In the last days of the primary election the Kennedy campaign added a new element, Franklin Roosevelt Jr., who for months had been discussing the campaign with the Kennedys. “When Frank came down to talk to Mr. Kennedy and Jack on the patio, and I was there for dinner, and he had that wonderful smile, that wonderful voice and vocabulary,” Rose recalled. “And he was talking about West Virginia, whether Jack should campaign there and whether he would go with him. And I felt then the marvelous personality he had and the facility for public speaking and his smile and being a Roosevelt, I am certainly glad that he is not a candidate against Jack in the primaries. That thought crossed my mind then … you would think he would have been the one that campaigned and not my son. And that is life.”
Two decades before, Joe had sat with President Roosevelt in the White House. That day he had given up what he thought was his own chance for political immortality to endow his sons with their chances for power. Joe had never traded in his marker, and though for years it had seemed valueless, he would make it pay out now.
Joe was a man who never forgot and rarely forgave. He surely was aware of the exquisite irony of this moment. The son and namesake of the president who had shoved him off the pages of history was helping Joe’s own son to reach the White House. FDR was a great man and a poor father. He had given his son an immortal name, an awesome persona, and natural grace, but little of the strength, will, and ambition that was his own essence. FDR Jr. was a self-indulgent, heavy-drinking namesake. The former congressman had been a lobbyist for the Trujillo dictatorship and a distributor of Italian cars in Washington, work that Joe’s own sons would have never considered.
Franklin Roosevelt Jr. bore what in West Virginia was the most glorious of names. He was the son of the man whose New Deal had, as many in the state saw it, given shoes to people who had walked barefoot, electric light to those who had sat in darkness, and bread to those who were hungry. By rights, FDR Jr. should have been having this discussion, not with the centrist Jack but with the liberal Humphrey, who was a proud, happy defender of the New Deal legacy. That’s where his mother Eleanor would have placed him, or with her beloved Adlai Stevenson, not with who she considered the opportunistic Jack Kennedy.
FDR Jr. would have served Jack mightily by coming to West Virginia to speak for his candidacy and stand beside him, as if Jack too were an equal stalwart of the New Deal and its legacy. For the Kennedys, that was not enough, and they pushed Roosevelt to speak words that proved to be both untrue and unspeakable. Jack’s staff had come up with documentation that Humphrey had not served in World War II. “I remember discussing it with Ken O’Donnell and with Bobby Kennedy,” Feldman recalled. It was then, in Feldman’s words, “made available to Franklin.”
This was the kind of material that was dropped into the laps of friendly journalists, not shouted from the campaign platform by a man bearing one of the most revered names in American politics. “Bobby had been bringing pressure on me to mention it,” Roosevelt recalled. “He kept calling—five or six calls a day.” Bobby cared nothing about Roosevelt’s reputation, or he would have backed off.
“Is FDR Jr. there tonight?” Jack wrote on his notepad. “The best thing would be some veterans group there. I have to be extremely careful however—as so many people want to stick it to me.”
FDR Jr. began his assault on Humphrey with shrewd insinuations, lauding Jack as “the only wounded veteran” in the race. That was a mite too subtle and on April 27, he told an audience: “There’s another candidate in your primary. He’s a good Democrat, but I don’t know where he was in World War II.” That was so unseemly that the Washington Star characterized it as “a new low in dirty politics.”
A good politician learns to keep his distance from the mean and the ugly, to let others dismiss those he would fire and to have surrogates speak the ugly words he wants stated. It may have been Bobby, and behind him Joe, who pushed FDR Jr. to speak as he had, but Jack knew all about it. Humphrey peeled the bark of civility off his attacks and took the desperate expedient of screaming the truth to all within hearing. “I don’t have any daddy who can pay the bills for me,” Humphrey shouted, his words streaked with self-pity. “I can’t afford to run around this state with a little black bag and a checkbook.”
“And the Star says we are guilty of ‘dirty politics,’” Jack scribbled on a piece of paper. Jack could have asked Roosevelt to back off, but he did not. A week and a half later, Roosevelt had suddenly discovered where Humphrey had been during the war: a “draft dodger” hiding at home. The candidate tried to point out that even though he had been a married man with three children, he had tried to enlist in the navy but was turned down because of a physical disability. The charges had inflicted a heavy wound, however, in proudly patriotic West Virginia.
At that point, right before the election, Jack issued a statement condemning the discussion of Humphrey’s war record. “There was a lot of criticism, and the Kennedys repudiated the statement and cut the ground out from under me,” FDR Jr. recalled. “That was the beginning of the break between Bobby and me.”
While the Kennedys stood back watching, Roosevelt had besmirched Humphrey’s reputation. Although the Minnesota senator would quickly wipe off the dark spots, Roosevelt’s role in West Virginia would stain him for the rest of his life. What angered Roosevelt most was that what he had said was not only unwise and unfair but untrue. “It was based on so-called reliable information which was made available to me,” he later reflected. “It was used in the heat of the closing days of a vital and decisive primary, and … when I found it was unwarranted I went to Mr. Humphrey and not only ate crow but asked for his forgiveness.”
Jack might have been traipsing across West Virginia wearing the laurels of a war hero, but he remained a Catholic. West Virginia was overwhelmingly Protestant, full of God-fearing, churchgoing folks who had probably never met a Catholic and surely had never voted for one. Most of them had heard tales of an Italian pope and his hold on the American faithful. They had heard whispered yarns of the strange language spoken and strange rituals enacted in the dark recesses of the Catholic churches whose portals they would never enter. Their ministers often told them that a Catholic president would have another master in the Vatican.
In 1960, this Pentecostal vision of Catholics was only an exaggerated version of the dominant Protestant culture’s view on Catholics. Prejudice against Catholics was widespread in America, from the ignorant mouthing of the Ku Klux Klan to the no less pernicious musings of many political liberals, but the hard center of Jack’s problems lay with Protestant ministers, who feared the gloved hand of Rome reaching into the White House and were ready to tell their congregations as much. Like millions of his co-religionists, Jack was only a nominal Catholic. He attended mass, but he acted as if the rituals of the Church were its essence. He was as much bewildered as irritated when he was constantly confronted with questions about his faith.
Part of the hierarchy of his own church was no more welcoming of Jack’s candidacy than the fire-and-brimstone preachers of the Bible Belt. Some of the bishops and cardinals were so conservative, like New York’s Cardinal Spellman, that they preferred the mock-Quaker Nixon to Kennedy. Others made the calculating and indeed accurate assessment that Kennedy would not be “their” president; he would have to distance himself so far from the Church that he would take positions on aid to parochial education and other matters that were harmful to the Church. In March 1960, Archbishop Egidio Vagnozzi, apostolic Vatican delegate in Washington, said off the record to a New York Times reporter that though most bishops in America favored Jack “‘simply because he is a Catholic’ … a sophisticated current among Roman Catholics in the U.S., and in the Vatican, feels that a Roman Catholic in the White House at this moment might do more harm than good to the Church.”
Most presidents invoked the name of God to justify the most secular of policies. To assuage the fears and prejudices of Protestants and Jews, Jack took an unprecedented position on the r
ole of religion in public life. He told Look magazine in March 1959, that “whatever one’s religion in private life may be, for the officer holder, nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution in all its parts—including the First Amendment and the strict separation of church and state.”
In their zeal to protect the presidency from the machinations of Rome, the ministers had essentially induced Jack to promise to drive God out of the White House. This grievously offended the Catholic press, while the most prejudiced of his critics considered it a further example of the duplicities of Rome. Among the many letters of protest Jack received was one from a group of thirty-eight students at a Midwestern parochial school who lamented “the crash of an idol.”
No one was more concerned with this issue than Joe and Cardinal Cushing. The Boston priest worked assiduously to promote Jack’s candidacy in a manner that his Protestant counterparts would have felt proved their every fear about the heavy hand of the Church. “Wherever I go they think I am Jack’s campaign manager,” Cushing wrote Joe in May 1960. The previous March, when Jack’s campaign was just beginning, Joe had written Cushing: “This letter really adds up to saying that if Jack stays in the fight, it will be you who has kept him in. If he wins, it will be you who has made it possible.”
Two months later, Joe wrote the religious leader again, essentially giving him carte blanche as to how Jack would handle the religious issue. “I hope that we won’t have the Catholic question raised again, but it might be a good idea to have some phrases worked out and handed to Jack to be added to the list of matters that he carries in his head. But we will be guided entirely by your thoughts on this.”
Cushing replied two days later that “the religious issue should be taboo. Those who raise it never change their opinions no matter what answer we give them. This whole thing is very subtle. It will come to the forefront again and again but it may be a political devise [sic] to get us off the beam.”
His father and his favorite priest had spoken from the depths of their experience that Jack had better steer as far from the religion issue as he could. But now, in the last weeks of the campaign in the heart of fundamentalist Protestant America, Jack decided to face the religion issue straight on. In doing so, he went not only against his father and Cushing but his West Virginian staff, who supposedly knew these people best, against his own pollster’s studied judgment, and against the advice of most of his sophisticated Washington aides.
A great politician knows that if he stands back far enough from a problem, it may take on a manageable form and become an opportunity. He knows too that the defining of an issue is often the winning of an issue. There were many crucial decisions in Jack’s quest for the White House, but few to compare to this moment. The issue would rise up again and again, but almost always in the form in which Jack had defined it as he campaigned in the hills and hollows of West Virginia. To do what he was doing took the courage that he considered the king of all virtues. But political courage rarely stands alone, and his was welded to an awesomely shrewd sense of human beings and their emotions.
“I refuse to believe that I was denied the right to be president on the day I was baptized,” he told his audiences. “Nobody asked me if I was a Catholic when I joined the United States Navy…. Nobody asked my brother if he was a Catholic or a Protestant before he climbed into an American bomber plane to fly his last mission.”
How were his listeners to respond when the matter was couched as an act of elemental fairness? Wasn’t there something in their nature that didn’t like bullies and thought that a fight was fair only if either man could win? How brilliantly Jack had finessed the issue so that Catholics could feel comfortable voting for him because he shared their faith, while Protestants who voted against him for the same reason became bigots.
And pity poor Humphrey rattling across the state in his sad little bus, while Jack soared above in the Caroline. Could the Minnesota liberal shout out that all his life he had sung an anthem of tolerance, and that he was nothing but a foil in this whole business? If he said that, he would look like a bigot. Unable to say anything, he could only continue his bumpy ride and speak about everything but what he wanted to discuss.
On the weekend before the primary election, Jack appeared on a paid television program broadcast across West Virginia. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. was still of use, and he sat beside Jack, asking him questions that had been prepared by the candidate’s staff. Theodore White, the famed chronicler of this campaign, recalled this half hour as “the finest TV broadcast I have ever heard any politician make.”
Roosevelt gently asked the questions, and Jack ran with them, toying with them in soliloquies daring in their length. Jack was the very image of “cool,” a term that was rising out of the Beat underground and the hip black jazz world. He and this new medium were one. He had all the media-anointed credibility of a television anchor, his words sanctified as truth.
There is nothing like a picture to convince another person, and there were two pictures being broadcast: the pictures on the flickering black-and-white screens in homes and bars from Bluefield to Morgantown, and the pictures created by Jack’s own words.
“So when any man stands on the steps of the Capitol and takes the oath of office of president, he is swearing to support the separation of church and state,” he said as his viewers fixed this image in their minds. “He puts one hand on the Bible and raises the other hand to God as he takes the oath. And if he breaks his oath, he is not only committing a crime against the Constitution, for which the Congress can impeach him—and should impeach him—but he is committing a sin against God.”
Then Jack stopped for a moment. He had raised the ante a final time, placing God’s own name on top of his stack of chips. It was a fierce, just, almighty God these people worshiped. Would Jack dare blaspheme against God before so many witnesses? And if he did, wasn’t God’s wrath worse than any judgment that mortals could mete out? Jack raised his hand from an imaginary Bible as if he had just taken that sacred oath, and then he repeated his words: “A sin against God, for he has sworn on the Bible.”
By then Jack knew that the polls were looking better and better in the West Virginia primary, but victory was not yet complete. “I suppose if I win my poon days are over,” Jack wrote on a notepad, lamenting the fact that his extracurricular sex life might soon be halted. “I suppose they are going to hit me with something before we are finished.” He was almost certainly thinking that some sort of sex scandal would break.
On election day, when almost any other candidate would have prowled the environs of his hotel room, badgering aides for the first hint of results, Jack flew up to Washington. That evening he attended a movie with Ben Bradlee. Jack left the movie every twenty minutes or so to call Bobby at the Kanawha Hotel, each time learning that the results were not yet known. When he slumped back into his theater seat next to Bradlee, he had hardly missed any plot points; the film, a soft-core porn item called Private Property, consisted largely of a series of rapes and seductions.
Jack did not learn that he had won a landslide victory, 61 percent to 39 percent, until he returned to his house and received a triumphant call from Bobby at 11:30 P.M.. The occasion called for a few celebratory toasts and a good night’s sleep. Sleep was not even a possibility. He knew that he would have to fly back to Charleston through the night skies with Jackie to thank in person those who had helped him with the crucial victory. It did not matter that he was tired, that the hour was late, or that the air was turbulent. This was part of the natural risk of a politician’s life, a backstage danger that the audiences never saw.
As Jack flew back to West Virginia for a short-lived celebration, Bobby trudged over to Humphrey’s hotel and walked with the politician back to his headquarters for his public capitulation. Bobby appeared deeply touched by Humphrey’s emotional concession, though his tears were like those of a pyromaniac standing back from the conflagration he has set off as his victims run from the burning building.
Jack stayed in the state capital long enough to shake Humphrey’s hand, thank the voters over television, and hold a short press conference. At her husband’s moment of triumph, Jackie stood alone like a shanghaied but unwanted passenger on a voyage to parts unknown. She turned and walked back to the car and sat there by herself in the darkness waiting for Jack.
As the Caroline flew back toward Washington in the predawn hours, the passengers were as giddy and lighthearted as a college football team returning from a victory. Only Jack was different. He sat there in the half-light looking ahead toward the Maryland primary and trying to gauge how his West Virginia victory would affect the uncommitted states. He was on the greatest journey of his life, and he was only partway there.
20
A Patriot’s Song
On a Thursday evening in early July at the 1960 Democratic Convention, Wyoming cast its fifteen deciding votes for Jack, and the forty-three-year-old senator became the Democratic nominee. The candidate had secreted himself away from the convention, his whereabouts known only to his intimates. Soon after the vote, he descended on the new Los Angeles Sports Arena out of the cool night, his arrival signaled by a score of lights hurtling through the blackness.
In the cottage outside the gigantic arena stood the most powerful Democrats waiting to greet the man their party had just accorded its greatest honor. Only they had the clout to whisper a few words to Jack before he made his grand entrance to thank the delegates. The party leaders stood back as Jack got out of the sedan and greeted Bobby and Sarge Shriver, his brother-in-law. Part of the pols’ reticence was the natural deference to power. As prominent as they were, and as much as some of them had done to further the younger man’s ambition, there would always be a line now between them and the man who stood before them. Something else, however, kept them at a distance. As much as Jack had pretended that he was one of them, an American politician born and bred, he was different.
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