CHAPTER THREE Aboard the “Caroline”
During the presidential campaign of 1960, Senator Kennedy and his aides traveled across the country in the “Caroline,” the private plane named for his daughter.
FROM SEPTEMBER 4 TO NOVEMBER 8, 1960, Dick was a member of the small traveling team that crisscrossed the country with Kennedy on his private plane for sixty-eight days of nonstop campaigning.
Dick knew from the start he was embarking upon an enormous adventure. It was as if he had been sailing in a small, protected harbor in Washington; now, he suddenly found himself tossed on the open sea where the waves, wind—everything—was larger and wilder.
For the past ten months, he had tracked the candidate’s progress on a map in the Senate office. Dick had been briefed about the people’s reactions to the senator’s speeches and provided with stacks of information that catered to his shifting audiences throughout the primaries. To date, however, most of his knowledge about the candidate had been gleaned from impressions and observations of others—newspapers and magazines, office chatter, conversations with reporters.
Now that he was scheduled to join Kennedy every day, he would be able to make his own observations. If the earlier pace in Washington had seemed frantic and burdensome, it was now total immersion. Food and sleep were, of course, necessary, but secondary. There was no outside life.
The “Caroline,” christened for Kennedy’s daughter, was a Convair 240, the first private plane used by a presidential candidate during a campaign. With meticulous care, it had been modified into a luxurious flying executive office, complete with desk, typewriter, filing cabinet, mimeograph, and small kitchen. There were several plush couches and four chairs that could be converted into small beds for Ted and Dick, the two-man speechwriting team. Dave Powers, Kennedy’s longtime friend and companion, and Kenny O’Donnell, master of advance scheduling and logistics, occupied the other two chair/beds. The far corner was the domain of Pierre Salinger and members of the traveling press corps. Kennedy, captain of this crew, had his own suite of bedrooms further aft on the plane.
If Ted and Dick worked like a tag team, writing speeches to order in the field, Robert Kennedy commandeered the entire campaign organization from back in Washington. The whole apparatus was a far cry from the cottage industry Dick had found upon entering the Senate Office Building the year before. The campaign included a research staff, a team of academics, a financial team, and advance men in every state—all sending information both to headquarters in Washington, and to the staff on the “Caroline.” Consequently, the plane itself was no more the entire campaign than an orbiting spaceship was independent of Mission Control.
“You were all so young,” I marveled to Dick after looking up the ages of the team. “The candidate was forty-three; Bobby Kennedy and Pierre Salinger, thirty-five; Ted Sorensen and brother-in-law Steve Smith, thirty-two; and you—”
“Twenty-eight,” he interrupted with a trace of vanity, “youngest of the lot.”
Following the campaign’s official opening on September 7 at Cadillac Square in Detroit, the “Caroline” headed west to Idaho and Oregon. During rare moments of downtime, some played cards while others worked in silence or napped. Sorensen would often diagram his drafts on yellow legal pads as Dick pecked away on his portable typewriter.
Early on in the campaign, Dick recalled for me a game they would play, a contest to see who could name the most presidential slogans from previous campaigns. “Vote yourself a farm” Dick volunteered from Lincoln’s 1860 campaign, and someone said, “Stop showing off, Goodwin!” “Keep cool with Coolidge,” someone else called out. “Stand Pat with McKinley,” another offered. On and on they went, rapid-fire: TR’s “Square Deal,” FDR’s “New Deal,” “Return to Normalcy with Harding,” Truman’s “Fair Deal,” Stevenson’s “New America,” “Get on a Raft with Taft.”
“That would have been hazardous,” I interjected, laughing, “considering Taft’s three hundred pounds!”
“We were in the midst of this game of wits and historical recall,” Dick continued, “when we became aware that the senator himself had paused in the aisle, leaning forward on the back of a chair, eavesdropping in amusement. All of a sudden, he said, ‘You know, there’s something to your game. Republicans are always calling for a return to normalcy, contentment, the status quo. And we’re always pushing forward with our square deals and new deals and fair Americas. But don’t let me interrupt you.’ That our game had set something in motion in Kennedy’s mind would become clear several days later.”
SEPTEMBER 9, 1960
That occasion was an address Kennedy was to deliver—one on which Dick had worked with special care—on September 9 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. It would be Kennedy’s first major speech devoted to civil rights in the national campaign. Here was an opportunity to imagine what Kennedy might do as president. We found the draft Dick had prepared along with a transcript of the speech the candidate had actually delivered. Dick’s draft reiterated the progressive conception of the presidency that had been spelled out in the January speech but was now applied to civil rights.
An overflow crowd of seven thousand people jammed the Shrine Auditorium that evening. Three thousand more were turned away. No longer was Kennedy searching out an audience as during those solitary days at the start of the primaries. Clearly, people were now searching out the candidate. “It was by all odds,” one reporter noted, “the biggest and most enthusiastic indoor crowd he has drawn on his current political swing.”
Dick remembered pacing nervously in the back of the room as Kennedy walked toward the podium. He was eager to gauge the reception to the speech he had drafted. The crowd was on its feet chanting “We Want Jack” for three minutes as Kennedy smiled happily from the podium. Their enthusiasm infected the candidate. This was a more relaxed and animated John Kennedy than Dick had seen before. He opened with a rare personal comment. “First, I would like to have you meet—well, my wife is home having a baby.” The crowd burst into laughter and the senator actually seemed to be enjoying himself. Dick said he could feel encouragement well up from the crowd: “Kennedy stoked their zeal with his off-the-cuff riff, building on the game of political slogans our team had played on those long flights.”
“You can tell in this country, by contrasting the slogans of the two parties, what the two parties stand for. McKinley, ‘Stand Pat with McKinley’; ‘Retain normalcy with Warren G. Harding.’ ” The laughter began to rise and spread. “ ‘Keep cool with Coolidge,’ ” he added. “Had enough?” he asked the crowd. “The weakest slogans in the history of American politics.”
“For the moment, I was so rapt with his remarks,” Dick told me, “I almost forgot my draft.” One after another, the proud and active slogans of the Democratic Party were recited to a crescendo of applause: “A New Freedom,” “A New Deal,” “A Fair Deal,” all leading to “A New Frontier” for the United States. (The phrase “New Frontier” had first appeared in a draft Sorensen wrote for Kennedy’s acceptance speech.)
The spell cast by the candidate’s improvisation and utilization of the slogans to illustrate a sharp divide that would help define the coming campaign worked so well that Dick was no longer apprehensive when Kennedy, at long last, retrieved the speech on civil rights from his pocket.
Kennedy promised to fight for civil rights with all the powers of the presidency, “as legislative leader, as Chief Executive, and as the center of moral power of the United States.” As legislative leader he would fight for the bills necessary to ensure every American’s constitutional rights. As chief executive, he would be prepared to end racial discrimination in every arena of federal activity. He then specifically pledged that he would issue “an Executive Order putting an end to racial discrimination in federally subsidized and supported housing.”
Finally, Kennedy promised he would use the bully pulpit to educate the country about “the great moral issues” involved in civil rights.
Dick remembered the singular excitement he felt when he heard the housing pledge and the reference to educating the country on “the great moral issues.” But it was not long before Kennedy pocketed Dick’s speech, and returned to his extemporaneous performance, which pumped up the energy of the crowd. He never reached Dick’s favorite line, “If the President does not himself wage the struggle for equal rights—if he stands above the battle—then the battle will be inevitably lost.” Kennedy concluded with the wish that future historians would look back at the present moment and say, “There were the great years of the American life, the 1960s. Give me those years.” The crowd erupted in a deafening standing ovation. To Dick, it seemed bizarre that once again Kennedy spoke as if he were looking back on things to come.
Buoyed by the rapture unleashed in the auditorium, the senator shot Dick a smile and a compliment later that evening: “Nice speech, Dick.”
“Both of them,” Dick acknowledged, knowing full well that the substance of his speech had been drowned out by the virtuoso improvisation that so gratified the Democratic audience.
Reviews the next day spoke of Kennedy’s remarkable, rousing ability to improvise, contrasting it to his more restrained and undemonstrative performance when closely adhering to the text. “So much for my speech!” Dick said as we read the reviews. The whole occasion, he admitted, had left him conflicted—entranced and exhilarated, yet somehow disappointed.
Three months later, after the election had been won, President-elect Kennedy asked Dick to compile a list of the specific promises, vows, and pledges he had made during the campaign. We found that complete list in Dick’s archive—eighty-one promises in all—including three explicit proposals for medical care for the aged, federal aid for education, and an overhaul of immigration laws.
“Not one of these passed during the Kennedy administration,” I reflexively pointed out to Dick. “And every one of them became law under Lyndon Johnson.”
Before an argument had time to flare up, however, there it was on the list before us: Promise #52. Kennedy’s pledge to put an end to discrimination in federal housing by signing an executive order. And in an added flourish, later in the campaign he had pledged immediate action on the order by “one stroke of the pen.”
“Who the hell wrote that,” a nettled Kennedy had asked as he went over the list with Ted and Dick. “I didn’t,” Sorensen readily offered.
Dick told me he never had less desire to take credit for something he had written than at that moment. He stayed quiet. “Well, then,” Kennedy said, “I guess nobody wrote it.”
Some couples plan an evening together so they can stream the latest series or watch a major sporting event. When Dick and I reached the box containing materials related to the four 1960 debates between Kennedy and Nixon, we decided to have what Dick called “a debate date.” We settled in front of Dick’s computer with a bottle of wine, and watched the first debate that had taken place in Chicago more than a half century earlier on September 26, 1960.
To prepare for our “date,” I had combed through Dick’s debate box. There were pages torn from a yellow pad upon which Kennedy had scrawled requests for clarification or new information. I skimmed reams of material and statistics organized by subject. I knew from Dick’s earlier comments and accounts offered by Sorensen and Mike Feldman (the head of research), who had flown in from Washington to assist, what lengths this trio had gone to prepare in the days before the debate. Anticipated questions had been reduced to one hundred. A stack of 5 x 8 index cards summarized, in single sentences, both candidates’ positions on every conceivable issue, along with suggested rejoinders to Nixon’s likely charges. The candidate committed to memory statistics and numbers to support his arguments concerning every domestic subject. Facts, it was hoped, would give him a mature heft, control, and authority.
I asked Dick to explain how some of these various items found in the box had come into his possession. As the junior member of the team, Dick had been designated the “pack mule,” charged wherever they traveled with dragging a heavy nylon suitcase and a Sears footlocker that contained a library of memos, drafts, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and whatever research materials the team might find necessary. The suitcase was packed with the fabled “Nixopedia,” a compilation of every statement Nixon had made on taxes, civil rights, education, domestic policy, and foreign affairs. This assemblage of statements, misstatements, and deceptions had been indexed in an oversized black binder.
“Imagine,” Dick said, raising his wineglass to toast the cell phone on the small table beside us, “I could have slipped all the contents of that suitcase and the footlocker into my jacket pocket if I’d had YOU in those days.”
“We hardly slept the night before,” Dick remarked. “Sorensen was working on an opening statement. Mike Feldman and I had arranged and rearranged the stack of index cards, checked and rechecked the facts.”
SEPTEMBER 26, 1960
On the morning of the debate, as the trio approached the candidate’s suite at the Ambassador East, Dick was apprehensive—as if the most important exam of his life loomed ahead. Had they done everything they could to prepare Kennedy for what they all knew could well be the hinge of the entire campaign?
“How did Kennedy strike you that morning?” I asked Dick.
“Calm, almost eerily so,” Dick said, recalling him propped up in bed in a T-shirt and khakis, barefoot, his breakfast tray still beside him. To conserve his voice, Kennedy spoke as little as possible, writing out questions on a yellow pad, things he wanted checked or confirmed. Sorensen showed him the draft of the opening statement he had prepared, but it was not to Kennedy’s liking; he felt it was too ornate for television, and wanted the sentences short, crisp, and straightforward.
Then Kennedy began to review the stack of index cards, stopping every now and then to suggest a shorter answer or ask for clarification. One after another, he would flip through the cards as if playing a game of solitaire. Once each card had been committed to memory, he would flip it away, until the carpet beside the bed was strewn with index cards.
In the early afternoon, when the team had taken a break to gather more supporting data, Dick realized that he’d left his yellow pad full of scrawled questions on the table in the room adjoining Kennedy’s bedroom. When he returned to retrieve it, he saw—to his amazement—that on this day of all pressurized days, the candidate had retired for a nap! Unlike the candidate’s aides, who had reached the point of near total exhaustion, Kennedy understood the importance of pacing himself, of relaxing and replenishing his energy.
Dick very quietly gathered up the pages and swiftly took his leave to get ready for one final session, after which Kennedy would have a light meal, put on his dark suit, and head to the CBS studio.
Reportedly, Richard Nixon spent most of the day in seclusion at the Pick-Congress Hotel, accompanied only by his wife, Pat. A seeming contrast might be drawn between the two candidates in the degree of preparation, organization, and forethought they invested in an event that would forever alter the course of modern presidential politics. Seventy million people would be watching the debate, two thirds of all the adults in the United States.
“Are you nervous?” Dick asked, smiling and patting the back of my hand as we were about to start watching the debate. “Who do you think will win?”
“I want to hear what you think as we go along,” I said.
“Oh, so now you want a running commentary? At the movies you always tell me to keep quiet.” Dick’s tendency to burst forth with witticisms in the middle of movies invariably embarrassed me. Somehow he had never learned how to whisper.
After CBS anchor Howard K. Smith introduced the candidates, I immediately noticed Kennedy’s dark suit, sharply defined against the gray backdrop, in contrast with Nixon’s gray suit, indistinct against the gray background. Kennedy’s composed posture, hands quietly folded in his lap, one leg crossing the other, similarly contrasted with Nixon’s body language, painfully ill at ease, lips pursed, eyes shifting, legs splayed awkwardly beneath his chair.
“It’s not fair!” I blurted. “It’s a debate, not a beauty contest.”
“What does fair have to do with it?” Dick retorted.
Unable to watch with an impartial eye even after five or six decades, Dick relished the contrast: “It’s like Twenty-One with JFK as glamorous Charlie Van Doren and Nixon as poor Herbie Stempel. A leading man versus a character actor.”
John Kennedy’s eight-minute opening statement, improved and reshaped from Sorensen’s earlier draft that morning, declared his resolve that we must do better at home in order to strengthen our leadership abroad. With statistics absorbed from the campaign and sharpened during the days of rehearsal, he presented a quick survey of steel and power production, education, farming, as well as a comparison between the productivity of scientists and engineers in the Soviet Union and the United States. All suggested that we had become stagnant and were in danger of falling behind. With his staccato delivery punctuating a drumbeat of facts and figures, he unfolded a narrative of dissatisfaction with our domestic policy that, if we did not get moving, boded ill for our stature in the world at large.
For me, the most persuasive moment of the debate occurred when Kennedy deployed statistics to illustrate how the lack of equal opportunity affects the trajectory of Black lives from the moment they are born: “I’m not satisfied until every American enjoys his full constitutional rights. If a Negro baby is born—and this is true also of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in some of our cities—he has about one-half as much chance to get through high school as a white baby. He has one-third as much chance to get through college as a white student. He has about a third as much chance to be a professional man, about half as much chance to own a house. He has about four times as much chance that he’ll be out of work in his life as the white baby. I think we can do better.” To this narrative Nixon made no comment.
From the start of his own opening statement, the vice president was on the defensive, eager, as his running mate Henry Cabot Lodge had cautioned him during the one phone call he had taken that afternoon, to avoid “an assassin image.” Again and again, he agreed with Kennedy’s ultimate goals; their differences, the conciliatory “new Nixon” said, were not in the destination but in the means to get there.
Long before our bottle of wine was gone, I began to feel a slight sympathy for Richard Nixon, his effort to gamely smile while sweat glistened on his chin in the harsh television light.
“Close your eyes,” Dick chuckled. “Don’t watch. Make believe it’s radio. He’ll improve.”
And it was true—as commentators had noted at the time. If one listened on the radio, the debaters seemed more or less equal. Richard Nixon had counterpunched, making his debating points and arguments capably to answer Kennedy’s assertions.
The more striking impression on television, however, belonged to Kennedy. He seemed to ignore Nixon altogether, making his case directly to the people on the other side of the camera. Watching the two men side by side, the contention that Vice President Nixon was the more seasoned and mature candidate, possessed of greater authority and capacity to lead, had vanished before the first debate was over.
Dick loved to tell the story of his ebullience following that first debate. As they settled on the “Caroline” that night, bound for a day of campaigning in northern Ohio, Kennedy relaxed with his favorite meal: a bowl of tomato soup and a beer. He then proceeded to evaluate the entire debate, reviewing where he might improve and what he might amend. To Dick, it all seemed too muted. Unable to restrain his enthusiasm, he exclaimed, “We’ve got it won now! Not just the debate but the election!” Kennedy smiled, finished his beer, and said, “Next week, Cold War and foreign policy. Better get some sleep and get ready.” Dick told me he learned something important that night. Kennedy was a veteran sailor, a professional. Regardless of circumstances, he kept steady and stable, on an even keel.
Yet without question, something decisive and positive had happened for Kennedy during the debate, something that could be seen, felt, and heard in Ohio the next morning. The crowds hadn’t merely doubled, they had quadrupled, as had the intensity, excitement, energy, and high-pitched screams. Those millions of television sets that had been tuned in to the debate the night before had given birth to a political celebrity of the first order.
As the YouTube video ended, and our “debate date” was drawing to a close, my mind wandered back to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, each of which had lasted three or four hours, through hot afternoon sun or torch-lit nights, while the debaters fleshed out their positions, explored complexities, and called on history to amuse and entertain the enormous crowds who were not simply spectators but participants, regularly and often loudly voicing their own opinions. “Hit ’em again, harder, harder” was a common chant. When someone in the crowd yelled to Lincoln that he was two-faced, he drew roars of laughter, the story is told, when he responded: “If I had two faces, do you think I’d be wearing this face?”
“Both Kennedy and Nixon were stiff, wary,” I said to Dick, “neither had an amusing or reflective moment.”
“For good reason,” countered Dick. “A TV debate is not exactly a format for levity, complexity, or reflection. Time is short, stakes are enormous. A single, serious mistake could prove fatal to months of campaigning. Style, of necessity, towers over substance.”
OCTOBER 1960
After midnight on October 14, 1960, the “Caroline” landed at Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Three weeks remained until Election Day. The daily toll of exertions, the level of fatigue, had begun to show. Everyone was bone-tired as the caravan set out for Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan.
The previous evening, the candidates had faced off in a third debate, their faces three thousand miles apart but brought together through the novel magic of the split screen—Nixon in California, Kennedy in New York. Across the continent, they hammered at one another in what many would consider Nixon’s best performance of the debates.
As Kennedy headed from New York to Michigan in early morning darkness to arrive at the college campus, there was little to suggest that one of the most memorable and enduring moments of the entire campaign—a signature expression of his future administration—was about to be ignited.
It was nearing 2 a.m. by the time the cars and buses reached the Michigan Union, where Kennedy was scheduled to catch a few hours of sleep before starting on a morning whistle-stop tour of the state. No one with the campaign had expected to find upwards of ten thousand students waiting in the streets to greet the candidate. Neither Ted nor Dick had prepared remarks for the occasion. Flourishing placards and signs of support, the crowd chanted Kennedy’s name as he stepped from his car and headed up the stone steps to the Union.
As Kennedy ascended those steps, Dick distinctly remembered making a hasty exit to the cafeteria with Ted Sorensen. “We missed the whole thing. We were famished. At the very moment that Kennedy proposed the Peace Corps, I was eating a piece of lemon meringue pie.”
Kennedy began with good-natured flattery, referring to himself as “a graduate of the Michigan of the East, Harvard University.” He then fell back on his familiar argument that the 1960 campaign presaged the outcome of the race between communism and the free world. But suddenly, he caught a second wind, and swerved from his stock stump speech that was shot through with pledges and promises of what he would deliver as president. Instead, he asked the gathered young people what they might be willing to contribute for the country:
How many of you, who are going to be doctors, are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer—whether a free society can compete.
What stirred John Kennedy to these spontaneously formulated questions is not clear. Weariness, intuition, or, most likely I suspect, because it was the last thing in his mind from the debate that had taken place only hours before—whether America’s prestige in the world was rising or falling relative to the communist nations. The concept of students volunteering for public service in Africa and Asia might bolster goodwill for America as these third-world countries (as Kennedy had characterized them in the debate) wavered “on the razor edge of decision” between the free world and the communist system.
As he drew “the longest short speech,” as he called it, to a close, Kennedy candidly confessed that he had come to the Union that cold and early morning simply to go to bed. This drew raucous laughter and applause that continued to mount when he threw down a final challenge: “Let me say in conclusion, this University is not maintained by its alumni, or by the state, merely to help its graduates have an economic advantage in the life struggle. There is certainly a greater purpose, and I’m sure you recognize it.”
When prospective students tour the University of Michigan today, there is a bronze plaque at the entrance of the Michigan Union: “Here at 2:00 a.m. on October 14, 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy first defined the Peace Corps. He stood at the place marked by the medallion and was cheered by a large and enthusiastic student audience for the Hope and Promise his idea gave the world.”
Kennedy’s remarks had lasted only three minutes. Yet something extraordinary transpired: The students took up the challenge he posed. They organized, they held meetings, they sent letters and telegrams to the campaign asking Kennedy to develop plans for a volunteer Peace Corps. They signed petitions pledging to give not two but three years of their lives to help people in developing countries. There is a direct line between their actions and the altered speech Kennedy would deliver several weeks later in San Francisco, where he formally proposed a Peace Corps.
The Peace Corps “might still be just an idea,” Sargent Shriver, the first Peace Corps director, later recalled, “but for the affirmative response of those Michigan students and faculty…. Without a strong popular response [Kennedy] would have concluded the idea was impractical or premature. That probably would have ended it then and there. Instead, it was almost a case of spontaneous combustion.”
During the last week of the campaign, Dick met with two Michigan graduate students—a married couple, Alan and Judith Guskin—who had lodged in his memory because they were leaders of both the letter-writing campaign and the petition drive. As I began reflecting on this period of Dick’s experience with the Kennedy campaign, these former student activists provided the critical entrance into the Peace Corps story that had been missing for me: the perspective of the students themselves.
Locating the Guskins in California and Florida, now in their eighties (no longer married but still friends), made it possible for me to tell a more intimate story than the standard narrative of “the Great Man” proposing a Peace Corps that was consequently realized. If ever an event illustrates the meaning of the term “grassroots”—how a spark can ignite an enthusiasm that will change hundreds of thousands of lives and literally encircle the world—such an event happened that night.
Both Alan and Judy were in the process of writing memoirs. Both have led lives built on their commitment to help others. And both look on October 14, 1960, as the night that changed their lives. Judy recalls that it transformed her from a graduate student into a citizen armed with a greater purpose than just a degree and a job. I asked them to tell me about the mood of the crowd as they waited for Kennedy’s delayed arrival. Alan described a noisy, good-natured gathering, buoyed by intermittent announcements over the loudspeaker, explaining that although bad weather had hindered the candidate he was headed their way.
Judy explained that there was a 10 p.m. curfew for female students at the time, which the dean of women imposed (in loco parentis) with an iron fist. If she caught female students out beyond this curfew, or kissing in public, she would call their parents. But on this night, the dean had a problem. Despite the curfew, women made up half the crowd. There was no way for the dean to enforce the despised lock-up rule once the women had assembled there. Consequently, every half hour an announcement was made, extending the women’s curfew an additional half hour.
“The campus was alive,” Alan recalled. “They called us the Silent Generation, but there were stirrings within us. Many of us had just listened to the third Kennedy-Nixon debate. A spirit of activism had been building for months.” The seminal event that had jolted the students’ participation, Alan believed, was the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. He spoke, in particular, of the sit-ins that had spread throughout the South the previous semester after four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, refused to leave a Woolworth’s lunch counter that had denied them service. That spring, Alan and Judy had marched and demonstrated in front of their local Woolworth’s in solidarity with the sit-in movement in the South.
“The energy was there,” Judy stressed. “JFK came to the right campus at the right time.”
In the days that followed, students took Kennedy’s questions to heart. For Alan and Judy, however, discussion crystallized into action when Connecticut congressman and former ambassador to India Chester Bowles came to UM to speak on Kennedy’s behalf. After a student inquired about Kennedy’s challenge, Bowles mentioned that his own son and daughter-in-law were currently helping to build a school in Nigeria. “A light bulb went off in my head,” Alan said. “This was something concrete, something real. I turned to a fellow student and asked: ‘Would you be willing to do something like this?’ The emphatic response was YES!”
Alan and Judy went to a late-night restaurant after Bowles’s talk. Then and there, they drafted a letter to the campus paper, The Michigan Daily, calling for students to write to the Kennedy campaign in support of a program that would allow young people to serve abroad. The Daily’s editor at the time was Tom Hayden, already a committed activist, who, two years afterward, would draft the Port Huron Statement—the foundation for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
Hayden published Alan and Judy’s call for action, and continued to publicize their every initiative in the days and weeks that followed. With the help of the Daily, the idea of a petition drive (where each student would pledge to serve overseas for two or three years of their lives) caught fire. A group of faculty members came aboard, allowing the petition to circulate in classrooms. Within a week, a thousand signatures had been gathered.
The next link in the chain was the Michigan director of the Kennedy campaign, Mildred Jeffrey. Millie was “a force of nature,” Alan remembered. A leader in the labor movement, she would march with Martin Luther King Jr. and become a founding member of the National Women’s Political Caucus. It was this veteran activist who brought the students’ efforts to the attention of Ted and Dick. Dick told me that he had no sooner heard from Millie that these students were willing to volunteer a significant portion of their lives for public service, than straightaway he knew that this was no flash in the pan. They were deadly in earnest.
Dick worked with Sorensen to redraft an upcoming speech on foreign policy to be delivered at the Cow Palace in San Francisco to include a formal proposal for “a peace corps of talented young men and women, willing and able to serve their country in this fashion for three years.” The speech noted that the nation was “full of young people eager to serve,” specifically mentioning the commitment made by the UM students.
Dick’s hand can be readily detected in the closing lines, which used a favorite quote of his from the Greek philosopher Archimedes. “Give me a fulcrum,” Archimedes said, “and I will move the world.” Dick would later invoke the same line of Archimedes in the historic speech he drafted for Robert Kennedy to give in South Africa. He used it often in his own speeches; in fact, he quoted it so often in conversation that I began to imagine Archimedes as one of Dick’s friends.
The day Kennedy delivered the Cow Palace speech, Millie Jeffrey called the Guskins’ apartment. When Judy answered, Millie told her that Kennedy was flying from San Francisco to Toledo, and would like to meet with them and see their petitions. “Could you repeat that?” Judy asked, stunned.
The Guskins borrowed a car and drove to Toledo. “We waited on the tarmac for the ‘Caroline’ to land,” Judy recalled. “The senator got off the plane with Ted Sorensen and Richard Goodwin and they came over to the small group of us. Millie introduced us. And I had the honor of handing the senator the petitions.” A photographer from The Michigan Daily captured the moment when an eager Judy, her shining hair pulled back in a ponytail, clutched the sheaf of petitions before presenting them to the weary-eyed candidate, who is holding his outstretched fingers to receive her offering of proof. That photograph now resides in the Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston.
“I remember his intensity,” Judy recalled. “The way he listened.” These were words I had heard almost verbatim from many people in different places. With a smile, Kennedy assured Judy that he understood from Millie he couldn’t keep the petitions. They were the originals and the students needed them for organizing. But Kennedy wanted to hold them, to look over the ranks of their names. Their earnestness and conviction brought the reality of the proposal home.
“Are you really serious about the Peace Corps?” Alan asked.
“Until Tuesday [Election Day], we’ll worry about this nation,” Kennedy nodded, “after Tuesday, the world.”
Once Kennedy had departed the airport to deliver a speech on the American economy in downtown Toledo, Dick and Ted accompanied Judy and Alan for coffee. They talked of the Peace Corps and the upcoming election, then only five days away. Nixon had immediately denounced the idea of a Peace Corps, “a Kiddie Corps,” he called it, warning that it would become a haven for draft dodgers.
For both Judy and Alan, as for so many others, the Peace Corps would prove a transformative experience. The Guskins were in the first group to travel to Thailand, where they spent two of “the best years” of their lives. Judy taught English and organized a teacher training program at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok; Alan set up a new program at the same school in psychology and educational research.
“The values of the Peace Corps stayed with us the rest of our lives,” Alan said. “We learned respect for our own ground and respect for the ground of others with different cultures, religions, and languages,” Judy added. When they returned home, they served as founders of the VISTA program, LBJ’s domestic Peace Corps, and worked with the poverty program before completing their doctoral studies at UM. Alan went on to become a faculty member at the University of Michigan and later a senior administrator at several universities, including the president of Antioch, while Judy became a professor, as well as an educational consultant for school districts on issues relating to racial equality and refugee education.
For Dick, the Peace Corps, more than any other program of the Kennedy years, represented the essence of the New Frontier. After the inauguration, he would join the task force that created the Peace Corps program, using his position on the White House staff to help launch the organization. He was barely older than the typical volunteer. He, too, shared the common desire to find a greater meaning and purpose in life. It was not surprising to me that when Dick’s work in the White House later came to an abrupt and dispiriting end, he would find a home working with Sargent Shriver at the Peace Corps.
OCTOBER 1960
Curiously, Dick was able to offer little assistance when I tried to get a sense of what it was like inside the campaign during those final weeks before Election Day. He hardly had any distinct memories at all. “Depleted, nerve-worn, excited,” he said. “So exhausted from stress and lack of sleep, the whole thing gave way to a dream state. We were leery of standing still, we wanted to stay aggressive, but we were fearful of making mistakes.”
When I found Kennedy’s itinerary and speaking schedule for the final weeks of the campaign, I was filled with amazement. No wonder Dick’s memory was a blur. In the space of six days (beginning with his impromptu remarks on the steps of the Michigan Union at 2 a.m. on the morning of Friday, October 14, until his remarks at a Democratic dinner in New York the following Thursday, October 20), he delivered forty-three speeches: eleven in Michigan, after four hours of sleep, six in Pennsylvania the next day, three on a zigzag route from New Jersey to Delaware to Maryland on Sunday, six in Ohio on Monday, five in Florida on Tuesday, and twelve more in New York on Wednesday and Thursday.
Of necessity, the candidate relied heavily on repetition, shuffling a handful of speeches that shifted from criticism of the Republican Party to the historic importance of the present election, from economic stagnation at home, to the decline of American prestige abroad. Yet he also managed to deliver new policy addresses on ethics in government, Latin American affairs, and national defense.
The pressure was ratcheted up on the Sorensen-Goodwin speechwriting team as never before. They had spent the past two months in total campaign immersion, living and working beside one another. And what a team they formed!
On the evening of Sunday, October 16, at 6 p.m., after marathon days in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, Kennedy was scheduled to appear on Meet the Press. That afternoon, Dick had worked on preparing the questions for the show, while Ted was drafting the speech on ethics in government to be delivered in Wittenberg, Ohio, the next day. Ted traveled with Kennedy to Wittenberg while Dick stayed in the hotel in Middletown, Ohio, drafting the Latin American speech for Tampa, Florida. That evening, on the plane to Florida, Ted began working on the national defense speech for Miami while Dick went over the Latin American speech with Kennedy. When they arrived in Miami at 2 a.m., the speech on national defense was not yet finished.
The best description of the exertion, skill, and passion this tandem team demonstrated is found in Theodore White’s account of their nonstop, pedal-to-the-metal sprint to the finish:
They decided to work in shifts. Goodwin went to bed while Sorensen labored with a secretary until 5 A.M. When Sorensen went to bed at five, his secretary woke Goodwin after his three hours of sleep, to give him the Sorensen draft. Goodwin worked on that draft until eight, when he woke the Senator to present it to him. But now the Senator wanted substantial changes—to include nonmilitary aspects of the cold war as well as the purely military. At 8:30 Goodwin began the last draft, pushing his sheets to the mimeograph machine as he wrote.
… So, during the morning, as the candidate barnstormed and spoke at supermarkets and crossroads, the speech writers once more rearranged his words and ideas. Goodwin hailed a taxi when they had finished and sped out to intercept the campaign caravan and present the candidate with a finished text of his ideas on national defense; he intercepted the candidate at a toll gate on the Miami causeway, where he flagged the campaign caravan to a halt, delivering the final version to the candidate forty-five minutes before he was to adopt it as the defense posture of the next President of the United States. Then the two ideologues could take a cat nap; but that afternoon, as Kennedy delivered their Latin America speech at Tampa, they were up again, preparing quips and jokes to be used at the Alfred E. Smith Dinner in New York the following evening.
Out of this punch-drunk cloud, Dick remembered only one episode with any clarity because it was so unpleasant and because he was the cause of what James Reston in The New York Times called Kennedy’s “worst major blunder of the campaign.”
OCTOBER 20, 1960
Late in the evening on October 20, at the staff headquarters of New York’s Biltmore Hotel, Dick was hammering away on an anti-Castro statement for Kennedy to release the following morning. At first glance, the statement seemed similar to dozens that Kennedy had made during the campaign. It was a call for collective action against the new communist regime in Cuba.
It was then Dick ran afoul of his own rhetorical fluency. He wrote: “We must attempt to strengthen the anti-Castro forces in exile, and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro. Thus far these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our Government.”
In the normal chain of campaign protocol, the statement would have been shown to Kennedy before release. Dick called Kennedy’s room at the Carlyle to read it to him but was told he was already asleep. If ever the candidate needed sleep, it was that night; the next day was his fourth and final debate with Nixon, to be focused on foreign policy. If the statement was going to make the morning papers, it had to be released at once. After showing it to Sorensen, Dick let it go—the only public statement during the entire campaign Kennedy had not personally approved. Sorensen later called the uncleared statement simply “a vague generalization thrown in to pad out an anti-Castro program.” That’s not, however, how it was perceived at the time. It was the phrase fighters for freedom that stuck in the craw.
Little did Dick know at the time that the Eisenhower administration was secretly training a covert force of freedom fighter exiles in a scheme that would one day become known to the world as the Bay of Pigs. While Nixon was fully aware of these secret plans, he chose in the course of the debate to excoriate Kennedy’s statement as “shocking,” characterizing it as a dangerous proposal that risked World War III.
The next day, the newspapers echoed Nixon’s assault on JFK. “Such a statement by a man who may become president is reckless and indefensible,” observed The Pittsburgh Press, arguing that, “It seems another case of ‘shooting from the hip’—an unfortunate quality in a man who aspires to be president.” And The Arizona Republic advised the senator to “consult his college textbooks on international relations before making any more foreign statements.”
Kennedy was forced to issue a clarification. He never intended to dishonor any treaty obligations. He had intended to signal only “moral and psychological support, not military or political support.” Nearing the finish line of the campaign, with nerves frayed on all sides, it was a bad time for clarifications.
This period was one of the few times, Dick told me, that he had seen Kennedy openly peeved. Public outbursts of emotion or anger, yelling or screaming, were not his style. But Kennedy’s only reproach to Sorensen and Dick came in the form of irony: “If I win this thing, I won it,” he told them, “but if I lose it, you guys lost it.”
I often wondered what drove Dick and the core team around Kennedy to such exorbitant efforts and loyalties. Even in his eighties, Dick found no simple answer. “Excitement,” he said one day, and after hesitating, “a sense of shared purpose, idealism, and of course personal ambition.” Then, after another thoughtful pause, he said, “I realize now I had a young man’s hero worship for the man himself… I guess it boils down to a kind of love.”
NOVEMBER 8, 1960
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected president on November 8, 1960, by the smallest margin in the twentieth century. He won the popular vote by only 118,574 votes of the over 68 million cast.
For more than half a century, historians have debated what tipped the balance of the election to give Kennedy his razor-thin victory. In an election this close, any reason sufficed, and reasons abounded. Some, noting the surge that Eisenhower’s entry into the race produced toward the close of the campaign, have speculated that Nixon would have won if the president had lent his genial and grandfatherly glow to his vice president’s bid earlier on. Others have pointed to the selection of LBJ (bringing aboard Texas and six additional southern states), the impact of the televised debates, the listless economy. Still others credit Kennedy’s phone call to assist Martin Luther King Jr.’s release from prison.
Yet when all was said and done, Kennedy had worked longer and harder than Nixon. He had built the superior campaign, powered by a fierce core of believers.
In the weeks following the election, Republicans pressed claims of voting irregularities and provided anecdotal evidence they believed suggested fraud. Recounts were held in a few places, but those efforts were short-lived. The rancor died down and a peaceful transition was initiated.
After the election, Kennedy’s first announcement was his selection of Ted Sorensen as special counsel. This was the key post held by Colonel Edward House under Woodrow Wilson, and Harry Hopkins under FDR, and Dick felt that no one was more deserving than Sorensen. Sorensen would be the president’s “principal adviser on domestic policy and programs, his source of ideas, his draftsman of speeches, and messages.”
But when Sorensen announced that Dick, along with Mike Feldman and campaign adviser Lee White, would come into the White House as his assistants, Dick balked. He wanted to be involved not just in talking about policy, but in making it. He didn’t want to continue writing speeches for Ted Sorensen in a job that would be little more than a continuation of the campaign. He did not then foresee that language and policy were often part and parcel of the same action, like two logs that can make a fire.
Dick began to seek out other opportunities within the administration. When his search came to the president-elect’s attention, Kennedy called Dick into his office. “I hear you don’t want to work in the White House,” Kennedy said. Dick explained that he didn’t want to work under Ted and that he knew Ted was far more valuable than he was, so he thought he’d try something else. “You know how we do things,” Kennedy said in his customary cryptic manner. “I think you better stay on here for a while.”
Not by coincidence, from then on Dick received assignments directly from President Kennedy, and the three staffers were given the title assistant special counsel rather than assistant to the special counsel.
That small change signaled a large difference in titles. “It was a question of belief and power to get something done,” Dick told me, “proximity to power to make beliefs come true.”
Sorensen never forgave Dick. He considered it an ungrateful transgression. Their relationship would never again be as close as it had been. Ted believed he had plucked Dick up and made him who he was. Early in the campaign, he had relayed a conversation to Dick that he’d had with Steve Smith, Kennedy’s brother-in law. “I told him how remarkably you had managed to master our way of doing things.” What had first seemed a compliment quickly swerved into something else: “I added that any bright man given the same kind of direct, personal instruction would have done the same thing.” Dick had searched Ted’s face for a glint of humor, but none was to be found.
Four years later, when Dick was comfortably settled in the White House as LBJ’s chief speechwriter and policy adviser, he wrote to Sorensen:
I have been saddened by reports which have come to me from extraordinary sources [most certainly LBJ himself] of some of the critical comments you have made of me. I made many, almost fatal mistakes when I first came to government. I like to think they sprang more from inexperience, lack of knowledge and naivete, than from opportunism. In any event I have learned much, and painfully.
At the close of the 1960 campaign, I felt very close to you. Admiration is far too restrained a word to express my feelings. We had worked and traveled and lived and exchanged confidences together. In an unjustified romanticism—which I have since given up—I thought this meant something in terms of real friendship. I remember few things more vividly than trying to call you the morning after the election, not getting through, and not seeing you for a few days… I know this was pretty callow and innocent stuff, but it was there.
As you know, JFK asked me to stay… and history took its difficult and maturing course for me.
I have always been sorry about what happened.
JANUARY 9, 1961
Kennedy’s first speech as president-elect was scheduled for the Boston State House eleven days before his Washington inauguration. Since Sorensen was at work on the inaugural, Kennedy tasked Dick to begin drafting the Boston speech. By this point, having come through the primaries and the election, Dick had learned, he told me, to decipher Kennedy’s manner of giving directives, however indirect or roundabout:
“I was always fond of Lincoln’s goodbye to his fellow townsmen in Springfield, Illinois,” Kennedy had remarked. “It’s from his heart, and it’s short. That’s important.
“But Dick,” he concluded with a nod and a smile, “less God.”
Dick set to work reading and rereading Lincoln’s adieu until he had committed it to memory. In the decades that followed, he would often recite Lincoln’s “Farewell Address,” along with choice passages from Shakespeare, Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” with its “shot heard round the world,” “Casey at the Bat,” Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat,” and countless others. Whenever he saw fit, Dick would draw from his wide and eclectic repertoire and declaim in his sonorous voice—whether at the ballpark, on walks with me, at our favorite bar, or simply waking up in our bedroom to greet the day.
“My friends,” Lincoln had begun, speaking from the train platform as he set forth on his twelve-day journey to Washington,
No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing, when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail.
Arthur Schlesinger had forwarded a memo to Kennedy suggesting an excerpt from John Winthrop’s sermon to his shipmates on the flagship Arbella as they landed in New England, facing the challenge of creating a new government on a new frontier. “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” These words, the “city upon a hill,” first delivered more than three centuries before, is how John Kennedy’s farewell to Massachusetts would be remembered in history.
It was an emotional speech to write. If it was a nostalgic farewell for Kennedy, it was a trip down memory lane for Dick as well. Massachusetts was Dick’s home, the place where he was born, the place he went to college and law school, the place where his mother and brother still lived. It was with his state representative from Brookline, Sumner Kaplan, that Dick had battled for rent control and waged a fight to investigate discriminatory practices in sororities and fraternities on college campuses. Kennedy had often joked with Dick that they were two Brookline boys. Both had deep emotional investments in Massachusetts.
The night before his address to the State House, Kennedy slept in his old apartment on Bowdoin Street, the place Dick had first met him during the spring of 1958 and had prompted him to tell his friend George Cuomo that working with Kennedy “no matter how interesting, is bound to be a sort of dead end for one so young.”
“I bet it didn’t seem such a dead end that morning of January 9,” I remarked.
“Anything but,” Dick said. “I had changed a lot in those last two years and so had he.”
Despite the bitter cold morning, loud hurrahs and screams of hundreds of people greeted Kennedy as he emerged from his apartment at 10 a.m. before crossing the Charles River to attend a meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers. There, an equally enthusiastic crowd trailed him through Harvard Yard. “Speech, speech,” they cried. Grinning as he climbed the steps to University Hall, Kennedy jested, “I am here to go over your grades with President Nathan Pusey, and I’ll protect your interests.” That touched off an explosion of applause. After lunch with the overseers, Kennedy spent the afternoon at Arthur Schlesinger’s house, where he met with a small group of professors.
He then returned to the great domed Bulfinch building for his address to the joint session of the legislature. Following ancient tradition, two sergeants at arms—in frock coats and top hats, carrying white and gold maces—were granted permission from the presiding officer to admit the president-elect. He had briefly addressed this body only once fifteen years before, as a decorated Navy hero, accompanied by his grandfather and former Boston mayor John Francis Fitzgerald.
The president-elect was in “a nostalgic mood” as he began his speech. “For fourteen years I have placed my confidence in the citizens of Massachusetts…. For forty-three years—whether I was in London, Washington, the South Pacific or elsewhere—this has been my home; and God willing, wherever I serve shall remain my home. It was here my grandparents were born—it is here I hope my grandchildren will be born.”
On the draft of the speech, Kennedy had made several annotations, crossing out and inserting new words. Those small changes revealed a huge shift in perspective. They delineate an astute distinction between the days before the election and the day after. No longer was he placing his confidence in the voters, as the draft had read, but rather in the citizens. He was not asking for votes. There were no sides now. We were all working together.
This tribute from a native son produced tumultuous applause in the packed chamber. His delivery barely resembled the clipped voice from the early primaries, and his leisurely pace was no longer that of the candidate who had raced through his talks as if he were a nervous young student speaking before the class. This was the president-elect returning to his home state, channeling Abraham Lincoln, promising that as he created his new administration, he would be guided by John Winthrop’s recognition that “we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.”
And then he turned to the future, to the hope that when “the high court of history” came to sit in judgment of his administration, it would note that he had surrounded himself with men of “courage, judgment, integrity, and dedication.”
“These are the qualities which, with God’s help, this son of Massachusetts hopes will characterize our government’s conduct in the four stormy years that lie ahead,” Kennedy concluded. “I ask for your help and your prayers, as I embark on this new and solemn journey.”
Abraham Lincoln never came back to live in Springfield. Nor would John Fitzgerald Kennedy return to reside in Boston.