Wisconsin, West Virginia, and the Catholic Issue
“SO,” KENNY DECLARED, “this is our situation as I head to the Hotel Wisconsin, much to my dismay. Ohio has fallen into shape. The senator announces. Ohio announces for him and there was the follow-up we earlier detailed. We then have to make an organizational decision. Bobby then called me one day and asked me to come over to his house; this was early January.
“Bobby said to me, ‘If we do go into Wisconsin, you will have to go out there full-time and live.’”
Bobby then told Kenny, “We would have to run the same type campaign we ran in Massachusetts, so therefore we needed to have someone full-time from the Kennedy organization actually giving day-to-day direction to their operation in Wisconsin.”
“In fact,” Kenny recalled, “it is right after Jack’s announcement that I moved full-time to Wisconsin.” Kenny told Helen, somewhat sarcastically, “Having looked at the state and analyzed it, I am terribly excited about spending January, February, and March in Wisconsin at the Hotel Wisconsin, because there was not much snow on the ground and such a pleasant place to trudge around.”
“At least you have a warm coat,” she joked, trying not to add to his concern. By now, Helen was as enthusiastic as Kenny was about Jack’s candidacy. Besides, she figured, win or lose, Kenny would be home, back to a regular job, as he had promised.
On January 21, in Milwaukee, Jack Kennedy with Jackie at his side announced his plans to enter the Wisconsin Democratic primary.
Wearing his new warm navy winter coat, Kenny kissed Helen and his children good-bye and headed for Wisconsin. Bobby picked him up for the ride to the airport. “Hey, roomie!” Bobby said with a laugh, waving to Helen and the kids.
“Don’t,” Kenny muttered, giving Bobby a cold stare. Bobby laughed. Kenny was admittedly none too happy to be spending the winter in Wisconsin. He was pleased that they had secured the endorsement of DiSalle in Ohio, but that did not mean he had to be happy about going to spend the coldest months of the year in Wisconsin.
“Figure out how to put the Christmas present together?” Bobby asked as they drove to the airport.
Kenny and Bobby had started a tradition. Each year they would find the most complicated Christmas present to send to each other’s children. The plan was that each of them would be stuck putting the present together all night on Christmas Eve. This recent Christmas, Bobby had sent Kenny’s children a full-size train set that they could ride in.
Kenny had glared at Bobby. “You just wait till next year.”
Bobby laughed. “All night, huh?”
Kenny refused to answer out of pride.
Kenny would spend the next three months “of my lifetime trudging around Wisconsin in the freezing cold with Jerry Bruno and Ivan Nestingen. The real excitement would come,” Kenny said sarcastically, “when Bobby came out full-time as we got closer. As promised, he moved into my little hotel room at the Hotel Wisconsin rather than spend the money for his own room.”
“I will even pay for you to have your own room,” Kenny had offered, as Bobby moved into the room and took over.
“You have no money, Kenny,” Bobby reminded him with a chuckle.
“Oh, that’s right,” Kenny laughed. “I guess I’m stuck with you. Remember, you are the one moving in with me!”
They both shared a tired laugh as they headed downstairs to find someplace to eat.
The terms of entering the Wisconsin primary were certainly less complicated than anything they had faced in Ohio. Wisconsin’s governor, Pat Lucey, had indicated in his every manner, direct and indirect, that he would welcome Kennedy’s entry and support him. However, Lucey thought it best not to openly commit himself. He would come as close as he could to that and then make available to Kennedy’s team his political operation without overtly supporting them. The understanding was, until he could publicly endorse the senator, he would come as close as he could. It would be obvious to anyone that he did support the senator and that the team could build on his operation. This was far different than Ohio, where the Kennedy team had to literally force DiSalle’s support for Jack.
With the understanding with Lucey reached, one of the first steps was to secure political people in Wisconsin. One of the first on board, who would become a key player for both Jack and later Bobby, was Jerry Bruno. A tough-minded political type, former marine, and man made from the same mold as the Kennedys, Bruno had come highly recommended by both Senator William Proxmire and Governor Lucey. He would be their first Kennedy man on the ground in Wisconsin and would be able to provide them with a lay of the land. He and Kenny became close friends, and he would eventually be an essential member of Kennedy’s advance team, which Kenny ran, both during the 1960 campaign and in the White House.
Bruno was tasked with securing the first Kennedy for President offices in Wisconsin. The offices that Bruno had originally set up were across from Marquette University. The next step was to successfully persuade Ivan Nestingen, then mayor of Madison, to join the team.
Kenny, having just arrived, told Bruno, “I have not met Ivan yet.” Kenny recalled that Nestingen, “like Bruno, would prove vital.”
Kenny and Ivan would also become the closest of friends, and Justine would quickly recruit Ivan’s wife, Jerry, to join the Kennedy operation.
“In truth, being a Catholic,” Kenny explained, “his open support would not be beneficial to us. Wisconsin attorney general John Reynolds and a few other political pros in the area were supportive, but since they were all Catholics, it was not the right time, so the search went on to find a non-Catholic. That is how we ended up with Ivan Nestingen.”
Ivan was the Norwegian Lutheran mayor of what Kenny termed the “so-called intellectual capital of Wisconsin, and he also had been head of the ‘Joe Must Go’ club during the horrendous McCarthy days. So he carried impeccable credentials for Kennedy. Ivan was a good solid liberal who was not completely convinced that Senator Kennedy was a real liberal. Ivan met with the senator on several occasions. . . . He feared Jack was a ‘convenient liberal,’ but after our third meeting, the deal was sealed. Ivan was finally convinced that Jack was the best hope to beat Nixon. It was a very touch-and-go situation. Ivan was the ideal candidate to assume the campaign’s leadership role in the state, at least on the surface, assuming that Lucey and Reynolds would run what would consist of the full Wisconsin operation, once we had enough non-Catholic support. Once Ivan acquiesced, Bruno, Ivan, and Lucey went to work. They would be prepared as best they could in case the senator ran in the primary.”
As they began to get the lay of the land and set up shop, Kenny and Bobby began to see that Jack’s tough approach was having the intended affect among the political professionals. It would make it a bit easier going forward. It had already helped in Wisconsin.
Kenny was convinced: “Watching the going-over that Jack had given DiSalle, other political professionals, such as Lucey, Proxmire, and Ivan Nestingen, came aboard more easily and quickly. The political professional discovered that Jack Kennedy and his team were not to be taken lightly.”
“Suddenly,” as Kenny put it, “the political elite were dealing with hard-bitten, cold professionals, no matter our age. They realized that we were tough, knew how to work the system, could organize the precincts, and unlike Adlai Stevenson, we had a candidate willing to play hardball to get what he wanted. They suddenly realized the victories in Massachusetts were not accidents nor luck nor a result of Joe’s money. They realized Jack’s rise to prominence was based much more on political shrewdness and skill than looks or charm or money.”
With Ohio secure, Jack’s team moved into Wisconsin, West Virginia, Indiana, and Maryland in a much stronger position.
With the help of Bruno, who laid out the political issues, pitfalls, and possibilities across the state, both Larry and Kenny looked at the state and analyzed it. Wisconsin was absolutely critical for Jack. That Kenny was given sole direction and control of the state operation spoke volumes about the amount of trust Jack, Bobby, and Joe placed in Kenny.
“Of course,” Sandy Vanocur later said to Kenny, “if you lost, you would have been dead.”
Kenny laughed. Truer words were never spoken. “Clearly, they trusted me,” Kenny said. “They knew I could handle it. Quite clearly, if I lost Wisconsin, it would have been the shortest presidential campaign experience I ever had.”
But, Kenny said, Bobby had “more confidence in me than anybody else for personal reasons. Secondly, it made reasonable sense after the ’58 campaign for them to be convinced I could run a state campaign.”
It was Kenny’s view that Larry would have “done better dealing with the politicians across the different states than I could.”
Bobby wisely agreed with Kenny. As in Massachusetts, Larry was given the task of working the political professionals.
“I felt Larry was quite good,” Kenny explained, “and there was no one else who could handle the professional politicians with his competence and political savvy. He spoke their language.”
Kenny explained, “Winning was the only option. If we beat Hubert in his backyard, that should be the end of Hubert. The others were not going to come into the primaries, not after Ohio. With Ohio and Wisconsin back to back, we felt sure that the senator would be on his way to the Los Angeles convention.”
As Kenny listened to Bruno lay out the state, Kenny saw immediately why Bobby and Jack had placed Kenny there full-time. Fortunately, Wisconsin was structured in many ways like Massachusetts. With Kenny in charge and with guidance on the local level from Mayor Nestingen and Jerry Bruno, the operation was efficient enough.
Bruno had great political instincts and was, as Kenny said, “the kind of guy who could run with the ball on his own when needed.”
In Kennedy campaign parlance, that meant that whatever was dropped in Jerry Bruno’s lap, he could handle. The Kennedy team highly valued such skill and flexibility.
What they discovered fairly quickly was that, as they had expected, their experience at the grassroots level was not enough. They needed a two-tiered operation, so Larry O’Brien moved quickly on securing the establishment while the others worked on get-out-the-vote efforts. “Let’s be honest,” Kenny said later, “Larry did not have the sort of rough edges that Bobby and I had. That worked beautifully for us.” As with Massachusetts, “the girls” were brought in, headed by the tough and capable Helen Keyes.
Larry would work the professionals, relying on Joe for the heavy hitters. While Kenny would continue to work with Jack on the day-to-day events around the state, Bobby, Kenny’s new roommate, worked on overseeing all aspects. It was a complicated, intense operation.
Justine O’Donnell put it this way: “Bobby and Kenny realized quickly that even though the state looked politically similar to Massachusetts, it was larger, the issues more complicated, and you could not simply translate the Massachusetts model intact. In other words, as [Kenny] said, ‘we needed to create a model that could adjust immediately for the political variables in the state.’”
Justine remembered being in the headquarters on one very cold morning when Kenny came in with Bobby after a telephone conference with Jack and Joe Kennedy.
“Put out the call,” Bobby instructed. “All hands on deck.” Justine hit the phones, from Kennedy family members, to Kennedy cousins, to Kennedy family friends such as Bobby’s best pal from Milton, David Hackett, to Jack’s friend Lem Billings and anyone and everyone else.
When Kenny heard that Lem was coming, he asked Bobby directly, “I can understand a sharp fellow like David Hackett, but what exactly does Lem Billings do, except to be annoying?”Bobby glared at Kenny. “If anyone annoys you, Kenny, all the better.”
The two friends laughed. Such was their friendship, an opportunity to tease one another never lost.
“If you were thin-skinned,” Helen Keyes had said, quite correctly, “the Kennedy team was not the place for you. They were a tough, take-no-prisoners but get-the-job-done crowd.” Helen Keyes herself was unusual. She was and remained for years the only woman to truly take charge of and head up a Kennedy political campaign.
“It was mostly a man’s operation,” Justine said, “until Helen came along. She was tough, smart, and did not take guff from anyone. She knew her business and she could hold her own with Kenny and Bobby. They all came to respect her enormously.”
Dave Powers teased Justine, “Jack said, ‘If he has got a pulse and can walk upright, get ’em here!’”
She did, and her recruits would include both O’Donnell brothers, older brother Cleo and younger brother Warren O’Donnell, who had become best pals with Teddy Kennedy, Jack’s youngest brother.
“Can’t Kenny have picked a warmer place?” Warren griped with a laugh.
Justine handed him his assignment and pointed to the door. “Just go!”
He did. So did everyone else. “I don’t think,” Cleo said, “we left a door unknocked upon, no matter how high the damn snowdrifts.”
The Kennedy family was also enlisted to help, and pretty soon Wisconsin, like Massachusetts, was drowning in famed Kennedy teas. Jackie, for whom this would be a rare campaign experience, also showed up in Wisconsin. She was very pregnant with John Jr. and, following doctor’s orders, would participate little beyond Wisconsin and West Virginia. But where she did campaign, she dazzled, even prompting Jack to complain that she was attracting larger crowds than he was.
The Kennedy forces even recruited Pat Kennedy and her husband, Peter Lawford, from Hollywood. “Everyone wanted to meet Pat and Peter,” Justine O’Donnell recalled. “They could not be everywhere, so we would set up a tea, promise they’d be there, and then some other Kennedy family member would show up instead. We would claim that they got stuck in Hollywood, when in truth they might be a few doors down hosting another party. But whatever Kennedy family member showed up was exciting enough.”
The heavy schedule and cold weather took their toll on everyone. Kenny dreaded the early morning calls, leaving Dave Powers with the dangerous job of waking Jack up at 5:00 a.m. to go shake hands at some plant in the bitter cold. Despite the weather, his bad back, swollen and frozen hands, and a myriad of other health issues, Jack made every meet-and-greet.
Kenny understood the seriousness of the health issues and marveled at Jack’s stamina. On one particular trip, they were headed to a TV station for an interview Bruno had arranged. When they arrived, Bruno waited to pick them up and Jack complained about the weather.
“In Wisconsin, this is just a flurry,” Bruno said with a chuckle.
“Anywhere else,” Kenny complained, “it’s called a blizzard.”
They headed out anyway on terrible roads, Kenny recalled. “It was not too long before we were stuck. We were trying to make it up this hill. Hell, I could see the TV station tower off in the distance but could not imagine how we would get there.”
As the wheel spun helplessly, Kenny jumped out, followed by Powers and then Jack. As Bruno tried to steer, the wind and snow whipping around them, Kenny, Jack, and Dave pushed, prompting Jack to quip, “Jack Kennedy, presidential candidate, lost in a snowdrift somewhere in Wisconsin. He had such potential.”
They all burst out laughing just as the car broke loose. Jumping into the car, Kenny shoved Bruno aside and they took off.
“I think,” Bruno said, “we broke every speed limit and went through every light there was. I think the wheels even left the ground a few times. It was the scariest ride I had ever been on.”
They pulled up in front of the TV station moments before airtime, and Jack jumped out and walked ahead, limping slightly, clearly in pain. Kenny clipped along closely at his heels. Kenny turned just before disappearing after Jack. “Pretty impressive driving, huh?” Kenny asked.
Bruno, still shaken, could only nod.
Kenny smiled. “I know,” he said, with that smile just at the edges of his mouth. “Especially when you realize I don’t have a driver’s license.”
Bruno watched in awe as Jack walked quickly into the station, his right hand lightly tapping the wall as he walked. These Kennedy guys were maybe a little crazy, pretty tough, and maybe a little ruthless, but in the end, Bruno figured, “they were going to be a hell of a lot of fun to work with. Jack Kennedy was going to be my kind of president.”
“This guy,” Bruno said, “was a new kind of politician. I liked what I saw. I was sure most of the Wisconsin voters would as well.”
Kenny recalled, “The family was in Wisconsin full-time after a while. In fact, the senator himself was there full-time. The fact is, Bobby spent about as much time in Wisconsin as I did. He would go back once in a while to Washington, but he was living with me at the Hotel Wisconsin.
“I knew Wisconsin was critical. Jack would ask me occasionally to go talk to some professional political fellow, who needed to be spoken to roughly, which I happily did. But I spent 100 percent of my time in Wisconsin, and at a certain point Bobby spent 98 percent of his time in Wisconsin.”
While Joe Kennedy wisely stayed home and worked the phones, staying out of the public view, the Kennedy family was everywhere.
“Eunice, Pat, and Jean appeared at receptions and house parties and rang doorbells,” Kenny noted. “Teddy even risked his neck making a much-publicized ski jump on his brother’s behalf.”
“Bobby,” Kenny said, “worked twenty-four hours a day.”
Hubert Humphrey even began to complain that beyond all the money being thrown into the Kennedy efforts, there were just too many Kennedys. In an often-repeated story, Hubert was quoted as saying, “Teddy or Eunice talks to a crowd, wearing a raccoon coat and a stocking cap, and people think they’re listening to Jack. I get reports that Jack is appearing in three or four different places at the same time!”
On April 5, Jack would win the Wisconsin primary, Kenny recalled, with “more popular votes than any candidate in the history of the state’s primary, carrying six of the ten congressional districts and getting two-thirds of the delegate votes. That pleased the Kennedy forces, but ultimately it was not enough to sew up the nomination.”
Underlying the victory were some ominous signs that would lead them straight into West Virginia. Jack had lost what Kenny and Bobby called “the three so-called Protestant districts in the western part of the state, and he lost to Humphrey in the second district around Madison, an area they had expected to win.”
It was a cold bucket of water thrown on what should have been a clear victory for the Kennedy forces.
“His victory,” Kenny said, “was belittled because it came from strongly Catholic districts.”
Despite losing a neighboring state that should have been an easy win for him, Humphrey felt entitled to claim some sort of moral victory, vowing to fight on to West Virginia.
This enraged the Kennedy forces. Now it was only a spoiler campaign or, as Kenny called it, “a Stop Kennedy campaign. If Hubert could not win Wisconsin, a neighboring state, he could not get the nomination. His decision to go into West Virginia could be construed as nothing more than Kennedy antagonism.”
They would have to win a largely Protestant West Virginia and fight again. In Jack’s hotel suite at the Milwaukee Hotel, the Kennedy forces watched the returns with no sense of victory.
“What does it mean, Johnny?” his sister Eunice asked.
“It means,” Jack said, with exhaustion evident in his voice and without turning to look at her, “we’ve got to go to West Virginia in the morning. And then we’ve got to go to Maryland, Indiana, and Oregon and win them all.”
The room was quiet.
Symbolically, the Kennedy win in Wisconsin had been a kind of failure. “Damned Catholic thing,” was all Jack could say. After the two victories in New Hampshire the previous month and now Wisconsin, the Kennedy team headed to West Virginia aboard the Caroline for the next big battle.
The campaign was now swarming with political pros, family members, and friends recruited by various Kennedys. Ralph Dungan, now full-time with the campaign, remembered that the campaign quickly began to break into different operations or camps. “There were two kinds of Kennedy people,” he recalled. “There were the pros directly working with the senator and Bobby, who, you know, didn’t worry about the moral judgments of political decisions. Headed by O’Donnell, their job was to get the senator elected. That was especially true of Kenny. Kenny dealt with things in a fashion that the senator appreciated. In other words, if the job is to win this primary, let’s win it. Then let’s win all the primaries; let’s win the nomination and get elected. Let’s worry about how we dealt with any moral issues after the election.
“O’Donnell especially was tough on everyone, tough on the Kennedy family forces. Everyone knew he spoke for Jack, but he was especially tough on family friends who often were well-meaning but got in the way, screwed things up. People were scared of him. I was not. Even though I worked with Sorensen, because of my union ties I had earned Kenny’s acceptance. Kenny could say and do things that Jack wanted done, without Jack having to handle it himself.”
Hy Raskin agreed. “Kenny’s job, as he saw it, was to get Jack elected, period.” It was best not to get in the way.
This tough, no-holds-barred attitude permeated the upper echelons of the Kennedy operation, personified by Kenny, Bobby, Steve, and Joe, and there was little doubt to those who understood Jack Kennedy that this reflected Jack’s approach to the campaign. Jack Kennedy had handpicked these men, and their selection in no small measure reflected his personality. It was this seasoned operation that took on Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia. Angry that Humphrey had forced this showdown on them, the Kennedy team members were determined to win, and in winning they would make sure Hubert paid a price.
The Kennedy effort in West Virginia was headed up by Bob McDonough, a tough, capable West Virginian who would prove critical to Kennedy’s victory. Kenny and Bobby flew into a meeting McDonough had arranged at the Kanawha Hotel.
Lou Harris’s poll, taken just four months prior, showed that Kennedy could beat Humphrey in West Virginia by a comfortable margin of seventy to thirty. Therefore, while Jack, Bobby, and Kenny were not happy about the upcoming battle in West Virginia, they entered it with some confidence.
As they took their seats at the front table in the overcrowded room at the hotel, Bobby was delighted by the turnout. “What are our problems?” Bobby asked pleasantly.
After a moment of awkward silence, a man in the back of the room stood and shouted, “There’s only one problem. He’s a Catholic. That’s our goddamned problem!”
With that, Kenny gulped. He and Bobby exchanged worried glances as the room broke into an uproar. Jack was in Washington, DC, and as soon as the meeting ended, Bobby and Kenny ran to a telephone. Bobby called Jack to give him the bad news. The Catholic issue was back with a vengeance.
“In truth,” Kenny told Larry later, “the Catholic issue never went away.”
Now the polls were completely reversed, and they were in trouble. Jack was “taken aback by Bobby’s discouragement,” saying to Bobby and Kenny, “Come on, it can’t be that bad. Don’t forget the Lou Harris poll that showed us ahead.”
“No, Jack,” Bobby explained, his face ashen and his hands slightly shaking as he spoke on the phone. “The people in that poll just found out that you were a Catholic.”
Jack was quiet. Stunned. “You guys come back to Washington for a few days,” Jack said, “and we’ll see what we can do with Hubert.”
The first strategy turned out to be pointless. Humphrey had no way to get the nomination, so the Irish Brotherhood thought that perhaps he could be persuaded to withdraw. Everyone who could be enlisted was enlisted to call on Hubert. The effort understandably had the opposite effect.
“I am not sure how I would react to a lot of pressure telling me to quit, either,” Jack said later. Indeed, Humphrey himself said that he had resented the pressure, though later he came to wish he had listened to them.
The Kennedy team was furious. Hubert had no chance to win. Why stay in other than to stop Jack? In the end, no amount of persuading could get Hubert to change his mind.
To make matters worse, he was being pushed by Lyndon Johnson, Senator Robert Byrd, Symington, and the Stevenson forces to stay in. They all wanted the nomination for themselves, but they were not willing to put their names on the primary ballot. Their collective goal in West Virginia was to use Hubert to stop Jack.
“We went into the campaign,” Kenny said, “in a gloomy mood, figuring that the odds were stacked against us and praying that Jack might at least be able to keep Humphrey from winning more than 60 percent of the vote so that we could at least claim the moral victory that Hubert had claimed in Wisconsin.”
But Jack, Kenny, and Bobby did not find out until later about the pressures that had been brought to bear on Hubert. “Labor lawyer Arthur Goldberg,” Hubert said, “was the key man for the Kennedy forces, and he urged me not to go into West Virginia. I explained to him why I was going in. I told him, ‘Look, no matter what happens in this election, you know that I will be out for the ticket.’”
“They said,” Hubert remembered afterward, “‘please try to conduct yourself so that if things don’t go well for you, there can be some rapprochement after the election.’ In terms of their promise of a Kennedy–Humphrey ticket, I never believed them.”
As Kenny recalled, “Aside from the challenge of the religious issue, the primary in West Virginia became such a blatantly open effort on the part of all the other contenders to stop Kennedy that Jack’s Irish temper made him eager to plunge into it.”
Jack, however, “was cheerfully unperturbed. He seemed almost eager for the battle. I was thinking, Here we are, starting an entirely new kind of fight against emotional prejudice, with nothing working for us except the courage and personality of this fellow with the unruly hair sitting beside me in the back cabin of the Caroline.”
When they arrived later that afternoon at the Kennedy headquarters in Charleston, West Virginia, Bob McDonough had already brought together a crowd. But the greeting was something Kenny and Jack had never experienced before. The crowd was polite but distant, standoffish. They seemed almost to pull back from Jack when he went to shake their hands, as if they might catch something. There were several Pinkerton agents there to protect Jack and the headquarters, something else Kenny had not yet experienced.
“Most of the crowd moved away from Jack as he approached,” Kenny said. “They moved into the shadows across the street. Only two men approached him to shake his hand.”
As they headed into the dreary Kennedy headquarters, Jack walked along quietly in front of Kenny, his hands stuffed in his coat pockets. Kenny sensed Jack’s surprise at the outright hostility of the West Virginians.
Kenny said, “As we walked down the hallway toward the clerk’s office and then on to the Kennedy offices, people in the office and in the hallways literally shrank back against the wall to let him pass.”
Jack turned to Kenny with a wry smile. “Those two guys who approached you must have been a couple of visiting Catholics from Pennsylvania.”
They laughed. “At least,” Kenny joked, “we have not totally lost our sense of humor.” Not yet anyway.
When they finally had some time alone in Jack’s suite at the Kanawha Hotel, Jack turned to Kenny and shook his head. “Well, I guess you and Bobby weren’t exaggerating.”
Kenny smiled faintly. No, they had not been.
“Let’s call everyone,” Jack said. “If they want a fight, let’s give them one.”
They were in West Virginia now. As ugly as the fight was shaping up to be, Jack, Kenny, and Bobby put out the word to “summon all the troops.”
“The first time Jack spoke out about the religious issue,” Kenny recalled, “was before a big crowd at a noon rally on the main street in Morgantown.”
The crowd was surprised. So were Kenny and Jack, who later said that he had simply gotten tired of it and had decided it was time to address the issue head-on.
“I was with him all day,” Kenny said, “and I had no idea he was going to do it.”
“Nobody,” Jack declared during his speech, “asked me if I was a Catholic when I joined the United States Navy.”
Kenny declared that the entire thing was “so unexpected, like having a bucket of water thrown in my face.”
It was the first time anyone recalled Jack addressing the Catholic issue publicly, and especially in front of a Protestant audience. He went with what Dave and Kenny called “fire and dash,” rhetorically demanding to know whether forty million Americans had given up their right to run for the presidency the day they were baptized Catholics.
From there, Jack made it even more personal, exclaiming, “That wasn’t the country my brother died for in Europe, and nobody asked my brother if he was a Catholic or a Protestant before he climbed into an American bomber to fly his last mission.”
If Jack had asked beforehand, Kenny, Bobby, and Dave would have advised against such a speech. Jack, as usual, went with his gut.
Jack believed that the people of West Virginia were straightforward fighters, no-nonsense people who, no matter how they viewed his religion, appreciated his candor. The victory to come would show that once again Jack’s decision to go with his gut was the right one.
When they climbed back in the car to go to the next stop, Jack turned to Kenny, who was seated in the back, and asked, “How did it go?”
“Good,” Kenny replied, though he admitted later that he was still in shock. “Keep it up.”
Jack used a similar version of the same comments in every subsequent speech. And he gave so many speeches that he eventually lost his voice, forcing Ted Sorensen, a Protestant, to pinch-hit for him, an irony that was not lost on the Brotherhood.
Later, Jack laughed it off. He had Sorensen give the damned speech because Sorensen wrote it!
Jack felt, and Kenny later agreed, that they had finally broken the back of the religious issue with a combination punch: First, at Joe’s behest, they brought in Franklin Roosevelt Jr., who raised his father’s name at every occasion possible, putting up two fingers and saying, ‘My daddy and Jack’s daddy were like this.’”
For West Virginians, FDR remained a god, and this was a powerful endorsement. On several occasions Franklin Roosevelt Jr. questioned Hubert’s patriotism in both subtle and not too subtle ways, asking why Humphrey had not served when Jack was, after all, a “war hero.”
Humphrey, who was legitimately 4-F, resented this, but probably not as much as his wife, Muriel, did. Such slights are not easily overcome. This was, as Kenny called it, “one step too far.”
Once again, the slight was blamed on Bobby, not because Bobby told Roosevelt to do it but because he did not tell him to stop saying it. Bobby was all about victory. He knew they were still running behind and would leave no weapon in their arsenal unused.
Kenny was not sure where the idea of a debate came from. He later said it was Hubert’s idea, which was not exactly correct. Hubert said the idea came from the Kennedys. In Kenny and Larry’s view, Jack had all the edge on the issues, but nothing of substance could be debated on television as long as Hubert kept pressing the Catholic issue.
Hubert was nonetheless sure that the idea for the debate had come from the Kennedy side. Hubert had first broached it in Wisconsin, but Kennedy, then ahead, had avoided it. Now that he was behind, Jack wanted the opportunity.
“I was in the middle of a meeting, a conference call with labor leaders, and I received a telephone call saying, ‘Senator Kennedy has accepted your invitation to debate,’” Humphrey recalled. “I was surprised. I had never invited him to debate. I knew it was not my strength.”
But once he accepted, Humphrey could not back out. It was a Kennedy ploy, and it worked.
The reason for Jack’s wanting the debate, which took place on May 4, was that it played beautifully to his strengths. Jack had clearly mastered the new medium of television.
“The debate itself,” Kenny said later, “was inconclusive because of the similarity of the liberal stands both candidates took on the campaign issues.”
However, just as with the Nixon–Kennedy debates that would be broadcast shortly thereafter, Jack was poised and cool, witty, fast on his feet, and confident.
Bobby pushed Jack hard before the debate to accuse Hubert of being a stalking horse for the “ghost candidates.” Ever the prosecutor, Bobby wanted to “have Jack handle himself like it was the McClellan Committee,” as Kenny teased.
Jack knew better. He seemed completely at ease, in sharp contrast to Hubert, who, according to his own later admission, “was nervous and uncomfortable.”
“Look,” Jack explained to Bobby, “I could say to him, ‘You’re not a real candidate. You are just a stalking horse for Johnson or Stevenson.’ And Hubert would say, ‘That is wrong. I am a real candidate.’ Where does that leave anybody? What good does that do? We still have to show we can defeat Hubert and the Catholic issue at the polls.”
Jack’s second major rebuttal to the religious issue came in a Sunday evening broadcast on May 8, before voting day. Jack appeared on television and delivered what Kenny called “a serious and moving plea for tolerance, explaining that a Catholic president who allowed his decisions to be influenced by his church would be breaking the oath of office and could be impeached.”
Dick Donahue, another Boston Irishman and extended member of the Irish Brotherhood, was with Jack in the TV studio. Donahue noted, “The speech, beautifully done by Sorensen, was considered by many to be one of the greatest speaking performances of Jack’s entire career.”
Another main component of the campaign was money. Joe spent it with abandon in West Virginia, as he had in Wisconsin. Humphrey was not wrong to feel that the primary was being “inundated with money.” Historian Robert Dallek noted that “where Humphrey’s total expenditures on the campaign amounted to about $25,000, the Kennedys spent $34,000 on TV programming alone.” But it was not Kennedy money alone. Rumors have long been whispered about a favor involving Joe and Frank Sinatra and some friends in Chicago, but it was not as unusual as it might sound.
The final element, which may or may not be true, was, as one friend described it, “a little help from our friends in Chicago.” Apparently, Joe Kennedy did make a few well-placed calls to Kennedy admirer Frank Sinatra, asking for help. According to Tina Sinatra, Frank’s daughter, “Joseph Kennedy asked the singer and actor to talk to the Mafia about securing the labor union vote in the crucial West Virginia primary.”
Frank, for his part, was happy to make the call and help. Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana assured Frank that “the request would be met with a couple of phone calls” on his end. Believe it or not, Kenny noted, “they all planned to vote for Jack as well. A vote was a vote.” And a call for a little help was just a call for a little help.
Frankly, Kenny said, “Jack did not involve himself in such matters,” leaving it to Kenny, Bobby, and Joe.
Kenny said later, “The earthy and realistic people of West Virginia were accustomed to seeing the local candidate for sheriff carrying a little black bag that contained something other than a few bottles of bourbon whiskey. This is one of those stories where less is more.”
On May 10, the day the votes were cast in West Virginia, despite the effort on all fronts, the Kennedy forces remained worried. While Jack had made great headway on the religious issue, it seemed to still lurk just underneath the surface.
“Bigotry,” Jack said, “is hard to overcome. Maybe we did. I hope we did.”
Kenny recalled, “On the morning of the primary voting, Jack flew to Washington to spend the day with Jackie and to appear with her at the Democratic women’s luncheon. When Bobby and I drove back to Charleston after watching the Caroline take off, we felt our presidential campaign was over.”
Jack had prevailed in primaries in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Indiana after his victory in Wisconsin. Despite these successes, however, a loss to Hubert in West Virginia would, as Kenny said, “be a barrier blocking Kennedy from the party’s nomination.”
A loss would be pinned squarely on the religious issue. “They would say, ‘If he can’t win there, he can’t beat Nixon, because of the damned religious thing,’” Jack said to Kenny over a drink one night after a long, hard day of campaigning.
Kenny demurred. He remained convinced that there had to be a way. As Kenny and Bobby climbed out of the car after seeing Jack off, they trudged back toward the West Virginia headquarters.
Bobby moaned, “We might as well stay home and watch the convention on television. Damn that Hubert Humphrey.”
“Don’t be such an optimist, Bobby,” Kenny teased, trying to lighten the mood.
But Bobby had spoken too soon. Hubert had told his aides in the closing weeks of the campaign that he felt the primary slipping away from him. His assumption had been correct.
“If only we’d had more time and money,” Humphrey would later say. Thankfully for Jack, they did not. At nine o’clock that evening, as the first returns began to come in from a precinct in Hardy County, “Kennedy had ninety-six votes to Humphrey’s thirty-six,” Kenny said. It was an early sign that West Virginia was about to seal Jack Kennedy’s ticket to Los Angeles.
In the end, Jack Kennedy won by a 35 percent margin, soundly defeating Hubert Humphrey in Protestant West Virginia and sealing the nomination. Jack correctly feared, though, that reports of the Catholic issue having been put to bed were greatly exaggerated.
Kenny and Bobby called Jack at his home in Washington, DC, where he had had dinner and gone to a movie with his friends Ben and Toni Bradlee.
When they got back, Kenny said, “Jack found a note from Bobby left for him by his assistant, Provi Paredes, and he let out a whoop of joy, opened a bottle of champagne, and drank a quiet toast with Jackie and the Bradlees before flying aboard the Caroline to West Virginia to thank supporters and workers.”
With Hubert’s defeat in West Virginia, Jack had the nomination. No matter which other ghost candidates still envisioned opportunities for themselves, Jack and Kenny knew better.
So did Hubert. “We went into West Virginia, and I made some statements that I would have been better off if I had not made then, in retrospect—primarily about money—because I sensed I was being inundated. I never made them personally about President Kennedy as such.”
Jack noted with pleasure that he had even won Sophia, hometown of West Virginia senator Robert Byrd, who was a major supporter of Lyndon Johnson’s ghost candidacy.
Bobby studied the telegram from Hubert conceding defeat and congratulating Jack. “God, this must be awful for poor Hubert, ending up this way after working so very hard in two states.” Bobby made his way in the cold, icy rain to Hubert’s headquarters. Both sides remained somewhat bitter, but Bobby was determined to put everything behind them. Walking into the Humphrey headquarters, Bobby, who underneath the toughness could be an emotional man, as Kenny well knew, moved to Muriel Humphrey’s side and gave her a hug.
Hubert recalled, “When Bobby arrived in our room, he moved quickly to Muriel and kissed her on the check. Muriel stiffened, stared, and turned in silent hostility, walking away from him, fighting tears and angry words.”
While the anger remained that night, Jack, in his characteristic fashion, would ultimately work things out with Hubert.
“Sure,” Hubert said, “I was angry. I gave John Bailey a good working-over a couple of times. But after the West Virginia primary, I went over that evening and complimented and congratulated Jack Kennedy. Afterward, I had a visit with him in Washington, in my office. He came down to see me, and we talked about the future and Los Angeles.”
Later, Hubert would admit something he had up until then told only his beloved wife, Muriel. “I never said it publicly or to my staff, but I felt we were licked in the last week. I just felt it was over. There was nothing to be done at that point but see the damn thing through.”
Kenny put it this way: “It was all over. Jack had won. He was now going to get the nomination. All we had now was the final cleanup work as we moved toward Los Angeles. There was now no question that the senator would get the nomination. The chips were beginning to fall into place. We proceeded from here to other primaries, now that the teeth had been pulled from the opposition behind Hubert.”
Jack agreed and told Kenny that he firmly believed that “with this victory, the opposition would be placed in an extremely difficult position. If they were afraid to meet me in a state that was so disadvantageous to us as West Virginia, it seemed to me that they would not dare take us on in some of the other states.”
From here forward, Kenny explained, “We made a basic mental assumption that the ball game was over, and unless we made some major mistake, John Kennedy would be nominated in Los Angeles on the first ballot.”
Kenny would later recall that one evening while relaxing at the White House with the president after a busy day, Jack reflected on the critical events and decisions that had brought them to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He also reflected on how often the most important events were ones over which they had no control. How they reacted to those events made all the difference.
“Just think,” Jack said to Kenny, “if Wisconsin had turned out differently, we might not be sitting here right now.”
As Kenny said later, “Like his fortunate defeat in the floor fight for the vice presidential nomination in 1956, Kennedy’s less-than-decisive win over Hubert Humphrey in the 1960 Wisconsin primary was a disappointment that later turned into a blessing.”
Jack’s symbolic loss in Wisconsin gave Hubert just enough hope to “challenge Kennedy once more in the West Virginia primary, forcing Kennedy to run against a Protestant opponent in a Bible Belt state that was 95 percent Protestant, where Kennedy’s Catholicism was the burning issue.”
In West Virginia, Jack would carry forty-eight of fifty-five counties. Kennedy’s victory was, as Kenny said, “much to the astonishment of most of the Democratic leaders around the country, who then made haste to climb aboard the Kennedy bandwagon.”
Challenges still lay ahead if they were going to win the nomination, but they had truly come a long way since the first meeting in Palm Beach just a year before.