Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  Bradlee soon saw clearly the obstacles ahead for his new pal, what he called “the mines” he’d have to navigate: “His age—at forty-three, he’d be the youngest man ever elected president, and the first one born in the twentieth century. His religion—too much of America believed that a Catholic president would have to take orders from the pope in Rome. His health—he’d been given the last rites several times. His father—Joseph P. Kennedy’s reputation was secure as a womanizing robber baron, who’d been anti-war and seen as pro-German while he was ambassador to Britain during World War II, and pro-McCarthy during the fifties.”

  When Bradlee asked Jack if it didn’t seem “strange” to him to be running for president, Kennedy offered even his friend a stock reply: “Yes, until I stop and look around at the other people who are running for the job. And then I think I’m just as qualified as they are.” When he asked if he thought he could pull it off, Kennedy’s answer was even more studied: “Yes. If I don’t make a single mistake, and if I don’t get maneuvered into a position where there’s no way out.”

  It was, in fact, a troubled time, as the 1950s were coming to a close. The country that had proudly, gloriously led the forces that vanquished the Axis dictators now had a growing set of worries when it looked beyond its borders in almost any direction. From the earliest moments of his run for the presidency, the country that Jack Kennedy was hoping to convince he could lead was beset by an unsettling feeling. Americans sensed they were losing pace in the Cold War, and weren’t sure how this had happened. The Soviets were moving worldwide; we were fading as a global power, not dramatically, but undeniably.

  In October 1957, the country even became wary, suddenly, about the grandfatherly leadership of Dwight Eisenhower. The launching of the Soviet space satellite Sputnik sent an ugly shiver down the spines of complacent citizens long convinced of their country’s enduring edge against the “Soviet menace.” We’d been told by Wernher von Braun and Walt Disney—in 1955 more than 40 million of us had watched on TV the gung-ho film Man in Space, which they’d made together—that the United States would be the first to launch a satellite into orbit. Now the Russians had done it. Our leaders had committed the worst sin a politician can—as Churchill once noted: to promise success and then fail.

  The second tangible sign of losing pace came on New Year’s Eve 1958. That evening the Cuban president, Fulgencia Batista, a dictator who’d been up until that moment agreeably rotten, sneaked out of Havana at midnight and headed into exile. His departure allowed the bearded leader Fidel Castro, a young lawyer-turned-guerrilla clad in fatigues, to come down out of the Sierra Maestra and assume power. When Castro, who’d sold himself as a democratic reformer, announced his allegiance to Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet Union had an ally ninety miles from our coast.

  There was also intangible evidence of America’s failure to keep pace against the encroaching Soviet menace. As we fought the battle of the global game board, there came a creeping sense ours was not the winning side.

  Kennedy had run on the spirit of the returning vet in ’46, then, in 1952, had catapulted himself past the Yankee order in Massachusetts, thanks both to the creative way he again worked his own tribe and also to its own rising self-estimation.

  Now, with Ike aging and the decade slowing, the candidate saw how his fellow Americans were reacting against the dullness, feeling a restless urge to do something. Even in their prosperity, they knew the times weren’t living up to their aspirations, felt the pang of their unchallenged spirits. Jack Kennedy, having been out there in a way no one else was, sensed the mood of the country in a way uniquely his own, and now staked his claim on the task of getting us moving again.

  28

  New Hampshire Primary

  29

  West Virginia Debate

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  HARDBALL

  See DiSalle and make sure he is going to meet his commitment.

  —The candidate’s instructions, October 28, 1959

  At the 1956 Democratic Convention, Jack Kennedy had allowed himself to be at the mercy of the delegates. From now on, he was going to call the shots. He would be the one making other politicians do his bidding. He would do, on a national scale, what he’d accomplished at home, when grabbing control of the Massachusetts Democratic Party committee. This would mean wooing those he could, playing hardball with the ones he couldn’t.

  In early November 1958, Kennedy won reelection to the U.S. Senate for his second term by a margin of three to one. Later that month Jack stopped by Tip O’Neill’s office, wanting to talk to Tip’s top guy, Tommy Mullen, about how the vote had gone in their district, the one Jack himself had once represented. Tip remembered, “Together, the two of them, Mullen and Kennedy, went over the district precinct by precinct—where the Irish lived, where the Jews lived, and so on, with every ethnic group. Jack wanted to know how each one had voted because he intended to use that information on the national scene for the 1960 presidential election. I’d never seen anybody study the voting patterns of ethnic and religious groups in a systematic way before, and I don’t think that most people realized then, or appreciate now, that Jack Kennedy was a very sophisticated student of politics.”

  Looking around, Kennedy wasn’t impressed by the field he would face. “There’s nothing there in 1960,” he told a doubting Charlie Bartlett, who argued he should wait at least eight years. “This is really the time,” Jack insisted. The Rackets Committee had made him a celebrated figure. Bobby, too. “For the couple of years there, all you heard was the name Kennedy,” Ken O’Donnell recalled. Jack’s tough, evenhanded treatment of both labor and management had shown “a different kind of Democratic politician.” He gave the impression of being independent, fearless.

  At the same time, the Kennedy brothers were creating a reputation for themselves as dangerous enemies, even when it came to fellow Democrats. Thanks to them, George Chacharis, a onetime millworker who was the mayor of Gary, Indiana, went to prison for conspiracy and tax evasion. Pierre Salinger recalls that Jack preferred killing a politician to wounding one. “ ‘A wounded tiger,’ he always said, ‘was more dangerous than either a living or a dead one.’ “

  It was Salinger’s first exposure to Jack Kennedy’s ruthlessness. Up until then, Jack had appeared, on the surface, the one with the easygoing nature. Salinger was fascinated. He was learning what Ken O’Donnell and others had before him. Bobby was the one who’d gained the reputation for ruthlessness, but Jack could be pitiless.

  Two important strategy meetings, looking to the immediate future, were staged six months apart in 1959. The first, with everyone flying to the Kennedy family house in Palm Beach, was held in April. It was here Jack revealed himself as a man fully in charge of his troops and the operation upon which they were embarking.

  “At Palm Beach, the senator was in full command,” Ted Sorensen recounted. “He was still his chief campaign manager and strategy advisor. He knew each stage, the problems it presented, the names of those to contact—not only governors and senators but their administrative assistants as well, not only politicians but publishers and private citizens. He kept in touch with the Kennedy men in every state, acquired field workers for the primary states, made all the crucial decisions, and was the final depository of all reports and rumors concerning the attitudes of key figures.”

  Sorensen knew, by now, his boss’s special way of dealing with “rumors.” “Whenever word reached him of a politician who was being privately and persistently antagonistic, the senator would often ask a third party to see the offender—not because he hoped for the latter’s support, but because ‘I want him to know that I know what he’s saying.’ “

  Ted Sorensen, now a veteran well acquainted with Jack’s thinking and his wishes, briefed the others in Palm Beach on the campaign to date. O’Donnell recalled, “Sorensen dominated much of this meeting—with the exception of the senator, of course. He’d done a great deal of research on each primary and the pros/cons for and against, so
he talked and we listened. Then Senator Kennedy and his father would respond accordingly. Bobby, Larry, and I had little to contribute. We listened carefully.

  “The main thrust of the first conversation was that the senator planned to set up some sort of organization in Washington, D.C., reasonably rapidly,” O’Donnell continued. “This was the first and critical step towards putting together professional organizations. Steve Smith, husband of Jack’s sister Jean, was going to come down from New York, open and run the office in Washington, to begin organizing the campaign. Sorensen had been the record-keeper on where the candidate stood with regional party leaders. As Steve took over and became more and more familiar, he increasingly took over that role from Sorensen. He oversaw the filing system that recorded how Jack stood with the delegates and politicians across the country.

  “If the senator met a delegate and the delegate said that he’d support Kennedy if he ran for president . . . then either Dave Powers or Ted would make such a notation on the card and give it a number. The numbering system began with a ten. If a delegate was a ten, that meant he was a totally committed Kennedy man.” The card was then “returned to the main file in the Washington campaign office and then the senator would write the person a thank-you letter.”

  According to O’Donnell, “There was still an element of hush-hush: Steve Smith’s headquarters bore no mention of the Kennedy campaign. They couldn’t have asked for a more anonymous office without lying: the sign read simply, ‘Stephen E. Smith.’ “ The Kennedy campaign was still, at this point, purposely under the radar.

  In addition, the Kennedy team at Palm Beach had moved on to the wider issues facing the candidate throughout the country. Sorensen took notes of the questions posed. It came down to what had been learned in 1956: Who calls the shots when picking delegates, and how do we influence them? This inevitably led to the question of which state primaries the candidate would have to enter.

  It was not clear if winning primaries, even a great many of them, would be enough to secure the nomination. As recently as 1952, Kefauver had won practically all of them; still, the convention had “drafted” Stevenson. The goal now was to win as many primaries as possible, meanwhile convincing the big-state governors to climb aboard the bandwagon. It was still a common practice for governors to run in their own state primaries, then arrive at the convention to broker their delegates in backroom deals.

  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 f
arm 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.