Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas Read Free Book Online Page A

indictment by a federal grand jury for mail fraud didn’t dampen Charlestown’s enthusiasm for the old scoundrel. Reelected in 1944, he withdrew only after winning his fourth term as mayor. That left his congressional seat to be filled by special election in 1946. One of the candidates was Honey Fitz’s grandson—John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
    At first, the notion seemed preposterous. Kennedy was virtually a stranger to Boston, having spent the best part of his twenty-nine years in New York, Hyannis Port, and the South Pacific. His “residence” in the district was the Bellevue Hotel on Beacon Hill. “You’re a carpetbagger,” one politician in the district told him bitterly. “You don’t belong here.” Moreover, his patrician gloss, the elegant ease acquired at Choate and Harvard and cultivated in London and Palm Beach, was not calculated to go down well in the waterfront saloons of Charlestown, the clammy tenements of the North End, or the bleak three-deckers of East Boston, Brighton, Somerville, and Cambridge. True, his family’s roots went deep in the district: not only had Honey Fitz represented it in Congress for six years, but Jack’s paternal grandfather, Patrick J. Kennedy, had been born and raised in East Boston and served as its Democratic ward leader for many years. But those roots could be as much a hindrance as an asset. Boston’s Irish were notoriously resentful of the “two toilet” Irish who had betrayed their heritage by moving to the suburbs and sending their sons to Harvard.
    One who shared those feelings was Alice McGoff’s father, Bernie Kirk. A second-generation Irish-American, Bernie had worked for decades at a South End ink factory, where he served as a union shop steward. “The little man has to unite to get anyplace,” he would tell his daughter Alice, and that turn of mind was reflected in his stalwart Democratic politics, his unwavering support for Al Smith, David I. Walsh, and Franklin Roosevelt. But he had no use whatsoever for Joe Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, whom he regarded as a womanizer, a high liver, an incurable conniver. “That man’s forgotten where he came from,” he’d tell Alice, “he’s no longer one of us.” Moreover, Kennedy was simply too close to Richard Cardinal Cushing, Boston’s venerable archbishop. There was a touch of the anticlerical in Bernie; priests were okay when they stuck to the Church’s business, he thought, but their writ didn’t extend to public life. Cushing and Kennedy were both overreachers, too eager to steal a march on their countrymen. There was an old Charlestown saying, “Up to me, up to me, but never above me.” No son of Joe Kennedy’s was going to clamber over Bernie’s head.
    Moreover, Bernie was committed to Charlestown’s own candidate for Congress.John F. “Spring” Cotter, a popular figure who had served as secretary to Curley and before that to Congressman John P. Higgins. When Higgins resigned his congressional seat, Cotter had been appointed to fill out his unexpired term. During his years in Washington, he had dispensed countless favors to his fellow “Townies.” The Kirks had received more than a few of them, and now Bernie Kirk was determined to return the favor.
    Among the Townies who had committed themselves to Spring Cotter was a young Air Force veteran named Dave Powers. One night in January 1946 there was a knock at the door of the three-decker that Dave shared with his widowed sister and her eight children. When he opened it, there stood a gangly fellow who stuck out his hand and said, “My name’s Jack Kennedy. I’m a candidate for Congress.” Sitting at the kitchen table, Powers explained that he was working for one of Kennedy’s opponents. But he liked his young visitor, and when Kennedy mentioned that he was speaking the next week to Gold Star Mothers at Charlestown’s American Legion Hall, Powers agreed to go with him.
    The next Tuesday, Dave stood at the back of the hall as