Promise Kept

In his opening campaign speech, young Jack Kennedy recalled a promise he had made when he was a PT-boat skipper in the Solomons. Said he: "When ships were sinking and young Americans were dying ... I firmly resolved to serve my country in peace as honestly as I tried to serve it in war." His method of serving was to try for Congress as a Democrat from Massachusetts' Eleventh District.

He was well equipped with a platform. As early as 1940, still a Harvard senior, John F. Kennedy had ably interpreted the failures of British foreign policy as a warning to the U.S. He wrapped up his findings in a timely book: Why England Slept (because she refused to sacrifice butter for guns, to prevent a war she never really believed would come). After a war in which his older brother and brother-in-law had been killed, in which he himself had been wounded when a Jap destroyer cut his boat in half, Jack Kennedy was even more convinced that U.S. security and world peace depended on U.S. vigilance.

He came out strongly for U.N., backed the loan to Britain, urged a strong Army & Navy for the U.S.

Spaghetti & Tea. But the voters were uninterested. A Harvard public-opinion expert made a study of the district, advised him to avoid world problems. As president of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (named after his dead brother), and as an American Legionnaire, he already had the wholehearted support of most veterans. His big job was to convince the 37 different nationalities in some of Boston's grimiest slums that he was not just the wealthy son of wealthy Joe Kennedy, former Ambassador to Britain.

A boyish-looking bachelor of 29, he worked hard to prove he was no snob. By campaign's end he had made some 450 speeches before luncheon clubs, Catholic societies, the Camelia Lodge of Sons of Italy. He ate spaghetti with Italians, drank tea with Chinese, sipped sirupy coffee with Syrians. He stuck to local topics: restoration of Boston's port, encouragement of New England industries, aid for veterans.

On election day he went to the polls with his grandmother and grandfather, John F. ("Honey") Fitzgerald, onetime Mayor of Boston. Then he sneaked off to a movie, A Night in Casablanca. That night, when returns showed he had beaten his toughest rival in his home territory, grave, earnest, teetotaling Jack Kennedy knew he was in. Rarely has a Republican Congressman been elected from the Eleventh District.

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