Kennedy: The Classic Biography (13 page)

He used little or no slang, dialect, legalistic terms, contractions, clichés, elaborate metaphors or ornate figures of speech. He refused to be folksy or to include any phrase or image he considered corny, tasteless or trite.
⁴
He rarely used words he considered hackneyed: “humble,” “dynamic,” “glorious.” He used none of the customary word fillers (e.g., “And I say to you that is a legitimate question and here is my answer”). And he did not hesitate to depart from strict rules of English usage when he thought adherence to them (e.g., “Our agenda
are
long”) would grate on the listener’s ear.

The intellectual level of his speeches showed erudition but not arrogance. Though he knew a little French (“very little,” he commented in 1957 after a somewhat halting telephone conversation with the King of Morocco on the North African situation), he was most reluctant to include any foreign words in his addresses.

He was not reluctant, however, particularly in those pre-1960 days, to pack his speeches with statistics and quotations—frequently too many for audiences unaccustomed to his rapid-fire delivery. While I learned to keep a
Bartlett’s
and similar works handy, the Senator was the chief source of his own best quotations. Some were in the black notebooks he had kept since college—some were in favorite reference books on his desk, such as Agar’s
The Price of Union
—most were in his head.

He would not always be certain of the exact wording or even the author of a quotation he wanted, but he could suggest enough for his staff or the Library of Congress to find it. Preparing his brief, effective statement against the isolationist Bricker Amendment to the Constitution, for example, he told me, “Someone—was it Falkland?—gave the classic definition of conservatism which went something like‘When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.’ Let’s include the exact quotation and author.”
⁵

He also liked on occasion—especially with college audiences which he enjoyed—to include humorous illustrations and quotations in the body of his speeches. An excerpt from a particularly abusive debate between earlier Senators and statesmen always delighted him, possibly because it contrasted so vividly with his own style of understatement.

Humor in the
body
of a prepared speech, however, was rare compared to its use at the
beginning
of almost every speech he made off the Senate floor. While here, too, he preferred historical or political anecdotes, both the quality and the sources of this introductory material varied widely. He believed topical, tasteful, pertinent, pointed humor at the beginning of his remarks to be a major means of establishing audience rapport; and he would work with me as diligently for the right opening witticism, or take as much pride the next day in some spontaneous barb he had flung, as he would on the more substantive paragraphs in his text.

Successful stories told by a toastmaster or by another speaker would be jotted down for future reference. Collections of Finley Peter Dunne and Will Rogers, current newspaper columns and quotations, the works of writers who liberally sprinkled their thoughts on history and government with amusing expressions or examples (such as Denis Brogan and T. V. Smith) were all carefully mined. Standard jokebooks were never used, nor would he ever say, “That reminds me of the story of…” as a bridge to some irrelevant and lengthy anecdote, but many an old saw was adapted to modern politics and to a particular audience.

No laugh-getter once used or even considered was ever discarded. A large “humor folder” in my files grew continuously. Omitting all anecdotes from the texts that were distributed to the press usually avoided their being publicized, and thus made possible their use in another speech in another part of the country. Audiences watching him scribbling away during dinner often thought he was rewriting his speech, as at times he was. More often he was jotting down the opening lines most appropriate to that audience, working in many cases from a typewritten “humor list” of one-line reminders.

Except for joking about the political liabilities of his own religion, he avoided all ethnic references as well as all off-color remarks in public (although not in private). The only joke which backfired was told early in his Senate career. “The cab driver did such a good job rushing me to this luncheon,” he told a Washington audience, “that I was going to give him a big tip and and tell him to vote Democratic. Then I remembered the advice of Senator Green, so I gave him no tip and told him to vote Republican.” The Associated Press solemnly reported the story as though it had actually happened, and a storm of letters from cab drivers and their wives caused the Senator to think twice about his choice of humor in the future.

He liked to poke fun at politics and politicians, his party, his colleagues and himself. He liked humor that was both topical and original, irreverent but gentle. In his eight years in the Senate no speech assignment worried him longer or more deeply than his role as Democratic jester for the Washington Gridiron Club Dinner in 1958. His successful ten-minute talk on that occasion was drawn from several hours of material gathered from many sources and tried on many “experts.” Thereafter he tended more and more, except perhaps on the 1960 campaign circuit, to use that kind of political, more subtle and self-belittling humor, for it was naturally consistent with his own personality and private wit.

His best humor, of course, was spontaneous, and his increasing confidence on the platform brought increasing numbers of spur-of-the-moment gibes. Candor and humor, when combined, can be dangerous weapons politically, and at times he had to restrain his natural instincts in this direction.

In addition to the humor file, we kept a collection of appropriate speech endings—usually quotations from famous figures or incidents from history which, coupled with a brief peroration of his own, could conclude almost any speech on any subject with a dramatic flourish. On many of the hectic precampaign trips of 1957-1959, he would leave one community for the next with a paraphrase from a favorite Robert Frost poem:

Iowa City is lovely, dark and deep

But I have promises to keep

And miles to go before I sleep.”
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He soon knew all these closings by heart; and while the standard closings, like the humorous openings, were almost always omitted from his released texts in order to facilitate their continued use elsewhere, his own reading copy (prepared in extra-large type) would have merely a word or a phrase to indicate the appropriate close: e.g., “Candles,” “General Marshall,” “Rising or Setting Sun.”

Obviously the Senator was capable of selecting and remembering his own peroration without the help of these few words. But he looked upon his text and each part of it as insurance. Should the pressures of the moment or the fatigue of the trip benumb his brain as he stood on his feet, he wanted a complete text in his hands which he could follow or at least take off from. He would often deviate from his text or delete passages previously approved and sometimes discard it entirely. But—particularly in earlier days, when he knew his extemporaneous remarks were likely to be less organized, precise and grammatical than a more carefully prepared text—he wanted the reassurance a manuscript gave him.

HIS SENATE SPEECHES

A tremendous amount of staff research preceded every Kennedy talk. He was known in the Library of Congress as the heaviest borrower of their reference works. He did not make as many major Senate speeches as some of his more vocal colleagues, nor did he measure his—or their—effectiveness by the publicity a speech was given.

One of the most carefully researched, widely publicized and officially ignored speeches Senator Kennedy ever delivered was his address in 1957 outlining the interest of America and the West in a negotiated solution for eventual self-determination in Algeria. The speech proved to be substantially and in some ways distressingly prophetic in subsequent years, but it was bitterly criticized at the time in Washington as well as Paris. His name and speech, he later discovered, were hailed throughout North Africa—and an American correspondent who visited the Algerian camp related to the Senator his surprise at being interviewed by weary, grimy rebels on Kennedy’s chances for the Presidency. There was, however, no Algerian vote in this country, and reporters looked hard for political motives.

In retrospect, Kennedy never agreed with critics who felt he should not have spoken on the subject—though perhaps “independence” sounded too precise for his purposes, he admitted—nor with those who felt he was insincerely searching for headlines. As a junior Senator, he could do no more than raise his voice, and Secretary of State Dulles told him privately that he used Kennedy’s speech to advantage in putting quiet heat on the French. Moderates in Paris also welcomed the speech as support for their futile attempts to prevent extremists from taking over both sides.

The Algerian speech was consistent with the Senator’s long-standing convictions about the dangers of Western colonialism and with two earlier speeches he had given on French Indochina. The longer the independence of the Vietnamese people was postponed, he said in 1953 and 1954, and the longer we believed repeated French and American predictions of an imminent French military victory, the more difficult the future would be for Vietnam and her sister states once they were fully free. He could not then have foreseen how deeply he would be involved in those correctly predicted difficulties. Indeed, on many subjects—Algeria, Indochina, India, Poland, Latin America and defense—Kennedy’s speeches were well ahead of both his colleagues and the headlines.

When a major Kennedy speech on the Senate floor led to debate with the opposition, he usually held his own against more senior Republican Senators—whether it was Homer Ferguson defending Eisenhower’s “new look” cut in Army strength, Styles Bridges opposing Kennedy’s request for increased aid to India, William Knowland defeating by one vote a Kennedy measure to encourage Polish nationalism, or Homer Capehart demanding a secret session of the Senate to debate Kennedy’s complaints about the complacent pace of our strategic forces.

Outside the labor area, his most successful effort on the Senate floor was in leading the opposition to constitutional changes in the Electoral College aimed at splitting up the strength of the more populous two-party states. (Interestingly enough, had one proposal been in effect in 1960, Nixon would have been elected President. Had the other proposal been in effect, it is likely that no candidate would have had an electoral vote majority, thus throwing the vote into the House of Representatives with no certainty of the result, inasmuch as each state delegation is given only one vote and Nixon carried twenty-six of the fifty states.)

The Kennedy Senate staff, even when supplemented in later years by the part-time or full-time efforts of Fred Holborn, Harris Wofford and Richard Goodwin, could not keep pace with his demand for new speech ideas and material. Professor Archibald Cox of the Harvard Law School (later Solicitor General) headed a team of outside experts on labor reform. Professors Max Millikan and Walt Rostow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the latter was later Assistant Secretary of State) were among many advisers on foreign policy. For material on a speech on nuclear tests, he directed me to call his friend Sir David Ormsby-Gore (later U.K. Ambassador to the U.S.) in the British UN delegation. His 1954 speech on Indochina was checked with Ed Gullion of the Foreign Service (later his Ambassador to the Congo) and with an old family friend, Arthur Krock of the
New York Times
(later the chief critic of his policy in the Congo). Columnist Joe Alsop helped on a defense speech. Jacqueline translated French documents for his Vietnam speech. Law professors Freund and Howe were consulted on civil rights. Occasionally he would turn to his father’s associate, New Dealer James Landis. In short, while the Senator was a brainy man, his intelligence included the ability to know his own limitations of time and knowledge and to draw on the brains of others.

HIS WRITINGS

In addition to speeches, he began in mid-term to produce a large number of magazine articles—on legislation, politics, foreign policy, economic issues and history. He asked me to help on these also. Early in 1954 he asked me to read a passage in Agar’s
The Price of Union
, which had long intrigued him. It told of John Quincy Adams’ independence as a Federalist Senator from Massachusetts. If we could find more such examples of Senators defying constituent pressures, he said, he would have the raw material for a worthwhile magazine essay. He wanted to remind people that politics was—or could be—the noblest profession.

Sporadically over the next few months we talked about the proposed article. I suggested Senator Norris from my home state of Nebraska, with whom my father had been associated. Arthur Krock suggested the late Senator Taft’s opposition to the Nuremberg Trials. An article in the
American Bar Association Journal
told of Edmund G. Ross and the Andrew Johnson impeachment. In a book of great orations was Daniel Webster’s “Seventh of March” speech and the Abolitionist attack on it. Slowly the Kennedy file of examples and material grew during 1954, but he had no time to do anything with it.

Then, in mid-January, 1955, the Senator had nothing but time. Convalescing from his back operation, he was confined to bed in his father’s house in Palm Beach. At times listless, at times restless, he knew his mind required an absorbing activity to compensate for his body’s painful inactivity. By telephone and letter, the “political courage” project was resurrected, a draft article completed and a copy dispatched for consideration by
Harper’s Magazine.
It was tentatively entitled “Patterns of Political Courage”—and the thought was already growing in the Senator’s mind that there was enough material of this kind to produce a book instead of an article.