The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [197]
Lodge told the good news to one of his top aides, who mentioned the extraordinary endorsement to Joseph Timilty, Joe’s closest political associate. Joe went to see Fox. Joe knew that the paper was in financial trouble, and after the apparent application of a half-million-dollar loan, the next day the Post endorsed Jack.
“I don’t know whether he arranged for him to get a loan or got him a loan or what,” Bobby recalled. “I don’t remember the details, but the Boston Post supported John Kennedy—and there was a connection between the two events. I don’t know … specifically what was involved, but I know he was an unsavory figure.” Jack was more blunt in speaking to the journalist Fletcher Knebel: “You know, we had to buy that fucking paper or I’d have been licked.”
Boston’s thriving ethnic press was for the most part just as mercenary as the publisher of the Boston Post. These papers viewed the election not as a subject for vigorous reporting but as an enviable opportunity for political advertising. When one of Jack’s aides, Ralph Coghlan, went around Boston meeting the various editors, he reported that every paper, from the Armenian Hairenik and the Italian Gazzetta Del Massachusetts to the black Chronicle, expected ads in return for its support. In the inner world of the campaign it was all tit-for-tat, my favor for yours, a series of exchanges that had little to do with principles or ideas.
For the Kennedy men, this was not only a campaign for the Senate but a testing ground, and they were perfecting techniques and strategy that they intended one day to employ to elevate Jack to the White House.
After one particularly tough day on the campaign trail, an exhausted Jack sat in his father’s apartment on Beacon Street talking with his father and Morrissey about the campaign. As difficult as this Senate campaign was proving, Joe said that Jack must think further ahead. If he won in November, he would win the presidential nomination and election to the White House.
“I will work our the plans to elect you president,” he told his son, in a voice brimming with assurance. “It will not be more difficult for you to be elected president than it will be to win the Lodge fight.”
When Jack won the election by seventy thousand votes, or 51.5 percent, the candidate was not the only noble victor that evening; his father, brother, and mother had triumphed as well. Joe and Rose remembered so vividly how Honey Fitz had run against Lodge’s grandfather for the Senate in 1916, and how painful it had been when he lost. “At last the Fitzgeralds have evened the score with the Lodges,” Rose said.
What more exquisite revenge for a century of slights than to best the senator bearing the greatest old Boston political name of them all. As he had promised he would do if he won, Jack sang “Sweet Adeline” that evening. This was not his own tune, however, but his grandfather’s political theme song, and he would no more look back at his immigrant past than would the shrewd young politicos who surrounded him.
Joe had done what had to be done, and if this meant buying the Boston Post’s endorsement as one would buy billboard space, so be it. He had made at least one other crucial move. The man who ran for Jack’s seat that year, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr., insisted years later that Joe had pushed Governor Paul Dever to run for reelection when the man wanted to retire. Dever was a party politician who had built a machine across the Commonwealth dedicated to the advancement of the Democratic Party and its candidates and agenda. A man with high blood pressure and a heart condition, the governor had been advised by his doctors not to run.
On this election evening there was only one dour face in Jack’s headquarters. That was his own father. Joe spent much of the time on the phone talking to the governor, hoping to hear that Dever had finally pulled ahead. The governor’s organization had helped Jack more than Dever. At four in the morning Joe gave up. “Paul is not going to make it. I guess I’ll go to bed.” Joe got up from his chair and turned back once more before