In private he was funnier. Riding in an elevator in the Capitol with a Republican congressman, Walter Judd of Minnesota, Johnson asked him, “Have you heard the news?” “What news?” Judd responded. “Jack’s pediatricians have just given him a clean bill of health!” Johnson said. And not so funny. Although Humphrey and Symington would make “small cracks” about Kennedy, Hugh Sidey would observe, “they were never bitter. They knew the game, and the closest they’d get to being bitter was that he was a rich, spoiled kid who had never had to make it.… The most vicious evaluation of Senator Kennedy was from Johnson, and that got quite violent at times.” After a campaign trip to Oklahoma in June, he offered Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News a ride back to Washington on the Convair, and, Lisagor was to recount, “all of the enmity and hostility that he held for the Kennedys came out. He called Kennedy a ‘little scrawny fellow with rickets’ and God knows what other kind of diseases. He said, ‘Have you ever seen his ankles? They’re about so round.’ ” And Johnson made a tiny circle with his fingers.
There were other flights with Lyndon Johnson, jacket and tie off, sitting beside other reporters pouring out his feelings about “the boy,” the Texas twang clear and sharp through the hum of the engines. Even reporters who had covered Johnson for years were startled by the depth of his feelings. “It is amazing to note the changes that have come over the man,” Robert G. Spivack wrote on June 27. “One day he is the ingratiating, let’s-all-be-friends … political gladhander; the next day he is a rough-tough, kick-and-gouge fighter who will destroy anyone who gets in the way. Johnson seems determined that no matter what happens to his presidential ambitions, the one who must not become President of the United States is the man he contemptuously calls ‘Johnny’ Kennedy.”
One issue he had stayed away from was health: for a candidate who had suffered a major heart attack, health wasn’t a sure winner. But now any card he held had to be played. A decade before, as the chief counsel of Johnson’s Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, Donald Cook had impressed Johnson as a very sharp lawyer and investigator. Now he was president of the American Power Company, but at the end of June Johnson drafted him to investigate Jack Kennedy’s health.
Going directly to Frank Brough, who, as president of a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, “has,” as Cook was to tell Walter Jenkins, “a great many doctor contacts around the country,” Cook quickly struck pay dirt. “Brough told me about this Addison’s Disease,” he told Jenkins. “Kennedy … was treated for it in the Lahey Clinic in Boston.… I am told he not only had it but has it now and is receiving treatment for it.”
By the next day, Cook had the name of a doctor, Lewis Hurxthal, who he said had treated Kennedy for Addison’s disease at Lahey, and the fact that “the records of [the] case are not kept in the general clinic files, but in Hurxthal’s personal records.” He told a Johnson aide, Arthur Perry, to tell Johnson that Kennedy was under Hurxthal’s “care … right down to the present time” and that the medication given for Addison’s “creates what the doctors call a psychic problem,” including “a split personality and … very neurotic behavior patterns.” Cook suggested that the story be leaked to “some newshound … without involving the Senator,” but Johnson took a role himself, telephoning a California internist who had once worked at Lahey in an attempt to confirm that Kennedy had the disease. Despite the doctor’s refusal to provide this confirmation, however, Johnson decided to make the issue public—not himself, of course; publicly he stayed above the fray, refusing to get into the health issue at all, but having John Connally and India Edwards hold a press conference in which Mrs. Edwards said that Kennedy did indeed have Addison’s disease, which she defined as “something to do with lymph glands.” She added that “Doctors have told me he would not be alive if not for cortisone.”
But the Kennedys deflected the attack with their usual skill. Seizing on the fact that the classic cause of Addison’s was tuberculosis, which Jack Kennedy did not have (his Addison’s was caused by other factors), Robert Kennedy said that his brother “does not now nor has he ever had an ailment described classically as Addison’s Disease, which is a turberculose destruction of the adrenal gland”; that his brother had only “some adrenal insufficiency” which “is not in any way a dangerous condition”; and that “any statement to the contrary is malicious and false … despicable tactics … a sure sign of the desperation of the opposition. Evidently there are those within the Democratic Party who would prefer that if they cannot win the nomination themselves they want the Democrat who does win to lose in November.” Sorensen went further. Evidently feeling himself justified by the fact that Kennedy was taking not cortisone but a cortisone derivative, he told a reporter flatly, “He is not on cortisone.” And when the reporter asked him what other drugs Kennedy might be using, he said, “I don’t know that he is on anything—any more than you and I are on.” So successful were the Kennedys that the next day New York’s Carmine De Sapio, friendly to Johnson, had an intermediary relay a message to the candidate: that Mrs. Edwards’ statement had backfired “and was going to hurt badly” not Kennedy but Johnson, and that “Johnson should disavow” it—which Johnson did.
None of his cards took a trick. It was just too late. On July 5, with the convention just six days away—standing, as Mary McGrory sarcastically put it, “before the barn door” and “declaring that the horse has not been stolen”—Lyndon Johnson said the words he had never said before: “I am, as of this moment, a candidate for the office of President of the United States.” His voice suddenly broke as he was reading that sentence; “I had never heard him do that before,” Horace Busby says. (The announcement, delivered in the auditorium of the new Senate Office Building, packed with reporters and cheering Senate staffers, and with Rayburn’s bald head shining in the front row, was filled with jabs at his leading opponent’s failure to condemn McCarthy—he himself, he said, had been “a working liberal when Joe McCarthy had been at the height”; at his absences from the Senate—he himself had stayed on the job while “those who have engaged in active campaigns have missed hundreds of votes.… The next President is not going to be a talking President or a traveling President. He is going to be a working President”; and at his inexperience: the “forces of evil in this world … will have no mercy for innocence.” If the next President “is inexperienced in making government work, he becomes a weak link in the whole chain of the free world.”) Then, after a last visit to the White House with Rayburn to try and persuade Eisenhower to publicly criticize Kennedy—the President was to recount that the two Texans felt he was “a mediocrity in the Senate … a nobody who had a rich father.… And they’d tell some of the God-damndest stories”—on Friday, July 8, he flew to Los Angeles. Excoriating his top campaign workers (“He got mad,” Herring says. “He felt we hadn’t done our job. He didn’t feel we had done enough with the delegates. ‘If you’d done the job you were supposed to have done, I wouldn’t be in this situation’ ”), he told them he was going to win despite their incompetence. Listing the states that were going to switch to him after the first ballot, he said, “It was going to be nip and tuck but he still felt he would win.” But an article on the front page of Saturday’s New York Times showed how unrealistic it was for him to hope for the support of any substantial number of northern liberals. “Top-level labor leaders passed the word to union delegates to the Democratic National Convention today to give no aid to Senator Lyndon B. Johnson for nomination to any office,” it said. At a meeting of union leaders, one after the other had denounced what they called the “Johnson operation” to “hold liberal and labor legislation hostage to his candidacy,” it said. While the article contained no direct quotes from the meeting—that was evidently the condition on which a description of it had been given to reporter Joseph Loftus—Loftus got the wording across nonetheless: the most powerful leader, gruff old George Meany, president of the fifteen-million-member-strong AFL-CIO, had, the article said, “left no doubt … that Senato
r Johnson should be regarded by all union delegates as an arch foe of labor.”
And, liberal leaders said Sunday, of civil rights as well. All the candidates had been invited to a rally organized by the NAACP that evening to support a civil rights fight in the convention’s platform committee, and Johnson had accepted. Now he said he wasn’t coming, sending former Interior Secretary Chapman in his place. The audience, about six thousand persons, mostly African-American, was tough on all the candidates except for Humphrey, who was cheered when he rose to speak. When Kennedy was introduced, some boos mingled with the applause; he spoke in generalities, making no specific pledges on Negro rights, but apparently convinced the audience of his sincerity; at the end of his talk, the applause was no more than polite, but there were no boos. Then Chapman spoke. As soon as he mentioned Johnson’s name, the jeering and angry shouts were so loud, and went on so long, that for a time it seemed he would not be allowed to continue. When, finally, he was, he said, “If I did not think Senator Johnson would support the Supreme Court decision [on school desegregation] wholeheartedly, I would not support him.” The skeptical reaction drowned him out again.
One by one, all that weekend, delegations came down for Kennedy. Calling on Johnson in his suite—7333—in the Biltmore Hotel on Saturday morning, De Sapio and Prendergast delivered in private the news that Mayor Wagner, who hadn’t come, would announce publicly that afternoon: that Kennedy would receive 104 or 105 of New York’s 114 votes. On Saturday also, Governors Docking and Loveless announced that they would release the Kansas and Iowa delegations from their favorite-son candidacies; although Kennedy had only a bare majority of Kansas’ 21 votes, under the unit rule if the delegation was released, Kennedy would get all 21. The big headlines in the Sunday newspapers said: MOVE TO KENNEDY NEARS STAMPEDE; JOHNSON SEEMS HEADED FOR POLITICAL ALAMO. And later on Sunday, Dick Daley let it be known that Kennedy would get all but a handful of Illinois’ 69 votes.
THERE REMAINED just one hope: what Joseph Alsop called “the single major herd of delegates that is … genuinely uncommitted. This is the Pennsylvania delegation, 81 strong, sternly commanded by the Sphinx of Harrisburg, Gov. David Lawrence.”
Slim though the chance might be, it was definitely a chance. Despite the headlines, if Kennedy didn’t take almost all of Pennsylvania’s votes, he might still be well short of the 761 he needed. Pennsylvania would not caucus until Monday morning, and, as Alsop wrote on Friday, the result of that caucus would be “decisive” for Kennedy’s chances. “Everything depends on Pennsylvania,” Lyndon Johnson said that weekend. “If we could have held Pennsylvania,” John Connally was to recall years later, “we would have stopped him.” And that weekend Lawrence was doing—as he had been doing for more than a year—everything he could to keep his state out of Kennedy’s column.
The son of an Irish teamster, David (“Don’t Call Me ‘Boss’ ”) Lawrence had dropped out of high school at fourteen to run errands for a Pittsburgh alderman, and thereafter his education had been as a politician, and a formative moment had come in 1928. Idolizing another poor and uneducated Irishman up from the slums, Alfred E. Smith, for the social reforms Smith had enacted as governor of New York, Lawrence had thrown himself and his Pittsburgh machine into Smith’s presidential campaign. The storm of anti-Catholic prejudice that sent the “Happy Warrior” to overwhelming defeat—fiery crosses had blazed on midwestern hills as Smith’s campaign train passed—had burned into Lawrence the belief that Roman Catholicism was an insurmountable handicap in American politics; in 1932, despite his admiration for Smith, he took his machine into Franklin D. Roosevelt’s camp, “solely,” Lawrence’s biographer wrote, “on the religious issue.” Then, in 1958, after four terms as Pittsburgh’s mayor, he ran for the governorship. Until the end of his life, he never stopped talking about what had happened to him in that race: about the hate-filled letters that poured into his home, some of them worded so violently that he feared for his family’s safety; about the ministers in Pennsylvania’s rural Dutch districts who warned their congregants not to vote for a Roman Catholic; about how, although he had come out of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and the hard coal counties, with a huge plurality, he had almost lost anyway, when the vote from the non-Catholic areas came in. On the morning after a Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in 1959, Lawrence had attended a Sunday Mass together with Richard Daley, Robert Wagner, Carmine De Sapio, Mike DiSalle and Pat Brown—a communion of the bosses—and during breakfast after church Lawrence delivered his sermon: that Kennedy “just can’t win. Districts that have always gone Democratic I lost because I was a Catholic.” Now, on the eve of the 1960 convention, the stocky, grizzled ruler of the Pennsylvania Democrats was convinced that, despite West Virginia, nothing had changed; Kennedy’s victory there might have eased the fears of some of those other leaders about anti-Catholic prejudice; it had done little to ease Lawrence’s. “I figured … he’ll lose Pennsylvania sure,” he was to recall. And he was afraid that Kennedy’s name at the top of the ticket would, by arousing anti-Catholic sentiment in those “Dutch Democratic districts,” drag other Pennsylvania Democrats down with him. Says an old friend who talked to Lawrence shortly after West Virginia: “What he wanted was to win. He was convinced that the whole ticket was going to go down the drain because you couldn’t elect a Roman Catholic.” An ambitious program he wanted to pass as governor depended on his narrow margin in the legislature. If Kennedy was the nominee, Lawrence recalls, “I could see losing … the Legislature.”
And there were, besides, his feelings about Adlai Stevenson, feelings which one reporter called “an almost youthful adoration,” the admiration, almost awe, of the tough old boss, with little formal education, for Stevenson’s learning, wit and brilliance. He had played a crucial role in getting Adlai the nomination in 1952 and 1956, and, Lawrence’s son was to say, in 1960 “though I don’t think his political sense was with Stevenson … his heart was with Stevenson.” Lawrence himself would say, “I was very enamored of Stevenson, because I think of him as one of the ablest men in the world and the ablest man I ever met.”
The Kennedys had been working on Dave Lawrence not for months but for years; Joseph Kennedy had made a substantial contribution to his 1958 gubernatorial campaign. (“Why would you want to contribute in Pennsylvania?” Lawrence’s protégé, Joe Barr, had asked the patriarch at the time.) In Pennsylvania’s own, non-binding 1960 primary, more than 175,000 Democrats, an astonishingly high number, had written in Kennedy’s name, and more than half the state’s eighty-one delegates were for him. But Lawrence wouldn’t budge. “We were all furious” at him, Rose Kennedy would recall. “Joe has worked with Lawrence all winter, but he still can’t believe a Catholic can be elected. He has been one of the most exasperating and tantalizing forces.”
That didn’t mean that Lawrence was for Johnson. If he felt a Catholic couldn’t win, he had the same feeling about a southerner, even after Johnson’s speech at the Zembo Mosque. On a visit to the Taj Mahal near the end of May, he was “given the ‘full treatment.’ ” Emerging “in a daze,” he “sought refuge” in the office of Pennsylvania Senator Joseph Clark, and told him, “in wondering tones,” that “the man has sold himself on the idea that he is going to be our nominee and the next President. Now how can I ask Pennsylvania Democrats to vote for Lyndon Johnson?”
Over that weekend in Los Angeles, Johnson was working furiously to hold the Pennsylvania delegates. His partner in the effort was a key player in the Pennsylvania game, John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, who had been his ally—a secret ally, since labor union support was not a political desideratum in Texas—for years; the UMW’s chief counsel, Welly Hopkins, a onetime Hill Country legislator for whom Johnson, as a young man, had campaigned in Texas, had carried cash back to that state for both of Johnson’s Senate campaigns.
In any state with as much coal as Pennsylvania, of course, the mine workers would be a potent political force; Lewis had already dispatched UMW Secretary-Treasurer Tom
Kennedy to Los Angeles, and, on Lewis’ instructions, Hopkins had been discussing with Johnson ways in which Johnson might hold at least a substantial bloc of the Pennsylvania delegation.
The last chance melted away due to Stevenson’s indecisiveness. Arriving in Los Angeles, Lawrence found that more of his Pennsylvania delegates than ever were for Kennedy, and Chicago’s Daley let him see with his own eyes that Stevenson had little support even from his own state, inviting Lawrence to attend the Illinois caucus on Sunday, in which Stevenson received only a handful of votes. Nevertheless, meeting Sunday night “with the man he had championed for almost a decade,” Lawrence pleaded with him to announce that he was a candidate. “You’ll have eighty-five percent of the Pennsylvania delegation,” he said. “I can hold it. They’re going to kill me, but I can hold it. They’re all on the [state] payroll.” And if he held Pennsylvania, Lawrence said, Kennedy couldn’t win on the first ballot, “and this guy is dead if it goes to a second ballot. He’s dead!” But Pennsylvania was going to caucus the next morning. “You’ve got to tell me right now.”
Adlai was Adlai. “If the party wants me …”
“No, no, Governor,” Lawrence said. “Right now. I have to know right now!”
Finally, Stevenson said cavalierly, “Do what you have to, Dave.” Adlai’s aide Willard Wirtz said in despair, “Governor, are you sure that’s the message you want to give Governor Lawrence?” but Stevenson said it was. “Adlai could have said anything but that and he [Lawrence] would’ve stopped Pennsylvania from going to Kennedy,” said another Stevenson aide. Lawrence had given Stevenson a last chance—and Stevenson had refused it. Lawrence told Stevenson that Pennsylvania would go for Kennedy at the caucus. All during that weekend, Welly Hopkins says, the UMW’s Tom Kennedy had been working the Pennsylvania delegates, and “there was some reason to believe that there might be a last-minute gambit … through Lawrence that they be put in Lyndon’s column,” but “he wasn’t able to put it over although he tried.”
The Passage of Power Page 18