JFK's political career began where he had been born–in
Massachusetts, where his father had numerous contacts, and where
a prominent seat in the House of Representatives had just become
vacant. For a time, there was talk of JFK's running for lieutenant-governor, but
in the end he settled on running for the House's Eleventh District,
a sprawling area that included much of East Boston and Cambridge.
Save for Harvard University and its surroundings, the Eleventh
was a poor district, filled with factories, railway yards, and
dumps, and teeming with Irish and Italian immigrants. It was a
heavily Democratic district, so the key to winning the election
lay in winning the Democratic primary. To that end, Joseph Kennedy, Sr.
pulled out all the stops. Using his connections in the Boston newspapers,
he played up his family's charitable work, their staunch Catholicism,
and JFK's status as a war hero. A fortune was poured into streetcar
advertising for the young candidate, and local politicians were
mobilized to lend their support.
JFK's opponents accused him of being a rich, spoiled
carpetbagger, slumming for votes in a poor district, but no one
could doubt his energy and enthusiasm. Gaunt and pale from his
long illnesses, he nevertheless made countless appearances and
speeches around the district, marched in parades, and canvassed
the district, shaking hands and asking for votes. "We took him
out to taverns," a local organizer named Pat Mulhern said later,
"we took him in hotels, we took him up to the South End, we met
'em on street corners, we took him in clubrooms. We took him
every place." Exhausted and ill with a fever, JFK took the primary
easily on June 17, 1946. The fall election was a formality–JFK
swept past the Republican candidate, and in January of 1947 entered
Congress as the "gentleman from Massachusetts."
The political landscape was changing when JFK reached
Washington. World War II was over, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt
was dead. President Harry Truman was doing his best to expand
the liberal social programs of his predecessor, but he faced staunch opposition
from a coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans, who anticipated
winning the White House in the 1948 election. (In actuality,
Truman would eke out a narrow, comeback victory over Republican
Thomas E. Dewey.) It took some time for the inexperienced and
youthful-looking JFK to find his footing in the capital. During
his first term, he hewed close to the Democratic party line on
domestic policy, voting against reducing funding for school lunches,
opposing the weakening of rent control, mobilizing veteran support
for a housing bill that failed to pass, and supporting attempts
to raise the minimum wage. During this time, he served on the
House Education and Labor Commission, as one of the two most junior
members. The other was a California Republican named Richard Nixon.
Only on foreign policy did he buck the party line. When China
fell to the Communist armies of Mao Zedong in early 1949, JFK
denounced the Truman government for its inaction, joining a chorus
of voices that accused the administration of having "lost China."
Meanwhile, during JFK's first term in office, the root
of his constant illness was finally discovered. He fell ill on
a trip to England in the fall of 1948, and while the press was
told that this was a recurrence of his war-time malaria, JFK had
in fact been diagnosed with Addison's Disease. This incurable
ailment was often fatal (one doctor predicted in 1948 that JFK
had only a year to live), since it involved an impairment of the
adrenal glands, and a weakening of the immune system. Treatment
with cortisone injections improved JFK's health, enabling him to
gain weight and improve his skin color, but for the rest of his
political career (and life) his health was fragile. JFK and his
family worked hard to keep his Addison's Disease a secret, aware
that public knowledge of such a condition would probably torpedo
his chances of political advancement.
Reelected to a second term in the House in 1948, and
then a third in 1950, JFK gradually became more comfortable in
Washington. His health improved, and he entered the capital's
social scene, enjoying usually brief romantic liaisons with numerous
women. In the realm of politics, the Cold War, the struggle for
global power between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., had become the
dominant political issue of the day. After the debate over China,
JFK emerged as a consistent, if unpredictable, critic of the Truman
administration's foreign policy. Meanwhile, he had become friends
with a freshman senator from Wisconsin, a Republican named Joseph
McCarthy. It was McCarthy who, in February 1950, made a speech
in which he claimed to have information indicating that over two
hundred employees of the State Department were members of the Communist
Party. So began the era of "McCarthyism," in which fears (later
proved to be somewhat justified) of Russian spying on the U.S.
served as the grounds for an unprecedented witch-hunt aimed at
rooting out "Reds." During this time, Richard Nixon became famous
for chairing congressional hearings that unmasked a Communist
spy named Alger Hiss. Meanwhile, overseas, the Communist threat
became more real with U.S. involvement in the Korean
War (1950-53), in which Communist North Korea attempted
to conquer U.S.-backed South Korea. But McCarthy himself overreached,
and his career became a byword for repression, paranoia, and insidious
gossip-mongering. While JFK never played an active role in the
witch-hunts, he also never condemned McCarthy strongly, and many
Democrats would hold that against him for years.
Nevertheless, JFK felt sufficiently secure in his popularity
to mount a run for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts in 1952.
He was up against Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a Republican and a
member of the wealthy, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant elite of New England.
The race was a contest, as one writer put it, between the Blue
Bloods (the New England aristocracy) and the Green Bloods (the
rising, and largely Irish, immigrant class). Again, Joseph Kennedy,
Sr.'s money and connections had tremendous impact. It was a Republican
year, nationwide, as the popular general Dwight Eisenhower won
the presidential election over the Democratic candidate, Adlai
Stevenson; Eisenhower's Vice-President was former Congressman
Richard Nixon. To the dismay of old Yankee society, however, JFK
won in Massachusetts, by just seventy thousand votes, and in January
1953, he was sworn in as a U.S. Senator.
