The Kennedy plan now was to let Nixon head out onto the set and sit there, all by himself, until the very last moment. It was the purest psychological warfare. Even with just sixty seconds to go, the seat waiting for Jack was still empty. As it was down to about fifteen seconds, he strolled out. When the debate began, its seventy million viewers saw Jack Kennedy, with his legs crossed and his hands folded on this lap, appearing poised, elegant. Next to him, Nixon seemed not just ill but ill at ease, unshaven, his legs awkwardly apart.
Kennedy used the largest audience of the campaign to make his sharpest critique of the status quo. Even under the still-popular Eisenhower, the 1950s were ending with a slow economy and growing fear. Playing on both, the Democratic challenger began his pitch. “This is a great country, but I think it could be a greater country. And this is a powerful country, but I think it could be a more powerful country.” He went on to inventory what he saw as America’s failure to keep up its post–World War II momentum.
Among the many disappointing facts he marshaled—economic growth, widening poverty, inferior education, among other shortcomings—he made specific mention of corruption in the Teamsters. “I’m not satisfied when I see men like Jimmy Hoffa—in charge of the largest union in the United States—still free.” He was pointing not just to the man’s criminality but his and his brother’s three-year campaign to bring him down.
In that first Kennedy-Nixon national face-to-face, the Democrat was seen as the clear victor.
The second presidential debate came eleven days later. The first had been broadcast from the CBS bureau in Chicago. This time around it would be televised from the NBC studios in Washington. It’s where we did Hardball for twenty years.
Veteran television journalist John Harter, then a young NBC page, remembers watching Bobby and Jack Kennedy enter the building on Nebraska Avenue NW. He saw Jack right away start to complain about the cold temperature once he’d stepped into the studio. “What the hell is this?” Jack demanded, according to Bill Wilson, once he passed through the heavy doors into the frigid studio. Bobby instantly realized what was afoot. The frozen air told him the Nixon team was trying to prevent its candidate from sweating as heavily as he had in the first debate. Angrily—though it was just the sort of trick Bobby might have tried himself—he raced to the studio’s control room, demanding to know what was going on. But Wilson, unlike Bobby, guessed where the setting might actually be changed. Dashing down to the building’s basement, he met with a surprise. “There was a guy standing stationed there. He said he’d been told not to let anybody change anything. I said, ‘Get out of my way or I’m going to call the police!’ He immediately left, and I switched the air conditioning back down.”
The night before, in Cincinnati, the Democratic candidate had given a major speech on what he called “the glaring failure of American foreign policy.” Just as the Republicans had accused the Democrats of “losing” China under Truman, the out-of-power Democrats were now doing the same with Cuba. By the autumn of 1960, the island nation had become a major election issue, a hot trigger of the Cold War.
Just ninety miles from Florida, Cuba had long been a North American playground, a haven for prostitution and gambling. All that, however, had changed on New Year’s Eve 1958 when dictator Fulgencio Batista—with whom the U.S. had enjoyed a cozy relationship—fled the country, leaving it to the rebel forces of Fidel Castro advancing from the mountains. Initially, the United States had greeted the bearded, army-fatigues-clad Castro as a hero—his admirers then had included teenagers like me—a leader who’d bring freedom to Cuba. When he visited New York that spring, he arrived as a democratic leader, promising a free press and elections to a country now freed of its despotic regime.
The first sign of betrayal came when the new Cuban leader began executing hundreds of former Batista supporters by firing squad. Next came the mass expropriations of farmland and foreign-owned businesses, along with his growing ties to Moscow and Castro’s own declaration that he was a Communist. Within months, Americans realized they had a Soviet ally less than a hundred miles away.
Fidel Castro’s Cuba was a point of special vulnerability for the current vice president and Republican hopeful. Long a firebrand anti-Communist, Nixon found himself having to defend the embarrassing failure that had come on his and President Eisenhower’s watch. He could not even mention whatever thin hope he held for the current administration to bring down the despised Castro regime. That knowledge was top secret.
Nixon knew that the CIA had been training a Cuban exile force to attack the island. What angered him now was that Jack Kennedy also knew it. Already suspicious that the CIA, then a popular destination for Ivy Leaguers, was favoring the Harvard guy, he became infuriated when a Kennedy press release, sent out on the eve of the final debate, claimed: “We must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista democratic anti-Castro forces in exile and in Cuba itself who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro. Thus far, these fighters for freedom have had no support from our government.”
As far as he was concerned, his opponent was taking advantage of his required silence on the Cuban invasion operation to make him, Richard Nixon, look weak. But what he didn’t know was that Kennedy had a source of his own. Alabama governor John Patterson, one of his strong backers—a courageous position given the Bible Belt opposition to the Catholic candidate—had given him a heads-up. Patterson had been let in on the invasion plans when the CIA had sought recruits for the operation in his state’s National Guard. He had also been told the plan had the full support of President Eisenhower.
• • •
Harris Wofford’s first encounter with Bobby Kennedy in 1957 wasn’t auspicious. At the time, he was a legal assistant on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and planning a trip to the Soviet Union. Friends suggested that he drop in on Bobby, who’d traveled there two years earlier. He found himself kept waiting while Bobby ate his lunch, talked on the phone, and continued working on the papers in front of him. What he wound up getting for his time was a warning about Soviet surveillance of tourists, with an anti-Communist diatribe thrown in, and a swift goodbye.
Now a law professor at Notre Dame, Wofford came to the campaign with impressive credentials. In May 1960, Jack Kennedy having asked his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver to set up a civil rights unit in the campaign, Bobby called upon Wofford to lead it.
“We’re in trouble with Negroes,” Bobby, in his role as campaign manager, told the new recruit. “We really don’t know much about this whole thing. We’ve been dealing outside the field of the main Negro leadership and have to start from scratch.” He was admitting that neither his brother nor he had taken up civil rights as a personal cause.
In October, the American Baptist minister Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., along with a group of student protesters, was arrested in Atlanta. They’d been participating in a sit-in at the Magnolia Room, the segregated restaurant of the landmark downtown Rich’s Department Store. The first such “sit-in” had taken place the previous February at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Coretta Scott King, who married the civil rights leader in 1953, described the reality African Americans then had to face throughout the South: “There was hardly a place outside our own neighborhoods where a Negro could even get a soda except by going to the side door of a drugstore and having it handed out.”
While the other protesters were soon released, King, who the year before had been charged with a traffic violation, now had that probation revoked and his conviction reinstated. Sentenced to six months in prison at hard labor, King heard the judge refuse to allow him to post bail. “We must prepare ourselves,” King told his father and fellow minister, “for the fact that I am going to have to serve this time.”
Coretta King wept in public, she would say, “for the first time since the Movement began in 1955.” Five months pregnant, she was afraid her baby would come with her husband still imprisoned. She became further horrified when her husband wa
s awoken in the night and driven from the city jail to a cell two hundred miles into rural Georgia. Reaching her friend Harris Wofford, now working in the Kennedy campaign, she desperately begged for his help. “They are going to kill him,” she repeated. “I know they are going to kill him.”
Wofford began to toss ideas around with his good friend, newspaper publisher and civil rights activist Louis Martin. What they were looking for was a possible gesture in support of King that Wofford, with his connections, could help accomplish. What they came up with was the possibility of the Democratic candidate Jack Kennedy making a compassionate phone call to Coretta King.
Shriver, excited by the plan Wofford presented to him, was in Chicago where Jack was on the campaign trail. He knew he needed to talk to him alone, at a moment when he could make the appeal on a personal basis. Shriver didn’t want the campaign advisers weighing only the political pluses and minuses.
“Why don’t you telephone Mrs. King and give her your sympathy?” Shriver said to Jack once the coast was clear. “Negroes don’t expect everything will change tomorrow, no matter who’s elected. But they do want to know whether you care. If you telephone Mrs. King, they’ll know you understand and will help. You’ll reach their hearts and give support to a pregnant woman now afraid her husband will be killed.”
“That’s a good idea,” the candidate replied unhesitatingly. “Why not? Do you have her number? Get her on the phone.”
Mrs. King would later recount Kennedy’s words to her: “I want to express my concern about your husband. I know this must be very hard on you. I understand you’re expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call me.”
When Pierre Salinger learned of the call and informed Bobby, Jack’s campaign manager was at first disbelieving, then furious. “Bob wants to see you bomb-throwers right away,” was the summons Wofford and Martin heard when called in to account for their actions. He was waiting for them, and had no trouble expressing his displeasure. “Do you know,” he asked the two men responsible, “that three Southern governors told us that if Jack supported Jimmy Hoffa, Nikita Khrushchev or Martin Luther King, they’d throw their states to Nixon?” Adding, “Do you know that the election may be razor close and you’ve probably lost it for us?”
In the hours that followed, Bobby experienced a change of heart as he had more time to think about it while on a plane to New York. What bothered him was the abuse of power. He said later that he couldn’t believe that a judge would deny bail in a case like King’s, which involved a misdemeanor. “It just burned me, all the way up here on the plane,” Bob told reporter John Seigenthaler afterward. “The more I thought about the injustice of it, the more I thought what a son of a bitch that judge was.”
At three o’clock in the morning, he was on the phone to Louis Martin. He’d done something Martin deserved to know about. And because of his role in getting the Kennedys involved, he wanted him to hear it from him directly. “I wanted you to know,” Bobby told him, “that I called that judge in Georgia today.” He’d managed to win King’s release.
“You are now an honorary brother,” Martin, an African American, told him.
What Bobby didn’t say was how it all happened. Jack had phoned Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver, a fellow Democrat, and asked for his help. He agreed but explained the need to protect himself, which meant the need to call on intermediaries. Only then would it be safe for Bobby to contact the judge.
Dr. King expressed his gratitude with careful seriousness. “I am deeply indebted to Senator Kennedy, who served as a great force in making my release possible. There are moments when the politically expedient can be morally wise. I hold Senator Kennedy in very high esteem. I am convinced he will seek to exercise the power of his office to fully implement the civil rights plank of his party’s platform.”
Jack Kennedy’s conversation with Mrs. King may well have been the single most important episode of the campaign. It is now a touchstone moment of twentieth-century American political lore.
Within hours, Wofford and Martin put together a pamphlet to showcase the role the Kennedys had played in Reverend King’s release from prison. The “blue bomb,” as it soon became known—it was printed on light blue paper—included strong praise for Jack’s intervention from Coretta King, Martin Luther King, Sr., along with other major civil rights leaders. Kennedy’s willingness to jump in and help contrasted with Nixon’s stepping away from requests for help. It gave rise to the unforgettable banner running across the top of the flyer: “ ‘No Comment Nixon’ Versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy.” With two million copies sent to black churches across the country, it proved a game changer. Even as the Kennedy-Johnson ticket held on to the Democratic “Solid South,” the African American vote in the North and Midwest contributed to its triumphs in the big electoral states.
• • •
Throughout the weeks since Jack had become the Democratic candidate, he and Bobby had rarely been in the same place at the same time. Once, however, they found themselves together on the campaign trail.
“Hi, Johnny. How are you?” Bobby greeted him.
“I’m tired,” Jack said.
“What the hell are you tired for?” Bobby wanted to know. “I’m doing all the work.”
And if that claim wasn’t the exact truth, it was true enough. As November 8 grew closer and closer, the candidate could see the toll it was taking on his chief lieutenant. “He’s living on nerves,” Jack said.
But he also made clear his appreciation. “I don’t have to think about organization. I just show up. He’s the hardest worker. He’s the greatest organizer. Bobby’s easily the best man I’ve ever seen.”
The trouble was, whatever they’d like to have believed, the race wasn’t over.
Jack himself couldn’t see the problem. He and the people traveling with him, experiencing the large enthusiastic crowds in the major cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, believed they were now well in the lead. It seemed to them they were pulling further and further away from Nixon, to whom for a while, back in the early fall, they’d seemed uncomfortably close.
But Bobby suspected, as he assessed the information coming in, that the religion issue had not been put to rest. “Nixon was gaining,” Richard Goodwin started to realize. “Another week and he’d have won. Kennedy felt that, too. You could tell. He didn’t say it, but you could tell.”
Another factor worrying Jack was the appearances the ever-popular Eisenhower had started to make on behalf of the vice president who hoped to succeed him. “Last week, Dick Nixon hit the panic button and started Ike speaking,” Jack complained to navy pal Red Fay. “He spoke in Philadelphia on Friday night and is going to make about four or five speeches between now and the election. With every word he utters, I can feel the votes leaving me. It’s like standing on a mound of sand with the tide running out. I’m telling you he’s knocking our block off. If the election was tomorrow I’d win easily, but six days from now it’s up for grabs.”
Finally, it was election night. Bobby’s house in Hyannis Port became an oceanside headquarters. Bobby set it all up in preparation for the countdown once the returns started to come in. “Each state has certain bellwether counties, and those were what we were monitoring. There was little you could do at this point but wait,” Ken O’Donnell remembered.
The first big sign of trouble was Ohio. “Bobby found me and pulled me aside. He said, ‘Kenny, it looks like we’re gone in Ohio.’ I said, ‘Let’s wait until Cleveland comes in and we’ll make it up there.’ Bobby shook his head and gave me this wan smile. ‘No, you don’t understand. These figures include Cleveland.’ I couldn’t believe it could be over so quickly.”
O’Donnell went on: “We called the Senator, and he came over. Ohio continued to dribble in, but we were obviously going to lose it. Bobby and I were devastated, and we felt it might all be over. The Senator was cal
m as could be, though, and said, ‘Let’s just wait.’ ”
NBC’s John Chancellor now began reporting that the count was tightening, that Nixon was catching up to his Democratic rival. O’Donnell recalled how Kennedy reacted on hearing this. “I don’t mind him closing the gap,” he said, watching the screen, “as much as I mind him smiling while he was doing it.”
“I think, around eleven or twelve o’clock there was sort of . . . not a shock,” said Dave Hackett, “but everybody being a little bit surprised at the turn it began to take.”
The candidate, to break the tension, now described the call he’d just had from his running mate. One thing Johnson had said to him was reassuring, that even if it had appeared a tough fight at the start in Texas, he thought it’d turn out all right in the end. Next, Jack reported, had come a pure LBJ kicker: “I see we carried Pennsylvania, but what happened to you in Ohio?”
The long watch continued until dawn. Jack went off to bed. Bobby couldn’t, still at his post watching the numbers. He could see during the predawn hours what was happening. Having expected to win comfortably, the verdict was now resting with a few yet to be decided states. The election was going to be close.
With the sun having risen, the Kennedys were learning just how close. It would end up Kennedy: 34,220,984; Nixon: 34,108,157. Whatever effect religion had, along with all the other variables—helping with Roman Catholics in the larger states, hurting in others—there had been small room for mistakes, either actively or by omission. They had run the very campaign that was necessary.
That Christmas, the president-elect and his wife presented Bobby with a special leather-bound copy of The Enemy Within, which had made the bestseller list during the campaign. “For Bobby—The Brother Within—who made the easy difficult,” Jack wrote in it. But Jacqueline’s inscription was heartfelt, unalloyed with the usual Kennedy irony. “To Bobby—who made the impossible possible and changed all our lives.”
Bobby Kennedy Page 17
