JFK
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And so it went, hour upon exhausting hour. Associated Press correspondent Jack Bell recalled, “At 5:00 A.M., I came across Kefauver doing a television recording in a corridor of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Kennedy, rushing to another meeting, tripped over the power wires and almost fell into his rival.” Sorensen, reflecting on the night, noted the total lack of sleep—and the frenzied confusion: “It was hectic, not very well organized, too many people packed into my bedroom who were just like me—green, completely green. I couldn’t have been greener. I didn’t talk to many people because I didn’t know too many people.” The candidate himself remembered the chaotic scene: “Everybody was running around. My sister Eunice worked on Delaware. I had breakfast with some of the California delegation. I went to a lot of caucuses. I got nothing from Ohio, of course, but I did talk to them. We got Virginia because Governor [John S.] Battle’s son was in the Navy with me. And we got Louisiana because their delegation sat right next to ours and they had a lot of bright young fellows with whom we got real friendly.”30
Bit by bit, Kennedy racked up support. He proved especially effective with southern delegates, many of whom viewed Kefauver as a turncoat on racial matters and liked what they saw as Kennedy’s centrism on civil rights and his stated concern about foreign textile competition. His war experience spoke to them as well, as did his dignified and youthful bearing.
Still, as the nominations closed and the balloting opened, no one knew how things would go. Kennedy had New England as well as Virginia, Louisiana, and Georgia, and on a second ballot he could count on New York and, it was hoped, Illinois. But that left a huge swath of the country still open, and he was weak in the West. Some high-placed Catholic party leaders continued to insist that the country was not yet ready for a Catholic on the ticket, and many northern liberals, suspicious of Kennedy for his failure to cast a censure vote against Joe McCarthy as well as his criticism of Truman for the “loss of China” in 1949, stuck with Humphrey or Kefauver or Wagner. The nominating and seconding speeches for Kennedy were neither a hindrance nor much of a help—Connecticut governor Abraham Ribicoff gave a ringing, largely off-the-cuff nominating speech (privately, he noted the irony of a Jew pushing a Catholic for the ticket), while Florida senator and Kennedy pal George Smathers and House Majority Leader John McCormack (the latter, in Sorensen’s words, “literally propelled toward the platform at the last minute by Bob Kennedy”) delivered hasty seconding speeches that failed to leave much of an impression.31
IV
On the first ballot, Kefauver jumped out to an early lead, running especially strong in the Midwest and the West. But Kennedy showed strength in Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana, and Nevada. “This thing is really worth winning now,” he told Sorensen as the two watched on television from Kennedy’s hotel room, the candidate flopping on the bed in his undershorts. They were further cheered when Illinois delivered 46 of its 64 votes to him, but disappointed when Maine split its 14 votes. Kennedy cursed out loud when power brokers Michael DiSalle of Ohio and David Lawrence of Pennsylvania, both nervous about having a fellow Catholic on the ticket, mustered more than 100 of their 132 combined votes for Kefauver. The other contenders struggled to gain traction, and by the end of the first ballot it looked like a two-man race: Kefauver stood at 483½, and Kennedy came next with 304, followed by Gore at 178, Wagner at 162½, and Humphrey at 134½. A total of 687 were needed to claim the nomination.32
Kennedy aide Kenny O’Donnell had repaired to a bar across the street to watch the voting on television. He sensed something important happening as Kennedy gained support—the thing might actually be within reach. “Even more amazing was the assembled crowd of Chicago truck drivers, policemen and stock yard workers around us, all of them cheering, pounding on the bar and waving their beer glasses when another Kennedy vote was announced.” O’Donnell hurried back to the convention floor.33
In round two, Kennedy picked up steam when Arkansas switched from Gore to him. By Illinois he led 155 to 82; by New Hampshire the margin stood at 271½ to 229½ in his favor. Then more good news: New Jersey and New York, both of which had backed Wagner in the first round, delivered 128 of their 134 combined votes to Kennedy. Suddenly the press scrum scrambled from Kefauver’s corridor to Kennedy’s, while on the convention floor there was bedlam as conventioneers marched up and down the aisles wearing placards and tooting horns, others standing on chairs, waving frantically for attention. Bobby Kennedy, John Bailey, and other Kennedy lieutenants roamed the Amphitheatre, shouting to delegations to come to their man. In his Stockyards Inn hotel room, however, the candidate was serene. “He bathed,” Sorensen would write, “then again reclined on the bed. Finally we moved, through a back exit, to a larger and more isolated room.”34
For a moment Kennedy surged way ahead, 402½ to 245½, only to see Kefauver pick up four state delegations and cut the margin to 416½ to 387. Oklahoma stayed with Gore (“He’s not our kind of folks,” the governor said of Kennedy), as did Tennessee, while Puerto Rico stuck with Wagner, even though he had withdrawn. The uncertainty in the hall increased. Then rose the imposing figure of Lyndon Johnson to announce that Texas proudly backed “the fighting Senator who wears the scars of battle, that fearless Senator…John Kennedy of Massachusetts!”35 Pandemonium in the Kennedy camp—it seemed a harbinger of victory. Sargent Shriver burst into his brother-in-law’s room and exclaimed, “Jack, you’ve got it!” Sorensen, too, reached out a hand of congratulation. The candidate waved them aside; he remained uncertain, even when the second round ended with him in the lead, 618 to 551½, which put him only 69 votes away from the magic 687.
His numbers grew still more when North Carolina cast half of its votes for Kennedy, and Kentucky switched its 30 votes from Gore to Kennedy. Only 39 votes separated Jack from a majority. Jackie, seated in the Kennedy box in the arena with other members of the family, started yelling enthusiastically, waving her “Stevenson for President” placard for all to see. In the hotel suite, her husband finished getting dressed and at last allowed that perhaps he should give thought to what he ought to say to the convention if nominated.
What happened next would be the subject of intense scrutiny and controversy. For suddenly the tide turned, as convention chairman Sam Rayburn recognized Tennessee. With the convention and the country hanging on every word, Albert Gore requested that his name be withdrawn as a candidate and his delegates released to “my colleague, Estes Kefauver.” Kefauver supporters erupted in cheers. Oklahoma then switched its twenty-eight votes from Gore to Kefauver, and Minnesota and Missouri changed from Humphrey to Kefauver. Illinois and South Carolina tried to stem the onslaught by moving a few votes to Kennedy, but it was for naught. The Kennedy surge was over. More Kefauver votes followed, and he took the lead. “Let’s go,” said Kennedy, and he pushed through the throng in his corridor and brushed aside supporters who wanted him to stick it out to the end. Once in the Amphitheater he headed straight for the rostrum and was recognized by Rayburn.
Kennedy spoke movingly and gallantly and without notes:
Ladies and gentlemen of this convention, I want to take this opportunity first to express my appreciation to Democrats from all parts of the country, north and south, east and west, who have been so generous and kind to me this afternoon. I think it proves, as nothing else can prove, what a strong and united party the Democratic party is.
Secondly, what has happened today bears out the good judgment of Governor Stevenson in deciding that this issue should be taken to the floor of the convention. Because I believe that the Democratic Party will go from this convention far stronger for what we have done here today. And therefore, ladies and gentlemen, recognizing that this convention has selected a man who has campaigned in all parts of the country, who was worked untiringly for the party, who will serve as an admirable running mate to Governor Stevenson, I hope that this convention will make Estes Kefauver’s nomination unanimous. Thank you.36
He backed away, the hall cheering wildly, only to have Rayburn whisper in his ear that he should make a motion. Kennedy returned to the rostrum and moved that the convention nominate Kefauver by acclimation. The crowd roared anew, as the band swung into the “Tennessee Waltz.”
V
If Adlai Stevenson had hoped to generate excitement by having the delegates choose his running mate, he certainly succeeded—beyond his wildest dreams. No American political convention since has matched those eighteen hours of August 16–17, 1956, for intrigue, high-stakes pressure, and sheer edge-of-your-seat suspense. In the following day’s New York Times, Russell Baker described the unfolding drama as “a spectacle that might have confounded all Christendom in the old days,” an epic political clash in an atmosphere shaken by “a shrieking pandemonium with 11,000 people on their feet and howling.”37
Whether Stevenson got the outcome he wanted is another question. An aide who was with him as he watched the balloting on television from his suite in the Blackstone Hotel thought he saw Stevenson visibly slump as Kefauver achieved his majority.38
For John F. Kennedy, the nomination fight would in time be seen as hugely helpful. For one thing, he and his brother Robert and the rest of their team learned valuable lessons about how to wage battle on the convention floor—about the importance of having a superior communications strategy and knowing how to track delegate counts, about grasping even the finer points of convention rules. For another, they saw how Estes Kefauver’s personal connection with a great many delegates had proved crucial. The Tennessean had been through a convention battle before, in 1952, and he learned then that there was no substitute for familiarity, for face-to-face interaction. Consequently, Kefauver had spent much time in the intervening years traveling the country, shaking hands, meeting people, chatting them up, often in his trademark coonskin cap (in honor of his pioneer forebears). Jack Kennedy hadn’t done that kind of traveling, didn’t have that same level of familiarity among people outside New England, and it made all the difference at the pivotal moment.39
Yet here, too, the Chicago experience would provide Kennedy with an immense boost. Even at the time, seasoned observers could see what the convention had done for him, especially in the new television age. (This was the first convention to have gavel-to-gavel coverage, and CBS and NBC each had more than three hundred employees on-site.) He had arrived in the Windy City as one of several contenders for the second spot on the presidential ticket, a rising leader in the party and a figure of intrigue on account of his youth, looks, and background, but not yet well known among the party’s rank and file. He left five days later as a star.
The Kennedy camp could scarcely have scripted things better. On Monday, the opening day, Kennedy had narrated, to universal acclaim, the film that introduced the first keynote speech. On Thursday he had delivered an effective nominating speech for the party’s presidential nominee, his handsome face and resonant voice beamed into living rooms all across the land. And on Friday he’d come within inches of winning the vice presidential balloting, then offered an impromptu concession, magnanimous and elegant and brief (it totaled 162 words), captured on television and raising his stature still more—in all parts of the nation. Kefauver had won the battle, but Kennedy, with his near miss, had captured the hearts of masses of Democrats. His surprising strength among southern delegates, meanwhile, seemed to strike a blow against the “Al Smith myth” that no Catholic could win national office. Best of all for him, as some could see already and others would soon determine, Kennedy would not be saddled with any responsibility for the drubbing Stevenson was likely to endure come November. Not for the first time in American politics and not for the last, a narrow defeat turned out to be the best possible result.
Arthur Schlesinger, the Stevenson insider, wrote to Kennedy on August 21 that “you clearly emerged as the man who gained most during the Convention….Your general demeanor and effectiveness made you in a single week a national political figure. The [coming fall] campaign provides a further opportunity to consolidate this impression.” Connecticut governor Abe Ribicoff, a staunch backer, told journalists, “We were awful close,” and “I am confident that Jack Kennedy has a great future ahead of him.” According to The Boston Globe, Kennedy may have lost by “a whisker,” but “he won the hearts of the Democratic convention delegates,” who let out a “mighty roar of approval” any time his name was mentioned. Another article in the paper said he had come away from Chicago “with the greatest increase in stature” and predicted “that the increased stature Sen. Kennedy has achieved will someday put him in the way of opportunity, which sometimes knocks more than once in politics.”40
Kennedy at the rostrum, alongside Democratic Party chairman Paul Butler.
Stevenson himself was effusive: “I had hoped to see you before you left Chicago, and left, may I say, a much bigger man than you arrived! If there was a hero, it was you, and if there has been a new gallantry on our horizon in recent years, it is yourself. I say with confidence that you couldn’t have been half as disappointed about the Vice Presidency as my children were, and I know that they reflect the view of many.”41
Kennedy would come to accept the view that the outcome in Chicago had served his purposes, but only later; in the initial hours after the tense battle in Chicago, he was morose. He had suffered his first major political reversal, and it stung. Back in his hotel suite, he grumbled to Jackie, Bobby, Eunice, and a few aides and friends about how close he had come and about friends who’d let him down. With cutting sarcasm he dictated an imaginary wire to fellow Catholic David Lawrence, Pittsburgh’s mayor, who had earlier invited him to that city but also had urged Stevenson not to choose a Catholic for the second spot.42
“What impressed me was that Jack really showed more emotion than I’d really seen him display up to that point,” George Smathers recalled of the scene, “and Jackie even shed some tears. I was just shocked that Jackie had taken it so seriously, felt so deeply about it. After all, the whole thing was only a twelve-hour operation.” Yet what Smathers had long considered Kennedy’s even-keeled nature soon reasserted itself: “He stood up on the corner of the bed and I kept wondering if he was going to fall and hurt himself. But he told everybody, ‘Look, it’s all over. We did great considering what time we had. I want to thank everybody.’ And then he made some joke about my speech being cut off. But I knew he was hurt, deeply hurt. The thing is, he came so close. These Kennedys, once they’re in something, they don’t like to lose. But it was great the way he could joke about it.”43
Robert Kennedy, who always felt things more deeply than did his older brother, took longer to cool down. “I sat right next to Bobby Kennedy [on the flight back to Boston],” said one delegate, “and he was bitter. He said they should have won and somebody had pulled something fishy and he wanted to know who did it.”44 Others wondered as well, then and afterwards, about the sudden shift to Kefauver just when Kennedy seemed to have the battle won, and whether shenanigans were involved.* Bobby also groused that if a large electronic tote board at the back of the hall had not been dismantled the night before, after Stevenson’s nomination (no one thought it would be needed anymore), delegates would have seen how close Jack was to victory on the second ballot and put him over the top.
VI
Exhausted from a mostly sleepless week in Chicago, his back pain unrelenting, Jack Kennedy returned to New England with Jackie. But he didn’t stay: to her intense disappointment, he departed in short order for the South of France. Jackie was herself feeling spent after the hectic convention, and moreover she was eight months pregnant; she thought they should recuperate together, in anticipation of the coming baby. But Jack would not be deterred. Still smarting from his defeat, he reasoned that he could take his long-planned trip and still be back in time for the baby’s birth. Jackie, rather than be by herself in his absence, opted to stay with her mother and stepfather at Hammersmith Farm.
On August 23, a few days after arriving at her mother’s Newport home, Jackie experienced severe cramps. She began to hemorrhage. Rushed to the Newport Hospital, she underwent an emergency cesarean. The baby was stillborn. Upon hearing of the emergency, Robert Kennedy went immediately to be with her, reaching her hospital bedside even before she had come to from her anesthetic. He made arrangements for the funeral of the baby, a girl the couple had intended to call Arabella. Bobby advised his parents not to tell Jack about what had occurred, on the theory that he would fly back immediately and find his wife so upset and angry at his absence that strains between them would become more severe. So Jack was initially told that Jackie felt poorly, with no mention of the stillbirth.47
Just how he responded when he was told this has never been made clear. The evidence is fragmentary. Some accounts claim that he packed his bags and made arrangements to return home as soon as possible; others say he hesitated, thinking he might continue his sail for a few more days.48 According to the latter version, it was only when George Smathers (also in the South of France but not on the boating trip) reached him by phone and stressed the seriousness of the situation that he reconsidered. “If you want to run for president, you’d better get your ass back to your wife’s bedside or every wife in the country will be against you,” Smathers allegedly lectured him.49 Whichever account is correct, the senator flew home, having learned of the stillbirth prior to departure. His anxiety deepened. Upon landing at Boston’s Logan Airport, he snapped at a reporter who dared ask him an election-related question, then immediately boarded a private plane to Newport, where he asked his driver, “Can you get me to Newport Hospital in ten minutes?” Only by violating traffic laws, came the answer. “He was nervous,” the driver said later, “and if the light would be yellow, he’d say, ‘Go through it. I’ll pay for all the tickets.’ ”50