by Ted Sorensen
Humphrey responded to Kennedy’s challenge by challenging Kennedy to enter Wisconsin and West Virginia.1 Johnson responded by tending to his duties as Majority Leader. Stevenson responded with another declaration that he was not a candidate. Symington, whose strategy required the avoidance of possible defeat before the convention, responded by saying that he was not a candidate although he “certainly would like to be President,” and he announced a nationwide speaking schedule to take his noncandidacy “into the homes, to the street corners…to the farms,” but not to the voters.
Equally threatening to Kennedy as the contenders who did not wish to enter primaries were the local “favorite sons” who did not wish him to enter their primaries. If the Senator, out of deference to their wishes and in the name of party harmony, decided to step aside too often, he would shatter his whole strategy of sweeping the primaries and seeking an early convention majority.
The list of primary states had been carefully reviewed. Those in which the results did not bind the delegates were historically less important. Those with genuine Presidential or Vice Presidential hopefuls as “favorite sons”—such as Humphrey in South Dakota (where Kennedy was skeptical anyway of a newspaper poll showing him leading Humphrey), Smathers in Florida and Meyner in New Jersey (where the primary was not binding anyway)—were sufficiently few to be ignored. On the other hand, quietly yielding the field to DiSalle in Ohio, Tawes in Maryland, Brown in California, Morse in Oregon and Hartke in Indiana would have meant yielding 240 essential first-ballot votes, without a struggle, to five less genuine favorite sons, all of whom reportedly looked more favorably on some other candidate than Kennedy.
Though his loyal supporters in each of these states uniformly urged him to run, the Senator approached each one differently. In Indiana, as the Kennedy campaign mounted, Senator Hartke, though friendly to Johnson, made clear he had no intention of running. In Maryland Governor Tawes, after a stern Kennedy confrontation, reluctantly forgot his friendship for Maryland-raised Stuart Symington and welcomed Kennedy as the state party’s candidate in the primary. In Oregon, inasmuch as a state law required Kennedy’s name to be placed on the ballot, he was obliged to enter the primary.
In California and Ohio, however, Kennedy chose not to run, despite the size of their delegations. Governor Pat Brown, in the name of party unity (of which there had long been little in California), and in hopes of his own ambitions (with which fellow Catholic Kennedy’s conflicted), asked all outsiders to stay out of his primary. At our Hyannis Port conference Kennedy had remarked that it was “not worthwhile to go into that primary without Brown’s consent.” For the Senator to oppose the Governor—who was not necessarily opposed to him—would involve an exhausting, expensive, party-splitting fight, after all other primaries were over, between two moderate Democrats, both Catholics; and inasmuch as the deadline for filing in California preceded most of the other primaries, Humphrey or some other contender might well enter the state and win, particularly since Brown might cut into Kennedy’s vote more deeply than into anyone else’s. Even a Kennedy victory, since it would be over the party regulars, might damage his chances of carrying the state in November. Worst of all, he said, “Pat might suddenly announce that he was running against me out there as a stand-in for Stevenson and beat me.”
A judicious compromise was quietly worked out. If Brown would agree to back Kennedy after the latter won all the primaries (except Oregon, where Morse was the favorite son)—and if a proper proportion of Kennedy supporters could be placed on a delegation too liberal to hold out for Symington or Johnson—Kennedy would agree not to enter. Though later he would wonder whether he had erred, he dispatched Larry O’Brien to a California motel near the spot where the delegates were being selected. O’Brien was secretly shown the delegate list at a time when few Californians knew it, and he was able to secure a fair Kennedy representation (predicted: at least 25 percent; actual strength at the convention: 40 percent) in exchange for no primary contest.
In Ohio, on the other hand, Kennedy was willing and ready to run. He had too much support in the state, had heard too many reports of DiSalle’s flirting with Symington and had too vivid a memory of DiSalle’s opposition in 1956 merely to hope for the best in Ohio. At a 1957 Kennedy dinner in Boston, DiSalle, referring to Kennedy’s 1956 Vice Presidential defeat, had declared the Senator to have been “spared for a greater political future,” but the Governor’s continued intransigence made the Senator wonder how long DiSalle would want to spare him.
The two men had a series of meetings and telephone calls. DiSalle pleaded the cause of Ohio party unity and the need to rebuild the organization. He warned that Senator Lausche might enter and defeat them both. He sought, between visits, to pressure his own county chairmen to take his side.
Kennedy was patient but adamant. He wanted Ohio’s 64 convention votes committed to him, and, if necessary, he was prepared to run a wholly amateur slate of Kennedy delegates to humiliate a slate of party leaders pledged to DiSalle or anyone else. He had already campaigned throughout the state. He possessed—and showed DiSalle—a series of Lou Harris polls that backed up his prediction of victory. He felt he could obtain the support of the Cleveland Press, having fulfilled three speaking engagements for its editor, Louis Seltzer. He had backing from the Cleveland, Cincinnati and other Democratic organizations. He, too, emphasized a united Ohio delegation, and said the surest way to obtain that unusual goal was to unite the delegation behind Kennedy.
DiSalle, a realistic politician, finally agreed late in 1959. The week after Kennedy announced, the Governor irrevocably and unequivocably (inasmuch as our office had prepared a draft of his statement) pledged the Ohio delegation to the Kennedy candidacy. Combined with the Maine and Maryland endorsements that same week, Kennedy’s capture of Ohio startled the Washington experts who thought he was really a Vice Presidential contender. (The following week Kennedy, in a National Press Club speech on the role of the Presidency which opened his campaign with a flourish, remarked that he felt as Abraham Lincoln must have felt when he wired after the 1863 elections: “Glory to God in the highest—Ohio has saved the nation I”)
The list of primaries was now clear: New Hampshire (no real opposition), Wisconsin (against Humphrey), Indiana (no real opposition), West Virginia (against Humphrey), Nebraska (no opposition), Massachusetts by write-in (no opposition), Maryland (against both Morse and, by state law, an uncommitted delegation) and Oregon (against Morse by his choice and against every potential candidate by state law). In short, with the exception of Ohio and California, he was entering every binding Presidential primary where no legitimate favorite son was running and most of the nonbinding primaries as well.
The map and calendar had advised him against it. The last five primaries, widely scattered from Maryland to Oregon, all fell within a three-week period. But he felt required to test the acceptability of his candidacy and competence in every part of the country. Few other candidates in history had done as much, and no other candidate in 1960 was willing to do it. But as he said in Maryland, “I would rather go into the convention with the endorsement of the people from this primary than with the backing of any major political figure in the United States.”
In each of these states, as he announced his entry into the primary, he stated—with some variations in emphasis on the basis of his knowledge of the state’s problems and a Harris Poll—the same basic issues confronting the nation:
Whether we can achieve a world of peace and freedom in place of the fantastically dangerous and expensive arms race…
Whether we can spur the nation’s economic growth to provide a more secure life for all Americans, regardless of race, creed or national origin…
Whether our food surplus can help us build a more stable peace abroad and feed our hungry here at home instead of wasting in warehouses…
Whether the children of this state and nation can obtain safe, decent, adequate public school facilities.
No primary state was e
ither written off or taken for granted. He wanted a big vote in every one. Even when battling from behind in West Virginia, he took time out to campaign in Indiana and Nebraska where he had no opposition. The fact that he had no opposition in conservative, agricultural Nebraska, despite Humphrey’s identification with the farmer and Symington’s location next door, was remarkable—but they had both found out too late that he had long been patiently touring every part of the state enlisting supporters and workers. The same was true in Indiana and Maryland.
The Senator and his wife opened the campaign in New Hampshire, where only a political unknown opposed him, as though he were in the fight of his life. Early in March he received a Democratic vote more than twice the previous record, and more than two thousand write-in votes on the Republican ballot at well. Richard Nixon, who ran unopposed on that ballot, also piled up a record vote, and there was in that primary a hint of trouble to come. Shortly before primary day, Nixon’s campaign manager, right-wing Republican Governor Wesley Powell, denounced Kennedy as “soft” on Communism; and, although Nixon asserted he did not approve of the attack either before or after its issuance, his congratulations to his campaign manager on the Republican turnout gave Kennedy a foretaste of the future.
WISCONSIN
The “stop-Kennedy” talkers (and they did little but talk) now turned their attention to Wisconsin. Unlike those primary states where favorite sons were a bane, this was one state where Kennedy would have preferred a neutral favorite son to avoid combating Humphrey in his own “back yard.” Minnesota and Wisconsin were distinguishable only by the invisible boundary between them. Both states had a surplus of farm products, a predominance of Protestant German and Scandinavian descendants, and aggressively liberal Democratic parties with strong farmer-labor backing. Minnesota newspapers and television stations reached many parts of Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s Democrats, in their long years as a minority, had looked for inspiration and assistance to Minnesota’s Humphrey. “He is better known here,” said the Milwaukee Journal, “than anywhere else outside of Minnesota.”
But all attempts to reserve Wisconsin for a favorite-son Senator, William Proxmire, foundered on the suspicions and ambitions of both Humphrey and Proxmire’s Wisconsin rival, Governor Gaylord Nelson. Nor would Proxmire or Kennedy accept the Stevenson-Humphrey-leaning Nelson as a favorite son. Humphrey, moreover, needed a victory to spark his campaign even more than he needed delegates. Ignoring Kennedy’s comparison of Wisconsin and Minnesota to New Hampshire and Massachusetts, he challenged Kennedy to contest with him in the one state Humphrey was confident of winning.
Kennedy knew the pitfalls. At our first organizational meeting in Palm Beach he had spoken of a Proxmire favorite-son candidacy, hopefully pro-Kennedy but at the worst neutral, in order to “avoid a Catholic vs. Protestant, urban vs. rural” split of the state which would be of no help to his cause. Favorable Harris Polls had softened his view, but the peculiar state primary law which awarded delegates according to the results in each Congressional district guaranteed an uncertain and unhappy conclusion. Humphrey’s clear-cut advantage in the areas bordering Minnesota might not be enough to stop a Kennedy victory but would be enough to show Kennedy as nationally weak with Protestants and farmers. (To make matters worse, the pro-Humphrey State Democratic Committee—overriding its pro-Kennedy chairman, Pat Lucey, our most effective ally, who had hoped to abolish the district-by-district pattern for a single winner-take-all primary—would vote 14-12, after Kennedy’s entry, to increase the proportion of district delegates, thus making it possible for a candidate in Humphrey’s position to win a majority of the delegates with a minority of the state-wide popular vote.)
Kennedy’s advisers were concerned. The polls were uncertain. The perils were plain. He resented having to enter a grueling fight against a likable candidate who had no chance for the nomination while the “inactive” candidates remained comfortably aloof. Symington, he told a New York audience, “is hoping Wisconsin will be a good clean fight—with no survivors.”
He would have preferred a showdown with Humphrey almost anywhere else in the nation. He was tempted to rest his chances on other primaries and states. But Kennedy knew that, with his handicaps, he had to risk all to gain all. Contrary to press reports at the time—which we encouraged, to emphasize the state’s difficulties—all his advisers knew it also. A final Lou Harris Poll was the clincher. To an almost apologetic Pat Lucey at the Madison airport, he said, with a reassuring half-grin, “You didn’t force me. My chances for the nomination right now are less than 50 percent. If I can win here, they will be better than 50 percent.”
He could not give all of his time to Wisconsin. He had to campaign simultaneously in other primaries, woo delegates in nonprimary states and stay on top of a full-scale national campaign. But Wisconsin, until the April 5 balloting, was the battleground; and there more than anywhere else John Kennedy learned to do battle.
“Whatever other qualifications I may have had when I became President,” he would say after it was all over,
one of them at least was that I knew Wisconsin better than any other President. My foot-tracks are in every house in this state…. I know the difference between the kind of farms they have in the Seventh District and the First District…. I suppose there is no training ground for the Presidency but I don’t think it’s a bad idea for a President to have stood outside of Maier’s meat factory…at 5:30 in the morning with the temperature ten above.
More than one day started at 5:30 in the morning and ended at 1: 30 that night. No one envied Dave Power’s assignment of waking the candidate up after a few hours of sleep to shake two thousand hands at a dark factory gate until his own would be swollen and blue. But he always dressed quickly if not uncomplainingly, and Jacqueline, too, fought back fatigue and cold to keep pace with a demanding schedule.
Kennedy friends and family poured into the state, each assigned to a specific district. Writer-artist Bill Walton, asked by the Senator for a month of his life, gave the first of several months to political organization. So did Billings, Spalding and others not on the payroll. Brother Bob and his field organization moved fast and far in the bleak Wisconsin winter, mapping schedules, distributing pamphlets, securing endorsements, answering attacks. The Kennedy family—Jack, Bob, Teddy and often their mother and sisters—could be found all over the state making speeches, shaking hands and winning votes. To demonstrate the Kennedy spirit at a sports carnival, Teddy made the first ski jump of his career. “I feel,” said Humphrey, “like an independent merchant competing against a chain store.”
But Humphrey had some important allies of his own. Most of Wisconsin’s local labor leaders, farm spokesmen and political liberals endorsed him. His own attractive family seemed more at home in Wisconsin than the sophisticated Kennedy girls. Symington and Stevenson supporters moved behind him. With paid television advertising, Wayne Morse came in to attack Kennedy. All the officialdom of Minnesota poured across the boundary to campaign for Humphrey. So did Teamster boss James Hoffa, the most powerful and dangerous figure of the labor movement to be exposed by the Rackets Committee. Humphrey emphatically repudiated Hoffa’s endorsement, but he stepped up the vehemence of his own attacks on Kennedy’s “Johnny-come-lately” farm record and on his wealth and campaign expenditures. (It should be emphasized that this chapter necessarily confines its discussion of Humphrey and other candidates to their opposition to Kennedy. Needless to say, their greater effort was not in opposing him but in advancing their own virtues, which were numerous.)
There were advantages of wealth, of which the airplane Caroline was the most ostentatious example. “But any candidate who attempts to finance his own campaign,” Senator Kennedy pointed out, “will end up in jail because it is against the law.” Kennedy himself had been raising money in Boston, Washington, New York and elsewhere for over a year, and his actual spending within Wisconsin roughly equaled Humphrey’s.
More disturbing to Kennedy were the attacks circulated by many W
isconsin liberals. The President was saddened to see intelligent men, who had reviled Joe McCarthy’s methods, themselves using methods which created an impression of anti-Catholicism. During the course of the primary fight, vicious falsehoods were whispered about Kennedy’s father, Kennedy’s religion and Kennedy’s personal life. Anti-Kennedy letters-to-the-editor were printed in the Madison Capital Times over obscure signatures, such as “Confused Catholic.” (“I see,” said Kennedy, referring to political editor Miles McMillan of the Capital Times, “a face full of energy and full of hate.”) Although Humphrey’s friend Governor Nelson professed a pro-Stevenson neutralism, in order to offend no one who might make him convention keynoter, it was with his apparent approval that members of his staff—including those who would later ask the Kennedy administration for top jobs—were openly and bitterly anti-Kennedy. All the old stories of Kennedy’s contributing to Nixon, of Kennedy’s deriding foreigners in a Harvard background lecture, of Kennedy’s admiring McCarthy, were resurrected without regard to well-documented past denials.
Humphrey, his speeches and his literature stepped up the attack on the still unruffled Kennedy: “If you can’t cry a little in politics, probably the only thing you can do is hate…. Beware of these orderly campaigns. They are ordered, bought and paid for…. [Kennedy] voted for the Benson farm program…record is like Nixon’s.”
Still Kennedy remained, in the words of James Reston, “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.” He continued his dawn-to-exhaustion schedule, talking about the pollution of Wisconsin’s rivers, the future of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the development of Wisconsin’s timber, the taxation of farm cooperatives and other topics selected from our file of over a hundred Wisconsin “speech sections.”