by John Norris
“Hiya, Bobby,” said Humphrey in greeting. RFK and Humphrey shook hands, and Bobby gently kissed Senator Humphrey’s wife, Muriel, on the cheek. Speaking to a dejected crowd well after midnight, the Minnesota senator announced that he was suspending his candidacy. Mary watched as a misty-eyed Bobby Kennedy walked over and put his arm around Humphrey. JFK was gathering momentum.
Knowing that he was more popular with rank-and-file Democrats than with party leaders, Kennedy competed in numerous primaries, and he rattled off a series of wins in doing so. By May, this strategy had left Kennedy running hard, but because it was still a time when nominees were determined more by backroom deals at the convention than by the actual results of primaries, he was aware that his real opposition wouldn’t emerge until delegates gathered in Los Angeles. Mary traveled with Kennedy as he stumped in Oregon and California, with Humphrey still on the ballot in Oregon. “I remember one night, very late, in a hotel corridor,” Mary said about a conversation with Kennedy. “Oh, we’d had a dreadful day.” Kennedy turned to Mary and said, “I hate this. This is a waste of time. Hubert can’t win. He can’t win. I don’t mind campaigning, but I don’t like this.”
Mary was a constant presence behind the scenes, and she was allowed remarkable access to planning and strategy discussions. Because Mary wrote color stories, seemed discreet, and was a woman, candidates wanted to impress and flatter her. They enjoyed her company, even when they took exception to her columns. Mary developed an almost unrivaled ability to interact with candidates when they were out of the public eye. This also meant that she had a great deal of inside information that she never used. Mary was more interested in capturing the character of politicians on the page than trading her access for exclusives.
As Mary’s colleague Duncan Spencer observed, Mary did not write “tips, scoops, rumors.” She wrote “what she sees, what she hears, sometimes what people tell her, she writes what is on their faces, what their clothes or pace show—knowing with the sureness of good nerves what clues are given by the surface.” Access was vital for Mary, and as she said, “I have to see, I have to hear. I’m primitive.”
Mary’s ability to move behind the scenes during campaigns had much in common with Theodore H. White, the noted chronicler of U.S. presidential campaigns. White wrote his first in-depth campaign portrait in 1960, and his book The Making of the President 1960 subsequently became a bestseller. Mary and White were good friends and shared Boston roots, with White having attended the Boys’ Latin School. While they both practiced personality-driven, observational journalism, Mary thought that White was far too reluctant to offer criticism. Both White and Mary changed how Americans talked about campaigns and how journalists wrote about them, as they painted their stories in intimately personal terms. They illuminated the fact that the most important parts of campaigns usually happened far away from the podium.
Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson still hoped to derail Kennedy at the convention, as did Adlai Stevenson. Yet even as Kennedy rolled to multiple primary wins, LBJ remained coy about his own intentions. Johnson finally announced his candidacy just six days before the convention, while JFK had spent two years organizing and planning for the race. It was a major miscalculation on Johnson’s part.
Both Johnson and Stevenson hoped their late bids for the nomination would succeed, but Kennedy was greeted like an idol at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles. Mary was taken aback by the fervor. “Some 3,500 placard-waving enthusiasts mobbed him on the airfield. They clawed at each other in their enthusiasm to get to him. They all but tore his arm out of the socket to shake his hand. They screamed ‘we want Kennedy’ even though he was right there.” Stevenson’s arrival was comparably airless and low-key as he told his supporters, “I am not here to promote my candidacy.”
In a bold yet seemingly quixotic move at the convention, Mary’s friend Senator Eugene McCarthy made an impassioned, lectern-thumping speech from the podium in support of Adlai Stevenson shortly before the delegates were scheduled to vote. McCarthy was no fan of the Kennedys and had once argued privately that he thought he was better suited to be president because he was “twice as liberal as Humphrey; twice as Catholic as Kennedy.”
Mary had gotten to know McCarthy during the 1950s, and they had a great deal in common. Hailing from the small town of Watkins, Minnesota, McCarthy, like Mary, was of half-German descent yet always identified himself as thoroughly Irish Catholic. Both were known for their wit and a great love of the classics, particularly the poetry of Yeats. Deeply religious, McCarthy had studied to become a Benedictine monk before his career veered into teaching and Minnesota politics. Throughout his life, McCarthy remained a student of religious philosophy, always eager to engage in theological debate. Both Mary and Gene considered themselves Commonweal Catholics, after the name of a popular Catholic publication that placed considerable emphasis on social justice and intellectualism while frowning on the increasingly harsh anti-Communist excesses of the early 1950s.
McCarthy’s speech at the convention was brilliant. He lit up the massive L.A. Memorial Coliseum as he pleaded with delegates to support Stevenson: “Do not reject this man who made us all proud to be called Democrats. Do not leave the prophet without honor in his own party.” McCarthy’s passion and eloquence poured out in probably the best speech he ever delivered. The crowd responded with a cascading roar as exhilarated delegates leapt to their feet. Mary was stirred, and surprised that McCarthy, “a sedate mumbler in the Senate,” had been so forceful. McCarthy had gotten people more excited about Stevenson than Stevenson ever had, and Mary admired his reckless fire.
“I was in Stevenson’s suite in Los Angeles the night he knew for once and for all, he would never be president,” Mary would recall. Stevenson had watched Senator McCarthy’s speech on television and then turned to Mary and remarked in approval, “Magnificent.” On the floor of the convention, Wyoming pushed Kennedy over the top for the nomination. Mary saw Stevenson and his trusted adviser George Ball headed to another room to draft a concession statement. “Now for some purple prose,” he said lightly to Mary. She could not tell whether he was resigned or relieved. “Thus ended a tentative and diffident thrust that was doomed from the start,” wrote Mary of Stevenson’s last presidential bid, “but which had moments of crazy elation and brought the one note of simple fervor to a pre-packaged convention.”
Mary, like most, was surprised by Kennedy’s choice of Lyndon Johnson as a running mate. It appears that Kennedy offered Johnson the nomination largely as a means of assuaging Johnson’s ego, hoping that he would turn down the position. Bobby Kennedy, who had been sent to the convention as an emissary to Johnson, was shocked when LBJ indicated that he wanted the nomination, and his efforts to get his brother to dump Johnson from the ticket were fruitless. Bobby and LBJ were both notoriously prickly personalities, and their relationship would come to be defined by bitterness and distrust.
After Adlai Stevenson introduced Kennedy for his acceptance speech, which drew the convention to a boisterous close, Stevenson spotted Mary in the crush and offered her a ride back to town in his Cadillac. As the two were ushered into the limousine, JFK joined them in the backseat. It was a remarkable moment. Mary departed the convention sandwiched between the Democratic Party’s past and future.
The conversation was strained.
“You look wonderfully well, Jack,” Stevenson commented. “So tan.”
Kennedy, still crackling with adrenaline, explained that it came from sitting in the back of convertibles during the campaign.
Stevenson grimaced and shook his head. “I never would do that. It’s awful, the sun in your eyes, the dust, you can’t see for hours afterwards.”
Although neither said anything, Kennedy and Mary must have shared the same thought at that moment: this was why Kennedy was the nominee and Stevenson was not. Politics was a contact sport, and Stevenson never had the heart for it.
At the Republican c
onvention in Chicago, the nomination of Nixon was a foregone conclusion, and the spectacle felt hollow to Mary, even more so because of the scene she had just left. “Two weeks ago at this time, the Democrats were boiling through the halls of the Biltmore in Los Angeles, singing and shouting,” she wrote. “There was snake-dancing in the lobby whenever anybody had the room, and at three o’clock in the morning, they were singing ‘My Wild Irish Rose’ in the bar.” The delegates, although they supported Nixon, had a hard time hiding their disappointment that President Eisenhower was departing the national stage.
After the conventions, there was a brief period in 1960 when both Senator Kennedy and Vice President Nixon, who would periodically preside over the Senate, could be found attending to their routine duties on the floor of Congress, wishing they were out on the campaign trail. Mary described them from her perch in the Senate press gallery: “When Mr. Nixon presides over the Senate, which he has done infrequently, he engages in rather lonely conversation with the Senate parliamentarian,” while just twenty feet away, “his rival, Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts, has transformed the back row of the Democratic side into a reasonable facsimile of his porch at Hyannis Port. He receives a constant stream of fellow senators from all parts of the country.”
As August ended, the two tickets began a mad dash that would not end until Election Day, and Mary was along for every step of the ride, including a tour of the South with Lyndon Johnson. She described Johnson playing to his strengths: “The Senator’s accent, as he pushes deeper into the South on his whistle-stop tour, subjecting himself, as he says ‘to the wisdom of the pee-pul,’ sounds as though every syllable has been individually fried in fatback,” Mary penned. “Senator Johnson has transformed the South in the last few days from a political or even geographical area into an amorphous emotional entity where everyone is either a friend or a relation.”
Mary’s volume of writing during the 1960 race was prodigious, with columns often appearing daily. Nixon was frequently in her sights. The insincere self-deprecations that filled his speeches were like fingernails on a blackboard to Mary. In the hands of a more nimble politician, the constant references to his roots would have been endearing rather than cloying. “He was an unhappy man, and he was a man just eaten alive by resentment and envy,” she said of Nixon. “A sense of grievance is not a good paramount quality in a president.”
Nixon bent over backwards during the 1960 campaign trying to soften his image. That strategy appeared to backfire when Kennedy and Nixon famously met in their first televised debate. Nixon, who was under the weather, was pallid and halting, while the telegenic Kennedy came across as urbane and in command. His own partisans feared that Nixon had gone soft.
Their first debate is frequently cited as marking the onset of television’s dominance of American politics, and certainly Kennedy benefited from the medium. The impact of television was a shock to print reporters. “The thing about being a reporter was that you were one of the select few that had a place at great events and were in fact ordered to go there,” Mary commented. “And the camera goes everywhere. It goes to Egypt to the depths of the temple, it goes on bombing runs. It goes to the darkest heart of a riot, and it goes to Buckingham Palace, and interviews at 10 Downing Street. There is so much immediacy, and we come lumbering up in the rear a day later. It is very hard to hold your ground.”
Mary couldn’t help but notice how the day after the Nixon-Kennedy debate, people came up to both men and said admiringly, “I saw you on television,” as if that mattered more than anything they said.
While she disliked Nixon, Mary thought he won the second debate decisively, saying he had the look “of a man who wishes to become President of the United States and is apparently ready to fight for it.”
Mary continued to marvel at the intensity of the crowds pouring out to greet JFK. “Every time the Senator passes down a main street or before an airport barrier, the sounds are of a Sunday afternoon at the beach, with shrieks of pleasure going up as each new wave comes in. But the Senator has learned to take it with a grin. . . . He talks to them and they talk back.” Mary was delighted to see Kennedy lifted by a measure of genuine joy as he sprinted through seventeen states in the final days of the campaign.
On the eve of the election, Kennedy and his team were optimistic, but Kennedy’s Catholicism continued to create an undercurrent of apprehension. With the polls tight, no one knew how great a liability his religion would be in the privacy of a voting booth.
Mary returned to Boston with JFK for Election Day. She watched as Kennedy and his very pregnant wife, Jackie, voted at 8:40 in the morning at the old West End branch of the Boston Public Library. Mary might have been dismissive of Kennedy’s prospects when he first explored a candidacy, but she was overjoyed that a Boston Irishman stood a whisper away from the highest office in the land.
Kennedy and a large entourage then made the short flight to Hyannis Port. During the flight, the last press “pool” of the campaign—the handful of reporters given closest access to the candidate for the day—was announced. Mary was not selected. She was furious.
“It was the last straw,” Mary said. “When we landed at the airport, Mrs. Kennedy was there, and said something pleasant about something I had written, and this stirred up my emotions all over again.” Mary stalked over to JFK and lit into him. “What do you have to do to become a pool reporter in this cavalcade? I have followed you for four years,” Mary demanded, “and I have never so much as ridden in the pool car.” (This coming from a woman who had shared a limousine ride from the convention with Kennedy and Stevenson.)
Teddy White used the ensuing exchange for the opening for his book, The Making of the President.
As he arrived in Hyannis Port, accompanied by more than a hundred correspondents, and more than 80 staff members from the other planes, the tensions broke ridiculously for a moment. Many of this group had followed him now for some 44,000 miles of campaigning since Labor Day, and one of the reporters, strained, caught him, insisting she was being prevented from observing him closely, deprived of her proper rotation in the “pool” choice of reporters who are closest to him. Gravely, and because he was fond of her and knew her to be devoted to him, and because, moreover, this is a man who never forgets either friend or enemy, he turned and said, “You and I will never be apart, Mary.” And yet he knew, and everyone knew, that if his hope, which she shared, came true, he would be apart, unreachably, from these people who had been his friends.
The election results were some of the closest in American history. Early returns for Kennedy in the industrial Northeast were solid, but Nixon showed surprising strength in the Midwest and the West as he steadily narrowed the gap. At three in the morning, Nixon spoke from California—not conceding, but acknowledging that Kennedy might have won the election. After little more than an hour’s sleep, Mary was back at work by five in the morning. Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, informed reporters that there would be one final press pool that would go to the Kennedy compound and await the final results. When he called out Mary’s name as part of that group, a small cheer erupted among the assembled press corps.
With some satisfaction, Mary noted that the last pool “was the best of the campaign.” On the manicured lawn that swept down toward the sea, JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy, gruffly ordered that extra chairs be retrieved from the house for a group photo. Mary greeted JFK in the yard as he carried his daughter, Caroline, piggyback on his shoulders. With some amusement, Mary watched a “bewildering succession” of Kennedy family members head out for brisk walks along the beach that fronted the six-acre compound. Nixon conceded that afternoon. Out of 68 million votes cast, only 113,000 separated the two men.
Kennedy made a brief speech claiming victory at the bunting-draped Hyannis Port armory. He assured his pregnant wife, “Not much longer, Jackie,” as she stood by his side. Kennedy’s closest aides stood around the foot of the platform, overco
me with emotion. Mary described the scene in a letter to Teddy White. “Hard-hearted Jack with tears in his eyes and his voice,” she wrote, “the very first time I have seen the slightest display of emotion in the candidate and his team.” JFK had won.
CHAPTER THREE
He Would Have Liked It
A thick, wet blanket of snow arrived on the eve of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961, tying Washington in knots. Thousands of cars were abandoned by commuters. With temperatures hovering in the low twenties on Inauguration Day, army snowplows helped clear the streets. The trees along Pennsylvania Avenue glistened in icy sheaths. Mary recalled the scene as Kennedy prepared to take the oath of office: “The sky was cloudless, the sun dazzling. A sharp wind knifed across the Capitol, stiffening the fingers of us reporters who sat at trestle tables in the plaza, stomping our frozen feet.”
The official program for the inauguration featured short essays from a number of reporters, including one from Mary in which she described JFK on the campaign trail: “Poor men in West Virginia heard a man from Boston say he needed their help, and they gave it. In the alien corn of Nebraska, with a familiar chopping motion of his right hand, he explained that America can be ‘great-ah,’ and the farmers knew what he meant.”
His words echoing across the Capitol, Kennedy declared, “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a cold and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today.” Mary described Kennedy at that moment as akin to “the captain on the bridge of a ship, outward bound.”
