Chapter One Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity John F. Kennedy and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. had much in common. Both graduated cum laude from Harvard and published books advocating greater military preparedness for democracies in the era before World War II. Both entered newspaper journalism but gave up the profession to pursue public office. Each volunteered for combat duty during World War II and were decorated for heroism on the battlefield, Kennedy in the South Pacific and Lodge in Europe. They were tall, handsome men born and reared in an atmosphere of wealth and privilege, coming from families with distinguished political pedigrees. While the two men had many similarities, they nevertheless differed in some critical aspects. Lodge, fifty, was fifteen years older than Kennedy and had a personality that best can be described as cold and aloof. "He wasn't the type of person you approached too easily," a 1952 campaign aide, James Sullivan, recalled. "He had a gracious manner, a certain remoteness.... He wouldn't put his arm around you and say, `Let's go out for a beer,' or something like that. No way." Though something of a loner himself in private life, Kennedy was more friendly and outgoing in public. "He had that marvelous quality of making you feel that you were his special friend," remembered Camman Newberry, a longtime Kennedy associate who, ironically, was Lodge's 1952 administrative assistant. "Now there's the mark, I think, of a real true politician in the best sense of the word." Whereas Lodge was the product of a centuries-old, tradition-laden Yankee lineage, Kennedy was only two generations removed from Irish immigrant status. "The Kennedys might be of Boston society," journalist Fletcher Knebel once shrewdly observed. "The Lodges were Boston society." The difference was not insignificant. While the Lodges encountered little difficulty in joining the best social clubs or vacationing at the most exclusive summer resort towns, the Kennedys for many years struggled to achieve full social acceptance. They were Irish Catholic and, as such, had to contend with the traditional prejudices that had predominated against their culture and religion for decades. "I was born here," Joseph P. Kennedy complained. "My children were born here. What the hell do I have to do to be an American?" Years later John Kennedy would echo his father's sentiments when he told a close friend that no Irish Catholic could ever belong to the Somerset Club, a traditional stronghold for Boston's Brahmin class. "If I moved back to Boston even after being President, it would make no difference," he said. On the surface, both candidates over several years had maintained cordial relations with one another. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and onetime Kennedy family confidant Arthur Krock, Kennedy even looked upon Lodge as his "ideal" for a public servant, when he was studying government at Harvard and Lodge was a first-term U.S. senator. As a freshman congressman, he continued to be respectful of Lodge and once even reprimanded an aide for making a tactless comment about the Republican while in the latter's presence. "I made a faux pas," remembered former Kennedy staffer William "Billy" Sutton. "I said to [Lodge] that day, `Well, I see the day I think that we'll be chasing you down these dark alleyways [on Capitol Hill] for your seat.' Jack got very mad at me. He said, `You shouldn't have said that. He's a nice guy.' I said, `It's politics and you'll run against him.'" The young Democrat's respect for Lodge also spilled over into legislative matters. When he needed a Senate cosponsor for a bill he was introducing in the House to aid Latvian refugees, he turned to Lodge for help. "If you could see your way clear to reintroduce the companion bill in the Senate, I shall be most grateful," Kennedy wrote the Republican lawmaker. "I will be only too happy to sponsor a Senate bill on behalf of the Latvian refugees which would be a companion bill to the one which you are sponsoring in the House," came the reply. Similarly, Lodge was not deficient in showing his own respect for Kennedy. As senator, he publicly lauded Kennedy for his reported heroics as a PT-boat commander in the South Pacific during World War II. "I think of Lt. Jack Kennedy of Massachusetts, son of our former Ambassador to Great Britain, whose PT-boat was cut in two by a destroyer, who drifted [eighteen] hours on the hull, and finally reached a small island," Lodge remarked in a July 7, 1943, speech that was later published in the Congressional Record . "Every night that young man would swim out to the channel, and, supported by his life preserver, would signal with a flashlight all through the night to attract the attention of an American boat. He finally succeeded, and thus, by means of his brave conduct, the other members of his crew were saved." Lodge also proved solicitous of his future political opponent in times of personal tragedy. When Kennedy's second-oldest sister, Kathleen, the widow of British nobleman William Hartington, the duke of Cavendish, died in a plane crash in the spring of 1948, the Republican lawmaker was quick to send off a warm letter of condolence. "This letter is for your family as well as for yourself personally and seeks to express some of the very deep sympathy which I feel for you all in the death of your sister," Lodge wrote Kennedy. Despite such overt gestures of cordiality, there were times that Kennedy and Lodge did not see eye to eye politically. One glaring example involved the Taft-Wagner-Ellender Housing bill, which was designed to provide low-cost housing for returning veterans of World War II. Kennedy, who strongly supported the measure, became privately incensed when Lodge helped bottle up the legislation in Senate committee. "So I don't think that Jack had much love for Lodge, I mean political love," Billy Sutton claimed. Lodge also had several dealings with Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. over the years, one of which occurred in 1938 when the then newly appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James approached him about a scheme to do away with the traditional practice of presenting American debutantes to the king and queen. The senior Kennedy had privately complained that the practice was personally degrading and detracted from his duties as ambassador. Between them, the two Harvard graduates devised a plan, whereby Lodge agreed to write a letter to Kennedy formally asking him to arrange a presentation for a local debutante. Kennedy, in turn, agreed to write back to Lodge saying that such an arrangement would be impossible given the heavy demands of his position. Lodge would then make Kennedy's letter public and announce his enthusiastic endorsement of the ambassador's decision, thus ensuring positive publicity for both figures. Everything went according to plan except for the last part. Kennedy's letter rejecting Lodge's request was somehow leaked to the press before Lodge had a chance to respond. While Kennedy received praise within American and British circles for ending an archaic ritual for the socially ambitious, Lodge became the "goat" of the affair. "To his chagrin, the senator was put in the pos-ition of being soundly rebuked by the Ambassador," a Boston Post editorial later commented. Though no final determination has ever been made concerning the origin of the press leak, Kennedy bristled at suggestions it came from him. "I quite agree that Cabot was against the idea of presentations, but the facts are not quite as you present," Kennedy wrote Post city editor Edward J. Dunn, "and my own belief is that there wasn't any attempt to make him a goat, but there were leaks in America that embarrassed the whole situation." If Lodge felt Joseph Kennedy had been the orchestrater of his public humiliation, the Massachusetts Republican never let on. In 1942 he accepted an undisclosed amount of financial help from the elder Kennedy in fending off a challenge by New Deal congressman Joseph E. Casey of Canton for a second Senate term. "I was quite active in the fall campaign," Kennedy noted cryptically to a friend a few months after the election. Kennedy had given the aid as a result of a personal falling-out he had with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He felt the Democratic president had largely ignored him as ambassador to Great Britain because of his isolationist views. Moreover, Kennedy resented how Roosevelt preferred bypassing him in communicating important diplomatic messages to the British Foreign Office. Since Casey was Roosevelt's hand-picked candidate of choice, Kennedy thought it would be satisfying from the standpoint of personal revenge to see the New Dealer go down in defeat. At first Kennedy tried to torpedo Casey's campaign by running his seventy-nine-year-old father-in-law, John F. Fitzgerald, the former mayor of Boston, against him in that fall's Democratic primary. But when Casey beat back Fitzgerald's challenge, 106,000 to 82,000, Kennedy turned his attention and considerable checkbook to Lodge. Regardless of the underlying motive, Lodge did not seem to forget the Kennedy family patriarch's generosity. When Kennedy evinced an interest in the late 1940s in becoming a member of the Hoover Commission, a bipartisan body charged with recommending ways to reorganize the executive branch, Lodge intervened successfully on his behalf. "I feel that you know that I am very appreciative of your interest in having me named to this Commission," Kennedy wrote Lodge. "It was a very nice thing for you to have done and I am grateful for your thought." Little did Lodge know that this would be the last political favor a Kennedy would ask of his family. By the eve of 1952 the battle lines were being clearly drawn between the two famous political clans. At stake was not only Lodge's Senate seat but also the honor of two families. Did Kennedy possess the necessary political skills to, as his mother would later say, "even the score" with the Lodges? This issue dominated political discourse in Massachusetts over the next twelve months. "Two households, both alike in dignity," an irreverent newspaperman wrote of the looming clash, while quoting the opening lines of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet . Yet it took more than dignity to win in politics, and Lodge's Democratic challenger fully understood this fact. His life's experience did not permit him to think otherwise. John F. Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts, the second oldest of nine children of Irish Catholic parents. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was a Harvard-educated business entrepreneur on his way to making the first of many millions on Wall Street and in Hollywood. His mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, was the daughter of former U.S. congressman and Boston mayor John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, one of the most colorful Irish American politicians of the early twentieth century. Although he once claimed in an interview to have been raised in a "real third rate district" (in actuality, Brookline was an upper-middle-class community), John Kennedy did not lack for any material comforts growing up. Indeed, he dressed in the finest clothes, attended the best schools, and was driven around town by a chauffeur. Emotionally, his needs were tended to by his mother. "She's not as forceful as my father," he later recalled, "but she was the glue." If Kennedy fell ill or needed a shoulder to cry on, Rose would invariably be there for him providing comfort and good cheer. "She was deeply religious, highly devout," he explained. "She wasn't interested in politics so much [but she] was interested in things like the Pilgrims' landing at Plymouth Rock, things like that." While Rose's influence was unquestionably strong, it still did not compare to that of Joseph P. Kennedy, whom many regarded as the "architect" of his children's lives. Proud, ambitious, overbearing, and unscrupulous, the "Founding Father" exerted a "savage domination" over his sons and daughters. "I don't think you can have nine children in a house without there being some rigid authority," John Kennedy later commented, "and I think my father supplied that. But not unnecessarily so, and I think it did us all good." Not everyone agreed with this assessment. "He disciplined Jack like a Jesuit," complained Boston friend Norman MacDonald. "When the father was around, Jack couldn't invite any of his friends he wanted to their summer home in Hyannis Port. He had to submit a guest list and schedule to his father, and could invite only people who were useful." Viewing his children as extensions of himself, Joseph P. Kennedy sought to instill in them a burning desire to succeed. "The father particularly laid it on hard trying to make the boys, and the girls, excellent in something," Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas later recalled, "whether it was touch football, or tennis, or boating, or something else." Sometimes the emphasis on competition bordered on the extreme. When his eldest son, Joe Junior, lost a sailboat race one summer, his father ordered a new mainsail be made that was nine inches longer than the rules of competition allowed. The notion of fair play did not enter into the equation. All that mattered was Joe Junior winning his next race. "For the Kennedys," Joseph Kennedy once said, "it is the castle or the outhouse--nothing in between." This obsession with winning stemmed from a deep-seated sense of personal frustration. Barred from entering Brahmin society on account of his Irish Catholic heritage ("When are the nice people of Boston going to accept us?" his wife asked an aquaintance), the elder Kennedy vowed his children would be accepted into elite circles. To this end he packed up his family and moved them to toney Riverdale, New York, in an attempt to "show" his supposed Brahmin betters he needed neither their acceptance nor approval. Not satisfied with having his children receive a public school education, he sent them off to select boarding schools where they could rub elbows with other sons and daughters of the rich and famous. If there was a model for what Joseph Kennedy wanted his children to become, one could look no further than Joe Junior. Tall, handsome, athletically gifted, and smart, the eldest son represented the "best and the brightest" of the Kennedy clan. In him Joe Senior invested all his hopes and dreams. "Joe [Junior] was the one," recalled a family friend; "he was always the anointed politician. Always." In contrast, John Kennedy was the proverbial runt of the litter. Thin, bookish, and sickly, the future president of the United States did not cut a particularly striking figure. "He was too slight, too frail, too brittle to make the varsity in any contact sport," recalled one prep school instructor. "He tried them all only to wind up with broken fingers, wrists or ankles or whatever. Through both school and college he was frustrated by his failure to measure up to his older brother, but he never stopped trying." More times than not, however, these efforts proved unsuccessful. "My brother is the efficient one in the family," young Jack conceded, "and I'm the boy who doesn't get things done.... If my brother were not so efficient, it would be easier for me to be efficient. He does it so much better than I do." To compensate for these perceived shortcomings and carve out his own sense of identity, Kennedy became something of an "archetypal rebel." At Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, for instance, he specialized in having fun and antagonizing the school's administration. "Well, I have two things to do," complained headmaster George St. John to Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. "One to run the school, another to run Jack Kennedy and his friends." Indeed, so unruly did Kennedy's behavior become that he came within a hair of being permanently expelled. The precipitating incident involved the formation of a clandestine student prankster group known as the Mucker's Club. So named for the term St. John used to describe undisciplined boys, the group flourished on the all-male campus, threatening even to surpass the popularity of the football team. "Why were we so devilish?" remarked one member. "Maybe we didn't like to be structured. Each of those guys had a pretty darn good sense of humor. Jack had a very, very keen wit. We just liked fooling people.... We were just nonorganization in some ways." Concerned that the "Muckers" were undermining his authority as headmaster, St. John rounded up the club's ringleaders, including Kennedy, and proceeded to inform them that they were no longer welcome as students at the school. "I don't blame him," remarked "Mucker" Maurice Shea years later. "He thought we were not quite the boys he wanted to have the stamp of Choate on." Only through the timely intercession of Joseph P. Kennedy, who reportedly made a generous financial contribution to the school, were the future Massachusetts politician and his friends able to avoid expulsion. "If that crazy Mucker's Club had been mine," the eider Kennedy told his son, "you can be sure it wouldn't have started with an M." Despite such levity, Joseph Kennedy was disturbed enough by the affair to pen his son the following warning: "Don't let me lose confidence in you again because it will be pretty nearly an impossible task to restore it--I am sure it will be a loss for you and a distinct loss for me." Thus chastened, John Kennedy spent the remainder of his Choate career staying out of trouble and improving upon his mediocre academic record. Still, he could not resist the temptation of pulling off one final prank. As class elections got under way, he convinced friends to stuff enough ballot boxes on his behalf to become "Most Likely to Succeed." Upon graduation from Choate in 1935, Kennedy entered Princeton University, but a hepatitis attack forced him to leave the school after only six weeks of classes. By attending the prestigious Ivy League institution, the former "Mucker" had hoped to escape the shadow of his older brother, Joe, who had become a star student athlete at Harvard. It didn't work out that way. News of his brother's triumphs continued to reach him at Princeton, thanks to letters from old Choate schoolmates and family members. "I always had the problem of my older brother," he later admitted to biographer James MacGregor Burns. Determined to match his brother's success, Kennedy gave in to pressure from his father to matriculate into his alma mater. "Jack," Joseph P. Kennedy wrote a Harvard dean at the time, "has a very brilliant mind for the things in which he is interested, but is careless and lacks application in those in which he is not interested. This is, of course, a bad fault." As if to prove his father's point, the younger Kennedy spent most of his freshman year pursuing the two activities he enjoyed the most: socializing and playing football. While he could hold his own against his brother in the former, he did not stand a chance against him in the latter. "Joe was physically more rugged," remembered Torbert MacDonald, Kennedy's Harvard roommate and later a U.S. congressman. "Jack played [junior varsity] offensive end and was a very good pass receiver. He had great desire, wanted to play very much, but his physical makeup was not that of an end who could block tackles which in those days were the biggest defensive linemen that the opponent ever had. His greatest success was in catching passes, shall we say." Indeed, it wasn't until his sophomore year that Kennedy's intellectual curiosity became aroused. Although his grades showed scant improvement, he began to read more and ask questions about the world around him. "I don't know what to attribute it to," he later told a journalist. "No, not professors. I guess I was just getting older.... It was during my junior year that I went to England for six months, which meant taking six courses as a senior and hard work. I had to work like hell." He took a semester off and went to England with his father, the ambassador to the Court of St. James appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt. FDR had made the move on strictly political grounds; he wanted to shore up support within his Irish Catholic constituency. This cold reality did not appear to bother the elder Kennedy, however. "The office," surmised historians David Burner and Thomas R. West, "would make him the social superior of Boston's `best people'; it was an achievement by which one generation of Kennedys could extend the reach of the next." The Kennedys did, in fact, for a time become the toast of London society, and while young Jack shared in the excitement of the seemingly endless rounds of embassy parties and royal galas, he spent an equal amount of time familiarizing himself with the problems that would soon plunge the Continent into World War II. "It was a great chance to go because it was certainly Europe on the eve," he later told an interviewer, "and the tempo was heightened because of it. It was a great opportunity to see a period of history which was one of the most significant." What he observed in Europe was later incorporated into his senior thesis, "Appeasement at Munich," which earned him magna cum laude honors. The 150-page study, an analysis of the reasons why British prime minister Neville Chamberlain "appeased" German leader Adolf Hitler at the Munich Conference of 1938, placed heavy emphasis on the role public opinion played in determining national policy. Arguing that the overwhelming pacifist sentiment of the country forced Chamberlain to make unwise concessions to the Nazi dictator, he proceeded to exonerate the British leader of any blame. He concluded that the Munich Pact, which pledged British acquiescence to Germany's seizure of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, was inevitable given the conditions of democratic government. Although there were some reservations about the quality of the writing, Kennedy's thesis advisor, Henry A. Yeomans, determined that, on the whole, the work represented "a laborious and intelligent discussion of a difficult question." Pleased by his son's effort and the thesis's mirroring of his own sympathetic attitude toward Chamberlain, Joseph P. Kennedy sent a copy to Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Arthur Krock of the New York Times . Finding the author's argument persuasive, the longtime Kennedy family friend recommended the work be refashioned into a book. "I was an editor, an advisor," Krock later admitted to Kennedy biographer Clay Blair, "and I may have supplied some of the material as far as prose is concerned, but it was [Kennedy's] book. So we got it published and you know the rest." Retitled Why England Slept , a clever take on Winston Churchill's widely acclaimed While England Slept , the book soared to the top of most national best-seller lists. But things were not as they appeared. Fearing poor book sales would reflect badly on his son's budding literary reputation, the elder Kennedy clandestinely purchased hundreds of copies to give the impression the work was a runaway success. "You would be surprised how a book that really makes the grade with high-class people stands you in good stead for years to come," the ambassador wrote his author-son. After his graduation from Harvard in June 1940, John Kennedy spent the next year and a half largely adrift and unfocused. He enrolled at Stanford University in California to do graduate work in business and political science, but the slow pace of academic life bored him. Putting aside his studies, the wealthy Ivy Leaguer spent most of his time visiting popular beachfront hideaways and dating socially eligible Stanford coeds. Only occasionally did the outside world intrude upon his thoughts. That occurred in December 1940, when his father sought his advice on a radio speech he intended to give on American neutrality. A staunch isolationist and defeatist ("I'll bet you five to one--any sum--that Hider will be at Buckingham Palace in two weeks," he once told an aide during this period), the now former ambassador sought to keep America out of World War II. Although he had expressed support of his father's isolationism as a college undergrad, even going so far as advocating "considerable concessions to Hitlerdom" in an unsigned Harvard Crimson editorial, John Kennedy had in the interim experienced a political transformation. Reasoning that a triumphant Nazi Germany in Europe would endanger the security of the entire Western Hemisphere, the future commander in chief urged his father to back policies aimed at militarily propping up a besieged Great Britain. "We should see," he wrote, "that our immediate menace is not invasion, but that England may fall--through lack of our support." Adhering to his son's advice, Joseph P. Kennedy came out in favor of the Lend-Lease Act, which empowered the president to sell or lend defense materials to Britain and her allies. When American entry into the war became more likely in 1941, John Kennedy decided to sign up for military duty. Again, as was the case with his decision to enter Harvard, sibling rivalry played a key role. Envious of his brother Joe's acceptance into the prestigious U.S. Naval Aviation program, the ex-ambassador's son tried to enlist in both the army and navy, but a bad back brought on by an earlier football injury convinced service officials that he lacked the physical health to be inducted. Unwilling to see Joe Junior have a monopoly on all the military glory, he got his father to arrange for a second navy physical, this time with a friendly doctor the elder Kennedy knew. The ruse worked; he passed the examination without difficulty and received an ensign's commission in the U.S. Naval Reserves. Several weeks later, while returning from a regular Sunday morning touch football session with friends, he heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. His life, as well as the lives of millions of other Americans, would never be the same. Kennedy's naval career began with an unglamorous desk job at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C. His assigned duties involved preparing a daily intelligence bulletin for the secretary of the navy and other top officials. "We never dealt in anything higher than `secret,'" remembered one contemporary, "and if we had code-breaking information, it came to us disguised, so we didn't know its source." Bored by the tedious work, the junior officer persuaded his father to "pull strings" and get him transferred to sea duty. Freed from the drudgery of intelligence work, Kennedy entered midshipman's school at Northwestern University, where he signed up for patrol torpedo boat duty. Otherwise known as PT-boats, these small but maneuverable craft had gained considerable publicity at the start of the war for whisking General Douglas MacArthur off to safety during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. Lured by the hype, Kennedy, along with several other Ivy Leaguers with sailing or yachting experience, could not resist the temptation of commanding so glamorous a vessel. Assigned to the Solomon Islands of the South Pacific, the now lieutenant junior grade got more action than he could have reasonably expected. On the night of August 1, 1943, Kennedy's boat, the PT-109, was sliced in two by a Japanese destroyer while on a routine patrol in the Blackett Strait. "How it felt?" the junior officer later mused. "I can best compare it to the onrushing trains in the old-time movies. They seemed to come right over you. Well, the feeling was the same, only the destroyer didn't come over us, it went right through us." Two crewmen lost their lives in the crash while another, forty-one-year-old machinist Patrick McMahan, was badly burned. Thrown into the sea by the impact of the collision, Kennedy cajoled the surviving thirteen members of his crew into swimming to a nearby atoll about three and a half miles away. "I have nothing to lose," he told them, "but some of you have wives and children, and I'm not going to order you to try to swim to that shore. You'll have to make your own decision on that." With Kennedy leading the way, all of his men arrived safely on the deserted atoll. "During the week we spent on the island," he later recounted, "the men never beefed as they did when a request for going to town in the states was refused them. I never could praise them enough." The feeling was mutual. "Kennedy was the hero," remembered crew member Charles "Bucky" Harris. He "saved our lives. I owed him my life. If it wasn't for him I wouldn't be here--I really feel that." What prompted such praise was the extent to which Kennedy was willing to place his own life at risk for the sake of his men. In a desperate attempt to signal a passing PT-boat, the young lieutenant swam out to an island passage with a blinking lantern in one hand. "In the first place," recalled a fellow survivor, "it was a hell of a long way out to the passage. He'd go out there and float. Now in my mind if the boats had seen a light in the water, they'd have blown the light out of the water!" After several failed attempts, including one in which his men had given him up for dead, the former Harvard athlete stumbled across some friendly natives who agreed to alert Allied authorities about the whereabouts of him and his crew. The now legendary message he gave them to deliver was written on the husk of a green coconut and read as follows: "NAURO ISL NATIVE KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT II ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY." In the immediate aftermath of his rescue, Kennedy tried to downplay any talk of being a hero. "None of that hero stuff about me," he curtly informed one reporter interviewing him about the incident. "Real heroes are not the men who return but those who stay out there like plenty of them do, two of my men included." His reluctance to see himself in this light was understandable. Though he displayed great courage and personal leadership in keeping his men together following the sinking, he had nonetheless showed questionable command judgment in allowing his ship to be sunk in the first place. Indeed, he had only one of his three engines engaged when the Japanese destroyer was spotted, making escape a highly unlikely prospect. "Kennedy," a naval commander later remarked, "had the most maneuverable vessel in the world. All that power and yet this knight in white armor managed to have his PT-boat rammed by a destroyer. Everybody in the fleet laughed about that." Such ridicule, however, did not prevent Joseph P. Kennedy from successfully lobbying Undersecretary of the Navy James Forrestal into awarding his son the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for valor. "Unmindful of personal danger," Forrestal's citation read, "Lieutenant Kennedy unhesitatingly braved the difficulties and hazards of darkness to direct rescue operations, swimming many hours to secure aid and food after he had succeeded in getting his crew ashore." Picking up on this heroic theme, the New Yorker magazine commissioned future Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey, a personal friend of the Kennedy family, to write about the PT-109 affair for a mid-1944 issue. Entitled "Survival" and later republished in a condensed form for the more widely circulated Reader's Digest , the article depicted John Kennedy in Hemingwayesque terms: "He thought he had never known such deep trouble.... His mind seemed to float away from his body. Darkness and time took the place of a mind in his skull. For a long time he slept, or was crazy or floated in a chill trance." For his part, the now famous junior officer felt uncomfortable about such embellishment. When he became president two decades later, he confided to a friend that the entire PT-109 episode was "more fucked up" than his efforts to unseat Fidel Castro in Cuba. To put the incident behind him, Kennedy took command of another vessel, the PT-59, before back troubles and a bout with malaria sidelined him permanently from active duty. It was while recovering from these ailments that he learned of his older brother Joe's death in a top secret mission over the skies of Europe. The news extracted a tremendous emotional toll on himself and his family, in particular Joseph P. Kennedy, who had previously informed anyone within earshot that he fully expected his eldest son to become president of the United States someday. "You know," the ambassador wrote an acquaintance, "how much I had tied my whole life up to his and what great things I saw in the future for him. Now it's all over." Following his discharge from the navy in 1945, John Kennedy briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist. Taking advantage of his father's friendship with conservative newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, the twenty-six-year-old war veteran landed a special correspondent's job with the Hearst-owned Chicago Herald American . Though he was a cub reporter, his family connections were such that he received one of the paper's choice assignments, covering the charter conference of the United Nations in San Francisco. While stylistically flat and redundant, his U.N. dispatches nonetheless showed flashes of a lively intellect. "There is an impression," he wrote, "that this is the conference to end wars and introduce peace on earth and good will towards nations--excluding, of course, Germany and Japan. Well, it's not going to do that." Citing Russian fears of a "German comeback" as the main obstacle to peace, Kennedy argued that it would be naive to think the ruling communist regime would not shore up its European borders as a hedge against another invasion. "They feel they earned this right to security," he concluded. Although he found newspaper work intellectually stimulating, Kennedy could not shake the feeling he was but a mere observer of great events. "He told me," recalled personal friend and journalist Charles Bartlett, "that the reason he decided to get out of the newspaper business was that he felt it was not effective; he wanted to be in something more active." Indeed, politics appeared to offer the kind of "effective" public involvement he was looking for. With the encouragement of his father, who privately relished the idea of his son's picking up the political torch for his fallen brother Joe, Kennedy began casting about for a public office for which to run. His opportunistic gaze eventually fell upon a U.S. House of Representatives seat in the Eleventh Congressional District of Massachusetts, a predominantly working-class Irish and Italian area that embraced Cambridge and portions of East Boston, Charlestown, Somerville, and Brighton. What made the seat so attractive to Kennedy was the fact that his Democratic family already had a well-established political base there, thanks largely to John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, who had represented the district in Congress at the turn of the century. (Continues...) Copyright © 2000 Thomas J. Whalen. All rights reserved.
