CHAPTER 8

Driving with Kennedy

ON A TUESDAY in early December 1959, I spent the night in the Travelers Hotel outside New York’s LaGuardia Airport to depart on New York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s chartered Eastern Airlines jet early the next morning for South Bend, Indiana, beginning a trip to explore his chances for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination. I was so excited I could hardly sleep, anticipating my first travel with a presidential campaigner. I had to act cool, however, as though I were an old hand on the political trail—befitting a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

The plane was filled with some thirty people from the news media, including a few big-timers but mostly reporters from Albany and New York accustomed to covering the governor. They all were male and even more liberal than the White House reporters covering President Dwight D. Eisenhower but unlike them were in love with the politician they covered. “Rocky,” as he was now called for the first time in his fifty-one years, was accessible to any reporter who wanted to talk to him, and in addition held two news conferences every morning (the real one for print reporters and then a shorter one for TV cameras, whose presence was objectionable to the dominant print media).

It would be hard for today’s ultraserious journalists to imagine what fun it was on the campaign circuit then. A poker game most nights, and drinking around the clock. Everybody started the morning with a Bloody Mary. Near the end of the trip when Eastern Airlines ran out of vodka, reporters nearly rioted. Flight attendants solved the problem by mixing the Bloody Marys with gin. Nobody complained.

A ringleader in fun making was the New York City bureau chief of the Gannett newspapers: short, rotund, balding, with a cigarette between his lips and a drink in his hand. It was Jack Germond. He was only three years my senior, and we both enjoyed tobacco, alcohol, and politics. It began a friendship spanning more than forty years. Germond worked hard, and so did I. Besides my daily coverage of Rockefeller, I published one front-page leader and two editpagers in ten days—considered phenomenal at the Journal.

Rockefeller’s message to party regulars: He was “a card-carrying Republican,” who got his start after college with a job on the local health board given him by the Westchester County party “boss.” While Vice President Richard Nixon at that point never strayed from the Eisenhower line, Rockefeller took positions to the right of Eisenhower and Nixon—advocating resumed underground testing of nuclear weapons and compulsory arbitration to settle crippling strikes.

After ten days, Rockefeller’s staff expressed satisfaction that the trip had gone well and predicted their chief would announce his candidacy within thirty days (as I reported in the Wall Street Journal ). Then just before Christmas, Nelson Rockefeller, not for the last time, surprised the political world. He announced he would not seek the presidential nomination, publicly complaining that party regulars had sewed it up for Nixon.

I believe Rockefeller could have won the nomination. Party regulars told me all during the December trip that if the governor could beat Nixon in just one primary, they would take a close look at him. Rockefeller could have won New Hampshire and, if he had, Wisconsin was tailor-made for an upset. Nixon’s base in Wisconsin relied on Catholics, who were determined to cross into the Democratic primary that year to vote for Kennedy.

Rockefeller as the Republican nominee, I am convinced, would have beaten Kennedy by carrying New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, all states that Nixon lost. Rockefeller’s administration would have been hardly less liberal than Kennedy’s but much more orderly, particularly in foreign affairs. I cannot believe Rockefeller would have wandered into war in Vietnam without a plan for winning it or that he would have been buffaloed by Nikita Khrushchev. On the other hand, Rockefeller as president would have forced a long postponement of the desirable realignment into conservative Republican and liberal Democratic parties. This might have eliminated a Goldwater candidacy and a Reagan presidency. Big government would have gotten even bigger, without the mitigation of Kennedy and Reagan tax cuts.

Personally, I was devastated by Rockefeller’s decision. I was then a one-issue voter attracted to which candidate was the toughest cold warrior, and Rockefeller fit that description. In truth, though, I was most upset by not being able to cover a slam-bang intraparty slugfest between Rockefeller and Nixon. Nor did having to focus on Nixon for the campaign year ahead appeal to me. Our relationship started poorly in the 1960 election cycle, and did not get better during the next three decades.

         

THE FIRST TIME Richard Nixon took notice of me resulted from a leader in the Wall Street Journal on March 31, 1960, co-authored by Al Otten and me. In bygone days before the Journal hired high-priced pollsters, its reporters would accost people at random in shopping centers and on street corners. Otten and I over the course of a week questioned hundreds of Wisconsin voters about that state’s hot Democratic presidential primary between John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey. We found Kennedy ahead, which is the way the primary turned out. But comparing notes, we also discovered many Wisconsin voters who said they had voted for Eisenhower in 1956 and would under no conditions vote for Nixon in 1960.

The resulting Otten-Novak story declared that Nixon “appears to be in serious political trouble,” with the front-page headline blaring that “He Faces Uphill Fight for Presidency.” Veteran Washington Post reporter Carroll Kilpatrick picked up the story and ran a page-one piece on it. Otten’s unknown collaborator was incorrectly identified by the Post as “Robert O. Novak,” but I was still thrilled. Richard Nixon was not so thrilled, I was told by his aides. He ranted about reporters drawing these conclusions from an amateurish, unscientific poll. He was right. Nixon won Wisconsin in November.

Nixon was even hotter when he picked up the Journal of April 25 to read my leader reporting that presidential candidates now “judiciously leaked” the polls they commissioned “to sway the course of politics.” I was evenhanded in exposing this chicanery on a bipartisan basis, but Nixon was only interested in what I wrote about his campaign: I revealed “the latest of a series of private polls leaked by the Nixon camp to counteract his falling rating in public polls.”

A furious Nixon complained to the Journal—not to me, not to the Washington bureau chief, but right to the top. He called Bernard Kilgore, president of Dow-Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and complained that Novak was anti-Nixon. Kilgore said merely he would pass this on to Warren Phillips, the paper’s managing editor. I was walking into my little Georgetown apartment when the phone rang with Phillips on the line to relay Nixon’s complaint. “What should I do?” I asked. “Nothing,” Phillips replied. That was the joy of working for the Wall Street Journal.

         

IN THE EARLY autumn of 1959, I was invited along with the other sixteen reporters in the Wall Street Journal ’s Washington bureau for dinner with Barney Kilgore at a suite in Washington’s Sheraton Park Hotel. I was surprised to see that Al Clark was not present. Kilgore started by saying that he wanted to find out what was good and what was bad about the way the bureau was run, adding that everything said would be strictly off the record. From whom? Clark obviously. As deftly guided by Kilgore, the conversation turned into an auto-da-fé against the unpopular bureau chief. I remember only two staffers present who defended Clark, and I—the bureau’s newest member—was one of them. Kilgore had decided to replace Clark, and wanted evidence that he had lost control of the bureau.

But the publisher’s real complaint against Clark was that he was not Scotty Reston. Barney Kilgore was building a great national newspaper and wanted his man in Washington to be as much a presence in the capital as James Reston of the New York Times and his predecessor, Arthur Krock. Hardly anybody in Washington knew Al Clark. He was replaced by Henry Gemmill, a golden boy of the Wall Street Journal who had been the paper’s managing editor at age thirty-one and was now a roving reporter. Keeping his managing editor’s salary of $50,000 (in 2007 dollars, $342,000), he was in 1960 the highest paid reporter in America. Gemmill knew far less about government and politics than Clark and never showed interest in educating himself, but he was a superb packager of the news.

Gemmill displayed that talent soon after arriving in Washington when Rowland Evans, ace congressional reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune, and I separately got hold of the same Democratic memo warning that continued attacks on Nixon could boomerang by making him the object of sympathy. I wrote it as an interesting but not earth-shaking story, and the new bureau chief called me into his office. Gemmill told me he thought we had a leader if we punched up the prose. The memorandum should be described as “prepared secretly, circulated privately and now given the closest attention by key party figures.” I wrote this, word for word. My story appeared in the left column of the Journal ’s page one, while Evans’s was buried inside a Saturday edition of the Herald-Tribune. Rowly had been beaten, and he would remember it.

Gemmill became the first Journal staffer since Kilgore to be taken into the Washington Gridiron Club and the paper’s first Washington bureau member ever to appear on a Sunday television interview show. But he never became another Arthur Krock or Scotty Reston. No WSJ bureau chief was a major Washington figure until Albert Hunt many years later.

Al Clark’s heart was broken, and he turned down offers to become a reporter-at-large for the newspaper and finished out his career at U.S. News & World Report with largely administrative duties. I had been given another illustration of the dangers of being a corporate employee.

AT EIGHT THIRTY on a Friday morning early in February 1960, I took a call in the Senate Press Gallery. It was Senator John F. Kennedy complaining about an item in the “Washington Wire” weekly column that morning in the Wall Street Journal reporting that his campaign for the presidential nomination was losing momentum. “Bob,” he said, “how can you say that when we haven’t even had a primary yet? Why don’t you come out to Wisconsin and see what’s really happening?”

The Wisconsin primary on April 5 was the first test for Kennedy’s strategy of winning the nomination by entering every possible primary. Fear of nominating the first Roman Catholic since the Al Smith disaster of 1928 had to be overcome by Kennedy demonstrating his electability in the primaries. Only Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota was also entering the primaries, but one primary loss could be fatal for Kennedy. Waiting to seize that opportunity were two serious candidates: Lyndon B. Johnson and Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri. Or would “non-candidate” Adlai E. Stevenson slide in as the party’s nominee for the third straight election?

With his customary generosity to a junior colleague, Al Otten opened the way for me to go to Wisconsin in early March. Although Kennedy and Humphrey were both liberals who disagreed on little, their contest was bitterly divisive for Wisconsin Democrats. One night I went to dinner at a Madison steak house with the state’s pro-Kennedy Democratic state chairman Patrick Lucey (a future governor) and his fiery Greek-American wife, Jean. She spotted two young former Lucey aides who had gone over to the Humphrey campaign and started shouting: “You little sons of bitches! You traitors!” All the while, Pat was remonstrating: “Jean, please, please.”

I hit the hat trick again during my first week in Wisconsin—a leader and two editpagers. On the March 10 editorial page, I tried to describe vivid differences in the two campaigns.

He [Kennedy] makes the ordeal of campaigning as painless as possible: Saving time by flitting about the state in his twin-engine plane, keeping about as close as any campaigner ever can to his schedule, finding time each evening for two hours of rest and privacy in his hotel room….

Mr. Humphrey, on the other hand, maintains a frenetic pace, fighting against time by racing across the countryside in a chartered bus but making a shambles of his schedule before his 18-hour day is over….

Whatever inward tension he might feel, Senator Kennedy sprawls in an airplane seat between stops, reading or quietly talking politics with aides and reporters. Bone weary as his bus tries vainly to reach the next town on time, Senator Humphrey nevertheless conferences excitedly with a campaign planner or delivers animated lectures to reporters on the Soviet menace and the need to preserve the family farm.

After this column was published, a young Kennedy supporter named Harris Wofford (a future U.S. senator from Pennsylvania) wrote me a letter complimenting me on describing the difference between a liberal “whose spring has sprung” and one whose future was before him. I had tried to be fair, but perhaps my preference for JFK showed. He was great fun to cover, while being with HHH was an ordeal.

After my March visit to Wisconsin, Kennedy gave me a ride back to Washington in his plane, the Caroline. When we got to National Airport, Kennedy asked me where I lived. When I said Georgetown, he said he lived there too and would give me a lift home. It was a wild ride, with the senator driving his convertible at breakneck speed and looking at me out of the corner of his eye to see how frightened I was.

On April 5, Kennedy won the Wisconsin primary. The last real chance to stop him was in the West Virginia primary on May 7.

         

LESS THAN A week before the West Virginia primary, LBJ’s aide George Reedy entered the Senate Press Gallery with an invitation. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who had been bragging he was “keeping the store” in Washington while Kennedy and Humphrey campaigned, was going to step out that Friday and Saturday on a three-state tour of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. He was inviting the regular Senate press corps to come along. Restricting the traveling news media entourage to his faithful Senate claque would guarantee more favorable coverage. Unfortunately for Johnson, however, I was among the Senate regulars.

The three stops were carefully selected. East Liverpool, Ohio, was the constituency of the mercurial Congressman Wayne Hays, who had defected from Kennedy after endorsing him and now backed Johnson. Then on to Pittsburgh, where Mayor Joseph Barr was making signs that he would break Kennedy’s hammerlock on Pennsylvania by supporting Johnson. Finally, the windup in Clarksburg, West Virginia, a state where LBJ had many supporters who wanted to kill the JFK candidacy by backing Humphrey in the upcoming primary.

Reporters traveling with Johnson expected that, following a Saturday Democratic fund-raising dinner in Clarksburg, the majority leader’s personal plane would go back to Washington. Not so. Reedy informed us belatedly that Johnson was headed for the LBJ ranch in Texas to finish out the weekend and would not return to Washington until Monday. We were all invited as guests at the ranch. The alternative was to somehow find our way home from rural West Virginia. We all went to Texas.

On Sunday, the ranch was inundated by Texas politicians (including a future speaker of the House, Jim Wright), all singing the praises of their host to the non-Texas reporters. It was a nonstop eatathon, drinkathon Sunday starting with a huge breakfast of thick bacon and deer sausage, followed by an immense barbecue lunch, and, before all that could be digested, a sit-down steak dinner. Johnson had never been so nice to me, personally driving me on a tour of his ranch in his Lincoln convertible.

This era of good feelings between the majority leader and me ended abruptly Monday morning when Johnson’s plane, returning to Washington, stopped for refueling in Nashville. At the airport somebody bought a copy of that day’s Wall Street Journal and gave it to Lyndon, who I was told was infuriated by the headline: “Sen. Johnson Gaining Little Support Among Northern Politicians in Bid for Nomination.” What followed in my report was even more stunning:

He can bedazzle convention delegates with his Texas charm, impress them with his self-assurance, surprise them with his little-known talents as a stump speaker. But despite the onslaught, Northern delegates continue to express the same lingering doubt:

“I’m afraid he might hurt the ticket in this state.”…

There is no question that the Texan is opening Northern eyes to his skills as a campaigner. But it seems doubtful that he has opened them nearly enough to turn to him as their choice for president.

I exposed in detail how flimsy were LBJ’s hopes. In Ohio, Congressman Hays could not even control the delegates in his own district. In Pennsylvania, Mayor Barr’s admiration for Johnson as “a leader of men” did not translate into delegates. In West Virginia, Johnson had to depend on Humphrey to break JFK’s lock on the nomination.

At the Nashville stop, a Johnson aide asked me whether I had dictated the story Sunday from a telephone at the ranch. I said that I had. “Well,” I was told, “the senator considers this a distinct violation of his hospitality.” I asked how I was supposed to transmit my story. I was told that I should not have written that kind of story at the ranch. That was LBJ’s attitude toward the press: bring them into your warm inner circle, and expect—indeed, demand—a quid pro quo.

         

ON THE DAY after my unfavorable report on his travels, Lyndon Johnson had a lot more than me to worry about. On May 10, Jack Kennedy trounced Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia, three-to-two.

To keep open the prospect of a brokered convention, Johnson’s agents had done everything possible behind the scenes for Humphrey. But Joe Kennedy bought the presidential nomination for his son in West Virginia. Howard Norton, reporting from Charleston, wrote in the May 11 Baltimore Sun: “Votes were being bought and sold openly in the streets of this city today.”

To my knowledge, the Wall Street Journal was the only news organization that tried to find why all those West Virginia Protestants voted for Jack Kennedy. Two of the paper’s best reporters, Joe Guilfoyle from New York and Roscoe Born from Washington, were sent to West Virginia for five weeks. We were all sworn to secrecy, and this effort did not become known for forty-six years (in Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot).

Born wrote a carefully documented report of how a presidential nomination was purchased in West Virginia through illegal, clandestine payoffs to sheriffs who controlled the voting process. The story was killed by the newspaper’s high command in New York. The official internal explanation was the refusal of sources to sign affidavits, but the real problem was the story’s predictable impact just before the Democratic convention in Los Angeles. The word inside the newspaper was that Barney Kilgore ordained it was not the place of the Wall Street Journal to decide the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.

         

KENNEDY’S “SMASHING UPSET victory” in West Virginia, Otten and I wrote on May 12, “all but clinches” the nomination. Even so, a Johnson-for-President office was set up in midtown Washington at the Ambassador Hotel. I found the bejeweled wives of Texas congressmen stuffing envelopes and answering telephones. I met John Connally, brought up from Houston to run the campaign, and found him urbane and charming—nothing like his political patron, LBJ. In hand-to-hand combat with Bobby Kennedy for delegates, Connally lost most of them but was preparing a coup for the biggest prize in the west.

Jack Kennedy had gone seven-for-seven in primary elections but passed up certain victory in California, the last scheduled primary with the rich reward of eighty-one delegates. State Democratic Chairman William Munnell, majority leader of the State Assembly, pleaded with the Kennedys not to provoke a contested primary against favorite son Governor Pat Brown that would open deep rifts in the California party. In a secret meeting in Carmel, the Kennedys agreed to stay out in return for a commitment from Munnell to hand over the delegation once Brown won the primary.

Was California really Kennedy’s, ending any doubt about the nomination? On my first reporting trip to the Golden State for a big Democratic dinner attended by all the candidates, less than six weeks before the national convention, I found the delegation in play, with LBJ’s operatives working hard to keep JFK from cashing in on the Carmel commitment.

One source for my analysis was Joe Cerrell, Munnell’s young executive director of the State Democratic Committee. I had dinner in Los Angeles at Trader Vic’s in the Beverly Hilton Hotel with Cerrell and his pretty blond girlfriend (and future wife), Lee Bullock, who also was a political operative. As I consumed one mai tai after another without taking a note, Joe and Lee never dreamed that anything they said would appear in the Wall Street Journal of June 3, 1960.

It did. I reported that “talks with scores of party leaders and convention delegates discloses a fragmented delegation with substantial backing” for Stevenson and “lesser support” for Johnson and Symington. The unwillingness of the newly desirable California Democrats to commit themselves to Kennedy was reflected in my story by this quote from Cerrell: “California Democrats are something like a girl who has just got rid of her teeth braces and thrown away her glasses; she doesn’t say yes to the first suitor.”

After we both returned to Washington, Senator Kennedy telephoned me with a complaint. “Bob, you really got this one wrong,” he told me. “We have California all wrapped up. If we don’t, I’ll eat your story.”

         

LOS ANGELES IN 1960 was the first convention I covered. Arriving in Los Angeles the week before the convention, I wrote on the editorial page of July 7 that Kennedy “is tantalizingly close” to the nomination despite “eleventh-hour anti-Kennedy outbursts,” which I proceeded to analyze. Arriving in LA a day after me, Al Otten expressed to me his resentment that I had rushed in to write the very piece he said he had planned himself.

During my two years with the Journal, Otten had shared political coverage with me and been kind in other ways. When I was suffering from the breakup of my marriage, Al and his wife, Jane, provided advice and consolation. With my Ford convertible in temporary possession of my estranged wife, the Ottens loaned me their Volkswagen Bug to drive up to Cape Cod (a kindness I repaid by burning a cigarette hole in the front seat). His complaint in Los Angeles was the first sign that this Journal veteran might resent his pushy young colleague—a factor in a major decision in my life two years later.

The July 7 piece was the first of three editpagers I wrote from the Los Angeles convention. The second two would be processed by Vermont C. Royster, the illustrious editor of the Wall Street Journal, once he arrived in Los Angeles. Short and stocky with a thick North Carolina accent, Vermont Connecticut Royster was a formidable character. He ended World War II as the captain of a destroyer escort, and thereafter conveyed the image of being on the quarterdeck of a warship.

My editorial page contributions had been handled in New York by Royster aides who seldom changed them. In LA, I was to get very different treatment from Royster. The first piece I gave Royster commented on the lack of passion among convention Democrats as they prepared to nominate Kennedy. When I entered the WSJ workspace in the Biltmore Hotel the next morning, Royster handed me an “edited” version of the column. “I made a few changes heah and theah,” he drawled. In fact, he had completely rewritten the first six paragraphs in his lyrical style that could not have been more different from my matter-of-fact prose.

“Roy, I would like to make one more change,” I said. I took out a pencil, crossed out “By Robert D. Novak” at the top and replaced it with “By Vermont C. Royster.” He stared at me without smiling, and I was scared to death. Would the old naval commander chew out this insolent staffer? Would he send me back to Washington? Would he fire me? “Well,” he finally said softly, “let’s see if we can have a meeting of minds.” We worked together on a third version that retained my prose with a few Roysterish touches. The final editpager I wrote from LA was processed by Royster with minimal changes. I had done the right thing to impress Vermont Royster, and henceforth he was my staunchest advocate in the Journal ’s executive hierarchy.

In addition to my editorial page contributions, I was assigned a front-page leader on John F. Kennedy and daily news stories. There was not much time in Los Angeles for horsing around, but I slipped away late one night to the Cinegrill Bar of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, a notorious pickup place. I never had been good at this, but I made contact with a cute English girl working as a nanny in Beverly Hills. She showed little interest in me, until I revealed I was covering the convention. “Oh,” she squealed in her working-class British accent, “do you think I could meet Jack Kennedy?” It was clear to me that if I was going to have any fun with her, the answer had better be yes.

Kennedy was doing the rounds of state delegations, and I brought along my English friend to one such reception. Kennedy rewarded each delegate with a handshake and grin, accompanied by a brief word before moving on. But Jack Kennedy was a sucker for pretty girls. He lingered with us a few moments as they talked about what part of England was her home. Then he asked us: “Where did you meet?” I broke an awkward silence when I said: “In a bar.” Kennedy laughed delightedly. I was afraid she would be offended, but she was walking on air after her conversation with John F. Kennedy.

The Sunday before the convention, the big, boisterous California delegation caucused at the cavernous NBC studios. State Democratic Chairman Munnell had welshed on his Carmel commitment to Kennedy. While he now publicly endorsed Stevenson, he was plotting with Connally behind the scenes as a crypto LBJ man. Joe Cerrell, Munnell’s aide, told me that when his boss reached the senator in the receiving line at NBC, Kennedy declined to shake his hand. A roll call of California’s 162 delegates showed an edge for Stevenson, with Kennedy in second place.

The California caucus proved the high-water mark of the Johnson-Stevenson collaboration. Kennedy was nominated on the first ballot Wednesday night, and all that remained was picking a vice president.

That presented a problem for the Wall Street Journal. I had already written the JFK profile as the right-hand column leader in Thursday’s paper, and it was locked in early Wednesday. We also needed a profile on the vice presidential nominee, whose identity would not be revealed until late Wednesday afternoon, with the deadline approaching for our nationally published newspaper.

We had asked JFK campaign manager Bobby Kennedy for help. Strictly for guidance and not to be published, would he give us the names of all possibilities as his brother’s running mate? We would then write a profile on each, and at the last minute slip in the story on the one selected. He gave us three names: Senator W. Stuart Symington of Missouri, Senator Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson of Washington, and Governor Orville Freeman of Minnesota. We all thought it odd for the little-known Freeman to be in that company.

I don’t believe Bobby intentionally misled us. I came to believe Freeman already had been chosen, and Bobby put up the two senators as decoys. Bobby knew about the selection of LBJ only a few hours before we did.

As the staffer who knew Johnson best, I was assigned the rush job. With no time to write this story, I dictated off the cuff to the New York desk. “This attempt to win the election by adding strength to the ticket in Southern, Border and some Western states,” I said, “involves the calculated risk of losing Negro and labor voters in the North.” What I did not write (because I did not appreciate it) was that Kennedy could not have possibly been elected president without Johnson on the ticket.

On Friday morning, the newly nominated John F. Kennedy was proceeding through the Biltmore’s lobby on his way to a Democratic National Committee meeting to exert his new power by purging the anti-LBJ Paul Butler as national chairman and replacing him with Scoop Jackson. Followed by reporters and television cameras, Kennedy motioned me over. I congratulated him on his nomination, and he responded by recalling my prediction of troubles in California: “You were right. If you have a little mustard, I’ll eat it right now.” I can’t imagine any other presidential nominee recalling a foolish statement at the moment of his greatest political triumph. That was the style that personally endeared Jack Kennedy to people who harbored doubts about his capacity.