To win, Kennedy would have to do it the hard way, dominating enough primaries that as the convention approached, those governors would go to him. Only that way could he gain the momentum he needed. Jack, after all, wasn’t a party favorite with either the liberal or Washington establishments. If the old Roosevelt crowd prevailed, it could well be Adlai Stevenson again. If Lyndon Johnson proved able to leverage his sizable Capitol Hill clout, the nomination might be his.
“By taking the case directly to the people, as he intended, he felt he’d be able to pick up a great many delegates,” O’Donnell said. “I think, very early, he took the position that the leaders and professionals will, in the end, follow their delegations. He believed he could succeed in building a fire under these leaders by appealing directly to the voters and to the delegates.”
The governors most on his mind were a trio composed of David Lawrence of Pennsylvania, Pat Brown of California, and Mike DiSalle of Ohio. These men, so the idea went, “would begin to get nervous and, though their inclination might—or not—be for John Kennedy, in the end they would follow their delegates.”
Kennedy knew he faced a problem with all his fellow Catholics. He needed to overcome their ingrained belief that one of them could not be elected president. To do that, he’d have to convince the governors to support him in the face of what many of them believed to be their own self-interest, fearing as they did that a Catholic on their state ballot would hurt the chances of their other candidates. Yet there was also something deeper at work. Any Catholic governor was at the top of the heap, as far as Catholic perception was concerned; he’d risen as high as he could up until that moment. Maintaining that ceiling on his possibilities meant he could congratulate himself on reaching the pinnacle he’d attained.
The cold fact was that these governors feared a backlash among their states’ voters. Bishop Wright, a politically savvy Catholic leader from Worcester, Massachusetts, and longtime family friend of the O’Donnells, had become the bishop of the Diocese of Pittsburgh. He warned O’Donnell that “he didn’t believe Governor Lawrence would support Senator Kennedy. The bishop indicated that friends had talked to him and that the governor was still exactly in the same spot he’d been in 1956, still horribly fearful of the problem a Catholic candidate would present to the Democratic ticket nationally. The governor also believed that under no circumstances would people in the state of Pennsylvania support a Catholic at the top of the ticket.” His nervousness was understandable, given that he was the first Catholic to hold his position.
Governor Pat Brown of California, also Catholic, was resisting Kennedy’s approaches. His aide Fred Dutton admitted later that he’d been urging his boss to hold off backing the Massachusetts candidate. “The truth of the matter is that Brown, privately, was very strong for Kennedy at that stage. It was me arguing that it made sense in terms of California politics—and everything else—that the governor stay uncommitted. This was something between just Brown and me, but Kennedy was completely aware of it. He had it right down to the gnat’s eyebrow.”
Brown had a high regard for Kennedy. “There was no bullshit to the man,” the former governor told me long into his retirement. He’d seen how Kennedy had come west well prepared. “His complete familiarity with California politics was incredible,” Dutton recalled. “I would guess he knew more about California politicians than any of the chief California Democratic politicians of the period.” But it wasn’t all soft sell. “O’Donnell and O’Brien were out several times,” said Dutton, “and made strong private approaches to various individuals—threatening, in fact, is the only accurate word.”
With O’Donnell and Bobby still on the Rackets Committee through the first half of 1959, the campaign progressed at a gradual pace. In the period between Palm Beach and the second strategy meeting in October, the senator continued to travel the country seeking out delegates. O’Brien and O’Donnell, at the behest of Bobby, began accompanying him on these trips, allowing Sorensen to remain in Washington, “working on issues and speeches.”
When Bobby left the committee in July in order to write his own book, The Enemy Within—billed as a “crusading lawyer’s personal story of a dramatic struggle with the ruthless enemies of clean unions and honest management”—he also took a hiatus from the campaign. O’Donnell noted with regret the difference his absence made.
The Kennedy campaign’s second crucial meeting that year was convened at Bobby’s Hyannis Port house in October. Again, Jack conducted it, once more demonstrating his leadership strengths, but also the in-depth knowledge he’d gained. This time the group included influential Democrats in need of continual reassurance that they were backing the right candidate. Among them were Governor Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut and that state’s party boss, John Bailey. When they left, each man present had designated responsibilities for which he’d volunteered.
For example, Larry O’Brien would handle California, Maryland, and Indiana, and Hy Raskin, a Chicago lawyer and onetime Stevenson loyalist, took Oregon. There were no salaries; just their expenses were paid by the campaign. And now, with his book finished, Bobby was free to assume the reins of the entire effort. They needed him “to take control and get it all organized in order to be effective,” said O’Donnell.
Currently looming was the decision whether to run in Ohio or Wisconsin. Since both primaries were held at the same time, a choice had to be made. If Kennedy tried to campaign in both, he’d be spreading himself too thin. It was decided that a win in Wisconsin, where a poll by Lou Harris showed him ahead, made the most sense. It would prove he could win in a Midwestern farm state against a regional rival, Senator Hubert Humphrey of neighboring Minnesota.
Here, the great potential advantage was identical to the disadvantage: his rival’s geographic edge. Humphrey had for years been a popular figure in Wisconsin. Beating him in his own territory would send a very definite signal. Here’s how O’Donnell recapped Kennedy’s thinking: “He said, ‘I’d be running against Hubert, who practically lives in Wisconsin. Minnesota and Wisconsin have about the same economic problems, Hubert obviously being on the right side. While I—a city boy from Boston—am not going to be on the right side of some Wisconsin problems.’ ”
Thus, with Wisconsin obviously such a challenge, it made victory there all the more significant. “He felt it would be a great gamble and, if he lost, it would knock him out of the ballpark, totally.” There was just one real danger the candidates saw to the enterprise: a battle with the Protestant Humphrey could draw unfavorable attention to Kennedy’s Catholicism and thus hurt him in primaries coming after.
But if Kennedy forfeited Wisconsin to Humphrey, focusing instead on Ohio, it would be a mistake, imagewise. Forgoing Wisconsin, with its largely rural population, would leave Kennedy seeming too much the candidate destined to take only the ethnic, big-city states.
Once the decision was made to campaign in Wisconsin, then the task was to figure out how to claim Ohio through other means. What happened next is an example of just how tough a politician Jack Kennedy had become. He and Bobby were about to give Governor Mike DiSalle of Ohio a variation on the Onions Burke routine.
DiSalle was presumed to favor Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, who was Harry Truman’s candidate to head the Democratic ticket. With DiSalle still owing a debt to Truman—he’d given him a sizable job in his administration, director of the Office of Price Stabilization, during the Korean War—the Kennedy people figured he was spoken for. That is, if the Ohio governor ran as a “favorite son” in the state’s primary, he’d then be expected to hand over his delegates to Symington at the convention.
But what if the Kennedy people didn’t intend to leave that option open to him? Soon, Kennedy warned DiSalle, “Mike, it’s time to shit or get off the pot. You’re either going to come out for me or we are going to run a delegation against you in Ohio and we’ll beat you.” And the truth was, Jack Kennedy was popular enough in Ohio to pull it off.
So, even if he wasn�
��t actively campaigning there, Ohio was still hugely critical for him, especially now that he’d been acting tough and holding a club over the head of the governor. At a press event organized by Ben Bradlee, one Newsweek reporter challenged Kennedy by asking him what his plans were for showing the skeptics he wasn’t “just another pretty boy from Boston and Harvard.” According to Bradlee, Jack didn’t hesitate before replying: “Well, for openers, I’m going to fucking well take Ohio.”
Before getting rough with DiSalle, the Kennedys needed to mend fences with labor. Kennedy declared that the United Auto Workers convention in Atlantic City would be his next destination to, as O’Donnell put it, “stop some of this drift” toward Humphrey and Stevenson, both reliable cultivators of organized labor.
At the UAW event, Kennedy further closed the distance between himself and Humphrey. The Minnesotan delivered a rousing speech that was received with great enthusiasm. Still, according to reports, the “wild and frenzied” reception given Jack Kennedy by the convention-goers surpassed it. And that wasn’t all. He’d won the support of the UAW leader, a highly regarded liberal. “The fact that Walter Reuther would walk away and say nice things about Jack Kennedy, which he did forcefully from that moment on,” said Ken O’Donnell, “that was a significant breakthrough for us.”
In a colorful episode, O’Donnell arranged a discreet meeting between Kennedy and Richard Gosser, “very much the old-school labor union type of fellow and not of the new-breed Reuther type.” Accompanying Gosser were his handlers, who “looked like wrestlers and like they might break a few legs when called upon. The senator shot me a look.”
Gosser confided to Jack that “the rank-and-file members of his locals were all without exception for John Kennedy” and that “all the resources that he could bring to bear in Ohio would be put at Senator Kennedy’s behest.”
O’Donnell recalled that Gosser “got very emotional, and while he was talking, his false teeth kept popping out. So, in between sentences, he’d reach up and shove them back in, with some force. The senator winced the first time, as it looked rather painful. Then, as Gosser kept doing it with every sentence, the senator would look over at me with that quizzical expression that said, ‘What have you gotten me into here?’ ” As comic as it was, it was a politically important meeting. Jack Kennedy was making allies he never could have imagined.
In all his years in politics to date, Jack Kennedy, the opposite of a joiner, had maintained his independence, and cherished it. He took special pride in not being part of the coalition of liberals and labor leaders dominating the Democratic scene of the 1950s. Yet, as he now moved to identify himself with them—he had begun calling himself a liberal—he was determined to preserve his separateness in private. “I always had a feeling that he regarded them as something apart from his philosophy,” Charlie Bartlett said. “I think he saw the liberals as the sort of people who ran like a pack.” Ben Bradlee concurred, with even greater bluntness: “He hated the liberals.”
Despite the fact that Vice President Richard Nixon was heavily favored to be his party’s candidate for the White House this time around—it was his turn—and despite Kennedy’s shots at him on the stump, friends of Jack knew he was anything but a Nixon hater. Whatever he might say out on the campaign trail, when at home he refused to join in when Nixon was being ridiculed. Ben Bradlee recalled how this annoyed Jack’s “card-carrying anti-Nixon friends.”
For example, one evening Jacqueline Kennedy had invited their old neighbors Joan and Arthur Gardner to dinner. There’d be just the two couples and Rose Kennedy, who was stopping by on her way to Palm Beach. Mrs. Gardner made a crack about the “dreadful” Richard Nixon, fully expecting her host to chime in with his agreement. He didn’t. “You have no idea what he’s been through,” Kennedy defended him. “Dick Nixon is the victim of the worst press that ever hit a politician in this country. What they did to him in the Helen Gahagan Douglas race was disgusting.”
Kennedy would take pains, even, to avoid hurting Nixon’s feelings. Arriving at a 1959 social event at which Nixon had reason to expect him, Kennedy changed his mind at the last second and decided it would be impolitic to be seen attending. Later, he stopped by the vice president’s office, with the apologetic explanation that he “did make it out there but at the last minute a crisis arose.” He’d had to avoid someone who was leaving just as he was arriving, he said, a person whom he’d rather didn’t know about his friendship with Dick. “Nixon is a nice fellow in private, and a very able man,” he would tell a British reporter around this time. “I worked with him on the Hill for a long time, but it seems he has a split personality and he is very bad in public, and nobody likes him.”
Charlie Bartlett had a memory of an especially telling moment. He and his wife, Martha, spent New Year’s Eve 1959 with the Kennedys. Something his old friend said that night caused him to write a note to himself the following morning. “Had dinner with Jack and Jackie—talked about presidential campaign a lot—Jack says if the Democrats don’t nominate him he’s going to vote for Nixon.” Bartlett told me that he figured moments like that are what get pals of famous people to write memoirs. He never did.
• • •
On January 2, 1960, John F. Kennedy stood in the Senate Caucus Room, one floor up from his office, and announced his candidacy. “The presidency is the most powerful office in the Free World,” he declared. “Through its leadership can come a more vital life for our people. In it are centered the hopes of the globe around us for freedom and a more secure life. For it is in the Executive Branch that the most crucial decisions of this century must be made in the next four years—how to end or alter the burdensome arms race, where Soviet gains already threaten our very existence . . . ” He was offering himself as a latter-day Churchill, warning his people that the enemy was arming while America was asleep. It was an homage to his hero and, at the same time, a son’s declaration of independence from his father’s support for Neville Chamberlain and appeasement.
It was also a challenge to would-be rivals. He spoke of his relentless cross-country campaigning “the past forty months.” He’d been out with the people since September 1956. Where were they? “I believe that any Democratic aspirant to this important nomination should be willing to submit to the voters his views, record, and competence in a series of primary contests.” He was daring Lyndon Johnson, master of the Senate, to come out and joust in the open fields. Better yet, he was using his weakness—his lack of a power base like Stevenson’s in the loyal Roosevelt cotillion or Johnson’s among the Senate barons—to suggest they do what he had to do: build a national organization from scratch.
But he kept coy about where he intended to make his fight. He would enter the New Hampshire primary, but keep his other options open. “I shall announce my plans with respect to the other primaries as their filing dates approach.” He was keeping other information hooded, too: a biography stapled to the prepared speech lightly wallpapered over significant facts.
The official handout opened with a description of his father having “served under Franklin Roosevelt,” a bland portrait of that terribly bitter relationship. It described the candidate as having been “educated in the public schools of Brookline, Massachusetts,” an obvious effort to democratize his elite upbringing. The document further said he’d attended the London School of Economics “in 35–36.” This was an obvious effort both to claim distinction and hood the serious illness that sent him back home from the LSE within days of his arrival, not to mention his registration at Princeton that same fall and the subsequent relapse that cost him the academic year. Illness, such a powerful part of Jack Kennedy’s biography, was clearly not something to be admitted in this version. Finally, the sheet highlighted the candidate’s “WAR RECORD,” something his opponents in the upcoming primaries, most particularly Hubert Humphrey, didn’t possess.
The campaign was on! The season had arisen for selling strengths and diverting attention from weaknesses. Jack Kennedy was now running
to be the champion of the party that had twice run Adlai Stevenson, a party still liberal at its heart, working-class in its gut. Traveling to Boston that evening, he summoned Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith, two keepers of the liberal keys and Stevenson regulars, to dine with him at the grand old Locke-Ober restaurant.
“At dinner he was, as usual, spirited and charming, but he also conveyed an intangible feeling of depression,” Schlesinger jotted in his journal later that night. “I had the sense that he feels himself increasingly hemmed in as a result of a circumstance over which he has no control—his religion; and he inevitably tends toward gloom and irritation when he considers how this circumstance may deny him what he thinks his talents and efforts have earned.
“I asked him what he considered the main sources of his own appeal. He said obviously there were no great differences between himself and Humphrey on issues, that it came down to a question of personality and image. ‘Hubert is too hot for the present mood of the people. He gets people too excited, too worked up. What they want today is a more boring, monotonous personality, like me.’ Jack plainly has no doubt about his capacity to beat Nixon and can hardly wait to take him on.”
When it came to pulling out ahead of the Democratic pack, Kennedy wanted to take as many big states as he could in his fight for the nomination. He also needed to decide where to put the biggest effort, where to devote the better part of what he had: his polling, his time, his money, his family, his father. Mike DiSalle, the Ohio governor, was still holding out on him. Privately supportive, he was still withholding his public endorsement. Though he had promised to come out for Kennedy, when Christmas 1959 came and went he was still wiggling. He now explained to Kennedy that, as a Catholic, his backing would not be as beneficial to him and recommended he find some non-Catholics in Ohio to back him. Kennedy got the message: DiSalle was trying to welsh on the deal.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 63
