“Your leadership in that battle was most skillful and decisive,” Douglas wrote him later. Although Arthur Krock grumbled over Kennedy’s “sometimes flimsy material,” other newspapers and many senators credited him with the rare achievement of winning the battle in debate. Certainly his command of his material and his conduct on the floor had immensely boosted Kennedy’s stock among the political leaders who make up the Senate.
Melee in Massachusetts
Kennedy’s handling of the Electoral College fight was all the more significant in view of a hot political battle that was brewing back home at the time. By March 1956, the Senator’s power and prestige in his own state were under severe challenge.
Kennedy had long before decided on his choice for the presidential nomination: Stevenson again. While he was not hopeful about the chances of any Democrat against Eisenhower, he felt that Stevenson, more than any other Democrat, had the capacity, experience, and moderate philosophy necessary for the job. Stevenson was also the front runner in early 1956, although Estes Kefauver was likely to contest with him. Kennedy had pleasant working relationships with Kefauver, but like most of his colleagues he did not rate the Tennesseean as of presidential quality.
There was some talk early in 1956 in Massachusetts that Kennedy would be a fine running mate for Stevenson. For example, a Democratic leader in the western part of the state, on his own initiative and without clearing with Kennedy, had announced his own candidacy for delegate to the national convention on a pledge to support Stevenson and Kennedy. The Senator, while undecided as to his own candidacy, was eager to control the Massachusetts delegation as much as possible in order to have some chips to throw Stevenson’s way in the great game scheduled for Chicago in August.
The stumbling block was John McCormack. The Majority Leader was cool to Stevenson for a number of reasons, one of which was a realistic view that Stevenson could not win. The veteran legislator had no candidate of his own; what he wanted was control of delegates at the convention. Now in his twenty-eighth year in the House, he disliked the notion of sharing power with a thirty-nine-year-old Boston green blood. Always a hard party worker and long considered the federal patronage dispenser for the state, McCormack had more influence among top Democratic circles than Kennedy, who had relied on his own appeal to the voters rather than working closely with the party organization. Indeed, many Democrats viewed Kennedy as a lone wolf who liked to play the Republican side of the street.
The stage seemed set for a tussle between the Majority Leader and the Senator. Matters came to a head when William Burke, a vehement supporter of McCormack, was elected chairman of the state Democratic committee at the end of 1955. Kennedy and McCormack had some liking and respect for each other, but Burke was of a very different cut. He was a long-time crony of Jim Curley; Collector of Customs in Boston under Roosevelt; more recently a gentleman onion farmer in the western part of the state. The big, bald politico had a dubious reputation as a wirepuller and bully. Also joining the McCormack forces were Fox of the Boston Post, now completely on the outs with Kennedy, and Curley himself, who still sought revenge against the man who had “betrayed” him during his time of anguish. Egged on by his supporters, McCormack considered running as a favorite son in the presidential primary scheduled for April. With Burke as chairman, such a combination, if uncontested, would have produced a delegation not only favorable to McCormack, but hostile to Kennedy and Stevenson.
Getting wind of this plan, Kennedy told McCormack and Burke that he would run as a favorite son himself unless they agreed to compromise on the membership of the delegation. In return, Kennedy agreed not to oppose Burke as chairman, at least for a time. McCormack and Burke agreed to this proposal. Kennedy and McCormack sat down together, and after some haggling they were able to agree on a unity slate.
Harmony was not to last long. Stevenson leaders in Chicago, with whom Kennedy was keeping in close touch, were pressing for some expression of support by Massachusetts voters. Burke and Fox could not resist a chance to boom McCormack and batter Kennedy and Stevenson. The unity slate meant that they could not fight for delegates at the April primary, but the April ballot would also have a space where voters could write in the name of the man they preferred for President. Why not get a big write-in vote for McCormack? While Burke bustled around the state and McCormack stayed out of the way in Washington, Fox converted the Post into a propaganda sheet for the old war horse.
Fox had some scores to even. With rising indignation he had watched Kennedy’s votes against McCarthyism and his shift to a more liberal position. What had happened to the man he had endorsed in 1952? One episode in particular had annoyed him. After fruitlessly denouncing Harvard’s toleration of “left-wingers” on its faculty, he had decided on a campaign to hit his alma mater where it would hurt—in the pocketbook—by setting up a committee to ask all alumni to withhold contributions to Harvard until it got rid of them. Fox had asked Kennedy to join the committee and Kennedy had refused.
As reports of McCormack write-in activities reached him, Kennedy tried to rally Stevenson supporters. But Kennedy and the Stevenson people had no chance against McCormack’s popularity among the party faithful in Boston. Carrying his own city by a four to one margin, the Majority Leader piled up almost 30,000 write-in votes across the state, about 10,000 more than Stevenson.
It was a trouncing for the Illinoisan—and for Kennedy, too. The results meant not only that McCormack could ask the delegation to support him on the first ballot as a favorite son, but McCormack now had more say about where delegates would go on the second ballot. Kennedy had lost face and prestige and still could offer nothing to Stevenson at the convention. All he had gained from the fight so far was an expensive lesson in the Boston school of political hard knocks.
Then Burke made a mistake. Stevenson’s supporters, he crowed, should have been in Princeton listening to Alger Hiss, who was making his first appearance after his release from prison. Kennedy had been aware throughout the winter of the opposition of McCarthyites like Fox. He had been aware that he confronted the old mucker element in Boston politics in the form of Curley and Burke. But now Burke’s statement was not only a slap in the face; it meant that the opposition, aside from McCormack himself, was stained with McCarthyism. In one sentence, Burke had illuminated the fact that Curleyism and McCarthyism, which had been somewhat separate tendencies in Boston, were now joined in opposition to Kennedy’s national ambitions.
Kennedy studied the situation. The weak point in McCormack’s forces was Burke himself, who had earned the ill will of a host of party leaders over the years because of his political tactics. The portly onion grower was up for re-election in mid-May. If he could be knocked out of the chairmanship, Kennedy could reassert his influence over the delegation at the convention.
Unhappily, this plan demanded of Kennedy something he had never done and was reluctant to undertake—moving into an internal party struggle with both fists flying. He had always managed to steer clear of such fights; he detested the murky maneuvers and petty name-calling that inevitably would be involved. A fight with Burke meant that both men would get dirtied, for Burke loved to pull his adversaries down to his own level. In one of the classic exchanges of Boston politics, he had once bellowed that he would grapple in the gutter with Paul Dever, to which someone replied quietly, “You would have to climb up, Bill.”
But his dander was up, and Kennedy decided to move against Burke, to do so quietly, however, by putting pressure on members of the state committee. The Kennedy forces had helped elect some pro-Stevenson committeemen in the April primary, and now Kennedy and his people went to work on the neutrals. Mayors, state legislators, union officials, liberal leaders, ADA members, and others were asked to put pressure on the committee members in their districts. Kennedy toured the state making phone calls and paying visits on party leaders. He even held a breakfast meeting with Burke in Northampton to see if he would pull out, but to no avail.
In the Berkshires,
Kennedy was rash enough to tell a reporter of his plans, and soon the battle was front-page news across the state. Former Governor Dever and a host of politicians lined up with Kennedy; McCormack announced that he was supporting Burke “1000 per cent.” Then Kennedy began to experience gutter warfare. Burke announced that at the Northampton meeting Kennedy had offered to make him Democratic national committeeman in place of Curley if Burke would quit as chairman. Quickly picking up his cue in Boston, Curley charged that Kennedy was trying to bribe him to get off the national committee to make room for Burke.
“Well, he hasn’t got money enough to buy me at any time,” declared Curley in righteous, and phony, indignation. “I never took any money from him or his whole family, and I never will.” Other Burke followers picked up the refrain—the millionaire Kennedy family was trying to take over the Democratic party.
For Kennedy, bringing his father and family into the picture was unbearable. Friends had never seen him so angry. Publicly, he hid his rage while he coolly set about to destroy Burke. As the committee meeting neared, Kennedy laid plans for the chairmanship battle with his usual attention to detail. To run against Burke, he dug up a city mayor, Pat Lynch, who could appeal to all factions. An elaborate “scenario” of six typewritten pages was prepared to guide the Kennedy forces through the correct parliamentary procedure and tactics at the coming election of a chairman. Burke’s tactics were anticipated and alternative lines of action established. As a final precaution, guards were hired to prevent the Burke forces from physically taking over the election meeting. Kennedy coached his forces at a last-minute strategy conference.
The meeting was in the best Boston tradition. Burke and a group of burly henchmen forced their way past the guards and took their places in the hotel conference room. The guards came in to keep order and barely averted fisticuffs. It took an hour to elect a temporary chairman to supervise the balloting. As the room grew dense with smoke, committee-men waxed eloquent over procedural points. Anonymous men in dark suits moved about whispering in people’s ears.
“Who are we voting on?” asked a man in a dark suit.
“Sit down—you’re not a member,” someone shouted.
“Just a point of order,” the man said, and sat down.
Somehow a vote was finally taken, and the Kennedy forces won decisively, 47 to 31. Quivering with frustration, Burke told reporters that he would run against Kennedy for the Senate in 1958, and “let him try to go out and buy votes like he bought this election. He and his millions don’t know what decency and honor mean.” The election, announced Kennedy, marked the beginning of a new era for Massachusetts Democrats. The fight, he added carefully, had not been directed at Congressman McCormack.
Who but Kennedy?
Whatever its moments of high and low comedy, the battle over Burke marked a major turn for Kennedy. For the first time, he had thrown his full weight into a battle not for his own candidacy, but to get a grip on the party machinery. Friends had warned him that he had little to gain and much to lose, that he might even be jeopardizing his chances for re-election in 1958. But the Senator was now turning his attention to national party politics. He had gambled for more power over the delegation to Chicago and won.
He now had a moral influence over a batch of delegates—but how would he use it? The national party picture was obscure. Kennedy’s best chance for the vice-presidential spot was on a ticket headed by Stevenson, but in the spring of 1956 the race seemed wide open. Kefauver had dealt Stevenson’s prospects a heavy blow by beating him in Minnesota, and Governor Averell Harriman, of New York, was running hard.
Kennedy, moreover, was genuinely uncertain of his own best interests. His father flatly opposed his candidacy on the grounds that Stevenson would probably lose to Eisenhower, no matter who his running mate was, and if it was Kennedy, the result would then be laid to a Catholic being on the ticket, and hence the prospects of a Catholic running for President would be set back by decades. Sorensen and others on Kennedy’s staff, however, urged him to run. They argued that a campaign, even if it failed, would project him onto the national scene. There was some grass-roots pressure, too; Massachusetts Democrats were organizing Kennedy-for-Vice-President committees, putting out leaflets, even ordering big Kennedy buttons.
Kennedy resolved the problem, for the moment, in his usual way—he made no decision but told Sorensen and other aides and members of his family to go ahead on their own.
It was a blinking green light—to go where? Sorensen and Reardon had the awkward problem of trying to organize support for a reluctant candidate, with the prospect that the decision ultimately would be made by one man whose identity they did not know. The only thing to do, they decided, was to build a strong case for Kennedy while quietly lining up support.
The main problem was the Catholic issue. Sorensen delved into voting records and came up with a detailed analysis claiming to demonstrate that a Catholic running mate would be a positive advantage to a Protestant candidate. Adorned with tables and footnotes, the long analysis argued that there was a “Catholic vote,” that this vote was coming to a peak with the maturing of immigrant offspring, and that it was concentrated in the big electoral states (whose strength in the Electoral College, of course, Kennedy had just safeguarded in Senate debate). Stevenson especially, it was argued, needed this Catholic support, for Eisenhower had made inroads on the Catholic vote. A page of statistics showed how Stevenson had run behind local Catholic candidates in the previous election.
Later on, this intriguing document was quietly let out to reporters as an analysis drawn up by “backers” of Kennedy. The planting was done so skillfully that the U.S. News & World Report published the whole account, and Time a long summary of it, both on the eve of the convention.
By June, the Kennedy-for-Vice-President boom was on—to the extent campaigns for second place can be boomed. A strong backer was Connecticut’s Governor Abraham Ribicoff, who, at the Governors’ Conference in Atlantic City, urged his fellow chief executives to support a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket. Asked if Kennedy’s religion would be a handicap, Ribicoff said: “Since 1928, the country has reached a deeper sense of maturity. Politicians are unimaginative when religious factors come up, but the people vote for a man on the basis of his character, personality and principles. I am for Senator Kennedy because of what he stands for. His religion doesn’t enter into it. I think he would add strength to the ticket. He has always had a strong appeal for the independent voter. He did so in a year when Eisenhower carried Massachusetts in a landslide. He would have a wide appeal because he is a middle-of-the-roader. Southerners would like his position on most matters.”
Other vice-presidential camps were active, too, by the spring of 1956. Defying the old political notion that a self-respecting politician has to be coaxed into accepting the nomination for second place, a dozen candidates were sniffing the political winds. So the Kennedy camp got busy with another lengthy analysis—this one of several dozen candidates, including some admittedly “preposterous” possibilities, in terms of certain tests. The tests were:
1. Availability. Thirteen possible candidates were dismissed as committed to their present job or running for something else—John McCormack, for example.
2. Compatibility. Must be consistently pro-Stevenson—ten candidates held ineligible.
3. Marital status. Should be married, and with no previous divorce—five candidates out.
4. Veteran status. “Not necessarily essential” but “strongly desirable”—eight candidates adversely affected.
5. Geographical status. Should come from large, balance-of-power states not too near Illinois—twenty-seven candidates dropped.
On the positive side, the report argued that Stevenson’s running mate must have a background in national policy and politics, a record as a vote getter, a “moderate” philosophy like Stevenson’s, a warm and sincere appeal on the “stump,” enough money to finance most of his own campaign and good contacts to get more. Carefully and col
dly, the report analyzed the pros and cons of the other candidates. Humphrey, for example, was summarized as “Strongly pro-Stevenson; married; young and healthy; not a veteran; state adjacent to Stevenson’s (11 electoral votes); 8 years’ experience in Congress; good vote getter; nationally known; considered active ADA’er to Stevenson’s left; ‘right’ on farm issue and Taft-Hartley; good speaker and personality; not wealthy.”
This merciless siphoning-out process came up with one ideal candidate: John F. Kennedy. “It would appear that the best of a good group is Senator Kennedy—young but not as young as [Frank] Clement (and nearly as old as Teddy Roosevelt when he was nominated Vice-President); now fully recovered from his spinal operation; holder of a brilliantly heroic combat record; married to a lovely wife; from the right kind of state in terms of size, location, and political tendencies; with more experience in Congress than Humphrey, Wagner, or Clement; author of a highly praised best-seller; widely known and popular; a proven vote-getter against big odds; a moderate Stevensonian philosophy; friendly with party leaders in all sections; ‘right’ on Taft-Hartley and acceptable on the farm issue; with a winning charm, particularly on TV; an able speaker; and independently wealthy, with close contacts with other contribution sources.
“He is not as experienced as [Clinton] Anderson,” the report granted, “as oratorical as Clement or as pro-farmer as Humphrey—but he has by far the best combination of positive qualifications, the only one who can meet every specification posed, and the most ‘winning’ of all the potential running-mates.” The reference to his being not as “pro-farmer” as Humphrey reflected awareness by the Kennedy forces that his opposition to more rigid price supports in the spring of 1956 had aroused some opposition on the part of farm groups.
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