An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

by Robert Dallek

  By the beginning of 1959, however, as Jack, Bobby, and the rest of the Kennedy team thought about the challenge before them, they concluded that shunning party leaders was a prescription for defeat; with only sixteen primaries, they would need the backing of party “bosses” as well as rank-and-file Democrats to have any realistic hope of being nominated. Implementing this strategy meant creating more formal organization than had existed so far. To this end, they installed Steve Smith, who was married to Jack’s sister Jean, in a nine-room office in the Washington, D.C., Esso building on Constitution Avenue near the Capitol. Because they were eager to keep the operation quiet, the building directory and office door listed only “Stephen E. Smith.” The thirty-two-year-old Smith, the son of a wealthy New York shipping family with some business experience, was asked to manage four secretaries corresponding with Democratic governors and state chairmen and local and grass root supporters around the country. Smith and his staff set up a card file of backers and potential allies and rated their loyalty on a one-to-ten scale. Detailed wall maps identifying areas of strength and weakness across the country gave the operation, which took the form of letters and telephone calls to any and all likely convention delegates, the feel of a military campaign.

  But even with the Smith office in place, more questions than answers remained about winning the nomination. On April 1, Jack, Joe, and Bobby met at Joe’s house in Palm Beach with Smith, pollster Lou Harris, and Jack’s Senate staff: O’Brien, O’Donnell, and Sorensen. They reviewed each state in detail, asking: “Where do we stand?” Who are the “key figures” that will “influence the delegation? . . . Should JFK be scheduled there this fall or earlier? Should Bobby be scheduled to speak there this spring or summer? Should a poll be taken—and when?” Which state primaries should they enter? “What kind of organization do we need within the state? Should we be lining up our own delegate slate?”

  Although Smith’s office and the April meeting provided no definitive answers to their questions, by the fall the campaign had made some significant gains. In October, when Gallup asked 1,454 Democratic county chairmen, “Regardless of whom you personally prefer, what is your best guess . . . as to who will get the Democratic nomination for President in 1960?” 32 percent chose Kennedy, 27 percent said Symington, 18 percent picked Stevenson, 9 percent selected Johnson, and 3 percent named Humphrey; 11 percent refused to say.

  IF JACK COULD begin to feel somewhat optimistic about his chances for the nomination, he was discouraged by Gallup’s finding that 61 percent of Democratic and Republican county chairmen thought that Nixon would beat Kennedy in the 1960 campaign; only 34 percent thought that Jack could defeat someone as well-known and experienced in national politics as the vice president. Fifty-five percent of the county chairmen believed that New York governor Nelson Rockefeller could also beat Kennedy. These surveys were in sharp contrast to polls showing Democrats favored over Republicans in the 1960 congressional elections by 57 to 43 percent and on party registration by 55 to 37 percent.

  The disappointing numbers underscored the need for Kennedy to launch an all-out campaign that demonstrated his national appeal to voters. And so by the autumn of 1959, despite still not having announced his candidacy, he had settled into an exhausting routine that took him to every part of the country. In October and November, he spent four days in Indiana, one day each in West Virginia, New York, and Nebraska, two days in Louisiana, made a stopover in Milwaukee on the way to Oregon, flew back to New York, followed by three- and four-day stays in Illinois, California, and Oregon, and briefer visits to Oklahoma, Delaware, Kansas, and Colorado. He addressed audiences of every size on street corners, at airports, on fairgrounds, and in theaters, armories, high schools, state capitols, restaurants, gambling casinos, hotels, and pool, union, lodge, and convention halls. The groups he addressed were as varied as the venues—farmers, labor unions, chambers of commerce, bar associations, ethnic societies, state legislatures, college and university students and faculties, and civic organizations.

  As he traveled, he learned how to pace his talks and strike responsive chords with audiences. When Katie Louchheim, the vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, heard him speak at a party meeting in July 1959, she described him as “certainly brilliant, his choice of topics, words, his fluency, all excellent. But his delivery took the cream off his own milk. He fairly rushes along, almost breathless, and his smiles are merely indicated, not given.” It was a familiar and long-standing criticism of Kennedy’s public speaking, and during the fall tour he made conscious efforts to improve. “I’m getting a lot better on speeches,” he told an interviewer, concluding that “at least now I’ve got a control over the subject matter and a confidence so that I can speak more and more off the cuff, and I know that the off the cuff is much better than the prepared speech. Perhaps when I get enough control, I can have more confidence about making them less declaratory and more emotional.” He also improved his technique of working a crowd. During this time, Sorensen wrote later, “he learned the art of swiftly getting down from the speaker’s stand into a crowd for handshaking instead of being trapped by a few eager voters behind the head table.” In short, he was becoming a master campaigner.

  But it was difficult, sometimes demoralizing work carried out despite continuing back pain and spasm, which he eased with early-morning and late-night hot baths. A journalist who followed him around said, “The tone was tiredness, drained tiredness of one hotel room after another hotel room,” nonstop speech-making, “people pulling you this way and that . . . smiling and smiling until your mouth is so dehydrated it doesn’t seem to belong to you any more . . . more hands than you can shake, more names than you can remember, [and] more promises than you can keep.” Through it all, Jack could never escape the thought that it might be in vain—a marathon run that tested the limits of his physical and psychological resilience and then ended in possible defeat. He countered such thoughts by remembering the potential payoff. There seemed no other justification imaginable.

  To improve Jack’s chances of winning, Bobby gave up his Senate staff job to become campaign manager. He immediately convened a meeting of seventeen principal people at his house in Hyannis Port at the end of October. Bobby was all business. “Jack,” he said in a staccato voice, “what has been done about the campaign, what planning has been done?” Before Jack could answer, Bobby asked: “Jack, how do you expect to run a successful campaign if you don’t get started? A day lost now can’t be picked up at the other end. It’s ridiculous that more work hasn’t been done already.” Jack, mimicking his brother’s delivery, said to no one in particular, “How would you like looking forward to that voice blasting in your ear for the next six months?”

  The group began by discussing a six-page summary of Jack’s political standing. It was decidedly upbeat, noting that Kennedy was “well on his way” to getting the nomination and winning the White House. His appeal to “rank-and-file voters” indicated that he was “the only Democrat who can beat either Nixon or Rockefeller.” But, refusing to take anything for granted, the report also acknowledged “handicaps of age, religion and a[n imperfect liberal] Senate voting record.” The conclusion: Jack would have to work hard for the nomination by entering the primaries and staking out controversial positions. Another, more recent analysis in October cited widespread doubts among Democrats about Jack’s seriousness, maturity, and credentials as a bona fide liberal.

  Jack believed it essential to show both close advisers and the larger public that he was not a stand-in for his father or under the control of his family but an independent leader who was passionate about using politics to advance the national well-being. So he used the October meeting to demonstrate his knowledge about vital issues. He also wanted to remind everyone—including his brother—who was ultimately in charge. For example, after he agreed to Bobby’s suggestion that the thirty-three-year-old journalist Pierre Salinger run campaign press operations, Jack took Salinger to task for issuing a statement on Bo
bby’s say-so. “Check those things with me,” he told Salinger. “You’re working for me, not for Bob now.”

  The meeting was an opportunity not for “hard-and-fast, dramatic, black-and-white decisions,” Sorensen said later, but for Jack to prove to his team that a forty-three-year-old Catholic senator with no executive experience deserved to be president. Dressed casually in “slacks and loafers, looking thoroughly boyish,” Kennedy “amaze[d] them all by a performance that remains in the memory of all those who listened. . . . For three hours, broken only occasionally by a bit of information he might request of the staff, he proceeded, occasionally sitting, sometimes standing, to survey the entire country without map or notes. It was a tour of America region by region, state by state,” and a demonstration that “he knew all the [party] factions and the key people in all the factions,” and where he needed to go.

  There was some strategizing, too. Minutes of the meeting show a concern with bringing former Connecticut governor and congressman Chester Bowles into the campaign—not because he was a leading progressive voice on foreign affairs and close to Kennedy’s thinking, as Jack later emphasized to him, but because he was so closely identified with party liberals. Nevertheless, rumors that Bowles might become secretary of state were to be encouraged. A discussion of winning southern support included somewhat cynical suggestions that liberal labor opposition to Jack be publicized as widely as possible in the region, where anti-union sentiment was prevalent.

  On Saturday, January 2, 1960, Kennedy formally announced his candidacy before an audience of three hundred supporters in the Senate Caucus Room. In choosing a slow news day after the New Year’s holiday, he assured himself extensive press coverage. His terse two-page statement sounded the themes he believed could carry him to the nomination and the White House. He wanted to become president, he said, to ensure “a more vital life for our people” and freedom for peoples everywhere. Specifically, he wished to end or alter the burdensome arms race, support freedom and order in the newly emerging nations, “rebuild the stature of American science and education . . . prevent the collapse of our farm economy and the decay of our cities,” rekindle economic growth, and give fresh direction to “our traditional moral purpose.” He had toured every continental state in the Union during the previous forty months and would now “submit to the voters his views, record and competence in a series of primary contests.” To answer objections that so young and inexperienced a senator would be a risky nominee, he emphasized his eighteen years of service to the country as a naval officer and member of Congress, and the extensive foreign travels that had taken him to “nearly every continent and country.”

  Reflecting skepticism about his candidacy, reporters asked if he would “refuse the vice presidential nomination under any circumstance.” His answer was unequivocal: “I will not be a candidate for Vice President under any circumstances and that is not subject to change.” As for the likely debate to erupt over his religion, he also gave an unqualified response. He acknowledged that it would be a matter of substantial discussion. But he saw only one concern for voters: “Does a candidate believe in the Constitution, does he believe in the First Amendment, does he believe in the separation of church and state.” Having said that, he dismissed the issue as one that had been settled 160 years ago and concluded that he saw “no value in discussing a matter which is that ancient, when there are so many issues in 1960 which are going to be important.”

  Despite everything he had said that day, few political commentators and activists thought Kennedy could get the nomination. House Democrats and party state chairmen now predicted Symington’s nomination; Democratic senators and southern leaders expected Johnson to get the top spot; most Democratic governors, editors, and “influential intellectuals” picked Stevenson or Humphrey, his stand-in, as the ultimate winner. Jack shrugged off their predictions.

  Kennedy saw Humphrey as the least likely to beat him. True, party liberals loved Humphrey: He had been fighting for civil rights and New Deal social programs since he had come to the Senate from Minnesota in 1949. When he spoke at a July 1959 party meeting in Washington, he outdid Kennedy and Symington. Katie Louchheim said that Jack “scored 100—but then so did Stuart, in his calm, dignified, statesmanlike brief speech. But it was Hubert who got the hand, was interrupted many times with applause. He shook ’em, he impassioned on their ‘topic,’ and yet he said nothing the others hadn’t said.” After Humphrey, with Jack’s encouragement, had spoken at the University of Virginia law school, where Jack’s brother Ted was a student, Kennedy asked his brother, “How did Hubert do down there?” Ted replied that he “had never heard anyone speak like Hubert Humphrey. He had a packed student audience, they were crawling all over the roof, and he just got standing ovation after standing ovation. That wasn’t quite the answer [Jack] wanted to hear,” Ted Kennedy recalled.

  But as a practical matter, Jack saw Humphrey as too liberal and unable to muster the 761 delegates needed to nominate him. He was “unpopular in some sectors,” like the business community, where people objected to his “extremism,” Jack told Lisagor. Jack told another journalist in the fall of 1959, “I don’t have to worry with Humphrey. . . . [He] is dead. . . . Whether or not he knows it, he is just a stalking horse for Stevenson and Symington.”

  As for Johnson, Jack, Bobby, and Ted believed that “no Southerner can be nominated by a Democratic convention”—and this included “the able majority leader, Lyndon Johnson. . . . Even if he were . . . conceded every Southern state, every border state and most of the moderate Eastern and Western states . . . there is still too large a bloc of states with liberal and minority votes that he cannot touch.” Joe Kennedy was more concerned about Johnson than Jack was, but Jack saw him as an outsize personality, “a ‘riverboat gambler,’” who was omnipotent in the Senate “but had no popularity in the country.” The fact, Jack said, that he had had a heart attack in 1955, which everyone knew about, and that he was someone “who has no very firm principles and does not believe in anything very deeply” would also work against him.

  Symington worried Kennedy as a potential compromise candidate. A former air force secretary with strong liberal credentials and Harry Truman’s support, Symington was acceptable to all wings of the party. Should the convention reach a deadlock over the nomination, Jack thought that Symington could emerge as the party’s choice. He told his father and brothers: “[Symington] comes from the right state, the right background, the right religion, age and appearance, with a noncontroversial voting record and speaking largely on matters of defense which offend no one. His appeal is largely to the older-line professional politicians, rallying under former President Truman . . . and their hope is that the convention will find objections with each of the other candidates and agree on Symington.” Jack also feared that the other candidates would bloody one another in the primaries while Symington stood on the sidelines. “I wish I could get Stu into a primary,” Jack privately told a reporter, “any primary, anywhere.” Barring that, the best strategy against Symington was to win the nomination on the first ballot or before a standoff could make him a viable choice. In the meantime, however, Joe Kennedy tried to find dirt on Symington. In particular, he asked investigators to look into why President Roosevelt had asked Harry Truman to find out whether the Emerson Electric Company, which Symington had headed in the forties, had shortchanged the war effort.

  But it was Stevenson’s “sleeping candidacy” that impressed Kennedy as his greatest threat. Jack never trusted his avowed noncandidacy. He accepted that Stevenson disliked the thought of another campaign and would not go after the nomination directly. “But he still has powerful friends—so his name belongs on the list of candidates,” the Kennedys concluded. Joe, however, was less worried about Stevenson than Jack was. “He is not a threat,” Joe told a journalist. “The Democratic party is through in the East if he is nominated. The leaders realize that it would be disastrous. . . . To elect their State ticket they need Jack. . . . The nomination
is a cinch. I’m not a bit worried about the nomination.”

  Joe’s remarks were a brave show of public confidence, which was a good campaign tactic. But at the start of 1960, Jack knew that nothing was settled. “Look,” he told a reporter, “when someone says to you, ‘You’re doing fine,’ it doesn’t mean a thing, and when someone says, ‘Just call any time you need anything,’ that doesn’t mean a thing, and when someone says, ‘You’ve got a lot of friends out here,’ that doesn’t mean a thing . . . but when they say, ‘I’m for you,’ that is the only thing that means something.”

  Most discouraging to Jack was the persistence of the country’s irrational anti-Catholicism. Fourteen years had passed since he entered politics, and still Jack was being asked the same offensive questions. Antagonism to the Church and fear of its influence over him were discussed openly. Katie Louchheim’s friends and relatives, for example, who were “definitely and categorically anti,” told her, “After all, this is still a Protestant country.” One of them said, “How would you like it if the country were run the way the Catholics run Conn[ecticut] and Mass[achusetts]?” When Schlesinger saw Jack on the evening of January 2, Kennedy “conveyed an intangible feeling of depression. I had the sense that he feels himself increasingly hemmed in as a result of a circumstance over which he has no control—his religion; and he inevitably tends toward gloom and irritation when he considers how the circumstance may deny him what he thinks his talent and efforts have earned.”

  THE FIRST PRIMARY contest in New Hampshire on March 6 would be a chance to show that Kennedy could attract a decisive number of Protestant votes, but New Hampshire was not seen as a significant test of Jack’s national appeal, since as a New England native son with no other serious contender, he seemed certain to win. To assure as big a margin as possible, however, the campaign sent Rose and Jack to speak across the state, which both did with great effectiveness. The outcome—85 percent of the vote against a smattering of write-ins for Stevenson and Symington—was all the Kennedys could have hoped for.