An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

by Robert Dallek

  Kennedy doubted that Johnson would accept an invitation to join the ticket. Johnson had declared, “I wouldn’t want to trade a vote for a gavel, and I certainly wouldn’t want to trade the active position of leadership of the greatest deliberative body in the world for the part-time job of presiding.” On July 12, when Tommy Corcoran told Jack that asking Johnson was the best way to win in November and avoid a defeat that could discourage another Catholic from running “for generations,” Kennedy had replied, “Stop kidding, Tommy, Johnson will turn me down.” Kennedy found it difficult to imagine that as dominating a personality as LBJ would be willing to take a backseat to someone who had deprived him of the presidency, especially someone he viewed as less qualified and less deserving of the job.

  In fact, Johnson wanted the vice presidency. By 1960, his control of the Senate as majority leader had begun to wane; the election of several liberals in 1958 had undercut his dominance. He also assumed that if Kennedy won the presidency without him, the White House would set the legislative agenda and he would be little more than the president’s man in the Senate. Moreover, if Nixon became president, he would have to deal with a Republican chief who would be less accommodating than Eisenhower and less inclined to allow Johnson to exercise effective leadership. Running for vice president would not only free him from future problems as majority leader but also might give him significant benefits. If Kennedy lost, he would nevertheless have a claim on the Democratic nomination in 1964. And if Kennedy won, Johnson hoped to use his political talent, which had made him an exceptional majority leader, to expand the influence of the vice president’s office as a prelude to running for president in 1968. The vice presidency is “my only chance ever to be President,” Johnson told Clare Booth Luce, Henry Luce’s wife and Eisenhower’s ambassador to Italy. He also saw running with Kennedy as a way to elevate the role of his native region. As a congressman and a senator, he had devoted himself to bringing the South back into the mainstream of the country’s economic and political life. An effective southern VP could influence policy making and open the way to the first southern president since the Civil War.

  For all Jack’s doubts about the majority leader’s willingness to join him, Johnson had actually sent clear signals to Jack that he was interested in second place. Indeed, one month before the convention, in June, when Bobby Baker and Ted Sorensen had discussed the possibility, Baker had “cautioned” Sorensen “not to be so certain that his boss would reject a Kennedy-Johnson ticket.” The day before Kennedy’s nomination, Sam Rayburn told John McCormack and Tip O’Neill that “if Kennedy wants Johnson for Vice President . . . then he has nothing else he can do but to be on the ticket.” Rayburn also said that if Jack called him with an offer for Johnson, he would insist that Johnson take it. When O’Neill gave Kennedy the message, Jack responded, “Of course I want Lyndon Johnson. . . . The only thing is, I would never want to offer it and have him turn me down; I would be terrifically embarrassed. He’s the natural. If I can ever get him on the ticket, no way we can lose.” Kennedy promised to call Rayburn that night. Immediately after Jack won the nomination, Johnson sent him a warm telegram of congratulations with the sentence, “LBJ now means Let’s Back Jack.”

  The telegram solidified Kennedy’s decision. At about 2 A.M. Powers called Johnson’s hotel room so that Jack could speak with him. When an aide said that Johnson was asleep, Kennedy asked Evelyn Lincoln to arrange a meeting with Johnson at ten in the morning. At 8:00 A.M. Jack met privately with Bobby in his Biltmore suite. As they came out of the room where they had been talking, Powers heard Bobby say, “If you are sure it’s what you want to do, go ahead and see him.” Bobby returned to his room for a bath. When O’Donnell entered Bob’s suite, Salinger greeted him with the news that Bobby had just asked him “to add up the electoral votes in the states we’re sure of and to add Texas.” O’Donnell, who, with Kennedy’s approval, had promised labor leaders and civil rights groups that they would never take LBJ, was furious. In the bathroom of Jack’s suite, the only place O’Donnell and Kennedy could find for a private discussion, O’Donnell told him, “This is the worst mistake you ever made.” It meant going “against all the people who supported you.” He warned that they would have to spend the campaign apologizing for having Johnson on the ticket and “trying to explain why he voted against everything you ever stood for.”

  Kennedy turned pale with anger. He was “so upset and hurt that it took him a while before he was able to collect himself.” He explained that he was less concerned with southern votes than with getting Johnson out of the Senate, where he could play havoc with a Kennedy administration legislative agenda. With Johnson gone, “I’ll have [Montana senator] Mike Mansfield as the leader . . . ” Kennedy said, “somebody I can trust and depend on.” He urged O’Donnell to carry this message to labor leaders and liberals more generally, who were as exercised by the news as O’Donnell was.

  But the liberals were not so easily appeased. When a labor group went to Kennedy’s suite at eleven o’clock, Bobby “was very distressed, Ken O’Donnell looked like a ghost, and Jack Kennedy was very nervous.” Jack justified his decision by saying that Johnson “would be so mean as Majority Leader—that it was much better having him as Vice President where you could control him.” Kennedy also tried to leave the question open by saying that he could not “see any reason in the world why [Johnson] would want it.” One of the labor leaders warned, “If you do this, you’re going to fuck everything up.” They threatened to block Johnson’s nomination with a floor fight.

  Jack and Bobby spent the afternoon trying to resolve the dilemma. Bobby went to see Johnson at about 2 P.M. to describe the opposition and suggest that he might want to be Democratic national chairman instead of vice president. When Johnson refused to see Bobby, he gave the message to Sam Rayburn, who fixed Bobby with “a long look and responded simply, ‘Shit.’” Phil Graham then called Jack to say that Johnson would only take the nomination if Kennedy “drafted” him. Jack replied that “he was in a general mess because some liberals were against LBJ.” Kennedy asked Graham to call back in three minutes, when he would finish a meeting and have a decision. During their next conversation, Kennedy told Graham, “It’s all set. . . . Tell Lyndon I want him.”

  But Jack remained unsure. He sent word to Johnson through Rayburn that he would call him directly at about 3 P.M. When no call came, Graham called Jack at 3:30. Though Kennedy promised to call Johnson at once, “he then again mentioned opposition to LBJ and asked for my judgment.” Graham predicted that southern gains would surpass liberal losses and urged against any change in plans. Shortly after 4:00 P.M., Johnson summoned Graham, who reported that Bobby had just been back and urged him to “withdraw for the sake of the party.” As Bobby remembered it, he told Johnson that there was a lot of opposition and that his brother “didn’t think he wanted to go through that kind of unpleasant fight.” Instead, Jack wanted him to run the party, and he could put his people in control as a prelude to running for president in eight years. Bobby recalled that Johnson looked like “he’d burst into tears. I didn’t know if it was just an act or anything. But he just shook and tears came into his eyes, and he said, ‘I want to be Vice President, and if the President will have me, I’ll join with him in making a fight for it.’” Bobby then reversed course and responded, “Well, then, that’s fine. He wants you to be Vice President if you want to be Vice President.”

  Amid the confusion, Graham now called Jack again. Kennedy, to hide his own ambivalence and reassure Johnson, told Graham, “Bobby’s been out of touch and doesn’t know what’s been happening.” Graham believed that Bobby had acted on his own in trying to bar Johnson from the ticket. Bobby disputed this: “With the close relationship between my brother and me, I wasn’t going down to see if he would withdraw just as a lark on my own.” His explanation rings true. Jack was trying to avoid a fight with liberals, but ultimately he was less concerned about offending them than with the price of forcing Johnson off the ticket a
nd then seeing him do nothing for, or even quietly oppose, his election in the South.

  Kennedy was not alone in his calculations. More realistic liberals saw Johnson as adding strength to the ticket and had no interest in dividing the party and helping to elect Nixon. Realizing this, and because Johnson promised to support the party’s civil rights plank, they backed away from a floor fight. The Kennedys further finessed the issue at the convention by suspending the rules and asking for a voice ballot just before the voting reached Michigan, the delegation most likely to oppose Johnson. Although the shouted “ayes” and “nays” seemed about evenly divided, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, the convention chairman, declared that two thirds of the delegates had concurred and announced Johnson’s nomination by acclamation. Eisenhower, who remembered Johnson’s warnings about Kennedy, told journalist Earl Mazo, “I turned on the television and there was that son of a bitch becoming a vice-presidential candidate with this ‘dangerous man.’”

  HAVING SECURED THE NOMINATION through an exhausting campaign and settled the vice presidential dispute without serious political damage, Kennedy confronted the election battle with relief and excitement. He saw much work to be done and numerous political shoals to be navigated, but he was clear on the central theme or principal direction of his campaign. He shared a belief with most commentators and analysts that America had lost its sense of national purpose, that the material well-being of the 1950s had translated into a “bland, vapid, self-satisfied, banal” society lacking the moral resolve to meet domestic and world problems. “The prosperity of the Eisenhower age is a deceptive sign of vigor and health,” Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz declared. He complained of the “boredom one senses on all sides, the torpor, the anxiety, the listlessness.” Literary critic Dwight Macdonald described Americans as “an unhappy people, a people without style, without a sense of what is humanly satisfying.” Adlai Stevenson feared that the fifties would end up like the twenties, when private gain had eclipsed public concern and then ended in disaster. Stevenson asked, “With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America’s exalted purposes and inspiring way of life?”

  Kennedy also saw the need to reestablish a sense of shared purpose, of inspirational goals, at the center of his campaign. Could an America that had become the richest, most comfortable society in world history stand up to the communist challenge? Were we as ready to make the kind of sacrifices the ideologues in Moscow and Peking urged upon their peoples in the long struggle they foresaw with the United States? Could we be as fired as the revolutionaries in Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, and Africa?

  In an early-evening acceptance speech at the Los Angeles Coliseum before eighty thousand people and a television audience of millions, Kennedy sounded his theme. Close observers agreed that his speech was imperfectly delivered: Kennedy was exhausted by the exertions of the last few days and partly blinded by the setting sun. (His disappointing performance convinced him in the future to increase the amounts of steroids he normally took whenever he faced the stress of giving a major speech or press conference.) Although the speech, to which a number of writers, including Ted Sorensen, made contributions, was a familiar recitation of campaign themes, it nevertheless was a memorable appeal to the country to renew its commitment to larger goals than personal, self-serving ones.

  Early on he addressed the opportunity Americans had to overcome an unspoken religious test for election to the highest office: “The Democratic Party, by nominating someone of my faith, has taken on . . . a new and hazardous risk,” he said. The answer to anyone who believed that his religion would hinder him as president was his record of rejecting “any kind of religious pressure or obligation that might directly or indirectly interfere with my conduct of the Presidency in the national interest. . . . I am telling you now what you are entitled to know: that my decisions on every public policy will be my own—as an American, a Democrat and a free man.”

  More important than this parochial issue were the larger problems of war and peace, of economic and social justice, and of the willingness of Americans to commit themselves to these noble ends. “Today our concern must be with the future,” Kennedy announced. “For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do. Abroad, the balance of power is shifting. There are new and more terrible weapons—new and uncertain nations—new pressures of population and deprivation. . . . The world has been close to war before—but now man, who has survived all previous threats to his existence, has taken into his mortal hands the power to exterminate the entire species some seven times over. Here at home, the changing face of the future is equally revolutionary. The New Deal and the Fair Deal were bold measures for their generations—but this is a new generation. . . .

  “Too many Americans have lost their way, their will and their sense of historic purpose,” Kennedy asserted. “It is a time, in short, for a new generation of leadership—new men to cope with new problems and new opportunities. . . . I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier,” Kennedy said with evident passion and conviction. “From the lands that stretch three thousand miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. They were not the captives of their own doubts, the prisoners of their own price tags. Their motto was not ‘every man for himself’—but ‘all for the common cause.’ . . . We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s—a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils—a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.”

  Kennedy had little use for slogans. But he understood that to mobilize Americans, he needed a captivating image, and the New Frontier was Kennedy’s way of communicating the challenge, the country’s fresh rendezvous with greatness. “The New Frontier of which I speak,” he explained, “is not a set of promises—it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. . . . Can a nation organized and governed such as ours endure? That is the real question. Have we the nerve and the will? . . . Are we up to the task—are we equal to the challenge? . . . That is the question of the New Frontier. That is the choice our nation must make—a choice . . . between the public interest and the private comfort—between national greatness and national decline. . . . All mankind waits upon our decision. A whole world looks to see what we will do. We cannot fail their trust, we cannot fail to try.”

  THE JULY DAYS after the convention were a heady time for Jack and his whole family. He had gained the second most coveted prize in American politics—a presidential nomination—and now stood only one campaign away from becoming the thirty-fourth American ever to reach the White House. Initial polls following the Democratic convention gave Jack a 17 to 22 percent lead in the five biggest states—California, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

  A prominent member of a famous family, Kennedy had long known what it was like to be under public scrutiny. But the attention accorded him and his family after the nomination surpassed anything he or his famous father had ever experienced. To recuperate from the months of traveling and the pressures of the convention, Jack flew from Los Angeles to Hyannis Port to rest, swim, cruise on the family yacht, sun himself with Bobby and others on lawn chairs, and talk about the coming campaign. Jackie, who was five months pregnant, was to take almost no part in the general election.

  Arthur Schlesinger Jr. remembers a visit to the Kennedy compound on a “shining summer Saturday. . . . The once placid Cape Cod village had lost its wistful tranquillity. It looked more like a town under military occupation, or a place where dangerous criminals or wild beasts were at large. Everywhere were roadblocks, cordons of policemen, photographers with cameras slung over their shoulders . . . tourists in flashy shirts and shorts waiting expectantly as if for a revelation. The atmosphere of a carnival or a hanging prevailed. . . . A stockade now half surrounded the Kennedy com
pound, and the approach was like crossing a frontier, with documents demanded every ten feet.”

  Schlesinger “had never seen Kennedy in better form—more relaxed, funny and free.” The afternoon was spent cruising serenely for several hours off the Cape, with Martha’s Vineyard dimly outlined in the distance. Swimming, cocktails, luncheon, and conversation filled a perfect day. But politics remained near to hand. Jack, Bobby, O’Brien, O’Donnell, Powers, Salinger, Sorensen, and Joe were all churning in anticipation of launching the fight for the greatest prize, and after only two days of rest at the Cape, Jack and Bobby plunged into a series of planning meetings, strategy sessions, and unity discussions with party rivals. Bobby summed up their outlook: “run and fight and scramble for ten weeks all the way.”

  Bobby gave new meaning to the term “hardball”: There was nothing subtle about his approach. “Gentlemen,” he told a group of New York reform Democrats, “I don’t give a damn if the state and county organizations survive after November, and I don’t give a damn if you survive. I want to elect John F. Kennedy.” The campaign’s Florida coordinator said Bobby was “absolutely strong, steel-willed. . . . He just was blunt and hard and tough and was of course a magnificent campaign manager.” Party workers who displeased him complained, “Little Brother Is Watching You.” Adlai Stevenson dubbed him the “Black Prince,” and Eisenhower, who called Jack “Little Boy Blue,” referred to Bobby as “that little shit.” Bobby was mindful of all the hard feelings but not apologetic: “I’m not running a popularity contest,” he told Hugh Sidey. “It doesn’t matter if they like me or not. . . . If people are not getting off their behinds and working enough, how do you say that nicely? Every time you make a decision in this business you make somebody mad.”