From the beginning, the Kennedy campaign was confronted with a painful conundrum: how to appeal to the southern states without alienating black voters, who held the balance in many important northern states, and vice versa.
The “Solid South,” a collection of former Confederate bastions, had been an essential part of the Democratic Party coalition for nearly a century and segregationist forces, still tied to the Democratic Party, controlled political life there. It was said that if Republicans called a statewide meeting anywhere in the South, it could be held in a telephone booth. Blacks, who made up as much as a third of the population in some states, were kept from voting by a wall of obstacles: poll taxes, literary tests requiring impossibly erudite interpretations of the Constitution, or simply the outright refusal of local officials to permit blacks to register and threats by some whites to resort to violence if they tried.
But the hold of the national Democratic Party on the South was loosening, strained by resentment over Truman’s decision to integrate the U.S. military and dramatized by the Dixiecrat walkout at the 1948 Democratic convention. In 1956 Eisenhower captured five of the eleven states that once made up the Confederacy, and the region loomed as a battleground in 1960.
At the same time, black voters were gaining political power elsewhere, and the increasingly liberal Democratic Party was trying to lure them from their traditional affection for the GOP. Inroads had been made, especially in urban areas, where black Democrats were elected to congressional seats, and there was movement toward a political takeover of big cities. By midcentury, with a fairly friendly Truman administration in place and a postwar sense of growing liberation, it was clear to Democrats that black voters could make the difference in a critical arc of industrial states running from New York to Michigan.
Kennedy found himself caught between the old alliances he had made with the southern grandees, the Russells and the Eastlands, and the realization that he needed to court and win over black voters. In Congress he had demonstrated ease in dealing with southerners; he drank whiskey with them in their backrooms and consummated legislative compromises. One of his best friends was George Smathers, a senator from Florida. Yet he displayed little affinity and much less than empathy with black Americans. They represented a world far removed from his own, a culture he did not seem to appreciate and made little attempt to understand.
“He had no close relationship with any Negro, so-called civil rights leaders,” asserted Simeon Booker, the well-traveled Washington correspondent for the giant Johnson Publishing Company, which fed Jet and Ebony magazines to a constituency of black readers across the country. Before he became a presidential candidate Kennedy had made only a few feeble efforts to connect with blacks. There was a perception among African Americans that the son of Harvard and great wealth was uncomfortable with them.
Just after his failed run for the vice presidential nomination in 1956, Kennedy enlisted the help of a socially prominent couple in black circles in Washington, Belford and Marjorie Lawson. Both held law degrees; the husband had argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the New Negro Alliance, and his wife had written for years for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s leading African American newspapers, located in the city where she grew up. Their role was to boost Kennedy’s profile among blacks.
Kennedy was shaping his run for the presidency in the summer of 1959 when Marjorie Lawson approached Martin Luther King Jr., a rising star in the firmament of civil rights leaders, about meeting with him. Although demands on King’s time prevented them from getting together, her overture was the first attempt to introduce two young men who soon became historic figures.
At the start of 1960, with his campaign in full throttle, Kennedy invited members of the Capital Press Club, an African American organization distinct from the Washington Press Club in the still-segregated city, to come to his home for a talk. At first it did not go well. The black reporters were suspicious of Kennedy because of his vote on the jury trial provision in the 1957 civil rights bill. To their knowledge, Kennedy had never been closely identified with black issues; on the other hand, his primary opponent, Hubert Humphrey, had been a champion of civil rights for more than a decade. Some of the visitors’ remarks were hostile, and Belford Lawson, who had arranged the meeting, tried to intervene. “No, I can speak for myself,” Kennedy said, and explained his position on jury trials for recalcitrant white voting registrars facing criminal contempt charges for their misbehavior, as well as other issues, at length. Before the reporters left, they felt better about him.
Kennedy continued to wrestle with issues important to blacks. His victory in West Virginia was tarnished in politically aware black communities, Booker said, by a belief that he had “just bought the Negro vote there” in order to defeat Humphrey, who should have been their real ally. On the eve of the convention Kennedy had to dismiss Belford Lawson, whom Booker called his “top Negro,” because it was discovered that he had been on retainer for Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters boss and mortal enemy of the Kennedy brothers. Marjorie Lawson remained on the staff, and Kennedy added Frank Reeves, who had worked for the NAACP, and Louis Martin, another well-connected black journalist. But the office was ruffled by bickering between Mrs. Lawson and Reeves, and the staff members who actually had Kennedy’s ear on the subject of civil rights were two liberal white men: his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver and Harris Wofford, the idealist who became a valuable advisor.
The first meeting between the candidate and King took place over breakfast at Kennedy’s apartment in New York in June 1960, a month before the convention. They talked for an hour, and King came away with the impression that Kennedy “did not have the grasp and the comprehension of the depths of the problem. . . . I could see that he didn’t have the emotional involvement. . . . He didn’t know too many Negroes personally.”
As a gesture to blacks, the Kennedys decided to add a prominent black name to the campaign masthead. They chose Congressman William Dawson of Chicago, but in a roundabout way that only added to racial misunderstanding. At a postconvention staff meeting, Robert Kennedy was complaining about the lack of productivity in a newly formed civil rights office when Louis Martin, who had recently joined the team, spoke up and said, in effect, We’re doing things, but I don’t think you’re doing enough. Martin told Jack Kennedy he needed to give more recognition to Dawson, a leader of blacks in the House since 1944. A meeting between the two was set up; it lasted thirty minutes.
Driving Dawson back to the capitol afterward, Martin asked, “How did it come out?”
Dawson only mumbled, “Well, now, he’s a young man. We had a nice uneventful chat.”
Despite his congressional seniority, Dawson commanded little respect among activist blacks. He was the product of a Chicago ward ripe with corruption and a cog in Mayor Daley’s machine, which relied on him to harvest thousands of black votes each election day. He discouraged use of the term civil rights on the grounds it might offend whites. He also advised against “relations with these wild young men like Martin Luther King. That will just get Kennedy in trouble.” At seventy-four he seemed aged beyond his years, and some thought he suffered from senility.
The campaign gave Dawson the title of chairman of the civil rights section and a place in their new office space in a K Street building near Robert Kennedy’s headquarters. The open layout offended the old congressman, who said he needed privacy. So Shiver arranged for an enclosed office to be constructed in the middle of the open space. Irreverent staffers called it “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
To attract black voters Kennedy would have to find someone—or something—more vigorous than Dawson.
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While he fumbled to improve his standing among black voters, Kennedy turned to his running mate to keep the South in the Democratic column. Johnson’s influence in these states—especially his own Texas—was the principal reason he had been chosen. Kennedy had looked at the national political equation and concluded that he could not win without the South. With Johnson at his side, he barnstormed through Texas for three days in September, including appearing before the Houston ministers; he made a few stops in the swing states of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia in the last two months before the election. Otherwise Kennedy was done with Dixie and depended on Johnson and the deals and arrangements he himself had made with key southerners.
Georgia got special attention. With 12 electoral votes, it was a richer prize than any of its neighbors, even Florida, and Atlanta represented the spiritual center of the South even though the city never became one of the floating capitals of the Confederacy. The state was the wellspring for conservative dynasties that spawned Senator Richard Russell and Senator Herman Talmadge, who had helped Democratic presidential candidates carry Georgia every four years. But the state was changing. Atlanta was the home of six historically black colleges that produced a counterbalance of black leadership. The sit-in movement that started in North Carolina early in 1960 quickly spread to Georgia, where the tactics of civil disobedience were being encouraged by people like King.
Several members of the Georgia power structure, including Governor Ernest Vandiver and publisher James H. Gray, met with Robert Kennedy at the Democratic convention, seeking assurance that his brother frowned upon sit-ins. Vandiver had been pressing for leniency from Kennedy on traditional southern ways of dealing with blacks. Robert told the group his brother approved of civil rights demonstrations—as long as they were lawful. Since sit-ins were illegal in Georgia, the protestors could expect no support from the Kennedy campaign. Still, the party’s platform had specifically singled out the sit-ins for praise. The Georgia Democrats went home withholding support for Kennedy in the fall.
During the special session of Congress, Vandiver—a very vocal critic of racial integration and the sit-ins—met with Kennedy and Johnson in the majority leader’s chambers in the capitol. He wanted to talk privately with Kennedy about a matter that he “didn’t want to discuss with anybody else.” They went into a small bathroom, where Vandiver talked of Eisenhower’s dispatch of federal troops to Little Rock in 1957 to ensure the integration of Central High School. Georgia’s legal docket was brimming with desegregation cases, and Vandiver wanted Kennedy to pledge not to send troops to Georgia to enforce school integration. “We wanted his cooperation rather than his sending in troops,” Vandiver explained.
According to Vandiver, Kennedy said, “Well, maybe marshals could handle the problem.”
“We don’t want any marshals, either,” Vandiver replied, and claimed that Kennedy agreed not to send troops or federal marshals. Days later Vandiver announced that Georgia Democrats would support the Kennedy ticket.
Other Deep South states also posed difficulties. Kennedy was already criticized by blacks for his cozy relationship with John Patterson, the segregationist governor of Alabama. But he faced another threat there and in Mississippi and Louisiana, where the fear of unpledged electors had inspired racist Democrats to spurn their party and get behind uncommitted slates for November. Under that plan southern states voting for unpledged electors would have a bloc in the Electoral College that could affect the election or throw a disputed contest into the House of Representatives, where the coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats still held sway.
The unpledged elector scheme was very popular in Mississippi. Governor Barnett, a tool of the Citizens Councils, had already offered himself as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in Los Angeles. He had wide support among many erstwhile Democrats in the state, and some went to great lengths to undermine their own party’s candidate. For example, the Kennedy campaign produced a television spot showing the candidate visiting Harlem and getting the endorsement of Harry Belafonte, a popular black singer and civil rights activist. The commercial was made available to anyone interested in civil rights. John Bell Williams, a Democratic congressman from Mississippi, bought a copy from Kennedy headquarters for $13.35. On the night Senator John Stennis, a loyal Democrat, went on statewide TV to endorse Kennedy, Williams arranged for time immediately afterward to show Belafonte’s endorsement of Kennedy. “Poor Stennis was crushed,” said John Seigenthaler, one of Robert Kennedy’s closest associates. “Ex-governor [J. P.] Coleman called us that night and said this was a devastating blow to the campaign. . . . He understood duplicates had been made of the film and that they had been circulated throughout the Southern states.” Steve Smith, the campaign manager in Washington, was put to work retrieving copies of the film and within twenty-four hours had recovered eight or ten. Smith and Robert Kennedy then met with the young woman who had unwittingly sold Williams the film and her supervisor in the campaign. “Both of them were literally scared to death,” Seigenthaler said. “Bob and Steve told them not to worry about it, just to be careful and diligent.” They tightened procedures for distributing the film in the future.
In Louisiana another renegade Democrat was causing trouble, a former legislator named Willie Rainach, who had been a delegate to Los Angeles. In the late 1950s he had used his legislative office to try to purge blacks from the state voting rolls. Alone among the Deep South states, Louisiana had permitted blacks to register during the populist reigns of Huey P. Long and his brother Earl, who was governor at the time of Rainach’s maneuver. At their height more than 160,000 blacks were eligible to vote in Louisiana. Rainach succeeded in substantially reducing that number in the conservative northern part of the state. He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1959 as the Citizens Council candidate in a field that also included a Ku Klux Klan member. After the 1960 convention he bolted the party and led the unpledged elector campaign in Louisiana.
But Kennedy was buoyed by the support of Louisiana Democrats he had first befriended in the days following the 1956 convention. They were his hosts during two memorable trips, when the senator from Massachusetts had gotten an enthusiastic reception in the heavily Catholic parishes of southern Louisiana. With their help, Kennedy’s strategists felt, they could negate the unpledged elector bid in Louisiana.
The Kennedy campaign also ran into difficulty with one of the candidate’s closest friends, George Smathers. The Florida senator had taken it upon himself to establish a separate southern campaign organization that would sponsor a speakers bureau and, under his command, coordinate Kennedy activity throughout Dixie. It was operating out of the Carroll Arms Hotel, a popular afternoon trysting place for members of Congress in the shadow of the Senate office buildings.
Robert Kennedy learned of the wildcat campaign after a low-level staffer named Howard Haggerud reported to Seigenthaler that the Smathers operation smacked of personal “empire building” and threatened to divert money from the legitimate Kennedy campaign. Robert “immediately saw the potential dangers” and told his brother of the operation. Jack called Smathers and told him to integrate the effort into the larger campaign. But “instead of getting better it got worse,” Seigenthaler said.
After failing to rein in Smathers, Robert decided the Florida senator would accompany him on an upcoming trip through the South. Smathers’s chief aides in the Carroll Arms advised against it, telling him, “They hate Bob Kennedy in the South, and he shouldn’t go on the trip.” Robert insisted and wound up in a furious argument with Smathers during the flight, declaring, “Senator Smathers, I can tell you’re his friend, but I can tell you Senator Kennedy is not going to submit to this type of operation. We’re not running a Southern campaign as a separate wing of this organization.” Smathers relented. He was allowed to keep the office at the Carroll Arms, but all speakers, finances, and campaign activities would be handled directly by the formal apparatus headed by Robert Kennedy and Steve Smith.
Kennedy also had to deal with southern white politicians who feared public association with him. One prominent Democrat in Florida, Farris Bryant, was well on his way to being elected governor that fall; Kennedy wanted Bryant to head his campaign in the state, but Bryant turned him down. He said he would do all he could in private, but because of their differing views on desegregation he could not be a public ally.
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To shore up southern support Johnson was put to work on a five-day whistle-stop train trip that began in the second week of October at Union Station in Washington and wound through eight states before ending in New Orleans. It was an interesting and bold move. Although Texas had been part of the Confederacy and most of the southern delegations had supported the Texas senator at the convention, the question remained whether he would be accepted as a southerner. Most natives of the Deep South considered Texas foreign to their region, a western state with few of the mores of Dixie. Some East Texas towns close to the Louisiana border were unmistakably southern, but in the heartland of the enormous state, in Dallas and Fort Worth and Austin, local values were western and few people considered themselves southern.
Johnson was the perfect person to bridge that gap. When he spoke with emphasis, he shouted, and his speeches from the caboose of the LBJ Special rang with a sound familiar to people who went to churches with hellfire-and-brimstone preachers, people who, for generations, had nurtured bombastic politicians braying a blend of populism and racism. There were no traces of racism in Johnson’s speeches, but he had an evangelical flair for persuasion, and he hit all the right notes.
At one of the first stops, in a small Virginia town, Johnson established the tone for his trip when he yelled, “What the Hell has Dick Nixon ever done for Culpeper?”
The LBJ Special was like the carnival coming to town. Its arrival was accompanied by a loud recording of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” a nineteenth-century song that had been made into a popular hit in the 1950s. Advance men carefully managed the train’s procession; at each stop they took on board mayors, aldermen, and county supervisors whose constituency lay in the town ahead, replacing those who had just appeared. When the train stopped, Johnson magically emerged with a group of local officials who publicly endorsed the Democratic ticket.
The Texas senator’s real work took place in a parlor car fitted with comfortable chairs, where he lectured the local dignitaries on the importance of sticking with the Democratic ticket. Using the same personal, brow-beating style he employed outside the Senate chamber, he told the officials of the rewards of loyalty and warned of the consequences if Nixon were elected, or if (he said when) Kennedy were elected without their help. He wound up talking to 1,247 various officials along the way, according to a count meticulously kept by his staff.
In his public speeches Johnson appealed to the South’s devotion to military service by talking of Kennedy’s heroism in the South Pacific and young Joe Kennedy’s death in World War II. “Nobody asked him what church he went to,” Johnson would add, to allay concerns about Catholicism.
The train plowed through Dixie with only one comic slip-up. As it pulled out of Greer, South Carolina, it seemed as if the blare of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” would never stop. Johnson could still be heard on the public address system when he roared to an aide, “Bobby, turn off that fuckin’ ‘Yeller Rose.’ ”
The LBJ Special attracted hundreds—sometimes thousands—of spectators in every town. At the final destination, New Orleans, Johnson was the guest of honor at a faux Mardi Gras parade attended by 100,000 people.
The trip was a ringing success.
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While Johnson romanced white southerners, Kennedy worked to earn the confidence of blacks in the North. Concerned that questions about his own voting record and the presence of a southerner on the ticket might upset this crucial community, Kennedy made his quest for black votes a top priority. The stronger effort had begun in earnest back in the spring, after Kennedy realized that Johnson would get most if not all the southern delegate votes for the presidential nomination. He was also receiving considerable criticism for his wooing of white southern politicians with Jim Crow ties. According to Walter Reuther’s top aide, Jack Conway, Kennedy was presiding over a campaign meeting touching on civil rights one day, when he suddenly stood up and snapped, “All right, there’s no question. The Negroes are right.” Almost immediately his top advisors Sargent Shriver and Meyer Feldman, as well as Marjorie Lawson, were dispatched to an NAACP meeting in Minnesota with instructions to transmit a more supportive, cogent message.
The fresh push reached a midsummer climax when Kennedy and his brother Robert were observed shaping the strongest civil rights plank a Democratic convention had ever seen and then helping to push it past the delegates. The renewed commitment encouraged advisors who had been lobbying for a greater effort in the face of opposition from such key staff members as Byron White, who argued against an association with civil rights. White called the issue inflammatory and unnecessary. Even the term civil rights raised red flags, not only from old Congressman Dawson but from Johnson, who pleaded that the campaign refer instead to “constitutional rights.”
In the period between the first and third debates with Nixon, Kennedy went on a dramatic offensive. A few days after the subject of civil rights was broached in the September 26 debate, people around Kennedy detected a sudden change. Going into Indianapolis for a routine campaign event, he shifted the parade route so that he would go through a black neighborhood. “They had Negroes three deep all along there and I think it did something to Kennedy,” Simeon Booker recalled.
Three days later, on October 7, Kennedy, accompanied by his pregnant wife, spoke to a student gathering at Howard University in Washington, perhaps the most prestigious Negro school in the country. The program was held under the auspices of the American Council on Human Rights. Nixon too had been invited but did not attend. Louis Martin gloated, “We had the Howard University student body to ourselves.” Kennedy’s message, Martin said, would reach “every college-trained Negro in America.” It was delivered “at a place that tradition had made important to them, and Nixon had failed to show.”
If the Howard event provided intellectual fodder for the thinking black voter, Kennedy triggered a visceral reaction among the masses with his performance in New York on October 12 at events surrounding the National Conference on Constitutional Rights, which his staff helped organize. His day began with breakfast with Eleanor Roosevelt at her home on East 75th Street; she would appear by his side later in the day, giving him her imprimatur, but first he had to take part in the city’s annual Columbus Day Parade, an event celebrating Italian heritage.
The National Conference on Constitutional Rights was ostensibly a nonpartisan affair, featuring panels for academic and business leaders to discuss the significance of the growing movement among blacks. Hubert Humphrey served as its chairman. In his remarks Kennedy pledged that two of his colleagues, Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania and Congressman Emanuel Celler of New York, were committed to drafting legislation and pushing to passage all of the elements of the civil rights plank of the Democratic Party. It was Kennedy’s first strong stand on behalf of civil rights legislation since 1957.
He also pledged to take important actions as president to advance civil rights, without waiting for a stubborn Congress. At the time blatant discrimination in housing was the lynchpin of the North’s version of segregation, including in the operation of federal housing programs. Kennedy promised to end it unilaterally, “with the stroke of a pen.”
It was during Kennedy’s remarks that day in front of the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, a famous local landmark, that his message caught fire. Flanked by Jacqueline Kennedy and Mrs. Roosevelt and joined by scores of Democratic officeholders and civil rights leaders, he faced a crowd of thousands in the nation’s most famous black neighborhood. He knew that Castro had recently stayed at the Theresa and that Khrushchev had come there to embrace the Cuban revolutionary. That recent history did not appear to make Kennedy uncomfortable, however. Instead he alluded to the ongoing revolutions against colonialism in Africa and the coming revolution in his own country.
“Beyond the fact of Castro coming to this hotel, Khrushchev coming to Castro, there is another great traveler in the world,” he told the crowd, “and that is the travel of world revolution, a world in turmoil. I am delighted to come to Harlem, and I think the whole world should come here, and the whole world should recognize that we all live right next to each other. . . . We should not fear the 20th century, for this worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American revolution.”
Roy Wilkins, the NAACP leader who once clashed with Kennedy over civil rights issues, said he would give the Democratic nominee a grade “above 90.”
Kennedy finally earned the unequivocal blessing of America’s own La Pasionaria, Eleanor Roosevelt, after four years of feuding coupled with her own reluctance to give up on Adlai Stevenson. She was famous for understatement, but at a news conference a few weeks later in Washington she was blunt in her assessment of Kennedy: “I think he’s learned better now. And I think his record in civil rights . . . has had a tremendous influence on Negro leaders.”
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Kennedy scored a triumph in New York that day, but sometimes his operation in the state looked like a political version of Guys and Dolls, though Damon Runyon never conceived a character more roguish than the real-life Democratic congressman from Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
A strikingly handsome and dapper man with a thin mustache, Powell doubled as the minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a Gothic Revival icon in Harlem. He was known for his spell-binding sermons; he also flirted outrageously with women and corruption. But he had become a powerful figure in Congress and boasted a following of tens of thousands beyond the boundaries of Harlem. It was important to line him up as a Kennedy spokesman, but doing so came at a cost.
In early negotiations with the Kennedy team, Harris Wofford told Powell the campaign needed his “thrust.” Powell delighted in the double entendre because of his reputation for sexual promiscuity. (In his Harlem speech even Kennedy played on Powell’s playboy antics. He said that across Africa many children were named for historical American heroes such as Washington and Lincoln. Noting that Powell had traveled there, he added, “There may be a couple called Adam Powell.” Powell shouted back, “Careful Jack!,” amid roars of appreciative laughter.)
Louis Martin was delegated to deal with Powell. He learned that if Powell agreed to go on the road for Kennedy he expected the campaign to provide him with luxury accommodations and a limousine at every stop. When the congressman suggested that with $300,000 he could set up a voter registration drive, Martin laughed. Powell eventually required “a sizable financial inducement”; it was approved by Steve Smith, cost unknown. Throughout the fall Powell demanded new outlays from the Kennedy campaign. Martin recalled giving him $5,000 one Saturday while the congressman was enjoying a massage in the House of Representatives gymnasium. Martin tucked the money in a book he handed Powell and rationalized, “We were paying for the speeches.”
Powell and his associate, Ray “the Fox” Jones, the Democratic Party leader in Harlem, embroiled the campaign in one minor scandal. They claimed to have a copy of a racially restrictive real estate covenant linked to a Nixon-owned property and sent out a flyer underlining its exclusionary language and adding the word “Shame!” Wofford learned that mailing the document was a violation of law and called Jones. “Ray,” he said, “we have been distributing something we shouldn’t have been.”
“You’re a little late,” Jones told him. “The FBI has just been seeing me this morning.”
The Kennedy campaign learned to work with Powell and Jones and other colorful figures, but their vicissitudes with the black politicians in New York paled beside the trouble caused by a four-ring circus of strife featuring Tammany Hall, the state’s liberal bloc, a Kennedy Citizens Committee yearning to be free of the party organization, and the reappearance of Paul Corbin, the Kennedy operative who kept showing up like the proverbial bad penny.
The Kennedy brothers, weary of dealing with Carmine DeSapio and Mike Prendergast, exacerbated relations with the New York bosses by fitting into their general election campaign two men who were bound to antagonize them: the artist William Walton, tapped to be in charge of Kennedy’s Citizens Committee in the state, and Corbin, the unorthodox character from Wisconsin, sent as a troubleshooter without the hint of a portfolio.
Tammany had already sneered at the selection of Walton; in fact the Democratic organization claimed they had a commitment from the Kennedys that there would be no separate group in the state. Mix into the stew a lot of factional fighting, and New York had all of the ingredients for an explosion. DeSapio and Prendergast were already at war with the reformers. Meanwhile New York’s Mayor Wagner was “becoming more and more a source of disrupting things,” Prendergast claimed, because he was “playing ball” with Alex Rose, the leader of the Liberal Party, who clearly stood “against the organization.”
Matters were made worse when Robert Kennedy introduced the Tammany bosses to two men who would be working for him in New York: Corbin and Ben Smith, a Kennedy friend from Massachusetts who had teamed with Corbin during the Wisconsin primary. “What the hell does a man from Wisconsin know about New York?” Prendergast snorted.
Robert mollified him by saying, “They don’t know a thing, Mike. They’re just fellows who are sort of making a little survey and looking over the state.” In fact Smith and Corbin were being sent upstate to find fresh leadership for the Citizens Committees.I
The Tammany leaders agreed to send one of their allies, Pat Fischer, with Smith and Corbin to help with what they were told was to be a survey. Within a week Fischer, horrified, called Prendergast, insisting, “You better do something about this.” Corbin was recruiting upstate voters to overthrow the party organization. “This guy Corbin is drunk. He’s at the bar. He says that you and DeSapio are captives of the Italians and the Jews; that you and DeSapio have to go.”
Another angry upstate party official warned Tammany Hall of Corbin: “If you don’t have this guy out of here in five hours, I’m going to send somebody out to work him over.”
In Corbin’s version he was a freelance operator unleashed on the New York organization by Robert Kennedy, who told him, “Just do as I told you, just like you’re back in Wisconsin,” where Corbin had been a disruptive force in some circles. “It didn’t take a week before the whole thing spread through the state,” Corbin recalled proudly. Word was being passed that “there was a guy coming, Corbin, who was a son of a bitch, who’s going to kick out DeSapio and get rid of the gangsters, get rid of the crooks.”
The Tammany twosome complained bitterly to the Kennedy campaign. DeSapio and Prendergast made two trips to Washington to meet personally with Robert Kennedy. At another point Robert delegated Seigenthaler to deal with them. “He didn’t want to listen to Mike Prendergast mouth about it,” explained Seigenthaler. “It was sort of pathetic to see these two so-called powers in the Democratic Party coming down on their hands and knees to plead about the way the citizens’ groups were acting in upstate New York.”
There was an inherent conflict between independent Kennedy groups and party organizations in other states, Seigenthaler said. “It happened all across the country. . . . By and large, those problems were worked out. But there were times, especially in New York, when they did not work out.”
(Most regular Democratic organizations and the citizens operations managed to work smoothly; in Michigan, for example, the two forces respected a strict division of labor between big cities and smaller communities. On the other hand, California remained the same faction-ridden problem it had been all year, and the discord would help cost Kennedy the state.)
In New York hatred boiled over. Prendergast despised Walton: “The guy was a problem. He used to tiptoe around here in a pair of sneakers with his handkerchief up his sleeve. I threw him out once. I told him: ‘Don’t come around here until you’re dressed properly.’ ” When Walton suggested that Eleanor Roosevelt be invited to speak at an event, Prendergast snapped, “Mind your own goddamn business.”
Walton too was harsh in his recollection of the squabble. He referred to DeSapio as “the Italian, evil man.”
When Kennedy went to Harlem, all of the belligerent parties were on the dais with him. Walton said the Tammany bosses “openly snubbed Mrs. Roosevelt and Governor Lehman.” And Kennedy noticed. “Jack was outraged,” recalled Walton. “And he said, ‘You know those cannibals. I want nothing to do with them. Nothing to do with them!’ ”
Behind the farce, however, was an understanding that New York was must-carry territory, the largest electoral vote prize of them all.
I After the election Smith was chosen to occupy Kennedy’s Senate seat until Kennedy’s youngest brother, Ted, came of constitutional age and could run for the position in 1962.