An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963

by Robert Dallek

  Kennedy’s unopposed candidacy in Indiana and Nebraska would give him those states’ delegates. Polls in California had showed that Jack could beat Governor Pat Brown in a primary, and as a trade-off for not running, Jack got a promise from Brown that if he won primaries in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and West Virginia, ran second behind Senator Wayne Morse in Oregon, and was leading for the nomination in the Gallup polls, Brown would support him at the convention.

  Ohio required some especially tough negotiations with Governor Mike DiSalle, who wanted to run as a favorite son and then barter his state’s delegates at the convention. But the Kennedys, threatening to back Cleveland Democratic leader Ray Miller, DiSalle’s chief rival, as the head of the Ohio delegation, forced Disalle into a public endorsement of Kennedy in January. At a meeting between Jack and DiSalle in an airport motel in Pittsburgh, Jack told him, “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.” When Jack’s threat did not settle matters, Bobby Kennedy, accompanied by party chairman John Bailey, went to Ohio to force the issue. Bailey, “a veteran politician who does not shock easily,” told Ken O’Donnell later that “he was startled by the going-over that Bobby had given DiSalle.” The conversation added to Bobby’s growing reputation as Jack’s hatchet man, but it forced DiSalle into a commitment like Brown’s that gave Jack valuable momentum.

  Deals and promises were not enough, though. Jack had to win a truly contested primary to show that it wasn’t all back-room dealings that qualified him for the nomination. (He thought that Johnson and Symington were making a serious mistake by staying out of all the primaries. Indeed, the day after announcing his candidacy, Kennedy had said that any aspiring nominee who avoided these contests did not deserve to have his candidacy taken seriously.) To meet the challenge, he reluctantly decided to run against Humphrey in Wisconsin. It meant risking the nomination. Wisconsin had a large Protestant population, so a defeat by Humphrey would increase doubts about a Catholic nominee. Joe Kennedy wrote a friend in Italy, “If we do not do very well there . . . we should get out of the fight.” He believed Wisconsin was “the crisis of the campaign.”

  In addition to the possible religious split, Humphrey had the advantage of being a next-door neighbor—the “third senator from Wisconsin,” as supporters called him. His rapport with Wisconsin farmers and liberals clustered in the university community in Madison made him a formidable opponent. Moreover, because Wisconsin was essential to his hopes of a nomination, Hubert seemed certain to make an all-out fight for a majority of the popular vote and the state’s thirty-one delegates.

  Yet Jack had some reason for optimism. Between May 1958 and November 1959, he had laid the groundwork for a possible statewide campaign. He had spent sixteen days in Wisconsin giving speeches and meeting Democrats in cities and towns he had never heard of before—Appleton, Ashland, Darlington, La Crosse, Lancaster, Platteville, Rhinelander, Rice Lake, Sparta, and Viroqua joined Green Bay, Milwaukee, and Sheboygan as vital to his political future. Leaving nothing to chance, he also chose a “full-time advance man and organizer of Kennedy clubs,” and enlisted the support of Pat Lucey, the state’s party chairman, and Ivan Nestingen, the mayor of Madison, both of whom were now convinced of Kennedy’s liberal credentials. Private polls in January 1960 showing Kennedy ahead of Humphrey helped ease the difficult but, in Jack’s mind, unavoidable decision to make the race.

  The six-week Wisconsin campaign running from mid-February to early April tested Jack’s endurance and commitment to winning the presidency. O’Donnell and Powers remembered it as a “winter of cold winds, cold towns and many cold people. Campaigning in rural areas of the state where nobody seemed to care about the presidential election was a strange and frustrating experience.” In a tavern, where Jack introduced himself to a couple of beer drinkers, saying, “I’m John Kennedy and I’m running for President,” one of them asked, “President of what?” On a freezing cold morning, as Jack stood for hours in the dark shaking hands with workers arriving at a meat packing plant, Powers whispered to O’Donnell, “God, if I had his money, I’d be down there on the patio at Palm Beach.” Powers might have added, “God, if I had his medical problems and all the physical discomfort campaigning added to them . . .” But Jack was determined to see his commitment through. When an elderly woman stopped him on the street to say, “You’re too soon, my boy, too soon,” Jack replied, “No, this is my time. My time is now.” Despite his youthful and robust appearance, he knew that in eight years—assuming the victor would serve two terms—his deteriorating back and chronic colitis might make running even more of a problem than it was in 1960.

  The battle was against more than wind chill and back pain. The abuse leveled at him by Humphrey’s campaign and a hostile press were enough alone to discourage him from competing. Sorensen said later that “vicious falsehoods were whispered about Kennedy’s father, Kennedy’s religion and Kennedy’s personal life.” Humphrey pilloried him as a Democratic Nixon who had recently joined the liberal ranks to win the nomination. Appealing to populist antagonism to Kennedy’s wealth, Humphrey declared, “Thank God, thank God” for his own “disorderly” campaign. “Beware of these orderly campaigns. They are ordered, bought and paid for. We are not selling corn flakes or some Hollywood production.” Voters had to make their choice, the balding Humphrey said, “on more than . . . how we cut our hair or how we look.” He complained of a Republican-inspired press buildup for Kennedy as a way to run Nixon against a weak opponent. Echoing the charge that Jack had “little emotional commitment to liberalism,” Humphrey said, “You have to learn to have the emotions of a human being when you are charged with the responsibilities of leadership.” Humphrey also attacked Jack as a recent convert to helping farmers, echoed criticism of Kennedy’s cautious response to Joe McCarthy, and before a Milwaukee Jewish audience implicitly compared Kennedy’s “organized campaign” to Nazi Germany, “one of the best-organized societies of our time.”

  Humphrey saw his attacks as a response to “an element of ruthlessness and toughness” in Kennedy’s campaign. Though he couldn’t prove it, he believed that Bobby Kennedy had started and helped circulate a rumor that the corrupt Teamsters union was working for Humphrey’s election. Moreover, he thought that the Kennedys were stimulating Catholics to vote for Jack by sending anonymous anti-Catholic materials to Catholic households.

  Kennedy largely ignored Humphrey’s assaults. James Reston noted that Jack “remained remarkably self-possessed. . . . He has shown not the slightest trace of anger. He has made no claims of victory. He has made no charges against Humphrey on the local shows or from the stump.” Instead, he ran a largely positive campaign, giving full rein to his charm and intelligence. Riding in a car with Kennedy for an appearance at a shopping center, Peter Lisagor asked, “‘Do you like these crowds and this sort of thing?’ [Kennedy] turned back and said, ‘I hate it.’” But the moment he stepped out of the car, “he lit up and smiled. He signed autographs on the brown shopping bags of these ladies who came pouring to him. . . . He went along as if he’d been doing this all of his life and loved it.”

  The Kennedy campaign was, for a very large part, Pat Lucey said, “just an effective presentation of a celebrity. . . . The family was an asset . . . genuinely glamorous as well as glamorized, so the people were anxious to meet them wherever they went.” As a result, Humphrey felt like a “corner grocer running against a chain store.” With Jack, Bobby, Rose, and the Kennedy sisters all campaigning in Wisconsin, Humphrey was outmanned. The Kennedys are “all over the state,” he complained, “and they look alike and sound alike. Teddy or Eunice talks to a crowd, wearing a raccoon coat and a stocking cap, and people think they’re listening to Jack. I get reports that Jack is appearing in three or four different places at the same time.”

  On April 5, Kennedy won a substantial victory, taking 56.5 percent of the vote. The 476,024 Kennedy ballots were the
most votes ever received by a candidate in the fifty-seven-year history of Wisconsin primaries, and Kennedy’s majorities in six out of ten districts entitled him to 60 percent of the state’s convention delegates. But Jack saw his success as raising more questions about his candidacy than it answered. Because the six districts he won included large numbers of Catholic voters and Humphrey’s districts were principally Protestant enclaves, including Madison, the center of liberal sentiment, Kennedy could not convince party chiefs that he would command broad backing in a national election. When Ted Sorensen heard the first returns showing Humphrey ahead in the western, rural areas of the state, he turned “ashen.” These numbers made him “mighty uneasy.” Dave Powers tried to put a positive face on the result: “A shift of . . . less than 3/10 of 1% of the vote . . . would have given Kennedy 8 districts to 2.” Powers also listed thirteen counties where 70 percent or more of non-Catholic votes were for Jack and six with substantial numbers of Catholics he lost. None of this, however, could change the initial perception of Kennedy as a candidate whose religion made a difference. When Jack heard the returns, he jumped from his seat and paced the room, muttering, “Damn religious thing.”

  Noticing the glum expression on Jack’s face as he studied the returns, Eunice Kennedy asked him, “What does it all mean?” He replied, “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.” Only then might the press stop publishing photos of Kennedy shaking hands with nuns and church officials and continually referring to Jack’s Catholicism. Kennedy kept track of how often newspaper accounts mentioned his religion, and he had not missed the fact that two days before the primary, the Milwaukee Journal had listed the number of voters in each county under three headings: Democrats, Republicans, and Catholics. “The religious issue became prominent because the newspapers said it was prominent,” Lucey asserted. When CBS newsman Walter Cronkite asked Jack after his Wisconsin victory whether being a Catholic had hurt him, Jack’s annoyance with Cronkite was unmistakable. Afterward, Bobby exploded at Cronkite and his staff, shouting that they had violated an agreement not to ask about religion and that his brother would never give them another interview. Cronkite was unaware of such a promise, and there would be many future interviews with both brothers. But Bobby’s outburst illustrated how angry he and Jack were at the implicit questions being raised about their loyalty to the country.

  If Wisconsin left the overall situation unsettled, Jack’s victory did accomplish something real and important. The outcome in Wisconsin essentially ended Humphrey’s bid for the nomination. If he could not win in a neighboring state with so many Protestants, farmers, and liberals, he was unlikely to win anywhere. But, stung by his defeat and confident that he could beat Jack in West Virginia, a state only 4 percent Catholic, Humphrey decided to continue his campaign. A Harris poll showed Jack ahead of Humphrey in West Virginia by 70 to 30 percent, but even if Humphrey closed some of that gap, Harris predicted, Jack would have “a comfortable margin of victory.” Harris saw West Virginia as “a powerful weapon against those who raise the ‘Catholic can’t win’ bit.”

  After Wisconsin, however, Jack and his advisers were not so sure. The Wisconsin race had made West Virginia voters more aware of Kennedy’s religion, and his lead over Humphrey disappeared. A poll of Kanawha county, the seat of the state capital, Charleston, showed Humphrey with 60 percent to Kennedy’s 40 percent. A report coming in to Dave Powers in April concluded that “public opinion had shifted and [Kennedy] would be lucky to get 40 per cent of the vote.” On April 6, the day after Wisconsin, Bobby, O’Donnell, and O’Brien went to Charleston, where they met with Kennedy organizers. “Well, what are our problems?” Bobby asked the gathering in a crowded hotel room. “There’s only one problem,” one man shouted. “He’s a Catholic. That’s our God-damned problem!” A Kennedy supporter in the state wrote Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. that “[U.S. Senator] Bob Byrd is getting out his Bible and fiddle to make the rounds of the country churches. These people weren’t thinking much of the religious issue, one way or another. But now every hate-monger, radio preacher and backwoods evangelist is being stirred up for an assault which will make 1928 look pale by comparison.”

  The state’s labor unions would also be a problem for Kennedy. A member of the United Steel Workers reported that Kennedy had been relying on “the reactionary element of the Democratic party . . . to head his state organization. He would be weak in . . . the Democratic stronghold in southern W. Va. In a race between Kennedy and Humphrey, we believe that Humphrey would win, even though the Kennedy forces would be better financed.”

  Though some of Jack’s advisers suggested that he skip West Virginia and concentrate instead on Indiana, Nebraska, and Maryland, he felt compelled to take up Humphrey’s challenge and show that a Catholic could win in a Protestant state. Robert McDonough, who ran Jack’s West Virginia office, believed that a victory there might allow Kennedy to “bury the religious issue.” At a planning meeting on April 8, Bobby stated their intention “to meet the religious issue head on.” The goal was to give rational answers to questions about Jack’s Catholicism and then move on to “something more important to those people.” Bobby consulted with Frank Fischer, West Virginia’s Junior Chamber of Commerce president, who knew the state as well as anyone. Fischer urged Bobby to talk about the “Four F’s . . . food, Franklin [Roosevelt], family, and the flag.”

  Jack set this strategy in motion on the first day of his West Virginia campaign. Before a crowd of three or four hundred people gathered on the steps of the Charleston post office, Jack, microphone in hand, aggressively fielded a question about his religion, “I am a Catholic, but the fact that I was born a Catholic, does that mean that I can’t be the President of the United States? I’m able to serve in Congress, and my brother was able to give his life, but we can’t be president?” McDonough “could just feel the crowd respond to and accept his answer.” With Humphrey making his campaign theme song “Give Me That Old Time Religion” and Baptists warning that a Catholic would owe allegiance to the pope, Jack continuously reminded voters that he had risked his life for the country. “Nobody asked me if I was a Catholic when I joined the United States Navy,” he declared. “Nobody asked my brother if he was a Catholic or Protestant before he climbed into an American bomber plane to fly his last mission.” The message was clear: How can you doubt my primary loyalty to America?

  Kennedy spent two intense weeks in the state between April 5 and May 10. “He was the most attractive candidate imaginable,” Bob McDonough said. “He just went up every valley in the state, down every road, and over every hill, and he shook hands by the thousands.” “I am the only Presidential candidate since 1924, when a West Virginian ran for the presidency,” Kennedy told audiences, “who knows where Slab Fork is and has been there.” He spoke so often and so loudly that he lost his voice and had to have his brother Ted and Sorensen speak for him. “Over and over again,” journalist Theodore White recorded, “there was the handsome, open-faced candidate on the TV screen, showing himself, proving that a Catholic wears no horns.” As important, a skillfully crafted TV documentary, which the campaign put on local stations around the state, displayed his winning manner and his achievements as a war hero, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and the father of a beautiful two-year-old daughter. A compelling sincerity about his devotion to American freedoms dissolved most objections to his Catholicism.

  Jackie Kennedy, despite concern among Jack’s advisers that her stylish dress and manners might alienate voters, effectively connected with audiences in West Virginia. Word of her considerateness spread after “a nice old man said he would love to meet Jackie but could not leave his invalid wife.” After Jackie visited their home, the man said, “Now I believe in Santa Claus. She looks like a real queen.” She endeared herself to audiences when introducing Jack. “I have to confess, I was born a Republican,” she said, “but you have t
o have been a Republican to realize how nice it is to be a Democrat.” Her two-year-old daughter Caroline’s vocabulary was increasing with each primary, she reported. Her “first words were ‘plane,’ ‘goodbye,’ and ‘New Hampshire,’ and just this morning she said ‘Wisconsin’ and ‘West Virginia.’” Already a month pregnant in April, Jackie, at risk of another miscarriage, would largely disappear from the rest of the 1960 campaign, but in West Virginia she worked aggressively on behalf of her husband.

  She was not alone. Understanding how crucial the state was to his chances, Kennedy enlisted all his relatives and friends in the campaign. “The Senator is still in West Virginia,” Evelyn Lincoln recorded on April 26. “Things do not look very good for him. . . . The Senator has brought all the people he can think of into the campaign. He has Lem Billings, Chuck Spalding, Ben Smith, Grant Stockdale, Bob Troutman, Sarge Shriver and many others down there working for him. Bobby is going all over making speeches and Teddy is too. Larry O’Brien is in charge of the organization and Kenny O’Donnell arranges his speaking schedule. Ralph Dungan is handling the labor setup. Chuck Roche and Pierre Salinger handle the press releases, TV, etc. Ted Reardon is in Wheeling.”

  Winning votes for Jack also meant taking them from Humphrey by neutralizing his advantage as a passionate advocate of liberal programs. If this began as cynical campaign politics, Kennedy’s visits to the state transformed it into a genuine concern. “Kennedy’s shock at the suffering he saw in West Virginia was so fresh,” Teddy White thought, “that it communicated itself with the emotion of original discovery.” Ted Sorensen remembered how appalled Kennedy was “by the pitiful conditions he saw, by the children of poverty, by the families living on surplus lard and cornmeal, by the waste of human resources.” He gained a fuller understanding of the unemployed workers, the pensioners, and the relief recipients demoralized by their poverty but eager for a chance to improve their lives. “I assure you that after five weeks living among you here in West Virginia,” Kennedy declared, “I shall never forget what I have seen. I have seen men, proud men, looking for work who cannot find it. I have seen people over 40 who are told that their services are no longer needed—too old. I have seen young people who want to live in the state, forced to leave the state for opportunities elsewhere. . . . I have seen older people who seek medical care that is too expensive for them to afford. I have seen unemployed miners and their families eating a diet of dry rations.” Attacking the indifference of the Eisenhower administration, Jack laid out a ten-point program to relieve suffering and expand economic opportunity. He promised to increase unemployment benefits, modernize Social Security, expand food distribution, establish a national fuels program, stimulate the coal industry, and increase defense spending in the state. “Much more can and should be done,” he announced in a letter to fellow Democrats. “That is why West Virginia will be on the top of my agenda at the White House.”