those bums up in Boston

"The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation's greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us."  --JFK

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[excerpt, An Unfinished Life]--------More constructive was an eighteen-month battle for statewide control of the Democratic party.  Kennedy had initially been reluctant to get into an intraparty conflict he associated with traditional Boston politics, and his father urged against it as well:  "Leave it alone and don't get into the gutter with those bums up there in Boston," Joe told him.   But O'Donnell and another Kennedy aide, Larry O'Brien, advised otherwise. 

Speculation that Jack might be Adlai Stevenson's running mate in 1956 convinced them that Jack's selection and political future now turned on delivering the Massachusetts delegation to Stevenson at the party's nominating convention.  Consequently, they urged Jack to wrest control of the state party committee from John McCormack and his ally William H. ("Onions") Burke, the chairman of the Democratic State Committee, who intended to back New York governor Averell Harriman for the presidential nomination.

  Massachusetts congressman Philip Philbin also urged Jack to take on McCormack and Burke.  "There is a great 'hassle' going on in the erudite Massachusetts Democracy," he sarcastically told Jack in March 1955.  "Various learned 'savants' and 'intellectuals' who shape the upper crust of our party organization are conducting a campaign for control, perhaps I should say a campaign to insure our defeat at the next election."  Kennedy and his team needed, Philbin said, to "clean up this deplorable situation."

...
The struggle turned into a no-holds barred contest.  Jack wrote, called, and met with committee candidates to ask for their support in overthrowing Burke.  Needing to suggest a replacement, he reluctantly picked John "Pat" Lynch, the longtime mayor of Somerville.  Lynch was a surprising choice; he was one of the old pols Jack seemed determined to defeat. 

Indeed, when O'Donnell brought Lynch in to see Jack, he "saw the shock on Jack's face."  The small, bald-headed fifty-five-year-old "leprechaun," as O'Donnell described him, dressed in a wide-brimmed hat and velvet-collared coat typical of Boston's Irish politicians was no one Jack wanted to identify with. 

But when the Dever Democrats made clear that it would be Lynch or Burke, Jack endorsed Lynch.  Even then, threatened fistfights and mayhem marked a three-hour committee meeting that produced a 47-31 vote for Lynch and Jack's undisputed control of the state party.

It had been the first time he had been "caught in a mud-slinging Boston Irish political brawl.  We never saw him so angry and frustrated," O'Donnell and Powers wrote.  During and after the fight, Kennedy took pains to divorce himself publicly from "gutter" politics. 

In an article published in the April Vogue and a June commencement address at Harvard, when the university gave him an honorary degree, he decried the current antagonism between intellectuals and politicians and reminded readers and listeners that the two were not mutually exclusive.  Recalling the careers of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, and the Adamses, he said "[The] nation's first great politicians . . . included among their ranks most of the nation's first great writers and scholars." 

Recounting an anecdote about an English mother who urged her son's Harrow instructors not to distract him from a Parliamentary career by teaching him poetry, Jack declared, "If more politicians knew poetry and more poets knew politics, I am convinced that the world would be a little better place to live."

The speech partly eased Kennedy's discomfort with the ugly fight he had just passed through, and it may also have been aimed at Adlai Stevenson, who shared Jack's affinity for a union of poetry and power.  But more important, it expressed his genuine idealism about what he wished to see in American political life. 

Seven years later, at the height of his public influence, he repeated the value he placed on those committed to the life of the mind.  In an October 1963 speech at Amherst College, he would say, "The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation's greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us."
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{An Unfinished Life.  Robert Dallek.
2003.  Little, Brown.}

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