JFK's Pre-1960 McCarthy Era Politics--Part 1

In the early 1960s--prior to his elimination in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 from the world of U.S. power elite presidential politics--JFK was viewed as a politically liberal Democrat by most people in the USA and the world. Yet during the McCarthy Era of the late 1940s and 1950s, JFK was apparently both pro-capitalist and very anti-communist in his political rhetoric and voting record. As Thomas J. Whalen recalled in his 2000 book Kennedy Versus Lodge:

"On the anti-communism front Kennedy was...strident in his criticism of [then-U.S. Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. in 1952 election campaign for Massachusetts' seat in U.S. Senate]...Kennedy...did not shy away from portraying his opponent as being `soft' on communism...

"...Winning votes and hitting the headlines were exactly what John Kennedy had in mind when he attempted to hang the soft-on communism label on Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. in 1952. Indeed, he accused Lodge of having the `number one record among the Republicans' when it came to supporting the supposedly appeasing foreign policy of the Truman administration. Lodge, he further charged, had proven derelict in his duty as senator by failing to support legislation that would have `stopped' trade in war materials with communist China or Soviet Russia...

"Kennedy had been expressing such...views since the beginning of his public career. Running for Congress in 1946...he stressed the `Red Menace' in many of his campaign appearances. `The candidate's political stance was almost ultraconservative,' recalled Kennedy campaign secretary William Sutton. `Many of his speeches emphasized anti-communism as well as anti-collectivism.'

"In an October [1946] radio speech in Boston, Kennedy boasted about having told a group of `intellectual liberals' that the Soviet Union was `a slave state' run by `a small clique of ruthless, powerful and selfish men,' who were bent on world conquest...

"Kennedy continued to be an anti-communist hardliner after he became a congressman. In 1947, as a freshman member of the House Committee on Education and Labor, he publicly called for the perjury indictment of Harlold Christoffel, a United Auto Workers union official who was under suspicion of being a communist for having led a 1941 strike against the Allis-Chalmers Company in Milwaukee...

"Kennedy maintained a steady drumbeat against communism throughout his congressional career. In 1948 he broke with his own party and voted for the Mundt-Nixon Bill, which required the registration of domestic communist front organizations as well as communist organizations and their members. Although vetoed by President Truman, the main provisions of the bill were incorporated into the Communist Control Act of 1950, the so-called McCarren Act, which Kennedy also supported..."