Kennedy: The Classic Biography (10 page)

He refused to adopt the practice of most liberal Senators of cosponsoring every measure circulated by every other liberal regardless of its effect on the budget, and his refusal was sometimes interpreted as rudeness. When we left the Capitol at the close of the 1954 session, he was racked by the pain in his back and discouraged over the opposition to his efforts to save money on the Colorado and Delaware rivers. “We made a lot of enemies for nothing,” he said, in one of his rare moments of discouragement.

But Senators are accustomed to divisions and debate, and he had no real “enemies” among his colleagues—with two possible exceptions. One was the lady from Maine, Senator Margaret Chase Smith—“a very formidable political figure,” he termed her in 1963. She was, during all the years of his travels for new Senatorial candidates, the only Republican Senator who regarded it as a personal affront that he had campaigned for a Democratic opponent.

The other “enemy” was Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. There were many reasons for McCarthy and Kennedy to be close. No state had a higher proportion of McCarthy supporters than Massachusetts. No newspaper was more devoted to his every cause than the Boston Post. McCarthy had not spoken in Massachusetts in the 1952 Senate campaign, and neither Kennedy nor Lodge, uncertain of the impact, had raised the issue of his methods. McCarthy had Bob Kennedy on his committee staff in 1953. Earlier he had visited the Kennedy girls at Cape Cod, and for some time he had basked in the admiration of the Ambassador. (In 1954, however, Senator Kennedy put down the phone after a chat with Hyannis Port and remarked, “McCarthy’s really gone now—even my father is down on him!”)

But McCarthy’s rough and wide-ranging hunts for Reds, “pinks” and headlines had often trampled on the liberties and sensibilities of those who had committed no crime, and John Kennedy was too rational and reasonable a man to remain indifferent to the extremism known as McCarthyism. After he voted against the confirmation to the Federal Communications Commission of McCarthy’s friend Robert Lee—a vote which had been converted into a test of McCarthy strength and sentiment—McCarthy would pass Kennedy in the hall without a nod. McCarthy was also disappointed that Kennedy had supported Charles “Chip” Bohlen to be Ambassador to the Soviet Union—supported former President of Harvard James B. Conant to be Ambassador to West Germany, despite a personal plea from McCarthy to Kennedy—supported a Hatch Act amendment barring political speeches by McCarthy friend Scott McLeod, then Security Chief at the Department of State—and later opposed McLeod’s nomination as Ambassador to Ireland. (“I sympathize with their wanting to get rid of McLeod,” Kennedy told me, “but why pick on poor old Ireland?”)

In addition, Kennedy was a thorn in McCarthy’s side in the full Government Operations Committee of which McCarthy was chairman (as he was of its Investigations Subcommittee). When McCarthy sought to name former Senator Owen Brewster as chief counsel to the full committee, Kennedy, fearing the tactics for which Brewster was noted would transfer to the full committee all the sins of the subcommittee, was responsible for delaying and defeating the appointment. When McCarthy sought a contempt citation of Corliss Lamont for refusing to answer questions on his books, Kennedy blocked its approval in committee until the Department of Justice certified its constitutionality (and the Supreme Court, he later noted, ruled the Department wrong).

Except for the Boston Post, however, most of his constituents and the nation still regarded the junior Senator from Massachusetts as neutral or equivocal on McCarthy. Kennedy made no speeches which appeased the passions of the multitudes of McCarthyites among the Massachusetts Irish, but, like most of his colleagues from sensitive states, he made no speeches against him. That was wrong. On a television interview in February of 1954, he stated that McCarthy and his associates were guilty of partisan excesses in calling Democrats “the party of treason.” Any specific vote found him on the side of civil liberties—he opposed, for example, looser restrictions on wiretapping and a bill to compel the waiver of a witness’ rights under the Fifth Amendment. He led the fight against loyalty oaths for students and labor leaders, and he supported changes in the rules to prevent the abuse of witnesses. But on the broader and vaguer issue of “McCarthyism” he preferred, like the Supreme Court, not to decide a case which was not actually before him. He answered constituent mail on the question with caution, stating candidly his views on specific issues but avoiding a commitment on the man.

Many thoughtful Americans believed that McCarthy’s conduct
was
an issue before the Senate as a whole. His name had become symbolic of an atmosphere which was increasingly intimidating many civil servants, teachers and others suspected of unorthodox beliefs. Within the strangely isolated walls of the Senate, however, a different atmosphere prevailed—an atmosphere in which, as Kennedy said later, “Most members are reluctant to judge personally the conduct of another. Perhaps that was wrong in McCarthy’s case—-perhaps we were not as sensitive as some and should have acted sooner. That is a reasonable indictment that falls on me as well.”

In any event, the case of McCarthy was soon formally before the Senate—less for the damage he had done to the reputation of loyal citizens than for the damage he had done to the reputation of the Senate. Senator Kennedy was not enthusiastic about the approach of Vermont Senator Ralph Flanders, whose rather loosely worded motion for a Senate censure of McCarthy initiated his downfall. McCarthy’s violations of due process, Kennedy reasoned, made it all the more important that due process be strictly followed in any proceeding against him. “Flanders had supported McCarthy wholeheartedly in the ’52 campaign when his talks were irrational,” he told me. “He only got mad at him when he went to work on the Republican Party.” And in the speech Kennedy had been planning to give in support of censure, he pointed out:

Although [the Senator from Vermont] has cited incidents stretching back as far as 1949 in support of his resolution, he has since that date voted to seat the Senator from Wisconsin as Chairman of the Government Operations Committee, voted funds for his investigations and failed—until recently—to protest publicly these past acts…. Indeed, as recently as last March, after Senator McCarthy had described in a speech the conduct of the Democratic Party as “twenty years of treason” or at best “criminal stupidity,” the Senator from Vermont…called this speech “magnificent for the Republican Party” and…stated that “all would be forgiven if he will only take the position and perform the way he did” the previous night.

The Kennedy speech had been carefully based on Senatorial and legal precedents. As a devotee of civil liberties I was proud of my participation in drafting it and the Senator’s plan to deliver it. It cast aside, as any court would, all the specious, emotion-tinged charges that surrounded the case. “Nor do I agree,” he had written, “with those who would override our basic concepts of due process by censuring an individual without reference to any single act deserving of censure.”

Instead, the Kennedy speech emphasized the need to identify concrete censurable practices which had occurred since the Senate had seated—and thus implicitly approved—McCarthy in 1953. He suggested that the record of hearings on the dispute between McCarthy and the Army provided ample grounds within the precedents of previous Senate censures. He later told me, “I think the grounds we picked were far superior to the ones the Watkins Committee picked.” His text, which covered more than twelve double-spaced pages, concluded with a quotation from the Bingham censure case by my boyhood hero, Senator Norris, urging censure “for the welfare of the country…and for the honor and dignity of the United States Senate.”

But this speech was never given and never released. On the night of July 31, 1954, I stood in the back of a crowded Senate chamber, holding in my hand copies prepared for distribution, as the first censure debate began. That afternoon at a strategy meeting called by Senator Herbert Lehman of New York, agreement on the need for more specific charges had been reached by Kennedy and other liberal Senators, most of whom had also previously avoided antagonizing the vocal McCarthy supporters in their states. Now Senator Kennedy was in his seat, speech in hand, crutches by his side. Senator Flanders made a vague and ineffective plea for action. Then a brilliant speech by Senator Morse, who had attended the afternoon meeting, turned the debate into one over proper procedure, and the Senate wisely voted to refer the whole matter to a Select Committee.

That committee, under Senator Arthur Watkins of Utah, at first hoped to file its report in late summer before the Senate went home. When it did not, Senator Kennedy, desperate for relief from his back, hoped that he would be out of the hospital before the Senate reconvened to consider the report in November. Instead, he was near death’s door in November, remaining incommunicado even when carried by stretcher to Palm Beach in December. In constant pain, under heavy sedation, almost wholly immobile, he could not use the telephone, read the
Congressional Record
or consider serious memoranda; and it was not until mid-January, 1955, when we discussed the Formosa Resolution and then later his book, that he and I could be in touch.

The responsibility for recording or not recording him on the censure vote in November, 1954, thus fell on me. I knew, had he been present, that he would have voted for censure along with every other Democrat. (He subsequently stated his approval of the action taken.) I guessed that my failure to record him would plague him for years to come. But I had been trained in the discipline of due process and civil liberties. An absent juror, who had not been present for the trial or even heard the indictment (which in this case was amended in the course of debate), should not have his predetermined position recorded. In all conscience I could not ask the Secretary of the Senate to pair or record Kennedy for censure.

Without question, as the Senator himself later admitted, he could have been more outspoken against McCarthy and his methods before the censure vote, had he not felt inhibited by his family’s friendship; and he could have more clearly stated his position after he returned to the Senate, although that struck him as cheap and hypocritical inasmuch as McCarthyism, and not long thereafter McCarthy, were dead. But his failure to be recorded at the time of the vote, which was persistently raised against him in some quarters, was due to my adherence to basic principles of civil liberties and not to his indifference to them.

CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE SENATE

However, those who were seeking excuses to doubt John Kennedy’s liberalism found new grounds in 1957. Although civil rights had not been a major issue in Massachusetts, where righteous laws against discrimination and persistent acts of discrimination had coexisted comfortably for years, Kennedy as Congressman and Senator had identified himself with the small civil rights bloc in both houses. He had supported a strong FEPC, abolition of the poll tax, antilynching legislation and amendment of the rule on filibusters. He had been the first member of Congress from New England to appoint a Negro to his staff.

In 1957 he supported the administration’s mild but precedent-setting voting rights bill, endorsing the effort to extend under Title III the Attorney General’s injunctive powers to cases on schooling and other rights. He asked me, however, to examine whether there was any legal basis in Vice President Richard Nixon’s proposed ruling to by-pass committee consideration of the bill. When I reported that I could find no such basis in either the Senate’s rules and precedents or the Constitution, and that similar manipulation could be employed by conservative Senators on right-to-work and other House bills, he supported the unsuccessful Morse request that the civil rights bill proceed normally to committee, subject to discharge in one week.

Many of the civil rights Democrats privately agreed with Morse that the ill-feeling engendered by abandoning traditional procedures would make passage of a strong bill more difficult. But fearful of being outmaneuvered politically by Nixon and the Republicans, most of them voted to uphold the Vice President’s ruling; and Kennedy’s vote for orderly procedure was condemned by civil rights leaders as a bid for Southern Presidential support. At a convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in mail from Boston Negro leaders, in editorials and columns, Kennedy’s vote was assailed.

The full force of their fury, however, was yet to come. Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, whose own star had been rising on the national horizon, was determined to obtain passage of the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction. A careful counter of Senate heads, he knew that he did not have the votes to break a Southern filibuster, that adoption of the “jury trial amendment” might avoid a full-scale filibuster, and that the votes of Kennedy and his friend John Pastore were needed for the adoption of that amendment.

The question dealt with by this amendment was whether local voting officials who had defied court orders on the registration of Negroes could be tried for criminal as well as civil contempt of court without a jury trial. The amendment required a jury trial in both kinds of cases. Both sides exaggerated its importance, with some Northerners calling the bill meaningless with such an amendment and some Southerners calling the bill monstrous without it. Enforcement of the bill could not, in fact, depend upon criminal (as opposed to civil) contempt proceedings. But emotion and oversimplification made the amendment a symbol at the expense of the facts. And although some three dozen other non-Southern Senators supported it, Kennedy’s vote was regarded as crucial.

He turned for advice to two Harvard professors of law, both noted for their devotion to civil rights, Mark DeWolfe Howe and Paul Freund. Both answered that acceptance of the amendment to pass the bill involved no betrayal of principle. Kennedy, followed by Pastore, supported the “jury trial amendment.” It passed. The bill passed. “It would be a heavy blow,” the Senator said to his critics, to abandon “a bill of real merit for the doubtful satisfaction of standing dogmatically by a provision which does not…add significantly to the substantive effect of the measure.”