At a Christmas meeting among Jack, Bobby, Joe Sr., and Ken O’Donnell, the decision was made to send Bobby out to Columbus to get Mike DiSalle on board once and for all. O’Donnell remembers Jack’s teasing his brother: “You’re mean and tough, and can say miserable things to Mike that I cannot. And if you get too obnoxious, then I’ll disown and disavow what you said and just tell DiSalle, ‘He’s a young kid and doesn’t know any better.’ ” Bobby, not amused, replied, “Thanks a lot.”
Early that January, Bobby Kennedy, accompanied by John Bailey, met with DiSalle. Afterward, the indignant governor called O’Donnell and Senator Kennedy to complain. “He was furious,” said O’Donnell. “He told me that Bobby was the ‘most obnoxious kid he’d ever met,’ that Bobby practically had called him a liar and said ‘We can’t trust you. You will do what you’re told.’
“In essence, Bobby’d done exactly what he’d been told to, of course. And then Bailey called me privately, saying he’d been horrified at the conversation. Bobby was awfully tough, completely unreasonable, rude and obnoxious, and totally demanded that DiSalle come out for his brother immediately. And if he did not, well . . . he threatened him.” To Bailey, it had sounded just like the kind of pressure mobsters applied.
According to a Newsweek feature, the taking of Ohio made for “a pretty dramatic story,” one that pitted DiSalle’s desires against the Kennedy Party’s own, as well as its “six months of careful effort.” Bobby had secured the endorsement and more. Jack, making good on his determination to claim Ohio’s delegates at the convention, had fashioned for himself a reputation.
Not only were such rivals as Lyndon Johnson, himself no slouch at brutal manipulation, put on notice by the Kennedy brothers’ maneuver, but so were the country’s political bosses, such as Carmine DeSapio of New York and Richard Daley of Chicago. They saw how Mike DiSalle was now running, committed to delivering his state’s delegates to John F. Kennedy at the national convention, and they were impressed.
In March, Kennedy won the New Hampshire primary with 85 percent of the vote. It was a big, if expected, victory. The Wisconsin primary, held the first week in April, was a contest between Jack’s national celebrity and Hubert Humphrey, the boy next door. Democratic voters in both his own state and the one to their east were looking to him to represent their own brand of Midwestern liberalism on the national scene. He was also enormously strong on farm issues, an area where his eastern rival was something of a city slicker.
Stumping around this alien landscape brought the fighter in Jack into sharp relief. “You think I’m out here to get votes?” he said, sitting in a Wisconsin diner one morning early in the campaign. “Well, I am, but not just for their vote. I’m trying to get the votes of a lot of people who are sitting right now in warm, comfortable homes all over the country, having a big breakfast of bacon and eggs, hoping that young Jack will fall right on his face in the snow. Bastards.”
Hubert Humphrey was, within his own realm, a uniquely well-respected Democratic figure, having stood up to anti-Semitism when he was Minneapolis mayor in the late 1940s. He’d also called upon his fellow party members to commit themselves to taking on the issue of civil rights at the 1948 convention. It was the speech he gave supporting this conviction that led to the Dixiecrat walkout there and to the third-party nomination of the segregationist candidate Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.
Because Wisconsin’s economy mirrored that of Minnesota, and because its Catholic population was low, the primary could be seen as Humphrey’s to lose. Facing these facts, the Kennedy people started early and hit hard. At the beginning of January, Bobby dispatched Kenny O’Donnell there to live full-time in the lead-up to the primary. “He knew we had to run the same type of campaign we’d run in Massachusetts—therefore we needed to have someone full-time from the Kennedy organization giving actual day-to-day direction,” O’Donnell said. Soon Bobby and Teddy Kennedy—whose first child, Kara, was born in February—followed O’Donnell, living with their wives and families at the Hotel Wisconsin in Milwaukee for seven weeks. Bobby, by this time, was the father of seven.
Pat Lucey, a former Wisconsin assemblyman who’d go on to the governorship, was an early supporter of Kennedy in the state. Watching the candidate, Lucey was impressed with his well-disciplined retail politics. As Lucey describes it, Senator Kennedy’s day began early and kept to a “grueling” pattern. “He was campaigning at six o’clock in the morning and probably at a shopping center at ten o’clock that night. Finally, he started running out of steam and thought he’d made enough of the right impression to let up a little bit.” The purpose had been achieved. The image of Jack Kennedy standing in freezing dawn weather at the factory gates was now fixed in the mind of the voter. For Pat Lucey, the result could be summed up as the “effective presentation of a celebrity.”
Humphrey, for his part, tried to portray the smart Kennedy operation as a negative. “Beware of these orderly campaigns,” he declared. “They are ordered, bought, and paid for. We are not selling corn flakes or some Hollywood production.” To imply further shallowness, Humphrey took aim at what he saw as his opponent’s superficial appeal. “You have to learn to have the emotions of a human being when you are charged with the responsibilities of leadership.” And then, if that wasn’t enough: Jack Kennedy had “little emotional commitment to liberals,” he took pains to remind his listeners. There was truth to this, of course. Kennedy’s newfound liberalism had been neatly packaged since the 1956 Democratic Convention.
But Kennedy enjoyed a state-of-the-art edge. Using Lou Harris’s polling data on local attitudes and concerns, Jack knew what people had on their minds, which arguments would win their interest. It was a breakthrough technique, and one that would change modern campaigning in the years to come.
By this point Jack was becoming keenly attuned to the image he projected. Having encouraged Charlie Bartlett to fly to Wisconsin to watch the reaction he drew from the crowds, he quickly revealed this self-awareness, even if he wasn’t about to make any adjustment to fit in with the local scene. When they’d finished dinner after his arrival, Bartlett was startled to hear the candidate ask: “Shall I wear this blue overcoat?” He was indicating his usual coat. “Or shall I wear this?” Now he was holding up a sporty brown herringbone. “Why not wear that one?” Bartlett suggested, pointing to the second. “It looks like Wisconsin.” This brought a swift retort: “Are you trying to change my personality?”
Bartlett also put effort into trying to convince him to wear a hat. “It was as cold as the devil up in Wisconsin. I bought him one of those fur hats with the flaps on it and tried to get him to wear that. But he wouldn’t.” In Bartlett’s phrase, as time went on, it was his old friend who “killed the hat.”
With loudspeakers throughout the state blaring the Oscar-winning song “High Hopes,” sung by Frank Sinatra—its lyrics now specially tailored for Kennedy’s candidacy—the presidential hopeful put on a dazzling show in Wisconsin, especially in its ethnic communities. He made a lasting impression when he appeared at a Polish event in Milwaukee, mainly because Jackie took the stage briefly and addressed the gathering in their native language. “I have great respect for the Polish people. Besides, my sister is married to a Pole,” she told them. Then she said, pronouncing the words carefully and correctly, “Poland will live forever.” Her listeners went wild.
A moment later, her husband caught the attention of Red Fay, asking over the tumult with a pleased grin: “How would you like to try and follow that?” Yet Jackie wasn’t her husband’s sole secret weapon in Wisconsin. Working for him there was a fellow who stayed under the radar and away from crowds. Paul Corbin was a campaign operative with a flair for dirty tricks. Later to be legendary in some political circles, Corbin began a close and lasting friendship with Bobby Kennedy during that push to win the 1960 Wisconsin primary. Probably his most famous stunt at the time had him distributing anti-Catholic material—ostensibly written by fearful Protestants—throughout largely Roman Cat
holic neighborhoods. Nothing incites voters to support their own kind like hard evidence they’re under assault from others.
For their own campaign song, the Humphrey people had chosen the tune of “Davy Crockett,” the jaunty theme of a hit Disney TV show. The problem was that their man was no more “king of the wild frontier” than he could claim to have “killed himself a b’ar when he was only three.” It was Jack Kennedy, who’d proven his grit and courage in his youth, who was plausibly heralding a new frontier.
While Kennedy believed his hard work would pay off, he also knew he had to win. “You have to keep coming up sevens,” he said, admitting, implicitly at least, that the outcome of the Wisconsin primary remained a crap shoot. However, on April 5, the balloting day, he admitted to Ben Bradlee the confidence he felt. “On the day Wisconsin voters went to the polls, he flew to some town in northern Michigan in the Caroline for a midday political rally before coming back for the returns, and I went with him. During the flight, I asked him for his prediction in each of the ten Wisconsin election districts. He wouldn’t tell me, but agreed to write them down and put them in a sealed envelope, if I’d do the same. We did, and Kennedy put them casually in a drawer on the plane, and switched the subject. Two or three days later, I was back on assignment on the Kennedy family plane and remembered the envelope. He pulled it out and showed me the predictions. I’d put down ‘Kennedy 7, Humphrey 3,’ out of an abundance of caution; I really thought it would be eight to two. Kennedy himself had put down, ‘JFK 9, HHH 1.’ ”
Despite a surprise attack from liberals trying to make last-minute political capital of the thousand-dollar contribution he’d delivered from his father to Nixon in 1950—an episode Kennedy aides were under instructions to deny—the Massachusetts senator had scored a big victory. The final count was 478,901 votes for John F. Kennedy to Hubert Humphrey’s 372,034.
But the results, the way they were presented, were inconclusive for two reasons. First, the press covered the Wisconsin Democratic vote in terms of congressional districts, of which there were ten: Kennedy took six, Humphrey four. Calling it that way made it appear a far narrower victory than a comparison of total votes for each candidate. This is because three of Humphrey’s four victorious congressional districts lay along his home state’s border and could have been expected to go his way. Kennedy’s friend Lem Billings had run the campaign in one of those districts and would later comment on the outcome there, saying, “In all fairness to myself, Humphrey was a very beloved figure in that district.”
Another reality helping, spinwise, to offset Humphrey’s loss was his victory in the congressional district that included Madison, the state capital, where the University of Wisconsin campus was also located. It was the single district Humphrey carried that was not on the Minnesota border, and for that reason it was judged to be a clear and unexpected upset of Jack Kennedy. Madison was the center of liberalism in the state, and even though Kennedy lost the district only narrowly, it looked bad. Why couldn’t Jack persuade the liberals he so needed to win the nomination that he should be their candidate?
The election-night coverage harped on the religion issue. Kennedy had won in six of the state’s ten congressional districts, the commentators decreed, mainly because Wisconsin’s Republican Catholics, rallying to their own, had crossed over to vote for him on the Democratic ballot.
“Kennedy is, of course, Roman Catholic, Humphrey a Congregationalist, and Nixon a Quaker,” Walter Cronkite reminded listeners. “And some observers think that the election has resolved into a religious struggle.” Sitting on a couch and smoking a small cigar, Kennedy watched Cronkite make this assessment with simmering rage, furious at seeing his victory recast along the very lines that represented a truth about himself that he could never change.
“One of the most elaborate and intense campaigns in the state’s history will end up achieving nothing,” another broadcaster intoned. After all the trudging through the snow, the hand-shaking, and the speechmaking, Jack was being denied the proper credit for snatching Wisconsin out of Humphrey’s grasp. Now the only choice was heading to heavily Protestant West Virginia, where the Democratic primary was scheduled for one month and five days later.
Adversity had again presented Jack Kennedy with a truth and a test. Wisconsin reminded the country of the hazard posed by his religion. He had predicted this himself at the April strategy meeting the previous year. Now the press was rehashing the same old story. Kennedy resented it, and to his sister Eunice, he spelled out the consequences of Wisconsin: “It means that we’ve got to go to West Virginia in the morning and do it all over again. And then we’ve got to go on to Maryland and Indiana and Oregon and win all of them.” He had to keep coming up sevens.
In deciding to throw his hat in the West Virginia primary, Jack Kennedy again had to overrule his father. Ben Bradlee recalled the two of them knocking heads over it. “When the question of West Virginia came up for discussion, Joe Kennedy argued strenuously against JFK’s entering, saying, ‘It’s a nothing state and they’ll kill him over the Catholic thing.’ A few minutes later JFK spoke out. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ve heard from the ambassador, and we’re all very grateful, Dad. But I’ve got to run in West Virginia.’ ”
Lem Billings saw it as his old school friend’s drive, his compulsion to rise to the occasion. “He knew that if he dropped West Virginia, particularly for a Catholic reason, it would be interpreted as meaning that a Catholic could never be president of the United States.”
Upon entering West Virginia, Kennedy must have felt his initial determination had bordered on bravado. The focus on his Catholicism was having an effect. Lou Harris’s numbers, which had been giving Kennedy a 70–30 lead in West Virginia, now showed Humphrey ahead 60–40. Pierre Salinger knew exactly what the turnabout boiled down to. “The reversal was, of course, produced by the addition of a single word to his poll. Harris had neglected to tell the people in West Virginia in his first one that John F. Kennedy was a Catholic. So we were right up against it there. But if we lost in West Virginia, we were gone.”
It suddenly didn’t look good. The unthinkable—an anti-Kennedy turnaround, a building backlash—might well be looming ahead. In Washington, the oddsmakers—including the self-interested Nixon, whose own future was tied to whomever the Democrats finally nominated—were betting that Jack couldn’t pull it off. Now it appeared that the nomination would have to be brokered, after all, at the convention in Los Angeles, a scenario that squared with Lyndon Johnson’s own game plan. The Senate leader imagined getting together with the delegates and wooing them in the same tried-and-true manner he used on senators before a key vote. He’d work the states one at a time, using his allies from the Hill as local kingmakers. Then, when the time came to pick the party’s nominee, the convention would choose a candidate who could actually win in November—not a Catholic, not a young backbencher who’d yet to do much of anything where it counted: on Capitol Hill.
Around this time, Lyndon Johnson called on Tip O’Neill in his office. The Senate leader said he understood O’Neill’s first loyalty was to his Massachusetts colleague, but that “the boy” was obviously going to falter after not getting the nomination on the first ballot. He lobbied O’Neill for his commitment on the second.
In West Virginia, Humphrey pressed the advantage he’d gained in Wisconsin. With the strains of “Give Me That Old Time Religion” coming from his campaign bus, he tried to play the faith advantage over Kennedy to the hilt. There was nothing subtle about it. Its verses had featured prominently—and ominously—in the film Inherit the Wind, a stirring drama based on the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial.” In the movie, released that year, the song comes to stand for the beliefs of the rural Christian fundamentalists opposed to any teaching of evolution, and in West Virginia its message was clear: Humphrey understood who the voters were, and Roman Catholic wasn’t part of the description.
Cannily—and what choice did he have?—Kennedy himself began citing his Catholicism at eve
ry opportunity, but often in the same context as his navy service. If his critics wanted to make his religion, rather than his political experience, the issue, he was willing to play their game. It was the game of politics at its most masterful. His brother Bobby would call this ploy “hanging a lantern on your problem.” Lem Billings recalled how, of necessity, the strategy had shifted. While in Wisconsin Jack had “pretty well avoided the religious question,” in West Virginia he “jumped into it with both feet. He pounded home day after day about religion.” There it became the issue, out in the open.
Kennedy showcased his service record in World War II to extinguish voters’ fears about possible conflicted loyalties; his allegiance was to the United States, it always had been and always would be. Why else had he risked his life in the Pacific? “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 Protestant before he climbed into an American bomber plane to fly his last mission.”
William Battle, who’d served in the PT boats with Kennedy, introduced him to a much-respected Episcopal bishop, Robert E. Lee Strider, with strong political influence in the Charleston area. “Young man, I should tell you right off the bat the only time I have ever voted Republican was when Al Smith ran for the Democratic nomination,” was the churchman’s opener to Kennedy, as Battle recalled. “And it was because of the Catholic issue. The way he handled it.”
Battle remembered the look Jack shot him, basically “What the hell did you bring me up here for?” And then Strider smiled. “That’s the way he handled it,” the bishop told his visitor. “Smith would not discuss it. You’ve handled your religion entirely differently. I’m satisfied, and I’d be delighted to work with you.” The next morning local papers throughout the coalfields region ran stories headlined: “Bishop Strider Supports Kennedy!”
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 64
