The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [254]
Jack’s friend Smathers, the new chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, pushed him to fly into Wisconsin for a day to help the underdog William Proxmire win his race in a state that had not sent a Democratic senator to Washington since the New Deal. “But find him some feminine companionship,” Smathers told Joe Miller, the campaign director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “He likes that when he’s on the road.” Miller demurred, but he did line up the board that Jack had requested for his bad back.
“I really hate this,” Jack muttered to Miller during the interminable day. “It’s meaningless.” But that day he was brilliant at hands-on politicking, saying one thing to the Polish-Americans, something else to a group of blacks, and still other words over a Catholic radio station. It was a compelling day, and it may have been the crucial factor in Proxmire’s narrow victory.
On a campaign trip to California in October, Jack dictated a lengthy confidential letter about his own Senate race to Steve Smith, admonishing his brother-in-law, “Be sure to keep this letter under lock and key or destroy it after you have taken notes from it.” Jack was running his own campaign, and he was running it with the most extraordinarily detailed concern. He saw his state as a complex matrix of peoples and groups that had to be wooed individually, each with a subtle, tailored approach.
The labor unions were crucial, and Jack had a different approach to each union leader. “I think it will be well for dad to call Dan Donovan of the Longshoremen’s,” he wrote. He thought Steve should consider having the Longshoremen’s leader “write a letter which we could pay for to all of his union members saying what a great fellow I am.” He wanted Reardon to “call Vic Turpin of New Bedford, head of the fishermen’s union.” Steve was to write a letter to Max Dobro, president of the Boston Taxi Drivers Association. Jack was fed up with Governor Furcolo’s refusal to work with him. “You might suggest to Kenny [O’Donnell] that he make it clear to the appropriate Furcolo people that there are quite a few people disturbed by the apparent ‘knifing,’ and who wonder whether the Irish are going to continue to support Italian candidates when the Italians won’t vote for Irish candidates.”
Jack was in control of his own political destiny, even if he felt it wise to keep secret just how much he dominated every gesture and every step. He was largely the mastermind of a campaign that O’Donnell and Powers boasted was “probably as nearly perfect in planning … as an election campaign in an off-year could be.” Teddy, the official campaign manager, was so irrelevant that in Jack’s three-page memo he did not mention his kid brother except to ask, “Should we get Eunice and Jean up in order to expand our coverage, especially as we are losing Teddy?” Jack mentioned his father only once, asking him to make a phone call. Joe contributed an estimated $1.5 million to the campaign coffers, made crucial phone calls, and talked his son up, but he was no éminence grise controlling the campaign.
Joe still believed that his conservative, isolationist political judgment was impeccable. After rereading an interview he gave to Life in 1945 in which he outlined his worldview, he marveled at the perfect precocity of his views. “I wouldn’t change a single word,” he told the Boston Sunday Herald