No, sir, th’ dimmycratic party ain’t on speakin’ terms with itsilf. Whin ye see two men with white neckties go into a sthreet car an’ set in opposite corners while wan mutthers “Traiter” an’ th’ other hisses “Miscreent” ye can bet they’re two dimmycratic leaders thryin’ to reunite th’ gran’ ol’ party.
—Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley’s Opinions, 1901
JACK KENNEDY’S REELECTION VICTORY in Massachusetts and his growing national visibility since the 1956 Democratic convention put him on everyone’s list of possible candidates for the presidency in 1960. He was an appealing alternative to Eisenhower. Ike was much admired, even loved, by millions of Americans, but alongside Kennedy, the sixty-nine-year-old president, who was in declining health and had become the oldest man ever to serve in the office, seemed stodgy. Kennedy’s vigor (“vigah,” Jack pronounced it, in the New England way) was seen as a potential asset in dealing with Soviet challenges, a sluggish economy, racial divisions, and what the literary critic Dwight Macdonald described as the “terrible shapelessness of American life.”
In 1957, more than 2,500 speaking invitations from all over the country testified to Kennedy’s appeal. Seizing upon the opportunity to reach influential audiences, he agreed to give 144 talks, nearly one every other day, in 47 states. By early 1958, he was receiving a hundred requests a week to speak. Some Massachusetts newspapers, eager to boost a native son, already pegged him as the Democratic nominee. Numerous party leaders agreed. A majority of the party’s forty-eight state chairmen described him as the likely choice, and 409 of the 1,220 delegates to the 1956 Democratic convention declared their preference for Kennedy in 1960. Although Democratic governors did not foresee a first-ballot victory, they thought that Jack would certainly lead in the early balloting.
Kennedy backers took additional satisfaction from polls in 1959 depicting him in the most flattering terms. Even Republicans conceded that he was “very smart… nice-looking… likeable… [and] knowledgeable about politics.” Although some in the GOP set him down as a “smart-alec… millionaire… headline hunter,” others wished that he were a member of their party. Democrats had only nice things to say about Jack, describing him with words and phrases like “truthful,” “not afraid to express himself,” “family man,” “nice-looking,” “vigorous,” “personable,” “intelligent,” and “level-headed.” Some independents thought he was “too outspoken,” but the great majority described him in extremely favorable terms. Sixty-four percent of all potential voters with an opinion about Kennedy believed that he had “the background and experience to be President.”
Despite this widespread esteem, knowledgeable political observers, including many in the Kennedy camp, saw formidable obstacles to Kennedy’s nomination and election. His positive image, however useful, allowed critics to describe him as more the product of a public relations campaign funded by his family’s fortune than the result of political accomplishments. William Shannon, a well-known columnist for the New York Post, wrote: “Month after month, from the glossy pages of Life to the multicolored cover of Redbook, Jack and Jackie smile out at millions of readers; he with his tousled hair and winning smile, she with her dark eyes and beautiful face. We hear of her pregnancy, of his wartime heroism, of their fondness for sailing. But what has all this to do with statesmanship?” New York Times columnist James Reston complained that “[Kennedy’s] clothes and hair-do are a masterpiece of contrived casualness.” Reston worried that there had been too much emphasis “on how to win the presidency rather than on how to run it.” Chicago Daily News reporter Peter Lisagor and other journalists met with Jack in 1958: They “looked at him walking out of the room, thin, slender, almost boyish really,” and one of them said, “ ‘Can you imagine that young fellow thinking he could be President of the United States any time soon?’ I must say the thought occurred to me, too,” Lisagor recalled.
Polls assessing Kennedy’s candidacy in a national campaign echoed Lisagor’s doubts. They foresaw a close contest with Vice President Richard M. Nixon, whose eight years under Eisenhower gave him a commanding lead for the Republican nomination. Moreover, a vigorous campaign for Nixon by Ike, whose approval ratings in the next-to-last year of his presidency ranged between 57 percent and 66 percent, seemed to promise a third consecutive Republican term. But no sitting vice president had gained the White House since Martin Van Buren in 1836, and several straw polls matching Adlai Stevenson and Kennedy against Nixon and New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, or Kennedy directly against Nixon, gave the Democrats a slight edge. Nothing in the surveys, however, suggested that Kennedy and the Democrats could take anything for granted.
The criticism and doubts bothered Jack, but he blunted them with humor. At the 1958 Gridiron dinner, an annual Washington ritual in which the press and politicians engaged in humorous exchanges, Jack poked fun at his father’s free spending in support of his political ambitions. He had “just received the following wire from my generous daddy,” JFK said. “ ‘Dear Jack—Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary—I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.’ ” To answer predictions that a Catholic president would have divided loyalties, Jack promised to make Methodist bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, an outspoken opponent of electing a Catholic, his personal envoy to the Vatican. To counter Oxnam’s complaint that a Catholic in the White House would be in constant touch with the pope, Jack declared his intention to have Oxnam “open negotiations for that Trans-Atlantic Tunnel immediately.” The Republicans did not escape his barbs: A 1958 recession had moved President Eisenhower to declare that, in Jack’s version, “we’re now at the end of the beginning of the upturn of the downturn.” He added, “Every bright spot the White House finds in the economy is like the policeman bending over the body in the alley who says cheerfully, ‘Two of his wounds are fatal—but the other one’s not so bad.’ ”
Jack’s wit scored points with journalists but had limited impact on Democratic voters and party officials, who would have the initial say about his candidacy. In 1959, Democrats were evenly divided between Kennedy and Stevenson. Each of them was the choice of between 25 percent and 30 percent of party members. Less encouraging, congressional Democrats put Kennedy fourth behind Lyndon Johnson, Stevenson, and Missouri senator Stuart Symington for the nomination. They thought that the forty-two-year-old Kennedy was too young to be president and preferred to see him run as vice president.
But Jack had no patience with being second. “We’ve always been competitive in our family,” he explained. “My father has been competitive all his life, that’s how he got where he is.” When Newton Minow, a Stevenson law partner, told Kennedy in 1957 that he could probably have the vice presidential nomination in 1960, Jack said: “ ‘I’m not interested in running for vice president. I’m interested in running for president.’ ‘You’re out of your mind,’ ” Minow replied. “ ‘You’re only thirty-nine years old, you haven’t got a chance to run for President.’ ‘No, Newt,’ ” Jack answered, “ ‘if I’m ever going to make it I’m going to make it in 1960.’ ” Sensible political calculations were shaping his decision. “If I don’t make it this time, and a Democrat makes it,” he told a reporter, “then it may [be] for eight years and there will be fresher faces coming along and I’ll get shoved in the background.” Besides, the vice presidency was “a dead job.” Nor did he think he could work with Stevenson, who “is a fussbudget about a lot of things and we might not get along.” Settling for second place was tantamount to defeat.
The greatest impediments to Jack’s nomination seemed to be liberal antagonism and doubts that a Catholic could or should win a general election. The two were not mutually exclusive. “Catholic-baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals,” one conservative declared. The Church frightened progressive Democrats, who regarded it as an authoritarian institution intolerant of ideas at odds with its teachings. Suspicion of divided Catholic loyalties between church and state was as old as the American Republic itself, and since the 1830s, when a mass migration of Catholics to America had begun, Protestants had warned against the Catholic threat to individual freedoms. In May 1959, 24 percent of voters said that they would not cast their ballots for a Catholic, even if he seemed to be well qualified for the presidency.
Most liberals subscribed to the view of Kennedy as an ambitious but superficial playboy with little more to recommend him than his good looks and charm. On none of the issues most important to them—McCarthyism, civil rights, and labor unions—had Jack been an outspoken advocate. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said later of liberal antagonism to Jack, “Kennedy seemed too cool and ambitious, too bored by the conditional reflexes of stereotyped liberalism, too much a young man in a hurry. He did not respond in anticipated ways and phrases and wore no liberal heart on his sleeve.” Joe Kennedy’s reputation as a robber baron and prewar appeaser of Nazi Germany also troubled liberals. And, despite numerous examples of political divergence between father and son, they saw Jack as little more than a surrogate for Joe, whom they believed to have been planning to buy the White House for one of his children since at least 1940.
Kennedy’s threat to a third Stevenson campaign was an additional source of liberal antagonism. Liberals hoped that despite Stevenson’s two defeats by Eisenhower, he might be able to win against Nixon in 1960. Some journalists shared this belief. (James Reston privately lamented “the effects upon this country of the advertising profession, the continual deterioration of our citizens, the lulling of their consciences, the degradation of their morals, and Adlai seems to me to be the only one that can raise our sights. He is the only one who speaks with the voice of a philosopher, of a poet, of a true leader.”) Journalist Theodore White wrote that California, Illinois, New York, Oregon, and Wisconsin “youngsters Stevenson had summoned to politics with high morality in 1952 had now matured and were unwilling in their maturity to forsake him.”
To discourage a stop-Kennedy drive, Jack publicly denied that he was a candidate. In 1958, he said that his campaign for reelection to the Senate required all his attention and that he needed to “take care of that matter before doing anything else.” When a journalist pointed out that he was giving speeches in five western and midwestern states in just one month, Jack explained that he was “interested in the Democratic party nationally” and was “delighted to go where I am asked.” In 1959, a reporter asked when Jack was “going to drop this public pretense of non-candidacy.” The time to declare his future intentions would be in 1960, he replied.
Early in 1958, as Jack’s presidential candidacy was gaining momentum, Eleanor Roosevelt published a magazine article in which she repeated her complaint that he had “dodged the McCarthy issue in 1954.” In May 1958, she made a more direct attack on Jack’s candidacy, telling an AP reporter that the country was ready to elect a Catholic to the presidency if he could separate the church from the state, but that she was “not sure Kennedy could do this.” In December, she stepped up her opposition to Jack in a television appearance, expressing doubts about his readiness for the presidency and noting his failure to demonstrate the kind of independence and courage he had celebrated in his book.
Jack avoided any public fight with her, answering her opposition in a private letter. He challenged her to support an allegation made during her TV appearance that his “father has been spending oodles of money all over the country and probably has a paid representative in every state by now…. I am certain you are the victim of misinformation,” Jack wrote, and asked her to have her “informant back up the charge with evidence.” She replied that if her comment was untrue, she would “gladly so state,” but she cited his father’s declaration that “he would spend any money to make his son the first Catholic President of this country, and many people as I travel about tell me of money spent by him on your behalf.” In response, Jack expressed disappointment that she would “accept the view that simply because a rumor or allegation is repeated it becomes commonly accepted as a fact.” He asked her to “correct the record in a fair and gracious manner.” When she published a newspaper column quoting Jack’s letter, he pressed her for a fuller retraction. When she agreed to write another column if Kennedy insisted, Jack told her not to bother, saying, “We can let it stand for the present.” Jack’s suggestion that they “get together sometime in the future to discuss other matters” provoked a snide telegram: “MY DEAR BOY I ONLY SAY THESE THINGS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD. I HAVE FOUND IN [A] LIFETIME OF ADVERSITY THAT WHEN BLOWS ARE RAINED ON ONE, IT IS ADVISABLE TO TURN THE OTHER PROFILE.”
MRS. ROOSEVELT’S REPRIMAND stemmed partly from a conviction that Jack’s denials about his father were misleading. She had no direct evidence of Joe’s spending in his son’s behalf, but she believed that all the rumors were more than idle gossip. And of course she was right. Joe had financed all Jack’s campaigns, including the 1958 romp, when he spent an estimated $1.5 million to ensure the landslide that would help launch Jack’s presidential bid.
As important, between 1958 and 1960, Joe became the campaign’s principal behind-the-scenes operator in the nomination fight. “You do what you think is right,” Joe told Jack after he was elected to the Senate, “and we’ll take care of the politicians.” And anything else that needs to be done, he might have added. When Jack wanted prominent civil rights advocate Harris Wofford to join his campaign, Joe pressed Father John Cavanaugh, Notre Dame University’s former president, to get sitting president Father Theodore Hesburgh to release Wofford from teaching duties at the law school. When Wofford told Sargent Shriver about Joe’s intervention, Shriver replied, “ ‘Don’t ever underestimate Mr. Kennedy.’ This was the only time I personally saw the long hand of Joe Kennedy,” Wofford wrote, “but if he would intervene so vigorously on such a small matter, I could imagine what he was like when he dealt with Mayor Daley for delegates. ‘And that is exactly who did deal with Daley most of the time,’ said Shriver.” Although Jack would pay ceremonial visits to Daley, “the long, tough talks were between the mayor and Joe Kennedy. Shriver said this was true of the negotiations with the Philadelphia leader, Congressman William Green, and with other Irish-Americans of the old school who were in key positions in a number of city and state Democratic organizations, including California and New York.”
“[Joe] knew instinctively who the important people were, who the bosses behind the scenes were,” New York congressman Eugene Keogh said. “From 1958 on he was in contact with them constantly by phone, presenting Jack’s case, explaining and interpreting his son, working these bosses.” Tip O’Neill remembered that when Joe learned that Joe Clark, a Pennsylvania state official, was the power behind Congressman Bill Green, he flew Clark to New York for a meeting in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. Joe also went to see Pennsylvania governor David Lawrence. During a secret meeting at a Harrisburg hotel, Joe was, as Lawrence remembers, “very vigorous.” When Lawrence asserted that a Catholic could not win the White House, Joe recounted a story about a New York bank president who said the same thing. “I was so goddamn mad at that fella,” Joe added. “I had nine million dollars in that bank and I felt like I’d pull out of that bank that day.”
New York party leader Mike Prendergast recalled how Joe “sent a lot of people in to donate money to the state organization, which we used for Jack’s election.” In July 1959, syndicated columnist Marquis Childs asserted that Joe had already spent one million dollars on Jack’s campaign and was the brains behind the whole operation. Jack’s acquisition of a plane leased to him by a Kennedy family corporation belied Kennedy denials that Joe had anything to do with the campaign. Harry Truman echoed the concerns about Joe when he told friends, “It’s not the Pope I’m afraid of, it’s the pop.” Jack knew this was the perception, but there seemed no other route to the presidency but along this tightrope.
THE 1958 CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS had given the Democratic party a decidedly liberal tilt. A recession producing higher unemployment nationwide and farm failures in the Midwest, Republican support of integration in the South and anti-union right-to-work laws in industrial states, and the “missile gap”—fears that America was losing the arms race to Russia—had translated into nearly two-to-one Democratic margins in both houses; their twenty-eight-seat gain in the Upper House was the most one-sided party victory in Senate history. Of the fifteen new Democratic senators, five were liberals and ten were moderates.
Because liberals would thus have a major say in who became the Democratic nominee, Jack had attempted to win Adlai Stevenson’s support. But Stevenson was uncooperative. After 1956, he had consistently denied any interest in another campaign, but when one of his law partners privately confided his own intention to back Kennedy, Stevenson predicted that “the Catholic issue is going to be badly against him, and, after all, Nixon must be beaten.” The partner took this to mean: “I want to be urged to run, and I want to be nominated.” Stevenson also told Newton Minow that Kennedy was too young and inexperienced to handle the job. Stevenson confided his doubts to Time reporter John Steele as well, setting Jack down as too ambitious and maybe even a little foolish, a young man reaching too quickly for the coveted prize. He was even more blunt with the British economist Barbara Ward Jackson. “I don’t think he’d be a good president,” Stevenson said. “I do not feel that he’s the right man for the job; I think he’s too young; I don’t think he fully understands the dimensions of the foreign affairs dilemmas that are coming up.”
With Stevenson refusing to help, Jack explored other means of bringing liberals to his side. In March 1958, when a TV interviewer asked him, “Do you think that the candidate in the Democratic party would have to be definitely associated with the liberal wing of the party in 1960?” Jack replied, “I do.” “Do you believe that you are in that wing?” the reporter continued. “I do,” Jack answered. “Do you count yourself as a liberal?” the reporter persisted. “I do,” Jack responded unequivocally.
His answers were part of a larger campaign to convince party liberals that he was one of them, or at the very least would be responsive to their concerns. But he also felt that liberals were uninformed about his record on civil liberties, civil rights, and labor. Consequently, between 1957 and 1960, he publicly emphasized that he had established his “independence from the Democratic party,” but that this was “essentially an independence from party organization rather than from its credo.” He believed that his votes on progressive issues compared favorably with those cast by congressional liberals. His speeches from this period are replete with references to his support of advanced progressive ideas. Liberals nevertheless remained reluctant to embrace him as a reasonable alternative to Stevenson, and this frustrated and angered him, partially because he believed it unrealistic of liberals to hope that Stevenson could be an effective candidate. In 1960, during a conversation with Peter Lisagor, who predicted that Stevenson would be the nominee, Kennedy “leaned forward—I remember this so vividly,” Lisagor said. It was “almost the only time I ever saw him angry… and he said, ‘Why, that’s impossible. Adlai Stevenson is a bitter man. He’s a bitter, deeply disillusioned, deeply hurt man.’ ” As Jack told another journalist regarding Stevenson, “People who want to be deluded are going to be deluded no matter what they are told.” In September, after economist John Kenneth Galbraith publicly supported Kennedy’s candidacy, Jack wrote him, “I rather imagine your voice will be drowned out by the antiphonal choruses of support for [California governor] Pat Brown, [Michigan governor] Soapy Williams and [New York mayor] Bob Wagner!”—all more acceptable liberals.
The gulf between Kennedy and party liberals came partly from an unbridgeable difference in perspective. New Deal–Fair Deal Democrats thought in terms of traditional welfare state concerns—economic security, social programs, racial equality. But as Jack told Harris Wofford, “The key thing for the country is a new foreign policy that will break out of the confines of the cold war. Then we can build a decent relationship with developing nations and begin to respond to their needs. We can stop the vicious circle of the arms race and promote diversity and peaceful change within the Soviet bloc. We can get this country moving again on its domestic problems.” He conceded that “Stevenson may see this, but he’s a two-time loser and has no real chance; nor has [Chester] Bowles or Humphrey, with whom I agree even more. The most likely alternatives are Johnson or Symington, but if either of them is nominated we might as well elect Dulles or Acheson; it would be the same cold-war foreign policy all over again.” (This was certainly prophetic about the Johnson presidency.)
Kennedy also gave voice to his thinking through James MacGregor Burns, who was writing Kennedy’s campaign biography, chiefly from interviews. Kennedy’s “mixed voting record” and resistance to being labeled as a New Dealer or a Fair Dealer made people question his liberal credentials, Burns wrote in his book. But Kennedy was a new kind of liberal, Burns asserted. Because the New Deal and the Fair Deal had “become properly entrenched in our way of life, and hence [were] no longer a disputed political issue,” Kennedy believed that “liberalism must be rethought and renewed.” As for foreign policy, a series of questions Burns posed to him made it clear that Kennedy was trying to craft fresh ways of thinking about the Cold War. In particular, Jack cautioned against overblown hopes: “It takes two to make peace,” he said. “I think it would be misleading to suggest that there are some magic formulas hitherto untried which would ease the relations between the free world and the communistic world, or which would shift the balance of power in our favor.”
He hoped nevertheless that “paramount” military power might “encourage the Russians and the Chinese to say a farewell to arms,” which could produce a competitive shift “to nonmilitary spheres.” Kennedy then foresaw “a struggle between the two systems… a test as to which system travels better, which system of political, economic, and social organization can more effectively transform the lives of the people in the newly emerging countries.”
Schlesinger signed on to Kennedy’s campaign principally because he saw him as a more realistic liberal than Stevenson, and it was Schlesinger who helped Jack find a distinctive liberal outlook. Eager to give “his campaign identity—to distinguish his appeal from that of his rivals and suggest that he could bring the country something no one else could,” Kennedy seized upon a memorandum Schlesinger wrote arguing that “the Eisenhower epoch, the period of passivity and acquiescence in our national life, was drawing to its natural end, and that a new time—a time of affirmation, progressivism and forward movement—impended.”
Schlesinger noted in his journal at the time: “This, I suppose, is the real irony. I have come, I think, to the private conclusion that I would rather have K as President than S. S is a much richer, more thoughtful, more creative person; but he has been away from power too long; he gives me an odd sense of unreality…. In contrast K gives a sense of cool, measured, intelligent concern with action and power. I feel that his administration would be less encumbered than S’s with commitments to past ideas or sentimentalities; that he would be more radical; and, though he is less creative personally, he might be more so politically.”
A lack of clear definition, however, made Kennedy’s “new” liberalism suspect. Indeed, the details of his domestic program sounded much like the old liberalism or little different from what progressive Democrats were advocating in 1960: “comprehensive housing legislation… a ten-point ‘bill of rights’ for improved living standards for older people… [a] bill to outlaw the bombing of homes, churches, schools, and community centers”; antilynching and anti–poll tax bills; a higher minimum wage; and an end to loyalty oaths. On foreign and defense policies as well, Kennedy seemed to be treading on familiar ground. True, he called for fresh thinking about Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East, emphasizing economic assistance, but a focus on military strength and the “ ‘magic power’ on our side [of] the desire of every person to be free, of every nation to be independent” gave little indication of just how he might turn the Cold War in a new direction.
BECAUSE THERE WERE only sixteen state primaries, the road to the nomination in 1960 principally involved winning over state party leaders. Direct contacts between Jack and prominent Democrats across the country seemed essential. Beyond wooing local party leaders, however, no one around Kennedy at the end of 1958 had a clear conception of how to proceed. O’Donnell and Powers thought the nomination fight would be a larger version of Kennedy’s 1952 and 1958 Senate races. As in Massachusetts, where they had largely shunned party chiefs, they initially thought in terms of a 1960 grass roots campaign. Bobby Kennedy agreed, telling a reporter that they could not rely on “the politicians” who controlled the big state delegations to the convention. “We have to get organized in those states,” he said, “and have secretaries in every major city.” The secretaries were to set up Kennedy clubs, or “citizen organizations,” mounting a “grass roots appeal over the party regulars.” The Republican nominations of Wendell Willkie in 1940, Tom Dewey in 1944, and Eisenhower in 1952 were models of how to wrest the nomination from the “bosses.”
By the beginning of 1959, however, as Jack, Bobby, and the rest of the Kennedy team thought about the challenge before them, they concluded that shunning party leaders was a prescription for defeat; with only sixteen primaries, they would need the backing of party “bosses” as well as rank-and-file Democrats to have any realistic hope of being nominated. Implementing this strategy meant creating more formal organization than had existed so far. To this end, they installed Steve Smith, who was married to Jack’s sister Jean, in a nine-room office in the Washington, D.C., Esso building on Constitution Avenue near the Capitol. Because they were eager to keep the operation quiet, the building directory and office door listed only “Stephen E. Smith.” The thirty-two-year-old Smith, the son of a wealthy New York shipping family with some business experience, was asked to manage four secretaries corresponding with Democratic governors and state chairmen and local and grass root supporters around the country. Smith and his staff set up a card file of backers and potential allies and rated their loyalty on a one-to-ten scale. Detailed wall maps identifying areas of strength and weakness across the country gave the operation, which took the form of letters and telephone calls to any and all likely convention delegates, the feel of a military campaign.
But even with the Smith office in place, more questions than answers remained about winning the nomination. On April 1, Jack, Joe, and Bobby met at Joe’s house in Palm Beach with Smith, pollster Lou Harris, and Jack’s Senate staff: O’Brien, O’Donnell, and Sorensen. They reviewed each state in detail, asking: “Where do we stand?” Who are the “key figures” that will “influence the delegation?… Should JFK be scheduled there this fall or earlier? Should Bobby be scheduled to speak there this spring or summer? Should a poll be taken—and when?” Which state primaries should they enter? “What kind of organization do we need within the state? Should we be lining up our own delegate slate?”
Although Smith’s office and the April meeting provided no definitive answers to their questions, by the fall the campaign had made some significant gains. In October, when Gallup asked 1,454 Democratic county chairmen, “Regardless of whom you personally prefer, what is your best guess… as to who will get the Democratic nomination for President in 1960?” 32 percent chose Kennedy, 27 percent said Symington, 18 percent picked Stevenson, 9 percent selected Johnson, and 3 percent named Humphrey; 11 percent refused to say.
IF JACK COULD begin to feel somewhat optimistic about his chances for the nomination, he was discouraged by Gallup’s finding that 61 percent of Democratic and Republican county chairmen thought that Nixon would beat Kennedy in the 1960 campaign; only 34 percent thought that Jack could defeat someone as well-known and experienced in national politics as the vice president. Fifty-five percent of the county chairmen believed that New York governor Nelson Rockefeller could also beat Kennedy. These surveys were in sharp contrast to polls showing Democrats favored over Republicans in the 1960 congressional elections by 57 to 43 percent and on party registration by 55 to 37 percent.
The disappointing numbers underscored the need for Kennedy to launch an all-out campaign that demonstrated his national appeal to voters. And so by the autumn of 1959, despite still not having announced his candidacy, he had settled into an exhausting routine that took him to every part of the country. In October and November, he spent four days in Indiana, one day each in West Virginia, New York, and Nebraska, two days in Louisiana, made a stopover in Milwaukee on the way to Oregon, flew back to New York, followed by three- and four-day stays in Illinois, California, and Oregon, and briefer visits to Oklahoma, Delaware, Kansas, and Colorado. He addressed audiences of every size on street corners, at airports, on fairgrounds, and in theaters, armories, high schools, state capitols, restaurants, gambling casinos, hotels, and pool, union, lodge, and convention halls. The groups he addressed were as varied as the venues—farmers, labor unions, chambers of commerce, bar associations, ethnic societies, state legislatures, college and university students and faculties, and civic organizations.
As he traveled, he learned how to pace his talks and strike responsive chords with audiences. When Katie Louchheim, the vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, heard him speak at a party meeting in July 1959, she described him as “certainly brilliant, his choice of topics, words, his fluency, all excellent. But his delivery took the cream off his own milk. He fairly rushes along, almost breathless, and his smiles are merely indicated, not given.” It was a familiar and long-standing criticism of Kennedy’s public speaking, and during the fall tour he made conscious efforts to improve. “I’m getting a lot better on speeches,” he told an interviewer, concluding that “at least now I’ve got a control over the subject matter and a confidence so that I can speak more and more off the cuff, and I know that the off the cuff is much better than the prepared speech. Perhaps when I get enough control, I can have more confidence about making them less declaratory and more emotional.” He also improved his technique of working a crowd. During this time, Sorensen wrote later, “he learned the art of swiftly getting down from the speaker’s stand into a crowd for handshaking instead of being trapped by a few eager voters behind the head table.” In short, he was becoming a master campaigner.
But it was difficult, sometimes demoralizing work carried out despite continuing back pain and spasm, which he eased with early-morning and late-night hot baths. A journalist who followed him around said, “The tone was tiredness, drained tiredness of one hotel room after another hotel room,” nonstop speech-making, “people pulling you this way and that… smiling and smiling until your mouth is so dehydrated it doesn’t seem to belong to you any more… more hands than you can shake, more names than you can remember, [and] more promises than you can keep.” Through it all, Jack could never escape the thought that it might be in vain—a marathon run that tested the limits of his physical and psychological resilience and then ended in possible defeat. He countered such thoughts by remembering the potential payoff. There seemed no other justification imaginable.
To improve Jack’s chances of winning, Bobby gave up his Senate staff job to become campaign manager. He immediately convened a meeting of seventeen principal people at his house in Hyannis Port at the end of October. Bobby was all business. “Jack,” he said in a staccato voice, “what has been done about the campaign, what planning has been done?” Before Jack could answer, Bobby asked: “Jack, how do you expect to run a successful campaign if you don’t get started? A day lost now can’t be picked up at the other end. It’s ridiculous that more work hasn’t been done already.” Jack, mimicking his brother’s delivery, said to no one in particular, “How would you like looking forward to that voice blasting in your ear for the next six months?”
The group began by discussing a six-page summary of Jack’s political standing. It was decidedly upbeat, noting that Kennedy was “well on his way” to getting the nomination and winning the White House. His appeal to “rank-and-file voters” indicated that he was “the only Democrat who can beat either Nixon or Rockefeller.” But, refusing to take anything for granted, the report also acknowledged “handicaps of age, religion and a[n imperfect liberal] Senate voting record.” The conclusion: Jack would have to work hard for the nomination by entering the primaries and staking out controversial positions. Another, more recent analysis in October cited widespread doubts among Democrats about Jack’s seriousness, maturity, and credentials as a bona fide liberal.
Jack believed it essential to show both close advisers and the larger public that he was not a stand-in for his father or under the control of his family but an independent leader who was passionate about using politics to advance the national well-being. So he used the October meeting to demonstrate his knowledge about vital issues. He also wanted to remind everyone—including his brother—who was ultimately in charge. For example, after he agreed to Bobby’s suggestion that the thirty-three-year-old journalist Pierre Salinger run campaign press operations, Jack took Salinger to task for issuing a statement on Bobby’s say-so. “Check those things with me,” he told Salinger. “You’re working for me, not for Bob now.”
The meeting was an opportunity not for “hard-and-fast, dramatic, black-and-white decisions,” Sorensen said later, but for Jack to prove to his team that a forty-three-year-old Catholic senator with no executive experience deserved to be president. Dressed casually in “slacks and loafers, looking thoroughly boyish,” Kennedy “amaze[d] them all by a performance that remains in the memory of all those who listened…. For three hours, broken only occasionally by a bit of information he might request of the staff, he proceeded, occasionally sitting, sometimes standing, to survey the entire country without map or notes. It was a tour of America region by region, state by state,” and a demonstration that “he knew all the [party] factions and the key people in all the factions,” and where he needed to go.
There was some strategizing, too. Minutes of the meeting show a concern with bringing former Connecticut governor and congressman Chester Bowles into the campaign—not because he was a leading progressive voice on foreign affairs and close to Kennedy’s thinking, as Jack later emphasized to him, but because he was so closely identified with party liberals. Nevertheless, rumors that Bowles might become secretary of state were to be encouraged. A discussion of winning southern support included somewhat cynical suggestions that liberal labor opposition to Jack be publicized as widely as possible in the region, where anti-union sentiment was prevalent.
On Saturday, January 2, 1960, Kennedy formally announced his candidacy before an audience of three hundred supporters in the Senate Caucus Room. In choosing a slow news day after the New Year’s holiday, he assured himself extensive press coverage. His terse two-page statement sounded the themes he believed could carry him to the nomination and the White House. He wanted to become president, he said, to ensure “a more vital life for our people” and freedom for peoples everywhere. Specifically, he wished to end or alter the burdensome arms race, support freedom and order in the newly emerging nations, “rebuild the stature of American science and education… prevent the collapse of our farm economy and the decay of our cities,” rekindle economic growth, and give fresh direction to “our traditional moral purpose.” He had toured every continental state in the Union during the previous forty months and would now “submit to the voters his views, record and competence in a series of primary contests.” To answer objections that so young and inexperienced a senator would be a risky nominee, he emphasized his eighteen years of service to the country as a naval officer and member of Congress, and the extensive foreign travels that had taken him to “nearly every continent and country.”
Reflecting skepticism about his candidacy, reporters asked if he would “refuse the vice presidential nomination under any circumstance.” His answer was unequivocal: “I will not be a candidate for Vice President under any circumstances and that is not subject to change.” As for the likely debate to erupt over his religion, he also gave an unqualified response. He acknowledged that it would be a matter of substantial discussion. But he saw only one concern for voters: “Does a candidate believe in the Constitution, does he believe in the First Amendment, does he believe in the separation of church and state.” Having said that, he dismissed the issue as one that had been settled 160 years ago and concluded that he saw “no value in discussing a matter which is that ancient, when there are so many issues in 1960 which are going to be important.”
Despite everything he had said that day, few political commentators and activists thought Kennedy could get the nomination. House Democrats and party state chairmen now predicted Symington’s nomination; Democratic senators and southern leaders expected Johnson to get the top spot; most Democratic governors, editors, and “influential intellectuals” picked Stevenson or Humphrey, his stand-in, as the ultimate winner. Jack shrugged off their predictions.
Kennedy saw Humphrey as the least likely to beat him. True, party liberals loved Humphrey: He had been fighting for civil rights and New Deal social programs since he had come to the Senate from Minnesota in 1949. When he spoke at a July 1959 party meeting in Washington, he outdid Kennedy and Symington. Katie Louchheim said that Jack “scored 100—but then so did Stuart, in his calm, dignified, statesmanlike brief speech. But it was Hubert who got the hand, was interrupted many times with applause. He shook ’em, he impassioned on their ‘topic,’ and yet he said nothing the others hadn’t said.” After Humphrey, with Jack’s encouragement, had spoken at the University of Virginia law school, where Jack’s brother Ted was a student, Kennedy asked his brother, “How did Hubert do down there?” Ted replied that he “had never heard anyone speak like Hubert Humphrey. He had a packed student audience, they were crawling all over the roof, and he just got standing ovation after standing ovation. That wasn’t quite the answer [Jack] wanted to hear,” Ted Kennedy recalled.
But as a practical matter, Jack saw Humphrey as too liberal and unable to muster the 761 delegates needed to nominate him. He was “unpopular in some sectors,” like the business community, where people objected to his “extremism,” Jack told Lisagor. Jack told another journalist in the fall of 1959, “I don’t have to worry with Humphrey…. [He] is dead…. Whether or not he knows it, he is just a stalking horse for Stevenson and Symington.”
As for Johnson, Jack, Bobby, and Ted believed that “no Southerner can be nominated by a Democratic convention”—and this included “the able majority leader, Lyndon Johnson…. Even if he were… conceded every Southern state, every border state and most of the moderate Eastern and Western states… there is still too large a bloc of states with liberal and minority votes that he cannot touch.” Joe Kennedy was more concerned about Johnson than Jack was, but Jack saw him as an outsize personality, “a ‘riverboat gambler,’ ” who was omnipotent in the Senate “but had no popularity in the country.” The fact, Jack said, that he had had a heart attack in 1955, which everyone knew about, and that he was someone “who has no very firm principles and does not believe in anything very deeply” would also work against him.
Symington worried Kennedy as a potential compromise candidate. A former air force secretary with strong liberal credentials and Harry Truman’s support, Symington was acceptable to all wings of the party. Should the convention reach a deadlock over the nomination, Jack thought that Symington could emerge as the party’s choice. He told his father and brothers: “[Symington] comes from the right state, the right background, the right religion, age and appearance, with a noncontroversial voting record and speaking largely on matters of defense which offend no one. His appeal is largely to the older-line professional politicians, rallying under former President Truman… and their hope is that the convention will find objections with each of the other candidates and agree on Symington.” Jack also feared that the other candidates would bloody one another in the primaries while Symington stood on the sidelines. “I wish I could get Stu into a primary,” Jack privately told a reporter, “any primary, anywhere.” Barring that, the best strategy against Symington was to win the nomination on the first ballot or before a standoff could make him a viable choice. In the meantime, however, Joe Kennedy tried to find dirt on Symington. In particular, he asked investigators to look into why President Roosevelt had asked Harry Truman to find out whether the Emerson Electric Company, which Symington had headed in the forties, had shortchanged the war effort.
But it was Stevenson’s “sleeping candidacy” that impressed Kennedy as his greatest threat. Jack never trusted his avowed noncandidacy. He accepted that Stevenson disliked the thought of another campaign and would not go after the nomination directly. “But he still has powerful friends—so his name belongs on the list of candidates,” the Kennedys concluded. Joe, however, was less worried about Stevenson than Jack was. “He is not a threat,” Joe told a journalist. “The Democratic party is through in the East if he is nominated. The leaders realize that it would be disastrous…. To elect their State ticket they need Jack…. The nomination is a cinch. I’m not a bit worried about the nomination.”
Joe’s remarks were a brave show of public confidence, which was a good campaign tactic. But at the start of 1960, Jack knew that nothing was settled. “Look,” he told a reporter, “when someone says to you, ‘You’re doing fine,’ it doesn’t mean a thing, and when someone says, ‘Just call any time you need anything,’ that doesn’t mean a thing, and when someone says, ‘You’ve got a lot of friends out here,’ that doesn’t mean a thing… but when they say, ‘I’m for you,’ that is the only thing that means something.”
Most discouraging to Jack was the persistence of the country’s irrational anti-Catholicism. Fourteen years had passed since he entered politics, and still Jack was being asked the same offensive questions. Antagonism to the Church and fear of its influence over him were discussed openly. Katie Louchheim’s friends and relatives, for example, who were “definitely and categorically anti,” told her, “After all, this is still a Protestant country.” One of them said, “How would you like it if the country were run the way the Catholics run Conn[ecticut] and Mass[achusetts]?” When Schlesinger saw Jack on the evening of January 2, Kennedy “conveyed an intangible feeling of depression. I had the sense that he feels himself increasingly hemmed in as a result of a circumstance over which he has no control—his religion; and he inevitably tends toward gloom and irritation when he considers how the circumstance may deny him what he thinks his talent and efforts have earned.”
THE FIRST PRIMARY contest in New Hampshire on March 6 would be a chance to show that Kennedy could attract a decisive number of Protestant votes, but New Hampshire was not seen as a significant test of Jack’s national appeal, since as a New England native son with no other serious contender, he seemed certain to win. To assure as big a margin as possible, however, the campaign sent Rose and Jack to speak across the state, which both did with great effectiveness. The outcome—85 percent of the vote against a smattering of write-ins for Stevenson and Symington—was all the Kennedys could have hoped for.
Kennedy’s unopposed candidacy in Indiana and Nebraska would give him those states’ delegates. Polls in California had showed that Jack could beat Governor Pat Brown in a primary, and as a trade-off for not running, Jack got a promise from Brown that if he won primaries in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and West Virginia, ran second behind Senator Wayne Morse in Oregon, and was leading for the nomination in the Gallup polls, Brown would support him at the convention.
Ohio required some especially tough negotiations with Governor Mike DiSalle, who wanted to run as a favorite son and then barter his state’s delegates at the convention. But the Kennedys, threatening to back Cleveland Democratic leader Ray Miller, DiSalle’s chief rival, as the head of the Ohio delegation, forced Disalle into a public endorsement of Kennedy in January. At a meeting between Jack and DiSalle in an airport motel in Pittsburgh, Jack told him, “Mike, it’s time to shit or get off the pot…. You’re either going to come out for me or we are going to run a delegation against you in Ohio and we’ll beat you.” When Jack’s threat did not settle matters, Bobby Kennedy, accompanied by party chairman John Bailey, went to Ohio to force the issue. Bailey, “a veteran politician who does not shock easily,” told Ken O’Donnell later that “he was startled by the going-over that Bobby had given DiSalle.” The conversation added to Bobby’s growing reputation as Jack’s hatchet man, but it forced DiSalle into a commitment like Brown’s that gave Jack valuable momentum.
Deals and promises were not enough, though. Jack had to win a truly contested primary to show that it wasn’t all back-room dealings that qualified him for the nomination. (He thought that Johnson and Symington were making a serious mistake by staying out of all the primaries. Indeed, the day after announcing his candidacy, Kennedy had said that any aspiring nominee who avoided these contests did not deserve to have his candidacy taken seriously.) To meet the challenge, he reluctantly decided to run against Humphrey in Wisconsin. It meant risking the nomination. Wisconsin had a large Protestant population, so a defeat by Humphrey would increase doubts about a Catholic nominee. Joe Kennedy wrote a friend in Italy, “If we do not do very well there… we should get out of the fight.” He believed Wisconsin was “the crisis of the campaign.”
In addition to the possible religious split, Humphrey had the advantage of being a next-door neighbor—the “third senator from Wisconsin,” as supporters called him. His rapport with Wisconsin farmers and liberals clustered in the university community in Madison made him a formidable opponent. Moreover, because Wisconsin was essential to his hopes of a nomination, Hubert seemed certain to make an all-out fight for a majority of the popular vote and the state’s thirty-one delegates.
Yet Jack had some reason for optimism. Between May 1958 and November 1959, he had laid the groundwork for a possible statewide campaign. He had spent sixteen days in Wisconsin giving speeches and meeting Democrats in cities and towns he had never heard of before—Appleton, Ashland, Darlington, La Crosse, Lancaster, Platteville, Rhinelander, Rice Lake, Sparta, and Viroqua joined Green Bay, Milwaukee, and Sheboygan as vital to his political future. Leaving nothing to chance, he also chose a “full-time advance man and organizer of Kennedy clubs,” and enlisted the support of Pat Lucey, the state’s party chairman, and Ivan Nestingen, the mayor of Madison, both of whom were now convinced of Kennedy’s liberal credentials. Private polls in January 1960 showing Kennedy ahead of Humphrey helped ease the difficult but, in Jack’s mind, unavoidable decision to make the race.
The six-week Wisconsin campaign running from mid-February to early April tested Jack’s endurance and commitment to winning the presidency. O’Donnell and Powers remembered it as a “winter of cold winds, cold towns and many cold people. Campaigning in rural areas of the state where nobody seemed to care about the presidential election was a strange and frustrating experience.” In a tavern, where Jack introduced himself to a couple of beer drinkers, saying, “I’m John Kennedy and I’m running for President,” one of them asked, “President of what?” On a freezing cold morning, as Jack stood for hours in the dark shaking hands with workers arriving at a meat packing plant, Powers whispered to O’Donnell, “God, if I had his money, I’d be down there on the patio at Palm Beach.” Powers might have added, “God, if I had his medical problems and all the physical discomfort campaigning added to them…” But Jack was determined to see his commitment through. When an elderly woman stopped him on the street to say, “You’re too soon, my boy, too soon,” Jack replied, “No, this is my time. My time is now.” Despite his youthful and robust appearance, he knew that in eight years—assuming the victor would serve two terms—his deteriorating back and chronic colitis might make running even more of a problem than it was in 1960.
The battle was against more than wind chill and back pain. The abuse leveled at him by Humphrey’s campaign and a hostile press were enough alone to discourage him from competing. Sorensen said later that “vicious falsehoods were whispered about Kennedy’s father, Kennedy’s religion and Kennedy’s personal life.” Humphrey pilloried him as a Democratic Nixon who had recently joined the liberal ranks to win the nomination. Appealing to populist antagonism to Kennedy’s wealth, Humphrey declared, “Thank God, thank God” for his own “disorderly” campaign. “Beware of these orderly campaigns. They are ordered, bought and paid for. We are not selling corn flakes or some Hollywood production.” Voters had to make their choice, the balding Humphrey said, “on more than… how we cut our hair or how we look.” He complained of a Republican-inspired press buildup for Kennedy as a way to run Nixon against a weak opponent. Echoing the charge that Jack had “little emotional commitment to liberalism,” Humphrey said, “You have to learn to have the emotions of a human being when you are charged with the responsibilities of leadership.” Humphrey also attacked Jack as a recent convert to helping farmers, echoed criticism of Kennedy’s cautious response to Joe McCarthy, and before a Milwaukee Jewish audience implicitly compared Kennedy’s “organized campaign” to Nazi Germany, “one of the best-organized societies of our time.”
Humphrey saw his attacks as a response to “an element of ruthlessness and toughness” in Kennedy’s campaign. Though he couldn’t prove it, he believed that Bobby Kennedy had started and helped circulate a rumor that the corrupt Teamsters union was working for Humphrey’s election. Moreover, he thought that the Kennedys were stimulating Catholics to vote for Jack by sending anonymous anti-Catholic materials to Catholic households.
Kennedy largely ignored Humphrey’s assaults. James Reston noted that Jack “remained remarkably self-possessed…. He has shown not the slightest trace of anger. He has made no claims of victory. He has made no charges against Humphrey on the local shows or from the stump.” Instead, he ran a largely positive campaign, giving full rein to his charm and intelligence. Riding in a car with Kennedy for an appearance at a shopping center, Peter Lisagor asked, “ ‘Do you like these crowds and this sort of thing?’ [Kennedy] turned back and said, ‘I hate it.’ ” But the moment he stepped out of the car, “he lit up and smiled. He signed autographs on the brown shopping bags of these ladies who came pouring to him…. He went along as if he’d been doing this all of his life and loved it.”
The Kennedy campaign was, for a very large part, Pat Lucey said, “just an effective presentation of a celebrity…. The family was an asset… genuinely glamorous as well as glamorized, so the people were anxious to meet them wherever they went.” As a result, Humphrey felt like a “corner grocer running against a chain store.” With Jack, Bobby, Rose, and the Kennedy sisters all campaigning in Wisconsin, Humphrey was outmanned. The Kennedys are “all over the state,” he complained, “and they look alike and sound alike. 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, Kennedy won a substantial victory, taking 56.5 percent of the vote. The 476,024 Kennedy ballots were the most votes ever received by a candidate in the fifty-seven-year history of Wisconsin primaries, and Kennedy’s majorities in six out of ten districts entitled him to 60 percent of the state’s convention delegates. But Jack saw his success as raising more questions about his candidacy than it answered. Because the six districts he won included large numbers of Catholic voters and Humphrey’s districts were principally Protestant enclaves, including Madison, the center of liberal sentiment, Kennedy could not convince party chiefs that he would command broad backing in a national election. When Ted Sorensen heard the first returns showing Humphrey ahead in the western, rural areas of the state, he turned “ashen.” These numbers made him “mighty uneasy.” Dave Powers tried to put a positive face on the result: “A shift of… less than 3/10 of 1% of the vote… would have given Kennedy 8 districts to 2.” Powers also listed thirteen counties where 70 percent or more of non-Catholic votes were for Jack and six with substantial numbers of Catholics he lost. None of this, however, could change the initial perception of Kennedy as a candidate whose religion made a difference. When Jack heard the returns, he jumped from his seat and paced the room, muttering, “Damn religious thing.”
Noticing the glum expression on Jack’s face as he studied the returns, Eunice Kennedy asked him, “What does it all mean?” He replied, “It means that we’ve got to go to West Virginia in the morning and do it all over again. And then we’ve got to go on to Maryland and Indiana and Oregon and win all of them.” Only then might the press stop publishing photos of Kennedy shaking hands with nuns and church officials and continually referring to Jack’s Catholicism. Kennedy kept track of how often newspaper accounts mentioned his religion, and he had not missed the fact that two days before the primary, the Milwaukee Journal had listed the number of voters in each county under three headings: Democrats, Republicans, and Catholics. “The religious issue became prominent because the newspapers said it was prominent,” Lucey asserted. When CBS newsman Walter Cronkite asked Jack after his Wisconsin victory whether being a Catholic had hurt him, Jack’s annoyance with Cronkite was unmistakable. Afterward, Bobby exploded at Cronkite and his staff, shouting that they had violated an agreement not to ask about religion and that his brother would never give them another interview. Cronkite was unaware of such a promise, and there would be many future interviews with both brothers. But Bobby’s outburst illustrated how angry he and Jack were at the implicit questions being raised about their loyalty to the country.
If Wisconsin left the overall situation unsettled, Jack’s victory did accomplish something real and important. The outcome in Wisconsin essentially ended Humphrey’s bid for the nomination. If he could not win in a neighboring state with so many Protestants, farmers, and liberals, he was unlikely to win anywhere. But, stung by his defeat and confident that he could beat Jack in West Virginia, a state only 4 percent Catholic, Humphrey decided to continue his campaign. A Harris poll showed Jack ahead of Humphrey in West Virginia by 70 to 30 percent, but even if Humphrey closed some of that gap, Harris predicted, Jack would have “a comfortable margin of victory.” Harris saw West Virginia as “a powerful weapon against those who raise the ‘Catholic can’t win’ bit.”
After Wisconsin, however, Jack and his advisers were not so sure. The Wisconsin race had made West Virginia voters more aware of Kennedy’s religion, and his lead over Humphrey disappeared. A poll of Kanawha county, the seat of the state capital, Charleston, showed Humphrey with 60 percent to Kennedy’s 40 percent. A report coming in to Dave Powers in April concluded that “public opinion had shifted and [Kennedy] would be lucky to get 40 per cent of the vote.” On April 6, the day after Wisconsin, Bobby, O’Donnell, and O’Brien went to Charleston, where they met with Kennedy organizers. “Well, what are our problems?” Bobby asked the gathering in a crowded hotel room. “There’s only one problem,” one man shouted. “He’s a Catholic. That’s our God-damned problem!” A Kennedy supporter in the state wrote Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. that “[U.S. Senator] Bob Byrd is getting out his Bible and fiddle to make the rounds of the country churches. These people weren’t thinking much of the religious issue, one way or another. But now every hate-monger, radio preacher and backwoods evangelist is being stirred up for an assault which will make 1928 look pale by comparison.”
The state’s labor unions would also be a problem for Kennedy. A member of the United Steel Workers reported that Kennedy had been relying on “the reactionary element of the Democratic party… to head his state organization. He would be weak in… the Democratic stronghold in southern W. Va. In a race between Kennedy and Humphrey, we believe that Humphrey would win, even though the Kennedy forces would be better financed.”
Though some of Jack’s advisers suggested that he skip West Virginia and concentrate instead on Indiana, Nebraska, and Maryland, he felt compelled to take up Humphrey’s challenge and show that a Catholic could win in a Protestant state. Robert McDonough, who ran Jack’s West Virginia office, believed that a victory there might allow Kennedy to “bury the religious issue.” At a planning meeting on April 8, Bobby stated their intention “to meet the religious issue head on.” The goal was to give rational answers to questions about Jack’s Catholicism and then move on to “something more important to those people.” Bobby consulted with Frank Fischer, West Virginia’s Junior Chamber of Commerce president, who knew the state as well as anyone. Fischer urged Bobby to talk about the “Four F’s… food, Franklin [Roosevelt], family, and the flag.”
Jack set this strategy in motion on the first day of his West Virginia campaign. Before a crowd of three or four hundred people gathered on the steps of the Charleston post office, Jack, microphone in hand, aggressively fielded a question about his religion, “I am a Catholic, but the fact that I was born a Catholic, does that mean that I can’t be the President of the United States? I’m able to serve in Congress, and my brother was able to give his life, but we can’t be president?” McDonough “could just feel the crowd respond to and accept his answer.” With Humphrey making his campaign theme song “Give Me That Old Time Religion” and Baptists warning that a Catholic would owe allegiance to the pope, Jack continuously reminded voters that he had risked his life for the country. “Nobody asked me if I was a Catholic when I joined the United States Navy,” he declared. “Nobody asked my brother if he was a Catholic or Protestant before he climbed into an American bomber plane to fly his last mission.” The message was clear: How can you doubt my primary loyalty to America?
Kennedy spent two intense weeks in the state between April 5 and May 10. “He was the most attractive candidate imaginable,” Bob McDonough said. “He just went up every valley in the state, down every road, and over every hill, and he shook hands by the thousands.” “I am the only Presidential candidate since 1924, when a West Virginian ran for the presidency,” Kennedy told audiences, “who knows where Slab Fork is and has been there.” He spoke so often and so loudly that he lost his voice and had to have his brother Ted and Sorensen speak for him. “Over and over again,” journalist Theodore White recorded, “there was the handsome, open-faced candidate on the TV screen, showing himself, proving that a Catholic wears no horns.” As important, a skillfully crafted TV documentary, which the campaign put on local stations around the state, displayed his winning manner and his achievements as a war hero, a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, and the father of a beautiful two-year-old daughter. A compelling sincerity about his devotion to American freedoms dissolved most objections to his Catholicism.
Jackie Kennedy, despite concern among Jack’s advisers that her stylish dress and manners might alienate voters, effectively connected with audiences in West Virginia. Word of her considerateness spread after “a nice old man said he would love to meet Jackie but could not leave his invalid wife.” After Jackie visited their home, the man said, “Now I believe in Santa Claus. She looks like a real queen.” She endeared herself to audiences when introducing Jack. “I have to confess, I was born a Republican,” she said, “but you have to have been a Republican to realize how nice it is to be a Democrat.” Her two-year-old daughter Caroline’s vocabulary was increasing with each primary, she reported. Her “first words were ‘plane,’ ‘goodbye,’ and ‘New Hampshire,’ and just this morning she said ‘Wisconsin’ and ‘West Virginia.’ ” Already a month pregnant in April, Jackie, at risk of another miscarriage, would largely disappear from the rest of the 1960 campaign, but in West Virginia she worked aggressively on behalf of her husband.
She was not alone. Understanding how crucial the state was to his chances, Kennedy enlisted all his relatives and friends in the campaign. “The Senator is still in West Virginia,” Evelyn Lincoln recorded on April 26. “Things do not look very good for him…. The Senator has brought all the people he can think of into the campaign. He has Lem Billings, Chuck Spalding, Ben Smith, Grant Stockdale, Bob Troutman, Sarge Shriver and many others down there working for him. Bobby is going all over making speeches and Teddy is too. Larry O’Brien is in charge of the organization and Kenny O’Donnell arranges his speaking schedule. Ralph Dungan is handling the labor setup. Chuck Roche and Pierre Salinger handle the press releases, TV, etc. Ted Reardon is in Wheeling.”
Winning votes for Jack also meant taking them from Humphrey by neutralizing his advantage as a passionate advocate of liberal programs. If this began as cynical campaign politics, Kennedy’s visits to the state transformed it into a genuine concern. “Kennedy’s shock at the suffering he saw in West Virginia was so fresh,” Teddy White thought, “that it communicated itself with the emotion of original discovery.” Ted Sorensen remembered how appalled Kennedy was “by the pitiful conditions he saw, by the children of poverty, by the families living on surplus lard and cornmeal, by the waste of human resources.” He gained a fuller understanding of the unemployed workers, the pensioners, and the relief recipients demoralized by their poverty but eager for a chance to improve their lives. “I assure you that after five weeks living among you here in West Virginia,” Kennedy declared, “I shall never forget what I have seen. I have seen men, proud men, looking for work who cannot find it. I have seen people over 40 who are told that their services are no longer needed—too old. I have seen young people who want to live in the state, forced to leave the state for opportunities elsewhere…. I have seen older people who seek medical care that is too expensive for them to afford. I have seen unemployed miners and their families eating a diet of dry rations.” Attacking the indifference of the Eisenhower administration, Jack laid out a ten-point program to relieve suffering and expand economic opportunity. He promised to increase unemployment benefits, modernize Social Security, expand food distribution, establish a national fuels program, stimulate the coal industry, and increase defense spending in the state. “Much more can and should be done,” he announced in a letter to fellow Democrats. “That is why West Virginia will be on the top of my agenda at the White House.”
On April 12, the fifteenth anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt’s death, Kennedy reminded an audience that Roosevelt had accomplished more in a hundred days than Eisenhower and Nixon had in eight years. “And now it is time for another ‘New Deal’—a New Deal for West Virginia,” Jack declared. To hammer home the point, Joe Kennedy suggested that they ask FDR Jr., a Kennedy supporter, to join the campaign, which he did with great success, drawing worshipful crowds wherever he went. A West Virginia journalist said it was like “God’s son coming down and saying it was all right to vote for this Catholic, it was permissible, it wasn’t something terrible to do.” Joe also shrewdly convinced FDR Jr. to send letters praising Jack from Hyde Park, New York, the site of FDR’s home and resting place, to West Virginia Democrats.
To undercut Humphrey’s stronger liberal identification, the Kennedys argued that a vote for Humphrey, who could not possibly get the nomination, would destroy prospects for the welfare reforms Jack proposed. Jack also described Humphrey as the tool of a “stop-Kennedy gang-up” backed by Lyndon Johnson and Stuart Symington. Senator Byrd publicly acknowledged the accuracy of Jack’s assertion. “If you are for Adlai Stevenson, Senator Stuart Symington, Senator Johnson or John Doe, this primary may be your last chance to stop Kennedy,” he declared. Seizing on Byrd’s candid statement, Jack responded: “Hubert Humphrey has no chance to win the Democratic nomination for President, and he knows it, so why is he running against me in this primary? To stop me and give the nomination to Johnson or Stevenson or Symington. If Johnson and the other candidates want your vote in the November election, why don’t they have enough respect for you to come here and ask for your vote in the primary?” It was a compelling argument that appealed to the self-interest and sense of fair play of West Virginia Democrats. At the same time Kennedy challenged Johnson publicly, he confronted him privately, complaining that Johnson was using Humphrey as a stalking-horse. According to Johnson, when he denied he was running, Jack pressured him to “get Senator Byrd ‘out of West Virginia.’ ” Johnson defended himself by telling Kennedy that he could not get Byrd out of his own state and reminded Jack that he had supported his vice presidential bid in 1956 and given him choice committee assignments.
With so much at stake in the election, the contest turned ugly. Humphrey attacked his “rivals” for the nomination as “millionaire ‘money’ candidates backed by political machines.” Specifically, he went after Kennedy’s free spending: “I don’t think elections should be bought…. American politics are far too important to belong to the money men…. Kennedy is the spoiled candidate and he and that young, emotional, juvenile Bobby are spending with wild abandon…. Anyone who gets in the way of papa’s pet is going to be destroyed…. I don’t seem to recall anybody giving the Kennedy family—father, mother, sons or daughters—the privilege of deciding who should… be our party’s nominee.”
When Kennedy complained about the “personal abuse” and “gutter politics,” Humphrey shot back, “Poor little Jack. That is a shame. And you can quote me on that.” Humphrey also ridiculed his complaint of an anti-Kennedy coalition: “I wish he would grow up and stop acting like a boy. What does he want, all the votes?” Humphrey asserted that Kennedy was “attempting to set up an alibi should he lose.”
Although Humphrey was never proud of his negative attacks, which did more to hurt him than Kennedy, he had reason for complaint. “I would suggest that brother Bobby examine his own conscience about innuendoes and smears,” he said. “If he has trouble knowing what I mean, I can refresh his memory very easily.” An FDR Jr. assertion that Humphrey had been a draft dodger, which Humphrey believed was approved by Bobby, if not Jack, particularly incensed him. In possession of information that Humphrey may have sought military deferments during World War II, Bobby had pressed Roosevelt to use this in retaliation for Humphrey’s harsh words. In fact, having tried and failed to get into the service because of physical disabilities, Humphrey corrected the record with the Kennedys. “They believed me,” he wrote later, “but never shut F.D.R. Jr., up, as they easily could have.” Jack publicly announced, “Any discussion of the war record of Senator Humphrey was done without my knowledge and consent, as I strongly disagree with the injection of this issue into the campaign.” His statement, however, did not challenge the accuracy of what Roosevelt had said. Having addressed issues of food, Franklin, and family in the campaign, the Kennedys were now taking care of the flag.
But it was Kennedy spending that Humphrey knew was his biggest problem. In West Virginia politics, money was king. “As I told you last time you were down here,” a state political veteran wrote FDR Jr. in April, “most of these coal-field counties are for sale. It is a matter of who gets there first with the most money.” Teddy White wrote, “Politics in West Virginia involves money—hot money, under-the-table money, open money.”
The payoffs involved a system of slating, which was a form of legalized bribery. To sort through dense ballots with long lists of names, voters relied on “slates” given to them by county political bosses, usually the county sheriff. Voters would then vote for those candidates on the slate. It was all very simple: The candidate who paid the most to the county Democratic boss (under the conceit of subsidizing “printing” costs) would have his list of backers identified as the “approved slate.” When one county sheriff told a Humphrey campaign organizer what each name on a slate would cost in his county and the man passed the word to Humphrey, the response was, “We would pay it, but we don’t have the money.” Where Humphrey’s total expenditures on the campaign amounted to $25,000, the Kennedys spent $34,000 on TV programming alone. With the Kennedys’ approval, Larry O’Brien independently negotiated the payments for the slates. “Our highest possible contribution was peanuts compared to what they [county leaders] had received from the Kennedy organization,” Humphrey complained. Such payments did not, O’Donnell noted, bother “the earthy and realistic people of West Virginia, who 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.”
On May 10, Kennedy won a landslide, 60.8 to 39.2 percent. As Joe Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson’s secretary, said of the 1920 Harding victory, “It wasn’t a landslide, it was an earthquake.” It did not matter that the vote was not binding on the state’s twenty-five convention delegates. Kennedy had proved that he could amass a big majority among Protestants. Kennedy opponents tried to downplay the result with accusations of vote buying. An investigation by Eisenhower’s attorney general William P. Rogers turned up no significant wrongdoing. The editor of the Charleston Gazette “sent two of our best men out. They spent three to four weeks checking. Kennedy did not buy that election,” he concluded. “He sold himself to the voters.” It was a fair assessment. The Kennedy expenditures financing the slates were technically legal. The combination of Jack’s personal appeal, lavish Kennedy campaign spending, an emphasis on economic uplift, assurances about Jack’s commitment to separation of church and state, and Humphrey’s pointless candidacy after Wisconsin gave Jack the decisive victory. When Newsweek quoted Humphrey as believing that the election was stolen from him, he wrote the editor, “I have no complaints about the election—Senator Kennedy won it and I lost it.”
Within ten days after West Virginia, Jack had beaten Wayne Morse in Maryland by 70 to 17 percent and then defeated him in Oregon, his home state, by 51 to 32 percent. It was Kennedy’s seventh straight primary victory and convinced Jack’s advisers that he was on his way to the nomination.
THERE WERE OTHER HURDLES to be cleared, however. Because many liberals still had hopes of nominating Stevenson, the Kennedys tried to weaken him by getting Humphrey to support Jack. After Humphrey conceded defeat in West Virginia, he sent word to Bobby Kennedy that he was dropping out of the race. Bobby immediately went to see him at his hotel in Charleston. He was not a welcome guest. In the words of liberal attorney Joe Rauh, Bobby was “the devil as far as this camp [was] concerned…. He was the one whom all our people were so bitter about.” The defeat had humiliated Humphrey; Rauh remembered his appearance at his campaign headquarters as “the saddest sight I’ve ever seen…. Humphrey stood all alone in the middle of this big room… and looked at the blackboard, and almost was speechless. The banjo player had started to cry, and Hubert had to comfort him.” Humphrey’s wife, Muriel, was furious. “She did not want to see any Kennedy, much less be touched by one,” Humphrey recalled. “When Bob arrived in our room, he moved quickly to her and kissed her on the cheek. Muriel stiffened, stared, and turned in silent hostility, walking away from him, fighting tears and angry words.” Bobby’s gesture was not enough to bring Humphrey to Jack’s side.
It was more important for Stevenson to back Kennedy at the convention; this would make Jack’s nomination a near certainty. Believing he was between eighty and one hundred votes short of the goal, Jack thought “it would be most helpful if Adlai could throw his votes… [my] way at the proper moment. If he hangs on to his votes,” Jack told Schlesinger through an intermediary, “it will only mean that either Symington or Johnson will benefit.”
Although Jack had little hope that Stevenson could be persuaded to support him, he was determined to try. Months before, he had sent word to Stevenson through Connecticut governor Abe Ribicoff that if he could not get the nomination, he would publicly announce his wish to run as Stevenson’s VP, “which would nail down the Catholic vote” for Stevenson. “If he comes out for me and I’ve got the nomination and I win,” he had also asked Ribicoff to tell Stevenson, “I’ll make him Secretary of State.” Stevenson would not agree. In May 1960, Jack approached Stevenson again. On his way back from a trip to the West Coast, Jack stopped at his home in Libertyville, Illinois. Stevenson refused to make any promises except not to join a “stop-Kennedy movement” or to encourage any draft of himself. Kennedy was disappointed. “God, why won’t he be satisfied with Secretary of State?” he said to Stevenson’s law firm partner Bill Blair. “I guess there’s nothing I can do,” he added, “except go out and collect as many votes as possible and hope that Stevenson will come along.” As he got on a plane to fly to Boston, Jack added, “Guess who the next person I see will be—the person who will say about Adlai, ‘I told you that son-of-a-bitch has been running for President every moment since 1956’?” Blair replied: “Daddy.”
Jack shared his father’s view and was furious with Stevenson for standing in his way. Jack believed that Stevenson had an overblown reputation as an intellectual. As the author of two books, Kennedy thought that he deserved to be seen as more cerebral than Stevenson, and told friends that he read more books in a week than Stevenson did in a year. He referred to Stevenson as a “switcher,” or bisexual, and wondered what women, who were his strongest supporters, saw in him. When Jack asked Stevenson’s friend Clayton Fritchey to explain the attraction, Fritchey replied, “He likes women, he likes to talk to them, to be around them. Do you like them?” Fritchey asked, twitting Jack for his reputation as a philanderer. “I wouldn’t go that far,” Jack answered. Kennedy preferred columnist Joe Alsop’s description of him as “a Stevenson with balls.”
Kennedy was even more angry at Johnson. After West Virginia, LBJ began saying that Kennedy had bought the election there and that the country would not want to nominate a president based on what four or five or even eight states did in primaries with limited voter participation. Johnson also told columnist Drew Pearson that “none of these big-city leaders in New York, New Jersey, or Illinois want Kennedy. Most of them are Catholics and they don’t want a Catholic heading up the ticket.” Johnson also went to see Stevenson. “Now, listen, Adlai, you just hang loose here,” he said. “Don’t make any commitments. You may still get it. Don’t help that kid, Kennedy. You just stay neutral.”
In May, after the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane and Moscow canceled a summit meeting between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, Kennedy criticized the administration’s failure to suspend such flights before the summit and refusal to acknowledge that it had spied. Johnson, seeing an opportunity to illustrate Jack’s inexperience in foreign affairs, declared, “I am not prepared to apologize to Mr. Khrushchev.” He then excluded Kennedy from a telegram he, Stevenson, Rayburn, and Fulbright sent the Soviet leader asking him to hold the summit conference with the president.
Even Truman joined the anti-Kennedy chorus, calling at a televised press conference for an open convention—not a “prearranged… mockery… controlled by one… candidate”—and declaring that the world crisis required someone “with the greatest possible maturity and experience.” Jack publicly replied that “Mr. Truman regards an open convention as one which studies all the candidates, reviews their records, and then takes his advice.” Jack also said that Truman’s maturity test “would have kept Jefferson from writing the Declaration of Independence, Washington from commanding the Continental Army, [and] Madison from fathering the Constitution.”
Despite Stevenson’s refusal to bow out and Johnson’s belated effort to become the nominee, the smart money was still on Kennedy. At the end of May, Bobby calculated that Jack had 577 delegates and could pick up the additional 184 needed for nomination from seven other states. Joe wrote an English friend, “If we can get a break at all in Pennsylvania and a reasonable break in California, we’re home.” In June, after Jack told his father that the Pennsylvania delegation was now solidly behind him, Joe declared, “Well, that’s it. We’ve got a solid majority.” Johnson conceded privately that “those wanting to bet the favorite had better put their money on Jack.”
Events in the days before the convention opened in Los Angeles on Monday, July 11, however, persuaded the Kennedys to take nothing for granted. Johnson announced his candidacy on July 5, and began publicly attacking Jack. LBJ’s backers reminded journalists and delegates of Kennedy’s response to Joe McCarthy, quoted Eleanor Roosevelt’s criticism of Kennedy, publicized Jack’s absenteeism as a senator (“Where was Jack?” an LBJ flyer asked), and, most troubling to the Kennedys, publicly asked for an evaluation of Jack’s health, explaining that he had Addison’s disease, which raised questions about his capacity to serve as president. Johnson called Dr. Gerald Labiner, an internist in Los Angeles who had been a fellow at the Lahey Clinic and knew Kennedy’s medical history, to ask if Jack had Addison’s disease. Although it was an open secret among Jack’s physicians, Labiner refused to confirm Johnson’s assumption.
In private, Johnson was more scathing, especially about Jack’s age and well-being. “Did you hear the news?” Johnson asked Minnesota congressman Walter Judd. “What news?” Judd replied. “Jack’s pediatricians have just given him a clean bill of health!” Johnson described Kennedy to Lisagor as “a little scrawny fellow with rickets. Have you ever seen his ankles?” Johnson asked. “ ‘They’re about so round,’ and he traced a minute circle with his finger.” If Johnson had known the full story of Jack’s poor health, he would undoubtedly have leaked it to the press. But the Kennedys had managed largely to keep Jack’s health problems a secret. Johnson also predicted that if Jack became president, Joe would run the country and Bobby would become secretary of labor.
The evening before Johnson and Rayburn flew to Los Angeles, they met with Eisenhower at the White House. Ike later told journalist Earl Mazo that they regarded Kennedy “as a mediocrity in the Senate, as a nobody who had a rich father…. And they’d tell some of the God-damndest stories.” They went on for two hours telling Eisenhower, “Ike, for the good of the country, you cannot let that man become elected President. Now, he might get the nomination out there, he probably will, but he’s a dangerous man.” They repeated the phrase several times. They obviously wanted Eisenhower to say something publicly that would help them block Kennedy’s nomination. But Ike did no more than assure them that if Kennedy were the candidate, Dick Nixon would beat him.
Some of Johnson’s remarks got back to Bobby. “I knew he hated Jack. But I didn’t think he hated him that much,” Bobby said to Lisagor. When Bobby Baker, LBJ’s Senate aide, complained to Bobby Kennedy that brother Ted was putting out stories about Johnson’s heart condition, Bobby angrily replied: “You’ve got your nerve. Lyndon Johnson has compared my father to the Nazis, and [Texas governor] John Connally… lied by saying that my brother was dying of Addison’s disease. You Johnson people are running a stinking damned campaign and you’ll get yours when the time comes.”
Calling Johnson’s tactics “despicable,” the Kennedys released statements denying that Jack had “an ailment classically described as Addison’s Disease” and describing Jack’s health as “excellent.” The statements more than shaded the truth: While Jack might not have had classical or primary Addison’s, at a minimum, he had a secondary form of the ailment. The Kennedys had never allowed Eugene Cohen, Jack’s endocrinologist, “the opportunity to carry out the necessary tests that would have been required to establish the diagnosis,” Cohen told Dr. Seymour Reichlin, another endocrinologist. “Thus, [Cohen] could never say definitively that Kennedy had the disease.” If it were known, however, that he also suffered from colitis, compression fractures of his spine, which forced him to take a variety of pain medications, and chronic prostatitis, it could have raised substantial doubts about his fitness for the presidency. Kennedy’s friend Bill Walton said later that during the campaign an aide followed Jack everywhere with a special little bag containing the medical support needed all the time. When the medical bag was misplaced during a campaign trip to Connecticut, Kennedy called up Abe Ribicoff and said, “There’s a medical bag floating around and it can’t get in anybody’s hands…. You have to find that bag. It would be murder” if the wrong people got hold of it and revealed its contents, which would have shown Jack’s reliance on so many drugs. (The bag was recovered.)
All the political churning in the run-up to the convention made the Kennedys apprehensive. They expected to win. But history had demonstrated that conventions were volatile and could produce unpredictable results. Two Democratic front-runners earlier in the century—Champ Clark in 1912 and William G. McAdoo in 1924—had found themselves upended by events beyond their control. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. counseled against assuming anything. He described a convention as “far too fluid and hysterical a phenomenon for exact history. Everything happens at once and everywhere, and everything changes too quickly. People talk too much, smoke too much, rush too much and sleep too little. Fatigue tightens nerves and produces susceptibility to rumor and panic. No one can see a convention whole…. At the time it is all a confusion; in retrospect it is all a blur.”
During a July 10 interview on Meet the Press, Jack was asked if he thought the convention was “wrapped up.” “No, I don’t,” he replied. “No convention is.” While he predicted a victory, he would not say on which ballot. Nor would he acknowledge his concern that a failure to win on the first ballot could lead to disaster. When Bobby was asked later why they had not given much initial thought to who would be vice president, he answered: “We wanted to just try to get the nomination…. We were counting votes. We had to win on the first ballot. We only won by fifteen votes…. I think in North Dakota and South Dakota we won it by half a vote. California was falling apart…. [New York’s] Carmine De Sapio came to me and said what we’d like to do is make a deal—30 votes will go to Lyndon Johnson and then you’ll get them all back on the second ballot. I said to hell with that; we’re going to win it on the first ballot. So you know, it was all that kind of business. There wasn’t any place that was stable.” They were worried that support in a number of states, especially Minnesota, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, might erode on second and third ballots and open the way for LBJ to win the nomination. Jack told Sorensen that if they did not win by the second ballot, it would be “never.” Joe Kennedy stopped in Las Vegas on his way to Los Angeles to place a substantial bet on Jack’s nomination. He was less interested in winning money than in encouraging a bandwagon psychology by reducing the odds on Jack’s success.
Although Stevenson had too few delegates to be nominated, his backers were so vocal, so intense, that they sustained illusions of a possible victory. When Harris Wofford arrived at the convention, he “found thousands of supporters marching and chanting, ‘We want Stevenson.’ Inside, other thousands in the galleries were continuing the cry at each opportunity. The next afternoon, when Stevenson himself entered to sit in the Illinois delegation, he received a huge ovation and was almost carried to the platform in a sea of enthusiasm.” “This was more than a demonstration,” Teddy White wrote later, “it was an explosion.”
Stevenson, swept up in the outpouring of emotion, lost perspective and tried to engineer a last-minute coup on his own behalf. He asked Richard Daley, who had announced the Illinois delegation for Kennedy, to switch on the first ballot. According to Bobby Kennedy, Stevenson told Daley, “ ‘We’ve got to have a favorite son and I come from Illinois, and you’ve got to be with me because it would be embarrassing if I don’t have Illinois.’ And Dick Daley almost threw him out of the office. He said Illinois had met their responsibilities to Adlai Stevenson and that they had pledged to Jack Kennedy and that’s the way they were going…. It seemed to us to be the actions of an old woman.” Daley recalled telling Stevenson that he had no support in the delegation and was lucky to have the two votes he got out of sixty-eight.
Nothing was left to chance. When Johnson took a fresh swipe at Kennedy on foreign affairs, declaring that “the forces of evil… will have no mercy for innocence, no gallantry for inexperience,” they prepared a fact sheet on Lyndon Johnson’s limited understanding of foreign affairs compared to Kennedy’s travels, knowledge, and experience. Kennedy volunteers took up a vigil over each of the fifty-four delegations. They ate, drank, and all but lived with them, reporting on their “moods, questions, and trends, and, above all… their votes.” Bobby insisted on practically having the name, address, and telephone number of every half vote. “I don’t want generalities or guesses,” he said. “There’s no point in our fooling ourselves. I want the cold facts.” When one volunteer complained at being asked to appear at 8:00 A.M. the next morning after three nights with almost no sleep, Bobby sharply responded, “Look, nobody asked you here…. If this is too tough for you, let us know and we’ll get somebody else.”
The Kennedy organization orchestrated Jack’s every move. Dave Powers found Jack a three-bedroom “hideaway” penthouse apartment on North Rossmore Avenue, a fifteen-minute drive from the downtown Biltmore Hotel, where Bobby set up campaign headquarters in an eighth-floor triple suite from which he exercised “precise, taut, disciplined” control. A floor above, Jack had a private suite adjacent to a press room from which Salinger turned out a daily four-page paper, the “Kennedy Convention News,” that was delivered to every delegate’s room. A band playing “High Hopes” and dancing girls dressed in “colorful candy-striped outfits” were part of a crowd of five thousand people meeting Jack at L.A.’s airport on Saturday, July 9. Another well-planned demonstration greeted Jack’s arrival at the Biltmore, where he worked his way through crowds of well-wishers at a Kennedy hospitality suite. In his ninth-floor sitting room, he studied the latest delegate counts and conferred with former New York governor Averell Harriman, George Meany, Jim Farley, and Mike Prendergast. After an NBC-TV interview, he joined Pennsylvania governor Dave Lawrence, who briefed him on conversations with several other big-city and state party leaders.
Jack spent Sunday, July 10, seeing several governors, attending a brunch for the California delegation, greeting twenty-five hundred convention delegates at a reception in the Biltmore ballroom, speaking to an NAACP conference at the Shrine Auditorium, attending a black-tie Democratic National Committee dinner at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, and appearing on TV network news programs. The pace picked up on Monday and Tuesday, when Jack, in a white air-conditioned Cadillac equipped with a telephone (a rarity in 1960), sped from one state caucus to another, shaking hands, making brief remarks, and answering questions. Inviting media coverage and arranging a Kennedy press conference with 750 journalists, the campaign added to the picture of an energetic, healthy, smiling candidate moving confidently toward an inevitable victory.
Despite all the outward signs of optimism, developments on Tuesday increased apprehensions among Kennedy supporters. In response to the passionate demonstrations for Stevenson, the California delegation shifted from Kennedy to an even split between Kennedy and Stevenson. The Kansas and Iowa caucuses defied their respective governors, who had promised their delegations to Jack, by agreeing to cast first-ballot votes for favorite sons.
Simultaneously, Johnson kept up his attacks. Before the Washington state delegation he pilloried Joe Kennedy as a Nazi appeaser: “I wasn’t any Chamberlain—umbrella policy man,” he declared. “I never thought Hitler was right.” Privately, Johnson’s supporters asked whether a Catholic could put the interests of the country ahead of those of his church. On Tuesday afternoon, Johnson challenged Jack to a debate before the Massachusetts and Texas delegations. When Kennedy accepted, Johnson assailed his voting record on farm legislation and civil rights, and his absenteeism. Jack deftly turned aside the criticism by saying he saw no need for a debate with Johnson “because I don’t think that Senator Johnson and I disagree on the great issues that face us.” Jack then praised LBJ’s record as majority leader and drew laughter by promising to support him for another term.
The excitement at the convention increased on Wednesday with the formal nominations of Johnson, Kennedy, and Stevenson. (Recognizing the hopelessness of his candidacy, Symington had dropped out.) The explosion of enthusiasm for Stevenson exceeded anything seen at a Democratic convention since William Jennings Bryan had gained the nomination on an emotional tide of protest in 1896. A brilliantly cadenced speech by Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy ignited the demonstration. “Do not reject this man,” McCarthy pleaded. “Do not reject this man who has made us all proud to be Democrats. Do not leave this prophet without honor in his own party.” Having filled the floor and packed the galleries with their supporters, Stevenson’s backers cheered, shouted, sang, chanted, marched, and snake-danced their way around the hall, shouting, “We want Stevenson.” Only after party officials had turned out the lights could they restore order. Watching the spectacle on television at his father’s rented Beverly Hills estate, Jack said, “Don’t worry, Dad. Stevenson has everything but delegates.” Joe was not so sure. The night before at a dinner party, he had been scathing about Stevenson’s refusal to step aside: “Your man must be out of his mind,” Joe said to Bill Blair. When Blair replied that he was for Jack, Joe “shook his fist at me and said, ‘You’ve got 24 hours.’ ”
Jack was right about Stevenson’s delegate support. But Bobby refused to take the nomination for granted. Earlier in the day, he had told organizers, “We can’t miss a trick in the next twelve hours. If we don’t win tonight, we’re dead.” Although they gained twice as many delegates as Johnson on the first ballot, they did not clinch the victory until the end of the roll call, when Wyoming’s fifteen votes gave them 763 delegates, two more than the required majority. At the convention hall, where Jack and Bobby had a private moment together after the nomination, Jack could be seen smiling and Bobby, with his customary intensity and head bowed, repeatedly hitting the open palm of his left hand with the fist of his right hand. The next day, when Dick Daley tried to sell Jack on a vice presidential candidate with a reminder of how much he had done to help him get the nomination, Kennedy responded, “Not you nor anybody else nominated us. We did it ourselves.”