What I Am Reading: "Kennedy Versus Lodge" by Thomas J. Whalen

I sat on this book for a while before I read it. Why? No reason. Too familiar a topic, I guess. Kennedy's political rise: old hat. Well-known #MApoli. Maybe reading a tiny bit about Endicott Peabody pushed me over the edge, or maybe it was just because I had a day before my next library order arrived. Or maybe it was that the book's introduction referred to it as a "monograph" and an appeal to academic snobbery worked.

Anyway, this is the story of how a rising Irish-Catholic political dynasty eclipsed an existing Yankee/Boston Brahmin dynasty in Massachusetts. It is not some Shakespearian tale about the fall of the man of yester-year like The Last Hurrah; Henry Cabot Lodge, Junior was only 50 and arguably in his political prime, with a potential career as Senate Majority Leader and beyond ahead of him, when he lost to Kennedy in 1952. In fact, his attention to his national career may have played a large role in his Massachusetts defeat. With his subsequent career as UN Ambassador, Nixon's running mate, and Ambassador to Vietnam, he is an interesting might-have-been figure for theorizing on an alternate election result.

First, though: the book. This is an earlier work of historian Thomas J. Whalen. His name was very familiar to me, though I can't place the reason: most of his books are about JFK, LBJ, or baseball, and I haven’t read any of them. This monograph was mostly fine in terms of prose, though it had a tendency to re-introduce people no matter how recently it had referred to them. For example, the Speaker of the House from 1977 to 1987 is "Thomas P. 'Tip' O'Neill" every single time he is referenced. Beyond that, there are a few minor errors or contradictions that one can spot without even searching for them, such as calling Eisenhower's Massachusetts victory the last until Reagan's in 1984 over Mondale; or when Senator David I. Walsh is sited as being from both Fitchburg and Canton on the same page (p.51). Hopefully for Prof. Whalen's readers, these little kinks were ironed out in subsequent works.

Anyway, on to the show. Kennedy and Lodge were, superficially, similar candidates. Both were from political dynasties: Kennedy the descendent of Boston Mayors on both sides, and Lodge the third member of his family to serve in the Senate. Both were raised and ushered into their political careers by stern taskmaster patriarchs: Kennedy by his father, the frustrated Ambassador Joe; and Lodge by his grandfather, the long-serving Senator Henry Cabot Lodge who had clashed with Woodrow Wilson in an earlier era. Lodge had in fact beat Mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald in a Senate election in 1916. The career of Lodge Junior (“Cabot” to his friends) spanned several political eras: he was first elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1932, where he pivoted from his family's arch-conservatism by serving as a progressive Republican, supportive of New Deal policies. He ran for the Senate in 1936 and defeated Governor (and colorful former/future Boston mayor) James Michael Curley, who received little support from the Roosevelt Administration out of concerns that it would be subject to too much graft. Lodge wasn't the worst of the isolationists despite earlier writing a book on the subject; and he pivoted to an internationalist foreign policy with the advent of World War II. He served briefly as a tank commander in North Africa while still a Senator, then resigned from the Senate in 1944 to serve in Europe. Upon his return, he was elected to the state's other Senate seat in 1946, defeating pain-in-the-ass conservative Democratic incumbent David I. Walsh. In this second span in the Senate, he continued his career as a liberal and an internationalist, and tried to bring the Republican Party along for the ride with him.

Kennedy, of course, served on a PT Boat in the Pacific during the war, and ran for Congress in Boston in 1946 as a young, handsome, veteran candidate with a lot of family money behind him. He was a lackadaisical Congressman during his first term, until improved treatments for his Addison's Disease gave him a new lease on health and he buckled down for another two terms. He rejected the idea of primarying Democratic incumbent Governor Paul A. Dever in 1952 in favor of pursuing the higher national profile of a Senate seat, outside of the seniority-based confines of the House.

The 1952 election was a good one for Republicans overall, as Dwight Eisenhower ended twenty years of Democratic rule and brought the House and Senate along with him. Lodge did important work in persuading Eisenhower to run and securing the nomination for him, driven by his goal of a forward-facing, progressive Republican party and his opposition to archconservative Senator Robert A. Taft. However, the Democrats in Massachusetts were coming into their own at this time. The state had long voted Democratic at the Presidential level due to its large Catholic population, but the party was too riven by division between ethnic groups and the personal fiefdoms of Curley and Walsh to take downballot advantage. This changed in 1948 under the leadership of, as he is known here, Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, and dean of the New England Democratic delegation Congressman John McCormack. They ran a well-funded, well-organized, centralized campaign that took advantage of a ballot question (no. 4, repealing an anti-birth control law) that riled up Catholics and another (right to work) that riled up union members, and took over the Massachusetts House of Representatives for the first time in history. The Kennedys were the beneficiaries of this well-organized Democratic machine, and they kicked it into overdrive with copious cash infusions.

This is one of the main reasons that Kennedy ultimately beat Lodge: he out-hustled him. Kennedy was campaigning all day, every day, for months prior to Lodge's engagement, as the latter was busy with his Eisenhower pursuits for much of 1952. The Kennedy organization paid to organize and advertise in every town and precinct, and deployed all kinds of surrogates to woo the female vote and other constituencies. Kennedy and Dever didn't like each other, but they made a mutual campaign pact in Boston, where Dever had the boots on the ground and Kennedy had the money. The telegenic Kennedy and his formerly Hollywood father made better use of TV than Lodge did, and at points he covered dozens of events per day. The campaign was eventually managed by his brother Robert, but this was a logistical job while Jack, Ambassador Joe and others set the agenda and called the shots.

Lodge faced other headwinds. Though an internationalist and opponent of the Soviet Union, he was not thrown into a red-baiting tizzy as other conservatives were about the "infiltration" of the Truman Administration by communists. This, plus his support of New/Square Deal policies, plus his anti-Taft maneuvering, made an enemy out of Basil Brewer, New Bedford-based newspaper publisher and archconservative. Brewer had in fact been the only convention delegate to vote against Eisenhower's final nomination, and resented Lodge for his successful convention stewardship (his call of an early vote on credentials of contested delegates "won a number of wavering delegates; identified itself with a good moral cause; established the fact that they had the votes; dominated the next day's headlines; and seized the initiative," according to the Boston Herald). On the other hand, Kennedy was exactly the kind of Truman-flogging Red Scare alarmist that Brewer liked, courtesy perhaps of his own archconservative father. Brewer threw his fairly influential support behind Kennedy, and a generous loan brought conservative John Fox of the Boston Post along as well. Lodge, meanwhile, had support from many of the state's other papers, but these cut into his constituency.

Some of the Massachusetts-specific campaign issues are interesting to the modern reader. Massachusetts industries were losing ground to those in the South, where there were lower wages and no unions. Instead of engaging in the modern race to the bottom, both candidates supported minimum wage laws to attempt to rectify the issue (and explicitly to help their state’s industries). Lodge, however, voted for Taft-Hartley based on its provisions against strikes during a national emergency, and earned the enmity of labor unions. The regionalism is striking - Kennedy even hyped his own vote against some elements of TVA funding, as the hydropower provided an unfair advantage to Southern industries. New England's rejection of a similar large-scale hydropower project from the New Deal era remains, of course, unmentioned (see Leuchtenburg, Flood Control Politics).

National issues came up as well, and one was of course Senator Joe McCarthy, then in his red-baiting prime. McCarthy was both socially and ideologically closer to the Kennedys, as he had been a guest at the Hyannisport compound and palled around Washington with Jack. However, Lodge was in his party, and had done him a solid by dissenting from the majority report on the Tydings Committee that had rejected McCarthy's claims of Communist infiltration of the State Department. McCarthy squared this circle by offering to campaign for Lodge, as the latter wanted, upon receipt of a public request to do so. Lodge balked at this, thinking the request would alienate some of his upscale Brahmin supporters. Whalen thinks that he should have gone for it though, he could have used more Catholic votes in Boston. McCarthy did send an endorsement telegram shortly before the election.

In the end, Kennedy's money, organization, and lengthy head start as Lodge saw to his Eisenhower affairs carried the day by about 51% to 48%, even as the Republicans won the Governor’s office and the state’s electoral votes. The data isn't perfect, but Whalen looks at Lodge’s numbers against prior opponents and credits the Catholic vote and Kennedy's full-court press for the women’s' vote, as well as conservative support, for the victory. Kennedy went on, believe it or not, to be President, while Lodge went on for some reason to be Nixon's running mate. I was reading a bit on Wikipedia recently about his take-charge role as Ambassador in Kennedy's Vietnam operations, where Kennedy placed him in order to deflect partisan criticism in case he "lost" Vietnam as Truman had "lost" China. That, however, is beyond the scope of this monograph.