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Continuing with Davis Talbot's..The Devil's Chessboard...

[...The cruel circus of American politics has a way of exposing a candidate’s inner self, particularly the hurly-burly of congressional campaigns, where the battle is fought up close and on one’s home turf. Allen Dulles briefly threw himself into the political arena in August 1938, when he declared himself a candidate in the Republican primary for the Sixteenth Congressional District, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where he and Clover maintained a town house. Like Foster, who later ran a similarly ill-fated campaign for the U.S. Senate, Allen had a nuanced feel for power but not for politics. The brothers were imbued with a sense of public service, but in their minds, democracy was something to be saved from the demos. “Democracy works only if the so-called intelligent people make it work,” Allen told the press on the eve of his campaign. “You can’t sit back and let democracy run itself.”

Dulles’s patrician sensibility did not play well in the campaign, even with the posh Republican voters on the Upper East Side. During the race, he put together all of the right elements, like a corporate lawyer meticulously building his case. He lined up the support of prestigious Republicans, such as Elihu Root Jr., the son of Teddy Roosevelt’s secretary of state, who served as his honorary campaign chairman. He secured the endorsements of the leading New York newspapers, including the Times and the Herald Tribune. And he opened up a campaign office at the Belmont Plaza Hotel, where Clover dutifully wrote several hundred letters soliciting support from women voters in the district, like a Junior League doyenne volunteering for a favorite charity. But there was no passion in the Dulles campaign. His speeches were stilted and his debate performance was lawyerly and bloodless.

The monthlong primary campaign pitted Dulles against the incumbent, a conservative Democratic congressman named John J. O’Connor, who had cross filed in the Republican primary after President Roosevelt announced his intention to purge O’Connor as a traitor to the New Deal. During the brief race, Dulles tried to carefully parse his attacks on the popular president, expressing sympathy with FDR’s “broad social aims” while denouncing his “dictatorial attitude.” But O’Connor—who had established himself as one of the more effective opponents of the New Deal in Congress—came across as a more muscular enemy of Roosevelt. And when the battle-scarred political warhorse turned his invective on Dulles, accusing him of “selling out” his country to “international interests” and Wall Street titans like J. Pierpont Morgan, Dulles could only muster a rational-sounding, but feeble, reply.

On Election Day, September 21, Dulles went down to a thumping defeat, losing the Republican nomination by a three-to-two margin to a man who did not even belong to the party. Dulles promptly returned to the world of discreet power that he knew best, never again subjecting himself to the slings and arrows of electoral combat.

On the surface, John F. Kennedy seemed similarly unsuited for the rough and-tumble of democracy. Privileged, reserved, and physically frail, young Jack Kennedy was a far cry from his glad-handing political forebears, such as his maternal grandfather, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the perennial Boston politician who wooed voters with his gift for song and blarney. Late into his career, JFK continued to worry that he was too introverted for politics. In January 1960, three days after declaring his presidential candidacy, Kennedy confided to friends over dinner, “I’m not a political type.” In contrast to his grandfather, who “wanted to talk to everybody,” added Kennedy, “I’d rather read a book on a plane than talk to the fellow next to me.” ...]

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/03/part-9-devils-chessboardthe-torch-is.html