurion himself had walked up the aisle. Then Congressman John McCormack, a man nicknamed “Rabbi John,” appeared, to another thunderous round of applause.
And finally, when the two speakers had made their remarks, Congressman Kennedy strode onto the stage. When he finished his talk and walked off to more applause, a travelogue on Israel played on the screen. It was a glorious evening, especially if you were working for Jack. The campaign replicated the same approach in other heavily Jewish areas.
While they attempted to manipulate the various ethnic groups and constituencies, the Kennedys maintained a well-earned cynicism toward much of the press. Jack was forever flattering journalism and journalists, but flattery is to respect what copper is to gold, the cheapest kind of currency. Jack applied it to those journalists inordinately attracted to its coinage.
The Kennedys’ scorn for some members of the press was honestly won, and it presented a number of moral conundrums. When did generosity become a bribe? And who was guiltier, the supplicant with the outstretched hand or the patron who greased his palm with a few coins?
Jack had observed for years the family’s relationship with Arthur Krock. His father would not think of issuing significant campaign statements without running them past Krock. The reporter was not a conniving hack seeking to supplement his miserable wages with handouts from Joe. He was the premier political columnist for the New York Times, the most important newspaper in America, and he was available at all times and all hours, for advice, help with speeches, or whatever sundry duty the family demanded. In the 1930s, Joe had offered to pay the journalist five thousand dollars for his work on Joe’s book supporting Roosevelt, and that may have been the least of it. It was whispered around the Kennedy camp that he was on the old man’s payroll. Better if he was, for if he was being paid only in access, deference, and the illusion of importance, he was a man who was bought cheaply indeed.
If a man of Krock’s stature was so amenable, then certain lesser journalists and newspapers were even more so. In October, Lodge met with John Fox, the new owner of the Boston Post. The Post was a Democratic standard-bearer, at least it had been before Fox bought the troubled daily. Fox planned to endorse Lodge, however, support that Lodge thought easily worth forty thousand votes, enough to ensure his reelection.