Where's Jack?

In the great game of U.S. politics, where getting more votes than the other guy on Election Day is the requisite of survival, it is not uncommon for politicians to try to be many things to many voters, to take one tone in a small town and another in a big city, to try to sound conservative to conservatives and liberal to liberals. The art lies in being able to project double images without getting accused of being two-faced. In this political art, Presidential Hopeful John F. Kennedy, for all his youth and boyish charm, is already a master. Items:

Labor: As a sponsor of last year's labor-reform measure, Kennedy can appear before non-labor audiences as a fighter against union corruption (a stance immeasurably helped by Teamster Boss Jimmy Hoffa's implacable hatred). Before farm audiences, traditionally hostile to labor unions, Jack benefits from identification with his younger brother Bob. the aggressive, much-televised counsel of the Senate's McClellan Committee and author of a briskly selling book about labor corruption, The Enemy Within, At the same time, Jack has tried hard to persuade labor leaders that he is organized labor's staunch friend. He damned President Eisenhower's use of the Taft-Hartley Act to call an 80-day halt in last year's steel strike (after the strike had dragged on for twelve weeks with no settlement in prospect) as the "most one-sided, unfortunate and unfair action in this Administration's history." Top A.F.L.-C.I.O. leaders have forgiven him for his sponsorship of labor reform, have even publicly praised him for trying to "get rid of the more obvious injustices" of the Landrum-Griffin reform bill.

Legislative Record: Partly because of his 1956 book, Profiles in Courage, Kennedy has acquired the luster of a courageous, statesmanlike legislator. Yet in his 14 years in the House and Senate, he has never fathered any major legislation. He worked hard on the Senate labor-reform bill (TIME, Sept. 14), but it got so ground up in the congressional mills that the enacted Landrum-Griffin version did not even carry his name (for which he came to be very thankful).

Welfare State: As the son of a multi millionaire and a millionaire himself, Harvard-accented, dark-suited Jack Kennedy carries about an aura that makes him acceptable to many right-leaning Democrats and independents who instinctively reject any unmistakable liberal such as Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey. But Kennedy's stands and voting records on most domestic issues are not widely different from Humphrey's. Kennedy's closest advisers on domestic policies, including Harvard Professors Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth (The Affluent Society) Galbraith, tend to be liberals of the Americans for Democratic Action camp. Kennedy falls easily into such sweeping A.D.A.-type rhetoric as "17 million Americans go to bed hungry every night." Following the liberal line that the U.S. economy is not growing fast enough,

Kennedy calls for a "sufficiently stimulated rate of growth."

Tolerance: Kennedy is widely regarded as a high-minded crusader for religious tolerance, fighting the battle against prejudice that Al Smith lost in 1928. His arguments against using religion as a yardstick in choosing a President are eloquent and moving. Yet he has not hesitated to play on the theme that the Democratic Party might lose the Catholic vote to the Republicans unless he is the presidential nominee--a suggestion that the New York Times's Washington Correspondent James Reston called "blackmail."

China Policy: Since the Roman Catholic Church is militantly antiCommunist, Kennedy feels that his Catholicism makes him pretty much immune to any suspicion of "softness" toward Communism. Accordingly, he can take the political risks of proposing to "bring the Chinese into the nuclear test ban talks at Geneva," declaring himself "wholly opposed" to any U.S. commitment to defend the Nationalist islands of Quemoy and Matsu. He also has Connecticut Congressman Chester Bowles as his principal foreign policy adviser. U.S. Ambassador to India under Harry Truman, and a conspicuous liberal, Bowles advocates a "two Chinas" policy (i.e., the U.S. should cease to recognize the Nationalist Chinese government as the legitimate government of anything but Formosa), which would, in effect, imply recognition of the Red Chinese government in mainland China, and undermine the U.S.'s long campaign to keep Red China out of the United Nations.

More than trickery, Kennedy's double imagery seems to be one more instance of his keen political sixth sense. Knowing well the strength of his family anchor in conservatism, he senses how far he can loop toward liberalism to bring the liberals into camp, without getting so far out that he can't get back.

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