1962 United States Senate special election in Massachusetts
The 1962 United States Senate special election in Massachusetts was held on November 6, 1962. The election was won by Ted Kennedy, the youngest brother of then-President John F. Kennedy, who would remain Senator until his death in 2009.
As of 2024, Kennedy and Lodge's combined age of 65 remains the youngest for two major candidates in a United States Senate election. With professor H. Stuart Hughes, the grandson of Charles Evans Hughes, running a serious independent campaign, this election also featured three of America's most prominent political families.
Background[edit]
Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts was elected President of the United States in November 1960. At the same time, Republican John Volpe was elected to succeed scandal-plagued Democrat Foster Furcolo as Governor of Massachusetts while Republican Leverett Saltonstall was re-elected to the U.S. Senate. Under the Seventeenth Amendment, the sitting state Governor has the authority to temporarily fill vacancies in the Senate as soon as they arise. With Volpe scheduled to take office on January 5, 1961, the Kennedys were thus compelled to engage in time-sensitive negotiations with Furcolo regarding the successor to Kennedy's Senate seat.
Furcolo initially hoped to appoint himself to Kennedy's vacant seat. He was dissuaded from this course of action under strong pressure from the Kennedys. The incoming president was not only keen to maintain a Democratic presence from his home state in the Senate but under strong pressure from his father Joseph P. Kennedy to ensure the seat remained in the family. With a strong Democratic majority in the Senate assured in any case, the Kennedy family made it clear to Furcolo that they would be content to challenge whoever Volpe might have appointed to the seat in 1962 and in any event would not support any election bid from Furcolo.
It was initially speculated that Kennedy's brother Robert F. Kennedy, who managed the presidential campaign and was the president-elect's only surviving brother old enough to serve in the Senate, would be the family's choice to succeed John F. Kennedy in the Senate. However, at the insistence of the family patriarch and to some controversy, the president-elect agreed to nominate Robert for Attorney General of the United States. Joseph Kennedy effectively nominated Benjamin A. Smith II, a Kennedy family friend and roommate of his deceased eldest son Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., to be duly appointed by Furcolo to succeed John F. Kennedy after the president-elect officially resigned on December 22. Smith served as a placeholder for Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy, who, at the time, was too young to be constitutionally eligible for the seat.[1]