Kennedy: The Classic Biography (14 page)

Harper was interested in a book, and there then began a steady stream of material to the Senator’s bedside stand. I did not see him until the middle of March when I traveled to Palm Beach to work with him for ten days. But I received instructions almost daily by letter and sometimes telephone—books to ship down, memoranda to prepare, sources to check, materials to assemble. More than two hundred books, journals, magazines,
Congressional Records
and old newspaper files were scanned, as well as my father’s correspondence with Norris and other sources.

The Senator dictated into a machine, to local stenographers in Palm Beach and to the stenographers I brought down on my two visits. He reshaped, rewrote and coordinated historical memoranda prepared by Professor Jules Davids of George Washington University, whom Jacqueline had recommended, by James Landis and by me. He considered, and mostly rejected, new examples which our research produced, such as Senators Humphrey Marshall and Thomas Corwin. He decided to exclude the story of John Tyler’s resignation from the Senate, which had been included in the original magazine article.

He insisted on knowing the full historical background of each chapter And he developed, as he read and wrote, a far keener insight into his own political philosophy as well as the obligations of the office-holder in a democracy. Many assumed that the book was intended as a “personal catharsis,” a justification or substitute for his role in the McCarthy censure. In truth this was never mentioned, and the theme of the book predated the censure controversy.

The work was a tonic to his spirits and a distraction from his pain. A return to the hospital for another dangerous operation in February of 1955 slowed him down only temporarily. Even there, where his survival was again in doubt, he wrote on a board propped up before him as he lay flat on his back. Returning to Palm Beach, he resumed as quickly as possible his steady pace of research and dictation. At first he worked lying in bed, then propped up on the porch or patio and later sitting in the sun near the Atlantic beach or pool.

Except for the introductory and concluding chapters, the bulk of the manuscript was finished by the time he returned to the Senate on June 1. Several crates of books, mostly the property of the Library of Congress, were shipped from Palm Beach back to Washington. Still the work continued, in his office and home, day and night. Finally a title was selected—
Profiles in Courage
—a selection he made after a long debate in which he successively considered and rejected “Patterns of Political Courage” (the magazine article title), “Call the Roll” (my favorite at the time), “Eight Were Courageous” (one of the publisher’s suggestions), “The Patriots” and “Courage in the Senate.”

With publication of
Profiles in Courage
on January 1, 1956, John Kennedy became more than “just another freshman Senator.” The book was an instant and consistent best-seller. It was favorably reviewed. It was translated into dozens of languages, from Persian to Gujrati. Although, with the exception of one chapter, attempts to convert it into a television or film presentation fell through until 1963, most of its chapters were reprinted in mass circulation magazines and newspapers. Book luncheons and universities invited the author to speak. A rain of honorary degrees began to fall.

But of all honors he would receive throughout his life, none would make him more happy than his receipt in 1957 of the Pulitzer Prize for biography. And of all the abuse he would receive throughout his life, none would make him more angry than the charge a few months later that he had not written his own book.

The charge was long rumored in private, despite the fact that the Senator had written a best-selling book years earlier. Finally it was made publicly by columnist Drew Pearson on the ABC television
Mike Wallace Show
on Saturday night, December 7, 1957. When then asked by Wallace “Who wrote the book for him?” Mr. Pearson replied, “I don’t recall at the present moment.”

On Sunday afternoon the Senator called me in an unusual state of high agitation and anger. He talked, as he had never done before, of lawyers and lawsuits. “We might as well quit if we let this stand,” he said when I counseled caution. “This challenges my ability to write the book, my honesty in signing it and my integrity in accepting the Pulitzer Prize.”

Room 362 in the Senate Office Building was as gloomy that week as the weather. We rounded up samples of the manuscript in the Senator’s handwriting. We prepared a list of possible witnesses who had seen him at work on
Profiles
—secretaries who had taken dictation, visitors to Palm Beach, publishers and others. The services of Washington attorney Clark Clifford were obtained. After further conferences in Washington and New York, a direct confrontation with ABC executives was arranged.

There followed an unpleasant day. Mr. Pearson, when telephoned by ABC in the presence of the Senator and Clifford, said that Ted Sorensen had “written” the book—not merely worked on the assembly and preparation of the materials upon which much of the book was based, as the Senator had fully acknowledged in the Preface, but had actually been its author.

The ABC executives, after privately cross-examining me at length, finally agreed that the Senator was clearly the author of
Profiles in Courage
with sole responsibility for its concept and contents, and with such assistance, during his convalescence, as his Preface acknowledged. But they sought to avoid their own responsibility for publishing an untrue rumor by making a new and equally untrue charge—namely, that I had privately boasted of being the author.

More examination and argument ensued. The conversations upon which this latest charge were based proved fictitious, an invention of ABC staff members too eager to please.

“Perhaps,” said an ABC vice president to the Senator, as I waited in another room, “Sorensen made the statement when drinking.”

“He doesn’t drink!” snapped the Senator.

“Perhaps he said it when he was mad at you.”

“He’s never been mad at me,” said the Senator.

Finally I was called back into the room. It was agreed that I would furnish a sworn statement that I was not the author and had never claimed authorship of
Profiles in Courage
, and that ABC would make a complete statement of retraction and apology at the opening of the next
Mike Wallace Show.

The speed as well as the tone of this retraction was gratifying. Two months later, after a talk with the Senator and a review of the evidence, Drew Pearson—though the Senator felt no further retraction was needed—included in his column the small parenthetical note that the “author of‘Profiles in Courage’ is Senator Jack Kennedy of Massachusetts.”

Flying back to Washington that night in December, Clark Clifford and I could laugh over one aspect of the day’s dismal, though necessary, proceedings. I was not the author of Jack Kennedy’s book—but I had “ghost-written” ABc’s statement of retraction and regret.

1
The aging but mentally agile Senator Theodore Francis Green from industrialized Rhode Island voted with Kennedy on this issue, for all New England farmers thought high grain supports increased their feed costs; and when Kennedy asked Green if the farmers in Rhode Island were backing him up in this controversy, the old Senator replied, “Oh my, yes—
both
of them.”

2
Wilkins linked Kennedy’s vote with a supposed newspaper picture showing the Senator with his arm around the Governor of Georgia. Most gregarious politicians would assume such a picture existed. But the restrained Senator from Massachusetts knew that he had never posed, as he wrote Wilkins, with his “arm around the Governor
or anyone else,”
and Wilkins later admitted that he had intended only “a figure of speech.”

3
Presumably this meant that Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa considered himself a power in the Democratic Party, but once the investigation began, Hoffa, forgetting his 1953 claim that a Republican committee in the House was persecuting him because he was a Democrat, claimed that the Kennedys were out to get him because he was a Republican.

4
When he learned that a noted political analyst claimed his opposition to Kennedy’s Presidential candidacy was based on the latter’s statement that Western Europe “would be flushed down the drain,” the Senator could assert without hesitation that he had never used such a phrase in his life.

5
That particular “definition” exemplified the caution with which he approached any tinkering with the Constitution, leading him to oppose not only the Bricker Amendment and the Mundt-Daniel Electoral College Amendment but a reduction in the voting age as well. He favored the latter on its merits, he said, and would support it on the ballot in Massachusetts. But he felt that his stand against needless or hasty Congressional action on Constitutional amendments required him to oppose it in the absence of more widespread action by the states or further evidence of its necessity. Had the national voting age been eighteen in 1960, polls indicate that Kennedy’s margin would not have been so narrow.

6
Until his wife corrected him, he at first confused two poems by using instead of the first line quoted above the words “I’ll hitch my wagon to a star.”

CHAPTER III
THE POLITICIAN

I
N 1956 HARVARD UNIVERSITY
awarded John Kennedy an honorary degree with a citation as brief and balanced as the best of his speeches: “Brave officer, able Senator, son of Harvard; loyal to party, he remains steadfast to principle.”

The second clause was an admirable summary of the Senator’s politics. Loyal to party, he remained steadfast to principle. His votes in the Senate were independently determined but consistently with the progressives in his party. He had not always cast a straight Democratic ballot at the polls, but had long worked at speech-making and fund-raising for fellow Democrats both inside and outside Massachusetts. He did not conceal his party label, as many do, in his campaign media, but he also successfully appealed for independent and Republican votes. He was rarely personal about politics—even though in private he talked more about personalities than issues—and did not dislike those who opposed or even attacked him so long as they were open and impersonal in their stand.

In
Profiles in Courage
he wrote: “We cannot permit the pressures of party responsibility to submerge on every issue the call of personal responsibility.” But he was a partisan Democrat. He told me midway through his first Senate term that, had he arrived from outer space wholly ignorant of the issues, he would, “after listening a while to Mundt, Curtis and that group, gladly be a Democrat.” Democrats, he said, generally had more heart, more foresight and more energy. They were not satisfied with things as they were and believed they could make them better.

But his partisanship had not been sufficiently blind or bitter to endear him to some of the “professional” party leaders, “pols,” hacks and hangers-on in Massachusetts. He was of Irish descent, like most of them, but he was “Harvard Irish.” Despite the fact that he consistently ran ahead of other Democrats in the state, he did not, in their judgment, look or talk like the traditional Massachusetts politician. It was a judgment with which he might have agreed. “I hadn’t considered myself a political type,” he wrote in 1960, explaining why he had assumed in college that his older brother would be the family politician. Nevertheless this product of an unusually political family, representing the most political of cities, liked politics more each year, and became in time a far better practitioner of that profession than any of the so-called “professionals.”

The professionals thought he had shown his party unreliability early as a young Congressman. He had been the only member of the Massachusetts Democratic delegation in 1947 unwilling to sign a petition to President Truman seeking clemency for James Michael Curley. Curley, onetime Mayor of Boston, Congressman and Governor of Massachusetts, was regarded as the “elder statesman” of the old-style Democratic politics, with which Kennedy had no wish to be associated. More importantly, he later told me, Curley’s, term in prison for a mail fraud conviction had barely started, and a check with the authorities showed no grounds for a medical plea. Despite Curley’s popularity in his old district, despite a request from delegation leader John McCormack, the young Congressman could not be persuaded that the party image would be helped by the “Purple Shamrock’s” premature release.

The Senator enjoyed Edwin O’Connor’s novel of urban politics,
The Last Hurrah
, but he regretted the resulting reglorification of Curley, upon whose career it seemed to be based. When Curley died late in 1958, the Senator was reached in an Anchorage hotel room by a Massachusetts radio reporter who was apparently unaware that it was 5
A.M.
in Alaska. After struggling briefly with a cautious, telephone-recorded statement about Curley’s “colorful” career which would surely be “missed,” Kennedy gave up with his own somewhat colorful—and presumably recorded—oath and went back to sleep.

The old-line politicians grumbled also that Kennedy had always relied on a personal organization instead of the party and on amateurs instead of “pros.” He used a self-proclaimed “pol” named Francis X. Morrissey as a political confidence man and buffer in Boston—but depended on his brothers and others of whom the “pros” had barely heard to run his Massachusetts campaigns. As a Senator, they complained, he voted too independently, spent too much time courting Republican voters and was not helping the party (i.e., themselves) sufficiently by dispensing patronage. They overlooked the fact that a freshman Democratic Senator under a Republican administration has very little Federal patronage to dispense; and that his influence on state government patronage was limited during his eight years in the Senate by the two occupants of the governor’s office—Republican Christian Herter, and then a Democrat, Foster Furcolo, who was not on friendly terms with the Senator.