COUNTDOWN: 229 DAYS

March 29, 1960

Madison, Wisconsin

Hunkered down and freezing in a beat-up campaign bus on the side of a Wisconsin road, Hubert Humphrey could hear the engine of an airplane passing overhead.

It has to be that damn Jack Kennedy, Humphrey thought.

“Come down here, Jack, and play fair!” Humphrey shouted, startling the others on the bus.

It seemed like Kennedy was taunting Humphrey. Everywhere Humphrey campaigned—from small towns to big cities—some smiling, slick Kennedy was already there, shaking the hand of every Democrat in sight.

It was frustrating. Humphrey didn’t have Kennedy’s charisma or deep pockets. He was a balding middle-aged man with a round face and a high-pitched, squeaky voice. But Humphrey had a ton of credibility. People trusted him. And he didn’t give up easily.

The Minnesota senator was a passionate campaigner, an unabashed liberal who’d become a politician because he truly wanted to help people. He felt the government existed to improve the quality of life for all Americans, not just the privileged few. Politics was his calling.

Humphrey’s upbringing was the antithesis of his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. The forty-eight-year-old Humphrey and his three siblings grew up in Doland, South Dakota, a farming community of some six hundred people.

His father was a pharmacist who owned a drugstore in town, while his mother, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, was a teacher in a little one-room schoolhouse on the prairie, where the temperature stayed in the single digits for a good part of the winter.

The local economy was dependent on small family farms scattered across the sprawling prairies in the eastern part of the state. And like many rural communities, Doland faced serious economic problems long before the Great Depression. Humphrey wrote in his autobiography that “farmers were caught in a vise of high costs and low prices. And drought made life and economic conditions even worse.”

Humphrey knew it was a vicious cycle. “As the land and profits dried up, banks began to fail.” And when that happens, people have less money to spend in drugstores like the one owned by Humphrey’s father.

One of the few Democrats in the area, his father lost his drugstore, then the family home as they struggled with crushing debt. Growing up in hard times, Humphrey learned a lot about people and human nature. During the Great Depression, it wasn’t the traditional poor who were in rebellion—but “those who had once had something. Now, they were mad—ready to march, picket, indeed to destroy.”

Despite the hardships, Humphrey’s parents taught him to keep the faith. His father had lost nearly everything, yet one night, Humphrey recalled his father talking with great passion about the promise of America.

“Just think of it, boys. Here we are in the middle of this great big continent, here in South Dakota, with the land stretching out for hundreds of miles with people who can vote and govern their own lives, with riches enough for all if we will take care to do justice,” Humphrey Sr. said.

Maybe that’s why Humphrey tried not to lose hope—even in the face of overwhelming odds.

He was influenced by President Franklin Roosevelt’s attempts to alleviate the Great Depression with New Deal programs. After graduating high school, he briefly attended the University of Minnesota. When he ran out of money, he went home—to work at the family pharmacy.

A few years later, he attended an intense six-month program at the Capitol College of Pharmacy in Denver. When he completed the program, Humphrey became a registered pharmacist. But by the late 1930s, he was unhappy with his career. So, he returned to the University of Minnesota, earning a political science degree.

After working for several government agencies, he successfully ran for mayor of Minneapolis in 1945. Three years later, Humphrey delivered a passionate speech at the Democratic National Convention about civil rights that openly challenged the segregationists, who wanted to maintain the status quo in the South.

He implored Democrats “to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” Thirty-five of the nearly 280 delegates from southern states—the so-called Dixiecrats—walked out in protest, but the civil rights platform was adopted by a 71-vote majority.

The speech resonated with Minnesota voters as well, and he found support in the party. He was elected to the U.S. Senate later that year. It was the first time in nearly a century that voters had sent a Minnesota Democrat to the Senate. Humphrey didn’t waste any time. When he got to Washington, he became a champion for social issues.

Now here he was, in Wisconsin, the prototypical midwestern state. While it had a diverse agricultural economy with seventy thousand farms, Wisconsin also had large urban and industrial areas. Thirty-two percent of Wisconsin’s population was Roman Catholic, the largest percentage in the Midwest.

Humphrey genuinely loved campaigning. He was known to stride into a firehouse and greet firefighters with “How’s business, boys? Slow, I hope.” Then he’d whip out a card with his qualifications printed on one side and “mama’s recipe for beef soup” on the other.

“Try it,” he’d tell the firefighters. “It’ll give you the vitality of a buffalo.”

He wore the underdog label like a badge of honor. What he didn’t like was a disadvantage on the campaign trail.

With a week to go until the Wisconsin primary, polls showed the race was close. Kennedy was ahead, but he needed to trounce Humphrey if his heavy-on-the-primaries strategy was going to work.

Kennedy spent two weeks of February in Wisconsin. He woke up early to stand at factory gates at dawn, greeting workers at the shift change. He spent his days crisscrossing the state from county to county, giving speech after speech.

The grueling schedule was taking a toll on his spirits and his fragile health.

Unlike Humphrey, Kennedy wasn’t fond of campaigning. It could be physically strenuous for him, especially with his health issues. Even so, when Kennedy emerged from the car, his smile would light up the scene. He shook each outstretched hand with such a natural ease that no one would ever suspect his true feelings.

Wisconsin had nearly 4 million people spread out over a wide area, and the Kennedy clan hit cities and towns with their distinct brand of campaigning. JFK’s mother, Rose, and brothers Robert and Ted were featured at campaign receptions with coffee and cake. His sisters Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Jean Kennedy Smith, and Patricia Kennedy Lawford fanned out across the state, meeting and greeting voters in small towns and rural areas, touting their brother and happily taking questions about their family.

Everywhere the Kennedys went, they were followed by reporters, and voters. Lots of people had seen their faces in newspapers and magazines. They were celebrities.

But it wasn’t all clear sailing for Kennedy. The days were long and the weather was brutal. And some people in the crowds questioned his candidacy.

Campaign aides Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers described it as “that winter of cold winds, cold towns and many cold people.”

At one stop, an old woman approached Kennedy with some advice. “You’re too soon, my boy,” she scolded JFK. “Too soon.”

John and Jacqueline Kennedy, campaigning in Wisconsin

(Photo courtesy of the Telegraph Herald, Dubuque, Iowa)

Kennedy knew what she meant: He was too young to run for such an important office. But whether it was his ambition, his health, or two of his siblings dying in plane crashes—Joe Jr. in 1944 and Kathleen “Kick” in 1948—he felt he had no time to waste.

“No. This is my time. My time is now,” he said.

JFK knew the Wisconsin primary wouldn’t be nearly as easy as New Hampshire, where Humphrey wasn’t even on the ballot. But thanks to Robert Kennedy’s steady management, Jack Kennedy’s campaign was a sophisticated operation. His ads were slick and professional, and the voters who saw Jack and Jackie Kennedy on television turned out to see them in person. They were bright lights in a dull, dark season.

The Kennedys cultivated an image as a wholesome American family. They had a young daughter and Jacqueline was pregnant.

And in an appealing media coup, their radio and television commercials featured Frank Sinatra singing a somewhat awkward rewrite of his hit “High Hopes”—with lyrics tailored to the campaign:

Everyone is voting for Jack

’Cause he’s got what all the rest lack

Everyone wants to back—Jack

Jack is on the right track

’Cause he’s got high hopes

He’s got high hopes

Humphrey knew that defeating Kennedy in Wisconsin would strike a heavy blow against the momentum JFK was counting on. Pundits agreed. Several said that if Kennedy didn’t walk away with a decisive victory in Wisconsin, he might well not get the Democratic presidential nomination on the first ballot. And the longer the voting went on at the convention, the more likely it was that Kennedy would fade and another candidate would emerge—maybe someone like Adlai Stevenson, who had lost two presidential elections to Dwight Eisenhower, or Texas senator Lyndon Johnson.

But Humphrey wasn’t thinking about the Democratic National Convention. He was worried about today, in Madison and Beloit and Oshkosh. He was worried about all the attractive Kennedy siblings and JFK’s increasingly famous wife combing the counties for votes.

At one point Humphrey wrote of the onslaught, “I felt like an independent merchant competing against a chain store.”

Humphrey and Kennedy were both drawing big crowds—sometimes in the same places but at different times. They’d trudge through the slush on Main Street to shake hands. They kept things civil, but that was beginning to fray: The Kennedy camp was hitting Humphrey with smear tactics, a technique designed to deflect attention from Kennedy’s “Catholic problem.”

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Humphrey tried to enlist but was rejected three times, twice by the Navy and once by the Army, due to color blindness and other physical ailments.

The Kennedy team whispered that Humphrey was a draft dodger. They saturated the state with campaign workers and attack ads. Humphrey’s campaign was old-fashioned by comparison; he spent only a little more than $100,000 on flyers, placards, and his rickety bus in Wisconsin. No one could say how much money Kennedy spent. His old man had pumped in at least $1 million up to this point, and his aides raised more by selling hundreds of lapel pins shaped like PT boats, a reminder of Kennedy’s heroics during World War II.

As the primary drew closer, the fighting got edgier. Anti-Catholic pamphlets circulated, and the Kennedy camp suspected Humphrey. But Humphrey thought it might be the Kennedys, as a way to fire up Catholic voters and make sure they went to the polls.

It wasn’t a fair fight.

Humphrey and his wife, Muriel, were average-looking people with no Hollywood connections. They had no private airplane—just a bus with a broken heater. The candidate and his crew were known to spend nights on the bus, parked along country roads on the way to the next campaign event.

But the Minnesota senator was committed.

“Beware of these orderly campaigns, they are ordered, bought, and paid for. We are not selling corn flakes or some Hollywood production,” he warned his supporters. Everyone had to make their choice “on more than how we cut our hair or how we look.”

Kennedy had charm, was the point, but Humphrey had passion. Kennedy’s plane might beat him to the next location, but Humphrey had the better message, and a stronger legislative record.

In the end, he believed that the message was what mattered. Humphrey promised to stay optimistic, no matter how ugly the Wisconsin fight became. He would stay in the race.

But the ugliness hadn’t even begun.