From the beginning Lyndon Johnson was a spectral presence in the 1960 campaign, undeclared as a candidate yet lurking in the wings as Kennedy’s most formidable rival. Despite his assurances to Robert Kennedy at their awkward meeting the previous December that he had no intention of running in the primaries, Johnson always figured in the Kennedy campaign’s long-range strategy. There seemed to be many signals that Johnson would have to be confronted at some point—if not in the primaries, then at the convention, where he could call in all of the IOUs he had collected in his years as Senate majority leader.
The year before, Johnson had already arranged for changes in Texas election laws that would enable him to run simultaneously for two offices in 1960: his own reelection to the Senate and as Democratic nominee for president or vice president. There was more evidence of his intentions in Austin: an office to promote an unofficial campaign, run by a Johnson protégé, an up-and-coming Texas politician named John Connally, who nursed a virulent hatred of Kennedy. Elsewhere another of the Texas senator’s closest associates, Walter Jenkins, busied himself organizing “Johnson for President” clubs.
Then there were the whispers from Capitol Hill of efforts by Johnson and his associates to diminish Kennedy’s image. Johnson was said to evoke belly laughs in the Senate cloakroom by telling of Joe Kennedy’s pleas to put his son on the Foreign Relations Committee and by passing along unflattering descriptions of the young senator from Massachusetts as “a skinny little fellow that had all the diseases.”
Standing at six feet, four inches, Johnson exuded power. Yet he had let Kennedy steal the march from him in the spring of 1960. Johnson’s friends were puzzled by his absence in the primaries and wondered whether he worried that his heart might fail him again or that he harbored a psychological fear of defeat. More likely, it was thought, Johnson believed that he need not bother with the primaries. Instead he could count on the influence of Senate committee chairmen he helped put in place. He could also draw upon the friendship of his legislative coequal and personal mentor on the other side of the Hill, Sam Rayburn, to curry favor with party leaders and, if necessary, to intimidate young congressmen attracted to Kennedy.
A few days before the Arizona Democratic convention in April Congressman Stewart Udall was summoned to the speaker’s rostrum in the House chamber. “I understand you’re having a state convention,” Rayburn said to Udall. “Are you right in the middle of this?”
Udall acknowledged that he was.
“Well, I have a candidate for the nomination,” Rayburn growled. “My colleague from Texas. I don’t want you to hurt him.”
In an effort to soothe the old man, Udall replied, “Mr. Speaker, I’m not trying to hurt anybody. I committed myself several months ago to John Kennedy, and I’m going to do everything I can to help him. I am not trying to hurt your man. As a matter of fact, if Kennedy can’t get the support in Arizona, your man obviously is the man who will. If I can’t put Kennedy over, I’m not going to be against him.”
Johnson had his partisans in Arizona. He was relying on the aging senator Carl Hayden and a former Arizona senator, Ernest McFarland, to carry the day for him in their state. But they proved to be spent forces, and after a series of acrimonious caucuses a different group, including people like Udall, bound to Kennedy, wound up winning two-thirds of the seats on the Arizona delegation to the national convention. With a unit rule in force, this put Kennedy in position to get all of the state’s votes.
———
With Humphrey eliminated and the nation’s political cognoscenti stunned by the size of Kennedy’s victory in Protestant West Virginia, Kennedy began moving methodically through the remainder of the primary schedule with the goal of amassing as many delegates as possible toward the magic number of 761.
Unopposed, Kennedy won the Nebraska primary on the same night as his triumph in West Virginia, the result of his early groundwork in the state. He turned immediately to Maryland, which would hold its primary a week later. Even as he concentrated on West Virginia, the high command of his campaign staff had targeted Maryland as a fallback place to regain momentum if he lost in the Mountaineer State. However, they faced difficulties in Maryland from the start.
Governor J. Millard Tawes had planned to lead an uncommitted Maryland delegation to Los Angeles and was unhappy over Kennedy’s decision to run in the state. Kennedy appeared briefly in Annapolis in February to file as a candidate; at the time this was considered a mere formality. But following Kennedy’s impressive victories in the early primaries, his campaign asked Bernie Boutin, their erstwhile New Hampshire leader, to come south and help establish a beachhead in Maryland. He visited Tawes to tell him that Kennedy would compete in the state. “I am very sorry,” Tawes told Boutin. “I wish the senator wouldn’t come in.”
“I’m very sorry to have troubled you, Governor,” Boutin replied. “But we are in, and we’re going to stay in.”
The commitment had been made, but the execution was still lacking. There was inevitable friction in the Maryland organization between local leaders and out-of-state Kennedy men such as Boutin and Kennedy’s close friend Congressman Torbert Macdonald of Massachusetts, who was supposed to set up an organization in Maryland but had little success. Democratic members of the state’s congressional delegation were reluctant to get involved, and a well-known ward leader in Baltimore was demanding $12,000 from the campaign to deliver several precincts that were heavily Democratic.
When Boutin relayed word of the call for cash, Robert Kennedy instructed, “Tell him to go to hell.” After Boutin passed on the message, the ward leader lowered his price to $3,000. Told of the markdown, Robert had the same reaction: “Tell him to go to hell.”
Robert displayed bravado with the Baltimore politician, but he worried that the Maryland campaign was in a mess, wracked by backbiting and the refusal of the state’s Democratic apparatus to get on board. And Kennedy faced a new candidate, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, who was using the Maryland primary to warm up for a test of Kennedy in Morse’s state a few days later.
The day after West Virginia, Kennedy swept into Maryland. One of his friends, Joe Tydings, had taken unofficial charge of the effort there. The stepson of a former Maryland governor, Millard Tydings, the young legislator managed to enlist a couple of big names in Democratic circles: Baltimore’s mayor Tommy D’Alesandro and Blair Lee. They set up a vigorous three-day tour of the state for Kennedy, which ranged from the suburbs outside Washington to Baltimore and on to several Eastern Shore communities. When Kennedy arrived as the victor in West Virginia, previously recalcitrant Maryland Democrats swarmed to be nearby. For style points Tydings commandeered a shiny convertible to ferry the candidate to an event in Havre de Grace, near Tydings’s home. While on the Eastern Shore the Kennedy motorcade passed through a village called Kennedyville; there was regret afterward that the schedule had not included an event there.
By the time Kennedy finished the tour, the outcome in Maryland appeared to be a fait accompli. Governor Tawes did not need further persuasion; he made a public endorsement of Kennedy at the end of the week. He had been shown the results of a Harris survey in Maryland before the primary season that showed Kennedy whipping Symington—who grew up in Baltimore and whose family had developed an island in the Chesapeake Bay—by a whopping 56 to 11 percent. Matched against Tawes, once the putative favorite son, Kennedy led 54–20. Harris concluded, “Baltimore city looks solid as a rock. . . . No matter what combination of opponents is pitted against JFK in the Maryland primary, as of January, 1960, it now seems certain that the Massachusetts Democrats will emerge victorious and by a good margin.”
Harris’s prophecy played out four months later. Kennedy mauled his lone opponent, the maverick Senator Morse, by better than 4 to 1. He had already moved on to Oregon to challenge Morse on his home ground.
———
The Kennedy campaign had always viewed Oregon, one of the most independent and progressive of states, as problematic. There was no way to avoid the contest; the primary ballot would include the names of any candidate the secretary of state chose to list. At the first of the year Robert Kennedy had feared that Adlai Stevenson, another noncandidate who retained a strong liberal following in the state, might become a spoiler. In a January 20 memo to his brother, Robert wrote, “It is obviously important to try to keep Stevenson out of the Oregon primary.” He proceeded to outline a Machiavellian way to do so.
Congressman Charles O. Porter would be behind any Stevenson initiative in the state, Robert said, adding that Porter “both dislikes and fears” Morse, who had become his political nemesis. “If you went to see Porter at a propitious moment and said that you were thinking of not actively running in Oregon if Stevenson was in the primary, then Porter might very well reconsider his efforts on behalf of Stevenson because the implication of your statement would be that the state would virtually be turned over to Wayne Morse.”
Events over the next four months would make the suggestion unnecessary. Kennedy’s string of primary wins had shaken out the field. Stevenson was no longer a threat in Oregon, and although Humphrey, Symington, and Johnson would all be on the ballot, the only active competitor would be Morse.
Described as “the loneliest man in Washington” because of his ornery manners and his refusal to follow the dictates of his party’s leadership, Morse bolted from the Republican Party in 1955 to become a Democrat, but he regularly defied his new party too. When the Democratic national chairman Paul Butler criticized Morse earlier in the year, saying his favorite-son gambit would interfere “with bona fide candidates in presidential primaries,” Morse declared himself a candidate in Maryland rather than dropping out in Oregon.
In spite of his embarrassing defeat in Maryland, Morse claimed he would get 60 percent of the vote in Oregon and turned his caustic tongue on Kennedy, calling him a “synthetic liberal,” a “kiss the baby” type of candidate, and an “interloper” in Oregon affairs. No one knew whether his diatribes were the product of his cantankerous nature or provoked by some substantive policy differences. There had been at least one legislative dispute. As a strong ally of organized labor, Morse assailed Kennedy as an enemy of the labor movement because of his major role in the Landrum-Griffin union reform bill.
For all of Morse’s criticism, Kennedy had been able to establish more than a mere foothold in Oregon’s liberal community. With their old favorite, Stevenson, on the sidelines, many of the respected liberals in the state enlisted in the Kennedy campaign. Well before the primary date in May he had the backing of Edith Green, an imposing new voice for education and women’s issues in Congress, as well as the friendship of the politically prominent Neuberger family.
For years Oregon’s other Democratic senator, Richard Neuberger, had been engaged in a strange feud with Morse that could be traced to the time Neuberger was a law school student and Morse the dean of the University of Oregon Law School. Nearly three decades later the two men exchanged angry letters, delivered by messengers, to each other’s Senate offices. Some of their correspondence was leaked to newspapers, and their longtime animosity went public. Two months before the Oregon primary the forty-seven-year-old Neuberger, suffering from cancer, died after a cerebral hemorrhage. His death sent his widow, Maurine, to his Senate seat and helped drive his mourning followers into the Kennedy camp.
Given the dynamics, it was not difficult for Kennedy to decide to compete in Oregon, the only primary where he would openly challenge a favorite son. He refused to be drawn into a personal fight with Morse and constantly lowballed his own chances, telling reporters that Morse should win.
Because the interval between the Maryland and Oregon primaries was less than a week, the state did not witness the marathon, two-man campaign that had characterized the struggle in West Virginia. But the result was the same. Kennedy enjoyed another outstanding victory, getting 51 percent of the votes to Morse’s 32 percent. The outcome served as an exclamation point for Kennedy’s spring offensive.
———
Kennedy did not contest the Florida primary, which came four days after Oregon, for a very good reason. One of his best friends, George Smathers, was running as a favorite son and could be relied upon to eventually add his state’s delegates to Kennedy’s growing total. But there was a tale of mutual mischief between the two men that preceded their agreement.
Kennedy had originally thought of entering the primary because he felt Florida offered a chance for him to beat Johnson. Geographically Florida extended farther south than other states in Dixie, but its demographics did not match its neighbors’. In the Miami–Fort Lauderdale area, a substantial Jewish population was more likely to vote like New York than like Georgia. Thousands of people had migrated to the sunny state, bringing their moderate politics with them. In short, Florida had pockets of hard-core conservatives who were raised there, but the state’s politics were more cosmopolitan than any other in the Deep South.
To preserve his own good relationship with his Senate majority leader, Smathers thought he could head off a collision between Johnson and Kennedy by filing early as a favorite-son candidate. Johnson did nothing.
Smathers was a dashing figure who won his Senate seat in 1950 in a legendary campaign against the incumbent, a liberal Democrat named Claude Pepper. With the cold war a major issue, Smathers branded his opponent “Red Pepper” and a communist sympathizer. Stories that grew out of the race may have been apocryphal, but they spread across the region—accounts of Smathers speaking to dimwitted audiences, accusing Pepper’s sister of being a “thespian” in New York, and revealing that Pepper once practiced “celibacy.”
Smathers supported typical southern, conservative values, and was a critic of the Supreme Court’s historic desegregation decision in 1954. But despite their differences, Smathers and Kennedy developed a close friendship. Smathers was a member of Kennedy’s wedding party and later one of his companions on a stag sailing expedition in the Mediterranean in 1956, the time when Jackie Kennedy, back home in the United States, suffered a miscarriage. Roger Mudd, a familiar face on network television for decades, wrote that Kennedy and Smathers, “together or singly, were wolves on the prowl, always able to find or attract gorgeous prey.”
On the morning of March 1, the filing deadline in Florida, Smathers got a call from Kennedy inviting him to breakfast at his office. Smathers thought it odd, even though they caroused together as playboys and shared many meals.
As they began eating, Kennedy looked at the clock and announced, “You’ve got two hours to withdraw.”
“Two hours to withdraw from what?” asked Smathers.
“Withdraw from the race in Florida.”
“Oh, my God,” Smathers exclaimed. “Is today the day?”
“Yeah,” Kennedy said, “today is the filing day, and you better get out because I’m going to run.”
“Jack, I can’t get out. The [state] Democratic Party has already nominated me. No way!”
“Well, you can always withdraw yourself,” Kennedy said.
“No, I just simply can’t do it. I can’t let those people down. I’ve told them I was going to run and it’s been in all the press and everyone knows it.”
They continued their meal, and Kennedy seemed to be smirking. It was 11:30 a.m., and the minute hand was winding toward noon, the deadline, Kennedy claimed, for filing in Florida. He raised the subject again. “Come on!” he snapped. “You know damn well you’re not going to run. It’s just stupid. Get out!” He turned up the pressure. “I’ve got a guy down there in Tallahassee. He’s got a check. He’s going to file a check. And I’m going to be a candidate, and you have to run against me.”
Smathers was adamant. “OK you’re going to have to run against me. I don’t think you can beat me down there.”
Kennedy cited the case of a Maryland congressman who had entertained notions of running as a favorite son. “Look what I did to Danny Brewster in Maryland. He did the same thing, and I beat his ass.” (Kennedy’s staff was actually scaring off the competition in Maryland by showing polls to local politicians that demonstrated his strength there.)
“That’s Danny Brewster in Maryland,” Smathers retorted. “You haven’t beaten Smathers in Florida yet.”
Kennedy cursed and grinned again. “Look, you’re my best friend. If I get this now, I can win the nomination down there. I’ll just have the thing closed up. You just have to get out. You have only got five minutes.” He said his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, had an open telephone line to Florida to pass on the late decision.
“Jack, there’s no use doing it. I am not going to get out. I cannot afford to. I told the people down there I’m going to run. You’re going to get more than half the delegates anyway. What the hell are you worried about? You’ll end up getting all of them. But they’re all committed to me now. They have to stay with me through the first ballot.”
At noon Kennedy declared, “Goddamnit. All right. Too late. OK, forget it.” He leaned back in his chair, looked at his friend, and said, laughing, “You know, you’re a son of a bitch.”
“What are you so pissed off about?” Smathers asked. “This is a little ridiculous.”
“I could have won,” Kennedy said. “Now I have to go through this crap of courting all of you. . . . I wanted to win. I wanted to put it to Johnson, and that would have eliminated Johnson. That’s the first good state in the South.”
He called to his secretary, “Bring in the polls.”
With the surveys laid out on his desk, Kennedy and Smathers studied the results. The numbers indicated that Kennedy ran ahead of Johnson in Florida—but not Smathers.
Smathers snorted in triumph and said to his buddy, “You dirty bastard. You would have run against me if it had looked like you could have won.”
Smathers would run unopposed in the Florida primary, locking up the state’s 30 votes. That would prevent any Kennedy rival—including Johnson—from getting support from a major state in the South on the critical first ballot and assure Kennedy of many Florida votes on any subsequent ballot.
———
While Kennedy was scoring impressive victories in the May primaries, the nation’s attention was diverted by an international crisis that threw new foreign policy questions into the year’s political equation. It was also the occasion for a rare but serious mistake by the front-runner.
On May 1 an American spy plane, flying at high altitude deep into the Soviet Union, was hit by a surface-to-air missile. Its CIA pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured after he bailed out as the secret aircraft, a U-2, plunged to earth. After the Soviets announced a mysterious crash, the U.S. government went into full denial, claiming that the plane went missing during a flight out of Turkey. The American reaction put President Eisenhower in the most embarrassing dilemma of his administration when the Soviets responded by parading the pilot, now a prisoner, and remains of the U-2 on television. Eisenhower was forced to admit that the United States had been engaged in an espionage mission in the skies over the communist superpower.
The U-2 incident set the scene for a second foreign policy disaster for the United States. In the middle of the month Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev abruptly walked out of a peace summit in Paris he was attending with the leaders of three Western governments: Eisenhower, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Great Britain, and President Charles de Gaulle of France.
The crisis not only begged for appropriate responses from the candidates to succeed Eisenhower; it also reintroduced the possibility that at the coming convention the Democrats might turn to Stevenson, considered a knowledgeable statesman well-seasoned in dealing with foreign policy issues; at least in terms of public perception, Kennedy was not.
Even as Kennedy overpowered his opponents on the primary ballots, his campaign now found itself fighting off the shadow candidacies of Stevenson as well as Johnson, especially after Kennedy flubbed a remark about the U-2 incident.
Although he had been beaten twice as the Democratic standard-bearer, Stevenson remained the darling of liberal purists, who constituted a considerable faction in the party. Eleanor Roosevelt had importuned him all year to run. The former first lady issued a public statement on June 10, endorsing Stevenson and recommending a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket. After agonizing over the proper wording for a response, Stevenson sent a wire to Mrs. Roosevelt the next day: “I do not now intend to try to influence the nomination in any way—by ‘endorsing’ anyone or trying to ‘stop’ anyone, or by seeking it myself. I have not made and will not make any ‘deals’ with anyone.”
Intrigue was afoot, but the “Stop Kennedy” movement was uncoordinated. Only three days earlier, Stevenson had written privately to Humphrey, “You ask when I am ‘going to make a direct move for the nomination.’ I do not intend to make any ‘move’ at all, or to try to affect the nomination in any way. I don’t think I have the right to interfere with the efforts of any who may, at this point, as citizens and Democrats, recommend my nomination; but I will do nothing to seek it myself.”
All that would change.
His relationship with Kennedy had been unsettled since Kennedy’s unsuccessful bid to get on his ticket in 1956 and Robert Kennedy’s tour with Stevenson that fall as a campaign aide. Jack Kennedy felt that Stevenson’s indecision in picking a running mate reflected a politician unable to make hard choices. His younger brother was more scathing in his critique of the 1956 Stevenson campaign effort; he later described Stevenson and his brother as “different types” who “never got along.”
Stevenson was equally suspicious of the Kennedys. He withheld any endorsement of Kennedy during the primary season because he feared the country was not ready to embrace a Catholic candidate. He also told John Sharon, one of his closest associates, that he was troubled by Joe Kennedy. “I don’t know myself what influence the old man has on Jack,” he said. “I don’t think the country has as short a memory as some people believe with respect to Ambassador Kennedy’s views when he was ambassador.”
According to Sharon, Stevenson felt “Bobby Kennedy was a fairly ruthless, though effective, schemer. He has some reservations in his own mind about how totally truthful Bobby was in his political maneuverings.”
At one point in the spring of 1960, as Kennedy collected more and more delegates, Stevenson met secretly with Johnson in Washington, where they discussed a deal offered by Johnson that was designed to stop Kennedy short of the nomination. Johnson claimed to have more than 400 delegate votes sewed up at the convention. If he failed to crest beyond the 761 needed to win the nomination, he told Stevenson, he would throw them to the two-time nominee rather than see Kennedy win.
After their meeting Stevenson rode with Sharon to a luncheon meeting with another of his earnest liberal supporters in Washington, Agnes Meyer. He told Sharon he had just been privy to “the most anti-Kennedy diatribe he’d ever heard.” Johnson had shown him polls displaying the public’s resistance to a Catholic and had denigrated his fellow senator. Stevenson seemed stunned by the intensity of Johnson’s attack. “I’ve heard a lot of anti-Kennedy talk from various people around the country,” he told Sharon, “but never anything quite as vitriolic as that.”
Johnson’s loyalist in Texas, John Connally, piled on, telling Sharon that the Johnson camp was “convinced that the Kennedys could be proved to have bought the West Virginia primary.”
Throughout the primaries Kennedy kept in touch with the Stevenson interests through frequent telephone conversations with his friend William Blair, who had been Stevenson’s law partner. Stevenson was said to be irritated that Kennedy did not talk with him directly.
With Democratic liberals again looking toward Stevenson following the U-2 incident, middle men such as Blair and Sharon—who were friendly to both sides—concluded that the Kennedys believed Stevenson had joined a conspiracy to block them.
To discourage that belief, Stevenson sent a “Dear Jack” letter to the candidate on May 11, congratulating him on his success and declaring, “It reflects the confidence which you have earned through your campaign and your record.” He said he would be willing to meet with Kennedy at any convenient time.
In a combustible political environment Kennedy traveled to Stevenson’s country home in Libertyville outside Chicago the day after his triumph in Oregon. The meeting was arranged by Blair, who hoped it would lead to Stevenson’s blessing Kennedy. The candidate and the former nominee met privately for less than an hour. Kennedy told Stevenson he felt he was within 80 to 100 delegate votes of winning the nomination and believed Stevenson’s endorsement would put him over the top. The former Illinois governor said he was not ready to come out for anyone, but he assured his visitor he “would not be a party—overtly or covertly—to any ‘stop Kennedy’ movements.” For the sake of party unity Stevenson stressed the importance of Kennedy’s willingness, if nominated, to seek Johnson’s cooperation. Kennedy said there was only one way to deal with Johnson: “beat him.” He described Johnson as “a chronic liar”: “He had been making all sorts of assurances to me for years and has lived up to none of them.”
Less than an hour later Kennedy’s anger at Johnson boiled over in a comment to Blair as he boarded his plane to Cape Cod: “Guess who the next person I see will be? The person who will say, ‘I told you that son of a bitch has been running for president every moment since 1956’?” Blair immediately thought of the Kennedy family patriarch. He grinned and answered, “Daddy.”
Afterward Stevenson told Arthur Schlesinger, who had a foot in both the Kennedy and the Stevenson camps, that he had made a “dire mistake” in mentioning Johnson to Kennedy; it had provoked him. Kennedy, in turn, told Schlesinger he believed Stevenson had been “snowed” by Johnson. Rather than bringing the two men together, the meeting further estranged them. Robert Kennedy said his brother regarded Stevenson as “a pain in the ass.” He characterized the May negotiations between the Kennedys and Stevenson as having to deal with “the actions of an old woman.”
———
His inability to extract an endorsement from Stevenson left Kennedy facing the possibility of a Stevenson uprising at the convention. But Kennedy moved to strengthen his foreign policy position with a speech in the Senate two weeks later that offered him some protection from complaints by Stevenson supporters that he was a naïf, out of his depths in foreign affairs, after he blundered badly in comments on the U-2 snafu.
Just before the Oregon primary, shortly after Khrushchev stalked out of the failed Paris summit, Kennedy was campaigning at a shopping center in Eugene when he got a press question about the crisis. Without preparation and obviously without thinking, he criticized the Eisenhower administration for what he called its “backing and filling” that month. Then he went further, saying he would have expressed “regret that the flight did take place . . . regret at the timing and give assurances that it would not happen again.”
The eastern political establishment pounced on him. The Republican Senate leaders, Everett Dirksen of Illinois and Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, raised the “suspicion of appeasement,” and Nixon called the statement “naïve.” More important, Johnson began to slam Kennedy. For days, as he made campaign-style trips around the country, he regularly shouted at the crowds, “I’m not prepared to apologize to Mr. Khrushchev! Are you?”
Kennedy did not respond immediately, and the attacks soon subsided. Instead he prepared a more comprehensive statement on the poor state of relations with the Soviet Union, and he delivered it on the Senate floor.
In the carefully constructed address Kennedy began by blaming Khrushchev for the collapse of the summit meeting: “The insults and distortions of Mr. Khrushchev—the violence of his attacks—shocked all Americans and united the country in admiration for the dignity and self-control of President Eisenhower.”
But Kennedy quickly pivoted into sharp criticism of the Eisenhower administration’s failure to develop a tough, constructive policy to confront the Soviet Union. “As a substitute for policy, Mr. Eisenhower has tried smiling at the Russians, our State Department has tried frowning at them, and Mr. Nixon has tried both. None have succeeded.”
He outlined twelve points he intended to follow if elected president, ranging from an assurance that the nation would have invulnerable nuclear retaliatory power to a commitment to establish strong relationships with emerging nations in Africa, “to persuade them that they do not have to turn to Moscow for the guidance and friendship they so desperately need.”
He described his position as “a challenging agenda” for himself and for the country. But for now he had to concentrate on more pressing political issues at home.