CHAPTER ELEVEN
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 farm 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.
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.
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 Catholic 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 noton 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 every 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!”
Ken O’Donnell noted the way Kennedy was affected by what he saw in West Virginia. “Here right in our midst was a great mass of people totally ignored, yet they didn’t complain as he talked to them. They didn’t like it; they weren’t lazy, they were just people who’d been in poverty so long they didn’t know a way out.” Pierre Salinger saw the same thing. “I believe West Virginia brought a real transformation of John F. Kennedy as a person. He came into contact, really for the first time, with poverty. He saw what had happened as a result of the technological changes in coal mining. He saw hundreds of people sitting around the city with nothing to do. It affected him very deeply. It really, in my opinion, changed his whole outlook on life.”
What now made a difference to the campaign’s fortunes in West Virginia was the inherited prestige of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. The president’s son and namesake was brought in to strike at the Minnesotan’s soft underbelly, his failure to fight in World War II. From here on in, the gloves were off. The conclusion of that conflict was just fifteen years in the past, and memories of its horrors and its casualties, along with its many great acts of heroism, hadn’t faded. Ben Bradlee knew how Jack always wanted to know where a fellow of his generation had been in the “wor-ah.” It was a key for him, a key to sizing up other men.
Humphrey was vulnerable, and the wartime president’s son spread the news. Humphrey twice had attempted to enlist only to be rejected for medical reasons. But to guarantee that no voter remained unaware of who’d served and who hadn’t, the Kennedys undertook a comprehensive education program. Souvenir PT 109 insignia emblems of Jack Kennedy’s wartime heroism were put on sale at the affordable price of a dollar. A letter from FDR Jr. endorsing the young candidate, was mailed to West Virginia voters. It was postmarked Hyde Park, New York, unmistakably signaling its connection to America’s greatest Democrat.
Out on the campaign trail, Kennedy made it clear to the curious crowds that came to hear him that here was a chance for little West Virginia to choose the country’s top leader. “The basic strategy was a psychological one,” Pierre Salinger recalled. “That is, let West Virginia play a role in selecting the next president of the United States. If Hubert Humphrey wins the West Virginia primary, he will never receive the nomination of the Democratic Party. Therefore, you are throwing your vote away. If John F. Kennedy wins the West Virginia primary, you will have selected the next president of the United States.”
Salinger confessed the campaign’s subtext. The state had a lot to gain from electing a president. “West Virginia, the fiftieth state in the union in defense contracts, wanted to be with a winner who would remember it. John F. Kennedy sold West Virginia on the fact that if he became president he would never forget West Virginia.”
Money also played a crucial role. The county political people expected to be paid for their election efforts, and the Kennedys would do what was expected. West Virginia was a state, after all, where the facts of political life weren’t overseen by reformers. The decisive swing came on election eve, when the largest amounts yet of Kennedy cash started falling into outstretched hands. Humphrey could do little but complain. “I’m being ganged up on by wealth. I can’t afford to run around this state with a little black bag and a checkbook.”
Salinger didn’t argue with the assessment. “We were running the campaign there as if you were running a campaign to elect a ward leader in New York or Chicago. We whipped this campaign down to the sheriffs, the district attorneys, and the councilmen because this is the way you win elections in West Virginia.”
The Nixon backer Charles McWhorter, a native of the state, saw it as a daunting preview of the general election. “They went through West Virginia like a tornado, putting money—big bucks!—into sheriffs’ races. You were either for Kennedy or you weren’t. The Kennedy people just wanted the gold ring. They were ruthless in that objective. That scared the shit out of me.”
In the last days, Kennedy was campaigning so hard that he lost his voice. Trying to rest it, he scribbled a note to Charlie Bartlett just as the final showdown at the polls was about to occur. What he wrote said it all: “I’d give my right testicle to win this one.”
But, as he had told Ben Bradlee, he would not be maneuvered into a corner. He would not let the entire campaign hang on winning one difficult primary. His mind was racing ahead to whatever the West Virginia results might require. He warned his old college friend, and now U.S. congressman, Torby Macdonald, who was running the Kennedy campaign in Maryland, that he might need him more than ever. The primary there was to take place that Friday.
“If Jack were beaten in West Virginia,” Macdonald said, “then this would be a bail-out operation, in which he’d win so overwhelmingly in Maryland that everyone would forget about West Virginia. It may have been wishful thinking, but that was the point—and that’s why I worked as hard as I did in Maryland.”
Just as Jack Kennedy had refused to sit on that little island in the Solomons, awaiting a rescuer for him and his men, just as he’d swum again and again out into the water looking for help, just as he’d sent Barney Ross when he couldn’t do it, now he was sending an S.O.S. to his buddy Torby. When it came to survival, he was not a pessimist, but he was seized by the fear that West Virginia had slipped from his hands.
He made sure to fly back to Washington, D.C., as the actual election was getting under way. He’d look even more a loser should the results go against him and he was there, hanging around in West Virginia, on primary night.
To pass the time while the votes came in, the Kennedys, joined by the Bradlees, went out to dinner. Getting away from the action and the teasing hints from the early returns is standard political practice. For his sanity, a candidate needs to remove himself, however momentarily, from the minute-to-minute rumblings and false reports bringing alternating euphoria and gloom. It’s also a pleasure to find yourself alone with good friends after weeks of craziness with strangers.
Bradlee remembers: “The Kennedys asked us to sweat the vote out with them at dinner, but dinner was over long before any remotely meaningful results were in. After a quick call to brother Bobby at the Kanawha Hotel in Charleston, we all got into their car and drove to the Trans-Lux theater to see Suddenly Last Summer. Bad omen. It was a film with a surprise ending, whose publicity included a warning that no one would be admitted after the show started.”
They ended up at a film showing around the corner from the White House. To Bradlee it seemed like porn. “Not the hard-core stuff of later years, but a nasty little thing called Private Property, starring Kate Manx as a horny housewife.” Bradlee said he and Kennedy “wondered aloud if the movie was on the Catholic index of forbidden films”—it was—and “whether or not there were any votes in it either way for Kennedy in allegedly anti-Catholic West Virginia if it were known he was in attendance.”
“Kennedy’s concentration was absolutely zero,” Bradlee recalled. “He left every twenty minutes to call Bobby in West Virginia. Each time he returned, he’d whisper ‘Nothing definite yet,’ slouch back into his seat and flick his teeth with the fingernail of the middle finger on his right hand, until he left to call again.”
Word suddenly came that Kennedy had won. The foursome headed to National Airport and boarded the Caroline for the short hop to the state that had just defied all the doomsayers, all the experts, all the Democrats backing the wrong horse.
The moment of Kennedy’s victory speech, O’Donnell recalled, was both ecstatic and poignant. “He gave the usual speech—about the hard work, and about what wonderful people they all were, and that he would keep his word to them. . . . And if he won the presidency he intended to come back to West Virginia and keep his word. That all the things he’d seen there that disturbed him so much, as president of the United States he’d do something about. That hadn’t just been campaign talk. It was a commitment. And then he moved in and worked the room and shook everyone’s hand.”
What a night! “The place was jammed and it was around two a.m., and he came over and thanked us,” O’Donnell continued. “He pulled me aside and shook his head and said, ‘What the hell happened? We won!’ I just laughed and shook my head, looked at Bobby, who was exhausted. He nodded.” For his part, Salinger could see a weight had lifted: “He was elated. He knew he’d been nominated.”
Ben Bradlee, though, was stunned to see how little attention the exhilarated victor showed his wife that night. “Kennedy ignored Jackie, and she seemed miserable at being left out of things. She was then far from the national figure she later became in her own right. She . . . stood on a stairway, totally ignored, as JFK made his victory statement on television. Later, when Kennedy was enjoying his greatest moment of triumph to date, with everyone in the hall shouting and yelling, Jackie quietly disappeared and went out to the car and sat by herself, until he was ready to fly back to Washington.”
The candidate was alone in his triumph.
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