Tag Archives: American Government

The Lives and Deaths of Third Parties in America

29 Thursday Dec 2016

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Richard Hofstadter

“[T]hird-party leaders in the United States must look for success in terms different from those that apply to the major parties, for in those terms third parties always fail. No third party has ever won possession of the government or replaced one of the major parties. (Even the Republican Party came into existence as a new major party, created out of sections of the old ones, not as a third party grown to major-party strength.) Third parties have often played an important role in our politics, but it is different in kind from the role of governing parties. Major parties have lived more for patronage than for principles; their goal has been to bind together a sufficiently large coalition of diverse interests to get into power; and once in power, to arrange sufficiently satisfactory compromises of interests to remain there. Minor parties have been attached to some special idea or interest, and they have generally expressed their positions through firm and identifiable programs and principles. Their function has not been to win or govern, but to agitate, educate, generate new ideas, and supply the dynamic element in our political life. When a third party’s demands become popular enough, they are appropriated by one or both of the major parties and the third party disappears. Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.”

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Pulled from chapter three of The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter.

Read on:

John Updike: What I Believe

17 Saturday Jan 2015

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John Updike 2

“A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. At the age of 73, I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing…

I also believe, instinctively, if not very cogently, in the American political experiment, which I take to be, at bottom, a matter of trusting the citizens to know their own minds and best interests. ‘To govern with the consent of the governed’: this spells the ideal. And though the implementation will inevitably be approximate and debatable, and though totalitarianism or technocratic government can obtain some swift successes, in the end, only a democracy can enlist a people’s energies on a sustained and renewable basis. To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures — if not happiness — its hopeful pursuit.

Cosmically, I seem to be of two minds. The power of materialist science to explain everything — from the behavior of the galaxies to that of molecules, atoms and their sub-microscopic components — seems to be inarguable and the principal glory of the modern mind. On the other hand, the reality of subjective sensations, desires and — may we even say — illusions, composes the basic substance of our existence, and religion alone, in its many forms, attempts to address, organize and placate these. I believe, then, that religious faith will continue to be an essential part of being human, as it has been for me.”

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Excerpted from John Updike’s short article “Testing the Limits of What I Think and Feel”.

Our Partisanship as a Moral Failing

02 Tuesday Sep 2014

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David Brooks 32

John Meacham: If our country itself is irreconcilably polarized, then in classic republican — lowercase “r” — thinking, that is going to be reflected in our political system.

David Brooks: I’m coming around to that view, which I was very resistant to over the last ten years. A lot of people have argued that [polarization] begins out in the country, not in Washington. I guess I more or less accept that now.

And I think it’s a moral failing that we all share. Which is that if you have a modest sense of your own rightness, and if you think that politics is generally a competition between half-truths, then you’re going to need the other people on the other side, and you’re going to value the similarity of taste. You know, you may disagree with a Republican, or disagree with a Democrat, but you’re still American and you still basically share the same culture. And you know your side is half wrong.

If you have that mentality that ‘Well, I’m probably half wrong; he’s probably half right,’ then it’s going to be a lot easier to come to an agreement. But if you have an egotistical attitude that ‘I’m 100% right and they’re 100% wrong,’ which is a moral failing — a failing of intellectual morality — then it’s very hard to come to an agreement.

And I do think that we’ve had a failure of modesty about our own rightness and wrongness. And I’m in the op-ed business, so believe me that people like me have contributed as much as anybody to this moral failure. But I think it has built up gradually and has become somewhat consuming.

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David Brooks and Jon Meacham, in conversation when Meacham subbed for Charlie Rose this summer.

More:

  • George Washington rips party politics
  • Mark Leibovich rips our cowardly political culture
  • Meacham and Brooks riff on Jefferson and Hamilton

John Meacham

Can We Be Optimistic about America’s Future? (Yes, Says Charles Krauthammer)

02 Monday Jun 2014

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Charles Krauthammer

“Looking down the road, to the future of the United States, I… I really am, despite the burden of our current problems, optimistic.

If you believe, as I do, in the political ideology of liberty; in the importance of an open civil society, and that the relationship between the citizen and the state should be a limited one, then I think you must believe that, if we can advocate those ideas clearly enough, we will win out in the end. And when you take away the other contaminants — the personalities, the contingencies, the financial crises, the Congressional gridlocks, the things that are confined to ‘the times’ — those ideals will survive for another generation. And that’s why I think, in the end, reality does win out. That’s why I’m confident.

Let me just end by saying that I’ve always had a sense that there is something providential about American history — and this is from somebody who isn’t strictly religious. But here is a nation founded on the edge of civilization by a tiny colony, living on the outskirts of the civilized world — one that, at a time when it needs it, miraculously finds within its borders the most brilliant generation of political thinkers in the history of the world. Then, a century later, when it needs a Lincoln, it finds a Lincoln. Then, in the 20th century, when it needed an FDR to fight and destroy fascism, it found it. When it needed Reagan to revive the country, it found one. And I don’t think there is a Reagan or an FDR on our horizon.

But there’s something about American history that redeems itself in a way that should inspire even the most pessimistic cynic. The way I would summarize the root of this feeling is by quoting my favorite pundit, Otto von Bismarck. He’s not known for his punditry, but he did famously say that, “God looks after four things: children, drunks, idiots… and the United States of America.”

I think he still does. I hope he still does. Thank you.”

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Charles Krauthammer, speaking off-the-cuff at the closing of his address to last summer’s Bradley Symposium.

More from Bradley:

‘She Goes Not Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy’: John Quincy Adams on U.S. Isolationism

22 Wednesday Jan 2014

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John Quincey Adams

In the summer of 1821, Greek Revolutionaries rose up to fight for their independence from the Ottoman Empire, and petitioned the United States to join in their struggle. John Quincy Adams, who was then Secretary of State, presented the following response to the U.S. Congress, outlining why America would not intervene.

“Let our answer be this — America… in the assembly of nations, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has… without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings.

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: but she would be no longer the ruler of her own soul…

Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of mind. She has a spear and a shield; but the motto upon her shield is Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.”

Ottoman Empire

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From John Quincy Adams’s address to Congress, delivered on July 4th, 1821. (You can find a lengthy, illuminating discussion of this address in Fred Kaplan’s biography John Quincy Adams: American Visionary.)

As Secretary of State from 1817 to 1824, John Quincy Adams became one of America’s finest diplomats in what was a crucial, formative era in the young nation’s history. Serving in the cabinet of James Monroe, Adams was the chief architect of the famous Monroe Doctrine, which declared the United States would resist any European attempts to colonize the Americas, while also remaining unaligned and uninvolved in the internal affairs of European states and colonies.

In 1821, this doctrine was put to the test, as the Greek Revolution erupted along the northeastern corner of the Ottoman Empire. With European powers rushing to the side of the Greeks in their struggle against Turkish occupation, the revolutionaries petitioned the United States for assistance.

Adams looked with sympathy upon the Greek fight for independence. He viewed it as one battle in a larger struggle between Islam and the West, and along with President Monroe, held deep misgivings about the Ottoman Empire, especially in the wake of the Barbary Wars. Yet Adams refused to commit the United States to the struggle for Greece (which would last until 1832, three years after Adams himself would retire from the White House.)

In July 4th, 1821, Secretary Adams delivered a speech to Congress in which he answered the Greek revolutionaries’ request for aid and outlined the broader American approach to foreign policy. His words above are, in addition to very eloquent, a fine summary of the moral and economic merits of non-interventionism.

“We should go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” That’d look nice on a bumper sticker in ’16, don’t you think?

‘Through the Haze of Pain’: Robert Kennedy Rises from the Depths

25 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by in History, Philosophy

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Robert Francis Kennedy

“With all he had striven for smashed in a single afternoon, [Robert] had an overwhelming sense of the fragility and contingency of life. He had never taken plans very seriously in the past. He could not believe in them at all now…

Robert Kennedy at last traveled in that speculative area where doubt lived. He returned from the dangerous journey, his faith intact, but deepened, enriched. From Aeschylus and Camus he drew a sort of Christian stoicism and fatalism: a conviction that man could not escape his destiny, but that this did not relieve him of the responsibility of fulfilling his own best self. He supplemented the Greek image of man against fate with the existentialist proposition that man, defining himself by his choices, remakes himself each day and therefore can never rest. Life was a sequence of risks. To fail to meet them was to destroy a part of oneself.

He made his way through the haze of pain—and in doing so brought other sufferers insight and relief. ‘For the next two and a half years,’ wrote Rita Dallas, his father’s nurse, ‘Robert Kennedy became the central focus of strength and hope for the family…. Despite his own grief and loneliness, he radiated an inner strength that I have never seen before in any other man…. Bobby was the one who welded the pieces back together.’ As his father had said so long before, he would keep the Kennedys together, you could bet.

He was now the head of the family. With his father stricken, his older brothers dead, he was accountable to himself. The qualities he had so long subordinated in the interest of others—the concern under the combativeness, the gentleness under the carapace, the idealism, at once wistful and passionate, under the toughness—could rise freely to the surface. He could be himself at last.”

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A passage pulled from Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger.

I promise this is the last section from Schlesinger or Dallek that I’ll post — at least for awhile.

RFK / JFKRobert Kennedy FamilyRobert Kennedy and ChildrenRobert Kennedy and daughterJohn F. And Jacqueline Kennedy With Baby Caroline Kennedy

‘The Mystery of Suffering’: Robert Kennedy and the Meaning of Grief

24 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by in History, Philosophy

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Robert F. Kennedy Looking at John F. Kennedy Walk Away by Nat Fein

“Over Easter in 1964 [Robert] went with Jacqueline, her sister and brother-in-law, the Radziwills, and Charles Spalding to Paul Mellon’s house in Antigua. Jacqueline, who had been seeking her own consolation, showed him Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way. ‘I’d read it quite a lot before and I brought it with me. So I gave it to him and I remember he’d disappear. He’d be in his room an awful lot of the time… reading that and underlining things.’…

Robert Kennedy’s underlinings suggest themes that spoke to his anguish. He understood with Aeschylus ‘the antagonism at the heart of the world,’ mankind fast bound to calamity, life a perilous adventure; but then ‘men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life…’ This was not swashbuckling defiance; rather it was the perception that the mystery of suffering underlay the knowledge of life… Robert Kennedy memorized the great lines from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus: ‘He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.’…

As John Kennedy’s sense of the Greeks was colored by his own innate joy in existence, Robert’s was directed by an abiding melancholy. He underscored a line from Herodotus: ‘Brief as life is there never yet was or will be a man who does not wish more than once to die rather than to live.’ In later years, at the end of an evening, he would sometimes quote the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles:

The long days store up many things nearer to grief than joy
… Death at the last, the deliverer.
Not to be born is past all prizing best.
Next best by far when one has seen the light.
Is to go thither swiftly whence he came.

The fact that he found primary solace in Greek impressions of character and fate did not make him less faithful a Catholic. Still, at the time of truth, Catholic writers did not give him precisely what he needed. And his tragic sense was, to use Auden’s distinction, Greek rather than Christian—the tragedy of necessity rather than the tragedy of possibility; ‘What a pity it had to be this way,’ rather than, ‘What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.'”

Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy

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Again from Arthur Schlesinger’s great (if hagiographic) biography Robert Kennedy and His Times.

About the top picture: It is not an image of Robert and John together, with John walking away from his brother across the dunes. Rather, this photograph was taken in 1966. Robert was touring a photo gallery, when he came across this Mark Evans mural of his brother. While he had casually strolled past the other works, he stopped for several seconds before this one, not saying a word, then continued walking. The resulting photograph of the event was taken by Nat Fein.

I’ve written out some meandering reflections on the references and broader implications to be found in this section of Schlesinger’s book, but I’m going to publish them later this week, hopefully in combination with some other scattered thoughts about John F. Kennedy’s legacy and death.

Until then, read a section of Robert’s improvised eulogy for Martin Luther King Jr., in which he quotes the above passage from Aeschylus.

Aeschylus

Last Words for MLK

Or, read some additional wisdom from the Greeks:

Roman Face

From Homer’s Odyssey

Romans Statue

From the Discourses of Epictetus

‘Tragedy without Reason?’: Robert Kennedy Endures His Brother’s Death

23 Saturday Nov 2013

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President Kennedy gallery

“Tragedy without reason? But was there anything in the universe without reason? The question echoed: ‘Why, God?’ For an agnostic the murder of John Kennedy seemed one more expression of the ultimate fortuity of things. But for those who believed in a universe infused by the Almighty with pattern and purpose—as the Kennedys did—Dallas brought on a philosophical as well as an emotional crisis. Robert Kennedy in particular had to come to terms with his brother’s death before he could truly resume his own existence.

In these dark weeks and months, on solitary walks across wintry fields, in long reverie at his desk in the Department of Justice, in the late afternoon before the fire in Jacqueline Kennedy’s Georgetown drawing room, in his reading—now more intense than ever before, as if each next page might contain the essential clue—he was struggling with that fundamental perplexity: whether there was, after all, any sense to the universe. His faith had taught him there was. His experience now raised the searching and terrible doubt. If it were a universe of pattern, what divine purpose had the murder of a beloved brother served? An old Irish ballad haunted him.

Sheep without a shepherd;
When the snow shuts out the sky—
Oh, why did you leave us, Owen?
Why did you die?

He scrawled on a yellow sheet:

The innocent suffer—how can that be possible and God be just.

and

All things are to be examined & called into question—
There are no limits set to thought.”

Robert Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Ted Kennedy at the Funeral for John F. Kennedy

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From chapter 26 (“Corridors of Grief”) of Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger.

How Robert Kennedy Responded to Tragedy

22 Friday Nov 2013

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Robert Kennedy and Brothers

“The question arose whether the coffin should be open or closed. The casket arrived at the White House early in the morning of the twenty-third. After a brief service in the East Room, ‘I (Robert) asked everybody to leave and I asked them to open it… When I saw it, I’d made my mind up. I didn’t want it open.’…

He spent the night in the Lincoln bedroom. Charles Spalding went with him and said, ‘There’s a sleeping pill around somewhere.’ Spalding found a pill. Robert Kennedy said, ‘God, it’s so awful. Everything was really beginning to run so well.’ He was still controlled. Spalding closed the door. ‘Then I just heard him break down…. I heard him sob and say, “Why, God?”’

He lay fitfully for an hour or two. Soon it was daylight. He walked down the hall and came in on Jacqueline, sitting on her bed in a dressing gown, talking to the children. Young John Kennedy said that a bad man had shot his father. His older sister, Caroline, said that Daddy was too big for his coffin…

Robert Kennedy sent a letter to each of his children and told his sisters to do likewise. He wrote his son Joe:

On the day of the burial
of your Godfather
John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Nov. 24, 1963
Dear Joe,

You are the oldest of all the male grandchildren. You have a special and particular responsibility now which I know you will fulfill.
Remember all the things that Jack started—be kind to others that are less fortunate than we—and love our country.

Love to you
Daddy

Robert F. and John F. Kennedy

He appeared, I noted the day after Dallas, ‘composed, withdrawn and resolute.’ Ben Bradlee the same day saw him ‘clearly emerging as the strongest of the stricken.’ Discipline and duty summoned him to the occasion. Within he was demolished. ‘It was much harder for him than anybody,’ said LeMoyne Billings, his friend of so many years. He had put ‘his brother’s career absolutely first; and not anything about his own career whatsoever. And I think that the shock of losing what he’d built everything around … aside from losing the loved figure … was just absolutely [devastating]—he didn’t know where he was…. Everything was just pulled out from under him.’ They had been years of fulfillment, but of derivative fulfillment: fulfillment not of himself but of a brother and a family. Now in a crazed flash all was wiped out. ‘Why, God?’

Robert Kennedy was a desperately wounded man. ‘I just had the feeling,’ said John Seigenthaler, ‘that it was physically painful, almost as if he were on the rack or that he had a toothache or that he had a heart attack. I mean it was pain and it showed itself as being pain…. It was very obvious to me, almost when he got up to walk that it hurt to get up to walk.’ Everything he did was done through a ‘haze of pain.’ ‘He was the most shattered man I had ever seen in my life,’ said Pierre Salinger. ‘He was virtually non-functioning. He would walk for hours by himself.’ Douglas Dillon offered him his house in Hobe Sound, Florida, where Robert and Ethel went with a few friends at the end of the month. They played touch football —‘really vicious games,’ Salinger recalled. ‘… It seemed to me the way he was getting his feelings out was in, you know, knocking people down.’

Sardonic withdrawal seemed to distance the anguish. Seigenthaler went out to Hickory Hill after the funeral. ‘Obviously in pain, [Robert] opened the door and said something like this, “Come on in, somebody shot my brother, and we’re watching his funeral on television.” When Helen Keyes arrived from Boston to help with his mail, ‘I didn’t want to see him; I just figured I’d dissolve; and I walked in and he said, “Come in.” I said, “All right.” And he said to me, “Been to any good funerals lately?” Oh, I almost died, and yet once he said that it was out in the open, and, you know, we just picked up and went on from there.’ Senator Herbert Lehman of New York died early in December. Robert Kennedy, in New York for the services, said to his Milton friend Mary Bailey Gimbel, ‘I don’t like to let too many days go by without a funeral.’

Robert and John F. Kennedy2

Friends did their best. John Bartlow Martin, retiring as ambassador to the Dominican Republic, went to say goodbye. ‘How his face had aged in the years I’d known him.’ Martin attempted a few words of comfort. ‘With that odd tentative half-smile, so well known to his friends, so little to others, he murmured…‘Well, three years is better than nothing.’ Peter Maas arrived from New York on the first day the Attorney General went out publicly—to a Christmas party arranged by Mary McGrory of the Washington Star for an orphanage.

The moment he walked in the room, all these little children—screaming and playing—there was just suddenly silence…. Bob stepped into the middle of the room and just then a little black boy—I don’t suppose he was more than six or seven years old—suddenly darted forward, and stopped in front of him, and said, ‘Your brother’s deadl Your brother’s dead!’ … The adults, all of us, we just kind of turned away…. The little boy knew he had done something wrong, but he didn’t know what; so he started to cry. Bobby stepped forward and picked him up, in kind of one motion, and held him very close for a moment, and he said, ‘That’s all right. I have another brother.’”

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From Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger.

It’s the “remember all the things that Jack started” in Robert’s letter to young Joe that gets me. Started: like the title Robert Dallek’s great book, an unfinished life.

The KennedysRobert and John F. Kennedy 8Robert Kennedy and John F. Kennedy
Robert Kennedy and John F. KennedyRobert Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Robert and John F. Kennedy3 John F. Kennedy Material released by the National Archives in Washington

Jack’s Easy Conquests

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

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John F. Kennedy

“Jack’s greatest success in his first two years at Harvard was in winning friends and proving to be ‘a lady’s man’…

Jack’s discovery that girls liked him or that he had a talent for charming them gave him special satisfaction… ‘I can’t help it,’ he declared with evident self-pleasure [in a letter to an adolescent friend] . ‘It can’t be my good looks because I’m not much handsomer than anybody else. It must be my personality.’…

Jack’s easy conquests compounded the feeling that, like the member of a privileged aristocracy, of a libertine class, he was entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly, even gratefully, from the object of his immediate affection. Furthermore, there did not have to be a conflict between private fun and public good. David Cecil’s The Young Melbourne, a 1939 biography of Queen Victoria’s prime minister, depicted young British aristocrats performing heroic feats in the service of queen and country while privately practicing unrestrained sexual indulgence with no regard for the conventional standards of monogamous marriages or premarital courting. Jack would later say that it was one of his two favorite books.

One woman reporter remembered that Jack ‘didn’t have to lift a finger to attract women; they were drawn to him in battalions.’ After Harvard, when he spent a term in the fall of 1940 at Stanford (where, unlike at Harvard, men and women attended classes together), he wrote Lem Billings: ‘Still can’t get use to the co-eds but am taking them in my stride. Expect to cut one out of the herd and brand her shortly, but am taking it very slow as do not want to be known as the beast of the East.’

But restraint was usually not the order of the day. He had so many women, he could not remember their names; ‘Hello, kid,’ was his absentminded way of greeting a current amour. Stories are legion — no doubt, some the invention of imagination, but others most probably true — of his self-indulgent sexual escapades. ‘We have only fifteen minutes,’ he told a beautiful co-ed invited to his hotel room during a campaign stop in 1960. ‘I wish we had time for some foreplay,’ he told another beauty he dated in the 1950s… At a society party in New York he asked the artist William Walton how many women in the gathering of socialites he had slept with. When Walton gave him ‘a true count,’ Jack said, ‘Wow, I envy you.’ Walton replied: ‘Look, I was here earlier than you were.’ And Jack responded, ‘I’m going to catch up.'”

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Again from Dallek’s great biography, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, this excerpt pulled from chapter 2 (“Privileged Youth”).

John in Joe’s Shadow

19 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by in History

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Joe Kennedy Jr. and John F. Kennedy

“For someone who prided himself on his independence — whose sense of self rested partly on questioning authority, on making up his own mind about public issues and private standards — taking on his elder brother’s identity was not Jack Kennedy’s idea of coming into his own. Indeed, if a political career were strictly a case of satisfying his father’s ambitions and honoring his brother’s memory by fulfilling his life plan, it is more than doubtful that he would have taken on the assignment. To be sure, he felt, as he wrote Lem Billings, ‘terribly exposed and vulnerable’ after his brother’s death. Joe’s passing burdened him with an ‘unnamed responsibility’ to his whole family — to its desire to expand upon the public distinction established by Joe Sr. and to fulfill Joe Jr.’s intention to reach for the highest office.

Nor was his father completely confident that Jack was well suited for the job. As Joe said later, his eldest son [Joe Jr.] ‘used to talk about being President some day, and a lot of smart people thought he would make it. He was altogether different from Jack — more dynamic, more sociable and easy going. Jack in those days back there when he was getting out of college was rather shy, withdrawn and quiet. His mother and I couldn’t picture him as a politician. We were sure he’d be a teacher or a writer.’ Mark Dalton, a politician close to the Kennedys in 1945, remembered Jack as far from a natural. He did not seem ‘to be built for politics in the sense of being the easygoing affable person. He was extremely drawn and thin… He was always shy. He drove himself into this… It must have been a tremendous effort of will.’ Nor was he comfortable with public speaking, impressing one of his navy friends as unpolished: ‘He spoke very fast, very rapidly, and seemed to be just a trifle embarrassed on stage.’…

Despite his father’s help — or perhaps because of it — Jack continued to have great doubts about whether he was making the right decision. He could not shake the feeling that he was essentially a stand-in for Joe Jr. When he spoke with Look magazine, which published an article about his campaign, he said that he was only doing ‘the job Joe would have done.’ Privately he told friends, ‘I’m just filling Joe’s shoes. If he were alive, I’d never be in this.’ He later told a reporter, ‘If Joe had lived, I probably would have gone to law school in 1946.’ He disliked the inevitable comparisons between him and his brother, in which he seemed all too likely to come off second-best, but it seemed impossible to shake them.

Jack also felt temperamentally unsuited to an old-fashioned Boston-style campaign. False camaraderie was alien to his nature. He was a charmer but not an easygoing, affable character like his grandfather Honey Fitz, who loved mingling with people. Drinking in bars with strangers with whom he swapped stories and jokes was not a part of JFK’s disposition. ‘As far as backslapping with the politicians,’ he said, ‘I think I’d rather go somewhere with my familiars or sit alone somewhere and read a book.'”

Joe Kennedy Jr., Joseph Kennedy Sr., and John F. Kennedy

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From chapter 4 (“Choosing Politics”) of Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963.

In the 2nd chapter of the book, there is an anecdote which relates Joe Jr.’s affable swagger during his days at Harvard:

His brother’s success in campus politics also reduced any hopes Jack may have had of making a mark in that area. Under an unstated family rule of primogeniture, the eldest son had first call on a political career. And Joe Jr. left no doubt that this was already his life’s ambition. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, one of Joe’s tutors, remembered him as keenly interested in politics and public affairs and quick to cite his father as the source of his beliefs. “When I become President, I will take you up to the White House with me,” he liked to tell people. Joe’s quick rise to prominence on campus gave resonance to his boasts.

John F. Kennedy, Joe Sr., Joe Jr.

Later, Dallek characterizes the cataclysmic effect that Joe Jr.’s death in World War Two had on his father and younger brother:

Joe’s death devastated his father, who told a friend, “You know how much I had tied my whole life up to his and what great things I saw in the future for him.” To another friend, he explained that he needed to interest himself in something new, or he would go mad, “because all my plans for my own future were all tied up with young Joe and that has gone to smash.” Joe’s death also confirmed his father’s worst fear that U.S. involvement in the war would cost his family dearly, deepening his antagonism to American involvements abroad for the rest of his life.

His brother’s death also evoked a terrible sense of loss in Jack…

His heroic death left Jack with unresolved feelings toward his brother and father. His competition with Joe had “defined his own identity,” he told Lem Billings. Now there was no elder brother to compete against, and Joe Jr.’s death sealed his superiority “forever in his father’s heart.” “I’m shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win,” Jack said.

Given the upcoming anniversary of his death, I’ll be posting more from and about Jack Kennedy in the next few days.

Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.