The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

And Jack Kennedy made the contacts—and turned contacts into allies—in person, crisscrossing the country again and again. In September, an infection around the spinal fusion required hospitalization and a “wide incision,” and thereafter, as he recuperated in Hyannis Port, was so painful that his father made what must have been a difficult telephone call for him. “Maybe Jack should stop torturing himself and he should call the whole thing off,” Joseph Kennedy said to Dr. Travell. “Do you think he can make it? There are plenty of other things for him to do.” Calling it off, however, was not something Jack Kennedy was considering. Visiting Hyannis Port, Dr. Travell sat with the senator studying his schedule for the next five weeks, and trying to find time in it for rest periods. “There was,” she wrote, “scarcely a free hour.” The senator told her the schedule couldn’t be changed.

  Lyndon Johnson might well have read John F. Kennedy differently than he did—more accurately. He was, in fact, particularly well qualified—almost uniquely well qualified—to do so. For all the differences between the two men, there was at least one notable similarity, and it had to do with their campaigns for office, starting with each man’s first campaign. Jack Kennedy was not the only one of the two men, after all, who had, during his first campaign for Congress, driven himself to the limit of his physical endurance, and then beyond, until at the end of the campaign—but not until the end—he had collapsed in public. Kennedy’s collapse had been in that Bunker Hill Day parade on the last day before the election; Johnson’s, during his first campaign for Congress, in 1937, was two days before the election, in the Travis County Courthouse. All during that campaign—a campaign it seemed all but impossible for him to win—he had been losing weight; during it he lost about forty pounds from an already thin frame, until his cheeks were so hollow and his eyes sunk so deep in their sockets that, as I have written, “he might have been a candidate by El Greco.” Then he began vomiting frequently, constantly complaining of stomach cramps, sometimes doubling over during a speech. The complaints were not taken seriously because he never slackened the pace that led to Ed Clark’s comment that “I never thought it was possible for anyone to work that hard,” but on a Thursday night in the courthouse—the election was on Saturday—he was delivering a speech, holding on to the railing in front of him for support, when, doubling over, white-faced, he sat down on the floor. He got up, finished the speech and then was rushed to an Austin hospital, where doctors, finding his appendix was about to rupture, operated almost immediately. Jack Kennedy was, moreover, not the only one of the two men who had fought through pain—great pain—in a later campaign. During his 1948 race for the Senate, Johnson was suffering from a kidney stone and kidney colic, an illness whose “agonizing” pain medical textbooks describe as “unbearable.” His doctor said he didn’t know “how in the world a man could keep functioning in the pain that he was in.” But he kept functioning, smiling through speeches and receiving lines even though, in the car being driven to them, his driver, looking in the rearview mirror, often saw him doubled over in pain, clutching his groin, shivering and gasping for breath. A temperature of over 104 degrees left him racked alternately by fever and violent chills. Refusing for long days to be hospitalized despite warnings that he was risking irreparable loss of kidney function, he suspended his campaign only (and even then against his will) when he could no longer control his shivering, and could barely sit upright. When, in the hospital, doctors told him that an operation to remove the stone was imperative—that with his fever, caused by infection, not abating, and the possibility of abscess and gangrene in the prognosis, his situation was becoming life-threatening—Johnson nevertheless refused to agree to one because the lengthy recovery time would end his hopes of winning the campaign, finally persuading surgeons to try to remove the stone by an alternative procedure that they were doubtful would work, but which in fact succeeded. Throughout his life, Lyndon Johnson had aimed at only one goal, and in his efforts to advance along the path to that goal had displayed a determination—a desperation, really—that raised the question of what limits he would drive himself to in that quest, and indeed whether there were any limits. Had Johnson read Jack Kennedy more accurately, he might have seen that the same question might have been asked about him. The man Lyndon Johnson was running against—this man he didn’t take seriously—not only wanted the same thing he did, but was a man just as determined to get it as he was.

  AS DETERMINED AS HE WAS, and much better at running for the presidency than Johnson had thought possible.

  One of Jack Kennedy’s most impressive characteristics was an ability to observe—and to generalize from his observations, to understand the implications of what he was seeing—no matter how hectic his pace might be: to “learn on the run,” as one of his aides would put it. And as he raced back and forth across the United States in 1957, and continued to do so at the beginning of 1958, he had drawn one definite conclusion: that, as he told a friendly reporter at the end of 1957, “The Senate is not the place to run from”—that not only was being a United States senator not much of an advantage when it came to running for the presidency, it might even on balance be a disadvantage, and quite a considerable one at that.

  While newspaper and magazine coverage of the Senate, of necessity consisting of hard-to-follow explanations of arcane legislative technicalities, didn’t translate into public interest in that body, and the benefit to a presidential candidate in being an active senator was therefore very limited, the liability inherent in such a role wasn’t limited at all. A senator was constantly being forced to take stands on controversial issues, and such stands antagonized one side or the other—which meant antagonizing individuals or groups whose support a senator needed if he wanted to be President. One reason that Kennedy had lost the vice presidential nomination to Kefauver was the refusal of Midwest states to support him because of a vote he had cast against an Eisenhower Administration bill to prop up farm prices. And then there had been the Joe McCarthy issue: McCarthy was a friend of Joseph Kennedy Sr., a friend of the whole Kennedy family; in fact, Kennedy had been the only Democratic senator not to vote for McCarthy’s censure. Kennedy had hoped that the fact that he had been in the hospital for much of the censure debate might insulate him from criticism for not voting; it hadn’t. In the history of the United States, only one senator—Warren Gamaliel Harding in 1921—had ascended to the White House directly from the Senate, and Kennedy understood why: “No matter how you vote, somebody is made happy and somebody unhappy,” he explained. “If you vote against enough people, you are dead politically.”

  Jack Kennedy had the ability not only to “learn on the run” but also to act on what he learned, to act rationally, dispassionately, coldly. Spending time in the Senate was a drawback, so he would spend as little time as possible there: that meant not doing the job to which he had been elected. He would be criticized—for absenteeism, for shirking his duties. But he had calculated that, in terms of his presidential run, such criticism would be far outweighed by the benefits from campaigning across the country; it was a criticism that would have to be accepted—and he accepted it.

  Not only was Kennedy learning who had what Theodore H. White calls the “pieces of power,” he was learning who didn’t have them—which meant that he was learning, firsthand, the hollowness behind Lyndon Johnson’s belief that the Old Bulls of the Senate ruled their home-state pastures. Politics was changing, the old-style organizations were no longer so dominant, and as part of the change, in every state younger men—in 1957, about Kennedy’s age: forty—were rising up on the political ladder, some still on the lower rungs, some just entering politics, many of them war veterans like himself; they identified with him, were willing to work for him. Kennedy organizations were being set up in many states; thousands of names were being indexed at Kennedy headquarters. “Johnson thinks the campaign is in Washington,” Kennedy said one day to Ted Sorensen. “It’s not. It’s out here.”

  And, of course, there was the new factor in politics, th
e factor that was to transform politics, the medium—television—that could transmute a little-known senator into a national figure in a moment.

  Jack Kennedy had had that moment, at the 1956 Democratic convention in Chicago—had had, at that convention, two moments, in fact. The first had been on its opening night. The lights in the hall dimmed, a huge movie screen unrolled above the podium, and a dramatic and moving documentary, The Pursuit of Happiness, on the history of the Democratic Party, made by the Hollywood director Dore Schary, was shown to the eleven thousand delegates—and to forty million viewers watching the convention on television. The shots of Roosevelt and Truman brought the delegates to their feet with a roar—and so did the film’s on-screen narrator, Jack Kennedy. Schary, sitting on the convention floor, saw that the personality of the young, handsome senator “just … jumped at you on the screen.” Jack Kennedy, the New York Times reported, “came before the convention tonight as a movie star.”

  Then, two nights later, came his daylong battle with Kefauver, which for a few minutes he appeared to have won, but which he lost at the wire. Television loves a drama, and that neck-and-neck race was a riveting drama—and so was Kennedy’s appearance on the rostrum to concede.

  Biographies of Kennedy almost unanimously say he was smiling as he conceded. He wasn’t. This was Jack Kennedy in defeat: below him, waving in his face as he came out on the platform, was a sea of signs—“Win with Estes!”—celebrating the man who had beaten him. There was no trace of a smile on his face. For once, his attire wasn’t impeccable; one wing of his shirt collar stuck out of his jacket. Sam Rayburn had handed him the big gavel as he stepped up to the podium, and as he said the few necessary words (“I want to take this opportunity first to express my appreciation to Democrats from all parts of the country—North and South, East and West—who have been so generous and kind to me. I hope that this convention will make Estes Kefauver’s nomination unanimous”), his hands never stopped turning it restlessly around and around. As his beautiful young wife watched him from a box in the hall, her face, above her black dress and pearls, was sad. Thinking his words had completed his chore, he turned to step down from the podium, but Rayburn took his arm firmly and turned him back, saying he had to make a formal motion that the nomination be made unanimous, and as he stepped back to the microphone, he did so with an air of resignation before walking off again, while the band played Kefauver’s theme song, “The Tennessee Waltz.” This was the first time in his political career that Jack Kennedy had tasted defeat, and it was apparent that he didn’t like the feeling at all. Yet not only his words but his demeanor, if resigned and disappointed, had been gracious—the demeanor of a handsome young man dignified, even gallant, in defeat. “And then he was gone, the underdog candidate who had intrigued and captivated the hearts and minds of millions of Americans,” as one historian put it. “The dramatic race,” which “had glued millions to their television sets,” was “his great moment—the moment when he passed through a kind of political sound barrier to register on the nation’s memory,” wrote another.

  Kennedy realized that. About a year later he ran into Jim Rowe at some airport and the two men sat down for a chat, and Kennedy said, “Jim, do you know who’s the most well-known senator in the United States?”

  “Kefauver,” Rowe replied, thinking of the Tennessean’s nationally televised organized crime hearings, and, he recalls, Kennedy said, “That’s right. And do you know who the second most well-known senator is?”

  “Who?” Rowe asked.

  “I am,” Jack Kennedy said. “And do you know why? It was the half hour on national television when I ran against Kefauver for the vice presidency.”

  While in hindsight, the transformation that television was to make in American politics seems obvious, at the time few politicians recognized this new reality as Kennedy did. Seizing every opportunity to be on-screen, he appeared not only as a guest on the Sunday interview shows from Washington, but also, for example, as narrator on two programs that the popular show Omnibus presented on the Mideast crisis. Moreover, his good looks and relaxed charm made him naturally suited to the new medium that was becoming a fixture in America. Television critic Jack Gould called him “the most telegenic person in public life.” And his popularity on television brought him a flood of invitations to appear before Democratic groups all over the country. To dispel doubts about his health, he played golf and touch football with photographers present, but in reality the constant traveling was hard on him; his back began giving him trouble again, but as long as he wore both the brace and the elastic bandage, his back held up; by the end of 1957, he had made hundreds of speeches, in forty-seven states.

  AND THOSE SPEECHES were increasingly effective.

  During his six unproductive years in the House of Representatives, when Mary Davis, his secretary, had been so annoyed by his “rather lackadaisical” attitude toward work, there had, nonetheless, been “one thing” about Jack Kennedy “that really surprised me”—the speeches he dictated to her.

  “He wrote his own,” Ms. Davis was to recall. “He appeared to be such a disinterested guy, not involved, couldn’t care less, but then he’d say, ‘Mary, come on in.’ Then he would start dictating off the top of his head. The flow of language, his command of English, was extraordinary. It would come out beautifully—exactly what he wanted to say. And I’d think, ‘This—coming from you.’ I surprised myself, but I came to the conclusion that he was brilliant—the brightest person I’ve ever known.”

  Brilliant though the content of the speeches that Jack Kennedy dictated during those six years may have been, however, audiences were less than impressed, because of the way he delivered them. Despite magical moments like the one with the Gold Star Mothers, most of his talks were still delivered much too fast, with his smiles so fleeting and mechanical that their brightness hardly registered, and his physical appearance—the gaunt cheeks, the stiffness with which he moved, the suits hanging too loosely—did not add to their effectiveness. Occasionally, if he got caught up in what he was saying, his right arm would come up, and his hand would be extended to emphasize a point, but the gesture was a tentative one, the arm usually not coming up very far, and quickly coming down again. And during his first three years in the Senate, of course, before Dr. Travell, he was all too often delivering his speeches while he was in pain; several times he was forced to give them while standing on those crutches, with their big, padded crosspieces.

  After the cortisone and Dr. Travell, however, his face became fuller (sometimes, in fact, too full for his liking; the drug sometimes caused a slight puffiness around his jaw). His body filled out, too; he seemed healthy, full of energy. The grin was, really, the same grin, but it beamed out now from a face that was very handsome but in a different way from before: confident, strong. The way he delivered his speeches changed, too. His suits now looked casual and debonair, made elegant by his bearing as much as by the fabric; only late in the day, when the press of the suit jacket had wilted and the jacket clung to his frame a little bit, would the outline of the brace be even faintly visible. And the right arm was coming up more and more, higher—to shoulder level, often—and the hand was jabbing forward more and more emphatically as he made his points. And there was something different about the way he was starting to hold his head: sometimes it would tilt a little to the right, and his chin would come up, and out: strong, self-assured. His voice, with its distinctive New England accent, had always sounded earnest; now it was becoming more emphatic; sometimes, in fact—not often but sometimes—it was starting to have quite a ring to it. Lyndon Johnson might still be clinging to the image of a frail, ineffectual Jack Kennedy, but, month by month, as Kennedy crisscrossed the country in 1957 and 1958, speech following speech, that picture was changing: the chin coming up more and more, not just confident but a bit cocky, combative, ready for any challenge; the hand, when he got carried away, often up above his shoulder now, the forefinger jabbing at the sky, the fist punching at the audie
nce, then the hand reaching to the crowd, palm up in entreaty and exhortation. And if, after the speech or during a press conference, he got hostile questions, which were mostly about his Catholicism, the chin would cock up a little more, the gesture would be more emphatic, and he would answer with a mixture of sincerity and self-deprecatory humor that brought audiences over to his side. “I have never seen anybody in my life develop like Jack Kennedy did as a personality, and as a speaker, and as an attractive person, over the last seven, eight years of his life,” George Smathers was to say. “It was just a miracle transformation.” In addition, during the same time that this was happening, there were, month after month, the feature stories in national magazines—on him, and on his glamorous wife, and, after November, 1957, on his little daughter Caroline, and on his whole glamorous, talented, wealthy family: “The Rise of the Brothers Kennedy” in Look, “The Amazing Kennedys” in the Saturday Evening Post (which called its readers’ attention to “the flowering of another great political family, such as the Adamses, the Lodges, and the La Follettes”)—the cover stories in Time, McCall’s, Redbook, one after the other, so that Jack Kennedy’s broad, open, assured grin, under that trademark unruly forelock, seemed to be beaming constantly from newsstands.

  Being out on the campaign trail meant he wasn’t in the Senate—during his eight years in the Senate, according to one estimate, Kennedy was away from Washington at least half of the time it was in session—and conventional political observers complained bitterly about the dereliction. “This man seeks the highest elective office in the world not primarily as a politician, but as a celebrity,” one wrote. Said New York Post columnist William V. Shannon: “There is a growing tendency on the part of Americans to ‘consume’ political figures in much the same sense we consume entertainment personalities on television and in the movies. Month after month, from the glossy pages of Life to the multicolored cover of Redbook, Jack and Jackie Kennedy smile out at millions of readers; he with his tousled hair and winning smile, she with her dark eyes and beautiful face. We hear of her pregnancy, of his wartime heroism, of their fondness for sailing. But what has all this to do with statesmanship?” The answer was: Nothing. While Lyndon Johnson’s assessment of Jack Kennedy as a senator—“He never did a thing”—is an exaggeration, its import is, on the whole, not far wrong. “His Senate career,” concludes one of his biographers, Robert Dallek, “produced no major legislation that contributed substantially to the national well-being.” Misgivings about his lack of accomplishments were drowned out by the ubiquity and attractiveness of his media appearances, however. By May of 1957, the nationally syndicated columnist Marquis Childs would write, “Seldom in the annals of this political capital has anyone risen as rapidly and as steadily in a presidential sweepstakes as Jack Kennedy.” The effect of his celebrity was evident even in the enclave that was home to many of the capital’s political elite. During the spring of 1958, Kennedy had a drink with the columnist Joseph Alsop at Alsop’s home on Dumbarton Avenue in Georgetown. As he was making his farewells on the high stoop of the house, some of Alsop’s neighbors, looking out their windows, happened to see him. Opening the windows, they began to applaud. Lyndon Johnson had been visiting homes in Georgetown for almost a quarter of a century. No one had ever applauded him. By that spring, Kennedy had reversed his standing against Kefauver in the Gallup Polls; now, instead of trailing him by eleven points, as had been the case the year before, he was ahead by eleven. Kefauver, in fact, was all but out of the race; in 1952 and 1956 he had made himself a threat by his relentless and effective campaigning; there was an equally relentless, and more effective, campaigner in the race now. In March, 1958, Time’s Washington bureau chief felt “by general agreement,” Kennedy is “the early-season favorite” to win the Democratic nomination; unless he was stopped, he would “win on the first ballot.”