honorary Townie. Charlestown voted overwhelmingly for his return to Congress in 1948 and 1950, for his election to the Senate in 1952 and 1958, and to put him in the White House in 1960. And Kennedy returned the attention. He appointed Bob Morey, his Townie driver, to be U.S. Marshal for Massachusetts, and he brought Dave Powers into the White House as boon companion. Powers took pains to see that loyal Charlestown supporters received appropriate recognition. In April 1961, the President received some three hundred members of the Bunker Hill Council of the Knights of Columbus—
his
council. For nearly an hour, the proud Knights milled across the White House lawn, jawing with
their
President.
The substance of Kennedy’s policies did nothing to alienate Charlestown. In foreign policy, he was perceived as a tough guy, a battle-hardened veteran, not unlike the thousands of Charlestown men who had fought in the two world wars and Korea (there is a legend that Charlestown sent more boys into World War II than any community of its size in the country). Charlestown’s vetsthrilled to Kennedy’s rhetorical flourishes, applauded his firm resistance to international Communism, cheered the attempted invasion of Cuba and the brinksmanship of the Missile Crisis.
In domestic matters, Kennedy suited the Townies nearly as well. For although he came to be considered a liberal, he was deeply suspicious of the conventional pieties. One strain in him, to be sure, rang with lofty purpose, summoning the nation to live up to its highest aspirations (“No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings”). But another side was ironic, intensely aware of man’s limitations (“Life is unfair,” he liked to say). Something deep in Kennedy’s Irish soul bespoke a tragic view of life; the Kirks and their neighbors responded to that.
On civil rights, Kennedy’s stance was deliberate and intensely political. Convinced that he didn’t have the votes in Congress to enact significant rights legislation—and afraid that the attempt would cost him Southern support for the remainder of his legislative program—he was determined to move in this area only by executive order. Yet even here he was laggard, delaying more than two years in signing an order to ban discrimination in federal housing programs, something which, during the campaign, he had airily declared “the President could do by a stroke of his pen.” With this delay, Martin Luther King said, Kennedy had “undermined confidence in his intentions.” Summing up the President’s first year in office, King found it “essentially cautious and defensive”; Kennedy had the understanding and political skill, but “the moral passion is missing.” Even when Kennedy finally introduced a civil rights bill in February 1963, black leaders bemoaned its lack of teeth.
It took the Birmingham crisis of late spring 1963—with Bull Connor’s cops using nightsticks, dogs, and fire hoses on King’s marchers—to create a sense of national urgency to which the President could respond. And respond he did in a nationally televised address that June, in which he said the country confronted “a moral issue … as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.” That night, the President announced that he would bring in a new, stronger civil rights bill, embodying “the proposition that race has no place in American life and law.” To support the bill, a quarter million Americans marched on Washington on August 28. That evening, Kennedy received ten black leaders at the White House, greeting them with the very words King had used at the Lincoln Memorial just hours before—“I have a dream.” At last, it seemed, the dreams of Martin Luther King and the political exigencies of John F. Kennedy were about to converge. Less than three months later, the President was dead.
When Lyndon Johnson capitalized on the nation’s grief to push Kennedy’s civil rights bill through
his
council. For nearly an hour, the proud Knights milled across the White House lawn, jawing with
their
President.
The substance of Kennedy’s policies did nothing to alienate Charlestown. In foreign policy, he was perceived as a tough guy, a battle-hardened veteran, not unlike the thousands of Charlestown men who had fought in the two world wars and Korea (there is a legend that Charlestown sent more boys into World War II than any community of its size in the country). Charlestown’s vetsthrilled to Kennedy’s rhetorical flourishes, applauded his firm resistance to international Communism, cheered the attempted invasion of Cuba and the brinksmanship of the Missile Crisis.
In domestic matters, Kennedy suited the Townies nearly as well. For although he came to be considered a liberal, he was deeply suspicious of the conventional pieties. One strain in him, to be sure, rang with lofty purpose, summoning the nation to live up to its highest aspirations (“No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings”). But another side was ironic, intensely aware of man’s limitations (“Life is unfair,” he liked to say). Something deep in Kennedy’s Irish soul bespoke a tragic view of life; the Kirks and their neighbors responded to that.
On civil rights, Kennedy’s stance was deliberate and intensely political. Convinced that he didn’t have the votes in Congress to enact significant rights legislation—and afraid that the attempt would cost him Southern support for the remainder of his legislative program—he was determined to move in this area only by executive order. Yet even here he was laggard, delaying more than two years in signing an order to ban discrimination in federal housing programs, something which, during the campaign, he had airily declared “the President could do by a stroke of his pen.” With this delay, Martin Luther King said, Kennedy had “undermined confidence in his intentions.” Summing up the President’s first year in office, King found it “essentially cautious and defensive”; Kennedy had the understanding and political skill, but “the moral passion is missing.” Even when Kennedy finally introduced a civil rights bill in February 1963, black leaders bemoaned its lack of teeth.
It took the Birmingham crisis of late spring 1963—with Bull Connor’s cops using nightsticks, dogs, and fire hoses on King’s marchers—to create a sense of national urgency to which the President could respond. And respond he did in a nationally televised address that June, in which he said the country confronted “a moral issue … as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.” That night, the President announced that he would bring in a new, stronger civil rights bill, embodying “the proposition that race has no place in American life and law.” To support the bill, a quarter million Americans marched on Washington on August 28. That evening, Kennedy received ten black leaders at the White House, greeting them with the very words King had used at the Lincoln Memorial just hours before—“I have a dream.” At last, it seemed, the dreams of Martin Luther King and the political exigencies of John F. Kennedy were about to converge. Less than three months later, the President was dead.
When Lyndon Johnson capitalized on the nation’s grief to push Kennedy’s civil rights bill through
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