Jack Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  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.

  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.