Kennedy’s motorcade through Cork, Ireland. Photograph Robert LeRoy Knudsen , U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

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J. F. Kennedy, Reluctant Heir

by Norman B. Schwartz

When John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was twenty-seven and in a military hospital in Arizona, an airplane explosion over England killed his elder brother, Joseph Kennedy Jr, his father’s favorite and heir apparent. After a prescribed period of mourning the Irish American patriarch, Joseph Kennedy Sr, set his mind to finding a successor. The obvious candidate was his next son in line.

Young John, the ambassador’s second son, was not the ideal choice. Chronic back pain and other ailments had burdened him since childhood. When he entered Harvard in 1936, the university where his father had once been a star athlete, he respected his father’s belief that physical activity was the best therapy and joined the football and baseball programs. Given his health problems, there was no possibility that he would become a star player like his father. The only sport he seemed to have any talent for was golf.

When the war came to America in December 1941 the man who had been a military attaché in London when John’s father had been Ambassador to the Court of St James’s saw that John (nicknamed Jack) entered the navy with the rank of ensign. After a period of training, he was quickly promoted to Lieutenant Junior Grade and given command of USS PT-109, one of the many seventy-eight-foot patrol torpedo craft whose mission was to attack Japanese shipping in the Pacific.

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One night, while under his command, a Japanese destroyer unexpectedly rammed Kennedy’s boat and cut it in two. The collision killed two men upon impact. Kennedy fell on his bad back, but despite his pain saved other members of his small crew. Swimming with the survivors in the dark waters of the Pacific, he cut a strap from one incapacitated sailor’s life jacket, placing it between his teeth, and towed the crew member miles to a nearby island.

On 8 August 1943 a PT boat sent to look for them found him and his remaining crew. The Lieutenant Junior Grade displayed his usual deadpan humor and greeted his rescuers coolly. “Where have you been?” he asked, and when offered something to eat after six days of isolation, replied straight-faced: “No thanks. I just had a coconut.”

Immediately recognizing the incident’s publicity value, Father Joe, a master of promotion, made sure Boston’s local newspapers covered Jack’s heroic actions. JFK was much more modest. When interviewed, he explained that he had acted as he had, as an officer must, for the single reason that “they sunk my boat.” The young officer suspected, of course, that as no other PT boat had ever been rammed before and men under his command had been killed, he would soon be court-martialed. Instead, for reasons he could easily guess, the Navy and Marines awarded him a medal and a Purple Heart.

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During his son’s recovery at home, Father Joe asked a family friend, the novelist John Hersey, for help. Hersey wrote a lengthy article about the incident The New Yorker published. The patriarch arranged for its reprinting in the far more popular national magazine, Reader’s Digest. After John received an honorable discharge in 1945, his father convinced the then incumbent Massachusetts congressional representative from the 11th District to vacate his seat so that his son could run for office. Joseph ensured there was a mass mailing of Hersey’s article, free window signs and car stickers were distributed throughout the district, and KENNEDY FOR CONGRESS advertisements plastered throughout the Boston subway system.

With his father’s unceasing funds and unceasing determination, it was no surprise that the young war veteran defeated his Republican opponent in the general election with seventy-three per cent of the vote. Once in office, however, the winner showed little enthusiasm for the post-war role his father had chosen for him. His novice status in the lower house of Congress resulted in minor committee assignments and a lack of any real political influence. He earned a reputation for his rates of absenteeism in Congress.¹ To many of his colleagues, he was just another rich kid dabbling temporarily in politics. Still the dutiful son, he followed his father’s instructions and served his Massachusetts congressional district for six more undistinguished years.

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In 1953, after many decades in power, the Democrat party suffered defeat. Voters elected their wartime hero, General Eisenhower, as president under the banner of the Republican Party. JFK’s father, with his genius for smelling out the winds of the Cold War, correctly prophesied that the liberal policies of FDR’s New Deal, policies Harry Truman had continued to champion, were now passé. A new, more conservative regime had come to power. Loyal to his party, however, Joseph ran his son for the Senate not as a Republican but as a centrist Democrat (read conservative) and, once again having spent a fortune to assure victory, JFK won.

The ex-ambassador encouraged JFK to model himself after a Marine Corps veteran he much admired – Joe “Tail Gunner” McCarthy, senator from the state of Wisconsin, a rising star, some claimed star opportunist, who had switched from Democrat to Republican and won. Both McCarthy and Joseph Kennedy were first-generation Americans, sons of Irish American immigrants with a weighty chip on their shoulders. Both had started their political careers as loyal FDR Democrats only to have changed their minds about their leader’s politics when the man in charge changed his mind about them. The newly elected Wisconsin senator had often been a guest at the Kennedy house on numerous occasions and had even dated two of the sisters, Eunice and Pat – the latter, one day, to marry MGM actor Peter Lawford.

Joseph Kennedy and Senator McCarthy both sensed that the easiest way to power in this changing climate was to be perceived as an outspoken, fearless anti-Communist. McCarthy had shot to national fame in the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, first by making the dubious claim that there had been insidious Communist infiltration inside the Truman administration and later hinting there was a “spy ring” employed in the State Department. He also supported what was called the “Lavender Scare,” insinuating there might be too many homosexuals, vulnerable to blackmail, closeted in government service. His claims, unfounded or not, touched upon something in the national Zeitgeist and won him enormous popular approval throughout the nation.

As early as January 1949, JFK denounced Truman and the State Department for contributing to the “tragic story of China whose freedom we once fought to preserve. What our young men had saved, our diplomats and our President have frittered away.”² In February 1952, at a banquet at Harvard when an after-dinner speaker mentioned how proud he was that their university had never graduated either an Alger Hiss or a Joe McCarthy, JFK shouted, “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” and left the reunion.³ But such outbursts were rare for a man who prided himself on the sangfroid he had displayed as a naval officer.

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JFK continued to watch, standing by coolly on the sidelines, still more an observer of the political scene than an active participant in any major legislation. He watched with his usual wry amusement at mankind’s foibles personified by the senator’s increasingly comic or terrifying bluster. Fully understanding why his father wanted him to hitch himself to the McCarthy wagon, young Kennedy guessed – as it turned out, with great prescience – that McCarthy would one day go too far, too fast.

That day came, of course, in 1954 when McCarthy foolishly accused the United States Army of being infested with communists. JFK could not help but note how the old soldier, Eisenhower, disapproved of McCarthy’s outrageous inference and turned against him. After a long investigation, the only leftie the senator’s committee produced to support their claim was a single, lowly officer in the Signal Corps laboratory at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.

A desperate McCarthy then turned on, of all people, Fred Fisher, a young Boston lawyer hired by the committee’s esteemed attorney for the defense, Joseph Welsh. Fisher had past ties to a liberal organization now identified as communist. The accusation appalled Welsh, who responded famously and theatrically: “Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. […] Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”⁴

That last sentence, that last question captured forever by the cameras and seen by millions of home viewers, was a devastating blow. John Kennedy, ever the realist, knew instantly that his father’s protégé had made an irrefutable misstep that would take him down. And did.

October of 1954, JFK entered the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City for a two-part operation to fuse sections of his spinal vertebrae. In November, the Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress, which they would not regain for another forty years. In December, both Democrat and Republican members of the Senate joined hands and voted to censure McCarthy – a gesture of condemnation not used against any member since 1929. When the chastisement occurred, John F. Kennedy, recuperating in hospital, was absent – the only Democratic senator in the house who failed to go on record against McCarthy. Kennedy’s detractors often point to his moment of silence and inaction when McCarthy was being censured as a burning proof and condemnation of a clever opportunist’s fundamental character. JFK had been given a speech drafted by a member of his staff which condemned McCarthy and his tactics, which, at the last minute, he decided not to deliver. He was in the hospital when a vote of censure was taken.

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In 1956, when John Kennedy was thirty-eight years old, still a relatively unfamiliar junior senator from Massachusetts, he wrote (or had rewritten for him) a book called Profiles in Courage, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. Contrary to its title, Kennedy’s detractors often point to his moment of silence and inaction as opportunism when McCarthy was being censured.

JFK’s supporters, of course, claim otherwise. They defend their hero by saying that unlike the haters in his family and in the Congress of the United States, Kennedy was to the core a master politician and pragmatist – what the OED defines as a person concerned with practical results rather than abstract ideals. Had he not had those qualities at a time of great national crisis, he would never have been elected seven years later as the 35th President of the United States – a position his father had long pursued and never attained either for himself or his other sons.

Notes

¹See https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/jfkcamp-0098-010#?image_identifier=JFKCAMP-0098-010-p0001, retrieved 13 June 2025. And according to Wikipedia, “As a congressman, Kennedy had a reputation for not taking much interest in the running of his office or his constituents’ concerns, with one of the highest absenteeism rates in the House, although much was explained by illness.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy, retrieved 24 June 2025.

²See https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/salem-ma-19490130, retrieved 13 June 2026.

³See https://www.orwelltoday.com/jfkmccarthy.shtml, retrieved 13 June 2025.

⁴See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_N._Welch, retrieved 13 June 2025, and https://youtube.com/watch?v=svUyYzzv6VI, retrieve

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Norman B. Schwartz is the author of the comic novels ‘ALL THINGS small‘, Paradise Now, Don Juan in Space, True (Cinema) Confessions, Hollywood: Below and Beyond, and the DIY guide, The Art Of The Schnoorr. He spent over forty years working on films in Hollywood and Rome. Norman was the first ADR sound editor / post-production dialogue director to be admitted to Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.

Norman B. Schwartz’s essays will appear in sequence monthly in each issue of Ars Notoria Magazine. In October of 2025, a paperback edition of the complete collection of his essays titled: HOLLYOOD  Actors & Politicos/ a Shared Profession was published and is available for purchase from Centre House Press.