The telephone call came right after New Year’s in 1957. The recipient in Atlanta, media mogul Leonard Reinsch, was the most knowledgeable source in the Democratic Party on the increasing ties between politics and a world of broadcasting undergoing upheaval because of the new power of television. For good measure Reinsch was the boss at Cox Broadcasting, an excellent example of this explosive growth.
Kennedy was calling to ask if he could send someone to talk with Reinsch about campaigning, appearing on television, and an American spectacle that seemed to hold considerable potential for televised impact: the national nominating convention. Reinsch quickly assented and within days Lynn Johnson, an executive from the Kennedy family–owned Merchandise Mart in Chicago, arrived in his office. What followed were roughly a half-dozen meetings between Reinsch and Kennedy in Washington that began a close relationship lasting through the 1960 campaign.
Reinsch’s institutional memory was vast, extending from advice to Franklin D. Roosevelt during his final reelection campaign, in 1944, to Harry Truman in 1948 and Adlai Stevenson during both presidential elections in the 1950s. There was even more to his relevant background. Reinsch was a very big shot at Cox Broadcasting, founded by James M. Cox, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1920. Cox may have gotten thumped by Warren G. Harding in the “return to normalcy” election, but before he began expanding his media empire he had been a well-regarded governor of Ohio. Reinsch, in short, had a personal connection to the entire history of the modern Democratic Party as well as an understanding of the modern media, and in 1960 he would be the party’s radio-television director—as well as a Kennedy man.
Reinsch represented just the tip of a growing assemblage of backstage activity as word seeped into the political world that Kennedy was up to something more than a repeat of Chicago with a different outcome. In the spring of 1957, at a party before the annual dinner of Washington’s Gridiron Club, the premier example of the cozy relationship between self-important press figures and prominent politicians, Kennedy bumped into Newton Minow, Stevenson’s law partner, who had been helpful in his vice presidential bid. Said Minow, “Jack, if you’re still interested in the vice presidency you’ve got it next time.”
Replied Kennedy, incredulously, “Vice president? Vice president? Newt, I’m going to run for president.”
None of these statements was widely reported, however. Unlike today, the media waited for formal announcements rather than broadcast the slightest rumor. There was a great deal of running room backstage, and Kennedy took full advantage of it.
No one outside Kennedy’s small inner circle noticed that at every appearance or speech either Sorensen or a secretary quietly collected the names and contact information of virtually everyone with whom he met. This would lead to further exchanges between the candidate and his prospective supporters. No candidate had ever used such a tactic. When a formal campaign was formed two years later the bulging files contained roughly thirty thousand names. An incipient organization was in place before Hubert Humphrey had even had his first meeting to discuss 1960 strategy, and Lyndon Johnson was still playing Hamlet on the Potomac, wondering whether to actually declare himself a candidate.
In the spring Kennedy was the commencement speaker at the University of Georgia. For this date family friend Robert Troutman organized a large reception to broaden Kennedy’s exposure. More than a thousand invitations were sent out; according to Troutman, each name went into the swelling campaign files, and each person would get a Christmas card every year until Kennedy was in the White House.
Many noticed the continual bursts of favorable national publicity, largely attracted by the force of Kennedy’s personality. But hardly anyone realized the impact of a steady accumulation in policy and scholarly journals of pieces written by Kennedy and Sorensen—the total would approach fifty—as well as speeches developing a detailed view on all the major foreign and domestic topics of the day, from the nuclear arms race to unemployment compensation. Kennedy was well aware that in addition to his religion, the major obstacles to his candidacy were his relative youth and the absence of a significant accomplishment in his congressional record. Speaking with authority on the major issues would, in time, mitigate those problems.
Kennedy also began trying to resolve political questions that were visible in the delegate votes for vice president at the 1956 convention. These were especially apparent in the western states. One of his office neighbors during his House days was a fellow World War II veteran, Wayne Aspinall of Colorado. From the outset of their friendship, Aspinall was aware of Kennedy’s independent streak, notably as a fiscal conservative who occasionally opposed reclamation and other western projects advocates felt were important to the region’s economic health.
Shortly after the 1956 election Kennedy invited Aspinall to lunch in his Senate office. After the dishes were cleared Kennedy asked why the western states hadn’t voted for him; Aspinall, who had supported Kefauver, replied that Kennedy was simply not considered a friend of the West. They discussed development issues in depth. Kennedy listened and requested the names of western Democrats who knew the issues best. “And of course that was the time,” Aspinall recalled, “when I knew that Senator Kennedy was running for the presidency of the United States.” Over the coming months Kennedy developed more nuanced and detailed positions about a region that would supply his margin of nomination victory in Los Angeles three years later.
Aspinall was not the only westerner on Kennedy’s radar. In 1957 Wyoming had a new party chairman, an energetic, convivial fellow named Teno Roncalio. Among the first phone calls he received from outside the state was one from Sorensen, requesting a visit with Wyoming’s prominent Democrats. Roncalio was happy to oblige because he had a request of his own: getting Kennedy into the state in 1958 to stump for candidates in local elections. Sorensen agreed to the deal and went to Wyoming to plan his boss’s schedule. He minced no words with Roncalio, telling him Kennedy was planning to seek the presidency and was looking for early supporters.
Beyond policy, basic questions still remained for Kennedy: How to run, and against which likely opponents? The list of potential adversaries began with Stevenson. In 1957 an important source of information about the two-time nominee’s intentions was Hyman Raskin, another of Stevenson’s longtime advisors, who was well connected in the West and with labor unions. A product of Sioux City, Iowa, Raskin had the sharpest elbows in Stevenson’s rarefied liberal world. After laboring at the top of the campaigns in 1952 and 1956, he was now working privately in Chicago.
Raskin was unusual in believing immediately after the 1956 election that Kennedy would be a viable presidential candidate. Meeting with Stevenson supporters and delegates in Florida during the holidays, he was impressed by their great interest in Kennedy. Discussing Kennedy with Stevenson himself, Raskin learned that the former nominee would “definitely” not be a presidential candidate again and was happy that virtually his entire Chicago-based high command—including William Blair and Willard Wirtz as well as Minow—were big fans of Kennedy. This still left open the question of what the widely beloved Stevenson would do if the national convention opened without a clear first-ballot choice.
Raskin’s Kennedy connection became real after Florida’s Senator Smathers got them together later that year. Raskin appears to have been the only person outside the immediate family who was invited to Joseph Kennedy’s estate in Palm Beach over the December 1957 holidays to talk politics. With Kennedy, his father, and his brother Robert in attendance, Raskin recalled, “I did most of the talking and Ambassador Kennedy asked most of the questions.”
The conversation revealed a difference of opinion and therefore of strategy. Raskin was in favor of what Kennedy was already doing: raising his profile both personally and politically, working on organization from outside the known political world while preparing to step up the pace after his presumed reelection in 1958. The candidate’s father, however, believed the convention would remain the deliberative, brokered affair it had been for decades; making speeches and getting publicity was fine, but it was through private deals with the most powerful Democrats that success would come. It was a fact, after all, that even with sixteen primaries scheduled in 1960, roughly three-quarters of the delegates would be selected via long-established processes that fell short of real democracy. In theory all but a relative handful of delegates would arrive uncommitted in Los Angeles in 1960.
Kennedy had heard the essence of this point of view from his father throughout his decade in politics but had consistently gone another way.
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Kennedy was determined to approach his campaign in a manner that, though new to presidential politics, he had already established in his previous campaigns: “Start early.” In the story of how he harvested delegates for 1960 by making person-to-person connections rather than pandering to party bosses, the past truly serves as prologue.
During the formative stages of Kennedy’s uphill battle against Henry Cabot Lodge in 1952, Joe Kennedy had let his imagination and ambition roam freely in front of his son and the former ambassador’s day-to-day Massachusetts political operative, Francis X. Morrissey. “I will work out plans to elect you President,” Morrissey recalled the father telling the son. “It will not be any more difficult for you to be elected President than it will be to win the Lodge fight. While it will require a tremendous amount of work on your part, you will need about twenty key men in the country to get the nomination, for it is these men who will control the nomination.”
Joe’s theory wasn’t accurate in 1952, and it was far outdated four years later; for 1960 it was simply irrelevant. More important, Jack Kennedy had never thought about politics that way, not in his very first campaign for Congress in 1946, not in his upset of Lodge, and not now, in his coming campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960. Instead he preferred to think of himself as a grassroots organizer who started well ahead of his opponents. He recognized his major assets—the family political connections to Grandfather Honey Fitz as well as his father’s money, influence, and brokering skills. But he emphasized the importance of developing a ground-level organization of devoted followers.
On the cusp of his climactic campaign he said, “I started early, in my opinion the most important key to political success. . . . I worked really hard trying to get the support of the non-professionals who are much more ready to commit themselves early than the traditional politicians. . . . I did the same thing in ’52 as I’m doing now, which may not be successful nationally. Start early.”
Kennedy had jumped into his first congressional race in late 1945, almost immediately after James Michael Curley resigned his House seat following his election as mayor of Boston, even in the midst of a federal corruption investigation that would send him to jail the following year. The rest of the large field in the Democratic primary the following June would not be active until the spring. That late start would cost them when Kennedy’s preparation months earlier helped earn him victory. Six years later he employed the same tactic—“Start early”—against a napping Senator Lodge.
“In 1952,” Kennedy recalled, “I worked a year and a half ahead of the November election, a year and a half before Senator Lodge did. I believe most aspirants for public office start much too late. . . . For the politician to make a dent in the consciousness of the great majority of the people is a long and laborious job.”
Along the way Kennedy employed several other innovations. Before the Democratic congressional primary in 1946 one of his young campaign workers in Cambridge came up with the idea of hosting a huge tea party for women in the district, lured by engraved invitations and the prospect of meeting an attractive candidate and members of his large and well-known family. Kennedy pulled off the famous event at the staid Hotel Commander just off Harvard Square when hundreds of women with little history in politics came to mingle with the Kennedys. In 1952 Kennedy hosted more than thirty of these events, shaking hands with at least seventy-five thousand people.
There was more. In 1951, when he decided to run for the Senate, his state party appeared preoccupied with the reelection of its popular governor, Paul Dever. So Kennedy organized every one of the more than 350 cities and towns in Massachusetts, installing someone in each operation whose first loyalty was to Kennedy. They were called “secretaries,” a title chosen to avoid any whiff of the old-time party bosses.I
When Kennedy first ran for the Senate, he had more than twenty thousand volunteers. They were overseen by a new face in the Kennedy command group, Lawrence O’Brien, a Springfield native who had previously served on Foster Furcolo’s congressional staff in Washington. The son of Irish immigrants, O’Brien was more analytic in his approach to politics than the brawling style favored by so many of the Irish pols in Massachusetts. His beginnings were modest; his father owned a tavern-restaurant that had been crushed by the Depression but struggled back at least to solvency as his boy grew up. O’Brien had a law degree, six years of experience as an aide to Furcolo, and a deserved reputation for meticulous work; his reserved, formal manner obscured the private delight of an immigrant’s son every time politicians like Curley (whom he otherwise detested) stuck a thumb in the eyes of the ruling Brahmins. He easily won the trust of Kennedy, his elder by two months.
The first thing O’Brien did was use the signatures on Kennedy’s nominating petitions to build the organization. Back then, some 2,500 verified signatures were required to get on the primary ballot; by O’Brien’s typically meticulous count, Kennedy turned in no fewer than 232,324. Each individual got a thank-you note. The thirty teas the following year were very important as well, but equally so was O’Brien’s insistence that everyone who attended must sign in with contact information. Each of them also got a thank-you note with a plea to volunteer. Soon O’Brien had some seventy-five thousand names. And there were “coffees” as well as “teas”; when Kennedy and his siblings and mother were featured on a morning television program, neighbors at some five thousand prearranged house parties watched the show together.
Even then it was O’Brien’s unshaken conviction that as a supplement to Kennedy’s public campaigning, diligent organizational work was worth 3 to 5 percentage points in the final balloting. That grassroots strategy was in place four years later, when Kennedy began his run for president.
Late in his first congressional primary campaign, in 1946, Kennedy distributed an eight-page “newspaper” with photos and text about his life, war record, and issue positions. It was delivered to every household in his sprawling district. Six years later the Kennedy campaign papered the entire state with what they called “the tabloid.” The tabloids would go out by the millions to key states in 1960.
In 1946, by the time serious Kennedy money was being spent on radio advertisements and billboards, Kennedy may have already come close to nailing the election for his congressional seat. More than a month from the June primary the Boston Post published a survey indicating he was poised to get roughly as much support as all the other candidates combined. Not believing it, Joe Kennedy quietly paid for another poll, by a firm used by the New York Daily News. It reported the same result, which accurately predicted the outcome on primary day.
The past was indeed prologue—with one major exception. When his presidential campaign began, Kennedy had to deal with the task not only of introducing himself to the country but also of reassuring a national Democratic Party that didn’t know him very well and didn’t especially trust him.
Hence the frenetic campaigning. He made more than 140 appearances in 1957 alone, after sorting through some 2,500 invitations. A dozen seemed to arrive daily. There were hundreds of phone calls and numerous meetings with Reinsch and others. Kennedy enjoyed a sudden ramping up of his exposure in mass-market media outlets, particularly in popular magazines, on a scale that no one else in the mix for the presidential nomination could match. All this activity increased his reputation as a thoughtful participant in the major domestic and foreign policy issues of the day, making it harder for skeptics and critics to paint him as too young and too green. He also began an effort to woo the national press, especially writers who focused on politics, to convince them to take him seriously as a national figure, even if most of them accepted the conventional wisdom that his winning the Democratic nomination was a bridge too far.
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Kennedy may have been a novice in big-time politics, but not where celebrity was concerned. From the day he entered school in the 1920s to the moment he decided to run for president, an aura of fame and family fortune had surrounded him. It suffused his adolescent experiences in this country and abroad. His wedding in Newport, Rhode Island, and the enormous reception afterward was the subject of a photo spread and story in Life magazine. That fall the newlyweds were visited on prime-time television by Edward R. Murrow for his popular interview show, Person to Person. Kennedy and his parents had always courted the large magazines that served as the important media outlets when television was just beginning to expand its reach into American culture. And editors and television producers knew the handsome young senator produced sales and ratings that a Johnson or Humphrey could only dream—and complain—about.
Even before CBS set up its cameras for the Person to Person interview, the Saturday Evening Post was burnishing Kennedy’s fame. The middlebrow magazine was locked with another popular weekly, Look, in a circulation war with the powerhouse Life, which at its height sold 13.5 million copies a week. The Saturday Evening Post weighed in with a gushing cover story titled “The Amazing Kennedys,” which declared that they embodied “the flowering of another great political family, such as the Adamses, the Lodges and the La Follettes,” a twentieth-century progressive Wisconsin clan. Not to be outdone, Look followed that summer with an eight-page spread built around a fresh angle: the rising brother-stars, Jack and Robert.
But in that first year of Kennedy’s shadow campaign the love affair between the Kennedys and Henry Luce’s Time-Life empire throbbed most passionately. Luce and Joe Kennedy knew each other very well, and both understood that in a general election the publisher’s Republican beliefs would overrule their friendship. But before then Luce was only too happy to help Jack Kennedy at every turn, with the added benefit that the Kennedy features always sold. Life’s first major investment of space as Kennedy started running in 1957 was a piece in March titled “Where the Democrats Go from Here.” The author was John F. Kennedy, who dared to urge his party to embrace working families. It was a bland prescription, but it got his name in print. The joke in Kennedy’s world was that someone in the office should be fired for not exploiting the access further by selling an athletic angle, like touch football or sailing, for Luce’s latest successful creation, Sports Illustrated.
Yet nothing topped Kennedy’s exposure in the country’s most important newsweekly, Time. In the fall the magazine followed him on a legitimate story, a visit to Jackson, Mississippi, to urge obedience to federal court desegregation orders, even as the embers of the fire in Little Rock, Arkansas, were still glowing. That was followed, on November 18, by a brief but glowing account of one of Kennedy’s scores of successful political jaunts, this one in Kansas. Then, on December 2, came the ultimate: a cover story.
The long piece made a few stabs at thoroughness (religion, age, and résumé) and mentioned the other likely candidates in 1960: Humphrey, Stevenson, Johnson, and Kefauver, as well as a few dark horses—the freshly elected governor of New Jersey, Robert Meyner; G. Mennen Williams, governor of Michigan; and Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon. But there was no mistaking the true focus of the story, which was an excellent example of what people in the news and political trades would call a “puff piece,” a flattering account of a fresh personality on the national scene willing to take on the obstacles facing him. Consider one of Kennedy’s quotes in the article: “Nobody is going to hand me the nomination. If I were governor of a large state, Protestant, and fifty-five, I could sit back and let it come to me. But if I’m going to get it I’ll have to work for it, and damn hard.”
Time clumsily referred to Kennedy’s political fortunes as “a soaring satellite.” That term appears to have been a partial steal from yet another cover story that year, in Esquire, which served up yet another marvelous example of the hyper-prose Kennedy evoked. Reaching back to the Chicago convention for its liftoff, the story, “Who Will Win in 1960?,” reported, “He reached the publicity stratosphere with one rocket burst of television and stays there, floating effortless like a satellite, worrying the Hell out of other earthly and Democratic hopefuls.”
In one of its very few cautionary notes, the Time cover story wondered if Kennedy’s political emergence represented a case of “too far too fast.” There was no indication that Kennedy himself agreed with that assessment. He and Sorensen did agree, however, that it was extremely important that he project seriousness where the key issues of the day were concerned, that his exposure not be designed solely to raise his profile nationally as something akin to an entertainment figure. More than a few eyebrows twitched, for example, when the Time cover story described the enraptured reaction to his public appearance by two women, with not a syllable of reference to anything Kennedy had said. Far more than religion or age or résumé, Kennedy and Sorensen feared the sobriquet “lightweight.”
They worked hard to avoid it. As his campaign began, Kennedy’s byline appeared in the first of more than three dozen journals and magazines—many of them decidedly on the highbrow side—unveiling positions and commentary on a host of domestic and foreign policy matters. Yes, he wrote “Young Men in Politics” for the magazine Living for Young Homemakers, but he also offered an early sample of his views on the growing number of “neutral” nations in the cold war, penning “If India Falls” for the Progressive. His increasingly liberal views on immigration got an airing in the newsletter of the American Committee on Italian Immigration, and he shared an award with the Washington newsletter of the Delta Zeta sorority for a piece on the role of education in the struggle against communism. An updated version of the “Bailey Report” on Catholic and non-Catholic voting trends appeared in Jubilee, and he contributed an essay for Everywoman titled “Would You Want Your Daughter to Be President?” The pre-feminist-era piece was optimistic, but he emphasized the importance of sound qualifications. For the National Education Association’s magazine he advocated federal aid to local school districts to help pay teachers’ salaries, and he came through on an offer from McCall’s to produce a female version of Profiles in Courage, focusing on the stories of the maverick congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, the seventeenth-century religious freedom pioneer Anne Hutchinson, and Prudence Crandall, a nineteenth-century trailblazer in integrated education.
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At first Kennedy’s speaking schedule did not contribute much to this transformation. By 1957 he had been in the political business for a decade, and it was second nature for him to follow a politician’s ritual in his rhetoric—to sound eloquent and erudite without saying anything particularly important or controversial. He had a standing instruction for Sorensen—“I can’t afford to sound just like any senator”—but that was more for his own comfort because he hated repeating himself. Speechwriter Sorensen prepared what he called “sections,” short bursts on different topics that could be plugged into Kennedy’s remarks to create the illusion of variety.
This emphasis on making a good impression rather than making waves tended to highlight the few occasions when Kennedy actively sought headlines. There were primarily two areas that prompted him to speak out: foreign policy, and corruption and racketeering in the labor union movement. Each case was connected to changes in Kennedy’s Senate life that proved important when he formally became a presidential candidate.
As 1957 began, Kennedy finally succeeded, after years of pleading, in getting a seat on the prestigious Senate Foreign Relations Committee. At the same time he decided to take a Democratic slot on a special committee being established to investigate “improper activities in labor and management.” It would become popularly known as the Senate Rackets Committee, and its hearings provided daytime television viewing for a vast national audience. It was no coincidence that the committee’s staff director was Robert Kennedy. John Kennedy’s position on the investigative panel proved helpful. His Rackets Committee work inspired invitations to speak beginning in March 1957 and continually thereafter, especially in the South, where suspicions about union activism were historically greater than in the rest of the country.
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In Washington—and among the political cognoscenti around the country—Kennedy’s early activity was seen as a harbinger for 1960, though more often as a play for the second place on a Democratic ticket instead of a bid for the presidential nomination As he began to deal more and more with reporters and columnists, Kennedy strove to be taken seriously and not casually dismissed. In this he was enormously successful.
By the spring the commentators impressed by Kennedy included Marquis Childs, a prolific writer, correspondent, and eventually syndicated columnist whose home base was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Seldom in the annals of this political capital,” he wrote that May, “has anyone risen as rapidly and as steadily as Sen. John F. Kennedy in the ten years since he came to the House from Massachusetts.”
The implications for 1960 were noted, even while Kennedy’s prospects were discounted. The press has always had an enormous bias toward the conventional, and in the 1950s the status quo did not seem favorable for a relative newcomer who could crash the party only by winning primaries. Instead the press continued to focus on the future national convention as a deliberative body composed of party chieftains who would make decisions independent of mere voters’ views in primaries in a minority of the states. That meant Lyndon Johnson had to be ruled in as a major force and that Adlai Stevenson couldn’t be ruled out for a third candidacy.
Against that consensus Kennedy labored with writers in his private dealings to make sure they understood he was running and to appreciate there was a method to his madness.
“Most people didn’t take Kennedy very seriously early on,” recalled Robert Donovan, an influential correspondent at the New York Herald Tribune and later the Los Angeles Times.II “It just seemed unlikely and [yet] you knew that he thought very seriously that he was going to be the nominee of that party.”
For years it has been a practice in Washington that political figures meet with small groups of writers to exchange gossip and size each other up. These sessions, over lunch, cocktails, or dinner, are almost always either off the record or on what is known as “deep background,” meaning no quotation or attribution of any kind is allowed. These ground rules allow for more candor and more vigor in the conversations. In accounts of Kennedy’s meetings with the journalists, he made no attempt to disguise his efforts to win the Democratic nomination; still, there were no headlines blaring “Kennedy Is Running.” Typically he tried to make it clear that his activity was more a campaign of personal ambition than a gesture on behalf of some issue-oriented cause.
At one gathering in the staid Metropolitan Club, around the corner from the White House, Kennedy was pushed on why he thought he should be president. His reply: “It’s not that I have some burning thing to take to the nation. It’s just, ‘Why not me?’ ” At a meeting early in 1957 the discussion turned to Stevenson’s prospects. After Kennedy got an earful of positive assessments from the writers about the two-time nominee, he replied sharply, “How can you say a thing like that? Adlai Stevenson is the most embittered human being I know. He’s been embittered by these two defeats and just wouldn’t be worth another run at this thing.”
More often Kennedy was able to discuss the merits of possible candidacies, including his own, methodically. Recalled Peter Lisagor, a widely admired scribe for the Chicago Daily News, “He went over Symington and Humphrey as I recall it, and Adlai, pointing up their liabilities and their assets. And then he went over himself and this is where he won the whole group with this totally detached, cool, candid evaluation of himself—the fact that he was a man of relative youth, Catholic, inexperienced in the Senate and no administrative experience, all the rest of it—and came out with the conclusion that he was at least as well qualified as any of the others and made a good case for it.”
The attraction between Kennedy and the writers was mutual, and genuine—even if somewhat overblown as the years passed. He had some very close friends in the business—Charles Bartlett, Joseph Alsop, and, especially as 1960 neared, Ben Bradlee. But his growing favorable image was more the result of his own quotable accessibility than of friendly reporters anxious to promote him—and to cover up the indiscretions in his private life.
On a few occasions reporters operated as Kennedy’s political eyes and ears and shared material with him—sometimes handing over their own stories before publication. For example, Sorensen had in his possession several pages of Fletcher Knebel’s copy headed for his Cowles Publications outlets in Des Moines and Minneapolis. Jerry Landay, a Westinghouse Broadcasting newscaster on his way to stints at ABC and CBS, gave Kennedy the benefit of his considerable knowledge of world affairs in a memorandum on important issues addressed “to the hosts of becalmed voters of the country who seem to find solace in the optimistic readings of Nixon.”
Probably the most eyebrow-raising example of ethically questionable dialogue between Kennedy and a journalist involved regular memoranda, crammed with political information, sent to Kennedy by columnist Bruce Biossat. If there was a dean of political writing in the 1950s, it was Biossat. His résumé dated from Franklin Roosevelt’s third term, and he had a sterling reputation for detailed, shrewd reporting among his colleagues. Syndicated by the North American Newspaper Alliance, Biossat’s commentary was for years must reading in the political world. But long before the primaries began—and up until the election in 1960—Biossat had an exclusive audience of top Kennedy aides who studied his memos regularly.
More significant, Kennedy’s dealings with the press revealed a campaign behind the scenes that could not have been more proactive. If a columnist or editorial writer had something complimentary to say, he could be assured of getting a note expressing gratitude. Critical articles were just as likely to get a response, usually mild-mannered but pointed. Kennedy’s attentive attitude extended to situations that could have become serious but wound up barely qualifying as bumps in the road.
The first important instance of damage control occurred about nine months into Kennedy’s campaign in 1957, when he slipped into New York Hospital for surgery on the area where his two major back operations in 1954–55 had concentrated. The procedure was neither dangerous nor particularly serious, but it was needed to drain a soft-tissue abscess around the original incision. Kennedy was off the road just briefly, but his hospitalization did serve as an opportunity to gauge how, if at all, his health would be handled as his drive for the nomination proceeded.
Nearly a decade earlier, while in Britain, Kennedy had been formally, and secretly, diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a condition in which the adrenal glands do not produce enough steroid hormones. It is a chronic condition and was generally considered quite serious, until steroid medicines were found that could control it. Kennedy had been taking them orally for years, successfully.
Nevertheless his health was something of a mess. He had lousy digestion, was prone to frequent infections, and the back surgeries only marginally improved his chronic pain. He took several medicines regularly to alleviate his problems, including continual injections of procaine to deaden his back pain when it became severe.
Aware of the political ramifications of a serious illness, Kennedy and those close to him who knew his condition lied from the outset about the Addison’s disease. And in the years before detailed medical histories became de rigueur for national politicians his full health profile, including his sickly childhood, was consistently masked. The lie was assisted by the fact that when he was feeling well he was photographed as an active, athletic adult—playing golf (he was very good), tossing a football around in vigorous games with family and friends on Cape Cod, and keeping to a trying schedule that had been his hallmark since his first race for Congress.
When Fletcher Knebel prepared the first article about his health, Kennedy’s staff came up with a statement that dodged the larger truth but was at least medically accurate as far as it went. Versions of the explanation were used throughout the presidential campaign. To wit: “I contracted malaria during the war and had a series of fevers. Diagnosis showed that the malaria had caused a malfunctioning of the adrenal glands. From 1946 through 1949 I underwent treatment for this malfunctioning and the glands were restored to their full use. I have received no treatment for it since that time and had no recurrence of the trouble.”
As it turned out, no one really noticed. As far as is known, after his New York Hospital stay, Kennedy never spent another day in a hospital until he died six years later. The brief hospitalization was the occasion for some rethinking of his overall health and some understandable second thoughts from his father. However, his new doctor, Janet Travell, looked at him and his upcoming, busy schedule and advised no changes.
Three months later there was a second incident, which could have been much more serious. Kennedy had received a publicity boost and commercial success for Profiles in Courage. In the spring of 1957 the book’s run was crowned with a Pulitzer Prize for history. As soon as the award was announced, there was immediate, jealous speculation behind the scenes in Washington and New York and insinuations that Kennedy’s authorship could be suspect.
The rumors remained just that until Saturday evening, December 7, on an ABC show hosted by a young broadcaster named Mike Wallace. Television was just beginning to put more edge and controversy into its discussion programs, and Wallace was an early practitioner. One of his guests that evening was the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, whose “Washington Merry-Go-Round” made him the capital’s premier scandalmonger.
Wallace provoked the incident when the subject of the book came up by asking Pearson, “Who wrote the book for him?” Pearson didn’t offer a name, but he remarked that Kennedy had “won a Pulitzer Prize on a book that was ghostwritten for him. . . . The book ‘Profiles in Courage’ was written for Senator Kennedy by somebody else and he has never acknowledged that fact.”
Joseph Kennedy hit the roof, and his son was no less angry and concerned. Joe acted first, calling Clark Clifford, the onetime Truman aide who had become a legendary lawyer and Washington insider. Clifford recalled the father’s outburst and demands that ABC and Pearson be sued: “I waited until he finished this long tirade over the telephone, to which I said, ‘Well it all depends on what you want to accomplish; if you want to drag the matter out for possibly two or three years without getting a conclusion then that’s exactly the best way to do it and get occasional publicity about it and all. If, on the other hand you would like to get a retraction—which is what we ought to go with—which would clear it up, then I think we ought to get in touch with them and let’s don’t talk about suing any more at all.”
Clifford didn’t earn top dollar for nothing. Joe quickly quieted down and agreed. After meeting with his son and Sorensen, Clifford and they went to New York with voluminous files on the book from both the senator and Sorensen. The father wanted to send someone down from Boston as well, but a storm blocked him. That left Kennedy, Sorensen, and Clifford to spend two days with ABC boss Leonard Goldenson and a vice president.
The truth is that the book was a genuine collaboration with Sorensen, with some additional material in the form of certain chapter drafts by Jules David, a Georgetown University professor whom Jacqueline Kennedy knew. The material, which survives, demonstrates that the idea and form of the volume were Kennedy’s alone. Shaped in 1955 during his long recuperation in Florida from his back surgeries, the manuscript has Kennedy’s handwriting all over it, from beginning to end.
The ABC executives had nothing to counter the Kennedy offensive. Over the telephone Pearson himself acknowledged having no relevant evidence. The full retraction was on the air by the next broadcast of the Wallace program. Ironically the statement was ghostwritten—by Sorensen. The Kennedy office stayed on the alert for any other charges that someone other than the senator had been the author, but there were none during the course of his campaign.
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At the close of the year the family gathered for the holidays—along with their invited political guest, Hy Raskin—still unsure and divided over campaign strategy but satisfied at how the first year had gone for the candidate. Kennedy had a head start on his potential rivals and had managed to create far more interest than controversy.
For perspective, Sorensen said, he found insight in a historian friend’s odd linkage of Kennedy’s approach to Mao Zedong’s strategy in his successful revolution in China—to encircle the major cities from the outside, patiently waiting for them to crumble—with the British political practice of focusing on “rotten boroughs,” the out-of-the-way constituencies where organizational work could proceed successfully without attracting much attention from opponents. The analogies seemed to fit.
But the campaign Sorensen was in effect managing at this point was also pure Kennedy, based on the assumption he had treated as gospel ever since his first campaign for Congress in 1946: Start very, very early, and work first from outside formal party structures. In a meeting with Democrats in the Midwest, Sorensen summarized his boss’s firm belief: “One hour of work in 1957 is worth two hours of work in 1958.”
Sorensen also recalled Kennedy saying, “In every campaign I’ve ever been in, they’ve said I was starting too early—that I would peak too soon or get too much exposure or run out of gas or be too easy a target. I would never have won any race following that advice.”
I The Kennedy family’s political base in the state would be maintained without interruption all the way through his brother Ted’s long political career.
II Donovan eventually wrote the book that became the movie PT109, about Kennedy’s wartime heroism.