Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  Of course, he also had to face prejudice. “If we have to have a Catholic,” Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn told Stevenson, “I hope we don’t have to take that little pissant Kennedy.” But some Catholics were themselves a problem. James Farley, the old New Deal warhorse who’d helped make FDR and then broken with him when he ran for his unprecedented third term in 1940, gave Stevenson his opinion: “America is not ready for a Catholic yet.”

  Kennedy also took a hit from the party’s liberal wing, who knew he wasn’t really one of them, who’d never forgotten, let alone forgiven, his failure to cast a censure vote against Joe McCarthy. To woo the keepers of the New Deal flame whom he’d spent his early congressional years bashing over Yalta and the loss of China—those same liberals with whom he said he did “not feel comfortable”—he now needed to do some genuflecting.

  When he managed to set up a meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt in Chicago, the former first lady and Democratic grande dame didn’t make it easy. She’d let it be known how “troubled” she was by “Senator K’s evasive attitude on McCarthy.” Her opinion wasn’t changed by their get-together. Elaborately orchestrated, it turned out to be a disaster, with the rapport between them nonexistent. When Mrs. Roosevelt raised the McCarthy issue, Jack replied that it was “so long ago” it didn’t help. He also quibbled that the time to censure the Wisconsin senator had been when he returned to the Senate for his second term in 1953.

  FDR’s widow was having none of it. In full dudgeon, she berated Jack in front of everyone present, including other politicians who came and went throughout the discussion. Mrs. Roosevelt correctly saw herself as not just Franklin Roosevelt’s partner within the Democratic Party but his political heir. She regarded Kennedy’s approach to her as less than sincere, which it was.

  Balancing his failure to win over Mrs. Roosevelt, there now came good news. They began to get promises of support from delegates far and wide. Two or three in Nevada, one in Wyoming, one in Utah, and so forth, people who were for Jack Kennedy personally, but represented no large group of votes or delegates. They’d knock on the door of the hotel suite and say, “My name is Mary Jones. I’ve seen the senator on television and I think he is wonderful.” Or, “I’m from Oregon, and I want to vote for him.”

  Winning the support of big-state delegations was a more serious challenge. Charlie Bartlett described the process of Jack going to the Democratic bosses of the country—all complete strangers to him—and asking for their backing. It was an intimidating group that included the major honchos of the New York machine. But he was breaking new ground.

  “After Stevenson had thrown down the challenge, it was all beginning to accelerate, and he was obviously quite excited. I said, ‘Look, there’s Carmine DeSapio. You ought to go and see what you can do about him. He might be able to help you.’ I wish I had a movie of that scene. There he was—this rather slight figure, and DeSapio was a rather big fellow—and the reporters were all around DeSapio, completely ignoring Kennedy. But he went up and shyly said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. DeSapio, but my name is John Kennedy from Massachusetts, and I wondered if I could have a few words with you?’ That was the beginning. As I remember, he got a pretty good chunk of the New York vote.” It was like his old door-to-door campaigning in the Boston neighborhoods.

  When the public balloting began, Kennedy mustered surprising strength, with the Southern bloc contributing to his numbers. “Texas proudly casts its fifty-six votes for the fighting sailor who wears the scars of battle,” Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson hollered when his state’s delegation was recognized. The first ballot count was John F. Kennedy, 304 delegates; Estes Kefauver, 483; Albert Gore, 178. A total of 686 was needed for the required two-thirds majority.

  With the second balloting, momentum further shifted to Kennedy. Once again, he was drawing more support than expected from the Southern states. “I’m going to sing ‘Dixie’ for the rest of my life,” Jack promised aloud as the states reported their counts to the podium. With 646 delegates, victory seemed assured.

  Kennedy and Kefauver were now the two main contenders. The other candidates were flagging. The next ballot would be the decider.

  Ted Sorensen was watching the broadcast from campaign headquarters at the Stockyards Inn, as was his boss. “The second ballot was already under way, and a Kennedy trend had set in. The South was anxious to stop Kefauver, and Kennedy was picking up most of the Gore and Southern favorite-son votes. He was also getting the Wagner votes. Kefauver was gaining more slowly, but hardly a handful of delegates had left him. Bob Kennedy and his lieutenants were all over the floor shouting to delegations to come with Kennedy. Our television set showed wild confusion on the convention floor and a climbing Kennedy total. But the senator was as calm as ever. He bathed, then again reclined on the bed. The race was now neck and neck, and Kennedy knew that no lead was enough if it could not produce a majority.”

  The religious issue was about to intervene. The governor of Oklahoma stayed with the also-ran Gore, his candidacy now dead in the water, rather than back a Catholic. “He’s not our kind of folks,” he told a Kennedy pleader. With South Carolina, Illinois, and Alabama all seeking recognition to shift their delegates to Kennedy, the convention chairman, Sam Rayburn, instead recognized Oklahoma, which switched its Gore votes to Kefauver. Rayburn then called on Senator Gore, who now threw his own dwindling number of delegates to his fellow Tennessean.

  Kennedy, who’d been in the lead, could see that the trend had shifted. “Let’s go!” Kennedy said to Sorensen. Once inside the Amphitheatre, he began pushing his way through the crowded floor up to the podium. While some convention officials tried to stop him, urging him to wait for the balloting to be completed, Jack walked onto the rostrum, smiling. Speaking impromptu, he congratulated Kefauver, saluted Adlai Stevenson for allowing the delegates to choose his running mate, and called for making the nomination of Kefauver unanimous.

  That moment up on the stage, before the national television cameras, was Jack Kennedy’s unforgettable debut as a national leader.

  In a matter of hours Jack had learned a slew of lessons. He’d discovered the need for state-of-the-art communications on the convention floor; the need for an ongoing, accurate delegate count; for a perfect grasp of the minutiae of convention rules. Friendships were important, too. Celebrated senators mattered less. Estes Kefauver had beaten Jack because he knew delegates personally; after all, it had been his second time around and what he himself had learned in ’52 he’d put into action now. Wearing his trademark coonskin cap—a reference to his pioneer ancestors—Kefauver was a familiar figure who had shaken a lot of hands in a great many small towns. Unlike him, Jack Kennedy lacked the experience of traveling the length and breadth of the country itself and connecting with voters face-to-face.

  These lessons, absorbed and put to use later, were nothing in contrast with his triumph. He had taken a near-miss for the vice-presidential nomination and converted it, at the moment he raced to the podium, into a career-changing event. He had gone to Chicago one of several Democrats looking to the White House, and now was a subject of national fascination. In an inspired gesture of magnanimity, he had, in effect, won the first national primary of 1960.

  In the short run, of course, all he counted was the loss itself. Just an hour ago, his vote total was rising, seeming to clinch the deal. Now he was absorbing the defeat. As Jackie and his aides gathered around him in their hotel suite, he refused to be cheered by those who said the close defeat was the best possible outcome, that he’d made a name for himself without having to endure the thrashing in November everyone expected for the Stevenson ticket.

  “He hated to lose anything, and glared at us when we tried to console him by telling him he was the luckiest man in the world,” says Ken O’Donnell. The defeat brought Kennedy to a sober reckoning. He now believed that whatever lip service they paid to tolerance, the main party leaders, such as Rayburn, would simply not let him—young, independent, and Catholic—become their nomin
ee. The 1956 experience also marked Kennedy’s metamorphosis from dilettante to professional. “I’ve learned that you don’t get far in politics until you become a total politician,” he told his crew. “That means you’ve got to deal with the party leaders as well as with the voters.”

  Until that week in Chicago, the Kennedy people had been parochial in their experience and their outlook. But what had just happened to Jack—this incredible almost getting the vice-presidential nomination—was no real guide to what they’d have to do now. He, Jack Kennedy, needed to get out in the country, among the future delegates on their home ground, doing what Kefauver had done, but better.

  “It was too damned close not to be disappointed,” Kennedy would say years later. “Kefauver deserved it. I always thought that, with his victories in the primaries. Because I had done much better than I thought I would, I was not desolate. I was awfully tired. We had worked awfully hard, and we had come damn close.”

  Jackie Kennedy would recall how hard her husband had driven himself in his chase for votes: “Five days in Chicago, never went to bed.”

  What mattered was that John F. Kennedy now owned an edge on which he’d had no claim before. Change was stirring out in that vast territory beyond Capitol Hill. Those who’d watched on television had seen a dazzling sight. In a sea of gray faces, the camera had lingered on the handsome countenance of Jack Kennedy. It had spotted, too, his radiant spouse: anyone with Jacqueline Kennedy by his side could hardly be counted among life’s losers. Moreover, by making himself so visible, even in defeat, Jack Kennedy had gained the advantage that would carry him to victory four years later—those millions of Catholics who’d seen him felt pride, then were disappointed, and now were on his side, ready for the next chance.

  Yet Jack Kennedy was not, we now know, the perfect vessel for the hopes of America’s Roman Catholics. Though he and his gorgeous wife seemed in public a stunning portrait of the adoring, supportive couple, the reality behind the picture was far from perfection. As planned, once the convention ended, Jack left Chicago for a sailing trip in the Mediterranean with Torby, Smathers, and his brother Teddy tagging along. Just as he’d hung out with a buddy during his honeymoon, he was defecting again at another less than ideal moment. Left behind was his wife, eight months pregnant with their first child.

  During his absence, Jackie found herself faced with dangerous complications of the pregnancy, necessitating a Caesarean. But it was too late. On August 23, less than a week after the convention ended, Jackie delivered a stillborn daughter she had wanted to name Arabella. She suffered this tragedy without the presence of her vacationing husband. He wasn’t even close by.

  Jack had hurt his wife deeply. While he had always refused to accept his father’s politics, or his selfish view of the world, when it came to his marriage he was Joe Kennedy’s true son. Jackie was able to see the effect her husband had on other women, and it wasn’t easy. Yet she’d given him the nickname “Magic” for his ability to walk into a room and seduce all present. Charlie Bartlett could see the effect on her of his pal’s behavior in those early years of marriage. “She wasn’t the carefree, happy Jackie Bouvier anymore.” But Jack’s behavior now traveled beyond casual infidelity. He wasn’t there when she needed him. He’d shown off his wife at the convention for political gain, then left her to suffer her tragedy alone.

  It was Bobby, usually politically astute, who made the decision not to alert his brother about what had happened. His reasoning seemed based on the belief that Jack’s returning from a pleasure trip to console his grieving wife would be the wrong sort of reunion. It was a bad call, and the newspapers got the story. George Smathers made it his business to persuade Kennedy to return home pronto, telling him that his marriage was at stake and, along with it, his ambitions for high office.

  That fall Jack Kennedy traveled the country for Adlai Stevenson. He owed him, after all. What Stevenson was giving him now was actually better than the vice-presidential nod; it was the perfect trial run. It set Jack loose on the political circuit as a Stevenson man. To the Democratic Party, still dominated by its liberal faction, this was an incalculable benefit. After August 1956 Jack knew what he possessed, and what he needed to change. He was a smart and engaging outsider, a moderate in a party still run by its liberal establishment.

  To win the next prize he sought, he’d have to become part of it. He would do what was necessary.

  25

  Senate Rackets Committee, 1959

  26

  Ben Bradlee

  27

  Ted Sorensen

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHARM

  A little touch of Harry in the night.

  —William Shakespeare, Henry V

  What we are born with are our gifts. What we learn are our prizes. Jack Kennedy came into the world with good looks and wealth, and the social confidence that accompanies them. He possessed an instinctive trait for getting to the heart of a matter that enabled him to direct himself to the essence of a challenge. He possessed also an ability—rare and somewhat unsettling—to separate himself from the emotions of those around him. He was uncannily astute, moreover, when it came to seeing the motives of those he encountered. That he could know what moved others but not be moved himself brought hurt to those close to him, but it was for Kennedy himself a source of strength and provided for him an almost scary independence.

  All these gifts would have been his had he never embarked on a career in professional politics. His prizes were what he picked up along the way. He now understood better than he might have before how the candidate who starts early gives himself the advantage. He saw how much simple personal contact mattered when you wanted something from people. He’d recognized the truth of that during his first race, back in ’46, when he was out at dawn, campaigning at the Charlestown docks, and then staying with it until late in the evening when he sat with constituents in their living rooms. To accomplish his goal, he’d practically killed himself—and it had worked.

  He’d learned, too, in that first, winning effort, that the ambitious politician such as himself needs to create his own organization; he cannot expect existing political factions to whisk him forward. And he quickly realized that the key to forging loyalty within his organization was the invitation itself. The mere act of asking someone to become a Kennedy person was the step that mattered. Nothing builds fealty like getting people out there working for you. With time, discipline, experience, and trust, Jack Kennedy had forged a strong team, one that had been blooded in battle and now was ready for a fresh attack on an even greater trophy.

  At the 1956 convention, Kennedy had begun to set the course for the next four years. Above all, he had made his presence known. But the strong backing for Kefauver, known as both a heavy drinker and difficult maverick, had been a clear sign that liberals didn’t see Jack as one of their own—which, of course, he wasn’t. The truth is, even Stevenson himself had reservations about the Tennessean who’d been twice his rival before he was his running mate. “Kefauver has never done anything to me,” he told his friend the historian Arthur Schlesinger. “I just instinctively don’t like that fellow.”

  The pivotal revelation in Chicago for Kennedy and his budding strategists was the emerging power of the primaries. A big change had occurred in the way Americans choose presidents. Consider the difference in how Adlai Stevenson had won his party’s nomination in 1952 and how he gained it again in ’56. In January of ’52, he’d been summoned to meet with President Truman. In that meeting, Truman had offered him the presidential nomination, as if it were a Kansas City patronage job. Stevenson, to the dismay of his host, turned it down. He said he wanted to run for reelection as governor of Illinois.

  In March, Truman met with him a second time and offered the nomination again. Stevenson once more held back. Only at the convention itself, staged in Chicago, did Adlai finally bow to the “Draft Stevenson” pressure and agree to be the party’s candidate against Dwight Eisenhower.

  What’s
particularly interesting, given what came later, is that, during all those months Truman and the party were urging Stevenson to run, Senator Kefauver was out there doing his own thing, running and winning primaries, including the New Hampshire contest in which he famously upset the incumbent, Truman. So, in 1952, what mattered was not victory in the primaries, but the blessing of the president, along with the excitement Stevenson was able to stir on the convention floor by the rousing speech he gave, which started a stampede for his nomination.

  Four years later, the nomination went to the same man—but by a very different route. As he had before, Kefauver again won New Hampshire, this time swamping Stevenson. He went on to secure the primaries in Minnesota and Wisconsin. But then Stevenson turned the tide, winning in Oregon, Florida, and California, where he’d retained his popularity among the Democratic faithful. By the end, he won more primary votes, overall, than Kefauver.

  So, if Jack Kennedy was to win the presidential nomination in 1960, there was only one route for him. He needed to go out in the country and build the basis for winning primaries. Here he faced a set of personal challenges. One concern was his health. His Addison’s disease required that he pace himself and, as needed, take time off to rest. In addition, he would have to contend with the perennial twin curses of his bad back and weak stomach. “I know I’ll never be more than eighty to eighty-five percent healthy,” he told Red Fay, “but as long as I know that, I’m all right.”