by Ted Sorensen
Perhaps he already realized that his prominent role in the convention, his tense race with Kefauver and his graceful acceptance of defeat had made him overnight a nationally acclaimed figure. Perhaps he knew that his showing among Southern delegates—even if many of them had been motivated by their opposition to Kefauver—was the first chink in the Al Smith myth that no Catholic could win national office. And, more importantly, perhaps he already knew that were he to occupy second place on a losing Stevenson ticket in 1956, neither he nor any other Catholic would be considered again for several decades.
In later years, weary of the myth that he had entered politics as an involuntary substitute for his deceased brother Joe, he commented that Joe was more of a winner, that he, too, would have won the Congressional and Senatorial elections Jack did, that he, too, would have sought the Vice Presidency, but that he would have won the nomination—“And today Joe’s political career would be a shambles.” Certainly there was far more truth than humor in his quip at the Gridiron Dinner two years later:
I am grateful…to “Mr. Sam” Rayburn. At the last Democratic Convention, if he had not recognized the Tennessee and Oklahoma delegations when he did, I might have won that race with Senator Kefauver—and my political career would now be over.
1 Since the 1958 campaign and the Kennedy pre-eminence in Massachusetts state politics must be seen as a whole, I shall tell the ’58 story before going back to the relatively brief bid for the Vice Presidential nomination in 1956.
PART TWO
The Kennedy Candidacy
CHAPTER IV
THE CONTENDER
JOHN F. KENNEDY WANTED SOMEDAY to be President of the United States.
This wish did not suddenly seize him at some particular time. It was not an obsession to which all other interests were subordinated. It was not inherited from his brother, imposed by his father or inspired by his illness. He was not dissatisfied with his life as a Senator, had no fascination with power for the sake of power and needed no glory for his ego. He would not have felt cheated and frustrated had the office never been his; and, prior to the events of 1956 which thrust it within the realm of possibility, he had no timetable or plans for obtaining it. Nor did he seek the job in the belief that he was fulfilling his nation’s destiny or because he had some grand design for the future.
John Kennedy wanted to be President simply because, as he told a newsman early in 1956 when he had no specific intentions toward the office, “I suppose anybody in politics would like to be President”—because, as he said so often in 1960, “that is the center of action, the mainspring, the wellspring of the American system”—because, as he said in 1962, “at least you have an opportunity to do something about all the problems which…I would be concerned about [anyway] as a father or as a citizen…and if what you do is useful and successful, then…that is a great satisfaction.”
As a Democrat he believed four more years of Republican rule would be ruinous. As a citizen he feared for the course of his country in the sixties. As a politician and public servant he aspired, as many men do, to reach the top of his profession. As a member of both houses of Congress he was daily more aware of how limited was their power to improve our nation and society. Nothing could better sum up his reasons for seeking the Presidency than seven words he used constantly in the campaign: “because I want to get things done.”
To his father, who warned that its pressures could make it “the worst job in the world,” he said these problems still had to be solved by human beings. He knew the responsibilities of the office would be lonely and demanding. But he had confidence in himself, in his judgment, his courage, his knowledge of public affairs, his years of experience in the House and Senate, his background of world travel and his conversations with chief executives in this country and many others. With his usual candor he told one interviewer before the 1960 convention, “The burden is heavy…[but] this job is going to be done. I am one of the four or five candidates who will be considered to do it. I approach it with a feeling that I can meet the responsibilities of the office.”
In private he could be even more explicit, listing the men who in his lifetime had held, sought or were among the four or five then seeking the job—men whose talents were at best not superior to his own. Of the other possible contenders he regarded Johnson as the ablest and Symington as the most likely compromise choice. He liked and respected both of them and Stevenson and Humphrey also. But Stevenson, having twice been his party’s standard-bearer, said flatly he would not run again; and Kennedy objectively considered his own ability to be nominated and elected and to lead the nation through a perilous period superior to that of all four men.
Kefauver, whom he bested in a competition for a seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee early in 1957, appeared likely to be a candidate in 1960 only for re-election to the Senate. Governors Brown of California, Williams of Michigan, Collins of Florida, Chandler of Kentucky and Meyner of New Jersey, all of whom were mentioned by local boosters, had no visible nationwide following, although Meyner tried hard to acquire one.
Neither Republican candidate, in the Senator’s opinion, was unbeatable. Richard Nixon, he wrote in 1957, would be a “tough, skillful, shrewd opponent…. It will take more than abusive statements to beat Mr. Nixon—those he can read riding in the 1961 Inaugural parade.” But he felt that Nixon’s ambitions exceeded his ability and that neither his platform presence nor his past inspired confidence among the voters.
He did not know Nelson Rockefeller prior to his election as Governor of New York. When the two were paired as speakers at the annual Al Smith Dinner in 1959, the Senator regarded it as a competition. Throughout the dinner, as he anxiously worked over his own speech, he worried all the more watching the Governor confidently smiling and talking, never glancing at his text. But the contrast could not have been greater as Rockefeller stumbled through a long and listless speech followed by Kennedy’s brief, humorous and more pertinent remarks. “I’d like to appear with him every night of the week!” he exclaimed to me on the phone the next morning.
These were the men, then, Republicans and Democrats, from whose ranks the next President would be picked; and the Senator said, in effect, that someone has to do it, these are, the men considered, therefore “Why not me?”
All this was not vanity but objectivity. He was as objective about his liabilities as he was about his assets. Often, to the incredulity of newsmen and to the dismay of his followers, he would objectively list those liabilities in public. He knew that no Catholic had ever been elected President of the United States, where church membership was more than two to one Protestant—that no forty-three-year-old had ever been elected President—and that for these reasons in particular his party was unlikely to pick him. On the other hand, he knew that both his religion and his youthful appearance, while mistrusted by some, had also set him apart from most politicians and helped attract a nucleus of followers.
Perhaps, if he could have been guaranteed the Democratic Presidential nomination for any future year he chose, he would not have chosen 1960. Eight or twelve more years would have removed the age handicap, softened the religious handicap and possibly weakened the Republicans. But he had no such guarantee and was not in that respect free to choose. Circumstances, events and his own competitive instincts propelled him toward making the race in 1960, and once that die was cast, he felt, it was 1960 or never. Many advised him to wait, to step aside, to settle for second place—columnists, competitors, friends and strangers. As he campaigned one day early in 1960 on the streets of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, an elderly lady whose hand he grasped said, “Not now, young man, it’s too soon, it’s too soon.” And he replied gently but almost teasingly, “No, Mother, this is it. The time is now.” And she left him with a smiling “God bless you.”
Jack Kennedy did not accept—or publicly pretend to profess—the familiar fiction that this office seeks the man. “Nobody is going to hand me the nomination,” he told a reporter in 1957. �
��If I were governor of a large state, Protestant and fifty-five, I could sit back and let it come to me.”
He could not change his age. He would not change his religion. And he paid no heed to a suggestion that he seek the governorship of Massachusetts in 1958 as a safer steppingstone to the Presidency. Moreover, the governors of large states—whose offices traditionally supplied both parties with a large share of their Presidential nominees—were less prominently mentioned than Senators in the 1960 Democratic lists. This was partly due to chance. Many of the large states had Republican governors. Many of the Democratic governors were too old or too young, or their talents were not well enough known (or too well known). But it was also due to the elevation of the Senate as a forum for Presidential candidates. The once-touted executive experience of most governors was confined in large part to the problems of providing state and local services; and although rising costs and populations required unpopular tax increases to finance those services, governors, unlike Senators, had comparatively little opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of the far different national and particularly international issues with which Presidential campaigns were concerned.
It was not surprising, therefore, that at least four Senators—Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Symington—were regarded as the leading contenders for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1960; and Senators Kefauver, Gore, Lausche and Morse were also frequently mentioned. In 1958, when there were still forty-eight states and ninety-six Senators, Kennedy told the Washington Gridiron Club of a supposed press “survey” of each Senator’s preference for the Presidency, in which, he claimed, “ninety-six Senators each received one vote.”
The one Protestant-big-state governor whom Kennedy regarded as most likely to block him never became governor. Mayor Richardson Dilworth of Philadelphia, a friend of the Senator’s, had none of Kennedy’s liabilities and many of his assets—a photogenic appearance, a heroic war record, a name for idealism and integrity, and a background of wealth and education. The Senator was certain that Dilworth, if elected Governor of Pennsylvania in 1958, would be in 1960 an obvious choice for the Presidency in the same Northern and Eastern states to which Kennedy appealed and would also be more acceptable to Westerners and Southerners. But a candid reply by Dilworth to a Washington luncheon question on the recognition of Communist China gave his opponents within Pennsylvania’s Democratic hierarchy an excuse to discard him; and David Lawrence, who was not a Presidential contender, was elected Governor instead.
In that same crucial election of 1958, in which Kennedy won so overwhelmingly, three other Northern liberals—who, had they been in a position to bid for the Presidency, might well have cut deeply into Kennedy’s strength—all fared poorly: Averell Harriman lost his race for re-election as Governor of New York; Mennen Williams barely won reelection as Governor of Michigan; and Chester Bowles was denied the Senatorial nomination by the Connecticut State Democratic Convention. Bowles’s defeat was unfairly blamed by some on Kennedy, who actually took no part in any of these contests and would have favored all four men.
This assessment of the Presidential campaign scene, I should make clear, did not take place until after 1956. In earlier years the possibility of a Kennedy Presidential candidacy sometime in the future was frequently on my mind but never on his tongue. When I suggested to him on the Senate floor in 1954 that his support of a minor economy move “might look bad in some future national campaign,” he replied emphatically, “I can’t start basing my life on that or I’d be no good in this job or to myself.” Two years later, as he lay on his sickbed in Palm Beach, his worried wife asked me if he would someday be in the White House, and I told her what I had told Evelyn Lincoln after only one month’s work in his office: that someday he should be and could be President, but he would more likely be Vice President first.
The events of 1956 did not infect the Senator with the “Presidential bug,” altering his over-all ambitions and habits. But they did transform him almost instantly into a national leader of his party to whom the Presidency was no longer an impossibility.
He still did not talk in those terms. There was no single time and place at which he decided to try for the Presidency in 1960. As always, he was simply determined, in the new situation in which he found himself, to master the tides of time and events and see how far they could carry him. It was clear to me after the 1956 convention that the Presidency had become his primary goal, in politics and indeed in life. But he deliberately refrained from committing himself to the 1960 race—even privately, even in his own mind—until he was certain his nomination was possible. Volunteers requesting material or permission to form “Kennedy-for-President” clubs were asked to hold up (although their names and addresses were carefully saved in a “grass-roots support” file).
It was in an Evansville, Indiana, hotel room in October, 1959, that he said, as we chatted late one night about the nomination, “I think now I can make it”—a surprising statement to me since I had never thought he thought otherwise. Even then a final public decision was withheld until he felt it was both necessary and appropriate. A questioner in Wichita, Kansas, in November, 1959, asked him at least to name his favorite candidate. “I do have a favorite candidate,” replied the Senator, refusing to be trapped. “But until he has the guts to declare he’s a candidate, I’m not going to announce my support of him.” For “there is,” he told a reporter who pretended to be puzzled over Kennedy’s refusal to announce, “a time and place for everything.”
PRE-1960 TRAVELS
Autumn, 1956, was a time of campaigning for the Stevenson-Kefauver ticket. The Massachusetts Senator emerged from the spectacular Vice Presidential balloting more sought after by party members than any Democrat other than the two nominees. Covering more than thirty thousand miles in twenty-four states, he made over 150 speeches and appearances in the course of six weeks. As we worked one night that summer on his schedule, he suddenly said, “Why don’t you come along?” And on September 18, 1956, we began a series of two-man travels which over the next few years would take us into every state—most of them several times—seeking votes for Stevenson in 1956, seeking votes for Senatorial, state and local candidates in 1957-1958-1959, and seeking friends for Kennedy at every stop.
During these years, with the exception of a few overnight trips by train, we traveled exclusively by plane. The acquisition by the Kennedy family in 1959 of a private plane—later called the Caroline after his daughter, born in 1957—made this mode of travel more comfortable and convenient. The Caroline was a converted Convair complete with desk, galley and bedroom. But for more than two years, although many of the short hops and a few of the longer trips were by private plane, we relied primarily on the regular commercial carriers. In time we composed our own private rating of all the major airlines. He deplored the fact that one airline assigned its most senior stewardesses to transcontinental flights, that another used three-across seats on first-class flights and that another served invariably tasteless food. We flew from coast to coast in the prejet days when each trip was more than eight hours, the Senator working, napping, talking, reviewing his speeches and schedule, and reading newspapers, magazines and books of all kinds. Franklin’s Autobiography, I recall, occupied most of one trip.
We rarely missed a plane and barely caught most of them. He canceled more appearances on the basis of his Senate duties or poor health than as a result of bad flying weather, but I was grateful that no large commercial airline could be induced to risk flying its planes in storms by the most persuasive United States Senator. The pilots of private planes, on the other hand, were often more willing to be daring—although I appreciated one captain who told me with some fervor, “Listen, there’s only one life on this plane that’s important to me—mine—and I’m not risking it for the Senator or anyone else!”
We flew in all kinds of little planes, in all kinds of weather, with all kinds of pilots—experienced and inexperienced, professional and amateur, rested and fatigued. On a fligh
t from Phoenix to Denver, I had to hold the plane door closed. On a flight to Rockport, Maine, the pilot could not find the landing strip, and we circled over the area as he peered out one side and the Senator, sitting in the copilot’s seat, looked out the other. In order to appear on time at a corn-picking contest, we landed in an Iowa cornfield. After a flight over the Green Mountains of Vermont, our pilot confided that his compass was broken. We were tossed for hours in a snowstorm over the Rockies and in a fog over Lake Michigan. In pelting rain we took off in an amphibious plane from a choppy, timber-filled bay in Alaska, with the Senator working the windshield wiper by hand.
The only moment of real danger occurred on a 1956 flight to Reno, Nevada, from Twin Falls, Idaho. Our pilot, an Idaho politician who enjoyed flying his little single-engine plane as a hobby, was confessing openly to fatigue, having picked us up that morning in Salt Lake City. With high mountains and darkness ahead, he decided to land at Elko, Nevada, and find a professional pilot who could take us the rest of the way. Just as we were approaching the Elko landing strip (“We were coming in with the wind instead of against it,” the Senator later insisted), the little plane veered over on one side. The Senator gave me a swift, half-serious, half-humorous glance, and then the plane righted itself for a somewhat bumpy landing. Another pilot in another single-engine plane took us over the mountains by moonlight, all the time assuring us that one engine was really as safe as two. We landed at one end of the Reno Airport and trudged in with our bags, just as the Democratic dignitaries and brass band awaiting us marched out to meet a more dignified twin-engine plane at the other end of the field bearing two surprised industrialists.