ONE EVENING near the end of the thronged, ceaseless journey toward election day, as we sat on the Caroline — the small twin-engine propeller-driven plane that carried the candidate and his staff — Ted Sorensen, who had spent years of unremitting labor helping chart the Kennedy course, turned and said to me, “Your timing was awfully lucky. You missed all those years of work, and got on board just in time for the victory.”
He was right, although I hadn’t planned it that way. For three years Kennedy and his staff had been traveling to endless meals of cooling meat and overdone potatoes, while I had been absorbed by law school exams, Justice Frankfurter’s demands, and the quiz show investigation. Nor were the rewards yet certain. I was personally sure that Kennedy would win, but my excessive confidence rested more on faith than knowledge of politics. In fact, we would tremble at the edge of defeat until the very end, and, had we lost, I would have been just another young ex-campaign assistant looking for a job. Still, I was very lucky, at least as judged by the parameters of Sorensen’s own spacious aspirations. I had been selected to accompany the Democratic candidate in a presidential campaign. Should he be elected, I was virtually certain of a position with responsibilities larger than those ordinarily entrusted to a youth just two years out of school.
As Sorensen reminded me of my good fortune, the Caroline suddenly began to shudder, striking turbulent air as it descended toward its landing somewhere over the Great Plains. Although I was vulnerable to fear of flying, there was no rush of anxiety as I leaned over to pick up a few papers scattered by our drop through an air pocket. Imprisoned in this tiny capsule of hollowed metal piercing the storm thousands of feet above the desolate, corrugated earth, I felt as secure as though I were in my Georgetown living room. Kennedy was on board. And we all knew that nothing could happen to him. He was destiny’s child, our talisman against outrageous fate. Throughout the plane the normal sounds of conversation, immune to the dangerous sweep of air, demonstrated that my companions shared my belief — this blind, irrational faith that, for a while, we were protected by the candidate’s immortality.
I still have Kennedy’s reading copy of a speech from that trip. The text, after reciting a litany of national goals, pronounces that “all this will not be accomplished in the first 100 days,” a reference to the opening months of the New Deal. On that page the candidate has carefully crossed out the number 100, and changed the phrase to “1000 days.” Merely a rhetorical flourish and, perhaps, a more calculated effort to avoid too clear an identification with Roosevelt’s revolutionary program. Nevertheless, with a single cramped movement of the pen, the mere addition of a cipher, Kennedy had drawn the boundary of his presidency and of his life. Thus the gods cryptically mocked the arrogant faith that provided such false sustaining comfort.
It was not a traditional first day on the job when in the fall of 1959 I entered Kennedy’s Senate office to begin my labors. There would be no period of orientation, no introductory lectures, but only the briefest of greetings — little more than acknowledgment of my existence — before Ted Sorensen handed me a folder crammed with memos, saying, “The senator is doing a two-thousand-word article on arms control, this is some background stuff on our position, we need it by tomorrow,” showed me to a desk, and disappeared behind a partition. Of course I didn’t know anything about arms control. But that didn’t seem to matter. The folder contained information from publications and academic advisers, along with previous Kennedy speeches. My job was not to make policy, not to create, but to translate the ponderous mélange of fact and opinion into a brief, readable piece suitable for a moderately ignorant public.
In the early evening, Sorensen, having completed whatever urgent task had absorbed him through the daylight hours, came over to my desk, read through the four or five pages I had completed. “Not bad,” he said and then, assuming the mantle of editorial revision, showed me where cuts could be made, complicated structure shortened, and, most important, where I might have deviated from the senator’s established position.
It was, at first, through Sorensen that I came to know the “Kennedy style” — the ordered structure of his analysis, the somewhat ordered cadences of his formal speeches, the general themes (“A great country that can be greater,” “Democrats lead while Republicans preside,” “The country’s sinking but it’ll swim again”) — which would frame the discussion of specific issues. Later, I would form a more directly personal view of Kennedy’s thought and manner of speech. But now, at the beginning, Sorensen was indispensable. He had worked closely with Kennedy for years, knew Kennedy’s ambitions and mind as well as any man. (No one ever really knew John Kennedy.)
Later I would have my differences with Ted Sorensen, but those old resentments have long since faded, leaving me with the memory of the exciting dawn days of my career when he was both model and mentor to the young apprentice politician. He was described by Teddy White as “self-sufficient, taut, purposeful, a man of brilliant intellectual gifts, jealously devoted to the President and rather indifferent to personal relations.” All true. But we were not a fraternal organization, or a group of college chums. Our relationship was shaped by the common commitment of our energies to a single goal, a bond that — until the goal was achieved — would be far stronger than mere friendship, if, ultimately, far more fragile.
I learned a lot from Ted about the craft of politics and political speechwriting. And he always appeared grateful at having found someone to share the burdens of his work, even if he seemed to look upon me less as a discovery than a creation. “I was talking to Steve Smith [Kennedy’s brother-in-law] the other day,” Sorensen said to me during my second month at work, “and I told him how remarkably you had managed to master our way of doing things. He said it was probably because you were working with me on a daily basis. That any bright young man who got the same kind of direct, personal instruction would have done the same thing.” He related the anecdote without a smile, looked toward me as if expecting some expression of gratitude for what, to me, hardly seemed a compliment.
Through the fall and winter of 1959 and early 1960, as I toiled to help meet the boundless flow of requests for speeches, articles, and brochures, I discovered that the demands of politics were insatiable; that the notorious saying “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” was misleading bravado. Either the going was always tough — which is partly true — or you kept going whatever the conditions — which is also true. Arriving at Kennedy’s office in the Senate Office Building, I and my handful of colleagues worked well into the night, our labors arrested only by a rational calculation of the need for sleep. While, in another building, the larger campaign structure was being constructed under the leadership of Robert Kennedy.
Late at night, leaving the office, we would stand for a moment, clearing our lungs of the stale office air, staring at the unlit office buildings, and, across the street, at the somnolent Capitol. The darkened windows, blending into the night-gray of the gargantuan stone structures, testified to the absence of the other guardians and leaders of the nation’s well-being. All but one. No matter how late we left the office, from across the street the night was pierced by a single lighted window from the office of the Senate majority leader. No one could outlast Lyndon.
My understanding of the campaign — of presidential politics in general — evolved gradually, through conversations, observations, experiences. Years later Justice Frankfurter told President Johnson in my presence, “That boy has politics in his blood.” I did not know whether the remark was intended as a compliment or a prescription for emergency dialysis. In any event, even if I had a natural talent for politics, understanding of the process, knowledge of “how it works,” comes only through experience, and I had entered that most exclusive and intense classroom of all — a presidential campaign.
“I don’t mind sticking it to old Ike,” said the senator as we sat on a bench in the deserted Butler Aviation terminal at Washington’s National Airport. It was a cold January day in 1960, and Ted Sorensen and I had come to meet him on his return from still another trip to the heartland, bringing with us a draft of the speech that was to be the informal inauguration of Kennedy’s presidential campaign. He had made the formal announcement of his candidacy twelve days earlier, to a crowd of reporters, family members, and staff gathered in the Senate Caucus Room. I was only in my third month with the senator’s staff, and this was my first participation in a major campaign event.
Scheduled for delivery at the National Press Club, the speech was intended to describe Kennedy’s view of the presidential office, a foundation for the message he would carry into the primary elections. Weeks of preparation, memos from presidential scholars, Kennedy’s own statements and private reflections had been distilled into a dozen pages, which asserted, in a litany of forceful clichés, that the role of the president was to lead, morally and in action, to take initiatives and not just react to crisis, to revive a flagging America and draw the nation to new heights of grandeur. Wreathed with quotations from legendary heroes and scholars of repute, the address was not an exercise in political science. It was intended as contrast and rebuke to the Eisenhower presidency — then perceived as a time of listless drift, presided over by a man unwilling to intervene against a gradual deterioration of American strength and spirit.
I had participated in shaping this draft with considerable enthusiasm, sharing, as I then did, the fashionable liberal contempt for this “do-nothing” man, with his confused syntax, who had somehow mesmerized huge numbers of people into thinking him half great. Gallup polls showed him to be the most popular incumbent since Roosevelt. In late 1959, during a presidential trip to a dozen nations, huge crowds stood in the drenching Italian rain and under the blazing sun of India to hail a triumphant Eisenhower. I and my colleagues tried to find reasons for this “unjustified” popularity, and, naturally, we found them: “He was the conquering hero of World War II”; “He was a benign, unthreatening person,” a kind of “father figure to the world.” Only much later, after years of turbulence and rivers of blood, did I come to understand how much I had underestimated Eisenhower.
It was true that his failure to deal with emerging domestic problems, particularly his reluctance to intervene in the growing racial crisis, had deepened the difficulties that his successors would have to confront. But it was also true that he brought the Korean conflict to a swift conclusion, and throughout his term he sent no Americans into combat. He was the first president since Hoover of whom this could be said, and he was to be the last for a long time. This was not merely good fortune. In Hungary and Cuba, Indochina and the straits of Formosa, Eisenhower resisted pressures for forceful intervention to which other presidents might have yielded. He kept the military under firm civilian control for the last time, warned of the alliance between big business and big defense that threatened the health of our economy, and strove, desperately but futilely, to bring an end to the Cold War. George Kistiakowsky, Eisenhower’s science adviser, once told me that after the collapse of his scheduled summit meeting with Khrushchev, Eisenhower, in tones of melancholy reflection, had told him: “My entire administration has been a failure. The one thing I wanted, thought I could achieve, to move from the arms race toward peace, is a shambles. The whole thing is a wreck.” Clearly the masses of India and Brazil, Italy and the United States understood something that those of us who were closer and more sophisticated failed to grasp. Eisenhower was a man of peace. He was infused by an essential goodwill toward his companions of the earth. They knew it. And they loved him for it. There were worse things than inaction. Much worse.
But this wisdom, so bitterly acquired, lay far in the future on this cool night as I watched the weary young senator scrutinize the pages that would form the foundation of his approaching campaign. Despite evident fatigue and the grotesque hour, no phrase was carelessly skimmed, no idea allowed to pass without reflection and judgment. I was struck by his attention to the smallest details of expression, a characteristic he was to manifest throughout the campaign. I was not then aware of how few politicians so meticulously guard themselves against the errors of subordinates.
Even though I and, I assume, Sorensen, firmly believed that Eisenhower deserved the most severe censure for the inadequacies of his leadership, his personal popularity was also a fact. The polemic we might have written, the one that conveyed our true opinion, had been tailored to the political realities of the day. The speech did not mention Eisenhower by name. One could not attack “old Ike.” Not personally. But the implications of Kennedy’s address were clear. His call for new leadership to lift America from its corrosive complacency was an implicit but harsh accusation of Eisenhower failures.
Sorensen and I, our manuscript in hand, felt compelled to warn the weary candidate that the speech would be so interpreted. He did not even look up from the draft. Our admonitions were superfluous. The man could read. The man was smart. And his laconic rejoinder, the reflection of a course already set.
What choice did he have? A Democratic candidate had to run against the Republican record. His opponent would be Richard Nixon, whose greatest strength would be the popularity of his predecessor. Although Eisenhower was contemptuous of Nixon, whose own animosity toward the president who never wanted him was widely known, the two men were joined by the most powerful of political ties: self-interest. For Eisenhower, the election of a Republican successor would be a vindication of his leadership; and Nixon, like some infertile bride, had to rely on Eisenhower’s teeming allurements to nurture his own fortunes into flower. (This was a reality that Nixon — in a now-familiar habit of self-delusion — would deny, until in the last desperate days of the campaign, he would, at the price of some inward humiliation, ask Ike to campaign for him. Until then he had been determined to make it on his own, while the proud Eisenhower sat in the Oval Office waiting for the request that came only after it was too late. The enormous response to Eisenhower’s last-minute emergence — ticker-tape parades, cheering crowds — made it clear that an earlier intervention would have put Nixon in the White House.)
For the next year, in hundreds of speeches, in continual assaults on the Republican party, on the Republican record, and on the Republican candidate, the name of Eisenhower was omitted. We even managed to find a way to accuse Nixon of having personally “lost Cuba” to Castro. On an earlier trip to that now-hostile island, the vice-president had praised the doomed Batista. That misguided support of a repressive dictatorship had fed the fires of anti-American revolution. Or so we said. Much later in the campaign, sitting in a hotel room during a trip to the barrens of Ohio, I handed Kennedy the draft of a detailed “documented” assault on the Republican loss of Cuba, the negligent establishment of a “communist base only ninety miles from our shores.” Kennedy read the speech in silence, looked up, and remarked, musingly, “Of course, we don’t say how we would have saved Cuba.” Then, handing the speech back, unamended: “What the hell, they never told us how they would have saved China.”
With his speech on the presidency Kennedy had staked out his claim, presented the terms of the message on which his candidacy was based, and which he must now carry to the handful of primary voters whose judgment — on the man and what he stood for — would be decisive.
The first of the contested primaries was to take place on April 5 in Wisconsin. (Kennedy was an unopposed “favorite son” in New Hampshire.) In late March, sitting at a counter in some small Wisconsin diner, cradling an early-morning cup of coffee in his cold-numbed hands, Kennedy turned and gestured to workers approaching the factory gate where he would soon take his stand. “You think I’m out here to get votes,” he said to his companion. “Well, I am. But not just their votes. I’m trying to get the votes of a lot of people who are sitting right now in warm, comfortable homes all over the country, having a big breakfast of bacon and eggs, hoping that young Jack will fall right on his face in the snow. Bastards.” Then, reluctantly getting off the stool: “What the hell. They’ll take me if they have to. Let’s get started.”
The preceding fall, just before joining the Kennedy staff, I had attended Justice Frankfurter’s annual sherry party for his law clerks, past and present. In his customary dialectic fashion, the justice asked each of the more than twenty men who he thought would win the Democratic nomination. Adlai Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson were the clear preferences. I was the only member of this august company to select Kennedy, and my opinion was already hopelessly compromised by inexperience, desire, and ambition. But I was not merely getting myself “on the record.” I believed it. To me, Kennedy represented a new generation of believers. The others were politicians rooted in the past, out of touch with the reawakened aspirations of the nation. How could he be denied?
Quite easily, as it turned out. A single significant failure for Kennedy, an act of political daring by one of his opponents, would probably have been enough to keep him from the nomination.
“Let’s get this over quick,” Kennedy said just before the long campaign for the nomination was about to begin, “before they all find out how little they want me.”
Kennedy was right. They didn’t want him. “They” being the political leaders who would control most of the delegates to the national convention. The Democratic party as such did not exist. (Nor does it now.) It was simply a convenient label for a collection of state parties, which would assemble every four years to nominate a presidential candidate. There was the Unruh party in California, the Lawrence party in Pennsylvania, the Daley party in Illinois, the Johnson party in Texas, the Kennedy party in Massachusetts. And for those states not blessed with a single dominating leader, the party was guided by a handful of local leaders able to influence some significant portion of the state delegation.
The foundations of this traditional structure were already beginning to weaken. But in 1960, it constituted, for purposes of the nomination, the Democratic party, although the Kennedy campaign would prove, over time, to have accelerated a process of terminal decay.
Now, of course, the old bosses are gone. Lest we be too quick to exult in their demise, remember that this departed system nominated Roosevelt, Truman, Stevenson, John Kennedy. Not such a bad record compared to the current process whose selection is dictated by primaries, television, and, above all, by organization and money.
In the late winter of 1959, as the first presidential primaries approached, Kennedy had already spent four years traveling the country, campaigning for local candidates, attending party functions — piling up obligations, creating loyalties, charming and impressing the locals. But the most important leaders, those with power to decide the convention, still stood aside — waiting, calculating. Although most of them were New Deal liberals — and Kennedy was suspect to the party’s liberal wing — their hesitation was not predominantly ideological. They wanted a winner. And John Kennedy was too young, too inexperienced, and, above all, too Catholic. “Look at Dave Lawrence” (governor and boss of Pennsylvania), Kenny O’Donnell, Kennedy’s most trusted adviser, explained to me; “he loves Adlai, but Adlai’s not running. At least that’s what he says. He’s a Catholic himself, and he’s thinking of the next election. He doesn’t want Jack running all over the country stirring up the Catholic issue. It can only hurt him. And he doesn’t think Jack can make it anyway.”
Most of these leaders liked Jack Kennedy. Several of them, especially Mayor Daley of Illinois, owed something to the senator’s father, Joe Kennedy, obligations incurred during their own rise to power. But politics was their business. And business was business. They would go along — willingly or with reluctance — only if Kennedy could make their choice appear reasonable or, even better, inescapable.
Early in the primary season, I expressed some doubts about a particularly vicious attack on Kennedy’s opponent, Hubert Humphrey. Hubert had a strong following in the liberal wing of the party, I objected, and if we got too mean then, it might hurt us in the election. “Fuck the election,” Larry O’Brien — calm, sagacious, long-time political counselor — instructed me. “There won’t be any election, not for us, if we don’t get nominated. That’s all we can think about. If we make it, then we can worry about Hubert.” Political lesson No. X: “Keep your eye on the ball. Don’t risk the present for the sake of the future. Save statesmanship for the White House.”
There was no master plan, no grand strategy such as — it is reputed — Hamilton Jordan prepared for the aspiring Jimmy Carter. In 1956, Robert Kennedy had accompanied Adlai Stevenson’s campaign to, in his father’s words, “See how it was done.” And also, we might add, to see how it shouldn’t be done. “No wonder people thought Adlai was speaking over their heads,” said John Kennedy in the middle of his own campaign. “That’s just what he was doing.” Kennedy himself had spent four years campaigning within the party. He knew the players, those who counted and those who blustered; understood the levels of power, who controlled them, what could move them, how they might be influenced to his support even against their internal inclinations.
And he knew that the trail to the prize lay inexorably through the thicket of the presidential primaries — in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Indiana, Nebraska, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Oregon. So, with the exception of Ohio and California, he threw his hat into every single binding presidential primary where no legitimate favorite son was running.
Meanwhile, three of the leading contenders — Stuart Symington, Lyndon Johnson, and above all, Adlai Stevenson — waited for the prize to come to them. In physical appearance, Missouri Senator Stu Symington probably came closest to everybody’s idea of what a president ought to be. At fifty-eight, he was strikingly handsome, a large, athletic man with piercing blue eyes, an easy smile, and a ruddy, healthy complexion. He was favored by a poll of House Democrats, by a large number of labor leaders, and by many of the best-known professional politicians. And his biggest supporter was former President Harry Truman. But Truman, who viewed primaries as civil wars that tore the party organization apart, was one of the voices who persuaded Symington to eschew the primary route in favor of positioning himself as the perfect compromise candidate at a convention they all assumed would be deadlocked.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Lyndon Johnson, like Symington, assumed that the primaries would produce no clear-cut victor and that the Senate majority leader would then be able to cash in on the enormous accumulation of political debts his Washington leadership had earned him. He believed mistakenly that the leaders of the Senate would also command the state delegations. Favored by a poll of Senate Democrats, by most southern leaders, and by many professionals, Johnson sat back and waited.
Meanwhile, in Springfield, Illinois, Adlai Stevenson also waited. “Deep down he wants it,” a close friend said in the winter of 1959–60. “But he wants the convention to come to him, he doesn’t want to go to the convention.” Having endured a brutal string of primaries in 1956, he had no desire to go through it again and didn’t feel that he had to. If the people didn’t know who he was and what he stood for after two presidential races, then they would never know.
With Symington, Johnson, and Stevenson waiting in the wings, only one Democrat followed Kennedy’s lead into the primaries. Thank God — or fate — for Hubert Humphrey! The impassioned, intelligent senator from Minnesota, a leader of the party’s liberal wing, supported by followers of unmatched intensity, was also compelled to enter the primaries in pursuit of his presidential ambitions. He did not have the same problems as Kennedy. He had become firmly identified with the more ideological segment of the Democratic left, and had antagonized the South with his heroic plea for civil rights during the 1948 national convention. He could not expect to be nominated unless he proved that he could win elections outside his home state of Minnesota. And by taking on Kennedy, he transformed the primaries. If Kennedy had won without significant opposition, his victories would have been meaningless. Against the formidable Humphrey, they were to be decisive.
One should not wonder that some candidates ignored the primaries of 1960 in the expectation that the convention would ultimately turn to them. Until 1960 no Democrat had ever won the nomination because of the primaries, although a few had been driven from the field by defeat. There were only a handful of states that even conducted presidential primaries, and in some of those the results were not binding on the delegates. Until Kennedy, the most successful contestant in primary elections had been Estes Kefauver. And he never came close to the nomination. The primaries were largely symbolic exercises, interesting but inconclusive tests of a candidate’s skill and appeal. But that was just what John Kennedy needed: a symbol. A demonstration that — contrary to the established wisdom — people would vote for a young, inexperienced Catholic candidate for president of the United States. And even this demonstration would not have been enough except for the huge, largely unnoticed, growth of national media — corporate journalism and the unprecedented reach of television — which would bring local contests in places like Wisconsin and West Virginia into the consciousness of the nation, mini-Superbowls of politics. Now the Kansas farmer and the California commuter alike would follow the distant sounds of our favorite national sport, witness the victory, absorb enduring impressions of the victor. Political leaders in states remote from the campaign could sense their own constituencies’ response to the Kennedy candidacy, and knew that they could ignore it only at a price. And possibly, just possibly, if sentiment was strong enough, the price might be very high. It would be an overstatement to claim that the primaries forced the bosses to choose Kennedy. But, for many, it tipped the balance.
Wisconsin was supposed to be the knockout blow. Humphrey, decisively and humiliatingly defeated in the state neighboring his native Minnesota, would be forced to withdraw, allowing Kennedy to sweep through the remaining primaries. Sorensen and I, along with other staff members, toiled urgently, sleeplessly in the Washington office, unleashing a prodigal burst of energy as if entering the final lap and not — as it proved — only the beginning of a difficult marathon. But the center of the campaign was in the wintry cities and towns of Wisconsin; in Madison and Milwaukee, in Ashland and La Crosse, and in hundreds of other places, where Kennedy and his “machine” began at dawn to shake hands, speak to voters in auditoriums and small groups gathered at rural crossroads, distribute leaflets and bumper stickers, consume time on radio and television. Our job was to provide the fuel, a continual flow of statements and issue papers incorporated by the candidate into his incessant talks.
“This is awfully boring stuff,” I said to Sorensen as I handed him still another manuscript detailing the woes of the Wisconsin dairy farmer. Replete with facts, statistics, quasi-technical proposals for reversing the decline in farm income, I was describing a problem that I — a child of city streets — knew nothing about. “I don’t think people, even farmers, can follow all this stuff,” I told Sorensen. “I can hardly understand it myself, and I wrote it.” “That’s not the point,” Sorensen explained. “They don’t follow it. But at least they know he’s talking about something.” (Later in the campaign, as we worked together on a major farm speech, Kennedy turned to me, saying, “Tell me, Dick, have you ever seen a cow?” As a matter of fact, I had. Ten or twelve of them at the model Hood’s Milk Company farm, where my parents had taken me on infrequent visits to Boston’s rural outskirts. But I had not paid much attention to the livestock, being drawn to the playground swing and slides that the Hood Company had thoughtfully provided for grammar school tourists.)
Of course, I thought, reflecting on Sorensen’s comment. Kennedy’s second greatest handicap (next to Catholicism) was the perception — carefully cultivated by his opponents — of a millionaire playboy, a young second-term senator who had cleverly combined money, glamour, the PT-109, and, one was forced to admit, hard campaigning, to thrust himself into the race for an office he was unqualified to occupy. This censure — subsumed under the code word “inexperience” — was to impair his candidacy until the debates with Nixon convinced the voters he could more than hold his own against the incumbent vice-president. The purpose of the speeches was not simply to inform, but to demonstrate Kennedy’s command of national issues. The words were dense and difficult, but the music was plain. He knew what he was talking about. He knew about them. And that’s what they wanted to know about him.
So I wrote about dairy price supports, condemned the callousness of the Republican Department of Agriculture, discussed the manifold distresses of the wheat market, and — in one memorable thrust of exposition — promised to clean up the harbor at Ashland, Wisconsin, which — I assumed, on the advice of experts — was in serious trouble. (Ever since, even now, I occasionally feel stirrings of desire to visit those troubled waters whose name is so firmly graven in memory.)
Wisconsin was not easy territory for Kennedy. “The Wisconsin farmer is a very reserved person,” one reporter observed. “Day after day, Kennedy would walk along the street and shake hands with the people, but their response was never very enthusiastic. It was pleasant but just sort of a grunt and a nod of the head.” In one trip through the rural farms in the north he traveled two hundred fifty miles without seeing nearly that many eligible voters. In contrast, Humphrey found himself at home among the farmers of Wisconsin, declaring that he was “riding a wave of support” that could carry him to victory. “I never felt so sure of anything in my life,” Humphrey told a luncheon audience at Boscobel, a little river town in southern Wisconsin. “I feel like I just swallowed two tons of vitamins.”
Yet despite Humphrey’s public optimism, the reports coming back to the Kennedy office from Wisconsin were encouraging. Gradually the tireless, omnipresent Kennedy campaign was taking hold. Not only were the crowds larger, but their composition was changing to include younger people and others not normally drawn to political rallies. Shortly before the election, a Wisconsin political leader called me in Washington to report that more than four thousand people had turned out to cheer Kennedy at the Shroeder Hotel in Milwaukee. “It was great,” he enthused, “and the amazing thing was that I didn’t recognize half of them and I know nearly all the Democrats in this district.” Later, Humphrey would complain about Kennedy’s superiority of money and manpower. It was true, but not the whole truth. Kennedy also outworked his opponent.
“Whatever other qualifications I may have had,” Kennedy would later say after winning the presidency, “one of them at least was that I knew Wisconsin better than any other president. My foot-tracks are in every house in the state.… I know the difference between the kind of farms they have in the 7th District and the 1st District.… I don’t think it’s a bad idea for a President to have stood outside of Maier’s meat factory at 5:30 in the morning with the temperature at 10 above.”
Sensing defeat, reading the predictions of a Kennedy avalanche, a desperate Humphrey stepped up his attack. The campaign became more vicious, more personal. “Beware of these orderly campaigns,” Humphrey said. “They are ordered, bought and paid for.… I feel like an independent merchant competing against a chain store.” Humphrey supporters spread accusations of Kennedy’s admiration of Joe McCarthy, and about his father’s contributions to Nixon.
Returning to Washington for an important Senate vote, Kennedy talked to us about the new Humphrey “smear tactics” with mounting rage. “It’s just one fucking lie after another. First I’m some kind of a witch-hunter because I was in the hospital when that censure vote on McCarthy was taken. Then it’s the money Dad gave to Nixon ten years ago. Hell, he’s a businessman. He gave to everybody. Then it’s Bobby out buying votes. Do you know how many voters there are in Wisconsin? I know we’re rich, but not that rich. He talks about me, about my family, about my friends, the only thing he won’t discuss are the issues. Son-of-a-bitch.”
“We’ve got some pretty good stuff on Humphrey,” a staff member interrupted, “we could put it out, try and get him on the defensive.” Kennedy’s demeanor changed with astonishing swiftness, the infuriated tirade immediately replaced by the clipped, modulated tones of political calculation. “I don’t think so. I’m winning this thing on my own terms, and if we start exchanging smears the whole campaign will become an issue of credibility. Whose lies do you believe? I’d rather have people make a judgment about who can lead the country, and who can win.” Kennedy paused, smiled. “And if I’m wrong, there’ll be other primaries. You better hold on to that stuff, just in case.”
As the primary election approached, each staff member put five dollars into an office pool, the money to go to the person who most accurately predicted the result. I was the only one to prophesy a close election — my undeveloped intuition combined with the gambler’s knowledge that the odds of winning were increased if one selected the lowest or highest set of figures. And I won.
Kennedy was victorious, but it was not the expected knockout. Six of ten Wisconsin congressional districts went for Kennedy, and he received a decent but not overwhelming majority of the statewide popular vote. Given the expectations of the national press, the results were, at best, ambiguous; and the religious issue had been given new life.
A disappointed Kennedy received the returns in his third-floor suite at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee. Slowly sipping a bowl of chicken noodle soup, he knew instantly from the way the votes had split — with Humphrey winning the predominantly Protestant districts while he had swept the Catholic areas — that the results would be interpreted in religious terms. “What does it mean?” one of Kennedy’s sisters asked. “It means,” he responded bitterly, “that we have to do it all over again. We have to go through every primary and win every one of them — West Virginia and Maryland and Indiana and Oregon, all the way to the convention.”
Kennedy was right to worry. “Religion is a big factor in Kennedy victory” ran the front-page story in the New York Times. “Senator Kennedy’s drive for the Democratic Presidency gained new momentum today … but the voting also poses perils by emphasizing the religious issues. Politicians contended that a hardening of this issue in a country that is predominantly Protestant would in the long run make it more difficult for Senator Kennedy to get the nomination.”
In the meantime, a jubilant Humphrey — miraculously unburdened of his nightmare visions of humiliating cataclysm — proclaimed a moral victory that he intended to transform into a numerical majority in the next primary — in West Virginia, where less than 5 percent of the population was Catholic.
“Here is where fate intervened,” Pierre Salinger observed, “for had Humphrey given up the campaign then and there and not run in West Virginia, Kennedy might never have been able to demonstrate that he could overcome the Catholic issue. Had he faced no opposition, any victory there would have been meaningless in terms of bargaining with big-city bosses.”
So the campaign moved on to West Virginia. Several months earlier Kenny O’Donnell had met with West Virginia county and political leaders. “There’s nothing to worry about,” they reassured him, “Jack will murder Hubert. Humphrey’s liberalism just won’t take down here.” As soon as the Wisconsin votes were in, Kennedy sent O’Donnell to talk with the same group. The minute he walked into the room, he sensed the change in atmosphere. “We don’t know.” “It’ll be close,” a “tough fight.” “Wait a minute,” O’Donnell objected, “a few months ago you told me it would be a landslide.” There was a pause, an almost embarrassed silence, until a boss of Charleston broke the silence: “That’s right, but we didn’t know he was Catholic.”
O’Donnell left the meeting and called Kennedy.
“Tell me, Kenny,” Kennedy asked, “is there any way we can win down there?”
“Yes,” responded O’Donnell, “you can convert.”
If there was anything I knew less about than milk, it was coal. But coal it was. This economically downtrodden Appalachian state was out of time with most of affluent America. Proud of their war heroes and of Chuck Yeager, who had broken the world speed record for terrestrial travel, their patriotism was not an icon withdrawn for display on the Fourth of July but a temper of the mind. They were poor — many of them — but not broken. Their pride demanded only the chance to work, to make a decent life for their families; and they had worked — many of them in the painful, life-threatening depths of the mines — until distant, mysterious, indifferent forces had taken the tools from their hands and sentenced them to a struggle for subsistence.
So I read the memoranda sent by our experts, studied books on mining, on the state itself, and consulted the guidebook to West Virginia prepared by the New Deal Writers Project during the depression. And I wrote about coal: how to revitalize the mines, the industry. We proposed “coal by wire,” burning fuel in West Virginia generating plants to transmit electric power to other parts of the country. There were other subjects, of course, ranging from a program to industrialize the state (we had a program for everything), to rhetorical panegyrics about West Virginia’s heroic contribution to America.
There was one subject I did not write about: Kennedy’s Catholicism. We were instructed never to mention, even by implication, the question of religion. We did not prepare answers to the ominous rumors and charges, assert that he would not ban contraception, take orders from the pope and Cardinal Spellman, or construct a transatlantic tunnel between Washington and the Vatican. Yet it was the biggest issue. West Virginia was white, and very Protestant. Not only did most of the residents know little about Catholicism, they didn’t know any Catholics, thus lacking personal experience to counter even the most grotesque rumors and bizarre accusations.
Humphrey and his staff were equally taciturn. The decision for silence was not dictated by some aberrant intrusion of moral principle on what was becoming a brutal, bitter, “no holds barred” campaign. Humphrey refrained because, after all, everyone knew Kennedy was Catholic; those hostile to his faith required no reminder. They would vote their prejudices. But a direct assault would leave Humphrey vulnerable to charges of inciting bigotry, perhaps arouse a backlash that would harm his candidacy not only in West Virginia, but throughout the party. (In 1970, on a visit to Montgomery, Alabama, I asked George Wallace how he would handle the issue of Chappaquiddick in a campaign against Ted Kennedy. “I’d never mention it,” answered the skilled campaigner with a smile.)
Kennedy did not discuss his Catholicism for fear he would “only stir things up.” So, still ignoring the most important issue of his campaign, perhaps hoping he could dissolve it by the mere force of his presence, John Kennedy, indefatigable, in continual pain from his injured back, his Addison’s disease held in check by cortisone, spent interminable days driving from town halls to poisonous luncheon gatherings to run-down farms. He sat on a convenient log to chat with a group of curious, suspicious miners, then descended into the shaft where they spent their midnight days. They liked him. He was direct, his discussion stripped of rhetoric — he used words they could understand and answer; and he was curious, seemingly more interested in their way of life, the rigors of their job, even the mechanics of mining, than in trying to persuade them of his own merit. It was Kennedy at his best, because it was, in part, the real Kennedy. I never met a man so able to make an individual or a small group feel as if they and he were alone together, confined by the contours of a tiny world, bound by his quest to know, to understand, what others were like, what they were.
At another coal mine a week earlier Kennedy had come within six inches of being electrocuted. He was joking with miners at the Itmann operation of the Pocahontas Fuel Company when his head nearly touched a high-voltage line. “Look out for the wire,” shouted a group of miners. Kennedy ducked and then resumed his conversation. “That wire sure would have lit up your lights,” one miner said with a grin.
It was the natural efflorescence of Kennedy’s lifelong search for information, for knowledge to feed that protean comprehension whose changes enhanced his capacities to lead, to win elections, to satisfy an insatiable curiosity, to enhance the charm that, ever since he was a small boy, had won him a unique place in his rivalrous family. Kennedy was in West Virginia to win an election. But in that struggle he was learning more about America; about that underside of American life which he had never experienced so personally, intimately. Midway in the campaign, returning to Washington for a crucial Senate vote, he strode into the office, proclaiming to no one in particular: “You can’t imagine how those people live down there. I was better off in the war than they are in those coal mines. It’s not right. I’m going to do something about it. If we make it.” Then, ironically: “Even if they are a bunch of bigots.”
These were not people living in India or Africa, he later said. They were fellow Americans, thrown out of work, hungry in a country that stores food and lets it rot. Nearly 15 percent of the population was unemployed. One out of every eight people, more than one hundred thousand families, found it necessary to line up every day for handouts from the federal government’s stockpiles of surplus lard, rice, and cornmeal. He was particularly upset by the conditions in the hollows, where children took their free school lunches home to share with their starving parents.
By every customary standard of political judgment, the campaign was going well: The candidate was favorably received, said the right things, had assembled a good organization. But this was not a customary campaign. Beneath the surface, one still sensed the great, silent, resistant issue. It would not go away. Gradually Kennedy, his familiarity with the state and its people increasing, came to the inward judgment that most West Virginians did not hate Catholics, but they had fears — sensing in the Church some indefinable threat to their personal independence, to freedom. Thus, on April 19, in Wheeling, West Virginia, without warning, spontaneously, much to the surprise of his advisers, Kennedy spoke directly to the “Catholic issue” in an answer to a question from the audience. “I am a Catholic,” Kennedy responded, “but the fact that I was born a Catholic — does that mean that I can’t be president of the United States? I’m able to serve in Congress and my brother was able to give his life, but we can’t be president?” Feeling a positive reaction from the crowd, Kennedy decided then and there to bring the issue up himself wherever he went and to answer it as fully as he could. “Is anyone going to tell me that I lost this primary forty-two years ago when I was baptized?” he demanded of an applauding crowd in Fairmont. Then later in Clarksburg he told his audience that the real issues in West Virginia were unemployment, coal miners, and jobless glass workers, “not where I go to church on Sunday.”
“I will not allow any pope or church,” he told audience after audience, “to dictate to the president of the United States. There is no conflict between my religion and the obligations of office; should one arise I would resign. I refuse to believe that the people of this state are bigots, guided in this most important choice by prejudice.”
That message, repeated throughout the remainder of the campaign, began to erode the Catholic issue. West Virginians were not bigots, by God, and they would prove it!
The very fact that had seemed such a handicap — the almost total absence of a Catholic population — made the job easier. Prejudice is stronger, more virulent where the majority lives alongside a disliked minority. Proximity breeds fear, provides tangible objects for hostility, gives voice to dinner-table gossip and the ignorant fables of the local bar. Perhaps they didn’t like Catholics in West Virginia, were apprehensive, but it was the idea of Catholicism that fed their prejudice, not its tangible presence. And so, it could be met on the level of ideas.
In the closing days, the campaign became more bitter, the tone more personal. “I don’t think elections should be bought,” Humphrey told a cheering crowd in the heart of the coalfields of southern West Virginia. “I can’t afford to run through with a checkbook and a little black bag.” (Presumably full of cash to bribe voters and local chieftains.) “Bobby said if they had to spend a half million to win here they would do it.… Kennedy is the spoiled candidate and he and that young, emotional, juvenile Bobby are spending with wild abandon.… Anyone who gets in the way of … papa’s pet is going to be destroyed.”
Kennedy decided it was time to hit back. From an anonymous source in Minnesota, the Kennedy camp received copies of correspondence between Humphrey and his draft board, letters revealing that Hubert had tried on several occasions to postpone his military service. It was decided that the material should be made public by Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., who was campaigning for Kennedy throughout the state, drawing large crowds. To the people of West Virginia President Roosevelt was a god. In the smallest mountain cabin, in the most dilapidated shack, there would be a single picture on the wall — a portrait of FDR. It was an important asset to have his son and namesake campaigning on our side, and if retaliation was needed, young Roosevelt was the perfect person to launch it.
No sooner had Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., made his charge that Senator Humphrey had sought a deferment during the war (that he was, in other words, a “draft dodger”) and that he had documents to prove this, than Kennedy immediately disavowed any knowledge of the incident. “Any discussion of the war record of Senator Hubert Humphrey was done without my knowledge and consent, and I strongly disapprove the injection of this issue into the campaign,” Kennedy said. “I have campaigned on the issues in West Virginia. These are issues of today and of the future and not of matters twenty years ago.” But the damage was done.
On May 10, a wet, drizzly day, the voters in West Virginia went to the polls. By 10 P.M. it was clear that Kennedy had scored a triumphant victory, sweeping Humphrey in every part of the state — in the cities of Charleston and Wheeling, in the suburbs, in the hill country, in the hollows.
Desiring to hear the returns in the privacy of his Georgetown home (afraid that he would lose), Kennedy had flown home earlier that day. The moment his victory was clear, however, he chartered a plane to fly back to West Virginia. At 1 A.M. Humphrey’s telegram of concession arrived at the Kennedy headquarters in Charleston. Minutes later, Bobby Kennedy, representing his brother, who was still en route from Washington, walked through the rain-soaked streets to pay a call on Humphrey. Senator Humphrey’s eyes gleamed with tears as he spoke to his followers, many of whom were weeping. “I have a brief statement to make. I am no longer a candidate for the presidential nomination.” Bobby Kennedy walked over to Humphrey and put his arm around his shoulders. Then they walked out together to meet the victorious John Kennedy, who was just then arriving back in Charleston.
“The religious issue has been buried here in the soil of West Virginia,” Kennedy told a jubilant crowd. “I will not forget the people of West Virginia, nor will I forget what I have seen or learned here.”
That night, the Senate office was in an uproar as the returns revealed a Kennedy landslide, and later, we broke into cheers as Humphrey conceded defeat and withdrew from the presidential fight. Across the street, in his Capitol Building chambers, the Senate majority leader was also watching. Whether he knew it or not, his last chance for the nomination was gone. Johnson might have done very well in West Virginia had he entered the primary. It was his kind of state: half southern, afflicted with rural poverty similar to that of his native west Texas. Among such people, and in such an atmosphere, Johnson could be a potent campaigner. He had proved that in Texas. A victory in West Virginia would have eliminated Kennedy, and brought him close to the nomination. But he did not choose to run. Thought it unnecessary. Was afraid to risk defeat. And so it was over — this time.
Only one obstacle remained. Adlai Stevenson was the personal favorite of the party’s liberal wing. And there was still time for him to enter the Oregon primary — a state that was little more than one giant suburb, a Stevenson stronghold. A victory in Oregon might well be enough to transform party sentiment — admiring, nostalgic, almost romantic — into the more substantial currency of delegate votes. “I always knew,” Kennedy said later, “that Adlai was the only one who could beat me. He was the one they wanted. But he just wouldn’t go for it.” Still, in the spring of 1960, after West Virginia, aware of Adlai’s potential threat, Kennedy offered to make Stevenson secretary of state in return for his support. Stevenson declined, hoping that, in the end, the convention would reject this young usurper. But all he did was hope. He did not enter the late primaries. He did not work to enlist the delegations of crucial states. He waited for fortune to come to him. So he lost; and, afterward, was never considered for the State Department appointment he desired. The delegates may have loved Adlai, but they voted for Kennedy. He had demonstrated that neither youth, inexperience, nor Catholic faith were insuperable obstacles to victory. And even though one could argue in the abstract that Wisconsin and West Virginia were not “typical,” the entire country had watched Kennedy’s arduous, thrilling struggle to victory. To reject him now would appear a blatant defiance of the popular will, and, even more ominously, a nasty affront to the Democratic party’s huge Catholic constituency. Doubts remained — about the man, about his ability to defeat Nixon — but there was no choice. He had to be nominated.
It was years before the dimensions of Kennedy’s achievement were fully understood. He had used the primaries — hitherto symbolic — to capture the Democratic party, setting in motion an irreversible change in American politics.
During the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, those of us who remained in Washington prepared for our takeover of the Democratic party. By inviolable tradition, the party machinery — the National Committee, its records, and staff — belonged to the presidential nominee. As soon as Wyoming’s votes gave Kennedy the nomination, we left the Senate office, descended to the darkened street below, where waiting automobiles carried us across town to the K Street headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. As we entered, the members of the committee staff, watching a television broadcast from Constitution Hall, turned, startled by this unannounced invasion, their surprise soon yielding to awareness, as we filed through the offices, placing briefcases and cartons of papers on nearby desks. The old party was gone. The Kennedy party had come. Just like the movies! A coup — swift, silent, and successful. Except there was no opposition. After all, we were all on the same side. At least, we were now.