The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [245]
18
The Rites of Ambition
Jack could have stepped forward now and stood as the great champion of colonial peoples, whether they resided in Algeria or Indonesia or Poland. At far less political risk, he could have stood his ground as an articulate spokesman for eventual Algerian independence. Instead, as was his pattern, he stepped gingerly back, telling his staff that he was “wary of being known as the senator from Algeria.”
Just as nationalism and the struggle for independence was the great international moral issue of his time, so civil rights was the great domestic moral issue. On this issue, Jack was even more reluctant to take a leading role. He was instinctively a moderate, tempering his progressive instincts on foreign policy and social issues with a conservative wariness of the dangers of wrenching change. He cared to some degree intellectually about the plight of blacks in the segregated South, but he did not have the liberal passion of his colleague Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, who cried out in a loud, fervent voice that enough was enough, wrongs had to be righted, and righted now.
Jack stood with some of his more reactionary colleagues on several technical matters as the 1957 civil rights bill worked its way through Congress. Unlike the vociferous Humphrey, Jack was wooing southern Democrats to stand behind his presidential banner, but his refusal to stand forthrightly with his liberal colleagues was perhaps something more than narrow pragmatism. As he had with some of the procedural votes on McCarthy, he ended up looking like a man of expediency. The charge rankled him. “It’s awful … you know what they say about you, but they say this … [was] an attempt to appease the South,” he told Burns. “Politically it was a mistake.”
The reality was that if Jack’s chances for a presidential nomination had rested on his legislative record, he would scarcely have been considered a plausible candidate. He had no stellar record of bills stamped with his bold mark, as did Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas, another potential candidate. Nor did he stand at the forefront of a political issue, as Humphrey did on civil rights. Neither of these men, however, had the captivating persona that Jack was exhibiting on speaking trips that took him from Arkansas to New York City, Baltimore to Mississippi. He was deemed worthy of a Time cover in 1957, and major articles appeared in magazines ranging from women’s periodicals such as McCall’s and Redbook to mass general-interest magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and American Weekly, to more obscure, policy-oriented publications such as Foreign Policy Bulletin and the National Education Association Journal.
As he flew from state to state and interspersed his days in Washington with one interview after another, Jack continued to be cursed by bad health. His bad back and Addison’s disease were burden enough. Then the dog that Jackie had given him for Christmas in 1956, when they were staying at his father’s New York apartment, set off such a severe allergic reaction that he had an asthma attack and the animal had to be given away. For a long time afterward, he became sick again every time the couple stayed in the apartment at 277 Park Avenue.
On another occasion while he was in New York Hospital, Jack checked out to go to a friend’s house for dinner. The friend had a dog, and by the time Jack checked back into the hospital, he was breathing so badly from his asthma that the hospital staff became frightened.
In the middle of September 1957, Jack developed an abscess on his scarred back that induced a high fever and such wrenching back pain that he entered New York Hospital. The doctors drained the abscess and put him on a heavy dosage of penicillin and streptomycin.
Jack wanted to minimize the whole business, but a