Kennedy: The Classic Biography (12 page)

(The only serious case of office nonfeasance occurred during his convalescence away from the office. While the Senator’s position was never decided by the amount or nature of his mail—it was not, in his opinion, representative and much of it was not spontaneous—he was anxious that each letter be answered promptly and with as much specific information as possible. A new girl in charge of legislative mail in 1955 found that the volume of letters, despite the Senator’s absence, was greater than she could handle. Lee White, searching for an unanswered letter about which an angry constituent had telephoned him, found, stuffed in the bottom drawer of her desk, over thirteen hundred unanswered letters and postcards. She couldn’t bring herself to throw them away, she confessed, with some relief that her ordeal was over. All the girls in the office joined forces to help, all the mail was answered, and the unlucky lady found another position—in a bank!)

Mail was always a burden in the office, and constituent complaints and demands were sometimes an irritant. “All of us,” the Senator wrote in the introductory chapter to
Profiles in Courage
, “occasionally have the urge to follow the example of Congressman John Steven McGroarty of California, who wrote a constituent in 1934:

One of the countless drawbacks of being in Congress is that I am compelled to receive impertinent letters from a jackass like you in which you say I promised to have the Sierra Madre mountains reforested and I have been in Congress two months and haven’t done it. Will you please take two running jumps and go to hell.”

Senator Kennedy signed very little of the correspondence he approved for his signature and dictated even less of it. Staff members composed letters in accordance with his thinking. Mass mailings employed a mechanical signature pen. Most of his individual letters—and sometimes even autographed books or pictures—were signed by secretaries so skillful in imitating his handwriting that even he could not detect the difference. He once complained to Ted Reardon that the signature affixed that year for his Senatorial mailing frank—which appeared on all his envelopes—was a poor, illegible imitation, and Ted respectfully pointed out that that year the Senator had submitted his own signature for the frank.

On the other hand he sometimes answered mail not worthy of his time or not even addressed to him. This resulted from his habit of picking up and leafing through whatever was lying on top of whatever desk he was passing. Whenever the number of items I had to bring to his attention was uncomfortably long, I found that some progress could be achieved by leaving many of them on the corner of my desk.

My original assignment in 1953 had been the preparation of a legislative program for the New England economy, and this led that year to a series of three comprehensive speeches on the Senate floor, a number of bills, related speeches and national magazine articles and a formal organization of the New England Senators’ Conference (with a Nebraskan as secretary).

Initiation of the conference, which had been suggested in his series of Senate speeches, was shared with his Massachusetts colleague, courtly Leverett Saltonstall. Thereafter both offices worked closely together on Massachusetts problems, holding a number of joint meetings and issuing joint releases.

Though Saltonstall and Kennedy usually voted differently on national policy, they retained affection and respect for each other. Each enjoyed the additional political support gained by being associated with the other, and each privately preferred sharing Senatorial prerogatives with a colleague from the opposite party rather than with a competitor from his own. They took turns taking the lead on joint measures for Massachusetts, with the wholly unspoken understanding that they would all be known as Saltonstall-Kennedy bills in the senior Senator’s 1954 and 1960 campaigns and as Kennedy-Saltonstall bills in 1958.

At a 1963 party dinner Kennedy noted that Saltonstall, at a Republican gathering earlier in the week, had introduced Senator Barry Gold-water with the less-than-ringing endorsement: “He and I have differed on many problems, but we like and respect one another.” Kennedy paused as he repeated the words and then added, “I used to get a better introduction than that from Senator Saltonstall when I was in the Senate I”

On election night, 1960, the early returns indicated that Kennedy had won the Presidency and carried Saltonstall’s opponent in with him. Kennedy evinced genuine regret, and expressed in the midst of all his other cares a desire to make use of his old friend’s talents. “What about Ambassador to Canada?” I asked, and he replied, “He’d be perfect for it”—but Saltonstall’s final victorious vote abruptly ended his ambassadorial career.

On the Senate floor, in a Tennessee speech and in a national magazine article, Kennedy emphasized in 1953 that his efforts for New England were not directed against competition from the South or any other area, so long as that competition was fair. Substandard wages were unfair competition, and he wanted the minimum raised. But the TVA and public power were fair competition, and he wanted New England’s resources developed.

He took a similar approach to foreign competition. While assisting many Massachusetts industries in their applications for tariff relief, he was often the only Senator from New England voting for liberal trade programs.

But the severest test of whether his approach was provincial or national came early in 1954 when the St. Lawrence Seaway was once again before the Senate. For twenty years it had failed of passage, and for twenty years every Massachusetts Senator and Congressman, regardless of party or district, had voted against it. Kennedy had opposed it in his 1952 campaign. Saltonstall, in one of his rare disagreements with President Eisenhower, was opposing it in 1954. Massachusetts port and railroad interests were among the leading lobbyists against it. The Boston longshoremen, who had been faithful Kennedy supporters, condemned it as a threat to their jobs.

But the Senator characteristically asked me to collect for him an objective compilation of the facts—and the facts showed that the Seaway would not do the harm alleged, was needed in the national interest and would in all probability (which was not clear in 1952) be built by Canada alone if the United States delayed any longer. He ordered a speech drafted in support of the project, but withheld a final decision until the next day so he could “sleep on it.”

He did not, he admitted the next day, do much sleeping. Years later he would make far more difficult and dangerous decisions without any loss of sleep, but this was in many ways a turning point for the thirty-six-year-old Senator, He had no obligation to vote for the Seaway and endanger his political base. He was not required to speak on either side. A quiet vote of opposition would have received no attention. But he was determined to represent the national interest, and he had told his constituents that a provincial outlook would only continue their neglect by the rest of the country. Still he hesitated. Then, with a shake of his head—a shake I would often see, meaning “Well, this is what I must do, for better or worse”—he walked over to the Senate floor and delivered the speech.

Citing his state’s traditional opposition, he declared, “I am unable to accept such a narrow view of my function as United States Senator.” Standing proudly at the back of the chamber, I was instantly besieged for copies. The speech was regarded as a turning point in the Seaway debate as well as in the Senator’s career. The Seaway at last became law. The Boston Post accused Kennedy of “ruining New England.” His opponent in 1958 charged that it was all designed to help Joseph Kennedy’s Merchandise Mart in Chicago. A friend on the Boston City Council warned him not to walk in the 1954 St. Patrick’s Day parade, lest catcalls and worse be hurled at him in the dockworkers’ district. But he marched—and there were no incidents. Throughout his career he refused to shrink from the possibilities of hostility in his audience—whether it was in Boston, Jackson, Houston, Caracas or Dallas.

HIS SPEECH-WRITING

St. Patrick’s Day 1954 also marked a change in my role in the office. My duties as Legislative Assistant had gradually expanded over the whole scope of his legislative activities, committees and mail. The New England economy was still the focal point of my efforts, however. While I worked on any outside speeches or articles concerning his New England program, I had little to do with the few other speeches he gave. But when he approved my suggested draft of his speech for a 1954 St. Patrick’s Day Dinner (a phenomenon unknown in my background), my role as speech collaborator on any and all subjects was fixed for nearly ten years.

It became my most taxing role. Although I had previously done some writing and public speaking—as a high school and college debater and as editor of the
Nebraska Law Review
—my pen (for I drafted anything of importance in longhand) was not always sufficiently fast or facile to keep pace with the Senator’s varied and increasing demands. But the long, tedious hours of writing were rewarded both by the additional bond they forged between us and by his approval and use of my efforts. The morning after a particularly successful speech he would frequently call and thank me for my part.

He would never blindly accept or blandly deliver a text he had not seen and edited. We always discussed the topic, the approach and the conclusions in advance. He always had quotations or historical allusions to include. Sometimes he would review an outline. And he always, upon receiving my draft, altered, deleted or added phrases, paragraphs or pages. Some drafts he rejected entirely.

As the years went on, and I came to know what he thought on each subject as well as how he wished to say it, our style and standard became increasingly one. When the volume of both his speaking and my duties increased in the years before 1960, we tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to find other wordsmiths who could write for him in the style to which he was accustomed. The style of those whom we tried may have been very good. It may have been superior. But it was not his.

The very fact that I was involved in his other activities and decisions, and constantly present to hear his public and private utterances, made it increasingly easy for me to fulfill the speech-writing role—and increasingly difficult to shed or even share it. “I know you wish you could get out of writing so many speeches,” he said to me one weary night in an Indianapolis hotel room in 1959. “I wish I could get out of giving so many, but that’s the situation we’re both in for the present.”

In that situation we turned out hundreds of speeches, some good, some bad, some mediocre. The poorer speeches, in my view, occurred for the most part in the early days when we were learning and in later days when we were rushed. Invariably the more time he had to edit and rewrite, the better the speech would be.

The Kennedy style of speech-writing—our style, I am not reluctant to say, for he never pretended that he had time to prepare first drafts for all his speeches—evolved gradually over the years. Prepared texts were carefully designed for an orderly presentation of their substance but with no deliberate affectation of any certain style. We were not conscious of following the elaborate techniques later ascribed to these speeches by literary analysts. Neither of us had any special training in composition, linguistics or semantics. Our chief criterion was always audience comprehension and comfort, and this meant: (1) short speeches, short clauses and short words, wherever possible; (2) a series of points or propositions in numbered or logical sequence, wherever appropriate; and (3) the construction of sentences, phrases and paragraphs in such a manner as to simplify, clarify and emphasize.

The test of a text was hot how it appeared to the eye but how it sounded to the ear. His best paragraphs, when read aloud, often had a cadence not unlike blank verse—indeed at times key words would rhyme. He was fond of alliterative sentences, not solely for reasons of rhetoric but to reinforce the audience’s recollection of his reasoning. Sentences began, however incorrect some may have regarded it, with “And” or “But” whenever that simplified and shortened the text. His frequent use of dashes as a means of separating clauses was of doubtful grammatical standing—but it simplified the delivery and even the publication of a speech in a manner no comma, parenthesis or semicolon could match.

Words were regarded as tools of precision, to be chosen and applied with a craftsman’s care to whatever the situation required. He liked to be exact. But if the situation required a certain vagueness, he would deliberately choose a word of varying interpretations rather than bury his imprecision in ponderous prose.

For he disliked verbosity and pomposity in his own remarks as much as he disliked them in others. He wanted both his message and his language to be plain and unpretentious, but never patronizing. He wanted his major policy statements to be positive, specific and definite, avoiding the use of “suggest,” “perhaps” and “possible alternatives for consideration.” At the same time, his emphasis on a course of reason—rejecting the extremes of either side—helped produce the parallel construction and use of contrasts with which he later became identified. He had a weakness for one unnecessary phrase: “The harsh facts of the matter are…”—but, with few other exceptions, his sentences were lean and crisp.

No speech was more than twenty to thirty minutes in duration. They were all too short and too crowded with facts to permit any excess of generalities and sentimentalities. His texts wasted no words and his delivery wasted no time. Frequently he moved from one solid fact or argument to another, without the usual repetition and elaboration, far too quickly for his audiences to digest or even applaud his conclusions. Nor would he always pause for applause when it came.

He spoke at first with no gestures, though he gradually developed a short jab to emphasize his points. Often his tone was monotonous. Often his emphasis was on the wrong word. But often when his audiences were large and enthusiastic—particularly indoors, if the hall was not too vast—an almost electric charge would transmit vitality back and forth between speaker and listeners.