Kennedy: The Classic Biography (5 page)

He was unawed by generals and admirals (even more so once he was President) and had grave doubts about military indoctrination. When still hospitalized by the Navy in 1944, he had written to a friend concerning the “super-human ability of the Navy to screw up everything they touch.”

Even the simple delivery of a letter frequently overburdens this heaving puffing war machine of ours. God save this country of ours from those patriots whose war cry is “what this country needs is to be run with military efficiency.”

He had also achieved some notice in 1949 when he stated on the floor of the House that “the leadership of the American Legion has not had a constructive thought for the benefit of this country since 1918.” (Some insist that his original retort was somewhat more sweeping and bitter than this
Congressional Record
version.)

He was proud of his academic training but did not believe that all wisdom resided in Harvard or other Eastern schools. (As President, upon receiving an honorary degree at Yale, he observed, “Now I have the best of both worlds—a Yale degree and a Harvard education.”) And he was proud to have been elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers, for few Catholics had ever been elected. His defeat for that post in 1955 was a new and disappointing experience for a man accustomed to winning. But he selected his Senate and White House aides without regard to the source of their education, and he recognized that his own Ivy League background was not always a political asset. When I included in the first draft of an article for his alumni magazine the statement:

A Harvard diploma is considered by most Massachusetts voters to be evidence of devotion to the public,

the Senator changed it to read:

A Harvard diploma is considered by
many
Massachusetts voters,
although not all I hasten to add
,to be evidence of
some talent and ability.

He did not believe that all virtue resided in the Catholic Church, nor did he believe that all non-Catholics would (or should) go to hell. He felt neither self-conscious nor superior about his religion but simply accepted it as part of his life. He resented the attempt of an earlier biographer to label him as “not deeply religious”; he faithfully attended Mass each Sunday, even in the midst of fatiguing out-of-state travels when no voter would know whether he attended services or not. But not once in eleven years—despite all our discussions of church-state affairs—did he ever disclose his personal views on man’s relation to God.

He did not require or prefer Catholics on his staff and neither knew nor cared about our religious beliefs. Many of his close friends were not Catholics. While he was both a Catholic and a scholar, he could not be called a Catholic scholar. He cared not a whit for theology, sprinkled quotations from the Protestant version of the Bible throughout his speeches, and once startled and amused his wife by reading his favorite passage from Ecclesiastes (“… a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance…”) with his own irreverent addition from the political world: “a time to fish and a time to cut bait.” During the eleven years I knew him, I never heard him pray aloud in the presence of others, never saw him kiss a bishop’s ring and never knew him to alter his religious practices for political convenience.

“There is an old saying in Boston,” he said, “that‘we get our religion from Rome and our politics at home.’” He showed no awe of the Catholic hierarchy and no reservations about the wisdom of separating church and state. “There is nothing inconsistent,” he wrote me in 1959, “about believing in the separation of church and state and being a good Catholic—quite the reverse….I don’t believe there is…[any] conflict between being a Catholic and fulfilling your constitutional duties.” A priest, angered by his answer at a Catholic girls’ school that “recognition of Red China was not a moral issue,” asked him, “Senator Kennedy, do you not believe that all law comes from God?” The Senator snapped back, “I’m a Catholic, so of course I believe it—but that has nothing to do with international law.”

Although he was born to money and did not hesitate to spend it, he had no special interest in accumulating more of it. He had nothing in common with those wealthy individuals who were indifferent to the needs of others. He consistently voted—on oil and gas issues, for example—against his own (and his father’s) pocketbook. His father had never pressed him or any of the Kennedy brothers to follow in his financial footsteps. Having never had to think about money, the Senator often left Washington without it, and would reimburse me for tabs I picked up in our travels. It is said that in his first campaign for Congress his mother, relating her son’s talents to a Boston cab driver, found herself presented with a $1.85 fare bill he had run up in that very cab earlier in the campaign because he had no cash with him. Instead of assuming the life of ease which was clearly open to him, Jack Kennedy forced himself physically and mentally to enter successively more difficult levels of political and governmental activity.

His closest friends covered a wide social range, and no one ever thought him a snob. Although he once expressed astonishment that I would ride a streetcar home, he never drove the most expensive car, and returned, with regrets, to the dealer a flashy white Jaguar his wife gave him for Christmas in 1957. They lived in a fashionable but unpretentious house and avoided the Washington cocktail circuit to an unusual degree. Both strongly preferred small groups of friends to large crowds.

The Senator never wore a ring, a diamond stickpin or any jewelry other than an ordinary watch and tie clasp. All his government salaries—as Congressman, Senator and President—he donated to charity, roughly half a million dollars. His political campaigns, while costly, avoided the kind of lavish display (such as billboards, full-page advertisements or telethons) that might provoke charges of excess. But he was not ashamed of the fact that his father’s wealth had enabled him to present himself for public office without being financially dependent on powerful pressure groups. On the contrary, he regarded his own good fortune as an obligation: “Of those to whom much is given, much is required.” And he asked his wife to save for his files this passage from Albert Einstein:

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received.

Jack Kennedy loved Boston and Boston loved Jack Kennedy, but he was always more than a Bostonian. Like many lovers they rarely lived together. He was born in the Boston suburb of Brookline. He was brought up in his more formative years in Bronxville, New York, where his father had moved the entire family in the belief that an Irish Catholic businessman and his children would have less opportunity in Boston. The Senator’s parents had voted in Florida since he was a child. He spent his summers at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod. When he launched his first campaign in 1946 as a shy, skinny, twenty-eight-year-old candidate for Congress in Boston’s hard-boiled Eleventh District, from which James Michael Curley was retiring, he knew almost no one in the city except his grandfather; and he relied on friends from his student and Navy days, whether residents of Massachusetts or not, to supplement the efforts of his family and their political contacts. Except for two very brief stints as a newspaperman, his entire working career was centered largely in Washington, D.C.

Even during those years in the House and Senate when he was concentrating on service to Massachusetts, he was more of a national figure. He never owned a house in Boston as he did in Washington. Although as a Congressman and Senator he maintained a voting residence in a somewhat plain and faded apartment building at 122 Bowdoin Street across from the Massachusetts State House, he was rarely there when not campaigning. The fact that several other Kennedys—and their families—for a time claimed the same three-room apartment (No. 36) as their voting address was a source of some amusement and sometimes irritation to local politicians. “If he’s elected President,” one was reported to have said, “he’ll be the first carpetbagger voter to get to the White House.” From time to time, prior to his 1958 re-election, the Senator considered buying a house in Boston, but since his winters were spent in Washington, New York and Palm Beach, he settled instead for a summer home on Cape Cod.

As a Senator from Massachusetts, he did not insist that his professional staff members come from the state they would be serving and studying. In fact, he preferred that they did not. “That way,” he told me, “if they don’t work out, I’m under no political pressure or obligation to retain them.” He was, however, amused that his assistant on New England’s economic problems came from Nebraska; and he once suggested, when I was to represent him at a Massachusetts businessmen’s dinner, that I tell anyone who asked that I came “from West Hyannis Port. No one at the dinner will be from there.”

We had different ideological backgrounds, and most of the professional liberals were slow to warm to him. But I found that he was the truest and oldest kind of liberal: the free man with the free mind. He entered Congress, he freely admitted, with little or no political philosophy The aggressive attitudes of many “professional liberals” made him “uncomfortable.” But he was not opposed, as he wrote me in the fall of 1959,

to the liberal credo as it is generally assumed. You are certainly regarded as a liberal and I hope I am in the general sense, but we both speak disparagingly of those doctrinaire “liberals” …who are so opposed to me…. The word “conservative” has many implications with which I do not want to be identified. “Restrained” is more exact. I know too many conservatives in politics with whom I have nothing in common.

Kennedy had seen that many devotees of the left as well as the right could be rigid and dogmatic in their views, parroting the opinions of their respective political and intellectual leaders without reflection or re-examination. His own vote, in contrast, was not tied to the vote of any other Senator or group of Senators or to the wishes of any private individual or group.

The most formal statement of his political credo was in his 1960 address to the Liberal Party of New York:

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas…. Liberalism…faith in man’s ability…reason and judgment…is our best and our only hope in the world today.

He said this and he believed it. But he had not written it and did not naturally speak of his philosophical outlook in such grandiloquent terms. He usually summed up his place on the political spectrum in simpler ways:

A Northern Democrat with some sense of restraint.

A moderate Democrat who seeks to follow the national interest as his conscience directs him to see it.

A practical liberal…a pragmatic liberal.

When asked which kind of President he hoped to be, liberal or conservative, he replied, “I hope to be responsible.” Perhaps his wife summed him up best as “an idealist without illusions.”

As Senator, candidate and President, his tests were: Can it work? Can it help? And, often but not always: Can it pass? He could grasp the essence of a complex subject with amazing speed, and his natural instincts were almost always on the progressive side of an issue. But his natural caution required him to test those instincts against evidence and experience. This realistic emphasis on the possible induced critics and commentators to describe him as a pragmatist, which for the most part he was. But he had a strong streak of idealism and optimism as well. To be reminded by daily disappointments that he lived in an imperfect world did not surprise or depress him, but he cared enough about the future of that world never to be satisfied with the present. Indeed, in his campaign and in the White House, his analyses of conditions in his country and planet consistently began with those four words: “I am not satisfied…”

HIS GROWTH

For the most part, all the foregoing would serve to describe him in 1963 as well as 1953. But he was not the same man. For no attribute he possessed in 1953 was more pronounced or more important than his capacity for growth, his willingness to learn, his determination to explore and to inquire and to profit by experience. He was always interested in a new challenge or competition. He had a limitless curiosity about nearly everything—people, places, the past, the future. Those who had nothing to say made him impatient. He hated to bore or be bored. But he enjoyed listening at length to anyone with new information or ideas on almost any subject, and he never forgot what he heard. He read constantly and rapidly—magazines, newspapers, biography and history (as well as fiction both good and bad). At times, on a plane or by a pool, he would read aloud to me a paragraph he found particularly forceful. After taking the time while a Senator to enroll in a speed-reading course in Baltimore with his friend Lem Billings and brother Bob, he could read twelve hundred words a minute. More amazing was the accuracy with which he remembered and applied what he read.

Consequently he was always learning and growing. When one of his grammar school teachers retired in 1963, he sent her a wire stating that he had thought of returning for a refresher course in mathematics, “but the rigors of self-education in Washington” made it impossible. In my daily contacts with him, the many changes which this growth and self-education produced rarely seemed pronounced; but looking back over the little less than eleven years in which we worked together, I can see that he changed in many ways—and that he was more than eleven years older.