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  3. THE WAR

  As war came closer to America, Kennedy, having been rejected by the Army because of his back, succeeded in 1941 in persuading the Navy to let him in. After Pearl Harbor, he pulled every possible string to get sea duty, finally enrolling his father in the cause. In due course there followed the Pacific, PT-109, the Solomon Islands campaign, Talagi and Rendova, and the incredible few days in August 1943 when the Japanese destroyer Amagiri sliced his boat in half and plunged Kennedy and his crew into the waters of Ferguson Passage, now suddenly aflame with burning gasoline. Kennedy’s calm bravery, his extraordinary feat in towing one of his crew to refuge by gripping the end of the life jacket belt in his teeth, his leadership, resourcefulness and cheer until rescue came—this was one of the authentic passages of heroism in the war, so well described in later accounts by John Hersey and Robert Donovan and so seldom mentioned by Kennedy himself. (In a Person to Person program with Edward R. Murrow in the late fifties, Kennedy called it “an interesting experience.” Murrow responded: “Interesting. I should think that would be one of the great understatements.” When during the Presidency Donovan proposed doing a book on PT-109, Kennedy tried his best to discourage him, saying that there was no story and that it would be a waste of his time. Donovan went ahead nevertheless and eventually decided that he would have to go out to the Solomons and reswim Kennedy’s course. Kennedy, who thought this utter madness, could not get over the idea of anyone’s going to such trouble and expense.)

  The incident in the Solomons embodied two of Kennedy’s deeper preoccupations—with courage and with death. He hated discussing these matters in the abstract, but they were nonetheless enduring themes of his life. Robert Kennedy tells us that courage was the virtue his brother most admired. In the first instance, this meant physical courage—the courage of men under enemy fire, of men silently suffering pain, the courage of the sailor and the mountain climber and of men who stared down mobs or soared into outer space. And, when he entered politics, it came to mean moral courage—the courage to which he later dedicated his Profiles, the courage of “a man who does what he must—in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures,” the courage which, he said, “is the basis of all human morality.”

  Courage—and death. The two are related, because courage, if it is more than reckless bravado, involves the exquisite understanding that death may be its price. “The education of the average American child of the upper middle class,” Norbert Wiener has written, “is such as to guard him solicitously against the awareness of death and doom.” But this is less true of children brought up in an orthodox faith. Kennedy’s religious upbringing, his illness, his reading about the death of kings—all must have joined to give him an early sense of human mortality. Then death became his intimate during the long hours in the black, streaming waters of Ferguson Passage. Exactly a year later, he was notified that his brother Joe had been killed on an air mission against Nazi submarine bases in western Europe. In another month his English brother-in-law, the Marquis of Hartington, the husband of his sister Kathleen, was killed in France.

  In a looseleaf notebook of 1945, filled with fragments about Joe and Billy Hartington—Joe’s posthumous citation, a Washington Post editorial on his death, Kathleen’s letter about her husband’s death and letters from Billy Hartington’s fellow officers in the Coldstream Guards—he inserted two quotations describing the death of Raymond Asquith in France in 1915—one from Churchill’s Great Contemporaries:

  The War which found the measure of so many men never got to the bottom of him, and, when the Grenadiers strode into the crash and thunder of the Somme, he went to his fate, cool, poised, resolute, matter-of-fact, debonair.

  and another from a favorite book, John Buchan’s Pilgrim’s Way:

  He loved his youth, and his youth has become eternal. Debonair and brilliant and brave, he is now part of that immortal England which knows not age or weariness or defeat.

  His wife later said, “The poignancy of men dying young haunted him.”

  4. IN SEARCH OF SELF

  Along with a deep sorrow over the battalions of wasted lives, the war left him with an intense concern about the prevention of such waste in the future. He went to San Francisco in June 1945 as a special writer for the Hearst press to watch the founding of the United Nations. For a young veteran, with stabbing memories of violence and death, it was in a way a disenchanting experience. But for a student of politics it was an indispensable education.

  “It would be very easy to write a letter to you that was angry,” he observed afterward to a PT-boat friend who had sought his opinion of the conference. “When I think of how much this war has cost us, of the deaths of Cy and Peter and Orv and Gil and Demi and Joe and Billy and all of those thousands and millions who have died with them—when I think of all those gallant acts that I have seen or anyone has seen who has been to the war—it would be a very easy thing to feel disappointed and somewhat betrayed.” The conference, he continued, lacked moral force; not idealism but self-interest brought the nations together. “You have seen battlefields where sacrifice was the order of the day and to compare that sacrifice to the timidity and selfishness of the nations gathered at San Francisco must inevitably be disillusioning.”

  Yet could the conference have achieved more? The hard fact was that nations were not prepared to yield their sovereignty to an international organization. He listened in the corridors to the world government arguments of another young veteran, Cord Meyer, about to start the World Federalists. “Admittedly world organization with common obedience to law would be solution,” Kennedy scribbled in a notebook. “Not that easy. If there is not the feeling that war is the ultimate evil, a feeling strong enough to drive them together, then you can’t work out this internationalist plan.” “Things cannot be forced from the top,” he told his PT-boat friend.

  The international relinquishing of sovereignty would have to spring from the people—it would have to be so strong that the elected delegates would be turned out of office if they failed to do it. . . . We must face the truth that the people have not been horrified by war to a sufficient extent to force them to go to any extent rather than have another war. . . . War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

  These were the things to be considered “when you consider that Conference in San Francisco. You must measure its accomplishments against its possibilities. What [the] Conference accomplished is that it made war more difficult.” He summed up his feelings about the UN in his notebook:

  Danger of too great a build-up.

  Mustn’t expect too much.

  A truly just solution will leave every nation somewhat disappointed.

  There is no cure all.

  This was his mood immediately after the war: don’t expect too much: no cure-alls. The next year he wrote succinctly in the six-year report of the Harvard Class of 1940, “I joined the Navy in 1941, served in P.T. Boats in the Pacific and was retired in April, 1945, because of injuries.” (The Class Secretary added a footnote: “Kennedy received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal.”) Concluding a brief paragraph, Kennedy replied to a question asked all members of the class, “I am pessimistic about the future of the country.”

  He had expected to become a writer; but the San Francisco experience may have helped persuade him that it was better to sit at the conference table than to wait outside with the press. His brother’s death also changed things. The family assumption had been that Joe, who had made his political debut as a delegate at the 1940 Democratic convention (where he cast his vote, as pledged, against Franklin Roosevelt), would be the Kennedy to enter politics. Though Ambassador Kennedy did not, as myth later had it, automatically promote his second son into the slot now so sadly vacant, Jack, like many young veterans, felt the need of doing something to help the world for which so many friends had died. Politics perhaps attracted him less as a means of
saving this world than of keeping it from getting worse. In 1946 he returned to Boston to test the political air.

  The return to Boston must have involved a form of what anthropologists call ‘culture shock.’ While born a Boston Irishman, he had never been a member of the Boston Irish community; and his life had carried him far away from his roots. Now, in the 11th Congressional District, he was back among his own people, yet not quite of them. He liked their toughness and their loyalty, but regretted their anti-intellectualism. Campaigning through the three-deckers of Charlestown and the North End, he fraternized for the first time with the men and women from whom the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds had sprung. In the dimly lit hall of one Charlestown tenement he encountered David Powers, a man of exceptional sweetness and fidelity, who beguiled him with his flow of stories, his knowledge of Irish Boston, and his capacity for affable relaxation. Kennedy, at first a little stiff and shy, soon began to relax himself, though, as the old Boston politician and raconteur Clem Norton (the model for Hennessy in Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah) put it, he never quite acquired ‘a street personality.’

  In the fall of 1947 I returned to Massachusetts myself to teach history at Harvard. A note from Kennedy in January 1948 started “Dear Arthur” (and continued: “I have your letter of January 2nd, relative to your interest in conditions at the Harvard Square Post Office”); but my first distinct recollection is of a political meeting in Harvard Yard during the presidential election that October, where we sat together and chatted while he waited his turn to go to the platform. Thomas H. Eliot, who had represented Cambridge with distinction in the House until he was redistricted and beaten by Curley in the Democratic primary, was speaking. The position of the Yankee Democrat in Massachusetts was not easy; and Eliot appeared to be overcompensating for his suspicious origins by the warmth of his advocacy of Paul A. Dever, the Irish Catholic candidate for governor. Kennedy leaned over and said, “How can a man like Tom Eliot say such things about a man like Paul Dever?” Later my opinion of Dever was higher, and so too, I think, was Kennedy’s. Eliot, who is now Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, may not have been so wrong as we thought. But at the time I was surprised and impressed by Kennedy’s unorthodox reaction.

  I should not have been so surprised. He had already shown his independence by his refusal to join his Massachusetts Democratic colleagues in the House in petitioning President Truman to pardon Curley, who, though still mayor of Boston, was by 1948 in Danbury prison for using the mails to defraud. (He was, it used to be said, the only mayor of Boston to serve two terms at once.) Occasional meetings with Kennedy in the next years strengthened the impression of a skeptical mind, a laconic tongue, enormous personal charm, an agreeable disdain for the rituals of Massachusetts politics and a detachment from the pieties of American liberalism. He still looked exceedingly young (actually he was six months older than I), but he was plainly purposeful and his own master.

  In 1949, for some reason which now escapes me, perhaps because it might be a first step toward the governorship, I urged him to run for mayor of Boston. He replied, “I am interested in my work here in the House, and feel that there is much good that I can do from here.” He was right, of course, to avoid the mayoralty trap; but it was soon evident that he was considering possibilities beyond the House. By 1950 he was making regular weekend visits to Massachusetts, speaking in places remote from his own district. He was plainly preparing to run for senator or governor in 1952. Which it would be depended on whether Paul Dever, now governor, chose to seek re-election or to challenge the incumbent Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Kennedy’s preference for the Senate was clear. As he said one day, gesturing at the State House, “I hate to think of myself up in that corner office deciding on sewer contracts.”

  Early in 1952 Senator Paul H. Douglas of Illinois delivered the Godkin Lectures at Harvard. The Douglases came for luncheon one winter Sunday along with Bernard De Voto, Joseph Alsop, the McGeorge Bundys and Kennedy. Douglas, who seemed to regard the young Congressman with paternal fondness, warned him sternly against trying for the Senate, especially if the Republicans should nominate Eisenhower. Why not accumulate seniority in the House? or would not the governorship be less risky? Kennedy listened quietly and said little. Doubtless he received much advice of this sort. But, almost as if he felt he had little time to lose, he had long since resolved to push ahead. When Dever announced in April that he planned to run again for the governorship, Kennedy promptly declared his candidacy for the Senate.

  I was away from the state most of the fall, working on Adlai Stevenson’s staff in Springfield, Illinois. When the Stevenson party was campaigning through Massachusetts in October, we were much impressed by the cool efficiency of the Kennedy operation and by Kennedy himself, slim, careless and purposeful against the sodden background of the old-time Boston politicians. He beat Lodge by 70,000 votes. In the gloom of Stevenson’s defeat, his success was a consolation. Victory now sent him back to Washington as a junior member of the Democratic minority in the Senate.

  War had been a hardening experience, and politics hardened him more. Massachusetts Democrats did not exist as a party in the usual sense of the word. They formed rather a collection of rival tongs, controlled by local chieftains and presided over by an impotent state committee. Kennedy carved out his own domain and pursued his own goals. He showed himself determined, unrelenting and profane, able to beat the pols on their own ground and in their own language.

  With his instinct for compartmentalization, he did not often display this part of his life to friends in other layers. His closest associate in these enterprises was his brother Robert, who managed his campaign for the Senate in 1952. Though Robert Kennedy was also a Harvard man, the Cambridge liberals regarded him with marked distrust because of his association with the McCarthy Committee; nor were his expressed views on public policy reassuring. Early in 1954 he sent a letter to the New York Times which, among other things, seemed to argue the Republican thesis about the iniquity of the Yalta conference. I was moved to write a forceful but perhaps condescending answer denouncing the letter as “an astonishing mixture of distortion and error.” Robert Kennedy came back with a lively rejoinder. The last sentence suggests the tone: “I do not wish to appear critical of Mr. Schlesinger’s scholarship for his polemics cover such a wide variety of subjects that it is understandable that he is not always able to read all of the documents he so vigorously discusses.” He sent me a copy along with a note to the effect that he hoped his response would “clarify the record sufficiently for you to make the necessary public apology.” I replied in like spirit; but the Times, bored with the argument, did not bother to print the rebuttals and surrebuttals. This exchange only amused Jack Kennedy, who later said, “My sisters are very mad at you because of the letter you wrote about Bobby.”

  In the 1956 campaign, Robert Kennedy joined the Stevenson party and accompanied the candidate in his trips around the country. He said very little, and no one quite knew what he was doing. (Actually he was learning how a national campaign should—or should not—be run.) His presence was, to my mind, a bit ominous; and I imagine he regarded mine with equal enthusiasm. One day in October Stevenson addressed a meeting in West Virginia. He was due that night in New York; but fog and rain set in, and only one plane was available to fly the candidate north. Arrangements were made to send the rest of the party on to Pittsburgh by bus. When the buses finally appeared, we all tumbled in and groped for seats in the darkness. In a minute I turned to look at my seatmate and, to our joint annoyance, found Robert Kennedy. For the next several hours, we rode through the storm to Pittsburgh. Having no alternative, we fell into reluctant conversation. To my surprise he was pleasant, reasonable and amusing. Thereafter our relations were amiable and uncomplicated.

  Next to his brother, Kennedy’s chief lieutenant in Massachusetts was a Springfield public relations man who had once worked for Foster Furcolo, Lawrence O’Brien. O’Brien played a large role in organizing the 1952 c
ampaign for the Senate and subsequently joined the senatorial staff. In 1956 the Kennedys engaged in a bitter fight with John McCormack for control of the Democratic State Committee. For that fracas Bobby added to the group a Harvard classmate and former football captain, Kenneth O’Donnell; in 1960 O’Donnell became John Kennedy’s appointments secretary and a key figure in the campaign. O’Brien and O’Donnell were both astute, unruffled, soft-spoken and terse. Both had great humor: Larry’s was friendly and genial, while Ken, who looked like one of the young IRA men in trenchcoats in John Ford’s film of The Informer, had a grim, cryptic wit which could be devastating. Both were liberals in the New Deal tradition—more so at this time than the Kennedys. O’Brien had been an early Massachusetts member of Americans for Democratic Action. Once when Robert Kennedy brought O’Donnell home to dinner in their college days, O’Donnell defended Franklin Roosevelt with such vigor that Ambassador Kennedy, deeply angered, left the table. Nevertheless, both were realistic organization politicians slightly contemptuous of reformers and reform groups. They worked in perfect unison with the Kennedys, shared that common understanding which abbreviates communication to swift phrases and imperceptible changes in facial expression, and filled in a vital part of Kennedy’s life. Dave Powers, less involved in politics, kept the whole group happy.