CHAPTER EIGHT

SURVIVAL

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

—Ernest Hemingway

Jack Kennedy had faced death often in his life. He’d spent much of his teenage years with doctors examining him, saying what an “interesting” case he presented. Leukemia, even, was mentioned. He never did manage to escape the knot he felt in his stomach, a chronic reminder of the frequent invalidism he’d lived with in youth and which now followed him into adulthood. When the Japanese destroyer cut through PT 109, barely missing him, the pounding he took said, This is what it feels like to die. Once home, the surgery performed on his back left him with a pain he was forced to live with. In London, there was the diagnosis of Addison’s.

In 1954, Jack had a choice to make. He could play it one way, living a diminished life that would lead, very likely, to worse. Or he could risk it all—just as he’d done when he left Plum Pudding Island and swam out into that channel in hope of rescue. He was thirty-seven years old and staring at a future that promised a different sort of torture than he might have suffered at the hands of the Japanese. His steadily worsening back promised a return to the sickbed he’d endured as a boy. This time, however, his dreamed-of future would no longer be looming before him, but, rather, drifting forever into the past.

He would, of course, throw everything he had on the table. Rather than accept a lessened existence, he chose to bet his life on the operating room.

The year began with him executing a masterstroke. As a freshman congressman, he’d shown his independence by withholding his signature from the sleazy Curley petition. Now, in his second year in the Senate, Kennedy made an even bolder move, separating himself from the ranks of his fellow New Englanders. He voted for the creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway, connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes. This meant backing a public works project that could mean the loss of Boston Harbor’s importance as a major shipping port.

That 1954 January vote made him an unpopular figure in Massachusetts. It wasn’t hard to understand why. The carving out of a direct route from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes could be seen in New England only in terms of its economic threat to the region. The Northeast was already in decline, and those factories engaged in shoemaking and in textiles, especially, were moving to the non-unionized, cheap-labor South. If ships could find their way to the Midwest without docking at Boston Harbor, huge numbers of jobs would be lost. The men and families who relied on those jobs—the townies of Charlestown and other harbor areas—wondered aloud why their young Irish representative in Washington wasn’t now safeguarding them.

“The story circulated around the state,” said Ken O’Donnell, who was friendly with many longshoremen, “that the Seaway was being built to take care of his father’s Merchandise Mart . . . that he was caught at last, paying off Joe Kennedy for all the money he spent on the election.”

In 1945 Joseph P. Kennedy had purchased the Merchandise Mart, the giant Chicago landmark and, at the time, the largest building in the world. Who stood to gain more from the opening of a direct shipping lane to the Atlantic than the man reaping the profits from this giant center for retailers and wholesalers situated there near Lake Michigan?

Tip O’Neill saw a grander political motive in Kennedy’s vote. He spotted it as the first clear signal that Jack Kennedy’s horizons stretched well beyond the job he now held. “I knew Jack was serious about running for president back in 1954, when he mentioned that he intended to vote for the St. Lawrence Seaway project. The whole Northeast delegation was opposed to that bill, because once you opened the Seaway, you killed the port of Boston, which was the closest port to Europe. The Boston papers were against it, and so were the merchant marines and the longshoremen. But Jack wanted to show that he wasn’t parochial, and that he had a truly national perspective. Although he acknowledged that the Seaway would hurt Boston, he supported it because the project would benefit the country as a whole.”

The burst of vitriol directed at him spurred his historical curiosity. “After he had been in the Senate for less than a year,” Sorensen would write in his late-in-life memoirs, “JFK called me into his office and said he wanted my help researching and writing a magazine article on the history of senatorial courage.”

Kennedy had come upon accounts of the heat John Quincy Adams—later the country’s sixth president—had taken not quite a century and a half earlier for a transgression similar to his own. As a Massachusetts senator, Adams had voted against the economic interests of New England when he supported President Jefferson’s embargo on Great Britain because of its attacks on American ships. As a result, he lost his Senate seat. Eighteen years later, though, Adams entered the White House.

Kennedy was another New Englander with wide ambitions. Still a Cold Warrior, he maintained his belief that the global struggle against Communism must remain his country’s prime concern. “If we do not stand firm amid the conflicting tides of neutralism, resignation, isolation, and indifference, then all will be lost, and one by one the free countries of the earth will fall until finally the direct assault will begin on the great citadel—the United States,” he would declare in a 1956 commencement speech at Boston College. He had only contempt for those men and women—and this included fellow Democrats—who refused to regard the fight against Communism as the essential struggle of the times.

Yet he worried how the struggle was being waged. A stark example was the desperate French fight in Indochina. Weakened by its humiliation in World War II, France was fighting to regain its international stature, to hold on to its colonial empire. Its conflict with the popular Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, had become a grinding war of attrition. Many on the American right, Vice President Richard Nixon included, wanted to go to the aid of the French. Communism, they felt, must be resisted on every square inch of global real estate.

When the North Vietnamese forces, the Viet Minh, surrounded the French army at Dien Bien Phu in ’54, Nixon grew more hawkish still, telling news editors he supported sending “American boys” to replace them. He then backed a secret plan, code-named “Operation Vulture,” to drop atom bombs on the Viet Minh. He, other Republicans, and some Democrats like Jack Kennedy had blamed President Truman for “losing” China by not giving sufficient aid to the anti-Communist Chiang Kai-shek. The Eisenhower administration could not afford to lose Indochina.

Despite his own anti-Communism, Jack Kennedy resisted falling into line. For the first time, he broke with the Eurocentric view of the Cold War. He also challenged the Republicans’ position that the United States could defend itself worldwide on the basis of its nuclear supremacy alone. We could not intimidate an adversary such as Ho Chi Minh with the threat of dropping a hydrogen bomb in the jungles of Indochina. It would not be credible.

The argument he was using was the same one he’d employed to justify Britain’s failure to confront Hitler at Munich: the capability to fight such a war was not in place. “To pour money, material and men into the jungles of Indo-China without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and self-destructive. I am, frankly, of the belief that no amount of military assistance in Indo-China can conquer an enemy that is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.”

Equally important to him was the reality he’d seen for himself during his trip to Indochina three years earlier. And that reality was the power of nationalism. On this issue Jack Kennedy found common ground with the newly elected Republican senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, who demanded, as the price for American aid, that the French promise Indochina its independence.

But it was closer to home that Cold War issues were causing Senator Kennedy the greatest challenges. Since January 1950, Joseph R. McCarthy, the Republican junior senator from Wisconsin, had made himself into a force to be reckoned with. His relentless effort to unearth Communists within the government and the American establishment made “McCarthyism” the one-size-fits-all label pinned to the national Red hunt. With bullying zeal, McCarthy and his Senate subcommittee unjustly tarnished and in some cases ruined reputations.

McCarthy was fueled by the temper of the times. In August 1945, the people of America had looked out upon a world dominated by the United States as by no other country in history. Within a year, the geopolitical shifts were so alarming that Winston Churchill spoke of an Iron Curtain being drawn down between free Western Europe and an Eastern Europe falling increasingly under the control of Moscow. Within two years, the victory in Europe had largely been undone. Czechoslovakia and Poland, the countries that had been the casus belli of World War II, were now under Soviet domination.

Other news from around the globe added to the sense of disillusion and insecurity across America. In 1949, the same year Mao Tse-tung claimed all of mainland China, the Soviets exploded their first atom bomb, an event that occurred shockingly in advance of American predictions—or expectations.

In 1950 came the conviction of the top American diplomat Alger Hiss, who’d presided at the United Nations Conference in San Francisco, which Jack Kennedy covered for Hearst, for his role in a Soviet espionage plot. The fear of Communism on the advance would spike violently with the coming of the Korean War. In July of that year, a thirty-two-year-old New Yorker, Julius Rosenberg, was arrested for helping to pass atomic secrets to Moscow; a month later, his wife, Ethel, was taken into custody.

This was the national mood when Joseph McCarthy entered stage right. He’d begun his crusade in January of 1950 in a speech to a Republican women’s group in Wheeling, West Virginia. There he borrowed phrases from a speech Richard Nixon had just given on the Hiss conviction. McCarthy upped the ante by declaring that Hiss was only the iceberg’s tip, that the State Department actually, if unknowingly, harbored large numbers of dedicated Communists—and all committed to the sabotage of American interests in favor of those of the Soviet Union. Unchecked, he would ride high on the brazenness of such charges, reaching his zenith of popularity in January 1954. At that juncture, 50 percent of the American people held a favorable opinion of the Wisconsin senator, just 29 percent an unfavorable one.

But his downhill slide was about to begin, precipitated by CBS’s Edward R. Murrow, a broadcaster who’d made his reputation reporting from London during the Blitz and who was revered for his integrity. In March 1954, Murrow aired a special entitled Point of Order! in which he attacked McCarthy, and dared him to present an on-air rebuttal. McCarthy’s response offers a classic example of how he strung together events to craft his outrageous indictments.

“My good friends,” he said, “if there were no Communists in our government, would we have consented to and connived to turn over all of our Chinese friends to the Russians? If there were no Communists in our government, why did we delay for eighteen months, delay our research on the hydrogen bomb, even though our intelligence agencies were reporting day after day that the Russians were feverishly pushing their development of the H-Bomb? Our nation may well die because of that eighteen months’ deliberate delay. And I ask you, who caused it? Was it loyal Americans? Or was it traitors in our government?”

There you have it, an absurd but compelling case against those in high places. It was the old charge of rot at the top. If the Chinese Communists took over China, it was the doing of Commies in our own government. If the Russians had sprinted forward and now had flaunted their H-bomb, it was because we’d slowed down to let them catch us. In short, if anything bad happened, the reason is we were stabbed in the back.

McCarthy loved charging respected figures with bad faith, thus lending a catchy populism to his accusations of treason. In his view, it was the country’s best and brightest who were selling us out. “The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because the enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in government we can give.”

To validate this belief system, he fixed in his sights on such lofty officials as President Truman himself, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and his predecessor, George Marshall, who’d been army chief of staff in World War II. He attacked them all, famously calling Marshall the perpetrator of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”

Of course, no demagogue ever has a lifetime career, and Joe McCarthy’s own downfall was determined when he decided to focus his crusade on the presence of hidden Communists in the U.S. Army. The target he selected for attack was an army major, Dr. Irving Peress, a dentist who’d been a member of the American Labor Party, believed to be a Communist Party front. When Peress’s commanding officer at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, Brigadier General Ralph Zwicker—a Silver and Bronze Star recipient who’d been a hero of the Battle of the Bulge—appeared before his committee, the senator taunted him, saying he was “not fit to wear that uniform.”

That encounter showed the extent to which McCarthy was beginning to spiral out of control. His absolute fall from grace came a month later in a moment of television history. The newly launched American Broadcasting Corporation, ABC, covered gavel to gavel the thirty-six days of hearings convened. The April 1954 broadcasts of the Army-McCarthy proceedings gave the audience sitting at home the chance to examine McCarthy’s own conduct as well as the wild charges he brought against army personnel.

Thus, with the entire country watching—on some days, as many as 20 million people—he self-destructed, with the help of a righteous attorney, Joseph Nye Welch, the army’s chief counsel, who objected to the senator’s innuendo-filled attack on one of his staff lawyers for a past membership in a left-wing legal group. Voicing his distaste, he accused McCarthy of “reckless cruelty” and then asked whether he had “no decency.” It was a stunningly unexpected comeback, and one that marked McCarthy as a pure bully. For the first time, many Americans focused on Joe McCarthy’s tactics and didn’t like the looks of them.

Not everyone turned on McCarthy. More than a third of the country remained loyal to him after the five weeks of legal spectacle. His fellow Irish-Americans were especially defiant, seeing him as a lonely challenger to the country’s political, diplomatic, and academic elites.

Within days of the Army-McCarthy hearings, Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, a Republican, introduced a resolution to censure his colleague and remove him from the chairmanship of his committees. It read, in part, “Were the Wisconsin senator in the pay of the Communists, he could not have done a better job for them.” Now that public opinion had turned on him, the Democrats were free to cast Joe McCarthy as their ultimate archvillain.

Jack Kennedy had a McCarthy problem and he knew it. Joining his fellow Democrats, who were now calling for McCarthy’s head on a pike, put him in a serious dilemma. For one thing, up until this moment he’d successfully managed to say nothing on the subject of Joe McCarthy’s harsh tactics. It was a silence he would, in the years to come, always have to answer for. Outside the Senate, moreover, he was actually known to be quite friendly with the man. The pair of them had hung around together during Jack’s early congressional days, and McCarthy, handsome in a Black Irish way, had been out on dates with Jack’s sisters. A close friend of Bobby’s wife, Ethel, McCarthy was a kind of unofficial uncle to their two young children, especially the eldest, Kathleen. Because of his friendship with the Kennedys, McCarthy had refrained from endorsing his fellow Senate Republican Henry Cabot Lodge in the race he lost to Jack. The December before, Jack had been a guest at McCarthy’s wedding, as had many of the Kennedy family.

Another problem for Jack was Bobby’s closeness to the senator. For half the previous year, he’d been a McCarthy staffer. Their father, a financial supporter of the Republican senator as well as a friend, had helped pave the way for the job. However, Bobby had quit, smarting under the fact that he was outranked by the senator’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, a fellow whom he despised. But his departure didn’t last long. The next January he switched sides, hired now by the investigating committee’s Democratic minority as its chief counsel.

When the time came for the Democrats to move against McCarthy, it would fall to the twenty-eight-year-old Bobby, despite his continued personal loyalty, to write the draft of the Democratic members’ report on the senator’s out-of-control conduct. While it targeted Cohn’s behavior, it placed responsibilities on the committee’s chairman. “Senator McCarthy and Mr. Cohn merit severe criticism,” and “the Senator cannot escape responsibility for the misconduct of Cohn. Nor can he excuse the irresponsibility attaching to many of his charges. The Senate should take action to correct this situation.”

Still, it was one thing to staff the committee report, as Bobby, acting in his official capacity, had done. It would be a very different matter to vote for the historic censure of a colleague—a man who was also a friend—as Jack would now be asked to do.

There had actually been rumblings against McCarthy in the Senate for several years at this point, including a declaration made by his own party members that denounced smear tactics—in effect, McCarthyism—without mentioning the names of any specific lawmaker. In response, McCarthy contemptuously dubbed Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who originated the declaration, along with the six fellow Republicans who joined her, “Snow White and Her Six Dwarfs.” With the Army-McCarthy hearings having weakened McCarthy and made him at last vulnerable, Senator Flanders’s intention was now to deliver the coup de grâce.

Yet, even given the rising swell of condemnation, Jack Kennedy remained resistant when it came to voting to censure a man whose wedding he’d attended, for whom his brother had worked, and to whom his father had provided sizable contributions. Had Jack joined the vote against McCarthy, it would have meant a dramatic, even traitorous break with his father and brother, who’d devoted themselves so totally to his career and were not ready to abandon a fellow anti-Communist and close friend.

How was he going to handle it? Personal connections aside, there were other factors affecting his ultimate decision when it came to the McCarthy censure vote. An important one, of course, was how it played back home. The same people of Massachusetts who’d supported Jack on the basis of the old loyalties were largely—and vehemently—in McCarthy’s corner. These men and women saw the battle as one pitting the Ivy League establishment against the working-class Irishman. For such Americans, here was a contest between those who seemed far too dainty, if not neutral, on exposing Communists in government and regular people who were willing to play rough.

It was bad enough Jack had gone to Harvard, but here he would be taking sides against one of his own—a fellow who happened to be the best-known Irishman in the country. It would be an act of betrayal, nothing less. Whatever Joe McCarthy’s faults, most Irish-Americans viewed his motives as right, while those of his enemies were, at best, suspect.

In Jack Kennedy’s own office, the enormous tribal significance of the McCarthy issue was brought home by Ken O’Donnell, whose brother Warren was then a student at Holy Cross. After Warren had delivered a strong classroom attack on McCarthy and his methods, his older brother recalled, “He was told to sit down, and the rejoinder from the priest, quite coldly, was: ‘I guess I shouldn’t expect anything less from someone whose brother went to Harvard and is friends with Jack Kennedy.’ “

O’Donnell, who was running the Kennedy office in Boston, keeping watch on the constituents and their concerns, insisted that Jack’s voting against McCarthy would be “political suicide.” He never changed his mind. “The feeling was that strong. If he’d voted for censure, there’s no question it would have ended the career of Jack Kennedy in Massachusetts.”

He believed that the only course was for Jack “to avoid the vote. McCarthy was deteriorating to nothing more than the subject of barroom brawls. In time, he would fade. These haters always do, and, if you argued against him, you were a Communist. My view was that we needed to stand back and allow him to self-destruct.”

The passions of that historic moment created strange alliances. O’Donnell could never forget what he’d seen one night at a favorite political hangout. “I was in the Bellevue bar, having a drink, and we were watching the hearings. Bobby Kennedy had this altercation with Roy Cohn right on television. Remember, it was a group there, watching, of Boston Irish politicians, some truck drivers, and hardworking guys, most tinged with anti-Semitism. So Cohn wasn’t the type of fellow you’d think they’d like. Yet every single person in that bar cheered and yelled and hoped he’d belt Bobby one.”

Jack got this. Despite his seeming golden-boy status, he felt the lure of the underdog throughout his life; once a Mucker, always a Mucker. For this reason, he got Richard Nixon, his early congressional buddy, in ways that others in his circle never did. A part of him, the stubborn part—the part still dominant—cheered just about anyone liberals loved to hate.

Two years earlier he’d walked out of that Spee event after another attendee had dared compare McCarthy with Alger Hiss. Jack, after all, had run for Congress as a “fighting conservative.” His identity as a Cold Warrior was well known. Besides the all-politics-is-local aspect, there was the issue of Communism itself and what it actually meant in the context of American life and American security. There were those who took its threat seriously and those who pooh-poohed it, with Jack squarely in the vigilant camp, a position he’d arrived at long before.

He’d criticized FDR’s compromises at Yalta, and blamed Truman for the losses in Asia. “I’m very happy to tell them I’m not a liberal,” he’d declared in a Saturday Evening Post interview the year before.

Even years later, when he’d begun to identify himself as a “liberal,” he would confess to having little sympathy for the people McCarthy had persecuted. “I had not known the sort of people who were called before the McCarthy committee. I agree that many of them were seriously manhandled, but they represented a different world to me. What I mean is, I did not identify with them, and so I did not get as worked up as other liberals did.”

The decision would come down to the coldest calculation. Sorensen, in his memoir, summed up the situation: “JFK knew that if he voted with his fellow Democrats and anti-McCarthy Republicans on a motion to censure McCarthy, he would be defying many in his home state and family, but if he voted against such a motion, he would be denounced by the leading members of his party, by the leading liberals and intellectuals in the country and his alma mater, by the leaders of the Senate, and by the major national newspapers.”

That spring of 1954, as he looked to both past and future—his entangling ties to McCarthy and what they would cost him later—Jack Kennedy found himself staring into the face of mortal danger. In April, the back pain from which he’d long suffered turned unbearable. X-rays taken showed that the fifth lumbar vertebra had collapsed, a result believed by some to be a result of steroids prescribed over the years for his Addison’s disease. According to the historian Robert Dallek, he couldn’t even bend down to pull a sock onto his left foot; only by walking sideways could he get up and down stairs.

Yet Kennedy managed to keep any awareness of these ever-encroaching medical setbacks from the public. Snapshots taken that May show Jack, Jackie, and Bobby Kennedy enjoying the Washington spring, playing touch football in the park behind Dumbarton Oaks. Wearing a T-shirt, Jack looks sunny and healthy. Jacqueline, still in her preregal stage, appears joyously youthful and untroubled.

The photographs reveal nothing of either’s pain. You can see in these pictures neither the dire reality of Jack’s health nor the sadness his infidelities were already causing the twenty-four-year-old he’d married just the autumn before. “I’ve often wondered if I’d do it again,” Charlie Bartlett would say of the two he’d brought together after seeing the one hurt the other so. “I don’t understand Jack’s promiscuity at all.” Yet all that’s apparent in the images of those halcyon days are the skills the pair shared in their concealment.

As bad as his condition was, however, it was about to get worse. By August his weight had dropped from 180 pounds to 140. So bad was the back pain that Jack needed to remain on the Senate floor between votes rather than attempt the commute from his office across Constitution Avenue. As the days passed, with little to stimulate him except agony, he arrived at a point of existential decision: the choice was between living a life of increasingly limited mobility—ending up in a wheelchair was inevitable—or else taking an enormous risk by submitting to spinal surgery.

In describing to Larry O’Brien the operation he chose now to endure, he minced no words. “This is the one that kills you or cures you.”

To John Galvin, he explained that he was going to New York, to the Hospital for Special Surgery there, because his Boston doctors had advised against the procedure. “They said the best thing to do would be to stay with the crutches and live, rather than take the chance on the operation and die. He told me then, ‘I’d rather die than be on crutches the rest of my life.’ “

What intensified the danger was his Addison’s disease. It meant his body could not produce the adrenaline needed to deal with the shock of surgery. The steroids he was taking complicated matters still further by reducing his ability to stave off infection. Jack knew that he faced the possibility of dying on the operating table. None of this was foreign territory to him.

With this high-risk surgery now on his calendar, Kennedy had to take on two political crises. One was the McCarthy censure, the other even nastier.

The midterm elections were coming in November, and Jack’s Massachusetts colleague Foster Furcolo was running for the Senate. Jack didn’t like the man’s ambitions, which happened to be the same as his own. In fact, he didn’t like the man, marking him as an “empty suit,” a politician with no other reason to seek public office than the status it accorded the winner. It didn’t help that Furcolo, whose base was Springfield, hadn’t endorsed Jack in ’52.

The antagonism between them was at once tribal and personal. Ever since Larry O’Brien, once a Furcolo staffer, had joined up with Jack in 1950, there’d been bad blood. Six years apart in age, the two legislators were both Harvard grads, both focused on getting ahead politically. Beyond that, they were simply rivals for the same turf: one Italian, the other Irish. As far as Jack was concerned, the Commonwealth wasn’t big enough for both of them.

In the summer of 1954, their simmering feud came to a boil. Furcolo was the Democratic candidate for Senate, the same job Jack already had—if Furcolo won, it would make him the junior senator—and he looked to Jack for his backing. But there was no way Jack wanted Furcolo to become his political equal either in Washington or in Massachusetts. Complicating matters even more, Jack felt affection for the incumbent Furcolo wanted to run against, the Republican Leverett Saltonstall, a Brahmin of the same stripe as the man Jack had vanquished, Henry Cabot Lodge. As the Commonwealth’s pair of senators, Jack and “Salty” had built a good working relationship.

“This was the circumstance for Kennedy’s oft-quoted remark that ‘sometimes party asks too much,’ “ Ted Sorensen recalled. In fact, Jack engaged him in a secret plan to undercut Furcolo’s chances. “When I had been with him barely eighteen months,” the aide recalled, “JFK took me to Boston, where he decided to oppose quietly the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Senate against Leverett Saltonstall, JFK’s Republican Senate colleague, in the 1954 election.” It was another caper, like sneaking into the Massachusetts State House after hours to file his ’46 nominating petitions. It was willful deception. Kennedy needed to make it look like he was being the loyal party man all while his bright young brain truster would be using his skills as a researcher-writer to provide ammo for the enemy.

Lending Sorensen to Saltonstall was only part of the plan. Late that summer, Kennedy met with Ken O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and instructed them to get on board to assist the Democratic candidate Robert Murphy, who was running for governor. The scheme called for Jack to endorse Murphy for governor and Furcolo for the Senate on the same live TV program. This being the era before videotape, Furcolo would have Jack’s backing but would be unable to keep showing it in TV ads.

Kennedy’s mistake was his failure to keep his dislike for Furcolo as secret as he kept his plotting. When the night of the live appearance arrived, Furcolo got a prebroadcast copy of Kennedy’s intended remarks and blew up.

“Furcolo told him he wouldn’t go on the show unless he received a more forthright and direct endorsement,” O’Donnell recalled. “The senator then gave him that famous line, ‘You’ve got a hell of a nerve, Foster. You’re lucky you’re here.’ The senator next, quite coldly, went on to remind Furcolo of the time he had refused to endorse him. The exchange was quite heated.” The actual telecast, however, went off smoothly enough. As they were leaving, Furcolo even wished Jack well with his coming surgery—“The main thing is, take care of your back”—a gesture of goodwill that Jack saw as entirely insincere.

Then hell broke loose. Even if the papers failed to notice that Senator Kennedy neglected to offer a personal endorsement of Furcolo, one radio station—albeit with a bit of help—got it cold. “I was riding into town that next morning,” said O’Donnell, “and I heard on the radio that Senator Kennedy’s not naming Foster Furcolo had been a direct affront. That he’d done it on purpose and, in fact, was not endorsing Foster Furcolo. The report quoted Frank Morrissey.”

Morrissey was Joe Kennedy’s man, the one he’d assigned to hang around his son’s political operation and report back anything his boss wanted to know. Here’s O’Donnell’s account of that morning-after: “I called Frank and asked him to come over immediately. When he got there, I put it right to him and asked, ‘What happened here?’ He told me he thought it was off the record. I just stared at him. Couldn’t believe it. All our preparation out of the window. I remember my exact words. I walked over and opened the window and said, ‘Frank, jump.’ He looked around and then looked like he would cry.”

O’Donnell, who recalled the scene in all its drama years later, had no trouble recognizing the very real damage. Every politician in the state now knew what Jack Kennedy thought of Furcolo and how he’d undercut him in their one and only joint television appearance. “We’d been building up a solid residue of party regulars, and now they pointed to this and said, ‘We were right about him in ’52. He and his people are a bunch of Harvard bastards who take care of themselves. They don’t care about the party. Kennedy does not want Furcolo in there because he’ll compete with him. Kennedy doesn’t want two Democratic senators.’ “

A tribal war now loomed. Italians in Massachusetts had been voting for Irish candidates for generations. Now one of their own, Furcolo, was seen getting the bum’s rush by a prince of the Irish side. Needing both groups in order to win statewide, certainly to win big, the Kennedys recognized the cost of the screwup as well as anyone. Here, though, Jack had made himself vulnerable by allowing his feelings to get in the way of his political calculation.

On October 10, Jack checked into the Hospital for Special Surgery. The operation was postponed three times, finally taking place eleven days later, on the twenty-first. Only then, before he was taken into the operating room, did he finally address the Furcolo problem. O’Donnell recalls the effort it took. “I kept pushing and, through some process of negotiation and with Bobby’s help, we finally extracted a statement from him. It was unsatisfactory, but covered the problem. What we did was disavow Morrissey.”

At the same time, O’Donnell knew it wouldn’t fly. He would call the snubbing of Furcolo, who lost that November, “the only wrong political move Jack Kennedy ever made.”

The back operation did not go well. After more than three hours in the surgeons’ hands, Kennedy was left with a metal plate inserted in his spine. At that point he developed a urinary tract infection that failed to respond to antibiotics, sending him into a coma. The news spread around the political world that the handsome Massachusetts senator’s life was in jeopardy.

“The odds made by the political wise guys were that he wouldn’t live,” Ken O’Donnell recalled, “and that if he did live he’d be a cripple. It became ‘he might not make it.’ “

Evelyn Lincoln, the secretary in his Senate office, got the terrible news that “the doctors didn’t expect him to live until morning.” The Kennedy death watch even was reported on television. For the third time in his life, Jack was given the last rites of his church. Jacqueline Kennedy, never one to practice her religion openly, went down on her knees to pray. Richard Nixon, being driven home that night, was heard to moan: “That poor young man is going to die. Oh, God, don’t let him die.” His Secret Service agent never forgot it.

Rallying in the night, against the odds, Jack pulled through. “The doctors don’t understand where he gets his strength,” the hospital told Lincoln when she called to ask about the patient the following morning. But the ordeal left a darkness in Kennedy.

“The tenor of his voice was tinged with pain,” Ken O’Donnell said. “You could detect it in his voice even over the telephone. It was the first time in my experience with him—and I’d say, in his life—when he was, in fact, disinterested completely in politics. John Kennedy was at the lowest point of anytime I’d known him in his career, physically, mentally, and politically. He was at the bottom. It seemed over.”

Back in Washington, the two Teds, Reardon and Sorensen, had been left in charge. The trouble was, Jack had given Sorensen, his young legislative assistant, no guidance on what he wanted to do about the upcoming vote to censure Joseph McCarthy. Sorensen, for his part, never called his boss’s hospital room to ask how he wanted to be counted on the issue. Perhaps, it was simply preferable not to ask. He said he “feared the wrath of the senator’s brother and father more than the senator’s” if he declared Jack in favor of the McCarthy censure. In the end, Sorensen concluded, “I . . . suspected—correctly—that there was no point in my trying to reach him on an issue he wanted to duck.”

On December 2, 1954, the Senate at last brought down the curtain on the peculiar political spectacle starring Senator Joseph McCarthy. Except for the absent Kennedy, every Democrat, joined by half the Republicans, voted for the condemnation. The controversial senator would live just two and half years longer, dying of acute hepatitis brought on by alcoholism. By that time, his anti-Communist crusade and his political significance both were long over.

The man in the New York hospital bed had missed the vote.

Kennedy tried to make light of it. “You know, when I get downstairs, I know exactly what’s going to happen,” he told Chuck Spalding upon leaving the hospital a few days before Christmas. “Those reporters are going to lean over me with great concern, and every one of those guys is going to say, ‘Now, Senator, what about McCarthy?’ Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to reach for my back and I’m going to yell ‘Oow!’ and then I’m going to pull the sheet over my head and hope we can get out of there.”

Jack left it to Bobby to carry the family’s continuing respect for their fallen Irish-American ally. In January, while Jack was recuperating in Palm Beach, his younger brother was honored at a Junior Chamber of Commerce dinner as one of the country’s “Ten Outstanding Young Men.” When the evening’s speaker, Edward R. Murrow, rose to address those in attendance, Bobby walked out of the room, a silent protest against a man who’d played a significant role in bringing down McCarthy. When the senator died in 1956, Bobby Kennedy flew to Appleton, Wisconsin, for the funeral and stayed with the mourners’ procession all the way to the gravesite.

Now Jack Kennedy had survived another brush with death. He was helped through the crisis by the one strong emotional reality of his life: old friendships. One name high on the list was Red Fay. “In January 1955, Bobby called to ask if I could come to Florida. The family was worried about Jack, and didn’t know whether he was going to live. The doctor felt that he was losing interest, and a visit from someone closely associated with happier times might help him regain his usual optimism and enjoyment of life. I flew to Palm Beach and spent ten days with him.”

It was an opportunity for someone who cared about him to realize what Jack was up against. Fay watched as his recuperating friend gave himself a shot as part of the treatment for his back. “ ‘Jack,’ I said, ‘the way you take that jab, it looks like it doesn’t even hurt.’ Before I had time to dodge, he reached over and jabbed the same needle into my leg. I screamed with the pain.”

Down in Palm Beach, with time on his hands, surrounded by Jackie and family members, he took up oil painting and spent hours playing Monopoly. His convalescence lasted for almost six months and was interrupted only by a trip back to New York for a second surgery. While in Florida he grew close to his new brother-in-law, the young Hollywood star Peter Lawford, who’d married Patricia Kennedy the year before. “I think we hit it off because he loved my business. He loved anything to do with the arts and motion pictures. It never ceased to amaze me.”

The British-born Lawford, who’d been in films since he was a young boy, observed Jack with an actor’s keen eye. He got as good a look at him as anybody. “I don’t think anybody ever made up John Kennedy’s mind for him. I don’t think anybody swayed him, including his father. I think he took what he wanted and then sifted it, you know, evaluated it. Then he did what he wanted to do with it.” Lawford was amazed at Kennedy’s self-discipline and his will to make the most of every day, the preciousness of time to him. “He was really ill with that back, but he fought his way through that, and, as you know, wrote the book while he was lying on his back.”

The book was Profiles in Courage. It was Kennedy’s tribute to eight U.S. senators who during their legislative careers had taken positions highly unpopular with their constituents. Though Kennedy dug up the stories and sketched out his intentions, Ted Sorensen did most of the actual writing. So it’s fair to call the project a collaboration. The bookish child had been father to the man. “He was enormously well read in American history and literature,” Hugh Fraser, the British politician and longtime friend, recalled. “I mean, to me, staggeringly so.” Charlie Bartlett saw the book as an obvious undertaking for Jack. “I think the whole concept of the really gutsy decisions made by men with seats in the Senate fascinated him. So when he had this time, I suppose it was natural for him to turn to it.” Bartlett, like all the others gathered around Jack in Palm Beach, would watch him, still unable to rise from bed, writing upside down on a board suspended above him.

In his memoirs, Sorensen explained that they worked on the book by letter and telephone. The reason was, he was in Washington helping hold down the fort in Kennedy’s office while his boss was on his back down in Florida. The way Sorensen explained the enterprise, Kennedy played an especially serious role composing the first and last chapters and that he, the aide, wrote the first draft of the rest.

The theme and the bulk of the content were pure Jack. As smart as Sorensen was, and even given his familiarity with politics—his Republican father had been the attorney general of Nebraska—he was nonetheless a twenty-seven-year-old. He’d arrived in Washington only four years earlier, armed with a law degree but no on-the-ground political experience. He would admit that he was nowhere as well read as Kennedy in American history.

The voice of John F. Kennedy seems to me to be noticeably audible in Profiles in Courage. For example, in the opening passages, you read, “Where else, in a non-totalitarian society, but in the political profession is the individual expected to sacrifice all—including his own career—for the national good?” It’s a quip that, I think, captures Jack Kennedy’s own ironic style. Another sentence, I believe, derives from his ability to see things from the inside out as well as the outside in: the prospect of forced retirementfrom “the most exclusive club in the world, the possibilities of giving up the interesting work, the fascinating trappings and the impressive prerogatives of Congressional office, can cause even the most courageous politician a serious loss of sleep.”

Here’s a story that comes clearly from the insider Jack: “One senator, since retired, said that he voted with the special interests on every issue, hoping that by election time all of them added together would constitute nearly a majority that would remember him favorably, while the other members of the public would never know about—much less remember—his vote against their welfare.” That senator was George Smathers, his pal who’d once said he didn’t “give a damn.” That business about the senator being “retired” was a cover.

David Ormsby-Gore, now a member of Parliament, stayed in touch with his friend as he recovered. “He must have been getting near the end of the book—but one of the lessons he had drawn from examining these moments in American history was that there were very much two sides to each problem. Now, this didn’t prevent him being capable of taking decisions, and knowing that somebody had to make decisions, but it did always prevent him saying, ‘I know that I have got nothing but right on my side, and the other side is entirely wrong,’ and he never would adopt that attitude.

“He said that one of the rather sad things about life, particularly if you were a politician, was that you discovered that the other side really had a good case. He was most unpartisan in that way. . . . He wondered whether he was really cut out to be a politician because he was often so impressed by the other side’s arguments when he really examined them in detail. Where he thought that there was a valid case against his position, he was always rather impressed by the arguments advanced.”

At the end of May, with the help of physical therapy, a corset, and a rocking chair, Jack was set to proceed gingerly with a career that had hung, along with his life, in the balance. Pale and limping, he returned to Capitol Hill more sensitive than usual to imagery. When a Senate page, Martin Dowd, saw the long-absent senator approaching on crutches and opened the Senate chamber door for him, Kennedy tore into him. “Shut that door!” Kennedy yelled to the crushed seventeen-year-old. Unwilling to drop the matter, he confronted Dowd a moment later. “Don’t you touch that door until I tell you to!”

Sorensen could sense how his boss had grown tougher, not just on others but himself. The political columnist and Kennedy friend Joseph Alsop also recognized the transformation: “Something very important happened inside him, I think, when he had that illness, because he came out of it a very much more serious fellow than he was prior to it. He had gone through the valley of the shadow of death, and he had displayed immense courage, which he’d always had.”

That June, Kennedy gave a party in Hyannis, inviting to Cape Cod not just his own supporters, but also a sizable group of Democrats who’d never been active for him. Ken O’Donnell helped pull it together. “Larry and I got a call saying he was coming back to Massachusetts and the first thing he wanted to do was have a political reunion of the Kennedy secretaries.” Clearly, the purpose of the event was to prove to the faithful how healthy he was. It was to show others, coming out of morbid curiosity, that he remained formidable.

“The thing I remember most about the event was that he was physically able to move around. There were no crutches. They had softball games and so forth, and it was an excellent outing. A very successful political event—an all-day affair.” O’Donnell could see Jack’s appeal to the rank-and-file types hadn’t faded. “What struck me the most and to me was critical was that he still held the same old attraction for people. All our people loved him, but you knew there was no question about that. If he’d returned flat on his back or in a wheelchair, our people would have been there. But I was watching the others. The reaction from the professional politicians that were there: they loved him. Loved him, despite themselves.”

If Kennedy was going to go further in politics, he needed to bring all the factions of Massachusetts together. He needed to win over those who practiced politics day in and day out. “It was important for our political futures and for the senator’s that if we were going to take the next step, we had to know them on an intimate personal basis. We realized how important it was that they shouldn’t feel we were snobs, that we didn’t look down on the ‘regulars.’ “

It was obvious that Kennedy’s renewed vigor had stirred a healthy fear among the Massachusetts Democratic stalwarts. Abandoning him might well mean abandoning the winning side. No political regular likes being tied to a loser, and while a young senator sidelined for six months with medical problems might have the voters’ sympathy for a time, what good was he? Besides, Jack Kennedy had end-run them over the years, and many had been waiting for him to get his comeuppance. His sunny reappearance at that June picnic was therefore vital to his prospects.

“Out of that affair,” O’Donnell said, summing up the situation, “I think, at least in our minds, we accepted that, for Senator Kennedy, the bottom point had been reached. Now there was a solid foundation from which to build forward.”

• • •

Moving into the future, the Kennedy Party needed to reach out to the wider Democratic organization and win it to the cause. It was no longer enough to woo and charm. To win the big prizes Jack now needed to master the rougher side of politics. To intimidate those he could not seduce, he’d have to play the game harder than his rivals.

23

Filing petition for senate reeletion, 1958

24

Adlai Stevenson