Kennedy and King

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JOHN KENNEDY KNEW about discrimination not from the experiences of blacks but from his own family's immigrant history. From the moment they stepped ashore in Boston in the late nineteenth century, his Irish Catholic ancestors struggled against exclusion by the established, ruling Protestants. "He felt that as an Irishman somewhere along the line he had been discriminated against," recalled his friend George Smathers. Unlike many Irish immigrants, the Kennedys climbed out of the slums and prospered through politics and business.

Kennedy's maternal grandfather, John F. Fitzgerald, was a born politician, rosy cheeked and outgoing; known as Honey Fitz, he was so garrulous his banter became known as Fitzblarney. His bright-eyed amiability won him three terms in the U.S. Congress before he captured the job he most coveted: mayor of Boston, serving as the first city boss whose parents were born in Ireland. Kennedy's paternal grandfather, Patrick Joseph Kennedy, showed early promise as a businessman. In his twenties he bought a run-down saloon, using loans from his family and his earnings from work as a stevedore on the Boston docks, and swiftly turned it into a thriving watering hole. P.J., as he was known, was an imposing figure with a handlebar mustache and a barman's willing ear; he had sharp blue eyes, a thick mane of red hair, and was a rare Irish teetotaler. Soon he bought himself another saloon, then a partnership in a Boston hotel, and finally established a profitable whiskey-importing business. Eventually he became a leading state legislator and was invited to the Democratic National Convention in 1888, where he gave a seconding speech for the presidential nomination of Grover Cleveland.

Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, sought to further elevate the family's social status by amassing a fortune. As a youth he felt the sting of second-class citizenship in help-wanted ads that asked for "Protestants only" and warned: "No Irish need apply." By the 1920s Joe was a millionaire, thanks to some crafty stock market speculation, and he tooled around Boston in his chauffeured Rolls-Royce. But he never overcame feelings of social inferiority. His enormous wealth wasn't enough to break down barriers to membership at the Cohasset Golf Club. Decades later he was still aggrieved, as he told a newspaper reporter: "Those narrow-minded bigoted sons of bitches barred me because I was an Irish Catholic and son of a barkeep."

Joseph Kennedy married the devout and iron-willed Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald in 1914 and, after watching two games of the World Series in Philadelphia on their honeymoon, the couple began turning out a brood of nine children: Joseph Jr. arrived in 1915, and John in 1917, followed by five girls and two more boys, including Robert Kennedy in 1925. Joseph Kennedy nursed dreams of grand political success for his firstborn son as a path to social acceptance, and he was prepared to use his wealth and wits to choreograph Joe Jr.'s political ascent. Ever defiant, the patriarch enrolled young Joe Jr. and John in the elite private school Noble and Greenough in the 1920s, where bullies attacked them because of their Irish Catholic heritage. Of the two boys, Jack, at age seven, was the more frail; he was gaunt, with protruding ears, and because he had been frequently ill and had to convalesce for long periods, he had become a voracious reader. Joe, aged nine, was bigger, stronger, and healthier; he proudly wore the mantle of eldest, anointed son. Like his father, he was hot-tempered and resolved matters with his fists.

One day at recess, cocky Joe turned on his tormentors and a brawl ensued. Jack put up a tough front but he was not a fighter; instead he laid stakes on his brother. A classmate, Augustus Soule, recalled Jack Kennedy, already a cool-headed politician, circulating in the crowd betting on Joe Jr.'s grit. Wagers were made using the youthful currency of the day: marbles, which kids carried in a little bag in their pockets. By the end of the contest, Joe Jr. was battered but victorious and Jack was considerably wealthier in marbles. Later Soule admitted to his father that he lost all his marbles in a bet with Jack Kennedy. "It's an indelible memory," Soule recalled, "Joe fighting and getting all bloody, and Jack going around, betting marbles very quietly."

If the Kennedys suffered bias, their wealth and white skin cushioned the blow. What Jack and his family confronted was nowhere near as harsh as the day-to-day institutional degradation that blacks endured. Jack was intellectually opposed to discrimination, believing it was unfair and irrational. But his emotional grasp of black hardship did not go deep. Around the family dinner table, Jack and his siblings learned compassion for the disadvantaged, but blacks weren't singled out for special attention. "We did grow up with the idea that there were a lot of people that were less fortunate," Bobby Kennedy recalled. "And white people and Negroes were all put in the same category.… We had a social responsibility to try to do something about it. But as far as separating the Negroes for having a more difficult time than the white people, that was not a particular issue in our house."

Little evidence exists that Jack Kennedy harbored a racial bias. Seldom, if ever, was he heard to utter a slur. Once, as a teenager in 1936, he resorted to vulgar language during an extended illness, telling a friend that the Boston hospital where he was confined was a "nigger place." His usage of the epithet seemed an anomaly, occasioned more by naïveté and youth than a habit of bigoted slander. Insatiably curious about people, Kennedy did not seem to possess instinctive prejudice; nor was he given to the anti-Semitism that came easily to his father and his older brother. Jack did not isolate blacks on the basis of skin color; but if this attitude freed him of bigotry, it also prevented him from fully understanding racial discrimination.

Kennedy was as removed from the black community as most any white American coming of age in the first half of the twentieth century. Black churches were foreign to him; he rarely ventured into black neighborhoods; his interaction with black professionals was minimal; and he had almost no exposure to the racial hardship experienced in the segregated South. Any black seen in the Kennedy household was almost invariably a servant. For the Kennedys, interracial friendships were almost nonexistent, and if one took root, it was not a relationship of equals. "I never saw a Negro on level social terms with the Kennedys in all my years of acquaintance with them, and I never heard the subject mentioned," observed journalist Arthur Krock, who was a longtime family friend and promoter of the Kennedy image until the relationship later ruptured. Young Jack Kennedy didn't brood over the condition of blacks in America; the bitter reality of their existence scarcely entered his consciousness. As his brother Bobby once explained, "We didn't lie awake nights worrying about it."

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AT HARVARD IN the late 1930s, Jack had a black valet courtesy of his father. George Taylor looked after Jack's clothes and shoes and served as his chauffeur. Jack and George developed a casual, jocular relationship. Snubbing the social hierarchy of the elite institution, Jack treated Taylor almost as one of the boys, seeking his advice, smoking cigars together, and chatting with him about their mutual passion for girls. Jack was a fun-loving gadabout during his student days; buddying around with his valet was in part the antics of an irreverent, open-minded kid. "We were good friends," Taylor recalled in an interview in 1964.

In college Jack had not yet decided to enter politics, perhaps preferring to teach or write. But at about age twenty the lanky, handsome boy tested his oratorical skills by giving his first speech at the Boston YMCA, focusing on the Soviet threat. Afterward, he was eager to hear his valet's opinion of his performance. "Taylor, how'd I do?" Jack asked him. And the valet let him know: "Jack, terrific!" Often dashing off to see local movies, and Broadway shows, and the opera in New York, Kennedy sometimes took his valet along. "He'd say, 'Come on, Taylor,' And we'd go to an opera," Taylor remembered, where he would gamely sit through the show.

Despite his friendliness toward his valet, college-age Jack had little interest in racial advocacy. Even as a young man, Jack was adept at compartmentalizing his world, and blacks resided in a distant, unexplored corner. His interests lay elsewhere: in women, good times, and foreign affairs. Jack's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was United States ambassador to Great Britain, and Jack spent considerable time in London and traveling through Europe, which fired a passion for international relations. He wrote his undergraduate thesis on why Britain was slow to rearm before the Second World War and, with the help of family friends, got it published as a book, Why England Slept, in 1940 at age twenty-three.

During the war, the Kennedy family was shattered when favorite son Joe Jr. died on a risky bombing mission in Europe. Jack survived his own wartime calamity: the sinking of the PT boat he commanded in the Pacific. For his courage and for saving the life of a crewman he earned national praise as a war hero. Once when he was asked by a high school student how he became a hero, he replied with his self-effacing wit: "It was easy—they sank my boat." With the loss of Joe Jr., Jack returned from the war and accepted the mantle of the Kennedys' oldest son and began seeking to fulfill his father's dream of political greatness for the family.

Jack threw himself into campaigning for a congressional seat in Massachusetts, ignoring constant, sometimes debilitating, pain from lifelong back troubles that had been aggravated by the PT boat incident. In his father's eyes, tough, robust Joe Jr. had been destined for the White House; now all that had changed. In 1946, gangly Jack at age twenty-nine took to the hustings, ill informed about his district and lacking a polished speaking style. Jack was swept along by the Kennedy name, which had been established by his father's wealth and his stint as an ambassador. Joe Sr. funded the campaign, coached the young candidate, and was masterful in drumming up publicity. Night after night, father and son reviewed Jack's performances onstage, the patriarch teaching the candidate how to improve his delivery, and over time Jack gained confidence. Demanding as Joe Sr. was, he loved his children with an all-consuming passion. He urged Jack on with a combination of flattery and sharp criticism. "If I walked out on the stage," Jack recalled, "and fell flat on my face, Father would say I fell better than anyone else."

Jack's valet, George Taylor, stayed with him after college, but now the relationship became strained. In a 1977 interview, Taylor claimed that Jack had given him the job of appointments secretary in this first campaign but then shoved him aside in favor of a family friend. When Taylor complained, he said Kennedy told him: "As of now, you will just have to do with the cooking, the shoes, and my clothes." To which Taylor replied, "Jack, to hell with you." Taylor quit as valet but remained loyal to the candidate and helped rustle up black voters. One night when Jack bought sandwiches for his volunteers at a Cambridge restaurant, he directed the races to sit in separate dining areas. Taylor was outraged. "They're all giving their time," he told Jack. "They're all human beings. Why segregate in this way?" Jack replied: "George, you're thin-skinned. That's one of the things of the time." Taylor responded, "They don't have a color line here in Harvard Square."

Jack handily won the election and arrived in Washington in 1947 as Massachusetts representative for the Eleventh Congressional District, the same seat his grandfather Honey Fitz had held fifty years earlier. In a series titled "New Faces in the House," the Washington Post featured the new congressman under the headline: YOUNG KENNEDY HARD WORKER. This image of the industrious young legislator was planted no doubt by his father, master media manipulator, to counter perceptions of Jack Kennedy as a rich-boy, do-nothing ladies' man. The paper alluded to the reputation: "One of Massachusetts' most eligible bachelors—handsome, 6-foot John F. (Jack) Kennedy—will be one of the youngest members of the new Congress." But then the Post hewed to the Kennedy line: "The social lions of the Washington 'Cocktail Circuit' may be in for a disappointment, for the serious-minded 29-year-old son of the former Ambassador has little time for anything but work."

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During his freshman term, Jack Kennedy espoused bedrock liberal policies that included calls to eliminate racial prejudice. But he stopped short of challenging the Southern culture of segregation, partly out of respect for regional customs and partly because of his ignorance of actual conditions in the South. Although he had traveled much of the world he had still rarely, if at all, stepped foot in the American Deep South.

To avoid the sticky national debate over equal rights, Kennedy approached the question largely as a local issue. "We weren't thinking of the Negroes of Mississippi or Alabama—what should be done for them," recalled Bobby Kennedy, who managed his brother's winning congressional campaign. "We were thinking of what needed to be done in Massachusetts." By keeping the focus local, Jack was free to accord his constituent blacks the respect any human deserved without having to perform a political dance to justify it. As a World War II veteran, he appreciated the sacrifices of all soldiers, regardless of race. He spoke at a 1948 ceremony honoring two black war heroes, and strolled through black communities with the same ease and charm he brought to the white neighborhoods. "Northern pols were normally stand-offish," recalled Harold Vaughan, a black aide in Boston. "But Kennedy would just walk into a beauty salon in a black neighborhood, go right up to the woman below the hairdryer and say: 'Hi, I'm Jack Kennedy.'"