KENNEDY'S LIBERALISM

...Not only did he give solid support to economic and military aid measures, but he struck out on his own on frontiers that most politicians avoided...

...History, indeed, may record that, until now, he is the most progressive candidate ever nominated by a major party...

...In July, 1957, he amazed veteran politi-cos in Washington with a long, carefully prepared, and biting attack on French policy in Algeria, ending with the suggestion that President Eisenhower try to achieve through the offices of friendly countries a solution that would in effect recognize Algeria's independence...

...It is significant that Joseph Kennedy, the candidate's father, though conservative in many respects, never had the repugnance for social welfare programs that characterized many of his anti-New Deal business friends...

...It developed that the proposed constitutional change would have placed disproportionate voting power in rural areas and reduced the strength of the city vote, particularly the influence of big minority groups, such as Negroes and labor, in the big urban states...

...Never was he any kind of isolationist, even in those early days, when one might have expected him to be somewhat under the influence of his father...

...Hence they were in a position to take such action on the platform as would strengthen their position in the fall Presidential campaign against Nixon...

...He said this not in a critical tone, but almost wistfully, as though he envied those who had made up their minds so easily, so early...

...If Kennedy had followed Democratic Party precedent he would have lined up a combination of Southern and Northern delegate strength, as Wood-row Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Adlai Stevenson had done...

...He not only voted for this section but took the floor to defend his position vigorously...

...He still had reservations about high support prices for Western farmers—prices that increased costs of feed for dairy farmers in New England—but he now went down the line for resource development programs...

...It was only with the passage of years and the broadening of his national perspective that he understood that farm and resource programs were the rural counterparts to the urban progressivism of social welfare programs...

...I mean the willingness to use generously and imaginatively the nation's economic and ideological power to achieve international stability and economic progress abroad...

...In my judgment, he is...

...My own endorsement of that decision, and its support in the state I have the honor, in part, to represent, has been too clear to permit me to cast a vote that will be interpreted as a repudiation of it...

...It would be tragic if liberals neglected their own engagement with Kennedy's brand of liberalism because of false fears aroused by a few of Kennedy's waverings and indecisions years back in a different world...

...The campaign of 1960 is the culmination of Kennedy's deepening intellectual engagement with liberalism...

...His Irish immigrant forebears had turned to government for aid in the harsh new world of proletarian Boston...

...As for the argument that Kennedy was avoiding creative thinking and action, there may be something to that, too...

...Such a strong statement demands a definition of terms...

...On urban progressivism he maintained his social welfare position, but he gained a broader comprehension of the need for rural progressivism too...

...He looked speculatively off toward the ocean...

...obviously politicians who want to get ahead size up audience reaction ahead of time...

...Negroes were annoyed by Kennedy's deference to old Senate procedures, Southerners by his outspoken support of Title III...

...He had "plus" scores on all major social welfare legislation on the scorecards of labor and liberal journals...

...But he voted for final passage of the bill...

...of the Taft-Hartley bill...

...it would have gerrymandered the Electoral College in a conservative rural direction much as Congress is gerrymandered today...

...He upheld President Truman's unsuccessful veto JAMES MacGREGOR BURNS, professor of political science at Williams College, made an exhaustive study of Senator Kenned/s record in preparation for the writing of his widely-acclaimed biography, "John Kennedy: A Political Profile...

...Kennedy demurred...

...He urged more intelligent and generous policies toward Latin America...

...The leadership of the American Legion," he asserted in attacking one of the most powerful pressure groups in the nation, "has not had a constructive thought for the benefit of the country since 19181" During his first year in Congress, Kennedy fought the Hartley bill as one that would "strike down in one devastating blow" the union shop and industry-wide bargaining...

...But here again Kennedy seems less guilty of stereotyped thinking than many of his contemporaries who have been successful in politics...

...In his early foreign policy positions Kennedy's liberalism was somewhat more mixed, but not enough to obscure a basic internationalism that has been growing in depth and consistency in more recent years...

...Had he not swung to a strong progressive position rather late in his public career...

...He evidently had none...

...In the last two or three years, in short, Kennedy has become one of the most consistent liberals in the Senate, especially in foreign policy but also in social welfare issues, civil liberties, and civil rights...

...My own hunch is that there is a much simpler and better reason for Kennedy's shift to liberalism...

...It might well be that his liberalism is all the more lasting and solid simply because it is laboriously constructed on the firm underpinnings of observed conditions and on fourteen years of grappling with legislative detail...

...In sharp contrast to his position as a Representative, he now urged more emphasis on economic aid and less on military...

...If Kennedy had any misgivings about the liberalism of the platform, he could easily have had it dampened down...

...Kennedy has shifted to a strong liberal position, they argue, because (1) when he became ambitious for the Presidency he realized that the only road to the White House was the liberal road...

...It was in the field of foreign policy, however, that Kennedy moved most firmly and imaginatively to a liberal, internationalist position...

...In that year Southern Dixiecrats and conservative Republicans teamed up to abolish the "winner-take-all" nature of the Electoral College system...

...Of course, some cynics would argue that he was simply preparing for the day when he would run for President or Vice President, as an urban Catholic, but this would suggest a Machiavellian astuteness and long-range planning on the part of Kennedy that he simply did not possess...

...There is no point in detailing Kennedy's social welfare positions in Congress through the next thirteen years, because the pattern is absolutely consistent...

...No busy politician in our time is going to re-think on his own all the policy positions of his party or of the liberal heritage...

...What is the significance of this...

...Some would explain it away...

...it was a committee that Kennedy dominated, through his strength in the convention, that drew up the most progressive platform in the history of either major party...

...The 1960 Democratic platform is an amazingly liberal platform, both in its general objectives but most significantly in its specifics...

...But he strongly supported the basic Truman foreign policies...

...He co-sponsored a five-year Development Loan program that was incorporated, in part, in mutual security legislation...

...He had no large library of liberal thought from which to draw his arguments...

...This is not the action of a man who takes a policy stand simply because it might help his political advancement...

...He hotly criticized the Supreme Court for setting aside a perjury citation by the House Labor committee, of which Kennedy was a member, against Harold Christoffel, leader of the Communist-dominated strike against Al-lis-Chalmers in 1941...

...But he did not...

...he directed the floor fight against it...

...He has built his liberalism piecemeal as he has tackled specific problems of domestic and foreign policy...

...He has learned his liberalism the slow, hard way, through years of legislative homework, through endless committee hearings and executive sessions, through extensive travel, through long discussions and correspondence with liberal leaders, through exposure to the Washington political cosmopolitanism that stands in such contrast with Boston parochialism...

...Whether he passed that test depends on one's judgment as to whether, in this case, the ends justified the means...

...Still, he supported the great bulk of the Truman and subsequent farm and resource legislation...

...A number of Senate liberals proposed to invoke an obscure Senate rule and bypass the Eastland committee...

...It is clear now, as I indicated in The Progressive last month, that Kennedy definitely favored the censure of McCarthy in 1954 and would have voted for censure if he had been in the Senate rather than on a hospital bed almost completely isolated from politics...

...He believed that liberals, in evading ordinary parliamentary procedure, would establish a precedent that might make great difficulties for them in the future...

...What many Americans saw as a supreme moral issue Kennedy saw as a threat to the proper procedures and decorum of the Senate...

...Lawrence Seaway over the anguished protests of the port of Boston, which feared Seaway competition...

...It is a Kennedy platform...

...I can state with some certainty that the Kennedy forces were sure several weeks before the convention that they would win the nomination...

...The engagement was long in the making, but all the stronger as a result...

...This was not the first time that Kennedy had baffled both sides of a burning issue— the most notable previous case was McCarthyism...

...The real issue facing the Senate, he declared, was whether the Senators would stand for or against the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation...

...He favored withdrawal of United States forces from Quemoy and Matsu...

...Yes, he said, he had come by his liberalism in slow stages...

...The sternest test of Kennedy's liberalism in the Senate was civil rights in 1957...

...his paternal grandfather, "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, had traveled the world boosting the port of Boston, and Kennedy himself had first won office with the help of votes of Boston longshoremen...

...John Kennedy demonstrated this kind of progressivism from the very beginning of his political career...

...But he deliberately spurned this traditional pre-convention strategy and gambled on support from the North...

...That same year, before winning office, he publicly battled leaders of veterans groups who were opposed to public housing, and soon after taking his seat in the House he bitterly denounced the American Legion, of which he was a member, for playing the real estate lobby's game in opposing housing legislation...

...He had not got it early, in big gulps, as had so many of his generation...

...During the next two years he was in the advance guard of the small band of Senators calling for a reassessment of some of our stale foreign policies...

...By the spring of 1960 he could predict, quite correctly, that he was going into the convention with virtually no Southern support at all...

...he was almost completely on his own...

...He has demonstrated this shift most clearly in his opposition to a proposal that employers as well as union leaders sign non-Communist affidavits if they wished to use the services of the National Labor Relations Board—neither employers nor employees should sign, Kennedy felt —and in his vigorous leadership for repeal of a provision requiring students to sign a loyalty oath if they wished to be eligible for Federal loans or grants...

...Unlike most Americans, he did not grow up in an environment that scorned the role of government—quite the contrary...

...And he has shown a capacity to approach old problems with fresh ideas, as in the case of Algeria, India, the satellites, and Quemoy and Matsu...

...Most liberal political scientists—myself included—were so eager to get rid of some of the archaic and dangerous features of the Electoral College that we were willing to go along with the proposal...

...By progres-sivism I mean a disposition to use government as a means of broadening individual opportunity and advancing social welfare at home...

...But Kennedy, along with Paul Douglas and a few other Senators, insisted on reading the fine print...

...But from various comments he made during these years, Kennedy's main position on civil liberties—to the extent that he had one—seemed to be that the really important concern of his constituents was not airy academic abstractions about civil liberties, but rent control, social security, and other economic and social matters...

...they saw the need for governmental protection of those most exposed to the ravages of illness, slums, low wages, high prices...

...As for civil liberties, Kennedy did not encounter enough issues in the House to test his basic position...

...It was his own man, Chester Bowles, who chaired the platform committee...

...During his six years in the House —and perhaps during the first two or three years in the Senate—John Kennedy was essentially a "bread-and-butter" liberal and an internationalist who differed with certain emphases and procedures in Administration foreign policy, whether Democratic or Republican...

...By progressivism I mean also opposition to use of government—or of any other means—to stifle the free flow of ideas...

...He showed special concern for India and Africa, and became chairman of Foreign Relations Committee subcommittees dealing with these areas...

...He opposed reduction in school lunch appropriations, a District of Columbia sales tax, the weakening of rent control, tax relief for the oil industry...

...He was not against civil liberties—they had simply not assumed a significant place in his list of priorities...

...Considering the support that Kennedy received from Southerners in his convention battle for the Vice Presidential nomination with Estes Kefauver in 1956, one might have expected him to seek the same support in his quest for the Presidential nomination in 1960...

...His support for the Seaway signified, among other things, the distance Kennedy had traveled from his Boston forebears...

...The most recent test of—and the great monument to—Kennedy's progressivism is the platform the Democratic Party adopted in July in Los Angeles...

...I often think of his remark as I listen to progressives wondering whether Kennedy is a "real" liberal...

...His later years in the Senate, especially from about 1955 on, saw a steady swing to a consistently liberal stand in all three basic areas discussed above...

...During 1959 he proposed long-term, intensive aid to India as a means of making that country a showplace of economic development achieved through democratic means...

...Kennedy not only opposed the proposal...

...Indeed, he has always had a positive aversion to stereotypes, whether of the liberal or conservative variety...

...Perhaps the most striking example of Kennedy's refusal to be a victim of liberal stereotypes and traditional thinking was the little-known fight he conducted in 1956 against an attempt by conservatives to alter the workings of the Electoral College...

...Campaigning for Congress for the first time in 1946, he got an eyeful of the ugly slums, shabby urban areas, and dilapidated schools throughout Boston's Eleventh Congressional District...

...The most conspicuous—certainly the most courageous—of his actions on this score was voting for the St...

...He supported broadened social security, higher minimum wages, liberalized immigration laws, and bigger housing programs...

...But Kennedy strongly backed the bill itself—especially the vital Title III, which authorized the Attorney General to use injunctive power to enforce school desegregation and other civil rights...

...because (2) he swallowed the liberal line uncritically and tagged along with the whole New Deal-Fair Deal line as a means of avoiding hard decisions and fresh thinking...

...Kennedy may envy those who gained their liberalism in strong, sudden drafts, but is his liberalism to be doubted because he reached it by another, more twisting, more difficult route...

...where he mainly differed with the Administration was not over the major thrust of the program but over methods of administration...

...During the same term he offered an amendment reducing economic aid to Africa and the Near East, and he favored cutting economic aid to Europe...

...To be sure, he did vote against- a number of farm and resource bills or appropriations because he felt—wrongly, I think, in some cases—that they were boondoggles...

...they sought and won jobs in the municipal services, such as the police and fire departments...

...In the first sense—the use of government to expand opportunity and social welfare—Kennedy has always been a progressive...

...Not only Secretary of State John Foster Dulles but also Dean Acheson and other Democrats proceeded to rap the young man's knuckles...

...and (3) for both of these reasons...

...He won the contest in a brilliant display of parliamentary leadership, argumentative skill, knowledge of the immense complexities of the subject, and sheer tenacity...

...The first argument has some merit...

...But here again Kennedy moved swiftly from this rather tepid position to one of vigorous defense of civil liberties...

...During his second term in the House he voted to recommit the Trade Agreements Extension Act, in part because of the impact of the trade program on Massachusetts employment...

...He is also the author of "The Lion and the Fox," a political biography of Franklin 0. Roosevelt...

...He said that the European nations should intensify their own efforts to strengthen military defenses against the Soviets, but he did not believe that for that reason the United States should reduce its own military commitment abroad...

...In the face of protests from hysterically anti-Soviet Polish leaders in Massachusetts, he urged closer economic and cultural relations between the United States and Russian-dominated Poland...

...But everything depends on what kind of audience a man is trying to satisfy...

...It was in this respect that Kennedy departed most sharply from the basic liberal heritage...

...Under the regular procedure, the civil rights bill passed by the House would have been sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee, under the chairmanship of Mississippi's Senator James O. Eastland, chief gravedigger for civil rights measures...

...It is also clear that his opposition to McCarthy—like the censure resolution actually passed by the Senate in December, 1954—was based on the narrow grounds of McCarthy's violation of Senate procedure and dignity rather than on the essential grounds of his attacks on individual liberties and his irresponsible exercise of his Senatorial powers...

...Hence he would have solicited Southern backing by softer stands on civil rights, minimum wage legislation, and other delicate issues between North and South...