by Ted Sorensen
In short, the primary purpose of these speech-making trips was not to talk but to listen and learn. He learned to tell the difference between volunteer workers who could talk and those who could also work, between a friendly comment (“Well do all we can for you”) and a firm commitment. (One governor, I noted in a 1959 memorandum to Abe Ribicoff before the National Governors’ Conference, “has succeeded, at various times, in convincing the Kennedy, Stevenson and Johnson camps that he is really for their man.”)
He learned also to tell the difference between those who were party leaders in name and those who actually spoke for delegates. In New York, for example, Congressman Charles Buckley had considerably less national fame but considerably more delegation influence than former National Chairman James Farley. In Illinois at that time, National Committeeman Jake Arvey had the national publicity, but Chicago’s Mayor Dick Daley had the votes. In Puerto Rico Governor Munoz Marin had more wisdom and stature, but State Chairman Jose Benitez had more Democratic delegates. Buckley, Daley and Benitez were for Kennedy.
Most of his fellow Senators, Kennedy found, had comparatively little political power in state and national conventions. Neither the veteran Carl Hayden of Arizona nor the freshman Tom Dodd of Connecticut, for example, could translate their endorsements of Johnson into a single vote in their pro-Kennedy unit-rule convention delegations.
He found factionalism and rivalries, based more on competing personalities than on ideologies, dividing the Democrats in nearly every state, and he learned to pick his way carefully through these contending forces. He did not confine his search for help to the possessors of high office. John Reynolds (later Governor of Wisconsin), Joseph Tydings (later Senator from Maryland), Robert McDonough (later State Chairman in West Virginia) and Teno Roncalio (later Congressman at Large from Wyoming), to name but four examples, were enlisted in the Kennedy cause long before their talents were equally recognized throughout their home states.
Just as John Kennedy represented a new era in Massachusetts Democratic politics, he gradually built up a corps of new Kennedy Democrats throughout the fifty states. Some were old friends from college or Navy days (it must have been a very large PT boat to have contained all the shipmates we met). Some were delegates who had supported him at the 1956 Convention and enjoyed the special bond that created. Some were friends from the Congress or candidates he had helped. Some were Catholics who felt a strong affinity for his hopes for a political breakthrough—although we took pains not to have Catholics as the most prominent Kennedy leaders in any state. But most of these recruits were simply Democratic workers and voters whose response to our various mailings and meetings indicated their attraction to the unique Kennedy brand of energetic idealism and common sense. Few promises of future patronage were asked and none was given, although it was made clear that, if Kennedy were elected, he would be looking for talented people whom he knew, trusted and could work with.
In many of the smaller states the Kennedy nucleus was started by a series of meetings I held in 1959 and 1960. I also represented the Senator at conferences of the Western and Midwestern Democratic organizations (telling one protesting Michiganer that I still voted in Nebraska and resided in a state—Virginia—-which extended further west than Detroit). While attending the Midwest Conference in Milwaukee, I asked—at the suggestion of Pat Lucey and John Reynolds—Mayor Ivan Nestingen of Madison, liberal, Lutheran and Scandinavian, to be our leader in Wisconsin. While attending the Western States Conference in Denver, I asked—at the suggestion of our key contact, Joe Dolan—an old Kennedy friend, Byron “Whizzer” White, to be our leader in Colorado. Both White and Nestingen were superb, as were others similarly recruited. In one state our Protestant-Scandinavian chairman not only had great ability and loyalty but so looked, talked and acted the part of the rustic, raw-boned corn-husker from what Eastern city dwellers called “the sticks” that the Senator accused me of finding him through some Hollywood type-casting studio.
But I knew full well that a national campaign required many more hands and far more experienced hands than my own. In a memorandum discussed with the Senator in December, 1958, in New York, I attempted to put his prior efforts into perspective and proposed the addition of several campaign aides. The most urgent need was for an administrative assistant to take over our lists of key Democrats, scheduling arrangements and political mail, and we agreed that his brother-in-law Steve Smith, who had smoothly overseen the administrative side of his 1958 Senatorial campaign, was the logical choice.
Steve did an outstanding job, quietly opening a political headquarters in the Esso Building located at the foot of Capitol Hill, and taking with him my card files, memoranda and assistant Jean Lewis. In time he was joined by two long-time Kennedy friends and hardheaded political aides from his Massachusetts Senate races, Larry O’Brien and Kenny O’Donnell; by Bob Wallace, formerly with Senator Douglas; by Pierre Salinger, a former newsman who left his post as investigator for the Senate Rackets Committee to become a superb campaign press secretary; and, finally, by Robert Kennedy, whose organizational and administrative skills, as well as his political judgment and ferocious dedication, made him the Senator’s first and only choice for campaign manager, though neither he nor anyone else had a formal title and there was no organization chart. Bob’s work with the Rackets Committee had made him controversial as well as famous, but the Senator shrewdly observed, “I’ll take all his enemies if I can have all his friends, too.”
In addition to these full-time campaigners, John Bailey of Connecticut and Hy Raskin of Chicago lent a part-time professional touch; Massachusetts Congressmen Macdonald and Boland helped out increasingly, as did Governors Ribicoff and Roberts; the Senator’s brother Teddy and brother-in-law Sargent Shriver focused on the West and Midwest; his father talked to friends in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Nevada and elsewhere; and Dave Powers of Boston, with his invaluable and indefatigable smile, began serving as the Senator’s personal aide on most of the major trips. He also used Jacques Lowe of New York as a semiofficial campaign photographer (although Jacques’s single-minded pursuit of his art at times annoyed the Senator, and it was with genuine delight one day in a remote corner of Oregon that he ordered the Caroline not to wait for him).
While expanding his political organization, the Senator also acted to beef up the intellectual side of his staff. We tried out nearly a dozen potential speech-writers, making commitments to none, giving an opportunity to all. To one experienced author I wrote: “In fairness, I must repeat my warning that our past experience would indicate that the chances of satisfying the Senator’s standards are slim.” One full-time writer, Richard Goodwin, was finally hired, with occasional assistance from many other sources.
At the same time, with the help of Professor Earl Latham of Amherst College and a graduate student in Cambridge, I initiated at the Senator’s request and in his name an informal committee to tap the ideas and information of scholars and thinkers in Massachusetts and elsewhere. Drawn primarily from the Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculties, with a smattering of names from other schools and professions, the members of our “Academic Advisory Committee” held their first organizational meeting with me at the Hotel Commander in Cambridge on December 3, 1958. Thereafter they met infrequently with the Senator or myself, answered written or telephoned inquiries, and produced a great number of well-documented position papers and recommendations on current problems and programs. Among the members of this group who would later occupy posts in the Kennedy administration or task forces were Professors Cox, Wiesner, Schlesinger, Galbraith, Rostow, Millikan, Keppel, Chayes, Nitze, Harris, Kaysen, Samuelson, Cohen, Hilsman and Tobin, as well as General James Gavin and numerous others.
Not all of their material was usable and even less was actually used. But it provided a fresh and reassuring reservoir of expert intellect at a time when the Senator’s speech schedule was exhausting both our intellectual and physical resources. Those able to talk personally with hi
m were deeply impressed. Some of them who had similarly briefed Stevenson in 1956 were amazed at Kennedy’s familiarity with an even greater range of current issues.
No announcement was made at the time about the committee’s formation, but its very existence, when known, helped recruit Kennedy supporters in the liberal intellectual “community” who had leaned to Stevenson or Humphrey. This was in part its purpose, for the liberal intellectuals, with few delegates but many prestigious and articulate voices, could be a formidable foe, as Barkley and Kefauver had learned. Suspicious of Kennedy’s father, religion and supposed McCarthy history, they were in these pre-1960 days held in the Stevenson camp by Eleanor Roosevelt and others. Kennedy’s “academic advisers” formed an important beachhead on this front.
An effort was also made, with limited success, to set up similar groups in some of the difficult Presidential primary states. In addition, many of the original committee members joined in Written appeals to fellow professors and intellectuals in these states. Our largest single effort to woo the intellectuals was the mass mailing in the spring of 1960 of Kennedy’s The Strategy of Peace, a collection of his speeches, with particular emphasis on foreign policy, which we had prepared for campaign purposes. Editors, scientists, columnists, educators, reporters, authors, publishers, labor leaders, clergymen, public opinion leaders and liberal politicians in great number received copies of the book “personally” from the Senator. One previously pro-Humphrey professor responded:
The Strategy of Peace is incontestably the best campaign document I can imagine, for it communicates what various other books and most news reports inadequately convey…. You emerge from the book as the kind of reflective and purposeful candidate that many of us seek.
Despite all this activity, the formal preconvention organization remained small. Contrary to reports, no public relations agency or expert was employed, no nationally known political professionals were placed on the full-time payroll, and none of his father’s associates or employees was involved in campaigning. We did not have a paid political worker in every state, and although the Senator did privately contribute to the Congressional or Senatorial campaigns of numerous friends, many of them were not delegates and many who were delegates voted for other hopefuls. Irritated by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt’s statement on television that his father was spending lavish sums on his candidacy, he repeatedly asked her for a retraction, which she refused on the grounds that her “information came largely from remarks made by people in many places.” (He took in better humor a 1958 Gridiron skit which portrayed him, to the tune of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” as singing “Just send the bill to Daddy.” In his own speech that followed, he claimed to have just received a wire from his “generous Daddy” reading: “Dear Jack: Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary—I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”)
Our first organizational meeting took place in the Kennedy home in Palm Beach on April 1, 1959. Most of us flew in the night before. In attendance were John F. Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Stephen Smith, Lou Harris, Larry O’Brien, Kenny O’Donnell, Bob Wallace and myself. Since only the Senator, Steve Smith and I were at that point engaged in the campaign, the meeting was a bit disorganized. But each state was reviewed, assignments were improvised, strategy was discussed and key names were checked. Polls were ordered for certain states and delayed for certain others. Bob Kennedy’s role as a labor rackets-buster having secured him both popularity and speaking invitations throughout the South, it was decided that he could, even before devoting full-time to the campaign, make contacts in states less likely to invite the Senator.
Among the notes taken of that meeting, in addition to the state-by-state notations, are the following:
… Publicize poll results to key people…. Have Protestant staff member go out to certain states…. Get list of labor delegates…. Definite commitments…. System of checks on workers within states…. Keep the field crowded…. Foreign policy, peace emphasis…. Run against the other candidates—not God.
The atmosphere throughout the meeting, as at all subsequent meetings, was one of quiet confidence: there was a job to be done which could be done; we had the best man; no state was impossible, no effort was too great, no detail was too small. Indeed, this air of confidence permanently characterized the entire Kennedy campaign. It was not smug or strident, but it reassured his followers and impressed the skeptics. It also impressed his wife, who loyally wanted whatever he wanted but had been worried about the strains of the Presidency on his health and family life. “I see, every succeeding day I am married to him,” she wrote in a personal note in 1959, “that he has what may be the single most important quality for a leader—an imperturbable self-confidence and sureness of his powers.”
At Palm Beach, and in all subsequent meetings, the Senator was in full command. He was still his own chief campaign manager and strategy adviser. He knew each state, 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 coordinated the talks and travels of his campaign staff. He squeezed in with his Senate duties a series of private man-to-man conferences and phone calls with local political leaders and an increased schedule of travel. He invited friendly members of Congress to lunch in his office and sought their advice and assistance. 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.
Rumors spread fast in politics—few secrets hold fast. Reports on who said what about whom poured steadily into our offices. 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.” His own political agents were under instructions never to attack his competitors or argue with their supporters. Our approach instead was: “Once your man is out of the race, why not come with us?”
On October 28, 1959, a second organizational meeting was held in the Robert Kennedy house in Hyannis Port. Present were the participants in the Palm Beach conference and these additions: Ted Kennedy, John Bailey, Dennis Roberts, Pierre Salinger, Hy Raskin (a veteran of two Stevenson campaigns), Dave Hackett (friend and aide to Bob Kennedy), Marjorie Lawson (able Washington attorney working with Negro voters) and John Salter (an aide to Senator Henry Jackson). Again the Senator conducted the meeting, displaying his mastery of the political situation in each state. He knew without notes who was friendly and who was hostile, which states had primaries and which primaries were binding, which delegations might be governed by the unit rule, which could be instructed by state conventions and which contained wholly free agents.
No one at the meeting could match his knowledge of detail. The lines of responsibility were still unclear or overlapping in many areas. But to a far greater degree than had been true at Palm Beach in April, he was talking with a going political team which had a better grasp of its task. His travels that fall in twenty-two states had been better planned and executed, with efficient advance men and mailings to set up his public audiences and private conferences. Most of those present had already traveled extensively on his behalf, probing strengths and weaknesses, presenting arguments, building an organization. No one there had ever participated in the direction of a successful Presidential election campaign. All had different backgrounds, abilities and opinions of each other. But all were dedicated to the election of John Kennedy.
State by state the outlook was reviewed and assignments handed out. Larry O’Brien, under Bob Kennedy’s general supervision, was given responsibility for the states with Presidential primaries:
The Manchester delegate situation [an internal feud] should be straightened out….A speaking date should be set up for the
Negro district in Baltimore…. See DiSalle and make sure he is going to meet his commitment…. After local election is over, get invitation to Lake County [Indiana]…. Call Boyle [Nebraska] every so often to keep in touch…. Organization well set up in Wisconsin…. Make sure Mrs. Green [Oregon] selects an executive secretary…. No decision on West Virginia until poll has been taken…. Find out source of story stating that friends say Kennedy will run in California.
Those are but a few of the Senator’s directions on the Presidential primary states as noted by a secretary. Omitting Minnesota, Missouri, Texas and the South (as strongholds of Humphrey, Symington and Johnson respectively), all states were similarly reviewed and assigned—including Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Panama Canal Zone, each of which is entitled to convention delegates. Reporting procedures were established. Trips were planned. Campaign films were planned. Polls were requested for Ohio and Wisconsin, delayed for Nebraska, West Virginia and California. A contemplated trip to Africa in December as chairman of the Senate African Affairs Subcommittee was ruled out for lack of time. A picture Christmas card was discussed which would be sent to every name in the political file. And near the close of the meeting the Senator disclosed his intention to’ announce—in a letter to some seventy thousand names in our files on January 1, 1960, and in a Washington press conference on January 2—his candidacy for the Presidency of the United States.