CHAPTER SIX

BOBBY

All this business about Jack and Bobby being blood brothers has been exaggerated. They didn’t really become close until 1952, and it was politics that brought them together.

—Eunice Kennedy Shriver

By 1951, Jack Kennedy’s ambition was clear. He wanted very much to reach the Senate. Three times voted in, he’d proved himself an independent Democrat, an ardent anti-Communist, and he had been an efficient, if sometimes detached, steward of constituent services. Based upon his performance and popularity in such a heavily Democratic district, the House seat could have been his for life.

His chance at the Senate would arrive the following year when Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a Republican, came up for reelection. The only problem was that Governor Paul Dever, having already served two terms himself, was also considering a job change. If Dever chose to take on Lodge and run for senator, Jack’s only option would be to declare for the State House. Whichever happened, he’d definitely decided he wasn’t going to stay put. Thus, in January 1951, he gave Tip O’Neill a heads-up.

“I’ve decided not to run for a fourth term in the House,” he told him. “I don’t yet know whether I’ll run for the Senate or governor, but you can be sure of one thing: my seat will be open. I won’t be making any announcements for at least another year, so don’t tell a soul. But in case you have any interest in running, I wanted to give you a head start.”

Getting ahead in politics generally requires solving a pair of equations, the first being the availability of an office that matches the politician’s ambitions. The other is finding the right person to run the campaign. While waiting for Paul Dever to make his decision, Jack got a lead on meeting the second challenge.

Here’s how it happened: In September, Kennedy set off on a seven-week fact-finding trip to the Far East. America was at war in Korea, Asia presented the premier foreign-policy front, and the issues presented by foreign policy continued to be his primary interest. The trip would have the added merit of establishing in voters’ minds his firsthand experience. However, as the trip was being planned, a family issue arose, casting a slight shadow over it. The problem was pressure from his father to take along his younger brother Bobby. Jack’s reaction was that his sibling, eight years his junior, would be nothing but a hindrance, a “pain in the ass.”

While Jack had been a warm, loving brother to both Joe Jr. and Kathleen, still missing them terribly, he had yet to form close ties with the younger members of the family. At the time, Bobby struck him as a very different sort from himself, a far more churchy guy, a straight arrow who spent most of his time trying to impress their father with his dutifulness. But rather than Bobby’s presence being an annoyance, the opposite turned out to be true. Spending their first ever quality time together, they managed to surprise each other.

As Jack traveled with his brother all the way from Israel to Japan—from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea, stopping in India and Indochina—what they found deepened his own longstanding fascination with foreign policy. But the circumstances they encountered also opened the eyes of both men to the sparks of postwar nationalism beginning to catch fire in each country they visited. While Jack admired the nobility of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the French military commander he met in Hanoi, for instance, he sensed the war he was fighting was “foredoomed.”

More important than any other knowledge Jack gained over the course of their journey was the strength of heart he discovered in Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy—and the extent of his brother’s love for him. The evidence came during a moment of mortal peril when Jack, thousands of miles from home, suffered a frightening new episode of his Addison’s disease. The younger brother more than rose to the occasion, showing his guts under pressure and also his resourcefulness. He got things done.

As Jack was flown from Tokyo to a U.S. military hospital in Okinawa, Bobby never left his side, keeping watch over him as his temperature rose to 106 degrees and he became first delirious, then comatose. It looked like he was dying, and for the second time he was given the last rites.

The upshot of this latest brush with death was a memory an older brother would be unlikely to forget. Where Jack had once seen only the puritan, he now recognized the protector.

Back home, Jack Kennedy once again focused on his quest to leave the U.S. House of Representatives behind. In his mind he was already out of there, and even began disparaging the 435 members as “worms.” He’d had it with the House. He’d already begun spending weekends campaigning statewide, and the map hanging on the wall of his Bowdoin Street apartment was starting to be thickly covered in pins. Those were Dave Powers’s markers indicating where a speech had been made or where his boss had shared a coffee with a significant political leader.

The time had come to face the big challenge. For him, running for governor in ’52 would only be a connecting flight to the next destination. Chuck Spalding could see his friend’s determination. Eventually, “if he was going to get anywhere, he’d always have to be able to beat somebody like Lodge . . . So, I think, he made the decision, ‘I’ve been long enough in the House. It’s time for me to move ahead. If I’m going to do it, I’ve got to take this much of a chance.’ “ Pitting himself against Henry Cabot Lodge—now and not later—had overwhelming appeal. Above all, it showed audacity, a quality that ranked high with Jack.

On December 2, 1951, Kennedy made the admission, rare for a politician, of personal ambition. He did it during an appearance—his first—on NBC’s Meet the Press. The moderator had wasted no time zeroing in on the hot political rumor buzzing through the Bay State.

Lawrence Spivak:	When I was in Boston last week, I heard a good deal of talk about you. There were many who thought that you would be the Democratic nominee for the senatorship against Henry Cabot Lodge. Are you going to run?
Jack Kennedy:	Well, uh, I’d like to go to the Senate. I’m definitely interested in it. I think most of us in the House who came in after the war—some of them have already gone to the Senate, like George Smathers and Nixon and others, and I’m definitely interested in going to the Senate, and I’m seriously considering running.

But, to anyone paying attention, it was obvious it wasn’t just the intramural rivalry of his ’46 House classmates driving him. His thinking about matters beyond the scope of the typical House member, his grander notions, were in every way a part of who he was, of who he had become.

The mind of Jack Kennedy, in fact, was already busy with the big picture. He’d been traveling the world since his teens. He’d witnessed Britain and Europe up close in the late ’30s, he’d fought in the war and come back to see the depressing events in postwar Europe and Asia. He’d honed a personal sense of what was wrong with U.S. influence abroad.

On his trip to the Far East, for instance, he’d had an eyewitness look at the predicament of France trying to hold on to its empire after World War II, against the local resistance to colonial power. What he saw was the overriding strength of the Vietnamese people’s desire for independence.

“You can never defeat the Communist movement in Indochina until you get the support of the natives,” he explained in a speech on his return, “and you won’t get the support of the natives as long as they feel that the French are fighting the Communists in order to hold their own power there. And I think we shouldn’t give the military assistance until the French clearly make an agreement with the natives that at the end of a certain time when the Communists are defeated that the French will pull out and give this country the right of self-determination and the right to govern themselves.”

He also articulated that Sunday morning a strong critique of the way America represented itself overseas. On that same Meet the Press, Spivak quoted back to Kennedy a remark he’d made about our diplomats being “unconscious of the fact that their role was not tennis and cocktails but the interpretation to the foreign country of the meaning of American life.” Is this something, he wanted to know, Kennedy had seen for himself?

“I think something ought to be done about it. I think there are a lot of young men interested in going into the Foreign Service. I don’t know where they get a lot of the ones I saw. I think we’re not getting the representative, well-rounded type of young man to go to the Foreign Service that we should as a rule. . . . I was up at a college in Massachusetts two days ago, speaking, and I asked, out of five hundred students how many would be interested in going into the Foreign Service, and a surprisingly large number raised their hand. What I think is that they’re not getting young men who are well-rounded, who are balanced, and who are what we like to think of as representative Americans.”

This call to service for young Americans—especially as they might affect the developing world—marked the beginning of an idea that, a decade later, inspired the country. It was one of many emblematic ideas evolving in his mind even now.

That trip to the Far East had been a confidence builder. Upon his return, Jack had shared what he learned with the voters. It was a repeat of his performance in 1946 as he’d entered the political arena. Back then he’d talked mainly of his experiences in the Pacific Theater, along with the need to prevent another war like the one just ended.

Since then he’d grasped, both instinctively and intellectually, the central importance of nationalism in the new world order and how it would affect Great Power relationships, most crucially those between the United States and the emerging Communist monoliths of Russia and China. What he witnessed, and also deeply understood, was the way that people struggled to free themselves from foreign control. It was a fight that Kennedy, the Irishman and Mucker, could feel in his genes.

He was discovering his ability to absorb complexity. In understanding the dangers facing his country, he saw, too, the role he might play. He had a mission now. To survive the Cold War, his country must grasp its nature. If he could get to the Senate, he might change history.

Despite his resolve to move forward, come what may, Jack began 1952 still unsure which office he would now seek or who’d help him win it. He’d spent four years traveling the state, decorating the map with those pushpins, hitting small towns that statewide Democratic candidates rarely visited. But still he needed an organization that could deliver the vote. He needed people.

The very first recruit to the cause was Lawrence F. O’Brien, with whom Jack had earlier been friendly down in Washington and now got in touch with to see if he’d come on board. When Jack met him, O’Brien was on the staff of another Massachusetts congressman, Foster Furcolo. Before taking that job, he’d worked in his family’s cafe and bar in Springfield. Well connected in Democratic politics in Springfield, he’d served as manager for three of Furcolo’s campaigns.

One day on Capitol Hill, the two of them, Jack and Larry, had dinner, during the course of which O’Brien declared he’d had enough of Washington. Perhaps he’d also had enough of Furcolo. He was heading home.

At a later meeting in Boston, Kennedy asked him to help out with his own effort in the Springfield area, and O’Brien agreed. But it took a strong-arm play by his former boss to complete O’Brien’s transition to Kennedy loyalist. O’Brien had agreed to set up a public meeting for Kennedy, only to have Jack get word from Furcolo that Springfield was his turf and he wanted it called off. Jack replied, too bad, he intended to go ahead as planned and Furcolo would just have to live with it.

Larry O’Brien was impressed. The son of Irish immigrants whose dad was a local Democratic leader, he saw Jack Kennedy as a new kind of Irish politician, virtually the antithesis of the typical Democratic pol from Boston. “Republicans were respectable. Republicans didn’t get thrown in jail like Jim Curley,” O’Brien would write, describing the divide between the two parties as it had long been. The thing was, Jack Kennedy was “respectable” in a whole new style. And what O’Brien, a seasoned strategist, saw was how Jack Kennedy could win votes, especially in the Boston suburbs, that the Democrats had been losing because of the dishonesty of scoundrels like Curley.

“But Jack Kennedy was different. If the Yankee politicians had their snob appeal, so did the Kennedys. Those suburban sons and daughters of immigrants might not say ‘I’m a Democrat,’ but I hoped they could be brought to say, ‘I’m for Jack Kennedy.’ “

To O’Brien, his new ally, Jack made the extent of his ambition clear. Pointing at the Massachusetts State House from the window of his Bowdoin Street apartment, he put it this way: “Larry, I don’t look forward to sitting over there in the governor’s office and dealing out sewer contracts.”

In aiming high and refusing to be satisfied with even the governor’s job—when what he wanted was to be a senator—Jack was showing how much his ambitions paralleled his father’s. Joe Kennedy refused to settle for what his fellow Boston Irish regarded as good enough achievement, an upper-middle-class level of success. Joe wanted more—and allowed nothing to stand in his way. In his own words: “For the Kennedys, it’s either the castle or the outhouse.”

Besides O’Brien, the other key recruit joined the team as a result of Bobby Kennedy’s intervention. In February 1952, Bobby got in touch with his college roommate Ken O’Donnell, suggesting he join the campaign effort. “He called me and said Jack was going to run, had not decided for what, but he was going to run.”

Ken O’Donnell was a hybrid—a middle-class Irish guy who’d gone to Harvard, but whose dad had been the legendary football coach at Holy Cross. Raised in Worcester, he was both town and gown. In World War II, he’d served in the Army Air Corps based in Britain and flown more than thirty missions over Germany as a bombardier, often in the lead plane. During the Battle of the Bulge he was forced to crash-land between German and Allied lines. But his most harrowing exploit came when he’d had to climb down and kick loose a bomb stuck in the doors. He’d ended up hanging on to the plane for dear life—certainly a strong memory to carry into one’s postwar career, and also a character-building one. His football career at Harvard only added to his appeal. On all counts, Ken O’Donnell was the kind of guy Jack Kennedy could admire and, eventually, trust.

At their first meeting to discuss the job, just five days after the call had come from Bobby, Jack was put off by O’Donnell’s questioning of him. The problem was that Ken had asked him which office he actually wanted to run for, a reasonable enough question for a prospective campaign worker. Jack didn’t like it. One reason was that he didn’t know the answer. But Ken O’Donnell was just the kind of guy Jack needed to win, no matter his place on the ballot.

At home in Harvard Yard and on Soldiers Field, O’Donnell was equally at ease with those “lace-curtain” Irish who’d gained wealth and social self-esteem. Yet he knew, too, the working class with all its awe of pedigreed Yankees like Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and its entrenched resentment of the lace-curtain types. He knew the be-grudgers, those Irish who made a specialty of hating those who either had a leg up on them or acted as if they did. Winning Ken O’Donnell’s steadfast loyalty, which he soon did, was one of Jack Kennedy’s crowning lifetime achievements.

Ken recognized Jack’s voter appeal long before he went to work for him. “He started getting our attention because he made statements and did things that weren’t the norm for politicians in Massachusetts. When he didn’t sign Curley’s pardon petition, it didn’t mean much in terms of the position, but it meant something to my generation. We quietly watched . . . and here was a guy who bore some watching. Frankly, his money had something to do with it. He was wealthy, so he could be independent of the political machine. They can’t crush him the way they can somebody else, because he has both the money to stand up to them and the guts to tell them to go to hell. He was one of us. He is a veteran. He has had enough. He can afford to take them on.”

“Them” was personified by the name Henry Cabot Lodge. And, to illustrate exactly the weight that name once carried in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, consider this famous bit of doggerel penned by a Holy Cross graduate:

In the land of the bean and the cod,

The Cabots speak only to the Lodges,

And the Lodges only to God.

The current Henry Cabot Lodge was the grandson of the first Henry Cabot Lodge, who’d beaten Jack Kennedy’s grandfather John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald for the U.S. Senate. He was the Republican who’d successfully crushed Woodrow Wilson’s struggle to establish the League of Nations following World War I.

In 1936 his grandson, at the age of thirty-four, assumed the ancestral Lodge seat. Then, in 1942, the younger Lodge joined the U.S. Army and served gallantly in North Africa while remaining a senator. His outfit won the distinction of being the first American unit in World War II to make ground contact with the German army. When President Roosevelt ordered that men serving in both the military and the Congress make a choice between the two roles, Lodge left the army in 1942. But after winning reelection that year, he chose to give up his seat to rejoin the army, the first senator to do so since the Civil War.

As a lieutenant colonel, Lodge distinguished himself in Europe by once single-handedly capturing a four-man German patrol. He was decorated with the French Légion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre. At the end of the war, he served as liaison officer and interpreter in the surrender negotiations with German forces. In 1946, he ran for the Senate again, now a handsome war hero come back to serve the people. As such, he drew extraordinary respect, especially among the Irish, who usually voted Democratic. He was viewed by them as a man of the people, a man’s man, a strong-jawed Yankee who was a regular enough guy to come have a beer at the local bar. Though times were changing, such condescension still went over well. Lodge was the kind of high-standing Brahmin the Irish looked up to.

Ken O’Donnell understood that Senator Lodge was more than the well-born patrician, more than just his name or his family tree. He recognized the reality of Lodge’s very genuine accomplishment, returning from the war and in ’46 beating Senator David I. Walsh, a powerful Democratic fixture on the state’s political scene for nearly half a century. “Lodge, killing off Walsh, became the giant of Massachusetts politics. He had a good organization, excellent staff, and he was honest. Lodge was everything people wanted in a politician.”

By early 1952, Lodge was a major figure in national Republican politics. He would soon be an even greater pillar of the party. It was he who, sticking his neck out, asked General Dwight David Eisenhower, formerly supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and now supreme commander of NATO, to run for president. When Ike rebuffed his proposal, Lodge went on Meet the Press and promoted the idea publicly. With the general’s quiet support, he soon accepted the job of Eisenhower’s campaign manager, entering him in the New Hampshire primary. When his candidate beat the Ohio senator known as “Mr. Republican,” Robert A. Taft, in that momentous contest, Lodge had not only pulled off a considerable coup, but was now the closest advisor to a five-star hero headed for the White House.

Mark Dalton, a good friend to Jack whose speechwriting ability was his greatest asset, had been the official “campaign manager” for that first congressional run in 1946. More a pipe-smoking intellectual than a tough, savvy strategist, Dalton was once again nominally in charge of what was happening, but with no title and no real power. Unfortunately, he possessed none of the organization-building or tactical skills necessary to get up and running the sort of statewide campaign now called for. Besides that, he was absolutely incapable of mustering the strength to withstand the meddling of Jack’s father, the nature of whose influence—he was paying the bills—could never for an instant not be dealt with. And this was a job that needed doing.

For all his wily self-made rich man’s shrewdness, the estimable Joseph P. Kennedy lacked political sense. Good at making money, he had little or no gift for democracy. He thought you got your way in this world by cozying up to people at the top, and bossing everyone else. His notion of putting together an effective campaign team was to get a squad of old political hands together and then start barking orders. That was no playbook for winning elections, certainly not the one against Henry Cabot Lodge.

Therefore, the first thing O’Donnell—whose political grasp was instinctive—looked to accomplish once he signed on to Jack’s effort was to get the old man’s hands out of the pudding. And not just that, but from the instant he arrived on the scene, he recognized an even bigger issue, which was that nothing had been done, throughout those early months of 1952, to build a statewide organization that could ever hope to come together to unseat the formidable incumbent. What was deadly clear to O’Donnell was the extent to which the two problems were intertwined.

No one had the nerve to stand up to Joe Kennedy when it came to naming Kennedy “secretaries” across the state. O’Donnell recalled: “I said to Dalton, ‘Look, we need to name a secretary or leader in each community to be a Kennedy man, and then that person can form committees and set up events, but we can’t be sitting in this office.’ “ Soon, Ken would conclude that Dalton simply was “too nice to be in politics.” But that wasn’t the same as solving the problem.

Jack himself could not make up his mind. He wouldn’t fire Dalton, but at the same time he wouldn’t give him the authority to do the job, not even the title. If Dalton was too weak, and he, O’Donnell, too much the newcomer, then who was there around who’d be able to short-circuit Joe Kennedy’s meddling, to talk back to him and keep him on the sidelines? Only one man seemed to fill the bill, O’Donnell concluded: his old roommate, Bobby.

Bobby, O’Donnell knew, understood how to gain his father’s approval, for the simple reason that he’d spent his young life doing it. It was a task that Jack, who kept his distance from his father and was always wary of him, couldn’t manage. By being the good son, Bobby had earned and could now cash in on his father’s trust. If Jack was to win this election, the question of bringing in Bobby would have to be answered. And soon.

The date for Jack’s big decision was April 6. That’s because Governor Paul Dever had scheduled that date to announce which job he was running for. Would the governor think he might be able to beat Lodge, or would he decide to play it safe and seek a third term?

Joe Healey, Jack’s Harvard tutor, went with Kennedy when he was summoned to the meeting with Dever, which took place at the grand old Ritz-Carlton across from the Boston Public Garden. “We arrived at the Ritz about three o’clock, went to a room, and waited. Governor Dever had a topcoat on, and he said—and I think these were his exact words—‘Jack, I’m a candidate for reelection.’ And Jack said, ‘Well, that’s fine. I’m a candidate for the Senate.’ “

There were many factors joining together to favor Jack Kennedy’s Senate run in 1952.

A keen observer, Jack saw it was now the case that, whatever they’d felt previously, Irish voters could now express pride, and not resentment, when called upon to identify with their most socially and financially successful family. His own personal charm had a great deal to do with how the Kennedy name resounded. So did all the countless hours he’d put into meeting voters and making them feel that a connection had been made and that he was, really, one of them.

The Kennedy “teas” were a smart combination of old and new. A novel concept, they served to boost awareness of Jack’s senatorial campaign, and at the same time create followers who would then, they hoped, turn into volunteers. The official hosts at the kickoff tea would be the former ambassador to the Court of St. James, the Honorable Joseph P. Kennedy, and his wife, Rose. After all, everyone knew the pair of them had spent time in London among the English. Why wouldn’t they want to hold a “tea” to meet and greet the people of Massachusetts?

Thus, Kennedy’s background, rather than his party, became the major element in his attractiveness to voters. What worked splendidly was the way the teas bridged the obvious gap. The invitees were excited and pleased to be there—working-class and middle-class women alike. It proved a brilliant strategy for claiming the majority of voters.

Across the state, Jack’s attractive sisters Eunice, Pat, and Jean hit the hustings for him as they had in Cambridge six years earlier. Everywhere these events took place, Jack Kennedy came off as the kind of aristocratic Irishman that the public enjoying the cakes and cookies hadn’t seen before—one of theirs, and yet the perfect challenger, well matched against the elegant Henry Cabot Lodge.

As David Powers would note, one basic truth about these receptions was that here was an invitation turning up in mailboxes amid envelopes normally filled only with bills. Finding themselves requested to come have tea with the Kennedys left many of the recipients astonished—and pleased. For the first tea held in his gritty hometown of Worcester, Ken O’Donnell made certain the invitations went out—specifically—to regular Catholics, rather than “lace-curtain” ones.

Here’s his description of that afternoon: “It was a beautiful day. He was on crutches. He walked in and the room came to a halt. Everyone stared. He walked in and took over, and every one of those people just had hands on him, wanted to shake his hand and touch him. This little Italian lady was wearing a new dress and hat and gloves she paid $100 for and she could not get to him fast enough. They weren’t the hoity-toity rich, they were the hardworking poor of Worcester, but today, this day, they all looked hoity-toity, all dressed to shake the hands of that young congressman and his family. The place was packed, lines out the door. You could not move. Packed. I knew then, ‘We’ve got something going here. This guy, he’s got it.’

“He spoke, shook every single person’s hand in the room. He was on crutches, and, by the end, it was clear his hand was swollen—and it was evident to me he was in pain, real pain. I remember being concerned about him. It was the first time I realized he had substantial health issues. I hate to say it, but I was concerned, also, from a political standpoint. I realized there was something more to his health problems and I was wondering what it was. I also was wondering whether you can elect a candidate who has to be on crutches all the time.

“He wasn’t well known in Worcester. He hadn’t spent a lot of time in Worcester, and hadn’t gotten any good press in Worcester. It was something different. I wouldn’t have gone, myself, and I didn’t think my mother would go, but she was there. I was shocked to see her and all her friends. Shocked. I had never known them to bother with politicians. Then, I just knew.

“You’re talking two or three thousand people on a Sunday who came out to meet him. They went through the line once and they’d go back again, then shake his hand again, then just stop and watch him, just watch him. They would not leave. Nobody would leave until he left, and even after he left they all just stood there in awe. It was just that I had never seen anything like it. I just felt this guy could go all the way.”

In fact, the very visible strains of his physical infirmities caused Jack Kennedy—greeting voters as he stood there on crutches—to resemble distantly, and despite his wealth, a character like Dickens’s Tiny Tim. His simple fortitude compelled people to root for him. When X-rays taken of Jack’s spine in 1951 showed the collapse of support bones in his spinal column, it could hardly have been surprising to anyone who spent time with him, especially out on the road. Charlie Bartlett, who joined him on some of these trips, remembered Jack keeping a stiff upper lip through it all. “I must say, he always had a sort of stoic, sociable quality about it. He’d drive all over that damn state. With that back it must have hurt like hell, and he’d sit there with the coat collar up and drive through those cold Massachusetts evenings.”

But even though Ken O’Donnell was now convinced Jack might actually have a very good shot at winning against the formidable Lodge, what was still needed was someone to run the show. “The whole operation had degenerated into a three-ring circus, with Joe Kennedy coming in once in a while disrupting things, Jack showing up only rarely, and nothing getting done the minute he left.” Somebody had to play middleman.

“I knew the Kennedys well enough by then to know the only one who can talk to the Kennedys is a Kennedy. It took a Kennedy to take on a Kennedy. I knew Bobby was the only one with enough sense, who was tough enough and a regular enough guy to run the campaign. He’d be the only one able to turn to the father and say, ‘No, Jack won’t do it.’ “

At this point Ken made his move. He phoned Bobby and laid it on the line, all but demanding he drop everything and get up to Massachusetts to run his brother’s campaign. Otherwise, Jack was going to have his butt handed to him. Bobby hated what he was hearing, for the understandable reason that he wanted to build his own career as a Justice Department lawyer and thus his own life. But he could hear his friend’s argument, knew it, probably, even before he heard it. Someone had to broker matters between his dad and Jack. He was the one—the only one—to do it, and do it right.

Now that Bobby seemingly was willing to leave his job and come run the campaign, there was the problem of selling Jack on the idea. O’Donnell recalled the scene in the car when he and his boss went head to head on it. The truth was, Jack didn’t like hearing Ken had talked to Bobby without going through him first, but, at the same time, and despite his irritation, he saw the point.

First, Jack sounded off. He, above all, seemed stunned to learn that there’d been any lack of action on the part of his people. As O’Donnell remembers the tongue-lashing, Kennedy couldn’t believe they hadn’t begun naming local secretaries across the state. “As far as I’m concerned, this moment you can go ahead and begin. I’m not interested in the nuts and bolts of who’s going to run what. That’s the job of the organization and not the candidate.”

But, after he’d finished giving O’Donnell a taste of his anger, he’d also obviously talked his way into a decision. Ken O’Donnell had won. “That was the day that Bobby decided he would move to Massachusetts. Bobby, as I recall, went back to get his own personal affairs in order, and then he came up.”

Mark Dalton had seen it coming. Though he had his own law practice, he’d been volunteering time for Jack’s political career, mainly writing speeches, ever since the victorious ’46 race. He’d now given up his practice and come to work full-time for the congressman. It was a change in status, from friend and unofficial counselor to paid aide, and it would matter.

For him, the decisive incident occurred at a meeting at a social club in Fall River. As he made to leave, Kennedy had to pass the bar, where was parked a convivial trio “feeling no pain.” The men garrulously corralled Kennedy. Dalton, ignoring the candidate’s plight, had continued alone to the parking lot.

It was the wrong move. Jack wasn’t happy. “He got in the car, turned around, and stuck his finger in my belly,” Dalton recalled a half century later. “ ‘Don’t you ever let that happen to me again.’ ” Now he got the picture. “I was to take care of him with drunks. I was his caretaker, his bodyguard. That son of a bitch! Right in the belly! ‘Don’t you ever’!”

Jack’s rough treatment of his old pal was a sign of something off-kilter in the relationship. For him, the problem with Dalton wasn’t about getting waylaid by the Fall River drunks; rather, it was about the campaign, his father, and the way things felt stalled. The final moment for Dalton came at a meeting where Joe Kennedy tore into him for leasing a new campaign headquarters without his permission. “He didn’t like the building,” O’Donnell remembered. “He thought we’d paid too much for it. He didn’t like the owner. He thought the location was bad, and they had a great brawl about it.”

When Jack refused to stand up for his campaign manager, Dalton had no choice except to quit. Bobby made the gesture of trying to soften the blow by asking him to stay on as speechwriter, but Dalton left the office that day with his belongings and never returned. “I decided that I could no longer play a role in the Kennedy campaign in view of the feeling which had developed. I wrote John a little note saying I was through and then I told him that I was through.” Listening to him so many years later, it was obvious that Dalton never got over the way he’d been discarded.

Once Bobby arrived, he began working eighteen-hour days to get the campaign workers focused and up to full speed. “I didn’t become involved in what words should go in a speech, what should be said on a poster or billboard, what should be done on television. I was so busy with my part of it that I didn’t see any of that.” Most important, when he moved in, their father moved out.

This was, just for the record, not Bobby Kennedy’s first involvement in a Jack Kennedy campaign. He had a talent for organization. In the ’46 race, as a twenty-year-old, he’d asked for the toughest area, East Cambridge, territory loyal to the former Cambridge mayor Mike Neville, Jack’s strongest opponent, Tip O’Neill’s candidate. But Bobby took it slowly, laying the groundwork, spending time playing softball with the kids of the neighborhood, killing the notion that the Kennedys thought themselves superior. His brother ended up doing better in that community than anyone had expected.

Bobby enjoyed one advantage over Jack, and it had to do with their attitude toward Joe. While his brother was stubborn in his dealings with their father, Bobby was respectful and needy for love. This created a smooth relationship, even if one layered with guile. He proved to be the essential cog in the Kennedy machine. No one else could have done what he was now doing. There he was, having left his job in Washington, working all out in the campaign, using his father’s resources—money and public-relations clout—to produce the maximum impact where it counted, on the hearts and minds of the Massachusetts voters. Charlie Bartlett remembers listening to Bobby on the phone with the senior Kennedy. “Yes, Dad,” Bobby kept repeating, “Yes, Dad.” However, he wasn’t taking orders; rather, he was pacifying. Where Jack always took their dad with a grain of salt and didn’t mind letting him know it, the younger Kennedy boy never treated him as less than the paterfamilias.

It was now May and the election was six months away. Out in the field, Larry O’Brien was helping the cause by building the organization from the ground up, one Kennedy “secretary” at a time. What this meant, at a very basic, very significant level, was the creation of a totally different political network from that of the regular Massachusetts Democrats. “Our secretaries were making weekly reports to me, and they were growing more sophisticated from week to week. . . . For a long time neither Lodge nor the Democratic regulars realized what we were doing.”

At their April 6 meeting at the Ritz-Carlton, Governor Dever had made it clear that Jack was going to have to build his own organization. Meaning, if he chose to go up against Lodge, it was his show, for he wouldn’t be getting any help from Dever, who had his own race to run. But such a challenge also suited the Kennedy people. They wanted solid loyalty from their people, no confusion about which candidate mattered most.

For me, Ken O’Donnell personified the old brand of politics, which the Kennedys were customizing on a family basis. From the moment he signed on, he had one vocation: helping and protecting John F. Kennedy. And right now, in the summer of 1952, his value lay in his ability to grasp and use the reality of post–World War II Massachusetts, the world he knew. As a man who’d lived between Worcester and Cambridge, between Holy Cross and Harvard, he had a natural understanding of those voters Jack Kennedy needed to pry away from Lodge. They were folks whose parents were loyal Democrats, while they, this new generation, reserved the right to cast their ballot candidate by candidate.

What Jack Kennedy was trying to do, helped by O’Donnell and others, wasn’t going to be easy. They were trying to outflank Lodge, a moderate Republican, from the right and the left. In other words, Kennedy had to come off as both a tough Cold Warrior and a work-and-wages Democrat—which is precisely what he’d spent six years being. This allowed him to strike at his rival from the right for not being aggressive enough on foreign policy and from the left for not being sufficiently on the side of the average family struggling to make ends meet; that is, for not being a Democrat. It was a pincer move that was to work well again in a later Kennedy campaign. The strategy is to bash an opponent on both sides until you force him to go both ways to avoid the very charges you’re making against him. The voter sees the targeted rival being pulled apart by his own hands.

Kennedy set his people digging for weak spots in Lodge’s record. “Lodge was always on the popular side of every issue, which didn’t necessarily make him an awfully good statesman, but might make him a satisfactory politician,” Jack told Rip Horton. To prepare for the planned bombardment of Lodge, Ted Reardon, who’d been Jack’s top aide on the Hill, began assembling an inventory of his voting on the issues. This carefully documented loose-leaf binder, each page covered in sheer plastic, was soon dubbed “Lodge’s Dodges”—or, more irreverently, the “Bible”—and it provided the ammunition for the coming all-out assault.

Joe Healey, Kennedy’s speechwriter, found himself impressed by Reardon’s attention to Lodge’s every word, tracking down every discrepancy. “The major credit belongs to Ted Reardon for certainly one of the most thorough jobs in this area I have ever seen.”

From this point on, the campaign’s operating structure quickly fell into line. Bobby, as the campaign manager, decided where the money went. This is always the supreme power that comes with that title. “Any decision you wanted, Bobby made,” O’Donnell recalled. “If you were talking about spending two hundred bucks to do such and such, Bobby would say, yes, go ahead, and that was it.”

The Kennedy Party, as it continued to grow, was the perfect model of a volunteer operation. Those who came to work for Jack found themselves making a personal investment in the candidate’s future, resulting in a campaign of relationship rather than transaction. In this sense, it wasn’t about political payoffs, at least not in the business-as-usual way. Anyone who walked into a Kennedy headquarters was, right off the bat, given a task to do. His people knew the best method of earning and toughening loyalty was by quickly getting a newly interested citizen onto the team. Before you knew it, you were a “Kennedy person.”

What happened, as in 1946, was that word would start to spread that a member of this family or that friend or neighbor was “working for Jack Kennedy.” It made the campaign a kind of cement, ever expanding its hold. You pretty much wanted to take part. It was as simple as that for many people. And so the organization built on itself.

To enforce this, Bobby Kennedy repeatedly made it clear to one and all that there were to be no paid campaign workers. No exceptions. One local political veteran who’d supported Jack’s campaign in ’46 would learn the hard way that the campaign manager this time around wasn’t about to be messed with. Here’s Ken O’Donnell’s account of what happened when that fellow failed to take the hint:

“ ‘How much money is the candidate going to give us to spend in our district?’ this guy called out at a meeting. When Bob Kennedy ignored him and kept to the order of business, the man then stood up and cut Bobby off. ‘Listen, kid, we’ve been around a long time, we know politics. You’re wet behind the ears and you’d be better off in Washington than here, where you don’t know what you are doing. You’ve got to pay these people; you want campaign people out working for you, you got to pay them, and you can afford it. The Kennedys are rich.’ Bobby just stared at him. Then he got up, grabbed him by his collar, and showed him the door—and, as he was throwing him out in the street, he told him, ‘Would you mind getting lost . . . and keeping yourself lost.’ “

When the troublemaker appealed his case to Jack, Bobby didn’t like it one bit. “Look, you get one guy like that crying, then you have to pay him and his volunteers to work. Then other people hear about it, and then they want to be paid to volunteer, and then we’ll end up spending a million dollars in Boston alone. I’m not going to have him around. You asked me to run this campaign. I didn’t want to, but now I’m here, so I will run it my way.”

Jack was actually tougher than his younger brother. When Governor Dever began to worry that he was going to lose his race and saw Kennedy gaining strength, he offered to combine forces. Joseph Kennedy liked the idea; O’Brien and O’Donnell didn’t. Jack agreed with his people, refusing to be Dever’s life preserver. He gave Bobby the job of delivering the decision to his father and Dever both. “Don’t give in to them, but don’t get me involved with it,” were the instructions. The older brother was becoming a hard-nosed, un-sentimental politician. Bobby’s role was to play the part of one.

From the beginning, the teas that started it all proved to be an excellent recruiting platform. As O’Donnell was to explain, “Nobody went to one who didn’t fill out a card. We had them in every community, and . . . they allowed our organization to get going and to get our secretary in action.” They became competitive events. “When Lowell had four thousand, Lawrence had to have five thousand. So the secretary had a great incentive.”

Hugh Fraser, one of Jack’s British friends visiting at the time, was impressed by the novelty of these occasions, referring to them as “shenanigans.”

“The ‘tea party’ technique amazed me,” said Fraser, who’d never seen anything of its kind.

Anyone who organized a tea was required to provide a quota of signatures for Kennedy’s nomination papers. Only 2,500 signatures statewide were required for a candidate in the Senate primary, but Dave Powers and Larry O’Brien had decided that they’d ask the regional organizers to produce a grand total of 250,000. The reason, according to O’Donnell, was not just “psychological”; it was also a way to have a quarter-million voters not only committed but actively participating in the early stages, before the real fight started up in the general election campaign. Too, it was a gauge to help them figure how the organizers were performing and which ones were particularly effective.

The teas were aimed at winning the hearts of the working class, and also as a means of identifying and organizing the Democratic voter base. But equally crucial was the need to go after those Irish and other traditional Democratic voters who’d drifted away and might very likely stay drifted with the popular Ike as the Republican candidate.

It had been customary for statewide Democratic candidates in Massachusetts to expend their major effort in the larger cities, where most of their voters lived. In other words, they counted heavily on Boston. Jack Kennedy, instead, went out and methodically hit every neighborhood, including the largely Republican suburbs, ignoring the toll this relentless, unsparing, but extraordinarily effective effort to reach voters took on his physical well-being.

O’Donnell figured that Jack Kennedy could pull votes in small suburban communities where no other Democrat might. “We appreciated the fact that there were an awful lot of Democrats throughout the state, in those small towns, who’d moved out of Boston and out of the big cities into these small communities, had bought their own homes. They were Democrats, but ashamed of some of the antics that had been associated with the party.” He saw these as potential Kennedy people.

Here again, Kennedy had gotten traction from his early start in places off the standard grid for Democrats. “We’d be in those homes—in the homes with seven or eight people, who’d remember having coffee with Jack Kennedy in 1947 or ’48,” said O’Donnell.

The Second World War had changed a great deal in American life. In the Northeast, as elsewhere, the Irish and other ethnic groups were seeing beyond the old boundaries, and didn’t want to be the pawns of the big-city political bosses. They wanted the fresh air of the suburbs, the freedom of making up their own minds at election time. Many had gone to college under the GI Bill. They no longer felt confined by the politics of the old neighborhood. “Boston” meant a certain kind of old politics, and a sort they were only too happy to leave behind. This sense of the shifting times was definitely an idea the Kennedy campaign made skillful use of.

As election day approached, Tip O’Neill, facing no real opposition in the general election, got a call asking him to lend a hand. He was to be Jack’s stand-in at an election-eve radio broadcast. Tip’s script from Kennedy headquarters arrived just minutes before air-time. It “kicked the living hell out of Henry Cabot Lodge,” O’Neill would recall, to his chagrin. Senator Lodge, who spoke next, was outraged by what he regarded as an ambush, and told O’Neill’s wife, Millie, “The Kennedys would never give a speech like that for him. And I would never say the things about Jack Kennedy that he was saying about me.”

Lodge had a far bigger problem. Throughout the course of the campaign he’d been greatly distracted by his efforts, begun the year before, to promote Eisenhower. This had earned him the bitter hostility of Republican voters steadfastly loyal to Ike’s opponent for the nomination, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, “Mr. Republican.” Here Joe Kennedy saw his opportunity. He convinced the pro-Taft publisher of the New Bedford Standard-Times to reprint in full the glowing Reader’s Digest article on his son’s PT 109 exploits, then to break ranks and endorse the Democratic candidate, young Jack Kennedy, outright. When Jack went on the attack, criticizing Lodge’s absenteeism from the Senate, the newspaper dutifully repeated those charges in its editorials. Next, when Lodge countered by citing Kennedy’s own poor voting record, the Standard-Times refused to publish the information.

To gain the endorsement of the equally conservative Boston Post, Joseph P. Kennedy got out his checkbook to write its pliable publisher a loan for $500,000. About this episode, Jack would later joke that for him to win his Senate seat his father had to “buy a fuckin’ newspaper.”

To pound home Lodge’s weakness among Taft Republicans, Jack accused him of being a “100 percent” supporter of Truman’s appeasing administration policy in China and the Far East.

But if Lodge was overly committed to Eisenhower’s candidacy, Jack Kennedy was undercommitted to Adlai Stevenson’s. He simply could not disguise his lack of faith in the Democratic presidential nominee, and, after having breakfast with him at the 1952 Democratic National Convention, Kennedy complained about his encounter to a friend, “Well, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know why I allowed myself to be railroaded into that. That was an absolutely catastrophic breakfast.”

“What happened?” asked his listener.

“Well,” Jack explained, “practically nothing happened. As I saw it, he was looking at me and he knew that I didn’t really think he was the best candidate. He knew that I knew that he knew.”

The one man who might possibly have saved Lodge’s bid for reelection refused to help. When an S.O.S. came from Lodge’s campaign asking Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy to come to Boston and make a speech on behalf of the incumbent senator, McCarthy demurred. He told the conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., in whose Connecticut home he was staying at the time, that Lodge had always opposed him. Young Jack Kennedy, on the other hand, he counted as a covert supporter. McCarthy even told Buckley he’d made the Lodge people a counteroffer he knew would surely be refused. “I told them I’d go up to Boston to speak if Cabot publicly asked me to. And he’ll never do that; he’d lose the Harvard vote!”

Richard Nixon, meanwhile, had been put on the ballot as the Republican nominee for vice president, Ike’s running mate. It was a skyrocketing leap for a congressman who’d gone to Washington the same year as Jack. The latter was gracious in a handwritten note. “Dear Dick: I was tremendously pleased that the convention selected you for V.P. I was always convinced that you would move ahead to the top—but I never thought it would come this quickly. You were the ideal selection and will bring to the ticket a great deal of strength. Please give my best to your wife and all kinds of good luck to you.”

The Kennedy campaign, meanwhile, presented its own man as every inch an anti-Communist crusader as any Republican. When Adlai Stevenson made a campaign stop in Springfield, Massachusetts, Sargent Shriver—who was an employee of Joe’s in Chicago and would marry Eunice Kennedy the following year—sent him a very pointed note. “Up there, this anti-Communist business is a good thing to emphasize.”

Sarge Shriver also let it be known, in a briefing paper, exactly what the Kennedy people wanted the Democratic presidential candidate to say about the local boy when speaking on his behalf. Stevenson should say it was Kennedy, not his Republican colleague from California, Richard M. Nixon, who’d been the first to expose Communists in organized labor. He “was the man . . . that got Christoffel . . . not Nixon.”

The pitch was legitimate. Earlier in the year, Jack had attended an anniversary dinner of the Spee, his Harvard club. There, one of the speakers told the gathering how proud he was that their college had never produced “a Joseph McCarthy or an Alger Hiss.” Kennedy jumped from his chair. “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” he exclaimed, and left the dinner early.

The Kennedy family’s close association with Joe McCarthy wasn’t an asset everywhere in the Commonwealth. In fact, it hurt him badly with one particular community. Jewish voters had reason enough to question the younger Kennedy’s attitudes, given his father’s record of unveiled anti-Semitic comments and sentiment. Now the senior Kennedy once more expressed himself outrageously and stirred up the problem anew. When a campaign aide passed around a proposed statement attacking McCarthyism, Joe Kennedy went wild. “You and your . . . sheeny friends . . . are trying to ruin my son’s career.” Although Jack tried to assure the campaign worker, who was not himself Jewish, about his father, the episode became notorious.

Senator Lodge saw an opening. His campaign began distributing literature spotlighting a report by Herbert von Dirksen, who’d been the last German ambassador to Great Britain before World War II. In it the author recounted Joseph Kennedy’s support for Hitler’s prewar actions against the Jews. Lodge then recruited Congressman Jacob Javits of New York, a Jewish Republican, to come and speak to a large Jewish gathering in Mattapan. In his talk, Javits stressed repeatedly that Jack was “the son of his father.” As Tip O’Neill remembered the event, “He didn’t have to be any more explicit.”

But Javits, one of the smartest national legislators of his era, also had an indictment of Jack personally. Publicly critical of President Truman’s spending policies, Kennedy had voted for a House amendment to cut back foreign aid. While the measure dealt with the overall Middle East spending package, the reduction affected Israel, too. Despite Kennedy’s out-front backing for the creation of the Jewish state and his recent visit to the country, Javits’s attack stung. As O’Neill told the story, it took Majority Leader John McCormack himself to damp down the fire by spinning it that Kennedy had voted a “token” reduction of U.S. aid to Israel in order to save it from a larger cut. It was a simple case of a respected politician—McCormack was known as “the Rabbi” for his strong support of Jewish concerns—looking out for a fellow Democrat.

The father’s reputation, nastily earned as it was, would always be a problem for Jack. As Ken O’Donnell himself noted, “You can’t stop a whispering campaign if it’s true.” If Jack could never adequately defend his father’s attitudes, he certainly didn’t share them. He knew that Jewish fears were legitimate. “They have problems you don’t know anything about,” he’d remind O’Donnell.

His health, too, continued to be an issue he could never ignore. In October he made the mistake of sliding down a fireman’s pole in Everett, Massachusetts, an impulsive act that worsened the state of his already weakened back. “He was in intense pain towards the end of the campaign,” his aide John Galvin recalled. “I’m convinced that there were times when he was walking around almost unconscious.”

Despite such all too real medical handicaps, which couldn’t be disguised, the boyish Jack continued to win fans. That summer of 1952, three hundred Capitol Hill news correspondents had voted Congressman Kennedy of Massachusetts the “handsomest” member of the House. In order to capitalize on this perception, Jack proceeded to sign up for a special course offered by the CBS network on how to use the new medium of television to best advantage; it was a savvy move, since, by then, about half the households in the country owned a set. This habit of self-improvement was a pattern he continued, going on to take other courses in subjects ranging from speed-reading to public speaking.

On November 3—the eve of Election Day—General Eisenhower, the Republican candidate for president, ended his national campaign in Boston. Ahead in the polls, he was completing his march to the American presidency bearing tribute to the man who’d led him to the fight, the noble Henry Cabot Lodge.

“ ‘It looks like Eisenhower’s going to win easily,’ “ Torby Macdonald recalled telling Jack as the ballots were being counted the next night, “ ‘but I don’t think that necessarily means it’s going to affect you in Massachusetts.’ He said, ‘Why not?’ I said, ‘Well, I think you represent the best of the new generation, really, the newly arrived people. And Lodge represents the best of the old-line Yankees. I think there are more of the newly arrived people than there are of the old-line Yankees.’ “

Macdonald never forgot what came next. “ Then, out of the clear blue sky, he asked me a question. ‘I wonder what sort of job Ike will give Cabot?’ I just thought to myself that if I were in Jack’s position, listening to these returns . . . Where do you get that kind of serenity?

“By twelve o’clock that night, there was a definite conclusion that Eisenhower had carried the state by 200,000 votes. John Barry, a well-known writer for the Globe, went on TV and said authoritatively: ‘On the basis of the returns now received by the Boston Globe, it is definite that Governor Dever has been defeated for Governor of Massachusetts, that Congressman Kennedy has been defeated, and Senator Lodge has been reelected to the United States Senate.’ “

“Well, all hell broke loose,” O’Donnell recalled the moment. “The congressman called Bobby, furious—and Bobby cut him off and said, ‘Look, on the basis of our numbers and our chart and the basis of what we have and our computations, we are winning the race. And if the trend continues with little drop-off, we will defeat Lodge. The television and newspaper predictions are wrong.’ “

O’Donnell, O’Brien, and Bobby remained optimistic. Based on their calculations, the Kennedy vote was doing what it had to even as the candidate kept calling the headquarters and arguing.

“Finally, he got so frustrated he came down around midnight or so,” O’Donnell said, “and began to run the slide rule himself. He went town by town, and we walked him through it. But it became confusing to him, and he just kept telling us that the reports we were getting on the television and those we gave to him simply did not square at all.”

Governor Dever then telephoned and told Kennedy that, on the basis of the returns, they were both defeated and should concede together. O’Donnell recalled the dramatic response. “The congressman, who by now had learned our system—in fact, had made some improvements to it, typically, and knew it better than we did—said to the governor . . . that on the basis of our computations we were not defeated—and that, in fact, on the basis of our figures he was about to win by a narrow margin.”

At this point, there remained a general sense Kennedy had lost. Looking beyond their headquarters, they could see what appeared to be the electoral reality. Outside there were rowdies—“Irish bums,” O’Donnell called them, local fellows with various bones to pick—shouting drunkenly, “Jack Kennedy, you’re a loser and a faker! You’re in the shithouse with your old man!” Mainly, they were giving it to Bobby, who’d been the tough guy in the campaign.

By then, according to O’Donnell, “it was just us sitting around drinking coffee. Even most of the girls had left. It was a very disheartening moment.

“At about three or probably closer to four in the morning, only the major cities were still out . . . Worcester . . . Springfield . . . and I remember Bobby and the congressman began to give me some grief, because I’d dismissed the hand-picked Kennedy secretary the congressman had selected in Worcester—he was a faker and I’d replaced him with someone I knew and trusted. Now Bobby was saying to me, ‘Everything rides on Worcester and your judgment. If we lose, it’s your fault.’

“Well, it was beautiful: he hadn’t completed the sentence, literally not gotten the words out of his mouth, when I got a call from our man in Worcester saying we’d carried it by five thousand votes. And that, we all knew, was the final clincher. The congressman and Bobby looked at me in astonishment. Then the congressman said to me, ‘You’re either the brightest or the luckiest SOB on the planet!’ “

After the votes were tallied in the big cities, with Worcester and Springfield now in the Kennedy column, the candidate continued strongly, surpassing other Democrats. “Even in these little towns, we were running four, five, or six percentage points ahead of any Democrat and ahead of Dever. The margin of victory can really be found in all those small communities where he’d spent all that time and done all that work in for the past six, seven years. It was now paying off. Every weekend he could, he’d been out there meeting people, having coffee with them, handshaking—and it was now paying off as it was intended to.” The Kennedy Party strategy had worked.

The proud incumbent, there in his headquarters across the street, refused to accept defeat. “We could see him sitting there in his suit coat, looking very calm, watching the returns. What’s he waiting for? Why won’t he concede? What does he know that we don’t? The senator-elect kept asking me, ‘Are you sure?’ Yes, we were sure, but we were worried. At one point, he even joked, ‘Is this what victory looks like?’ We were sitting at the card table—the congressman, Dave, Bobby, Larry, myself, and just a few of the girls. The fair-weather types had all gone home.

“Finally, about six or six thirty, Lodge conceded. He walked across, looking dapper, and the congressman, now the senator-elect, said what a bunch of bums we all looked like. ‘Put a tie on, for God’s sake,’ he told Bobby. Lodge came over and shook the newly elected senator’s hand. He seemed very disconnected, as if he still could not comprehend that this young fellow had somehow bucked the tidal wave called Eisenhower.

“We ended up winning by seventy thousand votes in a very tight contest; I mean, we knew we were winning, but we also recognized it was very tight. The governor had lost by fourteen thousand votes at this time.”

Lyndon Johnson telephoned immediately after the results were in, causing Jack to remark, “That guy must never sleep.” O’Brien, though, saw the cunning: “Johnson wasn’t wasting any time in courting Kennedy’s support.” The Senate’s democratic leader had just been defeated and Johnson was gunning for the job.

The next night there was a celebration, and all the Democratic hacks and coat holders and meal tickets shamelessly showed up, driving O’Donnell and O’Brien crazy. Unfazed by the strange faces in the room, the victor performed in classic fashion. “The senator-elect got up on a table and sang a song in that famous Kennedy off-tune manner. It was pretty awful. Then it was he and Bobby singing together, in a duet. It was just awful, too.”

The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket carried the country by 7 million votes. In Massachusetts, Adlai Stevenson suffered a crushing defeat. Jack Kennedy, meanwhile, had carried the state against Ike’s number one man.

He’d taken on the best and beaten the best. He walked out of the race with a solid organization. He had shown his ability to cut people loose—Mark Dalton, after all, had been a close, deeply devoted champion—who failed to meet his needs. All the while, he let his younger brother take the heat for such acts and thus gain the reputation for being the ruthless one. Bobby, Kenny O’Donnell, and Larry O’Brien were now a rare combination of ice-cold efficiency and die-hard loyalty. The skipper had a new crew, a great one. They’d been blooded by a tough battle fought against the odds and won.

Jack and Bobby—and Kenny, too—would be together for the duration, and they would stand together in the worst crisis of the Cold War, when the stakes were much higher than a Senate seat.

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