The Senator from New England , livre ebook

The Senator from New England
The Senator from New England
The Rise of JFK
SEAN J. SAVAGE
Cover photo of John F. Kennedy courtesy of Getty Images (taken from the LIFE Images Collection). Photographer: Verner Reed.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Excelsior Editions is an imprint of State University of New York Press
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Diane Ganeles
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Savage, Sean J., 1964–
The senator from New England : the rise of JFK / Sean J. Savage.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5703-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5704-8 (e-book)
1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917–1963. 2. Legislators—Massachusetts—Biography. 3. United States. Congress. Senate—Biography. 4. New England—Politics and government—20th century. 5. Presidents—United States—Election—1960. 6. United States—Politics and government—1945–1989. 7. New England—Biography. I. Title.
E842.1.S28 2015
973.922092—dc23
[B]
2014030986
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to my mother, Irene M. Schollard (1929–2015)
Contents
Abbreviations
Preface
Chapter 1 JFK and Massachusetts Politics
Chapter 2 JFK and New England Economics
Chapter 3 JFK and the St. Lawrence Seaway
Chapter 4 JFK and the Politics of 1956
photo gallery
Chapter 5 JFK and the 1958 Elections
Chapter 6 JFK and the Politics of 1959
Chapter 7 From New England to the Nation: 1960
Epilogue
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Photographic Credits
Index
Abbreviations ADA Americans for Democratic Action BC Boston College BPL Boston Public Library BTC Bates College BU Boston University CHC College of the Holy Cross CQ Congressional Quarterly DAC Democratic Advisory Council DDE Dwight D. Eisenhower DDEL Dwight D. Eisenhower Library DNC Democratic National Committee DTC Dartmouth College EMK Edward M. Kennedy FDR Franklin D. Roosevelt GF General Files GPO Government Printing Office HST Harry S. Truman HSTL Harry S. Truman Library JFK John F. Kennedy JFKL John F. Kennedy Library JPK Joseph P. Kennedy LBJ Lyndon B. Johnson LBJL Lyndon B. Johnson Library LOC Library of Congress MCSL Margaret Chase Smith Library MHS Massachusetts Historical Society MSL Massachusetts State Library NYT New York Times OF Office Files OH Oral History transcript PC Providence College POF President’s Office Files PPP Pre-Presidential Papers RFK Robert F. Kennedy RNC Republican National Committee SC Stonehill College TPO Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. UCT University of Connecticut UPI United Press International URI University of Rhode Island UVM University of Vermont WHCF White House Central File
Preface
I developed the idea for writing The Senator from New England: The Rise of JFK while I was researching my third book, JFK, LBJ, and the Democratic Party . While researching secondary sources, I read John Kennedy: A Political Profile by James MacGregor Burns and Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy by Herbert S. Parmet. Each book includes a chapter entitled “The Senator from New England.” I then realized that the aspect of John F. Kennedy’s Senate career that focused on regional policy issues merited a book-length survey and analysis. In particular, The Senator from New England: The Rise of JFK explores how and why JFK changed from a senator emphasizing bipartisan, centrist, and eclectically conservative policy proposals to solve or ameliorate policy problems unique to, or especially prominent in, New England to a more liberal, partisan Democratic senator and presidential candidate who connected and subordinated the policy needs of Massachusetts and New England to those of the nation in general.
The primary sources used in this book include not only those of the Kennedy, Johnson, Truman, and Eisenhower presidential libraries. They also include those of Assumption College, Stonehill College, Boston College, Boston University, Bates College, Providence College, Dartmouth College, the College of the Holy Cross, the state universities of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, and Rhode Island, the Boston Public Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Massachusetts State Library, the Margaret Chase Smith Library, the Catholic Diocese of Worcester, and the Library of Congress. I am grateful for research grants from Saint Mary’s College and the foundations of the John F. Kennedy and Margaret Chase Smith libraries. I am also grateful for the typing skills of Sophia Schrage in preparing the manuscript of this book.
1
JFK and Massachusetts Politics
O N J ANUARY 9, 1961, P RESIDENT-ELECT John F. Kennedy delivered an address to the Massachusetts state legislature, officially known as the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at the State House in Boston. As he prepared to be inaugurated president, JFK assured his fellow Bay Staters, “The enduring qualities of Massachusetts—the common threads woven by the Pilgrim and the Puritan, the fisherman and the farmer, the Yankee and the immigrant—will not be and could not be forgotten in this nation’s executive mansion.” 1 He also quoted John Winthrop’s famous reference to the Puritans’ determination to make their colony “a city upon a hill—the eyes of all the people are upon us.” 2 In concluding his brief yet poignant speech, JFK identified courage, judgment, integrity, and dedication as “the historic qualities of the Bay Colony and the Bay State” and hoped that they “will characterize our government’s conduct in the four stormy years that lie ahead.” 3
Theodore C. Sorensen, JFK’s chief speech writer and future White House special counsel, helped JFK to prepare this speech. He wrote, “Kennedy the President-elect was not unmindful of his inability to be proud of all the politicians of Massachusetts as Massachusetts was of him.” 4 Sorensen added that, in January 1961, few states exceeded Massachusetts in “repeated disclosures of official wrongdoing” and that JFK “could neither avoid that issue nor deliver a self-righteous lecture about it.” 5
In his classic study of the 1960 presidential election, journalist Theodore H. White, a Boston native and Harvard graduate, claimed that Massachusetts was one of the four most politically corrupt states in the nation. 6 In his account of the Kennedy presidency, historian and White House aide Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., quoted JFK as telling him in 1960, “If I were knocked out of the Presidential thing, I would put Bobby into the Massachusetts picture to run for governor. It takes someone with Bobby’s nerve and his investigative experience to clean up the mess in the Legislature and the Governor’s Council.” 7
The contrast between the lofty, sentimental tone of JFK’s “Farewell to Massachusetts” speech and his private comments about his home state’s embarrassing national reputation for its politics was analogous to historian Perry Miller’s earlier observation in The New England Mind: From Colony to Province . In this book, Miller wrote that even as John Winthrop and other Puritans sought to build a “city upon a hill” in Massachusetts, they knew that it “was going to be the old, familiar world of sin and struggle.” 8
Shortly after JFK’s death, Boston Globe reporter John Harris wrote an article detailing much of the petty corruption, clannish factionalism, and Machiavellian maneuvering in Massachusetts politics during the 1950s and 1960s. Nevertheless, he optimistically concluded, “That the puritan ideal should be permitted permanently to languish in the state and city of its most perfect development seems unthinkable” because “the spirit and determination which once blazed the way to the establishment of a republic, are still in the New England air.” 9
Despite his frequent, private expressions of exasperation with politics in Massachusetts, JFK needed to appeal to the Puritan ideal of a “city upon a hill” in his rhetoric and some of his policy behavior while adapting to the unseemly aspects of Massachusetts politics that pressured and motivated him to develop the political skills necessary to progressively succeed in state, regional, and national politics. Kennedy was a Catholic and the great-grandson of Irish immigrants as well as the grandson of a state senator and mayor of Boston. Thus, JFK could understand and shrewdly participate in the Irish-dominated, so-called “immigrant ethos” which included machine politics, the use of government resources to benefit one’s family, friends, and political supporters, and an emphasis on social welfare and labor reforms in public policy. 10 Meanwhile, JFK’s inherited wealth, Harvard education, and father’s determination to instill in his sons the Brahmin values of noblesse oblige toward public service also enabled JFK to understand and apply the so-called “Yankee ethos.” In addition to the achievement of a morally and intellectually superior public good derived from the Puritans’ concept of a “city upon a hill,” the “Yankee ethos” within New England’s political culture included an emphasis on honesty and efficiency in government spending, a distaste for patronage jobs and other ethically questionab